Go Ahead and Jump

This Bitmob article is a reassuring (if brief) read, but the author’s focus doesn’t really extend beyond two games that have already gobbled up their fair share of good press, regardless of genre. The title of that article wishes to discuss how the Wii fomented a revival of traditionalist game design among the mainstream, a wish this blog post would be more than happy to oblige.

 

“You see my contact down there? Can’t miss it, looks like a plate.”

 

Except that after this paragraph, the Wii will not be part of the discussion – hope you don’t mind. Not for nothing, the Wii has been instrumental in bringing the platformer back into the mainstream periphery. Per capita, the higher-def consoles don’t seem to boast a comparable amount of shelf titles that put classic design on display, opting instead to keep that Funny, Oddly-Dressed Old Uncle of video game genres sequestered in the nursing homes that are XBLA and PSN. That’s great for the nostalgia buffs who are used to traversing the road less traveled. However, unless you’re prone to demo binges (which is, admittedly,  a reality that too many of us have to contend with occasionally,) stuff like Arkedo’s Pixel series might as well be persona non grata in digital distribution. On the Wii, smaller studios can not only take a chance on smaller-budget titles with fundamentalist design – thinking of A Boy and His Blob or Klonoa, here – because there’s little chance of overspending on meeting the expected high-res visual milestones. Therefore, there’s a balance in production flow between building upon play concepts and asset creation as a result of the minimalized risk. An added bonus is that some of these studios take chances with established licenses, which helps to decrease the market for uninspired shovelware. The icing is that these games are granted increased exposure, sharing shelf space with the likes of your banner “Gears of Halo Duty” AAA guff when finished.

 

Fuck the 22nd letter of the alphabet.

 

But for all the momentum that the Wii has given to a genre formerly abused to move licensed IP or to make quick cash for middleware studios, you gotta wonder how much of that inertia was siphoned from the Indie PC gaming scene. The PC has always been a fertile proving ground for startups that knew their code; for those that didn’t, the price of admission was Flash. Since then, free applications like GameMaker and IDEs like XNA have made the science much broader and more inviting to the uninitiated, requiring only that you have an idea good enough to commit to. The hypothesis here is that creative freedom pays in dividends, and the proliferation of Flash games and increasing awareness of the independent development culture seems to prove it. Nintendo simply saw a cost-effective development culture on the rise and decided to take advantage. Need I get started on mobile phone SDKs being freely distributed like Tootsie Rolls at a pedophile picnic?

All the while, it’s the classic “jump-on-this-grab-at-that” foundation that many of these smaller projects embrace, thanks to technological displacement and nostalgic trends. We get good, cheap gaming experiences (sometimes at the cost of convenience) but it’s a trend enjoyed by both the hardcores and the mainstream alike. And who wouldn’t want to jump on that?

Cult of Triviality – 10 Totally Forgotten Games: Part the First

Revered cult games themselves are an easy trip, although you wouldn’t think it. They’re ubiquitous, sure enough – you could take one of the shoddiest, most mishandled games ever produced and still somehow find a small cadre of acolytes dedicated to erasing the slander levied upon their Golden Calf by what they perceive to be the misguided gaming hoi-polloi. Cult games don’t necessarily have to be crap; maybe they didn’t sell well or didn’t garner those sexy 8-and-up review scores. Anything can be cult as long as it’s not successful.

The following exhibits reside in a hard-luck bubble, though – the anti-cult games. These are games that actually got great scores and accolades from various agents of the gaming press, but still sold for shit. Well, fine, a lot of vaunted cult games match that profile. Beyond Good and Evil, Hotel Dusk, Zack and Wiki are all poster children for the beloved cult game archetype. But there’s the rub: “beloved.” Remembered. And the games on this list don’t even have that going for them. They’re the promising bud of a young franchise scorned by an extremely insular public that would not have them. And now they’re bitter as all hell, staring at you and your indifference from beneath a shear veil of disdain and rage (and maybe a jaunty hat shaped like a rooster comb.)

7 Ain’t Bad: Punch-Out!!

The Wii and the Gamecube have both had a welcoming effect on my wallet with their respective (or shared, I guess) libraries: they don’t shame it. Every single game that I’ve ever bought on either system was fully worth the price because of one outstanding aspect or another, and I’m speaking of the typical retail drop of about $40 to $50 American. If I happen to score something at half of that or even a third, then it’s already turned out to be a good year for me. In comparison, my Playstation library is equivilent in size, but it would be much larger if I included all the games purchased for it that ended up taking the rejection train to eBay.

I’m disappointed in you, Punch-Out!!. I thought you might’ve been the disruptive element, the assassin to Nintendo’s squeaky-clean rep as king of my living room, but no! You just had to go ahead and live up to the promise of being a vast improvement upon a classic play structure without abritrarily changing a single fucking thing. Yes, nostalgic game geek, this is the game that you remember playing after school, during your afternoon recuperative sessions before questing that homework. And when I say that it is the game that you remember, the one that persists in your head rather than the not-so-intimidating reality, I mean it: characters are huge and full of amusing boist and bombast thanks to some of the richest hand-keyed animation seen in a 3-D game to date. But if all Punch-Out!! had going for it were exemplary production values then it would merely be a third of a potentially excellent game, right?

Punch-Out!! almost seems to revel in the fact that it needn’t fuck with something so accessible and pure, as while it offers three different control schemes for the player to choose from, you wouldn’t need to pick anything other than the familiar A+B+Select layout that the Wiimote “Classic” configuration mandates. Your opponents will demand everything of your thumbs in this game (especially in the Title Defense after-mode) and while the Nunchuk+Wiimote option isn’t necessarily borked, it simply isn’t as responsive. Seriously, Soda Popinski will exhibit this for you in about five seconds. That man isn’t a man at all, he’s an animal. A manimal, actually.

Also, like its forebears, the core of Punch-Out!!‘s action is rooted in adapting your limited attack and defense capabilites to effectively counter your opponent. Stats and contemplation have no jurisdiction here; this is all about pattern recognition and reflexes, sort of like a poker game where your role is to suss out which hand is holding a full house of unbridled pain. Your opponents are cocky and fast, but that cockiness is central to how you expedite a good beatdown as awareness of your opponent’s tells will keep you quick to the dodge and usually set the dope up for a dizzy. However, don’t expect to pull off a sure stick-’n'-move each time simply because your opponent telegraphs his punches; the fighters might be obvious, but they are quick and also hit much harder than Little Mac. Three unsuccessful dodges usually precludes a listless make-out session with the canvas. If you need further elaboration upon this point, perhaps you would like to step into Soda Popinski’s office. He’ll hand you a bitch card then knock you out colder than a frosted glass of RC Classic.

Unsurprisingly, not all of Punch-Out!!‘s appeal lies in its winking nods to the halcyon days of gaming’s wonder years. Most any developer that makes a habit of actually paying its employees and staying in business will tell you that a marquee game that mainlines unmolested nostalgia probably won’t return a decent enough profit. So, while Punch-Out!! calls upon the School of Twitch to form the foundation for play, its production values are as modern as a Wii can get (which I estimate to be about six years ago). Consider it a smart turn on developer Next Level’s part, then, to rely upon similarly traditional animation techniques to give flamboyant life to these hilarious 3-D pugilists. Recieving a thorough beating or two is something that Little Mac will become accustomed to so the idea of being entertained by your own immolation at the hands of your nemesis is fair compense for spending a round learning of your opponent’s taunts the hard way. Inversely, the extreme expressions and falldown animations resulting from dominating the opposition serves as a just reward for accplishing this. Each boxer has his own distinct personality (read: “embodies a very broad stereotype”), brought to life through fluid, outrageous motions that display an intimate understanding of several of the Twelve Principles. Of particular note is Principle number two – the entire game is based around the concept of anticipation. Each boxer’s taunts are dazzling but also easily noticable, giving you equitable opportunity to respond and satisfaction in knowing that you shut his trap. This all lends a richer character to the game, rendering its larger-than-life roster of palookas with a more potent realism than the frozen-faced, stiffly mocapped steroid marionettes that one would find in your average “photo-realistic” first-person shooter. Of course, one wonders if it’s even worth inhabiting a reality that could birth a hell-born creature of avarice like Soda Popinski, an abomination who eats men’s wills for lunch and drinks Hate straight from the tap.

I never really dwell upon the aural qualities of a game unless they happen to be exemplary. That being the case, I would like to mention that Next Level did a stunning job with the musical camouflage in this game – being that you’re going to be hearing the familiar Punch-Out!! music over and over ad infinitum, lending ethnic variation to the same song isn’t only welcome, it’s probably necessary. Thankfully, each iteration of the theme is a fun, personable accompaniment to its respective fighter’s stage and effortlessly strives to get the player to tap his/her toes throughout the fight. In particular, the peppy all-male choir in Soda Popinski’s stage provides a jaunty, optimistic counterpoint to having your very future torn from your corporeal form by a rabid, jellyrocket-shaped hurt machine in hot pants who will send you into a coma that you will not want to arouse from, lest you wake into a world where babies are rationed for sustenance and happiness is but a lie; a world where evil means survival and decent souls die the quickest; a world ruled… by Soda Popinski.

But I digress. Punch-Out!! still fucking rules, despite the looming, sucrose-addicted pinko threat that dwells within.

Neo-Geo Game Pocket Boy Color… Also

Is this true?

If so, too bad it never materialized. That would have been all of a guaranteed purchase in this household, regardless of the small library or the apparent lack of interest from third party publishers in bringing their properties over. Unfortunately, the best that an NGPC diehard could hope for at this point would be a possible compilation of those few great games on a newer handheld, recreated respectfully and accurately, mindless of potential overhead/profit conversion and making a quick, glitchy buck off of the corpse of fondly remembered franchises.

Right. And I’m hung like a mule.

With My Jelly Joints

It’s this thing called Sumotori.

Some might call it a broken game but take a second to consider the physics involved in the activity you have just witnessed. Warped-ass controls? Sure, that’s apparent enough. But the way that the cages interact with each other is simply superlative, and that takes a fair amount of work. This is what must happen now: a major publisher should pick up Sumotori and repackage it for domestic distribution as the keystone entry in a new “Hobolympics” franchise.

It’ll be bigger than AIDS. Just watch.

“Any Messages for Me, Eva?”

A decade post-release, I finally own a computer that’s wily and robust enough to crunch all the polygons necessary to enjoy Grim Fandango without wishing that the lag would kill me outright so that I could experience being in the Land of the Dead firsthand. It’s been a challenging walkthrough so far, in much the same way that eating sushi for the first time challenges one’s preconceptions as to what should and shouldn’t go in your mouth. Hopefully, I’ll be able to put a decently concise review together sometime soon.

And hey, look at the barging synchronicity! Tim Shafer has made the original design doc for Grim Fandango available for public consumption, and in weighty PDF form, no less. This was obviously done in celebration of me finally getting to play this after all these years.

Aw, Tim. You shouldn’t have.

Innovative + Balls = Lazy Yet Eye-Catching Title

This is the stuff that I habitually cruise these gaming-oriented ‘pro’ blogs for. Caught somewhere in the wild editorial brush among the Diablo III douchebaggery and that Australian goon that talks way too fast – sometimes transforming what would be a mostly humorous and sometimes pointed acid-bath rant into something that makes noises akin to a Toro chipper-shredder that’s gnawing on a gallon of Silly Putty – we get stuff like this.

The 8 Most Innovative Pinballs of All Time (presumably until the next knee-quaking Pat Lawlor masterpiece hits the street). And this is from Popular Mechanics? Shit be legit, yo.

Two of my favorites are on there and that makes me happy, although I get the feeling that one of them is only flying wingman so as not to leave the other as the sole representative from the 90′s to play the field, so to speak. But what about Funhouse? Or Safecracker? Or (and I’m being absolutely serious, here) Shaq Attack? Addams Family was a good deal of fun and all, but it was a vessel of technologies already introduced around two years prior to its release. In contrast, Funhouse (near as I can recall) may have been the very first pinball to successfully incorporate an in-game antagonist to vastly effective and to some, just outright terrifying effect. That latter reaction to the Rudy is usually a strong indicator of a person’s arguable grasp of reality, but it was there. That little bastard sitting near the back of the playfield, mouthing off veiled threats and shooting needles at you with those jerky, mechanized oculars. I sometimes glimpse him in dark corners of my room. Then the towering hellbeavers come and try to rob me of my precious leghair.

…whoa, blacked out there for a second.

Twilight Zone would be a hard one to topple, though. More than a decade and almost 20 different tables that I’ve put my boogery fingers on and few have prodded my emotions into such a whirlwind gallop as this Twilight Zone, offering the unwary player many stackable features that could be innocently enjoyed should the player actually overcome the sensation that he may well actually be tossing about with forces unknown from within the Zone itself. It certainly evokes that innocuously sinister presence that so many other artifacts from the show were seemingly shrouded in. Once the player pulls that plunger, he becomes marginally aware of the crowding presence of other pinball machines that may also happen to be in the room, as if they were bearing witness to this new challenger come to face their tribal head, flipper-to-flipper, and see if the task is met and finished without the defeating notion that the hapless player’s soul and quarters were stealthily sucked into that other dimension, never to be bartered back. Or maybe I just skipped my meds that week, dunno.

The Mark of Broadcast Excellence

This is when the first tease of your four-hour show contains the following yummy morsel of wit:

“He battled thugs in Road House and now he’s battling cancer. The latest on Patrick Swayze, coming up.”

I couldn’t be that funny if I got my dick caught in a pickle jar for undisclosed reasons.
You just go ahead and make that college degree your indulgent bitch, Ms. Producer.

Springtime for EA

Seen Battlefield: Heroes yet? No? Well, take a glance and tell me what I should be more shocked at: That EA aggressively continues to whore out existing franchises in their continuing efforts to wallpaper their offices in cash or the fact that their latest attempt in doing so is arguably their most daring idea to date. But, uh, it’s free, which leaves me little choice; I will play it, regardless. I am being indirectly forced to by my subconscious will to oversell my loyalty to anything that doesn’t take self-regard to an overwhelmingly insulting level.

You know, I think that’s why I’m so hasty in giving short-shrift to the FPS genre as a whole. It’s such a simple, emotionally vulgar distraction but you name one title and chances are that it’s fans often talk of it in the same tone of voice that film buffs use when talking about The Third Man.
When coupled with the fact that most FPS fans often regard a product that invokes visual elements of anything other than gritty (even in hardcore, outlandish Sci-Fi) as strictly for teh kiddies then we’re looking at a genre
whose purpose seems to be more of a security blanket and less of a good time. Take note of one of the selling points of that BF:H trailer: “The key element is ‘fun’”. Now, I may be waaay off base here, but who here plays games because it brings them provocative philosophical challenges? Sure, BioShock runs objectivist thought up a flagpole in terms of both story and gameplay and the game is enriched because of that, but if the play wasn’t good, it wouldn’t be a game. It’d be a movie.

So then I wondered why there were certain games of this type
that I have been actually able to get into in the past. For this exhibit, we have XIII, Armed and Dangerous, Timesplitters: Future Perfect, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, and Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. The gameplay between all of these titles can be comparable with most other shooters but the one other thing that sets most of these games outside the norm is a goddamn sense of humor with the possible exception of XIII. Let the record show that this approach often results in high marks from the gaming press but low regard in the general FPS gaming community, despite the excellent fucking writing that is the hallmark of some of these examples, particularly from the Timesplitters series.

All the more reason for casual player to scoff at the “core” gaming community’s interests. Who the fuck wants to hang around someone who keeps trying to convince you of their own self-importance? That sounds like egomania run amok to me, and that’s the only thing I think of when people try to reconcile the popularity of a very humorous, stylized product like Team Fortress 2 for themselves by linking it’s origins to the forefathers of contemporary illustration, especially when the end result more closely resembles something altogether more important but less impressive when it comes to namechecking.

Further case in point, and I’ll continue to use BF: H as an example as it could be (and is) construed by some thin-skinned bitches to be a mockery of one of the biggest tragedies to ever befall the human race. Fine, make that criticism, if it makes you feel all “insightful” and reverent, deep in that endless well of bullshit that you call a “soul”. But in doing so, you’ll need to tell Harvey Kurtzman, The Zucker Bros., Mel Brooks, Spike Milligan, Mort Walker, Bernard Fein and Albert Ruddy and all of the aforementioned gents at Termite Terrace that their insensitive treatment of anyone who’s lost a life in that bloody typhoon is not welcomed. I mean, how dare they try to decode a smile or a laugh from the extranatural, gore-washed insanity that was the Second World War? There’s no laughter in war! None!

…but we can turn it into shallow cash-in for desktop he-men to show everyone in the digital world what impressive deaths they could have made if only they’d had the balls to join the army. Don’t laugh at war, don’t distance yourself from it, don’t cast a critical eye to it, be it satirical or otherwise. Just emulate it. That’s honor.

My Arm, My Arm

Clover Studio wants to show you how to make a proper credit sequence: