61 Frames Per Second : Playstation

Namco, Your Klonoa Commercial is Dangerously Misleading

John Constantine — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Spoiler Warning. Giant, story-ruining, spoiler warning. Knock, knock. Who’s there? Spoiler Warning.

You know what, Namco, I’m getting a little tired of having to have these talks with you. I know you’re tired of it too. If you paid attention, this wouldn’t be happening. You’ve been doing a lot of good lately, and I want you to know I’m proud of you for it. Not only did you decide to remake Klonoa: Door to Phantomile on the game’s tenth anniversary, you brought back much of the Klonoa Works team to make it. Director Hideo Yoshizawa, artist Yoshihiko Arai, and composer Kanako Kakino. Wise, Namco, wise. You even decided against that atrocious redesign of Klonoa you were batting around last year.

This commercial, though, Namco. I don’t know if this is a very smart choice. It’s a little… misleading.

Yeah those kids sure are having fun. That announcer’s letting us know it too. Awesome. Some parent is going to buy Klonoa for their kid because it's about a fluffy bunny-cat man and his smiley face friend after watching this, for sure. Tell me this though?

How’s that happy kid going to feel when they get to the end of the eighth level and Klonoa's screaming, holding the corpse of his murdered grandfather?

How about when he beats it and he's told that Klonoa’s entire life was a lie and then the fluffy bunny-cat is forcefully torn out of reality, clutching onto the hands of the best friend that betrayed him?

Yeah. Way to think it through, Namco.

Editor’s Note: I wrote an article some months back identifying Shuichi Sakurazaki as the creator and director of Klonoa: Door to Phantomile. Seems that the credit should go to Hideo Yoshizawa. That said, as far as I can tell, these two men might be the same person. Anyone out there know what the deal is? The internet is less than forthcoming with the appropriate facts.

(Link: Kotaku)

Related links:

Klonoa: Careful, Namco. You Tread On My Dreams.
Klonoa's Truimphant(?) Return
Underrated: Klonoa Series
Where is Shuichi Sakurazaki, Creator of Ninja Gaiden?

The All New Retro: Bust-a-Groove and Low-Poly Love

John Constantine — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

I won’t deny it. My gaming tastes are a little unusual. Take my emulation aversion. Does a normal person spend months and months tracking down a rare and expensive cheat device so they can play an imported SNES game when they could download a ROM and SNES emulator in about ten seconds? No. This is not how a normal person behaves. As I slowly morph into something approximating an adult, I’ve been noticing another strange predilection in my gaming brain: a love of low-polygon graphics.

Some games do not age with grace. Their mechanics, and especially their graphics, develop the distinct taste of vinegar when they used to be wine just five years before. Yet the games of the 32- and 64-bit era, games that I thought were repulsive even at the time, are starting to take on a strange allure. Take a look at this screenshot from Tomb Raider 3 as a prime example:

It’s a relic, no pun intended. The cliff face is made of perfect right angles, covered in muddy textures doing their best to look like rock. Lara herself looks like a drawing dummy. This screenshot should be a text book example of why early polygonal graphics are best-forgotten growing pains from the medium’s adolescence. Given, low-poly graphics like these have survived. Most 3D Nintendo DS games are comparable to this screen, though they can be much better. Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy IV is not unlike graphics seen in the best the Playstation and Nintendo 64 had to offer ten years ago. DS games of its ilk though feature graphics of necessity, not of stylistic choice. Style is where I see the potential beauty of low-poly graphics. Ugly as they are, they could make for a whole new style of retro game design.

In the same way that Retro Game Challenge and Mega Man 9 have leveraged NES-level visual limitations to inform and color compelling game designs, I can see a designer intentionally choosing a low-poly presentation to inform their game. Instead of the game looking antiquated and ugly, you have a ready made cubist style that can make for extremely expressive games. Just look at Katamari Damacy.

Bust-a-Groove, Enix’s long forgotten rhythm game pictured at the top of this post, is what got me thinking about the potential of low-polygon design. Its models are primitive, but appealing in their simplicity and expressive thanks to the game’s excellent motion captured dances. Imagine if that game hadn’t come out in 1998. Say it came out in 2016. Would we say it’s ugly? Or would we say approvingly, “That’s old school.”? Retro even.

Mark my words, dear reader. It’ll happen. And it will be, if nothing else, interesting when it does.

Related links:

Not All Games Age Well
Question of the Day: Why Can’t I Emulate?
The 61FPS Review: Retro Game Challenge
Continuing the Old-School Conversation
Don’t Call It Retro: Mega Man 9 and Design Resurrection

BREAKING NEWS: Sony Announces Potential Price Drop for the PLAYSTATION............2. oh.

Amber Ahlborn — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

I have been waiting for a PS3 price drop, nay, expecting one for a few months now. I just want to see a show of hands here. Who out there, like me, is all ready to pick up a PS3 but only if it is priced within the range of sanity? The PS3 wasn't exactly setting the world aflame in sales prior to the global recession and so one wonders at Sony's stubborn refusal to accept that people, especially in this economy, are not willing to work extra hours just to afford their machine.

I could buy one at its current price, but I do not consider it worth it. To me, spending much over $300 for a video game machine is just slightly crazy. I really do not care how high end the hardware under the hood is. It's the software from which a console derives its worth. Sure, high end games look pretty and more power certainly will benefit some game designs, but looking at what's on the market, I'm not seeing the PS3's library proving this console is worth hundreds more than its competition or predecessor.

But hey, for all of you people out there who haven't bought your second or third PS2 yet, good news!.

Related Links:

New Year's PS3 Wish List: part 1

A Playstation Tradition

Facepalm: PS3 Hard to Program for "On Purpose"

Miami Law: Welcome Back Victor Ireland of Working Designs

John Constantine — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:05:00 GMT

Somehow I missed Victor Ireland’s re-emergence last December. I shouldn’t be too surprised. It might be big news to me, but the return of a niche industry icon best remembered by a handful of geeks for his American localizations of niche videogames ten years ago isn’t exactly Edge Online headline news material. It’s sidebar at best.

For everyone reading who doesn’t smile when they hear the word Alundra, here’s the score. Victor Ireland co-founded Working Designs. After opening in 1986, Working Designs was one of the only publishers in the Western world devoted to localizing strange Japanese games, particularly those JRPG things we enjoy so much here at 61FPS. Working Designs translations tended to be a bit strange, littered with juvenile humor and American pop culture references. They serviced a very small audience; not only were they putting out games in an unpopular genre, they had a habit of releasing them for doomed consoles like the Turbo-Grafx 16, Turbo CD, Sega CD, and Sega Saturn.

Working Design’s golden age was when they started releasing Playstation games at the end of the 1990s. Now that there was a growing market for Japanese games, the publisher was able to put out some extravagant packages. (Most notably the PS1 releases of Lunar, Lunar 2, and the Arc the Lad Collection. They all game with cloth maps, hardbound instruction manuals, and even zany bonuses like boxing puppets.) By the time the Playstation 2 came around though, Working Designs was in decline. They released three games for PS2 and shut their doors in 2005. Irleand put an impassioned statement on the company homepage which you can read here. In 2006, he opened a new publishing house called Gaijinworks and then promptly disappeared into the ether.

Today, Vic and Gaijinworks are finally on the map for real. Their first game, a Hotel Dusk-style DS adventure called Miami Law, is currently being developed for America by Hudson in Japan. It’s the perfect cultural stew, considering the man’s history. I’m psyched he’s back.

(Link: Joystiq)

Related links:

Where is Victor Ireland?
FMV Hell: Lunar, The Silver Star
Sega CD on iPhone: I Like Where This Is Going
The One That Got Away: Arc the Lad

Question of the Day: Ogre Battle and How Much Tutorial is Too Much?

John Constantine — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen hit Wii’s Virtual Console today. This is good for a variety of reasons. Quality Virtual Console releases are a rarity here in the far flung future of 2009. Ogre Battle is rare itself; its two English releases tend to fetch a pretty penny on Ebay. I’ve never played Yasumi Matsuno’s first foray into dense fantasy opera, so I’m looking forward to checking it out on the cheap.

My history with the Ogre series is confined to Ogre Battle 64. OB64 was one of the only N64 games I ever owned and I spent many, many hours playing it in the spring of 2001. I had almost no idea what I was doing. OB64 throws you into the deep end as soon you start, burying you under a mountain of circuitous cutscenes and leaving you to figure out its blend of TRPG and RTS play on your own. I was pretty proud of myself for getting thirty hours into OB64 without a guide. That is, until I read a FAQ and found out about the nearly endless number of stats you have to consider if you want to actually see the game’s ending. Nothing in the game tells you about party loyalty or how to measure a unit’s leadership potential. Nothing in the game even indicates that these are things you’re supposed to account for.

I love it when a game trusts me to learn how to play. I think that’s why people have responded so well to Retro Game Challenge. Even beyond its Famicom devotionals, the games trust you to learn their rules through play. Nothing is more frustrating than turning on a game and having to sit through an hour of tutorials, forcing you to plod through poorly acted scenes of someone telling you to press X to jump. By the same token, games like Ogre Battle are so complex that you need to have an in-game guide to teach you their rules by example. It’s very difficult to incorporate a successful guide. Make it all text, and you risk the player not retaining any of the information. Make it all cutscene or real-time lesson based, and you risk boring the hell out of your audience.

How much tutorial is too much? How much should a game teach you about the way it works while you play? Should games always leave the player to fend for themselves, foraging for success through trial and error? Let me know, dear reader.

Related links:

Populous: Text Based Tutorials Need to Die In A Fire
Games You Keep Coming Back To
Question of the Day: How Do You Make a Horror Game Horrifying?
Question of the Day: Yu-Gi-Oh! And Card-Based Videogames?
Question of the Day: Your Ideal Controller?
Question of the Day: Why Can’t I Emulate?

The One That Got Away: Arc the Lad

John Constantine — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Romanticizing the pre-internet age of games criticism is common amongst those of us born before 1990. With the presses stopped on Electronic Gaming Monthly, the last survivors of gaming print’s heyday are Gamepro and Nintendo Power. Those magazines still cater to the adolescent audience they always have, but they’ve lost all of their old schlocky appeal. It’s a good thing. Gaming print isn’t dead, and games criticism is slowly but surely emerging from its fandom-based larval form. Yeah the internet’s glutted with drivel, but there’s a lot of substantive, well-written study of the medium happening. *cough*

One thing certainly hasn’t changed. Gamefan may be long dead at this point, but Dave Halverson is still publishing monthly volumes of unabashed fandom in Play. Play, like Gamefan and Gamer’s Republic before it, isn’t really criticism. The magazine doesn’t engage in heady intellectualism like Edge, but it also doesn’t fall into Consumer Reports-style, reviews-and-previews tradition of Gamepro. Halverson’s publications are professionally made ‘zines, literal love letters to the industry they cover. The furor surrounding Halverson’s praise for Golden Axe: Beast Rider a few months back was surprising. The man isn’t a critic. He’s a lover. He publishes The Girls of Gaming, for crying out loud. Despite his flighty editorial mandate, Halverson’s pubs have had a surprisingly lasting impact on North American gaming culture. Today, Treasure is an iconic development studio beloved the world over. Gunstar Heroes wasn’t responsible for that notoriety. It was Gamefan’s constant lionization of the company that birthed the cult of Treasure.

Gamefan was, for me, a message in a bottle. Every single month, I would open an issue and be overwhelmed by bizarre foreign games I would never have a chance to play. And at the back of every issue waited the most cryptic and vexing passages of all: the advertisements for Halverson’s import games shop Game Cave. The ads were four-pages long and littered with miniscule pictures of games accompanied by nothing more than a title. That was where I saw this:

“Arc the Lad – PSX”. What in the hell was Arc the Lad? It had that JRPG look about it, but other than the stumpy characters and the vivid color, there was no way of figuring out what the game even was. It fascinated me. I always kept an eye out for Arc after that. It wasn’t until a few years later, as the JRPG boom took hold in the States that I learned that Arc the Lad was indeed a role-playing series. Since it was a first-party Sony game, and Sony refused to publish most 2D games outside of Japan, I had more than a language barrier standing between me and Arc.

Arc the Lad did eventually come here in 2002. When it did, it represented both the end of the Playstation era and the beginning of Working Designs downfall. It was a lavishly packaged set; cloth map, hard-bound instruction manual, the whole Working Designs shebang. It included the entire Playstation Arc trilogy and a side-game called Arc Arena. I couldn’t have cared less. In 2002, the PS2 library was finally heating up, the Xbox was proving its mettle, and the Gamecube was promising glossy, traditional Nintendo goodness. Sucks to the weird JRPG from 1995! Have you seen this game Maximo? That looks crazy! Eventually the Arc the Lad Collection disappeared from shelves and finding it in decent condition used proved problematic. Over the past seven years, I’ve regretted not picking it up. Arc the Lad, the one that got away.

I finally sat down with Arc in January. As tends to happen with the ones that get away, Arc turned out to not be what I imagined. I expected a traditional JRPG, the usual morass of clichés coated in a typical Working Designs translation (a mix of pop-culture references, glib humor, and stoicism.) What I got was a simple, brief tactical RPG, sort of Duplo blocks to Tactics Ogre’s Lego. The colorful world implied by that night time screenshot wasn’t there. There’s no exploration whatsoever in Arc actually. The world spanning adventure takes place almost entirely on a map as you’re shuffled between single-screen locales for dialogue and dungeons. (The dungeons, in fairness, do have multiple levels.)

I haven’t delved into Arc 2 or 3, yet. My understanding is that they’re far deeper, more interesting games than their progenitor. I may try them out at some point. If nothing else, my long lasting saga with Arc the Lad exemplifies the biggest difference between following videogames during the print and internet eras. Today, Googling a game title will get you billions of words detailing just how the game plays, how long it is, and how it stacks up to every other game ever made. Back when I saw that screen, a whole lot was left to the imagination. It’s a strange thing, following videogames. Sometimes, you like them even more when you don’t play them.

Next time, I’ll close out the White Whale/One That Got Away triptych with The Second Chance: Vagrant Story. See you then, y’all.

Related links:

The White Whale: Terranigma and Ahab Gaming
Where is Victor Ireland?
FMV Hell: Lunar, The Silver Star
Sega CD on iPhone: I Like Where This Is Going

Wii Brings Silent Hill to Climax

John Constantine — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

No, wait. Rewind. Switch that. Climax is going to bring Silent Hill to the Wii!

The rumor going ‘round the campfire is that those nutty Brits behind Silent Hill: Origins will be remaking the original Silent Hill for both Wii and PSP. 61FPS just spent this past Monday celebrating Silent Hill’s tenth birthday. What better way to celebrate the occasion than by taking a stroll down memory lane, waggling as you go?

As I mentioned in the Silent Hill retrospective, the game’s actual play has aged terribly. It’s also never been available for any system other than the original Playstation. A remake, in this rare instance, is an excellent idea. Climax’s Origins, while not exactly stunning in its originality, at least shows the team’s ability to properly capture Silent Hill’s atmosphere while making it more functional by modern standards.

Between Silent Hill and Klonoa, the Wii is starting to play host to some excellent remakes. I’d prefer that Konami, Namco, and every other publisher out there pour their resources into original content for Nintendo’s box, but I can’t complain too much. These are games that deserve an audience. If there’s anything that the Wii has, it’s an audience.

(Link: VG247)

Related links:

10 Years Ago This Week: Silent Hill
Silent Hill: Homecoming is, Thankfully, Both Silent and Hilly
Screen Test: Silent Hill Homecoming
Klonoa: Careful, Namco. You Tread On My Dreams.
Underrated: Klonoa Series

Rockman's Anti-PETA Rampage

Nadia Oxford — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:06:00 GMT

A lot of people love Mega Man Legends on the Playstation, but they have no idea how easy it is to abuse animals in the original Japanese title, Rockman Dash.

Seriously, Rockman can really kick the shit out of God's creatures.

For starters, there's a scene early in the game where Tron is treed by Paprika the rat dog. In the American version of the game, Mega Man negotiates with the furry terrorist. In the Japanese version, you can make Rockman's foot negotiate with the dog's ass. Paprika squeals and books it across the city. It's pretty hilarious.

Less hilarious is Rockman's ability to shoot down birds. When Samus shoots birds in Metroid Prime, it's funny because they explode with a perturbed “Caw!” When Rockman indulges in duck season, the birds just float to the ground silently and lay there, broken, before flashing and fading away.

Flashback city to overzealous air rifle mishaps.

Worse, Rockman can kick around the adorable white-socked black cats who tend to hang around the game's ruins. This is especially heartbreaking when you consider that you can beat up on the one cat you're allowed to take aboard the Flutter—the same cat who quickly gives birth to kittens thereafter.

I know this has you intrigued, because you are a bad person. All instances of animal abuse in Rockman Dash have been neatly chronicled in a YouTube video that follows after the jump.

As fans well know by now, Mega Man Legends 2 actually lets Mega Man dominate the animal kingdom with his boot. There are consequences, though: his armour turns black (so does his skin, distressingly), and he's marked as a thug. Townspeople lose their trust for him, and Roll becomes upset.

If things get bad enough, Roll confronts Mega Man and confides that she's worried about losing him. Mega Man has two options at this point. He can promise Roll that he'll clean up his act, or he can tell her, quote, “Leave me alone, you old busybody!”

Just another point in Mega Man Legends' long, long list of Win.

(Special thanks to Protodude's Rockman Corner.)

Related Links:

Underrated: Mega Man Legends Series
Sonic the Hedgehog: I'm Just Not That Into You
The Reason Why Mother 3 Never Came to America

10 Years Ago This Week: Silent Hill

John Constantine — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Silent Hill (released February 24th, 1999) did not mark a pivotal moment in the original Playstation’s lifecycle. Technologically speaking, Silent Hill was a solid effort, but nothing unusual for the time. Foregoing the pre-rendered backgrounds that were horror games’ stock-in-trade, Silent Hill’s full-3D environments weren’t as pristinely rendered as Konami’s own, year-old Metal Gear Solid. The CGI cutscenes, another requisite of the era, were competent but by no means up to the Squaresoft gold standard. Its control was wonky, its camera unwieldy, and the voice-acting was stiff even for a Playstation game. Of course, none of that matters. Silent Hill was a pivotal moment in game’s maturation as an affecting, expressive medium. Forget technology; its technical failings made it a stronger work. Forget genre; Silent Hill is not survival horror. It’s just horror.

The game’s premise and story are simple enough: widower Harry Mason travels to scenic Silent Hill with his adopted daughter Cheryl. On the drive there, during some of the game’s plastic-doll-CG, Harry almost hits someone standing in the road and crashes. When he comes to, he’s alone on the foggy streets of Silent Hill and the game has shifted to its playable state. Snow falls around Harry but doesn’t collect on the ground. From here, you, as Harry, follow what might be your daughter down a series of alleyways. As you go further down the alley, the camera shifts abruptly to successively stranger angles, mundane brick walls shift to rusting corrugated metal and rotting chain link fences, and silence gives way to buzzing dissonance. By the time you get to the end of the alley and find an eviscerated, inhuman body hanging from the wall, the gory imagery isn’t nearly as unsettling as the walk has been.

This opening sequence defines both Silent Hill as a series and its enduring legacy. The game that follows constantly shifts perspective in pushing you through the town’s locales, and there is no real safe haven. The game in Silent Hill is traditional exploration-puzzle-progress play made fresh by an unpredictable light-dark world dynamic. It’s not that one is good and one is bad; they’re both aggressive places. The duality is meant to unsettle and disorient both you and, in the hazy story, Harry. Every aspect of the design fuels that disorientation, too. Throughout Silent Hill, your field of vision is constantly obstructed, either by fog or darkness, a clever work around of the Playstation’s limitations, but essential to the game’s tone and goals. Akira Yamaoka’s sound design and its spectacular stereo mixing also aim to disturb. The game’s gurgling and grunting enemies are typically out of site until they’re right on top of you, and the only thing that signals their proximity is the static squall of the pocket radio you find early on. The awkwardness of the game’s acting, both the voice work, the script, and the animation of the characters, also serves the game’s atmosphere. While I’m not convinced it was intentional in the original Silent Hill, this sort of stilted drama has become a mainstay in the series, to great effect. It enhances the impressionistic tone, and lets the game’s unreality take root instead of constantly forcing linear plot on the player.

Horror games in 2009 are still made in the mold of the Playstation era: the dog-through-the-window scares of early Resident Evil, ominous-Gothic-setting of Tecmo’s Deception, and monster-escape of Sunsoft’s Clock Tower are still largely the types we see today. Sony’s Siren and Tecmo’s Fatal Frame series take atmospheric cues from Silent Hill, but are more tangible, less abrasively psychological games in subject matter. Even Team Silent took the franchise in a more digestible direction. After following up with Silent Hill 2 – a game that realizes every one of its predecessor’s ambitions – the team went on to make two more sequels that bear more tonal/structural resemblance to Resident Evil than their source material. The closest thing to a spiritual successor has been Punchline and Shuji Ishikawa’s Rule of Rose; Rule of Rose relies even more heavily on visual metaphor to convey its story than Silent Hill. (Unfortunately, it’s almost completely unplayable.)

Much as Silent Hill was informed by other games and media – the horrible “other world” and enemy designs recall Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder and the metaphor-heavy psychosexual narrative shares many of David Lynch’s more recognizable tics – it has managed to stand on its own artistic merits ten years on. Sadly, it just isn’t very easy (or fun) to play any more. Its technological failings certainly helped it to be a creative triumph. But those failings don’t do it any favors as a game today. It doesn’t help that the game has never been re-released outside of its inclusion in the Japan-only Silent Hill Ultimate Box in 2006. With the Team Silent disassembled and the series now in capable, albeit not very creative, hands, it’s unlikely that Silent Hill will ever have the same impact it did a decade ago.

Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week:

Syphon Filter
Alpha Centauri

Related links:

Silent Hill: Homecoming is, Thankfully, Both Silent and Hilly
Screen Test: Silent Hill Homecoming
OST: Rule of Rose

The White Whale: Terranigma and Ahab Gaming

John Constantine — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 01:00:00 GMT

I sympathized with Nadia’s post last week about the pants wetting nature of Terranigma’s “Desert” theme. That eerie swath of SNES atmospherics by Miyoko Kobayashi and Masanori Hikichi is still fresh in my memory, and not just from following the link in Madame Oxford’s piece. Three weeks ago, after some ten years of hunting, I finally sat down and played Terranigma in one day-long marathon session. This was both the realization of a long-standing desire to play Quintet’s final Super Nintendo entry in their Heaven and Earth saga and also part of a grand gaming journey I’ve undertaken here in 2009. The quest, as it were, is to track down three games from the past two decades that represent significant gaps in my experience: The One That Got Away, The Second Chance, and The White Whale. My goal is to finally see, after building up each game that fits these descriptions for me in my brain, how they live up long after their respective primes.

Given my inexplicable aversion to emulation, the English version of Terranigma has always been my white whale, the cartridge I’ve hunted for and that I’ve constantly sought for an actual way to play. An Australian copy of the game isn’t terribly rare, but it tends to fetch a high price, and then there’s the hurdle of getting it to run on a non-PAL Super Nintendo. That hurdle’s especially high since Terranigma, being one of the last Super Nintendo games, is fitted with a particularly finicky region-lockout chip. Even a Fami-clone that can play PAL carts like the Retro Duo won’t boot Terranigma. There are only two options for intrepid (and legitimately insane) gamers like myself. First, you can mod your SNES with 50/60 Hz region lockout switches. Fearing that I’d end up soldering my hand to the console, I opted out of this. The only other option is to find an incredibly rare version of the Pro Action Replay cheat device. Only three models will work, Mk2.P, 2.T, and 3, all of which only released in Europe in limited quantities. After trolling the net since last summer, I finally found one at the beginning of January. So, in spite of these barriers, in spite of my psychoses, I finally played and finished my white whale.

Was it worth the wait? Did Terranigma live up to a decade of expectation? It did and, unlike Ahab, I lived through the hunt. Terranigma is a lovingly crafted game and is, in many ways, the fullest expression of Quintet’s ambitions with the Heaven and Earth trilogy. It expands on Soul Blazer’s world building, goes far beyond Illusion of Gaia’s narrative and environmental scope, and perfects the metered combat they’d developed in both. It is a grand game, but somewhat schizophrenic as a result. In 2009, Terranigma stumbles in its storytelling, shuffling back and forth between explicit, driven plot and more subtle impressionism. Terranigma aims to be a Jack of all trades and ends up a master of none. But that doesn’t diminish the impact of its physical adventure, nor does it impeach its flawless presentation. If nothing else, I’m glad I played it.

That’s one step of three out of the way. Next up? The One That Got Away: Arc the Lad. See you next time, after I’ve abused my brain with Working Designs’ undoubtedly witty translation of Sony’s very first Playstation RPG.

Related links:

Time For Terranigma! Right?
Unsolicited Scares: Terranigma and the Desert
OST: Soul Blazer

The Console Wars Made Adorable

Nadia Oxford — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:50:00 GMT

Everyone gets embroiled in a console war once in a while. We have some kind of inborn instinct that causes us to rush to the defence of our beloved consoles as if they were a damsel cornered by a dragon. It's interesting to wonder what system-associated developers like Miyamoto think about such behaviour. “What, do you people have deep-rooted problems revolving around peer approval or something?”

When you think about how silly the console wars ultimately are, you really do have to duck your head in shame for participating (shortly before you go back and do it all over again). Or, sometimes, you might receive another reminder of how easily we can all get along if we just try. For instance, through an art project.

A board member on IGN has put together a small group of sketches titled, “The Console War is Officially Over.” The adorable pictures feature the major game consoles (and their young portable siblings) in various states of play.

(Those bedsheets should be burning merry hell.)

It's a heart-melting group of pics. It makes me feel really bad for ever fitting my Xbox 360 with sharp spurs and sending it after the PS3. They don't want to fight. They want to love. I vow to be a better console owner from now on.

(PSP, moar like Pee-ass-pee, lol)

Related Links:

Roundtable Discussion: Where Is the Handheld Version of the Console Wars?
Sign of the Times: Current Gen to Stick Around a Little Longer
Microsoft's New Year's Resolution

Whatcha Playing: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Again)

Nadia Oxford — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 04:06:00 GMT

I have a small stable of games I love returning to once in a while, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is among them. I own the original Playstation version (the actual original: it lacks the flu-snot green bar that labels it a best-selling re-release) and the emulation that was packed with the PSP's Dracula X Chronicles. I've finished both multiple times, but I decided that wasn't enough, so I downloaded the game once more on XBLA. Having lost my original Playstation at the bottom our sock drawer something like five years ago, it's nice to play Symphony of the Night on a large screen once more. It'd be nice if the Achievements weren't lame, but eh, if wishes were horses, and all that.

Symphony of the Night is still firmly in the top quality tier of the Castlevania hierarchy, but aging gamers draw in vital nutrients through message board fights about whether or not an esteemed game still deserves its lofty status. Over the past handful of years, Symphony of the Night has ignited similar arguments. Is the game as brilliant as we remember it? Was the Inverted Castle a stroke of game design genius or a cheap trick to extend gameplay?

Konami's premiere “Metroidvania” was one of the first titles I purchased on the Playstation: it helped usher me over the turbulent change from my teenage years to my adult years, which came with the inevitable realisation that you can't always do what you want to do, but there is no one who can stop you from enjoying the things that make the transition a little easier.

I'm undeniably biased towards Symphony of the Night, so I'm useless in a debate about its place amongst gaming history. At the same time, I don't think anyone can deny how lovingly put together it is. Every time I play Symphony of the Night, I discover some new thing: a mouse scurrying, doves nesting in the crevices of the Outer Wall, or (as I discovered very recently) the fact you can kill a toad by throwing Holy Water on its tongue, which pleases me greatly.

And even if you still insist on crossing your arms and saying “A-bloo-bloo-bloo awkward item screen,” you will surely recall how quickly the gorgeous piano melody in Orlox's Quarters made your annoyance melt away.

I think of Symphony of the Night as an integral soldier in the last stand for console-based 2D adventures. Sony of America was desperate to leave video gaming's “kiddy” image back with the colourful sprites on the Super Nintendo, and the 32-bit era of platformers—which birthed some of the finest in the genre—would have suffered for it if the likes of Konami and Capcom hadn't engaged in justifiable blackmail by threatening to hold big-name 3D titles if Sony wouldn't America have Castlevania and Mega Man. Interestingly, Symphony of the Night is a dignified and mature game regardless of its “primitive” presentation. Religious symbolism abounds, something Japan tends to be very hit-or-miss about. But it's all in context and it even aged well: heraldic imagery, spectral priests who listen to confessions, pious ghosts who cross themselves, and even a beautiful, sun-lit cathedral decorated with an ornate cross.

Incidentally, I still think Dracula has chutzpah for building a fully-loaded cathedral in the middle of his castle. He's all like, “Take that, God!”

I'm aware of Symphony of the Night's flaws, not the least of which is some kind of mapping joke that makes it prohibitively difficult to explore 200.6% of Dracula's abode. Certain gaps in the map will only be filled by doing a strange dance that involves shifting into a wolf, then shifting back after jumping. But who needs the reward at the end? Empty-headed Maria chases after Alucard. So what--

Oh crap, getting 200.6% is one of the Achievements on the Xbox 360 version of the game, isn't it? Bugger.

Related Links:

Suffering Castlevania Fatigue
Watcha Playing: Castlevania - Portrait of Ruin
Castlevania: Cruse of the Stupid Red Headed Kid

True Tales of Multiplayer: Fights, Tricks, and Fights!

Derrick Sanskrit — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Lately I've found myself chilling with my homeboys Dan and Ryan, playing old video games that most of our friends don't remember or never heard of at all hours of day and night. It started when Dan found an old cartridge of the Jaleco's SNES beat-em-up The Peace Keepers. I was impressed by the ability to recolor any of the game's sprites however you wanted, but otherwise the game was an all-around stunningly frustrating experience.

Things picked up for the next round, however, when I popped in my favorite SNES "sports" game, DMA Designs' Uniracers. I've gushed about Uniracers before, how it paved the way for trick-based games like Tony Hawk Pro Skater and DMA's next big hit Grand Theft Auto. The bright colors and self-aware living unicycles scared and confused my friends at first, but once we hit the Bowl course, where players pull off the craziest tricks they can in a set period of time for a higher score, suddenly it was an intense competition. Hours were spent rolling back and forth in the bowl , flipping, rolling, twisting, z-flipping, pulling off tabletops and head bounces, scoring Tubulars and Gnarlys and the coveted I Hate Races. Heated battles ensued with eyes locked on the scores. Rounds regularly ended with last minute reversals thanks to 60-point mega-chains. There were upsets and supreme victories all around.

Time for a change of pace, Ryan popped his all-time favorite into the Playstation, a 1997 Konami brawler I'd never heard of called Poy Poy. A 3D four-player arena fighting game, Poy Poy plays and looks a lot like both Power Stone and Super Smash Bros, only it came out a good solid year-and-a-half before either of those more recognizable titles. Cartoon polygon people run around colorful and vibrant enviroments picking up rocks and logs and bombs, or even each other, and throw them. Get hit, get hurt. Last man standing gets the most points. Upgradable gloves gave each character powerful special moves. The game was simple enough for me to learn within only a couple of ass-beatings yet clearly compelling enough for Ryan to love unconditionally for eleven years so far. The one true downside to Poy Poy when compared to Power Stone and Super Smash Bros is that the Playstation was only designed with two controller ports, so four-player games required a multi-tap accessory.

Three forgotten games from over a decade ago, all completely addictive and fun with good company and messy tacos. I'm sure these game sessions will become a regular occurrance, with Uniracers and Poy Poy bound to see repeat performances along with plenty more semi-obscure games to come.

What are your favorite forgotten gems, readers? What do your late-night multiplayer sessions involve?

Related Articles:
Mourning the End of Jaleco
Up All Night
Meet People On The Internet And Play Games With Them

A Playstation Tradition

Amber Ahlborn — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 02:30:00 GMT

It's official, I am committed to buying a PS3...eventually. I'm pretty darn optimistic that, considering the current US economy and Sony's own financial problems that we'll be seeing another price drop for the PS3 and that will be enough for me. Now if only I could afford an HD TV I'd be set. Though I may not have the system yet, today two games I ordered came in the mail: Ratchet & Clank Future and Devil May Cry 4. As I unpacked these games, I realized that, starting with the first Playstation, I seem to have created a bit of a buying tradition.

In the mid 1990s I was a happy N64 owner (the first game console I ever bought on launch day). Lots of people like to whine about the N64's small library but I found plenty to love. All the same, there were a few titles headed into the Sony camp that I badly wanted to play. Back then I was a huge Mega Man fan and I coveted Mega Man 8. There was also the then gorgeous Final Fantasy 7 waving its flashy FMVs in my face, demanding my attention. I bought both of these games before I actually got the Playstation, which with much hinting I managed to snag as a Xmas gift.

Years later when I was a student at DigiPen I picked up a Gamecube on its launch day. By this time, however, I already owned a small library of Playstation 2 games but no Playstation 2. I was actually lucky enough to have an apartment mate who had picked up the PS2 on its launch, so I had no need of one for myself until he moved out around a year later.

Now here we are in the present and the tradition continues. I picked up a Wii on launch * but always knew I'd eventually own a PS3 as well. Sony does have a few exclusive franchises I really enjoy. Once again I own the games before the system. Does anyone else out there have such backwards buying habits?

* Lots of people had interesting tales of hardship and heroics concerning their hunt for a Wii when it was first released. I, alas, do not. All I can say is that it's the first system I ever got up early to go stand in line for. I never pre-orderd it, but after that fateful E3 I started to pick up a vibe that maybe this was going to be a big deal after all. I got up at 6:30 and made it to my local Best Buy around 7:00 in the morning and become #63 in line (I'd confirmed the store had over a hundred systems for sale on a previous day). The line grew longer, people grumbled about waiting in the cold weather for hours (the store refused to open its doors before 9) but other than that, it was an uneventful day, at least until I got that baby home.

Related Links:

New Year's PS3 Wish List: part 1

New Year's PS3 Wish List: part 2

Facepalm: PS3 Hard to Program for "On Purpose"

When Does a Console Pay For Itself?

Nadia Oxford — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 04:03:00 GMT

Mr Cole Stryker and I share similar opinions on Nintendo's Wii. I do not believe it's going to kill the industry, nor do I think Nintendo is going to recruit hardcore gamers through a Super Smash Bros Brawl tournament and grind them into sustenance for casuals.

But after listening to the complaints about how little the Wii has to offer, I've come to wonder how gamers gauge their satisfaction with a system. When do you lean back, pat your belly and declare that a game console has wholly proved its worth?

I don't play with my Wii all hours of the day (huh huh), but I'm honestly puzzled by people who say, “I'm a long-time Nintendo fan, but I sold my Wii because there's nothing on it.” I'm going to assume that a “Nintendo fan” fought to the point of collapse during the bitter droughts that struck the N64 and GameCube. I owned both systems, and both earned me gasps from peers. “Jesus Christ, why?” they would wail.

Franchises like Mario and Zelda are in fact why I bought the N64, the GameCube and the Wii. My Playstation saw a lot more action than my N64, but declaring a console a flop once the dust on its casing reaches a certain level is deceiving. When The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was released, that dust layer was wiped off my N64 with one pass of a paper towel and I spent the next several weeks immersed in one of the best action titles to hit the industry. Repeat wipe-and-play for The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Super Mario 64, Paper Mario, Banjo-Kazooie, Wave Race 64, and Super Smash Bros.

I had a handful of quality exclusives that I thoroughly enjoyed, without even including Goldeneye, a title that made the N64 a must-own for thousands. The GameCube was another console that's considered woefully short on software, but again, it could be counted on for Zelda, Mario and Metroid. All I really need are a few high-caliber games before I feel happy with my system purchase, but I wonder if I'm just huddling on a sparsely-populated set of bleachers.

I loved Super Mario Galaxy. I enjoyed The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess because it improved on many of the things I loved about Ocarina of Time. I am happy for No More Heroes. I use Wii Fit almost daily. I am champing and stamping for the new Mario and Zelda titles we've been promised, to say nothing of Cave Story, Punch Out!! and Dragon Quest X.

I don't think the Wii has done a bad job entertaining me for the $250 I spent on it, but it's possible I ask too little of my consoles. Or maybe I've just seen what comes of passion and haste. The recent lean months have brought in a hardcore Wii-returning ritual that's intended to “stick it” to Nintendo for abandoning core gamers. I wonder how many sheepish faces I'm going to see buying back used Wiis in EB Games over the next year or two.

Related Links:

The Wii Is Not Killing Video Games
The Wii's Feats of Strength and its Disappointments
What Do You Want from "Wii HD?"

Actor's Scene Re-Dub Attempts To Make Up For Mega Man X4's Past Sins

Nadia Oxford — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:38:00 GMT

Mega Man 8 and Mega Man X4 are two of the first games we point at when we talk about the awkward spasms gaming went through in its transition from 16 to 32 bits. “Hey, remember when voice acting in Playstation games could make your dog's ears bleed?” we say.

The death of Iris in Mega Man X4 still holds in our memories, not entirely for good reasons. For starters, the romance between the two has since ignited way too many message board conversations about how/if robots Do It. Second, Zero's voice actor sounds like he drank a scalpel blade smoothie before he recorded. Third...well...WhatamIfighting4rrrrrr?”

Capcom did get its act together admirably in the latter Mega Man X games. Mega Man X: Command Mission, Mega Man X8 and Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X employed the same voice actors for all three games, giving the characters some much-needed consistency. Moreover, there is a hint of professionalism here, as the actors were all employed from The Ocean Group, a Canadian-based anime dubbing company.

Zero's adopted actor is Lucas Gilbertson, an Alberta native who voices the red Maverick Hunter by day and draws some awesomely effed-up pictures by night. Gilbertson was interviewed by a fansite/blog that asked him if he'd try redubbing Iris' death scene in Mega Man X4.

Guess what! He did! He also got a bit close to the microphone, so you might want to lower your volume a titch.

Well, the dude does admit in the interview that he loves to scream. More power to him, etc.

Related Links:

The Mega Man Robot Club
Know Your Mega Man Boss Weaknesses. It Will Save Your Life
The Delights of Continuity in Mega Man and Abroad

Crono: My First Aeris Gainsborough

Nadia Oxford — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 05:01:00 GMT

You remember Aeris' death in Final Fantasy VII, right? Sephiroth dropped from the sky, brandishing his very big sword, and he spit Aeris like a piece of sacrificial lamb on a shishkabob. Cloud broke out the pitas, Cid stirred up the hummus and—no, wait, that didn't happen. Aeris died in Cloud's arms and it was very sad. There, that's what happened.

Aeris's death, though curiously dry (not a drop of blood was spilled—what kind of impotent Jesus stand-in was she?), was a stunning event for the gaming world. Until the moment Sephiroth fell on her as neatly as a dart flying to a pub's board, it seemed unfathomable that a game character could die. Forever. No take-backs.

Unfathomable for some. Not so much for others.

I'd been there a couple years prior. Crono from Chrono Trigger was my first Aeris.

“But you can bring Crono back to life! His death's wasn't traumatic, you big attention whore!”

But reviving Crono isn't as easy as sprinkling him with phoenix down. It's actually an emotional investment, and when I played Chrono Trigger on the DS, I was surprised at how powerfully it still hit me.

Aeris got a sword through her gut, and admittedly that's a pretty bad way to go. But at least her body was laid to rest. Crono, on the other hand, throws himself at the deadly light Lavos generates and his body simply...dissolves. One second he's a boy on a quest; the next falls apart in a smear, like a stick of charcoal left in the rain.

After the party bumbles around lost for a while, they're given the opportunity to climb Death Peak and revive Crono using a special item that's also the game's namesake. Death Peak is a pretty unique locale, as far as Chrono Trigger goes. The snow-covered mountain lords over the far-flung future, but it has a sinisterly ancient feel to it; it was thrown up when Lavos erupted from the ground in 1999. Journeying through the future usually means visiting factories and crumbling ruins, but Death Peak feels like it's encased in a bubble that's separate from the rest of time.

It's on Death Peak we get an unsettling glimpse of his Lavos' spawn, a quiet prophesy of what's to come. A perpetual, gentle snowfall makes the mountain eerily peaceful. And at the top of the mountain...well, that's a special experience.

The teamwork Crono's friends use to bring him back to life strengthens their bonds and speaks of their characters. Crono's death would also have been an easy opportunity to give “depth” to the cast through mourning: “A-bloo-bloo-bloo, our hero is gone, Zeal will pay,” and whatnot.

When Crono first dies, Marle is confident he's alive. It's a little saddening to see her so adamant about an impossibility, but her resolve makes it hard to resist the Crono-Jesus sub-quest. You are part of the experience, not just an outsider viewing a cutscene.

Related Links:

The Weakest Link: Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross
WTFriday: The Chrono Trigger Anime
China Trigger

Sony’s New Year’s Resolution

John Constantine — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

For all intents and purposes, 2008 was an excellent year for Sony and the Playstations. Was it the salad days of 2001, when the Playstation 2 was coming into its own and Sony was crushing every proverbial ass in the world? Certainly not. But the Playstation 3 managed to finally get itself a stable of quality exclusives that weren’t completely ignored by the public and panned by the media. The Playstation Portable, despite receiving only a scant few notable games, had a banner year in Japan and continued to grow its install base in the rest of the world. The Playstation Network worked out a few of its kinks, and even if it’s the ugliest baby since Sloth, at least Home launched. And the good ol’ Playstation 2 continued, eight years after its birth, to both sell and play host to great new games. The end of the year, however, did not look so hot. The Playstation 3 got trounced by its competitors leading up to Christmas. You see, it didn’t matter how damn good Resistance 2, LittleBigPlanet, Motorstorm: Pacific Rim, or Valkyria Chronicles were. What mattered is that the average person in every country where the system is sold does not have $400 for a videogame console right now. Money, as you may have heard, is something of a concern for everyone right now. They don’t have much of it, and there isn’t a whole lot of work for them to make more of it, so it’s no wonder they aren’t paying for your box which costs just about twice what everybody else’s box does.

Sony? Resolve to make the damn Playstation 3 cheaper in 2009. Making the console profitable should not be the priority right now. Getting it into as many homes as possible needs to be priority one. Your first and third party line-up for 2009 is a traditional gamers’ dream. Rely on it. And if the box is cheap enough, you just might grab back a piece of that casual pie. March price drop, no new SKU. Done.

Oh, and also, software backwards compatibility. You shouldn’t have taken it out in the first place.

Related links:

Microsoft’s New Year’s Resolution
Virtual Console New Year's Resolutions
Nintendo’s New Year’s Resolution

X-Blades and the Cultural Uncanny Valley

John Constantine — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Years of schooling in composition left me with absolutely no sense of proper grammar, structure, and only a passing familiarity with proper spelling, but I did come away with a good sense of how not to seem like a jackass in an opening. The golden rules: don’t open with a question and don’t start with a definition. These rules can be broken only when absolutely necessary. Like now for instance!

How many of you have heard of X-Blades?

For clarity’s sake, X-Blades is a third-person action game in the Devil May Cry mold and it looks like a parody of Japanese videogames that you might see on The Simpsons. It stars a young woman sporting knives, blonde hair, and enormous eyes/breasts. She wears some string and tiny scraps of cloth over her privates and kills monsters in a fantasy land where it is apparently always dusk. Her name’s Ayumi. Of course it is! It's a videogame so overfull on cliché that it can’t possibly be real. But it is, and it actually seems fairly inoffensive, a potentially good way to drop a few hours between games that you actually give a damn about. Thing is, though, every time I’ve seen screens or footage of X-Blades something has just seemed off. I know that isn’t the most journalistic statement in the world but there’s no other way to put it. It’s just wrong, off-putting, something rotten inside of its seemingly pure trope-soup.

The reason X-Blades seems so peculiar, I think, has to do with where it’s from. The game, despite appearances, isn’t Japanese. It’s developer, the appropriately named Gaijin Entertainment, is Russian. It isn’t that there’s anything specific wrong with X-Blades — well, maybe Ayumi’s ridiculous design — but that the game suffers from a cultural Uncanny Valley effect. It seems that, when one culture tries to emulate another’s game design, the result is repellant. Take Japanese attempts at the first-person shooter, like Coded Arms. Even beyond it’s questionable PSP control, it’s lacking in the feel inherent in Western FPS design. Or how about the long-forgotten PS1 RPG, Shadow Madness? Even with Ted Woolsey steering that ship, Crave Entertainment’s attempt at making a “Western JRPG” fell flat on its face.

This isn’t what you’d call a scientific observation, dear reader. But still good food for thought.

Related links:

TVTropes' "Woolseyisms"
Crossing the Uncanny Valley
The Uncanny Valley: Tomb Raider and Lara Croft Are Starting to Freak Me Out
Video of the Day: Judah Friedlander Explains the Uncanny Valley

Beating the Dead Horse Who Has It Coming: Playstation Releases on PSN

John Constantine — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:45:00 GMT

Castlevania Chronicles, the peculiar Playstation remake of a peculiar X68000 remake of the original Castlevania, was released as a downloadable title on Playstation Network today. It ain’t the best Castlevania out there, but it’s still a swell action title. The disc release was never widely distributed either, so this will be the very first time most interested players will even get the chance to try it out. Of course, the same could be said of a lot of Playstation games. The halcyon days of 2003 when you could walk into any Blockbuster or Gamestop in the country and pick up five classic PS1 games, often times still shrinkwrapped, for ten or twenty bucks are long over, and the collector’s market is making many great games prohibitively expensive. Want to play Silent Hill? Hope you’ve got an extra sixty-five dollars lying around. How about Suikoden II, considered to be the series’ definitive installment? That’ll be $150. And what about cult classics like CyberConnect2’s Silent Bomber? Yeah, seventy smackers.

You shouldn’t have to pay top dollar for these games, though, considering they could very easily be released on the Playstation Network. Over the course of the past two years, SCEA, along with a handful of other US publishers, have put up a measly twenty-six Playstation games on PSN, while Sony Japan have released close to a hundred. This isn’t the first time I’ve brought up this inexplicable disparity here at 61 Frames Per Second, but seriously, Sony. What the hell is going on here?! If the current market has proven anything, it’s that you can put almost anything up for download on a console and someone will buy it. There is no other explanation for Boogerman’s presence on Nintendo’s Virtual Console. The expense of having a game re-rated by the ESRB can’t be that high if Boogerman is getting re-released.

Sony, if you want to convince people to buy a Playstation 3 or PSP, then nostalgia-bomb them. Tell them they can relive all their fondest memories of 1997 for a mere five dollars on the Playstation Network and I promise you, people will literally throw money at you. And no, I don’t mean you should put up more Jet Moto games.

Related links:

Sony Gives Thanks Via Charming PSN Deals
Far Out, Man
I’ll Tell You When I’ve Had Enough!
Sony Might Just Hate You
Boogerman: Too Immature for Children

Underrated: Klonoa Series

Amber Ahlborn — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Klonoa 2

As far as underrated games go, the Klonoa titles have enjoyed moderate success. Still, if you were to stop random gamers on the street and ask if they've played a Klonoa game chances are they haven't. The first Klonoa game was released on the original Playstation and was one of the earliest titles to combine sprite based characters with 3-D environments. The game play was centered around classic 2-D platforming with an emphasis on using the enemies Klonoa grabbed and inflated to clear barricades, jump higher (including stringing together long series of aerial maneuvers), and find ways around various obstacles. It was fantastically fun and innovative, offering a solid challenge and a very rewarding experience.

After Klonoa: Door to Phantomile was released, it saw a number of sequels on the Japan only WonderSwan hand held system and the GBA as well as one more console release on the Playstation 2 titled Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil. There's a lot to like about these games, from the whimsical art style to the surprisingly melancholy stories found in the console titles. One of the presentation highlights for me was always the music. Both of Klonoa's console games sport beautiful soundtracks that showcase both playful and eerie tunes.

Klona 2 - Maze of Memories music

Klonoa 2 - Ruins of Sorrow music

Simply put, these are some of my favorite games. I own the original Playstation disc.

The Original

Also, there's good news for all of you out there who failed to discover the first game. It's seeing an updated remake on the Wii.

The Remake

Don't let it pass you by a second time! Now, let's all join the little Namco cabbit for some Caramelldansen to celebrate his series, may it see greater recognition in the future.

Get up and Dance!

Related Links:

Klonoa: Careful, Namco. You Tread On My Dreams.

Klonoa's Truimphant(?) Return

Underrated: Buck Bumble

Periphery: The Coolest Homebrew Project Device Ever

John Constantine — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

My understanding is that Niagara Falls is something of an awe-inspiring sightseeing opportunity as far as natural formations go and it’s a tacky extravaganza of shoddy, moldering love hotels as a tourist destination. You go to gamble, eat at buffets, and look at some fast water, right? I honestly don’t know. I haven’t been there in eighteen years, and my child’s-memory is fuzzy at best. It’s a cluttered jumble of images and familial inside jokes, things like eating pickle chips and weighing the odds of my survival if I jumped the railing. My clearest memory, though, is the preponderance of freak museums. Every corner boasted its own hall of mismatched curiosities, from replicas of barrels that made the falls’ descent to stuffed polar bears and any number of imaginary anthropological curiosities. I fear going back because I prefer my memory of the city’s institutionalized theater-of-the-absurd.

I check the website GameSniped on a weekly basis because, while it is intangible, it is very much a gaming freak museum. Prototype NES carts, complete Master System collections, strange promotional materials from bygone eras. It is a literal island of lost games, the detritus of the medium’s collective subconscious, interesting to collectors and freaks only. And me of course. Today’s spotlight is especially alluring, as both a historical find and as an opportunity. Some intrepid Ebayer is selling off a boxed M2 development kit. The M2 was Panasonic’s finished but never commercially released follow-up to the 3DO, meant to compete with the Playstation and Saturn. Back at the end of August, I linked to some bonafide footage of Kenji Eno’s first version of D2 running on the M2 hardware and, man, is it ugly. While Panasonic never released the M2 as a gaming console, the hardware actually powers some mundane devices these days, including ATMS and Japanese coffee vending machines. At least that’s what Wikipedia says so, you know, take that with a teensy grain of salt.

Why should you, the intrepid gamer, care about this M2 development kit? Why, think of what you could do with it! You could be the first person in the 21st century to actually make an M2 game. Talk about nerd cred! They’d give you a symposium at GDC for that kind of nonsense. That, or five people on a message board would hail you as a visionary. You could also make your own Japanese coffee vending machine. Awesome? Yes.

Related links:

Games We Will Never Get to Play: Kenji Eno’s D2 for M2
Periphery: Archaic N64 Paraphernalia is The Best
Periphery: Emotiv's EPOC is Strong in the Force
Periphery: Angry Video Game Nerd Edition

Sony Might Just Hate You

John Constantine — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Even before the company’s dramatic fall from grace, there has been a number of reasons a discerning individual might think that Sony hates them. The original Playstation had a failure rate to challenge the Xbox 360’s and the first DualShock controller didn’t become a pack-in with the system for months after its release. The Playstation 2 launched at a pricey $299 and that price held until May of 2002 when Sony suddenly and without forewarning dropped it to $199, leaving thousands of gamers out a hundred bucks when a simple press release could have saved them the trouble. The PSP launched and its screen was plagued by dead pixels and the Playstation 3 cost half a grand at the cheapest when it launched in ’06. One day, they’re committed to backwards compatibility and against rumble in controllers, and the next they’re asking you drop sixty smackers on a controller that shakes and backwards compatibility is for the birds. Yep. Sony hates you. Sony hates all of us.

Well, today, Sony hates your potential creativity. If you’re anything like us, you looked at LittleBigPlanet and thought, “Oh man. I am totally remaking Castlevania III in that sumbitch.” As the game plowed through its autumn beta, it turned out there were many like minded souls out there, making all sorts of homage-laden playgrounds for Sackboy to romp about. Then, last week, Media Molecule started disappearing levels from LittleBigPlanet’s servers en masse. Claiming that these deleted levels were the target of user complaints, it turned out that they were almost all removed under the auspices of copyright infringement. Most of the levels erased were based on classic videogames, but as Kris Erickson pointed out on PS3 Informer, some levels were removed for so innocuous a reason as they shared a name with a movie. (It’s actually just as well this one was taken down. No one needs to be reminded that Failure to Launch exists.) Today, Sony released a statement outlining some “suggested” LittleBigPlanet rules of conduct:

• Ensure that the content you share with other users is suitable for all ages - everybody has access to your level if you publish it.

• Please respect other people's intellectual property rights. For example, don't use images, brands or logos that you're not entitled to use.

• If you come across any content that you feel the need to report, then please do it responsibly. Hoax reports will be considered inappropriate behaviour.

Nothing says creativity like a nice set of rules! Regarding the all ages part, I don’t see why Sony and Media Molecule didn’t incorporate age settings that reflect a given PS3’s parental settings in the first place. No hoax reporting? Fine. But the intellectual property issue is both prickly and offensive. As Erickson also points out in his excellent editorial, the majority of these levels deleted from LittleBigPlanet fall within the boundaries of fair use. The levels inherently don’t diminish the value of the work that inspired them because, especially with game homage, they have to run in LittleBigPlanet. But more importantly, none of these levels are made for commercial consumption. They are free, provided you already own the game and a Playstation. PSN member RoboAlucard92 isn’t getting paid for his Symphony of the Night level in LittleBigPlanet. When Konami releases their inevitable LittleBigPlanet Castlevania content pack, then that level might need to be taken down. But not before.

The very existence of LittleBigPlanet seems like an act of love. But this sort of corporate kowtowing looks a whole lot more like hate.

(Our thanks to CVG, PS3 Informer, and NeoGAF user newschool)

Related links:

Microsoft Just Might Hate You
Nintendo Might Just Hate You
Five Games That Will Be Awesome to Remake in LittleBigPlanet
Waiting: Four More Games That Will Be Awesome To Remake In LittleBigPlanet
Four More Games That ARE Awesome Remade In LittleBigPlanet

Rock Star Designer Fallout: Team Ninja’s Post-Itagaki Future

John Constantine — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

While the videogame-designer-as-rock-star phenomenon is still a growing factor across the game development landscape, it’s had a recognizable poster boy for close to a decade. The be-sun-spectacled Tomonobu Itagaki is gaming’s very own Noel Gallagher, a mouthy, arrogant source of great quotes with a spotty creative track record, but who’s inarguably responsible for a couple of masterpieces. He’s also a magnet for controversy. Even beyond his inflammatory comments about rival game franchises, namely Tekken and Devil May Cry, Itagaki has been at the center of multiple legal entanglements with his former publisher, Tecmo. First, it was charges of sexual harassment. Then, this past June, Itagaki quit Tecmo after shipping Ninja Gaiden 2 and immediately sued the publisher for not delivering on promised pay bonuses.

This is the problem with the rock star designer phenomenon. In the aftermath of Itagaki’s departure from Tecmo, everyone in the industry was asking what’s next for Itagaki and what is his beleaguered publisher – Tecmo’s president resigned shortly after Itagaki left and they were nearly acquired by Square-Enix after that, before agreeing to merge with Koei – going to do without him. No one really asked what Team Ninja, the team that Itagaki founded, was going to do without their public face. How does a development team recover when their image, an identity that’s secured them a devoted audience more than the games they’ve made, has walked away?

Well, the verdict’s still out on that one. Gamasutra’s Christian Nutt sat down with Itagaki’s successors, Yosuke Hayashi – Hayashi directed the Playstation 3 port of Team Ninja’s first Ninja Gaiden, a game publicly panned by Itagaki – and Hitoshi Hasegawa, and Team Ninja’s future is still an unknown. Both Hayashi and Hasegawa put on a brave public face, discussing this console generations’ still-growing potential, the team’s satisfaction in their work, and their enthusiasm for those machines. But neither commit to specific, new projects, nor what they might be interested in doing with the new creative freedom that comes from an auteur’s departure.

I wonder if it even matters, really. Do people buy Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden games because of Team Ninja and Itagaki’s reputation or because of those brands? Considering the emphasis Microsoft has put on Itagaki and the team’s name since the Xbox 360’s launch, you have to think that it’s at least a factor. Personally, I think that Tecmo will continue to sell these franchise games with or without the Team Ninja name on them. But I’ve been wrong before.

What do you think, everyone? Is Team Ninja hurt by the loss of their rock star?

Related links:

Game Designers: Rockstars, Auteurs, Dweebs?
Where Will You Go, Tecmo? What Will Happen to Our Love?
The 61FPS Review: Ninja Gaiden 2
Where is Shuichi Sakurazaki, Creator of Ninja Gaiden?
Watcha Playing: Ninja Gaiden - Dragon Sword
Whatcha Playing: The New Adventures of the Nintendo DS

The Weakest Link: Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross

Nadia Oxford — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:42:00 GMT

Chrono Cross is the official sequel to Chrono Trigger, and I often wonder if it should have been. I really enjoyed Chono Cross: the graphics are beautiful, the music is stunning and the cast (even though it numbers in the trillions) is generally fun to hang with. As its own game, Chrono Cross is a Playstation must-have. As a sequel to Chrono Trigger, however, it's kind of off-colour. Following up Chrono Trigger with Chrono Cross is like eating a zuccini right after an ice cream cone. Both taste good, but for entirely different reasons that don't mix well.

There stands an excellent chance that Chrono Trigger DS will hammer some hasty bridges between it and Chrono Cross, and I really wish it wouldn't. The Playstation re-release of Chrono Trigger (avoid avoid avoid) already established links between the two, so I fear it's too late.

You may have noticed that I mouth off a lot about how the quality of game stories can stand to be closer to what you'd find in a book. I don't know if there has ever been an author who took over a beloved universe and promptly killed off its cast in the most half-assed manner possible in order to move in his roster, but if there is, I doubt he made any friends.

The death of Crono and his buds bothered me because there was nothing about Chrono Trigger that indicated the Kingdom of Guardia was at war with Porre. Porre never even gave any indication that it wanted to be more than a three-house town with a fuzzy monster who called himself the Piano Man. Chrono Cross puts the two at war and it was as baffling as watching a little boy play Death Army with Barbies and My Little Ponies.

It's not to say every link between the two is impotent. The trip through the Dead Sea is appropriately spine-tingling, and even though I have big problems with Chrono Cross making burnt offerings of my favourite characters to tell its own story, I can acknowledge that it is a good story.

But when I play Chrono Trigger DS this winter, there will be a great sadness in my bosom. :(

Related Links:

OST: Chrono Cross
The End of Time and the Beginning of Fan Drama
Chrono Trigger Port: Are You Excited or Disappointed?

The Videogame Ages, part 2

John Constantine — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

In part one of The Videogame Ages, I discussed the inadequacy of “generation” language in gaming, and laid out The Golden Age of gaming. In part two, I look at the Silver and Bronze ages before taking a look at the modern era and the future.

The Silver Age – 1983 to 1996
8-Bit, 16-Bit, Early Handheld, Early 3D, Advanced PC and Arcade

The silver age of games is defined by expansion, in not just playability but breadth of experience. When home computers became affordable and home consoles began diversifying, games started transforming from immediate, single-mechanic experiences into more lasting forms. Silver age games were still about escalating challenge, but high scores ceased being the goal, replaced by definitive endings. Games started becoming more explicitly narrative-driven, as aesthetic justification on consoles and as the focus of many PC games (see the entire adventure game genre.) Portable gaming also started to rise to prominence during this period, early single-screen LCD games replaced by multi-game consoles like the Game Boy and Atari Lynx. Arcade and PC game technology pulled far away from home consoles, but all games were shifted from the rough visual abstraction of golden age games, into more aesthetically recognizable presentations – albeit still cartoonish impressionistic rather than realistic. The rise of polygonal 3D graphics, both real-time full 3D (Yu Suzuki’s Virtua series) and pre-rendered (Myst, etc.), at the end of the silver age marks the transition to bronze. In 1996, with the release of Mario 64, Tomb Raider, and Quake, the silver age comes to a close.

The Bronze Age – 1996 to 2006 (maybe)
32-bit, 64-bit, 128-bit, Death of Arcades, PC Equalization

While golden age games’ boundary was a single screen and silver age games were largely confined to movement from left to right or down to up, the bronze age is the birth of 3D space as gaming’s chief concern. This isn’t to say that games that take a place on a 2D plain ceased being important or a valid medium for experimentation (though they certainly became marginalized on consoles, PCs, and in arcades.) But creating spaces with depth similar to the physical world took center stage in design. This push toward realistic spaces is mirrored in game aesthetics. Nearly all the technological benchmarks of the bronze age have come from creating as lifelike a facsimile of real life as can be achieved on any technology. PC games typically set that high water mark, though by the end of 2006, home consoles had largely caught up to PCs, much as they did with arcade games during the first few years of the 20th century (arcades are close to extinct now.) Game narrative started heavily borrowing from film’s storytelling language, relying on scripted scenes voiced and acted by digital characters in an attempt to tell deeper stories, but games also started developing there own unique storytelling language during this period, some games allowing the player to always be immersed in drama through play (see: Half-Life.) Multiplayer games no longer required physical proximity with the rise of online play on both PCs and consoles, and portable gaming started offering richer, longer play experiences, akin to those found on consoles.

I’m not totally convinced that the bronze age has ended yet, but the telltale signs of gaming’s latest age-defining shift have been popping up with some frequency over the last few years. The argument can be made that the Heroic Age of gaming is one of community via online networks and MMOs, user-generated content (see: Spore, LittleBigPlanet, Halo 3, Boom Blox, etc.), and experiential gaming. Experiential gaming is a big one whose mettle has yet to be tested, whether or not broad physical activity, from waving a Wiimote to playing fake musical instruments, will catch on. It’s certainly a dramatic shift to see experiential gaming leave its one-time home, the arcade, and transform into a driving force of home gaming. Then again, who knows? Maybe the golden age of gaming has only just ended, and its now, when players can finally build games themselves inside of other games, that the silver age has begun. Let me know, dear reader.

Part 1

Related links:
Comparison of Wiki Articles Proves Geeks Inherited The Earth
MMO Predicts Life in 10 Years
Men Are From Hyrule, Women Are From Simville: If Gender Defines the Games We Play, Why Does Everyone Play By the Same Rules?
9/9/99 9 Years Later
Fix It: Alone in the Dark, Tiger Woods, and the Death of the Glitch
Everyone Will be Able to Rock

The Videogame Ages, part 1

John Constantine — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

This past Friday, I tried to slip a little piece of language into a discussion about game emulation that I was wary about using at all. At this point, the go-to boundaries for discussing videogames’ admittedly small history is console-technology generations. We say 8-Bit or 16-Bit because these are easy identifiers based on competing, contemporary technologies. But the language “The 8-Bit Generation” doesn’t account for arcade technology, PC games, or portable gaming. Now that Bob Dvorak’s Tennis for Two is officially fifty years-old, I think we can finally start applying broader terms to gaming’s evolutionary eras. Obviously history is fluid, and chances are these classifications won’t hold true in 2050, but for now they work. The Hesiodic ages, as laid out here, consider games on every platform; the rigid parameters of home consoles, the advanced nature of PC and Mac gaming throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, the fast strides made by arcade technology throughout that same period, and the predominantly inferior technology available in handheld gaming. Unlike Hesiod’s Ages of Man, however, the videogame ages are (mostly) a positive progression. Please note: these are not strict definitions. This is a discussion, and I want everyone to make their opinions heard in the comments section. Now then, onward to the Golden Age.

The Golden Age – 1958 to 1983
Dvorak, MIT, Early Arcade, Early Home Console

The golden age of gaming began in 1958 and was, for almost a decade and a half, almost exclusively concerned with tennis. It took Nolan Bushnell getting clever for us to start calling it Pong. Tennis for Two, Magnavox’s Odyssey, and Bushnell’s advice to “avoid missing ball for high score” was pretty much the only game in town until the mid-70s with some notable exceptions. The second videogame ever made has a more recognizable legacy in today’s games. Steve Russell’s Spacewar!, started in 1961 as a side-project of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT (history’s first hackers, dontchaknow,) shares the two-player, two-object dynamics of Pong but the gameplay focused on actually destroying your opponent in a science-fiction setting. These games set the standard for the golden age: individual play mechanics presented on single screens. By the late-70s and early-80s, as Atari and other early consoles that could play multiple games were becoming common, games started expanding in both scope and ambition. Adventure, Pitfall, and others introduced continuity in their worlds, while Pac-man and Donkey Kong made the first stabs at introducing narrative. On the technology end, 1980 saw scrolling action in Defender and the larval form of 3D play, vector graphics, in Battlezone. The game industry crash and the release of the Famicom in 1983 mark the end of this period.

Part 2

Related links:
Comparison of Wiki Articles Proves Geeks Inherited The Earth
MMO Predicts Life in 10 Years
Men Are From Hyrule, Women Are From Simville: If Gender Defines the Games We Play, Why Does Everyone Play By the Same Rules?
9/9/99 9 Years Later
Fix It: Alone in the Dark, Tiger Woods, and the Death of the Glitch
Everyone Will be Able to Rock

The Curious Case of Playstation Home

John Constantine — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

I sometimes forget that Playstation Home, Sony’s proposed Frankenstein Monster that blends Xbox Live-like online service with an American Apparel-ad-meets-Second Life 3D space, even exists. Following its debut at GDC 2007, I was intrigued by the idea, but in the intervening eighteen months, Home has yet to materialize in any meaningful way. A closed beta trial of the service launched way back in April 2007, preceding a tentative launch later that fall, and that beta has since been extended half a dozen times. Home’s actual launch is out there, somewhere in the unknowable vaporware-future, and thankfully so. According to any and all hands-on reports from beta testers, Home is a ghost town, empty but for a scant few trendy avatars wandering the eerie Logan’s Run-style wasteland, hunting for an awkwardly animated dance party that may never happen.

The public showings of Home’s game themed rooms, like a Warhawk battle planning lounge where matches can be launched from, have been intriguing, but still they’re still just a half-formed suggestion of a possibly good idea. Even 1up’s recent tour of a close-to-finished “Uncharted Bar”, a saloon area tied to the absolutely brilliant Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, gives only a hint of what visiting the space and using the service will actually be like. Even after considering the breadth of Home’s features – the trophy rooms, user apartments, interactive movie theaters, mini-games – I still have absolutely no idea what the service’s actual purpose is. Yeah, it’s interesting that you made this, Sony, but what the hell is the point?

Personally, I think the best possible thing that Sony could do with Home at this point is to take a page from Microsoft’s new frontend strategy, and start imitating Nintendo. Not by changing Home’s hipster avatars into cutesy caricatures, but by further evolving Home’s Second Life mallscape into something that could actually be considered a game in its own right. Nintendo’s already built the model for this move in Animal Crossing; rather than having Playstation users purchase faux-Ikea furniture for their trophy-laden domiciles, let them find things in the environment. Incorporate NPCs or even moderator run avatars that ask you to perform tasks or reward players with the best billiards scores. And if Sony wants to keep things in the trendy category, why not incentivize players to make Home a “green” space and then encourage them to power down the Playstation for awhile or even launch Folding At Home. Public interest in Home, and excitement for Sony’s online strategy, will only happen when it becomes clear that Home is more than a barrier between you and playing games with friends.

Related links:

The Strange Case of Hype
SCEE Playstation Day 2K8 Roundup: Killzone 2, Home, Little Big Planet Dated
Progress Quest: Playstation 3 Growing Up and The General Beauty of Firmware Updates
The Natural World of Little Big Planet

R.I.P. Xbox 720 and Playstation 4: The Future of Gaming

John Constantine — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:00:00 GMT

When Dennis Dyack laid out his vision for the One-Console Future, he theorized that the extinction of multiple videogame consoles wasn’t just a utopian possibility “where games would become better in quality, cheaper, and more widely available.” He said it was inevitable. I’ve never agreed with Mr. Dyack, but I don’t necessarily think he’s too far off. As Wedbush Morgan’s resident maverick Michael Pachter says in the latest episode of GameTrailers’ Bonus Round, the console war is already on the road to being less about technological difference’s as it is about a war of branding. Not who has the better games, graphics, and controllers, but whose name is cooler. I think that’s true. But it’s only one possibility.

The overall subject of Bonus Round this week is the future of videogames. What will we be playing in seven or eight years, during what would traditionally be the next generation of consoles, and what will we be playing those games on? Geoff Keighly sat down with Pachter, former editor in chief of EGM Dan Hsu, and Xbox co-creator Seamus Blackley to discuss the subject and their dialogue got me thinking about Dyack’s land-of-milk-honey-and-no-proprietary-technology predictions. Both Blackley and Pachter agree that eventually, as social infrastructure continues to grow as the driving factor behind all entertainment and artistic expression, videogame consoles will naturally consolidate along with every consumer device in an effort to provide unified access to a user’s personal experience. Your games, your friends list, your profile, photos, family trees, etc. all linked in with everything you use, including your game console. The games themselves, from Pachter’s point of view, have solidified as content; much like television programs between the ‘60s and today, the format has reached its final form, the only evolution left being delivery and a polishing of presentation. Dan Hsu, however, proposes that the console market has been indelibly changed by the Wii. Going forward, Sony, Microsoft, and whomever else’s consoles will diversify into different experiences defined by inputs like the Wii’s motion controller or balance board.

That’s the true shape gaming’s future. Blackley and Pachter aren’t wrong that functionality between every consumer device will continue to converge to satisfy our new communal needs, but this doesn’t ensure a Dyackian console. No, videogames are too young and are changing too quickly. They are in their adolescence as a form of expression. But the format, how we touch these stories, diversions, and competitions, is just being born.

Related links:

Too Much Crap: The Gamer’s Lament
The Madden IQ and The Future of Competitive Gaming
Counterpoint: Too Many Games?
Serious Business: Dennis Dyack Blames the Internet

Games We Will Never Get to Play: Kenji Eno’s D2 for M2

John Constantine — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:00:00 GMT

My obsession with Kenji Eno continues to grow despite the fact that I have yet to play a single game he designed. It isn’t just the mystery behind the man and his philosophy on design that’s got me so intrigued, but the fact that his games have always been on the periphery of my experience, especially the original D. Long before I had a Playstation or even a home computer that had a prayer of running the game, I remember gawking at pictures of the macabre adventure title in advertisements and being both fascinated and legitimately creeped out. When D2 came out for the Dreamcast, I was keen to check it and satisfy my younger self’s curiosity, but lost interest when I found out that the American version had been heavily censored. Thanks to Lost Levels and PC Games That Weren’t’s Timo Weirich, Kenji Eno and D just got a little bit more delightfully mysterious.

Weirich has been posting video of the original, scrapped version of D2 that was designed for the M2, the unreleased successor to Panasonic’s 3DO console. It’s fully 3D like the D2 that was eventually released but is almost the exact opposite in art direction and play, with an eerie castle setting as opposed to arctic wastes. Eno’s said that this version of the game was abandoned because he wanted to make a game with snow it, but other than that he’s offered no explanation for the radical change in design. This footage is all the info we’re likely to get.

Much love to Lost Levels, it’s great to see you all back after so long.

Related links:

Kenji Eno is a Mule of Epic Proportions
Kenichi Nishi and Kenji Eno’s Newtonica Brings iPhone Gaming Into the Realm of Awesome