61 Frames Per Second : contra

8 Bit Jesus: Holiday Chiptunes for Your Stocking

Cole Stryker — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

I know chiptunes are normally Derrick's game around these parts, but when I stumbled on Dr. Octoroc's 8-bit Jesus, I couldn't resist. It's an album of Christmasy chip tunes, half of which is available for free online as individual mp3's or a rar/zip file.

Now, as if a collection of bleep-bloopy Christmas songs weren't enough, Dr. Octoroc has carefully arranged each song to mimic the signature style of a specific development studio, publishin company or franchise. "The First Noel" is given the Hyrulian marching band treatment in "The Legend of Noel". "We Three Kings" plays like a frantic Contra boss battle in "We Three Konami". These classics should fit nicey between Bing and Andy Williams this holiday season.

Head on over to Dr. Octoroc's site for nine free songs.

F**k Your Future: Mirror’s Edge, Blade Runner, and the Future City

John Constantine — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The image above is a little bit of Deus Ex 3 concept art from Eidos Montreal, the crack design team who broadened our sexual horizons with Fear Effect and taught us that controlling sociopathic murders is boring as sin with Kane & Lynch. I can imagine the dialogue between the artists and producers when this image was submitted for approval:

"What do you got for us today, concept artists?"

"Check dis!"

"This isn't Deus Ex! This is just a screencap from Blade Runner with the guy from Deus Ex 1 smoking in front of it!"

"I'm fired aren't I?"

"No! It's perfect! That’s all these nerds want anyway."

I kid. There is no Deus Ex without Blade Runner, after all. While its influence isn’t quite on the level of Aliens, Blade Runner’s vision of a nightmare cityscape in the far-flung-but-familiar future is a close second. Its towering super-skyscrapers and dank alleyways are the aesthetic meat of beloved games like Shadowrun and Snatcher, but you can also see them in mid-period Contra, Flashback, Abe’s Odyssey/Exodus, and even recent blockbusters like Mass Effect. Then again, it’s not just games. Syd Mead’s Los Angeles has been the template for depicting the urban landscape of the future in all media for close to twenty-five years.

I’ve been curious for awhile now as to what the next popular conception of the cityscape is going to be. The Blade Runner type came on the heels of the ultra-slick Logan’s Run-style, cities of spires all white and sterile that typified science fiction from its 1950s heyday through the 1970s. This may not be the most academic logic in the world, but since sci-fi literature gave us our Future City model post-WWII, and sci-fi film bore its successor, I’m looking to videogames to create the next archetype.

If you’ve been reading 61FPS regularly, you probably won’t be surprised to hear me say that I think Mirror’s Edge features the most likely model for tomorrow’s City of Tomorrow. Edge’s nameless city has the same whitewashed sterility that was the hallmark of the 60s/70s future city but twists the model by coating it in streaks of primary color and keeping the architecture familiar. The buildings, subway stations, and shopping centers recall today’s Montreal but with a consistent modernist bent. Edge’s dystopia is also a recent institution. The story constantly reminds the player that the totalitarian government responsible for the city’s current shape hasn’t been in power long, and so the omnipresence of architecture-as-construction-site provides a fine narrative metaphor: you play behind the future city’s façade of perfection. Whether or not this model fully captures the zeitgeist of 2008 and beyond remains to be seen, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing Edge’s city more often then Blade Runner’s, especially in games, going forward.

Note: Forgive my hate against Eidos Montreal. Yeah, Fear Effect and Kane & Lynch suck, but they made Soul Bubbles. They’re alright.

(Link: Gamereactor via Kotaku)

Related links:

The Three Stigmata of The Halcyon Company: Philip K. Dick Comes to Games
Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True
Trailer Review: Mirror’s Edge
The Eternal Question: Why Is Super Mario Bros. Fun?
Ceci N'Est Pas Une 1-Up: The Surrealist Future of Postpunk Gaming

Whatcha Playing: The New Adventures of the Nintendo DS

John Constantine — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A strange thing happened ‘round about last October. For the first time since its release in April 2005, I was regularly playing games on PSP. I had been carrying a grudge against Sony for promising the world with their first handheld and not delivering even a fraction of the compelling software that they had on the first two home Playstations. But then, all of a sudden, there were all these fantastic games to sink my teeth into. Strategy RPGs like Jeanne D’Arc, old-school action like Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, and true genre benders like Crush had finally brought me into the PSP fold. The drawback? My DS went on the shelf and wasn’t touched for months. Oh, I brought it down when Contra 4 came out and on that rare Saturday morning that I felt like going back to my Animal Crossing village to do some weeding, stomp some roaches, and writing some letters. But I wasn’t playing anything new and I started wondering if the brief reign of the DS — not as a force of business but as a fount of compelling design — was over.

Man, was that stupid. For all of the greatness we’re seeing on the current crop of consoles, nothing can touch the dual-screened wonder for sheer versatility. My second honeymoon with the DS started with my introduction to the Phoenix Wright games, a series I was none too fond of at first. As I plunged deeper into the game, I became addicted to the story and the satisfaction of pushing it forward through simple logic puzzles. I never thought I would use a gaming console to read comic books, yet here I am, plowing through the second Phoenix Wright, loving every minute of it. I also mentioned last week that I’m taking on my first full Pokemon game, an experience that’s proving perilously habit-forming. My complete conversion back to the system came this weekend though. I spent time with games on opposite ends of the play spectrum, Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword and Shiren the Wanderer. Gaiden is a forward thinking action experience, a game as much about new ideas than it is about series tropes. Shiren the Wanderer is the pinnacle of throwbacks, a roguelike dungeon crawler as mechanically obtuse as it is simple to play. This is the essence of gaming on the DS, a constant barrage of new and old, design of yesteryear melding perfectly with fresh ways to, no pun intended, touch art. As the fall approaches and new console titles start dominating the gaming frontline, I’m sure I’ll gravitate back to playing at home. For now, I’ll be out in the sun, getting to know an old friend all over again.

Related links:

Going Back in There: My Very First Hour With Pokemon
Whatcha Playing: Ninja Gaiden – Dragon Sword
Whatcha Playing: How Many Buttons I Gotta Push

Don’t Call It Retro: Mega Man 9 and Design Resurrection

John Constantine — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

As 61 Frames Per Second’s newest team member Nadia pointed out earlier today, Mega Man 9 is a reality. Revitalizations of long-dormant franchises have been a mainstay in the gaming business since the Playstation 1-era, trading on nostalgia and brand recognition to push new designs. But the past few years have seen a growing trend of proper numerical sequels releasing a decade or more after their predecessors. Games like WayForward and Konami’s Contra 4 and Taito’s Legend of Kage 2 are not only sequels in name; play in these games is built on the same archaic fundamentals as their ancestors. Both Kage 2 and Contra 4’s only real advancements are slight visual upgrades and mechanical tweaks (both games, being designed for the Nintendo DS, introduce skills that necessitate play on both the system’s screens.) Mega Man 9, however, is unique. It is being made using the exact same tools and in the same style as it was twenty years ago.

The decision to build Mega Man 9 as an NES game is not mere retro pandering. Series creator Keiji Inafune has said numerous times that he’s kept making (and remaking) 2D Mega Man games (alongside teams like Inticreates, the team helming 9’s development) because it’s important to continue refining and rediscovering what made a simple design successful in the first place. With the freedom offered by digital distribution venues like WiiWare, creators like Inafune no longer need to ensure their games will be modern enough to succeed on store shelves. They can also utilize outmoded hardware, like the NES, to make their games.

In an editorial some months back, Play’s Dave Halverson waxed philosophical about digital distribution’s potential to revitalize not only old game types, but old hardware itself. New Genesis games, new Turbo-Grafx games. I scoffed at the time, but Mega Man 9 is serving me a big bowl of crow to eat.

The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels in Gaming History, Part 2

Peter Smith — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:31:00 GMT

Super Mario 64

If you'd asked a young me to imagine a three-dimensional Mario Bros. game, I'd have pictured a screenshot from Super Paper Mario — essentially, the point-A-to-point-B linearity of classic side-scrolling Mario, shot from a different camera angle. Instead, Shigeru Miyamoto's first 3D adventure completely rewrote the rules of platforming, replacing the "get to the end" format with a variety of challenges set in one, open physical space. To a generation weaned on linearity, this was pretty overwhelming at first — I remember being plunked down in Bob-Omb Battlefield and wandering around like a chump for an embarrassingly long time. 64 was so different from its precursors that you arguably wouldn't call it a sequel, but bear in mind that no one knew at the time what the next generation of games would look like. Early 32-bit games like Bug and Clockwork Knight dressed 2D gaming in 3D clothes. As usual, that nut Miyamoto had something different in mind. — PS

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest

This game is full of fucking liars. That's the least of its eccentricities but it's worth pointing out up front. Up until the late '80s, Konami's bread and butter was short arcade games, heavy on action and reflex based play as exemplified by well-known staples like Contra and Gradius. The original Castlevania was no different, just six linear stages of unforgiving reaction play that demanded careful attention to the game's weighted attack/jump timing. As home consoles strengthened their grip on players, Konami followed the growing trend of creating longer, deeper play experiences. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest has only superficial similarities to Castlevania. You jump over platforms, whip monsters, and move from left to right. But the world is persistent, requiring you to revisit most locales, and it's littered with towns. Towns are full of non-enemy characters selling items and offering "advice" on how to proceed through the game's barely defined obstacles. Simon's Quest also introduced one of gaming's first night-and-day systems. During the day, towns are safe. At night, everything kills you in two seconds and towns are full of zombie chicks. Konami retreated from Castlevania II's experiments for almost a decade, but the series has never since done anything quite so daring as having its lead die after beating the game. — JC

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

We are aware that this list is populated almost exclusively by games designed by Shigeru Miyamoto. What can we say? He's an adventurous guy. [Shouldn't that be "adventuresome guy?" — PS] The first Legend of Zelda is, arguably, Miyamoto's true masterpiece, the culmination of his first design era. His benchmarks: Donkey Kong created context and narrative, Super Mario Bros. brought speed and an expanding world beyond a single screen, and the Legend of Zelda created an actual world to explore, an organic place peppered with secrets. After its release in 1986, the next decade of Miyamoto's career was one marked more by refinement than creation. But, in 1987, Miyamoto got experimental. Alongside the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. 2 is Zelda's sequel, The Adventure of Link, a sequel so bizarre in its design choices that it's still seen as a blemish on a series considered unimpeachable by gamers and designers alike. While Zelda II doesn't eschew the original's birds-eye-view perspective entirely — travel and world exploration is presented this way, albeit with a much more expansive view — all the action takes place in multi-tiered scrolling stages (not dissimilar to SMB2's.) Items were replaced by spells learned from chatty townspeople, heart containers and swords replaced by role-playing style attribute growth, and link himself grew from a diminutive elf into a teenager with a peculiar, post-lobotomy stare. Unlike some of the other games on this list, very little of Zelda II's design has been used in subsequent adventures. I've found it only gets better with age, a diamond in the rough of a series that's become bloated and stagnant after twenty years of little revision. — JC

Click here for Part 1.
Click here for Part 3.