61 Frames Per Second : yakuza

In Defense of the QTE: Ninja Blade

John Constantine — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Now that the man’s winding down his career, let us honor Yu Suzuki for his most important contribution to game design: the QTE. Hey now. I can hear you rolling your eyes. We might be sick of pressing the X button every single time Crystal Dynamics wants Lara Croft to kick a tiger with style, but the quick time event provides us with some of videogames’ most satisfying thrills. They aren’t inherently bad. They’re just implemented very, very poorly. This week, you’ll be able to walk out into the world and pick up a copy of From Software’s Ninja Blade. Hell, you can go home right now and download a demo of Ninja Blade just to have a taste. One level is all you need to exemplify just how good quick time events can be in a game.

Here’s why.

First, a definition. In God of War’s wake, “quick time event” has transformed from a noun into a sort of critics’ short hand. It’s a blanket term to describe when, in a game where you have direct control of a character, the normal control is taken away and you watch a unique or atypical animation. While the animation plays, you must press a specific button as prompted on the screen. If you don’t, you’ll have to replay the sequence. Now, there are many parts of modern games that can be described this way and not all of them are quick time events. For example, in action games like MadWorld and Yakuza 2, you’re prompted with special inputs — press X next to a car, swing the Wiimote down — to finish off enemies. The most colorful finishing moves have you stringing these inputs together. These are not quick time events. They’re contextual actions. A quick time event is a choreographed, dramatic sequence where prompts imitate an action that you do not have direct control over. Resident Evil 4 has some classic examples. You, the player, steer Leon to the top of a hill and move forward. The game then shifts the camera to a group of enemies on a cliff above you. They push a boulder off said cliff that chases you and to escape you repeatedly press a button, which keeps Leon running. That button has nothing to do with movement during regular play. If you don’t press it here, the game ends. That’s a quick time event. They can, and have, enrich games with emotionally charged moments the game wouldn’t have otherwise.

The chief argument against quick time events is that they pull you out of a game by stripping away control, if only partially. They’re gaudy cheats to mask the passive storytelling devices of film instead of relying on a game’s interactivity to inform its drama and incident. It’s a valid argument against bad quick time events. The most recent games starring the aforementioned Lara Croft, particularly Tomb Raider Legend, have terrible quick time events made up of sixty second cinematics halved by a single, easy to miss button press. When implemented well, though, a quick time event is anything but a mask for inactive game sequences, as in Quantic Dream’s Indigo Prophecy. The game allows you limited sequences of full character control, relying on quick time events with inputs that imply the action to make up most of the play. Lucas Kane is running from police officers and needs to dodge left so you’re prompted to press both analog sticks in that direction. You aren’t moving Lucas, but the movement of both sticks translates as urgency, and agency, for you. These QTEs are fast to match the pace of the game and end up making for affecting play because of their speed and mimicry of the action. That’s the key to QTE success; tying your input as close to possible to dramatic actions that are impossible to depict, or make interactive, in the game itself.

Ninja Blade’s first level is about half quick time events and they are incredible spectacles. The level ends with a fight against a giant, grotesque spider on top of a skyscraper. The first part of the fight is familiar three-dimensional action; you move around with the level analog stick and press X, Y, and B buttons on the Xbox 360 controller to slice and stab with a sword. The second part, after whittling down the spider’s defenses, has you riding the spider up a skyscraper before riding a wrecking ball across the night sky, and then crushing the spider with it. There isn’t a way in games to make this one-hundred percent interactive and retain its presentation. Not yet at least. So sequence is a quick time event, and through a mixture of rumble in the control, speed of button prompts, and inputs that approximate other actions in the normal game, it’s completely engaging.

Like I said, QTEs don’t damn a game. They’re just another tool. Quality depends on the craftsmen.

Related links:

Love-Hate: In Defense of the Cutscene
Overpowering the Flavor: Cooking Mama World Kitchen and Cutscene Clutter
Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone
Sonic Unleased: Worse Than Syphilis
Sega's Yu Suzuki Steps Down
Where is Yu Suzuki?

Anything Less Than the Best is a Felony: Arkham Asylum Might Be the Best Batman Game Yet

John Constantine — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:30:00 GMT

Batman is awesome. I would never say that Batman wasn’t awesome. Batman is only a tool though. A conceit, a platform, a set of rules to tell entertaining stories with. There’s something people tend to forget every time a new Batman game gets announced. Bats hasn’t had a very good videogame career, but everyone seems to think it has to do with the medium. It isn’t that videogames starring Batman are usually bad. It’s that everything starring Batman is usually bad. There are three good Batman movies to four terrible ones. There is one good Batman cartoon, and four others that can physically damage three out of five human senses. There are a number of very good Batman comics. There also happens to be over one thousand Batman comics that suck.

As of 2009, there is one excellent Batman videogame (NES), a handful of okay Batman games, and close to twenty that are trash. Not trashy. I mean the sort of thing you put in the garbage. After watching a playthrough of Batman: Arkham Asylum’s first twenty minutes, I’m willing to say that Rocksteady Studios has the potential to make the first great Batman game. No fanboy hyperbole here. It actually looks that good.

The demoed chunk of Arkham Asylum’s first chapter expands on the trailer released this past January. Batman has arrested the Joker and is delivering him to the titular sanitarium. Outside of the brief cinema of Batman’s late night drive, the narrative heavy opening minutes mercifully give the player control, letting you walk alongside the guards and doctors as they escort the Joker in. It’s nice to not have to passively sit through the story and it lets you get sense of your surroundings. Rocksteady’s asylum is an amalgamation of previous incarnations (the game doesn’t adhere to any specific continuity, comic or otherwise.) Here, it takes up an entire island on the river near Gotham City, and is made up of founder Amadeus Arkham’s mansion and an industrialized facility. The hospital looks, appropriately enough, like a videogame setting. With its grimy metal hallways and shadowed vents, it looks like a place to keep the super-powered criminally insane. Purists might scoff at the design, but it’s tonally consistent with this version of Batman’s world. It all looks quite nice to boot. It has that wet look games built on Unreal Engine 3 tend to, but doesn’t suffer from any of the texturing troubles (see: environments loading sans textures) that plague games like Mass Effect. The character designs also seem familiar inside UE3, but that’s thanks to their Epic-ness; these thick-looking versions of Batman, Commissioner Gordon, the Joker, and Harley Quinn would look right at home in Gears of War. These also might get fans in a huff, especially the American McGee-ified Quinn, but they work in Arkham Asylum.

After the Joker escapes, you get your first taste of Arkham’s combat. Since I didn’t get to actually play the game, it’s impossible to say how the brawling feels, but it gives the best impression possible. Fighting recalls nothing if not Sega’s Yakuza. Thugs surround Batman and you dash back and forth between them, combo meter filling as you contantly move between them. The game intelligently interprets who you want to attack; press the analog stick in their direction along with X or Y (light and heavy strikes respectively), and you smoothly draw in for the hit. Like in Yakuza, finishing and strong moves also go into stylish slow-motion. (I was told that some of these moves are only in slow-motion the first few times they’re used, a smart choice that should keep the game fast.)You unlock new moves and upgrade Batman’s skills and equipment by gaining experience. It may damage some of the Batman persona – you are supposed to be the world’s greatest detective and an accomplished martial artist from the outset, after all – but it’s a welcome concession to the medium. Arkham Asylum needs to be a good game first, and making the combat an evolving set of rules will help it be just that. The game’s investigation and stealth play don’t hurt either.

At any point while playing, you can activate investigative mode. A colored filter covers the screen, highlighting interactive parts of the environment (concealed paths, grapple points) as well as scan-able information (characters, writing on walls.) In the demo, the extent of puzzle solving through investigation was limited to find-the-path and hit-the-switch problems, but producer Nathan Whitman said the game goes deeper as it progresses. (He mentioned crime scene investigations, which have popped up in other previews, but sadly I didn’t see any here.) If it all sounds a bit like Metroid Prime’s scan visor, that’s because it is. Whitman dropped exactly that name in describing the game’s investigation and seamless-world exploration. The investigation filter also informs Arkham’s “Silent Predator” play. Terrible name aside, these stealth features look solid and integral to nailing the character in a game. Many of the asylum’s rooms are large and allow for creative dispatching of enemies. Sneak through the shadows, activate investigation mode, grapple to the ceiling, drop down on a thug and zip him back up. When there’s only one baddie left, glide down with your cape wide and kick him in the head before he knows what’s coming. It all looks smooth and active as well, hardly a collection of cutscene triggers or QTEs.

I know. This is a lot of referencing classic games to paint a portrait of Arkham Asylum. Metroid Prime, Yakuza, Gears of War. I don’t think Rocksteady Games is trying to hide where they get their inspiration though. Even the game’s Batman: The Animated Series pedigree – Harley, Joker, and Bats are all voiced by their actors from that series, and Arkham’s written by alum and Detective Comics scribe Paul Dini – shows their willingness to pull from the best sources to make sure their Batman videogame is actually worth playing. It looks great. We’ll see how it feels to play when it comes out this summer.

Fanboy note: No, Batman’s eyes are not white. They won’t be. They are, however, white when he’s in investigation mode. Whitman said that’s the compromise to appease y’all. Ah well. Better than nothing.

Related links:

At Least Batman: Arkham Asylum's Story Will Be Good
Batman Can't Even Land a Punch on Superman in a Video Game
A Silver Lining to The Dark Knight
NYCC 2009 - DC Universe Online

John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Character

John Constantine — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:45:00 GMT

Next time you start telling somebody about a game you were playing — not a puzzle game or anything equally abstract — pay attention to how you refer to what you were doing in the game. Are you saying, “Then I jumped on the goomba!” or are you saying, “Then my guy jumped on the goomba!” Is it you finding the boomerang or is it Link? Are you driving the car, making the basket, managing the farm? Or is it your proxy, that little character walking about when you push a button to the right, that window meant to be a human being’s field of vision? As much as I thought about open worlds in 2008, I spent just as much time wondering what role character plays in great game design. A great game character doesn’t need to be one specific thing. It can be you, a literal representation of how you see yourself physically and even spiritually. It can also be a suit for you to put on, a fiction that you can inhabit, a doorway into story that isn’t just different from your daily life, but quite literally impossible. There was no shortage of astounding games in 2008, but there were a handful that, for me, were wholly defined by how they let you inhabit their characters, and characters made both for and by the player.

In my first look back at ’08, I mentioned how it was character that ultimately kept me from getting the most out of Grand Theft Auto IV. There was just too much dissonance in how Niko Bellic was represented. There were three Nikos. There was the Niko you see speaking in cutscenes, a haunted, practical man of honor, making a new life for himself in a new country by hunting down the demons of his past. There was the Niko you guided through the game’s structured missions, a ruthless, opportunistic murderer who would destroy anything and anyone for a buck. And, finally, the Niko that you played, the blank slate who could do anything in Liberty City, whether it was enjoying a nice walk on the beach or assaulting an international airport with nothing more than a motorcycle and a baseball bat. At no point in GTAIV did these three Nikos meld into a single character, and the constant contradictions between them made it impossible for me to enjoy the game after a certain point.

Metal Gear Solid 4 and Yakuza 2 (my absolute favorite game of 2008) were two of last year’s greatest achievements precisely because they didn’t fall prey to GTAIV’s representational failures. Both games are concerned with narrative — unchangeable, locked, and passively engaged narrative in both cases — but when you, as the player, take control of Old Snake and Kazuma Kiriyu, the actual play is designed to reinforce and serve those characters. The game is literally about them and thusly, depending on what type of player you are, they are about you. It impressed me to no end that, in both games, this was sufficient incentive to keep playing; I always wanted to know what was going to happen to Kiriyu and Snake. It’s convenient, then, that the play in both games was every bit as good as their mutual cutscenes were long. MGS4’s stealth and action finally felt organic after a decade of refinement and, of the hundreds of things you can do in Yakuza 2, even the most mundane were entertaining. (Selecting booze from an in-game menu and then reading about how it tastes? Awesome.)

The World Ends With You (my second favorite game of the year) utilized character just as effectively as Yakuza and Metal Gear, but in a much different way. TWEWY is an expertly designed game, flush with color and mechanical delights. No other game released in 2008, not Fallout 3, not anything, gave you as many options for customization as TWEWY did. You can, at any point, fundamentally change the flow of the game by altering its settings and your characters' attacks/apparel. What impresses me most about TWEWY, and what’s made the most lasting impression, is that the game doesn’t hook you into its story or battles through a single lead character or even an ever expanding cast of usable characters, as is the norm for role-playing games. TWEWY grabs you by framing every action in the game and story around a principal character’s relationship with their second. Not only does Neku grow as a person through his relationships with his partners, but the game layers complexity and nuance into its actual activities as a result of personal growth. Your role in the game isn’t Neku, his friends, or even a sort narrator (another RPG commonality.) You play the bond between characters. There’s nothing else like it.

Had I played and finished Fallout 3 before 2008 ended, it would most likely be included here at the end alongside Fable II and Soulcalibur IV, games that put the burden of character directly on you. But I didn’t, so more kudos to Fable and Soulcalibur. These two couldn’t be more different, but they share one distinct strength: they both allow you to mold character to an absurd degree. Soulcalibur IV is the best version of one of the best fighting games made, and its core character design, as is the case with fighting games in general, is half of its appeal. Its character creation mode, however, is the star of the show. Point me to a single other game that’s as versatile and accessible in letting you make a body to inhabit a game and have fun with. I’ll wait. Some people called Soulcalibur IV a let down. They are wrong. Fable II, on the other hand, doesn’t give you a whole lot to play with when it comes to making your character look how you want them to. There are far fewer costumes, hair styles, and other variables than there were in its predecessor. But Peter Molyneux finally delivered a game that allowed you to be a person of complex morality. Fable isn’t an unmitigated success. Its illusion of simulated society is often crippled by familiar boundaries (you can’t bring x person to x locale, etc.) and it’s far too easy to manipulate the NPC masses through simple actions. Despite its imperfections, the game does break the dualism that has dominated moral-choice-as-mechanic in games previously. You can be good but corrupt, bad but pure. The game fails because your character’s nature isn’t always reflected in the world around them, but it’s a monumentally important step forward and deserving of both praise and canonization.

I’ll be wrapping up 2008 once and for all in a couple of days. In the meantime, if you haven’t played any of these, what the hell are you waiting for?

Games of 2008: Yakuza 2, Metal Gear Solid 4, The World Ends With You, Fable II, Soulcalibur IV

Related links:

John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Open World
10 Games Nadia Played in 2008 Instead of Working
Joe’s Top Ten Games of 2008
My Top 10 of 2008 in No Particular Order
Derrick's Top 13 Games of 2008

Trailer Review: Yakuza 3

John Constantine — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Kazuma Kiryu and I are going to hang out. We’ll go out and he’ll show me the sights, take me to a hostess club, and we will laugh and laugh. Chances are, some dudes in puffy winter jackets will start some shit. I will hold their leader in a headlock and Kaz will drop kick that mofo so hard that Canadian children will say, “Ow” in their living rooms, thousands and thousands of miles away. We’ll high five each other then, before listening to a hardboiled detective tell us of intriguing and nefarious dealings in the Tokyo underworld. It’ll be sweet when the jazz rock starts playing. That heady day will only end when I’m woken up in my study, a firm bionic hand on my shoulder and a disapproving voice asking if I’m “dreaming of that Celestial roustabout” again. I will lie, of course. A white lie to soothe my beloved Commando’s nerves. But I will treasure that dream all the same.

Yakuza 3, as you can see from this trailer, looks totally frigging rad. As to what’s happening here, I have no clue. Kazuma Kiryu is hanging out with some kids, which I assume are from the orphanage he patronizes in Yakuza 2, on a beach, there’s a protest of some kind, some political intrigue, the flashy graphics are shown off, and many familiar faces appear, much to my delight. At one point, it looks like Kiryu’s beating the crap out of Albert Wesker from Resident Evil. I want this to be the case very badly. If you have yet to try either of the Yakuza games on PS2, this might look like a boring cutscene fest. Let me assure you, there is a monumental amount of game in the Yakuza series. There are many lengthy cutscenes, but Yakuza is one of those very rare instances when they’re actually a treat. The stories, while more than a little melodramatic and overblown, are well written and exciting, provided crime drama is something you enjoy.

Sega, please bring this here. Please.

(Link: Siliconera)

Previous Trailer Reviews:

Dragon Quest IX
TGS Trailer Time: Resident Evil 5
Retro Game Challenge
Golden Axe: Beast Rider
House of the Dead: Overkill
Riz-Zoawd
Idolm@ster PSP
The Last Guy
Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff
Captain Rainbow
The Past and Future With Mega Man 9 and Chrono Trigger DS
Densetsu no Stafi 5
Sonic Unleashed
Infinite Undiscovery
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
Street Fighter 4
The Conduit
Mirror’s Edge

Bringing Sexy Back: Toshihiro Nagoshi

John Constantine — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I mentioned it earlier today, but Sega’s been making me feel all tingly on the inside lately. It’s been a goodly while since Sega made my heart flutter, but they just keep making all the right moves. More than anything else from the publisher, Yakuza 2 has been the real inspiration behind all the tinglyness. No bones about it, I freaking love that game. It is awesome. But I got to thinking today, to whom do I owe my thanks for all the warmth inside? Well, certainly crime novelist Hase Seishu. His careful pen is responsible for Yakuza’s ongoing and thoroughly entertaining story. But producer Toshihiro Nagoshi certainly deserves a heaping spoonful of thanks as well. And you know what else? He is sexy as hell.

Taking Sega’s lumbering play model from Shenmue and turning it into a focused crime RPG like Yakuza is sexy. Creating a game like Super Monkey Ball, a game in which monkeys go into balls, roll around, and make funny noises, is also sexy. But even beyond that, look at the man! A few years back, he looked like this:

Then he started making games about badasses like Kiryu Kazuma and ball-monkeys and he transformed into this guy:

I wish I was the one giving him flowers.

Previously on Bringing Sexy Back:

Street Fighter Dress-Up Party!
Susan O’Connor
John Carmack
Retro Controllers of the Future
Yoji Shinkawa

Sex/Violence: Oneechanbara and the New Localization

John Constantine — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I thought about filing this under the Japan Scares Me category, but frankly Oneechanbara doesn’t scare me. It merely makes sense. I am not surprised that Japan makes games about a woman in a cowboy hat and lingerie who runs around with her pre-pubescent sister killing zombies with a gigantic sword and who ultimately goes insane when she’s completely covered with blood. This is just what Japan does. I’m pretty sure that there are soft drinks whose canisters are decorated with the exact same scenario. It’s probably called Refreshing Breast Blood No Zombie Drink White Plus. Chances are I would drink it. Because I delight in these things.

It’s curious, though, that Oneechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers is coming out in America at all. It’s actually the sixth entry in a franchise spawned out of D3’s Japan-only Simple 2000 series, bargain titles that typically riffed on basic game types that were *ahem* self-descriptive (see: Simple 2000 Vol. 15: The Rugby, Vol. 37: The Shooting,) but sometimes had bizarre, and distinctly Japanese, premises. Like Vol. 95: Zombies Vs. Ambulances, Oneechanbara is an odd one: instantly familiar as a game thanks to the raunch and violence, but just as familiar for its J-grindhouse tropes. It’s the sort of game – not especially well-made and too extreme to get a marketable ESRB rating – that Western gamers have only got a sampling of over the past twenty-years, a devoted-importer-only title. But D3 is bringing Oneechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers anyway, and they’re not altering it a bit, adding English to menus, subtitles for the dialogue, and nothing else.

The trend’s growing. Sega of America, after two years of acting like the game didn’t exist, just brought Yakuza 2 to the States, foregoing the B-list-Hollywood voiceovers that plagued the domestic release of its prequel, and making no effort to localize the game’s many mini-games built on Japanese cultural eccentricities. For example, the hostess bars you can go to certainly have English subtitles and menus, but there’s no effort to make them culturally relevant to an American or European player like you see in games like Phoenix Wright. Similarly, rogue-likes Izuna: The Unemployed Ninja and Shiren the Wanderer are also starting to appear, two-dimensional niche titles that don’t have a prayer of selling more than a handful of copies and would, previously, have never left Japan for exactly that reason. So why are games like Oneechanbara crossing the Pacific?

Two factors to consider: one, the cultural cache of Japanese media is no longer restricted to seedy basements covered in Evangelion wallscrolls and fan-subbed VHS tapes. Walk into any Barnes & Noble in the world and there’s an aisle of manga littered with be-hoodied people nose-deep in stories about schoolgirls killing zombies for you to step over. Also, as has been discussed many times in the past year, videogames are an international business now, so if a Japanese publisher is going to turn a profit on their game, they have to make sure that every dollar available in every corner of the planet can be spent on their product. But I’m not sure that these are the sole factors behind our newfound access to such peculiar games. What am I missing, dear reader?

Related links:

Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone
Surprise of the Week: Sega Releases a Good Game
Japan Scares Me: To Love-Ru - Exciting Outdoor School Version
It’s Dangerous to Go Alone
Whatcha Playing: The New Adventures of the Nintendo DS

Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone

John Constantine — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Videogames are rich with memorable moments. Born of both play and story, there are those images, those brief passages of achievement, that are emblazoned in your memory: the first time you clear 100,000 points in Tetris, the dogs bursting through the window in Resident Evil, the booming march that begins to play after the baby metroid’s sacrifice during Super Metroid’s climactic battle with Mother Brain. We are tied to these events thanks not only to those games’ mechanical and artistic design but because of our agency in them. We facilitate these conclusions and, since the game is well-made, we feel them. Another classic: Solid Snake’s first fight with the cyborg ninja, Grey Fox. Like so much of the Metal Gear Solid series, this sequence is ludicrous: simplistic to play, overdramatic, over-everything. But when Grey Fox begins screaming, “Make me feel!” and your controller begins to shake in time with his uncontrollable gesticulations, the scene becomes something else. In 1998, rumble technology was still relatively new in home gaming, so having this drama reflected in the physical world made that much more of an impression. Every time Snake was kicked in the gut or when you landed a hit amidst this half-man’s yowling was tangible.

I feel a lot like Grey Fox when I play videogames these days, particularly action fare. I want an action game to make me feel. Not necessarily a profound emotional reaction – though that’s always a plus – so much as a physical one. When I’m playing an action or sport game, it’s essential that the game translates the physicality and impact of my actions well lest the aesthetic façade covering the game’s rules be ruined. It’s no easy thing to affect either. This past week, I finished playing through what may well be Lucasarts’ final in-house game, the damn-near-ubiquitous Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. TFU is a good game, not a great one; its big-scale Jedi power fantasy is marred by some serious glitches and questionable design choices, like its over-reliance on quick time events. Even though I had a good time playing through it, I was perturbed by how weightless much of the action felt. It’s incredible that TFU’s three physics engines allow me to pick up almost every part of a game’s environment and toss it about willie-nillie, but a mammoth, building crushing boulder shouldn’t feel like it has the same mass as shoe-sized robot. (Before any of you Star Wars nerds pipe-up about size mattering not, shut up. Idiots.)

Alternatively, Sega’s Yakuza 2, a nearly three year-old game running on hardware that couldn’t hope to run the engine beneath TFU’s hood, has been an eye-opening physical experience. Yakuza 2 is, at heart, a modern Japanese role-playing game that trades ponderous turn-based fighting for beat’em-up combat that recalls Die Hard Arcade. Yakuza 2’s combat is deliciously precise and, more importantly, visceral. Every impact of the fist is felt in Yakuza 2, and it keeps what would otherwise be a very repetitive game constantly rewarding, but it takes every facet of the game working in concert for this to work. The fights are fast, never lasting more than ninety seconds, and there’s no discernible delay between your button inputs and your character’s moves outside of what seems natural (throwing a fat guy over your shoulder or landing a jump kick should, after all, take a few more seconds than a jab.) This is on top of impact sound effects (grunts, the exaggerated thump-pop of a blow landing). What puts it over the top is the game’s “Heat” moves, a one-button super move that activates a contextual one-hit kill provided you’ve filled a meter. “Heat” moves are brutal enough to make Tony Soprano blush, but their presentation is remarkable. The screen becomes slightly washed out, the camera provides a shifting, dramatic perspective, the controller shudders, and the onscreen characters enact serious violence like, say, ramming a thug’s head through a car windshield. But it all takes little more than five seconds. Every single aspect has weight and every aspect of the game is built to translate that weight to the player.

This marks the difference between a good game and a great game. Not every game needs to translate literal physicality, but every game should leave you feeling like you’ve transcended the many, many barriers between you and the actual game. When the controller, the television screen, and the cognitive dissonance between your brain and making something happen on screen disappear, that’s when the game becomes something more. It becomes unforgettable.

This is What We’re Playing. Here’s What We Played.

Whatcha Playing: Bubbles, Bubbles, Bubbles!!!
Whatcha Playing?: Final Ninja
Whatcha Playing: Cleaning House, Finding Roots
Whatcha Playing: The Thirst For Adventure, Pointing At Things, and Not Knowing What to Say
Whatcha Playing: The New Adventures of the Nintendo DS

Surprise of the Week: Sega Releases a Good Game

Bob Mackey — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Man, that PS2 just keeps hanging in there, doesn't it? We're nearly 8 years after the system's launch and still getting some pretty high-profile games; part of me wishes that the PS2 wasn't on its last legs (as far as quality software goes), because that would mean we'd still be seeing the great output that Japanese studios gave us last generation--when development costs were merely crazy instead of wholly and intractably insane. But in the world of reality, Yakuza 2 ships today, and it's pretty important.

If you didn't play the first Yakuza, you're not alone; it came out in the Fall of 2006, when the world cared only for the tidal wave of next-gen was about to hit. I actually found out about the game long after its release date, and GameFly-ed it the following Fall. Yakuza was actually pretty surprising for what I assumed would be a ripoff of Grand Theft Auto--okay, it kind of is a ripoff of Grand Theft Auto, in its own way. Add a distinctly Japanese sense of game design to the GTA series, and you've basically got Yakuza; and obviously, there are some benefits and drawbacks to this equation.

In many ways, Yakuza is a different take on the JRPG; stats are involved, shops are visited, and there are even random battles, for Christ's sake. This all sounds very neat, but the one thing that GTA has always been able to do that Yakuza couldn't copy is offering up a large world that's constantly streamed off of the disc. I don't know if any Japanese-developed game has ever had this feature, but it's one of the main reasons why the GTA series worked so well. The world of Yakuza was broken up into so many tiny chunks--requiring their own respective load times--that I had to quit playing out of sheer frustration. It's a shame, though, because I really loved what I played; the same situation happened to me a year earlier with Tales of the Abyss, where one out of every five minutes of gameplay involved awkwardly staring at my reflection on a black television screen.

The good news is the loading problems of the first game have been reduced drastically in Yakuza 2. More good news: the awkward (though ambitious) and ambitious dub from the first game is now gone, so we are now free of that extremely alienating effect (as seen in Shenmue) of Japanese characters speaking English in Japan with Japanese accents. With those much-needed changes, Yakuza 2 should be worth checking out, especially with that tantalizing $30 price tag. People, we need to start rewarding Sega for releasing something other than...well, you've seen some recent Sega games. Ask yourself what kind of future you want to live in.

Related Links:

Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games
Where is Yu Suzuki?
FMV Hell: Sonic CD