text by tim rogers

★★☆☆

“NOT ART.”

If you imagine for a moment that all of the emails I received between last November and today asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, that would leave an overwhelming majority of emails asking me why I haven’t reviewed BioShock yet, with runner-up email topics being when I’m going to review BioShock, or if there’s some reason I am blatantly ignoring BioShock. I imagine that a good percentage of those of you sending me such emails are genuinely confused, because you know deep in your bones that reviewing BioShock is something I need to do as a “critic” of videogames. The rest of you are probably sneering in anticipation of some belly-laugh worthy one-liner smackdowns. You probably have a bottle of brandy in your cupboard, and your best snifter polished and at the ready. I’d like to say that I will make sure your brandies do not go to waste. Though a small part of me (definitely not my brain!) is a little hesitant, because I just plain don’t like BioShock enough to tear it a new butt-hole, and I don’t hate it enough to pretend I love it. It’s just kind of . . . there.

Here we are, anyway, with today’s installment of the Action Button Fashionably Late Review:

Oh, the critics screamed themselves red-eyed, they did. Though we must be careful when we call the game-review-writing masses “critics” — a vast majority of them really just got into the habit of writing about the games “industry” so they could get free passes to E3, where they could get free, XXXL, radical, awesome black T-shirts with centered, capitalized company names in sans-serif font. This was before that sort of thing was even ironic. I saw a hip kid at a party the other night wearing a T-shirt that said “T-Shirt” in the middle of the chest, in Arial font, for example. I don’t want to name names (though by the end of this paragraph I might end up doing just that) — just believe me when I say that the majority of “game critics” have really poor taste regarding pretty much anything that qualifies as entertainment. The first time I met Chris Kohler, for example, I learned that he’s actually not pretending when he says his favorite band is Fleetwood Mac! For stuff’s sake, that guy gets paid a robust salary by WIRED, of all people, to blog about videogames!

And, according to Game Set Watch, “he’s the best mainstream commentator on digital download matters right now”. We are so screwed, my fellow gamer-kinds!

Here at Action Button Dot Net, we listen exclusively to music like this, or this, or sometimes this (when we’re having awesome 2P co-op sex). So you can bet your bottom dollar that we’re not going to be fooled by something just because it has Django Reinhardt in it.

For the record, Django Reinhardt is more of a father to me than Jesus ever was, and I grew up Catholic. I sat and listened to his recordings in dumbstruck silence for probably more hours of my young life than I spent trying to perfect a play-through of both quests of the original Zelda. I didn’t realize that the man was able to make such beautiful, complicated music with just two complete fingers until many years later, when I saw the Woody Allen film “Sweet and Lowdown”. There; I’ve just succeeded in mentioning Woody Allen in a videogame review. This will likely get me more emails asking me why I don’t have cancer, though hey, so be it. What I’m trying to prove here, perhaps a little snidely, is that I have interests outside videogames, interests in things like other forms of entertainment. I might even mention that I enjoy swimming and weightlifting. Might as well! Now I’ll step back, put my toes on the other side of the line, and say that I liked Japanese hardcore music before I played Jet Set Radio. What I’m trying to say is that videogames are not necessarily a poor introduction to culture as they are a weird one. There’s really no insight to be gained from this statement of opinion; I’m just throwing it out there. I find it weird that some people are suddenly pretending to have always been deeply interested in Art Deco, the literary works of Ayn Rand, and the expert guitarring of Django Reinhardt just because of a videogame. It’s like, at this point, with so much qualified culture in your videogame, it doesn’t even need to be “good“.

Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli’s “Beyond the Sea” is a timeless, objectively brilliant piece of music; its inclusion in the opening of BioShock is a no-brainer in almost every sense of the word: obviously, this is the kind of music that would play over the PA at the supermarkets of choice of elite artists and urban refugee philosophers in an alternate-reality 1950-something. On the other hand, it is also a “no-brainer” because this is a game about a community beneath the sea; hours into BioShock, which soon proves to be little more than a videogame, the possibility that the people in charge of music selection might have been confusing it with that song from “The Little Mermaid” becomes strikingly relevant.

What I’m saying is that BioShock is a pretty shell.

This game is not a masterpiece — it is the bare minimum. Its attention to detail with regard to its atmosphere and its narrative is not, in and of itself, a glorious feast: it is the very least we should expect from now on.

I have said before that “Each work of expression humankind creates will sit at the bottom of a gazed-down-upon canyon for centuries to come, as messages from the past.” BioShock will, I’m afraid, for the futuristic alien-robots that eventually come to earth to sift through the nuclear wreckage, most likely be virtually indistinguishable from those 1990s short-film monsterpieces about dudes driving a mine cart into a volcano full of dinosaurs, where the theater chairs tilted left and right and fans blew your hair back and eyes dry.

To explain it simply, without re-referencing the game’s core wallpaper themettes of Ayn Rand, Art Deco, and beautiful triumphant jazz music, here is a description of BioShock‘s story: a man is flying over the ocean in a plane. The plane crashes. He survives. He swims toward a monolithic structure. He goes inside. Without questioning why, he boards a deep-sea-diving vessel, and finds himself in an underwater “utopia” built years before by scholars, artists, and philosophers who found the then-modern society not suited to their ideals. Upon entering the city, he discovers it has been destroyed, and is currently teeming with drugged-out brain-thirsty genetic psycho-freaks. A man contacts the hero via short-wave radio, and offers guidance. He wants the hero to save his family, and himself, and help the last few sane survivors of this nightmare get to the surface and go back to the society that they had once seen fit to leave.

Of course, between point A and point B, there’s going to be a whole lot of psycho-freak smashing. “That sounds good”, says the entertainment connoisseur. “That sounds plausible”, says the literati. “That sounds hecking bad-butt“, says the gamer.

Unfortunately, the cracks in BioShock‘s facade start to show themselves sooner rather than later. Most pointedly, the hero is a boring, nameless, voiceless dunce. He speaks one line at the beginning of the story, and then undergoes a vow of word-silence (grunts only) for the duration of the tale. There are thousands of people, no doubt, capable of constructing arguments that seem convincing to themselves, who can defend the nameless silent protagonist in a videogame, though it just doesn’t cut it for me anymore: if you’re going to build a rich atmosphere, if you’re going to try to tell a story, you’re probably going to need more than just “a character” — you’ll need an interesting character. Even Grand Theft Auto started giving the hero a voice and a personality after Grand Theft Auto III, and that game’s main goal was presumably just to let the player mess around and live out stupid fantasies involving casino roofs, rocket launchers, city buses, and digital law enforcement.

Say what you will about the silent protagonist thing: we can all at least agree that the hero in this game is a bit weird. He will eat potato chips that might be a year old immediately upon finding pulling them out of a garbage can in a city full of genetic freak-out zompeople; where hypodermic needles are as “daily-routine” for the citizens as a cup of coffee, you’d think that the basic idea of “this place is a filthy bio-hazard” would at least be on the tip of one’s subconscious when one finds food in a waste receptacle.

He’s also the type of guy to have a tattoo of a chain on his left wrist (“Maybe he was in prison?” the thirteen-year-old gamers wonder, and feel like geniuses), and make a medium-pitched grunting sound once every twenty times he jumps. I’m no expert in Hard Dudes, though I imagine that a man crawling on his stomach through a knee-high sewer hole would probably stop repeatedly and nonchalantly smacking his wrench against the palm of his free hand every few seconds. Not so with our hero.

Also, judging by the various sounds he makes when eating food, I have to say he would never be allowed in my house. (Or within fifty feet of my house. (I have Dog Ears. (While we’re on the subject, please don’t ever, ever, ever call me on the phone if you’re chewing gum. I’m hecking serious as a heart attack. If I call you and you happen to be chewing, hey, I can accept that as my mistake. Just don’t do it the other way around. In addition to being disgusting, it’s also rude.)))

Not ten minutes into the monster-smashing portion of the game, the player comes across his first ever hypodermic needle — a “Plasmid”, the game calls them — and upon plucking it out of a busted vending machine, he immediately jams it into his arm, goes into wicked convulsions, crashes through a banister, and slams into the floor twenty feet below. The potato chips thing had made me laugh; this thing involving the instant hypodermic needle snapped me out of my trance; all at once, I was awake in the world of BioShock, watching the dream armed with rubber gloves and forceps. Our guiding spirit contacts us via the short-wave: “You’ve just used your first Plasmid! It’s a bit of a doozy! Your genetic code is being re-written!” Thanks for telling us that before we jammed it into our arm! I bet your starving family finds it hecking hilarious that you’re willing to let their only chance of salvation flail around on the floor while an entire troop of psycho-freaks walks by, stares at him, and laughs.

As it turns out, the first Plasmid our silent hero obtains gives him the power to shoot lightning bolts from his fingertips. Wonderful. In case you’ve forgotten what happened one paragraph ago, yes, this Plasmid came out of a vending machine. So here I am, awake in the dream of BioShock‘s cluttered study, thinking up reasons that artists and scholars and philosophers who saw fit to run away from modern society would want to be able to shoot lightning from their fingertips, much less be able to purchase this ability from a vending machine. What would honest, society-loathing, government-rejecting artists, scholars, and philosophers need the power of telepathic electricity for? To recharge batteries? The game has some cute little graphic designs explaining the power of each Plasmid as you obtain them, though they always make the powers look like little more than fuel for painful pranks. And here begins the slippery slope of my One Night With BioShock.

BioShock fails, and quite embarrassingly hard, as far as I’m concerned, when it comes time to tie all of its genuinely enthralling atmospheric concepts (underwater city, inspired art design, excellent music, political message, overt genetic enhancement as common and convenient as multivitamins) into an actual knife of entertainment. As-is, there’s just too much to do, too many choices to make. I like having to choose my weapon upgrades wisely, and I can honestly see the pure-hearted intent of the game designers in making me do so; it’s just that, in something like BioShock, the richer and more excellently executed the atmosphere, the more shocking and bubble-bursting are the whip-cracks of context.

Now, 95% of Bioshock‘s appeal for me, personally, is the mystery of this destroyed undersea utopia, and the pleasure of wondering what exactly went wrong. Early on, I felt like Sherlock Holmes as I pieced together the smaller clues: I saw the signboards discarded at the dock, displaying messages such as “WE DON’T BELONG TO YOU, RYAN”, and thought, “Aha! These people wanted to leave! Something was going wrong here — and someone named ‘Ryan’ was to blame!” It would have been really nice if these sort of hints had built gradually in momentum. Not so: eventually, quite early on, you get to the point where you can purchase the “Enrage” plasmid, which, according to its item description, “ENRAGES target, causing it to attack someone other than you”. In a game so steeped in lore and godly details, I can’t help wondering for a second what function such a genetic enhancement would serve in a society focused on self-betterment.

Ultimately, I come to the conclusion that this society failed and exploded because people are jerks: the people making these biological “enhancements” were jerks, and the people buying them were jerks. It really only takes one jerk to destroy a world.

I now stand a precarious step away from implying that the people who made this game are jerks as well, though I’ve seen that one photograph Kotaku always uses whenever BioShock director Ken Levine says something in an interview, and he doesn’t look like a bad guy at all (if you’re ever in Tokyo, Ken, we must do lunch, seriously; I know an excellent ethnic-mixture vegan curry place).

Still: they could have buried the mystery a little more deftly.

Or: I can sort of believe vending machines in the middle of the city, though why are there vending machines for Expensive Things in these god-forsaken maintenance tunnels under the city? It doesn’t make sense — how often did workers suddenly find themselves in need of psychic power upgrades in the middle of a walk up to the surface? Wouldn’t they have dealt with their psychic inventory management on the way to work in the morning, or waited to do it after their shift was over and they were headed back home?

The thing about giving all of the videogame-power-up dispensers in your immersive videogame concrete, in-world justifications, with tastefully tacky, interesting, exuberant neon graphic design, is that you’re begging for the player to supply real-world-logic to explain why they exist where they exist. At one point, your constant narrator informs you, of the ruin of the city: “Nobody knows exactly what happened . . . maybe he found he just didn’t like people.” Duh! What other kind of human being would take a look at a scientific research lab where a man had accidentally created a psychic-power-modifying injection that imbued the user with the ability to send any target into fits of violent rage and say “Yeah, sure, let’s put that in the hecking vending machines all over the city, see what happens.” And seriously, what kind of society-shunning undersea magical enclave of artists and scholars would literally need plentiful vending machines, complete with a stereotypical cigarollo-chomping Mexican mascot, to dispense weapons and ammunition for cash? You can say that they were having problems with smugglers, or that the genetic-splicing freak-bastards were overrunning the city and the people needed to defend themselves, though seriously, I’d imagine that, at a point like that, you’d just have government officials handing out guns in the street (err, “glass connecting tubes”). Maybe if they hadn’t taken time to convene the hecking Board of Artists and decide on what kind of rugged yet cute gun-belt-wearing mascot to stamp all over all of the gun-vending machines, they would have had time to fight back the threat before it ruined the whole damned place. In this, a game so reliant upon its immersing environmental qualities, In many ways — dare I say it — these context-ful vending machines are actually worse than the ammo crates of yesteryear. Nice job on that, guys! Try nuclear fusion, next!

Here I could ask the burning question: “Did no one in this society detect that maybe something about the psychic-enhancement thing was asking for trouble?” Though I’m pretty sure someone would link me to the Wikipedia page on Scientology, and then I’d have to pretend to feel ridiculous.

Around the time the game introduced the interestingly modeled neon-glowing vending machines that let me manage my psychic power slots — that is, let me un-equip one psychic power to make room for another — my Night-Vision was on, and I was seeing pink all over the place. I had a bunch of guns, and I was shooting lots of dudes, and I kind of wasn’t feeling it. Then there was this “boss” encounter where I had to put all of my weapons into a pneumatic tube before entering the room. I got to the end of the encounter and reclaimed my weapons from the other end of the pneumatic tube, at which time my characters hands flipped up and down, wielding each weapon for a split-second before snapping to another one. If only this had been Burnout Paradise on the PlayStation 3, where users with PlayStation(R)Eye(TM) cameras connected to their USB(C) ports will have a snapshot of their face taken at the precise moment of fatal impact with a rival racer in an online match; I would love to see what facial expression I was wearing when that thing happened with the pneumatic tube. I’d put it on every time I go to Starbucks; that way, when I saunter up and say “Shot of whiskey” to the gorgeous girl at the register, she might actually realize that I’m joking, instead of saying “We only have coffees and teas here, sir.” Seriously, I used to work at a Target store, for crying out loud, where three out of ten male customers over forty would spout such small-talky “jokes” as “Workin’ hard, or hardly workin’?” or “‘Tar-zhay’, huh? Fancy French establishment you got yourself here”. Walking into Starbucks and asking for a shot of whiskey in a perfect rendition of a Japanese Clint Eastwood is pretty hecking hilarious, compared to the stuff I had to put up with!

At any rate, I’m officially bored enough of writing about BioShock to begin thinking about what I’m going to actually order at Starbucks tonight, so I’m going to pause for ten minutes to do some deep knee bends, some crunches, and some push-ups.



TEN MINUTES LATER

I believe I was talking about my “Night Vision” being turned on, about my “seeing pink” all over BioShock. “Seeing pink” is a catch phrase I just copyrighted, meaning, well, that I am officially distanced enough from a work of media to see all of its logical inconsistencies as though they be made of neon. Even so, without my critical night vision, I’d be able to see BioShock‘s trespasses, because it’s just so eager to show them to me: Majestic vistas such as water cascading out of a cracked roof and onto a dilapidated dental chair are undermined by the glinting, glowing boxes of shotgun shells conveniently forgotten — and dry — atop nearby cabinets.

Seeing all drawers of said cabinet suddenly flip open when you press the A button is jarring. It makes you think, “A cabinet that well-rendered and normal-mapped shouldn’t pop open that quickly”, which is a strange sentence to put into cognition. (Then again, Physics are Weird, here in Rapture — sliding metal doors make creaking sounds, for example.) If you’re going to spend so many thousands of man-hours on rendering glossy torn upholstery, you could at least put in a drawer-opening animation. A fast drawer-opening animation.

And so many of the damned drawers are completely empty, as well. Why even show me three little empty bubbles with the word “Empty” by them, anyway? Can’t I see that the bubbles are empty? If it’s empty, why even show me the bubbles? Why not just show the cabinet as flipped-open and ransacked to begin with? Even if the item placement is random, it can’t be that hard to program, can it? Can it?

The weirdest of the little logic hiccups unfortunately involve the game’s strongest element — that would be “the mood”. All over the ruined city are these . . . tape-recorders, just lying on tables or desks, or hanging from hooks on walls. You pick them up, and you get to hear a private voice-diary from someone’s life. The first one you find is sitting on a table in a bar, overlooking a frankly spectacular view of the ocean. The voice of a woman echoes out of the tape, with microphone clarity, over the din of people enjoying themselves in a quietly lively place. She says she’s getting drunk, and alone, on New Year’s Eve. She laments what a “fool” she is, for “falling in love with Andrew Ryan!” It’s not impossible to believe that this woman would be drunk enough to tape-blog about her Deepest Personal Secrets in such a public place on New Years Eve; the very candor in her voice indicates immediately that she’s That Type of Woman. Her tape diary ends abruptly with an explosion sound and an “Oh my god!” So the story creeps up and seeps into our brains: something happened on New Year’s Eve, and this woman’s tape diary was forgotten here on the table.

As things progress, though, the tapes start to seem vaguely . . . rude. There’s a point where you see a frozen-solid pipe-tunnel leading to another hub of the undersea city; there’s a tape recorder lying on the ground, glinting ferociously, as you approach. You play the tape, and out comes a thick Cockney squawking: “These frozen pipes! I keep telling Mister Ryan, frozen pipes break easily! We have to fix the frozen pipes, or we’ll have some serious trouble.” I hear this and think, “Uhh, thanks for that?” The little monologue comes within millimeters of saying “We’ll need to use fire plasmids to melt this ice, if it gets too thick!” I imagine the original script must have called for such a line, though someone on the Quality Assurance assembly line must have realized how dumb that would sound. However, without such a connection to the flow of the game as a game, this disembodied flavor-monologue just seems wickedly out of place. It’s damned if it do, damned if it don’t. Around then, the Awakened gamer should begin wondering about the tapes; wondering why these supposed private diaries have been exhumed and strewn about in convenient locations. What with the weird satanic costume-ball masks being worn by the weird klepto-psychos gallavanting all over the place, it’s not hard to make some kind of synapse connection between “Crazy People” and “Crazy Behavior”; maybe one of these genetic blowouts made it a personal mission to arrange these tapes in convenient locations. If you’re like me, and you’re thinking this critically about BioShock, you start to notice, even, that someone was apparently being cremated in the mortuary at the exact moment this underwater apocalypse went down, and you begin to feel a deep dread — like you’re in the audience at your little brother’s school play, and he’s on stage, dressed up as an ostrich, and you know for a fact that he’s going to go stuff-ballistic, vomit blood all over someone, and storm through the audience biting people’s throats — you start to kind of pray, whether you Know God or Not, that at some point soon, this game is not going to try to explain this. Like you’ll get to the Final Boss, and he’ll be standing atop his Ziggurat Of Glory with his imperial cape billowing and his monocle glinting, and he’ll drop the megaton bombshell that he is both your father and he placed all those tapes so that you would find him — and then proceed to die by his hand.

Six hours or so into the experience, I’m kind of tired. The introduction of the oft-discussed Big-Daddy/Little Sister dynamic has come and gone, and the plot has at last let go its iron grip. The storyteller has succeeded in getting us drunk, and proceeds to stand us up and push us out the front door of the bar. We look back, and he’s dusting off his hands, turning around, and setting up the “CLOSED” sign. We are now free. Free to Move Forward in this Meticulous World. Free to Enjoy the “Game Play”.

Well.

I’m not going to lie to anyone, here. I know how “game development” goes. I know it involves a Lot of People with a Lot of Ideas, working a Lot of Hours in a big, fancy office. I know that some of the ideas some people work on end up being a whole lot better-executed than some of the other ideas other people work on (witness how great the driving is in Burnout 3, and how drop-dead terrible the menus and interface are). And though I do believe I originally said that Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was not a perfect game, I believe it demonstrates a much “more perfect” way to appropriately use an epic amount of human resources: basically, you write down what the player can do in your game, then you figure out what’s going to happen in your game, then you build a story around that, then you tell everyone, “This is the plan, and we’re sticking to it”. BioShock has too many ideas; too many Little Things To Do. And it’s a shame, because, as I might have said a dozen times before in this very article, the game has some drop-dead genuinely brilliant concepts. It’s just that everything turns into a grind in the end.

It’s like, in an action movie, yeah, where there’s a montage depicting a character’s recovery and/or training in the martial arts. Can you imagine what it would be like if the first forty-five minutes of “Rocky” breezed by, only to pause for three real-time months of footage of Rocky Balboa punching a heavy bag, jogging, eating oatmeal, doing sit-ups, perusing Reader’s Digest while taking epic stuffs? That’s kind of what happens to BioShock: it’s top-heavy, and then it’s boring. A little rearranging of the Feng Shui is in order: a little, gasp, Zelda-ism.

Take the Big Daddy / Little Sister dynamic I touched on earlier. This has been a firecracker of media discussion; this was the darling pet feature of the game. Basically, there are little girls, turned into demon-children by genetic experimentation, who represent the physical embodiment of some Great Power. They are accompanied, at all times, by giant bio-behemoth men in modified deep-sea diving suits. The image of the “Big Daddy” is so striking that it adorns the game’s box, that a metal “Big Daddy” figurine was the Grand Prize awarded to all rabid pre-installed fans savvy enough to pay an extra twenty dollars for the Limited Edition. Basically, the situation is this: The Little Sister is a harmless Little Girl. She has Great Power. If you so choose, you can “harvest” her for that power, making your in-game avatar stronger. However, the only way to get close to the Little Sister is to kill the Big Daddy. Do so, and the Little Sister will cower sadly. Save her, and your character does a Jesus Hand Dance, and sucks the evil out of her with his fingertips. Harvest her, and she sinks off screen, and there’s a scream.

In this day and age where Mass Effect can feature two muppet-like human beings having purely consensual prime-time network-TV Clothed Sex preceded by Literally a Dozen Hours of Accountant-worthy Courtship and cause even mildly Christian people to accuse games of instilling Our Children with the Hunger To Rape Other Children, one has to wonder whether the underlying “problem” with the videogame “industry” is one of people pressing too many buttons or not enough buttons. BioShock‘s “kill little girls for profit” mechanic is a surefire conversation-starter, though in the game, it’s handled with such sterile laryngitis that it might as well just not let you kill them at all.

My “idea” for how to “fix” this element of BioShock‘s game design, I’m afraid, is easier said than done. I’m going to go ahead and give the dudes and babes at 2K Boston the benefit of the doubt, and say that they probably thought of it first:

My idea is that there should have only ever been one Big Daddy, and one Little Sister. The story of the game would branch depending on whether you kill the Little Sister, and at which opportunity you kill her. Maybe the Big Daddy has some kind of card-key and can open doors that your character can’t, so it’s to your advantage to slink around behind them. Every time your path converges with theirs, there’d be some kind of big cathartic showdown. Maybe enemies would attack the Big Daddy, and he would destroy them, and you’d have to avoid getting caught in the fray, or else join the fight to take the Big Daddy down. Maybe the Big Daddy, ultimately, would perish at the end of the game if you let him live long enough, forcing you to make a decision about what to do with the girl.

Of course, this is easier said than done; it would require construction of actual thoughtful set-pieces; it would require the Big Daddy to be an epic, impossibly, amazingly difficult and worthy adversary; furthermore, it would require the Little Sister to be an actual character in the plot, even though she might be presented as an incidental bystander in the context of the greater story. Allowing context to render bystanders as “characters” is one of the great organic traits of modern fiction. BioShock, unfortunately, fails as “fiction” — and as “entertainment” — because its characters are as sharp as lead pipes. Everything that could be emotional or poignant is constantly having its lungs punctured by a rusty spike named “This Is A Videogame”. I stuff you not: at one point, just as the plot is about to let you go and plop you into The World, armed with your Fantastic Weapons and Psychic Powers, your guardian angel on the other side of the short-wave radio exclaims, in tears: “We’ll find the bastard! We’ll find him — and we’ll tear his heart out!” and at this exact moment, I spontaneously picked up a “battery” from the floor, resulting in harsh letters jumping up on the screen and poking their fingers into my eyeballs: “You got a component! Use components to invent things at a U-Invent!”

Eventually, everything in BioShock becomes “Something To Do In A Videogame”. Harvesting Little Sisters or Setting Them Free becomes a decision you make every fifteen minutes. Instead of a punctuation mark, it becomes a verb — and not just any verb, it becomes like a conjugation of “to be”. Killing Big Daddies, even on the hardest difficulty (we here at ABDN wouldn’t have it any other way), is repetitive and hollow. Just lob a bunch of grenades at him, electro-shock him, blast him with a tommy gun. Blow the heckers right up. Who gives a stuff? Not you, that’s for sure.

There was some talk — I think on Gama Sutra — wherein a BioShock game designer or someone related to a BioShock game designer talked about how there was too much stuff to do in the game, and that ultimately detracted from what could have been a tasty, crunchy flowing, living experience. To this, I say: no stuff, Sherlock. I’d like to congratulate you guys for acknowledging your flaws, and I’d like to hold out hope that you might turn out a brilliant game in the future, though seeing as you only recognized BioShock‘s packrattism in hindsight, I can’t be too optimistic.

BioShock means well, at least — its thrilling, thoughtful presentation is a testament to that — as at first it shows you an oblivious enemy standing in a puddle of water, and your guide whispers over the radio (how he can see what I can see, I don’t know): use your electric bolt on the water! Fry him! You do this. Said bad guy fries. Now he’s dead. Nice.

Six hours later, when you’re spilled out into the Game Proper, you’re still seeing guys standing hip-deep in water, and you’re still shocking them. There’s no catharsis in it anymore.

There’s a “puzzle” slightly before the game pushes you out into the street, where a door is locked and you need to find the combination. Amazingly, the combination is written on a piece of paper on a shelf just five meters away from the door. This is precisely where BioShock‘s good intentions crumbled into dust, and made me feel kind of sad; the game’s MO had been, from the outset, to “relay information to the player through atmospheric elements”. The beginning of the game, with luggage stacked on the dock at the city entrance and declarations of protest written on discarded picket signs, had felt like a triumph; now here I am, looking at a number scrawled very legibly on a sheet of paper. It’s four digits. The combination lock on the other side of the room requires four numbers. This absolutely, positively has to be the correct combination. I feel like I’m Sherlock Holmes, and Watson just confessed to me that every mystery I’ve ever “solved” had just been elaborate dinner-party skits concocted by him and a bunch of friends I’ve never met. For one thing, the revelation that Watson has friends is a real downer; for another thing, I’m still a smart guy, though only in the context of some drunk people’s idea of “fun”.

Night-vision goggles on, in the back of my brain, I’m solving ancient riddles: I now know why modern Zelda games are so heavy-handed and sucky. It’s because they spend so much time on them. They’ve got dungeons, plotted out like works of architecture, with hallways of yea length and pits of yea depth. Nintendo’s quality assurance period is so deafeningly long that the level designers must sit around tinkering with the dungeons sixteen hours a day, hoping they’ll get an order from above to “announce the release date already”.

“We’ve got this hallway here, see? In dungeon number six. It’s about fifty meters long. Tanaka put a lantern here, and you light the lantern, and this iron grate opens. That still leaves us with, uhh, like, thirty more meters. So check out what I did. I made a pit of spikes here. And see that wall over there?”

“Awwwwwwww stuff, Yamamoto-kun, is that a hookshot panel?”

“Yes, sir. The player obtains the hookshot in dungeon number four, and it’s only used three times up to this point in dungeon number six, so–“

“You are getting a ray-zuh!”

Et cetera. Or I could mention Rare’s Star Fox Adventures, where you get this “flame” “attachment” that lets you shoot “balls of fire” out of your “magic staff”, and how rather than be used to actually light things on fire, it’s usually used to shoot a “ball of fire” at a “flame panel” on a wall somewhere so that a door opens. Some ten hours of your life after getting that flame attachment, you might be at the end of a cavernous dungeon room, all the enemies dead, all of the blocks pushed, wondering what the hell you’re supposed to do to open the sealed door. You go into first-person view mode and scan the walls. There, way, way up behind you, is a “flame panel”. Both because there’s nothing else you can do and because you know this is the solution to the “puzzle”, you shoot the flame panel with your flame rod, and the door opens.

Seriously, aren’t there more clever things to do with 3D cameras than make me look for a flame panel to shoot with my flame rod?

This applies to BioShock all over the place, into infinity. Except it’s never as clearly offensive as the Star Fox Adventures Flame Rod Example. In fact, in giving me a “choice” of which gizmo from my Santa-sack of Stuff to use to conquer each pseudo-situation, BioShock is actually kind of worse off.

To wit: It used to be that characters would do stuff like fall asleep and dream about ravioli if you didn’t touch the controller. In BioShock, if you don’t press any buttons for a few moments, the words “Hold the right directional button to get a hint if you are stuck” appear on the screen.

The little puzzle-like mini-game you “play” every time you attempt to hack a downed turret or hover-drone-bot is about as fun as those rare, bizarrely self-important moments during your day at the office in which you actually have to use your cellular phone’s calculator function. Really, though, with all the concessions this game offers inexperienced players, I have to wonder when someone is going to make a puzzle element in a game that lets you end the whole charade with a single button press when you see the solution and have far more than adequate time to implement it. Call it the “I Get It Button”. While we’re at it, someone call Sony and tell them to include a feature in the next PlayStation 3 firmware that allows me to navigate several backdoor selections and eventually find a huge-text menu allowing me to disable the mandatory warning in front of every hecking game that tells me not to unplug the console from the wall and/or throw it out the window and/or experience a sudden power outage while the hard drive access light is blinking?

Eventually, the game gets just plain sloppy. There are several copy-editing related errors I have stored in the back of my head for some reason, like this one on-screen message that read “Your maximum health has been increased, allowing you to take more hits before being sent to a Resurrection Station”. I thought they were called Vita-Chambers?

Vita-Chambers are explained, very, very early in the game, as capsules that can re-energize your tired (and even dead) body, using some kind of mystical cloning technology. I’ll admit that I winced when I first read the explanation of Vita-Chambers, first because the description tells me that there’s “no need to touch or otherwise interact with a Vita-Chamber in order to activate it”, which is really dumb and silly, and second of all because I knew in the pit of my stomach that the game — a game with a story about life and death (and politics) — would not be able to roll on until its conclusion without somehow using the Vita-Chamber as a Key Element in the Plot. And when it did, my groan could have shattered a gazelle, had a gazelle been lurking outside my window, nuzzling through my sweet, hot garbage.



Tons of objects — beer bottles, some crates — have physics, and can be burst and blasted apart to reveal Delicious Items. Other crates, the likes of which are used to impede your progress and force you to seek Some Other Route, simply won’t budge.

When your main character gets wet, his field of vision becomes blurry the way that a camera lens does.

If a videogame is to be rightly hailed as a “masterpiece” and/or a work of “genius”, things like these need to not happen in the game, at the very least.

What we have here, with BioShock, is a well-meaning game with some excellent concepts and an iron grip on its execution. It’s just a shame that “its execution” equals “execution of absolutely hecking everything written in every draft of the design document.”

There’s been talk lately of Gore Verbinski, director of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” flicks, signing on to helm a film based on BioShock. The inevitable fanboy knee-jerk reaction was that it’d be “impossible” to relate BioShock‘s deep atmosphere in a movie. Are you kidding me? The only parts of BioShock that wouldn’t “translate” to a movie are the heavy-handed bullstuff things. Are the fan-creatures afraid that the film would neglect to inform the audience that the thing the main character rides down to the undersea city of Rapture at the beginning of the story is called a “Bathysphere”? Come to think of it, maybe that was my first hint that I would neither love nor hate BioShock: when the big white help text floated into view, telling me to press the A button to “Use Bathysphere”. Mac OSX’s spell checker doesn’t even say “Bathysphere” isn’t a real word, though, so maybe all of the internet forum-dwellers who instantly regaled friends with tales of “OMG” re: “the part in the bathysphere at the beginning” were just really big undersea lore aficionados.

At any rate, I think a BioShock film is a tremendous idea, and that Gore Verbinski is the perfect director, not because he’s amazingly capable of sculpting, like, actual art so much as because he at least has the conscience to request that his screen-writers use Microsoft Excel instead of Microsoft Word, you know, so that they can go to the bottom of the columns and see if there are any arithmetical errors before shipping it off to the storyboard artists: I swear, when I went to see the third film in a theater in Tokyo, they handed me a heckin’ flowchart explaining the relationships between the characters. Who hates who, who loves who, who’s being paid to backstab who, et cetera. I thought for a second that the flow-chart only covered the first two movies, though apparently it turned out pretty useful for piecing together the third. In the end, the story, though idiotic, was air-tight. What the hell more could you expect from a movie based on a theme park ride featuring animatronic cartoon pirates? That the film looked really good and was nominated for a record-breaking number of Academy Awards for “Best Johnny Depping” — that must have been Verbinski’s idea. It looks to me like it’s Verbinski 1, theme-park rides 0. And what is BioShock, in its present state, if not a theme-park ride with more Shit To Do? The presence of a pre-installed plot, the very idea of catharsis existing between the Big Daddy and the Little Sister is more than enough feeling to shape a compelling narrative. The game misses the opportunity to be Something That Is, because it is too busy concentrating on being Something To Do; a film could really capitalize, whether or not it offers the lead character the choice of lightning or fire rounds for his shotgun, whether or not the character recovers psychic power and loses health when he smokes a pack of cigarettes. Or at least it could bring Django Reinhardt back to the pop-culture pre-conscious.

Well.

I arrive at the end of this review, then, wanting to say something positive aside from my constant beating the dead horse of “lovingly crafted atmosphere”. Here’s all I can think of:

1. The water looks great!

2. It’s perfectly fine to set games in destroyed places because it gives level designers a perfect excuse for why there’s so much stuff unnaturally thrown around.

3. The arrow that guides you to objectives is smart, guiding you in the direction of the stairs and then in the direction of the door. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a guiding arrow do something like that in a game before, though it’s possible that I played a game with such an arrow and just didn’t notice because I otherwise wasn’t lost.



We here at Action Button Dot Net are planning something. It’s to be called “The Action Button Dot Net Manifesto”. It can and will be a list of what I (uhh, “we”) consider the best twenty-five games of all-time, ranked in order and everything. Naturally, these will all be games that would score four stars on the Action Button zero-to-four review scale.

I mention this because the game we will crown as the number one best game of all-time shares many, many traits in common with BioShock. However, it absolutely nails everything it aspires to. It is a tremendously great videogame, the likes of which BioShock had every opportunity to be; yes, I am rating BioShock as harshly as I have because I genuinely recognize and respect its potential when held up alongside the Best Game Ever. I’ve offered plenty of hints to the identity of that throughout this review. Feel free to guess, in the comments thread, what you think the game is (and if you already know, please don’t spoil it T-T).

The game is not Gears of War, so I’m fully free to use Gears as an example for my conclusion. Yes, we’re still operating under the belief that, game-design-wise, Gears of War is As Good As It Gets For Now.

Gears of War‘s simple mechanics are like a survival knife stabbing into an invincible watermelon: a delicious crunch of impact every time; we delight in beholding each and every watermelon tumble down the stairs, or come flying out of a window. BioShock‘s unwieldy choices-laden limp-noodle of a “game system”, on the other hand, is like swishing a chopstick in a glass of water. Eventually, it lets you swish a chopstick in a bathtub. The point is, both of these actions produce sounds — it’s just that one of them is just magnitudes more satisfying than the other.

Ultimately, what we need is a game with BioShock‘s love of details and Gears of War‘s crunch and flow. Because God help us if all of our “intelligent” games are going to be boring to play, and all our exciting games are going to star oatmeal-skinned meatheads. Come on, people. Let’s show a little creativity, a little diligence.

text by Brandon Parker

★★★☆

“KEEPING ME AWAKE AT NIGHT.”

I remember my tenth birthday. I was at the hospital because I only get sick one day of the year, which is my birthday. So you might wonder how I remember this specific hospital visit in particular. Well, I’ll tell you: I was in the waiting room and my mother said this birthday was very important because “you only hit double digits once.” While talking about getting older and whatnot, she asked me what I thought I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said, “Retired.” I couldn’t wait, I said. That was ridiculous, was what she said, that I had my whole life ahead me and etcetera. That was the point, though, because I had wisely realized very early in my life that I would never like working, wanted to waste as little of my life doing it as possible, and have yet to feel otherwise about the matter.



So at some point later on I realized mine would absolutely have to be a life as either a writer or bank robber. Obviously, I decided to try out bank robbing first, as it’s the most interesting and feasible of the two. However, on the day of the first big heist, I ended up with one hell of a stubbed toe and, being the cautious man I am, didn’t want to take even the slightest of chances, so I put that on hold for awhile.

That’s all in the past, however. Now I’m living the dream as a career criminal, currently spending some time in Liberty City, and a while back I came into contact with a particular Irish family, the McReary’s. There’s five brothers, four of whom are gangsters, while the other one, Francis, he’s a cop. You might think maybe he’s still close with the rest of them, or maybe he’s an inside man for them. Well, no. Whey talk about what a piece of stuff he is, so I’m thinking he probably doesn’t get invited to the family happenings and get togethers for a little bowling or anything.

Let me tell you about the four criminal brothers. Gerry is the scary oldest brother all the others follow and look up to, who seems like he probably kills people on regular basis without thinking much of it. Michael is the youngest and an imbecile. Derrick is a heroin addict, but he doesn’t let it interfere with his work, and he makes the bombs. He seems like a pretty smart guy. And then there is Packie, who was my introduction to the family. He enjoys cocaine and on one job where he proposed to steal money from the mob, he compared himself to Robin Hood. As far as I’m concerned, Robin Hood is one of the historical Badass Worthies, and anyone who uses him as a model for their way of life is a man of quality.

Not so long ago, Patrick, Derrick, Michael, and myself – we did a bank job, and you might say things “didn’t go as planned,” or that any and all stuff “went south.” Michael was shot and killed right in the goddamned bank lobby, and the remaining three of us had to shoot our way through three stuffloads of cops, two hecktons of SWAT guys, one goddamn attack chopper of some kind, all while navigating through alleys, streets, and the damn subway system. In the course of shooting our way out of that scenario, I think a real bond had been established between myself, Packie and Derrick. Since then, Packie had started calling me up, wanting to go out drinking, encouraging me to date his sister, asking me to look out for Derrick (who was riding the white horse real hard, if you know what I mean. He was doing a lot of heroin, I mean). I was getting involved, is what I’m trying to tell you. Emotions were coming into play. It wasn’t just for money anymore, dammit.

Anyway, some time passed, there’d been a turn of events, etc. – the point is that something came up. The cop brother, Francis; I’d done some work with him in the past. Well, he calls me up and tells me that he’s meeting his brother Derrick in the park and he needs me to kill him, because he’s going to talk to reporters and cause trouble. He’s not real specific. I assume it’s going to lead to some corruption on Francis’ part being revealed, being that that’s the same reason I had done work for him before. Right after that, Derrick also calls me and says his brother has just asked to meet with him, and could I do something because he’s real scared he’s going to be killed.

Now, I was in a real quandary here. I mean, an honest bind, a genuine fix, I didn’t know what to do. In fact, I was a little confused at first because I got mixed up and thought it was the older brother, Gerry, that Francis wanted killed, since he’d previously mentioned doing something about him, and Gerry, he’s headed for prison, soon, so I thought maybe he was trying to get out of that here. But then, as I was watching the meeting place through my rifle scope and the reality of the situation was finally setting in, Derrick is the one that shows up, making me extra befuddled, and so now I had to think extra quick.

Francis – he’s obviously a corrupt cop. In the past he’s also hired me to kill; even a damn lawyer, once, who was trying to clean up corruption and had dirt on him. Francis claims he’s only just had some bad luck, that he’s really trying to do good, and that he’s had to resort to illegal methods to fight crime in Liberty City. Maybe he’s right, maybe he does do good and once he becomes commissioner he’ll really have the ability and resources to do some good. He probably has the better chance of accomplishing something meaningful with his life at this point than Derrick. In a place like Liberty City, where I drive like a maniac, damaging other cars and injuring and killing numerous pedestrians because I’m not patient enough to follow the rules of the road, too lazy to try subway and too much of a miser to take a taxi, who am I to disagree with a policeman’s stance on crime or his methods of operating?

Meanwhile, Derrick spends most of his days high and sprawled out on a bench in some stuff hole of a park over in Alderney. He doesn’t seem to value his life much, but, then again, he also says he’s just been dealt a bad hand for a lot of his life, and that he’d like a way to start fresh. I’ve been trying to help him out with that, too, because I’d like to see him pull out of this rut he’s stuck in. I have to admit, I’m more than a little disgusted with myself for initially favoring him for the shooting, and almost unconsciously pulled the trigger without giving any real thought to it when I realized it was him instead of Gerry showing up. Oh, the heroin addict brother, my subconscious must have said – here I though it was Gerry. I disgust myself sometimes.

I remember the drive on the way to that bank job. Derrick voiced some concerns he had for his brother Packie, who seemed to have a meaner temperament that he remembered, since Derrick had only just recently returned from a long stay in Ireland. He spoke of Packie being such a “sweet kid” in the before times. Derrick’s obviously got a good heart. But most importantly, during the robbery itself, after setting up the explosives on the vault, he took the time to explain to the hostages that they shouldn’t worry about their money, the bank’s insured, it’s going to a good cause anyway, etc. I thought that was pretty great of him, though Patrick yelled at him for it. Derrick replied that he was only trying to be honest with the customers. We were putting them through a pretty stressful situation, after all.

Francis does not seem genuine in the least bit. Maybe he did originally believe in something, but he seems to have lost his way. I don’t believe he’s interested in getting actual policing and public defending done, rogue methods or not. He’s just a politician, now, wanting only to climb the ladder and make rank. The other brothers, while leading criminal lives, aren’t leading dishonest lives at least. When Derrick apologized to those bank customers, he sorta reminded me of myself, actually (which I told him when he asked why I was later helping him). And I knew Packie and those customers didn’t appreciate his honesty at that moment, but I did, and it’s what ended up saving his life.

Besides, if Derrick was really up to something terrible, Francis shouldn’t have been so vague, the dumbass. He really brought that bullet in his head on himself. Still, it wasn’t an easy decision. Thank god for Pause.





Well, there it is. That’s what I thought about when deciding which of two lives had more worth to the world. A responsibility I enjoyed not enjoying. I don’t think I was entirely sure of myself until now, but after getting it all out here, I know I made the right choice. Probably.

As for the rest of Liberty City, I don’t have much to say, other than something is going to have to be done eventually about these regular citizens and tax payers. Some government programs are going to have to be enacted, here. They need their quality or life improved. They walk around like mindless automatons who spawn into view just out of sight and come preprogrammed to say a handful of phrases. I don’t kill them because I’m concerned for their lives. It’s more like I don’t kill them for the same reason I don’t just walk up and stark kicking over other people’s sandcastles, or try to avoid driving through some guy’s yard, running over his garden and hedgework and stuff. Back in my day, in a place called Britannia, every citizen had a name and a job and a schedule for the day. I know you damn kids in Liberty City have always been like this, but your condition is only made all the more obvious now compared to the better expressiveness available to my close circle of friends and enemies, who have the luxury of cinematic non-interactive viewing scenes and all. I can’t empathize with the common man. The best I can do for them is jack a police car and hunt down ne’er-do-wells of society that aren’t myself using Johnny Law’s computer system.

Maybe the apathy of the citizens has something to do with there being not a whole lot to do in such a big metropolis. Just miles of empty stuff, looking like it could be easily made into something interesting that you have to drive past for forever to finally get to somewhere that is even vaguely interesting. Reminds me a lot of Missouri, actually, except you’d need a lot more effort to make the empty stuff into anything interesting.

And I was kidding about Pause. Good for Derrick there’s Pause. I hope he prays to the Pause every night, now, but I think my excitement would have benefited more with its absence. That’s about it, I guess.

text by Brandon Parker

★★★☆

“A STRANGE AND RARE DESERT PLANT THAT ONLY COMES UP OUT OF THE GROUND EVERY 20 YEARS OR SO, AND SO ALIEN IS ITS SHAPE AND UNIQUE ITS BEAUTY THAT THE SNAKES, LIZARDS, AND OTHER DESERT ANIMALS ALL STOP FIGHTING AND KILLING EACH OTHER OUT THERE, AND THEY ALL CALL A TRUCE JUST FOR THE CHANCE TO GET A GOOD LOOK AND WONDER IF IT'S EDIBLE OR NOT.”

I recently played Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsène Lupin, and let me inform you how excited I got after I had started that game up: real excited. Right as you settle into the game proper, instead of your everyday, commonplace tutorial screen popping up to educate you on the controls for your intial playthrough or whathaveyou, this game’s tutorial just tells you to get a damned notepad and pencil. Being that this is a Sherlock Holmes game, you’ll be playing as Sherlock Holmes, of course, and they won’t be cutting corners to make it easy on your theoretically ignorant selves. Only the beginning of the game, though, lives up to that intial assurance, in my opinion. The rest is the usual adventure game ridiculousness. Oh, well, they tried. Good for them. The main thing is, there’s a part early on where you have to find a certain painting in an art gallery. You have to type in an answer to a question, the question being, “What is depicted in the painting?” After spending half an hour typing in as many ways as I could think of to say, “HMS Victory,” I quit the game to look up a walkthrough and found the answer. It was “boat.” So: Brandon Parker is smarter than Sherlock Holmes. This is a historic fact, now. You can even add it to Wikipedia and reference this review.



Now, I worry about the kids sometimes, and myself. Back in “the fair time,” as I call it, you used to have your King’s Quests or your Monkey Islands, but nowadays, if you want a game that doesn’t involve shooting small nations of foreign men over and over in dull grey and brown environments, you’re stuck with either licensed stuff based off of Pixar movies or boring platformers with stupid animal mascots. And that’s another thing. Current kid movies have the same problem as current adventure games. Compare those beautiful, hand painted Disney movies of old to this lifeless, 3D animated computer stuff. I think a link could be drawn between adventure games and Disney movies. I don’t feel like doing it at the moment, though. Forgive me – I am exaggerating, slightly. There are the Icos and Katamaris and whatnot, but do kids even know about those things? Do those games get commercials, or do kids even watch television anymore? For all I know, these days they come out of the womb with hand cupped to the side of their ear, room for a cellphone to be slid in there, and then it’s straight to 4chan boot camp. We might be lost already.

It’s not that I don’t think they can’t handle the violence, or anything. I’m sure most can, and those that can’t will just end up as republicans, or spree killers, or something. I know I used think, wouldn’t it be great if Inspector Gadget wasn’t a dumbass and had hands that could turn into machine guns, or something useful, at the least? You’re not fooling anybody, there. Kids know that that kind of crap is dumbed down for them. That’s not what I’m asking for, however. It doesn’t have to be dumbed down or made for kids in particular at all. It just doesn’t have to be nonstop violence. I guess that’s what I’m saying. Say there’s a kid who wants to play something other than Halo. He just doesn’t know it yet. I’m sure the peer pressure to play Halo and “pwn bitches” with his peers on Xbox Live is enormous, but let’s say this guy is going to strike out on his own. Good for him. Yet, after trying to make it on his own out the real world, Poor Little Ness finds he has so few options that he ends up taking the weak man’s road of used Spec-Ops games for PSX. And he was such a good, promising young lad. Now doesn’t that break your god-damned heart?

I’m only emphasizing the kids, here, since they don’t call them your formative years because you’re free to completey heck them up however you want and change your mind later. I know I wouldn’t be the man I am today if I didn’t have all these fond memories of walking around all those green environments in old adventure games, back when trees were in games, constructing tools out of pocket lint. And personally, I’m also sick as hell of shooting people myself, anyway. By the time I play MGS4 I think the line will be dangerously blurred between player and character. I already feel like a tired, old veteran, sick of battle and death, now, so I won’t be playing so much as method acting.

I’d simply like to see something that has room for your imagination to get in there. The modern videogame is an alkali desert when it really needs to be something more, uh, fertile. Man didn’t abandon painting when he learned to sculpt. Let’s get some colors in there, some majestic green trees and clear blue skies. The imagination can’t grow in the desert. Anything creative or weird doesn’t have to be an abstract handheld game with a clever game play hook anymore. More Balloon Fight and Kiwi Kraze is what I want, I think. Remember Kiwi Kraze? You were a bird in New Zealand rescuing your bird buddies. I don’t know if anyone would even think to make something like that anymore. If they did, they’d use satellite imagery to recreate New Zealand exactly, or some bullstuff. You can do all sorts of weird stuff in games that’d be a lot harder to pull off in a movie or book. Let’s see some of that.

Back in the Fair Time, a company called Electronic Arts (you might’ve heard of them) didn’t look at those games from Sierra and Lucas Arts and see all the happy childhoods, the greenary, the cherished memories born from those games. No, to people like them, they could and can only see “markets” that need “penetrating.” Every bit as horrible as it sounds. These are the kinds of people that invent their own doublespeak business language to say things without really saying anything. The kind of people that up and buy the NFL when too many people start to buy their competition’s NFL game. Well, back when they were wanting to make adventure games, being incapable of ever creating a Full Throttle or a Gabriel Knight themselves, they merely waved their money around and brought in Sherlock Holmes, who, at the time, was the greatest detective (I’m now the best). They were decent enough adventure games, but poor Sherlock Holmes games. They were also damn ugly and lacking in the use of the color green, though I guess it’s the same for London.

Anyway, someone finally made a good Sherlock Holmes game, and it’s not even a real Sherlock Holmes game. It’s about some dude named Layton. A couple of guys making up their own stuff made a better Sherlock Holmes game than EA did, with the actual Sherlock Holmes. Is there something other than spending money that they can handle doing properly? Yeah, we’re not supposed to hate them anymore, being that they apologized for the murders of Origin, Bullfrog, and all – a standup thing to do, I’ll admit, but I won’t fall for that. I know how these people operate. They’re not like you and me. They don’t have a conscience. They’re machines, programmed to simply want more money. They’ll only show a response to anyone other than themselves if their income is threatened. They look at their invented graphs and formulas and follow them to the letter. When something new and original that doesn’t fit in these formulas does well, it’s a “big suprise” that “exceeds all expectations,” and so they imitate the hell out of it, thinking that’s all there is to it. You know at the end of FernGully: The Last Rainforest, when that machine is possessed by a demon and is going through the forest cutting everything down? EA is that demon possessed machine, and they’re cutting down that forest to make room for a new alkali desert, where, as you know, imagination is unable to grow.





Usually what makes an adventure game a stuff one is that the puzzles are just plain hecking nonsense. And, often, I think that happens because the game is just too damn long. The designers aren’t smart enough come up with enough clever puzzles to fit in the entire game for every situation, so they get desperate, and when they get desperate this leads to madness, which leads to the bizarro moonside logic. All of us here know of the Gabriel Knight Moustache Massacre of ’99. This is something now told to small children as a warning. I even think it’s in the latest edition of Bullfinch’s Mythology, under “Tragedies.” I was there at ground zero. I remember it clearly: I finally had a computer all my own for the first time, and, to celebrate, the two latest entries in my favorite game series’ at time – the games being GK3 and Ultima IX. I tell you, it did something to me, something whose effect still lingers to this day. I’d also like to point out that Ultima IX was diddled with by Electronic Arts, known by their true name, “Hexxus“. Hexxus was voiced by Tim Curry, who also voiced Gabriel Knight in his third game, and is known for sounding like a child molester. I personally believe that when the universe is trying to tell you something, you should listen.

So maybe it’s just too hard to come up with enough sensible puzzles to cover an entire game. The Big Sleep didn’t make complete sense to Raymond Chandler, and he wrote the damn thing. And remember the Holmes story where the guy injected monkey blood or something and started climbing trees? What in the heck was that all about? And what a literal pushover Moriarty was. Holmes was too smart for Doyle’s own good, in my opinion. So you wonder what hope there is for there ever being a great detective game that makes sense. But then you remember something like Full Throttle, a game so good that I actually forget it’s an adventure game, and then you think, maybe everyone else is just lazy. Well, you think too much. Just take it easy. What they’ve done here for Professor Layton is side-step that problem by just getting together a bunch of good puzzles that don’t really have much to do with jack stuff. It’s just a series of puzzles that usually come from some guy coming up and saying, “Have you heard of this one?” But they can get away with it because they’re all good ones. It’s really a puzzle game disguised as an adventure game, and therefore actually ends up being a better Sherlock Holmes simulator game than what any adventure game could ever be. Also, it’s a real nice looking game. It doesn’t look like anything else out there. A cartoon, but more The Little Prince than some anime horsestuff. So that’s pretty good.

I guess Japan has only one videogame magazine, and it’s called Famitsu. If any others exist, I have no knowledge of them. If you’re a hip American, perhaps you know all about this magazine, already. But in an issue, there was an article about Professor Layton, and the title of the article was, “Level 5’s new game’s genre is unknown? New style game to train your brain,” except it said that in Japanese, rather than English. Yeah, it seems that in Japan they see an adventure game and, to them, it is some kind of crazy Brain Training knock-off. Ha, ha, those lovable, crazy Japanese. The closest thing those primitive deviants have for comparison is cartoon sex games and Phoenix Wright, so this is a bold new step for them. I hope it takes off.

Anyway, according to the opening cutscene, Layton and I are under some sort of non-disclosure agreement by the curious village, so I can’t exactly talk in specifics about the events of The Case. Sorry. I’ll just say you missed out. A great time was had by all.

text by Brandon Parker

⋆☆☆☆

“LONG LIVE SADDAAAAAAAAAM!”

Here’s an exact quote taken from the back of Army of TWO‘s box, except for the italics. I added those.

“The United States have awarded contracts to TWO ex-Army Rangers from the unprecedented Private Military Cooperation (PMC). The challenges they face can only be achieved through intensive teamwork and flawless execution.”

Reading the box, you might get the idea that this is a co-op game for TWO players that have to cooperate – that is, the both of them, together. You’d be right, but if you missed out on that feature, they also misspelled and misinformed you as to the nature of PMCs just so they could have one more place on the box that mentioned working together somehow. I’m sure you know this already, but for the people who made the game, a PMC is a Private Military Corporation, of which there are several. It’s not just one big company called PMC that all mercenaries come from. It’s almost like that typo is at once a kind of metaphor for the entire game, while also subconsciously expressing That-One-Company’s desire to be the only videogame corporation in existence. No, not just the typo. Both of those sentences are a perfect metaphor for the game. A random assortment of words and phrases stuck together that don’t make any kind of sense on close inspection, but stand back and squint a bit and you get the idea that this game might be about AWESOME ACTION and INTENSIVE MILITARY ASS KICKING of SOME KIND, and it has CO-OP. Also, I’m pretty sure you want to overcome challenges, or just avoid them altogether – not achieve them.

Out at this place called 1Up, they got this thing called the 1Up Show. On one episode of this show, they were having a preview of Kane & Lynch, and they mentioned how everyone was referring to Kane & Lynch as, “that other co-op game besides Army of TWO,” which was true. Meanwhile, over at the EGM paper magazine, at some point they had some deal called “The Top 50 Original Games We’re Looking Forward To,” with Army of TWO on there taking first place. And people wonder why print is dead. Really, though, that must have bugged the hell out of whoever was in charge of all the TWOs. For how long must he toil while his TWOs’ go unnoticed? I haven’t seen the actual list. Still, I have to wonder: in what world did this game ever seem like it’d be a good game, much less a more original one than Kane & Lynch? And what the hell were these other “original” games? Apparently there’s 49 of them out there, somewhere. I almost think I want to see the list now, but then if Army of TWO was the best of the bunch, then no, I guess I actually don’t really want to see the list.

Kane & Lynch did actually have some potential, some inkling that, at the very least, one guy involved with the game in some cubicle somewhere was putting forth some real heart and effort into the damn thing. There was an attempt at some meaningful stuff that sort of came through. Kane and Lynch themselves were an attempt at putting some real characters into an action game. They were just two guys, a couple of violent criminal types, with families and whatnot, not some big goofy marine bastards (space or standard) or even pre-GTA IV GTA-esque caricatures. Unlike a lot of videogame characters, they almost somehow came off as real characters on their own, instead of a facsimile cobbled together from whatever movies the programmers had seen last. Yeah, Kane & Lynch attempted a lot of the things people are praising GTA IV for getting right. And I think the only reason GTA IV did it better is because, being a free roaming game, there’s all those opportunities for dialogue between the characters on car rides, stops at clothing stores, the phone calls. They were too stuck in their action game, the level-to-level, your character only shoots, reloads or crouches mold.

I kept my copy of Kane & Lynch instead of selling it like a man more capable of reason might, thinking that, while working on the sequel, maybe they’d put down the Tarantino for a while. They can stick with Michael Mann but watch some more Peckinpah, maybe check out Thunderbolt &amp, Lightfoot, definitely The Outfit, more of the old crime classics. Then when the second, good game came out, I could have them both up on the shelf there for completeness. That would be nice. I’d like that. All the sequel needs is some character moments. Have Kane and Lynch just hang out or do something besides nonstop shooting, and improve the actual shooting parts themselves a bit. Come up with some heist mechanic that goes beyond one dude shooting and the other dude holding a button to unlock doors. Don’t throw in any unnecessary crazy plot twist bullstuff either, try to keep it simple. And use the hecking trailer music. That would be pretty solid, I think. Hell, just work in that whole Gamespot business into the teaser trailer. “The two outlaws with nothing to lose are back! So scant and flimsy is the give-a-heck of these two hardasses, they even tried to PAY OFF REVIEWERS for their last game! RETURNING IN 2009!”

How did anybody ever find two jackasses with skull helmets more interesting or original than two aged, balding, badass criminals? You can’t get anymore unoriginal than space marine at this point, and they’re practically space marines in Iraq. I guess the ridiculousness of it all might have seemed appealing. “Two Skullheaded Idiots Shoot The Shit Out People and Can Tear Off Car Doors For Shields. And it’s Co-op.” Yeah, maybe I can sympathize with that a little more. And when you get into the game it definitely follows through on all this promise of being stupid as hell. You can spend money to “pimp” your guns with gold plated grips and stuff, buy new goofy helmets, that sort of crap. But THEN, there’s a cutscene where they show one of the characters asleep on his couch, and on his tv screen is the flaming, smoking towers of World Trade Center. Next I think he gets a phone call waking him up, the exact dialogue of which I don’t remember, though I’m sure it was something like, “Are you watching the news? It’s REAL BAD. This changes EVERYTHING, etc.” Then there’s a montage with big, booming music playing because it’s pump up time, and whoo! Let’s kick some terrorist ass, yeah!

No, see, I don’t think it works that way. You can’t depict an event like that, an event everyone playing your game who wasn’t in a coma at the time should remember witnessing for themselves at least in slow-mo x100 on TV, an event which resulted in the deaths of real life people, and because of which we’re engaged to this day in a real hecking questionable conflict that is still getting real-life people killed, and people I actually personally know are risking their lives in for – the reason, uh, I’m not entirely sure of. You can’t have that and your hecking skull helmets and “pimped” firearms. You can’t have it both ways. It just doesn’t work that way. There’s not even a single damned reason for that to even be in the game, other than a quick and cheap attempt at seeming relevant. There’s no message, no lesson or ideas or moral here behind this game that I can see. I can’t believe there’s any way this game is supposed to be some sort of clever commentary on war or the military or anything either. If they were that smart, they could have done it without using a real life tragedy. It’s like a wrestler coming out and saying, “It’s great/terrible to be here in [YOUR HOMETOWN]!” in an attempt to get booed/cheered.

I’m sort of surprised how much I’m bothered by this. When 9/11 actually happened, I didn’t sit around wondering “what next,” or need to talk about it, or anything like that which a lot of other people seemed to do then and for a while after. It didn’t really mean much to me at all. My reasons here are probably more vain. It’s probably just that I feel insulted that a game as stuffty and tasteless as this thinks it’s capable of stirring any deep feeling or thoughts in me. But I don’t even know for sure if the game does think that. I can’t for the life of me tell you what anyone making this game thought, other than “being a mercenary is an awesome and viable career choice for sociopaths, who are also awesome in their own right.” Yet, I’d like to think that if I, or someone I know, had died in the World Trade Center and then I had to put up with video clips of the Twin Towers being cut out of what I thought was a pretty poignant ending in Metal Gear Solid 2: The Sons of Liberty, only for a fully CGI recreation of the FLAMING and SMOKING Twin Towers on 9/11 to end up in something like Army of TWO, then I or Person I Knew would be pissed as hell and would haunt the stuff out of The-Company-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named until some vengeance was had.

Once in the game, they briefly reference President Eisenhower’s speech on the dangers of a growing industrial military complex. Shortly after that, you meet a character named Eisenhower whom they blow the living heck out of, almost as if they were trying to tell us they didn’t agree with the speech and the existence of the rest of the entire hecking game itself was too subtle to get that message across. That’s the only kind of opinion or point of view I’m picking up on, here. It shows some thought went into this, I guess. Only one thought, but there it is. There are, of course, no civilians on the battlefield. Personally, I would think a game that shows you 9/11, then shortly after sends you into battle in Afghanistan and Iraq, should incorporate something like that, but I know You-Know-Who is only capable of expanding horizons and raising bars in terms of depravity and tastelessness, so don’t worry. I wasn’t disappointed or anything.

Did you know Call of Duty 4 was a great game? Yeah, I liked that one. Remember that part where you barely stop the missiles from launching? My brother had already finished the game and was watching me, sharing in my excitement. When I barely succeeded, we cheered and high-fived each other, just like they’re supposed to do in stuffty action movies with similar scenes (not to say Call of Duty 4 itself is a stuffty action film. I would rate it a Die Hard 2 in terms of action videogame intelligence, which is pretty damn good for a videogame, in my opinion). See, we were in the moment, there. We bought into the scenario the game had setup to entertain us. Whe game was working. You could also easily say it’s the more “realistic” of the two games, and yet it didn’t need to bring in any real life murders to get me to go along with the damn game. How about that, huh? Really, what possessed Army of TWO, with its damn pimp rifles, to think it was up to the task of incorporating real life death and destruction into its stuffty, skullhelmet game? Only for reasons I can’t imagine. Reasons that I don’t think were real or ever existed at any time.

CoD4’s pretend scenarios made me feel more emotion than your stuffty CGI imitation of a real tragedy. How about that? How does that make you feel, What’s-Your-Faces? I’m kidding, of course. I know you don’t feel anything resembling emotion besides excitement or disappoint at sales numbers/forecasts/tea leaf readings. Call of Duty 4, though; now there’s a game you can actually tell that was made by actual living, breathing, thinking, feeling, reasoning-capable human beings. They cared enough about their game that they used all the money they made from Call of Duty 4 just to make sure only they could make games named Call of Duty from now on. All because they were tired of Activision, who, in their quest to be more like you guys, were stuffting all over Infinity Ward’s good name by hiring a group of trash peddlers called Treyarch to throw out some junk crafted with that loving let’s-just-get-this-done-so-we-can-go-get-paid-and-go-home attitude well all love. Just so they could have a new box with the label Call of Duty out there at least once a year, to penetrate all those markets and so forth. I bet they even tried to throw in some extra money just to get Treyarch to cancel their last and upcoming Call of Duty game, or call it something else, at least. Oh, well. heck Army of TWO and the high horse with Down syndrome it not so much rode in on (not anymore than Fred Flintstone “drives” his car, I’d say), but dragged between its feet as it straddled it for hundreds of miles.





Mental illness isn’t funny, though. I only brought up Down syndrome in conjunction with Army of TWO to illustrate the severity of its issues. In this game, you can buy Dirty Harry’s gun and modify it to where it’s some sort of shotgun looking thing. And let me tell you about co-op. Co-op saves anything. It turns bad games into gold, or good games into relics to be hoarded and traded for bear pelts in the future. I used to work in a videogame store, and one time a handicapped woman came in to trade her old Sega games. She wanted money for them, probably needing to pay off some extravagant medical bills. We only gave in-store credit for old stuff like that, so I couldn’t help her. Frustrated, she just left, leaving her games there on the counter. I’m going to come right out and say it: this lady, who was deaf and needed not one, but TWO, canes just to stand upright – I pilfered her Toe Jam & Earl. I wonder if she ever returned to that store. You tell me what else I was supposed to do in my situation. I’d never seen that game come in before or anytime after, and I already had the sequel. Anyway, co-op doesn’t do a damn thing for Army of TWO. When Dirty Harry’s gun and co-op don’t save the game, you’ve got some serious problems. That deaf, crippled lady has some good hecking prospects for the future compared to you.

Even if you took out that stupid 9/11 stuff, there’d still be something incredibly dumb about this game. And not a good, entertaining kind of dumb. It’s not even dumb in a Rayman’s Raving Rabbids kind of way. More like a kind of frustrated, angry kid snaps one day, gets a gun, shoots some people, thinks to himself, “Oh, heck. I just did something real hecking dumb, didn’t I?” kind of dumb. I feel terrible just from talking someone else into renting the game because I didn’t want to risk my precious dollars on it. And if that wasn’t enough, I made them play through it with me! I mean, stealing a crippled girls Toe Jam & Earl, yeah, okay, that’s understandable, but making another human being play through Army of TWO? I hope my tombstone reads: “Currently Burning In Hell For His Sins,” because I don’t want to lie, and that’s right where I’ll be if there’s any justice in this world. Let there be no bullstuff from my epitaph.

For now, though, I want everyone to turn around and march on up to IO Interactive and apologize right now. Say you’re sorry for not giving Kane & Lynch a fair shake, for how you threw your little sissy fit just because a few assholes at Eidos employed some bought-out heckers to trump up praise for their game, which had jack all to do with IO or the actual game itself. All in all, there were some notable efforts in that game. I mean it, everyone who didn’t should play it now and pretend it’s a GTA IV spinoff mission with hecked up aiming. Imagine that, between missions, you’re driving and chatting with Lynch, stopping on the way at drug stores to pick up more haliperodol, or whatever. Are you seeing what I’m seeing with my mind’s eye, here? It’s beautiful. As for you Army of TWO, watch as I place a dunce cap on your head and leave you in a corner as a warning to your peers. You don’t like that, do you? Although you’ve earned yourself a quarter of a star for having Dirty Harry’s gun and one more quarter of a star for making me realize I was too hard on Kane & Lynch. Thanks, Army of TWO.

text by tim rogers

★★★⋆

“ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE HOLODECK FROM 'STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION'.”

I’m not even going to think about “lucid” dreams. Let’s cut to the chase — until the day scientists develop a fool-proof method for me to have overtly erotic dreams about the woman of my choice one hundred percent of the time, Grand Theft Auto IV, for all it’s worth, is the Most Entertaining Thing on Earth. Much as I’d like to spend a third my salary on special condoms that are safe to apply before bedtime, I guess I’ll have to make do with Grand Theft Auto IV‘s online multiplayer for now.

Alternate first sentence: Grand Theft Auto IV is a videogame so hot that the first Amazon.com customer-submitted image of it is a fetishized photo of a man opening up a cardboard box full of copies of the game.

I’d reckon it’s even better than any of us dreamed Virtual Reality would ever be, even if we proudly own the experience of having spent four dollars to play, say, Dactyl Nightmare for three minutes. Back then, our idea of VR was that, someday, we’d be able to wear a huge heavy helmet on our heads and run around in a world that didn’t look real, doing things as complicated as shooting other characters who were being controlled by other players, who are also wearing heavy helmets. The “dream” of VR, way back when, involved a clever clause, which we can probably safely call the “Lawnmower Man Effect” — we didn’t care that this supposed “reality” didn’t look “real”, so long as it was immersed us, and made us “feel” like we were “there”. In other words, it had to be interesting.

In a way, graphics engineers of the early 1990s were lucky that the virtual reality programs of popular culture had succeeded in glamorizing bizarre and warped landscapes. If the “sex scene” in “The Lawnmower Man” had portrayed two absolutely real-looking individuals having sex in, say, a canopy bed in a windswept room in a castle on a mountaintop in Europe as opposed to portraying two mirror-skinned humanoid figures floating in a blue polygonal void, with bubbles protruding out of genitals and then touching, the “videogame industry” might have crashed before 1999. It perhaps also helped that the “virtual reality” of “The Lawnmower Man” was a vaguely religiously sinister entity, in which a man was turned into a genius and then a killing monster, and later imprisoned. That didn’t exactly make kids think “Man, pretending sucks“, though it perhaps subliminally reinforced the idea that there is kind of some fun stuff to do in reality.

Here we are, now, in 2008. “The future”, as foretold by the best science-fiction, began one year and some change ago. People are, presently, as entertained by the idea of sending text messages on their cellular phones as the mid-1990s had imagined people would be with the idea of taking a date to a virtual-reality pub and experiencing some surreal sex, and then maybe talking about philosophy whilst huffing grapefruit-flavored oxygen. The dream of VR isn’t dead; it’s only sleeping. It’s tossing and turning in Japan, where reasonably obese persons with low standards and addictive personalities will gladly line up for upwards of twenty foodless minutes to pay five dollars to play six minutes worth of a PSOne-era flat-shaded polygon buffet with a Gundam license slapped on it, just because, well, there’s a Gundam license slapped on it, and because in order to play the game, you have to sit in a chair inside a big, plastic, egg-shaped dome screen. The game itself is ugly and insipid, and I don’t want to talk about it, though hey, there you go: the closest modern equivalent to the VR dream of yesteryear. Digging a little deeper, we can identify Sony’s EyeToy and Nintendo’s DS and Wii controllers as a fragment of the dream of VR — translating real movements into on-screen movements. Meanwhile, massively multiplayer online role-playing games like Everquest and World of Warcraft have always just been finely flawed potshots at the Cyberspace dream of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash: this character is you, this world is fantastic, this sword is big, and on fire, and yes, there are a few (hundred thousand) numbers on-screen at any given time for you to forget that you forgot to file your taxes this year. In a Japanese hot-spring inn, there’s always a family-friendly section, where mom and dad and the kids can all go together — instead of a full bath, it’s an ankle-high, super-long trough. Foot-bathing. That’s what MMORPGs are — foot baths. A closer stab at the Neal Stephenson dream is Second Life, which is like an MMORPG except it has no clearly defined purpose — it’s just a “virtual playground” — is both objectively hideous on an aesthetic level (because there will always be some jerk with a vagina for a face wandering around the most minutely detailed and lush piece of virtual architecture) and cataclysmically uninteresting, because this sort of surreal landscape is the sort of thing we’d expected to have to wear a heavy helmet to experience: no helmet, no deal.

Not all videogames in existence are trying to be the Holodeck from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, which is simultaneously kind of a shame and kind of a relief. It’s a shame because the Holodeck is a good idea — such a good idea that they devoted entire whole arcs of episodes to what is essentially defined by the writers as “the way people entertain themselves in the 25th century” (Captain Jean-Luc Picard living out Shakespearean roles, et cetera) — and it’s a relief because there are so many uncannily horrifying ways to heck it up. What you’ll see, though, over the next couple years in this “Videogame Industry”, is that every time someone takes a step closer to the Holodeck, that game will sell two to six million copies upon release. It’s what people want, whether they want to want it or not.

The majority of MMORPGs take place in swords-and-sorcerers, dungeons-and-dragons settings because, quite frankly, taking place in the future, with robots and laserguns and hover-Vespas, would just remind people that they’re using a computer, and that would totally kill millions of buzzes on impact. Second Life is a gimpy mutant areality because People Are Jerks, and the developers know that if they poured all their “talent” into making the graphics look real, that would only make the sight of the people walking around in flat-shaded purple cat suits all the more jarring.

For taking place in a world that strives to be “real”, Grand Theft Auto is something of an anomaly among MMORPGs, and at the same time, it succeeds on levels that they never have. I’m going to put a paragraph break, now, so you can tab over to Hotmail (god, use Gmail already) and send me a paragraph of hate, accusing me ofbestiality or whatever, because “GTA isn’t an MMORPG”.

“MMORPG” stands for “Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Game”. The “first reference” rule of AP journalism dictates that I must spell out all the words of an abbreviation before using the abbreviation; I’m sure that every fat hack writing about videogames for money on the internet holds a doctorate in journalism, however, so I guess that means that whenever they use the term “MMORPG” in an article without first explaining what the letters stand for, that they’re referring to something other than a “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game”. Therefore, their journalistic perhaps-lapse frees me of the guilt associated with using the abbreviation “MMORPG” to talk about a game that just so happens to not be massively multiplayer or online.

Whether you don’t believe Grand Theft Auto is an MMORPG or not isn’t important — it’s the game that all MMORPG developers should be looking at above all other games — even their own games — and very seriously. MMORPGs present detailed worlds that, while perhaps not “realistic”, are at least “believable”. Grand Theft Auto has, since 2001, labored to produce a more minutely detailed and believable world than any other game on the market. And it succeeds for the simplest, most mathematical of reasons. The scientific calculators must have been working overtime at Rockstar North these past few laborious years, because with Grand Theft Auto IV, they have graduated another step toward the Holodeck, while “other” MMORPGs still smolder in Mathematician’s Hell.

Grand Theft Auto for the PlayStation, though primitive in presentation, gave players a solidly-structured city with one amazing quirk: the existence of innocence. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world now, that Grand Theft Auto gained immense popularity because it “lets you kill innocent people”, though was the “killing” of the innocent people ever the point? The more precise way to define Grand Theft Auto‘s revelation is that it allowed innocence to exist in the same world as the core of the game design. In other words: you can do the same things to innocent people or objects that you can do to the not-innocent people or objects.

As something of my hobby (most clearly defined as “pursuing a PhD in economics”), I’ve been reading a lot of thick high-level books on probability and combinatorics lately, and some of the real-life applications are fascinating. It’d take miles of paper to explain it in full detail, though the more you think about entertainment in mathematical terms, the more of a crock the idea of narrative comes to be. To imbue this paragraph with another tangent, let’s mention how I was watching the movie “Out of Sight” the other day, during which Jennifer Lopez, as a federal marshall, and George Clooney, as a bank robber breaking out of prison, somehow end up stuffed together in the trunk of a car as the first plot point. Miraculously, they begin talking about movies, namely Sydney Pollack’s “Three Days of the Condor“, starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway: “It always seemed so phony to me, how they got together so quickly like that”. The irony of this J-Lo-musing is manifold, considering her current situation as a character in a motion picture. Most poignantly, however, it points a fat, sharp finger at the very foundation of the idea of narrative: it’s a challenge for a writer to make something seem like a coincidence — for something to seem “phony” — in fiction. It requires the writer to establish clearly defined boundaries, and rules: to make the subject small enough to seem ridiculous in context, the writer needs to craft huge rules. We, the audience, need to know a massive load about the two characters before we can consider it “phony” that they fall in love so quickly. Because, ultimately, the writer wouldn’t be writing a story with these two people in it for no reason. For another example, let’s say we have a story about a man’s life. In one scene, we see him strike oil. In the next scene, we see him losing money on a stock market crash. Is it a “coincidence” that these things happen one right after another? Of course not — the writer / director / editor are conspiring to tell a story in terms of relevant events.

Videogames have, fundamentally, “failed” as “narrative” in the past because they fail to establish the finer workings of their worlds, and sometimes their characters. In a movie, we might see a guy whose girlfriend is killed during a robbery; an hour later in the movie, and years later in the man’s fictional life, we might see him take a bullet to defend a woman he doesn’t even know. One event is shown to us so that the other has context. In games with “narrative”, we rarely even get the scene where the hero tips his shoe-shine guy an extra nickel, and thus comes up short when it’s time to pay the check on his Big Date with the Hot Girl. Hell, we hardly ever get shoe-shine boys, period, in videogames.

BioShock, a recent, acclaimed, jiggling pile of protoplasm, initially tells us plenty about its world though no more about its character than that he’s the type of guy to immediately eat a bag of potato chips found in a garbage can even when he’s not hungry. Videogames tend to be straightforward sequences of dudes blasting demons because that’s what they’re about. There are no coincidences. I recall, now, a part from a scene in Super Mario Galaxy, in a stage called “The Rabbits Are Looking For Something”, where a bumblebee tells me “The rabbits are looking for something”, and then a rabbit three feet away tells me “We’re looking for something.” He says the somethings they’re looking for are star chips, just as the camera pulls up to show a star chip hovering in the sky. There are also three pegs in the ground, which the player will know he possesses the ability to pound down; two minutes later, a rabbit says he can “smell” a star chip, and the camera pans over to a crate, which the player knows he possesses the ability to shatter by shaking the Wiimote. In both cases, doing what you “can” do yields the star chip in question — one of them is inside the crate, and the other is bizarrely obtained by using a trampoline that materializes when you pound all three pegs into the ground; here, pathologically, is the root of The Modern Videogame’s failure: for remembering how to do what he can do without asking why, the game “rewards” the player with what it has contrived the player to “need“. This isn’t game design — it’s kleptomania. It’s no coincidence that all those packs of gum ended up in your jacket pocket.

It’s so horribly, disgustingly obvious, in the end, what the existence of innocence does for golden-age game design. Let’s retrofit the “essence” of Grand Theft Auto into Super Mario Bros., as an exercise: in Super Mario Bros., Super Mario is a Hero. He is saving the Princess. In order to save the Princess, he must navigate a thrown-down gauntlet of thousands and hundreds of enemy grunts. Mario’s quest — so says the manual — takes place in “The Mushroom Kingdom”, though as far as kingdoms go, it seems to only be full of Evil Monsters.

Mario’s quest takes him from the left side of the screen to the ever-unfolding right side of the screen. The enemies come from the right side to the left. Every four stages, there’s a castle, which Mario goes inside, in hopes of rescuing the princess. At the end of every castle, he finds a mushroom-headed kid-thing who tells him “Our princess is in another castle.”

Now, take your archetypal, fond memories of mushrooms and fire flowers and goombas and koopas, and superimpose this idea over it: the innocent, mushroom-headed kid-things are also running from the right side of the screen to the left, in the same direction as the enemies. Let’s say that they possess shared traits of both Mario — in that they die if they touch the enemies — and of the enemies — in that they also die if stomped by Mario.

Let that idea ferment in your head for a minute.

Stomp the enemies before the innocents run into them. Lose points every time an innocent dies. Stomp the innocents by accident, and lose points. If you’re a sadistic heck, you can stomp the innocents for the thrill of watching their pathetic death animations.

Nintendo games like Gyromite! would play around with the idea of “protecting” an on-screen avatar, though that was always the whole point of such games. If Mario is a Hero, why is “saving” someone something he only does once? Get Shigeru Miyamoto on the phone — seriously — if it was never even an “idea” to have rescuable innocent Toads in the stages in Super Mario Bros., then inform Nintendo that I’m more worthy of his job than he is.

The closest we would ever get to this kind of game, eventually, would be in tacky light-gun shooters, where “innocent civilians” would occasionally pop up. As there’s no on-screen player character in such games, it just doesn’t feel as “bad” when you shoot them as it does when you first run over an innocent person in Grand Theft Auto III. And the penalty for shooting innocent people in light-gun games has only ever been a loss of points.

Super Mario Bros. was inspired by the cream of the current crop, and it would go on to paint an entire genre (“action games”) right down to its bones: stumbling on the very first rung of the narrative ladder, “the hero fights bad guys” came to equal “the hero exists in a world where (aside from himself) only bad guys exist”. Again, no coincidences: only laziness, only lack of imagination.

I’m not knocking Super Mario Bros., of course. It was entertaining as all hell, is what it was. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, though to be fair I’d yet to see even a photograph of a naked woman at that point.

All I’m trying to say is that, at least conceptually, Grand Theft Auto had beaten Super Mario Bros. at its own game. No one seemed to notice, however, because the game’s presentation was subjectively flawed, and its attempts at mimicking reality just didn’t taste right when you still had to press a button to make a guy punch another guy.

Super Mario 64 popped open a frighteningly huge can of worms — 3D action with dynamic personality (the use of the words “dynamic personality” is my way of avoiding Tomb Raider et al). So it was that Grand Theft Auto III was born in the alternate dimension we call “Obviously Awesome, Financially Impossible”. When Rockstar had at last rotated the meat-grinder of life enough times, GTA III plopped itself down on the doorstep of mankind, and Maxim compared the hecking thing to “Pulp Fiction”, which is about as good and as bad as anything can probably get. Rockstar instantly ascended to the next spiritual plane. Their game was so huge in terms of scale, sales, and magnitude that it took years for everyone’s parents and local religious pundit of choice to finally catch on to its sinister side.

The simple way to put it is that Grand Theft Auto lets you kill in-game representations of “innocent” people in situations where no one is otherwise doing anything violent. It lets you turn peace into violence.

“Innocent” people in GTA are easy for any open mind to define: they are the people who are not immediately trying to kill you. Digital representations of human beings don’t need psychological profiles, most of the time: all they need to do is be standing there. Their role, at all times, is “potential victim” of simulated “violence”.

Since more money is poured into the graphical effects that happen when things explode that the graphical effects that happen when people group hug, Grand Theft Auto is mathematically doomed to be objectively “violent”. The simplest straw-man argument in defense of GTA is that in real-life, things can and will explode, as well, so in order to represent a “real” world in a videogame, one needs to account for the more highly improbable side of physics, for the more top-of-the-show side of nightly news. Why craft a detailed, yet ultimately fake world if spectacular things aren’t going to happen? Death is one of the handful of great truths in life; to not account for it in a videogame or any narrative presenting a depiction of reality is a hideous oversight — and (here I begin to crack) to not consider death of innocent people a thing of spectacular fascination, as an author, is to miss the point of not being hit by a bus every morning.

(Of course, perceiving the killing of an innocent person as “fun” is still kind of fundamentally sick.)

So here’s the truth: I personally have always perceived the Grand Theft Auto games as very simple IQ test questions. Through the miracle of graphic design and bare story cues, the game informs you that your character is a thug. The blip on your radar is the location of the MacGuffin. Go get the MacGuffin. Anyone who tries to stop you from getting the MacGuffin is Not An Innocent Person. All of the other cars on the road are full of people trying to mind their own business. In a MegaMan game, they would be the spinning blades the player must avoid to get at the bad guys. (“Obstacles”.)

In other words, I personally have always viewed the innocent people in Grand Theft Auto as things to avoid dangerous contact with. Only the relationship between the Main Character in a GTA and innocent pedestrians and the relationship between spinning obstacles in MegaMan is different — in GTA, the main character hurts the obstacles, not the other way around.

It’s pretty obvious that Grand Theft Auto was, initially, an experiment in “letting the player do ‘anything'” in a rigidly defined world. GTA III, gifted with the canvas of 3D and the experiment of two and a half other games under its belt, was more focused: it was to be an experiment to see how much the game designers could allow the player to do in a 3D space. The two GTA III pseudo-sequels that followed ticked off additional boxes on GTA III‘s initial checklist (“Ride motorcycles”, “Fly a jetliner”).

It seems to me, from a brief forensic analysis, that the purpose of GTA never was to make a game that lets players “be the bad guy”, that lets players “kill innocent people”. The idea was, essentially, to “let the player be free” — hence, perhaps, the name “Liberty City”. The idea of setting the game in a “realistic, modern city” was so obvious a third-grader could have come up with it and still flunked arithmetic. That the game designers chose to make the “hero” a bad man instead of a good man is, in the right twisted context, proof of their human virtue: it’s possible, in their game, to kill anyone, to drive around in traffic like a jerk-off, bumping cars off the road. If you make the “hero” of the game a good person — like a spy or a tax-man, or a cop — the idea of absolute freedom would run counter to the narrative context. The narrative context, of course, only exists because when we, as human beings, see a digital representation of a city, when we tilt an analog stick and see one person in the digital crowd move, we are biologically wired to wonder “Who’s That Guy?” “What’s His Story?” On the contrary, if GTA were a game about piloting a sphere and bumping cubes out of the rectangular pathway, shooting little squares at cylinders and watching them blink and disappear, no one would think it was very “fun” at all. “Entertainment” and “context” are, in many cases, the same exact thing. It’s regrettable sometimes, and sometimes you just kind of shrug and move on.

So yeah, in GTA, you’re a “bad guy” for reasons of cold mathematics, because, if by design players are allowed to “do anything”, that’s precisely what they’ll do. A thousand words on the nature of escapism could very easily flow forth from here: the more realistic the world inside the television screen looks, the more the average twelve-to-seventy-year-old is going to want to see Something heckin’ Nuts happen. Think of all the people who gave up on Sega’s 70-million-dollar disasterpiece Shenmue. I swear, that game is a story written by a first-year creative-writing student who literally cringes when she types the words “And then, Veronica slapped her boyfriend in the mouth.”

Games like Driver stumbled a bit, back in the day; inspired by GTA, the folks behind Driver set about making a true-crime focused opus of a game that took one aspect of the newly minted “crime genre” and expanded it. Namely, they wanted to make a game that was entirely focused on the idea of driving criminals away from robbery scenes. You were a getaway driver. The original idea of the game was that you’d just play it as a string of missions, with no context outside of “the police are chasing you”. Afraid, eventually, that the yet-invisible media pundits would jump out of nowhere and snipe the game’s “glorification” of “criminal activity”, they shoehorned in a narrative: don’t worry, you’re not really a bad guy. You’re an undercover FBI agent working for the mob. Some doctors would clinically diagnose this as a “lack of balls”, others would say it was a group of dudes sticking to their guns, refusing to turn the police cars with blaring sirens into contextless floating rectangular prisms.

History has muted the answer to that particular riddle. And yet, Grand Theft Auto went on using the police as threats and targets. The police are the simple, beautiful key to the dynamic of Grand Theft Auto‘s world; their presence is under- and over-estimated simultaneously by so many critics worldwide that I’m surprised any television on earth is capable of displaying them. In a GTA game, we have

1. The player character (the “main character”, the “protagonist”, the “person we want to see succeed”)

2. The innocent people (bystanders and onlookers, pedestrians and commuters, the “people minding their own business”)

3. The guilty people (assassination targets, gang bosses, henchmen, obstacles placed strategically around our goals, “the tyranny of evil men”)

4. The police

The police, simply put, show up when you do something “wrong”, as dictated by a simple algorithm. The police uphold the “order” of GTA; they’re the reason the game won’t ever turn into Second Life, and it’s better off for it. Let’s assume for a minute that GTA was crafted from the ground up to be a “videogame”, not a “narrative”: if GTA is “based” on “reality”, and the main character is a “bad” man by mathematical necessity, then the police are the developers’ injection of conscience. If you shoot an innocent person, the game sends police your way; so the line between “the innocent” and “the law” becomes invisible, and the line that separates your player character from the law and the innocent becomes embarrassingly fat. And then: if you’re having a firefight out in the street with some gangsters as part of a “mission”, the game is going to send police to the scene. Moral gray areas abound: mathematically, the player is wired to know that anyone shooting at his on-screen avatar is a threat to be eliminated. However, thanks to an elegant veneer of context, the player also knows that the police are the “good” guys. So the line between “self preservation” and “being an evil bastard” becomes thin, and fuzzy, and perversely entertaining. Thrilling. It is in that unholy region that GTA goes from being a well-executed game to being a multi-million-selling cultural phenomenon.

All it took to graduate from naughty pixel-play to genuine sales dynamo was years of probably-tedious checklist-filling by the developers: get real music on the radio, give the protagonist a name and a face, get Hollywood voice talent, let the player earn proficiencies by repeating simple actions, let them fly helicopters, let them order hamburgers at fast food joints, et cetera. The problem, “morally”, with “let the player eat at fast food joints” is that the main pillar of the game design is that NPCs, bad guys, good guys, and the police all exist in the same space, and can have the same actions performed on them. If you can shoot a bad guy, then the game is obligated to also let you shoot a good guy, or shoot the cashier at a fast-food joint. You don’t even have to rob the fast food joint — you can just shoot the guy and walk out.

Since the game development community finally caught on that GTA is amazing, we’ve seen stumbler after stumbler literally presume that the point of “let the player eat fast food” is “let the player shoot the cashier”. Okay, maybe I’m just talking about Saints Row, where your main character is supposed to be a member of a street-cleaning gang, though if you shoot an old lady at random, your positively religious partner won’t even dare to consider you a monster. In fact, he’ll start shooting along with you. The makers of Saints Row, in addition to perhaps not knowing how to use apostrophes, were inspired less by GTA as a slab of sparkling game design as they were inspired by the idea that some kids’ parents kinda thought it was the devil. See Exhibit A, a video trailer for Saints Row 2, in which theinexplicably paid Gary Busey spouts amateurishly-written one-liners about the glory of heavy weaponry. There’s a part where he says, as an on-screen character cuts an off-screen someone in half with a chainsaw, “Here’s a way to get back at your parents for how they raised you.” A shot of someone using a flamethrower: “Flamethrowers work.”

It’s painfully obvious — at least, to me — what the marketing guys at THQ and Volition are going for, in this age of YouTube, of the Blogosphere, of Web 2.0, of World 2.0; years ago, Acclaim got hilariously bold with their World 1.5 marketing scheme for some Turok game that probably sucked: they offered free copies of their game to any parents who actually named their child “Turok” and agreed not to have the name legally changed for something like three years. There was another game that they offered, like, free copies of, and a couple Cadbury’s chocolate bars, or something, if you’d agree to place an advertisement for the game on a tombstone that you happen to own (like, your grandfather’s). I remember, back then, a few people asking, “What the hell? Who are they advertising to? Who’s considering videogame purchases in a cemetery?” Anyone dull enough to even ask such a question, I wager, has probably thought of videogames in church. The point of Acclaim’s “advertising” wasn’t to “advertise” — it was to get people talking. It was to create “news” stories in “blogs”, about this crazy advertising stunt. Whether anyone took them up or not — I’m pretty sure no one did; I’d check Wikipedia and report back to you with some tidy facts, if for some reason, in this World 2.0 Age, that didn’t actually feel cheaper and dumber than just admitting that I don’t know — isn’t the point. The point is that it was advertising about advertising, directed at the core of the news media. All it took, in World 1.5, to cause a sensation, is to suggest a ridiculous reward for something improbable. “Acclaim will give you money if you name your child Turok” is a hilarious concept; if someone actually had named their baby Turok, that would have made a hell of a follow-up story. Either way, the follow-up story wasn’t necessary, especially because (and in spite of the fact) that the game no doubt sucked.

In World 2.0, in order to make a sensation, you have to Be Completely Innocent, and Cause Something Bad. Grand Theft Auto didn’t exactly cause world wars or anything — it gets blamed significantly less for the War in Iraq than it gets blamed for each shooting death in middle America — though it certainly is universally recognized as a driving force in the worldwide popular culture. I’d argue that it really is innocent escapism, and that the publishers’ hands are pretty clean in the event of any kids’ getting a hold of the game, because the rating on the box says kids shouldn’t have it. I play GTA like a mafia movie — Sonny Corleone sure as stuff doesn’t shoot the cashier every time he buys a bag of oranges, for example — kids too young to have seen a mafia movie, or understood it, will probably just start running over people and giggling. Who knows. At any rate, it’s quite safe to say that GTA put something into the world, and that the signs of the seed are starting to surface. Saints Row 2‘s “viral” video trailers with Gary Busey are a weird kind of devil-fragment: someone on the marketing team said, “Let’s actually make a game that makes a kid kill someone; let’s actually say ‘kill your parents’ in a subtle enough way to keep a lawsuit running for several months, to get the name of our game on the front page of a thousand newspapers worldwide. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, and the profit from sales and the name recognition will be more than worth the legal costs.” The world we live in — it’s kind of scary. People like THQ are stuffting in the marketing pool, and people like Nintendo are stuffting in the game design pool; sooner or later, this “industry”‘s pool is going to be figuratively full of stuff.

In a way, I respect Rockstar’s aloof, interview-shunning attitude. It shows that they have immense confidence in their games. I remember their “booth” at E3 in 2004 — a huge square of floor space, surrounded by barbed-wire fences with buses parked inside. No one was allowed in, because there was nothing to see. Just big “Grand Theft Auto” logos on the sides of buses. Rockstar knew — and know — that people like, love, want, and need their games, and here, in this transformed world, “No comment” has graduated from being the most strategic thing to say when confronted with a nasty rumor or accusation to being the most awesome thing you can say when given a glowing, dudely compliment.

The GTA games have been the hamster-water-bottle of the gaming populace since 2001, hung upside-down, dripping, sucked on long and hard from beneath by fuzzy, vaguely adorable, vaguely disgusting, absolutely tireless creatures. Rockstar is in a “do no wrong” position, as far as the press is concerned: each release is called the “best game ever” by literally every hobbyist magazine or fanboy blog. When Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was released, the US Official PlayStation Magazine’s front cover literally said “Is this the BEST GAME EVER? . . . We Think So!”

I was convinced it wasn’t quite the best game ever, nor even the best thing ever, though it certainly was nice. It did nice things. It saw Rockstar toying with the GTA III dynamite formula on a grander scale. You could now take girls out on dates, and possibly get laid, if you talked to them nicely enough. You could tap lots of buttons at the gym, to make your character grow bigger and more muscular. Or you could run around a lot on foot in the city, to make your character holocaust-skinny, with incredible endurance. Pedal a bike a lot to earn “bike” skill, and suddenly you’re able to jump over a semi truck while pedaling sixty miles per hour on a freeway. San Andreas topped Vice City and Liberty City by providing a whole state, complete with mini replicas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. At the end of the day, however — and I’m pretty sure this is obvious to everyone by now — “more stuff” doesn’t mean “better game”. Actually, maybe it’s not obvious. Someone on an internet forum I read was once listing his favorite games of all time, and said Space Harrier was number one and Shenmue was number two — then, minutes later, he realized that you can play Space Harrier inside Shenmue, so Shenmue was bumped up to number one. I saw that, and thought about how to respond for a second, and that second turned into a minute, and then I decided to go get a cup of coffee, and then I forgot about it until just now, years later. Was this Guy On The Internet wrong, even by his own standards? By all means. Mathematically. More to the point, was there Too Much Stuff in San Andreas? Most definitely. Some of it was good — the semi-deep clothing customization was hot (my Carl “CJ” Johnson wore green track pants, a sapphire blue button-down shirt, a sweet brown cowboy hat, and a wicked eyepatch, and he actually looked Tokyo-fashionable as opposed to just Hollywood-ridiculous), being able to recruit three AI companions was great (just talk to anyone wearing green in your neighborhood) and the “turf war” mini-game was conceptually excellent: stand in enemy “turf” and shoot enough rival gang members to initiate a “battle”. Defend the turf long enough, and it becomes yours. Try and conquer as much of the map as possible, though beware — leave one spot of your turf surrounded by enemy turf for too long, and they’ll fight back, even (especially) when you’re not there.

It’s just that a lot of the game was too rough and unfinished. Jagged moral edges stuck out here and there — though your hero is a guy who left the city because he hated gang activity, and has only come back to attend his mama’s funeral, when the first girl he dates says “Let’s do a drive-by!”, he replies with “Shit, you my kinda girl!” Mourning his dead mother, hateful of gang violence, he is nonetheless deeply pleased when a girl expresses interest in recklessly killing innocent people. When you recruit gang members and enter a car, they will immediately stick their guns out the windows and shoot at everything. Now, I’ve been to Los Angeles, and I know that people do die and kill there, though I’m pretty sure they don’t stick their guns out the window every time they get into a car.

And the story missions of San Andreas: it’s like a little girl throws a Frisbee, the camera follows it as the blue sky turns to outer space, and then the Frisbee turns into an intercontinental ballistic missile, and there’s a lobster-headed vagina-shaped alien being where we’d expected a happy puppy to be. And then there’s an explosion, and a rain of gold coins. In other words, San Andreas starts with a guy in town for his moms’ funeral, hounded by the jerkoff cops; it ends with you robbing a casino in Vegas and making hundreds of millions of dollars. The American Dream, huh? In between point A and point B, there are (literally and figuratively) many miles of dead countryside — just like America! — and copy-pasted neighborhoods of lifeless cookie-cutter houses — just like America! The producers had once said that the cities in GTA aren’t fully “realistic” because real cities weren’t designed with fun videogames in mind. That’s nice enough, as far as platitudes go, and I guess it’s even kind of true. In the same way, I guess the lives depicted in GTA aren’t “realistic” because real life isn’t designed with fun videogames in mind. Carl “CJ” Johnson is torn between being a Human Being and being a Videogame Character. Evidence existed in San Andreas that Rockstar understood their social role; GTA III had let the player have sex with virtual prostitutes, and as (once again) the game design’s central pillar dictated that all characters must live under the same rules, it must be as possible to kill a prostitute as it is to kill anyone else. It was only a matter of time before someone — not Rockstar — wrote on The Internet that you can have sex with a prostitute and then immediately kill her to get your money back. Because of all the adolescent LOLs and ROFLs and ROFLMAOs that this caused, Rockstar made sure that every prostitute in San Andreas carried a pistol. On the other hand, they made it so that the crack dealers — scary, threatening bastards — carried huge amounts of money. If that’s not dropping a dime in the “social responsibility” collection plate, I don’t know what is.

San Andreas, eventually, inspired game designers more than any other GTA game, because it was bigger, realer, rawer, and simply more present in the mass media and the pop culture. It was the most ticked-out checklist of them all, with more area, more stuff you could do, more ridiculous missions (complete with story-explained reasons to actually wear a jetpack, for god’s sake). Incomplete and sketchy as it was, it was more than a game: it was a comprehensive State of the Industry address, and everything that entails: many hours too long, kind of boring, it droned in explicit detail, outlining “Precisely Everything You Can Do With The Videogame Medium”. The curse of San Andreas is that you can only put so much stuff into a game before the player wonders “What can’t you do in this game?” — and then immediately answers the question: water-skiing. Why can I fly a jetliner when I can’t go water-skiing? Seriously? It’s like throwing in “everything”, even the kitchen sink, and forgetting to throw in the greasy frying pan that was in the kitchen sink.

Nonetheless, the world kowtowed to San Andreas, and more than a few good things came of it. Hell, we can probably say that Realtime Worlds’ “sandbox” action game Crackdown took the turf war concept and expanded it into an entire game — one more revisiting, and “sandbox turf war” could actually become its own genre. Crackdown was designed by one of the guys who made GTA in the first place, so maybe that’s why Crackdown seems to understand so many of GTA‘s shortcomings. The most strategic criticism one can levy at GTA is that everywhere you look (on the internet, or, hey, even in IGN’s video reviews), people are talking about the glory of ignoring the “story” and just going on crazy killing sprees. Crackdown makes the bold hypothesis that perhaps the reason so many people ignore the story and refer to killing sprees as “just having fun” with the game is because the story missions aren’t fun enough. Crackdown nearly cuts “story” out; the goal of the game is to heck stuff up, and if you’re a Christian, you’re in luck, because literally everyone (okay, almost everyone) in the city is a drug-shooting, casual-sexing junkie/murderer. And you, behold, are a cop. On top of all this, you can also jump three stories straight up and lift a car over your head. “Have fun, heckers!” Crackdown says, and proves a Big Fat Point: the people of the world will have fun, if that fun is fun, even if they’re forced to play the part of a do-gooding police officer instead of a hooker-slashing freak-off.

I guess, around the time the GTA-likes started to come out of the woodwork — Driv-Three-Er, The Getaway, the True Crime series, et al — the concept of the “Perfect Sandbox” game was born. Capcom took a stab at it from an obtuse angle, with Dead Rising, a game that requires the player, who is otherwise free to do whatever he can to survive, to “perform”, in a hopelessly constrained environment, according to the story’s strictly set schedule. Meanwhile, in the Rockstar Citadel, Bully was developed and released as a sly one-off. The conservative media went nuts, theorizing that the game was about school shootings. Rockstar ignored the buzz. This was strategic. When Bully was eventually plopped out for public consumption, it was a wee bit misunderstood, though there’s a fair deal of its game-design philosophizing all over GTA IV. With a constrained environment — a school — a mostly wholesome story — through pranks and staged beat-downs, teach the bad bullies
what for — and equal focuses on the life of the protagonist as human being and as a videogame character, Bully spoke to the golden future of videogames: the age of the Holodeck, of Square-Enix’s Anna Karenina, of the age of Smell-o-Vision and 8.1 Dolby Surround-Flavor, when “just being there”, in the game world, will be enough to make you say, “Well, yep, that’s entertainment.”



ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE GAME NOW

Describing the “perfect”, “ideal”, “optimal” Grand Theft Auto game, in detail, would be an extremely boring exercise. It’d be like describing concrete graphical details of Madden that need to be brushed up before we can say it looks absolutely real. Madden is lucky to be dealing with just a sport, played on a mostly solid-colored field; Grand Theft Auto has garbage littering the streets, homeless people asleep in gutters, strip clubs with busted neon signs. There’s more of a connection between the goals of Madden and the goals of GTA than you’d initially think (in other words, not just “money”) — they’re both striving to recreate an experience as accurately and precisely as possible. Neither game, alas, will ever succeed at its ultimate goal, which actually makes it very awesome that the developers keep trying. I’d assume it was because they were dense or something, though I don’t know. People with that much money can’t be stupid. Rockstar “took a break” from producing purely crime-fiction sagas to put out Table Tennis, which the press OMG’d and LOL’d at quite heartily. It was nonetheless a bold and perfectly understandable move: they wanted to try to make something perfect, for the same reason that lesser men occasionally feel like destroying something beautiful. Table tennis just happened to be the simplest sport to represent in a game. Ultimately, we here at Action Button Dot Net (“ABDN” on the NASDAQ) can’t give Grand Theft Auto IV a perfect four-star rating, because the darts mini-game kind of sucks, and this wouldn’t be an issue if Things Like Darts weren’t So Important to the flow of the game. It’s not like Rockstar is short on glowing reviews or anything. I’m pretty sure they won’t mind a less-than-perfect score from us. Hey guys, next time, if you want a perfect score, don’t make us buy the game ourselves! That’s not too much to ask, is it?

Rockstar’s Table Tennis rite-of-passage lends a certain sheen of life to GTA IV. It’s like, remember the computer-generated cut-scenes in Final Fantasy VII? Square spent $35 million on that stuff back in 1997, and now talking-head professors in productivity non-games on the Nintendo DS look better than that stuff. In other words, it’s only a matter of time before all of the mini-games in GTA are as good as Table Tennis. In the meanwhile, I suppose it goes without saying that GTA IV is definitely a step in the right direction, toward the “ideal” GTA game.

The graphics are better: it takes genuine hate-fueled passion to find an instance where a building model is used twice. At last, the night-time color palettes don’t look so muddy and unattractive (they still need a tiny bit more purple and turquoise). Unfortunately, however, the interiors of some buildings still look PlayStation 2-ish. Like the first two safehouses; I understand they’re not supposed to be “nice”. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have proper textures.

The story is leaner: not once in the game are you asked to drive a fire engine with a broken ladder into the Clown District to round up fifty unemployed mimes to form a makeshift ladder so you can climb into the top window of an apple-pie factory and crack the safe so as to steal the Cocaine Recipes within, and then escape with a nearby jet-pack. No, this time around, it’s all about shooting guys. Viewed from the air, some of the shoot-out stages are obviously plotted with Gears-of-War-caliber attention to level design. Some people, if you go by the internet, seem to not like the “sticking-to-walls bullstuff” of the game, though I find that complaint kind of weirdly ironic. It’s a game that presents a breathing simulation of a “realistic” world. These games have always had police officers who do their best to shoot you dead if you kill a random pedestrian; why shouldn’t the consequences of the bullets themselves have, you know, a tiny bit more weight? The cover mechanic is a gorgeous sweater from a prodigal grandma — too bad it’s two sizes too big, and, um, it’s really hard to slip in and out of cover, or slip into the cover you want to slip into, sometimes. The ability to press the cover button long before you approach the cover (so as to initiate a dramatic slide) is pretty sweet, though sometimes it’ll mean you’re now crouched on the wrong side of the cover, which means you get buckshot in the side of the head. Introduction of free-aiming into the series is a god-send: I realize they’ve had it in the PC versions forever, now, though it’s even more intuitive now: press the left trigger to initiate a clever auto-lock-on, and then use the right analog stick to tweak the finer points. It’s kind of creepy that there exist human beings who will say manually aiming is “better” or even “more realistic” because, yes, though I’ve never fired a gun, I don’t reckon I’d have to hold it in front of my face and track it very slowly to the right in order to shoot someone. On the other hand, I can’t call the combat system perfect, because sometimes the auto-lock-on still locks on to a hecking corpse, or sometimes it still locks on to an innocent bystander. I kind of don’t like that! I’m pretty sure that the corpse-lock-on could be justified away as a “pseudo-realistic portrayal of, uhh, how sometimes you don’t know, during a real-life gunfight, if a particular opponent is, uhh, dead or not”, though seriously, jack, we’re playing a videogame, here. You’ve already got life-meters on these guys. Also, seriously, how hard can it be to program the auto-aim so that it automatically locks on to the guy standing right in front of me with a shotgun pointed at my upper chest, instead of the guy upstairs and sixty feet away crouched behind a box and barely visible? Seriously, I’ve just ordered a book that promises to teach me C++ in 21 days — let’s see if I can’t figure this out by the end of next month. (Protip: I probably won’t.) While I’m at it, I’m going to figure out a way to classify “innocents” as their own AI class, and completely remove them from the auto-aim target queue when “hostile” class AI targets are present. Man, look at me — using big words, like I know what they mean! If it’s so easy for me to pretend I know what this stuff means, it must be even easier for Rockstar’s hotshot programmers to implement. A recent issue of Game Developer Magazine tells me that the median yearly salary for a “hotshot game programmer” is something like $93,000. Holy stuff! They can’t be stupid to be that rich, so it’s obvious that they just hate nice people. Can you believe that someone with that much money could resent innocent people, and wish them dead of accidental shotgun wounds? I mean, lawyers get paid six figures, and they protect people all the time! Politicians are millionaires, and they pass laws keeping gay people from getting married — that’s about as pro-life as you can get!

Someone on an internet forum I frequent poignantly expressed some confusion as to why the missions in GTA IV are “constrained” and “set-piecey”, despite the surrounding game being so wide-open and free. I can understand his mild disappointment, though I certainly don’t share it. It makes poetic sense, that more often than not there’s only one or two ways to best a mission. When, at any given time in the story, I have a choice of more than five different mob bosses, thugs, or drug dealers to accept a mission from, when I’m expected to choose what I’m even going to be doing in the first place, I like not having to think about how I’m going to do it. It speaks volumes that the design of the city streets — surprise surprise — in GTA IV is much more real-like than in previous games, where, if you recall several paragraphs ago, the producers had claimed it was more important to make the cities interesting as “a level in a videogame”. They’ve made the right sacrifice, I think: they’ve made a city that is real-like, breathing, living, worth experiencing in a slow-walking leisurely Second-Life-y pace. So it’s all the more fitting that the missions are more straightforward movie action scenes. When everyone sees a Big Movie, and they talk about it at the pizza parlor, they say specific things: “Man, that part where Darth Vader cut off Luke’s hand was awesome.” Imagine if that scene were under the viewer’s control — maybe you could make Darth Vader cut off Luke’s foot, instead. There’s a chance that people will simply say “The fight between Darth Vader and Luke was great”, though it won’t penetrate as deeply into the pop-culture unless there’s something everyone could agree upon. Everyone keeps citing the assassination of Salvatore Leone from GTA III — how it gave you multiple choices for how to complete the mission, and though that was the very essence of GTA at the time, in this post-San Andreas, post-Bully, post-Dead Rising world, the specific is all the more intriguing. There are certain very-well-planned missions with a bit of wiggle room in GTA IV — you just have to either be really, really skilled, or have a lot of imagination. There’s a bike chase halfway through the game where you chase two guys on motorcycles, and if you let the chase drag out long enough, they’ll duck into the subway tunnels, and it’ll beheckin ‘ awesome, because now you’re dodging trains. The “Salvatore Leone” mission of GTA III lets you choose how you’re going to kill the guy from the first-degree phases; GTA IV‘s more well-planned missions are all crimes of passion. In the bike chase, it’s highly possible for you to shoot the guys off their bikes from a distance, if you’re hot enough with the machine gun. The game gives them a fair enough lead, and even contextualizes their lead-off with a cut-scene during which protagonist Niko scrambles for a motorcycle of his own. Whether you pick the guys off from a distance with your machine gun using free-aim or side-swipe them into an oncoming train in the subway tunnels, or sideswipe them off the elevated train track when the chase emerges into the daylight again, or cap the son of a bitch immediately as he veers back onto the highway after the whole train-track chase, you’re going to feel like a badass, like a dude with a stuffed stomach full of videogame. Likewise, there’s another mission where you car-chase some diamond thieves all the way to Central Park. The game has scripted it so that their car will crash in Central Park and they’ll get out, and a gunfight ensues behind pillars under a bridge, escalating to a chase into a public restroom. However, if you be bad, you can end it all before they have a chance to crash. Hey, I’ll take that. Another mission, involving a spectacular jewish-mafia shootout in a museum, ends with a car chase during which you’re told to “lose” the guys. Does that mean run away? I stole a fast car and drove away. They killed me. I tried the mission again. (After reloading my save — hospitals charge ten thousand damn dollars! LOL @ American health care!) The next time, I stole the car in the front of the other two cars, and dropped a grenade out my window, effectively toasting the second car. The third car followed me tenaciously, attracting the attention of the cops. I lost the cops, though I couldn’t lose the mob. I ramped my car off the side of the road and onto the beach. I ran up and crouched beneath a wall, watching the big red blip draw closer. I stood up to get a better look. I remembered I had a rocket launcher. I crouched and prepared it. I stood up and fired at the front of the car. It flew about fifty feet up in the air. “MISSION CLEAR!” I pumped my fist, and the eternally iron-pumping black dude named “My Inner Monologue” shouted “Hell Yeah Motherhecker“. Et cetera, et cetera — there are enough moments like this written about on messageboards all over the internet; poke around, or play the game and make your own.

This is to say nothing of the gloriously straightforward, huge, multi-part mission where you rob a bank. Or any of the several clever Hideo-Kojima-worthy missions like the one where you have a sniper rifle, you’re on a roof, and the target is watching TV and you can’t get a shot. You have to zoom in to the telephone on the table, read the phone number written on it, dial said number on your cell phone, and then shoot him when he gets up to answer the phone.

There are a couple of “emotional” doozies among the mission, like where one main character asks you to kill another, at roughly the same time the other guy asks you to kill the other guy. It’s baffling. I made the “correct” choice, then saved in a new file, then reloaded my save, and tried it the other way. Holy lord, the other way was depressing, and when it was done, the other guy gave me $25,000, told me via cell-phone that I was a sick son of a bitch, and said he never wanted to see me again. Excellent. I didn’t save that file. Curiosity satisfied.

Despite this sort of thing, there’s another mission where you’re supposed to follow a guy in a car to his “crew”‘s house, so that you can kill the whole crew. It’s a satisfying low-speed chase, crashing through fences and people’s backyards in Videogame Jersey. You can kill the guy long before you get to his house, though that will fail you the mission. And then you’re yanked out of the immersive experience, and asked if you want to reset time, and retry. This is kind of a shame. Why can’t “failing” in this regard branch the mission off so that now the “crew” in question — their location lost, because you killed the guy before he could lead you to them — now gears up for revenge, and you have to smoke them out?

I understand that dynamically emergent narrative in a game is Very Complicated, and I’d probably snap my plastic Starbucks’ coffee stir in two and slit my wrists with the shard right here at my desk if The Boss asked me to “make it happen”. Still, Rockstar North has a thousand dudes, all of them no doubt huge with muscles, with wrists so coated with meat as to be impermeable to even the sharpest razors. They consistently manage to put together huge, epic games in pseudo-living cities. I’m pretty sure they could at least make it so that, I don’t know, there’s a little bit more choice in the flow of the story. This is the dream of “interactive cinema”, the corpse of which has long been absorbed into the game-design philosophy, ever since we found 3D. Why do I need to have so many people giving me missions? The main character, Niko, has a story. He has someone he needs to find, in Liberty City. That’s a good concept. He’s also got a cousin with a gambling problem. That’s a good concept as well. Might we see a GTA, some day, where I don’t have thirteen people supplying me with tips on what to do, where the main character’s conversations in his depressing living room with his gambling-addicted cousin determine who the next target is, or what they’re going to do next? Maybe give me one boss telling me what to do, make me feel like I’m actually part of a gang war. Make the “pass/fail” for the missions not so black and white — make it so that, sometimes, the guy might get away, and he’ll just get angry and want revenge, and that figures into the plot.

I know this is a lot of work, though you know what? Rockstar put a lot of work into this game. Too much work, even. There are too many god damnedsingleplayer missions. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy almost every one of them — it’s just that, eventually, there’s too much. Why not make it possible to get “an ending” in ten hours, and plaster it all over the box that the game has “dynamic branching paths”, and can be played again and again? More often than not, in the “videogame business”, game developers will Keep Every Feature of the original game when designing a sequel; that Rockstar North cut out jets and the weight-gain/weight-loss systems from San Andreas seems to me like absolute proof that they wanted GTA IV to be a slimmer game. I’m sure we can all agree with that. Yet, despite cutting out jets and hockey masks and pogo sticks and kitchen sinks and BMX bikes, they left the “dating” system in. And now you can take your male friends — even gay ones — on “dates” to play darts or shoot pool. It’s obvious that they wanted “normal human social interaction” to be a core element of the game — I mean, they chose it over plane-hijacking, for god’s sake — so might their aspirations already be pointing toward a sharp, focused, truly branching narrative? (Or might their choice just be indicating that they finally noticed that the absence of a “hug button” was probably why every jerk handed a controller immediately started running over pedestrians in a stolen car?)

It doesn’t even have to be every mission — just every once in a while. It couldn’t be that much harder than what these godmen are doing already, and it’d make a huge difference, and the critics would no doubt scream again. I know I would. I’d scream until my throat was raw; I’d black out, I’d wake up, and by god, I’d scream some more.





IGN managed to miraculously cause a controversy recently when their “video review” (or something) of GTA IV portrayed the protagonist beating a hooker to death. Rockstar claimed that they didn’t tell IGN to play up the hooker-killing aspect of the game. Nonetheless, it is Rockstar who must shoulder the blame, long after IGN apologizes. I could ruminate here for a bit on how this incident basically exposes IGN once and for all as the knuckle-dragging losers they no doubt are, most likely devoid enough of common sense to reach for their six-week-old plastic disposable Bic razors whenever they get an outbreak of pimples on their faces. Somehow, thanks to years of Nintenditioning, the jerk-offs at IGN had come to equate “things it is possible to do in a videogame” with “features of said videogame”. I’ve been over this before, in this review, though this time, I’m doing it after the “actually talking about the game now” headline, so I assume at least someone is paying attention.

At any rate, we here at Action Button Dot Net don’t shave when we have blemishes, and when we do shave, it’s with genuine badger hair shaving brushes, avocado-oil soap, and vintage-style German double-edge safety razors. We also recognize videogames as a deliberate medium, full of both things “to” do and things you “can” do. Some political pundits sniped at GTA IV, right on cue, saying that “in this game, it’s possible to have sex with a prostitute, kill her afterward, get your money back, and then, when the police show up, you can either cut them in half with a chainsaw or shoot them in the head with a shotgun”. For example, it’s possible to break any music CD, even one of gospel music, in two, and use it to stab a baby in the top of the head. It requires about as much imagination as killing a hooker in GTA IV — that doesn’t mean people go around doing it! Seriously.

If I were a killer in real life, I would probably find killing in GTA IV kind of boring. Likewise, though I don’t particularly mind reloading and then doing missions over all the way from the start when I fail or die, I get all weirdly antsy when bowling with an in-game “friend”. It lets me skip the “friend”‘s turn, though it doesn’t let me skip the animation of the ball coming out of the ball return. So there we have the framework of a mathematical proof that Games Do Not Create Evil: I am bored by the finer points of the in-game virtual bowling experience, just as some kids are enthralled by the ability to kill anyone in the game. In other words, when the game asks me to bear numb-faced witness to something I can do in real life, I am bored; the inverse of this is that I am enthralled when it offers me the chance to do something I can’t do in real life, like kill someone. I’m pretty certain that I’m psychologically incapable of actual murder, even in self-defense; if all the kids out there are equally excited when killing innocent people, that must mean that they, too, consider it something they could not possibly do in the real world. Maybe I’m on to something or maybe I’m being a jerk, though hey, there you have it. Fill in the blanks and win a Nobel Peace Prize.

The irony-loving mass media is alive, of course, with “sarcastic” “news” regarding the “lighter side” of GTA. How it’s not all about an eastern-European immigrant seeking revenge in a dark city — you can also eat hot dogs from street vendors, go bowling, play pool, obey traffic laws, et cetera. Few people, however, are adequately applauding the taxi system. What a brilliant addition — you can now hail a taxi, or call your cousin (who runs a car service) to summon a limo to your current location. This element right here isn’t “new” — it’s been around since Earthbound on the Super Nintendo, where you could order a pizza and have it delivered a randomly calculated interval of time later, even way outside of town — though it is quite necessary if a game is to create a “believable” world. It’s not just “realistic” — it’s courteous, and at the same time dead obvious. How bizarre was it, anyway, that the only way to travel in previous GTA games, at the beginning, was to literally steal an innocent person’s car? That’s a pretty huge oversight, I dare say. Of course, many cash-hungry game designers lifted the idea verbatim, resulting in all travel in Jak II, a game where you’re supposed to be saving people from oppression, being the result of hijacking the innocent peoples’ vehicles. By putting taxis into GTA IV they’ve elevated the game to the next plane — a higher plane than even the ability to pilot jet planes. Their simple presence makes the game all at once come together into something harmonious. Try riding a taxi from one end of the city to the other, and not skipping the driving scene. You can use the right analog stick to look out the window as the taxi streams over a bridge, golden sunset outside. It’s gorgeous. For an instant, that Holodeck future slips into view, and anything looks possible. Sometimes your taxi is stopped at an intersection in thick traffic, and the guy in the car next to you says in a loud voice “Man, this why I need a helicopter.” Classic. Then the weird little uncanny valley touches pop in: you’re walking down the street, and the game’s physics engine is excited enough to show you how people can drop cups of coffee if you bump into them. Of course they don’t pick the coffee up — it’s spilled, gone — though when it’s raining and you bump into someone and they drop their umbrella, they get appropriately peeved, and then just keep walking without picking the umbrella up again. No one remembered to tell that AI that it didn’t want to get wet — just that it should be carrying an umbrella until being interrupted.

And then there are the vast deserts of the brain: here, in this city, you can go to a comedy club, you can get drunk and watch the screen wobble terrifyingly. You can browse a hilariously-written semi-parody internet, with dead-hilarious PR copy for things like fictional beverages; you can read a “child beauty pageant” website and then, upon logging off, find yourself assaulted by a SWAT team. So why can’t you sit on a bench by the side of the road? Why can’t Niko sit down in a diner when he orders a hamburger? Why does he have to eat standing up? When you consider all the budget that must have been appropriated to the awesome radio stations, you really have to wonder about things like this.

In spite of how delicious and heavy and perfect I find the vehicle physics in GTA IV — this is GTA post-Burnout, of course, so the mouse-cursor physics of previous games just won’t do anymore — I labored, for the first twenty hours of play, to complete GTA IV without “stealing” a single car. Once I realized that cars taken during missions — like, when there’s a bike right there in front of you at the start of a mission, and you’re obviously supposed to ride it — don’t count as “stolen”, my quest was energized. I eventually gave up, though, because I accidentally stole taxis too many times. You have to hold the Y button to enter as a passenger. If you don’t hold the button all the way up to the part where Niko opens the back door, then he decides to steal the car. You might say that it doesn’t matter, or that it’s a weird thing to complain about, though really, with GTA IV, Rockstar has given the vehicles realistic physics, it has gifted the human bodies with realistic weight, it has included missions where you must choose to kill the target or let him live. It’s a “small” oversight that the game underestimates the difference between “I’m going to open the back door of this cab and get in as a passenger, and tell the man I want to go home” and “I’m going to walk up to this cab I just hailed, break the driver’s-side window with my elbow, drag the driver out by his neck, throw him onto the pavement, kick him in the ribs, get in his car, slam the door, sneer, and say ‘Nice car — JERK!'” Even in the mind of a man who was, say, in the military, I’m pretty sure there’s a cosmos-wide ravine in the mind between these two notions.

Then again, there’s apparently an Xbox Achievement, or something, awarded if you steal something like 600 cars. (I think?) Why can’t there be an Achievement for “clear all story missions without stealing a single innocent person’s car”? Probably because the game isn’t programmed to track something like that. They should get on it. It would be . . . nice, I guess. Maybe, if you manage to beat the game in such a way, you get a free super-car of some sort.

Of course, once I’m playing this game online, I have no qualms about being a jerk, stealing cars, standing in the middle of the road with a pistol, free-aiming, shooting drivers in the head, et cetera. It’s the New Hilarious. Once GTA IV emerges on the other end of the tunnel as The Only Game On Earth for Xbox Live kids, maybe that’ll spur on the team’s confidence in making a more strictly focused singleplayer. Who knows. Either way, I guess it’s a testament to the main character’s likability and his placement in the story — I didn’t want to make him do anything ridiculous. Speaking of Niko — I really think his voice could have been better. That they got a guy who isn’t Eastern-European kind of makes sense, if you think that maybe it’s, I don’t know, a jab at Super Mario. Still, they hadheckin’ Ray Liotta for Vice City — the least they could have done is get the lead singer from Gogol Bordello to do the voice of the main character. I mean, he’s a pretty great actor himself, and he’s even from New York. If you asked me, they kind of missed an opportunity.

Having seen how well they did with the GPS / cellular phone age, I kind of hope that the next GTA side-story will be set at least twenty years in the future, and possibly in some gritty Tokyo or Hong Kong replica, though maybe that wouldn’t work out, because what would the people talk about on the radio? They’d have to get so much more creative. (“Creative” is not a word I’d apply to the humor in GTA IV, perfect as it is most of the time — you need only read the comments thread on aYouTube video of a presidential debate or see two beer commercials or stand in an American supermarket for three minutes to be able to write a thousand jokes of this quality.) Part of GTA‘s charm is the heaps of social satire; in GTA IV, the radio segments are so well-written that they make even homophobia clever: the pundits will slam the violence in the game, though say nothing of the heaps of homophobia. While we’re at it, I have to wonder, since when are the “conservative” people the ones who support war? Since when is not wanting anyone to die unnecessarily strictly a belief of nose-pierced purple-haired freaks? No — must not start typing about things like that. Must go back to finishing this paragraph, and this review, with something that looks like the fantasy of a very fat person, so that people reading just the last sentence will get the impression they want to get: Yeah, I’d like a GTA: Near-Future Asian Metropolis, with squealing math-rock on every radio station. Man, I’d play that game all night! I’d probably have to switch this website’s rating scale to one-to-ten, just so I could give it a ten!

text by tim rogers

★★☆☆

“TOO MUCH HARDER THAN HAVING A REAL BAND.”

Well, the time has finally come. Here I am, reviewing Harmonix and EA’s Rock Band in an effort to make May “reader wish-fulfillment month” here at Action Button Dot Net (that’s “ABDN” on the NASDAQ), and I’m giving it two stars. Before you accuse me of having never played the game, I will accuse myself: I had never played Rock Band or its older, club-footed cousin Guitar Hero prior to just two weeks ago. Now, after the lovable peons (hey, I said “lovable”) in my office have spent the entirety of two months’ worth of lunch breaks increasing their band’s “popularity” meta-numbers, and after joining them on drums for two songs and practicing the guitar part of Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls on Parade” in Guitar Hero III by myself at the local air force base BX, while a fat man stood by sipping a two-liter of red Mountain Dew, marveling that I was able to sing all the words while playing on “Hard” and actually not losing, I consider myself one hundred percent fully permitted to write a review of this game.

First, a summary of the times: here we are, escapists and refugees from reality. If you care enough about videogames to read the entire first paragraph of this writing, you no doubt find something lacking in your Actual Life. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that. People who are satisfied are usually chided for being happy, and eventually become the victims of hate crimes. Videogames are a nice enough cure-all for boredom of the real-life variety; if nothing else, accusing an invisible Halo opponent of being black and/or gay feels exponentially better to the typical hillbilly than, say, being stuck in traffic for six hours.

It used to be that we didn’t have much to do outside of existing in reality and sleeping; toward the middle of the twentieth century, as the mass media became a toy for everyone — not just scientists — to enjoy, typically bored people started to get the idea in their heads to become “famous”. Human beings are irrational creatures; in the context of life as a cycle of genetic proliferation, homosexuality, for example, is no weirder than watching television, or wearing clothes. The people who saw Chuck Berry performing “Johnny B Goode” on television and decided that they, too, would someday wield guitars and flog the demons of tedium live, in front of thousands of gaping-mouthed spectators, might have, hundreds of generations past, been the strongest warriors, the fastest runners, the wearers of the best and finest genes. Too many truths abound over the years: the “strongest” warrior might not have just described the one most capable of prying a sabertooth tiger’s jaws open, shattering the poor beast’s skull — it might have described the warrior shrewd enough to lie in wait in shadows on a hillside, and roll boulders down at his prey. In this light, the heaviest, most meatheaded metal music becomes a platinum-coated object of respect: buff dudes tapping out exquisite, precise, thoughtful solos amidst aloof grimaces.

Did rock and roll die? Some will shout “rock and roll will never die” at the drop of a hat. Others with sigh and point to the fact that entering “Rock Band” after the “/wiki/” in “en.wikipedia.org/wiki” takes you immediately to a page describing the origin and sales history of the Rock Band videogame, instead of simply stating that “a ‘Rock Band’ is what you call it when you find a guitar, your friend steals a bass, and you persuade your neighbor to buy a snare drum and let you use his garage, and/or get famous doing so”. Others still will shudder, strung-out on coffee and cigarettes, and link you to Youtube video clip of the Ellen Degeneres show, in which a twelve-year-old kid plays through DragonForce’s “song” “Through the Fire and the Flames” on the hardest difficulty. The point you’re supposed to be watching for, here, is the amazed reaction of the audience when they realize that this child is only twelve years old, and he’s so good at Guitar Hero. Which is, yes, a videogame simulating playing the guitar. In other words, the tides of time have turned, and suddenly people are impressed that a child possesses the ability to pretend. Holy stuff! Even the doomsayers, who foretold that the cheap availability of simulations that let you pretend to play music would eventually usurp the real-life desire to play real music, are no doubt surprised by how quickly even the mainstream — those who neither play music nor pretend to play music — have taken to considering fake music, when played perfectly, a thing of applause-worthy spectacle. It used to be that awesome dudes like Steve Albini warned us that digital recording was the devil, and that analog was life, that life was analog; now, here’s Guitar Hero, and Rock Band; society’s head is so far up digital make-believe’s ass that the only people who notice exist so far outside the standard deviation (they pay upwards of $100 a month to be shouted at in sick-black basements by the sound of screaming fax machines), and care so little about “real” rock and roll that whatever they’re saying can’t be right, as far as the conservatives are concerned.

Tossed on top of this heap of Americana is a host of recent controversies, like the thing about Gibson, long-time supporters and spiritual godfathers of the Guitar Hero franchise (they put their name on the guitar controllers) throwing down a trump-card copyright infringement suit, saying that Guitar Hero had been violating a copyright they’d held for over a decade now. They went so far as to request that retailers stop selling the game — though, of course, only after it had sold millions and millions of copies. Sigh, that Gibson, innovators of electric guitars for decades, with used sales of their original relics eclipsing sales of their new guitars, which are all being eclipsed by the sale of flimsy plastic guitar-simulating tools, is reduced to stepping out of the shadows of lone-wolf rock-and-roll solitude to take potshots at technology. Marvel at how Gibson’s original copyright, for a guitar-performance simulator with numerical rankings for the players’ skill, skimmed very close to describing Konami’s Guitar Freaks games, in development in Japan since 1996. Fast-forward, and then rewind a bit, to the fact that Guitar Hero had only ever been its creators’ idea to jam their proverbial feet in the door, to warm the public up to music-simulation software and Expensive Plastic Controllers, before selling out to EA and revealing the real game they’d wanted to make — Rock Band, now with co-op play and even more Expensive Plastic Controllers. There’s some genuine marketing genius in there, somewhere — introducing people to plastic, and in a few short years convincing them that they needed that plastic like they needed oxygen; likewise, compare and contrast the consumer’s behavior with the behavior of Gibson, who no doubt was a tiny bit wrong if they assumed the Guitar Hero was stealing potential real-guitar sales (the thing about “expanding markets”, as it were, is that it leads every party involved to believe that they deserve everyone else’s money). Either way, about ninety-percent of me can’t help feeling that “genuine marketing genius” is about as anti-rock as you can get.

I have hesitated to review Rock Band or Guitar Hero, as videogames, for a long time, because I possess something that might be described by a lawyer as a “conflict of interest”: I like rock and roll music quite a great deal — enough to feel cheap using the word “love” — and it would be so very hard for me not to immediately dismiss the game without playing it, and say “you should just buy a real guitar”. That would get me thousands upon thousands of hate mails, I’m sure, and some of them would be so precious that I’d print them out, write “B+” in green crayon on them, and magnet them to my refrigerator. The longer I hesitated to write this review, the more I came to understand, quite poignantly, that not everyone wants to be a rock star in real life. Hell, not everyone even wants to touch a real guitar. The shocking fact of the matter, I found, is that not nearly everyone even likes any of the music they’re playing in Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Once again, I recall the parable of Gundam: Gundam is a multi-media-spanning project involving television shows, movies, videogames, action figures, plush toys, and plastic models, where any one of these representations is a cordial invitation to purchase and enjoy everything else related to Gundam. A single touch of the plastic of a well-molded, high-quality action figure might be enough to hook a three-year-old boy for life. Likewise, Guitar Hero and Rock Band‘s controllers are made of the cutest, crispiest plastic, and everyone touching that plastic seems to be objectively enjoying his or her self. The uninitiated observer will immediately assume any one of many things: these people enjoy guitars, these people enjoy rock and roll music, these people enjoy one another’s company, these people enjoy videogames, these people enjoy being shown a numerical representation of their efficiency in a particular activity, these people enjoy the posery images of flailing rockers on the television screen, these people enjoy pressing buttons. When a casual glance turns into a three- or four-second stare, it might eventually become apparent that not all of these things are true; however, everyone gathered around the television is so intently involved that no one can deny that something is happening. Anything so carefully positioned to look fun while at the same time inducing such states of fevered concentration can’t, objectively, be bad for you. If you have no real-life, burning desire to play a bitching guitar solo in front of thousands, maybe with your show being simulcast to movie theaters in shopping malls all over the American Midwest, maybe Guitar Hero, as an exercise in pressing buttons and watching Numbers Go Up, is all you really, spiritually need.

If you desire real rock, if you have the lion of rock awake and prowling in the jungle of your heart, so to speak, Rock Band will probably not do it for you. You will find the “video” elements of this game disgusting — big-haired, ugly-ass tattooed rockers flailing with scientific-calculator anti-precision on stage, giant, colorful, candy-like buttons and score numbers streaming by, a visual representation of the very “press buttons, be patronized” fetish we call “videogames”. In a way, Nintendo’s Ouendan / Elite Beat Agents series of games is a thousand times more inspirational to the would-be real-life rocker. Beware — I say this as a person who hates the Ouendan games, who once went on record in front of a federal jury as saying that he would rather “rhythmically beat an issue of Shonen Jump with disposable chopsticks while listening to J-pop on my iPod on the bus” than play Ouendan. Still, it deserves a small, paper-cake-plate of props, for having the balls to take the things I and many other man-children like me see in my head while listening to great pop-music (I imagine myself singing the song, on a bicycle, riding down a wide, empty street, with dozens of Japanese schoolgirls high-speed ballroom-dancing with one another, keeping pace with my bike, et cetera) and turn them into an actual videogame. Remember that C&C Music Factory: Make The Video game for the Sega CD, or whatever it was called — Ouendan is to that as Super Mario Bros. is to Pong.

And Rock Band is just pornography for people who like to know when they’re doing something right. I had a geography teacher in ninth grade, name Mr. Gulde, who actually quit his entire teaching career, one day, when a student, responding to Mr. Gulde’s question of “Are there any questions?” raised his hand, was called on, and asked, “Mr. Gulde, are you gay?” Mr. Gulde had something he called “The Gulde Method” for memorizing the names of countries in continents. It went like this: point at a country on a blank map with numbers on each country, say its name. If you know the name of the country is correct, point at the next country, and say its name. If you reach a point where you know you don’t know the name of a country, look at the numbered list on the other side of the paper. Then, start over from #1. This is basically how Rock Band teaches you to “play” a “song”.

In my first game of Guitar Hero, which was played on “Hard” difficulty, I messed up the first two notes of a song — I’d never so much as held the controller before — and the performance immediately ended. There was no “you lose” or “you suck” — just a freeze and a quick fade to black. I suppose that was kind of nice, though it sure as hell hadn’t taught me anything about how to do it correctly. With Rock Band, I had endured the sound of sticks clicking on plastic, that sound of a distant homeless man doing his “laundry”, for half a lunch break before I gravitated toward the break room and was asked if I wanted to play the drums. A co-worker assured me that the drums are “almost like playing real drums”. Yet there was such a sharp, gross penalty for missing a single beat. In no time, the drums were “retired” from the song, leaving the performance a husk. Everything went south after that — bands need drummers just like tigers need beating hearts.

I’ve heard tell of people’s Desire to Rock being awakened by Rock Band or Guitar Hero — people who didn’t know that they loved rock and roll until they were half-drunk and had a piece of plastic shoved into their hands at a frat party. Many of these people go on to purchase real guitars, or real drums, or real bass guitars, and start real bands. In this light, Gibson — or anyone else — is foolish to consider Rock Band or Guitar Hero a cannibal feeding on the heart-meat of would-be real musicians. To me, these games are an above-excellent litmus test: if you play them, and feel something, and realize there’s something missing inside you, and all at once damn the games to hell and search for a real instrument, then you are indeed a rock and roller. Those ensnared by the sweet visage of Numbers Going Up, by the transient joy of watching the number of “fans” at your Rock Band “show” stay steady, and then, miraculously, grow, don’t need to be real rock and rollers, and rock and roll doesn’t need those people to survive, in full health, for as long as there are soundproofed basements deep beneath the metropolises of this world. These people would never touch real guitars, and no real-guitar-player I feel comfortable saying I “know” would give up his real instrument for a life of Guitar Hero‘s sweet palliative.

In the end, the only “change” these games are affecting on gamers is a little bit of rhythm training, and an increased awareness in the Awesomeness of Rock. I saw a thing recently about some band releasing a song directly as a downloadable for Rock Band; some lifelong rock-rebels booed and hissed; I say, in this world where everyone’s sound system is hooked up to their HDTV, what’s the heckin’ difference? If you’ve got rock, put it out there. These games are as good a sheer cliff face as any for the wind-battered lichen of rock to exist on until eternity. I’d give it four stars out of ice-cold courtesy, for sheer social impact, if I’d ever been able to play it in a place where the TV volume is high enough to hear the vocals — and not hear the sound of the drumsticks repeatedly raping drum-plastic.





So, the conclusion of this review is that Rock Band is not detrimental to society. Though it may be ugly in the graphic design, heavy in the box, and have ridiculous characters that promote unfair stereotypes of rock and rollers or would-be rock and rollers, it’s not killing anyone, nor is it even food-poisoning anyone. In fact, I believe I have concluded that, in the right doses, these games are better party starters than Wii Sports, for example, because, for starters, it lets a medium-sized group of people know for certain when they are doing something, however unnecessary that something is, as well as it can be done, whereas Wii Sports only brings you farther from being able to play actual golf — and doesn’t involve Nirvana in any way.

That’s me rating this game in terms of its effects on society; what of its effects on me? Well, to be blunt, it made me feel like stuff. I’ve been playing the guitar for about a year and a half now, and every once in a while, I’ll sit down and try to play some old three-chord folk / punk / pop / rock song, singing along to the simple sound, and I’ll always get bored. I’ve sat in parks on days off with cans of Coca-Cola Zero, and I’ll riff on classic rock songs, and sing a few words, and a few girls will ask me my name, and a few guys will ask me if I’m in a band. Yet I’ve never played a song with “structure”, to “completion”. I just riff and vocalize. Me and my friend Andrew Bush will go into a studio sometimes and just blast the hell out of some instruments. I’ve thought, for the longest time, that I wanted my own “band” to lean more toward the cleaner side of noise rock; I switched from vocals (to drums to vocals) to guitar -vocal so that I could have more control over the shape of the songs we’re performing, though this was a double-edged blade, what because I had never played the guitar, and my “singing” “ability” suffers tremendously when I have this guitar in my hand and am raking it like a glue-sniffer. I’d felt comfortable, for a long time, exploiting the underground practice studios scattered around my megalopolis of choice like drunken salary men might exploit karaoke parlors: it’s something to do, in the private, in the dark.

Witnessing a group of perhaps-rock-ignorant individuals earn a perfect score on a “difficult” song in Rock Band deflated me partially — here are people, working together toward a goal of precision, and nailing it. Why can’t I have that precision? Why can’t I find someone else who wants it? In the interest of full disclosure, here is a video of what happened the last time I entered a basement practice studio with another human being with a “complete” “song” in mind, and tried to perform it to the end. We played the song maybe four more times after that video was filmed, and I kind of threw up water all over the sidewalk outside afterward, for no good reason. I avoided looking at the video for the longest time, and now that it’s on YouTube, I listen to it every once in a while, fancy the tune of the snare, and feel this bizarrely perhaps-unhealthy feeling of “accomplishment”. In the further interest of full “disclosure”, this is what happened the first time I decided to take my months of at-home guitar-practicing into a studio and jam with a drummer (and no microphone). I listen to that, and I feel pretty good, though I also feel like I need a lot more work. I’m almost twenty-nine years old, for god’s sake. Jimi and Kurt had been dead for two years at this point. There’s a moment in that recording, right there, I think it’s about two and a half minutes in, where I heard a voice in my head, saying “scream, and then play a guitar solo”, and I did as the voice insisted, and though I might have made hella mistakes up until that point, everything felt amazing for thirty seconds, as the drummer caught on to what was happening and started pounding the cymbals harder and harder.

In Rock Band, when you mess a song up, it becomes a chaotic, objective mess: instruments fade in and out of audibility, muting and unmuting and slowing down all over the place. Whether or not they possess knowledge of music theory that enables them to identify the cacophony as “Absolutely Not Music”, it is increasingly apparent to the players that they are Not Doing It Right, so they aim to do better next time. If nothing else, the song I linked above is an example of two guys, one with a real guitar, one with a real drum kit, Not Doing It Right, and feeling good anyway. (I pause to mention that the song linked above is not a “real” song, nor is it meant to resemble a “real” song; I will not link one of my “real” songs in a videogame review because that would entail me putting all my balls on the table, saying, “This is all I got.”) Here I face a fork in the road: I can either scorn Rock Band for not letting the people of the world experience the beautiful bounty of Enjoying One’s Mistakes, or I can scorn Real Life, for never letting me know, with absolute legible precision, when and how much I suck. It’s a coin toss, the outcome fluctuating from moment to moment: sometimes, we just want rock, and we don’t care what the world says, and sometimes, we want that stuff to be beautiful. More than most of the time, I find myself somewhere in between.

I can’t deny, at this point, that I will at least want to be a rock and roll star until the day I die; the point is to not wonder why I haven’t become one yet, or what happens when I do. We’d probably get kicked out of the Budokan for that performance right there, and possibly arrested, though I can sit here at my computer in my corporate office, convinced that somewhere on earth, there’s a basement where the (most likely ignorant) kids would stare saucer-eyed and find that guitar solo right there a thing of awesome beauty. I think for a second that that makes me a better person than, say, a man-mongrel begging for change outside a donut shop, with an empty beer bottle in a paper bag, I mean, throw that beer bottle away already, it’s empty, though I hesitate to say it makes me better at living This Human Life than the self-satisfied number-pushers in the office Rock Band circle. Might the feeling they feel, when seeing words like “PERFECT” flash on the screen, be just about equal to the feeling I feel wherein I imagine a fairy-tale basement where the Kids Don’t Hate Me? And would it be possible, someday, for me to be lulled away from my idiotic dream to Rock Before Others, to Be Satisfied with considering myself a rock-star, like Wesley Willis did, only without having to be laughed at by drunk frat boys — that is, thanks to a simulation I can enjoy at home, privately? Can a simulation ever make me feel good enough? Some people — usually the hideous ones — they’ve got Love Cancer, and pornography is good enough for the rest of their lives; they jerk off before they get out bed the same way some people drink coffee, and you know what? They’re not terrible human beings. They function, and they even, eventually, become happy, and not just when they’re six feet underground. If game designers can ever make my near-bulletproof embryonic rock ego feel good enough with one of these games, if they can make me feel dead in a good way — it would start with letting me noodle the god damn notes in the empty spaces (just program it so that the game remembers the most recent chord or note attached to a certain button press — I mean, the very first rhythm game ever, Parappa the Rapper, required you to improvise by slamming the button rhythmically! let’s not forget that!) — then I would give that game four stars, and I would give up.

As-is, these games are still light-years away from that. It’s one thing to tell me I hit 98% of the notes; it’s another thing to tell me that my playing was so good that 17,388 people materialized out of nowhere and entered the already-packed arena. It’s jarring and weird and depressing, and it’s harder to swallow than the voice of a gunmetal-colored robot monotoning “YOU DID WELL. NINETY-FIVE PERCENT.” It kind of makes me vaguely scared that there’s someone literally outside my house, waiting for me to fall asleep, so they can suck the breath out of my mouth with a vacuum cleaner, until I suffocate, until I am no more. Quite frankly, it’s scarier than a serial killer that everyone I know who plays these games hardly keeps the television volume above a whisper while doing so. And that’s putting it politely.

I believe the question was, “Could a simulation ever make me give up the real thing?” That’s the central question of this particular review, and it has a somewhat frightened answer: “I hope not.”

For me, if you consider the “goal” of having a “real” band “to be satisfied with one’s self”, then I would say that, as a “game”, Rock Band is “probably easier” than having an actual band, because it shows you numbers, and you can take them or leave them; you can care about them, or you can choose not to give a stuff. As a life experience, for me, it’s just too much harder than having a real band, because I just don’t feel right trying to be perfect, much as I’d love to be perfect, much as I’d gladly put perfection in my pocket if I found it lying in the street one day.

–tim rogers

(That said, I would buy Guitar Hero III if it was less than $60 and The Stone Roses’ “Breaking Into Heaven” was at least available via download.)

(The first electric guitar amplifier manufacturer to make an amp with a little LCD-equipped electronic selector to choose what song you want to play along to, and feature the ability to remove the original guitar track from said song with a single press of a button will be a millionaire overnight. Sure, plugging your iPod into the auxiliary input jack is always an option, though man, being able to do it karaoke style would be amazing. Man, they should make an amp with “Breaking Into Heaven” built in, and if you play the lead guitar note for note, the amp explodes at 5:46.Or not. Call it the “Guitar Hero Amp”, if you want. Put the logo on there and everything. Marshall should jump on that stuff.)

(*Actually, maybe someone could make a whole game out of “Breaking Into Heaven”. Make it just one stage, and exceedingly difficult. It’d be kind of like Ouendan — one fantasy-like music video based very roughly on the song’s lyrics, only maybe it would play like an action game, with hundreds of dudes assaulting you at once, with tweaking the analog stick translating to rotating your dude / chugging the bass and each punch being a note on the lead guitar.)

text by tim rogers

☆☆☆☆

“A POSTCARD FROM A ROBOT.”

(Author’s note: I originally wrote this article for insertcredit.com nearly two years ago. Though I didn’t know it back then, the “mission” behind writing this review would essentially serve as the “inspiration” for starting this here “website”. So let’s go ahead and call this review right here, originally titled “postcard from a robot”, “the genesis of action button dot net”. i don’t think enough people read it when i first posted it, so i’m putting it here, and now. i just kind of felt it was weirdly relevant to the two new reviews going live today.)

heck you Namco. heck you Bandai. heck you Namco-Bandai. heck you Bandai-Namco.

heck you for being presumptuous. heck you for being insulting. heck you for sneering Tetsuya Takahashi off of Xenosaga. heck you for tempting that man to even make a single one of those games in the first place. heck you for assuming the first of those games would sell a million copies upon release. heck you for being disappointed when it didn’t sell a million copies.

heck you for pressuring Keita Takahashi into making a sequel to Katamari. heck you for refusing to believe that a man capable of birthing such a brilliant idea might actually have a couple more brilliant ideas.

heck you for seemingly deriving pleasure from wronging people with the last name “Takahashi.”

heck you announcing Ridge Racer 7 for PlayStation3 not six months after releasing Ridge Racer 6 on Xbox 360. heck you for taking nearly five years to increase the numeral from 5 to 6, and then increasing the numeral from 6 to 7 in a few short months.

heck you for Ridge Racer in general. I bet, within the walls of your company, it’s absolutely positively imperative that everyone use the politest language when addressing the secretary, using the coffee machine, or operating a stapler; I bet you require your employees to turn off their cellular phones when they take a stuff in the employee restrooms. I bet you’re really proud of that stuff. Yet apparently you don’t think it shameful that you’re always there to release a schlocked-together Ridge Racer for every new console. heck you for possessing that ballless notion that “people who just bought a new console are bound to buy any game, right?”

heck you for Tekken 5! heck you for Tekken in general! heck you especially for Tekken 4, though heck you super-especially for releasing Tekken 5 on PlayStation2, and then immediately releasing Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection in the arcade. heck you for announcing Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection for PSP, with its stuffty little directional pad and unresponsive buttons, instead of PlayStation2!

heck you for that game sucking to begin with!

heck you for the character costumes in Soul Calibur III! heck you for giving Yunsung neon green Adidas high-tops!

heck you for putting names like “Zasalamel” on the back of cars in Ridge Racer 6 for Xbox 360! heck you for treating the names of your insignificant fighting game characters like they were fashion brands! heck you for presuming I care!

heck you for presuming I want to play Pac-Man while Ridge Racer 6 loads? heck you for sneering at the irony of a guy greeted with Pac-Man when he’s waiting for a game to load on his new high-definition television!

heck you for putting that Pac-Man game in the loading screen, when it’s not even a “loading” screen! I mean, why put a “Loading” game in there when there’s also a “Press the A button to start the game” displayed from the second the “Loading” screen appears!

heck you for Pac-Man, while we’re at it!

No, really!





Can you not see how hecking &^#$#ed Pac-Man is? He’s a yellow circle with a mouth! You make him three-dimensional, and he’s just a sphere! A hecking sphere! Who gives a stuff about a sphere?

heck you for the Tales of… series — sure, some of them are fun, and I enjoy them, though heck you for having so many different teams working on different Tales of… games at any given time because even though the games are all well-made and stand apart from one another in terms of story, you’re deathly afraid of releasing an RPG with any other name because you’re positively convinced they won’t sell, because you’re positively convinced people wouldn’t know the game was worth buying, because they wouldn’t be able to judge quality for themselves, because people need names and numerals in order to make decisions. hecking lighten up!!

Also heck you sideways for Tales of the World, an “original” PSP RPG that basically stars you as a generic guy who meets all the characters from the Tales of… games. So it’s like Kingdom Hearts, without Disney? And, according to screenshots, in Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology, EVERYONE IS LEVELING UP CONSTANTLY



LEVEL INFINITY

And most importantly, heck you to the moon for presuming, time and time again, I have nothing better to do than play videogames.

On top of all this, heck you for Portable Island: Tenohira no Resort, and all that it represents.

Basically, Portable Island: Tenohira no Resort (“Resort in the palm of your hand”) is a non-game. I almost typed “a non-game in the vein of Animal Crossing,” though I think that would be saying a little much. It’s not in the vein of Animal Crossing — it’s more in the vein of reading a six-month-old tennis magazine in a dentist’s office waiting room than it is in the vein of Animal Crossing.

To put it simply, the game is about a beverage-like island. The advertisements on the subway trains all over Tokyo this summer ask the passenger, “Would you like a tropical island?” using the same sentence structure with which a bartender would ask a customer if he’d like a beer. The island of this game is, then, to be drunk like shots of whiskey. The advertisement consists of a sticker plastered to the doors of the Ginza Line. Passengers who had been, a minute earlier, waiting on the platform at Ueno Station, fanning themselves with a plastic fan handed to them by someone at Yodobashi Camera an hour ago (mine said “Intel Core2 Duo Processors: On Sale Now!” on it) now stand, looking at this advertisement. “Would you like a tropical island, sir?” After just spending four uncomfortable minutes on a train platform where the air-conditioners are positioned at weird angles, and standing at the front of the line, the position most likely to score you a seat, means tragically dodging the overhead air-conditioning unit’s diagonal flow, you get on the train, and you have to stand, anyway. The tidal wave of air-conditioning in the train chills your sweat. Your shirt sticks stiffly to your skin, and then it does not. Like magic, your body temperature begins to do a little dance. Your eyes chance upon the advertisement on the door. “How about a tropical island right about now, sir?”

How does this make you feel? You’ve just felt refreshed, like diving into the ocean after spending a hectic afternoon being chased by bandits through the desert. The idea of a tropical island should at least have some emotional response.

I somehow doubt, however, that the marketers were thinking this far ahead.

When you hear the words “tropical island,” what do you think? What sensory reaction does it awaken in you? Do you recall sand pleasantly between your toes? Sand frustratingly beneath your swimsuit? Itchy sand in your pubic hair? Cold water on your toes? Warm water on your toes? Cold water up to your waist, suddenly turning warm? Beach balls? The smell of beach ball-vinyl? The heat of said vinyl, baked in the sun? Volleyballs? Smell of the ocean? The sound of seagulls?

The smell of the air-conditioning in the hotel. The sound of muzak at the hotel lounge. The way the sun plays your skin like a different organ than it is back at home. The bewildering sense of distance when you gaze at the ocean; though your home may lie in the direction behind you, when you watch those waves, if you have come from a place where no waves break, to see breaking waves should fill you with a feeling that wherever you live, it should be beyond this, out there somewhere. The sea has enchanted men and women and children for years, across many centuries and fictional universes. You can fall in love with nothing at all — a wonderful feeling — just by standing and staring at it.

If you’ve never been to a tropical island, you might hear the phrase “tropical island” and think, perhaps, of Hawaiian Punch, and the way it makes your teeth red.

They say it’s made of lava rocks, you know.

Either way — whether it’s the crushing, vaguely peaceful notion that, like the waves, our lives will eventually crash to a shore somewhere and break, or memories of summer stomach flu and vomiting Hawaiian Punch into a public pool in a manner that burned your nostrils, either of these experiences represent memories Portable Island cannot compete with.

If you see that advertisement on the train, you might fall into a standing heavy reverie about vacationing. You might feel like going somewhere far away, and for a few precious days existing in a place you do not normally exist. You might desire a paradigm shift; you might consider just about anything an escape.

This game is promising you a vacation in the palm of your hand. It is promising you relief from your everyday life. You put it in your PSP, and you play it on the train with headphones on. It’s supposed to make you feel calm. It’s supposed to make you feel peaceful and serene in short, violent bursts. It’s the aromatherapy of videogames; you have it turned on in your room, or your office, and there it is, a window to a world that is not your world, or anyone else’s. It’s at atmospheric modifier. It’s here to brighten your day, and sometimes engulf your attention.

I would sincerely like to believe that anyone able to be fooled by this parlor trick has not the social standing to ever board a train.

I don’t want to talk about the game, really. I really don’t want to. It’s not worth it. It’s a game about an island. Only you don’t do anything on the island. You relax. You can press buttons to lie down in the sand on the beach. You can walk up to the water. You can press a button between trees and attach a hammock. You can lie in the hammock, and tweak the analog stick to swing the hammock. You can aim a camera lens and take pictures of yourself in the hammock. You can lay your character in the hammock and then sit the PSP in a stand on your desk while you work on some inane project in the office. You can gaze at him every once in a while, and feel jealous. How you wish it were you in that hammock. The game is a ship in a bottle; much as you’d like to ride it, you can’t, because you yourself are not small enough to fit into a bottle.

When your character puts the hammock away, when he or she is done with it, the hammock disappears into the black hole of his or her pocket.

You can walk along rocks. There are penguins there. You can look at them. You can take pictures of them. If you want to go to a different part of the island, you can open your menu and warp there. You can collect food for turtles. You can throw the food on the ground near a turtle, and watch a turtle walk up and start eating it. Only you can’t squat low enough, and zoom in far enough to see his mouth on the food. He’s mostly just hovering and twitching over it.

You can change your character’s clothes. You can make him look like a beach bum, an Abercrombie kid, or a surfer. If you’ve chosen a female protagonist, you can make her wear a bikini or a trendy tropical dress. You can wear big floppy sun hats or Hawaiian shirts. You can touch the screen and think, “That is what I would be wearing if I were really heading to a tropical island this summer!”

If you use the game as a planning tool, the most important lessons it can teach you have mostly everything to do with videogames: fast-travel gets you where you’re going without having to press a boring amount of buttons, and items like mangos, when investigated, appear, accompanied with full descriptions, in the “item” menu. Mangos are high in vitamin C, says the menu. You can collect a whole lot of item descriptions, animal descriptions, and fish descriptions. The game doesn’t keep track of quantities of items collected. Otherwise, you’d feel like you were competing with something, and competition isn’t necessary of a vacation. This game is utopia in a box, and utopia consists of precisely one citizen.

According to an interview in Famitsu the week before the game’s release, the developers really love money and are genuinely afraid of the most efficient ways to get it. Takayuki Nakamura, the game’s producer, says people often tell him it seems like Boku no Natsuyasumi (“My Summer Vacation”) “for adults.” Director Shigeki Tooyama says, “People often ask, ‘Oh, do you regain your HP by sleeping in the hammock?'”

Producer Nakamura explains that the goal of their design is best summarized by the fishing activity: “In other games, the programmers have determined the plentitude and size of the fish. In this game, there is no action. You put out the fishing rod and watch. It’s relaxing. You don’t go on a vacation to be stressed.” I imagine he says this with a cheeky grin, like Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld pitching their idea for a television show “about nothing,” knowing it was a brilliant idea.

Their concept gets a thumbs-down; their execution gets a middle finger up. The game is very tacky. The only game the producers — and Famitsu‘s Mr. Hamamura, ever respectful — are careful not to mention in the brief interview is Animal Crossing, which is likely where Portable Island took its inspiration from. Animal Crossing is a relaxing game with a weird little economy system worked in; it is a game about living a life in a town with other residents. Portable Island is about being dead-alone on an island paradise. That the game doesn’t involve any skill for tasks like fishing is unfortunate; that it is set up in such a way as to make the player never feel like he’s anywhere, much less an island paradise, is near-tragic. That the developers skirt around so many questions in the interview, and talk about how AMAZED people are when they explain that the game has no HIT POINTS or LIFE METER or FINAL BOSS makes it impossible to believe they’ve never played Animal Crossing or Nintendogs. They’re being deliberate in the PR where they should have been deliberate with the game.

Could the game have been saved? Could it have been exciting, enthralling, captivating, and still been about a tropical island? I don’t see why not. Animal Crossing is about a peaceful village of animals, where there’s never a hurricane and there’s never a fire, and it somehow manages to captivate boys, girls, men, and women alike. Why is this? It’s because the game is about maintenance. There’s something to maintain. You clean up your room, you position furniture. You trade things with the animal residents, or with other players via the internet or wireless connection, and you sell them to earn money to buy other things, or a bigger house. You can go fishing, and tweak your fishing rod in hopes of catching bigger fish. You can sell the fish, and make money to buy things for your house. Time flows in real time; night falls, morning comes. Items in the shop change. There’s a mystical thrill out of seeing new items appear. That thrill turns real when you show that new piece of furniture to a friend and he or she says, “I want one of those, too!” As a videogame and as a piece of entertainment, Animal Crossing is a wonderful way to waste time on the train.

In Portable Island, when you collect items, they appear in a list. You can view this list in the menu. You can see a large photo of an item, and read a description of it. Is this supposed to be fun? Animal Crossing gives a graphic realization to each item; you can see it in your room, push it, and move it around. You can play with the positioning of every item in your house. In Portable Island, you’re staying in a hotel room that has to look exactly the same when you leave as it did when you arrived. Only you’re never leaving. Your main character, then, is a nutso conservative of the most mathematical variety, for adding up “room must be in the same condition when you leave as it was when you arrived” and “you will never leave” and ending up with “do not touch anything.”

You are alone on an island. You are very alone. There is nothing to do except sit by the waves, and ponder things like real-life credit-card balances.

That the producer suggests, in the abovementioned Famitsu interview, that anyone had ever likened his game to a Boku no natsuyasmi “for adults” smacks of the worst kind of bigheadedness. It’s a guy being bigheaded and uninformed, trying to hide his big head, and not realizing that everyone sees through it. No, Portable Island cannot be Boku no natsuyasmi “for adults,” because Boku no natsuyasumi is already “for adults.” The game is not merely a “simulator” of a vacation. It is a retelling of an actual, specific summer vacation, one experienced by a young boy, taken to his aunt and uncle’s country home in 1975. There are characters who talk about themselves. There’s a girl whose brother died. Each day begins with calisthenics and breakfast and ends when you go to bed. There’s a ghost story. In addition to collecting and trading fighting beetles, you will witness a young boy learning about others and learning about himself over the course of one bittersweet summer. The game reminds you that nothing, even (or especially) carefree days, lasts forever. This is a tale for adults who have grown up; kids look at Bokunatsu and think they’d rather play Pokemon. This, right here, is a game for the wisened men of the world.

Portable Island contains no love interest, no murder mystery, no ghost story. It’s just you, dead-alone on a hecking island. Turn the PSP on in the evening, and you can watch a sunset in a bottle. Why would you do this? At the same time, in the real world, a real sun is setting. You could set the game time to a different timezone, so that the sun will be rising in the game when it’s setting in the real world, though if you do this, you’ll be missing out on the alarm clock function.

Yes, the alarm clock function. Be aware that when I say that people don’t want games they can also use as alarm clocks, I am, of course, speaking for myself. I don’t want a game that can be used as an alarm clock. I have an alarm clock. It’s called my cellular phone. (Which also runs the original Ridge Racer.) I set the alarm before I go to bed. I tell the alarm to go off at 5:07AM with a light ring. Then I set a second alarm, to go off at 6:27AM, with a louder ring. I wake up and go running.

My phone is set to “original manner mode” — so I can configure how loudly each type of event is announced. A phone call always rings quietly. Phone emails are silent. My set alarms are as configured in the “alarm” menu. So I make one quiet, and one loud. This is my casual, modern-life acceptance of the fact that people will always hit the “snooze” button for an hour before actually waking up. So far, my brain hasn’t figured out the alarm is a filthy liar and started rebelling. Or maybe it has it figured out all along, and just doesn’t mind.

I have more fun programming my cellular phone than I do playing Portable Island.

In order to use Portable Island as an alarm clock, you need one of those PSP stands, you know, where you put the PSP in and it keeps it charged up. Before you put the game into sleep mode, you tell it what time you want it to go off. The game will then wake you up with “pleasant ocean sounds” when the time comes. Actually, you can set the ocean sounds to go off in a murmur ten minutes before the alarm proper.

Here I will say something about the sample quality of said ocean sounds: they’re pretty good, I guess.

The alarm clock function is featured on the advertisements on the Ginza Line. Right beneath “How about a tropical island to ease your worries, buddy?” are three photos. One of them shows the game as an alarm clock. “Wake up to pleasant ocean sounds! Brighten up your room with pleasant ocean sounds at any time of day!” That’s kind of creepy. Though I guess some people do stuff like that. They buy VHS tapes with tropical fish on them, because they can’t have an aquarium. Personally, I prefer the sound of the highway and the distant trains outside my apartment, especially when I’ve just gotten out of the shower and am drinking a cold glass of tea, and there’s a nice breeze coming in the window.

The other two pictures on the train advertisement display the “camera” function (take pictures of the game and save them to your Memory Stick!) and the musical instrument feature, respectively. The musical instrument feature is what professional journalists call a “crock of stuff”; you can play a ukulele, assorted percussion, or steel drums, using only the PSP’s buttons. The “assorted percussion” instrument is basically a throwaway. You just jag the face buttons and the directional buttons, making a cacophony. Or, well, it would be a cacophony, if the PSP’s headphone volume went up loud enough to allow a cacophony, or if the PSP’s speakers were strong enough to allow anyone else to hear the sound effects over the volume of the clattering train rails. The steel drums are slightly more interesting, because each button or direction pressed plays a specific note. You can actually put together melodies, if you have the patience, and/or love music despite a deep hatred for touching actual musical instruments.

The ukulele function is the one that’s getting all of the attention. Famitsu did a full feature on it, for example. All the way back at Tokyo Game Show 2005, Namco had hula-skirted booth personnel carrying PSPs around tempting people to try the ukulele. I was one such tempted. It was a novel idea at first. You hold the PSP upside-down while pressing and holding the face buttons (or a shoulder button plus face buttons for extra notes), and then flick the analog stick with your thumb to simulate strumming. (One of the options in this mode is to toggle the upstroke on or off, which is mystifying, because ukulele is quit the upstroked instrument. I say this as a man who’s screwed around with a ukulele whenever at a certain friend’s house.)

You can perform in time to songs, if you want. The game will simulate the other instruments, and you will strum the ukulele. It’s worth noting that the timing practice you’ll get by strumming the analog nub can actually gift you with some real skill at playing a ukulele. However, pressing and holding buttons on the PSP can’t exactly prepare you for playing a ukulele. There are no frets on a PSP. Moreover, the game does not grade your performance. Grading the player’s performance would, I imagine, go against the producers’ “relaxation” idea. As well produced as the musical mode is (probably handled by Namco’s Taiko drum game team), the songs all happen to be dismally fruity island numbers; having your significant other walk in on you practicing one of these would be like being caught by your mother masturbating to a pineapple fetishist’s magazine.

If you’re interested in ukuleles, for the price of this software you can purchase a real ukulele of above-average craftsmanship. It is about as portable as a PSP, and actually weighs less.

For the price of a PSP and this game, you can purchase a ukulele of superior construction, or else a Fender Japan Stratocaster electric guitar. Just saying.

You could also, yes, purchase an airplane ticket somewhere sunny, with some pocket money left over for a few beers, and sleep on the beach at night. Sleeping on the beach, you’ll find, is more comfortable than being packed into a late-night rush-hour train and staring at a fake young man lying on a fake hotel’s fake bed.

The game also has a “radio” function. Engage this function, and you can listen to any mp3s stored in your Memory Stick’s PSP/MUSIC folder played under a weird filter of static, seperated by the whisperings of a DJ whose English sounds vaguely (and with probably good reason) like a Japanese who grew up in Hawaii.

The inclusion of this tool is oddly flattering, and oddly insulting, depending on the flip of your mind’s coin at any given time. For one thing, I can listen to my mp3s on an iPod without this game’s randomizing help. And I can listen to them, maybe, in a cafe overlooking a rainy highway in Shibuya, during a devastating autumn where the nightingales flew south early, while waiting for a friend to show up and cheer me down. That Portable Island creates falsely picturesque context (listening to the radio on the beach, miles from civilization) for its presentation of the mp3s feels hollow given the game’s love of lack of conflict. Yet the basic premise feels like it might not be a bad idea in an actual game: if a game set on a tropical island would use your mp3s as background music during gameplay, interrupting them sometimes with tropical weather reports, it would be kind of neat. Yet this wouldn’t work for Portable Island, firstly because there is no actual “game” to speak of, and secondly because of the PSP’s hardware limitations. The system couldn’t possibly handle hammering the CPU, the UMD, and the Memory Stick all at once without expending the battery in thirty-five seconds.

This brings us to the main point of this critique: the PSP itself. The hardware limitations are this game’s ruin. Based on my hours of time playing it (to spite myself), and my seconds spent gazing at the advertisement on the Ginza Line, before the doors opened at my station and the ad slid into the abyss, I have come to the conclusion that any and all hope that this game will sell depends on, if not making the player feel like he or she truly is on a tropical island, at least reminding the player what a tropical island is like if he or she has gone, or imparting a little bit about what makes a tropical island great to players who have never had the opportunity to go to a tropical island.

At this goal, the game fails in all aspects. I could go into detail about how cheap the experience of actually “being” on the island feels, about how fast-travel forgives the laziness that prevents you from wanting to walk anywhere, how pressing a button to lie down in your bed feels clever until you realize now you’re staring at yourself in a bed, or how the island’s layout isn’t really that interesting, and most of the locations look the same. I won’t, however. I’ll just pick on the graphics and sound: the graphics look like little more than a polished-down PlayStation2 game. The sound — good samples, yes — is tinny and at a squeaky volume. It’s all very quiet and understated.

Let’s get it out in the open: This game is not virtual reality. This game is not a lucid dream. This game is definitely not the Holodeck on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

“Virtual reality” used to see bar patrons, six beers rich, paying four dollars to put on a plastic helmet and scream at flat-shaded pterodactyls for three minutes. There were maybe goals in this; the problem was it kept sobering people up, at which point they realized they were too old to pretend to do stuff that didn’t at least look real. Virtual reality, as an institution, collapsed, because ten years ago, when the most sophisticated polygons were in fighting games like Tekken, nothing a computer generated would end up looking worth the shame of putting on that plastic helmet. It would, in fact, be jarring, and disturbing, and sobering, though it might have been the developers’ intention to immerse the player in a world that felt real.

What I’m saying, then, Namco, is that until I can feel the sand between my toes, smell the sea, dip my toe into the waves, fall asleep, and work on a tan with the help of a computer program, please don’t make a game like Portable Island.

Well, I guess it’s a little too late for that.

Recently, the idea of virtual reality has started to creep back into the pop-culture pre-conscious. The head/movement-tracking technology necessary to make a game like Dactyl Nightmare more like a good dream is only recently being revisted, in the oddest little places, like Nintendo’s DS and Wii. Photorealistic graphics, as well, are being strived toward as we speak. In this light, we can pretend to appreciate Madden a little bit, as a game that, year by year, inches strategically toward total realism. Obviously, the average Madden fan doesn’t want to have to work like a football player to play the game, and that is why a sub-VR experience is fully tolerable. The ideal Madden would be, essentially, “realistic, interactive watching.” This is still a long way off. Though today’s fighting game characters look and move far more realistically than, say, they did ten years ago, if Oblivion is the best graphics can get in a game about a large, detailed world, then I’d say we’re a long way off of creating non-games that let mom star in her favorite soap-opera. How’s mom going to appreciate her favorite soap opera, if the male romantic lead in the game world looks uglier — and more like a haunted town’s female librarian — than she does in real life? See “The Uncanny Valley” for more.

In other words, there are technological leaps and bounds yet to be taken just to bring the audio/visual experience of gaming up to a level where something like Portable Island, a game about nothing, could be in the least bit successful. Then there’s the olfactory/tactile factor, and I reckon smellovision is still decades away.

So, until then, until that golden age where the “user interface” melts away, where all videogames will be “non-games,” until that day I can enjoy playing the part of Konstantin in Square-Enix’s Anna Karenina, I take it people will continue to escape from every day life with games that feature contests of wit and skill. You see, compared to a game of Gradius V, life is actually quite dull. There are many less meteors to dodge, fewer chances to fire lasers. To escape is not to relax — it is to live a fantasy. It is to fly, where we could previously only walk. To succeed at invented tests makes us feel proud. To fail at them makes us long to succeed, at times when there are so many real things around us that we need to maintain, we will gladly welcome a fleeting desire to succeed in something we can give up at any time. In games, we will run and jump, whereas in life, we seldom do more than walk.

There’s a hypothetical question for the moment, now that we’re thinking about it: could a game about walking be fun? Perhaps more poignantly, could a game about running be fun? Recently, Rockstar released a Table Tennis game, to the whoa whoa shocking shock of many games publications. People went nuts — “The makers of Grand Theft Auto bring you TABLE TENNIS!!!” — that the game didn’t involve killer prostitutes or, at least, selling drugs to minors, or shooting up high schools. Yet, one of the developers, interviewed in some videogame rag I read I don’t remember when, said they made the game out of a desire to perfect a representation of one simple action. So they chose the simplest action that could still be interesting and involving for two players: tennis. Well, table tennis, because the scale is smaller, and would allow them the breathing room to give optimal attention to all aspects of presentation. EA’s recent Fight Night: Round 3 tries the same thing — removing the “videogamey” elements of a sports game, forsaking life meters in favor of on-character damage indicators, telling us the score only as the score would be told if it were a real sporting event — that is, via voiced television announcers. Is this the future of sports games? Without a doubt. Is it the future of all other videogames? Only if a certain few designers like Fumito Ueda have their way.

Now, remember the first time you played Super Mario 64? It might have been at a demo kiosk somewhere. You might not have known how to hold the controller right away. Yet, eventually, it started to click. The idea of pushing the analog stick a little bit to make Mario walk, and pushing it all the way to make him run was a wonderful thrill. It was often said that you didn’t even have to enter the castle to have fun, the first time you played the game; of all the things the game did right (and, to some extent, wrong), the utter joy of your first run around the castle was a pop culture miracle in and of itself. Without music, without enemies, without the possibility of dying (outside of jumping off the top of the castle), we were able to have fun simply moving around in a videogame, and with the use of only two buttons, really. Future entries into the 3D platforming-adventure genre, such as the first Jak and Daxter, would later be criticized as “About as much fun as Super Mario 64 — if you couldn’t enter the castle.” Once we’d seen the thrills that lay inside the castle, the idea of just running around outside forever seemed ridiculous.

So it occurs to me, quite naturally, that before we can make a hypothetical videogame retelling of Anna Karenina (or, perhaps, War and Peace) that involves the player playing any role he wishes, we need to first make a game about running. And I don’t mean a kitschy simulation like cavia’s Naoko Takahashi’s Let’s Run a Marathon! — I mean, a game where the player actually presses buttons to run, all alone in a desert, or perhaps a city at night. The game will not allow the player to be free to enter buildings. However, it will be so enchanting in its simplicity and serenity that no one would dare think to enter a building. Why enter a building, when there is this thrill right here, this thrill of running?

Recall the scene in the film “Adaptation” where Robert McKee yells at Charlie Kauffman for accusing real life of being boring, with nothing happening. He says there are people dying everywhere, every day; there are people getting shot, people killing other people out of jealousy or politics. He says it’s presumptuous to try to make entertainment imitate your own life, just because your own life is boring. What he is implying is that if it is only possible to write what you know, and the only thing you know is idleness, and if idleness is not worth the time it takes to tell of, you should perhaps seek to know something else before seeking to tell a story.

Yet, in running, there is conflict. The goal changes from moment to moment. You will breathe differently as your heart is beating now than you will breathe when your heart is beating more quickly. When an exhale intersects with both feet being off the ground, the inhale feels different than it does at other times. The goal in running is to keep running. Simpler than Pong, with a ball and two paddles, this Hypothetical Videogame About Running would, ideally, seek to literally and concretely reconstruct, if only in audio-visual aspects, the perpetual struggle of a man against a believable road containing no obstacles. Without a single health gauge, ideally, the game’s conflict would be to not give in to tiredness; there would be no power-ups. At the end of a session, a player would not think he had wasted his time; he would not say, “I should have just gone out running for real,” because the game will impart on him the idea that all we do until we are killed by time is kill time. That all we can ever do is attempt to escape.

Perhaps that’s putting it a little desolately.

What I am perhaps endeavoring to say is that, in a videogame consisting of images on a screen (as in, not a VR program), starring a human character, game designers are responsible for

1. placing the character in an interesting situation
and/or

2. endowing the character’s every movement with a joy-like friction.
Perhaps I got a little too prosaic with that second rule.

There is no joy in the movement of the character in Portable Island. If there were, the designers wouldn’t see fit to include a fast-travel function for traveling around to the different parts of the island instantly. There is no contest, and no struggle. There are no interesting situations. That it was made by men who have played games “about nothing,” yet also feature struggles of the hand/eye or psychological variety, men who have no doubt made videogames about giant robots destroying buildings, or girls crying because of situations involving virus-carrying aliens. These are men whose “creative” switches have only two settings — nuts or nothing. One or zero. There’s nothing in between. Digital. No analog.

It’s tempting to say that the idea of a game where you do nothing, where nothing relies on skill, nor even on persistence, could be done well. It’s tempting to say that a game where you merely relax could, under some circumstances, be a tonic for a certain kind of life gone astray. Maybe girls who work in tough offices, and live with their stern parents, and enjoy taking the time to gaze at a far-off sunset in the palms of their hands, yearning for a life that turned out a little bit differently. These girls — these parasitic princesses of the modern era — deserve love, no doubt. They deserve flowers and they deserve the joy that comes with being told they are an essential ingredient of someone’s world.

Yet they also deserve the thrill of discovering how it feels when patience is awarded. They deserve the rush that comes with the realization that in this world, there are things that we can do. Portable Island wastes no time in advertising itself as a “soothing experience” for the soul. Therefore, it leaves itself wide-open for the following criticism:

Is this game a fitting escape, then, from our rigorous life at the office? What does it soothe? What needs soothing? The official site shows a picture of a man with Portable Island in his white PSP, kicking up a racket of sea sounds as he pounds away at some fierce code on his Sony Vaio. The game is positioning itself as something to be enjoyed passively, though I reckon any man with a computer can also download a music program to aid him in listening to sounds he’d prefer to hear over false ocean noises.

Another game tried, a while back, to appeal to the unfortunate princesses of the modern era. That game was Nintendogs; it sought to soothe the wailing desires of little boys and girls who wanted dogs and could have them. Yet, as a videogame, stupid as it was (I found it quite insipid and repetitive), it also contained real, momentarily flickering tests of circumstance. You throw the frisbee and watch it fly. There is joy in its flight. The dog catches it. There’s something nice about that. If your connection to the dog is a strong one — if your heart, as it were, is pure going into Nintendogs, it will entertain you for hours on end. A child unable to have a puppy could own this game and love it, and eventually be given a puppy for his or her birthday, and love the puppy for entirely different reasons. In the same way, yes, a human can love a robot, though only if the robot doesn’t, up front, guarantee it will be able to return this love — or, more specifically, if the robot makes it sparkling clear at the outset that “I am a robot; I cannot treat a human as a human would treat a human, because I am not a human. I am a robot.”

If Portable Island is indeed an effort to cure or a compensate for something lacking from our real lives, then I argue, on the basis of the above points, that it is a failure. There may be people on Amazon.co.jp who say they like it, though I reckon the girl who says “Children would find it boring; it’s clearly a game for adults who understand life’s finer pleasures” is a viral plant and the one guy who says the game “soothes” his worries gave Madonna’s album “Who’s that Girl?” four out of five stars, so he’s obviously a flake. (It deserves only three.) He also gave Nintendo’s Brain Training three stars out of five, indicating that he, too, might be a viral plant of Bandai-Namco.

Unlike Nintendogs or Animal Crossing, Portable Island is never a place we are; rather, it is a place someone we know has been. Inserting Portable Island into the PSP and flipping the POWER switch is not unlike sending your robotic butler to Hawaii and monitoring him with a hidden camera. On the island, he is free to do anything as long as it is possible to do, only he doesn’t seem to actually do any of these things, because he is a robot, and robots and butlers just don’t know what to do on vacation. Expecting him to turn around and do something fascinating in this vacuum of a world would be like expecting your coffee machine to start dispensing photocopies of gorilla handprints.

And so therein lies the rub; even a pacifist finds it impossible to play Grand Theft Auto without committing an act of violence, because the game is programmed with more attention to the physics that result from violence than the pyhsics that result from standing around doing nothing. In Portable Island, the pacifist is given a world where violence — or action — is not allowed even in imagination. While Grand Theft Auto might unknowingly aspire to be a mural painted by a naughty child, Portable Island is a postcard from a robot.

Repeat after me: we do not need postcards from robots. Though the robot might really be on the island in the photograph, the robot is only sending the postcard because someone else told him to. At least, when your aunt sends you a postcard from the Bahamas, she’s doing it because she’s thinking of you, or she wants you to think she’s thinking of you. Portable Island, a postcard from a robot, is not thinking of you, because it’s not thinking of anything. And that brings us to the problem with the world:

The most basic way to put it is that there is a problem with this world. That problem, put in simple words, tells us that “without war, there can be no peace; without hate, there can be no love.” Why is this so? Without yin, there cannot be yang; without light, there cannot be dark. Without the bad days, there can be no context for what makes good days so good. Every rock and roll band that stands on a stage in an arena faces sometimes tens of thousands of people who, without knowing it, are asking, deep in their hearts, “Why can’t it always be love? Why can’t it always be peace?” They are lacking in something; the rock and roll star, history’s greatest robot, without making a promise or a presumption, gives them what they need at that exact moment, and though the rock and roll star might create a memory or two in each of those people, it can’t guarantee them a safe and joyful future.

The problem with this world is that we can’t always be love, and we can’t always be peace. If this problem were willed human form, and it stood before you, what would you do? Would you punch it in the face with hopes of knocking its block off? Or would you jump to the ground and sink your teeth into its ankles? Would either course of action be the “right” one? The answer is simple, and at the same time, it is nothing at all. Let’s get pretentious and damning, then:

Each work of expression humankind creates will sit at the bottom of a gazed-down-upon canyon for centuries to come, as messages from the past. Portable Island is a message from a land so far away it might as well not even exist, from a person so dry they might not even be real. As an “artistic” endeavor, it is presumptuous, ankle-biting trash that the modern world would have been better off without.

That’s putting it simply.



note how they use a photo of a real island on the box. that fact will be important in the following section.

As mentioned, you can use the camera function to take a picture of the screen — maybe with a little zoom-in or zoom-out — and save the screenshots to your Memory Stick Duo. Yet, should you import the screenshots to your computer, maybe for printing out, you’ll find they are all watermarked in the lower-right corner with rather large white font:

COPYRIGHT 2006 BANDAI-NAMCO

What the hell is this, really? Is this at all necessary?

I can imagine printing one of these and taking it to my grandmother in the hospital. (Actually, my grandmother’s dead; roll with it, though.)

“Did you ever take that trip to the tropical island? Did those bad boys at that office of yours ever give you the time off?”
“Yeah, yeah they did, grandma.”
“Did you take a picture of the sunset for me?”
“Yes, I did, look.”
“Oh, this is lovely . . . wait, what’s this? Who’s . . . Ban-dai-Nam-co?”
“Oh, that, um . . .”
“ARE YOU GAY!?”

It would probably ruin her last few days on earth.

In a way, the idea of watermarking the screenshots the player takes within the game is pretty heavy. It raises a lot of questions. The watermark in Portable Island is such a sterile, ugly, huge one. It clutters up as large a chunk of the screenshot as possible, just so anyone looking at it knows exactly what company made this game.

Why not lighten up a little bit with it, though? Why not put the “Portable Island” logo down there, instead, plus a “Bandai-Namco” logo? Why make it so legal, and sterile?

Tiny font in the instruction manual reads, “Each screenshot will be watermarked for legal purposes.” What legal purposes? So that no one can use a screenshot from this game on their blog, and fool people into believing they’ve actually been to a tropical island? Are the graphics even good enough for that?

The only situation I can think of wherein having copyright information on each screenshot of the game would be a legally “necessary” thing would be if someone were to find a way to make the characters take on lewd poses or participate in scandalous situations. And then, the watermark would only exist to confirm to the public who is responsible for this mess. That’s a pretty sanctimonious reason for watermarking a screenshot.

If I were to ask a member of the development team about why the watermark appears on each screenshot, and why it’s so ugly, I’d no doubt be told, “Hey, it’s Japanese copyright law.” Yet, as one who lives his life by the letters of Japanese copyright law, I know it’s not necessary to protect such assets. You don’t have to put your name on each screenshot unless you’re overflowing with pride and want everyone to know it was you who did that. (That, or if you think people will use the screenshots for money purposes. Though trying to imagine anyone making money selling Portable Island screenshots to a vacation magazine only leads me to a conclusion that makes Namco look like assholes, so I’ll let go.)

Yet Namco is not proud. This game was appropriated a modest budget, was delayed for a while, was shrugged at by many executives, and somehow just emerged.

Once more, the fact that these Japanese game developers are all, on the average, run by chain-smoking combed-over sixty-something men with hair the color of cigarette ashes and teeth like fat-caked fishbones comes frighteningly into view. Bandai-Namco must put their name on the screenshots generated by the game because

1. The screenshots contain no characters immediately recognizable to the general public as Bandai-Namco properties (Pac-Man, Gundam, M.O.M.O, Tekken‘s Panda or Marshall Law)
2. If this situation had come up in the past, this is certainly how the elders would have handled it.

For heck’s sake, though, you’re spoiling how people enjoy games. They enjoy showing things and saying, “I took this picture in this videogame.” If they say, “Hey, I took this picture in this game called Portable Island,” if they let the name of the product emerge naturally in one conversation, then that’s a larger commercial success than subjecting a thousand indifferent people to your watermark. I mean, really, do you think the average consumer is going to look at a picture of a computer-generated polygon man in a hammock and say, “BANDAI-NAMCO, HUH? I SURE HAVE A LOT OF RESPECT FOR THAT CORPORATE CONGLOMERATE, NOW!”

Get over yourselves!! If your game was interesting to begin with, people would ask the name when they saw the screenshot. They’d say, “Hey, what game is that from?” Maybe you’re afraid that’s never going to happen? As it is now, putting your name on a screenshot of a generic island paradise is like hanging your kid’s C-minus on your refrigerator, because you’re pretty sure he couldn’t do any better if you asked him nicely.

(And while we’re at it — videogame websites, stop watermarking screenshots. You didn’t hecking make the games. Even if you took the screenshots.)

A recent Famitsu shows that Sega will release a PSP version of their Homestar home planetarium in October. The original homestar was something you place in your living room and turn off the lights, and suddenly, right there, on your ceiling, there’s a starry sky the likes of which you’ll never see in Tokyo (light pollution, you see). The Homestar was popular to a point where it’s now marked down enormously in electronic stores all over Japan.

Well, bewilderingly, there’s a PSP “version” coming. In addition to allowing you to gaze at the starry sky in the palm of your hand, there will be trivia modes and educational tours of the cosmos.

I can understand a home planetarium working on a ceiling, though come on, in the palm of your hand? There was a survey recently that said most PSP gamers in Japan play their PSPs at home. I guess this game is meant to be the evolution of reading a book under the covers with a flashlight?

Still, though: No. For one thing, my PSP screen has five or six dead pixels in it. What if I mistake a dead pixel cluster for the North Star? The educational aspect of the software would be failing then, wouldn’t it?

This is the latest in a fleet of “non-games” for the PSP, flagshipped by Portable Island. I watch each of them come, and think Nintendo really needs to hurry up, release the Wii, blow away the public, and convince every developer that the DS isn’t just a pop-culture fad-fluke. They need to show these people a little discipline.

What if I want to gaze at stars on the train to work? The PSP’s screen is so shiny that the black background would reflect the harsh train lighting. This would mean I’d be gazing at my own face and not imaginary stars. In the same way, I can mess with the timezones on my Portable Island, by locating the magical clock-idol deep in the island jungle (or by warping to the general vicinity), and make it so the sun is setting when I wake up in the morning, making the sky over the beach on my ride to work splattered with stars. The harsh orange lights on board the Ginza Line reflect in the PSP screen, and there I am, seeing up my own nostrils. My nose is kind of oily. I should quit eating some of the things I eat. I should probably try to be healthy, like I keep saying I will be, eventually. “Eventually” is a rough concept. I should quit listening to music that makes me yearn to make things better, and start actually trying to make things better. For myself, I mean.

I soak in some air-conditioning and think back to that advertisement on the train. Why release this game in the summer? Why not release it in the winter? It would make more sense to release it in the winter, especially with the slogan being “On Portable Island, it’s always summer.”

Hey. I know another place where it’s always summer. Yeah. A tropical island.

–tim rogers wanted to find a reason to mention that you fly to Portable Island on ‘ban-nam airlines’

text by tim rogers

★★★★

“THE FIRST VIDEOGAME OF THE REST OF OUR LIVES.”

If you imagine for a moment that all of the emails I got last year asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, and then you also pretended that the overwhelming majority of emails asking me why I haven’t reviewed BioShock yet, when I’m going to review BioShock, or if there’s some reason I am blatantly ignoring BioShock also didn’t exist, that would leave me with a healthy stack of emails asking me when I was going to review Call of Duty 4, how much I loved Call of Duty 4, or if I was going to call Call of Duty 4 the “best game ever” or not. Well, to answer those three questions:

1. Right now!
2. A lot!
3. Nope!

If you were to imagine for a moment that all the emails I got last week asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, that would leave you with an overwhelming majority of emails asking me “Why don’t you die?”, and if you were to imagine that those emails didn’t exist, you’d have a pretty significant number of emails asking me “If BioShock isn’t a great game, what is?” To answer those two questions:

1. Let me ask my secretary!
2. Call of Duty 4!

The truth is, I didn’t really feel like reviewing Call of Duty 4 because it’s kind of too good. Also, because I wasn’t sure what the name of the game is — that “4” there is definitely raised. It is definitely an exponent. Am I supposed to call the game “Call of Duty To The Fourth Power”? How many powers do we have to put on our duty before it’s patriotic enough for Joe Sixpack and Jennifer Twoliter to enjoy on Memorial Day?

Anyway, the short version of this review is that I liked the game a lot, as much as I probably can like a game — even if I might never play it again.

The long version is this:

Unlike BioShock, Call of Duty 4 has everything: seamless atmosphere, a compelling narrative, focused play mechanics, and moments of actual cathartic power that take advantage of the whole package. More than just a crotch massage plugged into a television set, Call of Duty 4 boldly toes the bizarrely forbidden line between “videogame” and “entertainment”. It’s made by people who get it so ferociously that they might not even know that there’s an “it” they’re getting. It’s hard, it’s fast, it’s lean, it’s learned, and it’s a dynamo. Developers of big-budget action-adventure games: please, if you have any common sense, this is the one you’re supposed to study. It’s the first game of the rest of our lives.

I can’t say I’ve been the biggest fan of the series. Or even the smallest one, or even the most medium-sized one. I first encountered Call of Duty 4 at a demo station at Tokyo Game Show 2007, where my brother Brandon Sheffield (of Gamasutra) played through the first mission under the enthusiastic guidance of an Activision / Infinity Ward representative. The guy was telling us how it was: you’re infiltrating a tanker, trying to get some enemy intel. You have to kill the crew, get the intel, get out, and get on your chopper. See this, now? The ship is sinking. Look at the water effects. Notice how the boat is tipping. Brandon handled it all with grace; I guess, since his magazine and website carry advertisements, occasionally rely on videogame developers to write features, and are genuinely in the habit of being as polite as possible to as many people as possible at all times, he was used to having people explain what was plainly visible. I guess I’m used to it, to, what with the line of work I’m in (let’s not even get into it), though maybe I would have minded it a whole lot less had I been actually playing. From what I could tell, the action on the screen looked distinctly, nonchalantly amazing: here we were, invading a tanker on the ocean, and outside the immediate scope of soldiers with guns versus soldiers with guns, things were happening: the ship was sinking, and it looked like the ship was sinking. We here at Action Button Dot Net are people of refined tastes: we go whole days, sometimes, listening only to The Stone Roses’ song “Breaking Into Heaven” on loop for twenty-four straight hours. I don’t need anyone telling me that something that is stuff-hot is stuff-hot, though I guess if the Activision guy had just been repeatedly saying “This Game Is Shit Hot” in a text-to-speech voice for the duration of the play session, I would have purchased the game and reviewed it immediately, just to compliment their amazing PR.

When I eventually played the game, it was after the fact; it was after every fact. Here’s what I knew, before I started playing Call of Duty 4:

1. Call of Duty and Medal of Honor are not related;
2. The previous Call of Duty games were all about World War II;
3. The first two Call of Duty games were developed by Infinity Ward;
4. The third Call of Duty game was not developed by Infinity Ward;
5. The fourth Call of Duty game was developed by Infinity Ward again;
6. The fourth Call of Duty game is not about World War II; it is set in modern times;
7. According to Wikipedia, “The Call of Duty Real-time Card Game was announced by card manufacturer Upper Deck”;
8. I’m pretty sure any card game is actually played in real-time;
9. I could be mistaken, because maybe the concept of time isn’t exactly “real” for people who spend their time playing collectible card games.

I very highly respect the idea of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, then, because Call of Duty is obviously a “strong enough” “intellectual property” to have a Real-time Card Game based on it, and messing with the formula (“the formula” being “World War II”) is a pretty bold move in this dead-horse-throttling industry we live in. Furthermore, I guess you could say my interest was piqued because World War II games have always managed to amazingly bore me. I don’t really get why: I find World War II a fascinating subject. Now that I think about it, I’ve never actually read a book about World War II on purpose, nor have I ever watched a movie about World War II because I had to, though I’ve heard a couple of people talk about World War II, and they seem to think it’s really interesting. There was a whole lot going on. Hitler was probably the last objectively evil human being history will allow; in a way, media — like newspapers, television, movies, and (hey!) videogames — spread the message of those terrible things that happened, of how even Russia and America were able to agree on something, and team up and just about literally save the world. I guess the games don’t do anything for me because — and call this a cop-out reason if you like — their graphics aren’t good enough. We’ve had decades of film dramatizations and Spielbergizations to go on, and the games just don’t look dead convincing enough. Modern War, though, hell, why not? After seeing that scene in “Fahrenheit 9/11” where an American hickboy explains that he listens to The Bloodhound Gang’s “The Roof is on Fire” while running over Iraqis in his M-1 Abrams battle tank, because “the roof is on fire” is a “metaphor”, because “Baghdad is also kinda on fire”, I figure, heck, go ahead and make a videogame out of this, already. There are moments when the events on the screen resemble things that happen in videogames — like when the AC-130 TV operator tells you that the friendlies are carrying IR beacons, so they’re glowing, so as to help you recognize who to not shoot. It strikes me that as much as games are training our kids how to join the military and/or murder civilian hookers, games (or, uh, software user interfaces in general) are teaching the military a thing or two. There was that DARPA prototype robo-tank recently, that operated by remote-control: the remote control was an Xbox 360 controller. I guess, if Call of Duty 4 had been made after the video footage of that DARPA prototype hit the internet, they would have had a perfect excuse to incorporate an Xbox 360 controller into the game and not be prickishly self-referential about it.

Call of Duty 4 is a videogame about modern-day US Marines and British SAS, taking part in small- and large-scale armed skirmishes in either some Middle-Eastern desert city or beneath the mauve-skied dawn of some rural Russian village. There’s a plot, though who the hell knows what’s going on, really? Games shouldn’t be about “narrative”; they should be about feeling like you’re an important (or at least active) part of some kind of important event. Ninety percent of the time, you’re taking orders from a man with lamb chops; your squad mates shout about tangos and charlies and bravos and tangos; sometimes, they’ll tell you that they’ve got lookout in front of this door frame, and that you are to go in and neutralize any threats (military speak for “blast anything breathing”); sometimes they scream that you need to run. Usually, whenever the latter happens, some cataclysmic event is occurring on the screen. That’s good — games should strive to, you know, have actual stuff happening. That’s the sort of thing “professional” reviewers should be able to commend: “The stuff happening on screen was interesting, and lovingly presented”. Instead, we just get people complimenting water effects: “Just looking at the water is very soothing. It’s so real it made me thirsty. –IGN.” Look higher, people!

Very early in the game, when you’re escaping a sinking ship, the level design offers you a multitude of choices which way to run. Your team is full of experienced, hard dudes, and they know where to go. So you follow them, and you get out alive. However, the game is sure to give you the choice to go some other route, though that will promptly get you killed. In the interest of science, I’ve put a controller in the hands of various friends, and not a single one of them has escaped from the tanker on the first try. At the end, they always go the wrong way, and Dreaded White Text tells them “You went the wrong way”. And that’s it. This seemed to frustrate many of my friends to no end, though I found it chaotically intriguing. I kind of wish the game had done more of that.

For the most part, though, actually playing Call of Duty 4 is entertaining in the most tenuous way. The game’s atmosphere works as hard as it can to simply make you feel like you’re a part of these big events. You get a very strong sense that you’re fighting with a team, probably because your teammates don’t ever say &^#$#ed things to one another, or high-five one-another, and because they actually obtain a significant amount of the kills during a firefight. And some of the gunfights are tough; tough enough to make you wonder how real soldiers put up with this stuff without, you know, dying. I guess the absolute animal fear of death has something to do with it. However, eventually, Call of Duty 4 managed to win me over, and greatly; its expertly executed atmosphere, and very focused play mechanics didn’t get tiring even as I dropped countless nickels into the slot machine of the moment on some of the more brutal gunfights. I started to respect the level design on deeper levels: usually, you’re heading toward waypoints, sometimes while being pursued by bad guys, or sometimes while avoiding lookouts. Every once in a while, all hell breaks loose and there are maybe fifteen guys on the top of a hill, which has two staircases and a couple of dirt roads leading up it. There’s no set-in-stone way to win each momentary skirmish, though “thinking on your feet” is a really good place to start. Shades of Metal Gear Solid 3 start to leak in, eventually, as the game allows you to feel for yourself when you’re doing well or phoning it in: sometimes, a fight will end without you scoring more than four or five kills; you’ll feel like stuff for having let your dudes do all the work, and then you’ll notice that two of them died. This feeling runs weirdly parallel to the arcade-like action feel of dropping nickels into the slot machine, trying wild tactics, getting shot in the head, trying something crazier next time. There you go: Call of Duty 4 effortlessly manages equal parts dramatic catharsis and arcade action.

There’s a conscientious, well-played part midway through the game, where a soldier on point races up a staircase, only to be grabbed by a Middle-Eastern Individual of Opposing Political Views: if you manage to shoot the attacker, the game awards you with an Xbox Achievement for having saved the guy (who, I notice from the credits, is named after a member of the development team). This is clever, mostly, because in many games (even this one) Xbox Achievements tend to award the player for doing arbitrary things that he doesn’t have to do in order to succeed at the game. There’s a word that game designers throw around often: “Visual language”. Basically, how the game, visually, tells the player that he’s doing something right or wrong; “Achievements”, with their big, bombastic, bloated, banal on-screen explosion of Old-Navy-worthy graphic design, are, to me, at least, the exact opposite of satisfaction: killing the final boss of a game and seeing “Achievement Unlocked: The End!” elicits a VH1 Pop-Up Video sound effect in the middle of my head, and I get something like the inverse of an erection (we call it a “turtle”). Yes, “Achievements” are a fragment of the devil, in this “videogame industry”; you can’t even use the points to buy anything. I suspect that giving a player an achievement for, you know, ensuring that one of his comrades doesn’t die is Infinity Ward’s way of subverting the masses in as clever a way as possible. For one thing, looking out for your own is something someone in the military, fighting a war, is obligated to do. On the other hand, each of Call of Duty 4‘s tenuous little gun-versus-gun contests sees you walking the razor’s edge between life and death, and the life and death of your expendable squad-mates; the game is constantly telling the player with its visual language whether he is doing well or not. This game is whispering that we don’t need “Achievements”, really, if the game is expertly well-made.



TANGENT “RE: DEATH” BEGINS

I kind of wonder, a lot more than is probably healthy, about death in videogames. Call of Duty 4 brings up the question of death many times, as your guy is shot in the side of the head and you scream “Who shot me?” and your friend, who is half-drunk, says “Dude, in a real war, you’d never see the bullets coming, either.” Eventually, he goes from being half-drunk to fully drunk, and that makes his words all the more consideration-worthy: Man, what kinds of people actually go out and fight real wars? What the heck is wrong with these people? Politics aside, who is willing to die for anything, much less the concept of a country? And what’s with these kids playing these FPSes, anyway? What the hell are they thinking? Do they see these games as training exercises for the one day when they’ll get to wield an AK in the name of shooting ragheads from the back of a Hummer? I’m not going to pretend that these kids possess a single political atom in their bodies; I know the score: they just want to kill. What I can say, with serious scientific certainty, is that I once saw a YouTube video of I think it was Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (boring game, by the way) where the first comment was “Awesome game” and the third comment accused the game of being for homosexuals because the graphics weren’t photo-realistic enough. I defecate you negative. I suppose this is why Call of Duty 4‘s Big Back-of-Box Quote is “The most PHOTO-REALISTIC video game WE’VE EVER SEEN.” (Game Informer.) I’m hardly even going to make fun of that quote; Activision PR did what they had to do.

On a high-enough difficulty level, Call of Duty 4 recreates some of the dread of war. I honestly tend to avoid FPSes where you can’t see the bullets “because you can’t see the bullets in real life”, because this isn’t real life, it’s a game. Though as I’ve said above, it plays well as a game; you feel like you did something when you win, you know you messed up when you lose, no matter how many dozens of times you lose. And the presentation remains seamless.

Anyway. There’s a part where Call of Duty 4 does something shocking; I don’t really know how to explain it without spoiling it, so let’s just say that it steps back through the fourth wall for a moment. Yes, I’m saying it had been standing in front of the fourth wall for its entire running time until that moment, when it stepped back behind the fourth wall. The scene involves death — though not in a videogame-y, “Looney Tunes”-y, “if at first you don’t succeed” way, and not in a melodramatic movie way, either. It’s easy to say that “the character you’re controlling dies as a result of the narrative”, and it’s easy to look at that statement, as what it is, and nitpick away: well, in the game, you can die so many times, in the middle of so many inconsequential skirmishes, and then you just respawn almost immediately (after reading a nice little anti-war quote by some famous person whose pacifist attitude didn’t stop them from dying) and try again like nothing had ever happened.

How can narrative-related death be special at all in a piece of work in a medium where the player must die repeatedly? The answer to these question is, of course, “The death must be shocking, and awful”. It must be a huge sentence-ending punctuation mark, where previous deaths had been commas. It’s a tall order, though Call of Duty 4 pulls it off, and when it does, it leaves you feeling deeply sad, or deeply confused. Either way, it’s made its point, and it’s perhaps even more brilliant than even I’ve given it credit for: if you be a cranberry-juice-sipping, organic red onion connoisseur who’s forty-five seconds away from coining the phrase “Post-Kojima”, you will say, “Interesting”, and you will continue playing; if you be review-writer for a website with expanding advertisements for “NEW! Pepsi-Filled Doritos!” plastered all over your reviews, you will say, “The publisher sent me this for free!”, and you will keep playing; if you be an iron-pumping jock-face frat boy, you will say, “Gonna kill me them heckin’ rag heads, them heckin’ commie bastards!” and you will keep playing, to keep killing you them heckin’ rag heads, them heckin’ commie bastards.

Welcome to Post-Kojima: a world where game designers do quirky little abnormal things with their games and nobody complains.

We can only pretend to complain (which is something we excel at): after being shocked by “that scene”, I will never be shocked by it again, nor is it hardly possible for me to be shocked by anything resembling it.

And part of me wonders if they could have pulled it off so the Guy Who Dies can’t die a single “normal” “in-game” death before the Big Moment. In fact, if they’d managed to do this, I might have had to call Call of Duty 4 the best game of all-time. They’ve already orchestrated every stage of the game so that there are air-strikes, visible helicopters firing at enemies you’ll never see, and adverse weather conditions; why not go the extra (ten (thousand)) mile(s), and orchestrate it so that your guy can’t die? Oh man, I’m talking out my ass here, I know, though wouldn’t that be really cool? I’d like to say that you could have one friendly soldier “accidentally” take the hit for you every time an enemy checkmates you, though that would require there to be a lot of friendlies, in the case of the player being a total jerk and putting the controller down just to see what happens.

I guess the game’s heavy-handed treatment of friendly fire is compensation enough: namely, if you shoot and kill one of the “main” characters, the screen will sharply fade, and Dreaded White Text informs you “Friendly Fire Will Not Be Tolerated!” I got curious, after a while, and it turns out that — hey — the main characters don’t ever get mortally wounded by the enemy on their own. Interesting.

Either way, game-y deaths included, Call of Duty 4 is all “visual language”. If you “die”, the game visually tells you that you messed up, and then it visually tells you that you’re alive again. Visual language is about more than color saturation and camera angles, though. For example, I’ve seen enough military movies to know, at least, that when the guy leading me stops in place and raises his hand, that means I should stop moving forward and crouch down on the ground, or that when all the guys in front of me run up and take cover behind a low wall, I should pop into place wherever there’s room. How novel, then, that Call of Duty 4 makes these common-sense reactions the correct thing to do game-wise whenever it seems right to do them. Meanwhile, other war FPSes, like Brothers in Arms, have game-like representations for things like suppressing fire: shoot enough at a distant enemy, and the aiming circle turns red, indicating that the enemy is suppressed. In Call of Duty 4, the game doesn’t tell you when your tactics are working. They just work — or they don’t. It’s hardly even a videogame, anymore, once you’ve plunged into it. It’s mostly “entertainment”. Mostly.

Call of Duty 4‘s instruction manual is eight pages long, six if you subtract the table of contents and the blank “NOTES” page (on which I drew a picture of a thumbs-up). No character in this game ever says anything about playing the game; no one voice actor was asked to speak actual words about in-game weapons, or name a single button on the videogame controller in your hands. The people represented in this game know what they’re doing; they’re soldiers; moreover, they’re serious soldiers, serious enough to literally say “target neutralized” immediately after shooting a dog. So when you’re in a city that has been deserted, soaking in the silent awe of what might have previously been a community center of some sort, your characters are free to say things like, “Fifty thousand people used to live here.” That’s the “narrative” “emerging”; they’re not even talking about the mission — possibly because the mission is the same as it ever is: move forward, follow orders, shoot anyone who would shoot you, throw grenades when prudent. If someone says jump, don’t even ask how high — just jump as high as you can. It’ll either be high enough, or you’ll be dead. That’s all the “game” there is to Call of Duty 4: now get out there and experience Modern Warfare.

I suppose this is where Call of Duty 4 wins versus something like BioShock — and it wins quite triumphantly, and instantly (by default, almost): because it’s easy to explain. Though its narrative does indeed hide things from the player, and though it does make many (successful, virtuoso) attempts to surprise the player, it never lies; it never feels cheap. In something like BioShock, you’ve got this fantastic, imaginative underwater world, and with something that loopy, the game designers also have a huge responsibility to explain everything, and they feel a crushing pressure to dazzle the player: no body renders a computer-animated dragon if they’re not going to make that dragon breate fire. Game designers tend to (“tend to”, yes) not quite always be Tolstoy, or even Dostoyevsky, so in cases like BioShock, we end up with “Your dude was being mind-controlled by a dude with a mind-control plasmid lol”; that still doesn’t answer the question of why things like mind-control psychic powers are available from vending machines in your game world; that still doesn’t change the fact that the game’s proudest moment is ridiculous: it shows you a Defenseless Little Girl and expects you to scream “art!” because the game offers you the “moral choice” to kill or not kill the Defenseless Little Girl, like killing little girls was something normal, non-evil people might occasionally do, et cetera.

In Call of Duty 4, story-wise and game-wise, there is nothing to explain: we’re fighting a war. We’re shooting these guys because if they saw us they’d shoot us. There’s no pandering and moping about how war is bad, because, quite frankly, this game makes war look hellish, and kind of sad, which I guess is the undeniable reality of war, anyway; when you weigh my “overall impression” of this game, the impact of the representation of the somewhat depressing (in a horrific way) nature of war and the satisfying snap of the combat are about 50-50. Like BioShock, this is a game that is essentially all mood; though the playable experience disappears so completely into that mood that when the game throws us a heavily post-Kojima “mission” where we “play” as a captive powerful man, waiting to be executed, or where we operate the guns of an AC-130 gunship, scorching faceless foes, witlessly staring through a videogame within a videogame, it’s more than interesting: it’s fantastic, moving, surprising, and, most impressively, it’s absolutely effortless. Hardly any “ingenuity” went into the crafting of this experience, and I say that with the utmost respect. Rather, Call of Duty 4 was seemingly constructed like that other great Russian invention, the rollercoaster: you get some graph paper and a straightedge, you decide, right here and right now, how tall that first hill is going to be, and the rest of the hills just build themselves.

It does so many hilariously right things, like condition you to believe that every single dog you’re ever going to encounter is going to be some one-hit-killing uber-difficult enemy monsterfreak, and then it’ll suddenly throw you a part in the middle of an extended stealth segment where you have a silenced sniper rifle and there’s a downright frightening-looking wild dog hovering around a carcass nearby. You can shoot the dog and not attract any attention, though your superior says we should just navigate around the dog. It turns out, even if the dog sees you, all he does is look at you and growl. That’s pretty fantastic: here we have evidence that the world of this game actually does contain some kind of semblance of life. All it takes is one little spark. I remember the very elementary example from Dragon Quest VII: of all the dozens of cities and all the thousands of citizens in those cities, in one little town, there’s a bar, and at that bar, there’s a woman wearing a red dress, sitting alone. If you talk to the girl, she says she’s perfectly fine and she doesn’t need your company. If you talk to a man on the other side of the bar, he says, “What’s the deal with that woman in the red dress, drinking alone?” A woman in a red dress and a man wondering why she’s alone: that’s all it takes, really, to make your “entertainment software virtual field map” into a “simulated world”.

Seriously, some of the stuff in here — the ecstatically brief “final boss” comes sharply to mind — makes Hideo Kojima look like a rank amateur. We can forgive — and even love — Kojima, at the end of the day, for being something of a prankster prodding at the videogame medium just to see what kind of noises it makes, though I’m pretty sure, as he is only one man, he’d be at a loss if asked to make a game that actually, really, literally approaches the craftsmanship of, say, a Scorsese film; the people behind Call of Duty 4, on the other hand, though I have reason to believe they have studied Metal Gear, Shadow of the Colossus, and many other important games, might not be “influenced” by any of them so much as they just have a rock-solid grip on common sense. Common sense, above all else, is usually the essential ingredient in being good at anything. For a game designer, common sense involves knowing that “experience” is more important than “narrative”, that “narrative” need only be the birds in the sky (or the helicopters raging by, guns blazing).

It’s like, rather than write down a million ideas for what kind of violent psychic powers our undersea-dwelling philosophers and artists might have been able to buy from a vending machine, this is a game where missions are conceived as “Yeah, you’re going to snipe some guy, then you’re going to run away from dudes who try to blow up the hotel you’re using as a sniper base; you’re going to run about a kilometer away, there’s going to be an abandoned swimming pool, and then you’re going to hold a position while you wait for your evacuation chopper to get there. Your partner is wounded, so when the chopper gets there, you have to pick him up and carry him into the chopper.” It might not mean everything to gamers or even game-designers these days, though the fact that you actually manipulate your character all the way into the chopper, and can then aim your gun out the back and shoot at the ground as you take off is pretty crucial.

One thing that kind of got me was the mission where you play a flashback; in a lesser game, I guess it works, because who gives a stuff, really, about where Spider-Man was last Friday, as long as stuff exploded? In this game, a regular virtuoso piece when it comes to impressing us with the impact and the, uh, presence of the present, when it asks me to play something in the past, and I make a mistake in that flashback, and a message on the screen tells me “Your actions got [so and so] killed”, I think, so what? Isn’t someone supposed to be just telling this story to a bunch of marines in some god-forsaken rat-hole in western Russia right now? If he messes up in his storytelling, or forgets a detail, says “So there were some guys on the left, and I, uhh, went to the left–I mean, the right–” does that erase his former commanding officer from existence, and alter future events?

On the other hand, when the situation comes to a head and I’m aiming a sniper rifle for an extended period of time, listening to very technical explanations of how wind speed affects bullet path from my superior, I’m thinking, in my Real Life Head over here, “Well, wait, isn’t this guy I’m aiming at still alive in the present?” And suddenly, there you go — that’s kind of an interesting feeling.

There are certain situations (like when you’re sneaking around, your cover gets blown, and the enemies open fire on you) wherein your character will literally be completely helpless, and in those situations, the game does not wrest controls from your hands; instead, it lets you feel what it’s like to die because you made a mistake. Compare this to platform games like Super Mario Galaxy, where you sometimes float down into a bottomless pit, helpless, in control, yet not in control, because you made a mistake. The feeling of helplessness is far more pronounced, far more obnoxious, and, weirdly, far more forgivable in Call of Duty 4, because the said helpless situations literally always involve your dude, you gun, your grenades, and some other dudes with guns and grenades. There are no bottomless pits, bottomless for the sake of being “something that can kill you”. It’s quite deceptively impressive how effectively the game communicates to you that you can’t solve all situations with a gun or grenades — either in real life, or even in this game, where your actions are limited to shooting, throwing grenades, and moving. Yes, sometimes “Moving” is the solution to your problems. So it is that all situations in Call of Duty 4 can and will be solved by shooting, throwing grenades, running away, hiding, or some combination thereof. Well, sometimes, you have to break a dog’s neck, though it’s as much a quick-time event as not a quick-time event: the button used to kill them is always, after all, the same button as a regular melee attack. The game does not ask you — even once — to throw a lightning bolt at a pool of water in which an enemy is standing, or use a key to open a door.





I guess if I had to nitpick something, it would be that sometimes the loading times are too short to read the bountiful anti-war quotes displayed on screen whenever you die.

Okay, no, I thought of another one: in this world of Modern Warfare, there exist doors that simply will not open no matter how many times you shoot them with an Uzi or stab them with your combat knife. No, these doors will only open when your commanding officer walks up to them and deems them fit to be opened. I can’t really call this a fault of the game, because,

1. How would my character know where to go, really? He’s just a grunt; he doesn’t have the intel.
2. Poking around at random doors is not listed as one of his orders.
3. 99% of the time, the game is very good about giving the player orders, and telling him where to go, and where to be.
4. If you play the game like a good soldier and not like a jerk, you should be able to make everything look pretty smooth.

I’ve said, before, that games can perhaps never be “art” because I seriously can’t think of a single game that some jerk can’t just pick up and immediately tilt the right analog stick to one side, cackling as the camera spins in circles — or some equivalent action. I was disappointed quite ferociously when I tried to show a particular friend the first stage of Stranglehold, a game that, if played correctly, looks really cool (though still not as cool as an actual John Woo movie); he immediately identified how silly it looks when the protagonist slides back and forth across a countertop. We here at Action Button Dot Net collectively say: heck that guy. I’m guaranteeing you, game developers: if you make a game that aspires to “art” if played all the way through, adjusting the camera a minimal amount of times and performing only the necessary actions, we will gladly attempt to play the game that way. Because, I mean, why not? I don’t see anyone else making that particular promise. I might as well make it.

Is Call of Duty 4 art if played perfectly, pristinely, quickly, and efficiently? If you never die, if you never get shot, is Call of Duty 4 as emotionally affecting as Saving Private Ryan? (Here we refrain from asking whether or not “Saving Private Ryan” is art.) The answer to this question is — surprise! — that that’s a &^#$#ed question: if you’re good enough at the game to not die or not get hit, then you’re probably not having “fun”; if you’re just watching someone else play, you’re more prone to ask questions like “why are there numbers on the screen?” “what does ‘checkpoint reached’ mean?” or “why does the camera almost never show anyone’s face?” In-game death, sometimes of the meaningless, un-telegraphed variety, motivates the player to be more observant; surviving the same challenge on a subsequent attempt makes him feel accomplished, or even entertained. So, in asking the question of how we can make a game that entertains the player without requiring the player to perform perfectly, we end up back at that boring question of how we can motivate the player to do better without making his on-screen avatar realistically die and then come right back to life.

For now, maybe just tweaking the respawn presentation is all we need. Just make the screen fade to black really quick, and then fade back up. Maybe make every checkpoint occur immediately after a memorable line of dialog: no one will be able to complain about hearing a particular line over and over again, because that would mean revealing when and where you died multiple times. “Looks like Christmas is coming three times this year — for the second time today!” you hear, just as you respawn, and you think, “Oh — I’m back here”.

I’m picking this nit really, really hard, right here, because it’s all I have; maybe you’ve come to realize that that’s the nature of this website. Call of Duty 4‘s singleplayer mode is a focused, tight game, of a voraciously consumable, short running time, with minimal filler or nonsense. It strokes the player’s ego sometimes, sure, with all the Tangoes and Charlies being bandied about, though hey, we might as well just chalk that up to etiquette: the player isn’t lying to himself; he’s admitting that he’s obviously the type of person to sit in his underwear in the dark in the dead of night controlling a pretend soldier in a pretend war. Might as well be nice to him. The play mechanics disappear almost completely into the structure and flow of the campaign, et cetera et cetera — so why can’t I turn off all the HUD elements? Much as I like that Einstein quote about how World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones, why can’t I turn those quotes off? What if I don’t want to know precisely how many bullets are left in my clip, or whenever the game has just saved itself?

Actually, I’m playing this online, multiplayer, right now (review of Call of Duty 4 multiplayer: fun!), and I’ve just noticed that my gun doesn’t bob up and down realistically when I move while crouched. Yes! That’s another significant complaint right there!

A less significant complaint is that I’m not quite sure what “throw back” means, even after beating the game — am I picking a grenade up off the ground and then throwing it back at the enemy? If so, why does the grenade just manage to suddenly appear in my hand? There’s no bend-over-and-grab animation. It’s a little confusing.

Also, I suppose I could mention that the textures on some of the surfaces are pretty low-resolution, though I reckon nobody would learn anything from my pointing that out. They obviously chose the lower textures so they could concentrate on performance, et cetera.

Many of my friends had trouble with the dreaded “Ferris Wheel” mission, so I guess that’s worth pointing out: there’s a Ferris wheel. You have one guy sniping enemy dudes from a grassy hill. The game gives you thirty seconds to plant some mines and C4 before going to hide in the shadows. You shoot some dudes, then shoot some more dudes, then you get a checkpoint; then a load of dudes comes in. The thing is, the C4 is really handy for the load of dudes; however, if you already placed the C4 in a not-perfect place, you’re hecked. I’ve polled my Gmail chat list, and something like one-third of the people I know who played this game gave up entirely at that mission. That kind of sucks; I reloaded my save, gladly played the run-up to the Ferris Wheel again, and planted C4 on the cars, so as to bomb the guys as they slid down the helicopter ropes. It did pretty good!

I really don’t know what else to say about this game; having just mentioned helicopters and ropes in the preceding paragraph, I am thinking about Choplifter, and wishing that Infinity Ward would make something of a Choplifter reboot / remake for next-generation consoles. Call it Call of Duty: Chopper. Let me fly a helicopter, rescuing dudes from the heat of battle, or dropping dudes off. Ascend or descend with L1 and R1; drop bombs with the L trigger, and firemachine guns with the R trigger. Let me use a badass rope ladder to rescue dudes if the “landing zone” (that’s “LZ” from now on) is “too hot”. There could be an online multiplayer mode, only it’d be more like Rock Band, because people would be forced to cooperate — you’ve got one guy flying the chopper, the other aiming the machine gun, and, uhh, I’m sure the pilot could handle the bombs and ladder himself, actually. So yeah — two-player co-op isn’t too bad! Your army would be ideally competing with another army, with their own two-man chopper team. You could build a pretty great game out of piloting a helicopter, with clever enough level design, like those Strike games EA made forever ago. What do you say, Infinity Ward? Pay me $100,000 a year and I’ll come over there and design the triumphant return of helicopter games for you. I’ll lease a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution — a red one — not six minutes after getting off the plane, just so I can drive over to your office and design a game about a helicopter. I’m not even kidding. I’ll design it all day and all night. Helicopters, man. They’re the next big thing, I’m not even kidding.

To sum up: Call of Duty 4 is a tight-as-hell game with seamless atmosphere, a compelling narrative that’s more about the Hollywoodian moment-to-moment nature of its experience than about any straightforward plot, and moments of actual cathartic power that take advantage of the whole package. Though the multiplayer is fun, I might never play through the singleplayer campaign again, much as I will fondly remember it as a thrilling piece of work and recommend it to friends and game designers for the next several years. No, dear readers, it’s not the “Best Game Ever” — and I won’t dare say that I could think of a better game (even though I can: I mean, just make a Zelda game with the focus and attention to detail of something like Call of Duty 4; I say this as a person who feels pretty much zero emotion when I hear the word “Zelda”, so take it or leave it) — and I still like Gears of War a tiny bit better, just because of the sheer ridiculousness of it. Much as I love Gears, though, I recognize that it’s not for everyone, so I wholeheartedly, hereby, allow the people of the world to like Call of Duty 4. And if you’re a game developer, please: this is the one (well, this and Portal) that you should rip off.

text by tim rogers

★★☆☆

“A GRINNING CORPSE.”

And so this is Christmas — and what have we Mario Kart Wii.



Actually, so proud of that first sentence right there, I let this review sit untouched for an hour and a half, and now that air has returned to my lungs and the pain in the pit of my stomach has evaporated, I have no idea what I was going to say. It was going to all be very coherent and straightforward, and I was probably going to call this game the “Best Mario Kart Yet!” and maybe even give it a perfect score. I don’t know anymore, though. So it often goes with criticism — you have to nip opinions in the bud, or else they start to change. Looks like I’m going to just have to complain about this game’s box for seven or eight paragraphs before actually talking about the game, and by the time I start talking about the game, you’ll have already counted all the paragraphs and reported the tally on your favorite web forum, and damned me repeatedly to the Special Hell for obese, homosexual serial murderers. Which, if only you’d stick around to the end of the review, you’d see is precisely the thing that a person who “likes” Mario Kart is supposed to do, anyway.

Insert the sound of me sighing! (If you need help imagining what I look like, imagine the World’s Fattest, Gayest Serial Murderer.)

Before I commence a long, perhaps-planned (“second-degree”) tangent about the box, let’s take a look at this sentence, which I’m pretty sure I had planned out in my head long before I lost concentration:

“Mario Kart Wii turns any weeknight into Christmas Eve.”

I’m pretty sure that when I first cooked that sentence up in my brain I meant to use it in a fairly straightforward review, in which I compared Mario Kart Wii fondly to what many human beings growing up in first-world countries consider to be a delicious and savorable evening of family togetherness and friendly rivalry as each prodigal brothers communicates the girth of his derring-dos far away from the fireplace.

Now, though, a few hours (during which “office work” was done) and several espressos removed from the original typing of that sentence, I’m capable of a more linear forensic analysis: perhaps, subconsciously, the writer of that sentence (“me”) was considering his own definition of Christmas Eve, which includes references to being locked in his room upstairs (by his own hand), gritting his teeth at the sound of pleasure rumbling up from downstairs, and girding up his loins for the morning, when he, despite pulling in a 4.0 GPA for his entire life and never speaking a single profane word, will not receive a single gift. More to the point, he’s going to have to sit there by the Christmas tree and watch his little brother open morbidly expensive present after morbidly expensive present — or else be excommunicated from his parents’ idea of the Catholic Church.

That is to say, yes, “Christmas” for me is synonymous with gritting my teeth and hissing like a rabid fairy whilst all the world becomes an orchestra in the name of pleasing someone even fatter than I am.

To be fair, Mario Kart Wii isn’t exactly like Christmas — in the case of real Christmas, my little brother would hop aboard the Fun Train at “YESSSSSSSSSSSS” Station and crash immediately into a wall, almost as animalistically pleased to report that “THIS SHIT IS BROKEN ALREADY WHAT THE heck” as he had been five minutes ago when he said “SWEET DUDE THIS IS ALL I EVER WANTED”. With Mario Kart Wii, no one complains that dad is a limp-noodle moron for not buying enough AA batteries, because they’re all “having fun” pointing the remote control at their RC cars and pretending it’s moving.

Here is where I am tempted, as I usually am, to say all the positive things about the game, just to get it out of the way. That means it’s time, once again, to engage my masterminded plan to Get the Kids off my Lawn — ie, begin the tongue-speaking tangent ritual. Lucky for you guys, I might have actually had this tangent written out for, like, two months already:

So Mario Kart Wii is the next title in a long line of games that come with a plastic accessory to snap the Wii Remote into. This time, it’s a steering wheel. Snap your Wiimote into this plastic steering wheel — made of delicious, vinyl smelling, pistol-heavy white plastic — and now you can pretend you’re driving a car. On your sofa! Welcome to the future!

The Wii Wheel is Nintendo’s first perhaps-inadvertent acknowledgement of just how silly the name “Wii” is, particularly because it repeats the “Whee” sound twice in a row, giving us a play on “Wee-wee”, which is a “cute” name that young parents frighteningly think up when it comes time to tell their male children what that shrunken sausage between their thighs is, or explain to their little girls what a dictionary would have to say about when water starts voluntarily leaking out the crack between their legs. Why didn’t they just call the accessory the “Wiil”? Probably because it would look ridiculous. You know how you can repeat a word over and over and over again, and then suddenly the word loses all meaning (Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove)? It’d be a lot like that. For over a year now, I personally have been comfortable with the name “Wii”. It has, for the longest time, struck me as entirely juvenile that any adult (at least, I’m pretty sure that anyone smart enough to type words on the internet must be an adult) would see the name “Wii” and think of “Wee-wee” — a maturity-archaic descriptor for urinary evacuation and/or the penis itself — before they would think of, I don’t know, “We”, the preferred first-person plural pronoun of English students worldwide.

If you set your mind to it, you can make any molehill into an apocalypse, so let’s try with the Wii Wheel: it is rigidly documented that when Nintendo’s concept-men got together under the Fellowship of the Revolution, desiring only to reinvent the way people think about budget-priced half-hearted morally void videogames, they had absolutely no idea what they were going to make in the end. On Kotaku there was this story linked once, with a bunch of pictures of concept sketches for the Nintendo “Revolution”‘s eventual controller. One of them was shaped like a huge Super Mario invincibility star (I can’t call it a “Starman” in good faith because that would be infringing on the David Bowie song, and infringing on David Bowie (he’s a big fan of the site) is something the Action Button Action Legal Team has told me repeatedly not to do), and it had like five buttons on it, one at each point. I guess players were supposed to press the Happy Button whenever they started to feel sad, and the various games (yet with pre-production titles like “Next Mario Game” and “Next Zelda Game” and “Next Animal Crossing“) would reciprocate by playing back a happy, encouraging text-message related to the day’s weather (internet connection required): “Six days of rain in a row means the price of brown rice will be sixteen yen cheaper per kilogram three months from now!”

Flash back way before this, and remember that time at an E3 press conference when Satoru Iwata, who we at Action Button Dot Net are dead convinced is absolutely not a stupid person, walked on-stage and presented the audience with their reward for bearing the heat of the afternoon and stale muffins: a little plastic box. “This is our new games console. It’s finished, and it’s the size of three DVD cases stacked on top of one another!” Amazed, shrieking applause followed.

Basically, that was Satoru Iwata talking out his balls, though not in the way you think: the console most certainly was complete. I mean, let’s face it, the thing’s just a Gamecube with a spec bump. I’m not knocking that aspect of the Wii, not by a longshot. In fact, I’m applauding the size of its testicles: Nintendo had slaved away for years under a liverspotted coal-tar-stuffting octogenarian with an epic mean streak, Sunday-driving down one wrong boulevard after another, and eventually they’d lost touch with the “people” that had made them rich in the first place. If Iwata were a character in Final Fantasy Tactics, he’d be a level 99 Calculator, for sure: with one swift flick of his wrist, he was able to make an epicly large percentage of Japanese Human Beings go bug-eyed at the sight of outdated graphics and tinny sound. All it took to pull off this magic trick was one bite-sized cypher: the idea-nugget that there are gamers, and there are non-gamers, and that non-gamers can be divided up into “people who have never played games” and “people who played games before and then stopped”, and that “people who played games before and then stopped”, while perhaps a smaller group than “people who have never played games”, are in fact probably a larger group than “gamers”. The point of Nintendo’s Revolution Vigil, during which I’m guessing a dozen greying men huddled in a bomb shelter subsisting on a meat-locker full of Boss Coffee for three months was to figure out how, exactly, to package the Same Old Shit in a way that made Grandma and Grandpa stuff their same old pants with excitement.

In the end, the “Wii”, a moniker chosen for its “first-person plural” aspect as well as its similarity to a shout of uncontrollable glee, was born and branded as “The DS, on your TV — only now, the stylus is invisible“. The DS, of course, had been the result of Satoru Iwata having conveniently eaten a Very Grotesquely Large Salad and a bowl of rice precisely twenty-two hours before first seeing the television commercials for Sony’s EyeToy: during that forty-five minute breakneck brickstuff, Iwata must have screamed “Eureka!” so many times that he couldn’t not invent the Nintendo DS by the time he began washing his hands. If only Sony Japan had had a little faith, if only they hadn’t dismissed “casual games” as something the Japanese don’t “do”, or if only Sony Europe had developed some solid concepts (like, say, EyeToy games that were deeper than window-washing and/or don’t feature the player’s horrifyingly-lit slack-jawed visage as the “protagonist”) to sell said septegenarian board members, then maybe the PlayStation 2 would be the top-selling console instead of the Wii, and the PlayStation 3 would either look more or less depressing, given your perspective.

Alternate sentence-clump I couldn’t fit in the above paragraph: long before I obtained an interest in poetry and my penis got so inexplicably large, I worked at a GameStop in Indiana, from roughly the Dreamcast launch to the PlayStation 2 launch. Right before the PlayStation 2 was released, Sony sent us demo stations, with fiber-optic blue track-lighting embedded in frosted glass: “PlayStation 2”, it said. We put this demo kiosk right next to the Dreamcast demo kiosk, and the kids who we accidentally babysat while their mother stood in the women’s shoe store across the hall looking lonely would stand there and squeal at the sphere-eyed, single-complexioned John Madden Football Warriors on screen: “PlayStation Two is toight!” We switched the PlayStation 2 inside for a Dreamcast, with the objectively-better-looking NFL 2K1, and the kids began to ogle it, and squeal: “PlayStation Two is toight!” In the end, we probably hecked up the world economy in a chaos-theory sort of way — maybe our trickery of those dumb kids, for selfish purposes, had been the butterfly-wing-flap that brought about the DS/Wii hurricane, who knows. Though at the time, it really, honestly seemed like something to do.

Back in the real world, here we are with this Nintendo Wii wheel. I’m not going to make too much fun of it, because it has a delicious weight and it smells like vintage vinyl records. It also manages to miraculously fill in some kind of psychological gap and feel, most of the time, not at all like bullstuff. This is remarkable, I guess, because games like Excitetruck on the Wii and Motorstorm on the PlayStation 3 have featured controller-tilting steering wheel controls and mostly ended up feeling cheap instead of psychically immersive. The Wii Wheel is no second coming of Christ or anything, though playing Mario Kart Wii with and without it leads me to mathematically declare that yes, it does make a difference.

Still, there’s a sort of weird pseudo-backwardness about it. If Nintendo’s goal with the Wii was to create new genres of fun while lighting peoples’ imaginations on fire, and if this goal required them to make a controller that was as simple as possible, why complicate things? What’s with all the add-ons? Like, I was at the presentation where Iwata revealed the new controller; I heard him say their goal was to make the simplest game controller possible, because a PlayStation pad was too daunting and the sight of an Xbox controller gave grandpa epilepsy; I thought it was hilarious, brilliant. Then they rolled out the nunchuk attachment, as if to say, “You can play regular games on it, too.” That left me a tiny bit confused. I don’t even feel like finishing this paragraph now, to be honest, so I’ll just say, and objectively, that if this world we live in is one where a PlayStation 3 controller, with four face buttons, a D-pad, four triggers, and two analog sticks, can and will make your aunt call the cops, then the Nintendo Wii Remote, plus protective rubber safety condom, plus nunchuk, is obviously a hybrid sextoy / murder-weapon, and you will need a Catholic priest to perform an exorcism on your eventual death bed if you’ve ever so much looked at one.

Though the initial Nintendo “Revolution” controller concept reel clearly showed a guy playing (from a point of view inside the TV, looking out — a crucial point for what we’re going to discuss later) a first-person shooter of some sort, Nintendo eventually released a “Zapper” peripheral, which is no more than a hollow shell that cheaply binds your remote and nunchuk together into the shape of a crude gun. It’s supposed to help the players’ imaginations, or something. If you ask me, it looks like what happens when the cinematographer for “Star Trek” drinks on the set.

If Nintendo is all about giving us this magnificent magic wand — and the Wiimote is a grand technological icon on par with the iPod, don’t get me wrong — and letting our imaginations run wild, why must they continually doubt our imaginations?

I would put that question in huge, bold letters, though something holds me back. I guess it’s the fact that, yes, I find that the Wii Wheel really does enhance the experience of using controller tilts to steer in Mario Kart Wii. Instead, all I can do is whimper: though the controller is shaped like a steering wheel, we have to press the “2” button on the Wiimote in order to accelerate, which makes it absolutely impossible to employ the 10-2 position on the wheel while playing the game. Why bother to simulate driving, if you’re going to force people to do so in such a manner that would, in the case of a real-life head-on collision and airbag deployment, result in the driver’s right hand flipping backward at a high enough speed to possibly break the passenger’s neck? (I smell a very loose class-action lawsuit, though I suppose Japan is exempt, for obvious reasons.)

When Nintendo announced — at the same press conference where they revealed the remote — that they’d be making “shells” for enhancing the remote, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I thought “shell” had been a slip — I thought they meant they’d keep making attachments like the nunchuk, things with buttons or whatever on them.

Therefore: if the upcoming Super Mario Sluggers baseball game comes with a baseball bat shell for the remote, it will be the Piece of White Plastic that Broke the Aircraft Carrier’s Back, and I will walk down to my local convenient store, withdraw 6,000 yen from the ATM, and proceed to eat it right there, in front of the super-hot visual-kei cashier dude. Maybe he’ll mistake me for a hardass, or else a wounded lunatic, and he’ll ask for my phone number, and we can have tea parties.

This, of course, is not even the tangent I meant to go on. No, it’s all just context for what I’m about to say:

Mario Kart Wii‘s box, in addition to being shiny, delicious, and somehow both white and colorful, in addition to being packed just firmly enough to squeeze with the tips of the fingers, setting off “I am holding a High-Quality Videogame Product, I must run home and eat a bowl of cereal AQAP” alarms within my obese human brain, also features a picture of Super Mario himself, and his brother Luigi, both holding Wii Wheels.

Why are they holding the Wii Wheel? Well, they’re playing Mario Kart Wii, of course.

An open-mouthed forensic analysis of this follows:

Mario and Luigi are holding the Wii Wheel on the front of the box for Mario Kart Wii.

They are floating on air, with feet kicking wildly and surprised expressions on their faces.

Their feet are, for the record, not in the position that people’s feet would need to be in to operate an automobile.

Beneath their bodies are shadows of what look to be formula-1 race cars.

The Wii Wheel is included in the box, as is a copy of Mario Kart Wii.

The photograph of the Wii Wheel in the background of the cover image is the actual size of the Wii Wheel in the box.

The DVD case containing the Mario Kart Wii software also features the picture of Mario and Luigi using the Wii Wheel.

The Wii Wheel in the background image of the instruction manual cover is a drawing, not a photograph.

It is also not actual size, for obvious reasons.

The Wii Wheel is not needed to play Mario Kart Wii.

The Seventh Circle of Hell is revealed on the game’s title screen, which features a (much-lower-resolution) instance of the aforementioned image.

(An inside-the-box observation: Amazon.co.jp’s official image of this game’s box is an actual photograph of the actual box, with an airbrushed shadow and all.)

(An outside-the-box observation: videogames are about us pretending to do things; in Mario Kart, we step into Mario’s virtual shoes as we hold a real-like steering wheel. Mario’s use of the wheel on this box can then only be seen as a mockery of us flesh-and-blood creations: if this game is about pretending to drive a car, then Mario is pretending to pretend to drive a car. Et cetera.)

Now, it is quite possible that Mario and Luigi are sitting on a sofa, though the sofa has been invisibled for presumably the same reasons that music comes even out of the trash cans at Disneyland. That’s not the point. The point is that here were are, adults, Horny As Hell in the 21st Century, possibly fornicating three or four times a week, possibly enjoying fornicating more than our forefathers did, and here’s Mario and Luigi, holding the same controller I’m holding, freaking out as they look in my direction. I’m about to press the A button and begin the enthralling user registration process, and they’re already having fun, albeit in freeze-frame. This is when the Nintendo “Revolution” concept reel showed off at Tokyo Game Show 2005 all comes rushing back to me: cheap horror-movie sounds, a young boy in a yellow T-shirt aiming the Wiimote with his right hand and twiddling an analog stick with his left hand while his girlfriend’s teeth chatter; some said that the “Revolution” was Nintendo giving a spiritual tax refund to those numb nincompoops who thought pulling the NES controller sharply upward might make Mario jump higher, and maybe those people were right; at the time, all that was certain was that Nintendo was now inside the game, looking out at us. We would be the stars in their new games, just as “You” would be TIME magazine’s “person of the year” in 2006. When the “Wii” was eventually named, and then quickly launched, the brilliant gateway for many non-players was the opportunity to craft a “Mii”, a videogame character that would essentially look like you — if you were a videogame character (with somewhat stuffty graphics).

Flash forward to 2008, an era some have dubbed “The Now”: here we have Established Videogame Characters, the Super Mario Brothers, aka Mario and Luigi, holding the game controller that real-life you and me are using to control said Established Videogame Characters in said Established Videogame Franchise. It’s easy to generalize, and raise up scarecrow debates, like how it’s bizarre that the box art (and title screen) portrays videogame characters doing something human beings can do on their own instead of portray them doing the fantastic, escapist things they can do in the ame, or ask hilarious questions like “What’s next, Little Sister using an Xbox 360 controller to control Big Daddy on the front of BioShock 2?”

More to the point: Part of Nintendo’s policy for Wii software was (and continues to be) that the advertisements always feature real-life human beings enjoying the games. Wii Play‘s box shows a real human hand clinging to a Wiimote, for example. With games like Smash Bros., with strong brand appeal and old-school controls, the advertising standards didn’t enter the equation. With Mario Kart Wii, Nintendo had themselves painted into a corner — on the one hand, we’ve got this orgasmically beloved characters, and on the other hand, we have a clever new way to engorge the players’ endorphins, to make them feel the car. That they went with advertising both at once is a no-brainer; that they made said image into their game’s title screen is the trumpet of a kind of third-world apocalypse. It bangs a gong in the brain: at Nintendo, something has changed.

Then you realize that, by playing Mario Kart Wii for enough hours, you can unlock the ability to use your Mii in a race.

The argument that ensues is awesome. You can figure it out yourself, because I have to throw up right now, for reasons completely not related to this article, or even videogames. It’ll be like a mad-lib. I’ll write the beginning:

“If and when they make a Wii2, with 720p graphics and a hard-drive, if and when they upgrade the Miis so their appendages don’t look as gimpy and/or so they can have more interesting clothes and a couple more face part options (multicolored hair, et cetera), there will still be a ‘Classic Mii’ option, for people who want the gimpy appendages or more limited selection of noses.”

And then the ending:

“And when, at last, Classic Mii Kart Wii 2 is released, you’ll be able to unlock Baby Mario.”

ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE GAME NOW

That was fun!

Now let’s talk about Mario Kart Wii. I’ll use the inverted pyramid method to summarize:

Mario Kart Wii for the Nintendo Wii, by Nintendo: you’ve played it already, or it’s definitely not your favorite game ever. I despise the weapons and everything they represent. The tracks are shining examples of good videogame level design — great videogame level design, even. We’re talking Original-Super Mario Bros.-worthy level design. Even the jerk-off parts in two tracks where you get fired out of a cannon and thus are not controlling the game for a whole three seconds are forgivable when, upon landing, you’re, like, going down a snowboard slope, with awesome speed-boosting half-pipes. The motorcycles are cool, with appropriately floaty drift mechanics, and the ability to do wheelies for extra speed boost. The graphics are colorful and sharp, with gritty textures that look actually cute, even confectionary-like; it’s like the Wii’s hamster-wheel graphics processor is finding a niche as some kind of sideways “new retro”. The character voices are hateful trash, a cacophony of homicidal crocodiles kacking down cotton candy, schizophrenic ostriches kacking down skittles, kleptomanic velociraptors kacking down broken glass; the music, for the most part, sounds like something a Brazilian community college professor would compose as a tool for conditioning the more gorillia-like breed of human &^#$# to masturbate to, thus sparing the lives and virginities of entire city blocks. Donkey Kong is great, and it’s sad that his voice sounds like Goofy drowning in Jell-O.

Now that that’s over with, I’m going to go back and expand on the second sentence of the above paragraph re: weapons.

I hate the weapons. Well, not all of them. The green shell and the banana peel can stay. And, of course, the speed-boost mushroom, which isn’t a “weapon”, anyway.

Anyway, most of the rest of the weapons are hateful. Let’s go ahead and make a list, in order from least to most hateful:

Red Shells: I guess these are kind of okay. They target the person in front of you — or right behind you — and they’re usually a sure hit, though they can be avoided.

Bob-omb: throw in any direction to cause a big explosion that can possibly catch many other drivers at once. I guess it’s decent because it takes a bit of skill to use, and it’s dangerous because you can get yourself caught up in the blast.

Thunder cloud: a thunder cloud appears above your car and hisses at you for a bit; wait too long and it’ll strike you with lightning and shrink you; tag another racer before the lightning comes out and the cloud will stick to his car, instead. Decent because it makes for a nice little game of hot potato and it carries a risk.

Super dash mushroom: a dash mushroom that can be used something like twenty times in rapid succession. Basically the game’s way of telling you that you suck, though you might stand a chance of getting better if only you win a couple of races and feel good about yourself.

Mega mushroom: turns your car twice the size and jacks the speed up to 200%. You can also crush any drivers you run over. Mostly fair because there’s a risk accompanying the reward (ie, your car is harder to control).

Invincibility Star: makes you invincible and about 200% faster. Kind of almost the same thing as the Mega Mushroom.

Bullet Bill: turns your car and driver into a Bullet Bill, which flies at about 1000% the speed of your car, flattening anything in its path and usually jumping you ahead ten or so places in the race; really easy to control. Kind of really stupidly unfair in a “Yay Button” sort of way.

POW Block: use this to cause an earthquake, flattening every car that’s touching the ground. Wouldn’t be quite so hateful if it was a tiny bit easier to avoid the quakes. I suppose you’re supposed to jump at some precise millisecond to avoid it, though I haven’t succeeded at it once. Always seems to impact just as you land on a tiny island before a ramp that will jump you to another tiny island, meaning that you fall into a pit and lose about twelve places in the race.

hecking Squid Thing: No, I’m not going to call it by its canonical name. Use this stupid thing to telepathically squirt ink on every driver in front of you, making it “harder” for them to “see”. If you get hit with this yourself, that means there’s going to be a big ugly black “ink” effect on the screen, obstructing your view. If you use this against computer racers, the “ink driving” AI algorithm kicks in, everyone starts bizarrely wobbling back and forth, and it’s horribly depressing: for a split-split second, your brain becomes unable to differentiate between the phrases “next time I get laid” and “the day I die”. Seriously, obstructing the view is not a good idea for a videogame. Have you ever heard about that blind kid who can beat anyone at Mortal Kombat? Yeah, that’s because Mortal Kombat isn’t a real videogame.

Lightning Bolt: awarded only to the most headgear-wearing-&^#$#ed of players, those who are in twelfth place and deserve to be there forever. When used, it shrinks every other kart on the course to half speed and half size, making them instantly crushable by the lightning-bolt-using driver. However, it does not change the fact that the driver who used it most likely sucks. It awards them only hope, for a few seconds, before restoring everything to normal and telling the jerk who used it to get to the back of the bus again. In short, it just causes immense annoyance to anyone who’s not losing to everyone.

The Fake Item Box: for heck’s sake, it doesn’t look anything like a real item box. For one thing, it’s red, and for another thing, the question mark is upside-down. According to the Japanese manual, “It looks exactly like a real item box.” That’s hecking false advertising, right there. I mean, I suppose that the average Japanese person doesn’t immediately reject an upside-down question mark, and — well, I realize that the average American can’t identify the North American continent on a map, though hell. It’s really, stupidly embarrassing, this thing. Anyone who hits one is either stupid enough to think it’s a real item box or just forced into a position where there’s no alternative, and in the latter case, they’re just going to think (if they’re like me, which I’m sure everyone is) of how ridiculous it is that these game designers might seriously think (or, even worse, be pretending to think) that people will mistake this thing for a real item box.

The Blue Shell: . . . well.

The Blue Shell is a sign of the times; it’s the first nail in the coffin of game design. Know that I come from a proud heritage of people who play Virtua Fighter 5 and genuinely enjoy losing because it teaches you something.

If you’re in a losing position and have been for a good amount of time, an algorithm behind the scenes kicks in and awards you a Blue Shell. Use it, and it rushes to the head of the pack and crashes into the person in first place with absolute certainty. Other drivers in the general area will also be decimated.

I’m sure that the general idea of the Blue Shell when it first appeared, in Super Mario Kart 64, was that a person in last place would obtain it, shudder with joy, and then be filled with the turgid urge to claw their way to the head of the pack and use it when within strategic range of the leaders.

In the current “videogame industry”, though, things like the Blue Shell are communistic concessions thrown to the people who Aren’t Getting Better. If my little brother, say, spent twenty hours a day doing something other than playing videogames — that is to say, if he sucked at videogames — the Blue Shell would be his “Best Thing Ever”: something to use when bitter and bored, to ruin the chances of the person who’s just so happening to win. The Blue Shell, simply described, is an easy way to strike back at the person who’s beating everyone, when you are the one losing to everyone. If that’s not heady, frothy communism in action, I really don’t know what the hell is. How is this a more family-friendly experience than killing hookers in Grand Theft Auto? If anything, the sugar-coating just makes the arsenic more dangerous, and it can’t be too hard to prove, from here, that Nintendo fanboys — big, sweaty, mouth-breathing — are actually individuals of scarier morals than most self-mutilating suicide-bombing terrorists.

Since the Nintendo Wii is the game console of the proletariat (“the game console of the proletariat” is the nice way to say “they should sell most of the games in the supermarket tabloid rack, next to ‘1,001 Baby Names for Girls (Now with more mixed-race names)'”), Nintendo has seen about sharpening the item randomization algorithms to razor edges. Everyone always has a chance to be in first place in Mario Kart Wii, which seems to make sense because I suppose it’s meant to be a “party” game for people with “friends”, though when you’re playing it dead alone, against a cold last-gen computer chip that’s only just barely powerful enough to keep a graphing calculator from meeting “six divided by three” with “ERROR”, and you’re about to cross the hecking finish line in first place and get hit by a POW Block, a Lightning Bolt, a Blue Shell, a Red Shell, and then the hecking Squid Thing — all it seems to do is present striking evidence that the world is full of pricks.

The theories seem stable enough: if we construct a few detailed Venn diagrams, we can prove that the person using the Blue Shell now might be the most technically skilled of players. He might just be having a run of stuffty luck because, of all the things we can mathematically prove about a race with more than two live (as in “not dead”) racers, someone must be losing at any given time, meaning that someone is getting these Almighty Items, and then using them, either out of bitterness or out of hope.

If you’ve got a pen and paper (or MSPaint), start making a flowchart of this: it is possible for a Good Player to be hecked back into last place, though Almighty Items only appear if one is in last place for a set period of time; a Good Player will most likely be able to advance a few places before being awarded an Almighty Item.

With a little bit of work I’m not 100% willing to do right now (got an erection again T-T), it can be quite easily proven that the only reason these items were originally conceived, in earlier installments of the series, was to make it possible for losers to become winners occasionally, and that in Mario Kart Wii, the items mainly exist to “liven up” the contest.

I have seen police officers who will accuse a man of being a homosexual for insisting that Mario Kart should just let the best man win. I’m well aware that I’m going to get at least a dozen half-sentence emails telling me that I obviously don’t like having fun. I’m fully prepared to ignore them. I stand by my assertion that maybe there’s a way to make an amazingly fun game with just a few weapons that require a small amount of skill to use.

In the name of research, I ironed my hair, donned designer eyeglasses, and gathered up a group of fourteen carrot-skinned, silver-lipped, corkscrew-beehive-headed Dolce-and-Gabbana-sunglasses-wearing Japanese part-time prostitutes and made them wait outside my apartment in single file while I forced each one in turn to play Mario Kart Wii for an hour. Twelve of them would ask me for money, six would report me to the police and press rape charges, and I think two of them actually didn’t have brains or eyes, though all of them managed to win first, second, or third place on cumulative points in the 50cc Mushroom Cup, despite them all whipping the wheel around over their heads and flailing like a lunatic, like they’d never even seen a guy driving a car in a movie.

In the end, there was me, trying to win the 150cc Special Cup, being hecked over countless times by jerk-off Lightning Bolts or Blue Shells and winding up in second place overall, maybe a dozen times in a row. It comes to feel almost like video poker, after a while — the computer obviously knows what you need in order to win, and though it’s illegal in a sense if it relies on anything more than raw math to determine what cards are dealt, when you do lose, you feel like stuff and you’re dead positive that god hates you.

It can be surmised even by an elementary school dropout that Mario Kart Wii is designed from the ground up to be “a game that people enjoy with their friends”. At what cost to our dignity, though? By “our” I don’t just mean “Hardcore video-gamers”, I mean “the human race”. There’s some Brave-New-World-style stuff peeking out from behind mama’s skirt, here: why would someone even care to get “better” if it’s possible to just keep relying on the jerk-ass weapons and occasionally getting a lucky break, just for being a jerk? With Virtua Fighter 5, it’s like, if you lose to a guy, it’s because he’s better than you. If you really like the game, you’ll keep playing whether you win or lose — with the idea being that you should want to win. Mario Kart Wii imagines a world where “it’s not whether you win or lose — it’s how you play the game” or “it’s all in good fun” or “they’re just jealous” are not just something gym teachers tell the fat kid the day he gets hazed to death in the showers; it imagines that world, and then it runs with it, straight for the gates of Hell, nose to the sky. That ain’t how it always is, jack. They wouldn’t call it a “game” if it was possible to not want to win. Someone up there needs to respect that. Rather than rely on its existing, sharp, utterly enjoyable core mechanics to encourage players to play more and get better, the game scoops out its right eye and offers it to the gods of $$$. And it sold 300,000 units on its launch day in Japan.

Mario Kart Wii unfolds as a game-design exercise with the personality of that sniveling rat bastard at every Japanese corporate party, the one who squints at a spreadsheet all day, doing no real work, and feels inadequate that he’s not bench-pressing intertwined naked lesbians on his lunch breaks, who decides in his dead samurai heart that he must go around, get in everyone’s face, take their drinks out of their hands, hold them just out of reach, chortle, guffaw, and make sure everyone is having Adequate Amounts of Fun. Some day he’ll blackmail a decently not-unattractive woman into marrying him, and when his child gets kicked in the balls at school because his dad is an asshole, he’ll tell his wife that it’s a tough world and people have to learn. Deep within the jumble of motives and execution-style hiccups called Mario Kart Wii is a mathematical proof for why you should never let the Boss speak a single suggestive word at a meeting requiring creativity: the Boss, if nothing else, exists only to ask the most hideously obvious, stupid questions at the latest time possible, and usually, if he doesn’t do this, the whole company will figuratively go down the drain. By the end of a brain-dead night of trophy collecting, of the coin-toss-like stiff odds, of the pachinko race dynamics, of the unbelievable, improbable luck that the same two racers keep finishing in the top three even though you and everyone else are bouncing all over the place, of shuddering that a gorilla named “Donkey” can share a winner’s circle with a fairy-tale princess and another instance of said fairy-tale princess as a baby, the world starts to feel the wrong color. Your mind wanders back to the Miis, to Mario holding the controller on the box, to the shadows of racecars, to the Lightning Bolt, to the Blue Shell: it’s like, all of a sudden, a publicist informs the YMCA that every “we regret to inform you that a toddler shat in our olympic-sized swimming pool” letter is bad enough for their reputation to the point that they’re probably legally better off just pumping their pools nationwide full of human feces and calling it a day: People who find the possibility of stuff in the water repulsive are a liability, whereas people who don’t mind swimming in steaming feces can be classified as, among many other things, “loyal customers”.





In short, Mario Kart Wii is a snappy little racing game with some bright happy graphics and some smashing great track design best enjoyed at your own pace in the time attack mode. It is also a sign of an three-quarters-decent-sized apocalypse, though hey, as long as everyone is having fun, that’s all that counts!

In closing, the back of the Japanese box says, and I quote (in translation):

“Battle it out in twelve-player races with rivals from all over the world! Your friends far away, or people from anywhere in the world!”

The semantics are intriguing, indicating dully to the reader that their friends are “far away”, and that anyone they haven’t ever met is a “people”, from “anywhere in the world”.

The applicable footnote reads:

“*You will need an internet connection.”

Welcome to the world, then. Hope you guys are enjoying the revolution.

text by Ario Barzan

★★☆☆

“A BEAUTIFUL BED-TIME STORY THAT€™S CONSTANTLY INTERRUPTED BY THE MONSTERS UNDER YOUR BED.”

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. This is a video game that managed to make me plunk down three days’ worth of hours, never to complete it, to speak of it as the most beautiful little monster. A great title that’s not great because it cheats itself out of true potential – accomplished by way of fetishistic and arid adherence to long-pointless craft, now cuddled by baroque swirls of Tradition – Dragon Quest VIII is presented as a young, budding musician in a shop who forsakes his talent and inherits his father’s business of shoe making. He’s forming the most wonderful compositions in his head – but, look, he’s in a shoe shop.



The story, here, is simple and straight, if sometimes embarrassing because of the (unusually good) voice acting that brings out the absurdity of situations (talking evil dogs with death vendettas). And, really, the voices are good, but I and the game could do without them. You are cast into the boots of Silent Hero Nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine, and your journey started before you started the game. Some time ago, a magician put a spell on the castle you guarded, turning most everyone into plants. Mysteriously, you weren’t affected. Now, you are stopping by a town for information, and your companions are a princess horse, a gremlin king, and a squat ruffian.

Your first battle is with three blue, bouncing, happy-faced dollops called Slimes, seemingly the series’ mascot, who leap out from the grass at your camp site. The screen’s colors smudge, then refocus. A first-person view shows the enemies with text saying “A slime appears!” three times. You select “Attack” from a menu displaying battle options, and you or the ruffian named Yangus will lash out with sword or club. You exchange blows with the Slimes until they are dead. It’s quick, mindless. The slimes are cute. Were this a one-time, referential throwback, I’d be slinging an arm around Dragon Quest VIII‘s back and telling it, “Listen – let’s hit the town, tonight. Drinks are on me.” But, no. Japanese RPGs come and go, faceless drones pumped out of the unloving corporate womb, and it’s a shame that here is Dragon Quest VIII, containing more character than damn near everything, and it’s a tragedy of design.

For forcing me into a three-to-five-or-more-minute situation every fifteen seconds, the game doesn’t do a very good job in validation. It’s not even that I have a big problem with the turn-based mold. Super Mario RPG was excellence. This realizes its format and hands in a circle with two dots and an upward crescent as a portrait for its figure drawing class. Simplicity is fine, provided there’s a constant verve. Dragon Quest VIII‘s mechanics are grayed by a tired prosaicism: there are no tweaks that produce even mildly involving combat.

The timing of button presses in Super Mario RPG let you better your attacks or reduce the potency of enemies’, and that simple element slipped such a deceptively thin layer into the fighting, leading to great results, like taking out bosses in a single usage of the Super Jump because you were awesome enough. Dragon Quest VIII‘s “timing,” then, is the Tension feature. Select “Psyche Up” and watch your avatar attempt to ease their constipation and incrementally increase their strength. This simply makes them into a pacifist; if you want your hit to be powerful enough to matter, you’ve go to keep selecting “Psyche Up” with each turn and refrain from all other actions until you’ve become a pseudo-Super Saiyan. Sometimes you won’t even fully power up. I guess that’s the game’s idea of a cute technical quirk. It’s cardboard-flavored, and relies on arbitrary oppositional behavior for proper execution (i.e. oh god I hope this boss doesn’t kill me before I can get a hit in at MAXIMUM POWER).

None of the fighting you do – and you do a hell of a lot of fighting – seems to matter, because you aren’t doing any fighting. Every attack is an animated substitute backed up by statistics, numbed by a wash of NES RPGs’ graph-paper-white and the disconnect from player input. It’s your numbers crunching against others’, and the so-called skill required for progress translates to the path of time consumption and “paper beats rock.” It doesn’t help that equipment is sold at merciless prices. The blur of the screen and the swell of the battle music sends a sickness through the gut similar to the feeling upon looking at the clock and knowing your shift at a hateful job is about to begin. The fighting isn’t something to be enjoyed within itself; it’s an aspect to get over with as soon as possible, which is sort of morbidly hilarious, considering how dragging the fights really are. There are awkwardly long pauses for loading and “charming” padding that drags. If Yangus hits an enemy and paralyzes them, the screen will say “X is paralyzed!” below, and represent this with zig-zagging lines around the monster. Then, the camera will zoom in on the monster and repeat the line, “X is paralyzed!” These annoyances build up to form speed bumps. Even saving is a bunch of drawn-out nonsense.

It’s a weird twist that part of Dragon Quest VIII‘s undoing is its own sincerity regarding its format. Seams are touted as time-honored triumphs (Look! I’m like what you played when you were little!). I surprise myself when I say the thing could be better off with a slice of dishonesty. Or, preferably, guts. I mean, okay – random fights. Why don’t we give them reasons for happening, rather than warping us to scuffles with three dragons when there were not three dragons in front of us on a huge field four-seconds ago? Logic, people. As part of any game becomes literalized, the remaining abstractions clash more furiously. The cohesiveness, pacing of Dragon Quest VIII‘s world cracks when naturalness is split up with antiques. Chrono Trigger did it right, and maybe if we’d stop being so afraid of it, maybe if we were willing to digest its ideas and stop treating it as that game – maybe we’d be somewhere.

So what else is left? Everything you do outside of the killing, and that, ladies and sirs, is the running, which is some of the most gorgeously divine running next to Shadow of the Colossus. It’s so good, hell, you might want to walk. I don’t care what you think about Akira Toriyama, his imprisoned character style be damned, because Dragon Quest VIII is luscious to gaze upon. When it’s on the television screen, I am playing 3D for the first time, as it were, using the camera like a madman to sop up blue, blue skies and bending trees on green, rolling hills. Heaven help those who’re insufferable maintainers of the same Mature Gamer pride that kept them from appreciating the joy of Wind Waker‘s style (God knows what would happen if they weren’t found chewing beef jerky, guffawing at a Chuck Norris joke, and sniping someone’s head via Sam Fisher). You could live in Dragon Quest VIII‘s buildings, warmed by fireplaces and thick colors, supported by velvety beams of wood and brickwork you want to touch. It’s disgustingly rich. Yes, I invested close to seventy hours on my file, and it was all for the running and the clean shorelines and the freshness of a pale sunrise.

Koichi Sugiyama, close to being in his eighties, and a gear in the series’ distinct trio (the other two being Toriyama and Yuji Horii), really got me to buy Dragon Quest VIII. The man is Bernstein, Debussy, Hubert Parry – a wealth of composers rolled into one distinct mind. He’s another Hitoshi Sakimoto, writing compositions not bound by the usual play-required context of game music. As far as I’m concerned, Sugiyama still hasn’t gotten past the peak of Dragon Quest V, a commonality in the field (Uematsu has his Final Fantasy 6, etc.), but it’s difficult to get disappointed with how consistent he is. This consistency, admittedly, has made some of his output feel a bit recurrent. Dragon Quest VIII‘s non-Japan release has (usually) orchestrated music, a decision I can appreciate, not being the world’s most rabid fan of MIDI. The soundtrack is sweet, clear, waiting to be explored, though it could use some restraint at points, or extra spice. The overworld theme gets too loud and too loopy after a while. On the other hand, the music for sailing is the greatest sailing music in the world, anything and everything it should be.





There is a part in Dragon Quest VIII where you’ve exited a town near the sea. The town is renowned for its sculptors. Beyond it, the climate has changed. Trees’ leaves and the grass are coated in autumn tones, a result of the Northern location and its nearby snowy lands. Between you and your ulterior motive is a Pisa-like building called Rydon’s Tower. Rydon, a man obsessed with height in his architecture, is supposedly still in the tower, still building up to the sky, still trying to outdo himself. Each slice of a floor is supported by columns, and their spacing exposes the blue enamel of the sky and brown, limber trees. The wind and Sugiyama’s in-game masterpiece quietly mingle. It’s a dream. As a professor is more critical of the slacker genius than the brain-dead slob, I pick on Dragon Quest VIII. While the coating is generally matured, sparkling, the mechanics remain rooted in the diaper they shat in two decades ago. An invocation of nostalgia is used as a crutch for entertainment, and the battle design isn’t “daringly antique” or “classically refreshing” – it’s stagnantly unaltered and impotent. People fear change above all else: this fear squashed and wrinkled Dragon Quest IX‘s intention to put us in the action. I hope Square-Enix has the balls to give the series’ pants a kick in the future. Dragon Quest VIII is a frustrating mixture: both sub-mediocre and soaring above the crowd. For that, I recommend it and say, “Stay the hell away.”

text by tim rogers

★★★★

I hope you guys had fun reading this website, because I’m probably not going to bother writing on it anymore!



The reason would be Treasure’s Bangai-O Spirits, a game so perfect and so deep that when it comes right down to the wire, I’d probably rather be sealed in a sensory deprivation tank playing it against my best friend for millenia than working, vacationing in the Bahamas, or even having pseudo-violent sex. That’s the sign of a good game, right there — if you’d willingly give up an opportunity to let a girl live out her fantasy to rape a man just so that you could deflect projectiles for a couple more hours. I get this feeling, playing this game — if I keep deflecting projectiles, eventually I’ll be so good at deflecting projectiles that I won’t even need to close my eyes or tense my knees to ejaculate. I will simply be. I will flow.

Maybe that’s not enough for the videogame company PR dudes who troll this website (hi dad!), so let’s put it into more back-of-boxy language:

Bangai-oh Spirits is “Brain Training” for God. He spake unto the earth: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the First and the Last, the Street Fighter II and the Street Fighter III, the Sin and Punishment and the Ikaruga, the carbon dioxide and the oxygen, the Bangai-oh Spirits for the Nintendo DS.”

This isn’t just the best game Treasure has ever made — hell, it isn’t even just the best game they can make, it’s a 210-gun salute to the head of the pathology they’ve waved proudly for the last decade and a half of their illustrious careers designing quirky little games that only morbidly obese people like myself seem capable of enjoying. It’s them dropping all their cards — five aces, including the elusive Golden Ace of Knives — on the table and putting a pistol in their mouth and saying heck you, I will pull this trigger, I swear I will.

This is hardly hyperbole.

Bangai-O Spirits is a puzzle game, a shooting game, a fighting game, an MMORPG. It is Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter III at the same time. In this age of Everyday Shooter and dozens of other one-man games that let you use two analog sticks to move and shoot at the same time, Treasure steps in with an update to their own Robotron riff, and they manage to outclass literally everyone, even without the multidirectional shooting gimmick.

What’s so good about the game? It’s kind of hard to put it in a few words, so we’ll have to break with tradition and actually discuss the way the game plays — not yet, though, don’t worry. I know, you wish I’d just keep talking about my penis for the duration of the review, though hey, sometimes we humans have to endure boring stuff.

The tutorial in Bangai-O Spirits is pretty boring. However, unlike an actual school, the long-winded tutorial in Bangai-O Spirits teaches you how to be objectively awesome. Each tutorial stage opens with a dialogue between three characters — a commander with an eyepatch, a young girl with large breasts, and a too-cool youth in a hip military uniform. In addition to teaching you how to use weapons, the commander also manages to enrage the cool youth: as the tutorials get more complicated and wordy, toward the end, the kid literally says that he didn’t realize he signed up for “an actual robot anime” — he just thought the robot and the anime characters on the box were there to draw in anime fans. The professor then gets defensive, insinuating that the end of Evangelion was “the best part”. Not making this up! When you beat the tutorial, the commander says, “We’ve defeated the Tutorial Army!” And the kid says, “That was fast. If we sell this game back now, do you think we can get at least 3,500 yen for it?”

Bangai-O Spirits: It burns!

The professor — and the girl — are quick to point out that the game has over 160 stages in the “Free play” mode, and that you can edit your own stages and play multiplayer, if you want. The kid shrugs this off, says that “stage-editing is for losers”.

And just like that — you’ll never see those three anime stereotypes again.

This is refreshing, when you consider that Treasure games have always had problems expressing story and character. Dynamite Headdy, their attempt to break into the mainstream with a “mascot” character, was a huge jumbled cluster of near-impossible challenges; it requires some degree of arcane voodoo magic to even get past the tutorial in that game, and it requires nerves of steel to like any of the bizarre characters. The music is Chinese water-torture. (The game itself is pretty alright.)

Treasure has gone through the weirdest phases of wanting to be popular and not giving a heck. Gunstar Heroes was an attempt to capitalize on a perceived opening in the action game market for people who didn’t like the look of Contra. It was apparently conceived as a kind of Sonic the Hedgehog with guns and fighting-game inspired close-quarters combat. Gunstar Heroes thrives whenever it’s not trying to tell a story, or be otherwise interesting. Each stage plays differently from the last, with a short shoot-em-up runup to the gimmick segments or boss parade: the Dice Palace stage, cited as the “best stage ever!” by game “journalists” with maybe a quarter-piece of their cranium missing, is all at once Treasure’s fragmentary genius and infuriating shortcomings rolled into one. It’s a line of pleasant little challenges — one-offs involving their pristine game engine — interrupted by an absolutely lazy hub where you roll a dice to move through a “board game” that’s just a straight line.

Gunstar Heroes begins to shine in stage five, which is titled “DESTROY THEM ALL” — contrary to what the lobotomites writing top-hundred lists will tell you, “DESTROY THEM ALL” is the “best stage ever”: all semblance of “level design” falls away, in the best way possible, and it’s just you, an entire enemy army, and occasional platforms. Flying enemies drop bombs, you jump up, grab them out of the air, and chuck them at towering robot walkers. Grunts run full-steam at you, and if you see an opening, you grab one and use him as a projectile, too. You do this over and over again for ten minutes, and the word “ENJOY” never vanishes from the stock-market ticker running across the bottom of your brain.

Why can’t Gunstar Heroes just be six straight hours of this? Why can’t it just never end? Let the computer just keep crunching the numbers and stuffting out bad guys — the more I kill, the more the computer stuffs. Zen Masters will tell you that there has to be balance, that without low points, high points wouldn’t feel as special, shadow lends context to light, et cetera, though really, Pac-Man Championship Edition is non-stop fun, and anyone who complains because there aren’t any NPCs to talk to is probably also a chimpanzee.

At any rate, Gunstar Heroes was something of a failure in Japan because

1. Most people on earth literally can’t read
2. It was on the MegaDrive, which was essentially the Xbox of its day.

Back then, people who owned MegaDrives in Japan were called “MegaDrivers”, just as the first wave of Xbox players called themselves “Xboxers”. Dynamite Headdy was Treasure’s idea of appealing to a broader audience — at least, in theory — and when the three-year-olds of the world found out that the instruction manual contained more words than “Happy” and “Fun”, it all went south.

Thus spake Alien Soldier, a schizophrenic, shattered velvet bag of demonic battle fragments. The full title of Alien Solider is, and I quote, “VISUAL SHOCK! SOUND SHOCK! NOW IS THE TIME TO THE 68000 HEART ON FIRE ALIEN SOLDER FOR MEGADRIVERS CUSTOM“. In other words, they’re weren’t lying to themselves — or anyone, really. Alien Soldier‘s title screen contains perhaps the longest story crawl of the 16-bit era, and no amount of resetting the console will make it any less ridiculous. Watching the superplays embedded on the Sega Ages compilation disc are like attending a waterski wedding on the surface of the sun. The game’s arcane mechanics are a Treasure staple: encouraging the player to play in the most ridiculous, unattractive way possible. To wit: the strongest attack at your disposal isn’t the flaming, screen-spanning dash that you can only perform with full health (and even then, only once) — it’s the pixels-wide flames that erupt from your character’s back as he’s doing said dash. Playing the game to completion is equal to breaking it — finding the pixels that work, freezing there, and TKO’ing every opponent in the first instant of the fight.

Eventually, Treasure tried to make money, and mostly failed, because they thought a game needed a “story” to be a phenomenal hit, and the story in the relatively high-budget Sin and Punishment was so loopy and bizarre that you can’t overlook it; to say it was written on acid or after smoking much reefer is a criminal overstatment. It’s more like something written in one day by a man with really bad indigestion cascading into diarrhea. For its mechanics, it’s easily one of the best games of all-time, and though the cut-scenes are fiercely skippable, the very fact that it has a story (and that its music sounds like pornography for librarians) keeps it out of the specialest place in my heart. It also — and this is pure conjecture — kept the game from being released outside Japan, even though it was written entirely in English and intended primarily for US release.

All throughout the years, as Treasure floundered with the weirdest cartoon licenses (Tiny Toon Adventures, for god’s sake), I wished they’d just make a full-on fighting game with Gunstar Heroes mechanics. They kind of almost did that with Yuyu Hakusho for MegaDrive, and later Guardian Heroes for Saturn — and most recently two Bleach-based fighting games on the Nintendo DS — though the games always felt too focused on “personality” and “selling points”. And they never set the world on fire.

Treasure’s Ikaruga, which resulted seemingly from a sudden desire to make the cleanest, simplest shooting game of all time as a kind of counterpoint to their Radiant Silvergun, the clusterheckiest shooter ever conceived, ironically, was perhaps their most internationally acclaimed game; maybe this has had something to do with Treasure’s recent game design roll-backs.

Bangai-Oh! for Dreamcast and the Nintendo 64, has always been my favorite Treasure game, not so much for its “hilarious quirky dialogue” as for its crunchy shooting action. There’s very little fat in the game, and it’s quite an accomplishment that Bangai-O Spirits is even leaner.

ACTUALLY DISCUSSING THE GAME NOW

I’m not even going to bother discussing how this game differs from Bangai-Oh, because it doesn’t matter: Bangai-Oh hardly exists anymore. Instead, I’m going to try to explain to you why you should buy this game, and not something like, I don’t know, Super Smash Bros..

In Bangai-O Spirits, you control a giant robot — which happens to be only the size of one “block” of the playing field. I believe this was the core concept of the original game — control a cursor-sized player character that looks like a giant robot.

Your goal in this game is to destroy various targets in stages. A rough map of the stage, with the required targets highlighted, takes up the top screen. You move around on the lower screen.

You have five general kinds of attacks. Before each mission, you’re free to select which weapons you want to use.

Press the Y button to use one basic weapon, and the B button to use another one.

Press the A button to dash in the direction you’re facing. Press any direction while dashing to change direction.

Press the L button or the R button to use one of two “EX Attacks”. Hold the button to charge the EX attack, and release to unleash it. The more enemy bullets in your general area when you release the trigger, the fiercer the attack you’ll unleash. If you let go of the button just as a bullet is hitting you, the missiles emanating from your body will even increase in size.

There are seven types of basic weapons. None of them are “better” than any other. Each has a definite strength and a definite weakness. All bullets are capable of canceling out other bullets, meaning that “the best defense is a good offense” and “the best offense is a good defense” are more than just something karate teachers tell kids.

I will explain the weapon classes briefly:

1. Bound laser: Laser-like missiles that reflect off walls at 45-degree angles. Pros: Can be used to access unsuspecting enemies in tight spots. Cons: Very average strength.

2. Homing missiles: Missiles that chase enemies. Pros: will hunt enemies down for several seconds; no need to even aim, most of the time. Cons: Even weaker than the bound shot; sub-par mid-air turning radius.

3. Break shot: Special shots capable of canceling two enemy bullets instead of one. Pros: can be used to cut through an enemy’s bullet curtain. Cons: even weaker than homing shot.

4. Napalm shot: Super-powerful shot. Pros: relatively twice the power of a bound shot. Cons: very easily canceled — normal bound / homing shots can eat through two napalm shots before being canceled themselves; break shots can eat four napalm shots.

5. Sword: It’s a sword. Pros: ultra-powerful, ultra fast. Cons: ultra-short-range. Hard to move forward and close in while attacking.

6. Shield: It’s a shield. Position it by tapping a direction and pressing the attack button. Pros: eats any and all bullets endlessly. Stays in the direction where you put it. “Movable cover”, essentially. Doesn’t fade even when you fire your other weapon. Cons: kind of hard to get used to! (Though in a Treasure game, “Kind of hard to get used to” is often used to describe The One Thing The Game Designer Wants You To Do All The Time.)

7. Bat: A giant baseball bat. Pros: can deflect any projectiles back at the enemy. Can deflect dozens of projectiles at a time, even. Can even turn enemies into projectiles. Can also be used to hit physics objects (conveniently shaped like soccer balls, baseballs, basketballs). Cons: Kind of slow. Not much attack power on its own.

Some of these weapons can even be combined in Radiant Silvergun style — homing and bound, for example — by pressing both buttons at once.

Your default attack mode is “free” — you can move while shooting — and your robot can fly all around the stage, with delicious crispy coasting physics. However, should you tap an attack button twice and then hold it the second time, your character will enter “fixed” mode, and you’ll stop anywhere (even in mid-air) and be free to aim in any direction. Useful in so many ways.

Now I’ll explain the EX attacks. Man, I’m like IGN over here:

1. Homing: Fires a multitude of homing shots. Good for: wide-open spaces with lots of enemies.

2. Bound: Fires a multitude of bound shots. Good for: twisty tunnels and lots of projectiles.

3. Break: Fires a multitude of break shots. Good for: lots of bullets, feeling tricky.

4. Napalm: Fires a multitude of napalm shots. Good for: feeling lucky.

5. Freeze: Freezes enemy bullets in the air. The “Treasure Factor”. Good for: super-playing and “puzzle”-solving. The longer you hold the button, the longer the bullets freeze.

6. Reflect: Works like a bat, except in all directions all at once. Good for: people who know what the hell they’re doing.

All EX attacks (except Freeze) can be “focused” in a direction of your choosing. In the previous Bangai-Oh game, you could only blast the bullets in a circle around your character’s body. In Spirits, you can press a directional button in one of eight ways while charging your attack, and then release the button to unleash the attack in only that direction.

And that’s it. That’s the game’s engine. The instruction manual doesn’t even describe the weapons — it just tells you to play the tutorial and find out for yourself. It knows that if you’re holding that instruction manual, you’re a Treasure-gaming freak who doesn’t read manuals anyway.

The tutorial contains the game’s only instances of “Story”. Its little lessons cascade into something huge, and the last stage is a frustrating, amazing, idiotic feat of level design with an infuriating execution and an exhilirating climax. Once you get past it, you’re free — as you’ve always been — to play the “Free Play” mode, which has, yes, well over a hundred and four tens of stages. You can play the stages in any order. You don’t even have to clear one stage to move on to the next. The interface is DOS-like in its cleanliness. Press the right directional button to advance forward one stage. If you’ve cleared the stage, your best time and top score will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. If you want to play a stage, press the A button. Now you have the DOS-like weapon-select screen. Choose your arsenal and play the stage. If you die, sucks to be you. Choose “exit” to go back to the stage-select menu. Try different weapons.

Many stages are beatable with any weapon selection; few absolutely require use of the bat to obtain the “easy” solutions. Many stages feature hang-ups that force you to open the menu and restart. Some stages feature extended side-scrolls climaxing in epic one-on-five battles with steel-trap-minded opponents of equal abilities. Some stages are massive labyrinths with multiple targets and pursuing grunts. Some stages are vertical scrolls that force you to avoid cascading unbreakable blocks while breaking the correct breakable blocks in order to reach the target. Other stages begin with the player surrounded at point-blank range by four giant honkin’ beam cannons; the 3-2-1 countdown to the start of the stage is basically a countdown to the trigger being pulled. You have literally half of one second to figure out how to win.

All of the praises heaped on Wario Ware instead belong to this game; the yokels of the world jump on Wario for featuring Nintendo Characters, who are virtually like game journalists’ “childhood friends”, only better, because they actually exist. Wario Ware has “amazing” stages that begin with a screen of The Legend of Zelda — there’s Link, and there’s a cave in a wall. When the game starts, you have five seconds to get into the cave. Get in, and the game pats you on the head and moves to another challenge. Sure, there are some nice things to say for the vision of Wario Ware, though at the end of the day, it doesn’t make the player feel spiritually complete, much less any smarter: there’s something to be said for the game’s glee in forcing the player to sharpen his mind to a point where he can acknowledge in a microsecond what he’s supposed to do, though the game ultimately fails in the eyes of god (and me) for never telling the player why. Bangai-O Spirits is about a son-of-a-bitching giant robot with fantastic weapons; your character is a soldier fighting the bad guys. You have to survive so that you can fight again. The only way to survive is to DESTROY THEM ALL.

Sometimes it’s a puzzle game, sometimes it’s a platformer. Sometimes it’s a hardcore bullet-hell shooter. Sometimes it’s a fighting game meant to be played by robots with laser-eyes. It is Every Genre. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter what it is, because it’s Bangai-O. It’s mind-expanding. It’s a diamond-sharp core engine joyfully level-designed gang-bang-style by a team of dudes who have been putting the “crunch” in “scrunch” for over a decade now. On the one hand, they don’t give a stuff what order you play the levels in. On the other hand, they need you to play this game every day for the rest of your life. For this purpose, they have created a level-edit mode.

The level-edit mode is more than just level-design — it’s a shockingly deep elementary course in game design. I described the weapons above, right? If you have any imagination at all, your mind should be teeming with possibilities. Make a puzzle stage, make a rock-hard traditional-style platform stage. If you’ve got a crush on the “Reflect” EX attack, make a stage that puts a new spin on it. The game is saintly in its generosity. Like I said above, Treasure aren’t just shooting themselves in the foot with this game — they’re shooting themselves in the throat. If you be a man who loves hardcore action games, you don’t need anything else.

The platinum icing on this golden cake, however, is the multiplayer mode. I spent six minutes throwing together a long rectangular stage with soccer balls and two evil enemy Bangai-O clones in it, and then played a deathmatch with a friend. We used bats and EX reflect, and just had a screaming orgy, squealing like distorted schoolchildren for literally 25 rounds in a row. Remember when you were ten, and you played River City Ransom with your buddy, and you stood on a garbage can and your buddy kicked the garbage can, which made you slide toward the edge of the screen, so you jumped and kicked a guy in the head? Then, years later, remember when you first played Halo co-op, and your friend got in the driver’s seat of the Warthog and you got on the turret, and you guys drove around hecking stuff up? Well, even in this day and age where four friends can get on Xbox Live and play Halo 3 transcontinentally, with one guy driving the warthog, another guy manning the turret, a third in the passenger’s seat firing a sniper rifle, and a fourth on a Ghost flying around shooting lasers — Bangai-O Spirits manages to provide gaggingly huge thrills with tiny sprites and solid-color backgrounds. It’ll make you remember Halo, and then remember River City Ransom, and then remember Bangai-O Spirits — the game you are playing right now. At the low points, it’s like playing the best game ever; at the high points, what is on the screen in your hands is pretty much the same thing that huge-headed aliens see when they mind-heck each other for sleepless, foodless dozens of hours on end.





What might go down as the game’s biggest “mainstream” innovation is its ability to transmit data via audio files. It says on the back of the box: “For the first time in history, custom map and reload data can be transmitted as sound files.” That’s kind of neat. Here I’d thought, for the longest time, that Treasure despised the aural sense (what with the brapping scrapping scraping nonsense-bullstuff music and limp sound effects that tend to populate their games, this one kind-of included). It’s nice to see them acknowledging that human beings have ears, I suppose. To load map data, you put it on an iPod and then just hold a headphone over the DS microphone. Sounds wacky, I know. The first time it actually worked, it kind of scared me a little bit. I wouldn’t stuff my pants with amazement if this cute little feature, above all else, is what makes Treasure world-famous after all. Failing that — well, listen to a stage for yourself. Game or no game, I know some people who would pay good money to stand in a dark room and listen to grown men in Darth Vader suits make sounds like this for two hours and call it “music”. Hell, one of those people is me.

At present, the Amazon.co.jp score for this game is three and a half out of five stars. The first review on the page describes the game as fun and nifty and all, though the tutorial is perhaps too confusing for beginners, so he has to give the game two stars. Boo-hoo. Another reviewer says, and I quote, “I wish they would have just ported the N64 version.” As a person who has played and loved the N64 and Dreamcast versions both, I say that this game is easily the better version. Not only that, you might as well not even compare it to the originals. It is its own game. And besides, everyone knows that the guys who write reviews of games on Amazon.co.jp are coke-bottle-glasses-wearing greasy-haired horse-teethed freakazoids who wear dirty pale-green electrician’s uniforms all day, every day, even though they don’t have a job.

I really don’t know what else to say to recommend this game to you. Don’t think about it in relation to any other games. Consider this game, for all intents and purposes, the only game in existence. If you read the description of weapons and it sounded purely awesome, if you’ve played every Kenta Cho game and often tell people “Yeah, this stuff is better than that Xbox stuff”, if you bought an Xbox 360 because Jeff Minter designed the music visualizer, if you know why Panzer Dragoon Zwei is exponentially better than Rez, if you possess enough cold hard evidence of the heart to prove in front of a jury that Cave Story murdered Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, then even if you be a female, you are my brother, and we will join for great justice and we will love this game until and even after the end times come, until and even after we lose our corporeal bodies due to the explosion of the sun or nuclear war. We will live on, in spirit — in Bangai-O spirit.

This game is a joyful disease. Pass it on.

In other words:

Absolute highest recommendation.

–tim rogers

addendum: I just revisited the instruction manual and read the profiles of the three “characters” in the “story” mode. It says of Ruri, the girl, that it “seems as though she’s not in love with Masato”. It says of Masato, the boy, that it “seems as though he’s not Ruri’s brother”. Yeah, that’s not just game-of-the-year-worthy story exposition — that’s the Best thing ever, right there.

addendum the second: To clarify, the multiplayer mode doesn’t allow the two players to kill one another. Yes, it’s tragic, because this game would essentially destroy Senko no Ronde in that case, and, in all ways imaginable, become the Greatest Game Ever. The multiplayer mode is, instead, about shooting bad guys together, competing for points on a stage-for-stage basis. If you set up a custom stage so that there are a bunch of evil Bangai-O clones, working together is pretty fun! Like, really pretty fun. Amazingly fun, sometimes, especially if you set up a stage that, scientifically, just isn’t possible to win, and then proceed to lose fifty times in a row, until you suddenly win ten times in a row. Balancing a VS mode for something like this would have been code-murder. It would have been like making a whole separate game, which I’m sure Treasure didn’t have time for.

text by tim rogers

★★☆☆

“THE BEST BOWEL-MOVEMENT SIMULATOR YET.”

So this is it. This is the big Nintendo Wii game. What’s even coming out for the Nintendo Wii after this? A quick visit to Nintendo.co.jp (which we’ll use because on Nintendo.com it’s impossible for anyone who’s not a robot-scientist to tell the difference between an in-site link and a McDonald’s advertisement) shows us that, of the 19 games on the “upcoming” list, 18 of them have already been released, the only one that hasn’t been already released is just a refitting of Common Sense Training for the Nintendo DS (now with the words “For Everyone” and “In Front of Your TV” shoehorned into the title to admirably allow maximum accessibility and minimum shame for the people the game seeks to fix), one of them is that terrifying Donkey Kong Jet Race game where you have to shake the controller and the nunchuk belligerently just to move, precisely three of them are games that haven’t precisely existed in another form on another platform (and one of those three is packed in when you buy a spare controller), and five of them feature Super Mario as a playable character. We’ve got Mario flying through space, Mario foot-racing against Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario playing soccer (not too much of a stretch given that some (many (most)) European soccer players have even uglier facial hair), Mario as a sheet of paper in a fairyland world where you have to open a god damned menu to “equip” the ability to jump (exagerration (critics loved it, anyway, citing the brilliance of the insipid gameplay mechanic wherein you press a button to rotate the screen into THREE-DEE MODE every time you arrive at an obstacle or puzzle whose solution isn’t immediately, painfully obvious)). It goes without saying that, of all these games in which Mario dons different hats while still donning his signature hat (I am a wordplay master) , the one most looked-forward-to by game-lovers the world over is the one in which Mario is permitted, both by the rules of the game and by simple operation of a game controller, to punch his younger brother (named “Luigi”) in the face. This is also something you can do in real life, unless you don’t have a younger brother (in the interest of the Nintendo fans in the audience, reading this review because this game stars Link from the Zelda series, I’ll explain that the reasons you might not have a younger brother are: you have only older brothers, older sisters, younger sisters, some combination of those three, you are an only child, or your younger brother has died, either by walking in front of a bus or jerking off too much, et cetera), though if, like me, your younger brother’s part time job involves accidentally keeping stampeding antelopes out of Wal-Mart at two in the morning, there’s a danger of your fist being consumed like by acid (or literally by teeth).



The only game on the list of Wii games on the Nintendo.co.jp website that I can actually applaud is Wii Fit, which doesn’t make sense because I like Wii Fit in concept alone; the execution is half-baked, and when you get down to brass tacks, it’s really hardly as much fun as “Billy’s Boot Camp”, which at least features appearances by gyrating, punching, kicking, furiously toned, tight, white-hot black women.

At any rate, here’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the biggest little dollop of gruel yet slopped on the lunch tray of gamerkind. The Japanese title is “Smash Brothers X“, which sounds so much cleaner. “Clean” is the biggest compliment-word this game should ever be awarded, and I don’t precisely mean that as an insult: it is undistilled, pure, gelatinous videogame essence, sat on a table to wobble until eternity. It’s the third game in a series that, in the interest of politeness, we’ll say “has two other games”. Both of those games were popular; this game (sequel #2) takes the “more of the same” model plopped out by the last game (sequel #1) to a new extreme, stuffing it full of more playable characters, more collectible items, more gameplay modes, and more Kingdom Hearts-influenced scenario (which in the previous games was set at zero).

Nintendo masterminded a breathtaking PR plan: literally, they managed to halt the mouth-breaths of mouth-breathing near-thirtysomethings the world over at least once a week in the half-year-long run up to the game’s release, all by regularly updating a simple, clean website. Some players — old enough to have fathered children and not noticed — kept steely resolve, vowing to avoid spoilers and not look at the website until after the game was released.

That is to say, it’s Memorial Day, we’re going to go see Mel Gibson in “The Patriot”, wherein any of the main characters could die at any time, and Nintendo has managed to get all of the kids into the minivan with just one no-popcorn warning.

In the end, what’s there to spoil? I’m sure someone could send me a long, psychotic email peppered with subtle allusions to child abuse, and by the end of that email, I’d know one person’s opinion, though I sure as hell wouldn’t understand it. What we have here is a videogame with a time- and sales-proven conceptual play hook, populated by characters that the player has already seen, or else he just plain isn’t interested. If the player has already seen all the characters, what’s to spoil? Well, for one thing, the way these characters, from classic 2D games, are represented in brilliant 3D, and the reason they appear in the “story”.

The “story” mode begins with Mario fighting Kirby in a giant arena that’s floating in space. The player chooses to play as either Mario or Kirby. If you choose Mario, when you win, you’ll see a cut-scene in which Mario punches Kirby so hard he turns into . . . an action figure of Kirby. Mario then walks up and touches the Kirby action figure, which turns back into Kirby. Mario pats Kirby on the back, and the two salute the wildly cheering crowds.

Then sinister stuff starts happening. A giant airship (owned by MetaKnight from the Kirby series, of course) shows up, et cetera et cetera, eventually we’ve got a running adventure in which Nintendo characters interact with one another with no dialogue (spoken or text), fighting for the vaguely defined “good guys” against hordes of “bad guys”; whenever a bad guy (Wario, Bowser, Ganondorf) shows up in a cut-scene, they’re equipped with a big sci-fi gun which, when fired, turns any Nintendo character into an action figure. Someone is trying to collect all of the Nintendo action figures! Who the flaming heck is it? If you want to know the answer, turn to the last page, and then buy the game.

Three, four, five, six times in the game, there’s a scene where a Big Bad Guy fires a gun at a Helpless Nintendo Character, and a Big Strong Nintendo Character jumps in the way of the beam, is turned into a toy, and is carted off. In all of those occasions, the Helpless Nintendo Character is, less than two seconds later, greeted by a Big-Brother-Like character. Fox McCloud comes down to help Diddy Kong after Donkey Kong is carted off by Wario, for example. (If you consider this a spoiler and are actually angry right now, please don’t visit this website anymore.)

The reason the characters are turning into action figures is simple: because the theme of the first Smash Bros. game was that all of the characters were action figures, and the player was just a kid playing with these action figures. Only the Kingdom Hearts II scenario-writer could say, “What if the action figures in Super Smash Bros. were real?” and then answer the follow-up question (“. . . you’re not hecking serious, are you?”) with “. . . Why wouldn’t I be serious?”

Yes. This is how game scenarios go when you’ve hired the guy who wrote Kingdom Hearts II.

As I slogged through the single-player experience, I looked on the bright side of things more than several times, going so far as to hope that the person collecting all the Nintendo action figures was a fifty-foot tall pimple-faced mama’s boy. Eventually, as story point after story point cascaded down the pipe, as I started to get tired of control quirks (like how hard your character snap-grabs a ledge over and over again when you’re trying to drop down), my optimism and patience wore to nanomachine thinness.

To be fair, Super Smash Bros. isn’t a platform game; it’s a fighting game that is occasionally a hit at parties. Still, that the team felt it crucial to include a twelve-hour-long mode consisting of side-scrolling stages interrupted by the only computer-animated cut-scenes in the game is proof that a lot of work went into this. Which is a shame, because all this mode really does is highlight just how dull the game’s core engine is. Why can’t it control just like Super Mario Bros. 3? Some of these level designs are okay, I guess, though when they start breaking out the Super Princess Peach-like “puzzles” (giving you a key literally two feet in front of a door), the air all around you may or may not become polluted with groans.

Some of the battles are satisfying, I suppose; the little animation when you kill an opponent in the deathmatch mode is fine-tuned to be satisfying, to be your motivation to kill more opponents — as used in single-player mode every time you kill anything, it provides a weird crunchy pace that is, at the very least, a lot better than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Arcade Game or its sequels. Back in the heyday of the multi-player money-sucking beat-em-up, games like The Simpsons or X-men The Arcade Game were brainless, ultimately metaphysically unsatisfying exercises that ended when the pizza arrived at the table. Those games just bled perfectly into the pizza-eating experience. Now, with Smash Bros. X, we have a game where the most satisfying elements feel like breaking the world brick-stuffting land-speed record. I’m not even messing with you here: about an hour into the “story” mode, (the timing of the previous night’s dinner might have had something to do with this), I nonchalantly paused the game, went to the toilet, and shat so hard I must have seen a ghost. Just as the eternally iron-pumping black man I sometimes call my “inner monologue” shouted “Hell Yeah Mother hecker!” Smash Bros. X was beyond the point of making perfect sense.

It was from that point on that I avoided playing the story mode with a second player; with such a random slog, when something satisfying somehow juts in, it becomes hard for either one of you to take credit. Credit — knowing who killed who — is everything in Smash Bros. X, and somehow having two players in the single-player mode somehow makes staying alive feel as cheap and dirty as dying repeatedly and credit-feeding Golden Axe. That stuff just isn’t funny.

Well, at least it isn’t “Tekken Force” mode from Tekken 3.

Eventually, the game got pretentious, portentous, and actually kind of rude. There are moments in the run up to the last stage (a hilariously giant Castlevania-like “exploration” maze) where the cut-scenes stop being funny and start feeling vaguely like what pornography must look like in the ecology-drenched world inhabited by the “Captain Planet” kids.

There’s a moment close to the very, very end that turns this game with sudden fierceness into The Anti-Literature. A tear literally escaped my body at the point, though it actually came out my nose, and not my eye (had a car accident as a kid), so I’m still not gay. Faced with a terrifyingly bland, Final Fantasy-like final boss, the Single Greatest and Worst Moment in Videogame History happens. If you’re like me and you always play videogames with one of those sofa-side TV trays hovering over your lap, for God’s sake, if you don’t want tomato soup on the ceiling, exercise caution when approaching the final boss of this game.

I’m actually kind of serious when I say that, if the clusterhecking nonsense of the story mode — headgear-wearing &^#$# cutscenes, twelve hours of sloggy gameplay and all — existed only to increase the hideous size of that exclamation point right before the final boss, then I take back everything I said, and champion this game as worthy of Andy Warhol.

I’m more or less positive, however, that it was all just an accident.

And then, it’s over. The game doesn’t need to put an ending in after what just happened; all we get is a wide-angle shot of all of the playable characters standing on a cliff, facing an orange sunset, the camera zooming back, as an orchestra, live via a cellular phone with really clear reception, belts out a terrifically banal, Final Fantasy-like “credits theme”. There’s a choir, singing in German, or Latin, or one of those languages spoken only by people no one likes, and every once in a while, the screen fades to black to show us title cards informing us of the deep and invigorating (warning: exact opposites used for hyperbole effect) meaning of the words being sung: “He was my friend! He helped me out when I needed help! He was great! He was my hero! And then we stood there, together!”

Remember that scene in Final Fantasy VIII, where the main characters went up into space and were suddenly like “LOL, we’re in space”? And though the game graphics were still jaggy polygons, and though the dialog still existed in boxes, suddenly a real song started playing, with the fruitiest lyrics, and being sung by a girl? Most human beings, if they were living in a college dormitory the first and last time they played that game, got up and did the “rape-prevention” deadbolt. With the ending of Smash Bros. X, a deadbolt doesn’t feel like enough. The feeling that your mother walked into your room (impossibly, because you are now an adult who has his own house and your mother is dead) to find you masturbating with an exuberant grin while staring at a tray of paperclips will not slide off your epidermis until you’ve taken at least six showers.

Of course, this music was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, no doubt submitted to Nintendo in the form of bleeping, blooping humming during a wicked Skype-powered conference call. The secretary took dictation, drawing a doodle of Hello Kitty with a tear on her cheek and a battle-axe on her shoulder, and twenty-five minutes later, we had us a videogame.

I don’t want to be rude — okay, maybe I do, just a little bit. Though yeah, some of this music is pretty bad. A lot of composers just fetishistically recreate the tracks with as much deadly realism as possible: The usually quite gifted (Wild Arms composer) Michiko Naruke turns in a shrill, ear-grating, fanboy-stroking, Nintendo-64-quality medley of the tinny and obnoxious little ocarina songs from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, set to gurgling little clumps of boring percussion. There’s not a single smile-cracker in the game aside from, bizarrely, (Lunar, Grandia, Radiata Stories composer) Noriyuki Iwadare and (Dawn of Mana, Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song composer) Kenji Ito’s exceptional, chunky-bass Fire Emblem tracks. I guess that’s because no single piece of Fire Emblem music is as iconic as, say, the Super Mario Bros. theme. Mr. Ito, who is the official torch-bearer for videogame composers as far as Action Button Dot Net is concerned, otherwise flails and cowers behind the sofa in fear of the slaps of gamers with tracks like “Space Armada” from Star Fox. Most of the time, everything is so by-the-book that the only way to even pretend to like this stuff is to already love it.

(Mr. Masafumi Takada (Godhand, No More Heroes, killer7) is disqualified from these discussions, for blatantly breaking Nintendo’s “whatever you do, don’t make something awesome” rule.)

Why would you call in a super-team of composers if you don’t want them to make music that reflects their personal style? It’s a little bit puzzling. Seeing as this game makes even Yuzo “Jesus” Koshiro sound like vanilla ice cream at best and potato chips at worst, I’m going to have to stand firm in my belief that all of the composers involved were doing their best to approximate what every other composer was going to sound like, and not succeeding. At worst, the music sounds like the background for a never-ending reel of eight-millimeter footage of ritualistically defecating Teletubbies; at best, the music sounds like something far too good for the ugly, noisy cacophony of cackles, heckles, squeals, screams, bonks, donks, honks, splatters, laser blasts, snuggles, snuffles, smacks, whacks, thwacks, snorks, and hee-hees of the on-screen cartoon orgy. Just as the sound of a circus strongman with a handlebar mustache tearing a wet cabbage in half with his bare hands punctuates a lovingly crafted piece of electronic music, a gong sounds, somewhere high in the sky: here we are, and we are finally old enough to have something worth being ashamed of.

Also, if this game’s Metal Gear Solid stage is any indication, the “Love Theme From Metal Gear Solid 4” is an almost direct rip-off of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” theme, which, as a person who once touched a violin on accident, is a downright awful piece of classical music.





In the end, Smash Bros. X is what it is. It’s a random, carnival-like brawling “experience” that is probably going to be pretty fun at parties if everyone has played and attained a fair degree of skill at various old 2D side-scrolling action games. It’s just — nope! — not quite enough for me. (Disclaimer: “Me” is a person who enjoys videogames and other forms of entertainment.)

For years, I’ve been telling people I wanted a big-scale “fighting” game that played exactly like the Castlevania games on the Gameboy Advance (or DS, I guess): I wanted snappy controls, I wanted quick fighting, I wanted real, human opponents. More than a dozen times, some jackass snapped his fingers and then pointed directly at my nose and declared “Smash Bros., dude!” I wish I remembered all of those guys’ names because I would tell each and every one of them, personally, to heck themselves. Instead, I’m going to use this paragraph to voice my concern about the game’s control scheme. Namely, the only way you’re going to be able to use a D-pad to move your character is if you play the game with just the Wiimote, which means that you have to press the A button with the side of your thumb and the hook-like pseudo-trigger B button with your middle finger to do a hard attack. Not too keen on that, thanks! I would rather use the Classic Controller’s brilliant D-pad (which I believe is the best D-pad of all time (I’ve verified this by playing through Landstalker with it)) to control my character. You can’t do this, however; though the game’s official website is smug enough to brag about the various controller-configuring menus, saying “We’ve thought of everything!” they actually haven’t thought of everything, because everything would mean I could use the D-pad to move.

Some people might say that the game doesn’t let you control movement with the D-pad because the analog stick is an integral part of the game design: you have to tap the analog stick hard in a specific direction as you press an attack button. I say that Virtua Fighter does a damn good job of having “short tap” and “long tap” special moves with just a digital joystick, and the execution time of said moves never feels longer than instantaneous. I want to double-tap that delicious, apple-pie-like, deep d-pad to run; I want to long-tap and short-tap to do smash attacks. My friends in the “Videogame Industry” tell me this is impossible in a game like Smash Bros. X, which is already taking huge risks and breaking tons of Nintendo’s internal rules (one of those rules being that a Nintendo-made game should neither have nor need a controller-input option menu), and that we should be glad we got as much as we did get, and that we should be doubly glad that this was all done in the interest of inviting The Casual Gamer to participate in the heated, old-school brawling action. Whatever. The default setting of the Classic Controller’s D-pad is left and right for “horizontal taunt”, up for “upward taunt”, and down for “downward taunt”. If Nintendo’s idea of inviting casual gamers into a hardcore game involves letting them do something useless in multiple directions, then I’d hate to see how they’re going to get hardcore gamers playing casual games, when that time comes. Are they going to invent overly complicated, customizable control schemes for a VCR-programming mini-game in Animal Crossing, where the A button operates the right index finger? On the other hand, a videogame that lets me customize my controls (thankfully, yes, I could make jumping button-activated and cancel the “up = jump” input) obviously assumes I know a thing or two about games, so why the stuff does it constantly put a little indicator over the character I’m controlling, even in the single-player mode — and only if I’m using a customized control scheme? I mean, why not put a “1P” indicator above someone who’s too dumb to make their own custom control scheme? It’s weird, and thinking about it actually kind of makes me lonely, like that screen on MySpace.com that keeps telling me “You must be someone’s friend to make comments about them”. Oh.

Seriously, not a single person whose hands I’ve plopped a Classic Controller into has not, immediately at the start of a match, pressed the D-pad to try to move, and instead initiated one taunt after another, after another, after another. I don’t know, though; maybe they were just really cocky professional players.

Also, for the record, I’ve never completed an actual match of Smash Bros. X online. Most of my opponents either drop out during the 60-second waiting period before matches start. Sometimes matches do indeed start, during which there’s no chat, of course, under the Friend Code Regime, so all players can do to communicate their sexual preferences or racial hate to opponents is name themselves CAUCASIAN PENIS and then stand there and not attack, demonstrating that their username is what they want to take; and the preset chat messages are ham-handed Japanese Uncle Jokes like “I think I dropped Ten Yen” (yeah, I’ll drop ten yen . . . in your ass (high five!)). During these matches, usually, people drop out due to lag, which is so bad that actually fighting is like trying to recommend a very long novel to a person in a train speeding outside and far beneath your bedroom window.

After attempting to play Super Mario Bros. 3 using the Classic Controller’s left analog stick instead of the glorious D-pad, I was absolutely shocked at how deliciously sensitive it is for 2D games. Going back to play Smash Bros. was kind of exasperating and floaty after that. All of the little weird things started popping out — like, the core mechanic of the game is that every time you hit someone their meter goes up, right? If it’s higher than 100%, then they’ll fly off the edge of the stage when hit with a strong attack. As they’re flying off, they can use a lovingly fetishistic mid-air jump plus a crispily implemented upward-thrusting special attack to grab on to the edge of the stage and get back in the game. This works really well, on the stages comprised of floating islands. The game goes ahead and vomits on its own gimmick’s shoes, though, with the multiple stages wherein the “edge” is just an edge of the screen. All it takes to die on these stages is to be knocked off, and out of sight. All of the friends I’ve played this game with have just shrugged and said “That’s how it was in some of the stages of Super Smash Bros. Melee, dude!” Oh? I suppose, in Nintendo’s case, that makes it alright to just do over and over again. Oh, well. Sometimes, though, you’ll be playing the game, and I swear that your damage meter will be at less than 80%, and some bastard like Ice Climber Kid will come up and whomp you with a hammer and you’ll just fly out into the background and “die”. What the hell is up with that? After a certain amount of single-player practice, I was getting to like the regular rules — try to get someone to fall off the edge, line up a brilliant smash attack to hit them just after they do their save move and before they touch the ground (so as to leave them helplessly flying, since they can only do the save once per flight). And then I start playing against people, and I’m on an FPS-worthy Killing Spree, and I’m barely getting touched, and then the game just throws me off into the distance after a random hit. What the hell is up with that? It’s like the inverse of Mario Party, where any player without any stars at the end of the game gets a star for achieving the worthwhile task of not getting any stars. It’s tacky and weird, and in a “hardcore” action game like this, it feels vaguely like Snickers suddenly announcing that their wrappers have always been edible — and delicious!

The high point of this game for me was, of course, being able to play as Sonic the Hedgehog, who I loved for his sharpness as a child and hated for his looseness as a man-child. In an age where every new game from Sonic Team controls like a stick of butter held vertical on a hot frying pan, Smash Bros. X emerges by default as the Best Game Starring Sonic the Hedgehog Since the Mega Drive Days. When I play as him, I’m so used to seeing him slide around helplessly in some of the most poorly-designed videogame stages of all time that I forget all my complaints about the controls and game design and allow myself to enjoy Sonic the Hedgehog not sucking.

I guess, by then, the game has its claws deep into my muscle fibers; I’m fantasizing, occasionally, about crafting custom stages for Sonic to play around in, and then sharing them with my friends. All the while, I wish that I could make my own characters, too. The recent-Smash Bros.-like Jump Superstars proved that Jump manga characters actually are cooler-looking than Nintendo characters. It’s enough to make you wonder.

It’s said that Katamari Damacy was originally plotted out with just spheres and cubes — roll this sphere around, sticking cubes and spheres to it, and it gets bigger. The personality of the game came afterward, and it kind of shows. I don’t even mean any offense by that: Katamari Damacy is a game of spectacularly skillful design. It’s fun, it’s amazingly well-conceived and executed, and the graphic design choices go above and beyond the call of duty to actually wedge some catharsis into the whole ordeal. The thing is, I’ve jerked myself into such a tizzy over Sonic the Hedgehog that it’s now very difficult for me to separate the concept of Smash Bros. from the execution. Did Hal Laboratory get an idea for an inverse fighting game (small characters and big stages instead of big characters and small stages) with a clever little play hook (knock the players off the edge, keep them from getting back up), or did Nintendo ask them to make a party-action game starring Nintendo characters, and this was the first thing they came up with? (1)

Would this game be worth any time at all with characters I didn’t recognize? Is this game just another Mario Golf, pulling Mario-addicted gamers to a completely different genre? From a Mario Golf perspective, it’s a hell of a success, though as the videogame for the Nintendo Wii that’s sold a million copies in the shortest amount of time — and, fatalistically, without even using any of the Wii’s selling points — it’s kind of embarrassing. Where the previous game let you discover figurines of characters during solo play, this game’s “big innovation” as regards the “collection” gimmick is to let the player also discover stickers, which they can then freely — and in 3D! — place on the figures they’ve collected via the museum mode. That Super Smash Bros. Brawl inspires people to do this sort of thing is a resounding testament to the fact that it might, perhaps, not be a terrible videogame. On paper, however, these things look scary, as though “videogames made me do it” is becoming as equally viable a defense for kleptomania as for multiple homicide. I mean, it’s got a Nintendogs . . . thing in it, wherein a polygonal puppy bounds up and paws at the screen. The thing is, the puppies in Nintendogs are crude computer-animated compromises for actual puppies; they’re not “Nintendo characters” per se. Putting them on a more mechanically capable machine than the Nintendo DS doesn’t make you exclaim, “Yay! A Puppy!” so much as it makes you scratch your head, identify subliminally that it’s a reference to Nintendogs, which is, yes, a videogame compromise for people who want a puppy and are just too lazy to get a puppy, and wonder why they didn’t just film an actual puppy, and then realize that if they did film an actual puppy, it would basically shatter the game’s vibe.

Or would it? The question you have to ask, at the end, is one of integrity: is there anything that can shatter this game’s vibe? Really? It might just be crafted from the ground up in the interest of all-encompassing immunity. We’ve already got a realistic human Solid Snake brandishing a realistic rocket launcher or sniper rifle against ultra-unrealistic humans like Ness from Mother 2, armed with a baseball bat, and a cartoon dinosaur named Yoshi, on a stage based on the Nintendo DS Picto-Chat application, where an unseen hand draws scratchy, sketchy lines that function as platforms. As a person who recently finished watching the entire series of “The Sopranos” and was amazed by the craft and sheer artistry of the finale, I feel vaguely insulted even thinking about how, in a world where BioShock (a game I, for the record, don’t even really like) exists, this tittering sack of fetish fragments called Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the game that just about everyone else who tangentially shares this hobby is looking forward to above anything else. God help us all when the walls start caving in.

(*Note: The score of this game, which is “two stars (out of four)” has been decided with much scientific thought. The rampant and somewhat embarrassing Nintendo fetishism discussed at forensic lengths in this review is responsible for the game being docked six stars, bringing it to a negative two stars (out of four) on our scale; the fact that I have played this game for several hours every day since its release with a gaggle of dudes who just don’t give a heck about Luigi’s canonical significance, and I have not yet gotten bored of it, adds four stars to the score, bringing it up to a positive two stars (out of four). So there you have it.)

–tim rogers

1) My good friend Theodore Troops has pointed me to this article, which answers the chicken-egg question of Smash Bros.’ origin. It seems like they did have a concept before they shoehorned in the Nintendo characters. Not wholly unbelievable at all!

2) Also, if you’re going to comment saying that I should try playing this game “as a fighting game” — well, I really don’t know why I didn’t mention that aspect! I guess it slipped my mind. I’ve been playing it with my “co-workers” in the Action Button Dot Net Laboratories for about an hour a day for three weeks now, and the fact that I haven’t quit playing it yet is the whole reason the game gets two stars. I swear, with a control scheme tailor-made to my needs (basically, I need it to feel just like Super Mario Bros. 3), this game would literally be a fourteen out of ten on the Action Button Dot Net zero- to four-star scale. Fetishism and all. Make of that what you will.

(*readers with a keen eye will notice that our rating system, which judges games on a scale of zero stars to four, with half-stars in between, can actually be interpreted to mean we’re rating games on a scale of one to nine. we leave the “ten” off so that only games branded “game of the year” will be regarded as “tens”. also, we leave the ten off so that two stars (5 out of 9) is the dead center of our scale, with as many ranking notches above it as below it. just to kind of stupidify what i just said (and to partly deflect hate mail), i’m going to paste this review into another review in about five minutes, and give it a four-star rating, add a different final sentence, and maybe cut a couple parts out or change a couple phrasings. make of that what you will. don’t worry, though: this is the real review.)

text by tim rogers

★★★★

“THE BEST GAME OF ALL-TIME.”

So this is it. This is the big Nintendo Wii game. What’s even coming out for the Nintendo Wii after this? Who gives a stuff! What more could you possibly need? Super Mario versus Solid Snake FTW!



At any rate, here’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the biggest little dollop of gruel yet slopped on the lunch tray of gamerkind. The Japanese title is “Smash Brothers X“, which sounds so much cleaner. “Clean” is the biggest compliment-word this game should ever be awarded, and I don’t precisely mean that as an insult: it is undistilled, pure, gelatinous videogame essence, sat on a table to wobble until eternity. It’s the third game in a series that, in the interest of politeness, we’ll say “has two other games”. Both of those games were popular; this game (sequel #2) takes the “more of the same” model plopped out by the last game (sequel #1) to a new extreme, stuffing it full of more playable characters, more collectible items, more gameplay modes, and more Kingdom Hearts-influenced scenario (which in the previous games was set at zero).

Nintendo masterminded a breathtaking PR plan: literally, they managed to halt the mouth-breaths of mouth-breathing near-thirtysomethings the world over at least once a week in the half-year-long run up to the game’s release, all by regularly updating a simple, clean website. Some players — old enough to have fathered children and not noticed — kept steely resolve, vowing to avoid spoilers and not look at the website until after the game was released.

That is to say, it’s Memorial Day, we’re going to go see Mel Gibson in “The Patriot”, wherein any of the main characters could die at any time, and Nintendo has managed to get all of the kids into the minivan without a single no-popcorn warning.

The “story” mode begins with Mario fighting Kirby in a giant arena that’s floating in space. The player chooses to play as either Mario or Kirby. If you choose Mario, when you win, you’ll see a cut-scene in which Mario punches Kirby so hard he turns into . . . an action figure of Kirby. Mario then walks up and touches the Kirby action figure, which turns back into Kirby. Mario pats Kirby on the back, and the two salute the wildly cheering crowds.

Then sinister stuff starts happening. A giant airship (owned by MetaKnight from the Kirby series, of course) shows up, et cetera et cetera, eventually we’ve got a running adventure in which Nintendo characters interact with one another with no dialogue (spoken or text), fighting for the vaguely defined “good guys” against hordes of “bad guys”; whenever a bad guy (Wario, Bowser, Ganondorf) shows up in a cut-scene, they’re equipped with a big sci-fi gun which, when fired, turns any Nintendo character into an action figure. Someone is trying to collect all of the Nintendo action figures! Who the flaming heck is it? If you want to know the answer, turn to the last page, and then buy the game.

Three, four, five, six times in the game, there’s a scene where a Big Bad Guy fires a gun at a Helpless Nintendo Character, and a Big Strong Nintendo Character jumps in the way of the beam, is turned into a toy, and is carted off. In all of those occasions, the Helpless Nintendo Character is, less than two seconds later, greeted by a Big-Brother-Like character.

The reason the characters are turning into action figures is simple: because the theme of the first Smash Bros. game was that all of the characters were action figures, and the player was just a kid playing with these action figures. Only the Kingdom Hearts II scenario-writer could say, “What if the action figures in Super Smash Bros. were real?” and then answer the follow-up question (“. . . you’re not hecking serious, are you?”) with “. . . Why wouldn’t I be serious?” That this sort of thing actually gets greenlighted is hilarious and awesome.

Yep. This is how game scenarios go when you’ve hired the guy who wrote Kingdom Hearts II. Mickey Mouse was such a badass in that.

THE GRAPHICS

Are great!

As I slogged through the single-player experience, I looked on the bright side of things more than several times, going so far as to hope that the person collecting all the Nintendo action figures was a fifty-foot tall pimple-faced mama’s boy.

I know, Super Smash Bros. isn’t a platform game; it’s a fighting game, and it’s an awesome one. Still, that the team felt it crucial to include a twelve-hour-long mode consisting of side-scrolling stages interrupted by the only computer-animated cut-scenes in the game is proof that a lot of work went into this. Maybe I’m nitpicking, though I kinda wish it controlled just like Super Mario Bros. 3. Some of these level designs are okay, I guess, though when they start breaking out the Super Princess Peach-like “puzzles” (giving you a key literally two feet in front of a door), the air all around you may or may not become polluted with groans.

Some of the battles are really satisfying; the little animation and sound effect when you kill an opponent in the deathmatch mode are fine-tuned to be satisfying, to be your motivation to kill more opponents — as used in single-player mode every time you kill anything, it provides a weird crunchy pace that is, at the very least, a lot better than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Arcade Game or its sequels. Back in the heyday of the multi-player money-sucking beat-em-up, games like The Simpsons or X-men The Arcade Game were brainless, ultimately metaphysically unsatisfying exercises that ended when the pizza arrived at the table. Those games just bled perfectly into the pizza-eating experience. Now, with Smash Bros. X, we have a game where the most satisfying elements feel like breaking the world brick-stuffting land-speed record. I’m not even messing with you here: about an hour into the “story” mode, (the timing of the previous night’s dinner might have had something to do with this), I nonchalantly paused the game, went to the toilet, and shat so hard I must have seen a ghost. Just as the eternally iron-pumping black man I sometimes call my “inner monologue” shouted “Hell Yeah Mother hecker!” Smash Bros. X was beyond the point of making perfect sense.

It was from that point on that I avoided playing the story mode with a second player; with such a random slog, when something satisfying somehow juts in, it becomes hard for either one of you to take credit. Credit — knowing who killed who — is everything in Smash Bros. X, and somehow having two players in the single-player mode somehow makes staying alive feel as cheap and dirty as dying repeatedly and credit-feeding Golden Axe. That stuff just isn’t funny.

It’s definitely not the “Tekken Force” mode from Tekken 3!

Eventually, the game got pretentious, portentous, and actually kind of rude. There are moments in the run up to the last stage (a hilariously giant Castlevania-like “exploration” maze) where the cut-scenes stop being funny and start feeling vaguely like what pornography must look like in the ecology-drenched world inhabited by the “Captain Planet” kids. Which is actually kind of hot — Wheeler would look awesome jerking off. What if he accidentally engaged the “FIRE!” ring?

THE STORY

Is awesome!

There’s a moment close to the very, very end that turns this game with sudden fierceness into The Anti-Literature. A tear literally escaped my body at the point, though it actually came out my nose, and not my eye (had a car accident as a kid), so I’m still not gay. Faced with a terrifyingly bland, Final Fantasy-like final boss, the Single Greatest and Worst Moment in Videogame History happens. If you’re like me and you always play videogames with one of those sofa-side TV trays hovering over your lap, for God’s sake, if you don’t want tomato soup on the ceiling, exercise caution when approaching the final boss of this game.

I’m actually kind of serious when I say that, if the clusterhecking nonsense of the story mode — headgear-wearing &^#$# cutscenes, twelve hours of sloggy gameplay and all — existed only to increase the hideous size of that exclamation point right before the final boss, then I take back everything I said, and champion this game as worthy of Andy Warhol.

And then, it’s over. The game doesn’t need to put an ending in after what just happened; all we get is a wide-angle shot of all of the playable characters standing on a cliff, facing an orange sunset, the camera zooming back, as an orchestra, live via a cellular phone with really clear reception, belts out a terrific, Final Fantasy-like “credits theme”. There’s a choir, singing in German, or Latin, or one of those languages spoken only the cool people studied in high school, and every once in a while, the screen fades to black to show us title cards informing us of the deep and invigorating meaning of the words being sung: “He was my friend! He helped me out when I needed help! He was great! He was my hero! And then we stood there, together!”

Remember that scene in Final Fantasy VIII, where the main characters went up into space and were suddenly like “LOL, we’re in space?” And though the game graphics were still jaggy polygons, and though the dialog still existed in boxes, suddenly a real song started playing, with the fruitiest lyrics, and being sung by a girl? Most human beings, if they were living in a college dormitory the first and last time they played that game, got up and did the “rape-prevention” deadbolt. The ending of Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the exact opposite of that.

THE MUSIC

Is fantastic!

Of course, this music was composed by Nobuo Uematsu. That’s right, Nintendo fans — Nintendo assembled an expert team of, like, twenty composers from various videogame companies to remix 8- or 16-bit Nintendo blooping theme music into awesome orchestral perfection. Michiko Naruke, who exhibited excellent use of live whistling in the classic opening theme of Wild Arms, pays her respect by making an awesome medley of all the two-bar ocarina songs from Zelda: Ocarina of Time. And the ocarina songs all sound just like they sounded in Zelda! Yuzo Koshiro, whose expertly composed new-age or techno soundtracks to games like Ys or Streets of Rage, turns in a bitching, note-for-note recreation of the Legend of Zelda overworld theme. Yes!

(Lunar, Grandia, Radiata Stories composer) Noriyuki Iwadare and (Dawn of Mana, Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song composer) Kenji Ito turn in exceptional, chunky-bass Fire Emblem tracks.

(Mr. Masafumi Takada (Godhand, No More Heroes, killer7), meanwhile, does a couple of weird little tunes that kinda don’t fit the action.)





In the end, Smash Bros. X is what it is. Let’s be honest: It’s a random, carnival-like brawling “experience” that is probably going to be pretty fun at parties if everyone has played and attained a fair degree of skill at various old 2D side-scrolling action games. And that’s why we love it!

Since no professional videogame review being aggragated by MetaCritic is actually “real” without negative points, I’m going to use this paragraph to voice my concern about the game’s control scheme. Namely, the only way you’re going to be able to use a D-pad to move your character is if you play the game with just the Wiimote, which means that you have to press the A button with the side of your thumb and the hook-like pseudo-trigger B button with your middle finger to do a hard attack. Not too keen on that, thanks! I would rather use the Classic Controller’s brilliant D-pad (which I believe is the best D-pad of all time (I’ve verified this by playing through Landstalker with it)) to control my character. You can’t do this, however; though the game’s official website is smug enough to brag about the various controller-configuring menus, saying “We’ve thought of everything!” they actually haven’t thought of everything, because everything would mean I could use the D-pad to move.

THE GAMEPLAY

Is spec-freakin’-tacular!

Some people might say that the game doesn’t let you control movement with the D-pad because the analog stick is an integral part of the game design: you have to tap the analog stick hard in a specific direction as you press an attack button. I say that Virtua Fighter does a damn good job of having “short tap” and “long tap” special moves with just a digital joystick, and the execution time of said moves never feels longer than instantaneous. I want to double-tap that delicious, apple-pie-like, deep d-pad to run; I want to long-tap and short-tap to do smash attacks. My friends in the “Videogame Industry” tell me this is impossible in a game like Smash Bros. X, which is already taking huge risks and breaking tons of Nintendo’s internal rules (one of those rules being that a Nintendo-made game should neither have nor need a controller-input option menu), and that we should be glad we got as much as we did get, and that we should be doubly glad that this was all done in the interest of inviting The Casual Gamer to participate in the heated, old-school brawling action. Whatever. The default setting of the Classic Controller’s D-pad is left and right for “horizontal taunt”, up for “upward taunt”, and down for “downward taunt”. If Nintendo’s idea of inviting casual gamers into a hardcore game involves letting them do something useless in multiple directions, then I’d hate to see how they’re going to get hardcore gamers playing casual games, when that time comes. Are they going to invent overly complicated, customizable control schemes for a VCR-programming mini-game in Animal Crossing, where the A button operates the right index finger? On the other hand, a videogame that lets me customize my controls (thankfully, yes, I could make jumping button-activated and cancel the “up = jump” input) obviously assumes I know a thing or two about games, so why the stuff does it constantly put a little indicator over the character I’m controlling, even in the single-player mode — and only if I’m using a customized control scheme? I mean, why not put a “1P” indicator above someone who’s too dumb to make their own custom control scheme? It’s weird, and thinking about it actually kind of makes me lonely, like that screen on MySpace.com that keeps telling me “You must be someone’s friend to make comments about them”. Oh.

Seriously, not a single person whose hands I’ve plopped a Classic Controller into has not, immediately at the start of a match, pressed the D-pad to try to move, and instead initiated one taunt after another, after another, after another. I don’t know, though; maybe they were just really cocky professional players.

Also, online play is awesome. Smashing a buddy thousands of miles away, all without lag — that is heaven!

The high point of this game for me was, of course, being able to play as Sonic the Hedgehog, who I loved for his sharpness as a child and hated for his looseness as a man-child. In an age where every new game from Sonic Team controls like a stick of butter held vertical on a hot frying pan, Smash Bros. X emerges by default as the Best Game Starring Sonic the Hedgehog Since the Mega Drive Days. When I play as him, I’m so used to seeing him slide around helplessly in some of the most poorly-designed videogame stages of all time that I forget all my complaints about the controls and game design and allow myself to enjoy Sonic the Hedgehog not sucking.

I guess, by then, the game has its claws deep into my muscle fibers; I’m fantasizing, occasionally, about crafting custom stages for Sonic to play around in, and then sharing them with my friends. All the while, I wish that I could make my own characters, too. The recent-Smash Bros.-like Jump Superstars proved that Jump manga characters actually are cooler-looking than Nintendo characters. It’s enough to make you wonder.

It’s said that Katamari Damacy was originally plotted out with just spheres and cubes — roll this sphere around, sticking cubes and spheres to it, and it gets bigger. The personality of the game came afterward, and it kind of shows. I don’t even mean any offense by that: Katamari Damacy is a game of spectacularly skillful design. It’s fun, it’s amazingly well-conceived and executed, and the graphic design choices go above and beyond the call of duty to actually wedge some catharsis into the whole ordeal. The thing is, I’ve jerked myself into such a tizzy over Sonic the Hedgehog that it’s now very difficult for me to separate the concept of Smash Bros. from the execution. Did Hal Laboratory get an idea for an inverse fighting game (small characters and big stages instead of big characters and small stages) with a clever little play hook (knock the players off the edge, keep them from getting back up), or did Nintendo ask them to make a party-action game starring Nintendo characters, and this was the first thing they came up with? Would this game be worth any time at all with characters I didn’t recognize? Is this game just another Mario Golf, pulling Mario-addicted gamers to a completely different genre? From a Mario Golf perspective, it’s a hell of a success, though as the videogame for the Nintendo Wii that’s sold a million copies in the shortest amount of time — and, fatalistically, without even using any of the Wii’s selling points — it’s kind of embarrassing. Where the previous game let you discover figurines of characters during solo play, this game’s “big innovation” as regards the “collection” gimmick is to let the player also discover stickers, which they can then freely — and in 3D! — place on the figures they’ve collected via the museum mode. That Super Smash Bros. Brawl inspires people to do this sort of thing is a resounding testament to the fact that it might, perhaps, not be a terrible videogame. On paper, however, these things look scary, as though “videogames made me do it” is becoming as equally viable a defense for kleptomania as for multiple homicide. I mean, it’s got a Nintendogs . . . thing in it, wherein a polygonal puppy bounds up and paws at the screen. The thing is, the puppies in Nintendogs are crude computer-animated compromises for actual puppies; they’re not “Nintendo characters” per se. Putting them on a more mechanically capable machine than the Nintendo DS doesn’t make you exclaim, “Yay! A Puppy!” so much as it makes you scratch your head, identify subliminally that it’s a reference to Nintendogs, which is, yes, a videogame compromise for people who want a puppy and are just too lazy to get a puppy, and wonder why they didn’t just film an actual puppy, and then realize that if they did film an actual puppy, it would basically shatter the game’s vibe.

Or would it? The question you have to ask, at the end, is one of integrity: is there anything that can shatter this game’s vibe? Really? It might just be crafted from the ground up in the interest of all-encompassing immunity. We’ve already got a realistic human Solid Snake brandishing a realistic rocket launcher or sniper rifle against ultra-unrealistic humans like Ness from Mother 2, armed with a baseball bat, and a cartoon dinosaur named Yoshi, on a stage based on the Nintendo DS Picto-Chat application, where an unseen hand draws scratchy, sketchy lines that function as platforms. As a person who recently finished watching the entire series of “The Sopranos” and was amazed by the craft and sheer artistry of the finale, I feel vaguely insulted even thinking about how, in a world where BioShock (a game I, for the record, don’t even really like) exists, this tittering sack of fetish fragments called Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the game that just about everyone else who tangentially shares this hobby is looking forward to above anything else. God help us all when the walls start caving in.

At least I know where I’ll be when Jesus comes riding that great big Yoshi in the sky: sitting on my sofa with my best buds, engaged deep and fierce in a hard round of Super Smash Bros. Brawl — Action Button Dot Net‘s choice for best game of all time, laughing it up, sharing good times, right up until the last atom make-disappears itself.

text by tim rogers

⋆☆☆☆

“ESCAPISM FOR QUADRIPLEGICS.”

I’m not going to lie to you: I haven’t actually played this game more than five minutes. I have, however, stopped at the arcade once every night for the past few months and ended up staring — for just a few moments — at fully-grown men with illustrious cigarette habits and mortal reasons for staring at this game until their wives are deep in dreamless sleep. The arcade of which I speak is a Namco-owned joint three seconds walking distance from the exit of the Seiyu supermarket in Ogikubo where I stop every night to buy okra and orange paprikas with which to cook life-fulfilling vegan fried rice. (That food reference there is for the kids. Every good game review should have one!) I enter this arcade for the same reason I enter the flower shop in the basement of Ogikubo Station: because the winter in Tokyo is a cold bitch ballroom dancing with a cold bastard. The company where I work is amazingly located on the top floor of the same building as a Tokyo Metro Marunouchi Line subway station; I take the elevator downstairs, walk onto the train with expert timing, and then get off not five minutes later in the deep underground of Ogikubo, the town where I proudly live. While many grown men dash up the escalator and eagerly into the freezing cold, I enter the Aoyama Flower Shop, which opens into the food basement of a Lumine department store; I track past the bagel shop and the rice shop and the custom-made tofu shop, through the international grocery (where I sometimes buy red onions), and through a winding passageway into the basement of the Town Seven building. I hold my breath as I walk past a fish market, glare at the amazingly good-looking girl who for some reason nonchalantly shouts “Good morning” or “Good evening” to passersby of a tangerine stand literally from the minute I leave for work on the morning to literally the minute I show up in the evening with my iPod headphones blasting math rock into my ears. Past the vegetble market, I slip through a passage into the Seiyu basement, grab a paprika and a mesh bag of okra, and then hop on the escalator upstairs. If I need eggs, or skim milk, I buy one of these things. If I’m out of brown rice, I buy some of that, too. Eventually, I’m at the register. I pay the money and head for the automatic doors, bracing myself for the blast of cold. The doors veen open, and there I am, outside, in the future. The year 2008. The second year in history the name of which has sounded like The Future. Not three seconds’ walking distance from the Seiyu door is the automatic door of abovementioned arcade. I plunge in, plastic grocery bags in hand. There I am, in a Japanese arcade. And there they are — the arcade denizens, the life-living human beings whose transit every night brings them here.



Make no bones about it: I enter this arcade every night because it is large, heated, and has two exits. The rear exit is close to the Seiyu supermarket exit; the front exit stands at the precipice of a crosswalk. I linger by that entrance — thankfully, a push-button-operated auto door, for maximum heating efficiency — until the light turns green; I sprint out the door, across the street, and down the famed Ogikubo Church Avenue shopping street, past the Seventh Day Adventist church and the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital, and right into my apartment door. Much as I like living next door to a Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in theory, it’s kind of useless if I actually get sick; they’d probably shrug and deny me treatment for one of my frequent ear infections because “Jesus is coming to claim our souls next week, anyway”.

While standing by the arcade door, I often catch reflections of Tekken 6 in the glass. Sometimes, I groan so much I fog the glass up, and then I can’t see Tekken 6 anymore, until I write “PENIS” in the fog and then I can see Tekken 6 again, inside the letters.

The point of all the writing in this piece, up until now (and it pains me to have to spell this out), is that I can cover four city blocks of distance by navigating commercialism-packed underground tunnels, and that the ten minutes I spend in the grocery store picking vegetables and waiting in line make me long for home; if only the men who got snared by the Namco arcade in Ogikubo, too, had spent ten minutes in the grocery store, they’d probably not consider it such a good idea to sit down and play Tekken 6. They’d probably get home sooner, maybe before eight PM. If they spend just ten minutes playing Tekken 6, that can interrupt their schedule to the point that it’s later than eight PM, so that they don’t feel like cooking when they get home. They’ll instead settle for some nasty cup ramen at a convenient store, and be unable to shave the next morning because of the pimples that popped up on their chin while they slept. They’ll go in to the office the next morning looking like an oily, vinegar-blooded scruff, and their chances of sexxing the secretary will further approach the floor.



NOW I’M GOING TO ACTUALLY REVIEW TEKKEN 6

Nope, just kidding! If you came to this website because you really want to read an IGN-style “fair” “review” of Tekken 6, I’d prefer it if you went somewhere else!

Tekken 6 is a blow job from a bear trap. Arcades “survived” in Japan for the most arbitrary of reasons — that they’re placed on top real-estate close to train stations; arcades “died” in America because you have to drive out of your way to go there. FPSes are popular in America because people craving person-on-person competition can get some action from the comfort of their own home (in other words, without having to drive thirty-minutes out of their way to an arcade); FPSes are not popular in Japan because anyone craving person-on-person gaming competition can get some from an arcade three minutes’ walk from their local grocery store. While there surely exist established games that Japanese arcade gamers will go out of their way to experience at a particular arcade (Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, for example), something like Tekken 6 is a conniving trap built by a conniving hack developer.

The idea to review Tekken 6 first came to me last night, as I waited in front of the glass at the Namco arcade in Ogikubo. Somehow, the glass wouldn’t fog up (might spring be coming?), so I gravitated toward the gorgeous LCD cabinets, commonplace since the rolling-out of Virtua Fighter 5 in 2006. At the arcade in Ogikubo, they’ve got two sets of eight machines, set up in two islands of four back-to-back pairs. As with any just about any fighting game in existence at the moment, you can purchase a member card to save your profile. It saves your win / loss record and whatever frighteningly gaudy costume items (clown wigs, gardening hats, novelty sunglasses) you’ve won and slapped onto your character.

The inherent problem with the card system is that all you have to do is glance at the corners of the screen on multiple machines for about five scientist-like minutes to realize how shattered this game is with regard to execution. I remember back when Tekken 3 was new — and for PlayStation! — and people dared to complain that Eddie Gordo was a “button-mashing character”, and that “anyone could win” with him. No one seemed to know that he was, indeed, the future of the series. Yeah — back then, the series that would become SoulCalibur was a history-based, slow-paced fighting game with excellent experimental music. Now we have Tekken 6, where the win/loss ratios in the corner of every machine I’ve encountered in the past twenty-four hours display the most frightening statistical anomaly: namely, that every player is roughly winning 50% of the time and losing 50% of the time. I would have tried to take pictures of the screens if Japanese arcade employees weren’t such nazis — the last time I even tried to write an email on my cellular phone in a Japanese arcade, I got my arm grabbed by a guy who yelled “NO FOTO!” so many times that the guy at the front desk started yelling it, too, making a big “X” with his hands.

If you ask me, they probably shouldn’t display the win/loss records at all times on the screen for Tekken 6. They should probably display the records at the beginning and end of the match only. In addition to making the game look sloppy, it also reveals to any passersby (especially girls) how much money each player has spent on the game. I swear, there are guys at the local arcade with something like 540 wins and 540 losses. Apply a little first-year algebra and you can discover that people are spending a decent chunk of change on this game. And for what? The chances of winning or losing are so even, like craps, which has a 51% chance of “winning” a roll, though Tekken 6 doesn’t give you money when you win. Rather, your only incentive for blasting forward in this jungle of shiny filth is the rare chance to win a “prize” at the end of a match. Insert your card — and a hundred yen — into a standalone machine, and you can configure your character to look like a complete jackass.

Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution championed the winnable items feature, only it was sure to make each winnable item somewhat stylish. Glancing at Tekken 6 monitors, you can almost imagine the PowerPoint presentation that set this disaster into motion. I have a serious hunch that some liver-spotted gray-skinned old joy-hating, coal-tar-stuffting cocklord actually used the words “Quantity over Quality”: last night, I saw Jin Kazama, the “main character” of the series (I think), dressed in black overalls, army boots, aviator sunglasses, a rainbow-colored clown wig, a giant broad straw farmer’s hat, and . . . a duffel bag full of rakes and hoes on his back. What the heck? Did they pass a memo around the office, asking everyone to think of ideas for winnable items, and some guy wrote, “My wife’s sister likes gardening, so how about a bag of rakes and hoes?” The boss snapped his fingers and said “Promotion!” And the guy said, “Really?” And the boss said “Hell no!” And then they put the rakes and hoes in there anyway. Because why not? They’ve got a quota to fill.

Whether the winnable items are tacky because they’re tacky or tacky because they disrupt the otherwise rigorously established aesthetic flow of the character designs is a tough call to make; luckily, I only missed one question on my California State DMV written test (“Which of the following is not a penalty for fleeing when requested to stop by a highway patrol officer?”), so I must at least not be mentally &^#$#ed. I’ll take a stab: everything about this game is hideous, from the sawmill drum machine and overdriven guitar soundtrack (I say this as someone who can tell when such music is good) right down to the convoluted labyrinth of a “story”.

Who knows what the hell is happening in the way of a “plot” in the Tekken series. It’s perhaps the only videogame that Uwe Boll could make better with a film adaptation. There’s an old guy with Batman-like hair, named Heihachi, who is supposedly evil, Japanese, and a billionaire. He may or may not be an artist’s rendition of the overlapped resume photographs of all the executive members of Namco. He has a son, and apparently he was also married, at some point, to a girl like forty years younger than him. Apparently, there’s something like a thirty-year time lapse between Tekken 2 and Tekken 3, during which the younger girl gets a little older, her son by the evil man is born and grows into the Main Character from a Japanese Fighting Game, and the Chinese man who looks like Fei Long — the Chinese man from Super Street Fighter II who looks like Bruce Lee — now has a son, who resembles his father down to the polygon, which is to say he still looks exactly like the guy from Super Street Fighter II who looks like Bruce Lee. Of course, the father is still playable — he just has gray hair now. The son is, of course, like the father, with a tweaked move set. I remember his CG ending — the CG endings were the selling-point of the PlayStation ports — in Tekken 3, where he’s practicing somersault kicks with his dad while the fat and muscular grotesquely bearded guy in a karate gi with a two-foot high flat-top and ridiculous sideburns stands by and guffaws for some reason. Tekken 4 was declared an abysmal failure even by Tekken fans, so I’m not even going to look it up on Wikipedia; my only experience with the game involved walk into a friend’s house for five minutes and realizing that the hideous guy with the &^#$#ed flat top is still in it. Tekken 5 opens with a computer-animated cut-scene that begins with white text on a black screen declaring “HEIHACHI MISHIMA IS DEAD“, though of course if you play the game enough it’s all like “JK DUDE LOL”, and then it’s like “HEIHACHI MISHIMA IS BACK“.

This is vintage Namco, the company who introduced a nice fighting game called Soul Edge to the world, changed the last word of the title and retooled it spectacularly for a sequel, which would tactically lack any of the emphasis on actual characters and story; when SoulCalibur was more popular than Soul Edge (called Soul Blade in America, because that sounds far more violent), they decided to call the next sequel SoulCalibur II. In Soul Calibur II, one of the “plot” lines concerns the death of the Greek Girl Character named Sophitia. Her sister Cassandra sets out to avenge her sister, though of course, since there are people who like Sophitia (the Microsoft Excel spreadsheets fail to conclude that Sophitia’s presence was not the reason Soul Calibur sold in the first place), they can’t just not put her into Soul Calibur II, so if you play enough — hey! There she is!

Also in Soul Calibur II, out of raw hope that someone, somewhere would buy all three console ports, Namco wedged in characters befitting of each of the available console’s personalities. the Xbox version got a Todd McFarlane approved Spawn; the Nintendo Gamecube version got a fetishistically modeled Link from The Legend of Zelda; The PlayStation 2 got Heihachi from Tekken, which was such a cop-out. In putting Spawn and Link into Soul Calibur II, Namco were announcing that they admired these characters and wanted to treat fans; in putting Heihachi into the PlayStation 2 port, they were basically saying that, yeah, we guess Tekken Tag Tournament was available for purchase at the launch of the PlayStation 2. Why not just put a Ridge Racer car in there as a playable character?

Witness another of the many faces of Namco: the conniving hacks who strive — real hard — to have a Ridge Racer game available on every game console on earth on the day of its launch, because so many people need to buy something.

With the straight-to-console Soul Calibur 3, Namco didn’t bother shoehorning in licensed characters. Instead, they put in a thoughtful character-creation mode, which ultimately didn’t quite deliver. Now SoulCalibur IV is on the horizon, and it stars hecking Darth Vader on the PlayStation 3 and Yoda on the Xbox 360. I’m not even going to try to say anything negative about that. (In fact, I’ll even say that I kinda want to play as Darth Vader, a little bit. Because, you know, what the hell.) With SoulCalibur II, they put Link, Spawn, and Heihachi on their respective console versions’ boxes. That didn’t seem like too much of a stretcher — I’m being very gentle here — though if they put Darth Vader or Yoda on the box of SoulCalibur IV, that’s pretty much the death knell. Even if Square- Enix announced a Lego Batman world for Kingdom Hearts III it wouldn’t be as despicable as Namco putting Yoda or Darth Vader on the box. Square-Enix — no, Square (let’s leave Enix out of this) — are lovable, pathos-dripping hacks. Namco are just palm-rubbing, lip-licking conniving hacks, standing out in front of the bar at two in the morning with a stack of fresh-from-Kinkos business cards in their inner jacket pocket, waiting for whatever girls are going to stumble out alone and drunk.

What, you really want to hear more about Tekken 6? What the heck is wrong with you?

What’s new in Tekken 6, you ask? Well, new characters, of course! Now, in addition to playing as a hideous man with sideburns and a flat top, a now-fully-restored and alive again Heihachi, and a Chinese guy who looks like Bruce Lee, you can also play as a disgusting, obese police officer man with a scraggly yellow beard, as though being overweight and in need of a shave wasn’t something many gamers should want to escape. Having said that, I suppose that a fat, bearded police officer is, probably, at least escapism for a quadriplegic. The two other new characters include a boyish girl (or girlish boy) with Final Fantasy-like hair and ornamental clothes. At a glance, s/he looks like a blond version of Eileen, a new character introduced in Virtua Fighter 5. The other new character is a Spanish bullfighter, and that’s where I blow the whistle: the other new character in Virtua Fighter 5 was a Mexican wrestler. That’s too much of a coincidence to pass up; besides, I know for a fact that many Japanese people don’t know the difference between a Mexican person and a Spanish person, and that most Japanese people are under the impression that anyone with a last name that ends in “Z” is probably either a bullfighter or a Mexican wrestler.

Other “fan favorites” return: characters that started as in-jokes, like the kangaroo, the grizzly bears, the panda bear, and a giant professional wrestler with a microscopic tiger head on his shoulders — continues into the present day for no fathomable reason other than “we own these characters, so we’re going to keep using them.”

In the interest of not being entirely negative, I’ll say that I’ve seen Tekken 5 and Tekken 6 running on adjacent cabinets (some players still “prefer” Tekken 5, I have surmised), and Tekken 6 definitely has better graphics. It’s more than marginal. The high-definition resolution does wonders. The bloom lighting is everywhere, and everything glows with a vaguely delicious plastic sheen.

Though you know what? It only ends up making the game look worse. Traipse through to the end of the single-player campaign and you’ll experience the latest in the Tekken series’ line of carnival-ride-like “Big Target” Brand final bosses. Tekken 5‘s towering Final Beast(), shiny like pleather, an Egyptian tomb-god, wields what I think is a weapon-like tail. Hit him with an upward kick, and he spins in the air, end over end, somersaulting no less than twelve times before hitting the ground. Watching this sixteen-foot-tall character spin so helplessly, and at such mach speed, is vaguely like watching a &^#$# slowly lick layers of paint off the Mona Lisa.

In the interest of internet science, which I know full well is mostly made up, I plunged forward and played a match against a guy engaged in a pachinko-like battle against the final boss. I timed my press of the start button with the first frame of animation of what would have been the boss’s final deathblow. I imagine the guy on the other side of the cabinet, smoking like it was going out of style, had the most non-plussed expression on his face. He was playing with a card, a win/loss record of roughly 400/400, and as the flat-topped bastard; I picked theblond girl-like person and proceeded to destroy him in three straight rounds, by utilizing the sparse rhythm I learned from months of trying to play the drums, basic knowledge of How to Not Lose in Virtua Fighter 5, and the exact same sliding-step-forward-straight-punch move spammed over and over again whenever I saw an opening. It could be that I’m as genius a fighting game strategist as Kurt Cobain was a guitarist, though I’m pretty sure it mostly has to do with Tekken just being a stuffty game. Or maybe the guy just wanted to lose.

If you’ve spent three minutes looking at a Tekken game, you’ve no doubt seen it: a character takes a quick step forward, delivering a jab. A big, pixely orange burst pops forth at the point of impact, and the hit character’s body jerks forward, goes limp like a ragdoll, and then, in the space of a single frame of animation, pops completely horizontal, one leg raised slightly above the other, parallel to the ground, and hovering at his opponent’s waist-level. Then, utilizing the sense of rhythm that he might have learned from banging a pot before being punished by his mother twenty years prior, the player with the upper hand taps forward and punches again; the impact — with the horizontal man’s kneecap, roughly — snaps the horizontal character back into a vertical position, wherein his body jerks forward, goes limp, and then pops horizontal again. The player doing the punching repeats this vertical-horizontal-vertial popping process as many times as he can, until eventually the character’s horizontal body slams into the ground with a sound like a thousand bombs blowing up nine hundred and ninety-nine airports.

Then there’s The Issue. This is something that bothered me about Tekken 5 as well, though now, with the graphical upgrades in Tekken 6, I just can’t let it slide: the ground shatters whenever a character falls on his or her back. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with sand, or snow, or marble: the ground will shatter. I have a scientific calculator right here (not really), and I can tell you that in order for a person to shatter marble with his or her back after falling over from a single punch to the chest, they’d need to be greater than or equal to nine hundred feet in height and moving no less than seven thousand miles per hour. The floor shatters, the fragments scatter into the air; if you aren’t blinking by now, you’ll notice as the fallen character bounces like a rubber ball that the part of the floor that had just shattered is still in pristine condition; the fragments finally fall, and then fade away.

To think, some people who don’t even think to shrug this off are complaining en masse about the crazy facial expressions in Street Fighter IV. For stuff’s sake, people — have you ever seen someone get punched in the stomach in real life? They usually don’t look too nonchalant about it! Street Fighter IV is carrying the torch forward from Street Fighter II, in which men (accurately) vomited on themselves when slam-kicked in the testicles. To not portray people in pain when they’re hit in a videogame is irresponsible; the shattering floors in Tekken are even worse.

With all the HDR lighting and high-definition textures on the floor surfaces, you’d figure that the development team would have made “cut this stuff out” a red-texted entry on their Action Item List. Think again! This is what they did in Tekken 5, so how dare anyone suggest they take it out of Tekken 6! The man who originally spoke that idea during a Tekken 5 planning meeting, during which “special move ideas” like “vomit into other character’s mouth” were written in careful, fine font on a dry erase board, though he was first reprimanded by the boss for not directly contributing to the “special move idea” discussion, now drives an actual mid-size car that cost between $12,000 and $16,000, which is a huge step up from the train he was riding to work every day before that. We must respect this working-class protagonist’s every day dream: the magic shatter-floors must return. Now we only have to wonder, if someone brings up the idea to put Indiana Jones in Tekken 7, will Namco executives buy him a box of gourmet chocolate-covered potato chips, or will they sue him for infringing on the SoulCalibur team’s ideas?





I’m not going to lie to you: I hate Tekken. I kind of hate Soul Calibur, too, though for purely different reasons. See, I hate Soul Calibur because I used to like it. With Soul Calibur III, in an attempt to appeal to people who yawned at Soul Calibur II, in an attempt to chase the dream that would see all people on earth, even people who spend $200 a month on hair-care products, playing SoulCalibur, they did hatefully uncool things to the character designs. My favorite character, Yunsung, as of Soul Calibur III, was dressed in what looked like a Halloween costume, with fluorescent green Adidas-looking shoes. It was around that point that I realized I didn’t like the series at all, that the only thing connecting me to it was that I had a few friends who were better at it than they were at Street Fighter III, which meant I got to play it and relax with people I knew pretty well. I loved the original — Soul Edge — because it was on PlayStation and it felt adventurous, with the instruction manual describing all the main characters’ heights as being around 5’5″ because, hey, that was huge back in the 16th century. Now they’ve grown up, and it’s all big hair and Limit Breaks. If I’m going to play these games alone — or, better yet, with someone I don’t know — I’m going to need to feel some human connection to the context, going in. Why not push the SoulCalibur team onto a Final Fantasy fighting game? Replace all the bland characters with their embarrassingly inflating football-shaped breasts and undercleavage with recognizable Final Fantasy characters, locations, and gloriously remixed music. The reason they don’t do this is simple; Keita Takahashi once told someone, who then told me, Namco refused to believe that he might have another game idea as good as Katamari Damacy, because “at Namco, the Tekken team makes Tekken, the Ridge Racer team makes Ridge Racer, the Ace Combat team makes Ace Combat.” Furthermore, though a Final Fantasy fighting game with a SoulCalibur engine is a definite money-printing license, Namco wouldn’t bother because they’d have to share that money with Square. Square wouldn’t bother because they’re already outsourcing a Final Fantasy fighting game, for PSP, even, and the conditions of their contract allow them to pretend that they made it themselves. In short, quality or creativity don’t matter to these people. And neither does money. It’s all about pride, about putting out your own thing and seeing how many numbers it can rack up, how long it stays there until the police or the sanitation workers haul it away.

And there sits Tekken 6, every day all of an eternity; the bear trap on the way home from work, pachinko for the men of the world who know gambling is wrong. Maybe the win/loss records are so even because literally half the time any given player just doesn’t want to win anymore. CONTINUE magazine, in their February, 2008 issue, named Tekken 6 as one of the worst games of 2007, right up there with Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and Namco’s The Idolm@ster. They derided The Idolm@ster for turning normal people into posers; they insinuate that no one who plays it actually wants to play it. These people who put down the money aren’t even convinced that anyone else considers the game worthwhile. Namco is simply riding the wave of “otaku”-awareness, and the players of disreputable bullstuff like The Idolm@ster merely seek to be “part of” something, even if it’s being part of some corporation’s attempt to cash in on loser-chic. The players laugh — in public, and on the internet — about how it might actually be funny to be pretending to like something, though eventually they fall into their own trap and actually start wondering if they might actually like it. This is how multiple personality disorders are born; Tekken is pretty much the same thing, only it’s about muscular dudes (and grizzly bears and pandas and kangaroos and dinosaurs) and grating stuff-rock instead of gyrating flat-chested little girls with wide-open, unblinking, face-sized eyes and terrifying pop numbers. Men plunk down money fatalistically, winning sometimes, losing sometimes, and when they walk away, they never look happy. And there’s me, waiting for the light outside to turn green, thinking about cooking dinner.

–tim rogers

( if you make this your band name, please credit me in your liner notes)
(* too-late disclaimer: if you already like tekken and claim to have some skill at it, that’s okay! no need to yell at me. i have so much respect for you; i’m not even kidding.)

text by tim rogers

★★★★

“THE BEST GAME EVER ABOUT POINTS A AND B.”

After playing Portal, it becomes abundantly clear that every videogame produced should probably be required by law to contain at least one fantastical item that the player wishes he could have in real life. The closest any game has ever gotten to Portal‘s Portal Gun would have to be the Castrol Tom’s Supra in Gran Turismo, which is kind of sad because that’s just a car.



Simply put, the Portal Gun lets you shoot a Blue Portal and a Red Portal; go in the Blue Portal, come out the Red Portal. Go in the Red Portal, come out the Blue Portal.

The beginning of the game streamlines the dynamic by providing you with Red Portals and letting you place Blue Portals. Even then, it’s enough to confuse most peoples’ girlfriends (if they exist). The very first puzzle after the player receives the ability to shoot both Red and Blue Portals involves a door across a very, very wide chasm. In order to get there, you just shoot a Portal of any color at the wall near the door and then shoot a Portal at the wall near where you stand. Enter the Portal nearest to you and, with a pan-flash worthy of Super Mario Bros., power flickers to life in virgin regions of your brain. It used to be, chasms were the point of games; in Portal, they’re just a casualty of the game’s brutally inventive, genre-breaking concept. The only way to play this game is to break what you already know about other games, which I suppose is especially true if you know nothing at all about games. This game is vandalism for the gamer’s mind; it breaks into the game design profession’s ladies department at midnight and straps diamond dildos on all the mannequins.

Any human being worth conversing with will, upon encountering that first genius chasm in Portal, begin to literally quiver whilst contemplating the possibilities of owning a real-life Portal gun. An elaborate example would involve putting one portal in, say, an apartment in Rome, and another one in your apartment in Philadelphia. Not everyone has an apartment in Rome, however. A simpler example — I wouldn’t mind having a portal in my bedroom and another one in my office five kilometers away. Would be nice to not have to commute! Have one portal on the sofa cushion and another on the ceiling above your toilet, for example, to turn defecating into something of a game. Sex with your girlfriend could become severely interesting, as you do her from in her apartment via a portal in your apartment, then pull out and close the portal, leaving her bewildered and alone. Or — and this was actually the first one I thought of — with very simple portal placement, you could finally experience auto-fellatio without straining your abdominal muscles (or having ribs removed). Just remember to close the portals when you’re done, or the next person stepping into your apartment is going to immediately know exactly what you were doing.

As Portal starts building in cleverness — with the introduction of surfaces that cannot be portaled — your mind may or may not calm down, and start to ponder potential puzzles. The first time the game threw a momentum-based puzzle my way, I immediately thought it would be awesome if there was a puzzle where you have to cross a long chasm by placing two portals on the floor far beneath your feet. When the game eventually tossed out one such puzzle, it felt really nice. Like the game was listening. Good games are like this — they make you start to expect to see your name in the credits.

The “story” of Portal, in typical Valve fashion, is told entirely as you’re actually playing the game. You wake up in a kind of test-tube bed with hideous music playing on a nearby radio. You are informed that you are a test subject. The droning computer voice refers to you as “[Subject Name Here]”, which at first seems like a funny little joke, and then eventually — if you duck into enough optional side rooms — seems less like a one-off and more like a sinister hint.

Sinister hint or not, it’s entirely up to you how much you read into the story — if at all — just as it’s up to you to play this game in the first place. Having gone into this game cold turkey, I had no idea what kind of “plot” there would be, if any, so I was weirdly shocked (this was at two in the morning) when I got to the first “side room” — dilapidated and littered with garbage, a stark contrast to the sterile white of the testing center. A cold wave came over me: no, the spectacular dialogue (spoken only by the computer voice) in this game isn’t just for optional amusement. There really is a story back there, somewhere.

My first side-room experience happened to come just minutes after I thought, what if we get to break out of this testing center and use the portal gun in real life? In a way, using the portal gun in a simulated videogamefacsimile of “real life” was more appealing, in that moment, than actually using a real portal gun in real real life, probably because the fake real life was a more immediate possibility. In the end, which was great, the game only met me halfway, though what a spectacular halfway it was.

Some said the game was too short; some people have also said that the greatest compliment a pop song can receive is “it’s too short”, though those people probably don’t regularly play three-hour videogames, and thus many of them might find Portal to be too long. (I happen to think there are many better things to say about pop music. “This song made me quit smoking”, for example, can be a better compliment than “It’s too short”. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear the song that made someone quit smoking?) I suppose the crux of this well-waged argument is that Portal is both short and not conducive to replaying. This is perhaps a fair criticism, though that first play-through is so much of a brain marathon that it’s going to stick with you for months, or even years. I’d rather play a three-hour game with a razor-sharp concept, hilariously quotable dialogue, and a vaguely sketched story that just keeps coming back to you than, say, scrounge around big environments looking to collect all 101 hecking Dalmatians. Also, as a short game, and as one that can be played mostly by utilizing actual common sense, it’s exceptionally easy to recommend it to people who don’t own any Devil May Cry T-shirts. In the end, Portal‘s three hours contain more story and more personality than probably any 100-hour game has ever had before it; it draws a new line in the sand between games that are about showing us something cool and games that are giving us something to do in the interim period between the game’s release and the day that the buy-back rate at used game shops falls through the floor. With this writing, I’d like to implore the Worldwide Videogame Industry to “make more games like Portal“, though seeing as when Famitsu implored the Japanese Videogame Industry to “make more games like Brain Training” we ended up with literally whole shop floors devoted to brain-training games, it’s probably not a good idea. I mean, there’s only so much you can do with portals, and even less you can do with a whole shelf full of games about portals.

While we’re at it, let’s say that consulting GameFAQs for this game should probably be illegal.

As with Katamari, there’s really no reason to make a sequel to Portal; again, as with Katamari, the only way to make a sequel would be to expand on the concept only logistically. An actual evolution of Katamari would present the player with a tiny clump in an actual, breathing, realistic metropolis. An evolution of Portal would see the escaped test subject fleeing from the feds in a sprawling real-world environment, with a certain destination clearly in mind (let’s say the penthouse office suite of a specific skyscraper) and numerous puzzles laid out in logical places throughout the city, solvable only with the portal gun; the player navigates from puzzle to puzzle as the indirect result of her being chased by shadowy men in radiation suits. Eventually, the game would come together like one huge puzzle.

Maybe you’d even have two portal guns, and be able to use four portals at a time. Man!

It occurs to me that it would be kind of cool if Valve were to collaborate a bit with Rockstar to make the portal gun a downloadable item in Grand Theft Auto IV. They don’t even have to produce any specific missions for it — if you pay, say, five dollars, then the portal gun is permanently placed in your character’s house. Man, that’s a good idea. Someone should give me a job, or something. I’m genuinely surprised at how I just can’t find the proper words to adequately congratulate myself, here.

The writing in Portal is so good, from moment to moment, that it births within me the unshakable and vaguely self-important impression that its writer, Erik Wolpaw (of Psychonauts and Old Man Murray) hates me personally. (There’s no better compliment I can give any piece of writing.) Still, the amount of rabid internet pseudo-posturing concerning the words “Weighted Companion Cube” or “Still Alive” (Protip: play the game to figure out what these words mean) is a bit bewildering. Half of the people who praise the Weighted Companion Cube as a fresh breath of emotion in a videogame industry that is otherwise desensitized to violence against grandmothers and grandfathers are also the sons of the same invisible bitch who step forward to “lol” whenever Kotaku posts a story about the current state of the “Ninjas vs. Pirates” meme. Scientists are hard at work in cooperation with the police, by the way, in proving the hypothesis that half of the people who claim to still find the words “Ninjas” and “Pirates” funny when used in the same sentence either played high school football or tried out for it. That some people will “LOL” at any mention of the Weighted Companion Cube or embroider little custom-made pillows of it while still commenting on web forums that “it’s kind of a shame that even if you wait like ten minutes to dispose of the cube GLaDOS still tells you you destroyed the cube faster than any past test subject” illustrates that these people are only pretending to have a sense of humor. (Here, if I wanted, I could turn this article into a pseudo-literary analysis of how GLaDOS is simply trying to make essentially every test subject feel like they’re more horrible than most other people, and how this is a subtle commentary on how videogames desensitize people, et cetera, though I’m probably the only person who would find that hilarious.) The best conclusion that can be reached, I suppose, is that people in general aren’t capable of truly appreciating quality for what it is, and the nagging feeling in the center of the brain that forces them to regurgitate the most boring key phrases of an otherwise virtuosic tableau of exciting phrases (I loved the “Didn’t we have some fun, though?” line, for example) is a yearning to understand why they enjoyed what they just enjoyed. Really, you have to just let it flow, man.

As good as Portal‘s writing is (and it is indeed excellent), at the end of the day, it’s really no more earth-shattering than the visual production values of God of War: in other words, it’s the bare minimum that videogame-reviewing reviewers and videogame-playing players should be expecting. Luckily for Portal, it also has a magnificent game concept, perfect pacing, and is actually playable from start to finish by someone who didn’t grow up with an unopened box of Super Mario Bros. & Legend of Zelda cereal (“collector’s item”) under their bed. For all it represents, it’s also Action Button Dot Net‘s Game of the Year, 2007. Sorry if you were expecting a ceremony for that! I might as well use this paragraph to say that Portal is “kind of tied” with Pac-Man: Championship Edition, in that if you play both of these games in one day, you’ve had about as much fun as it’s possible to have with videogames released in 2007. I often think of Portal sometimes while playing Pac-Man: Championship Edition, which I guess makes this sentence less of a tangent. Though the hell with it, tangents are more fun, and Portal is so good that talking about it is quite frankly boring. I’ll use the rest of this paragraph to say that the Action Button Dot Net Runner Up Game of the Year, 2007 is Stuntman Ignition, which, as it were, has much better graphics than Guitar Hero. I also pause here to spoil that Action Button Dot Net‘s Game of the Year, 2008 is most likely going to be Sega / Creative Assembly’s Viking: Battle for Asgard, because I love vikings, I love Creative Assembly, I consider Spartan: Total Warrior the sharpest game ever made, and most importantly because I have seen screenshots and I will not be swayed.

(*tied with pac-man: championship edition)

Getting back on topic, then: some kids have seen fit to both solve the puzzles in Portal and solve them as fast as possible, which is a little redundant, like seeing how fast you can write out all the answers on a calculus test with an answer key right next to you. Portal, unlike some (most) games, is not about the finger exercise — it’s about the experience of getting through it, letting it open your mind a little bit, putting it away, and then ceaselessly, turgidly, relentlessly forcing your friends to borrow it until everyone you know has played it and thanked you. To digress, the only game that’s better under this description would be God Hand, because I recommend that one fiercely and still play it. Then again, why would I want to play a game over and over again? Yearning for “replay value” is a sickness that dwells deep in the heart of every mainstream game reviewer. The best games aren’t ones with swathes of collectible bullstuff; they’re ones like Portal, or Cave Story — games that, art or pop-art or whatever the hell they are (Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood has called Cave Story “art”, and I’m pretty sure he’s smarter than me (not being sarcastic), so who knows), are so undeniably, tightly put-together that clearing them makes us never want to see them again, makes us wonder why the people who made them aren’t out, I don’t know, hecking curing cancer, developing the Ultimate Toothbrushing Solution, or something. In this day and age when even a (metaphorically) fat-fingered bastard like me can learn to script events in the Unreal Engine, Portal (no, not BioShock) is precisely the kind of videogame everyone out there needs to play. In short, it’s substance over style, and the style is spectacular.

Did you ever have this experience: a band or a book or a film that someone recommended to you very casually — maybe they said “I guess you might like them”, or something else mealy-mouthed enough to make you wonder what this jerk knows about what you like — and then, when you finally got around to listening to that band / reading that book / seeing that movie you were hecking blown away, and disappointed by all of your friends, because not a single one of them knows you well enough to know that this thing that they got to before you is precisely the sort of thing you’d love? I have that experience all the time, most recently with this game Portal, and the television show “The Sopranos”, which I started watching on a bizarre whim (it’s so good I haven’t touched a videogame in weeks). If you, dear reader, have actually read to the end of this inane, half-autistic nonsense right here (one of three articles written on one lunch break, meaning it took less than twenty minutes and was written hungry) and you still haven’t played Portal, you are hereby ordered to consider this the strongest possible recommendation.