Well, hello again! It's been a while, so lemme tell you what I've been up to over the past six months or so, vidja-game wise.
Mostly,I've been working on editing (read: rewriting) the script for an English-language romhack of Super Robot Wars Judgment for the Game Boy Advance, a ridiculously awesome game about robots punching other robots in half, as demonstrated by the following screenshot: Super Robot Wars is a really, really long-running franchise of strategical role-playin'-game-a-ma-phones that smush the characters and plotlines of a whole bunch of different robot anime together. This means hundreds of characters, most of the plotlines from their respective shows, and a lot of dialogue.
In the case of this romhack, said dialogue was translated by a non-native English speaker, and needed a lot of rewriting. I saw the project page for the game over at romhacking.net back in January, shot the project lead a PM asking if he needed any editing help, and got sent the dialogue for the game's first scenario. I spent a couple of hours polishing the thing up, sent it back to the project lead, and got a whole bunch of new scenario scripts in return. And so it went for about 5 months. Working on this thing was, I found, a lot of fun. I ended up skipping on Persona 4 in favor of rewriting goofy Super Robot Wars dialogue. Plus, y'know, last semester in college. Priorities (sorta).
For the record, I'm not a member of any kind of fan community devoted to these games, and I'd never even seen half of the shows featured in the game prior to starting work on the project. The franchise in its modern form is consistently breezy, silly fun that generally treats the player's time with respect, and I really dug working on it. When the translation patch gets released in a few months, I suspect you'll dig it too.
Still, I'm not quite done yet. The massive script has been edited, sure, but I still need to go back and see everything in context, proofread, find stuff I missed, and rewrite some more. I was originally thinking about turning this into a kind of "Let's Play" thing, akin to David Cabrera's old blog playthrough of the Super Robot Wars 2 remake from a few years ago, but decided against it at the last second. People are waiting for this dang translation patch, y'know? If I started talking about this game you can't play every day for a month or two, I would eventually start feeling like a pretty legit asshole, as opposed to a guy who was merely accused of being one by crazy robot fans.
So instead, I'm changing this thing from a vidja-game blog to an all-purpose one. I've been meaning to do it for a while, but this time it's fo' real. Consider this fair warning.
Arcade Mania!is a new book from Kotaku editor Brian Ashcraft about Japanese arcades, the games inside and the people who play them. That might sound like a fairly narrow focus, but Ashcraft smartly chooses to center not just on traditional joystick-based video games (played primarily by dudes with rich parents for 6 hours a day), but on UFO Catchers, sticker machines, and the amazingly sophisticated network-based Mahjongg and card-based arcade games that are both insanely popular and also nearly totally unknown in the West.
He's also made an interesting structural choice - the chapters of the book are organized the same way that the average Japanese game center is, with UFO Catchers up front, followed by music/fighting/shooting games, dedicated cabinet games, and so on.
Each chapter is a snapshot of the history of arcade games. Yu Suzuki and Hang-On are the lynchpin of the dedicated cabinet chapter, but it's not just about the 80s and 90s - the chapter also gives us a glimpse into the history of the non-video amusement games that eventually inspired Suzuki and others to put plastic motorcycles and Ferraris in game centers. The shooting game chapter covers the Space Invaders boom and Xevious, leading us right up to the present. There's even an interview with Minoru Ikeda, the guy who runs superplay DVD publisher INH, including an attempt to explain why he thought "Insanity Naked Hunter" would be a good name for a DVD publisher.
There's more fun reading in here - the fighting game section has interviews with Daigo Umehara, of course, but it also has chit-chat with Arc System's Daisuke Ishiwatari, SNK producer Shinya Kimoto (choice advice to future game designers: "Punching is important. That, and the sound effects of smacking someone."), and Virtua Fighter 5 director Daichi Katagiri. There's nothing earth-shattering in here for people who have been paying attention to these games for a while (You wa Shock from SNK exec Soichiro Hosoya: "We have to release our fighting games in arcades. If we didn't, no one would buy the console versions."), but Jean Snow's page layouts are clean and Ashcraft's newspapery-prose is consistently engaging and informative.
Even for people who already think they know everything about Japanese arcade games, though, the chapters on mahjong and card-based arcade games are pretty dang interesting. If you've used MAME at all in the past few years, chances are that you've noticed the enormous back-archive of utterly bewildering strip-mahjong games, and have since written off the concept of arcade mahjong as pandering bullshit devoid of any value whatsoever. Arcade Mania! is here to prove you wrong, son. Specifically: man, Sega's Network Taisen Mahjong and Konami's Mahjong Fight Club series are ridiculously sophisticated networked, touch-screen affairs with IP-card tracking and everything. Hell, Sega and Konami even have their own competing rosters of real-life pro mahjong players who are basically paid to play their respective arcade games all the time - the chance for regular players to run into pros is a big draw.
The one sorta-weak link in the book is the chapter on Retro Games, which consists primarily of an interview with Goichi Suda in which he talks about "maybe opening a retro game center" across the street from Grasshopper Manufacture, and some quotes from Toshiyuki Kanbayashi, the owner of Shibuya Kaikan Monaco, a fairly popular retro game center. It feels weirdly under-researched, and Suda is practically the only source quoted in the entire chapter. Oh, and the other weak link: Ashcraft fucks up during the music game chapter when describing DDR's double mode, which is expressly designed for one person to play with what appears to be two players' worth of inputs - he makes the rookie mistake of thinking that his interview subject is rad enough to be playing the normal game, designed for one player, on both the one and two-player side... actually, considering how confusing that last sentence is, his mistake was totally understandable.
Besides that, though? I dug the hell out of this book, and I bet you will too. It's about $15 or so over at amazon, and comes in the adorably-compact-by-western-standards A4 size. People walking by your bookshelf will be practically magnetized to the damn thing. Oh baby.
In lieu of providing new content, here are a couple of links that deserve your attention: First up is a Gamasutra interview with Arc System Works, the awesome men and woman behind the Guilty Gear series, the thoroughly under-appreciated Battle Fantasia, and a slew of other 2D fighting games, including the recently released BlazBlue. There's a lot of interesting information in here, most of which has handily been digested by David Cabrera (protip: if you don't read his blog on a regular basis, you totally should be), but I was most amused by BlazBlue director Toshimichi Mori's issue with the way Capcom has been presenting Street Fighter IV:
Toshimichi Mori: I'm not trying to pick a fight with Capcom or anything, but with Street Fighter IV, they made a big deal about how the game was designed to be accessible to people new to the genre.
I remember when I first read that in an interview, I was like, "What? How can they say that?!" I thought maybe I was seeing things. I think they need to take a second look at the list of moves for that game before they make a claim like that.
Sure, people like us who work with games, or fans of fighting games can do a hadouken or a shoryuken without thinking much about it, but for somebody just getting started? Those moves are pretty tough! You can't expect new players to just whip those moves out every time.
To fill your game with moves like that and then emphasize how simple it was for beginners to pick up seemed irresponsible to me. Street Fighter IV is not a game geared toward people who've never played fighters before. If they were really interested in making a beginner-friendly game, they should've made included a few impressive moves a player could do with the press of a button.
Maegawa: "When I was working on Parodius, we had a very short time with the game, so I wasn't able to compose a new soundtrack for it. But you know, classical music is public domain -- once the composer has died, 50 years later we're free to use it however we wish and the music belongs to the public....that's why we used classical music for the game. We only had one month to create the Parodius' soundtrack!"
There's lots of other cool stuff on the Retronauts blog besides this interview, anyway. I recommend checking it out.
Ketsui Death Label is a DS port of the arcade shooting game from which this blog's title is uneasily derived. The original game (developed by the genre-defnining Cave) has practically taken on the status of myth among shooting game fans - it's never been ported to a home console, you can't emulate it, and the arcade board itself sells for something like a thousand bucks last time I checked. It's also purportedly really good, with a scoring system that rewards getting up close to the enemies. Plus, there are lots of mesmerizing, colorful bullet patterns and excellent music courtesy of Manabu Namiki. And helicopters. Awww yeah. Death Label, developed by those Tetris Grand Masters over at Arika, is the most glorified boss rush ever made. Instead of a set number of stages like in the arcade game, the DS version consists of different courses, each one sending you up against different bosses from the arcade version of the game in a row. The play mechanics have been reappropriated a little bit for the small screens, but the end result still requires you to stay as close to the boss as long as you can without getting killed.
Interestingly, you also get a ton of points for carefully using up all of your bombs at each boss encounter, turning all of the bullets onscreen into big multiplier point items with each use. That's a scoring mechanic that doesn't show up very much in these kinds of games, which usually reward you for bombing as little as possible. Unfortunately, it also means that in a lot of cases you end up spending most of your time shooting the boss until near-dead, then waiting around until a particularly big bullet pattern comes out, bombing, and then waiting around some more.
Besides the steadily harder set of courses, the game also has an Extra Mode which replicates the fifth stage of the arcade game on the DS with a pretty absurd level of difficulty. There's also Doom Mode, in which you fight the true last boss of the arcade game over and over, with the difficulty ramping up each time.
The game has an art gallery that unlocks as you complete the equivalent of achievements ("destroy this boss," "destroy that boss," "don't bomb," etc.), which in turn unlocks a bizarre little side mode called "Oshiete IKD-san!" in which Cave head-honcho Tsuneki Ikeda instructs various characters from Ketsui itself on the game's play mechanics. There are also mini-superplay videos and assorted meta-weirdness from the development staff of the DS game. Most of it is beyond my rudimentary Japanese ability, but it, along with the included superplay DVD of the arcade version, show that Arika wasn't willing to just push this thing out the door. Sorta. It feels apologetic, like "hey, sorry we couldn't make a real game for the DS. Here's a bunch of unnecessary stuff for you to peruse as compensation." That's the kind of vibe I get, anyway.
Second opinion: here's a video review of the game by shmups forum member Rob, who lives in the great state of Alaska. You may find that he is pretty picky about these kinds of games (and maybe a little insane), but he is an important voice, nonetheless.
It's the end of the year, my friends. That means it's also time for a big list. It's my obligation as a blogger to write lists. And I am trying to oblige.
So here's a list of the best games I played this year (trying very hard to stick to games that came out in 2008), in no particular order. I'm not too big a fan of ordered lists. I will include bullet points, though! It's the least I can do.
Mother 3is a rarity. Superbly written, endlessly clever and imaginative, thematically rich in ways that make the vast majority of story-driven video games look like they're from some kind of other, more primitive dimension. It's also emotionally brutal, pulling only one punch in the course of its narrative. The 250-track score is undeniably one of the best in a game ever, and the way it's married to the thoroughly Dragon Questy battle system is perfectly restrained. Probably the only JRPG anyone needs to play, really.
Geometry Wars 2 fixes almost all the mistakes of its predecessor. The first game was an enormously flawed arena shooter (best way to get a big score: fly around the arena in circles for multiple days in a row) that inexplicably became the critical darling of both whoever metacritic tracks in addition to the large sub-target audience of pothead programmers with large TVs (I say this with the utmost respect!). With the sequel, we see Bizarre Creations' Stephen Cakebread learning how to make a good arcade game. A long game is minutes long, instead of hours and hours. The Deadline game mode, which lasts 3 minutes and requires a lot of interesting techniques in order to score well, features a complex rank system akin to those of arcade shooting games that adjusts its difficulty to the player's ability. And the way the upper-right corner of the screen shows your friends' scores at all times, updating as you get better? Great idea!
Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaidenis video game satire done exactly right. It treads into the theater of the absurd, plays a couple games of b-ball and leaves after a few hours. Better than the games it's lampooning, Barkley is careful to not overstay its welcome and to keep a straight face, no matter how stupid it gets. That people who don't get the joke took the game at face value as a "serious rpg" is all that needs to be said. If you can't play Mother 3 for whatever reason, play this instead.
Braid was pretty great. Especially if you drink and you get drunk or if you smoke weed and you get high.
The World Ends With Youwas... shit, that's another JRPG. Uh oh. TWEWY is a game that reminded me of a time when Square was not quite the relatively boring developer that it is now. Lots of progressive ideas that make numbers going up considerably more fun than normal, coherent, well-produced aesthetics, a loving and gutsy localization, and an unbelievably insane battle system thing. Oh yeah! It also had some funky music. Inexplicably good game.
Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer is the DS port of the super charming Super Famicom roguelike that has warmed the hearts of millions. What? It's only sold a a few thousand copies in the US? Son of a bitch. Don't let cult-hit unpopularity stop you from playing this game, which plays a little like Nethack with a lot more personality and less absurd bullshit for you deal with. Even better, the game actually teaches you how to play it. I think that's a benchmark for any difficult game, these days: why make the player look outside of the game itself in order to attain basic proficiency? The obvious answer is because youtube and niconico douga make it easier than ever for players to share information, but it's the thought that counts, guys. Shiren gives a shit. Will you?
Honorable mention goes to the following almost great games...
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix for being a great game that is also terribly, terribly buggy, crashing the 360 outright every other time I start the game up. Backbone Entertainment, you are an awful developer. Not awful enough to ruin Super Turbo, but almost!
No More Heroes, you are almost a fantastic game! So, so close. Let us focus on the good things, like the superb writing, voice acting and cutscene direction. The boss fights are also really good. Let us focus less on the bad things that are debatably "the point," like the barren cityscape and kinda monotonous combat and stuff like that. I'm sure the sequel will be awesome.
Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia is, finally, a modern Castlevania with some thought evident in its construction. Occasionally hard as hell, lighter on the OCD, and the bosses are mostly great. The amount of graphic reuse during some of the outdoor areas is bewildering and unfortunate, but the game leaves you with a good last impression, and that's important: these games haven't been able to do that for years. There are still obvious things wrong with this game (the villagers and their retarded fetch-quests, especially), but considering the brainless nature of its predecessors, it's still deserving of some high-fives. Or are they almost high-fives? Yeah, pretty sure they're real.
That wraps it up for this year. I'm sure I forgot at least a couple great games from this year, but I gotta wrap this thing up. Thanks for reading, and have a rockin' new year, ok?
First Blue Dragon, now Lost Odyssey, the other big-name Xbox 360 project from Mistwalker, a studio that seems incapable of making a good game.
Lost Odyssey's premise seems tailored specifically to make hack japanese role-playing game designers weep. The protagonist, a man named Kaim Argonar, is immortal. The game, however, is a remarkably traditional JRPG. How did the designers reconcile this? Well, if an immortal character falls in battle, they get back up a couple turns later with a percentage of their HP. If everyone gets KO'd, then it's game over as usual.
At the beginning of the game, we see Kaim get crushed beneath a meteor. Everyone in a hundred mile radius appears to be dead, buried beneath molten magma. Kaim's A-OK. Later, in another battle, he and another immortal character get hit by a gust of wind generated by the wings of some kind of large bird. They both take mortal damage and die. "GAME OVER" appears on the screen. There is a problem here!
Pacing problems abound. Here's a summary of the Things You Do in the first disc (10 hours) of the game, in order:
Nearly impossible-to-lose series of introductory battles. Both paralyizingly boring and pretty cool looking.
Long stroll through capital city. Jab the A button repeatedly while walking along every single wall in order to find Important Hidden Items (actually not important at all). Compared to the city folk with nothing interesting to say and the backtracking between areas, pressing the A button repeatedly is actually the most interesting part.
Finally leave the city for obligatory trek through dungeon that looks like a forest.
Hardest first boss in a modern JRPG ever.
Slightly shorter version of 2.
Slightly shorter version of 3 and 4.
Segment where you're trapped in prison and must walk around in circles until the game decides it is time for you to leave.
Awful stealth section.
Even longer version of 2.
Ominous foreshadowing.
Funeral minigame! First run around through a massive area and pick up 10 flowers by pressing the A button. Then do it again as another character, this time picking up twigs. Then a torch-waving minigame. Start crying.
Obligatory trek through dungeon that looks like a forest, followed by a dungeon that looks like a dungeon.
Save your game before inserting Disc 2.
On the upside, the English voice acting is pretty good!
beatmania IIDX is probably the hardest video game ever made. It was already the oldest and most stoically difficult music game out there, but the recently released Playstation 2 port of the 15th(!) arcade installment, the absurdly themed DJ TROOPERS, has a few new additions that push things right over the top.
IIDX is a hard game. I often describe it to people who are only familiar with Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the like as "Everything Hero." On the hardest difficulty (called "Another," for nebulous reasons), you play every damn part of the song, or close. Here, as an example, is autoplay of a song from the home version of DJ Troopers with an uncharacteristically Japanese title (and which is originally from Drummania/Guitar Freaks, another Konami music game series - the beatmania community calls them "transplant songs"):
Man, isn't that ridiculous? Especially 0:48! This is, actually, kind of the norm for hard songs in this game. Not necessarily in terms of sheer numbers - there are still lots of easy, or at least, easier songs - but there are more memorably virtuosic songs out there with every new version. It's hard for them not to dominate your impression of the series as a whole.
Now for some attempts at providing context: IIDX has always been about catering towards the fairly small group of people that obsessively play the game in Japanese arcades, or wish they could. In the arcade, you buy a card that keeps track of your scores. The card also allows you to set other players as your rivals, comparing your scores with other players in minute detail - you can play "against" other players' scores as ghosts, like in a racing game, with a little +/- number keeping track of where you are scorewise with an opponents' best score on a song. There's even a database included in each of the home versions with score data for every player registered in Konami's system from a certain date before the game's home release, giving everyone a shot at something resembling live competition.
Another concept that I feel is integral to understanding the people who play this game is that there's almost no memorization involved. Guitar Hero and Rock Band have convinced quite a few people I know that music games are all about memorizing the note patterns and practicing them over and over again until muscle memory takes over. IIDX can be played like that, sure, but the vast majority of players opt to focus on honing their ability to instinctively react to note patterns to a razor's (and eventually, lazor's) edge. There are a number of options, adjustable before and during every song, to let you do this. The first is "Hi-Speed," (adjustable from 0.5 up to 5) which spaces the notes out and makes them scroll faster. If you've played Rock Band with the "Breakneck Speed" option turned on, it's a little like that. The difference is that it's totally controllable. Hold down the start button in the middle of a song to bring up a list of the available hi-speeds (seen above). Press the top row of buttons on the controller to increase the hi-speed, and press the bottom row of buttons to lower it. It's pretty dang handy.
The other helpful feature is called "Sudden+," which causes a square pane to appear over the area where the notes appear (seen above). Hold down the start button and spin the turntable up and down to adjust how much of your view is obstructed. Combined with Hi-Speed, you can make the notes scroll at any damn speed you want, depending on personal preference, the song's BPM, etc. The result of all this is that you eventually learn to read notes that scream from the top of the screen at speeds that seem, initially, to be entirely unreadable.
There's a second phase to all of this madness, and it's called "Random." Like Hi-Speed, it's turned on before you start a song. Do so, and the default note patterns of the song (a big reference list can be found here) get randomized. Any note that normally appears in the 3rd column gets swapped over to a random other column, and so on for every other note in the song. In the above picture, the left side player has random turned off, and the right side player has random turned on.
The result is that every song can remain surprising for many, many plays. More importantly, you get to play a huge number of different patterns that don't necessarily exist in any song by default (I'm not even going to start talking about "s-random," which randomizes every single note, as opposed to just swapping the note columns around). A common topic of conversation among beatmania players is the notion of songs having "good randoms" or "bad randoms," or being more prone to either. It's a fascinating extra layer of gameyness.
Ok! Why's the home version of IIDX 15 so especially nuts? The reason is: they added a new, harder difficulty for around 20 songs, one of which was already one of the hardest songs in the game.
Let's compare. Below is a video of Mendes, which was already the "boss song" of IIDX15. On the left side of the screen is the Another difficulty setting (previously the highest, above Hyper and Normal difficulty). It has 2000 notes in the span of 2 minutes. On the right side of the screen is the new difficulty they added for the home version, which no one's really sure what to call yet ("Danger" difficulty and "black another" are frontrunners). It has 2626 notes in the span of 2 minutes, and is the closest thing yet in this game to a challenge that is genuinely physically impossible. As of this writing, there are an estimated 5 people in the world capable of clearing it. I think it's a good place to stop at, really:
Super Robot Wars is a really, really long-running franchise of strategical role-playin'-game-a-ma-phones that smush the characters and plotlines of a whole bunch of different robot anime together. This means hundreds of characters, most of the plotlines from their respective shows, and a lot of dialogue.
