Video-Matic

Items in Shadow Complex (so far)

noreply@blogger.com (Videomatic) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:26:00 +0000

The following is a list of what power-ups I’ve come across so far while playing this highly original and completely groundbreaking game.

I began the game with a Flashlight that shows up secrets and displays structural weaknesses and their colour which corresponds with what weapon can destroy them. Sort of like the X-Ray visor (Super Metroid) and Scan Visor (Metroid Prime) in one. Since then I have found these items:

* A backpack with climbing gear so I can grab onto ledges, kinda like in Metroid Fusion.

* Grenades which can be placed or thrown. They blow up green doors and surfaces.

* Multiple Health Packs which increase my maximum health in blocks of 100.

* Bionic Armour Suit. Hi-tech thermal gear that decreases damage taken from enemies and can be upgraded with Armour boost pickups.

* Suit Part: Air boost back-mounted jet – a sort of mini jet pack that can be used in mid air to extend the height of a leap, y’know like a Space Jump.

* Suit Part - water breathing apparatus. Allows full movement under water and fits over my head obscuring my face and eyes. (Hell, I’m even becoming more aesthetically similar to Samus.)

* A Foam gun that shoots purple Foam which disrupts electrical equipment. Can be used to open purple doors. Also incapacitates enemies for a short amount of time that can then be used as platforms. So it’s the Wave Beam with a bit of Ice Beam thrown in, I assume in order to plagiarise that too.

COMING SOON:

Missiles that can be used to open red doors.

_____________________________________

Still though, damn good game.

Passenger 57 and Speed are good movies because Die Hard is a great movie. The Magician is a good book because Lord of the Rings is too. So following this logic: Shadow Complex is a good game because Super Metroid is one of the best games ever.

- Danny

Metroid: Other Complex

noreply@blogger.com (Videomatic) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:41:00 +0000

When I was playing Shadow Complex (Epic Games, XBLA, 2009) last night I found myself thinking less “this is a huge waste of time, I could be playing Super Metroid (Nintendo, SNES/Wii, 2004,2007)” but rather more “this borrows A LOT from Metroid games but you know what, it’s making me really geared up for Other M!”

(Left – Shadow Complex / Right – Metroid: Other M)

In fact, if Metroid: Other M (Nintendo, Wii, 2010) manages to succeed in the areas where Shadow Complex fails then I’m on the one hand looking forward to and on the other hand apprehensive about what will probably be one damn fine game. What little gameplay elements I can decipher from Other M’s E3 trailer indicate that it looks as if it shares the 2.5d shooting on different planes aspect of Shadow Complex, and the real positive thing here is that in Shadow Complex it all works. Complex, as has been said rather well in other places, plays very much like Super but the whole while you’re operating your controller and shooting your weapons like you would in a 1st person shooter on account of the free aim with the right stick feature. At the outset it all seems as if the world and your head will explode, but this feeling, or the actual event doesn’t look or feel like happening at any point. Instead, it all gels, it’s gripping, and it all works. It’s such a relief in a way; this was my biggest concern about Other M, in other words the primary source of my apprehension, and to see it work so well and be so fun in another game is a massive source of excitement.

Now, let’s talk about Other M briefly, well namely what we’ve seen of it so far:

Firstly, as I eluded to before, between say about 1:35 and 2:00 is the only real sense of how the game actually plays I can find and even that doesn’t give me a very good idea. In roughly 25 seconds of footage I can see Prime like 1st person snippets, God Of War like quick time events, I can see Tomb Raider like running and jumping, and I can see Super Metroid like shooting complete with similar enemies. This jumbled mess of content does not a picture of a cohesive action game make. Now of course the questions and thoughts and ruminations I have about how this will play based on what I’ve seen in an E3 trailer could all be rendered moot and unfounded if you consider this as a point of reference:

What little gameplay this Metroid Prime (Nintendo, GC/Wii, 2002) trailer almost but not quite shows bears just about no resemblance to what the game finally turned out to be. But that being said I prefer this trailer a great deal, and there’s a big fat massive reason why. Whereas Prime’s trailer is largely concept art based with a lesser focus on gameplay; Other M’s trailer is primarily cut scene based and gives me the impression that the game relies heavily on story, and you know my feelings on story mixed with Metroid. Metroid for me is about discovery and exploration, if there has to be cut scenes or story in my game I want it to be found in computer logs I have to search for and investigate like in Prime, or during Elevator/loading sequences like in Fusion, or, in the case of older games in the series, in the frikkin’ instruction manual.

The other thing I just can’t abide and don’t in a million years want is a noticeable graphical difference between FMV and gameplay which I hate because it’s lazy and it’s un-immersive. It immediately begins to fundamentally make me feel like the game and it’s story are two different things which should never be the case. The Metroid Prime series shares it’s excellent storytelling technique with Half-Life (Valve, PC, 1998), in that both of them never try to break the action or the flow of the game on account of their story. Now don’t get me wrong here, I know the Prime series is over, I know it’s a new developer and all that so maybe I should just accept that it will be completely different. However I won’t be overly pleased if this aspect of the trailer is a huge part of the final product.

This whole change thing could be a good thing though. The whole lose all your powers and slowly gain them as a result of heavy exploration on a large and varied but unusually very well connected set of locales nature of Super, Fusion, and the Prime series is after so many years getting a little stale. For instance, does the announcement this week that Retro Studios may one day return to the Metroid Universe, despite previously saying they had moved on, mean that one day we’ll get a 4th game that is behind the shell of it’s mere changes essentially again the same game? Look at Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (Nintendo, GC/Wii, 2004) for example: it’s two biggest innovations were a dark world and the Screw Attack, and those were nabbed from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Nintendo, SNES/GC/Wii/GBA, 1991) and past Metroid games. So maybe if someone like Epic Games can come along and make Shadow Complex and get away with it (at this juncture I want you to know I think it is a very good game by the way) maybe that means it is high time for something new.

But really truly, thanks Shadow Complex, you’re lack of innovation coupled with new elements and actual real fun has made me more excited about Metroid: Other M. Now I just need more videos or another game completely out of nowhere to make me more excited about Super Mario Galaxy 2 (working title) (Nintendo, Wii, 2010).

- Danny

Best Scene In Cinema Hisory

noreply@blogger.com (Homage) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:14:00 +0000

INT. RUSSIAN HOTEL - DAY

GRIGORI MUSCOVIC, a swarthy Russian Mobster (Udo Kier), stares through his foreign gimlet eyes at BUSHNELL (DiCaprio).

MUSCOVIC
Misterra Bushnell, we demand rights
for your Tetris game.

BUSHNELL
Just a second.

IVAN KARNOV, a portly little fellow in a furry hat (Viggo Mortensen), brings BUSHNELL a phone on one of those silver platters they put phones on in the Seventies, right?

KARNOV
Atelephone forra you, Misterra Bushnell.

INT. ARCADE - DAY

TERRY NASCAR, a sweaty, long-haired arcade proprietor (Philip Seymour Hoffman), holds the phone feverishly to his cauliflower ear.

NASCAR
Nolan?? Nolan, is that you, man?? Listen,
we need answers now! HOW DO WE
REPLACE THE BUCKET FULL OF QUARTERS??

Things Gamers Need to Get Over: Movies

noreply@blogger.com (Homage) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:34:00 +0000

There are movies, and they are the dominant narrative art form of our age. Last night I was at a bar with a friend, and the friend's friend showed up, stoned, wearing one of those German Army jackets that say "I consider marijuana use a way of life", and with a bushy whaler-beard that said "I have no fucking idea how ridiculous I look".

And this gentleman, as a musician (see above) and general dick, was passionately of the opinion that cinema is not the dominant narrative art form of our age. This only served to cement my conviction that anyone who says movies are not the dominant narrative art form of our age is a dick with a dumb neck-beard.

When the fellow on the street - possibly not you or I, because we read Umberto Eco in coffee-houses without a sense of irony, but you know, the common, backbone-of-all-that-we-hold-dear salt-of-the-urban-earth fellow who doesn't see why it's necessary to hold a position on Dan Brown in order to function conversationally in modern society - when he wants to pay a book a compliment, he will say, "It had the cracking pace of a really well-made movie".

When Average Person - not you or I, of course, who can say "I like to listen to Fuck Buttons" with a straight face, but Average Fellow, who likes U2 and liked Oasis when they were big and has no problem with the continued professional existence of Jack Johnson - when he hears something he likes, consciously or unconsciously he very often likes it because it has a cinematic quality to it, a certain depth or grandeur or narrative cohesion such as might be found in a good picture. When Kiss wanted to do something really artistic and pompous and alienating toward their fanbase, what did they do? Release an album they described as "the soundtrack for a movie that hasn't been made yet". Aware of history as far back as Bush 1, Trent Reznor did the exact same thing and described it in exactly the same way a year or so back, but this did better because it turns out Nine Inch Nails fans are marginally less discerning than people who like "Lick it Up".

But nobody takes this pedestal-elevating as far as gamers. The games industry has decided that all gamers really want is games that feel like movies. Lazily-written advertising copy for videogames uses the word "cinematic" more often than movies do. What this means is that the game will feature stupid camera tricks of the kind that, when making atrocious 2-hour cutscene Beowulf, Robert Zemeckis would've discarded as too ostentatious. Games that say they're cinematic aren't wrong, but they're cinematic in the same completely correct sense of the word that Bad Boys 2 is cinematic. Which is to say, totally reactive, hopelessly vogue and dated as soon as they hit the streets, reveling in their lack of interesting use of the library of technique at their disposal, and not even doing at all well what it was they came here to do, which in the case of games is to be fun to play.

Discerning gamers are not sucked in by this. "Discerning", in this case, refers to maybe 10%, at an optimistic estimate, of the total gaming population. Of that 10%, most have got far enough to realise that movies are movies and games are games; they will then proceed to use every debate about the state of the art as an opportunity to launch into a comparison of How Movies Did It with How Games Are Doing It. They will only make very simple comparisons, and they will, if at all possible, bring it back to some cockamamie statistic about how games make more money than movies (so does petrol, that doesn't make it the dominant cultural purveyor of our time).

Basically insecure, gamers of this ilk had a fucking spaz when Roger Ebert expressed his personal and well-informed opinion that games would never be art. How dare he!? What would an old man in a sweater know about art? How could someone who had devoted his life to understanding and elucidating the possible definition of "good cultural product" know more than someone who had finished Halo 3?

If gamers would get over this insecurity, they could admit that movies are a much more mature art form than games, which is natural as they have almost a hundred years head start. They could admit that movies say more interesting things than games, and that it'll be a long time before a game comes along that can stay with you in the same way as Se7en or Collateral or City of God. (Hopefully they'll not even bother trying to bring up games that ape the style of the above - Silent Hill, Grand Theft Auto, Burnout Paradise - but because gamers are largely fairly unworldly teenage boys, they will). But then again, that no movie can have viewers staying up till the wee hours trying to beat someone's time on Mario Circuit 1.

Things Gamers Need To Get Over: Uwe Boll

noreply@blogger.com (Homage) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 03:50:00 +0000

Uwe Boll is a man who makes movies based on video games. These movies are invariably based on second-tier video games that nobody really cares about, such as Dungeon Seige or House of the Dead. For fuck's sake, Uwe Boll made a movie based on Bloodrayne, which was basically Turok multiplied by ass in the Games Everyone Inexplicably Gives A Fuck About Before Release Then When They Come Out And Suck Nobody Cares stakes. The games Uwe Boll makes movies of do not have very good stories, and/or the stories aren't the focus of the games, and/or the makers were such doofuses that they made the cutscenes unskippable but this rightly just meant nobody played them rather than everyone watched the cutscenes.

The movies Uwe Boll makes are, invariably, not very good. Nobody working at Video-matic towers here in sunny New Zealand has seen a Uwe Boll movie, but they never get very good press and they always go DTV here and they're full of d-list actors; also if Uwe Boll was any good at making movies, he'd have graduated to something where the story was the main focus by now, instead of continuing to make movies where the primary selling point is "man with axe kills trolls" or "cat used as silencer" or "tits".

Nerds all have a huge hate on for Uwe Boll because (as far as I can tell) he is alone in making their hobby seem less respectable. When a mediocre man makes a mediocre movie from mediocre source material, the usual response is to say, "does anyone want to watch No Country for Old Men instead?"; but when a mediocre man makes a mediocre movie from mediocre source material that has an option screen, nerds suddenly decide that (a) they really gave a fuck whether the video game of House of the Dead would accurately document the struggles of Thomas and "G" against the evil of Dr Curien; and (2) they are sure that given this patchy-at-best subject material, any filmmaker working today (possibly including themselves) would have done a fine job, but Uwe Boll has fucked it all up against all odds and made a bad movie.

This hatred for mediocre filmmaker Uwe Boll manifests itself in nerds making lame references whenever any videogame movie has been announced. If it is by Uwe Boll, the nerds will clamber from their nerd-holes to list all the good things about the game that Uwe Boll will be ruining (paying no attention to whether these are things that could ever conceivably work in a movie, a distinction about which nerds know nothing); if it is not by Uwe Boll, the nerds will make snide references to Uwe Boll's lack of talent, safe in the knowledge that the movie will be joining the hallowed ranks of Mortal Kombat Annihilation, Street Fighter, Super Mario Brothers, Wing Commander, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and Doom.

Video picks of the week

noreply@blogger.com (Videomatic) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:28:00 +0000

Not updated every week.

It may not be the best topic in the world but be like me, trust in the in-house creative team of Gametrailers.com, they can make just about anything interesting. March 15 saw the start of...

For almost two years now, starting with a six part look at Zelda, Gametrailers have been making awesome Retrospective-multi-part epics and this one is no exception: according to the trailer the Star Wars Retro' will finally rank in with 10 parts. Now I think I could do this in one episode; after you've talked about The Super Star Wars games Shadows of the Empire, Dark Forces, and the Rogue ... Factor 5 games really what else is there? I was a little to young to be impressed by Vector Graphics. I wasn't blown away by Battlezone when I first played it, and so I never I really got into Star Wars' impact on the Arcade scene. I played and loved some of Star Wars Arcade's spiritual successors, the Starfox games are the only example I can think of right now, so I should like it but it's hard to put this properly other than to say the Wireframe style does weird things to my head. My eyes fucking hurt, and normally I don't equate that with having fun.

Now that I think about it, other than Shadows of the Empire and Rogue Leader I can't remember actually ever enjoying a Star Wars game. The key here is that the two games I've mentioned here are off-shoots/spin-offs from the main Star Wars plot, so therefore they aren't strictly movie adaptations, which as a rule generally suck ass.

I said at the beginning that it's a weird choice for a topic but really it's just offbeat enough to make sense. After excellent Metroid and Zelda series' I was for a time pushing the GT forums for a take on the Mario mythos but I've realised after further thought that as interesting as some aspects would undoubtedly be, I don't really need to hear about Nintendo's real-life landlord Mario or the American downfall of Radar Scope ever again.

http://au.movies.ign.com/dor/articles/863515/legend-of-zelda-movie-trailer/videos/legendofzelda_filmtrailer_040108.html;jsessionid=1dints35ts48t

This is one of the greatest April Fool's pranks this year, probably not the greatest game-related one (WOW: BARD LOL CHOCOLATE RAIN ROFL) but definitely one of the best thought out and from the looks of it one of the most expensive pranks of all the bunch. I wasn't for a moment sucked in but if the world flipped out and everything announced on April 1st was true I'd buy a Vintage edition Xbox 360, play Lego Halo on it all the live long day, and then when I got bored of that I'd fucking go to this movie! That Gohma and those spiky things in the desert kicked ass! My advice, don't watch the trailer multiple times. Subsequent viewings with an analytical mind make the trailer's production faults really easy to pick: the "video" quality footage in Hyrule Castle town, the ridiculously poor light level in most of the shots, the lack of an independent Musical score or any actual film industry talent (be it actors or otherwise) etc etc. Imagine what might of been, and then leave it at that.

I couldn't place the spark of familiarity I had with April Fools/Zelda until my bro Joe bought up this what some dudes did last year:

I forgot how good that was! That concept art is actually very impressive. I love the whole "hardc0re gamerz" tone of the video. You get the feeling the Podcaster's chatting about it after the trailer is shown are saying "it's good to see Zelda done right! I can't wait to get up in there Gears of War styles."

I found this kid today in my most recent search for Youtube awesome guitar techniques: http://www.youtube.com/user/ZackKim

Now speaking as someone who has had a passing affiliation with the Guitar over the years: despite what the Youtube comments may say, that shit is nothing like playing the piano.

- Danny

Is a "Classic" sometimes just "old"

noreply@blogger.com (Videomatic) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:46:00 +0000

So I was doing my weekly thing at work of going through games getting them ready for sale and I came across this:

Naturally me and my 18-20 something student workmates got talking about this:

Being 18-20 this means in 1996 they were roughly 7-9, approaching the perfect age to discover videogames. Almost in unison they all chimed in with "Wow, that is a classic!" Turok: Dinosaur Hunter was a good game but far from a great one. I'll admit though, before Goldeneye 007 any console FPS that was playable stood out immediately and was highly praised, I hate to use such a worn phrase but anything before Goldeneye broke new ground.

Turok did do some great things, and some awfully frustrating things for the genre, with jumping between platforms. Also It's music and overall atmosphere, helped along by the game's creative use of the N64's volumetric fog, was very engaging for the time. When you eventually got to it's hub and then started going off to crazy levels the game started to crumble, but still today I think the journey to the hub ruins is one of the greatest first levels/game experiences of my life.

But my point here is that Turok is far from a classic, it won't appear on anybody's "lists" anytime soon. In the world of videogames Nostalgia is powerful force. In fact it could be argued that Nostalgia has a greater hold over Gamers than actual Creativity/Quality. Usually when a movie achieves what they call "classic status", or long after its release becomes a classic, it's because it is a great work of great creative merit. Whether it be directed well, acted well, written well, or shot well. Casablanca falls into all these categories.

I believe these 18-20 something kids call Turok a classic just because they played it when they were young, and we all have games like that and most of us are probably guilty of calling them classics. Is gaming even an old enough medium to have actual "classics?"

Discuss.

- Danny

P.S - This post is not really that long, my copy of The King of Kong arrived today. I'm gonna do some watching.

Professional Games Bloggers: A Mixed Bag

noreply@blogger.com (Homage) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:05:00 +0000

The latest 1up Yours, while managing to shoehorn in a neat little quote from VM's little brother Monkey King, also runs the gamut from insightful discourse re: review scores to videogame violence (dropping the usual crap and examining the issue as a creative device). Both make some trenchant new points, and the only ball they drop is to neglect the obvious elephant in the room of videogame reviewing.

Fellas, I'll tell you right now why Roger Ebert can review anything but you have to find "an FPS guy" to review Halo 3; why it's not so easy to just say "this is one person's opinion and take from it what you will". It's because professional videogame reviewers, by their very nature, are reviewing games as a product to consider investment in, whereas professional film critics are able to review movies as a creative work with an afterthought as to whether the man on the street should consider the picture worth the price of admission. A film critic's job is to stimulate discourse on the creative merits of her subject; a game critic's job is to tell the kids where to spend a week's wages.

There are exceptions here, and of course an exceptional critic (like, say, 1up's own Jeremy Parish) is able to evaluate creative worth without losing sight of the work as product, but by and large, this is the bed games reviewers make for themselves, and for the most part consumers wouldn't have it any other way. But this is why the best part of an enjoyable, professional website like 1up is often the retrospectives, genre roundups etc: because this where informed columnists are able to evaluate games in an openly subjective format, freed from the mandate of having to rate a product's financial worth from one to ten.

From enjoyable banter to embarrassing reactionary blather: Should I just start running a "spectacularly dumb Kotaku post of the week" feature or something? How many times can I write "siege-mentality, intellectually-stunted, perpetually cottaged nerds" before I break my keyboard? Here's the Shame of the Gawker Network on Barack Obama:

'Obama's been using video games as a metaphor for underachievement throughout his campaign speeches... Many of his campaign speeches have contained advice for parents to get kids to "put away the video games." This isn't anything new, either. ... But it's scary when a potential leader of a country so passively attributes video games with failure. It sounds like yet another instance of a politician not fully understanding what he's talking about, and jumping on the bandwagon, proliferating the popular sentiment that "video games are evil."'

Look, fellas, here's the deal. If you bleat nonstop about all the reasons your hobby should be let into the mainstream media, you then look really stupid if you appoint yourself official apologist and defender against every single charge ever levelled against said hobby. Because in the real world, guy, people utilise all sorts of things as part of the discourse all the time, and it's not always "oh thank goodness for the shiny-eyed gamer and his playful abandon tempered with creative genius".

Kotaku's older, real-blogger cousins at Defamer and Idolator don't feel the need to run how-dare-they posts every time anyone says anything about movies or music. It's this kind of they're-out-to-get-us crap that stops me reading about games on the Internet, which may be why I'm so woefully uninformed about same.

Games do Irony: 3 examples

noreply@blogger.com (Videomatic) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 01:49:00 +0000

This is the fourth game in an established series of Xbox exclusives combining elements of Dynasty Warriors with the basic structure of Western RPG's (Ultima, Diablo and the like). The series has never really done that well with critics or players, but whoever decided to call it's latest installment Circle of Doom on the Xbox 360 took whatever credibility the series had, knocked it out, and then kicked it when it was down. Taken at face value just looking at the box of a 360 game called Circle of Doom is inherantly humourous regardless of whatever game content is inside the box.

I just hope the final boss of sorts is a huge fire-breathing dragon who's powers, if inflicted upon the hero, manage to heat up your 360's core cpu until the system in the real world shuts down, in the process creating true immersion. That should be the ultimate way to die in Circle of Doom: the dragon catching you with his deadly breath, making you call the helpline again, and be without your xbox for 2 weeks to a month because those pesky Three Rings of Doom are back.

I was dummying/gutting games the other day at work and I got to this. When I dummy/gut something I have to put it's code and a description (ie the game's name) on the paper sleeve that houses the cd so that the other staff can easily find the game when everythings all filed away in draws. Now in an effort to be humourous/possibly offensive I was going to write Colin Mcrae: Dead, because Dirt and Dead are both four letter words that start with D, it's so punny! I thought about it for a while and realised that the use of the word Dirt in the context of someone being dead is just as funny.

Of course all of this is ironic because this was Colin Mcrae's last 'named' game before his tragic helicopter crash, which in itself is ironic seeing as he was a championship Rally Driver. Kind of like how what finished off Steve Irwin wasn't a Crocodile.

Okay maybe it's not all that Ironic but it is mighty strange that the Mario games got a fully orchestrated soundtrack before Zelda. Ever since the very beginning Mario soundwise has been all about the beeps and bloops and Zelda's style has been rousing scores. Super Mario Brothers in 1985 has one of the greatest pure midi sounding scores of all time, it has been said to have opened up a new world for developers in terms of what you could do with Midi. Then in 1987 with The Legend of Zelda Koji Kondo and his sound team attempted, with the many limitations the NES's sound capabilities presented, to create a rousing heroic main theme worthy of a hollywood film* and opened up the world all over again.

In Mario's teenage years (SNES, N64) the game series' soundscape took on a kind of reggae tone with carribean instrumentation and also briefly experimented with latin american instruments. In other words, not exactly what you'd find in a standard orchestra. All of this of course was done in Midi soundfonts. In later years, 2002 to be exact, Super Mario Sunshine played more with the Carribean tone, obviously inspired by it's setting.

1992's Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past expanded on the sweeping rousing idea, especially with the introduction of melodies like the peaceful Kakariko Villiage theme and the heroic ending theme. In 1998, hot on the heels of his John Willliams inspired score for Lylat Wars (Starfox 64), Koji Kondo and co. released The Ocarina of Time with a score heavy soundtrack that at the time rivalled some of the CD based soundtracks of around the same era.

For the purposes of background: In 2001 Super Smash Bros. Melee was released with a fully orchestrated soundtrack and an unbelievable amount of in-game content, so Orchestral Soundtracks turned out not be the space-guzzler they were once thought to be.

In about 2005/06 the real trailer (the one after the teaser) for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess came out using an original fully orchestrated composition and in doing so hinted that Zelda's soundscape might finally be getting what Final Fantasy fans had had since 1997. Sadly Miyamoto's fear of CD quality music interrupting game immersion, with a pinch of Zelda's good old friend time constraints, meant that in late 2006 Twilight Princess was released with a Soundtrack again generated by synthesizers. At the time this was largely criticised. General consensus among reviewers was that the score was Nostalgic, but not in the good way you usually associate with Nostalgia.

Then in 2007, the musicians behind Super Mario Galaxy argued with Miyamoto and created something that was both epic in nature and also uniquely Mario, and all the Zelda fans were like "wtf man, this is bogus" or words to that effect. Super Mario Galaxy's music sometimes feels the smallest, tiniest, slightest bit out of place, but never as out of place as the weird ambient pieces we got in Ocarina of Time's dungeons.

IN OTHER NEWS:

The next 'Iwata Asks' is up at Wii.com and this time the subject is Super Smash Bros: Brawl. Make sure to read the Galaxy and Twilight Princess interviews as well if you haven't already.

The Jeff Gertsmann thing is Videogame's equivalent of Zidane headbutting a dude in the chest. 1up editor Sam Kennedy's blog post on the subject is brilliant.

- Danny

* John Williams is often credited for doing a live arrangement of the theme, this is widely regarded as false. Many people think the track's ID3 tag and subsequent popularity is purely peer-to-peer created: ie one misinformed western user came upon a performance of the theme by a Japanese orchestra, picked up on the heavy references to Williams' music and made a wildly uneducated guess.

Welcome to Video Game Webpage!

noreply@blogger.com (Homage) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:36:00 +0000

Hey there and welcome to Video Game Webpage, the hardcore gamer's FRESHEST source for industry news and gossip, as well as RELIABLE opinions and reviews! Let's dive right on in and have a look at what's in store this week.

First up on VGW, we've got some news that's gonna blow you away! Can you say... firmware update?! That's right, Home Console has been patched for 08, and in our update of updates, we go under the hood to see how the changes will impact your ProGaming. Hardcore gamers look no further!

We're hardcore gamers here at VGW, and we're not afraid to say when a game stinks. That's why you'll love our feature, Game Package Art Through The Ages - you'll never guess what kind of medical curiosity the Blue Bomber started out life as! And is that a minotaur in your pants, or... wait, let us start that one over.

In From Russia With FUN, part VII of our retrospective look at all things Tetris, we lift the lid on one of gaming's deepest secrets - how Alex Patchevsky's masterpiece was almost co-opted by the Russian Mob! That's right - if it weren't for a well-timed phonecall for Nolan Bushnell asking how to empty the change buckets, you might be playing Tetris with Viggo Mortenstern in Eastern Promise! We guarantee, no matter how hardcore, you've never seen ANYTHING like this!

If you're a hardcore gamer, you won't want to miss our feature on great flops through the ages. You'll never guess where 5000 copies of ET: The Extra-Terrestrial wound up buried - or how John Romero managed to savage his own reputation in a brutal self-raping with Daikatana! And who could forget the Nokia N-Gage? Not John Romero, that's who! If only people remembered John Romero...

While hardcore gamers like to have their fun, there are serious issues in videogaming, an art form now more profitable, respected, financially viable and high-stakes than the film industry. We lift the lid to go under the hood of one of gaming's hot-button issues: discrimination in games. Are we making room for the honeys? Jayde Raymond speaks out on being a honey in gaming - and wait'll you see the pictorial! Prejudice is so yesterday! And hardcore gamers, don't miss our featured preview of the new Def Jam game, which features your favourite urban ballers going head to head and getting sweaty. Sounds a little bit gay to us - but you didn't hear it here!

Every hardcore gamer knows you can always trust our reviews, because we say exactly what we think. If a game's not worth your time out of the box, we'll be the first to let you know. That's not an issue for DeathCon, the hot new sandbox free-roaming crime thriller that's like a Scorsese movie on your Home Console! Check out our 9.5 rating if you don't believe us. Also hot is DragonSword, the sandbox hack-n-slash rpg that's a must for fans of BloodSun or EtherGate! We give it a 9.7 - check our review!

Not all this week's games are winners, though - the eagerly-awaited SandCrash suffers in conversion. Still - such eye-candy! Pretty - we want! Check out our 9.3 review! And hardcore gamers only need apply to FrostSlash Academy - this one's plagued with near-unplayable bugs! Talk about broken - read our 8.7-rated review if you don't believe us!

Finally check our GamerBlogs, where we dish on what adventures your hardcore compadres have been getting into this month. And check Sbuppy HoonPants, our irreverent webcomic that's not afraid to shatter a few of hardcore gaming's sacred cows!

Until next time, VGW readers - stay hardcore!

Super Mario Galaxy

noreply@blogger.com (Videomatic) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 03:43:00 +0000

A Belated Review

The New Nintendo

Super Mario Galaxy is the New Nintendo. It's a landmark in Nintendo's history, like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time a couple of generations ago or Super Mario Bros. 3 way before it. The DS Lite is New Nintendo, the Wii is unquestionably New Nintendo, so it's unbelievably exciting to see that in an era when Nintendo has released arguably the greatest hardware of its' entire games developing career, they still have the ability to make software to match. Twilight Princess showed some promise at the beginning but ultimately ran out of juice and suffered from being lost in replicating the experience, look and feel of Ocarina of Time rather than being a new game – some speculate this was due to fan pressure after 2003's incredibly innovative Wind Waker*. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption started out fantastic but as you may have previously read turned into a garbled, chaotic, overly western-influenced, escort mission having mess.

So because of what had come before I never expected as much as I've got out of Super Mario Galaxy. Plenty of people before me have said this already but it is a good way of describing this game: if you look at Mario's 3D games as a trilogy, in relation to the NES trilogy that came before it, then Galaxy is really the Super Mario Bros. 3 of the bunch. Aside from the obvious, it being the third one and all, Mario 64 first set the tone, Sunshine was then interesting with an emphasis on experimentation (and also unfairly somewhat badly received**), and then finally Galaxy refined everything that had come before while harking back to the spirit of the original, Like Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Galaxy is without a doubt the one of the three that will be the most revered in later years. Super Mario Bros. is still a classic but today is incredibly clunky to play, suffers from limited level design, and has almost no concept of a difficulty curve. Super Mario Bros 3. recently got re-released on the Wii's Virtual Console amongst great fervour and got many people enjoying it all over again, and for good reason: because it's still a damn fucking good game.

Super Mario Galaxy has a style and overall polish about it that I haven't seen since something like Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island or The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. This New Nintendo gives me great hope for a Starfox Wii title done right, or Super Smash Bros: Brawl being so much more than just a rehash of Melee.

Finally Settling In

One big part of the experience of Galaxy for me was that it feels like Mario is finally comfortable in the Dimension. "Mario is Platformers" in the same way as "Charles de Gaulle was France", so Galaxy is easily the best 3D platformer I've ever played because it feels like that by extension the genre itself is at last comfortable in the new dimension. Of course it took a Mario game to finally get us to this point.

In Mario's previous 3D adventures it broke down kind of like this:

Super Mario 64

Going in Mario wasn't so entirely sure about this whole going 8 directions thing, and he had just recently entered the world of Acrobatics (back-flips, somersaults and the like) so he decided to do the whole adventure excruciatingly slowly. Seriously, go back and play that game and you'll find yourself long-jumping and belly-sliding everywhere just to get around at a decent pace. It's mind-numbing. Before 64 Mario mustn't have really been working out quite as much as he used to, he felt a great deal weaker. For instance when Mario would hit a wall, or even just run into one, this would cause quite a jolt and would often cause unnecessary deaths because of the reverb involved. In Mario's 2D adventures he'd just hit a wall and fall straight down it. The injection of quote unquote real world physics into the mix shouldn't turn a formidable action hero into such a pussy.

Super Mario Sunshine

When it came time to have a vacation Mario decided to take things a little easier. So he quickly found Videogame's equivalent of Crutches, or even better Training Wheels, The F.L.U.U.D, and put it to great use, taking the place of many of his established and well renowned jumping skills. Being so excited at the prospect of his new water spouting safety-net Mario decided to run and jump around Isle Delfino almost as fast as Sonic on a bad day. When the Training Wheels came off (the Secret Stages***) his newfound love for speed resulted in many cut, scrapes, and booboos (deaths). Mario forgot how to jump in this game and relied too heavily on the power of his pack. He forgot probably the greatest jump in Platform Game history: The Long Jump.

Some of the jumps I could pull off in Sunshine using a combination of somersault, hover-nozzle, and belly slide I could just as easily pull off in Galaxy with the power of being awesome because the best designed piece of jumping in jumping history is back...and now it lets you orbit around planets.

Ever since the release of Super Mario 64 fanboys thought it was cool to say things like "Mario's really at home in 2D" and "when are we going to get another true Mario Game?" The most embarrassing thing for me is that I did agree with that line of thinking to a certain degree and I'm sure I've spouted similar phrases in the past. In 2006, ten years after Mario 64, the Fanboys got their wish with the DS's New Super Mario Bros**** which was very well received by critics and fans, however I was severely underwhelmed. The game felt somehow unlike a true Mario game despite trying so hard to be one. It was far too short and in some respects (music and animation) had decidedly poor production values. New Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess both I believe fall in a period where Nintendo were trying so hard to echo their former success and glory, most likely brought about by the decline of the N64 and then ultimate failure of the Gamecube, instead of actually designing a future software-wise. As I said at the beginning Super Mario Galaxy is New Nintendo so therefore it is also New Mario. I'm proud to say that now I feel like I don't need any more 2D Mario games, Galaxy is better than 'New' was in every way.

Welcome to the Galaxy

In terms of presentation Galaxy looks and sounds perfect. It all fits in with that sense of overall polish. The Graphics don't need to be any better than they are. They're flashy when they can be but ultimately they just serve the gameplay perfectly, which is all graphics should ever really do. It is somewhat odd that the Mario Franchise was the first of Nintendo's to receive a fully orchestrated soundtrack***** but after hearing the results the decision was a great one. It seems as if Miyamoto's philosophy of CD quality music having a poor technical relationship with the action in the game (on a midi level) and thus creating a lack of immersion for the player has been challenged. Maybe now I won't feel like I'm listening to a Portishead record when I go into a dungeon in the next Zelda game.

This is the hardest part of my review to explain, stuff in my head is rarely in proper written form you see: Super Mario Galaxy feels...well...different. I had been playing it for about an hour or so, adjusting to its changes after coming right off the back of freshly playing and finishing 64 and Sunshine in the lead up to its release, and I got to the first star in the Battlerock Galaxy. When I first went underneath and then on the side of the moving saucer to dodge an electric fence I got an unbelievably powerful sense that I was doing something new.

You'll see what I mean.

Danny

* I don't really side with this idea but that debate is for a whole different article.

**Super Mario Sunshine is a great example of vg critics contradicting themselves when the 'next big thing' comes out. When reviews for Galaxy started rolling in many made a habit of comparing its strengths against Sunshine's weaknesses. However, many of the strengths they mentioned were very similar, sometimes almost word for word, to what those same reviewers had said about Sunshine at the time of its release. I feel sorry for Sunshine, it was received very well at the time, and deservedly so, but in recent years has developed a reputation as a bad game. It's not a bad game. It's a very, very, very, very good game. But there is definitely something missing. It's just not a great game. Galaxy is though.

***That now look like Galaxy beta levels.

****And to a lesser extent the year after with Super Paper Mario.

*****Super Smash Bros. Melee doesn't really count because it involves second party developers.

Unfinished Ludology

noreply@blogger.com (Homage) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 07:33:00 +0000

I've just finished Final Fantasy XII. (Sephira, mutation, rebirth signified through vegetation, yadda yadda yadda). I've enjoyed it immensely, but here's the thing.

Know that feeling where you're nearing the end of a book you're really liking, and you find yourself rationing it, slowing your reading so it won't be over? Well, I had that in spades with Final Fantasy XII. But it's not until I was watching the ending that I realised that that feeling is different for games than it would be for a book or tv series.

Not Vaguely A Spoiler: In the final act of Final Fantasy XII - as is customary in a Squeenix adventure - all the game's Big Bads are just sitting up there in a big ol' Mana Fortress waiting for you to go kick their faces in, and you get the choice anytime whether to embark on the final showdown or just keep on adventuring about. And of course you could, theoretically, finish ALL the extra malarkey - the optional dungeons, completing the bestiary, hunting down all the marks, etc - before going to beat up the inevitable mutant angel-man. But you don't, because there gets a point where you go, this is silly, I'm just gonna see what this here North Cave is like, and then before you know it, bam!, The End.

Which is a fucking stupid choice of words. It's not the end. It's far from the end. There's still loads of Final Fantasy XII I haven't done. But then, there's also loads of Final Fantasy X I haven't done, and Metal Gear Solid 2, and Castlevania DS, for gosh sakes. But I know I won't be going back to those games for another big marathon, just as I doubt FFXII will keep me interested all the way to true completion, just as I'm putting off the (frankly, rather easy-looking) final finale of Phantom Hourglass for as many more secrets, piddling and expected, as I can.

I'm pretty sure I got everything I could in Secret of Mana and Link to the Past. I know I got absolutely fucking everything in Super Mario World. (On a rental, no less!) Hell, Terranigma was such a cunt that I got damn near everything even though I didn't manage to finish it (that savegame, of course, is now long gone).

There's interesting points to be made here on the overreliance on narrative within the RPG genre, the self-defeatist logic of making a game that's an absolute ludological revolution within its field and yet is narratively both less than compelling (or sense-making) and imposing of an artificial end on the proceedings.

But they are all overhadowed by the fact that Dan and I played through like a half dozen times and got every motherfucking thing you could in Goonies 2, which in a very real and palpable sense makes it the best narrative-hook game ever.

Congratulations, you're at Uni

noreply@blogger.com (Homage) — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 23:42:00 +0000

[Warning: The text you are about to read contains heady intellectual discourse and is not recommended for anyone made queasy by the discussion of feminist film theory or psychoanalytical signifiers.]

So begins man Joe McNeilly's essay on why "Portal is the most subversive game ever". Basically, what Joe's done is to note that a portal, in Portal, looks kind of like a vagina (that's your psychoanalytical signifier) and is shot from a gun held by the unseen protagonist (feminist film theory).

It's a nice theory, and he's right in that it's nice that Portal uses a female protagonist without either sexualising or providing her with an honorary dick, but... "most subversive game ever"? Surely that award goes to the first RPG to have an NPC provide you with control pad advice then ask what a B button is? After all, Joe, that would be intra-medial interrogation of the conventions of genre through a post-human window of materiality!

Shock: Newspapers Oversimplify

noreply@blogger.com (Homage) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:05:00 +0000

Okay, let's have a checklist of things I'll not be swiping at here:

- The "Main Stream Media".*
- Politicians.
- Jack Thompson.**
- Those Snooty Brits.

But I went and read this story in the Sun expecting to feel the usual contrary little glimmer of support, and instead - horror! - found myself agreeing (to a point) with the geeks who're making it the target du jour of their ire.

A study of literacy at primary schools in 41 countries saw our youngsters slip from third to 15th in just five years.

Ministers claimed pupils spend so much time on consoles that they are not burying their noses in books.

Yeeessss, well... Your wording, Sun, gives away the whole game here.

The whole stereotype of kids "burying their noses in books" itself brings to mind not the vast majority of Commonwealth youth, but a spotty, speccy minority who would oft be lampooned in the pages of Buster and Whizzer and Chips for their quizzical literacy.

Surely the children spending three hours a day on games - which, between FFXII and Phantom Hourglass, I'd sometimes approach myself at the moment, and I've read Lolita AND Interview with the Vampire - aren't for the most part using their gaming to supplant nose-in-book-time? Surely that third of ten-year-olds are just (and to my mind this may actually be worse) playing games when they would otherwise be building forts and playing soldiers and the like? Surely it's not that Britain's youth are being tempted from Lord of the Flies to Lost in Blue, so much as they're replacing conkers with Conker's***?

Of course, this is a bit of sensationalist misdirection on the Sun's part (I'm as surprised as you are), as the story here isn't really "zomg video games are turning our kids into dullards" so much as it's "Pol bemoans standard of education, doesn't have answers". Giving several million pounds toward literacy is laudable, but you can throw all the money you like at education and it won't do much if you're not putting it in the right place.

It's a shame Steve Maharey has recently departed his position as our Minister of Ed here in New Zealand (his work was just beginning: our standards of literacy are even lower than the rather abysmal scores in the Old Country): along with not doing a terrible job at getting the bucks for the teachers, Maharey's passion for rebuilding education for the 21st Century was fairly tireless.

Modern education hinges on principles that make it abundantly clear that you can't expect any amount of hand-wringing or funds-appropriating to change the tech-savvy of today's learners. Nor should you. It can't be a case of education versus fun; and when this fact is realised, the resultant changes in outlook don't need to be implemented with a resigned sigh of "if you can't beat 'em..."

Oh, right, we're on a gaming blog! Sorry, that's what happens when you post from work. Anyway, the point I'm making is this: Danny's and my 14-year-old brother is proof positive that Ed Balls [pun reflecting both the quixotic misguidedness and hilarious name of Mr. Balls here].

I think Joe would agree that the #1 factor in his getting past his inherited dyslexia has been none other than his enthusiasm for what I guess we have to call the new media - his mastery of the written word was enabled largely by enthusiastic use of popular educational tool Runescape, and through the reading/writing interaction of games like this and (the Sun's pictorial example) The Sims, he's now an accomplished short story writer and the kind of reader who polishes off books like Wu Ch'eng-En's Monkey saga for fun.

So the real story here, not that the Sun will report it and not that the nerds will spot it through the red mist of their persecution complexes, isn't games ruining education, and it's not politicians ruining games. It's the story of a country whose education system doesn't realise that it's the 21st Century.

* A piece of mine appears in a free little print publication this week, and is quoted in strange, non-rollover-enabled static applets I'm seeing in the odd floppy RSS compendium sitting on the coffee table, and let me tell you, it's making me feel a lot more legitimate than the prestigious dotcom at which it originally appeared.
** Guy's got his head screwed on right. Isn't it odd how the people railing against him re: Manhunt 2 suddenly slowed their collective roll as soon as Manhunt 2 turned out to be rubbish? Surely if you really cared about the ill-informed interpretations of politics supposedly motivating your anti-Thompson diatribes, the quality of the media you seek to defend would be the very definition of a non-issue? But that's a whole nother post.
*** I know, I know, I was very proud of that myself.

Extrapolating Your Extrapolations for Humorous Effect

noreply@blogger.com (Homage) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:55:00 +0000

There's plenty to be embarrassed about in Ars Technica's reporting of how Guitar Hero 3 sells music.

Perhaps the easiest thing to be embarrassed about (depending on how you happened on the story) is that a story on digital music traffic, the effect thereon of videogames, was covered on music-in-popcult blog Idolator, while their sister all-about-videogames blog Kotaku apparently missed the boat entirely*.

Also embarrassing is the seemingly rushed, fawning, isn't-technology-wonderful extrapolations from the figures**. Three of the bands supposedly reaping the most reward from the "Guitar Hero Effect" actually see marked growth in paid downloads for week of release, but then a drop in that (admittedly, still high) growth once the game has really had time to reach consumers.

It's safe to presume that the spike in downloads is the result of early adopters. The spike occurs on the week that ends on the day GH3 is released, meaning one of two things motivated those downloads: either

- GH3-heads are spending the week pre-emptively downloading everything they can from the final, final final, easter-eggs-and-all setlist; or
- Dorks who call themselves "hardcore" without a hint of irony are playing through the game on release day and downloading songs they like and/or hear as soon as they find them.

Now, these are both nice things to happen. It's always nice when people discover new music to like. But is it really changing the face of music if a few nerds realise that the Beastie Boys are kind of like MC Lars and thus worthy of a spin?

Embarrassing in a more business-as-usual kind of way is the attempts at legitimising this quickly-coined phenom: "a source close inside the music industry" is commenting on our data? Oh my, I bet it's Rick Rubin! And what does this source say?

"As long as your song ships with the game and you offer the track to be downloaded digitally, you see an increase.

"You don't say, dingus! Who'd have thought that making your track available for download would result in an increase in downloads?

Finally embarrassing is the clearest extrapolation from this confusing, half-story of a graph, which is that clearly, no Ars Technica staff were frequenting hipster bars during the big definitive-articles-are-the-saviours-of-rock boom of a couple of years back, which is hardly surprising. Look what they've done! With a simple de-pluralising, they've gone and made Julian Casablanca(s)' band name go and look dirty!

* Kotaku tend to operate on a siege-mentality us-against-the-world position common to geeks, so the easiest reasoning is that the story was passed over - despite Gawker blogs linking to each other whenever possible - on account of it didn't involve nerd-rage righteous indignation, naked non-actual women, or name-dropping re: the Kotaku staff saying nerdlinger stuff to awkward VG execs.
** To combat which, I am about to provide some rushed, ill-informed, isn't-technology-a-bubble counter-extrapolations.

Video Picks of the Week

noreply@blogger.com (Videomatic) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:00:00 +0000

Probably not updated every week.

This game is SOOOO Mario Galaxy. It's crazy. If it were to be finished and put out today it would probably be accused of being derivative despite being first worked on in 1995.

Reading a fellow blogger's post about saving sonic, finding mention of this game I'd never heard of*, reading the story surrounding the whole thing, and then watching this video added up to one of the most interesting days I've had on the internet in ages. Watching this video is kind of like listening to You Know You're Right by Nirvana, in that it is a somewhat depressing reminder of what might have been**: this could've been the Sonic everyone wanted after his 2D era; this could've been the game to stop Crash getting as big as he did; it could've of forever stopped people laughing at new Sonic games. But sadly it was never any of these things. The politics between the American and Japanese factions of Sega and the near-death work on the part of some developers, and the whole death of Sega thing I guess, would make a really interesting Tetris: From Russia with Love style documentary. You can read a fairly well written account of the sordid ordeal here.

This is developer Chris Senn's pitch video he showed to Sega for the original concept. Sega was quiet about the game for years but since all of the video footage and such came to light about halfway through last year all the nerdlingers are saying that he's a genius and he's the only person who should make the new 3D Sonic game. Maybe they're right, it has worked before, by that I mean handing a 2D to 3D transitional game to an American developer, a bunch of crazy yanks did make Metroid Prime. It is a bit different in this case though because many of Chris Senn's team had previously worked on Sonic 2 and 3 for the Megadrive. The only thing Retro did was play Super Metroid.

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/16333

I suggest downloading this video rather than streaming it, because it's a rather big file and watching stuff on Gamevideos is always a fucking bust because their servers are so shit. I never knew that the FX chip was being worked on so long before the actual release of the SNES. I look back, without the aid of Wikipedia and the like, and think of the FX chip actually being ulitised as quite a late addition to the SNES's lifespan. Once people had got over the power of Mode 7, Nintendo was all like "hey, look what else we can do." Well at least that's how I remember it going down in my head. If Argonaut were doing crazy 3D experiments with the Gameboy that would later become the FX chip, then why didn't we see Super Mario World launch the system with some of the crazy elements that made Yoshi's Island so awesome?

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/9143

Continuing the unofficial Vapourware theme of this week's Videos I continue with one of Nintendo's most famous cancelled titles: Starfox 2***. Elements and concepts from this game would later make their way into Vortex, Super Mario 64, Lylat Wars, and Starfox Command. Dylan Cuthbert says in the video that Miyamoto can be quite harsh with ideas and concepts at the time regardless of the time that went into them, but he never really forgets them. Starfox 2 was, at the time of cancellation, very close to being finished. So there have been rumours about a Virtual Console release since the service was launched. In my opinion that's the sort of thing the VC was made for. Bring it on.

I suppose I can't really do a Vapourware themed post without mentioning Duke Nukem: Forever. So that's all I'm going to do, mention it.

Danny

*I'm showing my ignorance here I know, all the Sega nerds are probably laughing right now. But I was pretty much a Nintendo Fanboy growing up. We sold our Master System to buy a SNES and never actually had a Megadrive.

**Although the two things do also both contain really awesome music.

***Also with fucking awesome music.

Metroid Prime 3: Stupid Story

noreply@blogger.com (Videomatic) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 06:55:00 +0000

The weird thing when you look at the similarity between Metroid Prime 3 and Halo 3's conclusion is that Metroid Prime 3 came out first (they were August and September respectively in the US). So is that Halo's story is scarily like Metroid's or is that both of their stories are like every other military based trilogy ever?

Sadly, Corruption is not the Last Crusade desperately needed after the trilogies overly dark Echoes*. It doesn't follow any of the rules of trilogies. It doesn't hark back to the spirit of the original or cleverly bring the story full circle at all, rather it brings a lot of extra plot and character elements that serve to almost ruin the entire Metroid Saga, whether it be Prime or not.

Back when there was Metroid, Super Metroid, Prime, and even Fusion I was excited about the group of scientists that were part of the Galactic Federation**. I'll be honest, what excited me the most was there resemblance to Weyland-Yutani, illustrated best by their dangerous experiments with Metroids and Metroid DNA and the disregard they had for any consequences. Fusion for the first time included Space Marines and through them the game told us a bit about Samus's military influenced past. However somewhere between Metroid Prime 1 and 2 the Galactic Federation and these Space Marines became one and the same, and because just about everything about Corruption is decidedly western, these Galactic Fed were then portrayed as gruff American grunts whose only solution was invasion.

At the outset Metroid Prime's Phazon saga seemed exciting. Prime started by telling us what the Space Pirates were first really after and then unveiled more of the secrets of the Chozo and Samus's strange armour. By the end of Prime we were beginning to know the true nature of Phazon. At the beginning of Echoes we learnt that Phazon had spread itself to other planets, and then throughout the game we were woven into a nice self contained plot of war between the Luminoth and the Ing (which bought in the Chozo for good measure). However somewhere along the way we were introduced to Dark Samus and this is where the problems began. Dark Samus was never really fleshed out in any way; she was just depicted as an anti-samus. It was hard to understand why or where she fit in. In 3 we now learn Dark Samus was created by Phazon, or rather the planet Phaaze, but why would a bio form intent on corrupting the entire universe create a doppelganger of a lowly Bounty Hunter? Granted she is a legendary bounty hunter but as 3 shows, Samus is hardly the biggest of the Bounty Hunters you meet in the saga and she does have known weaknesses. Why not just create a huge living monster out of Phazon who doesn't have the same inherent weaknesses as your adversary?

Although Dark Samus did bring about one of the most successful parts of the story: The in-fighting within the Space Pirates caused by the god-like worship of Dark Samus***. Previous to this the Space Pirates were your classic 1 dimensional villains. No one really knew why they were after Metroids or even for that matter what Metroid's actually did. The biggest fault with Corruption's narrative is that I imagine it takes great skill to create back-story for a story that didn't really exist in the first place. Back then story in games was nowhere near where it is now: games were looked on more as experiences rather than interactive adventures. The original Metroid's biggest hooks were saving your game, and walking left.

One thing Corruption does well is the Elysian area. It introduces the Chozo into the story and looks and plays exactly like a Metroid game should. If the whole game was like that I'd be happy. As it was I had to put up with a lacklustre musical score, two almost identical escort missions involving endless space pirates, and a rush of suit upgrades at the beginning of the game followed by an almost complete lack of them at the tail end of the game. Playing Corruption brings up a lot of questions, like: What are ship missile expansions for? Why bother giving me loads of energy tanks if they're not even used in the final section of the game? And why do each of the planets have to be so goddamn small? The total area of the game probably doesn't even add up to that of Prime 1.

Metroid Prime: Corruption is a really excellent first person shooter, with some of the best controls I've ever come across for the genre. It just also happens to be one of the worst Metroid games ever made.

Danny

* It was so dark it had its own dark world.

** The Galactic Federation were setup as a kind of interplanetary UN.

*** This wasn't the only example of God-like worship in this game: The Elysian's worshipped the Chozo, who were labelled as The Creators. On account of discovering their planet and creating their civilisation.

Dimensional Dilemmas

noreply@blogger.com (Videomatic) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 23:13:00 +0000

Videogames stand at the forefront of a crisis.

Beyond this generation games cannot move into the 4th dimension*, that of course being Time and Space. Now before we get to far ahead of ourselves its fair to say games have not yet conquered the 3rd dimension, and some would say that they have not explored all they can in 2D. But moving through the dimensions over the years has been a symbol of games developer's moving forward, and it has usually been shown through the growth of the platform genre: 2D platformers had you moving left, right, up, and down on a single plane, then 3D platformers added depth with the...well you all understand what that brought to the genre. The platform genre is the best one to explain these dimensional upgrades, if you take Racing games for example: racing games have always been to a certain degree 3D because a 2D racing game wouldn't make sense (I'd be interested if someone could prove me wrong here). You could never see enough of what was coming up next, and in most racing games you can't Jump - an incredibly vital part of the mechanics of 2D games.

These leaps forward are best viewed in key Mario games. The basics are: Super Mario Bros. showed everyone how 2D platformers
are supposed to work; Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island then showed us all everything that was possible with 2D platformers**, and then Super Mario 64 did the whole birth of the genre thing again with 3D games***. But in order to go more deeply into how games have moved through the dimensions we have to look at what Videogames have done to the concept of dimensions, how that concept has been so skewed by developers, journalists, or marketers to suit whatever point they are getting across. We have to look at the addition of a little thing called ".5".

Making things up

Ever since maybe Yoshi's Island, videogame industry publishers, developers, and commentators have been labelling certain types of 2D platformers as 2.5D. This is a fabrication, in the real world something cannot exist between two dimensions, dimensions are absolute. But for this line of thinking to work all you've got to do is forget that the 4 main dimensions can be labelled or assigned to actual things (lines, squares, cubes etc) and instead think of games as being on a multiple point scale. As I've said before Doom can't really be described as a true 3-D game but if you put it on the games industry's scale it would probably be about 2.75D.

How does this relate to games?

Take a moment to compare Super Mario 64 with Crash Bandicoot: Mario 64 is the benchmark and is a true 3D game on the industry's scale, Crash
looks and plays somewhat like a 3D platformer but because of a conscious decision against freedom by its developers you always run largely in one direction (sometimes misguidedly towards the screen) through it's very narrow environments or even what you could call 2D sections. So Crash Bandicoot is probably about a 2.9D on the scale. It seems odd when a critic might complain about Super Mario 64's use of Invisible Walls on the edge of some areas but then gladly play and rave about Crash Bandicoot which sometimes feels like 3D platformer's equivalent of prison. Both games were very well received and are still revered today, you could argue that Crash Bandicoot is the better game of the two because instead of having a reliance on breaking-new-ground and experimentation it concentrates on the conventions that made platforming games fun in the first place****, although you probably won't win because it's like saying Sonic The Hedgehog is a better game than Super Mario Bros. because it's faster. Alternatively you could argue that Crash Team Racing is a better game that Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong Racing combined, and you should always win.

Beyond the 3rd dimension there has been little experimentation: Microsoft's Blinx played around with it first in 2002 with Blinx: The Time Sweeper then further explored the 4th dimension with 2004's sequel Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space. Underneath all the new play mechanics however the two games still played like Mario 64 clones***** so on the scale they'd maybe sit at about 3.25D. I haven't yet played it, but from what I've seen Super Mario Galaxy does something a little more than 64, Sunshine, and just about every other 3D platformer before it. So on the industry's scale it could be a 3.5D game. And maybe that's just as far as the industry can (or should) go?

- Danny

* I suppose it would be possible to make a Tesseract in a 3-D platformer, but I can't imagine it would be very fun to traverse.

** Despite the release of New Super Mario Bros, Yoshi's Island is probably the greatest 2-D platformer of all time. Closely followed by Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil.

*** It was sure a lot more fun than the isometric funfest Sonic 3D: Flickies Island.

**** It's probably more than a coincidence that Super Mario Galaxy has 2D play sections...and a Spin Attack.

***** In the same way that most Sega Megadrive/Genesis games played like Super Mario World clones.