Metroid: Other Complex

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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.