Back in the CCCR New Mario Revisited

you can turn off the jump/twirl dual mapping by holding in the left control stick for a few seconds on the title screen

what the fuck

Back in the CCCR returns again: New Mario Wii U Luigi Deluxe

Back in the CCCR, aka Control Customization Reviews Revisited, is a column where we review control customization options in video games. 

It's been many long winters since we've been Back in the CCCR, but I thought I'd buy a Mario with my Christmas money and got exactly what I deserved. If there's anything that fires me up to write, it's muddled and overmapped controls with duplicate buttons that offer no customization whatsover.

I should be honest, though, and admit that New Super Mario Luigi U Deluxe Wii Brothers does have one option, and it's quite a pickler. The face buttons of the Switch controller (A, B, Y, X in the SNES diamond layout) are mapped in pairs to two functions - run and jump. Actually, it's a whole lot more functions than that, but hang tight. By default, A/B jump and Y/X run. If you'd like, "Controls 2" will swap the functions of B and X. However, A must remain as jump and Y must remain as run. This doesn't bother me so much as that I just don't get it*. Why not also swap the other two? Or just put the same-function buttons opposite each other (B/X run, A/Y jump) so that the player can get any configuration just by laying their thumb differently. Isn't that the point of dual mapping anyway?

Anyway, am I the only one that feels like Super Mario controls are getting kind of crappy? First of all, after playing various 3D Mario games, pressing down midair to ground-pound feels awful, especially on the already subobtimal non-gated analog stick or C-buttons. It's a dual mapping of actions that for maximum precision need to be synced - a ground-pound is a targeted action, and the targeting is performed by moving the stick while Mario is midair. So there's a moment when the player has Mario in position and now needs to swing down to actually trigger the action, meaning there will always be a delay. Compare to 3D Mario, where the L/R button is an independent input and frame-perfect timing isn't all that hard.

Then there's spin jump. Oh, the terrible spin jump. The default mapping on R/ZR is sensible enough if you're going to dual-map the face buttons like described above. Pressing R/ZR in mid-air performs a mid-air twirl for a bit of extra air-time - this is even more sensible, since there will be situations when a player needs to hold run, hold jump, and be ready to twirl, and all three on face buttons would preclude this. But then they start throwing wrenches in the gears. As is, this was too simple? complicated? so pressing jump again in midair ALSO performs the twirl, I guess for when your elderly grandfather is over for Toadette co-op and can only remember one button. This is a problem, because holding A midair has a different function - it extends jump height and puts Mario into enemy-bounce state. And these too functions are occasionally at odds: for instance if the player wants to do a short hop onto an enemy and bounce off (a common setup for jumps just out of normal reach). The correct button input for this would be tap A (short jump) then press and hold A (bounce state) before landing on the enemy. In Nu Luigi Mario: Two Deluxe Wii Brothers, this input sequence will trigger a midair twirl, slowing Mario's descent and fucking with the timing of the landing. This point, you could argue, is not inherently bad. It's just increasing the technicality of the gameplay. If you want to short hop and bounce without a twirl, you now need to time the second A to exactly the landing on the enemy. But didn't we just get through discussing an example where the gameplay has become less technical? We can't go both these directions at once. And the short hop and bounce has been in Mario Brothers since day one - for over 30 years - so I don't know why it needs to change now**. Just leave twirl on the other input you already established for it.

As usual, this stuff wouldn't be so frustrating if it wasn't done correctly right next door. It shows, or reinforces, that their focus with these games isn't solid action, but loosely sorta getting the right idea so you can play with your newborn baby and dog. Why does it matter if you can't get a frame-perfect ground-pound? asks Miyadumbo. We made it so that you can set a controller on your pregnant wife's stomach and the baby can kick Mario through the levels! And if your child was born with no head they can still beat the game without looking at the screen! More than anything, what makes Nintendo weird isn't so much that they pick weird targets, but that they refuse to broaden their aim just by adding in some very simple configuration (which I suppose does fit into the mentality of not considering your customers adults - we're having peas for dinner because I said so). I mean, is it really going to fuck with kids' heads so terribly if you let them put spin jump on a face button? You don't even write manuals for your games anymore.

*Actually, it does grate an extra 50% because the same exact "swap B and X" was the only control option in Zelda: BoW, and was substantially more pointless and obstructive there.

**I can't be fucked to remember when in the New Mario canon twirl was introduced - I don't remember it before this, but these games are designed with forgettability in mind.

Back in the CCCR: Asura's Wrath

Back in the CCCR (Control Customization Reviews Revisited) takes a closer look at one of the most critical but least appreciated aspects of the modern gaming vehicle: the control customization options. Today we tackle Capcom's Crazy Cutscene Caper of 2012: Cassandra's Wrath.

Wow, it's already that time of year? Yes indeedy, it's been exactly one year and about two weeks since Back in the CCCR last wOsE fWoM yOuR gWaVe like a mummy with a chip on its shoulder to stalk the nights of the living and drink their blood. The nights' blood. Today we've got Asura's Wrath and we're going to learn an important lesson.

Don't use the options screen to trick the player.

Don't use the options screen to taunt the player.

I don't know. Maybe CyberConnect2 and Capcom were trying to make a point. Asura's Wrath is, on a basic level, a game about a hopping mad dude who can't help himself from getting angrier and angrier until his eyeballs literally explode out of his head and into the sun. I don't know that it ever earns the title of "parody" or "satire", but it's at least an absurd pastiche of angry antihero tropes. Maybe the control customization antics were the developers' little way of forcing me to empathize with Asura. Maybe CyberConnect said to themselves: "how can we make the player as rabidly furious as a man whose closest allies killed his wife and kidnapped his daughter before casting him into the underworld for 12,000 years? They'll be playing a video game - that'll probably make them pretty relaxed and happy. What can we take away from them? What is the ultimate betrayal of the player?"

The ultimate betrayal of the player is to offer an option called "Invert camera Y-axis" in a game that is 50% 3rd-person-shooter and have that option NOT AFFECT THE THIRD-PERSON SHOOTING SEGMENTS OF THE GAME. That's right. Not only is there no way to invert the cursor control during the rail-shooting and fine-aim gameplay, there actually is a camera inversion option in the menu to tempt you and remind you that the developers were totally aware that many players like to invert the Y-axis - but that they only thought it was important for the free camera in melee combat arenas. I was so incredulous at this that I actually went into the menu like three times to flip this switch and make sure it wasn't actually inverting the controls and that my brain wasn't playing tricks on me. No. They actually just decided that the arena camera was more important than goddamned aiming a gun.

Who fucking makes these calls? There are few people I can honestly say I would punch in the face without ever having met. The guy who says "we don't need aim inversion because I don't use it" is one of them. If I could meet this developer in person I wouldn't stop at a sucker punch, I'd be prepared with a nice pair of vice grips - one to affix his hand to a table, and the other to clamp onto his fingers one at a time so I could bend each back and upwards until it snapped off; you know, UP - the direction I want my cursor to move when I'm holding the analog stick DOWN, as the vice would be holding his hand. Hopefully this would convey my ire. If not, perhaps he has an infant child or cat that he could throw into the air for target practice so I could demonstrate to him that when you aim a .45 cal upwards, you actually pull back, just as I'm naturally inclined to pull back on an analog stick to aim skyward in a third-person-shooter such as Asura's Wrath. 

So, in short, this little control customization decision certainly has Asura's wrath flowing through me. 

The verdict? Asura's Wrath gets retitled Back in the CCCR's Wrath and sent to Hell for 12,000 years.

Back in the Back in the CCCR: Lazer Invasion

Looks like this feature is back by request, just in time for the holidays! Toady I've got quite a treat for you: a game about lazers!

Apparently though, in this case "lazers" means helicopters... armed with machine guns and missiles. Why the fucky-cake is it called Lazer Invasion? Well, it's not, it's called Laser* Invasion, but I choose not to observe that spelling. It's a ridiculous name to start with, conjuring images of extraterrestrial UFOs firing lazerbeams - while piloted by lazerbeams - taking over the world. XCOM, with the grey aliens replaced by lazers, is what I was seeing in my head. Even if that image was low on the make-sense-o-meter, I felt that two things were for sure: this game will have lazers, and this game will have invasion, be it alien or wartime. I guess maybe in some tiny sense it delivers on Mister 2 there (army not aliens), but as for the lazer action, I'm still looking.

Check out all three gameplay styles.

This was a '91 Konami NES game, leading one to expect high production value. Remember, late-period NES was COMPETING with SNES (not to mention Sega's Genesis), so the games had to look and smell good. Lazervasion does not disappoint. It switches between a first-person arcade flight shooter (like After Burner or Star Fox), an Operation Wolf-style shooting gallery, and Eye of the Beholder style labyrinths.  What is this, Getsu Fuuma Den? Anyone? Jesus, read the blog. It was also released with its very own peripheral, the LazerScope. Don't think that zany proprietary one-game-only controllers were an invention of Wii developers.

The scope sits over your eye and you yell "Fiiiire!" to shoot. It's as if Konami knew that in a scant two decades, every game would be controlled by yelling the word "Fire!".

Since neither I nor anyone gives a shit about the weird-ass LazerScope that presumably worked about as effectively as a skeleton flyin' off a hot tin roof, the game also supported the Zapper, or for those disinterested in light guns altogether (or running on an emulator - certainly NOT me), the standard NES controller. I don't fully understand how the flying or maze portions could control with a light gun, so the gamepad was probably necessary for 2/3 of the game anyway. Invasion of the Lazers gets a gentle pat on the back right away for offering three totally different controllers - a lesser game would be completely bound to its peripheral (Duck Hunt, I'm looking at you). As we relearned with Wii, a successful game needs to support as many control styles as possible - many didn't, and I'd love to say they failed as a result, but who fucking knows. The point is, the fan-pleasingest were those that supported Wiimote, Classic Controller, Mote/Nunchuk, GCN controller, et al. So Invasion earns cujos for being ahead of its time, setting a standard that many games even in 2013 don't observe.

The second control customization option that leads me to highlight Lazer Invasion shocked me so thoroughly that I was able to power the entire Eastern Seaboard for the subsequent three weeks. That's how Electro got made, right? When he played Lazer Invasion and said "holy dear mother of God - you can invert the controls?! In a Japanese NES game made in 1991?"? It's a fair reaction. Even in the PS2 era there were games still omitting this option. It's the main reason I invented this feature, so that I would have a place to bitch about games not offering proper axis inversion. As a matter of fact, I was so positive that LazVas wouldn't offer inversion that I didn't even check! When I started playing the first flight level, I was all "weakkkkkkkkkkk, non-inverted controls", then started dealing with it because I still wanted to play the game. After running out of continues and being sent back to the main menu, I checked out the options, and to my surprise, Barack Obama is black!

The verdict? Lazer Invasion gets an even Doc Brown wasn't this ahead of his time out of 10

Find the lazer in this image

Back in the CCCR - I don't know, some game [looks like it ended up being Mega Man X]

Lordy lordy what an ill-advised feature. Whose stupid idea was this? The worst part is that it was the original idea for the ENTIRE BLOG. And you think you have it bad now.

I have no idea how to choose games to Back in the CCCR. Any suggestions? That's half the reason I put it off all the time; the other half is that I can't write it when I'm anywhere but home, because I have to play the game to review its menus. It's not like I store them in my head. Hm, maybe I ought to take an hour or two one day at home, go through a dozen or two games taking notes, and write the reviews later based on the notes. That would actually be a... good idea.

How was that little vacation through my thought process? Pretty interesting stuff, right? That's what I call river-of-consciousness writing, and I've already copyrighted, patented, and litigated that word, so don't even try. Jimmy Joyce'd be proud. That sellout bastard. So uh, until I do the thing I just said I was gonna do, allow me to write one of the few Back in the CCCR's I can do from memory: Mega Man X.

Hey, that old boy just made an appearance in the last post! What is this, some kind of corporate Capcom shill blog? Next you're gonna want me to go buy a Pepsi.

Yes, I would like you to buy a Pepsi. All I wanted was a Pepsi. Just one Pepsi. And she wouldn't give it to me! So go buy a 2-liter today at your local Giant grocery store! At the low low price of $0.99! Pepsi has never tasted this good, and this cheap!

The original Pepsi marketing department

Wonder if I can get sued for that. For prices this low I mean. So low they can't be legal! Luckily the odds of a live person finding this blog are about the same as the Angels winning the pennant. Then we can be a family again! It never occurred to me at age 7 just how ridiculous is the concept of that movie. I guess that's the idea; kids don't understand sarcasm. That's why it was the greatest film ever made! (Ebert preferred Little Big League, but what does he know). Was the lesson in the end that his family actually did get back together because he believed, or that you shouldn't use figurative language around kids unless you want them to be really disappointed? I'm not reading the wikipedia, you do it.

I've played Mega Man X about a thousand times and each and every last time I have to take a detour into the options screen to set my controls. That's right, MMX let's you reassign all of your face and shoulder buttons freely. Spectators have asked me "how do you wall-jump/dash/charge so fluidly?" The answer, of course, is that the default controls are kinda stupid, because they make this nigh-impossible. Y for shoot, A for dash, and B for jump. The obvious evolution you can see this makes on classic Mega Man is that dash function, and the key to effective play of X is combining this speed with precision wall-jumping. How the fuck are you supposed to combine that with charging a shot when it requires three face buttons? The answer is simple: re-assign dash to one of the shoulders. High-level play is outright impossible without doing so. Of course, later Mega Man series (Zero, ZX) wised up and put it there by default.

The Verdict? Mega Man X gets a: Control customization saved this game from ruination out of 10

If some genius at Capcom was able to figure out in 1993 that giving the player full control customization can allow playability beyond what the developers had envisioned, why nearly 20 years later do I still need to be writing this feature?

Back in the CCCR Double Feature - The Witcher 2 and Dark Souls

Control customization Tim here with your weekly Back in the CCCR. Let's cover a little 360 title, a little 360 title that was ported from an even littler PC title called The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. While I maintain that the title of this particular game has been carefully calculated so as to completely vanish in the mire of generic fantasy that piles store shelves, it somehow has managed to make a bit of a name for itself. A lot of people say that this is a game that lets you actually make big choices and change the story. Some say it's got a strategically-grounded but challenging and action-heavy battle system. Others have made claims to the effect that it is chocked full of engaging morally ambiguous narratives. I'm going to stay away from those delusions of grandeur and keep my attention focused on what really matters to you, the everyday gamer: control customization.

Alright! This menu's got nesting! A menu within a menu. 

A control map: why have a tutorial when you can have a picture?

Y axis inversion: Always necessary

Toggle auto-rotating of Y and X cameras: this is because Witcher 2 was designed for PC. 

Vibration on or off: Kinda don't care about rumble. Note to self: post about this later.

The Verdict? The Witcher 2 gets a: I expected more from a PC game out of 10

This is the main stuff that happens in the game, so I guess they figured it didn't matter. Why do I feel like this screenshot should be from Kingdom Hearts?

For a special treat, I've decided to cover ANOTHER game, one which many seem to hold as a Japanese analogue to this western RPG: Dark Souls. I don't know why these many choose to do so, because it makes absolutely zero sense - the games have almost nothing in common beyond their grimdark setting and surprising difficulty.  Dark Souls is hardly an RPG in the traditional sense at all, instead falling closer to a Metroid style open-world adventure. The supposed RPGing aspect, the collection of souls, in fact functions a whole lot closer to a traditional high score counter.  Score. There's an interesting concept. Save it for later. 

Dark Souls has

X, Y axis inversion: of course ALWAYS. if you can't program a -1 then I [jumps off cliff]

Camera speed: it's called sensitivity in every other game but okay

Toggle auto lock-on: This is just confusing. Am I toggling auto lock-on, or am I toggling toggle auto lock-on?

Camera auto wall recovery: Uhh? Am I supposed to know what this means? Some debugger must've really wanted this and told the localization crew not to bother explaining. 

Vibration: there's a meter here so you can set how much vibration you want. How much vibration do you want? Seems stupid. On or off.

The Verdict? Dark Souls gets a: feigning uniqueness through absence of the option not to use the fucking triggers as attack out of 10

Quick, which button makes me block? Fuck, I just jumped off the ledge. Thank god they aren't getting cheap difficulty out of stupid restrictions! Developers know best! Fucking idiots.

I've hidden a secret within this post for all you Easter egg bunnies and cryptographers out there. See if you can find it! I'll give you one small hint: the secret is that the number 2 is referenced multiple times in the post. The Witcher 2, Dark Souls is the second game in a series, 360 is the second Microsoft video game console, I reviewed 2 games' CC options, From Software is a 2-word company name and so is CD Projekt (double double!), my middle initial is the second of my initials, there are 2 little humps in the letter M. Write in with more 2s that you find!

Back in the CCCR (Control Customization Reviews, Revisited) - Killer 7

Welcome to Back in the CCCR, a weekly feature where I'll be bringing you, the Internet stupidience, reviews of a mostly overlooked but critical aspect of the video game: the control customization options screen. You see, in the days of Benjamin Franklin, it was taken for granted that interface buttons would simply be labeled with their exact purpose, like on a keyboard. Functions like "jump" and "jump higher" were inscribed upon the arcade cabinets above the corresponding inputs. In fact, the earliest games simply came with a "WIN" button, but this was quickly recognized as too primitive and direct to keep players engaged. Soon games made their way to the home market and universal consoles were envisioned to function with numerous games, so the labels had to be generalized. Some controllers had so few buttons that the purpose was understood, like the Atari 2600's. A more complex, arcade-faithful approach was taken by the Intellivision and Colecovision for their nine-digit pads: game specific overlays that applied artwork and instructions to the layout. 

I've tried taping these to my N64 controller - it just never turns out quite how I wanted

By the time of the NES, it was realized that the player didn't spend much time looking down at his hands, rather memorizing the controls and relying on hand-die coordination. Thus, buttons were given generic names like "A" and "B" and were explained in manuals, tutorials, and menu screens. I'll save discussion of the evolution of these instructional techniques for a later feature.

These days, developers can't rely on the assumption that A will always mean "jump" and B will mean "B", nor can they help that players come into each game with a lifetime of law enforcement programming and the accompanying preferences. Thus, we have control customization options, allowing adjustment of everything from button assignment to axis orientation to sensitivity setting. However, some games manage this better than others. ASSHOLE developers like those responsible for Bayonetta assume some godlike prescience and offer no choices at all, wondering with childlike puzzlement why any of those other games would be so STUPID as to give the player choice. Modern PC games pretty universally provide 100% customization freedom, because they're made by people who actually have a single goddamn shred of sense in their brains. I'll take dozens of different stances in the ongoing West vs. East debacle that so entertains the gaming community, but you'll see in the progression of Back in the CCCR that this is one place where West dominates.

I won't bore you with any more of my endless insight and endless historical insight - there are a lot more of these to come and I'm going to have to pad the length somehow, so I better save some [endless insight] for later. For now let's get to our first review: Killer 7, a game I'm currently working through on Gamecube. Killer 7 is genre-defiant from the outset, so it's difficult to have any preconceived notions about the controls. The game's only movement is taken care of with "forward" and "turn around" buttons, which you'll hardly find in other titles. The shooting mechanic is an early adopter of what would soon become the modern standard, the RE4 model. Hold a trigger to draw/sight the weapon, and press another button to fire. That's just about all you'll find yourself doing. But of course, I'm not here to review controls, I'm here for the customization options.

Killer 7, a Japanese game through and through, gives exactly ONE setting to the player. This is the orientation of Y-axis aiming; traditional or inverted. No button assignment, no X-axis orientation, and no sensitivity. As awfully sparse as this is, the game gets away with it, since X-axis inversion is universally accepted as unnecessary for the first person perspective and there are so few buttons to use. The CC's downfall is one so preposterous that it may very well be a bug rather than a willing oversight. The options aren't saved! That's right. A game released in 2005 for some idiotic reason requires you to go into the settings menu EVERY LAST TIME you boot it. Get ready for some frustrating resets after sitting through the game's load times only to realize you forgot to set your preferences.

The verdict? Killer 7 gets a: Moronic out of 10.

You want me to fucking set the fucking options every time I turn on the fucking game? Why don't I pack it up, ship it back to Japan, and have your mother use her own blood to manually inscribe my preferences onto the disc at gunpoint?