Giana Sisters? More like Giana Sparksters! More like a rant about euro-games!

I don't know how I'm supposed to get a whole post out of this. I played the XBLA demo of Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, and it was bad. We done? Good.

It looks like we're not done, because this paragraph. Little history lesson: the original Great Giana Sisters is some kind of Super Mario Bros. ripoff (get it? Italian name? siblings? adjective? platforming? computer games? Internet telephony?), although they couldn't even get the title parody right (shouldn't it be Great Giana Siss.?). It was originally developed for the Comedydore 64 (uh oh) and has the feel and production value of like, maybe Chex Quest? I dunno, I think Chex Quest was better. Maybe Leisure Suit Larry. That's probably still too nice. How about Action 52? It's just a weird, cynical, European game with no apparent reason to exist - it isn't really a parody, because it has no jokes, but it isn't an original game because it has the exact same gameplay as SMB, down to the evil turtles, bouncing fireballs, and breakable blocks. The only thing that clearly distinguishes the two games is that GGS is clearly worse programmed and has uglier graphics (what C64 wasn't hideous? It was only a quarter step up from a ColecoVision.). I've heard some defend the game by saying "well NES and SMB had no foothold in Europe at the time", but SMB was non-existent on the Genesis/Mega Drive and Sega still found a way to compete without copying.

Euro-games are a thing though. I don't think I truly in my heart understand [mainland] Europe, because they like such weird crap. And I'm not trying to sound racist here. I just am racist. How come they never caught on to rock music? How come Germans have such a bizarre sense of humor? How come Latinos are obsessed with Morrissey? None of it adds up. And who's that old guy in the funny white hat that lives somewhere in Italy? What's his deal? I suppose it should come as no surprise that they have their own style of video game as well. Euro-shmups are unnecessarily slow, physics-heavy, and shop-driven, like Xenon; euro-platformers like Turrican and our very own Great Giana Sisters have bizarro level-design and completely rip more popular games; euro-brawlers turn out like Cyborg Justice. I actually just invented the term "euro-brawler", but man does Cyborg Justice make me glad it wasn't a thing. It kinda baffles me that we Americans are better able to relate to the Japanese game world than the European - then again, many genre 'baseline' games came from Japan (Space Invaders, Funky Kong), so we don't really differentiate between "Japanese games" and plain old "games".

You know how it's always obvious when an old game was developed in Europe? They just had a special touch for not understanding anything that made games fun. Or how to program. It's the Cyborg Justice thing where I think they'd probably only ever seen video games, not played them.

Sorry, I'm being Negative Nancy, Electrically Supercharged Superheroine of the Superfuture. There certainly are/were good European game companies - Britain alone has loads. There's fucking Rare, Ubisoft, Eidos (though most of their classic dev squads like Ion Storm, Looking Glass, and Crystal Dynamics were American), Ninja Theory, Digital Reality, and CD Projekt. Even Nintendo of America makes some great European games in the Europe. Truly a cavalcade of talent and overwhelming.

Because a whole continent is capable of collectively making a bad decision, a 2012 sequel to GGS was crowd-funded into existence, courtesy of Kickstarter. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams appeared on Steam last year and Xbox Live Arcade in early 2013, and good lord why is it exactly a Rocket Knight game? Well, that's not quite fair. RKA and Sparkster are blazingly fast, varied, enthralling to look at, and overall excellent. Twisted Sisters appears to be none of that. The reasons I make the comparison are mostly superficial, but superficial in a way that feels a bit more than coincidence. Again, recall that I only played the demo of Twisted Dreams, so it may take off in a lazerjet and explode into the troposphere an hour in. Sorry if it does. I'm so sorry. I don't have a million years/dollars to wait around for lazerjets in every game ever. I'm not Ignatius IGN. Ignatius IGN, that's a pretty good one. IGNatius. Yep.

So G-STD shares the following with Rock'n Night: rocket packs, boucing off walls at 45-degree angles, IDENTICAL blue and red diamonds, and dimension-swapping (like in the RKA waterfall level).

I dunno, they don't play all that similar - it's just strange to me that a "throwback" platformer with "unique" mechanics would draw all of those mechanics from a single game/series that started around the time it's throwing back to. Not to mention a series which was recently rebooted on the very same platforms.

Retro done Rocket Knight right: The post I accidentally didn't write yesterday

Before I shot off on a tangent faster than the sun shoots lazers at the moon, I was going to write yesterday (now it's two days ago, since I didn't finish this post Thursday as intended) about the underrated Rocket Knight and reigning eShop fan-fave, Mutant Mudds.

[Things are about to get a bit hairy nomenclaturally speaking - the Rocket Knight/Sparkster series is confusingly titled. Let me give you a "cheat's sheet" here. There are four completely distinct games in the series:

Rocket Knight Adventures (Genesis, 1993)

Sparkster: RKA2 (Genesis, 1994)

Sparkster (SNES, 1994)

Rocket Knight (XBLA, 2010)

and the main character is the same throughout, known dually as Sparkster and the Rocket Knight. Note that I'll always bold the titles, so if you see the names in tiny text, it means I'm referring to the character or the series whole. The sign of good writing is the need for a "cheat's sheet", though I think the blame this time rests firmly on Konami.]

I chose RK and MM because they're on opposite ends of the retro spectrum, whatever that means. A spectrum doesn't really have opposite ends, ya know, it's a continuous FINE who cares. Rocket Knight is retro game type I: a revival of a long-forgotten (or long-missed) property with intent to continue rather than reboot. Megan Man 9, Double Dragon Neon, and dare-I-say Street Fighter IV fall into this neighborhood. Mutant Mudds is retro type II: an entirely new property created as if in the past, like La-Mulana or Dark Void Zero. And remember, I said it's a spectrum, so games like Bit.Trip fall somewhere in between. Whichever the means, the intention of each type is for you to sit down and feel as though it's 19XX again.

Let's take a look at these means, since the degree to which they're successfully executed becomes the degree to which the game accomplishes the goal of retro (recall: to evoke a specific time, place, and packaging). At first it might seem as though Rocket Knight has the easier task; it's already got characters, setting, and gameplay to draw on. "Isn't any game starring Rocket Knight immediately retro?", you ask. In fact, that franchise nature makes things a lot tougher - see Donkey Kong Country Returns for a game unable to overcome the same baggage. It's not good enough to regurgitate the iconic series elements and say "ta-da", because saying "ta-da" has historically accomplished little to nothing in virtually any situation. At best that constitutes a fan-game - it's too easy to assume that a classic game is classic because of exactly what's in it, that to recreate greatness, all you need are the elements of greatness. The original Rocket Knight Adventures earned its belovation through innovation, uniqueness, and the solidification and expansion of ideas established by the sequels. By varying the core concepts of the original game, the continuing entries reflect on their predecessors and clarify their identities, while also incorporating new ideas into the body of work. This is why even the less-than-fun Rocket Knight Adventures 2 is valuable. Its weird insistence on super-hidden collectibles (basically Chaos Emeralds) calls focus to the element of exploration within the series that is otherwise easy to ignore - after playing RKA2, what seemed like aimlessly open environments in Sparkster become open-world mazes, promising exploratory platforming rather than accidental footholds.

So what we're really looking at isn't how Rocket Knight duplicates RKA and Sparkster(s), but how it presents new means of experience in congruence with the ideals of the older games. Rocket Knight presents the familiar (if you're Golem or I) anthropomorphized possum/pig/wolf world of the series, once again torn asunder (yeah boy) by war between... apparently an entire army vs. Sparkster. Though war has always been the backdrop of the games' stories, this time it's immediate, all-consuming, and epic. This is partially accomplished simply by an increase in resolution - with 1080 eyes to work with, a lot more can be jammed onto the screen, an opportunity Rocket Knight uses to populate the landscape with lively battles between pigs, wolves, and their war machines (sadly for RKA2 fans, the lizardmen do not return - get your fix from Skyrim instead). The choice of environments also keeps Rocket Knight focused - there aren't any detours through giant-musical-instrument-world this time around. Sparkster himself has become a more violent avatar, with more attacks than ever, an emphasis on close range combat, and an overactive jetpack. All of this serves both to recall to us the omnipresent world-at-war atmosphere of the Rocket Knight and to bring it to the fore, providing a new element of focus to go back and rediscover in the classic trilogy.

Mutant Mudds, on the other hand, gets a blank slate to write on. It's emulating a time period - let's say 1990, just for simplicity's sake - and thus can pick and choose from anywhere in the massive berth of game design of that era (or just pull heavily from Super Mario World and Virtual Boy Wario Land). Where Rocket Knight had to prove that there was still something to be done with the series, some way to evolve it creatively, Mudds isn't really out to prove that 1990 can be more than it already was. Instead, it wants to show us how simply fun a game can be without contrivance, how the olden standards remain not just functional, but viable. The success or failure of Mudds doesn't establish it as part of classic canon or prove that it would or would not have been awesome and original had it been released in 1990, rather it says "hey, guy. This old baseline, this still works. So there's nothing stopping you from innovating on top of it."

Someone should point out that I seem to be trivializing Mudds, shrinking its goals so it's easier to declare as successful. Well, that someone should go play the game and then see if they can stand by their contention, because frankly, if you can see any kind of ambition or experimentality in there, you have keener eyes than I (and everyone knows that I have the eyes of an eagle - an eagle which has lazerbeams for eyes. An optometrist told me this. I am not kidding.). The game gives you Firebrand's hover (Gargoyle's Quest), Mega Man's cannon (Mega Man), and drops you straight into the level hub, which is just a room full of doors. There are exactly 100 'coins' and one hidden door in every stage. You have infinite lives/continues and there are no checkpoints. It pretty much says "look, platforms, okay? You know what to do."

The platforming aspect of the game isn't so interesting to discuss, though I will say it works as well as any reviewer might have you believe, if not better. Mudds' true success as retro is in showing us that there are still fun characters to make, even without dialogue, duologue, diatribe, dissension, declamation, double talk - double talk, IT'S ALL TALK. You tell 'em, Adrian Belew. The titular Mudds are an alien species serving the role of Goombas and Koopas, varying in size and appearance corresponding to their function. Sure they're all brown, but I came to affectionately nickname each of them by the time I'd collected all forty water sprites (more specifically, I nicknamed each one "Tim"). The game's protagonist is definitely named Alex or Maximillian, I don't remember which, but he too is a success. Though clearly inspired (consciously or un-) by Earthbound's Jeff, the developers give Aleximillian just enough personality - his dorky, overly enthusiastic wave at the player when the controls go silent, the brief flash of buck teeth as he strolls along, and of course the shorts. The game makes you wish we got more such colorful 8-bit silliness, simply by non-referentially throwing us an example.

No one likes an excessively long post, which is why I decided it would be perfect to end this week of being too busy to write. If you made it this far, your special reward is that I'll remind you that you can demo both of these games for free! And both are available on PC with relatively modest system requirements! So if you're reading this post, you can probably have them downloaded and ready to play by the time you finish reading this post, had I put this paragraph at the beginning!

Top Ten: [2D] Platforming revisited

Rules for ALL top tens: 
DESERT ISLAND DISC! These are the ten games I would take if all other qualifiers were forever destroyed. That means there is a strong preference to take only one game per series/creative unit; however, this is not a strict rule. I may find myself unable to dispose of either Highway 61 (Revisited) or John Wesley Harding.
NO RANKING! The ten are presented arbitrarily ordered unless otherwise noted.
NO COLLECTIONS! Re-releases and remakes are okay, but no anthologies. Games must be originally intended as a standalone work. 
WHAT I SAY GOES! These are my choices. They aren't the games considered the best, or that were the most influential or successful. They are my subjective preferences. I will provide as much objective reasoning as I can, but at the end of the day, I like what I like and am always right, and you like whatever stupid things you like, because you're an idiot.

Yes, you've read the introduction, now read the list. Special criteria: only looking at games that are more 2D than not (gameplay, not graphics: New Super Mario Bros. is in but Super Mario Galaxy is out), only looking at games that are more platformer than not (Legend of the Mystical Ninja is probably the cutoff there, being exactly half-and-half), and not necessarily judging by which has the best raw platforming - just which is the best platformer.

For the sake of brevity, I'm going to focus on one or two elements that make each game great, rather than giving you a broad overview that you could get from Wikipedia.

1.) Sparkster (SNES)
Ah, Sparkster, ye long forgotten god in the pantheon of '90s animal mascots. Not to be mistaken for Sonic, Socket, or Sbubsy, Sparkster is a uniquely action-heavy platformer featuring the original Rocket Knight. All four Rocket Knight games have their virtues, but RKA and the SNES Sparkster (note: from here, I'm going to be using "Sparkster" exclusively to refer to the SNES game) are in a league above the other two, and most other platformers for that matter. RKA is known for its unique bosses and uh kind of gimmicky levels, while Sparkster has more expansive environments and paced obstacles. What's particularly great about Sparkster is how well it nails these broad environments.

See, most linear 2D games suck at encouraging exploration. They degenerate into collectathons (Plok, Bubsy, DKC), dilute the level design (Sonic), or make you explore every last inch of the stage to find a needle in the haystack (Sonic again, Genesis Sparkster). Sparkster succeeds though, because of Sparkster's own abilities moreso than the landscape itself. Sparkster has a jetpack which can blast him screens ahead or can be carefully used to eradicate enemies. This allows the designers to decompress the stages and also introduces an element of surprise and randomness. Sparkster doesn't have to lurch at a snail's pace (Sonic AGAIN) or make awkward unintuitive leaps of faith, because he can be launched wherever you want.

The boss battles also shine as they did in Rocket Knight Adventures, the hybrid shooter/melee combat tends to be fun, and there's a SHMUP LEVEL!!!!!!!!!! Sparkster's one downfall is that a few bosses are TOO hard, halting the game's pace.

2.) Super Mario World

When they turn the pages of history - when these days have passed long ago - will they read of Super Mario Bros. 3, or of Super Mario World? Perhaps the world will have been divided through the debate over which of these games is better, and two meganations will arise: Dinosaur Land and Mushroom Kingdom.

Dinosaur Land will tout the virtues of free-form navigation, its individual areas each offering countless forms of transport, from direct speedy bullet-trains to meandering hot-air balloons suited for methodical exploration. Airliners and underground metros will allow visitors to visit exotic locales in any order they please, such that more welcoming regions can be used as a base of operations in approaching those less forgiving.

Visitors to Mushroom Kingdom will find themselves surprised by the lack of this freedom of travel; stuck on maze-like and jammed surface roads, only the occasional one-way highway bypass will allow point to point transport. Worse yet, on entering each province tourists will find themselves forced onto a predetermined guide-path covering virtually every inch of ground, and when they've left they'll be unwelcome to return.

Did you get it? It was a metaphor. That's what a pet is for. Point is, SMB3 sucks, SMW rules.

3.) Abe's Exoddus
Cinematic platformers are a beast I've discussed before. They rely on methodical progress, trial-and-error, and thinking. Abe's Exoddus is just about the thinkingest among them. The game is littered with all kinds of puzzles of both the adventure game and Zelda variety, constantly having you slam your head against the keyboard asking why. But as I covered in my previous article, a lot of what makes these games fun, especially in the case of the hilarious Abe, is that fucking around with the tools given to you. I can't tell you how many times I've grabbed control of a Slig just to hear them babble at each other and then shot Abe and all the other Mudokons anyway. This gameplay is familiar from Oddysee, but what sells it this time around is the quicksave feature, allowing and encouraging experimentation.

Oddworld's greatest strength is no secret: the game world is an intricate, sometimes beautiful, sometimes reviling satire of the modern industrial world. Never before has an adaptation of Roger Waters' adaptation of Animal Farm been so poignant. Abe and his sheep-like friends only exist to consume and try to escape consumption, bullied into submission by Slig dogs, with all ruled by the iron-fist of the pig Glukkons. Okay, I'll admit I never read Animal Farm, because Orwell is a bit too dry and pedantic for my taste. But Animals is one of my favorite albums of all time, so at the very least I can tell you Oddworld's allegory corresponds to it.

That's a start for you, I'll be back tomorrow with the next couple top ten!