Why does Dracula ride the elevator?

Because his bats were on the other side.

So I mentioned last week that in Lords of Shadow 2 we get to play as Dracula, one of the great villains of literature, cinema, video-gamey, and most famously, Castlevania 64. This Drac ain't no pretty-boy good guy vampire like Twilight Sparkle or Kid Dracula or Bill Frampton - he's a bona fide lord of the night whose power was ripped directly from the face of Satan and used to send armies of darkness (on DVD) across Europe, decimating kingdoms, raping babies, and crushing the saintly warriors who dared challenge him. The first scene post-prologue gives us a first person view as Dracula feasts on a wailing mother and father (and implicitly their baby). He's definitely got a bit of the-world-wasn't-fair-to-me-so-I'm-not-gonna-be-fair-to-it brooding going on, but that's buried deep down inside where any good Darth Vader keeps it. 

We play as textbook "anti-heroes" all the time in games (it's the easiest way to justify murder-based gameplay), but the potential for an outright villainous protagonist is tempting. A villain has limitless potential - he isn't bound to a journey of redemption or evolution, so his arc can proceed in all kinds of unexpected directions. We aren't required to sympathize with a villain, only pity him. The Legacy of Kain is perhaps my favorite example - the story of the wrongfully murdered Kain whose quest for revenge is twisted by his moral destitution into world domination which in turn tears apart the metaphysical fabric of right and wrong, reflecting his inner perversion on the lands he claims to rule. Playing as a villain gives us the chance to live out power fantasies and perceive the translation of an internal compensatory struggle into external violence. 

In Lords of Shadow 2, our main character and would-be main villain Dracula, the final boss of dozens of Castlevanias past and single-handed slaughterer of an entire crusader army (seen in the prologue), rides a lot of elevators. 

That's how he gets up and down multi-story skyscrapers (and of course how the game hides loading times in the background)

The first time I found my Dracula-self milling about in an elevator the same way I do every night on the way up to my apartment, I realized something was wrong. It's an infinitely mundane and passive activity. Boring, maybe a bit soothing; patient. It's not that I believe Dracula is a stairs man or needs to turn into a bat and smash through the window everywhere he goes (although that is kinda what I imagine), it's just that I don't need to see him taking the elevator. Were it left off-screen I could infer that it happens, but I never would, because why the fuck would I be thinking about that. It is eminently skippable. Watching it, being made to think about it, ponder what's going through Dracula's head and if he's staring at the buttons light up as I do, totally disengages me from the character, particularly any sense of menace he may wield. Another game I played recently that used elevators for loading was DmC - in that it was made into a joke about Dante's impatience and fit with a character who was being railroaded through events, only barely able to clutch at threads of his own destiny. If Dracula is supposed to be a godly being, the only monster capable of matching Satan himself, he'd probably ought to be beyond things I do in my daily routine. Do we need to see him taking a leak? Or brushing his teeth? With all those nasty mutants and demons he digs his teeth into, Dracul probably needs some pretty potent Crest. 

Movies are a lot pickier about what they show because of time limitations and technical freedoms. They can easily switch perspective or setting without disorienting the viewer because they're already cut together from bits and pieces. Video games are typically more straightforward narratives and while indeed they may take the filmic approach, as does Asura's Wrath, they tend to mine realism from continuous worlds. Could Shadow of the Colossus present its boss battle gameplay with a stage select and loading screens? Sure, but it would come at the cost of its grand scale, oppressive isolation, and haunting melancholy. Not all game worlds form such a cohesive picture, and we tend to make jokes of the little absurdities: why is Link breaking pots instead of saving Zelda? Why are we breeding racing chickens in Final Fantasy VII when the world is on the brink of apocalypse? These asides may threaten our suspension of disbelief, but they're driven by a gameplay-first mentality that only undermines the narrative for the sake of sustaining playability. If we're having fun we're more likely to keep engaged and distracted from mundanities, so this works as an exchange. 

Dracula's elevator rides certainly aren't an exchange of gameplay for realism, so do they maintain the continuity of the virtual world? Well, they fill it out in some sense. They answer the question that Yes, Dracula does ride the elevator. And that answer makes me feel a lot lamer to be taking the reigns of the classic villain. It's only a component in a larger story syndrome - Drac is once again taking orders from an ostensibly more knowledgeable and influential character, he's fighting his own minions (mind-controlled!) rather than holy warriors and vampire slayers (except for that tantalizing intro segment), and he plays almost identically to Gabriel Belmont from the previous game. In fact he isn't much of a character at all. It's nice to suck my foes' blood, but that's just not enough to make me feel like the Prince of Darkness. 

Preamble to Lords of Shadow 2: How I feel about Lords of Shadow

Been playing Lords of Shadow 2 of course. I was a big fan of the first game, thought it was one of the better action games of last generation with its simple no-combo heal/powerup mechanics that emphasized reactive opportunistic combat through two magic modifiers - that is, take advantage of a pattern opening early on in a fight and you could use it for a huge punish that allowed skipping through mundane grinding or break-waiting. It was also nicely paced coming off something like Bayonetta that is just fight-fight-fight - not that I object to that, just that Lords of Shadow found its own niche making for a relaxing play exploring mini-labyrinth environments peppered with a pretty steady stream of new enemy and boss types. It had its cinematic moments but it wasn't drilled to the cutscene/variety-fest that is God of War where the combat is really just thin filler/icing on top of a core of event gameplay like kicking a box up a hallway or flying a pelican across the Mediterranean.

The weird enemy design was largely worthy of the Castlevania name

And even the most generic Tomb Raider environments were loaded with detail

Lords of Shadow was a confident game that felt like Castlevania - you walk around some and appreciate noxious swamps and desolate cliffs and dank dungeons where unholy abominations crawl out of the woodwork to challenge your progress. It found its own identity within the series - it wasn't a Platformervania like the early games; it's light press-in-a-direction-to-get-there climbforming was more in line with later games like Symphony of the Night or Dawn of Sorrow, yet like those games it also had a Clock Tower and a few later areas (those cliff areas whose name I can't remember atm) that brought challenging platforming to the forefront and happily threw the player to their death repeatedly, reminding us of the series origin. Without a continuous world it wasn't a Metroidvania either, but it still contained traces of that design pattern, from multi-pathing in the large stages to dozens of collectibles that could be reached only by backtracking after obtaining abilities during the story's progression. Chunky enemies with tight patterns that challenged the player to weave through a flurry of attacks to land a single whiplash have been an integral part of the series since Simon met his first Axe Armor - mid-period games like Rondo of Blood and Circle of the Moon were loaded with these tough enemies like Minotaurs and Arch Demons. It's this combat that Lords of Shadow brings to the forefront - instead of using battles to drain life and hinder progress through a larger obstacle course, they are the only obstacles, and the player has to string together perfect hits and dodges to survive each one. It's Combatvania for sure, but there's no reason that's not a valid paradigm. Fighting enemies was probably my favorite part of the other games and I enjoy comparing the principles on play there with those in Lords of Shadow. 

This computer chess match probably brings back nightmares for players who got this far, but I liked the occasional stumper - it's not like you couldn't go back to other levels while you were stuck to hone your combat or find collectibles, and you never had to play the puzzles again thanks to the stage format

The presence of climb-able bosses was lambasted as a Shadow of the Colossus ripoff, though it fit quite well as a translation of the sky-high screens-tall bosses of 2D Castlevanias

So why am I wasting all this time talking about Lords of Shadow when I actually just want to post about Lords of Shadow 2? Because I'm about to levy some complaints at the sequel - something that it's been taking a lot of. Actually I'm mostly having a great time (the excellent combat and boss fights are still in tact, the climbforming seems to be at late-game levels from the beginning, and the castle environments in particular might be more gorgeous than ever), I just needed you to know I'm not one of those people that has hated this entire reboot series and that I do not in any way shape or form conform to the prevailing current opinion that this is a bad game. I have no objection about it being a "real" Castlevania. I have no problem with elements supposedly "stolen" from God of War or Shadow of the Colossus. I even loved the twist that the hero of Lords of Shadow, the first Belmont, ends up becoming Dracula, and felt it fit perfectly with the story of that game and the tone of the series. I couldn't wait to see where they were going with things. 

Admittedly I kinda thought the sequel should be played AS Simon vs. this new Dracula (what's the point of turning your protagonist into a villain if he's going to stay the protagonist?), but Konami did give us that story in the form of Mirror of Fate. Unfortunately that was a handheld spinoff that I didn't really want to play - why put a crucial plot chapter there? Regardless, the Simon/Trevor/Alucard chapter DID happen in whatever form, so it's expected that we're back in the shoes of Dracula. He's now had his fall and his time as a villain, so it's time for the redemption chapter. How do I feel about these vampiric slippers? Well I should have a moment to talk about that tomorrow....

Konami ReBirth, followed swiftly by Konami ReDeath

Around 2009, classic-style 2D gaming was at a height it hadn't reached for over a decade. Retro series were showing a second life with Street Fighter IV, Mega Man 9, Pac-Man Championship Edition, and... um... Sonic 4. The time was ripe for Konami, action kings of the early '90s, to rise like a phoenix and show the world what hardcore gaming really meant. Few classics are as beloved as Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania, but the former two hadn't seen a commercially successful sequel in fifteen years, and the Castlevania property had completely abandoned its origins. Konami smartly chose this opportunity to capitalize on a "ReBirth" for all three series, combining retro stylings with brand new content. That was the only smart decision they made in the entire process, because...

What the hell are these games? If anything the three seem to form a contained "ReBirth" subseries rather than a systemic overhaul or continuation of their respective properties. I honestly can't tell if Konami intended to continue Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania so much as they wanted to launch a new "ReBirth" branding that would visit random classics with its trappings. The decision to use the same developer, same assets, and same art-style for all three games is beyond lame. Why are Contra and Castlevania suddenly only distinguished by palette? Think of how different Contra III and Super Castlevania IV look. It all reeks of trying to budget three games for the price of one. Could Konami possibly have conceived anything more throwaway and forgettable? Raise your hand if today, a mere four years later, you even remember the ReBirths.

The games look passable, but the unfaithful pixel art calls to mind "cell-phone game" more than "NES"

I cannot stress enough how mind-boggling short-sighted this approach was. All we have to look at is the ReBirth visual presentation to know that Konami fundamentally misunderstood what was making Capcom, Nintendo, and Sega so successful at rebooting old properties. My best shot at what was going through their minds is: "well it looks like people are willing to buy cheap old games with any graphics at all, so let's make some cheap games with old mechanics and crappy graphics". It's like it completely went over their heads that Mega Man 9 was cool for identically replicating NES graphics, or that A Boy and His Blob had intricate modern hand-drawn sprites, or that Sonic 4 brought Sonic into a lush HD revision of his classic 16-bit hangouts. There's a common denominator here - the games either go FULL retro, or they go FULL contemporary. Konami tried to forge some fanciful middle ground by opting for the sorta-retro look of recent indie games like Cave Story and Super Meat Boy: pixelated sprite art that doesn't match with any particular generation of hardware. This works for indie games attempting to evoke the general spirit of classic gaming rather than any particular era, but it has no place in fucking Castlevania. Clearly Konami didn't want to spend the cash to get a real development studio to produce Donkey Kong Country Returns-level graphics, but were also scared the public wouldn't accept throwback art. This in spite of plentiful examples that both approaches pay off.

If they were so fucking scared of retro graphics, why settle for such tired gameplay? These three games show no attempt at all at advancing or even slightly varying the mechanics of their predecessors. Gradius ReBirth kinda gets away with it, because Gradius never had any variety, but all of the classic Contra and Castlevania games played slightly differently. Instead of offering a new variation, ReBirth falls back on the most stripped-down set of mechanics. So these aren't really sequels at all. I'd accept this if we were doing a "pretend it's 1988" time-shift, but the visuals have already destroyed that illusion. If Konami was so sure they could improve on classic sprite-art, why be so conservative in the gameplay department? Pick a sandbox to play in! Again, there's a very simple explanation for this: they did the cheapest thing possible. It's like they were immensely reluctant to make these games, like they had already assumed they weren't going to make any money. I wonder if Koko does make any money these days?

Gradius ReBirth is the only one that even close to fits into its series - only because Gradius always took a step back for every step it took forward. Yes, I am referring to Edit Mode. Bring it fucking back you assholes.

I'm directing my ire at Konami higher-ups because it doesn't seem fair to come down hard on development studio M2. M2 should never have been chosen for all three of these games. They can obviously construct decent (if a bit unbalanced) action, and were these games not burdened with the responsibility of carrying on some of the greatest legacies in gaming history, they'd be fairly recommendable (and still are). But these guys had nowhere near the panache and versatility to turn out what needed to be three completely distinct entries of three completely distinct series under limited time and budget. Yes, I realize that the original Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania shared quite a bit of staff, but it must be noted that before ReBirth, M2 had only been responsible for collating and porting Sega and Konami classics to other platforms. These were the first three games they had ever developed (at least the first three they're ever credited for developing), and the early-90s Konami Dream Team they are not. Besides, I doubt they were getting much financial support. These weren't exactly headline releases - though of course they should've been.

What bothers me about the ReBirth games is less their immediate quality; rather it's what a terrible stepping stone they provide for their brands. Why rebirth your series if you can't/won't build off of that rebirth at all? There is simply nowhere to follow from ReBirth. They didn't invent any new series standards; they weakly perpetuated old conventions. What was Konami's plan for ReBirth Phase 2? More watered-down semi-remakes? Did they think that's what people wanted of the series going forward? Or were they planning a return to true classic-style Contra/Gradius/Castlevania games? In that case, why bother with the ReBirth detour at all? It was a cheap way to quickly grab and then immediately lose gamers' attention. If anything, it tarnished the name of all three properties and showed the gaming public that Konami just doesn't give a shit about its classic stable. Is it even remotely surprising that in the wake of ReBirth, Contra and Gradius once again dropped off the map and Castlevania moved directly into another reboot?

God I hate that they made Contra look like a Saturday-morning cartoon. Contra should be M-rated as fuck. At least they threw in an Escape from New York reference.

ReBirth is a cautionary example that tagging something as "retro" isn't enough to make it successful, even if it's paired with fan-favorite brands. Developers need to have actual vision that they can communicate to the player. Allow me a brief fantasy of what ReBirth could have been, had Konami assigned an actual brain to the project. Start with a wave of 8-bit Mega Man 9-style direct sequels, move up to 16-bit for a second wave, and so forth until landing on the most repeatable formula or making a jump to present-day visuals/gameplay. That is to say, it could have been an actual rebirth, leading into regrowth, leading into profit and good games all around. Thanx God this is what we got instead.

A Perfectly Haunting Musical Selection

May is starting, and spring is in full swing. With sunshine and life on the rise, GnG's undead readers will most likely experience seasonal depression. I can't do anything about the Earth's celestial circumstances, but I can provide some tunes to remind you of those late December days when the Moon ruled the sky. Dracula himself put these on a mixtape, calling it the Dracula Perfect Selection.

These songs really speak for themselves--I'll try not to get in the way, but I do have some high points to consider while you listen. Keep yer ears peeled, folks.

First up is Dracula’s sales pitch. He tries to tempt us to join him in his life of sin, inviting us on “a fantasy trip to Hell” (capitalization assumed).

Points of interest:

• Check out that ragtime piano at 2:36.
• He just wants to suck your blood.

Oddly enough, Dracula put a song from Simon Belmont on his "perfect" selection. Simon comes in with a most heinous rap at 2:59, saying, “Nightstalker, Nightwalker: I’m gonna get’cha, you’re all mine.” A more puerile commentator might ask if Simon is genuinely challenging Dracula or intending to join him in his sinful revelry or whatever it is vampires do.

Last but not least, I hope you’re ready for the 90s, because they’re here in full force. Get a load of that background track, too. It sure does take two to make a thing go right.
Skip to 1:44 for the ode to Simmon Belmont's struggle with Dracula. Then, stay tuned until 2:22 to hear the same choir sing about Santa Claus. I’m not kidding, listen for yourself. Listen for Yourself Himself.

Anarchy Reigns: To be damned by optimism

Before I get any further, let me clarify that I have NOT played Anarchy Reigns. It merely represents the latest in an unfortunate trend of games: those with good ideas reliant on community support.

Let me give you the ice cream on Anarchy Reigns, since no one has heard of it. You should have, since it's the pseudo-sequel to MadWorld, one of the best action games of this generation, and since that of course means it's developed by Platinum Games, developers responsible (sometimes by different names) for everything from Devil May Cry to Okami to Bayonetta. MadWorld was basically a modernized Streets of Rage - sizable open-ended stages without linear guidance were stocked with respawning goons, mid-bosses, death-traps, and mini-games. Anarchy Reigns expands this into a giant continuous open-world brawl. Since it's just a big city full of hostile brawlers, why not fill it with human combatants? Because, after all, the Internet is a place of magic and wonder.

This is a pretty good idea. It's less ambitious (i.e. more reasonable) in scope than an MMO, but still dense enough to offer a repeatably unique challenge. You just can't replicate human behavior and unpredictability, even with today's high-tech technological advances in technology. This comes with an inherent risk: every role needs an actor, and they need to be present at all times for the show to go on. Without players fully populating matches, all you're left with is an idea on a drawing board. A great idea, but gamers can't play an idea. Only ghosts can do that.

That's a risk that any multiplayer-centric game takes, but it's a much smaller barrier to overcome in, for instance, a 1v1 fighting game that only requires you to have one friend and allows you to sit in the same room and share a copy of the game. Tatsunoko vs. Capcom had no reason to be successful, but since I could always find at least one person online, or just get a friend to swing by, all was well. Hinging your entire concept on the notion that there will always be like hundreds of people playing requires A.) a giant budget and marketing campaign (Call of Duty, WoW) or B.) a heart full of hopes, dreams, butterflies, and optimism. Sometimes someone strikes gold. Other times it's Anarchy Reigns.

The thing that bugs me is that Sega, Platinum, and everyone involved had to know that the game wasn't going to be popular enough to sustain an online community. MadWorld sold like 35 copies. It's full of weird subject matter, super-mature content, poor graphics, and was launched at a terrible time for this type of title, against the likes of Capcom's gargantuan Devil may Cry and Platinum's own (for a different publisher of course) Metal Gear Rising: Revengreances. That's not a recipe for success. So is this a case where we can say the game is genuinely bad for hedging a bet that definitely wasn't going to pay off? Platinum knew there wasn't going to be community support, but they propped up the game with it anyway. Isn't that the same as developing an offline single-player platformer where there's a 95% chance the game will crash after stage 1? Even if stages 2 and on are the most brilliantly designed levels in history, it doesn't matter if you don't get to play them.

Americans completely eat up weird shit like this, right? Wait, I forgot my "not a completely moronic thing to say" hat this morning.

Yeah, Anarchy Reigns has the token single-player mode, and I guess that ought to be fun. It's almost enough to get me to buy the game, just because I can't get enough Platinum combat. But that's clearly a patch on the giant gaping damned-from-the-start black hole of the would-be multiplayer beat-'em-up. In the analogy above, the single-player is the equivalent of a stage 1.

Anarchy Reigns is far from the only offender. Look at Castlevania: Harmony of Despair or the thankfully canceled Mega Man Universe. It's good to experiment, but sticking a power-drill into your pupil isn't an experiment. As a gamer I just shake my head - this is Sega's mistake and their loss, not mine. As to an alternative solution, how we could make that great idea actually come to life... well that would take the genuine commitment of a company with a genuine budget. That discussion is the territory of marketing, not game design, and one that seems could use a heaping dose of common sense.

Toppest Tennest 2D Platformers, part Finally revisited

You're not gettin' tired of this, are you? I am. Top ten lists aren't accommodating to whacky hare-brained schemes and comic writing delusions. Translated into Fresca, that is to say that they aren't fun to write. They're... writing to write. You know, that satisfied/confident feeling you get from articulating your ideas? That one. But not anything I would go back and read to say "holy mother of the Great Gazoo what was going ON that day?". If you're me, you know that I like to surprise myself. But maybe I don't know that, and that's the surprise. On the scale of good to fun surprises, that one falls somewhere between "intervention" and "I'm pregnant".

7.) Bit.Trip Runner
Pregnant with ingenious rhythmic classical stylish platforming gameplay, you say? Bet they can't test you for that at Rite Aid. Is Bit.Trip Runner a platformer at all? Well, let's look at the definition. We're in control of a (literally) jammin' avatar, the eternally hip Commander Video, and we're definitely trying to circumlocutory him to a different location. What's crazy this time around is that CV is self-propelled! That's one of those external forces that we discussed before, but this one's a little different, because it seems to be working in tandem with our efforts instead of against them. An Unstoppable Force! Unfortunately for it, and for you, the environments of the Bit.Trip universe are littered with Immovable Objects. And what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? You get zipped back to the beginning of the level, that's what happens.

Someone go tell Socrates!

Runner is a symphony and cacophony describing the chapter of a man's life when he becomes obsessed with success and quantifiable worth, and the chapter of mankind's life in which it too was perverted by the dollar and the notion of profit. This is told wordlessly through one dude's marathon tracking the industrial life-cycle: the discovery of raw materials is followed by a mining operation and finally arrival in the city, the mecca of materialism. Runner remains upbeat in spite of its overbearing thematic material - Commander Video is single-mindedly propelled by naive optimism, not all-consuming avarice. These doomy and morose implications are saved for the subsequent slice of Gaijin's narrative (Fate), which should in its entirety be considered required material for every budding game enthusiast.

The audio/visual execution is exemplary in conveying the feeling that the player is controlling a work of art, step by step creating the music video of their own triumph.

8.) Yoshi's Story
Yoshi's Story doesn't suck. There, I said it. You'd be surprised how few people take that statement seriously - well, if you played the game and had any idea what you were doing, you'd be surprised. Yoshi's Story may very well be the only collectathon that ever worked. It doesn't require you to break out your fine-toothed comb like its forebear, Yoshi's Island, opting to hide its secrets on clever detours and down foreboding paths instead of in plain sight but under a rock that was under another slightly larger rock. This approach to level design is common among the games I've listed, because I'm shallow that way.

And it just may be a balloonatic I'm lookin' for

Yoshi is yet another FPTC, a fun protagonist to control. His is an example of a world that lets you take advantage of this. It isn't punched through with pits directly to hell or running wild with flaming electrified spiny bees. The landscape at hand is well, for lack of a better word, bouncy. It encourages the player to run amok and creatively experiment without the spectre of death looming above. It's not that the game is easy (though any player with even the tiniest speck of patience will see the finish line), it's that there are ways of interacting with things that don't rely on the binary "kill or be killed" that has become a little too rote in the medium. The game is playful and friendly without pandering to children; it wants you to bump around and poke things just to be surprised at what happens. It's an interactive world, not a gauntlet.

The art that brings this world to life also deserves accolades for its effectiveness. An N64 game, it's as beautiful in 2012 as it was in 1997, relying on detailed and deep renders that bring to mind the best of Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario RPG, Baten Kaitos, or Kirby's Epic Yarn.

9.) Castlevania X: Rondo of Blood
For all the super-series the industry has left alive since the '80s, Castlevania has the best reputation outside of the Nintendo classics. While Mega Man became synonymous with cloned template games, Sonic was seen as eternally in pursuit of past glory, and Final Fantasy became emblematic of cult favoritism, Castlevania has maintained a popular set of core mechanics while varying the context enough to stay interesting. It also has vampires and Gothic castles, and nerds love those.

Boil this down, skim the fat, peel the rind, strain the juices, and throw it at your brother's head, and what you'll have left is Rondo of Blood. This is sadly the hardest series entry to get your hands on in the States, but as of the PSP remake and Wii Virtual Console re-release, you've got no excuse. Simply put, the game is a bitch to play. Yup, that's what I'm saying makes Castlevania fun. It's annoying.

Really no game in the series escapes this, but let's talk Castlevania X. Every goddamn enemy, every goddamn jumping segment, is a fucking pain in the fucking ass. It's impossible not to die all the time.

What's good about that. I dunno.

What's the last one? Perhaps the greatest platformer of all time? Come on, you must know. If you haven't guessed, we'll be back next time to share.