Capcom Arcade Cabinet in brief, Pt. 2

Some more Capcom Arcade Cabinet overviews.

1943 Kai - This is a (bizarro) arrange version of 1943 - the stages are essentially the same, but now there's weird anachronistic stuff like lazer-beams. What's strange is that Capcom felt they needed to reserve that kind of thing for a spinoff, as if the success of 1942/1943 had been based on their historical accuracy. Honestly it's not really its own game, so there's not much to recommend, but diehard fans of 1943 will certainly appreciate the new variety.

Ghosts n' Goblins - The original Gs n' Gs, this is very familiar ground for anyone who's ever touched the series. The arcade version of Ghosts n' Goblins runs closer to its next-gen sequels (the Ghouls n' Ghostss) that it does to its own home console port for the NES, though admittedly there's little difference between any of the early entries. It has more of a shooter feel than the gimmickier, platformier Genesis and SNES games, but will certainly satiate anyone's hungry for more Arthur. Though I'd of course recommend Demon's Crest or Gargoyle's Quest first.

Gun.Smoke - I really hate this game. It's another basic variation on the vertical scrolling shooter, but by this point it feels like Capcom was really arbitrarily varying the rules to justify original releases. It's a hyper-primitized Commando, what perhaps we would get if someone forgot to have the second half of the idea for that game. And, while I may find Commando painful to play, it still gets credit for being its own thing. Gun.Smoke does not.  The player can shoot in three directions at a very limited range and the screen auto-scrolls. This is not a strong concept, but not an inherently bad one. What makes Gun.Smoke so unplayable is that A.) It doesn't realize it auto-scrolls and B.) the mechanical parameters (range and speed) are so heavily weighted against the player that it just feels quarter-feastingly unfair. B is self-explanatory; on A, the problem is that enemies crowd up near the top of the screen and just back up along with the rate of scrolling, so you get completely overwhelmed. This is just a wildly pointless and unfun affair, and I challenge anyone to stomach even the first level - especially with 16 other arcade games in the collection to tempt you away. Plus, love Wild Guns though I may, the Wild West is a really stupid setting for a shmup.

Trojan - Hey, an arcade sideways walker! Alright! Well, al-okay at least. ASWs, eh. Trojan certainly doesn't break the mold - it's gimmick to compete with Altered Beast's transformation and Astyanax's power meter is... a shield! I'd say it's almost too slow and boring to be considered an ASW, then I remember how Altered Beast plays. The particularly bothersome thing to me about Trojan is the attack range. See, it sounds like I'm complaining about really trivial things. But you play ~20 arcade games from the same company and the same four-year period back-to-back and try having deep thoughts. It's just boring. Arcade games weren't any good til at least the '90s, and even then I take them with a grain of salt. Anyway, frickin' attack range. It's one of those games where your range is so short that if you mistime a swing against an oncoming enemy, you immediately get hit, so you end up just spamming the attack button. Think Ninja Gaiden or Batman (NES). Also, what's going on with the setting in this game? It's like cyberpunk with a tiny dash of ancient Greek. Like if Spartans stalked the trashy streets of Double Dragon. Needless to say, no one needs to play this.

Avengers - This one's kinda unique in that it's so ill-conceived. All I can figure from playing Avengers is that someone at Capcom spotted Double Dragon and said "we have to one-up this concept as quickly as possible... can you guys make a street-fighting game from our Commando engine?"

I really hesitate to call it a beat-'em-up, because frankly, it's not, but that's the concept and the marketing tagline. "A top-down beat-'em-up". But there's really no fighting in the game - it's just Commando with a short-range attack. You steam-roll shmup-like swarms of dumb enemies who possess no sense of self-preservation and go down in one hit. There are separate buttons for punch and kick, but the attacks are largely identical (except that kick has longer range), so there's no incentive to alternate or create combos. It's almost worth playing just to ponder if this abject failure is what drove the company to produce the genre-defining Final Fight just two years later.

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This wasn't such a great group. Lotta yikesers. Can the last batch save the oven? We'll see what Section Z, The Speed Rumbler, and SonSon have to say about it, and if they have any cooking tips either.

Some words on Super Ghouls'n Ghosts

Since I've covered the two subseries recently (Demons Crest/Gargoyle's Quest and Maximo), might as well talk about mainline GnG.

Super Ghouls'n Ghosts. For all the superfluous "super"s that are thrown around throughout the SNES library, Super Ghouls'n Ghosts is the one that best earns it. The arcane tome known as dictionary.com provides this definition: "super: of an extreme or excessive degree". How better could one possibly describe the antagonistic forces - the eponymous ghouls and ghosts - of Super GnG? Severe, punishing, unforgiving, exorbitant, obnoxious, take it away, Mr. Thesaurus! The very nature of the game is its wildly skewed balance, pitting a very ordinary hero against an extraordinary threat. So I can't think of a more fitting title - besides perhaps You're Gonna Super Lose, which didn't test well with focus groups.

Goddamn these fuckers

It is an ass game. It is so stupid, pisses me off in every way possible, and there is no way that anyone should ever want to play it. It's random as shit, wildly unbalanced, controls beyond unintuitively and some ASSHOLES claim it's one of the greatest platformers of all time. Nothing pisses me off more than a bunch of ASSHOLES declaring something to be one of the greatest somethings of something. Look at the Grammy. The Oscar. There could literally be nothing worse for a work than in its time to be declared the best of its time. WHY would you like Super Ghouls in Ghosts? I've never heard any legitimate answer or explanation. But I know the secret. It's hard. And any game that is hard (proper hard) immediately develops a following, because there is that handful of assholes (ASSHOLES) who manages to stomach it all the way through to the end just so they can say "I beat it". And then comes that most scoundrelous of questions: "who fucking cares?". Well, now that they've wasted the time and made the claim, Asshole Group A needs to justify it somehow, so they condescendingly say "it's an amazing game and you'll never get to experience that because you SUCK too much to win". It's always going to be subjective whether anyone liked the game, but now there's that ulterior motive: that elite distinguishing earned because claiming that they like it means they're "good enough" to like it.

Still though, who cares?

Well, for all its unpleasantness, Super GnG does have a strange charm, an enthralling character that always seems to drag you back for one more try. I don't think it deserves dismissal among the elitist ranks of Gradius V, Metal Slug 3, or Battletoads. The people who are speed-running or 1CC-ing this game have totally missed the point.  It manages to be captivating because you don't actually have to win, and you can accept that making it to the end is hardly even the goal anymore. You just want to make it one more second, survive a tiny bit longer. The game laughs in the face of the notion that there is an end; when you do finally defeat the boss at the climax of the last stage, you're informed: "Actually, Sir Lonely, you have to do it again. You don't rescue the princess this time. Go back to the beginning, which is now set to a higher difficulty, retrieve this bracelet that wasn't available the first time around, and then come back here." It's not like a "bad ending" or a Second Quest (Legend of Zelda), it's literally that you have to beat all of the stages two times through to reach the end. What a dick move.

The fuck is going on here

Yet it reminds us of the purgatorial nature of Super Ghouls'n Ghosts. We aren't really supposed to be enjoying ourselves. We aren't supposed to grasp for the light at the end of the tunnel. We're beating our heads against a ridiculous wall, laughing at the futility, lamenting every squandered opportunity. Yet somehow it isn't soul-crushing, but invigorating. Everything is so well-crafted, so technically impressive (slanting, shaking, and morphing environments) and artistically detailed (everything has a face?) JUST to fuck you over, that you can't help but delight in the hours spent wasting your life.

The 3est Protagonists

Did you see how it looks kinda like "Best" but actually is going to be about the 3 ___est (superlative) protagonists? Eh you'll get it in a second. Then you'll laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and cry, then laugh again, then cry again, by which point the slow-acting poison I've injected into your lunch will have taken effect and you'll be lifeless on the floor. Did you know that last year, over thirty-five blog-readers were killed by slow-acting poisons? Not readers of this blog, of course. I assure you, you're perfectly safe here. Nowhere on the Internet could be as safe as gnggames.blogspot.com. We even have built-in airbags!

So this is a silly idea I had that developed from what I now look back and realize was a better idea, to list my ten funnest protagonists. Instead, I've outsourced the work to the other bloggers, each of us bringing you a list of three protags adorned with appropriate superlatives. I'm gonna kick us off - stay tuned for the (probably better) lists from Greg, Ezio, Andrew, and Elesia, comin' atcha each Tuesday for the next monthish.

Villainousest: Max Payne / Kirby (tie)
It'd be nice if we could take a step back to days when a hero could be pacifistic (or at least a bit toned down), but while the most popular genre of game remains "First Person Shooter", I don't think it's going to happen. So let's fuck it all and just admit it: our protagonists are often villains. Not antiheroes - full-blown villains. Marcus Fenix (Gears of War), Nathan Drake (Uncharted), Optimus Prime (Fall of Cybertron), Wei Shen (Sleeping Dogs) - regardless of supposed values and platitudes, they're thieves, warmongers, and murderers. Kain (Blood Omen) is in fact one of my favorites simply because he is openly so. Of this vast selection of evil protagonists, however, two in particular stand out.

Max Payne is basically a complete shithead. And whoever wrote his dialogue probably shares that trait. I've talked before about how much I hate this character. Max whines and whinges on about what a sorry state his life is in, how he drinks to forget and doesn't have any reason to keep going. In fact, his entire character can be summed up in a short scene:

This is supposed to be "existential" or something, because someone at Rockstar saw a film noir movie, read one paragraph on Wikipedia about the subject, then tried to base this character around it. In fact, it's kinda humorous, and if you gave Max a maniacal laugh, he'd essentially be a more brutal Joker. He kills an endless stream of people (hundreds, if not thousands, by the time Max Payne 3 has closed) because he can't figure out a reason not to. His mantra: "I'll kill until I can figure out why I'm killing".

Kirby isn't particularly more murderous than the traditional platforming head-bopper (though his modus operandi of devouring foes makes his quest a bit more gruesome); like Max, what makes him particularly evil is his purpose, or lack thereof. Kirby has occasionally accomplished something like saving Dreamland (I think? did Adventure even have a story? 64?), and in these cases he can probably be cut some slack (even though he appears to be genociding the inhabitants of the very world he is supposedly preserving). But let's take for example Kirby's Squeak Squad. In this instance, a gang of mice (get it? Squeak Squad?) has run off with... a slice of shortcake Kirby was about to eat. Kirby could get another slice at whatever his local bakery situation may be, but he wants justice. Fair enough. The question this game begs, however, is whether wantonly slaughtering an entire population who likely had nothing to do with the theft is "justice". I have to wonder - is Kirby just indulging his murderous tendencies in the facade of being wronged, or is he delusionally imagining that every person/creature/monster he meets is part of some vast conspiracy to steal his cake?

Loneliest: Sir Lonely (Ghosts'n Goblins series)

Here's the deal with Sir Lonely:

If that doesn't touch your heart, I don't know what will. A hero propelled by his own loneliness through one of the most frustrating, hostile quests of all time. Like five times. As Youtube commenter gentrygh (?!) writes: "I feel Sir A. Lone indeed!" Thanks, gentrygh, for putting into words what I never could!

On a side note, I really wish there was a way to change my Youtube username.

Least OP'd: The Master/God (ActRaiser and ActRaiser II)

There's a little word we use around my home that often comes in handy for situations like this: OP'd (oh-peed). OP'd is long for OP, which is short for Over-Powered. Yes, occasionally a game contains some character, unit, or move that is so unbalanced that the only word to describe it is "OP'd". But that isn't the correct usage of the term. Like many terms of art, the meaning has become a bit removed from the etymology; from a gamer's perspective, the meaning of OP'd is simple: anything used to defeat me. If I lose a match of Marvel vs. Capcom 3, the opposing character is clearly OP'd. So OP'd. That special attack he used to defeat me is even more OP'd. It's just bullshit. That Dragonite that defeated my entire Pokemon team is totally OP'd. So on.

Let's ignore that paragraph. Pretend it never happened, like that time in childhood when your... well, sometimes it's better to forget. In a game where the player takes the role of God (called The Master in the NA release), he would probably expect to feel a little OP'd. As a matter of fact, OP'd = OP = OverPowered < OmniPotent = OP = God = holyshiiiiiiiiiit! But the ActRaiser games completely twist your expectations, providing a substantial platforming challenge (particularly II). After a short time with the game, the player might actually arrive at just the opposite conclusion - that every single fucking enemy is utterly OP'd. We're talking about a game where God (yes, the Christian God, Lord Almighty, Praise His Name on High, Shalom) can be defeated by a dragonfly. A large dragonfly, sure, but a dragonfly nonetheless. Maybe this is the reason for it, but I don't remember any parts of the Bible where Jesus hides behind a bush to trick a bug into passing him over. Or, wait, is that what that Passover nonsense is all about?

If Darksiders is a God of War ripoff, then call me Mark Pringles

I'd like to bring you a point today. A very special point that has been near and dear to my heart for almost my entire life. That point is: Darksiders reminds me so much of the PS2 Maximo games that claiming it's derivative of anything else not only proves the subjectivity of such claims, but also that everything is derivative of everything. I talked about this last week - everything under the sun has been done before. Darksiders is no different, God of War is no different, Shadow of the Colossus is no different, etc.

You don't need any incoming knowledge of Maximo or Darksiders to understand this argument; allow me to set you up with the basic facts:
-Maximo: Ghosts to Glory is a 2001 hack'n slash from the Ghosts'n Goblins series, receiving only one sequel, 2003's Army of Zin
-God of War is an ongoing series which has seen seven games since its 2005 debut and has become one of the most popular and profitable in gaming
-Darksiders is an original action/adventure property from 2009 with a big budget and blockbuster aspirations. Developed by Vigil Games.
-Though positively received, Darksiders has earned a reputation as less of an original game and more a greatest hits mishmash of mainstream giants like God of War, Legend of Zelda, and Shadow of the Colossus.

Before I get any further, let me remark that I do not care that few people have played the Maximo games. This post is not a case for those games or their significance in gaming history. Ghosts to Glory is novel and Army of Zin is a good time, but you haven't really missed out on anything if you skipped them back in the PS2 era. My subconscious picked them as my example when it interrupted my Darksiders session to say "hey doesn't this remind you of Maximo?" - plenty of other games could be used to make this same argument.

What bothers me is the suggestion that Darksiders couldn't exist without a handful of extremely recent pop games (ooooh, new term. Bet you can guess what it means!), as if it isn't a natural creation but rather some kind of Frankensteinberger's Monster. It strikes me as utter arrogance on a player/critic's part to assume that they know so much more about games than the developers at Vigil that they can dismiss their work as a bunch of "stolen" mechanics. Yes, a few bits of Darksiders' gameplay are tinglingly familiar: the don't-call-it-a-Portal-Gun Voidwalker, the fucking first tool-item being a boomerang. Vigil isn't trying to trick us into believing it created these ideas, they're providing their own take on recent innovations that haven't yet been further explored. Whether they prove successful in expanding these ideas doesn't affect that it's a worthwhile intention.

These references are mere asides to a game that otherwise fits comfortably in the action/adventure genre. If the core of the game was the Portal-mechanic or Panzer Dragoon flying stage, it might be worth complaining, but it isn't. The central gameplay is exploring environments and combating monsters. Yeah, I can see where God of War plays out much the same, but uh... it hardly invented that. If anything, calling Darksiders derivative of God of War is a testament to how generic the latter game is. In that case just about everything is inspired by God of War, since apparently it's the only game that ever had a character killing monsters in a fantastical landscape. Moreover, the gameplay of Darksiders conforms to expectations. It's pretty much exactly what I'm looking for in a game where I play as one of the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse.

If our protagonist suddenly burst into a musical number, then I'd be suspicious

Any game is just going to remind you of what you're familiar with. It's good to identify influences and become knowledgeable about both long-running trends and contemporary fads, and it's equally important to recognize that every game attempts to bring a new story to life. The means by which that is done can be new or old, but most of all should be appropriate.


asggggggggggggggggggG I', so tired eright now. I ewamted to make this oist post have anyhting to do wtih Maximo so it would make even a tiney bit of sience sense but ive given up ast this point. I wrote what you can fee abeove etis mornign and was gonna aediet edit after lkunch but now a[p[a[parrently oene cupo f coffeee is not eno=ugjh to trick me into staying awake to write, i can barely do work right now or not fall asleeepo at my dcesk. i'll right about darkeiders again later anythiway and mayhbe revisit this;.