What I'm Playing, July's end '13

In this feature, we commemorate games I have for the first time started and finished in the last few highly variable time units.

Thank god July is finally over. Ever notice what a bizarre, unpredictable month it is? Every year it's like, "nothing in July is gonna surprise me this year", and every year it gets weird. Sometimes it's good stuff and sometimes it's bad. Sometimes you discover Devo, sometimes a city blows up. Sometimes you lose your virginity, sometimes you lose your best friend. Sometimes you have a fun barbecue and sometimes you get addicted to drugs. It's July. Heightened reality. Frankly I say it's the heat what makes everyone act so crazy.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Super Mario Land (Game Boy / 3DS VC)

Well yeah, this game is short as shit and easy too. People always point to New Super Mario Bros. for starting that trend where lives are pointless because you finish the game with like 50, but I found that to be the case with Super Mario Land as well. I had twenty-some lives upon first completion. It just really loads you up with the coins.

That said, once you die, the dyin' don't stop. Because the game has such wonky physics (Mario goes from zero to sixty in less than a millisecond, gravity seems to be a constant instead of acceleration, and your sprite has a tiny hit box (which means a tiny landing area)), it's all about getting into the flow of things. As soon as you lose your grip, it's easy to die 5-10 times in just a few seconds. That was my experience, at least. The game only offers one continue, but since it's only about ten minutes long, even that seems unnecessary.

Games Started:

Capsized (XBLA)

Here we've got a nice little indie-that-made-it-to-the-big-times-after-many-years-and-then-didn't-really-get-the-attention-they-deserved type story. Capsized isn't all the way there, but it's at least the genesis of a great game. It's basically a linear weapons-heavy Super Metroid, not too different from the recent Bad Bots or Shadow Complex, though far heavier on the atmosphere. Capsized starts off on a real lazer-foot - for one thing, the foreign jungle planet teeming with life is a really nice, not particularly common setting. Okay, Avatar and that, but I can't really think of another game short of Turok that reminds me of this environment.

The problem is that Capsized feels more like a playground than a finished product. The physics are great and the shooting is a blast (a blast!), but the levels don't hold together well. There are occasional half-baked puzzles and some decent structurally challenging fights, but too often things completely fall apart and you feel like you have to cheese or glitch your way through to the end - like no one actually bothered to take the time to make sure that the solutions worked. There were times I was kinda surprised I was playing a game on XBLA proper (a game for which I had spent money) and not the Indie Marketplace, because Bleed feels far better put together. The game looks and controls professionally, but the level design just isn't there. It's not even that it's bad or ill-conceived - it's just so raw and messy that it feels like a first draft - something unfinished or put together with a different game's level editor. I think it's extremely telling that the game has four different ways of high-jumping - a jetpack, a grapple beam, wall-jumps, and a force-push that can be aimed at the ground. Surely a bit more time spent in the levels would have demonstrated how redundant these are and led the developers to either prune a few or design specifically around them.

This is more of a nitpick, but the atmosphere is also undercut by the lack of progression in the narrative. The protagonist has crash-landed on this planet and is now on a rescue mission, recovering his crewmates. I'm now 3/4 through the game and that's literally all I know of the plot. There's been no detail of the original space mission, no history or investigation of the nameless planet I've crash-landed on, no scope or context whatsoever. I don't even know if I'm waiting for a rescue ship to pick us up or hoping to rebuild my escape pod. I think the developers/writers had all of this information in their heads, but didn't realize how tight-lipped they were being. It's just frustrating to watch a neat idea spoiled by the weak aping of age-old silent narratives.

Dragon Quest IX (DS)

Time for a little Dragon Quest, Nein? That was German for "Time for a little Dragon Quest, No?" In conclusion, I guess so. The DS of course had a million Dairy Queens to choose from and everyone's got their own little opinion on which is best, so I decided to go with Famitsu's 40/40 Game of the Year 4040, Dragon Quest IX. I like a little battle animation to go with my RPG, and besides, it got me into a conversation with a cute girl at Gamestop about JRPGs, and she actually wasn't a retard. Like, she knew who Yoko Shimomura was and Vanillaware. I know, that's some compelling story. Save it for the autobiography and all that.

Dragon's Quest IX both does the JRPG thing better than most JRPGs and does the WRPG thing worse than most WRPGs. By that I mean to say, you know how there are three basic levels on which town-crawling RPGs set up plots? You know them, so I'm not going to say. Okay, I'll say. At the highest level there is some kind of main story that usually heavily involves the main character, main villain, main maguffin, and dictates the main path through towns/dungeons/a forest. This exists in all RPGs and um, pretty much all games and stories for that matter. In Dragon Quest IX, this plot can be summarized as "God decides he doesn't like Earth and decides to blow it up, and one angel has to collect seven figs to stop him". Sound familiar? They usually do. DQIX pays very little attention to this overarching narrative and leaves it alone for hours at a time.

The second level of narrative is the town-level ("the JRPG thing"). It's composed of the individual stories that surround each place you visit on your journey, or each maguffin you collect. While these function structurally as acts, with their own setup, rising tension, and climax, I hesitate to universally assign that term, as the stories often find complete resolution and don't contribute to the overall rising tension, which would be unusual for a traditional act. An instance of a DQIX town-act is a story set in a port where the villagers have come to worship a sea-god summoned by an orphan girl. The god provides them fish, so they have stopped working and become lazy. The mayor of the town becomes even greedier and demands that the girl summon the god to bring him treasure from the ocean depths, then the true nature of the beast is revealed, the mayor repents, and the town lives happily ever after. These self-contained component tales of DQIX offer surprising emotional and symbolic depth and turn the game into what is essentially a very strong anthology of mini-RPGs.

The even more granular level is non-player-character (NPC) stories ("the WRPG thing"). These typically take the form of side-quests assigned by various scattered NPCs and are almost always entirely self-contained. DQIX has a fair share of these too (more than your average JRPG), but they're barely worth describing - a pretty representative example of what I've seen so far was an old man who told me "my grandson said I look like a slug. Go kill ten slugs for me!"

Injustice: God's Among Us (Xbox 360)

Ahh, Mortal Kombat. I mean Injust: Ice Gods Among Us. Netherrealm is definitely continuing their streak of extremely well-rounded high-production easily-accessibly fighting games. We'll talk about the propensity of the fighting genre for single-play later this week; otherwise my strongest initial impression of Ija-Gu-Gu is that it doesn't feel all that much like Mortal Kombat. It's at least as different from its Cuz as, say, Tekken is from SoulCalibur. You can tell they're running on the same engine and a lot of familiar building blocks are in place (sweeps, uppercuts, and bounces feel exactly the same), but there's way more flying around, laser-beamy flare, and time-bending speed to take the place of Mortal Kombat's delightful gore.

"A great superhero can be summed up in a single sentence" (I said that) - in the case of Injustice, that becomes "a single button". The "Character Power" button is a great way to quickly translate each of these superhumans' key advantages into battle instead of leaving players to fumble with special inputs. When I play as Green Arrow, what do I want to do? Shoot fancy arrows. The Character Power button instantly lets me shoot fire, ice, and electric arrows without needing to explore or memorize input combos. As Superman it grants super-strength, as the Flash it slows down time; Doomsday it makes invulnerable, and Deathstroke it allows perfect sniping accuracy. The button is only held back from its potential by the limited creativity in implementing certain characters' superpowers, or lack thereof. While it's fitting of the trickster king Joker to have a slippery dodge/counter, Batman's technological superiority is represented as... a couple of bat missiles. There are also too many characters who get boring super strength (Supes, Cyborg, Shazam...) or invulnerability (Doomsday, Luthor (sigh), Grundy...) and a few who pretty clearly have an arbitrarily assigned ability due to the lack of their real powers' fighting-game-practicality (Aquaman, for instance, has his famous... Water Shirk?). Still, it's a great idea that's mostly well done, and unless you're a fan of some really specific character that got the short shrift (there aren't many, and they're mostly lesser characters like Harley Quinn), I imagine you'll be pleased.

Gain Ground (Genesis / Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection)

I'd goofed off a bit with Gain Ground before, just to see what it was all about, but this is my first actual go at beating it. As an arcade port to the Sega Genesis, it's hardly friendly - the Collection's save states alleviate the otherwise quite damning save/password-free play length (at least 2 hours). Still, for the degree of punishment the game serves for using a continue (lose all of your characters), it's hard not to save scum. Anyway, I don't have a lot of steam left to write about Gain Ground right now, so check out this discussion of the game's dubious straddling of the line between shooting and strategy.

It's a great combination and certainly starts off as good fun, but from what I can tell, Ground struggles to keep the strategy elements going strong on the back nine. By that point the player is at or near maximum offensive capability and thirty screens deep, so there's not a ton to do to make things harder other than pile on the enemy waves. Which makes things play more like a generic arena shooter.

Capcom Arcade Cabinet (XBLA)

Not really an individual game, but I've been working through my impressions here already.  

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Wow this was a long post. Those were almost reviews. Could've at least split this up over two days - but you know me! I'm always contenting my fans! Plus I didn't post yesterday, so that.

Gaining ground on Gain Ground: a Duologue

Duologue. Diatribe. Dissension. Declamation. Double Talk. Double Talk. It's alllll talk. So is this feature, captured from some of the secret email archives of co-bloggers Greg (Yourself) and Greg (Golem).

Yourself: If you would care to make a case for Gain Ground being a strategy game, I think it might make a good duologue. Sorry the Mario/Wario one didn't go anywhere, you kinda took it in a different direction than I intended (I wanted to talk about the characters - the series as a whole compared is a gigantic subject). Not to mention I got real sour on Wario Land II.

Golem: The easy way is to put Gain Ground next to a strategy game and eyeball it. 

Well, eyeball away

It reminds me of strategy RPGs/Shining Force in particular. You directly control one character at a time. The space you can attack is important; can you attack directly in front of you, or can you only hit things at a range? Can you attack to the sides, or can you only shoot straight on? Even the choice between two weapons reminds me of swapping primary weapons on the fly in Shining Force (equipping a throwing dagger for a turn where you can't quite get close enough to hit an enemy by sword). Finally, there's the satisfaction of building a complementary party, and just like Shining Force (or most SRPGs, really), losing a single character is a big deal.

The hard, although more satisfying, method would first find a definition for strategy game by the goals and opposition method. I think you could say there are two possible goals, either A) felling everyone in the opposing force or B) taking out a lynchpin (a boss). Or is that too specific? As for opposition, you'd at least start by saying your army faces another army. The other army also takes advantage of space against you, with strategies like flanking. Actually, maybe your goal at any given point in a strategy game is to occupy the advantageous ground.

Yourself: "Strategy" is hard to define, because it can be both a type of gameplay OR a characteristic. Often it falls into the same category as "action", being a modifier rather than a mode unto itself. Like I was saying last night, you can have a strategy FPS. This seems to be the sense most applicable to Gain Ground, which I'd call a strategy shmup. Strategic gameplay is characterized by improvised rules, non-obvious methods and goals, and recursive strategy (yes, strategy is built from smaller strategies).

As an actual mode of interactivity, "strategy" probably refers to the chess-derived army-puppeteering that we see in, well, strategy games, as diverse as Pikmin, Shining Force, and StarCraft. I wish we had a different word for it - "tactics" perhaps - to make a distinction from the adjectival mode, but I think we both agree that nothing fits better in either case than "strategy". I don't feel like defining it in terms of goals/opposition right now because I think it's tangential to this conversation.

It's a stretch to put Gain Ground into this strategy genre, simply because it's more obviously a shooter. Its gameplay is comprised of shooting things. Calling it a strategy game is the equivalent of calling Super Mario Bros. an action game - yes, it bears the appropriate traits, but is further distinguished. That said, it certainly does fall under the strategy umbrella. It's a strategy shooter, no doubt. It presents the player with a static challenge and allows them to develop, test, and refine their own methods of approach, providing a variety of tools to allow for individualization and improvisation. Simply watching how differently the two of us approached each level evidences the non-linearity of the challenge.

Yourself (7 hours later): Well, I take that back a little bit. Gain Ground could be viewed as a true strategy game. The fact that you only control one unit (or at least that only one unit exists at a time) doesn't preclude it from that style, even if it simplifies it significantly. And of course, when multiple players are introduced (up to three in the arcade version), the player squad starts to resemble an SRPG battalion.

I was originally approaching Shining Force from a strategic combat paradigm, thinking of the entire game as one drawn-out fight. If we instead understand it as a marriage of combat and tactics, separating the unit face-offs (combat) from the overarching army / battlefield management (tactics), it becomes clear how it relates to Gain Ground. Swap in shooting for automatic turn-based battles and hit the real-time clock on the tactics (a la Ogre Battle), and you're pretty close. Keeping in mind that, again, the tactics are relatively simple because of the limited number of independent units.

Golem: The comparison between Ogre Battle and Shining Force bugs me because in Ogre Battle, attacks don't take up space, units do. Ogre Battle is a more macro experience, while Shining Force happens on a per-soldier basis. But then, I don't know how meaningful that difference really is.

Ogre Battle: A More Macro Experience. Wait a minute, there was never a Queen song by that name!

Actually, I like that distinction. If I had my way, strategy would refer to more macro games while tactical would refer to more micro games. Like Wario Ware.

Also, even though you only control one character at a time in Gain Ground, you still face off against an army. Is all-Ike mode in Fire Emblem: The Gamecube One not a strategy RPG? This is what prevents Mega Man from being a tactical platformer, too, since you don't face off against armies. Or, if you do fight armies, like in Contra, you're not interested in occupying any single space.

Yourself: "in Ogre Battle, attacks don't take up space, units do" doesn't mean anything to me. Are you referring to the fact that units in OB must make contact to engage, while Shining Force units are often able to attack from two spaces away or use area-of-effect spells? If so, that's just being nitpicky between individual games. We picked OB to be the example of tactical action because it's the most SRPG-like RTS, and we picked Shining Force to represent the other side because apparently that's the only tactics game you've ever played, but it'd be easy to pick two that sync up better and hold just as true for the rest of the comparison. Units have range ("attacks take up space"?) in RTSs like Starcraft and Command & Conquer, and in some turn-based strategies like Romance of the Three Kingdoms units have zero range ("attacks don't take up space"?). So... what's your point? Both mechanics clearly exist across the real-time/turn-based barrier. It is not news that Ogre Battle and Shining Force are not perfectly identical in every way.

I think spatial control is certainly key to what we're calling the tactics (chess) gameplay mode. As I said (or at least thought) before, one of the things that keys us off to Gain Ground's tactics predilection is that it takes place in static, one-screen environments. Contra is pretty immediately thrown out as a parallel, because - as you said - there's no urge to maintain space. The environment is in a constant state of change. A more revealing comparison is with Smash TV or Robotron 64, which similarly keep the setting to one screen. Here the primary contrast with Gain Ground is the mobility of enemies - they render the idea of controlling space a near impossibility.

Golem: I'm trying to think if there's anything more to be said on Gain Ground, but nothing's coming to mind. I don't think anything is left for issues of range and space. I'll have to look back and see if there are any lingering threads.

I also tried to think about a version of Gain Ground where you control multiple units, and I got Syndicate. Can't say the gameplay is all that similar. Definitely a game I don't know what to do with, but I think we've discussed it before.

You just got Syndicated

Yourself: On the subject of armies and where the line is drawn between the opposition in Mega Man/Contra and Gain Ground/Fire Emblem, I think the barrier is largely perceptive. When I mentioned that strategy gameplay is composed of controlling armies, I meant specifically that - there are two (or more) singular forces which each control a span of dumb subordinates. While I realize that the processor doing computations for Mike Mettaur and Phil Screwdriver is indeed a singular force, they act autonomously without communication - simply put, they're independent AIs. Whatever "teamwork" might happen between them is incidental. Even if they are programmed to act as a team (or, say, controlled by two separate players), they're still behaving with selfish interests and internal motivation. And if they do start to form large scale strategies, and strictly adhere to those strategies, and alternate them in turn, well then, um, yeah, it does become a strategy game.

On the player side, an army/force is defined by division of control, be it synchronously or asynchronously. Gain Ground does possess that with its multi-character squad, but I'm not sure it's a necessary element of strategy anyway. Probably a lot of this conversation could have been alleviated by properly defining strategy early on, but whoops, too late now.

Golem: Well, I can't say it was a bad conversation to have. This is vague territory--as you said, some barriers are largely perceptive--so it's good to have something more to go on.

While I don't know that two players make up an army, it did help during Gain Ground when we had complementary abilities. If one person can throw high and the other can throw far, you can assign unique paths to each player. In particular, I think there were times when one of us stayed back as the other person cleared a path. In most games, coop works just fine playing as identical units.

Yourself: As for Syndicate - is that Gain Ground with multiple units? At least, any more so than any other RTS we've already mentioned? I thought it used cursor control. What makes you call it out - do you have to aim and dodge bullets and stuff? Or just that it has little dudes instead of tanks?

As we discussed IRL (sadly not captured in this duologue - until I explain it now!), the main difference between traditional real-time strategy and Gain Ground (besides the number of player units) is that a real-time strategy uses AI routines to determine character behavior, while Gain Ground uses direct input. This parallels the difference between Fire Emblem and Shining Force - in the former, the player controls a cursor while a path-finding algorithm determines units' routes. In Shining Force, the player directly controls each unit during its turn and can freely walk within set bounds (similar to - lol - Quest 64). Of course, in these turn-based games, the difference is completely superficial - nothing can happen until the turn is executed, so all that matters is the characters' final resting place. In real-time games like Syndicate and Gain Ground, the difference between cursor control and direct input is so dramatic that it would lead most to classify one game as strategy and the other as action, despite the fact that they are both hybrids.

Golem: Oh, Syndicate gives you direct control over the little dudes, and you can decide if you want to control all four of them at once or just one at a time. (I say this based on the SNES one.) Control all four at once and hit down on the D-pad, and they all go down. That said, I just meant it as an offhanded remark, since I can't claim to understand anything more about that game. I'll double check that when I have access to it.

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And that he did. Happily ever after.