Vectorman revisited

Hm beating Vectorman really just came down to getting a 5x1Up. That was enough to ride the wave to a few 2Ups and 3Ups and ultimately the end credits, even though I'd never seen the final four stages. I guess it was neat how the penultimate stage was set in the first stage of Pulseman, in the context that I was debating which to beat first. Now Pulseman will feel like a fun spinoff! Which incidentally has the same problem of a too-close camera.

Question I'm surprised I don't hear more often: how come V-man is yellow during cutscenes and green during gameplay? Paint shortages? Where's Super Mario Color Splash when you need him?

Super Turrican vs. Mega Turrican

I picked up Mega Turrican after doing the deed on Super C. Poking at them in emulation, Mega and Super always seemed close in quality, but everyone assured me Super was The Good One. Not so much the case. Mega Turrican is every bit a traditional Big Showy Genesis Run-and-Gun, and a legitimately great one. The levels are strongly conceptually driven (the sewer starts out dry and gradually fills up with water! the junkyard has steep mountains with enemies falling from above! the Aliens level has tight angled corridors that neutralize your weapon while shit jumps out at you!), the excess mechanics occupy unique design space (morph ball is the fastest way to move and allows dodging otherwise unavoidable attacks! grapple is the only way to reach certain areas! there isn't a laser beam that freezes every enemy in the game!) while still providing strategic variety (grapple can be used to short-circuit platforming! weapon choice influences aiming!), and the whole game looks and sounds awesome.

Super Turrican is fun, but it never gets over its weird identity of Mega Man meets SNES-style maze platforming (I take this to be the canonical Turrican identity, but it doesn't mean I like it). Enemies feel meaningless since clearing the path is only part of the battle, and the freeze beam doesn't add dimensionality to the shooting the same way grapple does for Mega's platforming. In fact, it flattens the design, since it turns every enemy into a hunk of stone. Individual levels still have a unified sense of purpose, but I'm not sure they go deep enough to describe as theme - they're more like well-done gimmicks. The conveyor belt level gradually transitions through three types of conveyor, upping the hazards and narrowing the pathing as it goes, but it never comes together as more than "the conveyor belt level". Note that shooting doesn't in any way inform that. Mega Turrican gets more mileage out of organic structures and combinations - emphasizing a grueling climb up a hill of trash with tiny enemies bouncing down, then transitioning to a bunch of huge wrecking balls you need to duck through enemy-filled pits to get past (but of course you bounce off enemies, so getting in the pit is complicated!). It's probably easier to deliver these high-interplay scenarios when the player is railroaded on a single path... but that's just an argument for Mega Turrican having a better approach. Even Super's great ice level fails to coalesce into a conceptual space beyond the slipping gimmick (although isn't it neat that each game takes its best level from a Most Reviled Platforming Trope?)

Mega feels more complete than Super, from the dynamic setpieces (the crazy intro to the junkyard where you fly through the atmosphere jumping between spaceships!) to the platforming robustness provided by the grapple (jumping around in Super feels really boring afterwards), but also in content. Understandably, Super's final level was cut, but even ignoring that it feels like an alpha version or a game's worth of filler - doubly so when the big moments like Master Hand and Alien Train turn out to be recycled from Mega (or possibly earlier series entries?). Its level themes are ruins, volcano, factory, ice, Alien - a fairly generic set - compared to Mega's lab, sewer, junkyard, Alien, factory, which doesn't sound a lot more interesting, except that they all draw from the same techno-mechanical aesthetic and give the game an overarching personality.

There are some minor quibbles with Mega, like the difficulty balancing being off to the degree that I smart-bombed the final boss to death (both phases!), or that the later levels are long as fuck and meting out vital morph ball energy over 15 minutes is a lot to ask even from a seasoned player, but all told I'm kinda surprised it's never been reclaimed as one of the hidden treasures of the Genesis, being so characteristic of the library. I get why Turrican fans frown at it, but it complements RKA, Gunstar, Ranger X, etc. quite nicely. And it's a hell of a lot better than that goddamned Revenge of Shinobi. It's also got the best 16-bit cinematic this side of Phantasy Star IV.

I don't know why I wrote this really long review of Mega/Super Turrican. Maybe because I was surprised how different they are and that I ever assumed Mega was just more of the same. Maybe because HG101's coverage is entirely about how the Amiga port has different backgrounds.

Shining Force II is like chess, plus it has a chess level!

Isn't that sweet? Right in the middle of this serious-ass fantasy campaign about a late-term evil abortion comes a chapter titled "Rick Moranis vs. Archon" in which the player characters get shrunken down and thrown on a living chess board. It's a game of chess... for survival! Plus Harry Potter hadn't even done it yet so this is literally the first time in the history of fiction that real people were portrayed as fighting against chess pieces. 

Although, should I be bothered that the board isn't correct? Is that a thing of Japanese game designers not knowing much about chess (is it as obscure over there as go is over here?), or did they put like five queens and not nearly enough pawns on the board as an attempt at balance? Because they could've defined the pieces however they wanted to be balanced (since it's not like they behave like actual chess pieces). It's just kinda arbitrary that the board is wrong.

This really made me smile though. The Shinings Force, Fires Emblem, and even Xs-COM are what I mentally categorize as "chess plus" games, where the principles are the same as chess - threaten units with attack ranges, create traps, use placement for blocking - but rather than movement type as the major determining factor of units' value, you have numeric statistics and rock-paper-scissors balances (like Fire Emblem's sword-axe-lance cycle). Interestingly enough (to mention in this context), Shining Force II* is the game that really got me thinking along those lines.

Initiated combat in Shining Force II is unidirectional**. That means the immediate act of attacking an enemy unit does not negatively impact the player unit. Thus, instead of considering dealt damage against received damage (as is a key factor in Fire Emblem), an attack is valued by dealt damage vs. positional advantage. "Is it worth breaking my line for a big attack on that archer?" "Should I box in that high level unit instead of spreading out to attack weaker ones?" The matter of numerical damage aside, this is chess tactics, where the key determining factors of a move are positional - as important as whether a piece is captured are which pieces the move attacks (places in immediate danger of being captured) and which pieces it defends.

Turn order in RPGs usually follows one of two paradigms: the first, that used by Shining Force II, is unit turns, where the game determines a turn order of units based on their statistics, and the player moves a unit once when its turn comes up. The alternative is team turns, where teams alternate order and during their team's turn, the player can move each unit once (as in Fire Emblem). I don't think I've ever seen an RPG using straight up chess ordering, where a turn consists of a player moving any single unit once; you can see how that doesn't really facilitate RPG leveling/balance.

Team turns lend to a more predictive style of play where it's best to map out the opponent's likely next move and plan accordingly. Each player has complete control of the board that the opponent will face in their next turn. Though this does have its similarity to chess on a broad strategic level, the primary consequence is that players are actually making moves with gigantic multi-armed units rather than with individual pieces. There is so much a player can do with the moving parts of their army that a great deal of build-up is required, then rarely paid off, to execute individual turns. Though the player is controlling ostensibly independent units, they need to take into consideration a butterfly effect of consequences if the opponent makes a single unexpected gambit. Though this hints at grand scope, in effect it leads to an extremely safe mode of play wherein turns are constructed in such a way as to focus solely around guaranteed plays for one or two units.

With Shining Force II's style of turns, unit moves regain their chess-like significance as the primary agents of player strategies. Essentially, there is feedback after every decision point: when the player relinquishes control of a unit, they relinquish control of the game. The next turn may be theirs or the opponent's, but they won't be able to revisit that unit until the round is completed. Successful tactics need to account for how each unit on the map can benefit from each individual move, because they will get a chance to take advantage of it before an overall position is composed.

A more specific chess tactic available in Shining Force II but not in XCOM or Fire Emblem (referencing them a lot, but they really do provide the perfect counterpoint) is the sacrifice. Units are reset at the beginning of every battle in Shining Force II - a battle has no lasting repercussions except for experience point gains. Thus sacrificing a unit becomes a viable tactic. A sacrificial lamb can be used to spread out an enemy formation, lead an all-out attack, provide a momentary barrier, or to bait a trap. The lack of consequence threatens to lead to lazy play, where as a player gains the upper hand their strategy loosens and risks lose their meaning. The simple fact of it is that Shining Force II is balanced so that just isn't the case. There are of course guaranteed-win scenarios during endgame, but the pacing of the battles as tiered skirmishes means that a casualty at any point can lead to a substantial statistical disadvantage in the next skirmish. Sacrifices are still a major trade-off, and the presence of such a tactic only makes the game more strategically rich.

It may not inherently be a strength for a game to be chess-like in nature, but in my experience with strategy RPGs and Shining Force II in general it proves to be nothing but a boon. There is a reason chess is the most popular board game in the world and Warhammer isn't. That reason may have to do with date of origin and which game contains orcs; nonetheless, it's combinatorial complexity is something to aspire to, not compete against.

*For the record, I'm pretty sure everything here applies to Shining Force as well. I've just only played II.

**there is a tiny exception to this. Defending units, probably depending on their stats, have something like a 5% chance of doing a counterattack. It's so rare that it's not so much a factor in tactics as it is a forced non-determinism. I'm okay with this in Shining Force II (though it seems unnecessary given that the make-up and exact statistics of a player's squad in a grind-enabled game provides plenty of non-determinism anyway), but the similar implementation in Fire Emblem bothers me because of the drastic implications of a mistake in Fire Emblem. Get a bad roll on that 95% accuracy attack and you may lose a squad member permanently. 

Reading material: Sega v. Accolade

On the left: Sega. On the right: Accolade. Hedgehog Court - it's just like Kangaroo Court, but you go insane.

Continuing the "feature" of me "featuring" other content, I recommend checking out this very interesting court case on the subject of software licensing, copyright, and trademarks. Back in the early '90s, Sega tried to stop any cartridges lacking the expensive Sega license from running on their hardware, but a handful of enterprising young developers at Accolade found the practice to be a little too much like extortion and decided to code a workaround that let their games run without approval. Their defense was that reverse engineering a piece of software to decipher how it works was not inherently a breach of copyright. When Sega took steps to lock out and legally entrap Accolade, the rebellious developers struck back with some clever software and legal tactics of their own. You'll have to read the rest here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

The suit is over twenty years old and it's been a decade since Sega has made a console or Accolade even existed, but it established a software copyright case law precedent still referenced today. It's also interesting to read the ridiculously shady shit Sega tried to get away with. Also, I've seen a lot of hilarious court case names in my day, but the therein cited "Anti-Monopoly, Inc. vs. General Mills Fun Group" definitely ranks highly.

Story where it's least expected, or not: Sonic 2

Continuing my recent blue streak, I completed Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for Genesis for the first time this past weekend. It's an excellent platformer with memorable stages and deep mechanics, the kind - and sorry, I hate this phrase, but it's really applicable here - the kind they just don't make anymore. Each of Sonic 2's stages is its very own game worth mastering, employing unique interaction, structure, and pacing. As much as I believed the opposite five years ago, Sonic 2 is a classic for a reason. Yet the game's greatest shortcoming parallels this strength: narratively, it is irreconcilably fragmented. 

I realize the first reaction to this is: "you're gonna complain about Sonic 2's story? While you're at it, why not ask for the back-story to Beethoven's Fifth?" We'll get to the latter point in a moment, but first I should clarify that I am not complaining about the actual substance of the plot. I don't care if Sonic is a space alien sent to destroy the Badniks as a way of harvesting Flickies that he can feed to his starving home planet. What I'm discussing is the necessity for story itself in order to fulfill the potential of a narrative medium. Sonic 2 has great platforming, great music, and great visuals, but - for me - where it falls short of being a great game is in connecting these elements with a story. 

What the game does provide for story - if you've somehow managed to get to this video game blog without ever having played Sonic 2, or perhaps don't remember - is a collection of untethered elements. We have Sonic, we have random robots, we have all kinds of colorful locales, but there is zero dialogue, zero exposition, and zero cut-scenes (unless you're counting the miniscule Tails-flying-a-plane moments in Sky Chase and Winged Fortress Zones). When Sonic completes a zone, the screen fades to black and immediately fades back in at the next zone. There is no communication of where he is, how he got there, or why he is there. We could assume each stage is next to the surrounding ones, but this creates some implicitly humorous notions of Sonic's world - like that there's a giant casino in the middle of an aquatic ruin. Worse yet, we don't know who Sonic is, we certainly don't know anything about this Tails asshole, and Robotnik is an enigma as well - though clearly he has it in for our hero. The one clue we do get is the animals - whenever Sonic destroys a Badnik or unlocks an end-of-zone capsule, tiny animals are set free. So apparently Sonic is a tiny animal rescuer?

By comparison, Super Mario Bros. has an equally primitive but more effectively woven story. We may not get that Mario is a plumber (not like that matters), but the "Your princess is in another castle" scenes are just enough to tell us what Mario's quest is and where it will take him. We learn he's rescuing a princess who has been imprisoned in a castle, and we know that he doesn't know where this princess is. So Mario is methodically combing through hostile castles. Fine. It gives him a reason to be where he is. We can also garner some understanding of who he's fighting just through visual design - the Koopas are obviously related to King Koopa, while the Toads are clearly the good guys / victims, so Mario must be up against some kind of occupying army. It's tiny stuff, but enough to bring together the game as a story.

But Sonic doesn't need a story just cuz Mario had one, or cuz I said so. Every work of art sets its own terms for success - there are no universal objective end criteria that always hold true. Yet a single criterion can act sufficiently as a point of evaluation: the work should live up to its own standards to accomplish what it set out to accomplish. Sonic 2 creates the expectation of narrative - it presents the player with a sequence of concrete scenes, a protagonist and antagonist, and consistent forces of conflict. It has story elements. For it to lack connective tissue is a failure to live up to its own promise, a setup without a payoff, and is in that sense a shortcoming. 

Miles "Tails" Per Hour: a setup without a payoff

Let's return to the music analogy. Greg L. brought this up, arguing that cut-scenes for Sonic would be as extraneous as a written program for a symphony - that they could add clarification, but wouldn't inherently alter or improve the audience experience of the composition. I contend that cut-scenes in a game are not the equivalent of verbal back-story to a symphony. A game is a multimedia presentation. Any presentation of story - from stage titles to cinematics to atmosphere and audio/visuals - is as much a part of the game as are the interactive mechanics. You can't play the game without experiencing it. That is to say, it is as much a part of the game as a composer's overture and interludes are a part of his symphony. A written program for a symphony would be the equivalent of a manual, which I am obviously excluding from the text of the game.

In truth, symphonies almost never have these "verbal back-stories", despite the fact that they usually do contain some kind of plot. They are either abstract or representative through musical terms alone - the story is meant to be received through impression, not dictation. Games can accomplish this level of storytelling through mechanics, in that gameplay functions identically removed from context. Nonetheless, they (or at least the Sonic games) pair concrete presentation with this abstract interaction. Were we to consider mechanics the abstract element of Sonic 2's delivery, even acknowledging that they tell a story of their own, there is still an excess of concrete data presented to the player. To experience the mechanics, the player has to look at Emerald Hill Zone, has to control Sonic, and has to fight robots and Robotniks - all concrete experiences. A symphony does not present this pairing of abstract and concrete. There's no need for verbal explanation because there's no verbal data to link. Thus, for Sonic to successfully emulate a symphony still leaves it an incomplete experience on its own terms. 

Interestingly, Richard Wagner maintained that symphonies were a limited format, unable to match the expressive capacity of a multimedia work (Gesamtkunstwerk).

Wagner's favorite game was, of course, Odin Sphere

Oddly enough, Sonic 2 stands alone among the Genesis trilogy in failing to tell a story. Sonic 3 & Knuckles introduces interstitial cut-scenes to fill the player in on character motives and scene sequencing. The levels and enemies themselves are still a bit of an arbitrary batch, but we have the general sense that time is progressing and a plot is taking place. Just check out the cut-scene where Sonic/Knuckles is thrown from the Flying Battery (Zone) into the desert of Sandopolis Zone. That's connectivity - it doesn't leave it to my imagination to figure out if there's an oilfield at the bottom of a crystal cave. Btw, to whomever named Sandopolis Zone: bravo. I admire your work.

Admirably, Sonic 1 accomplishes a similar effect passively without any explicit narration. Its progression of zones (story-wise) makes far more sense than Sonic 2's, to the point where it eludes any sensation of arbitrariness. Marble Zone looks kinda like what lies beneath Green Hill, then the forest remains in view (in the background) from Spring Yard, like Sonic is at the very foot of industrialization. Labyrinth admittedly I don't get, but Star Light works as a continuation of Spring Yard, like Sonic is crossing from the edge of the urban region to the center, where he discovers the polluted techno-futuristic metropolis of Scrap Brain. There's a steady progression from nature to civilization, delineating a clear journey for Sonic. He has left his forest home to seek out and destroy Robotnik's industrial haven. The story also appears to take place over the course of one day, the sky getting darker as the game progresses. The player can feel Sonic getting closer to Robotnik's lair, the [reverse] heart of darkness, clarifying that this is indeed a story of nature vs. artifice. 

That is to say, over time, the original series essentially inverts its story presentation. In Sonic 1, the plot is told passively with environmental progression and no explicit narration. Sonic 2 drops the logical progression and adds nothing, essentially making it The Game Without a Story. Sonic 3&K gets us back on track, but instead of returning to Sonic 1's sensibilities, it goes for active narration to link otherwise unrelated sequences. Without making a comment on overall quality, this makes 1 and 3 more complete, fulfilling experiences that live up to their own aspirations. 

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.

-----------------------------------------------------

And that he did. Happily ever after.

Let's Listen: Beasts as Black as Night

You're probably familiar with the old saying, "You can always judge an RPG soundtrack by its boss tune." Boss anthems are hardly ever the most emotive or interesting songs on a soundtrack, but there's something irresistible about their sense of dire emergency. I'm here today to talk about Beasts as Black as Night, the boss theme for Ys III.
What happens when you release the same RPG across multiple platforms? Ys III takes the route of using the same soundtrack on each console.

SNES

This is why that route is oft regrettable. In a Controversial Blogging Choice, I'm leading an article about one song with a bad example of that song.

Say what you will about the SNES, its synths hold up pretty well. The SNES version of Beasts as Black as Night, however, doesn't understand what to do with them. The lead instrument (0:12) is too contemplative to fit the urgent role of the lead melody. Equally puzzling is the pan flute used for the rapidly moving background instrument (0:00) which works more by chance than anything.

(Look to Nobuo Uematsu's SNES Final Fantasy soundtracks for songs that don't press the hardware but still pack in plenty of emotion and panache. For a soundtrack that tailors its sound to the console, check out Mortal Kombat SNES vs. Genesis.)

Genesis

The Genesis version finds siblings in the PC-88 and X68000 versions, but its production takes the lead by a nose. Just like the title, every instrument in here is dark and searing. Am I getting too flowery?

The fun of Beasts as Black as Night kicks off immediately (well, 0:05) with a guitar that spirals violently downward, marked spooky by a whistle in the distant background. Out of the soundtracks limited to hardware synths, the Genesis version is the best-produced not only for its synths but for its attention to mastering.

TurboGrafx-CD

But the TurboGrafx-CD version wasn't limited to hardware synths. It may be cheating, but the TG-CD version is my personal favorite. Most CD consoles back in the day (early 90s) had a penchant for overblown rock music, but Ys III does that one better and mixes in plenty of weird synths. I like to think that the lead synth is a bassoon!! The point is, this version--without going too far--has flakes of the unusual in its instrumentation.
Notable features of this version are the solo at 1:21 and the breakdown + solo at 2:52.

(For an overblown rock CD soundtrack, I think everyone's favorite example is Lords of Thunder.)

Unfortunately, there are some versions I couldn't find. I'd love to hear the MSX version, for instance. However, I would be remiss if I didn't at least link you to the Oath in Felghana version, which is overblown in a more orchestral and less weirdo synth way. Most of my talk was about instrument choice, but I guess that's what happens when you take a simple song and discuss it three times over.

Cyborg Justice: Omastar I have not laughed this hard at a game in a while

Because I'm a hip and hoppening d00d (or just because it snowed and my phone GPS wouldn't work), last Saturday I skipped out on a blogmate's party (hi Andrew!) to stay in, play MAME, and watch The Muppet Movie with a different blogmate (hi Greg!) and my girlfriend (you don't get a shout-out). The Muppet Movie remains one of my all-time favorites. It is extremely good. A filmic revelation - no - a filmic expression (a bad enough joke between even the two people that understand it, I thought that one was ripe for publication).

The twist here is that as much as I delighted in Fozzy's terrible jokes and Gonzo's terrible mental and sexual affliction, earlier that very night I laughed almost equally as hard at a peculiar Genesis game upon which Golem and I stumbled. While I'm doing shout-outs, let me give credit to the YouTuber whose list of "Criminally Overlooked Games" led me to Cyborg Justice. While IMO most of the games he lists are minor curiosities rather than forgotten treasures, Cyborg Justice is without a doubt a true gem. And I mean that in the worst way imaginable. You really need to experience this for yourself - words don't do it justice. No - words don't do it... Cyborg Justice.

Here's a potential definition of good control I'm just gonna scrape off the top of my head: the ability to subconsciously recreate a consciously desired outcome. That is, you should never need to think about which buttons to press - optimally, you desire a maneuver, then your hands and the controller automatically do the work. I don't remember whether it was Golem or I who said it, but the agreed upon description of Cyborg Justice was: "I have no idea how to do the move that I just did". This could perhaps serve as a definition of BAD control. Or just bad interfacing in general. Take, for instance, the Talking Heads classic "Once in a Lifetime". Remember the part where David Byrne says:
"And you may ask yourself: 'How do I work this?'
And you may ask yourself: 'How did I just do that move?'
And you may tell yourself: 'This is not my Streets of Rage 2!'
And you may tell yourself: 'This seems to be Cyborg Justice!'"

Admittedly, Golem and I made no effort to seek out the manual, but why would we? That would take away all the fun. Cyborg Justice is a game where you have no idea what anything means or does, where you can hardly tell yourself apart from the enemies, and where missiles fly all over the place - at ALL times. It also has a preposterous soundtrack and introduction, and one of the worst heads-up displays I've ever seen. Look at those fucking monotone life bars and the system-font numbers beside them - HomeVresion had better than that (high five guy!). The lack of production value there wildly contrasts with the ridiculous number of animations each cyborg possesses - which probably explains why every sprite in the game is built from the same handful of arm/torso/leg pieces.

Some delusional fans INSIST that this robot from Wreck-It Ralph is a CyboJust reference, though I don't see it

My head wouldn't explode or anything to learn that the game was the work of some experimenting digital artists/animators, though it puzzles me why such a thing would be on a console like Genesis. Even more perplexing is that Sega themselves published the game. I know there was less quality control in the early '90s, but Christ Almighty. The hallmark of this game is the feeling that it was designed by people who either A.) thought they were so far ahead of everyone else that they could completely revolutionize control or B.) had never played a game before in their lives. Why didn't Sega come in and say "hey guys, this is neat and all, but check out this game called Streets of Rage. You might learn something from it.". Why am I acting surprised that Sega made a single bad decision? They made thousands in 1993 alone.

So who the hell are Novotrade, esteemed developers of Cyberg Justice? Without putting on my research pants to watch some credits (viewers at home - PLEASE do not try to watch credits without your research pants), I'll just check out their library on Wikipedia. Assuming they ever did another game. Here we go! They're - yikes - Hungarian, changed names to Appaloosa, and are most famed for... wait a minute. Ecco?! These are the guys who developed Ecco the goddamned Dolphin?! Sure that game makes no sense and isn't any fun to play, but it was still popular and actually has some really cool ideas. Was NOT expecting that - though maybe it explains why they thought they could revolutionize beat-em-ups. No wonder Sega was happy to publish this refuse. Aside from that series, looks like they handled mostly licensed properties, particularly hilarious ports like the Amiga version of Castlevania, the Game Gear Adv. Batman & Robin (a great game on SNES and Genesis), and some depressingly received PSX Contras. Not to mention a holy-shit-I-need-to-play-this-now Magic School Bus game. And, wow, who wouldn't be proud to have their name in the credits of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tails_and_the_Music_Maker

"So we destroyed our brains and made this game"

If you do anything this weekend, be it bar-going, train-hopping, fancy-pantsing, or just plain old American breathing, remember: you could be dispensing Cyborg Justice.

Try this game: Cottoning to Cotton

You're forgiven if you've never heard of Cotton. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Go now in love and peace to serve the SNES. Amen.

Does the word "cotton" meaning "to come to like" come from a mispronunciation of "caught on"? Perhaps with some kind of Boston accent? Seems wildly unlikely. Etymologists, write in.

Seriously, Ad Caption Guy???

Cotton is a pretty tiny series of shoot-'em-ups (shmups) spanning from the early '90s to about '03. The chronology is so convoluted that I'm just going to refer you to Hardcore Gaming 101, though suffice to say that there are only two primary series entries: Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams and Cotton 2: Magical Night Dreams, both of which debuted in arcades and were subsequently ported/arranged*/spun-off onto every major Japanese console of the time. Only a single - hilariously chosen - release ever made it to the West: the Turbo-CD port of the first arcade game. The series graced every console from the Famicom (NES) to the Dreamcast, yet the publishers chose the Turbo-CD version to bring to North America? Did you know that less than three (3!) Turbo-CD units were owned by live humans in its active lifespan? Did you know that if there were as many humans as there are molecules in the universe, and were the Turbo-CD's sales numbers adjusted proportionally, it still would have moved less units than the N64 did with Earth's existent population of ~6 billion? Did you know that science considers it a statistical impossibility to own a Turbo-CD? 

Let me give you a quick sense of Cotton's raison d'raisin before I send you off to your local ROM conservatory to legally enjoy the most fulfilling of life's pleasures, trying out new games. The name itself, Cotton, refers to a lil' witch gal who serves as the series' recurring protagonist, perennially accompanied by one of anime's other great tropes: a completely inappropriately clothed buxom fairy. This bipolar protagonistic pairing sets the scene for a veritable Lethal Weapon of tales, though Cotton ought to be exclaiming "I'm too young for this shit!" in place of Danny Glover's filmic line. Generally the series is undeservedly lumped into that deservedly unpopular subgenre, the cute-'em-up**, but aside from Cotton herself, the game's fantasy setting is relatively dark and serious. Check out these screenshots and videos if you don't believe me.

I've experimented with everything in the series short of Dreamcast's Rainbow Cotton and found that you can basically get the full experience through just three games, which I'll describe in detail... after these messages!

A screen from the surprisingly dark arcade original

Maerchen Adventure Cotton 100% (Super Famicom):

For those just being introduced to the shmup, a fast-paced and accessible experience

Though the sprites have strangely become cutesy, this is otherwise what Cotton is all about. A bare-bones level up / down system, one-hit deaths, bouncy power-ups a la Twinbee, and frequent boss battles. The pared down mechanics and forgiving balance make 100% a great place to start for anyone new to the genre. It's not too tough, keeps the scenery changing, and provides a pretty comprehensible scoring mechanic that is instructively tied to power-ups. If Gradius and R-Type scared the shit out of you and Fantasy Zone was a yawn, don't give up on the genre yet - MAC100% may be just the game you're looking for. And PLEASE do me a favor and appreciate the laziest title screen music ever.

Magical Night Dreams: Cotton 2 (Arcade):

For longtime shmup fans looking for a new experience, this is the Mischief Makers of the genre

Cotton 2 is kinda silly for a few reasons - it's definitely one of those games that you may not 'get' after dicking around for ten minutes, then you'll go to Youtube to check out a walkthrough and say, "OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH". Now that you can skip that step, we can talk about how the entire game revolves around grabbing enemies and tossing them out to ricochet off each other around the planet. In fact, the need to keep alive your makeshift projectiles (by shooting them, re-grabbing them, or making sure they keep hitting enemies) calls to mind pinball - turn the game on its side and turn off the scrolling, and you'd be damn close. It's a neat twist, if not necessarily brilliant, and I certainly can't think of another game that plays the same.

Panorama Cotton (Mega Drive):

For, well, anyone with even the slightest appetite for oldies. If you've enjoyed a single 16-bit game since 1994, you owe it to yourself to track this down

Here's the game that gives the whole series a reason to exist, and as the king of irony (Jeff Daniels) would have it, it's the most unique in terms of gameplay.  Panorama Cotton belongs to the tragically small genre of 3D rail-shmups (Star Fox, Space Harrier, and the present day Kid Icarus: Uprising and Sin & Punishment). Fans will get a kick out of seeing all the ideas of the series adapted into this presentation - this is still very much Cotton. Newcomers won't care about that, but have to be impressed by the extent to which the game pushes not just the Genesis, but 2D sprite games altogether. Beautiful aesthetics are about seeing a vision and pushing it through with utter disregard for technical limitation; while Panorama's choppy framerate and jaggies might turn off a blind snob, it's hard not to be blown away when the game takes you swooping over a cliff and down through a waterfall, or up into the skies above the clouds. This is the antithesis of Star Fox, and everything classics are made of. A complete fuck you to what "can" be accomplished.

So go play a Cotton game. Not because you're guaranteed to like it, but because I'm sure at least one of them is like nothing you've played before.

*arrange: a term relating almost exclusively to shmups, an arrange is like a remix of a song - same core elements with a new twist, be it new controls, score mechanics, or power-ups. Think Super Street Fighter II.

**cute-em-up: a shoot-em-up with "cutesy" style graphics and a comic tone, usually with very simple mechanics, large sprites, a slow pace, etc. See: Parodius.

Give this game a shot, revisited: Comix Zone

I've picked up Comix Zone once or twice in the past, only to be frustrated by its lame difficulty so quickly that I tossed it aside before moving past the first level. Who hasn't? Giving the game another shot, I was surprised to find it's actually spectacularly ahead of its time, as possibly the most cinematic, narrative-driven 20th century sidescroller I've ever played. Not what you were expecting to hear, was it? That's because this forward-thinking architecture is a bit muffled by the in-your-face brawling challenge and idiosyncratic art-style. The game is usually brushed away as a small footnote in the Genesis library, notable only for its immediately effectual presentation. Play a little longer, and you'll find an experience far more unique, one that utilizes its comic book inspiration for more than just pretty graphics.

Comix Zone may very well have been made by people who had never played a video game before, or were at least extremely new to the medium. There are dozens of weird decisions that go so thoroughly and unintuitively against convention that the designers must have been either completely unaware of these conventions, or looking to boldly set them alight. I lean toward the former because their sights don't seem set on a particular target, rather they haphazardly reinvent left and right. Death resets the entire game! Punching things drains your life! Fighting game controls except with a jump button! It's like they played Mortal Kombat once and then assumed all other games were based on that. It's kinda weird and amateurish, but not in a bad way. Not in a remarkable way, either. In those days, plenty of games popped up with this kind of "I can make a video game too!" feel. Play the other Strider II sometime, or anything developed by Culture Brain.

If you get caught up in this, and you will - momentarily - you're likely to quickly pass on Comix Zone as a game with a gimmick and nothing more. That'd be a shame, because a little more time reveals that the comic book theme of the game is much more than a gimmick. Games often mimic film in an attempt to add narrative depth, adopting the trends and proven success of an older and more artistically acclaimed medium. I'll discuss elsewhere why I think this is often a mistake, and that "cinematic" should be a dirty word in the gaming community, but we can at least acknowledge that it's business as usual. Is it any more a gimmick for Comix Zone to borrow the presentation of comics than for Ninja Gaiden to use cinematic cut-scenes to tell its story? Only when you take into consideration the fringe presence of comics in the scholarly and popular artistic communities.

The narrative structure of comics turns out to lend itself surprisingly well to video games. This is an episodic structure, a presentation of sequential static scenes with discrete leaps in time and place linking them together. A structure which can be whittled down to only moments of action without sacrificing fluidity. This works perfectly for a game, which wants to take you to as many places as possible in as short a time as it can, without ever taking the control away from the player. It also needs to keep in each place for long enough for action and exposition to occur, rather than a film which will continuously move.

Note that none of these techniques are unavailable to film, as in fact it and comics are already excruciatingly close art-forms, presenting a union of imagery and language. The emphasis, however, is different. For a game of the 2D era like Comix Zone, comics offer a more natural influence. A smaller field of view must be crammed with more details because the viewpoint will always be static, changes in location need to be discontinuous because walking is boring, and action and exposition need to be able to be set aside for one another, rather than passing by so quickly that the player loses track.

The end result is that every situation in Comix Zone is narrative-driven. Every panel of the game's stage structure needs to justify its existence and needs to be different from those before and after it. This divides the gameplay into micro-stages that only last thirty seconds or a minute, and imbues each with only a small chunk of narrative, rather than relying on a five-minute cutscene to explain the subsequent thirty-minute level. The story is developed throughout the whole of the game, and while gameplay still relies on a repeated fighting mechanic, each fight is the result of some new plot development and is given a reason to exist. This is wildly ahead of its time in 1995 when the age of Streets of Rage beat-em-ups was just coming to a close, where you accepted that sometimes a bad guy actually did just have a literal army of thugs to stall you.

It's certainly heavier on action than any genuine comic book or film could be while still carrying a story, but what is important is that the action is tied to the narrative. That means the game is actually watchable, not just playable (hence the longplay above! Check it out, because I assure you, you won't make it to the end otherwise, not without a lot of dedication). Games don't have to tell stories, but those that do should look to an example like Comix Zone as a means of accomplishing it without abandoning the tenets of the medium.