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.

Platformer of the Month Nov. '14, Kid Klown in Crazy Chase

The platformer is the seminal genre of video game history. Always adapting to trends and technologies, never out of style, it provides an underpinning for action games of era after era. Platformers are responsible for our sense of space and navigation; they form the bridge that transports reality into digital worlds. Without platformers, we'd all may as well be playing shuffleboard. Each month we dive into the deep well of platforming history, hoping to find forgotten treasure or even an extra life. We'll be bringing you everything we uncover here at the Platformer of the Month Club.

Game: Kid Klown in Crazy Chase
Year: 1994
Developer: Kemco
Publisher: Kemco
Platform: SNES, GBA

Oh we are starting this off on one hell of a foot. A size 23 foot. I've got two words for you. Up. Down. Clown. Town. Kid Klown. Crazy Chase. Okay, back to using full sentences. Actually my first note looking at that boxart is that our mascot here (indisputably one of the most acclaimed of the 2D era) is more your classically-styled harlequin (or Christmas elf) than what I first picture as a clown. I guess it's only in 21st century America that clowns have developed that firm image of "orange afro rainbow pants and party hat". Kid Klown looks almost... respectable.

Speaking of classically-stylization, that's one thing this game doesn't! Kid Klown himself might remind you of a Sonic the Hedgehog or a Bonk, but the tightly timed uni-directional gameplay is hedged in future memories of now-popular "endless runners" like Canabalt, Flappy Bird, or Bit Trip Runner. But hey, the game uses traditional running and jumping controls and challenges the player to navigate a course, so it's only reasonable to approach it as a platformer.

So is Kid Klown a Lost City of Atlantis, defining trends a decade yet to come, or is it shallow tripe meant to capture the lowest common denominator? Don't make a joke about "what if it's both?". I did that in my head and it got sighs all around.

How is the game's aesthetic appeal?
Yourself: It's impossible to play Kid Klown without visions of Road Runner dancing through my head. The developers definitely made the most of their trial-and-error gameplay as a setup for varied physical comedy bits. While the individual traps aren't much to look at, Kid K's pratfalls are drawn out to downright whacky levels. He jerks his body three or four times before tearing his head out of a block of ice, floats gently to the ground after being flattened to a pancake, and shakes off water like a dog. A lot of old platformers show cartoon influence, but Kid Klown takes it an extra one half to three quarters of a mile.

The soundtrack has an appropriately jaunty tempo but I can't say I found much to like in the composition.
Golem: By 1994, the Super Nintendo was churning out high quality graphics, and Kid Klown benefits from an attention to detail. In the city level, Kid passes by mundane skyscrapers and through standard construction sites, only to be flattened by a swarm of comically undersized sedans. The contrast between realistic settings and jokey elements goes a long way to sell the humor here.

As for music, Kid Klown sets the right pace and tone for a nutzo chase, but  fails to provide any memorable melodies.

How does the player character control?
Golem: Hold down to make Kid Klown run diagonally down-right along a straight path, and use left or right to strafe either direction. Up will let you slow and eventually halt Kid, but he can never move backwards. Aside from running, the only other function is a jump with a fixed height.

Holding down to move diagonally allows Kid's path to take more screen space, but it also makes judging his trajectory more difficult. Additionally, having to hold down can be troublesome when you need to be precise with moving left and right (it's just easy to fumble on the control pad).

Interestingly, the options menu offers an upside-down control scheme for left-handed players.
Yourself: 4-way isometric control tends to bother me, but here it works mostly fine since you're only moving in one general direction. Using d-pad down for what amounts to an accelerator is unpleasant though. Kid has momentum and controls essentially like a car, which leaves me wondering how smoothly the game might have felt had it used A for accelerate and B for brake. Hell, I actually might get out my emulator and try it.

What kind of non-aggressive elements guide the player's path?
Golem: Balloons. Each stage in the game is littered with balloons Kid can grab by jumping. They can either have a coin, health recovery, some damaging element (like a bomb), or an all-important card suit (heart, spade, club, or diamond). However, what's inside remains a mystery even on repeat playthroughs.

While most balloons will contain the same thing time and again, on each play of a stage, the four suits will be randomly distributed to different balloons. The catch is that you need all four suits to clear the stage. Luckily, if you reach the end of a stage without all four suits, the game loops you with no penalty and keeps all balloons the same.

Aside from balloons, stages feature the occasional platforming element. A springboard here, a moving platform there, and a balloon to ride down a cliffside.
Yourself: There are also coins strewn about the path which unlock bonus stages.

What kind of enemies impede the player's path?
Yourself: Most of what you'll battle in this game aren't so much enemies as they are traps. Banana peels, lava arcs, crab claws and fire hydrants all stand in between Kid and his rival, a bomb with a spade on it. There are typically three means of avoidance: run around, jump over, or stop. The game is pretty reasonable in introducing new and more complex enemies, as stage 1 is comprised largely of things to be jumped over (bushes, cannon balls, spike pits), stage 2 features a lot more that need to be run around (cars, caution barriers, falling pots), and stage 3 is the first time you'll really need to stop (for fire walls, falling boulders, and lava).

Though there are essentially only three responses they'll inspire, the challenge is in learning the traps' timing. How long is it between a shadow appearing and a boulder falling? When is the next car going to speed across the road? You'll generally need to pick up the rhythm of the level and get a good sense of the distance Kid can jump.

Many traps can be dealt with by any of the available means - when Kid is stopped he can walk left or right without moving down at all - but they may not be equally cost-effective. Likewise, being in the right position on the cross-axis is crucial for grabbing balloons, so you may be forced into jumping over a preceding trap that you would've just run around were you ignoring them. Taking the safe route is something that comes into play on repeated loops when you know which balloons you're aiming for.

How are player character mechanics varied?
Yourself: While Kid Klown is absent any power-ups or character selection, some level-specific elements affect the way the character moves. Steep hills show up in a couple places (I think only in Stages 1, 3, and 5) to introduce a speed boost, linearly increasing difficulty via reflex time. Stage 4 is entirely an ice level, as usual decreasing friction so the character takes longer to get going and stays in motion longer after the control is released. I didn't have much trouble with the ice stage, and in fact I think the game let up a bit on the trap difficulty to account for it.

Not really a mechanic, but Stage 5 decreases visibility to a small circle around Kid K. Like the speed-up, this basically just increases necessary reflex time.

How are individual levels built from these elements? Does this facilitate exploration?
Golem: Towards the start of the game, in the first two stages,  elements pop in for brief moments soon to be followed by a different challenge. In stage one, Kid scampers away from rolling logs, weaves between hurled axes, and leaps over shrubbery all in the same breath. In the later stages, ideas pick up a little more consistency, such as the ice stage that places two rising/falling block segments right after one another.

There's always a great variety to the hazards, but their placement picks up a more consistent verse/chorus structure later in the game. This keeps the early game fresh and frantic while lending the later game more of a get-down-to-business-and-study feel.

Yourself: The game uses mild randomization to create some variety on replays. As mentioned above, the suits hidden in balloons are shuffled around every time you die or restart. Occasionally individual traps will also be position-shifted (a bush that was on the right is now on the left, etc.). There is theoretically an optimal path to each level established by the consistent placement of coins in balloons; however, the unpredictability of suit location means on a first run the player will need to check every balloon anyway. So the randomization defeats the purpose of the collectibles altogether.

On continued loops, a player can refine their approach to account for balloons they've already checked. Since looping is a punishment for not succeeding on a first try, it feels weird for it to add complexity to the gameplay - the structure suggests a good player is one who can grab all the balloons on the first try, not one who can learn their contents.

How is the boss variety and how do boss fights generally work?
Yourself: No bosses to be found here. Our main villain, the Ace of Spades, is just a constant nuisance.
Golem: There were bonus games after stages (sometimes). They weren't bosses, and we didn't figure out how to win them.
Yourself: I kid klown you not, there was an air hockey game where scoring in either goal costs you a chance. How do you win this? Sigh. I looked it up and it's that you have to score three goals to get a one-up. Meaning if you don't have three chances to start out with (chances are determined by coins divided by 10) then there's no point in even trying.

What is the overarching structure of the game?
Golem: Five stages, all in a row. If you run out of health or time, you spend a continue and restart the current stage. If you reach the end of the stage without every suit, the stage loops while preserving balloon layout. If you grab all suits on each stage on your first run, the game can move at a quick clip; miss just one suit, and you replay a stage, slowing the pace considerably.
Yourself: At the end of each stage, Kid grabs a key. If the stage is completed on the first loop, he also gets a heart. At the finale, the player is presented with ten keyholes, 60 seconds, and a princess locked in a cell with a time-bomb. You can select the placement of your keys, but each can only be used once and there is no indication which might be the one and only correct keyhole. So it's pure luck whether you screw up and witness the princess explode right before your eyes. The internet tells me that getting it right leads to a better ending (depending on opinion) and getting it right AND getting all the hearts is necessary for the best. The hearts challenge makes sense for replay value. The keys not so much.

Word on the street is that getting the best ending opens up hard mode *<:O]

How is the learning curve and difficulty?
Yourself: For a game that allows only 3 retries, Kid Klown is pretty forgiving. Allowing the player to loop through the stage if they missed any items is a good call and alleviates the frustration of close misses and screw-ups. The levels mix things up enough that they require individual learning, so that's solid too. Unfortunately, the core gameplay - timing jumps within fixed windows - does nothing to differentiate style or skill of play, so each challenge is extremely binary - either you get hit or you don't. A minute to learn, no additional time to master.
Golem: Kid Klown features tweaks to make it more forgiving, such as loops and a generous health bar, but the core concept--collect four randomly placed balloons without passing them (on a diagonal course, no less)--is harsh. On the other hand, building a mastery of the courses led us to collect balloons more consistently, so the learning process itself had a nice incline to it. We'd start out a course entirely confused, gradually warm up to its challenges, and eventually zip to balloons as needed. It's just that, as Yourself says, there's not much past that. Perhaps the suits could've been an optional challenge rather than a necessary one.

Play again or recommend?
Golem: While Kid Klown finds excellent execution, its core concept is so ornery and shallow that it's hard to recommend. I had fun yelling at it.
Yourself: Check it out on Youtube or something. It's a "cool, I didn't know this game existed". The wacky face-plants are where the game finds most of its identity and they don't have much lasting value.

This was a really inappropriate game to flex this survey. Look forward to a better entry next month, when we'll be playing Maximo: Ghosts to Glory!

Discover the Age of Discovery with Uncharted Waters: New Horizons

I can't believe I forgot to mention New Horizons during my post about history games, seeing as it's A.) about an atypical period of history and B.) a really really good game. 

A lot of times it's called Uncharted Waters: New Horizons after the English title of the first game in the series, but the box art disagrees with that nomenclature

The Age of Discovery (1978-2009) isn't exactly the secret history of Addis Ababa. In the United States it's the earliest era of history that gets serious attention even in elementary school because, surprise surprise, it's the first period that can be construed to be about America. I think the only historical facts I remember from old Youth's Benefit Elementary are: "1492 etc." and "the Civil War was fought over slavery". I don't think I ever really 'got' why Cristobel Columbus was such a big deal (and learned later that's because he really wasn't) but I do know one thing: he proved the earth was round. Hang on, spell check is suggesting I correct "he proved the earth was round" to "that was already common knowledge for hundreds of years preceding". But you're used to typos here. As for the Civil War, I still resent that they taught us that. It's such an insidious lie on so many levels. 

But, as the saying goes, that's all uncharted water under the bridge, because there's still plenty to learn about the days of sailing a ship into the blue yonder and discovering New Horizons. Yes, when I got back from my yacht trip to Japan I couldn't wait to open my new SNES game and give it a try. What I found was a delightful mix of Oregon Trail's survivalism, Sid Meier Is Pirates' open-ended variety, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms' deep strategic gameplay. The game is essentially an RPG - you're a little dude of your choosing and the king of your choosing sends you on a quest. The difference here is that the little dudes are (fictional) captains from the (real) major powers of the Age of Discovery with according socio-military-political quests more akin to what you see in 4X strategy games. England's out for blood for oil, the Netherlands is just trying to chill out, and the Ottoman Empire... well, let's not even talk about the Ottoman Empire.

On your way to making history there are a wide variety of tools at your disposal to face the wide variety of challenges at your anti-disposal. Regardless of goals, the same key factors will be in play: you'll have to build up a fleet, man it, keep it supplied, and keep wealth moving if you don't want to end up stranded. From the moment you set sail you need to be tracking the status of your fleet and the waters you're traveling through, not to mention your gold reserves. Unpaid and unfed men won't last long in pirate territory, even if your flagship is brimming with cannons. Nor will a battle armada be capable of crossing the turbulent Atlantic ocean.

Fleet construction, navigation, trading, and turn-based combat form the pillars of gameplay no matter which journey you choose, while the role-playing varies wildly from game to game. Any of the characters can go down whichever road they like - there are no restrictions once the game starts - but different starting conditions and bonuses make each better adaptable to their designated quest (and technically the game only ends when that quest is accomplished).

Mr. Dutch doesn't start with much of anything and doesn't get a lot of help from his homeland, but he has the most straightforward goal - to chart the entire world. On the surface this sounds pretty boring, but it's not as easy as driving around every square of the map and calling it a day. The world, it turns out, is a big place, and lots of bad things can happen on a long journey into unknown territories. You'll need to pick ships that can stand up to crashes and storms - all the speed in the world won't make up for dead wind or a wrecked fleet. It'll take a lot of sailors too, unless you want to get stuck on the banks of the Nile when your whole crew gets eaten by crocodiles. Then there's the matter of budgeting supplies - too much food and water will slow you down and waste space that could be used for cannons, but too little and you won't make it back. Determining these parameters takes a lot of experimentation that'll gradually familiarize you with the logistics, and as you get better you'll be able to successfully manage longer - and more profitable - journeys.

Whether you're building a ship to explore the world or playing a Turkish merchant, trade will be the foundation of your budget. Ships and supplies are expensive, and long voyages of discovery, though they bring back expensive exotic goods, are risky at best. This isn't the kind of RPG where you can grind for cash - you'll need to be able to turn money into more money by wisely buying and selling cargo. The goods available vary from port to port, as do the prices, so you'll need to figure out which trips can turn a profit, while also considering that longer trips will be more dangerous and costly in supplies. Beyond that, flooding one market with a certain type of cargo will devalue it, so you'll need to regularly pursue new routes and keep a balance. Again your fleet will be the bottleneck that controls how much you can haul, how much a trip costs (not only are bigger ships more expensive to buy, construct, and maintain, but they require larger crews who will drain your money in salary and provisions), and how quickly you can traverse destinations. Since you'll probably be sailing the hotly contested seas of Europe, if you can't outrun pirates and foreign marauders, you'll need to be able to defend your toothless cargo ships.

War is unavoidable when playing as Jeff Britain or Sabrina the Spaniard, both of whom start out with powerful fleets and are tasked with increasing their nations' dominance on the continent. International relations can be brokered and allies will leave you alone while enemies harass you and your ports. Winning over ports is primarily a financial struggle, while taking the seas comes down to combat. Attacking enemy fleets will make the world safer for your ships and ports, but can also be used to increase your own wealth and firepower - preying on merchants and commandeering rather than sinking enemy ships is a fast way to vast resources. Once initiated, combat takes place on a grid resembling Fire Emblem or Shining Force where ships launch into turn based battle. Combat is probably the hardest part of the game to grasp, as wind, ship type, cannon type, position, commanding officers, and other factors I'm sure I'm forgetting play a role. If you want to win battles but either can't figure out the fleet situation or just don't have a fleet, you can get tricky and pull up to the enemy flagship for a quick duel. Dueling is essentially a protracted game of rock-paper-scissors (there's also equipment that comes into play) and, while risky, a successful duel means you now own a new fleet. That, of course, means that many more ships to manage.

Rounding out the character set we have James Franco of Portugal - the 'main' character recommended for newcomers, his story has regimented objectives that cover the modes of gameplay - and Pagliacci, the prototypical sad Italian clown. If you hone in on the story objectives and already know what you're doing, you can beat the six campaigns in maybe 10 hours apiece, but you'd also be missing out on all the exploration and experimentation that makes the game so interesting. I put around 30 hours each into Dutch Dave and The Brit, which I think sufficiently covered the game's content. Like any good strategy/simulation/RPG, the devil is in the details and every replay is different, so there's no real 'finishing' with the game.

How much actual history does it teach? It's a mixed bag. This is a great simulator game in that I feel as if I'm managing a fleet spearheading world domination. It keeps me engaged with minutiae while also providing enough autonomy that it doesn't bog down. However, that autonomy means that, while the setting is historical, the sequence of events is not. No Spanish pirate conquered the British empire in 1608. I don't know that the Ottomans had colonies in Africa or the New World, and I definitely don't know any better after playing this game. The ships themselves are so rigidly balanced and standardized that they don't seem representative of any reality, and I'm guessing many of these models did not coexist. While the summaries are short, the "landmarks" - encompassing everything from durians to the pyramids to the North Pole - do a good (ballpark) job of placing many of the discoveries first introduced to Europeans in this age. The major ports and goods of the era and their relative significance is also neat to explore.

I don't know a lot of games that are easily comparable to New Horizons. Though this is technically the second game in the fiveish-part Daikoukai Jidai series, only it and the first (Uncharted Waters) made it out of Japan. Naturally Koei's own Romance of the Three Kingdoms series bears similar strategic gameplay, but it never frees the player from the basic strategy map-and-menu interface and the singular goal of conquest. What makes New Horizons such a unique role-playing experience is the autonomy, the continuous challenge of maintaining a fleet while also having indirect control over the state of the world at large. It's a scope not even most WRPGs touch; a perfectly measured balance of challenging survivalism that delivers more influence and freedom with increased mastery. 

Give This Game a Shot: Nosferatu, Man

Nosferatu is a pretty crazy one. As soon as it boots up and you see this:

you could be forgiven for mistaking the game for a Vic Tokai-esque Castlevania clone. I mean good lord. Same font, same castle beneath a full moon, same bat cursor? These SETA fucks really couldn't come up with anything of their own to communicate "vampire"? And is "SETA" supposed to be a fake version of "SEGA"?

Hilariously, this isn't even the first Castlevania-riff which SETA piloted. They published 8 Eyes for the NES, known as perhaps the most blatant Castle-Clone this side of Vampire: Master of Darkness. At least Master of Darkness could excuse itself in that there were no other Castlevania alternatives on Game Gear.

Also worth a chuckle is that the original 1922 filmic classic Nosferatu, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, is thus titled because Murnau and Co. couldn't obtain the rights to the 1897 novel. Was SETA trying to call back to that? Reawaken the spirit of unlicensed vampire ripoffs?

Thankfully, Nosferatu's Castlevanialarities cease immediately after the title screen (barring that they're both gothic horror games). As soon as you hit start you'll watch a quick (admittedly Castlevanian) cut-scene and then see your character dumped into a locked prison cell. Classic puzzle setup. So you look in the mirror, see what you saw, take the saw, use it to cut off your own head, throw your head as hard as you can at the cell door

In short order, you'll discover that the game is... a cinematic platformer! With spookiness! And brawling! And a really fucking strict time limit. I've heard this game described (in a YouTube comment...) as a mix of Prince of Persia, Castlevania, and Streets of Rage. That's a boldly over-ambitious application of all three - really it's just an action game set across short, tightly-timed mazes that encourage an arcade-style mastery of the mechanics and environments for a fluid play-through. Each stage presents a number of routes, some heavier on obstacle course platforming, others on combat, and others on 'puzzles' (namely tricky jumps, movable blocks, and pressure switches), but the time limit succinctly communicates that there isn't enough time in a single run to investigate all of these available avenues. This isn't Castlevania or some bullshit. Despite that uh, title screen there.

Luckily you've got infinite lives to experiment with these paths, so you won't have to play the entire game over and over to master the later environments (a la Sonic). Once you've conquered a boss (every three stages), the timer resets and you keep that checkpoint for good, allowing you to take your time repeatedly dying and learning each area's nuances (though continuing will cost relatively insignificant upgrades). Still, it's a long enough game that unless you're using emulator save states, you'll have to get good to beat it in one sitting. That's the classic tradeoff for infinite continues - high difficulty and no saving. Fair enough as far as I'm concerned. Unless you're ready to sit down for three straight hours of continuous respawns, you probably won't see the credits until you've spent a lot of time refining your skills and learning the levels - and enemies.

Aside from the arcade-style challenge, those enemies are what really distinguish Nosferatu from the cinematic platforming field. If you've played Prince of Persia, Abe's Oddysee, or Another World, you know the platforming mechanics at play in Nosferatu. Not to say they're bad, just that they've been done before and were, even in 1994, a bit worn. Cine-plats typically separate out their combat (Persia) or omit it completely (Abe), so it's unusual to see it integrated as thoroughly as in Nosferatu. What typically draws attention here is the player character's "Streets of Rage-esque" moveset, but as that mostly boils down to button-mashing, it's really the presentation of the combat that shines through. A wide variety of enemies are used to block your path, to guard platforms, and to provide chase, and almost all of them can be either dodged or smacked down (TM). This really breaks up the monotony, not because there is platforming, then combat, then platforming, then combat (Prince of Persia already does that), but because there is a choice between fight or flight. Each enemy gives the player a chance to evaluate risk both in terms of time and life, and a chance to decide whether they have more faith in their combat or navigational skills.

There are some cool fighting-game style boss-battles to boot

If you like cinematic platformers like Prince of Persia or semi-open-ended platforming of the Sonic, Super Mario World, and Rondo of Blood variety, definitely give Nosferatu a shot. I don't think it's going to provide much of a combat/action fix, but if you like challenging maze exploration and are looking for a unique 2D platformer, you definitely can't go wrong here.

Here today, Godzilla tomorrow: Learning to adapt

Sometimes, when a licensed property is planted in fertile soil for just the right amount of time and administered just the right amount of care, a metaphor is born. Lavished with love and tenderness, that metaphor may just grow up into a fresh bowl of shredded cabbage.

Super Godzilla and Godzilla: Save the Earth present different facets of the character. The Godzilla character, not the shredded cabbage. We're off the cabbage thing. Move on already.

Besides supporting a series of substandard plots, underdeveloped characters, and contrived science fiction, there are two main activities associated with the G-Man: destroying cities and fighting monsters. After all, most of his movie titles are built from the words "Godzilla", "Versus", and "Destroy" (Godzilla vs. Destroyah cuts right to the chase). So it's only natural that in playing a Godzilla game we'd expect to control some egg-huffing reporter/cop who has to convince his boss that some giant monster is about to go crazy, and we'd expect to completely drop out of the game and have nothing to do after about 20 minutes. Or we'd want to be a young, optimistic politician/military officer who has to rally Japan's defense forces in their futile struggle against the unstoppable G. I kid, but it only took one adaptation before Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters (NES) shifted gameplay to a Famicom Wars army-versus-Godzilla structure. While there's certainly something to that approach, the most obvious appeal of the Godzilla franchise is shifting the Big Bad Beast into the protagonary role, giving us a break from fighting monsters and lettings us play as one. As Godzilla, the players are going to want to smash, crash, and bash; elements any decent adaptation would be wise to incorporate.

2004's Godzilla: Save the Earth and 1993's Super Godzilla are indeed decent adaptations. They let us control Godzilla, they let us wreak havoc on civilization, and they let us go toe-to-toe with other towering foes. They let us drive a Godzilla-shaped bus, eat Godzilla-shaped cereal, and brush Godzilla-shaped teeth using a Godzilla-shaped toothbrush.

Godzilla: Save the Earth is the easier game to describe, so let's start there. One of the main things Godzilla has done is his half-century as our spiritual guide is lay waste to other big dudes. Particularly in the late Showa era (~1966-1975), Godzilla served the function of a gigantic reptilian Hulk Hogan. The kaiju had human personalities, their own signature move-sets, and match records to defend. This was the era that gave us Destroy All Monsters and All Monsters Attack. Save the Earth was a semi tie-in with 2004's Final Wars, a revival monster mash that made for a temporary sendoff to God-Z and his over-sized compatriots, so it's to be expected that it's a 4-player 3D arena fighting/wrestling game the likes of Power Stone and other games in that genre that I don't play. Rakugaki Showtime? That's such an obscure reference I'm not even sure it fits here. Anyway, Save the Earth isn't completely off-the-hook Party Fighter; the big focus is on one-on-one matches, and practiced strategy is enough to overcome ad-hoc "equalizing" mechanics like power-ups and environmental attacks. It kinda goes without saying why this works for the Godzilla franchise - of course we want to select from the classic kaiju lineup, of course we want to battle it out across cities, of course we want multiplayer mayhem. The entire concept is a no-brainer, it sells itself.

Save the Earth, in accordance with the film era that inspired it, is very man-in-a-suit Godzilla. When we step into Godzilla's (or any other kaiju's) shoes, we aren't necessarily restricted in unusual or specific ways any more so than when we take over Sub-Zero or SoulCalibur. It looks like we're playing as a giant monster, but doesn't inherently feel like it. Godzilla controls like a human. BUT!, Godzilla's capabilities and surroundings are not in keeping with those of a normal human. He towers over a fully interactive playground of office blocks, skyscrapers, boulders, and oil tankers. The uniqueness of this interactive incarnation of the Gentle Giant comes from what you can do, not how you do it. The game gives us control of a massive all-powerful abomination and lets us gleefully run rampant in the sandbox of civilization, freely flexing our new-found might without limitations. Chuck buildings? Swat helicopters? Swing a radio tower like a club? You better believe Godzilla can in Save the Earth. It's a game that lets our imagination run wild over what it might be like to have a tiny city at our feet - what it might be like if we were the man in the suit. It's a game about the abstract concept, appeal, and potential of Godzilla.

On the flipside, Super Godzilla lets us feel like we've stepped into the films and wormed our way into the cinematic flow. The Heisei film run (1984-1995) focused on the antagonistic, monolithic nature of the big G, painting him as mankind's terrible curse that repeatedly comes back to punish us. This fully animalistic Godzilla is indifferent to humanity, often destructive but occasionally manipulated to good ends. Super Godzilla sticks with this framework and the general storytelling rules of the movies, using a human cast to bridge the player to Godzilla and providing only second-degree control of the monster. The conceit, if you'll allow me to use that word in a way that it is not supposed to be used but frequently is, is that Japanese scientists have developed a device that draws Godzilla in a certain direction, north, south, east, or west. (This feels loosely based on the "bird-machine" from Godzilla ('84) that used magnetic "bird-waves" to draw Godzilla into a volcano). Godzilla marches forward on his own, but the player sets his direction as indicated by an onscreen arrow. The split-screen interface pairs a symbolic tracking map with a widescreen video monitor on the beast himself, steadily plodding forward. When Godzilla moves through an obstacle we watch on the monitor as he autonomously interacts, tearing terrain to pieces and shrugging off gunfire. The boss fights likewise implement a heavily cinematic spin on fighting games, in which the player needs to time attacks with Godzilla's and the enemies' "fighting spirit" to execute lengthy cut-scene specials.

The player gets the sense that they're barely in control, clutching the reigns of this relentless force, struggling to coax it to the desired goal. They can never concretely specify a path or destination (or an attack in the boss fights), left with the imprecise means of the Bird Machine. Godzilla can't be expected to wait or make intelligent decisions on his own - direct him through a building, and he will crash his way through. He is a dumb animal, but a powerful one. That makes it that much cooler that we have even a little bit of input - our limitations show how powerful he is, while the extent of our influence is enough to make that power feel our own. Super Godzilla puts the inhuman, savage power of Godzilla in the hands of the player.

Save the Earth and Super Godzilla make a pretty interesting pairing, both as different types of Godzilla games and as different types of adaptations. Save the Earth decides to hone in on the most game-ready aspect of the franchise and run with it as far as possible, letting the player indulge in the sensation of control in a familiar setting; "if I were Godzilla, I would...". Super Godzilla recreates the movie-going experience from top to bottom, establishing the core audience participation that defines the films: the simultaneous awe and terror in response to Godzilla, the notion that this is a horrifying, destructive monster... that is also essentially innocent and thus fun to root for. The real battle is for control of Godzilla. It's kinda interesting that the more cinematic and what could be called more mature interpretation is the one that came out in 1993. Anyway, what we have are two really great adaptations. Great games by their own right? Who cares. No one's trying to sell them without the 'Zil. But absolutely a great case study in how to successfully translate other media into video games.

Stomaching Super Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back

A LTA in a GFFA, I loved nothing more than Legos, Star Wars, and Super Nintendo. So whenever those things came together, I was in heaven. Sadly, this won't be a post about my Episode I Lego collection. Sadder still, I came of age before the debut of the Lego Star Wars video games, so they've been pretty lost on me. Saddest yet, I spent a lot of time playing Super Star Wars and Super Return of the Jedi instead. I don't remember if I ever legitimately completed the games, but thanks to a cheat code featured in Nintendo Power, I was able to unlock debug mode to warp around levels and live like a king in his castle. I never played much Super Empire Strikes Back, having access to it only through friends. When the opportunity came to pick it up on Virtual Console, I had no choice but to give it a shot to see how it stacked up.

The Super Star Wars trilogy is the work of obscure developer Sculptured Studios toiling under the oversight of LucasArts. Wikipedia tells me that Sculptured was a prolific developer of licensed games and ports (aka shlock), though I'm not seeing a lot of games I recognize in their library. The Atari XEGS port of Mario Bros.? SeaQuest DSV for the Game Boy? The NES classic Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves starring Kevin Cosner as Robin "Friar Tuck" Hood, the Prince of Thieves? Among the few original titles Sculptured developed is the notoriously terrible Day Dreamin' Davey, often mistakenly attributed to publisher Hal Labs (it amazes me to this day that people don't know the difference between a developer and a publisher). Suffice to say that their only lasting work has been Super Star Wars. 

Chewbacca's famous spin-move, from the part of the movie where he fights robot bounty hunters

Since the first and third games play largely the same, it's no surprise that Empire fits comfortably in between. It's a brutally difficult Contra-influenced run-and-gun featuring Turrican-style open levels, melee combat, and occasional vehicular variety segments. The shooting spans tediously slow and punishingly frantic (a long life bar ensures that the game is never nearly as precise as Japanese one-hit-death shooters like Metal Slug), while the platforming tends to be obnoxiously demanding thanks to a love of asynchronously moving platforms and (literal) slippery slopes. The vehicle segments... I can't even formulate a summary, so we'll come back to those later. They're um, ahead of their time? At heart at least. Empire introduces a password feature which, along with a difficulty select and a large supply of lives/continues, keeps the game relatively finishable for most players. The original Super Star Wars lacks any type of progress tracking and thus must be beaten in one grueling sitting, ensuring that only one human being has ever reached the end unassisted - he died of mental trauma shortly thereafter. 

Remember this guy from the movies?

The two biggest gameplay changes made in part two are run-gunning and lightsaber combat. Han Solo and Chewbacca can't wield the lightsaber, so the shooting still takes center stage (you think it's unnecessary to say that, but the Super Star Wars series takes some pretty sweeping liberties with the film canon... like having Luke duel and kill the Sarlacc monster on his way to buy the droids at the beginning of Episode IV). The original SSW required the player to stand still to shoot (Bass rules), creating somewhat slow-moving and methodical screen-clearing. The introduction of simultaneous walk-shoot-aiming speeds up the gameplay a ton. It also gives the player the inclination to say "fuck this game" and bolt for the exit, though that usually backfires. Empire's mobile shooting allows it to move away from the Mega Man-style one-screen-at-a-time feel, letting swarms of infinitely spawning enemies flood in from off-screen and chase the player for minutes at a time. That is to say, the characters' offensive prowess has been cranked up a notch, but the opposition has gone up two. If you don't constantly run with the attack button held, you'll be locked into standing aim mode and quickly overwhelmed. If this sounds dynamic and cool, that's just a testament to poor writing. What it is is boring. The game often degrades into a one-note randomized arcade shooter, quickly pushing from sensory overload into brain-fried apathy. There is so much going on beyond the player's capability to manage that success and failure feel extremely random.

What comes to the rescue of the manic mess that is Super Empire Strikes Back is Luke's lightsaber. The lightsaber was a pretty useless joke in Super Star Wars, but here it's been completely redesigned. Few 20th century games attempted anything resembling melee combat outside of the brawler framework, but Empire/Jedi's Luke belongs with Castlevania IV's Simon Belmont and ActRaiser 2's Master as a remarkably capable action protagonist gone medieval. He can swing the lightsaber in a fast horizontal arc or slowly over his head to clear out flying enemies, he can use it to reflect projectiles back to their source and block melee attacks, and best of all, he spins it around his somersaulting body for the best jump attack ever; a giant, deadly ball of destruction. 

The greatest jump attack of all time?

And you know what? It complements the absurd cavalcade of enemies and touchy platforming. It gives the action a sort of Dynasty Warriors feel - what I would call lawnmower combat. A super-powered player character mowing down seas of impotent foes like blades of grass. That's not to say it makes the game easy - the stalwart, position-dominant enemies can withstand enough blows to put a careless rampage to a plummet of an end. Think of it as mowing a lawn strewn with logs. Still, the lightsaber provides the player some much-needed control of the game's stampeding flow. It stands out and makes things work - at least for a little while.

Luke's stages are many screens tall and usually set outdoors, often offering two or more paths. The top path tends to be a strict platforming challenge and the bottom a combat free-for-all, though players will probably find themselves indiscriminately bouncing between high and low against their will thanks to the imprecision of the platforming. If you weren't sure whether platforming would combine well with infinite monster closets, Super Empire Strikes Back provides a definitive "no". It's just not rewarding to struggle through a bunch of tough jumps only to be thrown back down to the shitty path by a bird swooping in from off-screen.

Alas, Luke's levels make up less than half of the game and are still marred by weird design choices like hilariously deep spike pits and pace-destroying freeze-monsters. The remainder of the playtime is dedicated to the largely identical Han Solo and Chewbacca, who themselves are just Luke-minus-lightsaber (unlike in SSW and Jedi, Luke here can swap between blaster and lightsaber at will). Han and Chewie's levels scale back the nutty platforming a bit (actually, a lot) and present what is essentially a corridor-shooter. The landscape is flat, ceilings are low, and almost all progress is made directly left-to-right or right-to-left. In fact, most of Han's levels are just one long corridor interrupted by occasional elevator cut-scenes. It's cool that the characters get different level types and even helps to keep the lightsabering fresh, but you can't really get around the fact that the Han/Chewie levels are extremely repetitive and don't evolve much over ther course of the game.

Probably the single most annoying thing about the game is the collision behavior. The player character and any enemy entity (be it a monster, projectile, or just debris) cannot EVER co-occupy the same space. What makes that insane is that enemy position takes precedence over the player - that means an enemy that walks into a standing player character will push the player around! Even the tiniest bats can push a standing character off a ledge with just a bump. There's no post-damage invincibility (that blinking phase that Mega Man and Sonic have) to cope with this, meaning that if an enemy walks straight forward into your character, they will damage and push you until you fall off a ledge or run out of health. Sometimes it feels like the game is aware of this weird trait and uses it to create challenge, like with the turrets in Cloud City that pause for a moment after dying (giving the player a small window to rush by) before exploding into a flurry of debris. Sometimes, like in the caverns of Hoth, it's mind-fuckingly annoying that an enemy can freeze Luke and push him into an instant-death spike pit before he has a chance to thaw. This combined with an excess of undodgeables means it's literally impossible to hold your ground in this game. Like the shooting and respawning enemies, this does encourage a no-brakes play-style, but simultaneously punishes it. Didn't expect an enemy to spawn on the edge of the platform you're jumping to? Too late, your jump already got blocked and you probably died.

The bosses are probably the best part of the game, but that's mostly just because they aren't as annoying as the levels. Still, their tendency to instantaneously dole out heaps of unavoidable damage can get very frustrating.

No post on Super Empire Strikes Back could be complete without at least a shout-out to the vehicle levels. These stages are a great idea - much of Star Wars' action has always been bound to its trademark spaceships, so an adaptation would be just as incomplete without them as it would without lazerbeams. It's also really cool that all of the vehicle levels are different - there's a sorta turret-shooter set in an asteroid field, a few brief scrolling shooter levels , and even a full 3D Battle of Hoth. The Gradius-style sidescrolling shoot-em-up levels, played as a snowspeeder and some kind of speeder bike (better known from Return of the Jedi, but whatever), are so short and easy as not to register, but the Battle of Hoth is pretty cool. It's very primitive 3D (this was '93) and is set in a looping environment (like the multiplayer arenas of Star Fox 64), but provides a few different enemy types to shoot down and even - and I could barely believe this - a tow cable mechanic that needs to be used to wrap up and trip the big AT-AT walkers. Oddly enough, these variety stages are much more fair than the main gameplay, or at least the difficulty is appropriately scaled to the randomness. Even if it wouldn't sustain an entire game of its own, the snowspeeding is fun for its run-time and provides some much needed relief from the monotonous sidescrolling levels. It's also probably the most faithful-to-the-movie part of the game, if you like that kinda thing. Just don't play it back-to-back with Rogue Squadron.

There's fun to be had and a handful of good concepts at work here, but overall the game is too frustrating to ever be satisfying more than momentarily. The upside to that is... well... there are plenty of cheats and passwords out there. You can give yourself 99 lives, use debug mode's stage select to skip to the end, instantly unlock all the Force powers, or just switch on invincibility. Normally I'd say that requiring codes to be fun makes a game a definite skip, but Empire's Luke is a genuinely unique character worth experiencing for anyone interested in 2D game mechanics. How much and for how long you can enjoy that experience will probably be determined by whether you're willing to cheat - and I will add that all the enemy pushiness actually allows the game to retain much of its challenge even if the player character is invincible (in a Warioland 2 kind of way). I'm typically not one to complain about difficulty (I don't mind not finishing games, as I consider a single session to be a complete experience), but this game has no dignity about it. This is not Alien Soldier or Gradius II - it's not about learning to play right, it's about learning to abuse a system that is more than happy to abuse you. And that is the essence of Super Empire Strikes Back - a constant battle against the very mechanics of the game. 
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Hey I just learned that LucasArts was shut down in April. I probably already knew, but didn't care. Their good games percentage has been awfully low since the turn of the millennium (conspicuously coincident with the debut of the prequel trilogy), so it's probably better for Disney to shop around the Star Wars property to third parties. Who knows how that'll turn out, but it couldn't be much worse than the disappointing output of recent years. If Star Wars games were as multitudinous now as they were in the '90s, Force Unleashed and Star Wars Kinect could be swept under the rug along with middling and embarrassing disappointments like Yoda Stories and Masters of Teras Kasi. But with no Dark Forces, X-Wing, or Rogue Squadron to outshine them, every Star Wars flop today is enough to convince a player that the series is in the wrong hands. And let's not forget that the popular favorite Star Wars games all in fact were developed by third parties: Super Star Wars of course (Sculptured), X-Wing/Tie Fighter (Totally Games), Rogue Squadron (Factor 5), Jedi Knight II (Raven), Knights of the Old Republic (BioWare), Battlefront (Pandemic), and Lego Star Wars (Traveller's Tales). Yeah, wait a minute. That's like, all of the good Star Wars games ever. So basically, the only good Star Wars games that can be attributed to LucasArts are Dark Forces I and II. Not to mention that the diaspora of the classic adventure team (Tim Schaefer, Ron Gilbert, et al.) is well-documented and long over. So who cares again that the studio was disbanded?

The only song ever made

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.

Cybernator: A 2D realism... game

Another main thing that is oh so fucked up in oh so many games of the '80s and '90s is that the player is made of glass, i.e., touching ANYTHING kills them. This is the most frustrating and almost game-ruining aspect of Contra. The screen is so littered with deadly hazards that the player feels trapped and the course excessively linear (why does bumping into an enemy soldier kill me, but not him? Maybe Bill should've put on a shirt, since his adversaries are apparently sporting lazer-armor). Compare this to Metal Slug or Shock Troopers, wherein only bullets (or tanks/planes) are dangerous, and the player has bucketfuls more freedom. 

Ram into things to your heart's desire! Also, this box-art is weird/terrible

As one may or may not have guessed, Cybernator belongs to the latter category, in which enemies need to attack you to be dangerous. Seems like the game would be totally fucked were this not the case, considering the molasses-y rate of movement discussed yesterday. This allows cleaner offensive prioritization - since foes are not immediate deathtraps, the player can ignore the weaker and slower ones while focusing on the most dangerous. It gives personality to the enemies - a cannon emplacement doesn't function at all similarly to an aggressive mech. As a matter of fact, the ability to 'defeat' cannons simply by getting so close that you're inside of their area-of-attack is so realistic that it makes you shake your head that other games don't do the same. It gives a sense of real space without resorting to 3D gameplay. Further contributing to the sense of location is that enemies do not respawn (except in places where logically there would be multiple waves).

You know, I think that may be my big problem with Contra and similar shmups (R-Type, Gradius). Not specifically that touching enemies is damaging, or that they respawn, but that there is no sense of a realistic space. It just fails to make sense on such a basic level that I can't immerse myself in the world. I can't connect to the avatar (as much as I should be able to connect to a sentient space-ship or submarine) because the world is brimming with nonsensical rules. The more rules you need, the less natural the experience becomes, and the less natural the experience, the more time I spend thinking about the meta-game - dealing with the limitations of the rule-set rather than the opposition to the goals as defined inside the game. There are players that thrive on this (see just about any speed-runner or high-scorer), but it's the exact opposite of what I want from an engaging experience. I want to interact with the world from inside the world, to, heh, beat the enemy at their own game.

Back on topic, Cybernator's stages feel genuinely mission driven. The plot, asinine though it may be, sets us up to expect a military campaign. The first stage sees the player infiltrate an enemy colony, a mission corroborated in the stage design by broad spaces and patterned defenses. The subsequent flight through an asteroid field is accordingly frantic, blasting off at exponentially greater speed, then slowing back down as the objective shifts to a search for an enemy weapon among the "roids" (seriously, that's the word the game uses). Though progress during this mission remains linearly left-to-right, the environment stretches for multiple screens vertically, giving the player a sense of exploration. The inertially-driven zero-gravity navigation lends the appropriate tension to this search, as the player never knows whether they'll careen into a friendly power-up or a nest of turrets. Even the boundaries of the screen add to the realism, as they subtly suggest (or at least comply with) the limited visibility created by the splay of asteroids. The boss eventually bursts forth from the surface of one such body, terminating the search in a pitched showdown. 

Yes, let's!

From there we take to another infiltration, this time through the claustrophobic corridors of a space-battleship (I think? story not real clear on that one), followed by a meteoric decent to Earth, a land-battle against wave after wave of tanks and bombers, and much, much more. Much, much, much, much, much more. But you should play the game instead of listening to my description. The point is that the goal of each mission is reinforced by the gameplay - you don't get to the end and say "oh, right, I was rescuing a princess all along". You're reminded at each turn that your immediate actions are part of the overall strategy, instilling each move with purpose. And you can even fail the mission while still moving past the level!

Between its limiting controls (the robot feels like a robot), cogent interactivity (absence of excessive meta-rules), and synergistic level design (objectives and stages harmonize), Cybernator begs to be classified as realism. Uh oh. We're on thin ice here. As usual, the culture of gaming has already stolen and misunderstood this term, trying to purpose it equivalently to film and literature. "Realistic" has come to mean "looks real" (Modern Warfare), or "has a lot of characters that do their own thing" (Skyrim). Get me any mainstream gaming journalist in here and they'll assure us that "realism" wasn't invented til somewhere around the turn of the millennium, and certainly not until 3D became the norm. While I won't make any attempt to deny that 3D and world-building can be major factors in realism, what makes games unique is their interactivity, so the key element to examine is the reality of this interactivity. Not how real does it look, but how real does it feel. Not whether this world feels inhabited, but whether the player feels like they are inhabiting it.

Cybernator in briefly

As every year, I'm taking off on this special holiday....

April Foollllls!!!! Is the holiday to which I was referring.

APril FOOL AGAIN!!!! I meant the day after Easter. Who's the fool now? You're pretty fuckin' gullible. Did you actually think your mom was dead last year when I told you she had cancer? I just locked her in the closet, waiting for you to figure it out. Go check! Oh, she's been in there for a year without food and now she's a skeleton? skeleton + closet = jokez

To keep things around here alive while I relax on the couch with a submarine-sandwich-shaped sandwich, let me enjoy you with a story about a game I call Cybernator. If I was released in Japan, I'd know the game as Assault Suits Valken, the second of five games in the Assault Suits series. Each game was released on a different platform (Genesis, SNES, Saturn, PSX, and PS2), and only the first two made it to the West, without their Assault Suits moniker or any relation. The first, Genesis' Assault Suits Leynos/Target Earth is pretty terrible as far as I've played. It feels like a lazy Contra-inspired Mobile Suit Gundam cash-in. Swap out the army dudes for giant robots, but oh yeah, don't bother to make the sprites big or translate that into control or anything. You be the judge, jury, and execution:

Maybe it's just because of the stark contrast with Cybernator, but Target Earth looks decidedly... low-budget. In its defense, it was a 1990 Genesis game, meaning the tech was limited and the devs were inexperienced. For point of contrast, check out what Cybernator looked like in 1992 on the SNES:

First of all, I love that player sprite. It doesn't get much better than that. Look at all those moving parts! The backgrounds are certainly on the static side, but at least they're layered. If Konami had bothered to implement parallax, this would be one of the SNES' prettiest games. Nonetheless, the huge sprites (befitting of a giant mech game) almost make up for it. There's plenty to look at. These days, criticism of grey/brown color schemes runs amok like a Muk, but in 1992 not every game was a near-future military shooter. Sure, scifi robots weren't anything new, but the palette of Cybernator matches the content, which is what matters, probably.

The mainest thing I like about this game is the control. Cyber-Nate, as I assume the main character/bot is called, plays with a hulking weight that makes every move feel deliberate, every massive stomp, reload, or boost taking a noticeable amount of time to execute. It's not simply push right to go right, but it's also not Steel Battalion. The SNES only has six buttons, after all. Also, the mech can aim in sixteen directions instead of eight! That's just plain neat.

You know Steel Battalion, right? The mech game which could ONLY be controlled with this hilarious hardware?

Wait remember what I said about being off today? Yeah I better go play Cybernator instead of wasting time talking about it. You'll be sorry!

?

Dunkey Kung Cuntry 2: Yyyyyo boy

Man, this game. THIS GAME. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest. That's a terrible pun. I wish anyone would learn that a play on words doesn't work if the second meaning doesn't have any meaning. "Diddy's Kong Quest" makes sense; Diddy is on a quest to find (Donkey) Kong. On the flip-side, "Diddy's Conquest" is nonsense. That isn't what the game is. He doesn't conquest anything, he's a monkey on a rescue mission, not Francisco Pizarro Jr. So, C- for titling. Actually make that a straight-up D, because Rareware is a British company - they have zero excuse to screw up the English language. I don't know why I'm suggesting that developers (rather than publishers) title games.

These are the actual 3D models used for the sprite renders. Personally I prefer the sprites - I mean, Christ, look at Al E. Gator's face

So let's look at the most talked about aspect of the game, the monkeys. Or apes, as it were. Diddy Kong himself is a carryover from the original Donkey Kong Country, released a year prior (1994). Diddy is typically identified as a chimp (short for chim-pansy), a variety of pretty intelligent ape. They're no dolphins, but they're pretttyy, prettttttay smart (I'm almost positive they're smarter than dolphins, but no one ever tried to teach them English by giving them LSD). So people are all, "Diddy Kong's a smart bloke, so he must be a chimp, right?" He demonstrates his intelligence through such tasks as doing a cartwheel, jumping on alligators' heads, smashing barrels, etc. I won't debate that this is clearly the work of a sophisticated mind; nevertheless, evidence to the contrary exists in the form of Diddy's prehensile tail. Apes, you'll recall from science, don't have tails. Chimps, you'll recall from a few sentences ago, are apes. We have thence rigorously proven that Diddy Kong is not an ape, and thus not a chimp. This is pretty much what mathematics was like in college, by the way. Mainly this type of thing. Thank you, college!

Dixie, Diddy Kong's brother (spoiler) and the second playable character, is notable for her long ponytail and beret. While many a simian sports a fashionable lid, what baffles me here is the flowing blonde mane. Is it a wig? That would be hard to believe, considering that Dixie can suspend her entire body weight upon the tensile strength of her hair. Perhaps then a weave? I don't think sub-human lifeforms can comprehend the functionality of such a complex device. Pretty sure I ain't never seen a chicken flaunting a toupee. So, to quote a famous American, what's the deal here? How can Dixie be a longhair? It's simply unheard of in nature. 

Dixie Kong in her natural habitat

So both Diddy and Dixie Kong are some mystery creatures who look like apes but defy logic by means of a (pony)tail. Perhaps they belong to yet-to-be-discovered species? Was Rare trying to tell us something? Maybe that's why Nintendo delisted the games from their Wii Virtual Console service last November. Some type of conspiracy cover-up spearheaded by Carolus Linnaeus and Jane Goodall. Don't be surprised if this blog post 'mysteriously' disappears too. I've probably just been FBI watch-listed. 

DKC2 is littered with other anatomically incorrect wildlife, but you'd probably be pretty pissed if I spent another paragraph on the subject. Let me just summarize by saying that one of them is called Sneakers the Spider (because he wears sneakers, get it? I don't) and another is Snakey the Snake, because he is shaped like a spring and can jump high. I guess if I wanted a game to feature an animal that could jump, it probably wouldn't be a fucking snake. When was the last time you were strolling "in the flat fieEeEeelds" and a snake jumped up in your face? Plus the snake was bigger than a rhino. Come on guys. Can we make a little less sense?

The platforming is nice though. It's not particularly finessexcellent, but when it gets rolling it can be a blast. The game has a rollickinger sense of speed than any 16-bit platformer barring perhaps Super Mario World. The problem is that stages are so long and obstacles so unforgiving that you'll only get to experience that speed on occasion. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one that feels this way (so ronery), but DKC2 is one of the hardest platformers I've ever played. After ten tries on a level, I can usually do it flawlessly, but it takes those ten practices. I guess the nostalgia hounds already have years of experience to taint their sense of challenge. The repetition depletes a large portion of the thrill; by the time you've figured out the 'right' way to play, you've already seen the whole level a dozen times. By comparison, one of the more exhilarating platformers I've played recently is Bit.Trip Runner 2, which uses difficulty scaling and gradual feature introduction to ensure that I can complete stages on a first run while still feeling like I've accomplished something. That has its own flip-side that I might discuss another time, but the takeaway is that it makes DKC2's stages feel like an utter slog and defeats any sensation of achievement they should convey, despite the ostensible speed of traversal.

That said, I love that Country 2 is a thinking man's platformer without resorting to puzzles. I referred to the notion of "figuring out" the platforming; what I mean is that the difficulty lies in determining the right course of action, not in executing it. How should I time and sequence my moves? Where should I change paths, which risks have suitable payoffs? This isn't mere memorization - that would imply that the correct route is obvious on completion. DKC provides that feeling most familiar from physics platformers (Trine etc.), the "whoa - was I supposed to be able to win that way?" triumph. It certainly has it's linear segments, but most often it provides the player numerous means to progress and to challenge themselves. While I'm an avid hater of collection (next paragraph), much reward lies simply in manipulating the challenge. There are good and bad solutions to every level, and the payoff of devising a better strategy is an easier replay. This allows me to feel like I'm truly getting better at the game with each attempt.

Collectathonism. Rare basically invented this idea, and it's been both a curse and a curse through the history of platforming. In some sense, modern Achievements/Trophies are derived from the concept, the notion that players will strain themselves for any reward, however worthless, as long as it's acknowledged. The Donkey Kong Country games challenged the player to reach 100% completion (you could even go beyond 100%!) by finding and snatching every last hidden trinket in the game world. This is totally optional, so many people say "you can't complain". Well reading my complaint is totally optional too, so fuck you. The collection in DKC2 has its highs and lows - sometimes it provides secret minigames and shortcuts, while more often it triggers aimless wandering and pixel-sweeping. See, I might - just might - be able to forgive this if not for one thing: invisible items. What makes collection fun (or at least gives it the potential to be) is that the player spots some treasure off the beaten path and asks themselves "how the hell do I get over there?". This inspires experimentation. See Warioland: Shake It! for a game that does this perfectly. If items are invisible, the player is expected to ask "how do I get EVERYWHERE", including places they aren't intended to go. To discover everything, they must throw themselves down EVERY pit, scramble into EVERY corner, and jump in EVERY open space. The suspicion it inspires is boundless, which renders the visible collectibles pointless. Why show me some of the coins when I have to scour every inch of every level anyway?

The reward for getting everything... you can tell Diddy is overjoyed

That's my thoughts after finishing the game once (I first played it 15+ years ago, but this was my first serious run). A lot of Mankey-fanatics out there have surely played the game dozens of times and most of them just like to talk about the secrets. But everyone has said everything there is to say about that, so I just wanted to point out that, y'know, it also has good platforming. Because the secret shit really isn't enough to drive the entire game, plus it's way worse than people say, plus other games do the same thing better (again, Warioland).