Back in the CCCR New Mario Revisited

you can turn off the jump/twirl dual mapping by holding in the left control stick for a few seconds on the title screen

what the fuck

Back in the CCCR returns again: New Mario Wii U Luigi Deluxe

Back in the CCCR, aka Control Customization Reviews Revisited, is a column where we review control customization options in video games. 

It's been many long winters since we've been Back in the CCCR, but I thought I'd buy a Mario with my Christmas money and got exactly what I deserved. If there's anything that fires me up to write, it's muddled and overmapped controls with duplicate buttons that offer no customization whatsover.

I should be honest, though, and admit that New Super Mario Luigi U Deluxe Wii Brothers does have one option, and it's quite a pickler. The face buttons of the Switch controller (A, B, Y, X in the SNES diamond layout) are mapped in pairs to two functions - run and jump. Actually, it's a whole lot more functions than that, but hang tight. By default, A/B jump and Y/X run. If you'd like, "Controls 2" will swap the functions of B and X. However, A must remain as jump and Y must remain as run. This doesn't bother me so much as that I just don't get it*. Why not also swap the other two? Or just put the same-function buttons opposite each other (B/X run, A/Y jump) so that the player can get any configuration just by laying their thumb differently. Isn't that the point of dual mapping anyway?

Anyway, am I the only one that feels like Super Mario controls are getting kind of crappy? First of all, after playing various 3D Mario games, pressing down midair to ground-pound feels awful, especially on the already subobtimal non-gated analog stick or C-buttons. It's a dual mapping of actions that for maximum precision need to be synced - a ground-pound is a targeted action, and the targeting is performed by moving the stick while Mario is midair. So there's a moment when the player has Mario in position and now needs to swing down to actually trigger the action, meaning there will always be a delay. Compare to 3D Mario, where the L/R button is an independent input and frame-perfect timing isn't all that hard.

Then there's spin jump. Oh, the terrible spin jump. The default mapping on R/ZR is sensible enough if you're going to dual-map the face buttons like described above. Pressing R/ZR in mid-air performs a mid-air twirl for a bit of extra air-time - this is even more sensible, since there will be situations when a player needs to hold run, hold jump, and be ready to twirl, and all three on face buttons would preclude this. But then they start throwing wrenches in the gears. As is, this was too simple? complicated? so pressing jump again in midair ALSO performs the twirl, I guess for when your elderly grandfather is over for Toadette co-op and can only remember one button. This is a problem, because holding A midair has a different function - it extends jump height and puts Mario into enemy-bounce state. And these too functions are occasionally at odds: for instance if the player wants to do a short hop onto an enemy and bounce off (a common setup for jumps just out of normal reach). The correct button input for this would be tap A (short jump) then press and hold A (bounce state) before landing on the enemy. In Nu Luigi Mario: Two Deluxe Wii Brothers, this input sequence will trigger a midair twirl, slowing Mario's descent and fucking with the timing of the landing. This point, you could argue, is not inherently bad. It's just increasing the technicality of the gameplay. If you want to short hop and bounce without a twirl, you now need to time the second A to exactly the landing on the enemy. But didn't we just get through discussing an example where the gameplay has become less technical? We can't go both these directions at once. And the short hop and bounce has been in Mario Brothers since day one - for over 30 years - so I don't know why it needs to change now**. Just leave twirl on the other input you already established for it.

As usual, this stuff wouldn't be so frustrating if it wasn't done correctly right next door. It shows, or reinforces, that their focus with these games isn't solid action, but loosely sorta getting the right idea so you can play with your newborn baby and dog. Why does it matter if you can't get a frame-perfect ground-pound? asks Miyadumbo. We made it so that you can set a controller on your pregnant wife's stomach and the baby can kick Mario through the levels! And if your child was born with no head they can still beat the game without looking at the screen! More than anything, what makes Nintendo weird isn't so much that they pick weird targets, but that they refuse to broaden their aim just by adding in some very simple configuration (which I suppose does fit into the mentality of not considering your customers adults - we're having peas for dinner because I said so). I mean, is it really going to fuck with kids' heads so terribly if you let them put spin jump on a face button? You don't even write manuals for your games anymore.

*Actually, it does grate an extra 50% because the same exact "swap B and X" was the only control option in Zelda: BoW, and was substantially more pointless and obstructive there.

**I can't be fucked to remember when in the New Mario canon twirl was introduced - I don't remember it before this, but these games are designed with forgettability in mind.

What I'm Playing, October '14

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

Well my initial push to finish games is looking pretty good.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Xbox 360)

That took all of five days. It's not the 8-hour playtime that makes Revengeance feel short, it's the swift pull-up halfway through where the earlier multi-tiered levels give way to reused environments, redundant stealth encounters, and sorta insulting stage numbering (one short stage doesn't have a boss, then the next is just a boss, etc.). You basically get 3 full and 4 quarter-stages. Still, I love the action here - it's a Japanese assimilation of the stealth alternating counter-driven style of popular Western games like Arkham Asylum and Assassin's Creed. The weird pacing just makes higher difficulty replays awkward, with the shockingly early climax leaving little to challenge your skills on the back end.

This is the peak of the game's difficulty. It is the Stage 3 boss. In a 7-stage game.

Kid Klown in Crazy Chase (SNES)

This one was done for the already-published Platformer of the Month Club, enjoy.

Games Finished:

Bayonetta (Xbox 360)

Speaking of weird endgame pacing. Bayonetta becomes wildly indulgent in the final act, giving too much time to variety stages (both Space Harrier and Motorcycle Madness), redundant boss reduxes, and fake-out endings. The main thing I like about this game is the bread and butter combat, but for the last two to three hours there basically isn't any. It doesn't help that (at least in Normal mode) bosses are excruciatingly easy, but still tediously long. Recently I've been starting action games on hard mode because why fuck around, but Bayonetta sadly does not permit that and is far, far too easy for any but the most novice players (professional reviewers) on Normal.

In also hurts that the game is a bit churlish with rewarding performance, as the only thing holding me back from platinum level rankings was that I didn't seek out the hidden sub-stages and thus had a bunch of zeroes in my overall score. Here's a bit of personal philosophy: action games should not have hidden sub-stages. Ever. That is explicitly, shamefully bad design.

Bayonetta had some uniquely paced combat, getting almost turn-based with its reliance on time-slowing dodges, so I could see myself playing it again. Still, it's very sandboxy and I think you'd have to be an idiot to rank it with the good stuff like Ninja Gaiden Black and Double Dragon 2.

Crashmo (Nintendo 3DS eShop)

I kinda can't believe I beat this. Technically there are still 20 or so bonus stages to go, but I got the all-important credit roll so I'm happy to call it done. The thing that kept Crashmo alive late-game was the introduction of gigantic puzzles with dozens of pieces that allowed free-form solutions. They probably rank as much easier than the more rigid challenges (at least for me they were), but they were a lot more rewarding to play, allowing me to prove I had learned and could reapply the many specific techniques developed through the game's course.

Street Fighter 2010 (NES / 3DS VC)

Okay, the last level here was insane. Most stages in this game give you 120 seconds to kill one boss. With the same time limit, this level featured three reused (but now harder) bosses and two totally new ones. That's 20 seconds a boss, and these guys have strict patterns that only leave them vulnerable in certain windows. I really had no choice but to cheese it with save states. Oh well. Lotta good bosses here, you can see the Capcom house-style that permeates Mega Man X and Gargoyle's Quest as well.

Super Mario 64 (N64 / Wii VC)

I have a bit of an OCD problem with Super Mario 64. I am really uncomfortable with leaving stars behind, so I end up 100%ing every world before moving on, which leads to a lot of time wasted on levels I don't really like. Still, this game is goddamn genius no matter which way you slice. Level greats include Whomp's Fortress, Lava Lava Lake, Hazy Hazy Maze Cave, Dire Dire Docks, Pirate Bay's Cavern, and Tock Tock Clock. Anti-favorites include: Shifting Shifting Sand Land, Snowman Blowman Land, Tiny Tiny Big World, and Boo House.

The improved resolution Virtual Console port proves that SM64 still looks fantastic

God of War (PS2)

Even back when it was the second or third modern melee action game I'd ever played, I really did not care for God of War. It has these insanely unwelcome "adventure" parts that usually involve mandatory backtracking or puzzles, the camera angles are very annoying (namely because the movement controls are camera-relative), and the combat is soooo repetitive. Sure, it feels nice and squishy, but that only gets you so far after battle #1000 with the same three enemy types and the same two combos that always defeat them. The game sorta tries to find some identity by spreading battles across different arena types (moving floors, small platforms, tiers) but it makes annoying choices that tend to backfire.

Games Started:

The Evil Within (Xbox 360)

Check up on my chapterly coverage for which I am being paid by Capcom to make as many Resident Evil 4 comparisons as humanly possible. In my defense, I see every game through the lens of Resident Evil 4. Or Mega Man X or Ogre Battle 64, as genre applies.

Wave Race 64 (N64 / Wii VC)

The international Commune Podcast game du jour for November, Wave Race is heavy on the waves and light on the races. I enjoy the wave-handling mechanics a lot, it's just that the sparse course selection and 1v1 limitation pretty heavily restrict this as a multiplayer alternative. Compared to this, it's no surprise that the de facto party racer for the eternally ripe N64 has become Star Wars Episode I Racer.

One and Done:

Hyrule Warriors (Wii U)

Just got this for the sake of it, it feels insanely well-polished - at least compared to the "budget" feel common to Dynasty Warrior games. I'll come back and play it for real sometime in the future.

The Firemen (SNES)

Another podcaster, this is a pretty easy top-down shooter that mixes in a little exploration and a timer. It's fun but it is hard to count it as a game-in-progress when the only thing holding me back from beating it is I just haven't played it a second time.

Mario VERSUS Luigi: Character select in platformers. 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).

Golem: So, I was thinking about what I might use to write a hefty email, and character distinction in Super Mario 3D World kept bugging me. I dunno how much of this is me repeating myself from the other night, but hey, it's worthwhile to get it written down. None of this is a specific rebuttal to what you said the other night.

In Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Tails and Knuckles offer platforming abilities far beyond Sonic's. The huge, sprawling levels offer plenty of opportunities for areas that only Tails can access, other areas that only Knuckles can access, and some they can both reach that Sonic can't.

I don't know how familiar you are with Sonic 3 & Knuckles, so you may have to take some of this on faith.

I wouldn't call that a particularly shallow system, especially since Sonic 3 & Knuckles often blends in paths naturally. Even when it's something dopey like a wall that only Knuckles can break, the path beyond A) explores a new space of the level map that you may have imagined exploring and B) sticks to the assets and general design sensibilities of the stage. (That latter point is a frightening discussion unto itself, but I think for the purposes of this email, we can gloss over that.)

But mechanically speaking, I think it's a copout compared to something like Super Mario Bros. 2. That is, I mean to compare the low-level rhythm of gameplay, the feel of each individual jump. Sonic 3 & Knuckles' system offers greater possibilities in terms of overall level exploration and uncovering entire new areas.

Anyway, every time you separate characters into their own unique stage segments, that's one less chance for a comparison. If you get a part that requires Knuckles so you can glide over pits, you'll never know what it's like to carry Sonic through that section (you'll have two different sections and only one way to experience each). On the other hand, if you have a tough platforming segment with Sonic, you might remark to yourself that Knuckles would sure be helpful (one section that has two different experiences).

And that leads to a lot of neat strategery in Super Mario Bros. 2. 1-2 has a difficult cave portion where Snifits corner you as you try to blast open walls. One option is to take Toad, who's built for combat--not like you need to make big jumps in the cave anyway. Or, you could take Luigi; if you're skilled, you can bypass that cave section entirely by jumping to the top of a tall hill. Anyone can play that part, but the character you choose will cast the same stage design in a different light.

There are neat moments of character comparison in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, and Super Mario Bros. 2 does feature character-specific paths. I just mean to compare their overall demeanor. Can I use the word "demeanor" like that?

So, in general, I like to have a way to cheese a situation and a skilled way to approach a situation. That's as opposed to something binary, either you can do a segment or you can't.

And I think that fits Super Mario 3D World's overall arcadey mentality. Something like Sonic 3 & Knuckles or Super Mario 64 is built for hanging out and poking around. Super Mario 3D World, on the other hand, has stages built around a single path. The interesting part isn't how you explore, it's in the mechanics of experiencing that path.

You also get character-relevant puzzles, but they're not character-dependent. So, that green star might be easier to grab with Peach, and recognizing as much is solving a puzzle. Figuring out how to get there with Mario is another puzzle.

3D World does have moments where you can only collect something if you have the right powerup, but that's a matter of skill rather than character choice. They'll always give you the necessary powerup in the level, too.

If all the character-specific switches in 3D World lead to stamps, and none to green stars, that would fall in line with my reading. I have no idea if that's the case.

On that note, it's worth saying that my points about Super Mario 3D World are in theory. A better writer would have examples: here's one green star that suggests the use of one character and provides challenge for another, something like that. Not only has it been like two weeks since 3D World came out, but given the game's size and range (see: the Super Mario Galaxies), I don't know that I'll ever have a great grasp on it.

[So we had a bit of an offline discussion about how many games actually have a character select, particularly platformers featuring exploration, and particularly ones that don't allow swapping on the fly. The answer we came up with is that we don't know a ton :( . Super Mario Bros. 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles are not a particularly common model - if you think about it, the primary games starring character selection are fighters/racers/shoot-em-ups/brawlers/etc. Those adventurier games that do allow character selection, like a few from the late Castlevania and Mega Man series or Ganbare Goemon, usually have completely scripted differences in campaigns (a la Resident Evil) or superficial or action-only distinctions between characters.

Nonetheless, the conversation on SMB2 and S&K3 is valid and in keeping with the original lead-in, Super Mario 3D World]

Yourself: What it sounds like you like about Super Mario Bros. 2 is that it's a platformer with a weapon select; your 'weapons' here being the characters' physical attributes. I suppose what leads me to make that wholly semantic distinction is the notion that there are really two skill-sets at play in a game that includes both action and exploration, one for each type of gameplay. In as simple a platformer as Sonic 3 & Knuckles or SMB2, those skill-sets are comprised of the same abilities, but still applied differently - Knuckles' glide may allow him to safely swoop over a boss or cross a gap to a new section of a level that Sonic can't reach. Anyway, I liken the selection of an action skill-set to a weapon select because, really, isn't that the same thing you see in a Gradius or a Gunstar Heroes or an Earth Defense Force 2017? The pre-determination of a set of functional capabilities?

You say of Super Mario Bros. 2: "the character you choose will cast the same stage design in a different light". I find that to be a somewhat optimistic way of looking at things. For instance, the aforementioned cave from 1-2 - it really doesn't feel like it's made to be played as any character BUT Toad/Mario. Sure Luigi can make it through, but his skills don't offer any benefits - in fact, his high jump just kind of gets in the way, causing him to bump into the ceiling and making Snifit bullets harder to dodge, and his slow pick-up speed makes the bombs more tedious to deal with. I suppose that's "a different light", but to me that light seems to be revealing that that part of the level is meant for a different character - similar to the way 4-1 (Lakitu stage) of Super Mario Bros. is suited to the Fire Flower, even though it can certainly be survived without. I see how Luigi's version is different, but it's not totally clear to me how it's rewarding (it's slow and awkward to time).

I'm not saying this is a universal syndrome or that I have a problem with that, simply that my impression of the game is that it vacillates between generic-enough-to-play-the-same-with-every-character and character-specific segments, such that I don't think it really is so much more complex than "pick the character you like best, and occasionally switch to someone specific for a particular segment". There are subtly variant experiences and plenty of parts that do play uniquely interesting with all four, and there's certainly nothing to dictate that you must have a favorite character, i.e. that you can't equally enjoy playing with all four, but I've never found nearly enough variation in the bread-and-butter gameplay between characters to make it feel any more like four games in one than Pokemon Red is 1.1390625e+13 (150^6) in one.

Bearing that in mind, neither Super Mario Bros. 2 nor Super Mario 3D World is purely an action game. There is exploration and (light) puzzle-solving to be done as well, thus the characters' exploratory skill-sets come into play when I'm making a selection. In fact, in Super Mario 3D World my choice is dictated almost entirely by how I'm looking to play the game. While the characters are largely balanced, the heavy use of scrolling and mobile and rhythmic obstacles, like the Train levels, the gate level [fill the number in later], and the rolling tiles in Star-2 certainly suggest faster characters for better scores and play times. With that on top of the tendency for Green Stars and Stamps to be hidden past high and long jumps, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to designate Mario and Toad as the action characters and Luigi and Peach as the explorers. So, playing with that understanding, I don't even really need to be on the lookout for Luigi- or Peach-specific puzzles - I can just plow through the fun-runs with Toad and not worry about missing a Star, knowing that when I go back with Peach I'll have a much easier time grabbing it anyway. 

I don't think I've come across any (or enough to remember) "puzzles" complex enough that they demand character-specific solutions (yeah, Peach can cheese a lot of stuff, but so can anyone with a Raccoon suit) - the game has not broken my general Mario mentality of playing stages once for challenge and once for completion - the difference here is that I have different characters suited for each play-through. That's really nice - since I'm still going for completion on every run, I get to see multiple variations on the action and on the puzzles. But again, I don't think the game provides a compelling argument to play every stage with every character. And that's not even touching on the fact that a larger number of the levels are built around equalizing mechanics like the boost pads and beep-boop blocks that essentially nullify character benefits. 

Golem: That got me thinking; one key difference between Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario 3D World is the sense of platforming. I notice fewer bottomless pits in Super Mario 3D World, lessening the importance of someone like Peach. On top of that, verticality isn't played up as much, either--after all, judging how tall something is in 3D World is harder than in 2D. So, I might pick Luigi in Super Mario Bros. 2 if one level has those plants that shoot fire straight up, since he'd be able to jump over the fire. I don't think I ever have trouble jumping over anything in Super Mario 3D World. In all, the size of my jumps is less important for regular old action, meaning it (pretty much) only holds relevance when I'm exploring. That's on top of the other gestures that even out character attributes that you mentioned, such as powerups and boost pads.

So, when it comes to something like Super Mario Bros. 2, I think you don't give "subtly variant experiences" enough credit. Assuming you enjoy the game enough to play all the way through four times, it's neat that the characters tweak that experience. It's not an entirely new game, but I gain a new appreciation for old challenges. So far, in Super Mario 3D World, I've struggled to find enough subtle variance to care. These days, I'm usually just picking Mario because I can't find something to care about in the other characters. (Rosalina aside, who opens up new attack possibilities.) Granted, that's working alongside my general fatigue with the game, so I'm already biased against it.

But it sounds like you'd say the game is fairly balanced between action and exploration? You have one approach to the stage where you just clear it, and another where you collect everything, so it sounds like you pick from Mario/Toad just as often as Luigi/Peach.

Yourself: When it comes to a mechanic though, is it fair to presume you enjoy the game enough to play all the way through four times? I'm not even sure I agree with the unpleasantly specific thesis, "if you like SMB2, you'll love playing through as all four characters! If you don't like SMB2, you won't!" Given the presumption that one likes the game enough to play it multiple times, the proclivity still exists for a player to pick the same character that felt best the first time. That's typically how I end up playing any given game - as you said, we're assuming I'm already motivated by other factors to replay, so I don't tend to re-evaluate the character selection process. If I decided I liked Mario for 3-1 the first time, there was probably a reason I made that decision, so I'm likely to stick with Mario for 3-1 the second time. 

I think the issue we've been skirting is simply a difference in the way you and I play games. We both enjoy gameplay that encourages experimentation, and selection is an explicit mechanic through which a game can facilitate tomfoolery. I think the conversation on SMB2 has pretty clearly illustrated the two sides of the issue - your approach, to uniquely combine skills with challenges to gradually uncover more information about every individual part of the game, and mine, to try to solve the puzzle of which selection maxes some metric for each situation and then to put together the solutions to form a grand picture of the game. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the way you think about it is: "what is Mario's version of the game like? How does it compare to Toadstool's?" Whereas I think about "which parts of the game belong to Luigi? Which are played as Toad?" Don't get me wrong, I'm not coming out in support of the Sonic 3 & Knuckles / World of Illusion approach, where there are portions of the stage ONLY accessible by a single character, because figuring out which parts I like to play as whom - solving that puzzle - is entirely why I like character select. But that rarely involves actually playing all the parts with all the characters.

Back to 3D World - I think we both land in the same place, that for the purported experimental avenue that the character select provides, there aren't enough original rewards to reap from the levels to justify exploring it. No to your latter question, I wouldn't say 3D World is anywhere even close to balanced between action and exploration. As I said, I still go for completion on every run, even the "action" run, and the game is so light on puzzles/exploration that I usually do get the 100% on that Mario/Toad attempt. It's only maybe a quarter of the time that I find myself dropping to the Luigi/Peach pool for a collection rerun. It's a slightly different kind of play-though, but one that I only experience on a small fraction of the levels.

Golem: That's a succinct way to put it--that is, "what's X's version of the game like?" versus "which parts of the game belongs to X?" You know, using X reminds me that that's what X4 versus X5 is like. Putting aside the question of whether or not one would actually want to play X5, you get character selection on a per-level basis because some levels work better with a ranged weapon, while others feel better with a strong melee move.

Is the conclusion that Super Mario 3D World's characters ultimately satisfy no one? I mean, I'd take it over New Super Mario Bros' character selection any day, but they aren't different enough, and the stages don't do much to evoke their differences. On the other hand, if you're building a game for four-player coop, I can see why you wouldn't want the characters to stray too far from one another.

Yourself: Yeah. The conclusion is that it's a game that's made for co-op, so going too out-of-bounds for an interesting single-player character would've made it a hassle to play. I'll give them that co-op is fun, and that given more balanced stage design - a Super Mario Galaxy 2, if you will - I think the differentiation between action and exploratory characters would be sufficiently interesting. Of course, the portioning and flow of levels in Galaxy 2 vs. 3D World is an entirely different conversation... and one we almost had instead of this one, had I fired off my half-completed opening email before yours on character select.

It figures you would bring up X4/X5 - this conversation actually made me want to go back and replay them. I always enjoyed the distinction between X and Zero in X4, feeling like it really was two different games, but never got a feel for it in X5. 

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

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

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

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Super Mario Land (Game Boy / 3DS VC)

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

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

Games Started:

Capsized (XBLA)

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

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

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

Dragon Quest IX (DS)

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

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

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

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

Injustice: God's Among Us (Xbox 360)

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

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

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

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

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

Capcom Arcade Cabinet (XBLA)

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

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

Traveling through the uncanny valley to Super Mario Land

WOW Super Mario Land is weird. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, the least legitimate-feeling legitimate Mario title I've ever played. Mario Paint and Mario's Time Machine feel more in league with the rest of the franchise. I've played (I... think?) every other Mario platformer ever made (haven't picked up 3D Land or New SMB Wii U yet, but will); Land just happened to be the last classic I got around to. So turns out it goes a little like this:

What the hell is this? Do I even need to add a comment? Thing is, I've played Super Mario Land 2, and it is NOT this. Land 2 has got its own idiosyncrasies, but was clearly shaped from the mold of Super Mario World. Now I know why it's the only Game Boy Mario anyone mentions. Really, Super Mario Land 2 is not a sequel to Super Mario Land. Silly me for making that assumption. I realize Land was released in 1989 when the series was still pretty hot of the presses, but it's still post-Super Mario Bros. 3 - you can't say the series conventions hadn't been set in stone. 

Set in stone like those ramblin' Moai men chasin' down a grayscale rendition of the original SMB Mario sprite. Am I witnessing Mario vacationing in Gradius? That might help to explain the bombshell that is the UFO parked at the beginning of 2-1 - has Mario always been traveling by UFO? I don't remember that from the other games; then again, nothing precluded it. Except, you know, this whole thing called sanity. And don't come at me with "you could see the UFO in the background of various earlier stages, so obviously Mario stole it / was abducted", because that doesn't exactly ground the scenario. Ohhhh, Mario stole the UFO and flew it to Gradius. K. Still, this is just general silliness acceptable in a series as inherently fantastical as Mario, even if it does feel a little more Super Show than Super Mario Bros. Even the submarine and airplane scrolling shooter levels feel acceptably experimental, if a bit hackneyed (throwing shmup levels into a platformer was about as unique at the time as throwing a turret segment into an FPS today).

Anyway, Mario has been transplanted into foreign settings before - Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) was based on a completely different game! But - and I don't think this can be ascribed to the fact that I first played 2 when I was 5 - Shy Guys and Beezos and Crowfoots don't feel all that different from Goombas, Koopers, and Bazingos. It can't be the foreign elements of Super Mario Land that make it so strange; no, in fact, it's the familiar elements. Everything in the game is almost recognizable, but rendered with some unnecessary twist that makes it outright bizarre. It's a classic song played in the wrong key. And on recorder. 

The first half of the game's familiarity comes from its, ahem, "real-world" settings. Mario starts at the pyramids and makes his way through Bonefish Grill, the above-depicted Easter Island, and, of course, Japan - cringe/laugh-inducingly introduced with the Asian Theme Song. It's not that Mario hasn't dropped by a pyramid before, but here they're littered with traditional Egyptian iconography and he fights sphinxes. It's clearly meant to be Egypt, not just a fantasy Mushroom/Turtle world based on nondescript imagery like castles and pipes. Completely distanced from reality, the sillier trappings of the Super Mario Bros.' Mushroom Kingdom whiz by without a hiccup like any children's cartoon. But when Mario is stomping a winged Moai into a pancake, then that pancake waits a second before flipping off the screen with an alien whir, I feel like I'm watching Superjail or something.

The more unsettling half-familiarity comes from the traditional Mario elements. Many note that this is the first Mario game not to have relied on Shigeru Miyamoto's input, being produced instead by the legendary Gunpei Yokoi. Yokoi is grounded in the routine: as always, Mario spends Super Mario Land busting blocks, collecting 1UPs, shooting flower-powered projectiles, and bopping Koopas on the head. Yet these activities are each rendered with a bizarre twist: as never before or again, the blocks are half Mario's width, 1UPs are represented by hearts, fireballs bounce around at 45 degree angles like billiard balls, and stomping Koopas TRANSFORMS THEM INTO BOMBS! A more subtle but genuinely awkward change is the removal of the "powering up/down" gameplay freeze that occurs when Mario grabs a mushroom or takes damage in every other series entry.

Okay, so the first change I can understand. The developers wanted a large, identifiable Mario sprite, but they also didn't want to lose screen real-estate, so they scaled down everything but Mario. This mitigates the cramped feeling of other Game Boy transfers like Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge and Metroid 2, but leaves Mario feeling like Gulliver on a visit to Lilliput. Even weirder is the choice to stick with the ultra-flat original Super Mario Bros. sprite, which, at twice the size and half the detail, doesn't mesh with his environment at all. Far more detailed (and humanoid) Mario sprites had already been introduced by Super Mario Bros. 2 & 3, so it's a bit of a mystery why they weren't chosen. The rest of the changes are just nonsense. They're Yokoi saying "let's make this game different" while changing the most trivial things possible. The Bomb-Koopas come across the weirdest, though I imagine they were driven by a reluctance or inability to reproduce the complex Shell Physics engine of the previous games.

The thing is, the game isn't bad by any means. None of this actually plays to its disadvantage beyond an initial culture shock, and in fact the game's only outright flaws are sloppy physics, poorly implemented checkpoints, and the extremely low difficulty and short length. So I can - and do - fully recommend it to any Mario fan, just to experience the weirdest trip Mario ever took. But get it for free like I did. No - I didn't emulate it, you asshole! I would never do that! YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE! How dare you?! I got it as a prize for being a Gold Member of Club Nintendo. Nerd.

The Bad, the Good, and the Ugly: Marios

The Bad, the Good, and the Ugly takes a look at a character archetype and breaks down where it's gone right, wrong, or just plain weird. While the effort may seem perfunctory, we hope to examine the consonance (or dissonance) between high-level concepts and their practical execution. 

I'm not here to tell you the best Mario game. I wouldn't dream of it. That's for you and your local priest or medicine man to resolve. Rather, I'd like for us to have a calm, level-headed discussion about which incarnations of Mario should and should not exist. 

The only rule of Mario is that no one fucking cares what he's doing, he has to be fun. Funsylvania. Mario is an ideal. Almost nonstop since his appearance in Super Mario Bros., he has served as the pattern from which other player-characters derive. He is the patron saint of muckin' about, against whom all shall be judged. Everyone wants to be Mario, except for a brief and sad period where they wanted to be Sonic, who himself is really just another wannabe. At his best, we're thrilled just to steer Mario around a flat (Donut) plain. But every plumber has his fall from grace....

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The Good: Mario (Super Mario 64)

No one even understood how to make a 3D character until this. This Mario is the first and best character to deliver the sensation of running around a real environment just for play. There's no streamlining, no shortcuts around physical logic for the sake of gameplay - Mario runs around like a person would run around (realize that even to this day, the majority of PC games use digital control - Mario was full analog in 1996!). What's crazy is how gratifying it is. Triple jumps and wall-bounces and other complex acrobatics take some know-how, but still derive from the same one-button control scheme. Discovering what Mario can do is a game in and of itself, and the delight is in learning when and how to use your new second nature.

Oh, plus he can fucking fly. If you're going to take advantage of 3D, that's the way you have to do it.

The Bad: Super Paper Mario (Super Paper Mario)

Come on. This game is so bad. It's one of the worst games to bear the Mario moniker (excluding the million weird non-canonical cameos), it's a travesty against the genius that was Paper Mario, and it only contributes to the utter lack of substantial first-party efforts on Wii. Hmm, "contributes to the lack"? That's kind of an oxymoron. I don't think you can say that. Luckily, I can. But I made a promise that I wasn't gonna pass judgment on Mario games - not today - and that's a promise I have to keep. For the good of whalekind.

Still, the not-a-game-ness of SPM is inextricably linked to the shittiness of its edition of Mario. This is a 2D game; Mario has flourished in two dimensions for decades, longer than just about any character we know. He's to this day great in his original flatness, as New Super Mario Bros. can attest. But SPM, as a walkabout RPG without platforming or combat, trashes every precept that has made the character great. This "super" "paper" "Mario" has no momentum, he is not victim to gravity, friction, acceleration, or any other real-world forces - unless you count the Wiimote's gyroscope - he doesn't spring, he has criminally little effect on the world, and he has to bounce on enemies numerous times to make them even flinch. And don't forget - for each bounce to give maximum reward, you have to waggle the remote! I'm not as rabidly anti-waggle as some Wii-haters, but could there possibly be a worse place to require it than when MARIO JUMPS ON THINGS? He does it non-stop! Why interfere with his defining characteristic?

This is #2 on my list of reasons to blow up Shigeru Miyamoto's family, because yes, I hold him personally responsible for this game which I'm sure he had zero input on. How did Intelligent Systems make games as Intelligent as Tetris Attack, Paper Mario, and Fire Emblem without knowing what makes Mario Mario?

The Ugly: Baby Mario (Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island)

Baby Mario is just so fucking annoying and pointless, contributing in no way to the gameplay of what is one of the most overrated and unnecessary platformers of all time (is there any reason not to skip directly from SMW to Yoshi's Story?). I mean, were people really begging for Mario to be relegated to a sidekick in his own main series? And for him to be turned into a baby? Yeah, there's nothing more adorable than a screeching plumber baby (NOT baby plumber... although I guess Baby Mario does just as much plumbing as does Regular Mario). You don't even get to control him - his sole purpose is now to annoy you if you screw up. Cool, guy! Couldn't they have just invented a new stupid character to do this? They invented Bowser Jr. (or I guess Princess Toadstool gave birth to him, but whatever).

Nintendo at least had the courtesy not to make us play as BM, and one can hardly complain about Yoshi. But I do cringe every time I see him included in one of the Mario _____ (Kart/Tennis etc.) games. Baby Mario for Smash Bros.!

This one was a tough call, as Sunshine's FLUDD Mario is a weird one too. FLUDD may have been the last thing we wanted to see strapped to Mario's back, and many agree that the non-FLUDD levels were the best part of Sunshine, but I'll be damned if the thing isn't a blast to play with. So it gets an honorable mention. Even though I don't really know what the "Ugly" category even means.

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Look if my goddamn computer hadn't been blue-screening like a blue-screener for the last couple days, I would've written a better post. But it didn't and I didn't and that's where we are. There's not a lot of new things to be said about Super Mario 64, I'm afraid. I mean I guess probably no one's ever called it African-American, but only for fear of NAACP intervention.

Random thoughts for the day

None of this was worth making into a real post, or is really worth reading.

-Why do people love the springy Snakey Snake from Donkey Kong Country 2, but bitch uncontrollably when presented with Spring Mario from Super Mario Galaxy? Spring Mario is the much more interesting character variation. It provides a verticality to environments that is otherwise absent in Galaxy. DKC2 is already littered with towering stages like Kannon's Klaim and Mainbrace Mayhem. We don't need goddamn Toxic Tower. Furthermore, Mario is a precisely controlling character, so adding determinism to his movements is a change of pace. Since Diddy and Dixie already control like their feet are made out of banana peels, the loose-handling Snakey serves no purpose.

Some players reported heart attacks at this moment. I thought it was a great addition to the best galaxy in Galaxy. Certainly far better than pointless Fireball Mario (oooh, break crates for 30 seconds) or Bee Mario (what is this, Sunshine?)

-Oh noooooooooooo David Hayter isn't gonna be Solid Snake anymore. Maybe they'll get someone with a modicum of talent this time around. Admittedly, the main reason I've skipped the majority of the Metal Gear Solid series is that it plays like shit, I can't do long cut-scenes (Lord have Mercy on the time I tried to play Star Ocean: [this cut-scene feels like it's going to last] Til the End of Time), I can't care about the story ("you just have to start from the beginning!", k no), and stealth action is so overdone these days that why would I play what is unanimously agreed upon as the worst execution thereof? I could be replaying Splinter Cell: Conviction or Dishonored. Anyway, the non-main reason I have no interest in MGS is that Solid Snake sounds like such a pussy. Go watch Escape from New York. K, now you know what Solid Snake is intended to sound like. Now listen to David Hayter do the voice. When I hear that, I imagine Kurt Russell's character in the 6th grade, doing his nightly check to see if he got pubes yet. Spoiler alert: he didn't.

I also get quite the laugh imagining Hayter asking for some stupid amount of money from Konami, his ego so severely inflated that he thinks the series can't go on with him. "But I'm Solid Snake!!!!" No, Solid Snake is a drawing. You're a guy doing a comedy voice that sounds like a girl.

-Was Snake Man ahead of his time? Think about it. It wasn't until the X series (set like 100 years after the originals) that the Robot Masters / Mavericks started being animal themed. Was he a prototype for this transition, or a time-traveler from X's era? Okay so it wasn't a random thought, I'm just running with the snake thing. Fuck you too.

DLC... with Achievements! A brief duologue

Random email convo.

Yourself: I finished Sleeping Dogs last week and I'm taking a look at the DLC. Not that I desperately need more of the game, but it did have a stellar combat system that I never mind time into. It has an obscene number of tiny two-mission DLC packs, it's so stupid. There are so many that there isn't even a single collected-for-a-discount package. So I decided to check out reviews to see if any were particularly good or bad, since I'll probably get one or two (they're only $3 a pop). 

I found it inconceivably amusing that a major criticism one reviewer leveled at a certain pack was "it doesn't have achievements". So achievements now have monetary value? That's... literally everything that's wrong with the state of gaming today.

Golem: That got me thinking. I dunno why, but I'm looking forward to New Super Luigi U. If you haven't heard, Nintendo's developing a whole new campaign for NSMBU: same world map, all new levels. Part of it is probably that it's an exciting and forward-thinking idea (...in terms of what Nintendo normally does), but there's also some excitement just for new Mario levels. It sucks when you buy a whole new game that feels the same as the one from four years ago, but DLC is, well, not a whole new game. I'm just crossing my fingers that New Super Luigi U isn't $60 or something crazy.

It won't have any achievements.

Yourself: It seems like what DLC was once envisioned to be. Versus selling Fire Emblem maps for $3 a piece. A replacement for iterative sequels, rather than a micro-transaction marketplace.

Wii U doesn't have any kind of Achievement/Trophy system, right? I know some developers just build that stuff into their game (e.g. Bit.Trip Runner and Shank 2) and some have their own proprietary achievements (the ridiculous Ubisoft Uplay system). What may blow the minds of America at large is that Shank 2 actually ties unlockables to its Achievements. Unlockables? WHAT DOES THAT WORD MEAN? You mean like that new costume you can "unlock" for Ryu for $2.99?

Super Mario War: A history of The Mushroom Kingdom

I love this because of how much everyone else hates it. Anyway, let me fill you in on some Mario canon that may be unfamiliar to you, which will hopefully help you come to understand the strange ongoing relationship between Mario, Peach, Bowser, and friends. Everything I say here is taken straight from the games. I'm not relying on supplemental material like instruction booklets or spinoffs like Turtles in Time.

The first game allowing playable Koopas

For the sake of sanity, we're going to say that Super Mario Bros. is the first Mario game. It's the first one with any sense of a plot, the first clearly set in the Mushroom Kingdom, the first appearance of Toadstool/Peach, King Koopa/Bowser, so forth. It's the first non-Donkey Kong Mario that you can really give a skiff about. This first chapter of the story I'm about to relate pertains to Super Mario Bros. and its first true follow-up, Super Mario Bros. 3. I can't even say I remember where things go from there, but I'm sure it gets pretty hairy. Some sort of Jurassic Park situation IIRC.

So here's the deal. Super Mario Bros. is clearly set during a war, presumably between the Mushroom Kingdom and whatever Kingdom Bowser is in charge of (remember, his name at the time was King Koopa). We'll call it the Koopa Kingdom. Mario might be a Mushroom soldier, but his uniform certainly isn't regulation. Most likely he's a commando on a one-man crusade to rescue the princess and topple Bowser's reign. That said, it could also be interpreted that Mario is a revolutionary, trying to end a cruel monarchy, and that the entire game is set in only one kingdom - that is, Bowser is the King of the same country where Toadstool is Princess. It remains unclear, but I prefer the latter theory, if only because there is no apparent delineation between levels supposedly set in different kingdoms.

A particular narrative delight is 6-3, which gives us a glimpse at the pre-war Mushroom Kingdom. You may remember 6-3 as the black-and-white level, at the opening of which Mario softly utters "I remember now...". The black-and-white imagery is a common visual trope, indicating that this scene takes place years in the past. 6-3 is idiosyncratic in that it is the only one of the 32 stages that is completely devoid of the standard Koopa armies. No Koopers, Goombas, or even Fishy-Bloos, just a few solitary Bullet Bills foreshadowing the onslaught to come. Some have suggested that this is the first day of the Koopa invasion, a D-Day of sorts, which Mario is now recalling, remembering how far he's come.

The game is spread over the course of eight "worlds", each culminating in a castle infiltration. It seems clear from this that Mario is embarking on eight different military campaigns, each targeted at one of Bowser's strongholds. The post-boss dialogue - "our princess is in another castle" - makes explicit that Mario takes down each of these fortresses with the expectation that the princess is held within. Considering the span of his conquest and the effort it would realistically take for one man to overcome an army, it seems natural that each of these "worlds" may take place over a span of time closer to a year than the few minutes it takes to play through in the game.

This is where things get controversial. As I see it, it seems a surety based on Mario's extensive spy/informant network that he does indeed have the correct castle each time, but King Koopa manages to evacuate the princess just in time to move to his next stronghold and leave Mario fighting a Replicant and rescuing a Toad.  This explains how Toadstool was able to give birth to eight Koopa children in the span of the first game (the third being an immediate sequel). She was trapped in each castle for a year and had no choice but to... well, you've been to the Internet, I don't need to explain it to you. As Koopa has never had another romantic interest (nor do there appear to be adult females of his species), this is the only provable origin on the Koopa Kids. Also, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 pretty heavy-handedly hints that's what happened. Plus Peach is openly Bowser Jr.'s mother, so it's not like the two are... strangers to intimacy.

XCOM: is it survival horror? Hafta think.

Let me note that I'm again referring to Enemy Unknown, though this discussion will also mostly apply to the original UFO Defense, and it is specific to the higher difficulties, though not necessarily Iron Man mode (for those who haven't played the game, Iron Man is a one-file-only auto-saving mode that prevents the practice of "save scumming", i.e. reverting to an earlier save when you're losing).

As usual, we need to start from a definition of survival horror. Seriously, at this point it won't be long before I've defined just about every genre ever, I'm moving at such an annoying rate. Horror is something in which video games can really excel beyond any other medium, because the player has a much more vested stake in the action. They can't look away from the screen, because the character in the horrifying situation is an extension of themselves. Yet that notion is not what makes the genre - that's why there's that whole other word in the title. Horror can show up in action games like RE4 or Devil May Cry, RPGs like Shin Megami Tensei, or shooters like DOOM. Survival is the real gameplay meat here. Survival. What the hell does that mean. Not dying?

That creature you see before you is the antithesis of survival

That's quite the insight, "not dying". But that's common to nearly all games. If all we want to do is survive these games, surely dying must factor in more prominently than it does elsewhere. Constant threat of death? That's closer. Survival horrors are going to go for unexpected kills. Unpredictability is part of it. That's not good enough though. Jumps scares, eh. You can unexpectedly fall into a pit in Super Mario Bros. and it'll make for a hilarious moment rather than a terrifying one. I'm gonna go from my gut here. Forget the semantics. I think... survival horror is gameplay in which every forward progress the player takes raises a lethal threat to his success. A game where everything is always at risk. Because when I think about it, RE4, BioShock, and Dead Space were when the genre started to transcend itself. And why did that happen? What was lost, that made these games no longer about survival? That there were conflicts in which you felt no life-threatening stake.

Whew. That felt good. These definitions aren't always easy, because it has to be simple. If it can't fit in one sentence, you've lost it. I'm happy with this one though. Survival horror means you put your life on the line with every step. I'm not really interested in conventions and all that baggage, that's what I mean when I say the definition has to be short and snappy. We want the heart that drives the classics, so we can look at it in a new light.

XCOM is a good way to do that. Taken through the lens of SRPG, it's still a smashing game, but a familiar one. Units are fragile and expendable, weapons are inaccurate, fog of war. That about covers it. But if we look at it as a survival horror, it's a unique and expansive experiment. Now I know the other Greg out there reading is all riled up right about now and gonna tell me this is completely a writing gimmick, but hear me out. I think the game very much invites this analysis and reflects some interesting ideas back at surv-hor.

The very premise of the game is to operate a military force which ensures the survival of humanity against otherworldly invaders. On the large scale this "survival" is represented as "panic", though clearly the understanding is that if the player loses the game, civilization ceases to exist. So this is kinda like the mother of all survival games! Where the risk/progress core really unveils itself is in the individual battles. Every mission requires you to deploy 4-6 soldiers. Each soldier deployed may not come back.

You can plan and strategize and play it safe as much as you want, but in the end you just never know who might die. The situation can always escalate. This is worked into the turn-based gameplay with simple die-roll statistics. For everything that should happen, you never know that it will. This tension builds up with every move, as you ask yourself whether you want to take that step into the dark.

Yeah. I think the answer to the title is yes. XCOM is survival horror, in its own way. So the genre's not as dead as someone wants you to think you believe. There's Dark Souls too.

Top Ten: [2D] Platforming revisited

Rules for ALL top tens: 
DESERT ISLAND DISC! These are the ten games I would take if all other qualifiers were forever destroyed. That means there is a strong preference to take only one game per series/creative unit; however, this is not a strict rule. I may find myself unable to dispose of either Highway 61 (Revisited) or John Wesley Harding.
NO RANKING! The ten are presented arbitrarily ordered unless otherwise noted.
NO COLLECTIONS! Re-releases and remakes are okay, but no anthologies. Games must be originally intended as a standalone work. 
WHAT I SAY GOES! These are my choices. They aren't the games considered the best, or that were the most influential or successful. They are my subjective preferences. I will provide as much objective reasoning as I can, but at the end of the day, I like what I like and am always right, and you like whatever stupid things you like, because you're an idiot.

Yes, you've read the introduction, now read the list. Special criteria: only looking at games that are more 2D than not (gameplay, not graphics: New Super Mario Bros. is in but Super Mario Galaxy is out), only looking at games that are more platformer than not (Legend of the Mystical Ninja is probably the cutoff there, being exactly half-and-half), and not necessarily judging by which has the best raw platforming - just which is the best platformer.

For the sake of brevity, I'm going to focus on one or two elements that make each game great, rather than giving you a broad overview that you could get from Wikipedia.

1.) Sparkster (SNES)
Ah, Sparkster, ye long forgotten god in the pantheon of '90s animal mascots. Not to be mistaken for Sonic, Socket, or Sbubsy, Sparkster is a uniquely action-heavy platformer featuring the original Rocket Knight. All four Rocket Knight games have their virtues, but RKA and the SNES Sparkster (note: from here, I'm going to be using "Sparkster" exclusively to refer to the SNES game) are in a league above the other two, and most other platformers for that matter. RKA is known for its unique bosses and uh kind of gimmicky levels, while Sparkster has more expansive environments and paced obstacles. What's particularly great about Sparkster is how well it nails these broad environments.

See, most linear 2D games suck at encouraging exploration. They degenerate into collectathons (Plok, Bubsy, DKC), dilute the level design (Sonic), or make you explore every last inch of the stage to find a needle in the haystack (Sonic again, Genesis Sparkster). Sparkster succeeds though, because of Sparkster's own abilities moreso than the landscape itself. Sparkster has a jetpack which can blast him screens ahead or can be carefully used to eradicate enemies. This allows the designers to decompress the stages and also introduces an element of surprise and randomness. Sparkster doesn't have to lurch at a snail's pace (Sonic AGAIN) or make awkward unintuitive leaps of faith, because he can be launched wherever you want.

The boss battles also shine as they did in Rocket Knight Adventures, the hybrid shooter/melee combat tends to be fun, and there's a SHMUP LEVEL!!!!!!!!!! Sparkster's one downfall is that a few bosses are TOO hard, halting the game's pace.

2.) Super Mario World

When they turn the pages of history - when these days have passed long ago - will they read of Super Mario Bros. 3, or of Super Mario World? Perhaps the world will have been divided through the debate over which of these games is better, and two meganations will arise: Dinosaur Land and Mushroom Kingdom.

Dinosaur Land will tout the virtues of free-form navigation, its individual areas each offering countless forms of transport, from direct speedy bullet-trains to meandering hot-air balloons suited for methodical exploration. Airliners and underground metros will allow visitors to visit exotic locales in any order they please, such that more welcoming regions can be used as a base of operations in approaching those less forgiving.

Visitors to Mushroom Kingdom will find themselves surprised by the lack of this freedom of travel; stuck on maze-like and jammed surface roads, only the occasional one-way highway bypass will allow point to point transport. Worse yet, on entering each province tourists will find themselves forced onto a predetermined guide-path covering virtually every inch of ground, and when they've left they'll be unwelcome to return.

Did you get it? It was a metaphor. That's what a pet is for. Point is, SMB3 sucks, SMW rules.

3.) Abe's Exoddus
Cinematic platformers are a beast I've discussed before. They rely on methodical progress, trial-and-error, and thinking. Abe's Exoddus is just about the thinkingest among them. The game is littered with all kinds of puzzles of both the adventure game and Zelda variety, constantly having you slam your head against the keyboard asking why. But as I covered in my previous article, a lot of what makes these games fun, especially in the case of the hilarious Abe, is that fucking around with the tools given to you. I can't tell you how many times I've grabbed control of a Slig just to hear them babble at each other and then shot Abe and all the other Mudokons anyway. This gameplay is familiar from Oddysee, but what sells it this time around is the quicksave feature, allowing and encouraging experimentation.

Oddworld's greatest strength is no secret: the game world is an intricate, sometimes beautiful, sometimes reviling satire of the modern industrial world. Never before has an adaptation of Roger Waters' adaptation of Animal Farm been so poignant. Abe and his sheep-like friends only exist to consume and try to escape consumption, bullied into submission by Slig dogs, with all ruled by the iron-fist of the pig Glukkons. Okay, I'll admit I never read Animal Farm, because Orwell is a bit too dry and pedantic for my taste. But Animals is one of my favorite albums of all time, so at the very least I can tell you Oddworld's allegory corresponds to it.

That's a start for you, I'll be back tomorrow with the next couple top ten!