Konami ReBirth, followed swiftly by Konami ReDeath

Around 2009, classic-style 2D gaming was at a height it hadn't reached for over a decade. Retro series were showing a second life with Street Fighter IV, Mega Man 9, Pac-Man Championship Edition, and... um... Sonic 4. The time was ripe for Konami, action kings of the early '90s, to rise like a phoenix and show the world what hardcore gaming really meant. Few classics are as beloved as Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania, but the former two hadn't seen a commercially successful sequel in fifteen years, and the Castlevania property had completely abandoned its origins. Konami smartly chose this opportunity to capitalize on a "ReBirth" for all three series, combining retro stylings with brand new content. That was the only smart decision they made in the entire process, because...

What the hell are these games? If anything the three seem to form a contained "ReBirth" subseries rather than a systemic overhaul or continuation of their respective properties. I honestly can't tell if Konami intended to continue Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania so much as they wanted to launch a new "ReBirth" branding that would visit random classics with its trappings. The decision to use the same developer, same assets, and same art-style for all three games is beyond lame. Why are Contra and Castlevania suddenly only distinguished by palette? Think of how different Contra III and Super Castlevania IV look. It all reeks of trying to budget three games for the price of one. Could Konami possibly have conceived anything more throwaway and forgettable? Raise your hand if today, a mere four years later, you even remember the ReBirths.

The games look passable, but the unfaithful pixel art calls to mind "cell-phone game" more than "NES"

I cannot stress enough how mind-boggling short-sighted this approach was. All we have to look at is the ReBirth visual presentation to know that Konami fundamentally misunderstood what was making Capcom, Nintendo, and Sega so successful at rebooting old properties. My best shot at what was going through their minds is: "well it looks like people are willing to buy cheap old games with any graphics at all, so let's make some cheap games with old mechanics and crappy graphics". It's like it completely went over their heads that Mega Man 9 was cool for identically replicating NES graphics, or that A Boy and His Blob had intricate modern hand-drawn sprites, or that Sonic 4 brought Sonic into a lush HD revision of his classic 16-bit hangouts. There's a common denominator here - the games either go FULL retro, or they go FULL contemporary. Konami tried to forge some fanciful middle ground by opting for the sorta-retro look of recent indie games like Cave Story and Super Meat Boy: pixelated sprite art that doesn't match with any particular generation of hardware. This works for indie games attempting to evoke the general spirit of classic gaming rather than any particular era, but it has no place in fucking Castlevania. Clearly Konami didn't want to spend the cash to get a real development studio to produce Donkey Kong Country Returns-level graphics, but were also scared the public wouldn't accept throwback art. This in spite of plentiful examples that both approaches pay off.

If they were so fucking scared of retro graphics, why settle for such tired gameplay? These three games show no attempt at all at advancing or even slightly varying the mechanics of their predecessors. Gradius ReBirth kinda gets away with it, because Gradius never had any variety, but all of the classic Contra and Castlevania games played slightly differently. Instead of offering a new variation, ReBirth falls back on the most stripped-down set of mechanics. So these aren't really sequels at all. I'd accept this if we were doing a "pretend it's 1988" time-shift, but the visuals have already destroyed that illusion. If Konami was so sure they could improve on classic sprite-art, why be so conservative in the gameplay department? Pick a sandbox to play in! Again, there's a very simple explanation for this: they did the cheapest thing possible. It's like they were immensely reluctant to make these games, like they had already assumed they weren't going to make any money. I wonder if Koko does make any money these days?

Gradius ReBirth is the only one that even close to fits into its series - only because Gradius always took a step back for every step it took forward. Yes, I am referring to Edit Mode. Bring it fucking back you assholes.

I'm directing my ire at Konami higher-ups because it doesn't seem fair to come down hard on development studio M2. M2 should never have been chosen for all three of these games. They can obviously construct decent (if a bit unbalanced) action, and were these games not burdened with the responsibility of carrying on some of the greatest legacies in gaming history, they'd be fairly recommendable (and still are). But these guys had nowhere near the panache and versatility to turn out what needed to be three completely distinct entries of three completely distinct series under limited time and budget. Yes, I realize that the original Contra, Gradius, and Castlevania shared quite a bit of staff, but it must be noted that before ReBirth, M2 had only been responsible for collating and porting Sega and Konami classics to other platforms. These were the first three games they had ever developed (at least the first three they're ever credited for developing), and the early-90s Konami Dream Team they are not. Besides, I doubt they were getting much financial support. These weren't exactly headline releases - though of course they should've been.

What bothers me about the ReBirth games is less their immediate quality; rather it's what a terrible stepping stone they provide for their brands. Why rebirth your series if you can't/won't build off of that rebirth at all? There is simply nowhere to follow from ReBirth. They didn't invent any new series standards; they weakly perpetuated old conventions. What was Konami's plan for ReBirth Phase 2? More watered-down semi-remakes? Did they think that's what people wanted of the series going forward? Or were they planning a return to true classic-style Contra/Gradius/Castlevania games? In that case, why bother with the ReBirth detour at all? It was a cheap way to quickly grab and then immediately lose gamers' attention. If anything, it tarnished the name of all three properties and showed the gaming public that Konami just doesn't give a shit about its classic stable. Is it even remotely surprising that in the wake of ReBirth, Contra and Gradius once again dropped off the map and Castlevania moved directly into another reboot?

God I hate that they made Contra look like a Saturday-morning cartoon. Contra should be M-rated as fuck. At least they threw in an Escape from New York reference.

ReBirth is a cautionary example that tagging something as "retro" isn't enough to make it successful, even if it's paired with fan-favorite brands. Developers need to have actual vision that they can communicate to the player. Allow me a brief fantasy of what ReBirth could have been, had Konami assigned an actual brain to the project. Start with a wave of 8-bit Mega Man 9-style direct sequels, move up to 16-bit for a second wave, and so forth until landing on the most repeatable formula or making a jump to present-day visuals/gameplay. That is to say, it could have been an actual rebirth, leading into regrowth, leading into profit and good games all around. Thanx God this is what we got instead.

Agh! Xenoblade Chronicles has a platforming segment?!

Agh!
Aghghaghaghahgahghaghahgaq~!

You thought Monolith was just fucking with you by throwing in that jump button. Nope. 30 hours into the game, bam! Platforming. J-j-j-j-j-jump tyyyyyyyme. It's kinda like this wall/cliff face thing that you have to work your way up, complete with branching paths and collectibles. The jumping works well enough, even if the camera is clearly out of its league. If I had to compare it to something- and it's so sudden, bland, and short that I see no point in doing so - but if I had to compare it to something, I'd say it's kinda like Castlevania (64) or a watered-down vertical Super Mario 64 stage like Whomp's Fortress. See for yourself (the first three minutes here):

Check out that view at 2:35! Breathtaking - what a payoff!

I was infinitely amused that they decided to put this in. Not that the game couldn't handle it, just that it didn't need it, nor did it gain anything from it. Unless it's about to become a RPlatformingG, this segment basically classifies as a minigame. But hey, if this is what they're offering in place of the "Shinra We Love You" song-and-dance routine from Final Fantasy VII, I'll take it.

And a-1, and a-2, and-a... Ohhhhhhh Shinra Shinra we love you, Shinra Shinra we love you too! If you don't sing along out loud, the president might mail you a grenade!

Punch Out that Red Steel P3

Punch Out!!, like traditional fighting games do for 2D or 3D, gave us an expansive look at the mechanics that can be used in first-person brawling. It played up the attack/counter and illustrated how to make close-up combat an action-reaction chain, rather than relying on concerted combo strings as in more mobile games. Red Steel 2 brings some of those mechanics to life in an actual adventure, becoming more of a proper brawler than Punch-Out!!.

A quick remark: aside from branding, Red Steel 2 has nothing in common with Red Steel, a totally forgettable shooter from the Wii launch. I'm of the opinion that Ubisoft made a horrendous mistake marketing Red Steel 2 as a sequel, as it's clearly its own game, but that's another discussion. Just be aware that any time I say Red Steel in this article, I mean the second game - I've barely even played the first.

The elephantberg in the room is of course motion controls, but let me save that for the end of the discussion. As soon as the first baddies appear and you see the enemy-tally popup below your health bar, you'll know this game is a brawler. It's even so kind as to remind you with semi-invisible lazer-walls that block your progress until you clear the enemies. There's really no shooter left in this architecture; you enter a room, the foes roll out of the woodwork, and the dance continues until one side is lifeless on the floor. You'll engage enemies individually, but the threat of those surrounding you remains present.

The sword combat is a loose application of what we learned in Punch-Out!!, with horizontal/vertical slashes standing in for high/low punches and dodging becoming more free-form (since you can move in any direction). Attacking from the sides and behind becomes a major strategy, as does protecting your own flanks. The best expansion on the formula is the addition of special moves which translate a quick sequence of inputs into a scripted sequence of blows onscreen. This makes you feel like one of the opponents from Punch-Out!!, lending character and player-determined style to what would otherwise be a vanilla fighting-style.

Where Red Steel 2 really shines is in the immediacy, the sharp viscerality of the battles. Something I alluded to in my recent Dishonored post was the brutality inherent in being so close to your victims. While Red Steel 2 doesn't attempt any intelligent commentary on the violence, it does turn it into a furious whirlwind that flies by your screen so fast that you can't help but feel like a wicked samurai. This is where the first-person identification with your avatar becomes critical - you aren't watching a Dante-esque badass blow through a swarm of nasties, you yourself are bringing each one down individually. The impact this brings to a brawler goes beyond what it contributes to a shooter, because you're right there, speedily dashing and twirling around.

Sorry that I couldn't find a great gameplay video - most people apparently suck at this game or refuse to properly use the motion controls, instead trying to play it as an early Wii "waggle" game and thus not being able to do the moves properly

This would be a blast on it's own, but goes even further thanks to the Wii MotionPlus controls. The validity or usefulness of motion controls as a whole is a sea to sail at another time, but in a game attempting to draw you as close as possible to the violence, their contribution can't be overstated. Are they necessary to make Red Steel 2 work? I don't think so. The FPBing has enough going for it already. But the difference they make particularly to special moves is what sells the game. Especially when returning to a game after not playing it for a while, I'm always annoyed to have to remember that A-X-X-Y-X does the big fancy combo. It's a level of inapproachability. Here all you need to know is that if you want to do a left-right swing followed by a stab, you... do a left-right swing followed by a stab.

I'm gonna wrap up this discussion next week when I bring you up to date on Zeno Clash (which I bought last night) and maybe a bit more of Dishonored.

Punch Out that Red Steel P2: A meditation on First Person Melee

There may not be an established FPB (first-person brawler) genre, but if we wander through the annals of gaming history (okay) we'll stumble upon a few games that approach the notion, or at the very least contain elements of influence for the theoretical genre-to-be. The most outright, blatantly advertised-as-such game is probably Zeno Clash, but because that's pretty obscure and I've yet to play it, you'll have to hold your pants on while I discuss some games that anyone has ever played, Punch-Out!! and Red Steel 2. Please note that I'm more familiar with Super Punch-Out!! than its NES precedent, so I'll be using the franchise name to refer to the games interchangeably. They aren't that different.

So why the hell Punch-Out!!? Not only is the game not first person, but it's clearly a fighting game, not a brawler. It's so close over-the-shoulder though (your character is goddamn transparent!) that I'm willing to use my imagination and call it first-person. Since the camera is static, there's clearly nothing that would fail to translate to a first-person game. As for the dueling nature, come on guy. You know brawlers and action games are just wide-scale implementations of fighting mechanics! In 1992 the terms were completely interchangeable - Final Fight was liberally referred to as a fighting game, and Street Fighter as a beat-em-up. I don't think it's that hard to imagine a Punch-Out!! with three or four fighters in the ring, but the game was so caught up in being a realistic boxing simulation that Nintendo was afraid to cross that line. So let's look at the mechanics.

It's not obvious how to make a fighting game fun without bogging it down in Systems (look at Guilty Gear and it's Super-Counter this and Hyper Roman Mega Greek Cancel), but Punch-Out!! was way ahead of its time. Sometimes it's dismissed as a rhythm game, but that's not any fairer than calling Arkham Asylum the same thing. There are clearly rhythmic elements to the combat, simply because the interplay is reactionary. The player has to observe, look for patterns and openings, and respond with defensive and offensive maneuvers. A pure rhythm game requires fixed responses to cues - when you see an X on the screen, you press X. Punch-Out!! creates gaps for improvisation. If a jab is coming, you can duck, block high, dodge left or right, or counter-punch. Which to do is left to the discretion of the player and his overall strategy. Reflexes are key, but so is strategy. How do you outsmart your opponent and knock him into submission?

I make an Arkham Asylum comparison despite the fact that Punch-Out!!'s combat goes beyond that. It can't simply be transposed into a third-person overhead action game. The strategy of the combat plays up a relationship between the player and his opponent, a direct chaining of relentless action and reaction that keeps them locked face-to-face. There's no backing away, no running for cover - the tension is built because the battle is up-close and personal in a first-person perspective, because every missed opportunity is not just the loss of a hit, but a gained opportunity for the enemy.

This brings us around to the complexity of this enemy. The focused combat needs an opponent worth focusing on, something that can't be taken down by a repeated string of standard attacks. Attacks need to follow some structure in order to allow the player any strategy beyond blind reflex, yet a vast repertoire has to keep him on his toes. Punch-Out!! gives the combatants a flurry of moves to draw on, even more than the player has at his disposal, and distinguishes different opponents by their preference. Learning these preferences also serves to slowly build up the player's own skill-set, his understanding of how to deal with moves in every situation.

What says complex, sophisticated foe better than clown?

Punch-Out!! is a game offering a lot more than meets the eye. It's not a simple rhythm game and certainly not a boxing sim, but rather a first-person fighter that demands the same acuity and alacrity as its side-scrolling and third-person peers. A FPB could stand to learn from the complexity of Punch-Out!!'s opponents and the tension it builds with locked-in head-to-head battles.

The Last Story: The Game That Kind of is a Strategy RPG (if you squint)

(Yourself is compiling his list of top ten strategy RPGs, so I figured I'd write about the second one I've ever played. The first one being Knights in the Nightmare.)

There's a sense of desperation in JRPGs today. You see a general frustration with PlayStation-era JRPG trends as the genre tries to gain new relevance. Combat can't be all menus, cutscenes absolutely must be skippable, so on and so forth.

Enter The Last Story. Initially, its combat doesn't do anything out of the ordinary; you attack automatically by rubbing up against foes, your party members assist you in real time--stuff I first encountered in Final Fantasy 12.

But with only a few minutes of gameplay under its belt, The Last Story introduces stealth shooter mechanics. By holding ZR, you can aim a crossbow in third person, and by pressing A, you can hide behind cover. So, by crawling behind cover, you can sneak around enemies and snipe them. I understand the need to experiment with the genre, but does it really help to throw in elements from Gears of War WinBack?

I found that one particular battle from the first chapter highlighted The Last Story's stealth shooter side. Up ahead, the enemy formation held one healer surrounded by grunts. If I decided to charge straight forward, I'd meet the grunts head on. I could handle them easily, but the problem was that healer. He could heal them from his protected position behind a line of grunts. The front line would constantly get healed, and I'd never break through their formation.

The smarter option was to sneak around the side of their formation, using cover to remain hidden. Luckily, the enemy party hadn't seen my party in hiding. So, I tip-toed behind cover until I found a good location for sniping the healer with my crossbow. I fired a shot, all but taking him out, and all hell broke loose as the enemy party realized I was invading their personal space.

The same formation that seemed so advantageous to my enemies was now their downfall. Once I killed the healer, I was planted right in the middle, able to strike their back line of troops. Meanwhile, the three other members of my party rushed up to meet me and took out the front line. The battle was clean and quick.

The largest difference between RPGs and strategy RPGs is the sense of space. In strategy RPGs, you can flank enemies, you can bottleneck them, etc. In games like Shining Force, spells have an area of effect; Blaze level 2 hits any enemy within a two-block radius, for instance.

And that sense of space is what stealth mechanics add to The Last Story. If you study the terrain, you can often use it in your favor against the enemies. For example, attacking an enemy from behind cover will deal bonus damage. In other words, where you attack is important.

The Last Story has a nifty assemblage of mechanics that develop the JRPG's action/strategy edge, but at the end of the day, they're often undercut by execution.

Taking a strategic approach is often pain-staking compared to the tried and true method of running into everything until it dies, especially given the low difficulty of many battles.

And, when the game does encourage you to play around with landscape and stealth, your party members will be sure to give you the full run-down on how to win that fight. For instance, for the battle detailed above, my party immediately told me exactly what to do.

But it was worth a shot, and it's a game I'll gladly tip my hat to.

La-Mulana, first reactions (and link to original)

Still sick as a dog that has mono, so I've got a bit of time to play La-Mulana while I'm in bed. This game is being presented as downright terrifying by those who've played it, with horror stories of no healing items, no way to progress without a guide, and a secret hard mode that can be permanently activated simply by reading the wrong stone tablet. The difficulty is being played up without much discussion of reward - I suppose proclaimed old-schoolers find difficulty a reward in and of itself.

The game has some great sprite art that ranges between 8-bit and 32-bit styles

That being said, I took the plunge because I like adventure-style platformers (Monster World, Muramasa, Ufouria (weird game)), loved the music, and can generally get a kick out of a good puzzle. I have a pretty strict no-guides rule when I play a new game; it's my opinion that if it takes me three hours to solve a puzzle, that's three hours the game intended me to spend. Then again, when I spot the hallmarks of poor design (poorly translated clues, indecipherable pathways (the "holy shit, I can go there?" effect), click everything rooms), I'm not going to hesitate to let GameFAQs save the entire game from being ruined by one moronic puzzle. See Simon's Quest for a game where I think it's perfectly legitimate to use a guide, and Wonder Boy III for one where you never should.

So where's La-Mulana gonna fall? With the puzzles being labeled simultaneously as "brilliant" and "I needed a guide", I wonder if some people know what good design is at all. For me it sounds like there might be a frightening amount of wandering and wondering. Or trial-and-error, and in a game with save points spread thin and limited health reserves, trial-and-error is a grim prospect.

La-Mulana was born as a freeware game with MSX-style graphics (MSX is an old game computer that never made it big in the US, for my readers who don't know that, which is none/all zero of you). If you don't want to spend ten bucks on the WiiWare game, check out the link below - but be warned, this version of the game is MUCH more difficult

So far none of those dark prophecies hold true! Two hours have gone by in no time and had me moving along without a hitch. The hardest puzzle so far was an Indiana Jones reference that I deciphered in all of ten seconds, and anywhere that I've had to experiment, the negative consequences were never a significant setback. Screwing up a puzzle usually just landed me in a completely different room with more secrets of its own - I never felt the need to trudge back to step one and start over because there's been so much else to do. Thus far it's a far denser game than Metroid, so the situation never feels hopeless. There's always somewhere else to investigate. If the game can keep this up for the rest of its duration, it'll be a smashing success. If anything, the biggest challenge at this point is that there is so much to do and so many places to look that I feel like I'm forgetting things. Hopefully that non-linearity is intentional and doesn't come back to bite me in the ass.

Oh yeah, and the whole limited health thing. The platforming is a bit rigid, so you can always take it slow when things start to get tight. In general the feel is of Metroid (can't believe I have to provide a link for Metroid but I have CERTAIN readers who don't know up from down - which is okay, you SHOULD be learning), where each individual hit from an enemy is barely a scrape in your life reserve, and only the cumulative damage of a long and reckless expedition will put you in danger of dying. Rarely will you find yourself shockingly low on health - it's a gradual process. This creates a sense of going on individual adventures, gauged in length by how long you can make your health last. You won't find yourself with fingers crossed hoping the next room is a save point, a la Castlevania, because you have to go home to heal (luckily, as soon as you find the necessary item you can warp to any save point at any time, even from midair).

Still working on figuring out up from down? Here's a start.

Alright. Enough details, I need to go play Dragon's Trap, because I've had this playing in my head since the minute I typed "Wonder Boy". Greaaaaaaaatttttttttessssssst soundtrack everrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

You can get the original freeware La-Mulana here:
http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=lamulana

Grab the English patch and the game itself from the links on the right-hand side of that page. It's all perfectly legal, the game was released for free. As aforementioned, this 2005 edition has primitive (authentic) MSX graphics and sound, and lacks almost all of the guidance the remake provides, rendering many puzzles painfully obscure. Then again, it is free. Either way, if you like what you're hearing or what you play there, go download the WiiWare game and support a developer that jumped through a lot of hoops to get you to play his game.

SNK fighters and Wii Virtual Console

Hey you know I'm happy as a clam eating a chicken that someone out there is still supporting the VC, especially someone like SNK whose games tend not to be as well-known, but do they really have to keep releasing games that A.) are only slightly modified sequels and B.) are available in latter-day compilations? 

It's the second one that kills me - you can go to Amazon with a fifty in hand (and please, as I do, physically hold your cash in your hand and try to exchange it with the Amazon webpage as though it were a cashier - it's up to you to decide when it's not going to work and the joke is over!) and pick up: 

Fatal Fury Battle Archives V1 -         $5.73

Fatal Fury Battle Archives V2 -        $1.25

Art of Fighting Anthology -                $3.78

World Heroes Anthology -                 $0.99

Samurai Showdown Anthology -         $11.97

King of Fighters - The Orochi Saga - $7.55

The great irony of it all is that no matter how many collections and re-releases they do, SNK still refused to put out Mark of Wolves in the West, which is otherwise generally considered the best game in the series and the best fighter they ever made. Also, the even greater irony is that Last Blade is still a better game.

Apologies all around if that felt like an ad, because hell, I don't even know how to do Amazon referral links, but holy shit look at what I just wrote for a second. We're talking about a perfectly legal method, not even involving MAME or buying yourself a USB arcade controller, that requires only a PS2, to spend $31.27 (plus shaping and hand ring!) and get like, what's that, close to 20 or 25 different games? Why would you ever in your life need to spend one more dollar on an SNK fighting game? You know they're all basically the same, right? And since none of them have online and all are going to be latched to your PS2, there's no competitive scene either (plus the weird thing where Fatal Fury is supposed to be a 1P game anyway).

And Metal Slug's just as bad. Metal Slug actually annoys me even more though, because people get all happy when a Metal Slug game comes out on VC. Listen asshole, go fucking buy the collection on Wii or PS2 right now. That is REQUIRED PLAYING. Those are some of the best run-and-gun games of all time, or, almost definitely they ARE the best run-and-gun games of all time. So by heralding a VC release, not only are you giving credit to the eighteenth overpriced resale of a game that's been available (on the same platform) for years, you're also admitting that you know absolutely JACK SHIT about 2D action games (and probably HAH, this is hilarious to me, probably think like Contra III or something is the best one) and ought not to be trusted with the words "arcade", "shmup", or "difficulty".

YES I AM CRANKY. You try being sick for over a week now and being unable to swallow or eat meat or talk or even breathe properly. It's not that fun. And I could have days or weeks left to go, and guess what, it's all probably just buildup to surgery I'm going to need. Fucking sweet. So you better go enjoy some SNK fighters in a financially responsible way and then someone release a good VC game, because not all of us can live the high life right now. And maybe, just maybe, I'll eventually feel up to playing or talking about La-Mulana.

Alright alright, so as not to leave this on an entirely negative note, let me give you a quick recommendation about an SNK fighter that IS worth playing and IS worth buying and hopefully will soon be followed by its sequel on VC. The Last Blade. It's a Edo-Samurai-Period-Piece, similar to Samurai Showdown but strangely a lot more fun. The characters don't all suck and it has a much more fluid combo system. It's generally just a much more approachable game than anything SNK ever put out; the systems are spelled out clearly, there's a built in counter button, what more could you want. So go check it out, it's a great one for children and kids alike!