Yearly Archives: 2004

The Car Door is Miyazaki

  • Reading time:4 mins read

The Castle of Cagliostro is better than I expected, even knowing its reputation. What struck me after seeing it — aside from how reminded I was (and with good reason) of Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door — was how imperfect the movie was. How imperfect Lupin seemed, in comparison to how he might have been. After all his effort and his skill and lucky chances, he, indeed, in a move which must put a gleam in Robert McKee’s eye, fails his mission.

This is part of the standard screenplay arc; the hero must rise to a height, then fall so he might rise again. See any boxing movie ever made, and note the moronic misunderstandings every couple must face three-quarters of the way through a romantic comedy, just so the man can make it up to the woman and they can realize how stupid they were for acting like completely different people just long enough to create tension. The difference here is, although we have a pretty good idea that Lupin will succeed, somehow, in the end, it never is certain. When he does succeed, he does it not because the plot demands it (although again, it does) so much as because he has earned it: not because he must, but because he might.

This works because we see him fail. Lupin is a flambuoyant man. He swings for the ropes, and although he knows what he’s doing, there’s a certain element of risk built into this behavior. Sure, Lupin can control himself — but that’s different from being in control. And with as small a window of success as his stunts need, if it’s not one darned thing it’s another.

Take a look at the episode on the rooftop, where Lupin intends to cross the several hundred yards of empty space, to a tower. He has one plan; life has another. That he is rescued by a sight gag — should we always be so fortunate — does little to dampen the near-disaster he put himself into. By the time Lupin does so suddenly, and arbitrarily, fall, we are prepared for it. We aren’t prepared in that we expect it; just in that it comes from somewhere. Yes, these things happen — and oh damn, he almost made it. It feels unfair, and frustrating — because we know on another day he might have succeeded. Chances are, he would have. Those are just the odds. What is all the more upsetting is that it is not until then we fully realize all that had been riding on Lupin. Even his archantagonist, Zenigata, had been on his side; with Lupin’s failure comes that realization so many antagonists come to: that without the protagonist, they have no reason to be.

The solution, then, is to stack the odds. The rest of the movie plays out much as one might expect: all the characters play to their strengths; the world is set to its normal order, perhaps a little wiser, perhaps a little sadder. We get perspective on the unending battle of the TV series. We feel wistful. And the oddly-silent credits roll.

Still, what we got is better than it need be. Better than, maybe, it should be, for what it is. A movie based on a long-running cartoon: this ain’t the kind of place you expect to go looking for truth, much less of the standalone sort. The characters jump into play with no real introduction; if you don’t already know the cast, why would you be watching a movie like this? No introductions are really needed, though. Relationships are implied, and used to the extent that the movie implies them. No one needs announce himself, as the personality is evident. One look from Lupin, and you know who Fujiko is — even if you don’t, really. She isn’t in the movie enough for it to matter, anyway. If you’re still burning for information, she clarifies the matter towards the end, saying nothing that first look didn’t.

I don’t know if I need to see this a dozen times. Then, for what the movie is, maybe it would be a failure if I did. It is worth the time, however.

Oh, and Konami almost certainly borrowed from this when designing Castlevania.

Texas Gunfire

  • Reading time:7 mins read

Doom is very different in philosophy and design from modern FP shooters.

Doom is built like a console game. Heck, Romero idolizes Miyamoto. Commander Keen came out of a demo that he and Carmack whipped up for Nintendo, showing how to implement the scrolling from Super Mario Bros. on a PC (which, I guess, was a feat at the time). Howard Lincoln yawned. The Texans made their own game.

Quake is, indeed, more the prototype for the modern shooter. It’s also kind of boring in comparison — at least, for me. Here they paid less attention to actual design; more to just getting a 3D engine up. That, and getting Trent Reznor involved. I mean, they already had a template with Wolf3D and Doom. Quake was just technology. They filled in the blanks with gray textures and asinine Lovecraft references. It feels like they were bored, doing it — as well they should have been, I guess, since that’s not what they cared about anymore. And this was about where Romero started to flake out, too. Whether the rise of Superprogrammer was the cause or result of this, I don’t know.

Doom isn’t concerned with being a first-person shooter as-such, since the genre didn’t exist at the time. Instead, it is an attempt to rework the rather barren Wolf3D into as vibrant a design as possible. To do something substantial with the concept, if you will. It’s kind of the same leap as from Quake to Half-Life, because it’s the same mentality at work.

Doom’s console sensibility extends from its controls (as with Wolf3D, it’s made to be played without a mouse; the mouse only really enters when you have a Z axis to worry about) to its level design and (as someone noted) pacing, to its monster designs, to its set pieces and its idea of secret areas and items.

For one, the game just drools charisma. We all can rattle off most of the monsters in Super Mario Bros. and Zelda. We know Brinstar like the backs of our hands. There is a certain iconography even to the level design: even if on a cursory glance it might not stand out as anything special, it bores into the consciousness just as well as a cheep-cheep or a zoomer. Everything is placed preciously, exactly because there is no template to fall back on.

And, as we know, there is a certain subconscious pacing built in, for how the game introduces concepts. You run to the right, jump up and hit the flashing object overhead. It makes a chime sound and a coin pops out. You’ve clearly done something well. You hit another block and a mushroom appears. It must not be harmful, unlike the enemy you either ran into, jumped on, or jumped over a moment before, as it comes out of a block like the one which rewarded you with a chime a moment before. When you touch it, you grow. Since you’re bigger, you can more easily reach the platforms above you. You try jumping and can break the bricks. Keep going right and you hit a pipe. Then two enemies. Eventually a pit. Then a fire flower. Then a koopa troopa.

And. So on. It all sounds simple, yet so few people get it right. And since it’s supposed to be invisible, so few people notice on a conscious level when it’s missing.

Doom does this, yes, on a mechanical level. Yet it does something else, too. It paces the atmosphere. I maintain that the best part of Doom is episode one (the Shareware episode) of Doom 1. After you leave the manmade environments, where something has gone really awfully wrong, and enter the abstract flesh-tents of Hell, the game has pretty much blown its wad (pun very much intended). Then the game just becomes about shooting, and I don’t much care for it. Episode one has a certain stress to it, however. You wander the station, looking for something to restore your ailing health. The lights go out. You hear snarls in the distance. You know something’s out there — but where?

And then there are just so many hidden passages. You never know what wall might open, and how. Or what you might find (like the Chainsaw). It’s kind of like Zelda, again. Often you can see things in the distance, or through windows, that you just plain can’t access through normal means. This gets you exploring.

The whole mindset that the game creates, with all of this — the mindset that it asks for — is different. It’s more introverted. More careful. The game is as much about exploration and generally owning the gameworld as it is about blowing shit up.

There’s a certain balance here, from level to level. Just study how things are laid out. It’s no mistake that the shareware episode is the best; after all, it’s the one that id needed to be good, if anyone was going to register.

>How would you say the modern FPS has deviated from this Doom mindset? And starting where, exactly? Doom II? Duke Nukem 3D? Quake?

I don’t know. I became disgusted with the whole degenre around the time of Q3 and UT. I like what I’ve seen about HL2, from this distance. It reminds me of, uh, Myst.

…

Quake’s probably a good place to start. Or maybe you could begin with all of the knockoffs of Wolf3D and Doom, which used the same engine yet didn’t do anything interesting with it. They helped to pollute the mindspace a bit, I bet, and distract from the reasons why Doom was as excellent as it was.

Quake’s the landmark, though, for all the obvious reasons. I mean, it led the way, from Quake to Quake II to Quake III, to a technology-oriented philosophy. It doesn’t matter what you do with the engine; it just matters what the engine does. Throw in a few rules and some network code, and you have a game.

I’m oversimplifying to an insulting degree, I realize. On the one hand, the whole multiplayer thing, although it appeals to me in NEGATIVE INCREMENTS, meaning a piece of me dies every time the subject comes up, has attained something of the same distinction that a versus fighter has in comparison to a sidescrolling brawler. It’s a place to show skill and piss on other people (even more so than with a fighter, for various reasons), and if that’s your kind of thing, there are a lot of excellent games to help you vent that testosterone.

On the other, you have the Half-Life-inspired movement toward using the form for a more holistic experience — expanding on exactly the part of Doom that the Quake thread gave up on. Halo sits on this end, mostly — though a little more to the right, toward Quake, than HL. If you were to count Metroid Prime as a FPS, it would be about as far to the left as possible.

>Masters of Doom says that Quake’s formative years were sort of the epitome of development hell. […] Carmack was going off into his abstract, workaholic computer world and Romero was becoming increasingly arrogant and was slacking off more than usual. The end result, then, was a Doom clone where the engine was designed independently of the levels, which were designed independently of each other, which is why they’re so goddamned bizzare and incongruous.

Yeah! I remember that, now. I guess that’s whence came Daikatana.

For my part, I did enjoy Quake at the time. It’s not half-bad. It’s just — it leaves me empty.

One Fist Too Many

  • Reading time:2 mins read

It feels like the “Harmonica” character was inserted into Once Upon a Time in the West after-the-fact. He’s sure unnecessary. He makes the movie longer than it need be, attracts time away from the main plot for no good or interesting reason, and generally clutters the situation. I think he wasn’t supposed to be there; that Cheyenne was the only male protagonist, and that half of Cheyenne was split away to form “Harmonica” (who, note, is an Indian — yet the other guy is named Cheyenne).

Assuming this is the case — well, why? I’ve an idea it has to do with Ennio Morricone. You see, by this point he was no longer writing the music at the last moment. I understand that, after the success of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, where he wrote a number of themes beforehand, he began to work more closely with Leone, working out the music before the movie was set, such that Leone would have something to guide him, conceptually.

From how he’s used, it feels like “Harmonica” was an experiment in tying the music more closely to the material. In other words, he’s an artistic gimmick. He plays harmonica (poorly), which gives an excuse for a harmonica theme to dominate the soundtrack, blurring lines that really don’t need to be blurred.

I feel that’s enough Leone for me, for now.

Under the Skin

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I think everything I’ve really liked has creeped me out just a little.

Western Deconstruction

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Structure of the first half of Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

  1. Title sequence
  2. Showdown #1; The Ugly identified
  3. Showdown #2 (and aftermath); The Bad identified
  4. Showdown #3 (and aftermath); The Good (such as he is) identified
  5. Back to The Bad; he beats a woman, showing how bad he is
  6. Back to The Ugly; the strange gunshop scene, where he displays his strange character traits
  7. (in the restored version) Added scene setting up the logic for the following scene; helps to space things out and show a little more of Tuco’s character
  8. Back to the Good, via Tuco; Blondie shows how sensitive he is, with the gun-cleaning scene; the outside world interferes for the first time, saving Blondie and setting the rest of the movie in motion
  9. (in the restored version) Back to The Bad; Angel Eyes’ eye-opening scene, where he is exposed to the effect of the war; some logic, to help explain why Angel Eyes returns when he does
  10. Back to the Ugly, then the Good; the squabble resolves. Blondie is again saved when the outside world (the stagecoach) again interferes, thus giving a greater goal for the movie and setting the third leg in motion.
  11. (in the restored version) Added scene setting up the logic for the following scene; helps to space things out and show a little more of Tuco’s character
  12. Tuco and Blondie at the mission; Tuco’s eye-opening scene, where he is exposed to the effect of the war; Tuco’s character is fully established, making Blondie more sympathetic to him
  13. Tuco and Blondie get caught up in the prison camp, to finally intersect with Angel Eyes
  14. etc.

I’ll fill the rest in later. It’s all downhill from here. Very… clean.

The removed scenes mostly help with the plot. Only one (aside from the boot thing, which is lovely) strikes me as important to the tone of the movie; that’s the early scene with Angel Eyes. The others are all nice to have, and make the movie feel fuller. More complete. I can see why they were cut, though, if cuts had to be made.

I can feel the walls closing in on me

  • Reading time:4 mins read

So everyone around me kept saying how great the new Zelda was

I don’t know. It struck me as another Zelda game, from what I saw of
it. And. I understand that some of Nintendo’s trends have been worsening. Even though Capcom’s making all of their games, these days.

Zelda used to be a thing of wonder. Now it is a template. Metroid is starting to go the same route, too. The series has been stagnating since the third game. Both series have been. It just gets more obvious, the more often it’s iterated. And the more out-of-touch and patronizing each iteration becomes.

Metroid Prime is a nice exception.

Wind Waker brings a lot of nice things to the series, just as Metroid Fusion does. The problems with them are the same, though. They don’t really succeed because in the end, the template rules. They have to answer to it, so they don’t get away with as much as they might. It’s mechanics, not experience, that Nintendo chooses to deliver these days.

I don’t give a damn about the rules. I want to feel something.

Here’s the part where I’m a wiseguy and ask which series has undergone more substantial changes over the years, Zelda or King of Fighters? I suspect most fans of either would pick the other, which is only natural. Fans of something pay attention to the small but sometimes crucial changes between iterations, while non-fans shrug their shoulders and say that they all sort of look the same.

I adore Zelda and Metroid — or at least, what they once stood for. The series have certainly changed; they’ve regressed. It’s pretty sad when the first two games are the most sophisticated, and everything else has just been about weeding away what made the games stand out from the crowd. A process of prolonged blanding. That’s what distresses me. I have come to be dismissive through one mediocre decision after another.

As far as fighting games go, KOF has evolved more in concept, and covered more ground, than any other series I can think of. If you can even compare it to other games; the series operates on its own terms. It’s more a serial novel than anything. Yet it’s a serial that only becomes richer and more rewarding as it unfurls.

Meanwhile, all of Nintendo’s series become more generalized and mathematical, drawing from the same proven design documents.

Metroid isn’t as far along the decay as Zelda, of course. Nintendo avoided the series for nearly a decade after Yokoi died. And Intelligent Systems isn’t EAD. Now Retro is doing some insightful stuff with the concept, fleshing it out in a way Nintendo never did. Zero Mission gets a lot right, especially where it borrows from Retro rather than from Miyamoto. I like the way it prepares the player for how to deal with Metroids, for instance. It is, however, still mired in the same hyper-safe, inbred theory that Nintendo’s been using since 1991. And with every generation, that theory generates more genetic defects…

If every chapter of KOF were 2002 or NeoWave, I would feel the same as
I do about Zelda. (Conversely, this would probably please a lot of people.) If a game like Wind Waker or Fusion were allowed to follow through on its own ideas, rather than bow to the Miyamoto machine, I would be inclined to care more.

I’ve not really played Majora’s Mask. It’s the only Zelda game aside from Wind Waker to look interesting to me since the NES. I played for about half an hour, and in that time noticed that all of the models were recycled from OoT. That wasn’t too encouraging, though I suppose it doesn’t mean anything on its own.

240 Denarii

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I went through the day in a bizarre, stomach-curdled funk. I had a vague headache, my eyes were blurry, my temper did not exist, and I couldn’t really sleep. I blamed everything and everyone. Sometimes I had to fight back tears. I had intended another odyssey in search of a certain coffee shop. That didn’t happen. Instead, I… sat. I tried to sleep. I read. I gritted my teeth. I forgot to eat. Eventually, set out by a book on Krakatoa that I have been reading, spot in spot, in the bathroom, I began researching things on The Internet.

In that book, I had come to a passage mentioning a claim a few years ago, in a British documentary, that an early explosion of Krakatoa, in 517 or thereabouts (early sixth centry, anyway) was in part responsible for everything from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Dark Ages to the Plague of Justinian.

This got me to wondering about the “Dark Ages”. The implication that the period could have been brought about by environmental factors, such as those that come after such an eruption… well, it perplexed me. So I pulled up Wikipedia and typed in “Dark Ages” — to find nothing terribly illuminating. Since I was up for a refresher on Charlemagne, however, I followed that thread. This brought me to the revelation that Charlemagne’s father, Pepin, was responsible for the revival of a system of coinage in the land formerly covered by the Western Empire. That system, inspired by the original Roman model, was as follows:

1 libra = 20 solidi = 240 denarii

How… oddly familiar. The math was just bizarre enough to force me a double-check on the pre-decimal system for Pounds Sterling. And what do we have here.

The “L” for pound comes from Libra; the “S” for shilling comes from Solidi, and the “D” for Penny comes from Denarii.

It’s the same thing. In at least some form, the original Roman system persisted until 1971, before progress made its blow.

This revelation led me to other topics. Those, to others. Hours later, I feel… fed.

Now, I may sleep.

Postmodernism

  • Reading time:4 mins read

>The logic of the fiction in MGS2 is broken to jarring effect often throughout the game. I understand that Tim’s article states that this is the entire point. However, I would argue that that is not a point at all.

Sure it is. Well, not on its own.

The issue at play here is a kind of a meta-understanding. A defamiliarized awareness of the nature of a particular form, as it were. Or a self-awareness within that form (which is itself a form of defamiliarization). This is exactly the way that we understand our world; by taking it out of context or by summing it up in unexpected, yet somehow logical, ways. This is also how humor works.

There is, therefore, a certain built-in level of humor. There is a certain built-in level of insight about the nature of everything that is happening, as it happens. If it all serves to make some interesting observations, then the project is a success.

If you will, that subjectivity is the whole damned idea here. It’s a big part of the process of defamiliarization. It’s a big part of deconstruction. Understanding the nature of that subjectivity, on (of course) a subjective basis.

A game like MGS2 works because of the questions it raises about the nature of the videogame, about our interaction with the videogame, about our expectations of a videogame. On its own, you might consider this obnoxious. On the long term, these are questions that need to be asked — because there aren’t a lot of people asking them. Asking us to look at what our assumptions are.

If all you want to do is be entertained (that is, to have your expectations met), then you’ll have a problem with this. If you are really interested in the medium, its nature and its potential, you will greet questions like these with a certain level of delight.

I, for one, didn’t care at all about Metal Gear until a bit of MGS2 was spoiled for me. Until I began to hear about to what degree Kojima went out of his way to fuck with his audience. Then, suddenly, I was transfixed. I had a new level of respect for the game, and for Kojima. Because he’s using his established power to force his audience to think. It would be one thing if the game were some little-known release with no media attention. Kojima had the limelight, however. So rather than just cash in, he decided to do something useful with that power. That, right there, is a part of the game. It’s not just the code, or even the game’s relationship with the player. It’s the wealth of expecations the player already has, going into the game.

If the game pisses people off, or confuses them — good! Frankly. It should. That means it’s doing part of its job. And that just adds to the experience for anyone who is in a position to giggle at what Kojima has done. To see the implicit humor on all of its levels; to see just what Kojima was trying to comment on; to think about what that might imply about videogames, and our relationship with them, in a broader sense. Some of those people might go on to make other games. Or at least to greet future games with a more critical eye.

It’s games (and stunts) like this which help to expand what videogames Can Be, simply by forcing us to look where we never would have thought to look otherwise. Some of us are annoyed because there’s nothing but a blank wall and a stagehand where we’re looking. Some of us are intrigued for the same reasons. It’s the latter who are targeted, and it’s the former who help to illustrate the idea for the latter. It’s just as well. They serve a purpose, too — in furthering that understanding and in heightening that humor. They just serve to make the joke, as it were, all the bigger and more profound.

It’s the sheer, high-level irreverence that gets me fired up. I get the same sensation out of observing MGS2, and the reaction to it, that I get out of a Marx Bros. movie.

If you know me, you will know that this is one of the greater compliments I can give.

The Gathering

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Someone asked why videogames — that is to say, console games — tend to be so sought-after by collectors, when PC games more often just fade away when their time passes. I’ve covered this before, in some form. Here it is again, though.

PC games are ephemeral. Console games are not. The latter feel real; concrete. The former are kind of disposable. You install them, you uninstall them. You’ll never have a standard experience. In a few years they’ll never work again. Magnetic media decay, and quickly. Cartridges, not so much. Now that everything’s on CD, the lines are blurred a bit.

I think it’s a similar question as to why VHS isn’t as collectable as DVD and cassettes aren’t as collectable as LPs or DVDs. They don’t feel as permanent. They aren’t an investment in the same way, because you don’t know if you will be able to rely on them when you feel you need them.

The whole idea of the collector is to amass trinkets which he will be able to refer to at whim. Often they are kept in as pure a condition as possible, just to preserve them for the future. Every addition is sort of like an addition to one’s extended being. One more exterior node to the mind, or personality. One more anchor to stability. One more reminder that one exists, that there is a certain order to life.

We collect because we want to capture life. Hold onto it forever. It comes from a deep inner need. Anything which can decay is a problem, from this mindset.

Of course, videogames themselves are an ephemeral phenomenon. If anything really does exist in the way we perceive it, videogames fail to do so except in the electrical space between hardware and the player’s mind. Once the electricity is gone, once the infrastructure that supports them is gone, videogames will also be gone. What physical remains remain wil be irrelevant.

Still. We all play our little games in life.

New Grounds

  • Reading time:21 mins read

Judging from what’s in the game now and from what Keiko Iju said in her intervew, it looks like Noise intends the roster in Maximum Impact 2 to look something like this:

  • Kyo, Beni, Iori
  • Terry, Joe, Rock
  • Mai, King, Lien
  • Ryo, Robert, Yuri
  • Alba, NEW, Soiree
  • Athena, Kensou, Mignon
  • Leona, Ralf, Clark
  • Chae, Chang, Jhun
  • K’, Maxima, Whip
  • Seth, Vanessa, Ramon

I’m not saying that’ll be the exact arrangement; it’s just an example. I can see a third Magical Girl taking Kensou’s place. Or a new woman, in King’s.

I’ve broken this into teams, because it seems from the current arrangement like Noise wanted a team-based structure; they just didn’t have enough characters to support it. If you notice, I’m mostly just adding one color character, as Noise puts it — meaning a supporting character or sidekick, such as Benimaru or Kensou — into each of the existing rough “teams” (going horizontally).

Color characters are the likes of Joe, King, Robert, Chang, Ramon, Whip, Vanessa. They serve no important role in the game balance. They don’t represent anything that isn’t already covered by someone more obvious. They exist mostly to provide different kinds of energy. To make the game feel more alive and varied. In my interpretation, it’s the kind of subtle variation just for the sake of humanity which makes The King of Fighters what it is.

Which might go a distance toward why MI doesn’t feel like a KOF game to me. You might notice that there are basically no supporting characters here. It’s all heroes; protagonists. Main characters. Icons. The only ones who you might count as supporting characters are Maxima and Seth — yet K’ and Maxima are close to a matched set, and Seth actually serves a bigger role in the plot than anyone outside the new characters.

Keeping Your Options Open: Reinterpreting a Legacy

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

This is an early draft of a feature or review (depending on your perspective) that soon after went up on Insert Credit. The version there is probably better. Still, interesting to compare.

I must be forward: although the series has charmed me for two decades, Gradius is as cold, arbitrary, and unforgiving as videogames get. It almost feels like it doesn’t want me to play it. For my part, I abide where I can; I turn the game off when I lose my first life. The only chapter that has stuck to me through the years is the NES version of Life Force — yet I adore the game. Life Force is one of my favorite games for the NES. It’s one of the best shooters I’ve played. It’s probably one of the games I have the greatest affection for, overall.

Clearly something is odd here.

On Metroid: Zero Mission

  • Reading time:2 mins read

> So I was wondering, why did you never review Metroid Zero Mission?

Because I moved to the other side of the continent, and some plans have gotten kind of lost along the way.

It’s a good game. I really like a few things it does, in particular the way it frames itself and what that means; how it justifies existing alongside the original version of that game. There are some little bits of narrative which I find uncommonly clever and illustrative of just how videogames work, as a medium. The game also tries hard to fix some of the problems in Fusion. Much of that is a success. Some of it, not so much.

I just had a dream in which it was common knowledge (and indeed true) that oranges, left unpicked, grew up to huge gourd-like fruits; their rinds hardened into a shell, while their pulp decayed into a juice then dried away. Oranges also grew along the ground, on vines. There was one orange in particular, on the front porch of my mother’s house in Maine, that had a fungal infection on one corner. Sort of a tumor. I knocked it off, only to realize that if it had the one infection, the whole orange was bad. Especially if I left the hole in the shell which I (unintentionally) did. So I tipped the orange over, adding a flood of rancid matured orange juice to the front lawn.

There are a few things about the game which I don’t like as well as I might, of course. Most of those would take a while to explain, though.

On the Outside: An Informal Look into Silent Hill 4

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [name redacted]

Today’s post is brought to you by Andrew Toups and the letter Æ.

People complain about Henry’s personality. I don’t get it. I mean, I do. There seems to be this idea that The Room is substantially more character-based than the earlier games, and that the tendency toward supreme understatement in all parties somehow undermines what emotional potential there might be. I don’t know how true that is, though. Taking the game for what it is, I get the idea that the characters are distant because they’re distant. Because that’s the nature of our interaction, as the player and as Henry Townsend.

See, Henry is a strangely normal guy; in a way, more typical than either Harry or James. He doesn’t have a dead wife and a lost daughter. He doesn’t have a dead wife and a crushing sense of guilt. He just has a bottle of white wine and a carton of chocolate milk in his fridge. He has no particular problems, outside his current predicament. Although compassionate for his part, he maintains his distance. As far as others are concerned, Henry’s role is of the bemused observer.

Although he’s not just a foil, Henry is a parallel for the player. You might call him a bit of a Raiden. Think of his circumstances in terms of Myst — with the Malkovich-holes in place of linking books. Notice how much of the game involves peeping — Henry, taking in his world indirectly, which we in turn take in indirectly through Henry. That is, except for the portions in room 302. Those, the most overtly Myst-like, we experience in the first-person. It is only when we leap through the holes, back into the game world, that Henry returns as a buffer.

In his relationship with others, Henry continues this role. He’s nice enough a person; it’s just, this isn’t his world. He’s busy living the life of the mind. Even when he’s standing next to Eileen, he’s still peeping. He’s not really there. He’s just watching.

It is this distance, and the safety it provides, which the game later tries to dissolve — for Henry and the player alike. When the game notices Henry is when it notices the player. When the darkness intrudes into room 302, it is intruding into the player’s own perceived safe space, where there is no Henry to fall back on.

For my part, I would find Henry’s conversations jarring if they were any less zoned-out. I would be distracted if the human relationships were any more satisfying. That would be too perfect. Perfection ruins any illusion. Henry would cease to be so very normal. He would become someone special. And he’s not. He’s no hero. He’s barely a protagonist. He’s just a twentysomething guy with white wine in his fridge. And at the end, Henry has resolved no personal problems. He remains the guy he always was. He just needs a new apartment.

Boston

  • Reading time:1 mins read

It just hit me the other day how absurd the term “scientist” indeed is, as it was considered from about two hundred years ago when it was coined up until around a hundred. If you consider that “science” is just a formal term (being Latin) for “knowledge”, and that the field that we now call science really IS basically a natural philosophy — it…

I mean. It’s like labeling yourself an ideological proponent of knowledge. Which is fine, I guess, but doesn’t it seem both inordinately arrogant and a little silly to claim that a rational consideration of exterior evidence (a reasonable, if inherently backward approach — as evidenced by the absurdity and horror that the scientific method has brought to, say, psychology, or any system where exterior variables only hint at the actual story) is equal to knowledge itself — and that you are a ideologue of this standpoint, this One Truth?

Sifting for Treasure

  • Reading time:5 mins read

When Yu Suzuki began his work on Shenmue, I doubt he any more understood what the game was going to be than I know what I’m going to eat for breakfast tomorrow. Sure, he had a plan — a plan for a Virtua Fighter-themed RPG. And when the game was finished, it had turned into a hands-on parable for the idea that life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

If, as they say, creativity is the tendency to make interesting mistakes, and if the best works are found in the editing, then intent becomes academic.

What, then, I find really interesting are those supernaturally clean concepts — statements so precise and frankly obvious that they surely must have burst from the aether of their own volition, without any human filter to muck them up. The truth is that, almost to the last, these are just the same shotgun ideas we all try to express, only edited to such a fine point that you feel you can use them as a weapon.

After a brief period of awe, I now understand Gradius V as one of these cases.

At the outset, I admit I was a little confused by how few choices the game seemed to present in comparison to past games. There is only one ship: the Vic Viper. There are four weapon modes, yet they all seem so similar; each has the same kind of a force field, all have the same laser, and what variable factors exist are much the same.

Later I saw that Treasure had merely brought the Options to the fore and center of the game mechanics, doing the uncanny obvious. With this one move, the game and indeed the whole concept of Gradius sticks as it never quite has and never would have otherwise. For the benefit of focus, away with the ripple laser and the photon torpedo and the classic Gradius shield, in favor of the Life Force model. Away with the checkpoint-respawning, again in favor of the Life Force system.*

Though — apparently not too far away. As insightful as the final game is, it looks like Treasure didn’t know any better than I what they were doing when they began. I say this because it seems they actually developed a bunch of that excess material which has so bogged down the series just for the sake of being there. When you beat the game — despite the difficulty level, I find it is more a when than an if — you are treated with a few of the details that Treasure apparently chose to leave out. Namely, a weapon select mode that includes a trove of abandoned concepts, largely inspired by past games.

As far as extras go, this one is about perfect; like a deleted scenes reel, only better. After the game knows the player has had the full experience, it eases up and returns all the toys that Treasure had taken away for fear of distraction, or even of undermining the whole game design. Even if it breaks the game, I finally get my ripple laser. I get a couple of neat missile types, which are far more useful (that is, easy to exploit) than the defaults. If I really want it, I can now use the old-style Gradius shield. I even have some wonky flavors of double shot, that I can combine with my Option type at will.

To me, this is neat precisely because I feel I have now earned the liberty to mess around. I’ve listened to what the game had to say. I’ve done what there is to do. Now we can let down our hair. It’s much the same strategy you see in fighting games like Capcom vs. SNK, where you to make want certain characters available, yet where those characters don’t really fit the main roster. So you lock them away, to make it clear that they’re just there for the fun of it; they’re not part of the actual design.

If I thought the game was brilliant before, I now also consider it generous. Particularly in regards to the insight it provides on Treasure’s creative process. It is a relief to see that they don’t just come up with these ideas; as with anyone, they have to just throw paint at the canvas, and see what sticks. Still, what editors they are!

A note: I see that Gradius V, as with Ikaruga, was designed and developed by only about half a dozen people. I think this says a lot for small teams. I wonder how the growth of team size corresponds to the way the medium has changed (and grown distracted) over the last decade. Something to think about.

* – If the game seems to draw from Life Force so much, I think there is a reason: Life Force is one of the only other games in the series to get certain key things right. Most of the other games in the series are so mired down in tradition and clutter that they become relics of broken-yet-cute ideas.