Star Fox: Fun While It Lasts

Back in January I got all excited at the thought of playing a version of Star Fox 64 in real 3D, and I have to say I haven’t been disappointed. Out of all of the 3DS games I’ve played so far, the 3D in Star Fox is by far the most impressive: giant starships fly over your head, asteroids spin lazily across the screen and flocks of space fighters swoop and twirl in front of your eyes in wonderful, glorious, eye-popping 3D. If you’re interested in impressing your friends with what the 3DS can do, then this is definitely the game to show it off to its full potential (although seeing as it’s still early days for the system, it will be fascinating to see how far developers can push it in the future).

The graphics are way, way better than the N64 original, as you’d expect, and the water and lava effects in particular are a sight for sore eyes, although overall the graphics keep that classic blocky feel of previous Star Fox games, revealing the series’ origin on the SNES. The sound effects are all present and correct as well, and it was particularly rewarding to hear all of the cheesy dialogue again, vis a vis:

General Pepper: It’s about time you showed up, Fox. You’re the only hope for our world.
Fox McCloud: I’ll do my best. Andross won’t have his way with me.

Oooh err Fox, I sincerely hope not. Speaking of dialogue, I spent pretty much the entire game trying to work out who Slippy Toad’s voice reminded me of, and it finally came to me when I was writing this post: Martin from The Simpsons. I did a quick check though, and apparently Martin is voiced by Russi Taylor, whereas Slippy is voiced by Lyssa Browne (interestingly, Slippy was voiced by men for the subsequent games Star Fox Adventures and Star Fox Assault, although I think I prefer Lyssa’s effort: have a listen for yourself and see which you prefer).

Gameplay-wise, Star Fox 64 3D is pretty much exactly the same as the original, which is no bad thing really seeing as the game was an absolute delight to play in the first place. The only major change is that they’ve now introduced an option whereby you can play using the 3DS’s motion controls – although as far as I can see, this is utterly pointless. As I mentioned in a previous post, the 3DS motion controls seem completely redundant to me, as moving your head (or the machine) out of the ‘sweet spot’ means the 3D illusion is immediately broken, so the only real way to use the motion controls is to turn the 3D off… which kind of defeats the whole point of the system. Plus why use fiddly and unresponsive motion controls when you could use the much more accurate circle pad? And why would you want to wave your 3DS around in public like a crazy person? Perhaps I’m missing something Nintendo, so please correct me if I’m wrong, but the 3DS motion controls seem to be a complete waste of time… Anyway, thankfully motion controls are optional for Star Fox 64 3D, and I found the circle pad and buttons to be wonderfully responsive. I really think that circle pad is an amazing achievement: compare it to the ‘nubbin’ of the PSP and you can see just how far handheld controls have moved on over the past half decade.

The one big flaw of Star Fox is sadly still evident: it’s just too damn short. It’s easy to finish the game on your first go, and you probably won’t be playing for more than a couple of hours. Still, the game’s longevity is increased by the fact you can unlock various routes through the Lylat System, and despite finishing the game several times, I still haven’t seen every level. However, I suppose the real key to the game’s longevity – like every shoot ‘em up -  is attempting to beat your own high score on each level, but this is something that’s never really appealed to me. As I’ve said before, once I’ve completed a game, I very rarely go back to it, so I expect Star Fox will eventually find its way onto eBay when I’ve finally worked out how to worm my way through all the levels. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted.

[Dictated by Lucius Merriweather]

Flailing and flosculation

I actually have wholesale ripped the name of this post off of a friend of mind who runs two blogs of the same names, respectively.  But it really couldn’t be a more fitting of a title for this post.

While I’m working on a few bigger pieces for the blog, I thought I’d take the opportunity to have a whole lot of stuff that, while disjointed and unrelated, are still pretty rad!

Thumb Wars

First cab off the rank, it’s no secret that I love portable games.  My last post was all about the admirable efforts of developers trying to replicate home console and arcade experiences onto the humble Game Boy.  But while retro is cool, the same phenomenon is still going on, only these days the stakes are higher and it is actually likely that a developer can come close to parity with the big end of town.  This is particularly the case with the Vita, which by all accounts is pretty damned close to replicating console experiences – with no better comparison being the handheld’s version of Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 – which looks pretty special. And if it were an arcade game, I’m sure it would come close to being ‘arcade-perfect’.  Now there’s a term I miss.

But ‘arcade-perfect’ ports on Sony handhelds aren’t a new thing, in fact two early PSP launch games were pretty impressive versions of 2D Capcom fighters.  But while Darkstalkers was pretty awesome, there was something undeniably awesome about having an as-close-to-perfect port of Street Fighter Alpha 3 in your bag for the bus trip into Uni.

A great time, yes, but definitely not the first time I was playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 on the go.  Crawfish Interactive’s 2002 go at cramming the still technically demanding fighter (despite being released to arcades in 1998) into the Gameboy Advance was certainly not to be ignored and showed that the limitations of handheld hardware could certainly be overcome with a talented development team at the helm.  The only real downside to the port was the physical lack of 6 buttons, but even that didn’t gimp the game to a point of not making it the most impressive fighter on the Gameboy Advance.

Sneaking into a smaller clothing size

And speaking of downsizing, the 3DS may be the last console to actually struggle to handle ports of current home console titles.  That’s fair enough, some of us don’t want a replicate of our home consoles anyway, but should it struggle with ports of last generation games?  Sorry Ubisoft, but your attempts at Splinter Cell 3DS look even more mediocre next to what it seems Capcom has pulled off with Resident Evil Revelations.  But mediocre of not, I am stupidly curious about Splinter Cell 3D (ostensibly a port of Chaos Theory) and will throw money at any retailer willing to put it into the bargain bin in order to find it a new home.  Frustration will ensue, I’m sure.

Frustration also ensued by the PSP entry into the series, Splinter Cell Essentials.  But popular opinion be damned, it wasn’t that bad….  Just a victim of a having to make concessions for the portable format. Admittedly though, perhaps the full Splinter Cell experience isn’t one for the road…

On Splinter cell, do you remember the incessant nay saying that went on when Splinter Cell and it’s sequel, Pandora Tomorrow, made the jump from the XBOX and PC behemoths to the humble PS2…   Painful.   At least it wasn’t the DS launch port of Chaos Theory.

Actually scrap all of the above – some things just don’t belong on portable systems in their current form.  Which is why the GBA versions of Splinter Cell and Pandora Tomorrow still probably reign as the best portable Sam Fisher experiences – providing you’re not expecting dynamic lighting and, well, 3D.

Cultural Stimulus

I actually think the Big Bang Theory is taking over the world.  Which sucks, because if the human race is going to succumb to an overlord, I wish it were slightly more intelligent and could reference gaming culture beyond just a superficial mention of Super Mario or Halo.  Whatever, I’m not losing sleep over it, I’m sure the show serves some segment of the population that thinks its more clever than it is.  Remind me to stay away from that segment.

Anyway, I have been watching a whole stack of The Guild, which is a web series that’s success has also seen it swing its way into a DVD release.  I’m not an MMORPG guy at all, but I appreciate the fact that the writer, Felicia Day, hasn’t just wikipedia-d video games and written a few references into a script.  She gets the genre and the culture, and for that reason it is worth watching, or buying, or both.

www.watchtheguild.com

Aural Pleasure

Ears are great.  The internet gets this, and provides us gamer types with all sorts of sounds that humour us with all sorts of information about video games, and video game related products.  Just in case you haven’t stumbled across it, or are just a dick without taste, the 8-4 Play Podcast is prime real estate when it comes to video game related Podcasts.  The antics of this rag-tag bunch of localisation and video game experts (including ex EGM alum Mark ‘Gaming Jesus’ MacDonald and John Ricciardi) will make you put those razor blades away for another fortnight just to hear what is going on in the world of video games in Japan.

Do it.

http://8-4.jp/blog/?lang=en

Visual Stimulation

The Killing Game Show was a brilliant game when it released back in 1991, that was fittingly wrapped up in a box that screamed ‘cusp of the 90′s’.  You know, back when box art meant something (and was probably never seen because of the high rate of piracy on the Amiga 500).  Raise your hand if you played this gem of a game!

This Is Just A Modern War Song

Let me take you back to the dim and distant past of January 2010. I’m in deepest darkest Dunstable, visiting my dear friend Curly (or Rich as he’s now known in respectable society) for his annual birthday bash. It’s rather late, and we have repaired to his luxury chalet for some refreshment and nibbles. Messrs Burke, TB and Manwich are in attendance, and they throw out the delightful suggestion that we play a newly released game by the name of ‘Modern Warfare 2′.

It turns out to be jolly good fun. Even though I am awful at it. As the evening draws to a close, I vow to keep up with my chums more often, and to this end I buy a shiny new Gold subscription to Xbox Live along with a brand new copy of Modern Warfare (the first one that is), fully intending to play with my pals online.

A year later my Gold subscription expires after I’ve managed to play online just three times, each for around half an hour. I work out that my failed attempt to join the ranks of the online gamers has cost me around £25 per hour in subscription fees. I decline to renew my subscription.

Cut to January 2012. I’m in Dunstable again, and my chums are excitedly talking about the delights of Modern Warfare 3. I shamefully admit that I still haven’t played Modern Warfare 1, despite having purchased it two years ago. They look at me with a mixture of confusion and pity. I vow to regain their trust and respect by at least making an effort to play one Modern Warfare game this decade.

But I have to say, playing Modern Warfare solo is a world away from the ribald joshing and playful oneupmanship of that birthday night two years ago. In place of the friendly, liquor-fuelled rivalry of the living room is the cold, hard, horror of war beamed directly from your telly box right into your pleading eyes.

I’ve played a fair few first person shooters, but my tastes tend to veer towards the sci-fi/supernatural (BioShock, Halo, Gears of War, FEAR 2, etc.), so playing a game whose main intention is to create a realistic representation of conflict was quite a shock. One of the early levels in the game places you in the streets of an unnamed Middle Eastern capital as part of an American invasion force, and the designers go to great lengths to recreate the confusion and chaos of warfare. Bullets zip past you from all directions, and mostly you can’t tell where they’re coming from, so you’re spinning round in a panic trying to find cover, and all the while your comrades are shouting and screaming and barking orders and one by one they’re dropping like flies and it feels like there’s nothing you can do to save them and then a grenade appears out of nowhere and BAM you’re dead. It’s as convincing a portrayal of an actual firefight as I’ve seen, and it’s eerily reminiscent of footage from ‘embedded’ reporters in actual war zones. But is it fun? Well, not really. Harrowing, perhaps. Draining, yes. Fun? No.

I guess the point is, whenever I’ve been watching footage from war zones on the 9 o’clock news, I’ve never, ever thought to myself, “Oooh, that looks like a laugh, I wouldn’t mind a go at that.” So I really rather wonder why you’d want to recreate that great war feeling in your own living room.

I realise I might be in the minority here (14 million Modern Warfare owners can’t be wrong).

About halfway through the game I was just about ready to jack it in: I was pretty much fed up to the back teeth of gunning down wave after wave of brown-skinned ‘bad guys’ before being blown to bits by an unseen grenade. Even worse, there seemed very little strategy to all the running and gunning – carefully picking off enemies from behind cover was a surefire way to meet swift grenade death, yet, against all reason, running straight at the enemy with guns blazing and grenades flying proved to be a surprisingly effective strategy. I was beginning to doubt the game’s ‘realistic’ credentials.

Then, just past the halfway point, the designers suddenly remembered they were meant to be making an enjoyable computer game rather than a harrowing war documentary and decided to include levels that are fun instead of drawn out stamina tests. It begins with ‘All Ghillied Up’.

Suddenly you’re transported from the modern-day Middle East to the Ukraine circa 1996, deep within the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. The visualisation of the deserted, radiation-ridden city of Pripyat is thoroughly absorbing, and the level simply drips with atmosphere – you really feel like you’re stepping into long-abandoned, forbidden territory. In a refreshing change of pace, the focus switches to carefully making your way past enemy guards rather than melting off the faces off insurgents with sustained machine gun fire, and the new approach makes for some heart-stopping moments. There was a particularly excellent scene in which you’re making your way across a field of long grass when suddenly an armoured column hoves into view. You drop to the ground and pray that your ghilly suit keeps you hidden from the enemy, but at the same time you need to shuffle out of the way of the incoming tanks. You know that any sudden movement will alert the troops, so you’re forced to crawl away painstakingly slowly as a 40-tonne tank bears down on you with alarming speed. Tense stuff. In fact, this level is so damn good that Now Gamer voted it number 20 in their 50 Greatest Gaming Moments.

The remaining levels of the game don’t quite hit the high point of ‘All Ghillied Up’, but they’re generally far more inventive and interesting than the first half of the game: the level in which you infiltrate a bunker against a tight time limit is particularly good, as is the final escape mission. So it’s safe to say that the single-player game goes some way to redeeming itself by the denouement – what could have been a tasteless, repetitive shooter ends up displaying some surprising inventiveness and a flair for dramatization.

However, I suppose I’m missing the point here.

The main reason that those 14 million or so gamers bought Modern Warfare wasn’t to sit there playing and replaying the single-player game, it was to shoot the crap out of their friends online, and this is where I just don’t get the appeal. I loved playing Modern Warfare 2 against Curly et al. in that epic late-night birthday gaming session, but when it comes to swapping bullets with randoms over t’interweb I’m just not interested. My limited online multiplayer experiences mostly consisted of me dying repeatedly to the mocking cries of people I’d never met, which, frankly, wasn’t fun in the slightest. Obviously, with a huge amount of patience and practice, it could eventually be me doing the killing rather than the dying, but the thought of the many, many hours I’d have to put into the game to reach that kind of level just puts me off completely.

The whole experience has really brought it home to me that I’m essentially a story gamer: I play games to see what happens next, and once I’ve finished a game once I hardly ever go back to it. I’m still partial to the odd local multiplayer session when circumstances allow, but these occasions are extremely rare nowadays, and I’ve realised that the thing I enjoy the most about gaming is being able to lose myself within an entirely new world. Which I suppose is why a game based around the horrors of real-life combat didn’t really click with me.

I guess in some ways I’m missing out on all the online fun – but on the other hand, I’m looking forward to the next drunken deathmatch in Dunstable.

PS. The title is a pun on ‘This Is Just A Modern Rock Song’ by Belle & Sebastian. I know, I’m referencing Belle & Sebastian songs, I really shouldn’t be playing these nasty war games. Anyway, here’s the song if you want to have a listen:

Graphics so real you’ll forget it’s only a game

I love portable gaming.  The sheer audacity for Capcom to claim that the graphics are ‘So Real You’ll Forget It’s Only A Game‘ is nothing short of hilarious.  Of course back in 1990, Gargoyle’s Quest probably was the best looking game to grace a handheld, and to put it in context, it was a fantastically attractive game running on a culmination of technology from the 1970s and 1980s.   But what the advertisement doesn’t tell you is that Gargoyle’s Quest, as a game, was probably the most ambitious Game boy title of the day, and even to this day is probably one of the best games for the platform.

Gargoyle's Quest (1990)

And that is simply what I love about portable consoles – the concessions that have to be made in order to deliver a quality product that appeals to whatever subset of people the developer is going for.  What I love even more is as the Game Boy (in particular) matured it tried, man did it try, to emulate what was happening one the ever-more-powerful home consoles.  And don’t even mention the fact that the Game Boy had only two buttons that were feasibly usable for game play.  Of course, that didn’t stop them from trying to implement control schemes that heavily relied on the Select Button, with one example coming to mind being the Game Boy version of NBA Jam Tournament Edition, which used the select button for the almost mandatory Turbo function.  This didn’t stop me playing more of the game than I care to think about – I just had to utilise an early version of the claw that PSP Monster Hunter fans are so familiar with.

NBA Jam Tournament Edition (1995)

There were reasons for trying to shoehorn these games onto a system that was clearly not designed for it though.  Back in the 1990s, the arcade was king, and the biggest deal in the world was that fateful day when those arcade classics came to home consoles for the first time.  The launch of Mortal Kombat on every console known to man at the time was a big deal, with September 13 1993 being dubbed Mortal Monday in an incredibly intelligent marketing campaign, accompanied by full page adverts in most gaming publications.

And the hype was worth it.  the console versions, for the most part, lived up to what was expected from an arcade port at the time, and delivered the game play that made the arcade version so popular (without the Fatalities on the Super Nintendo, that is).  Unfortunately, the Game Boy version was a shadow of its former self, delivering a game with almost unplayable levels of controller input lag, a shrunken roster, and game play that more resembled a Tiger Electronics handheld game than anything that had been seen on the Game Boy to date.  Looking at a screenshot (as below), you can’t help but see the promise though, and admire what the development team at Probe Entertainment attempted.

Mortal Kombat (1993)

Promise that was largely reached with the follow up entry in the series, Mortal Kombat II, which abandoned any hopes of emulating what the bigger home consoles could do, in favour of just making a good old fashioned fast-paced portable brawler.  The decision to develop the game on the system’s own merits reaped rewards, and although the graphics varied greatly from other console versions and the roster was again shrunken down from the arcades, the game was to date the best 2D fighter on the market for Nintendo’s humble handheld.  Unfortunately the third game in the series took a massive step backwards with Software Creations cramming an awful lot into the Game Boy cartridge, at the expense of game play.  Admirable, but perhaps a little too ambitious.

Mortal Kombat II (1994)

Of course Midway weren’t the only company to have a go at giving gamers on the go that beat ‘em up they craved.  In 1996, Atari Games entered the ring vying for some of that arcade beat ‘em up conversion money that Capcom and Midway had been raving about.  The game was Primal Rage, launched in the wake of Jurassic Park fever, and although the game in hindsight wasn’t that great, at the time it was the latest thing that had kids lining up in droves at the local arcade to play.  Not only did it look absolutely amazing with its stop motion animation, but in terms of sheer blood and visceral violence, it went toe-to-toe with the unbeatable behemoth Mortal Kombat II.  With this in mind it was a no-brainer to bring it to console audiences, and development was started across all major platforms, which by this stage included the next generation of hardware.  Obviously seeing the profitability of other genre leaders porting to handhelds, Atari commissioned Probe Software (who were handling most, if not all of the console ports) to handle the Game Boy and Game Gear versions of the game.  And the results, at least on the Game Boy version, weren’t too far off the mark.  The game looked and played the part,   and was a worthy version for those who didn’t have access to any home consoles at the time.  And while there were omissions – one character, Vertigo, was missing from this version – it wasn’t enough to render it entirely unidentifiable from its brethren on other systems.  In fact a Game Boy owner could consider that they had experienced Primal Rage even if they had only ever played the portable version.

Primal Rage (1995)

And for these achievements, I have nothing but absolute admiration for these developers who worked so hard to cram so much into the Game Boy.  By the end of its life cycle, it had seen entries in most major 2D fighter series of the day, including Street Fighter II (which played more like Super Street Fighter II) and Killer Instinct, and even a few attempts at matching what developers were achieving on the Super Nintendo, including the illustrious Donkey Kong Country experience through its sister series Donkey Kong Land, which in its lifetime saw three games that mimicked the respective entries on the SNES.  While these achievements aren’t that impressive, in particular when compared to what is being achieved these days on the 3DS and the Vita, within the confines of Nintendo’s little green- and grey-screened beast these games present nothing short of genius from the programmers working on them.

Donkey Kong Land (1995)

Killer Instinct (1995)

Street Fighter II (1995)