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Kirby’s Epic English Narrator

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In his November 2010 review of Kirby’s Epic Yarn, John Teti opened by comparing the cut scene narration to “story hour at the local library” as told by an “avuncular man”. Teti continues: “…the narrator just changes his voice as he reads the lines of each character: a bit squeakier for Kirby and a bit more serious for Kirby’s new friend, Prince Fluff. It’s a perfectly analogue intro to an analogue game.”

I wonder whether Teti would have made the same leap or the one I made had he played the UK localized version of the game which was released last week. The US version which Teti played is narrated by voice actor Dave White, born and raised in Seattle and who, from what I’ve read, does a great job of bringing warmth and levity to the role.

Thanks to a unexpectedly specific touch of localization by Nintendo, the UK version features in White’s place an English narrator. While I suspect the actor’s someone of less standing than Geoffrey Palmer of As Time Goes By fame*, I echo Richard Tutton’s view that it sounds a fair bit like him:

The combination of a wizened, measured English narrator and the craftwork-like threaded designs of Kirby’s vivid world immediately reminded me of hodgepodge British cartoons of the 70s and 80s. I used to watch classics like Roobarb and Custard (see below), Thomas the Tank Engine, and Postman Pat religiously, and the game’s opening took me right back to sitting cross-legged in front of my TV, listening intently as the likes of Richard Briers, Ringo Starr, and Ken Barrie leisurely spun an enchanting tea-time tale.

It may seem like a small touch, but I wonder if I would have had the same reaction to the American version of the game. I think I might have seen the narrative as charming and enjoyable enough, but the addition of a dry, almost Englishly lugubrious voice resonated so much with my childhood memories that I was unable to stop smiling and laughing whenever a cut scene popped up. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it let me regress throughout the whole of Kirby’s Epic Yarn, but maybe the childish whimsy of the play would have tired quicker had it not been tied together by the evocative ribbon of the narrative. Nintendo, Good-Feel and HAL Laboratory, kudos.

My play.tm review of the game will be up shortly, so look out for that.

*If anyone can shed some light on the voice actor’s identity I’d be very grateful

ADDENDUM: A quick realization that the credits are part of the final video unlocked in the Patch Plaza does indeed shed some light. The only English name listed under ‘Voice’ in the credits is Paul Vaughan’s, and a quick IMDb search reveals that (a) Paul Vaughan has done a bit of voice work in the recent past. Mystery solved?  

DOUBLE ADDENDUM: If this is true, then as GamerDork‘s Leon Cox pointed out to me on Twitter that means Paul Vaughan has narrated both Kirby’s Epic Yarn and its polar opposite bizarrely linked by punnery, 1984 shock mockumentary Threads. That’s kind of amazering.

The Best Licensed J-RPG You’ve Never Played

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My friend Rob lived at the bottom of Wimbledon Hill. We’d walk down the hill after school and I’d stop off at Rob’s place for about an hour before leaving to grab a Big Mac on the way home. Good times.

That’s the short version of the story. The long version involves having to admit that we as teenage boys sometimes spent that hour watching episodes of kid’s anime shows. The longer version involves admitting that one of the kid’s anime shows we sometimes watched was for girls. That show was Sailor Moon.

If you’ve never seen it, Sailor Moon is vapid, sexist, fucked-up madness of the nth kind. It’s probably most famous for its transformation sequence (see below) in which Serena (14 years old) transforms into her hyper-sexualized superhero form, Sailor Moon, complete with extended will-it-won’t-it fluttering of pleated miniskirt. Sick, sick, sick… and the rest of the show didn’t exactly shine a light for feminism either. And yet as vapid, sexist, fucked-up madness goes, Sailor Moon was pretty harmless if only because it was funny without knowing it was. How does a girl with two giant pigtails pull the Clark Kent disguise sans glasses? What kind of superhero calls himself Tuxedo Mask and sleeps well at night?

Sailor Moon may have been as simple as Paris Hilton, but its 1995 spin-off RPG for the Super Nintendo, Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon: Another Story, was as deep as Deep Blue – if Deep Blue had been smoking crack. But really, Another Story is the best licensed J-RPG you’ve never played.

In case you’re wondering which recess of my brain the thought to write about a Sailor Moon RPG sprang from, I was reminded of Another Story after reading what’s got to be an early contender for the most barmy gaming-related news of the year, namely that there’ll be a new Italian-exclusive Sailor Moon game next spring. Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

I digress – let’s go back to the 90s. The reason why I found the game in the first place was because my SNES died. After a winter of discontent and mourning, I figured I was well within my rights to download a SNES emulator. That eventually led to me ever extending ‘my own rights’ to the point where I had near-infinite collection of ROMs. Finding the Sailor Moon game was only an inevitability.

What I wasn’t expecting was Another Story to be so bloody fantastic. Yes, the story was mental drudgery and the rampant femininity was as sickly as a Barbie doll covered in honey, but all that was more than made up for by the game’s astonishingly engrossing battle mechanics. Very much in the vein of Chrono Trigger but with turn-based combat, Another Story revolved around combination moves between different sailor girls. Two, three, or all five girls in your party could combine to form devastating attack and defence moves, but which moves you could perform depended on the girls within your party. These moves ate up actions points (or whatever they were called) for everyone involved, though, so deciding between using the big-ass moves or playing coy with smaller attacks to preserve possible healing moves was always a tricky balancing act. And battles were rarely easy.

In the endgame you had something like nine or ten girls to choose a party of five from. With the endgame being ridiculously difficult (as was the trend for J-RPGs of that generation), especially considering the surprisingly variable way different enemies handled different attacks in Another Story, that choice was laced with danger.

Yes, we’re still talking about a Sailor Moon game here. Yes, it really was rock hard. The game never let up on you. If you weren’t levelling up each sailor girl equally, a specific battle where your weakest party members were left to fend for themselves would most likely prove a shitstorm. It was long too, pretty much as epically long as any of the mainstream J-RPGs of the time.

Let me put it this way: if it had been Final Fantasy game with a semi-decent story and a bit less focus on being a game for girls, people would be talking about Another Story and not instead make fun of its feminine healing items like ‘toilette’ and ‘fragrance’… oh shit, I’m part of the problem.  

But people don’t talk about Another Story, or at least I don’t think they do. I was pleasantly surprised to see a few Twitter folk jump for nostalgic joy when I mentioned the game earlier today, but I do have some total utter fruits on my Twitter feed so this was only to be expected. But so what? The way I see it, not everyone was cool enough to spend their teenage summers plunging hours into an RPG based on a Japanese show that embodied the country’s paedophilia problem. Well done me.

The (Bandage) Girl Gets The (Meat) Boy

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I was going to make today’s post the second part of my oh-so-exciting journey from not knowing how to hold a cricket bat to tweeting about the Ashes with Leigh Alexander, but I’ll save that for later on in the week. Instead, I’ll talk about a game I mentioned a couple of days ago: Super Meat Boy.

At its heart, Super Meat Boy is the refinement of Edmund McMillen’s Gish. It takes the unusually adhesive properties of Gish’s hero along with the game’s insane level of difficulty, and puts it together with quick burst levels, a depth of content, and an imaginatively referential plotline that sees Meat Boy ape Pokémon, Mega Man 2 and Ninja Gaiden in his quest to rescue Bandage Girl from the evil Dr Fetus.

I’m still plodding through the game – as you might have gathered, it’s not an easy one to complete – so I’ve only just unlocked World 7. The game appears to end after World 6 when you, as Meat Boy, bravely rescue Bandage girl from the clutches of Dr Fetus. But then, as detailed in a short cut scene that opens World 7, Meat Boy is suddenly kidnapped by a teleporting Dr Fetus. So in World 7 you play as Bandage Girl and traverse the levels of the fluffy but devilishly difficult Cotton Alley to save Meat Boy.

When I appeared on a recent Digital Cowboys podcast talking about how Faith saves her sister in Mirror’s Edge, I touched on how you never really see the girl get the guy in a game. Girl protagonists in games tend to be sociopathic misandrists who wear almost nothing, seemingly taunting the men they so hate by flaunting the unattainable. Getting the guy is clearly out of the question for these ladies.

I wrote an article a while back about failed attempts to feminize games and appeal to the lucrative female audience, and one of the games I laid waste to was Super Princess Peach. In Super Princess Peach you play as the often captured Princess of the Super Mario games and your task is to rescue Mario from the nasty Hammer brothers. A fantastic role-reversal, you might think, until you see how the pink-clad royal sets about saving the plumbers. Yes, the pouting, blonde Princess uses her emotions – I’m not kidding – to save the day, including crying to help her run faster. It’s a wonder she doesn’t have to dust to reveal secret levels.

In that respect, I choose to discount Super Princess Peach as a credible example of the girl getting the guy in a game, and as such I’m genuinely struggling to come up with an example where a love interest male gets captured and it’s up to the female to rescue him. And that’s where Super Meat Boy comes in.

I almost wonder if it’s playing on Super Princess Peach with the design of Cotton Alley, what with its pink fluffy maps and the music that could’ve been taken straight out of a Sailor Moon best-of compilation. The levels, though, are the very hardest in Super Meat Boy and as far as I’m aware Bandage Girl moves just the same as Meat Boy does – although when she splatters it kinda looks like marshmallow juice.

Are there better examples of games where the girl gets the guy? Or is Super Meat Boy’s Bandage Girl the first (if you discount the horribly sexist Super Princess Peach)? I suppose you could argue Yuna gets the guy in Final Fantasy X-2, but I’m convinced there must be better examples than that. Surely?

Nier The Caregiver

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Video games, like the people who play them, are often at their best when they’re not trying to be. Nier may represent an example of what I see as profound but accidental commentary via very typical game design.

In the game you play as Nier, a single father who’s searching the world for a way to cure his sick young daughter, Yonah. Nier and Yonah live in a small village which is always full of the same faces and voices. Yonah spends most of her days stuck in bed waiting for her dad to return, so in the game’s early stages you’re often leaving the village and coming back to it in your quest to find that cure.

Being a Japanese role-playing game – although in many respects it’s quite an atypical one – Nier’s home village is full of tropes of the genre. One of these, which has become more grating with the advent of dialogue-filled game discs, is the repeated script of villagers. As Nier, you’ll run past villager after villager saying out loud the same exact thing every time you pass them. Actually, I suspect this mechanic appears in most of Nier’s villages – I’m still early on in the game – but it’s the appearance of it in the home village that seems to present some accidental commentary on being a caregiver.

These exact same things that all these villagers repeat every time Nier runs past them all focus on his daughter and her terminal illness. They’ll say things like ‘that poor girl’ and ‘It’s so unfair! For all that to happen at such a young age’ and so on – I’ll probably misquoting a little but I’m sure you get the drift. Like any piece of dialogue repeated one too many times – ‘Jason!’ – these sentiments begins to grate, and quickly.

Thing is, as someone who’s been in the caregiver role a couple of times in his life, this reminded me of all the times I’ve talked to friends during those dark periods. The only thing they were ever able to say was stuff like ‘Oh poor so-and-so, it’s so horrible’ and ‘It must be tough looking after so-and-so’. And of course, while their sentiments are good and honest, the only thing those people are doing by saying stuff like that is reminding you of the reality you wish you had the power to change.

The helplessness of being a caregiver is so frustrating, and because of the level of investment involved, both in terms of time and love, you find yourself wanting to talk about anything but the person you’re looking after and the routine that both your lives have become.

Now, I don’t think Nier is trying to provide commentary on being a caregiver. Maybe I’m not giving the game enough credit because it’s certainly trying some interesting things in other areas, but since these vocally repetitive villagers appear elsewhere I’m more convinced that any commentary is accidental. And yet this mechanic manages to nail the repetitive, frustrating exchanges that most caregivers go through on a daily basis. For every villager that says the same loose word of comfort and regret as Nier walks past, I imagine him struggling to keep a brave face and not be drawn into the pain locked deep inside.

Right now as I type this out, I’m watching Nier sit on the ground, legs out in front and right arm rested on right knee, occasionally looking left then slowly right. He looks tired and resigned as his armour flutters in the breeze to the backdrop of the faint, wistful plucks of a lute. Sometimes a game, good or bad, can resonate so hard without even trying.

Re: Defending The Super Mario Galaxy

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Last week I responded to the very sexy Peter Willington’s criticism of Super Mario Galaxy and 3D Mario. Peter was kind enough to send on to me a response to my response, and with his permission I’m publishing it here. Now, I could respond again, but I suspect we’d be here all night and let’s face it, some of us would just rather watch QI. But my thanks do go to Peter for the initial vlog and for taking the time to read and respond to my witterings, and I’d love it if you would read his thoughts below:     

Sinan,

As I’ve made it known that my vlog is at times a little unclear – an unfortunate side effect of the piece being unedited, unscripted and largely unplanned in an experiment to improve my improvisational thought processes and speaking – I thought I’d answer your answer using the power of words, like a literary He-Man only less butch.

As you pointed out, I was lumping Galaxy in with 3D platformers which, while it’s a somewhat crude method of grouping titles, is a suitably accurate one, it’s a Mario platformer that is presented within a three dimensional space. It’s not, as you rightly point out, the same as 64 or Sunshine but indeed no two 3D Mario platformers are particularly similar (if we discount Galaxy 2), 64 was a little less gimmicky than Sunshine’s central water mechanic but was perhaps a “purer” platforming experience, while Galaxy‘s big innovation is that of dividing a larger, more unwieldy area into planetoids and playing with perspective much in the same way as Super Mario World 2‘s famous Moon boss did, albeit over the course of an entire game.

Your defence was of Galaxy, so I’d like to try to address that game specifically and, yep, you caught me, I got extremely bored with the title and haven’t made a whole heck of a lot of progress. I have, as you know by now, an extremely thin attention span, especially when it comes to my free time, so if I’m not engaged with a title after an hour or so, I tend to walk away. It’s a blessing and a curse in some ways, it means I have learnt to make very quick judgement calls on titles rather accurately, but the downside is that when a game begins to drastically improve after, let’s say four or five hours, I can miss out. Fortunately, game design is so yawn inducingly predictable 90% of the time that this is a rare instance, but perhaps on this occasion, I shouldn’t have underestimated Nintendo.

After all, Nintendo and I have a long relationship and the team in R&D1 were the creators of some of my most cherished memories in my formative years. They were inventive with the tech at their disposal and they created worlds full of charm from a handful of pixels. I suppose part of my biggest disappointment with Galaxy is that, while it’s certainly innovative in its world design and use of the Wii’s base technology  – god, the game looks amazing – the charm simply isn’t there. Perhaps it’s the voices the characters have been attributed, Charles Martinet for example seems like he’s aiming for “cartoon wacky” with Mario this time round, as opposed to the more martial arts inspired energy he displayed in 64. Maybe it’s that the title never really makes its mind up as to who it wants to appeal to, kids or adults, casual or core gamers and subsequently feels diluted. Or maybe it’s that I just don’t feel Mario needs to be in 3D.

You made an interesting point that games should evolve and try new things, including shifting their perspectives. I agree, without change, the industry dies, we saw that in the early eighties with the 2600, but I also think that not all change is necessarily positive. Take for instance the Sonic games, we see a series of fairly good 2D platformers hop onto the 3D bandwagon with little success and now we see it go back to 2D for its latest main series incarnation. I’m not saying that Mario Galaxy is in the same league as Sonic Adventure – I’d rather chop off my own right arm than play Adventure again, not once did Galaxy bring me to limb removal – but it proves the point that stepping forward isn’t always the right move.

I’d also like to reassure you that I think 3D (by which I mean polygonal 3D) games can and do work. I think there are plenty of genres that benefit from this element of depth; racing titles, shooters, action games etc, I just don’t think platformers benefit inherently with having the character moving with depth of field. This is due, primarily, to the minute actions you are often called upon to perform that involve the movement of said character. No other genre requires such attention to detail when it comes to the positioning of your avatar.

That isn’t to say I don’t think platformers should incorporate 3D elements, take Yoshi’s Island. It uses aspects of 3D in a 2D plane to great effect, while retaining the ease of player control that comes with games that stick to the X and the Y axis.

Which brings me to my point about control. It’s this added depth that naturally adds difficulty to judging distances and makes movement of a character harder (i.e. you have more to consider in your directions, elevation etc), and it makes me wonder whether you thought that Galaxy was a tougher game because of an inherent challenge in the design of levels or mechanics or enemies, or because the control of the character was in itself more challenging. If it’s the latter, that just doesn’t interest me, I’d rather have a nimble speed boat to dash through the waves, than a hulking tanker to ham fistedly smash through them. This goes to affect the ‘exploration’ element too, because no matter how rewarding the discovery of secret areas may be, if I’m not enjoying my time doing it, there’s no reason to do so.

But then I suppose that’s the point isn’t it, this is a question of personal taste, I’m not right and you’re not right, we just have two rational opinions that differ from one another. I have predisposed ideas of what a Nintendo title should be, sure, for me Mario isn’t about exploration. Metroid and Zelda do, yet they wouldn’t suit a side scrolling platformer, but the scarlet suited plumber does, he was made to jump on things and reach the end of a level quickly and that’s ok, that’s entertaining, from that I derive enjoyment. Though I’m glad the Mario games can be inventive and try new things, they don’t have to be 3D platformers any more than they have to be first person shooters and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be interested in the Italian handyman rocking an Uzi any more than the next sane person.

So thanks again to you Sinan for taking the time to intelligently pick apart my argument (and for letting me foul up your blog with this writing) because it’s made me think harder about what I don’t like about Galaxy and 3D Mario games as a whole. I’ve just been playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii for the first time and it makes me glad to know that you can have your Galaxy, I can have my World and we can both have fun in the Mushroom Kingdom. 

Cheers,

Peter Willington

Defending The Super Mario Galaxy

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After watching the esteemed Peter Willington describe why he thinks 3D Mario does not work, I thought I’d quickly pen a defence. This defence, however, is specifically for Super Mario Galaxy, which I believe shouldn’t be lumped in preceding 3D Mario games. I’d advise you to watch Peter’s vlog before reading as my train of thought will be a lot clearer if you have it as a point of reference. In fact, I’m going to address this post to Peter. I can so be N’Gai Croal.

Peter,

So, Mario 64 was the first 3D Mario as you well know. Nintendo’s aim was to realize a 3D world that retained the look of Mario, the feel of Mario, but to use the extra dimension of perspective to focus on another dimension of the play: exploration.  In Mario 64, this focus on exploration drew away from the challenge I and many others would associate with games like Super Mario 3 and Super Mario World. I don’t think Mario 64 was much about skill jumps or careful dodges, but more about exploration and discovery, both on a physical and visual level.

Skip ahead to Super Mario Galaxy, then. Nintendo goes back to a Mario 64-esque interpretation of 2D Mario, but adds gravity to the mix. Simple as? No not at all. I think you’re putting Galaxy into a box that it broke out of.

Super Mario Galaxy is full of challenge, so much so that it proved too challenging for a lot of players in its later stages. Just as Nintendo realized it had to open the space around the player to best use 3D in Mario 64, it learnt to close that space to help create challenge in Super Mario Galaxy. Mario’s galaxy-based adventure was full of restrictions that promoted challenge. I suppose you could call them tight, linear paths. There were tiny moving platforms, tricky long jumps and triple jumps to be made in narrow spaces over chasms. There were bosses that required just as much timing if not more than any of the stupidly easy bosses that populated 2D Mario games.

Galaxy also made fantastic use of lighting and shadows to give its world depth, difficulty with perceiving depth being one of your major problems with 3D Mario. Thing is, once I started to trust in Galaxy’s shadows, which is something that was pretty much instinctual with the game – even the coins had their own little circular shadows – I had no problem with the game’s depth. It’s in Galaxy 2 where you had to find all those floating green stars, some of which were floating over nothing but air, where problems arose. No shadows does equal big problems. Galaxy never had such trouble because it played it far safer with item collection. Your point about depth within a 2D plane confused me a bit. It seems to me that a lot of 3D games have pushed through this apparently fundamental issue. What is it about Mario that seperates it from other 3D games to the point where depth becomes such a problem with it? What makes Mario so hard to control in 3D compared to other characters?

The other thing regards Galaxy and challenge is that the bigger challenges come far later in the game – which I suspect you have not yet reached. If you can just sit back and enjoy the charm of exploring its opening worlds, you’ll find the game is far more willing to get tricky with its later stars. The 2D perspective is employed far more, not that it has to be but it is, and the 3D levels become incredibly tricky. Anyone who’s completed Luigi’s Purple Coin Challenge in Galaxy knows what I’m talking about. Wow, that level. It is some kind of mental, it really is.

Nothing in Mario 3 or Super Mario World had me repeating a sequence so much, and the repetition had nothing to do with being unable to overcome the 3D perspective. It was just plain tricky. The jumps had to be timed perfectly. A set route through the level had to be planned intricately. In Galaxy 2, in which the level reappears, I also had to be aware of an endless procession of cloned enemies mimicking my every move, expertly dodging and jumping over them to ensure safe passage over the rapidly disappearing platforms. It was intense, it was difficult, and it was really very fun. But it seems you will never get far enough to enjoy it, which is a shame. Here’s a teaser video to give you an idea.

Why did Galaxy leave these trickier levels until later? Because that’s what most games do, even the older Mario games. It just makes sense. Super Mario 3 didn’t really require timing until around its fourth world. Super Mario World was very easy up until the Special World, which was really just a bonus bit for advanced players.

Actually Super Mario World was much more about exploration than timing compared to the Mario before it, what with its bounty of secret routes to be discovered. Just because something is in a 2D perspective it doesn’t mean it can’t be about exploration – Zelda and Metroid taught us that, right? While exploration is a bigger part of the 3D games, it’s not as if it wasn’t part of 2D Mario. I think it’s a red herring to say Mario was all about the skills before 3D came along. Maybe your point is more that the exploration was not what you enjoyed about 2D Mario, which is fair enough.    

Having said that, I find your argument with regard to 3D Mario not working has more to do with personal pigeonholing than anything about Galaxy or the concept of 3D Mario which means they don’t work. Exploration is a valid part of the majority of video games and I’m not sure why Mario can’t be about that facet of play unless that facet of play is not to your taste. But if exploration isn’t to your taste then… well, I’m unsure how many video games you will ever get to enjoy. It certainly doesn’t mean 3D Mario doesn’t work and that argument also disregards how the Galaxy did have something for those who craved a bit more challenge like yourself – even if it took a little exploration to get to those parts. Is exploration really such a chore? Was Super Mario Galaxy really that charmless to you? I guess what I’m asking is whether or not you’ve played Sonic and the Secret Rings. Because that’s a particularly charmless game which abuses all three dimensions without consent. Galaxy is no such thing in my eyes.

There are other parts to your argument I would question. You argue that Galaxy had story where it shouldn’t, as if the game was so full of narrative compared to something like Super Mario 3. It really isn’t. There’s a bit of story here and there – maybe 20 minutes of playtime at most – but it isn’t like the game is a Chaucerian odyssey.  Also, if you actually see the story through to its end then there’s a really delicately told tale about death to be appreciated – rather impressive for a game that’s meant to be for kids. A lot more impressive then Super Mario 2’s ‘it was all a dream’, no?

To me, and it often feels this way with those who dislike 3D Mario games, I think your problems with Galaxy have more to do with a failure to put expectations to one side. 3D Mario shouldn’t be 2D Mario, that would be dull. And if you don’t like 3D Mario then fair enough, it’s not like Nintendo will ever stop making 2D Mario games. And honestly, no-one’s demanding that you like Super Mario Galaxy. Well, there probably are people demanding that you like Super Mario Galaxy, but these are the kind of people who like to call N4G home. The rest of us just respond with rather wordy blog posts and then move on – maybe not straight away, but eventually.  

But to say 3D Mario doesn’t work is, in my opinion, like saying all 3D games don’t work, that a franchise shouldn’t try to evolve and adapt to a new perspective. And frankly, my friend, gaming disagrees with you on that one. Well, Sega might agree with you, but those dudes aren’t going to admit it to our faces.  

Cheers

Sinan

The Too Human Story

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“This is going to benefit Silicon Knights in ways that are profound and long-lasting.” – Denis Dyack (pictured) speaking earlier this year about funding received for his team’s upcoming project.  

Earlier today I tuned in to Episode 40 of the GameCritics podcast – if you haven’t tried it then you haven’t lived. Or at least you’re missing out on a regularly superb games discussion forum. 

This particular episode was about deconstructing why two of the GameCritics crew love their respective games, ones which everyone else typically heaps scorn on. It was an unusual concept, one which I applaud heartily. It made for a great mix of insight and humour, but more than that it provided an exceptionally balanced take on games most of us ridicule.

One of these games was Too Human, a game beloved by smooth-talking host Tim Spaeth. It’s Too Human and its respective discussion that I’m concerning myself with here. I found it revealing listening to Tim’s reasons for loving the game, and indeed why the others casters shared a weird fondness for it. The common factor that seemed to come up – and don’t laugh – was Denis Dyack.

Now, I’m not suggesting Tim has some deeply stored feelings for the Silicon Knights president – maybe he does, but that’s for the (happily married) Tim to tell us. What I think Tim’s comments do echo, though, is that the games industry – or at least the games press – has a real fondness for the Too Human story. No, I’m not talking about the cybernordic beefcakes and all that bullshit, but about the story of the game’s protracted, troubled development, all led by one Mr Dyack.  

Too Human took nine years to make and in that time it changed a hundred times over. It demo-ed at E3 1999 with technically staggering cut scenes and a whole range of interesting ideas, so it caught attention straight away. But rumours of a cancellation surfaced and the game got delayed while Silicon Knights concentrated on Eternal Darkness and Twin Snakes. In the meantime it switched platforms from the PS1 to the N64 and eventually to the Xbox 360. As the years passed, and as the look and ethos of Too Human seemed to be in constant evolution, hopes for it ever hitting store shelves became drier and drier.

As far as I remember, things really turned sour after the E3 2006 demo. The demo was flatly ridiculed and – somewhat understandably with hindsight – the game was deemed last-gen. Since then, Dyack has been on the defensive/offensive when it comes to the games press – and anyone really. There was the war of words (and lawsuits) with Epic about the power of Unreal Engine 3. There was the NeoGAF saga which saw him banned repeatedly for his vociferous outrage, resulting in him making calls for the forum to be taken down. Then there was the 1UP Yours lecture during which he talked over the heads of listeners – your author included – with complicated theory on online discussion. And, of course, there were the conspiracy theories about members of the press having it in for the game.

Meanwhile, the game itself got seemingly forgotten. It became ridiculed on forums the world over before it had even hit retail. Industry followers began to realize Dyack’s lofty promises of meaningful choices, expansive combat and groundbreaking co-op were dropping one by one like flies. For all his ambition, when Too Human released it flatly failed on nearly every level, and most significant of all on a commercial level. It was not worth the wait.

Back on the show, Tim described this story with an edge of romanticism. He talked about Dyack’s promise of a deep, meaningful choice that players would have to make, one centred on becoming human or cybernetic (as suggested by the game’s title) and how this would shape the game’s story and mechanics. Amusingly, this choice ended up boiling down to a wholly arbitrary one at the beginning of the game. Tim commented in a half-joking way that he had a weird respect for Dyack for having the balls to completely fabricate his ass off about what his game could do.

There is a certain allure to the Too Human development story, for sure. It’s kind of fascinating to see what the game went through, what it came through, what it started as, and what it became. And in Dyack you have someone who is somewhat off the deep end and more than a little self-involved, but is genuinely entertaining and is an endless well of curious and interesting ideas, some of which the industry should actually listen to – you heard it here first.

And, as Brad Gallaway said on the show, for all the people mocking the game to high heaven, the truth is that Too Human is not all that bad. It has a bunch of problems and it does oh so many things wrong, but I wouldn’t go as far as to call it a bad game. It’s OK. Well, maybe a bit less than OK…

The problem, though, is when you strip that story down to the bare facts it’s hard to see it as romantic in any shape or form. Too Human was a failure, a failure that took up nearly a decade of hard-working developers’ lives. Why? Because of bungling that one can only help but feel centred around its enigmatic lead designer, a man so hell-bent on his vision and ideals that things started to become more about him than the game. Clearly, the game suffered for it. Even without presuming – and I’ll admit there’s an element of presumption here – that Dyack neglected the game to feed his own ego, it’s clear how his outbursts affected Internet-based perception of him and through him the game. That the demo was downloaded a record amount was a red herring – people just wanted to try the game out and cast their vulture-like judgements of epic failure.  

His staff suffered for it too, around an eighth of the nearly 200-strong Silicon Knights team losing their jobs in the aftermath of the game’s release. I can only wonder what financial and family problems the whole team went through as they strove to create a game successful enough to cover all the time and money spent. As far as I’m concerned, the Too Human story represents one of the sorriest the industry has ever presented, one that ultimately culminated in the release of a below-average video game and a lot of lost jobs.

I’m not arguing that Tim solely batted with a ‘Dyack’ play during the show, in fact he had an assortment of defences for the game, and I think most of them were pretty strong – as were the criticisms from others, mind you. All I wanted to point out, amidst the romanticism that really stood tall towards the end of the discussion, was that as a development project Too Human was a total disaster with dire consequences, and it’s for that reason it will remain unforgettable in my mind.

Four months ago, Silicon Knights received a $4 million influx of federal money to help fund its next game. “In our industry, you have to be very careful never to announce anything until the right time. We can only say it’s a next generation title and a high production value game,” Dyack said, speaking to the Welland Tribune. “That’s all we can say.”  

All I can say is that I hope he keeps his promises this time.

The Secret Pokémon Club

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This is in response to and follows on from the questions posed by Michael Abbott’s recent Brainy Gamer post, “Same as it ever was”, which considered why gamers love to return to Pokémon games.

Around four years ago I stayed on my own in Chichester for a few weeks. Chichester is a lovely, picturesque city in the South-East of England, full of history, full of greenery, and full of cake shops as my girlfriend and I would later discover on a subsequent, rather unhealthy revisit. What it’s not full of is all that much to do for a twenty-something with a short attention span.

So, on one lonely Chichester night, I walked down to the nearby newsagent and bought a Merlin Premier League sticker album and 10 packets of stickers. For the uninformed, these are albums you fill in with stickers of Premiership footballers playing that season. I spent the next hour carefully tearing open the packets and attaching each of the stickers neatly within white borders in an attempt to relive or reprise a part of my childhood.

What I was left with was a flimsy magazine with some stickers of overpaid, mostly unattractive men in it. It was a completely unfulfilling, useless experience. I wondered why my childhood self wasted his precious years of youth away on such a pastime.

So why is it that I’m excited about returning to the Pokémon series with new releases SoulSilver and HeartGold? After all, Pokémon is just the video game equivalent of the sticker album, right? The entire advertisement-driven-brainwashing point of playing a Pokémon game is to catch ‘em all, the same as how filling your album is the holy grail of collecting football stickers.

We tell ourselves that Pokémon games offer surprising depth in their combat for something so obviously aimed at kids, that they offer exciting and colourful worlds to explore, that playing with friends across the Internet makes for fun, compelling experiences full of longevity.

The truth is that gamers are now part of a medium that’s increasingly becoming less about beating games. It’s a medium that’s becoming less about childish fun and more about mature, thought-provoking content. It’s a medium that can provide a spectrum of experiences and expectations within one single game. In short, it’s a medium in which nowadays beating the game typically isn’t about collecting all 120 stars, finding all 50 intelligence tapes, or completing all 64 missions.

What Pokémon represents is unashamed regression to the days when you boasted to your friends about finding the shiny, glittery sticker with the Premier League logo on it, or the all-too-rare #67 Pog that was practically a golden nugget in the schoolyard. And with the inner circle that the gaming community has built up over the years, it’s not just an unashamed regression but an accepted one amongst friends – whether it should be or not. No-one cares if you’re 8 years old, 18, or 48; as long as you’ve got a Mantyke to exchange with my Mawile then you’re alright by me. And everyone knows the score: you haven’t completed a Pokémon game until you’ve caught every last one of the buggers – yup, even that one.

In a medium that’s so keen to prove itself as grown-up, in a society that dispels fun as something that’s prohibited for adults, Pokémon is the secret club for gamers who like to compare sticker albums and make a big deal out of something that really isn’t – which is what having fun is all about.

Why Heavy Rain Should Have Been An On-Rails, First-Person Light Gun Game But Without The Light Gun

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When I went to go see Dead Space: Extraction at EA’s offices last year, I stifled a scoff when it was introduced as a “guided first-person experience”. Them some fancy words for a light gun game, I thought. Indeed, no matter how good Extraction proved to be, my thought was right on the money. Despite apt use of motion-captured characters, a realistically shaky camera, and the mind-mush that were the hallucinations, Extraction was a very enjoyable, well orchestrated light gun game.

Then again, is there something in the concept of a guided first-person experience? What are the advantages of the on-rails action and the first-person perspective of a light gun game? Is there something to them in tandem that means they could be used outside of light gun games?

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Emergent Competitive Play Within Co-op Play

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I’ve recently returned to a popular Xbox Live Arcade game from last year, the puzzling platformer Splosion Man. I’ve been looking for a co-op game to enjoy with Joe DeLia, especially in lieu of the five hour-long nightmare devoid of even an iota of pleasure that was our disastrous Too Human session.

Thankfully, Splosion Man is an excellent game to play in co-op. Any frustration with its lofty difficulty level is engulfed by the satisfaction taken from laughing at each other’s misfortunes, this providing the platform for the game’s quirky humour to really shine. There are intelligent, inventive ideas specific to co-op too, particularly the synchronized 1-2-3 countdown that removes any hindrance to teamwork from lag. All in all, it’s a better game in co-op, as so many games prove to be.

As we played through a few levels, Joe begrudgingly noted that I was constantly reaching the finishing line before him. It wasn’t that there was any bonus for finishing first; as long as one of us finished the level, we both made it through to the next one. It’s just that, apparently, he wanted a piece of the imperceptible glory too. I told him that he had to earn it, and from there we made a game of it: whoever makes it to the finish line first wins. So, we helped each other through the next five levels – you have to, such is the nature of Splosion Man’s platforming level design – but when it came to the finish, all teamwork was abandoned in a madcap dash for the line.

It reminded me of that scene from the movie adaptation of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, when Gimley and Legolas are defending the fort. The pair decides to make a game of who can kill the most enemies. Just like Legolas trashed Gimley, I left Joe biting the dust with a final 4-1 result.  

This is the emergence of competitive play within co-operative play, where the competitive play works towards the aims of the co-operative play, despite being emergent and essentially disconnected. More than that, it amplifies desire to achieve the goals of the co-operative play by providing another motivation to do so: to beat your partner. Actually, it’s more than just emergent play. It’s the emergence of a game within a game. There are rules, win conditions, boundaries, etc. That the sub-game not only works with the objectives of the main game, but actually amplifies desire to achieve them, is quite fascinating to me.

Then again, think of all the times you’ve had a bet anything like who would score the most goals in a football match for your team, or who would run their part of the relay the fastest. Co-op remains fairly fertile territory for video games, but outside of them this type of play is not so unusual.

Does competitive play within co-operative play work better when it’s emergent? I’m not sure. I haven’t really given it enough thought, but I will note that I more enjoyed the artificial competition we made for ourselves in Splosion Man than any more imposed competitive play I had with my girlfriend in New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Sure, it was fun to push her off the edge once in a while, but ultimately that game was tough enough without squabbling between us. I think that analysis reveals that drawing any conclusions from that comparison would be foolish. It might be something worth exploring, though, and a subject I will probably return to in a future post.

Still, it was something that interested me and I thought I would share it instead of plunder further along in the world of Final Fantasy XIII’s Cocoon. On the tenuously segue way-based subject of grand games with theological ideas, I was wondering if Amiga classic Mega-Lo-Mania provided a good example of the reverse i.e. co-operative play within competition.

In this real-time strategy game – although players familiar with its time-bending play will understand why that description is misleading – you fought against up to 3 AI opponents for control of sectors within a map. You could strike alliances with them, if they were willing, and indeed break these alliances at will. The AI could form its own alliances too. To keep things fair, this was more often than not completely random, and the unpredictable AI made for captivating battles and outcomes.

Obviously this isn’t emergent, but you do have temporary co-operative play that amplifies the goal of the competitive play. The key difference is that the example for Splosion Man was purely in the name of fun, while this example is with strategy in mind. I’m not sure it’s even a legitimate example, but again I thought it was worth exploring. There may well be better examples to cite.

I’ve written in my planned notes to have some sort of conclusion here, but I’m not sure there’s one to be drawn, really. Maybe that emergent competitive play within co-operative play is kinda cool. I just wanted to share an observation, really. 

Oh wait, here’s a conclusion: Joe sucks at Splosion Man – hah!