After he died earlier this year, TCM devoted a night to showing Sidney Lumet movies, and so I used the opportunity to catch two of his movies that I hadn't seen all the way through before: Network and Dog Day Afternoon.
Network (1976)
***1/2
Two old newsmen, Max Schumacher and Howard Beale are out drinking. Depressed and drunk out of his mind, Howard Beale declares to Max that he's going to kill himself. Trying to diffuse the tension of the situation, Max jokes that Howard should kill himself on the air. It would be great for ratings. The next night, Howard is doing his nightly newscast for fictional station UBS and declares that he's being replaced due to low ratings and that he's going to kill himself on the air for his last show. Uh oh. This is how Sidney Lumet's well-acted and weirdly prophetic Network begins. Beale manages to convince his superiors to let him on the air again and apologize, only to break into a diatribe about how his real problem was that he "ran out of bullshit" to say every night. Initially the network is going to do the sensible thing, and get Beale off the air and hopefully let him get some help, but suddenly in comes Diana Christensen (Faye Dunnaway), the young upstart who's been charge of programming for the network, who sees potential in the freak show quality of Beale's on-air rantings. And so, with the blessing of network exec Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), Diana develops the idea to retool the network news, and turn Howard Beale into a "mad prophet."
UBS knows they have a hit on their hands when Beale shows up on the set a fidgety, sweaty mess and delivers the now famous "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" speech and viewers around the country actually open up their windows and start yelling along with him. They give him a brand new set with a live studio audience for him to speak his crazy babble to directly. Max is genuinely concerned that his friend really is every bit as insane as he's presenting himself on the air, and tries to say as much, but he doesn't hold much sway at the station anymore. In his dealings with Diana around the station, however, he becomes entranced with her, even though he pretty much has nothing but disdain for what she's done to his beloved news department. Diana says she used to have something of a girlhood crush on Max in his younger days, and so they enter into an affair (Max is very much married) together. Max actually confronts his devastated wife about Diana--in a brief part that won Beatrice Straight a Best Supporting Actress Oscar--and is really to abandon his marriage for her. It's somewhere around the time that Diana manages to continue talking about ratings points and the 18-54 demographic while they're in the middle of having sex that Max realizes that Diana is pretty much a hollow shell of a person whose job is her life and realizes he's made a huge mistake.
Meanwhile, Howard Beale runs afoul of the higher-ups when he devotes one of his mad prophet rants to a not yet publicly announced deal to sell UBS to a conglomerate of Saudi Arabians. Even though the crowd can't possibly care that much, they're completely sold on the whole Howard Beale schtick at this point, and so when he tells them to mail letters to the White House en masse opposing the deal that's exactly what they do. The big wigs are not pleased. Beale gets marched in front of the network president, played by long time character actor Ned Beatty, in a cool scene that takes place in a darkened boardroom that has kind of a surreal quality. The president seems to genuinely put the fear of God into Beale as he tells him to take back what he says (why will they listen to him? "Because you're on television, dummy!"). And so, Beale makes amends and can keep his show, but when his ratings start declining, his superiors begin to devise different plans for him, leading into the last act of the movie.
The biggest praise I can give Network is that it's almost terrifying in how predictive it is. The greying of the line between news and entertainment is something that can be seen on any of the 24 hour cable stations today. I have to admit that there's a lot of Glenn Beck to be seen in Howard Beale, even though Beale is a sympathetic figure and, conversely, I want to kick Glenn Beck repeatedly in the nuts every time I see a clip from his show. In the case of each of them, though, they represent people (one fictitious, one real) who got famous because they gave a voice to the fear and feeling of helplessness of the disillusioned populace of their era. You can argue that the policies Glenn Beck advocates aren't actually at all good for anybody except the moneyed interests that his show is supposed to run counter to, but that's a topic for a different blog post. The show successfully predicted the end of the era where everything that came out of the mouths of anchors like Walter Cronkite could be considered the God's truth, and the beginning of an era when news began to feel exploitative and when you couldn't really tell where fact ended and opinion began. In 1976, the filmmakers never could have known that one day Nancy Grace would be sitting behind what's ostensibly an anchor desk spending an hour yelling about how every high profile defendant is history's greatest monster regardless of the facts of the case. And yet, Howard Beale's retooled show in Network is pretty much cut from the same cloth.
Peter Finch, who won a posthumous Oscar, is excellent as Beale, and manages to make his anti-establishment rants something you want to cheer along with, while still establishing that he has well and truly lost it. William Holden is very good as Max, playing him as an Edward R. Murrow sort of figure (they actually mention that his character used to work with Murrow at CBS) in a world where Murrow's brand of journalism is no longer coveted. Faye Dunnaway successful makes her character alluring despite her unwavering single-mindedness for business. Robert Duvall does a solid job as well, playing basically what Tom Hagen from Godfather would be if he were a TV executive instead of a mob lawyer. Apparently Lumet and the screenwriter both had experience in television and it shows. It's a very intelligently written movie, and the accurate portrayal of the industry helps sell what's a pretty high-concept premise.
The movie isn't perfect. After the affair subplot plays out, Max seems to fade into the background a bit, which I don't think does justice to a character that is introduces alongside Beale at the top of the movie. There's a subplot where Diana convinces a group of left-wing revolutionaries to star in a sort of docu-drama that breaks up the flow of the rest of the movie and just isn't really that interesting. Towards the movie's conclusion, its initial plausibility kind of gets strained, as all of the network execs sit around and casually discuss the merits of killing a guy on the air. Granted, the whole point is that the network has pretty much fully abandoned all pretenses of dignity and good taste and are fully consumed by the quest for ratings, but it was a bridge too far for me. Speaking as someone who's pretty damn cynical, I wasn't quite prepared for the level of cynicism that the coldly abrupt ending is dripping with. It's a well directed movie from Sidney Lumet, although I think Dog Day Afternoon, which I'll review next is better.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
30 Days of Gaming: Day 29: A Game You Thought You Wouldn't Like, But Ended Up Loving
Day 29: A Game You Thought You Wouldn't Like, But Ended Up Loving
Being this close to completing this thing, I don't want to now skip over a post or just write "I don't know." But I'm honestly coming up with a bit of blank on this. Obviously, most of the games I own I bought with the theory in mind that they were going to be pretty good. It's a little harder for me to come up off-hand with a game that I really detested the idea of, but then played through a friend or something and realized I actually liked. I'm honestly not sure there are many examples of that happening for me. I don't know, maybe I'm naturally optimistic about games before I play them, or maybe I'm a good judge of getting a read on a game when I first see it. There is something that would kind of fit the basic idea of this topic, though, if I stretch the rules a bit. And so to make a post that might actually be of interest to read, I'm going to go ahead and do that and answer:
The Entire Idea of the Nintendo Wii
I never owned a Gamecube. There was one in the dorm my senior year of college that gave me my fill of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and I was willing to pass up the opportunity to play some games that looked interesting to me (Wind Waker, Metroid Prime) and just stick with a Playstation 2, rather than put down money for another console with an inferior overall library. I certainly wasn't the only person down on the Gamecube. Nintendo needed a bit of redemption with it's next console, I thought. So then comes E3, or the Tokyo Game Show, I don't remember which, and Nintendo comes out with their new system, with an easily mockable name (wee-wee!) and that uses a weird looking motion-controller. This is from a company that has a history of making some great games, but also making stuff like the Power Glove, the most pointless of all plastic musical instrument devices in the Donkey Konga drum, and the headache-inducing nightmare that was the Virtual Boy. Would the controller work at all the way it was supposed to? How feasible would be it be for games to be developed on it? Would it end up at the back of everyone's closet in three months?
I actually haven't been tempted enough to buy a Wii at this point, although with the price dropping, maybe. It still doesn't really have a huge, diverse library of games, which will always be a strike against it, but pretty much every experience I've had with the system has been positive. They made the hardware work, and have since further refined it with Wii Motion Plus and they've given you the option of using Gamecube controllers for games that require them or are easier with them. At launch, it had a simplistic, but great party game in the form of Wii Sports and it was equally adaptable to a more involved game like Twilight Princess. The success of the platform is evident in the fact that Sony and Microsoft both copied it in the form of Playstation Move and Kinect (granted, Kinect reprsents another leap forward in that it's entirely based on a camera and a controller at all). Nintendo went out on a limb with the Wii, and actually succeeded with it, unlike similar risks they've taken in the past. People will dismiss it's "casualness," but it's accessibility has brought in droves of new people to video games, and there's no reason why people who love holding an old fashioned controller and using all 14 buttons to call out ridiculously specific audibles in Madden shouldn't also be able to appreciate the simplicity of the Wii's make-whatever-motion-your-avatar-would-make style.
Next -- The grand finale!
Being this close to completing this thing, I don't want to now skip over a post or just write "I don't know." But I'm honestly coming up with a bit of blank on this. Obviously, most of the games I own I bought with the theory in mind that they were going to be pretty good. It's a little harder for me to come up off-hand with a game that I really detested the idea of, but then played through a friend or something and realized I actually liked. I'm honestly not sure there are many examples of that happening for me. I don't know, maybe I'm naturally optimistic about games before I play them, or maybe I'm a good judge of getting a read on a game when I first see it. There is something that would kind of fit the basic idea of this topic, though, if I stretch the rules a bit. And so to make a post that might actually be of interest to read, I'm going to go ahead and do that and answer:
The Entire Idea of the Nintendo Wii
I never owned a Gamecube. There was one in the dorm my senior year of college that gave me my fill of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and I was willing to pass up the opportunity to play some games that looked interesting to me (Wind Waker, Metroid Prime) and just stick with a Playstation 2, rather than put down money for another console with an inferior overall library. I certainly wasn't the only person down on the Gamecube. Nintendo needed a bit of redemption with it's next console, I thought. So then comes E3, or the Tokyo Game Show, I don't remember which, and Nintendo comes out with their new system, with an easily mockable name (wee-wee!) and that uses a weird looking motion-controller. This is from a company that has a history of making some great games, but also making stuff like the Power Glove, the most pointless of all plastic musical instrument devices in the Donkey Konga drum, and the headache-inducing nightmare that was the Virtual Boy. Would the controller work at all the way it was supposed to? How feasible would be it be for games to be developed on it? Would it end up at the back of everyone's closet in three months?
I actually haven't been tempted enough to buy a Wii at this point, although with the price dropping, maybe. It still doesn't really have a huge, diverse library of games, which will always be a strike against it, but pretty much every experience I've had with the system has been positive. They made the hardware work, and have since further refined it with Wii Motion Plus and they've given you the option of using Gamecube controllers for games that require them or are easier with them. At launch, it had a simplistic, but great party game in the form of Wii Sports and it was equally adaptable to a more involved game like Twilight Princess. The success of the platform is evident in the fact that Sony and Microsoft both copied it in the form of Playstation Move and Kinect (granted, Kinect reprsents another leap forward in that it's entirely based on a camera and a controller at all). Nintendo went out on a limb with the Wii, and actually succeeded with it, unlike similar risks they've taken in the past. People will dismiss it's "casualness," but it's accessibility has brought in droves of new people to video games, and there's no reason why people who love holding an old fashioned controller and using all 14 buttons to call out ridiculously specific audibles in Madden shouldn't also be able to appreciate the simplicity of the Wii's make-whatever-motion-your-avatar-would-make style.
Next -- The grand finale!
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
30 Days of Gaming: Day 28: Favorite Game Developer
Day 28: Favorite Game Developer
Given the heavy representation for Square so far, you might figure I'd go in that direction, and yeah, if you ignore the couple of misfires (*cough* The Bouncer *cough*), Square has a great history with the FF and Chrono series. I suppose, too, now that they're merged, you can throw in Enix's history as well and add the Mana series and a bunch of other stuff. But gonna say that I'm including quantity and diversity in this and say...
Capcom
Capcom has one of the longest running and most instantly recognizable game series in the form of Mega Man. The basic formula has maybe been overdone a bit to this point, but its a testament to what fun platformers they are that they can keep putting out sequels with the same core gameplay and still have people love them. Recently, they've revived the series with Mega Man 9 and 10, games you can download for a mere 10 bucks and are every bit as fun as the classic one. It's much more tactfully done than Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog 4, which they're putting out in "episodes," the first of which is only four stages long for 15 bucks and really isn't challenging whatsoever. There's also the Mega Man Battle Network games--RPGs with some action-y elements--which I've only played a bit of, but which I know have a pretty loyal fanbase. Capcom's also put out the Breath of Fire series, a more traditional fantasy RPG series with dragons and whatnot.
Capcom is also responsible for the mother of all tournament fighters: Street Fighter. Back in the day, Mortal Kombat was always super popular amonst my fellow adolescents, what with people getting their spines ripped out and the line, but Street Fighter was always a much more polished and more fun game than the clunky motion-captured MK. Eventually, some Street Fighter characters appear in the X-Men vs. Street Fighter arcade game that would eventually become the Marvel vs. Capcom series. On current gen systems, Capcom offers both Street Fighter IV and Marvel vs. Capcom, both fighting games but not really requiring exactly the same skill set. SF IV has more complex move sets where some moves might require a 360 or 720 degree rotation of your D-Pad/arcade stick to pull off, and thus encourages you to experiment with different combinations to find out how you can give yourself enough of a buffer to lead into a big move. MvC has some of the same strategies, but it has more standardized and simpler moves and thus is a little more about pure reaction time and knowing when to call your partners for an assist or a big crossover combo.
On the more action-y side of things, Capcom has the most celebrated survival-horror series produced in the form of Resident Evil. I've played though some of and watched a friend play through the rest of Resident Evil 2 and some of Code Veronica, but I can't say I've played the more recent REs. MC Chris gives Resident Evil 4 quite an endorsement though. There's also Onimusha, of which I've played games 1 & 3. The first is very much like a Resident Evil style survival horror game, only in feudal Japan. It had the RE style control where Up on the D-pad was always forward and went to considerable lengths to try and creep the hell out of you. Onimusha 3 was more of a straight-up action game and, just because, had Jean Reno's face and voice in it. It had more natural controls, the areas were a little less constrained and linear, and the gameplay was a little more varied. I had a ton of fun with it. Then there's Devil May Cry, which is kind of an Onimusha like-game, in that it's an action game where you might some demon sort of creatures, only it's turned way the hell up to 11. It's a big proponent of the Rule of Cool, and has some of the straight-up most ridiculous special abilities ever conceived.
Then there's the Phoenix Wright games on the DS. They're in the "visual novel" style and aren't much for replayabilty, and I can't say that they don't drag at points. Still, they represent a very novel concept that hadn't really been done before, like a lot of the best things on the DS. There's not much to the gameplay, but when the cases are at their most clever they make you think outside the box a bit and makes you use a bit of critical thinking. They also introduced two pretty enduring characters in Phoenix Wright himself and his pompous arch-rival prosecutor Miles Edgeworth.
There's a whole bunch more where these games came from. These are just games off the top of my head that I've played and enjoyed. Capcom has been around since video games are in their infancy and, yeah, has milked the hell out of their cash cows like Mega Man, but has also branched off in a lot of different directions at the same time. As time goes on, it seems like American developers are grabbing more and more of the spotlight, which is fine because it's not like the likes of Bioware don't make great games, but I hope Capcom sticks around for a long time to come.
Next: Day 29 - A game you thought you wouldn’t like, but ended up loving
Given the heavy representation for Square so far, you might figure I'd go in that direction, and yeah, if you ignore the couple of misfires (*cough* The Bouncer *cough*), Square has a great history with the FF and Chrono series. I suppose, too, now that they're merged, you can throw in Enix's history as well and add the Mana series and a bunch of other stuff. But gonna say that I'm including quantity and diversity in this and say...
Capcom
Capcom has one of the longest running and most instantly recognizable game series in the form of Mega Man. The basic formula has maybe been overdone a bit to this point, but its a testament to what fun platformers they are that they can keep putting out sequels with the same core gameplay and still have people love them. Recently, they've revived the series with Mega Man 9 and 10, games you can download for a mere 10 bucks and are every bit as fun as the classic one. It's much more tactfully done than Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog 4, which they're putting out in "episodes," the first of which is only four stages long for 15 bucks and really isn't challenging whatsoever. There's also the Mega Man Battle Network games--RPGs with some action-y elements--which I've only played a bit of, but which I know have a pretty loyal fanbase. Capcom's also put out the Breath of Fire series, a more traditional fantasy RPG series with dragons and whatnot.Capcom is also responsible for the mother of all tournament fighters: Street Fighter. Back in the day, Mortal Kombat was always super popular amonst my fellow adolescents, what with people getting their spines ripped out and the line, but Street Fighter was always a much more polished and more fun game than the clunky motion-captured MK. Eventually, some Street Fighter characters appear in the X-Men vs. Street Fighter arcade game that would eventually become the Marvel vs. Capcom series. On current gen systems, Capcom offers both Street Fighter IV and Marvel vs. Capcom, both fighting games but not really requiring exactly the same skill set. SF IV has more complex move sets where some moves might require a 360 or 720 degree rotation of your D-Pad/arcade stick to pull off, and thus encourages you to experiment with different combinations to find out how you can give yourself enough of a buffer to lead into a big move. MvC has some of the same strategies, but it has more standardized and simpler moves and thus is a little more about pure reaction time and knowing when to call your partners for an assist or a big crossover combo.
On the more action-y side of things, Capcom has the most celebrated survival-horror series produced in the form of Resident Evil. I've played though some of and watched a friend play through the rest of Resident Evil 2 and some of Code Veronica, but I can't say I've played the more recent REs. MC Chris gives Resident Evil 4 quite an endorsement though. There's also Onimusha, of which I've played games 1 & 3. The first is very much like a Resident Evil style survival horror game, only in feudal Japan. It had the RE style control where Up on the D-pad was always forward and went to considerable lengths to try and creep the hell out of you. Onimusha 3 was more of a straight-up action game and, just because, had Jean Reno's face and voice in it. It had more natural controls, the areas were a little less constrained and linear, and the gameplay was a little more varied. I had a ton of fun with it. Then there's Devil May Cry, which is kind of an Onimusha like-game, in that it's an action game where you might some demon sort of creatures, only it's turned way the hell up to 11. It's a big proponent of the Rule of Cool, and has some of the straight-up most ridiculous special abilities ever conceived.
Then there's the Phoenix Wright games on the DS. They're in the "visual novel" style and aren't much for replayabilty, and I can't say that they don't drag at points. Still, they represent a very novel concept that hadn't really been done before, like a lot of the best things on the DS. There's not much to the gameplay, but when the cases are at their most clever they make you think outside the box a bit and makes you use a bit of critical thinking. They also introduced two pretty enduring characters in Phoenix Wright himself and his pompous arch-rival prosecutor Miles Edgeworth.
There's a whole bunch more where these games came from. These are just games off the top of my head that I've played and enjoyed. Capcom has been around since video games are in their infancy and, yeah, has milked the hell out of their cash cows like Mega Man, but has also branched off in a lot of different directions at the same time. As time goes on, it seems like American developers are grabbing more and more of the spotlight, which is fine because it's not like the likes of Bioware don't make great games, but I hope Capcom sticks around for a long time to come.
Next: Day 29 - A game you thought you wouldn’t like, but ended up loving
Monday, April 11, 2011
30 Days of Gaming: Day 27: Most Epic Scene Ever
Day 27: Most Epic Scene Ever
Super Metroid: Final Battle and Escape
(SPOILERS)
If I thought about it long enough, I could probably come up with an answer for this that wasn't something that's already been mentioned, but thus far I've drawn a blank for whatever reason, and I'm eager to finish this off. I trust this will still be a pretty satisfactory answer for anybody who's played Super Metroid. After you zig-zag your way throughout all of Zebes, you finally find your way to Tourain, the planet's core. Everything looks dead and barren which, you soon realize, is because your metroid hatchling friend has been sucking the life of everything in sight. Unfortunately, it tries to do this to you as well, until at the last second it recognizes you as it's "mother." After recovering, you make your way to the Mother Brain room, where you fight through a sequence that's oddly similar to the end of the first game and seemingly too easy for a final boss fight. That's when, in a fantastic "aw, crap!" moment, some shrill, creepy-as-hell music hits, and the lifeless head of Mother Brain somehow spontaneously sprouts an enormous body and the real fight begins.
Mother Brain is on the verge of eye beaming you to death, when the metroid hatchling, now knowing who you are, busts in and makes the ultimate sacrifice as it heals you while mother brain vomits on it and, for some reason, gives you the ability to fire a giant-ass rainbow laser. With this, you easily dispel mother brain, but then in three minutes time you have to haul-ass all the way back to the surface and back to your ship at the very start of the game. That's one thing I always thought was cool about Super Metroid. In most games, you reach the final boss chamber, kick his ass, and maybe there's some escape via cutscene as the villains lair crumbles to dust or something, but in Super Metroid it's actually a closed loop. You begin and end at exactly the same spot. There's something pretty cool about how they designed the game to make that possible.
Next -- Day 28: Favorite Game Developer
Super Metroid: Final Battle and Escape
(SPOILERS)
If I thought about it long enough, I could probably come up with an answer for this that wasn't something that's already been mentioned, but thus far I've drawn a blank for whatever reason, and I'm eager to finish this off. I trust this will still be a pretty satisfactory answer for anybody who's played Super Metroid. After you zig-zag your way throughout all of Zebes, you finally find your way to Tourain, the planet's core. Everything looks dead and barren which, you soon realize, is because your metroid hatchling friend has been sucking the life of everything in sight. Unfortunately, it tries to do this to you as well, until at the last second it recognizes you as it's "mother." After recovering, you make your way to the Mother Brain room, where you fight through a sequence that's oddly similar to the end of the first game and seemingly too easy for a final boss fight. That's when, in a fantastic "aw, crap!" moment, some shrill, creepy-as-hell music hits, and the lifeless head of Mother Brain somehow spontaneously sprouts an enormous body and the real fight begins.
Mother Brain is on the verge of eye beaming you to death, when the metroid hatchling, now knowing who you are, busts in and makes the ultimate sacrifice as it heals you while mother brain vomits on it and, for some reason, gives you the ability to fire a giant-ass rainbow laser. With this, you easily dispel mother brain, but then in three minutes time you have to haul-ass all the way back to the surface and back to your ship at the very start of the game. That's one thing I always thought was cool about Super Metroid. In most games, you reach the final boss chamber, kick his ass, and maybe there's some escape via cutscene as the villains lair crumbles to dust or something, but in Super Metroid it's actually a closed loop. You begin and end at exactly the same spot. There's something pretty cool about how they designed the game to make that possible.
Next -- Day 28: Favorite Game Developer
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
30 Days of Gaming: Day 26: Best Voice Acting
Day 26: Best Voice Acting
I could have gone back to the well once more and written about Metal Gear again, because the voice acting has really been pretty excellent throughout the series and Snake, of course, has one of the most recognizable voices in games. On Day 26 of 30, though, I'm gonna talk about a game that I haven't gotten to yet but that absolutely deserves to be mentioned something in this thing...
Bioshock
"It wasn't impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea. It was impossible to build it anywhere else."
(some spoilers)
I've made no secret of my love for Metal Gear, but I can understand how the sheer amount of time you spend watching the massively complex narrative unravel and not actually playing the game would be off-putting to a lot of people. Bioshock is a pretty fascinating in that it manages to tell a pretty deep story, despite being a pretty traditional first-person shooter with almost no cutscenes and very little person-to-person interaction of any kind. The story is told through grainy black and white videos like the one that welcomes you to Rapture in the above video, or through audio tapes you find scattered about as you explore, and through the radio conversations you have with Atlas, Andrew Ryan, and a few other people. The voice acting, then, is really important to telling the story, simply because you're hearing people's voices much more than you're actually seeing them.
The standout voice is that of Andrew Ryan, the free-market worshiping father of Rapture. His voice has just the right amount of commanding presence and the right amount of disdain for all the no-good, lecherous, peons trying to ruin his utopia. His final monologue ("A man chooses! A slave obeys!") is great, and memorable and instantly recognizable enough for it to be subject of parody. Atlas's voice actor does a great job dramatically shifting from sincere to sinister after the central plot twist of the game is revealed. And then of course there are the voices of the Little Sisters, the various Slicers roaming about the deserted city, and the apparitions you see when you wig out on occasion are all sufficiently really fucking creepy. Bioshock is a lot of fun to play, but a huge reason why it stands head and shoulders above most first person shooters is that it created a truly unique world. The visual detail that 2K Games put into the ruins of Rapture matter a lot, but it matters at least equally that they created dynamic characters to inhabit it and that they got excellent voice actors to portray them.
The Dammit, They Tried Award:
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
The voice acting in SotN is really... it's not good, but I love how grandiose some of it is, and I love how in this scene, even though whoever is playing Richter is pretty much just phoning it in, Dracula just goes all out. "What is a man?! A miserable little pile of secrets!!"
Next: Day 27 - Most epic scene ever
I could have gone back to the well once more and written about Metal Gear again, because the voice acting has really been pretty excellent throughout the series and Snake, of course, has one of the most recognizable voices in games. On Day 26 of 30, though, I'm gonna talk about a game that I haven't gotten to yet but that absolutely deserves to be mentioned something in this thing...
Bioshock
"It wasn't impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea. It was impossible to build it anywhere else."
(some spoilers)
I've made no secret of my love for Metal Gear, but I can understand how the sheer amount of time you spend watching the massively complex narrative unravel and not actually playing the game would be off-putting to a lot of people. Bioshock is a pretty fascinating in that it manages to tell a pretty deep story, despite being a pretty traditional first-person shooter with almost no cutscenes and very little person-to-person interaction of any kind. The story is told through grainy black and white videos like the one that welcomes you to Rapture in the above video, or through audio tapes you find scattered about as you explore, and through the radio conversations you have with Atlas, Andrew Ryan, and a few other people. The voice acting, then, is really important to telling the story, simply because you're hearing people's voices much more than you're actually seeing them.
The standout voice is that of Andrew Ryan, the free-market worshiping father of Rapture. His voice has just the right amount of commanding presence and the right amount of disdain for all the no-good, lecherous, peons trying to ruin his utopia. His final monologue ("A man chooses! A slave obeys!") is great, and memorable and instantly recognizable enough for it to be subject of parody. Atlas's voice actor does a great job dramatically shifting from sincere to sinister after the central plot twist of the game is revealed. And then of course there are the voices of the Little Sisters, the various Slicers roaming about the deserted city, and the apparitions you see when you wig out on occasion are all sufficiently really fucking creepy. Bioshock is a lot of fun to play, but a huge reason why it stands head and shoulders above most first person shooters is that it created a truly unique world. The visual detail that 2K Games put into the ruins of Rapture matter a lot, but it matters at least equally that they created dynamic characters to inhabit it and that they got excellent voice actors to portray them.
The Dammit, They Tried Award:
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
The voice acting in SotN is really... it's not good, but I love how grandiose some of it is, and I love how in this scene, even though whoever is playing Richter is pretty much just phoning it in, Dracula just goes all out. "What is a man?! A miserable little pile of secrets!!"
Next: Day 27 - Most epic scene ever
30 Days of Gaming: Day 25: Game you plan on playing
Day 25: A Game You Plan on Playing
L.A. Noire
For all the praise they've gotten, my experience with Rockstar Games' stuff has basically been playing here and there and friends' copies. Planning on changing that with L.A. Noire though, where they've created a vast cityscape the way they did with the Grand Theft Auto games, only here they've wound the clock back to 1947 and they've created a police procedural game around it. Instead of just straight-up carjacking people and shootin' stuff, it looks like L.A. Noire will have you investigating crime scenes and interrogating suspects. I absolutely love film noir and hard-boiled detective stuff and the game looks like it's going to be steeped in that style. It looks a lot like they made Chinatown: The Game, and the idea of that sounds awesome to me. There's a ton of footage out there for the game--the above trailer is one of several they've released--and it all looks gorgeous. If it plays half as fun as it seems like it's going to, I'm going to enjoy the hell out of it. What I've seen has already sold me enough such that I'm going to buy it pretty much right at release and not really wait around for word of mouth to get around.
Also: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
I played and loved Oblivion, and DAMN this looks gorgeous.
L.A. Noire
For all the praise they've gotten, my experience with Rockstar Games' stuff has basically been playing here and there and friends' copies. Planning on changing that with L.A. Noire though, where they've created a vast cityscape the way they did with the Grand Theft Auto games, only here they've wound the clock back to 1947 and they've created a police procedural game around it. Instead of just straight-up carjacking people and shootin' stuff, it looks like L.A. Noire will have you investigating crime scenes and interrogating suspects. I absolutely love film noir and hard-boiled detective stuff and the game looks like it's going to be steeped in that style. It looks a lot like they made Chinatown: The Game, and the idea of that sounds awesome to me. There's a ton of footage out there for the game--the above trailer is one of several they've released--and it all looks gorgeous. If it plays half as fun as it seems like it's going to, I'm going to enjoy the hell out of it. What I've seen has already sold me enough such that I'm going to buy it pretty much right at release and not really wait around for word of mouth to get around.
Also: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
I played and loved Oblivion, and DAMN this looks gorgeous.
Saturday, April 02, 2011
30 Days of Gaming: Day 24: Favorite Classic Game
Day 24: Favorite Classic Game
Super Mario Brothers 3
The original Super Mario Bros. was The Game that Started it All and everything, but SMB3 took the basic idea of the original and improved upon it in every way. It introduced new gameplay elements like the inventory of items you could collect along the way from Toad or the Hammer Bros. stages and use as you saw fit before going into a level. The levels themselves were far more diverse and more interesting--like the level in the above video that bobs up and down in the water while the giant fish tries to eat your ass. It had some novel power-ups like the tanooki suit and cool easter eggs like the kuribo's shoe. And there was just a lot more of it. The guy in the above video obviously has the game down to a science and breezes through it, but assuming you didn't use the warp whistles, the game was long, and didn't give you the benefit of saves or passwords. To beat the game, you had to set aside a big chunk of time to work through it.
The game's difficulty curve was just right. The first couple of worlds you could get through without incident, the next few started throwing more elaborate obstacles at you, like the aforementioned oh-crap-the-platforms-are-sinking-into-the-sea level, and by world 7 you were wading through gauntlets of piranha plants. Levels would have a different feel to them depending on how you were going into them. Levels that just threw a ton of enemies at you might be easier with a fire flower, while levels with a lot of traps and jumps might be easier to fly over. Even though most of the game ultimately came down to timing, a fortress level where you were dodging fireballs and running through thwomps had a much different feel than, say, some of the midair platforming levels where the screen scrolled regardless of whether or not you kept moving forward. The game encouraged creativity and experimentation. A lot of hidden pipes were tucked away way up in the corners of levels that you'd have to go out of your way to find. There were a lot of cool tricks you could do with koopa shells if you set them off in just the right spot and watched them ricochet into enemies or power-up boxes or both.
Most importantly, even though the game was made long before the days of unlockables and branching stories and the like, it was still infinitely replayable. It had just the right amount of difficulty to keep most players from getting frustrated, while still providing enough challenge to not make the game feel like you were just going through the motions after a while (although the above Youtube video is kinda pushing that). A few years later after the SNES's release, Nintendo came back with Super Mario World. Some people might prefer World to SMB3, and you could certainly make a valid argument for it. The better hardware allowed them to create a more detailed art style, had some cool puzzles, especially in the ghost house levels, and had levels with hidden exists for you to find that would bring you along an alternate path. All of those things are cool, but there's just something about Super Mario Brothers 3 to me that's just aesthetically pleasing. The levels are all just the right length, there's just enough of them, they're diverse enough to not seem completely repetitive, and it had just the right amount of challenge to it. Simply, some of the most fun you'll have playing video games.
Day 25 - A game you plan on playing.
Lotta different directions I could go with this one...
Super Mario Brothers 3
The original Super Mario Bros. was The Game that Started it All and everything, but SMB3 took the basic idea of the original and improved upon it in every way. It introduced new gameplay elements like the inventory of items you could collect along the way from Toad or the Hammer Bros. stages and use as you saw fit before going into a level. The levels themselves were far more diverse and more interesting--like the level in the above video that bobs up and down in the water while the giant fish tries to eat your ass. It had some novel power-ups like the tanooki suit and cool easter eggs like the kuribo's shoe. And there was just a lot more of it. The guy in the above video obviously has the game down to a science and breezes through it, but assuming you didn't use the warp whistles, the game was long, and didn't give you the benefit of saves or passwords. To beat the game, you had to set aside a big chunk of time to work through it.
The game's difficulty curve was just right. The first couple of worlds you could get through without incident, the next few started throwing more elaborate obstacles at you, like the aforementioned oh-crap-the-platforms-are-sinking-into-the-sea level, and by world 7 you were wading through gauntlets of piranha plants. Levels would have a different feel to them depending on how you were going into them. Levels that just threw a ton of enemies at you might be easier with a fire flower, while levels with a lot of traps and jumps might be easier to fly over. Even though most of the game ultimately came down to timing, a fortress level where you were dodging fireballs and running through thwomps had a much different feel than, say, some of the midair platforming levels where the screen scrolled regardless of whether or not you kept moving forward. The game encouraged creativity and experimentation. A lot of hidden pipes were tucked away way up in the corners of levels that you'd have to go out of your way to find. There were a lot of cool tricks you could do with koopa shells if you set them off in just the right spot and watched them ricochet into enemies or power-up boxes or both.
Most importantly, even though the game was made long before the days of unlockables and branching stories and the like, it was still infinitely replayable. It had just the right amount of difficulty to keep most players from getting frustrated, while still providing enough challenge to not make the game feel like you were just going through the motions after a while (although the above Youtube video is kinda pushing that). A few years later after the SNES's release, Nintendo came back with Super Mario World. Some people might prefer World to SMB3, and you could certainly make a valid argument for it. The better hardware allowed them to create a more detailed art style, had some cool puzzles, especially in the ghost house levels, and had levels with hidden exists for you to find that would bring you along an alternate path. All of those things are cool, but there's just something about Super Mario Brothers 3 to me that's just aesthetically pleasing. The levels are all just the right length, there's just enough of them, they're diverse enough to not seem completely repetitive, and it had just the right amount of challenge to it. Simply, some of the most fun you'll have playing video games.
Day 25 - A game you plan on playing.
Lotta different directions I could go with this one...
Thursday, March 31, 2011
30 Days of Gaming: Day 23: Best Graphics or Art Style
Day 23: Best Graphics or Art Style
Okami
To this point, I've picked games that I've played all the way through for everything, but I have to make an exception here, because even though I've only played a little bit of Okami, I'm not sure I can come up with a better answer. Other games have used a similar cel-shading sort of technique, but no other game has used it to such great effect and used it to make a truly unique game world. Creating a game where all your abilities stem from drawing brushstrokes on the screen is novel in itself, and complementing that idea by creating a whole world that looks like it exists within a giant ukio-e painting brings it to an entirely different level. As impressive as the realism is in some of them, it gets kind of annoying seeing the vast wasteland of washed-out gunmetal gray that pervades most of the first-person shooters nowadays. Okami is the direct antithesis of this, a visually enthralling world where the colors are as alive as the characters that inhabit it.
Day 24: Favorite Classic Game
Not really sure what defines "classic" game, but I think I have some ideas to write about that will definitely qualify.
Okami
To this point, I've picked games that I've played all the way through for everything, but I have to make an exception here, because even though I've only played a little bit of Okami, I'm not sure I can come up with a better answer. Other games have used a similar cel-shading sort of technique, but no other game has used it to such great effect and used it to make a truly unique game world. Creating a game where all your abilities stem from drawing brushstrokes on the screen is novel in itself, and complementing that idea by creating a whole world that looks like it exists within a giant ukio-e painting brings it to an entirely different level. As impressive as the realism is in some of them, it gets kind of annoying seeing the vast wasteland of washed-out gunmetal gray that pervades most of the first-person shooters nowadays. Okami is the direct antithesis of this, a visually enthralling world where the colors are as alive as the characters that inhabit it.
Day 24: Favorite Classic Game
Not really sure what defines "classic" game, but I think I have some ideas to write about that will definitely qualify.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
30 Days of Gaming: Day 22: Most Disappointing Game Sequel
Day 22: Most Disappointing Game Sequel
Final Fantasy XII
I guess I'm going counter to at least what the gaming press said on this (Famitsu really gave it a 40/40??), but I know there are some people out there who are with me on this. It's not really a bad game at all--it's every bit as well produced as any other FF game--but it's a game that I really haven't had any desire to play a second time through since first playing it right at its release in 2007. To me, this is pretty significant, because everyone in a while the thought will pop up in my head that, "Hey, maybe I should go back and replay Final Fantasy VIII," and that was a game with a Junction system that pretty much broke the game, and a major plot point that involved all of the main characters remembering that they all came from the same orphanage which they'd all forgotten before because the summons that they use cause memory loss for some reason. It was a gorgeous game to look at, and I can't say that I didn't get some enjoyment out of exploring some of the environments, but the experience as a whole just didn't leave me with the same satisfaction that I've come to expect from the series.
I'm a big believer in the manta of "if it ain't broke don't fix it." Obviously, you can overdo this. I actually enjoy the Dynasty Warriors series, but I don't think there really needs to be 37 different games that all basically amount to "hit square a lot to cleave this mob of mostly motionless people with your halberd." But when I heard that FF XII was doing away with the series's turn-based battle system in favor of a more MMO style, I was apprehensive about it. At some point I read something--I wanna say it was on Penny Arcade--that kind of talked me off the ledge a bit, making the point that look, you can still pause the game and input commands like you used to, it's just that, for inconsequential battles, the game will just start killin' stuff for you and you don't have to sit there with the X button held down. That actually made a lot of sense. As much as I'm completely willing to put an ungodly number of hours into playing an RPG, I'm hardly adverse to streamlining the more tedious parts of it. Here's the thing, though: the game is still really, really tedious anyway.
The game felt a lot like an MMO, except without any other actual humans around you. The rate at which you got XP was unprecedentedly slow, and so despite the battles all taking less time, you had to fight far, far, more of them to level up. The game had a lot of vast, wide-open areas, which were impressive and all on PS2 hardware, but often took forever to get through, and the game had a lot of extended point A to point B travel in it. Really, the game overall just felt like a completely slog in a way that no previous FFs have, even FF IV with it's battle-every-three-steps encounter rate. The hunting board sidequests sometimes broke of the monotony of the game, but some of them also got annoying as hell, as finding the monster you had to kill meant being in the right area under certain circumstances like, "it has to be raining, you have to come in from the left side of the screen, it has to be a Tuesday when you're playing, and your memory card has to have exactly 3217K of space left." Okay, I made some of that up. But basically, the game felt like much more of a chore than it in any way needed to be.
Even in spite of this, the game would still be a fun experience if the game's pretty graphics were complimented by a memorable story. I can only speak for myself, but I remember absolutely nothing from the story. I'm not really kidding when I say that. It's been a while since I've played, but the cutscene in the above video, for example is completely foreign to me. While I Youtube, I watched the video of the last boss fight as well, and I have some very vague memories of the fight, but I wouldn't have remembered his name was Vayne beforehand, and I remember pretty much nothing about who he was or what his motivations were. The playable characters have perhaps a little bit more staying power for me, but not much. Ashe never had a moment like, say, the Sending that Yuna had and seemed to spend most of the game really confused. Balthier, for his occasional rapier wit, was less interesting than Locke in FF6, who was a 2D sprite. Fran had a cool accent, but again, I remember very little about what she did. I think the biggest problem was that, for the first time, they tried to seep the dialogue in this sort of Tolkein-esque poeticness, except that they completely overdid it, and you don't (or I didn't at least) end up really retaining the crux of the scene. I don't profess to have the biggest vocabulary in the world, (I know for a fact that I recycle a lot of the same words over and over again on this blog), but I don't think I'm an idiot, and I there were a lot of exchanges between characters that were fairly bewildering to me just because of how much fluff was in the dialogue. There was a lot of royal court political drama sort of stuff throughout the story, and the way the script was written made it extremely difficult to follow it all.
The battle system ended up being mostly okay, and having your characters actually actively move around the environment during a fight and having true area of effect spells added an interesting dynamic to the game. The boss fights were usually decently fun to play. My biggest complaint with the gameplay was the confounding license board system, which was a similar concept to FF X's sphere grid, except instead of just giving you stat boosts and new abilities, it included "licenses" for all types of equipment in the game. As VG cats lampooned at the time, FF XII was a game where you had to learn how to wear a hat. The system basically made it so all of your characters kind of wound up the same in the end, which was a problem the sphere grid had too, except that it seemed to happen faster with XII's.
As I said, FF XII is still a very well-made game and I can understand why some people would find enjoyment in it. The world of Ivalice is a pretty cool place, and the fact that they were able to put as much detail into it as they did on PS2 hardware is quite a feat. I just wish it was a bit faster to get around in Ivalice and that I found the people who inhabited it a bit more interesting.
Next: Day 23 -- Game you think had the best graphics or art style.
Best graphics and best art style kind of seem like separate questions to me. I'm going to focus more on art style, I think.
Final Fantasy XII
I guess I'm going counter to at least what the gaming press said on this (Famitsu really gave it a 40/40??), but I know there are some people out there who are with me on this. It's not really a bad game at all--it's every bit as well produced as any other FF game--but it's a game that I really haven't had any desire to play a second time through since first playing it right at its release in 2007. To me, this is pretty significant, because everyone in a while the thought will pop up in my head that, "Hey, maybe I should go back and replay Final Fantasy VIII," and that was a game with a Junction system that pretty much broke the game, and a major plot point that involved all of the main characters remembering that they all came from the same orphanage which they'd all forgotten before because the summons that they use cause memory loss for some reason. It was a gorgeous game to look at, and I can't say that I didn't get some enjoyment out of exploring some of the environments, but the experience as a whole just didn't leave me with the same satisfaction that I've come to expect from the series.
I'm a big believer in the manta of "if it ain't broke don't fix it." Obviously, you can overdo this. I actually enjoy the Dynasty Warriors series, but I don't think there really needs to be 37 different games that all basically amount to "hit square a lot to cleave this mob of mostly motionless people with your halberd." But when I heard that FF XII was doing away with the series's turn-based battle system in favor of a more MMO style, I was apprehensive about it. At some point I read something--I wanna say it was on Penny Arcade--that kind of talked me off the ledge a bit, making the point that look, you can still pause the game and input commands like you used to, it's just that, for inconsequential battles, the game will just start killin' stuff for you and you don't have to sit there with the X button held down. That actually made a lot of sense. As much as I'm completely willing to put an ungodly number of hours into playing an RPG, I'm hardly adverse to streamlining the more tedious parts of it. Here's the thing, though: the game is still really, really tedious anyway.
The game felt a lot like an MMO, except without any other actual humans around you. The rate at which you got XP was unprecedentedly slow, and so despite the battles all taking less time, you had to fight far, far, more of them to level up. The game had a lot of vast, wide-open areas, which were impressive and all on PS2 hardware, but often took forever to get through, and the game had a lot of extended point A to point B travel in it. Really, the game overall just felt like a completely slog in a way that no previous FFs have, even FF IV with it's battle-every-three-steps encounter rate. The hunting board sidequests sometimes broke of the monotony of the game, but some of them also got annoying as hell, as finding the monster you had to kill meant being in the right area under certain circumstances like, "it has to be raining, you have to come in from the left side of the screen, it has to be a Tuesday when you're playing, and your memory card has to have exactly 3217K of space left." Okay, I made some of that up. But basically, the game felt like much more of a chore than it in any way needed to be.
Even in spite of this, the game would still be a fun experience if the game's pretty graphics were complimented by a memorable story. I can only speak for myself, but I remember absolutely nothing from the story. I'm not really kidding when I say that. It's been a while since I've played, but the cutscene in the above video, for example is completely foreign to me. While I Youtube, I watched the video of the last boss fight as well, and I have some very vague memories of the fight, but I wouldn't have remembered his name was Vayne beforehand, and I remember pretty much nothing about who he was or what his motivations were. The playable characters have perhaps a little bit more staying power for me, but not much. Ashe never had a moment like, say, the Sending that Yuna had and seemed to spend most of the game really confused. Balthier, for his occasional rapier wit, was less interesting than Locke in FF6, who was a 2D sprite. Fran had a cool accent, but again, I remember very little about what she did. I think the biggest problem was that, for the first time, they tried to seep the dialogue in this sort of Tolkein-esque poeticness, except that they completely overdid it, and you don't (or I didn't at least) end up really retaining the crux of the scene. I don't profess to have the biggest vocabulary in the world, (I know for a fact that I recycle a lot of the same words over and over again on this blog), but I don't think I'm an idiot, and I there were a lot of exchanges between characters that were fairly bewildering to me just because of how much fluff was in the dialogue. There was a lot of royal court political drama sort of stuff throughout the story, and the way the script was written made it extremely difficult to follow it all.
The battle system ended up being mostly okay, and having your characters actually actively move around the environment during a fight and having true area of effect spells added an interesting dynamic to the game. The boss fights were usually decently fun to play. My biggest complaint with the gameplay was the confounding license board system, which was a similar concept to FF X's sphere grid, except instead of just giving you stat boosts and new abilities, it included "licenses" for all types of equipment in the game. As VG cats lampooned at the time, FF XII was a game where you had to learn how to wear a hat. The system basically made it so all of your characters kind of wound up the same in the end, which was a problem the sphere grid had too, except that it seemed to happen faster with XII's.
As I said, FF XII is still a very well-made game and I can understand why some people would find enjoyment in it. The world of Ivalice is a pretty cool place, and the fact that they were able to put as much detail into it as they did on PS2 hardware is quite a feat. I just wish it was a bit faster to get around in Ivalice and that I found the people who inhabited it a bit more interesting.
Next: Day 23 -- Game you think had the best graphics or art style.
Best graphics and best art style kind of seem like separate questions to me. I'm going to focus more on art style, I think.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
30 Days of Gaming: Day 21: Best Story
Day 21: Best Story
There's a lot of stuff that, from what I've been told, would be a contender for this category that I haven't played. The first one that comes to mind is the highly-praised, but once notoriously hard to find Xenogears. It's on Playstation Network now, so maybe I can change that in the future, but for now I've gotta work with what I've played. A couple of games I've already talked about are strong contenders. The Metal Gear Solid series has really pushed the envelope more than any other in terms of what sort of story a game can tell. Chrono Trigger, as my friend at He Been Weatherbeaten went with, had an ambitious story that had you traveling throughout past, present, and future. Final Fantasy VI had maybe the best cast of characters put together in a game, all of whom had their own subplots that developed over the game. But I'm going to go with a game that I've already blogged about here before a couple of years ago when I was replaying it again:
Final Fantasy VII
(spoilers)
"Speak with the planet? What does the planet say?"
I know FF VII gets an eye-roll from some people who aren't that crazy about the massive shadow it casts over other games that are about as good but which for one reason or another didn't have the massive mainstream success that FF VII did. It's true that it's not a perfect game, and I'm not going to argue that it is, but to me it's story is the most memorable out of any game I've played. Like a lot of games, it ultimately boils down to your basic "good defeats evil" story, but it's "good defeats evil" done especially well. It had a great setting, some memorable characters--even if somewhere a bit rough around the edges, perhaps, memorable villains, and Square used the newfound power of the Playstation and it's ability to play full-motion video to weave a fantastic story together.
Final Fantasy VII's intro is still one of the coolest sequences put together, in any medium, really. It foreshadows the story, with Aries appearing in a field of stars, it sets up the massive size of the truly impressive dieselpunk (seems like that's the term that fits best) creation that is Midgar, and gets you pumped up for starting the game proper, which begins as soon as you step off the train. Even with the break-neck opening, though, a big part of the genius of FF7's story is that it's true scale is hidden from you for the whole first act of the game. While you're in Midgar, it seems like the basic premise of the game is that the main antagonists are the head honchos at Shina Corp., and the goal of the game is to ecoterrorist your way around the city until you force a final confrontation, take out President Shinra, and liberate the city from the corporatocracy. If the game was merely that, it would still be pretty awesome, because as I said, Midgar is a pretty awesome creation, and it actually would've been cool to see even more of the city than what you did over the course of the game.
Maybe five or so hours in, though, (depending on how fast you're going, of course) the game completely pulls the rug out from under you when President Shinra dies, but not by your hand. You then set out from Midgar and get ready to explore the rest of the world, and Cloud tells you in flashback about Sephiroth and you realize, if you managed to avoid spoilers by the time you'd played the game, that the first act of the game was a bit of sleight-of-hand and that the stakes are way higher than just the fate of the city. If you were someone who had played Final Fantasy games before FF VII, you likely figured the world map was going to show up sooner or later, but I could easily see someone who wasn't familiar with the series and its conventions being rather taken aback by the game completely opening up the way it does. What's cool, though, is that when you replay the game from the beginning again, you can catch little hints pop up here and there, like the guy in slums with the number tattoo who's mysteriously sick.
As I said in my best villain post, Sephiroth's backstory is kind of muddled a bit, and you really have to watch all of the optional cut-scenes concerning Jenova and Professor Hojo and Profressor Gast's experiments to really get the complete picture. Sephiroth nevertheless has a plethora of iconic moments, first and foremost being the scene where he razes Nibelheim to the ground and you watch him walking away through the flames. The game does a great job building up the legend of him before you really directly confront him. You don't run into him during the Shinra headquarters sequence, but you find his giant masamune run clean through the Shinra President's body. Later, as you're tracking across the marsh, you see the giant cobra that murders you if you run into it (if you're not over-leveled, that is) impaled on a giant pole. By the time he kills operatically descends, seemingly from the heavens, to kill Aries, (hey, I said spoilers, and seriously, you knew that at this point, didn't you?) he's already obtained a God-like omnipresence over the game long before he literally becomes God-like at it's conclusion.
The game's supporting cast, while perhaps not as diverse and as colorful as FF6's, is great in its own right, and each character is utilized well as a piece in the larger picture of the puzzle. Barrett has been criticized, not unjustly, as basically being a Mr. T clone and perhaps not the most progressive portrayal of a character who happens to be a large black man in history, but in between his "You better watch yo' spikey headed ass!" comments he shows real humanity, and another layer is added to his character when you reach Corel and play through the subplot with Dyne. Aries is great as the girl whose existence seems oxymoronic, an eternally sunny-eyed optimist who grows flowers all day in the middle of a giant, run-down cesspool. Cid is kind of a comic-relief character for a while ("Sit down and drink your goddamned tea!"), but has a genuinely emotional moment at the climax of his part of the story, when you complete his lifelong dream and launch the Shinra rocket into space and he presses his face right up against the porthole to take in the fullest possible view of the stars. Yuffie will piss you right the hell off when she steals your materia but is funny as hell.
A lot of people are irked by Cloud starting Square's emotionally-detached loner protagonist phase that increased ten-fold with Squall in VIII, and yeah, maybe there's one to many "Cloud: ......." dialogue boxes in the game, but I think his descent into madness over the first half of the game is done really well. It's a great tease when you first see him go into one of his fits trying to plant a bomb in the Mako reactor and you see the ominous text from a nameless voice: "This is more than just a reactor." And the scene at the start of disc 2, when Cloud has completely succumbed to the idea that he's not human but rather a failed Sephiroth clone ("I wasn't chasing Sephiroth, I was being summoned by Sephiroth!") is a great and unexpected twist. The game had already killed off a playable character at the end of disc 1, which at the time really feels like it's going to be the low-point before the heroes start building up some momentum again towards the climax. But with that scene, where Cloud is seemingly lost for good, combined with the next scene where Tifa wakes up aboard the Highwind, and Barrett opens the shudders to reveal the big-ass ball of fire slowly falling to earth is a tremendously effective "how are they gonna get out of this one?" moments. The scene later in disc 2 where Tifa is roaming around in Cloud's head is maybe a little cheesy, but you can't help but smile during the big reveal in Cloud's real memory of Nibelheim when the Main Theme music builds up and Cloud comes rushing in to save Tifa. The game ends as you expect it would, with Sephiroth being defeated, although before Advent Children was made and set two years later (which I thought was decidedly "meh"), it had the added wrinkle of the last scene where Red XIII is taking his children to go see the ruins of Midgar and it's not really immediately clear that humans were actually deemed worthy to survive when Holy came to cleanse Meteor.
Put together, Final Fantasy VII's story is a great ride. It combines the high adventure of the old medieval FF games with a cool, dystopian future setting that was foreign to the series at the time. It used the new technology of the Playstation to make the story more up close and more personal than it had been and used full-motion video to make it bigger and more operatic. Plus, it had a cat yelling into a megaphone riding a giant moogle.
Serendipitously, Roger Ebert tweeted a link to someone's blog post, written as a open letter to him, while I was writing this one, and he mentions Final Fantasy VII.
Next: Day 22 -- A game sequel which disappointed you
And it's gonna be from this series...
There's a lot of stuff that, from what I've been told, would be a contender for this category that I haven't played. The first one that comes to mind is the highly-praised, but once notoriously hard to find Xenogears. It's on Playstation Network now, so maybe I can change that in the future, but for now I've gotta work with what I've played. A couple of games I've already talked about are strong contenders. The Metal Gear Solid series has really pushed the envelope more than any other in terms of what sort of story a game can tell. Chrono Trigger, as my friend at He Been Weatherbeaten went with, had an ambitious story that had you traveling throughout past, present, and future. Final Fantasy VI had maybe the best cast of characters put together in a game, all of whom had their own subplots that developed over the game. But I'm going to go with a game that I've already blogged about here before a couple of years ago when I was replaying it again:
Final Fantasy VII
(spoilers)
"Speak with the planet? What does the planet say?"
I know FF VII gets an eye-roll from some people who aren't that crazy about the massive shadow it casts over other games that are about as good but which for one reason or another didn't have the massive mainstream success that FF VII did. It's true that it's not a perfect game, and I'm not going to argue that it is, but to me it's story is the most memorable out of any game I've played. Like a lot of games, it ultimately boils down to your basic "good defeats evil" story, but it's "good defeats evil" done especially well. It had a great setting, some memorable characters--even if somewhere a bit rough around the edges, perhaps, memorable villains, and Square used the newfound power of the Playstation and it's ability to play full-motion video to weave a fantastic story together.
Final Fantasy VII's intro is still one of the coolest sequences put together, in any medium, really. It foreshadows the story, with Aries appearing in a field of stars, it sets up the massive size of the truly impressive dieselpunk (seems like that's the term that fits best) creation that is Midgar, and gets you pumped up for starting the game proper, which begins as soon as you step off the train. Even with the break-neck opening, though, a big part of the genius of FF7's story is that it's true scale is hidden from you for the whole first act of the game. While you're in Midgar, it seems like the basic premise of the game is that the main antagonists are the head honchos at Shina Corp., and the goal of the game is to ecoterrorist your way around the city until you force a final confrontation, take out President Shinra, and liberate the city from the corporatocracy. If the game was merely that, it would still be pretty awesome, because as I said, Midgar is a pretty awesome creation, and it actually would've been cool to see even more of the city than what you did over the course of the game.
Maybe five or so hours in, though, (depending on how fast you're going, of course) the game completely pulls the rug out from under you when President Shinra dies, but not by your hand. You then set out from Midgar and get ready to explore the rest of the world, and Cloud tells you in flashback about Sephiroth and you realize, if you managed to avoid spoilers by the time you'd played the game, that the first act of the game was a bit of sleight-of-hand and that the stakes are way higher than just the fate of the city. If you were someone who had played Final Fantasy games before FF VII, you likely figured the world map was going to show up sooner or later, but I could easily see someone who wasn't familiar with the series and its conventions being rather taken aback by the game completely opening up the way it does. What's cool, though, is that when you replay the game from the beginning again, you can catch little hints pop up here and there, like the guy in slums with the number tattoo who's mysteriously sick.
As I said in my best villain post, Sephiroth's backstory is kind of muddled a bit, and you really have to watch all of the optional cut-scenes concerning Jenova and Professor Hojo and Profressor Gast's experiments to really get the complete picture. Sephiroth nevertheless has a plethora of iconic moments, first and foremost being the scene where he razes Nibelheim to the ground and you watch him walking away through the flames. The game does a great job building up the legend of him before you really directly confront him. You don't run into him during the Shinra headquarters sequence, but you find his giant masamune run clean through the Shinra President's body. Later, as you're tracking across the marsh, you see the giant cobra that murders you if you run into it (if you're not over-leveled, that is) impaled on a giant pole. By the time he kills operatically descends, seemingly from the heavens, to kill Aries, (hey, I said spoilers, and seriously, you knew that at this point, didn't you?) he's already obtained a God-like omnipresence over the game long before he literally becomes God-like at it's conclusion.
The game's supporting cast, while perhaps not as diverse and as colorful as FF6's, is great in its own right, and each character is utilized well as a piece in the larger picture of the puzzle. Barrett has been criticized, not unjustly, as basically being a Mr. T clone and perhaps not the most progressive portrayal of a character who happens to be a large black man in history, but in between his "You better watch yo' spikey headed ass!" comments he shows real humanity, and another layer is added to his character when you reach Corel and play through the subplot with Dyne. Aries is great as the girl whose existence seems oxymoronic, an eternally sunny-eyed optimist who grows flowers all day in the middle of a giant, run-down cesspool. Cid is kind of a comic-relief character for a while ("Sit down and drink your goddamned tea!"), but has a genuinely emotional moment at the climax of his part of the story, when you complete his lifelong dream and launch the Shinra rocket into space and he presses his face right up against the porthole to take in the fullest possible view of the stars. Yuffie will piss you right the hell off when she steals your materia but is funny as hell.
A lot of people are irked by Cloud starting Square's emotionally-detached loner protagonist phase that increased ten-fold with Squall in VIII, and yeah, maybe there's one to many "Cloud: ......." dialogue boxes in the game, but I think his descent into madness over the first half of the game is done really well. It's a great tease when you first see him go into one of his fits trying to plant a bomb in the Mako reactor and you see the ominous text from a nameless voice: "This is more than just a reactor." And the scene at the start of disc 2, when Cloud has completely succumbed to the idea that he's not human but rather a failed Sephiroth clone ("I wasn't chasing Sephiroth, I was being summoned by Sephiroth!") is a great and unexpected twist. The game had already killed off a playable character at the end of disc 1, which at the time really feels like it's going to be the low-point before the heroes start building up some momentum again towards the climax. But with that scene, where Cloud is seemingly lost for good, combined with the next scene where Tifa wakes up aboard the Highwind, and Barrett opens the shudders to reveal the big-ass ball of fire slowly falling to earth is a tremendously effective "how are they gonna get out of this one?" moments. The scene later in disc 2 where Tifa is roaming around in Cloud's head is maybe a little cheesy, but you can't help but smile during the big reveal in Cloud's real memory of Nibelheim when the Main Theme music builds up and Cloud comes rushing in to save Tifa. The game ends as you expect it would, with Sephiroth being defeated, although before Advent Children was made and set two years later (which I thought was decidedly "meh"), it had the added wrinkle of the last scene where Red XIII is taking his children to go see the ruins of Midgar and it's not really immediately clear that humans were actually deemed worthy to survive when Holy came to cleanse Meteor.
Put together, Final Fantasy VII's story is a great ride. It combines the high adventure of the old medieval FF games with a cool, dystopian future setting that was foreign to the series at the time. It used the new technology of the Playstation to make the story more up close and more personal than it had been and used full-motion video to make it bigger and more operatic. Plus, it had a cat yelling into a megaphone riding a giant moogle.
Serendipitously, Roger Ebert tweeted a link to someone's blog post, written as a open letter to him, while I was writing this one, and he mentions Final Fantasy VII.
Next: Day 22 -- A game sequel which disappointed you
And it's gonna be from this series...
Thursday, March 24, 2011
30 Days of Gaming: Day 20: Favorite Genre
Day 20: Favorite Genre
For the record, I don't really think there's an incorrect answer to this question. I play a ton of sports games, some first person shooters, some tournament fighters--even though I tend to be bad at them. I have a guitar hero controller in my closet, though don't find much time to play music games. Point is though, I play a lot of different stuff. But you're not reading this to hear me answer "everything," so let's go with...
Role Playing Games
The thing about RPGs, is that there are a lot of different varieties of them. A western action RPG, the games in Bioware's library for instance, will have a much different feel than a turn-based JRPG like a Final Fantasy. An RPG might be very on-rails and focus on a detailed, set storyline, or it might be completely open and encourage as much explanation as possible. It might give you a lot of control over customizing your characters, or it might challenge you to make the best possible usage out of a stable of fixed characters. It might have strategy game elements, card game elements, or some other stuff that's completely out of left field. Thing is, all of these things, when done well, can be fun for their own reasons. Playing Oblivion and waiting till sundown so I could pick the lock of every house in the Imperial City and rob it blind (what, that's not what you did the whole game?) and playing Chrono Trigger and saving the world from a giant-ass shell that fires lasers are both entertaining as hell for me for different reasons. Really, the key to a good RPG is depth, and that can mean different things for different games. It can either mean telling a complex and emotional story, or giving you endless permutations of how you can level up and improve your character, or both. And that's the key to RPGs: the best ones are epic enough in scope to awe you the first time you play, and with good enough and deep enough gameplay to make you want to play again.
Next: Day 21 - Game with the best story. Gonna mull this over, but might be some redundancy here again.
For the record, I don't really think there's an incorrect answer to this question. I play a ton of sports games, some first person shooters, some tournament fighters--even though I tend to be bad at them. I have a guitar hero controller in my closet, though don't find much time to play music games. Point is though, I play a lot of different stuff. But you're not reading this to hear me answer "everything," so let's go with...
Role Playing Games
The thing about RPGs, is that there are a lot of different varieties of them. A western action RPG, the games in Bioware's library for instance, will have a much different feel than a turn-based JRPG like a Final Fantasy. An RPG might be very on-rails and focus on a detailed, set storyline, or it might be completely open and encourage as much explanation as possible. It might give you a lot of control over customizing your characters, or it might challenge you to make the best possible usage out of a stable of fixed characters. It might have strategy game elements, card game elements, or some other stuff that's completely out of left field. Thing is, all of these things, when done well, can be fun for their own reasons. Playing Oblivion and waiting till sundown so I could pick the lock of every house in the Imperial City and rob it blind (what, that's not what you did the whole game?) and playing Chrono Trigger and saving the world from a giant-ass shell that fires lasers are both entertaining as hell for me for different reasons. Really, the key to a good RPG is depth, and that can mean different things for different games. It can either mean telling a complex and emotional story, or giving you endless permutations of how you can level up and improve your character, or both. And that's the key to RPGs: the best ones are epic enough in scope to awe you the first time you play, and with good enough and deep enough gameplay to make you want to play again.
Next: Day 21 - Game with the best story. Gonna mull this over, but might be some redundancy here again.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
30 Days of Gaming Day 19: Picture of a game setting you wish you lived in
Day 19: Picture of a game setting you wish you lived inLindblum (Final Fantasy IX)
(image source)
Final Fantasy IX's greatest strength was how memorable its environments were. With two Playstation 1 FF games already under its belt, Square perfected the illustrated backgrounds it used in that era, and was able to add more actually rendered parts of the scenery than in VII or VIII. There were a bunch of cool places in IX. There was Burmecia, "The Realm of Endless Rain," Clerya, the city within a cyclone, and Treno, the city where it's always night for some reason. I think my favorite though was Lindblum, which combined the traditional RPG city built outward from a castle with some elements of steampunk thrown in. It's got good public transportation, it's accessible by airship, and has a theater district to boot. Sure it gets leveled pretty good by Queen Brahne's army at one point, but getting blown up from time to time is actually pretty much par for the course for an FF city.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
30 Days of Gaming Day 18: Favorite Protagonist
Day 18: Favorite Protagonist
Ezio Auditore (Assassin's Creed 2)
A game where you parkour your way around 15th century Italy stabbin' unsuspecting mopes and occasionally hanging out with Leonardo DaVinci is cool enough on it's own, but Assassin's Creed II actually tells a really good story, centered around it's tragic hero (maybe anti-hero?) Ezio. Within the first few minutes of the game, Ezio's father and brother are framed and hanged in the public square. The game follows Ezio for the next two decades of his life as he tries to uncover the plot the conspiracy that brought his family down. Whoever his voice actor is does an excellent job giving the character a distinctive sound while putting genuine emotion into the lines and making the Italian sound authentic. It's great seeing the character transition from loudmouth street rat to methodical assassin, though they never take all of the humanity out of the character either. They could have easily just make him like Frank Miller's (recent) Batman and ad him go around saying "ARRGH! MUST BREAK SPINES" the entire time, but he has a lot of humor throughout, not to mention bro hugs. Even before the character reappeared in the sequel Brotherhood, (which I haven't played yet) there was a ton of Ezio fanart and cosplay floating around the internet. You can put him on a pretty short list of characters that have reached that sort of universal recognition of badassery so quickly.
Next: Day 19: A picture of a game setting in which you'd like to live
gotta deliberate that one a bit
Ezio Auditore (Assassin's Creed 2)
A game where you parkour your way around 15th century Italy stabbin' unsuspecting mopes and occasionally hanging out with Leonardo DaVinci is cool enough on it's own, but Assassin's Creed II actually tells a really good story, centered around it's tragic hero (maybe anti-hero?) Ezio. Within the first few minutes of the game, Ezio's father and brother are framed and hanged in the public square. The game follows Ezio for the next two decades of his life as he tries to uncover the plot the conspiracy that brought his family down. Whoever his voice actor is does an excellent job giving the character a distinctive sound while putting genuine emotion into the lines and making the Italian sound authentic. It's great seeing the character transition from loudmouth street rat to methodical assassin, though they never take all of the humanity out of the character either. They could have easily just make him like Frank Miller's (recent) Batman and ad him go around saying "ARRGH! MUST BREAK SPINES" the entire time, but he has a lot of humor throughout, not to mention bro hugs. Even before the character reappeared in the sequel Brotherhood, (which I haven't played yet) there was a ton of Ezio fanart and cosplay floating around the internet. You can put him on a pretty short list of characters that have reached that sort of universal recognition of badassery so quickly.
Next: Day 19: A picture of a game setting in which you'd like to live
gotta deliberate that one a bit
Monday, March 21, 2011
Month of Video Games Day 17: Favorite Antagonist
(Firstly, this whole meme--and I can't for the life of me figure out where it started--is apparently referred to most often as "30 Days of Gaming" not "Month of Video Games" so... yeah, I pretty much just wanted to write the phrase 30 Days of Gaming to get more hits.)
My friend over at He Been Weatherbeaten predicted that we'd have the same answer for this one and, yeah, he was right. By their nature, video games are usually a classic good vs. evil story, and there are a lot of memorable villains out there, but one stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Day 17: Favorite Antagonist
Kefka (Final Fantasy VI)
(spoilers)
"Life... dreams... hope... Where'd they come from? And where are they headed? These things... I am going to destroy!"
He's got the most maniacal laugh that a 16-bit system can pump out, he's dressed up like a clown, he's completely bat-shit crazy, and his goal is to destroy everything. Some people might be tempted to answer Sephiroth from the next game in the series, and there's certainly a level of badassery in Sephiroth, though also some of that Tetsuya Nomura bishieness. But in FF VII, the whole deal with what the hell Jenova is and what the hell Sephiroth is doing with it gets a bit muddled. Kefka's motives and aspirations are elegant in their simplicity.
As someone with a border-lined unhealthy fixation of all things Batman, The Joker will always be first in the category of insane, murderous clowns for me, but Kefka is pretty damn close. The Joker certainly can't claim the successes that Kefka can. Part of what makes Kefka's character so great is the misdirection of it. For starters, he's dressed like a jester, and at the beginning of the game he seems like a bit of a bumbling idiot. In a brief flashback, we see him menacingly lording over a mind-controlled Terra, watching her murder the Empire's own soldiers, just because. The first time we seem him in the game proper, though, he's bitching about having to go out into the desert and that there's sand in his shoes. When he reaches Castle Figaro and Edgar quickly rebukes his demand that Terra be handed over to them, Kefka quickly retreats, except then he sets the entire castle on fire in the middle of the night. Later, when the Empire is laying siege to Doma, Cyan's homeland, Kefka poisons the water supply, killing everybody inside indiscriminately. And look how much fun he has killing Espers. Dude just does not give a fuck. Even still, for the first half of the game he seems to mostly be a lackly under Emperor Gestahl. Gestahl is just kind of power hungry, and is trying to obtain the power contained within Espers by converting to Magicite. This isn't ambitious enough for Kefka, who decides to straight-up murder him and then mess around with the statues that keep the world in balance, thus pretty much breaking the world. FF VI's cast of colorful rogues, of course, defeats Kefka in the end, but not before he has some time to rule over a broken and hopeless world from atop his giant ass tower. Oh yeah, he also turns into a God, and a cooler looking one that Sephiroth with his one big-ass wing sitting atop his cloud:
Next: Day 18 -- Best Protagonist. Seeing as this is basically what my day 2 post was, let's call this "best protagonist not previously mentioned"
My friend over at He Been Weatherbeaten predicted that we'd have the same answer for this one and, yeah, he was right. By their nature, video games are usually a classic good vs. evil story, and there are a lot of memorable villains out there, but one stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Day 17: Favorite Antagonist
Kefka (Final Fantasy VI)
(spoilers)
"Life... dreams... hope... Where'd they come from? And where are they headed? These things... I am going to destroy!"
He's got the most maniacal laugh that a 16-bit system can pump out, he's dressed up like a clown, he's completely bat-shit crazy, and his goal is to destroy everything. Some people might be tempted to answer Sephiroth from the next game in the series, and there's certainly a level of badassery in Sephiroth, though also some of that Tetsuya Nomura bishieness. But in FF VII, the whole deal with what the hell Jenova is and what the hell Sephiroth is doing with it gets a bit muddled. Kefka's motives and aspirations are elegant in their simplicity.
As someone with a border-lined unhealthy fixation of all things Batman, The Joker will always be first in the category of insane, murderous clowns for me, but Kefka is pretty damn close. The Joker certainly can't claim the successes that Kefka can. Part of what makes Kefka's character so great is the misdirection of it. For starters, he's dressed like a jester, and at the beginning of the game he seems like a bit of a bumbling idiot. In a brief flashback, we see him menacingly lording over a mind-controlled Terra, watching her murder the Empire's own soldiers, just because. The first time we seem him in the game proper, though, he's bitching about having to go out into the desert and that there's sand in his shoes. When he reaches Castle Figaro and Edgar quickly rebukes his demand that Terra be handed over to them, Kefka quickly retreats, except then he sets the entire castle on fire in the middle of the night. Later, when the Empire is laying siege to Doma, Cyan's homeland, Kefka poisons the water supply, killing everybody inside indiscriminately. And look how much fun he has killing Espers. Dude just does not give a fuck. Even still, for the first half of the game he seems to mostly be a lackly under Emperor Gestahl. Gestahl is just kind of power hungry, and is trying to obtain the power contained within Espers by converting to Magicite. This isn't ambitious enough for Kefka, who decides to straight-up murder him and then mess around with the statues that keep the world in balance, thus pretty much breaking the world. FF VI's cast of colorful rogues, of course, defeats Kefka in the end, but not before he has some time to rule over a broken and hopeless world from atop his giant ass tower. Oh yeah, he also turns into a God, and a cooler looking one that Sephiroth with his one big-ass wing sitting atop his cloud:
Next: Day 18 -- Best Protagonist. Seeing as this is basically what my day 2 post was, let's call this "best protagonist not previously mentioned"
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Month of Video Games Day 16: Game with the Best Cutscenes
I heaped a lot of praise on the Metal Gear Solid series for my Best Character post, and I do think that the series is pretty genius and that, at its core, it has things to say that are important and universal. What does it mean to be a patriot? Where are technology and the information age taking us? Why is nuclear proliferation so dangerous? I also don't deny for a second that surrounding these core themes is a vastly complicated and meandering plot that is oft-times completely, off-the-wall insane. There aren't many games with a higher story-to-gameplay ratio than the Metal Gear Solid series, and if the story wasn't presented in a way that didn't at least kind of keep you clued in on what was going on, while keeping the forward momentum of the games going, they would be complete train wrecks. The last game in the series is the culmination of everything that had led up to it, and Hideo Kojima and the rest of the creators were at their best in terms of storytelling.
Day 16: Game with the Best Cutscenes
Metal Gear Solid 4
(gonna be spoilers)
Metal Gear Solid 4 had a pretty colossal task ahead of it. It had to put a wrap on the story that had it's roots in an NES game from 1987, continued in a sequel that initially was only released the MSX computer system in Japan and therefore almost nobody played, and then ballooned into something much, much bigger with the three Solid games. MGS2, the previous game in terms of the chronology of events, ended, uh... let's say less than totally clearly. So the challenge was giving the whole opus a satisfying conclusion (note: I have not played Peace Walker on PSP which was released later, and I don't know how much it's story tie into the broader story of the Solid games) over the course of one more game. The game is the densest in a series of very dense games, and the cutscenes are long and numerous. At times, even for someone like me who loves the series, the cutscenes come dangerously close to completely overshadowing the playable part of the game, though to be fair, the flow of gameplay isn't broken up to as much as it was in MGS2 (enter door... cover conversation! walk 10 feet... codec conversation!). Most of the exposition is concentrated in the start of each of the game's five acts.
Getting through all the exposition would be brutal if it wasn't made interesting, but it is. David Hayter adds a sort of sorrow and world-weariness to Snake's gravelly, 17-packs-a-day voice, and Snake is developed more and able to have a say in things more instead of just repeating the last word in a codec conversation ("A Hind-D?!") Improving on the hilarious awkwardness of the first MGS, ("Snake, do you believe that love can bloom, even on the battlefield?") Kojima actually writes a human-sounding love subplot with Otacon and Naiomi. And for good measure, there's also some straight-up preposterous but awesome fight scenes like this to break up the talkiness. There are some long, long, monologues that are all over the place in scope and draw upon information from the previous games in the series, but they're made much easier to stay engaged in by some cool visuals. Look at the last half of this cutscence. The game shows you faces of the relevant characters to help explain what the hell is going on, but it doesn't just show you a bunch of faces, it turns the cutscene into it's own little mini-story. When the Boss is brought up, her image is overlayed in a flower pedal pattern, invoking the final fight in MGS3 where you fight her in a field of white flowers and have to reluctantly kill her. Each big exposition scene like this has its own sort of design motif going on.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is the best produced, best acted, and best written game in the series. I actually don't think it has the most entertaining gameplay. It's more constrained than the open jungle setting of Metal Gear Solid 3 and because of that it wasn't quite as fun for me. The cutscenes then, a bigger part of the total game than any game in a series that was already notoriously cut-scene heavy, had to be damn good. They were, and MGS4 ended up being an excellent capstone to a series that represents maybe the most ambitious undertaking in the medium of video games.
Runner-up: Final Fantasy VII
The CG is dated now, but man, that intro is still awesome.
Next: Day 17 -- Favorite antagonist
Month of Video Games Day 15: Post a screenshot from the game you're playing now
Day 15: Post a screenshot from the game you're playing now
Marvel vs. Capcom 3
(found via: http://thegeekrebellion.com/)
Staying true to his comic-book self, Deadpool does a lot of breaking the 4th wall in MvC. His taunt is just him saying "Taunt button!" out loud, he has a special move where he grabs the health and hyper bars off the screen and beats the other player with them, and yes, he taunts you, the player. What a dick. The game is a lot of fun. It's a little disappointing that they cut down the size of roster somewhat--the perfectly reasonable explanation for this is that it's a lot harder to create 3D models for every character than just sprites--but the game is still every bit as fun as it's predecessor, if not moreso.
Next: Day 16 - Game with the best cut scenes.
Think we may be revisiting a game already covered for this one...
Marvel vs. Capcom 3
(found via: http://thegeekrebellion.com/)
Staying true to his comic-book self, Deadpool does a lot of breaking the 4th wall in MvC. His taunt is just him saying "Taunt button!" out loud, he has a special move where he grabs the health and hyper bars off the screen and beats the other player with them, and yes, he taunts you, the player. What a dick. The game is a lot of fun. It's a little disappointing that they cut down the size of roster somewhat--the perfectly reasonable explanation for this is that it's a lot harder to create 3D models for every character than just sprites--but the game is still every bit as fun as it's predecessor, if not moreso.
Next: Day 16 - Game with the best cut scenes.
Think we may be revisiting a game already covered for this one...
Month of Video Games Day 14: Current (or most recent) gaming wallpaper
Day 14: Current (or most recent) gaming wallpaper
So here's the issue with this one: my laptop died a while back and I don't have any of my old wallpapers on this computer. Anyway, even though I really play games more than I watch anime, I oft times go for an anime-themed wallpaper for some reason. So basically I'm making this topic "go find a video game wallpaper that's cool." Done.
The FF7 cast, after Aries uh... has to go away.
via: http://www.desktopwallpaperhd.com/
So here's the issue with this one: my laptop died a while back and I don't have any of my old wallpapers on this computer. Anyway, even though I really play games more than I watch anime, I oft times go for an anime-themed wallpaper for some reason. So basically I'm making this topic "go find a video game wallpaper that's cool." Done.
The FF7 cast, after Aries uh... has to go away.
via: http://www.desktopwallpaperhd.com/
Friday, March 18, 2011
Month of Video Games Day 13: A game you've played more than five times.
Day 13: A game you've played more than 5 times
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3
(for purposes of this, I'm counting playing through all levels with 5 skaters as playing the game more than 5 times. If you don't think that counts... I dunno, you're weird)
I've never ridden a skateboard in my life. I don't really know anything about actual skateboarding. Luckily, that doesn't really matter to enjoy the Tony Hawk games (the early ones at least), which are really more about what skating would be like in a world where the laws of gravity were much more tenuous, falling about six stories onto concrete is mostly a minor inconvenience, and Wolverine occasionally shows up. Like actual skateboarding, (hey, I know at least this much) a big part of the appeal is kind new, cool lines to try out, it's just that here your lines might include jumping out of the window of a building, grinding the baggage claim at an airport, or ollieing into a haunted house. The game is kind of like Super Metroid in that it has an easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master thing going on. Completing enough goals to work your way through the ten or levels in the game is pretty simple, but being good enough to do ridiculousness like this is another matter. It's hard to really get sick of the game, because there's really not much of an upper bound as to how good you can be. If you pull off a million point combo, there's always a way to get to a million and a half by tacking on a few more moves.
The gameplay in Tony Hawk games is truly pretty unique. I guess when it comes down to it, it's mostly about timing and hitting the right button at the right time like anything else, but I in THPS you have the quick switching between the balance of holding a grind and the quick twitch of getting the best possible rotation on a vert move. I guess there have been other "extreme sports" type games out there, but none that I've played have the polish and intuitiveness that the Tony Hawk games have. All of the early games are fantastic, but I singled out 3 because I think it represents when they'd installed pretty much all of the major gameplay elements, but before it started to devolve into sillyness. THPS2 added manualing, where you could tap up and down and balance off the back of your board on flat ground as part of a combo. THPS3 took that one step further and added the revert, where you could tap a shoulder button (R2, if I recall?) at the right time, and go into a manual right from a vert move so you could mosey of the halfpipe or whatever you were in and find a rail to keep your combo going. After THPS3, the stuff they added just seemed superfluous and dumb, like special moves you could do on flat ground that you could do in succession in between spinning your board such that you could literally get hundreds of thousands of points by pretty much staying in one spot. Which really isn't in the spirit of the game at all, I don't think. And after the third game, they ditched the 2:00 time limit and opened the game up more, giving you goals through MMO sort of quests. One would think that this would make the game more interesting, but it actually kind of just made it more tedious, especially when they added a bunch of quests that have nothing to do with skating and have you riding a leaf blower around (seriously, I distinctly remember that being a quest). Really, the 2:00 time limit never bothered me much, because doing 2:00 runs never really got old.
There were at least a dozen skaters in THPS3, each with different move sets, and it was fun playing through the game with all of them. Each time, you'd end up achieving something through a little bit different means, grabbing one extra goal in a run, and generally just doing more impressive things than before. I have a lot of good memories passing the controller between friends running through the game with absolutely every character. One of the more replayable games out there.
Might combine these next 2 since they're easy and I've skipped a few days along the way:
Day 14 - Current (or most recent) gaming wallpaper.
Day 15 - Post a screenshot from the game you’re playing right now.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3
(for purposes of this, I'm counting playing through all levels with 5 skaters as playing the game more than 5 times. If you don't think that counts... I dunno, you're weird)
I've never ridden a skateboard in my life. I don't really know anything about actual skateboarding. Luckily, that doesn't really matter to enjoy the Tony Hawk games (the early ones at least), which are really more about what skating would be like in a world where the laws of gravity were much more tenuous, falling about six stories onto concrete is mostly a minor inconvenience, and Wolverine occasionally shows up. Like actual skateboarding, (hey, I know at least this much) a big part of the appeal is kind new, cool lines to try out, it's just that here your lines might include jumping out of the window of a building, grinding the baggage claim at an airport, or ollieing into a haunted house. The game is kind of like Super Metroid in that it has an easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master thing going on. Completing enough goals to work your way through the ten or levels in the game is pretty simple, but being good enough to do ridiculousness like this is another matter. It's hard to really get sick of the game, because there's really not much of an upper bound as to how good you can be. If you pull off a million point combo, there's always a way to get to a million and a half by tacking on a few more moves.
The gameplay in Tony Hawk games is truly pretty unique. I guess when it comes down to it, it's mostly about timing and hitting the right button at the right time like anything else, but I in THPS you have the quick switching between the balance of holding a grind and the quick twitch of getting the best possible rotation on a vert move. I guess there have been other "extreme sports" type games out there, but none that I've played have the polish and intuitiveness that the Tony Hawk games have. All of the early games are fantastic, but I singled out 3 because I think it represents when they'd installed pretty much all of the major gameplay elements, but before it started to devolve into sillyness. THPS2 added manualing, where you could tap up and down and balance off the back of your board on flat ground as part of a combo. THPS3 took that one step further and added the revert, where you could tap a shoulder button (R2, if I recall?) at the right time, and go into a manual right from a vert move so you could mosey of the halfpipe or whatever you were in and find a rail to keep your combo going. After THPS3, the stuff they added just seemed superfluous and dumb, like special moves you could do on flat ground that you could do in succession in between spinning your board such that you could literally get hundreds of thousands of points by pretty much staying in one spot. Which really isn't in the spirit of the game at all, I don't think. And after the third game, they ditched the 2:00 time limit and opened the game up more, giving you goals through MMO sort of quests. One would think that this would make the game more interesting, but it actually kind of just made it more tedious, especially when they added a bunch of quests that have nothing to do with skating and have you riding a leaf blower around (seriously, I distinctly remember that being a quest). Really, the 2:00 time limit never bothered me much, because doing 2:00 runs never really got old.
There were at least a dozen skaters in THPS3, each with different move sets, and it was fun playing through the game with all of them. Each time, you'd end up achieving something through a little bit different means, grabbing one extra goal in a run, and generally just doing more impressive things than before. I have a lot of good memories passing the controller between friends running through the game with absolutely every character. One of the more replayable games out there.
Might combine these next 2 since they're easy and I've skipped a few days along the way:
Day 14 - Current (or most recent) gaming wallpaper.
Day 15 - Post a screenshot from the game you’re playing right now.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Month of Video Games Day 12: A game everyone should play
Gonna be lazy today and take advantage of the fact that I've already written about video games here some. What's a game everyone should play? Batman: Arkham Asylum. Why should you play it? 'Cause this. If there's anything right with the world, Batman has pretty much universe appeal, and the game should have just the right difficulty curse that it shouldn't frustrate too many people. It has some elements of a stealth game and some of a beat-em-up and should appeal to both. For everything else you wanna know, see my original post.
Next: Day 13 -- A game you've played five times or more. Promise that will be less lazy.
Next: Day 13 -- A game you've played five times or more. Promise that will be less lazy.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Month of Video Games Day 11: Gaming System of Choice
Day 11: Gaming System of ChoicePlaystation 3
This is going to be a short one because I've never been one to really feel the need for console tribalism. Not so much anymore, but back in the day, I frequented the message boards on IGN.com a lot, and was always rather flabbergasted by the flame wars that would arise over which console was better, and the fighting over which console had the better E3 show that would ensue while E3 was still going on. I don't think Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo could pay PR people to shill for their system with quite the same tenacity that some random people on the internet do for free.
That said, I'm gonna answer the question, and I'm going to say Playstation 3. I really couldn't say if Playstation 3 itself has the best offering of the current generation as I don't own an X-Box 360 or a Wii and I think I've played enough of their libraries, but the thing about Playstation 3 is that it gives you two generations worth of backwards compatability (if you bought a version that offered backwards compatability). Nintendo 64 had some amazing games, but you can't stick an N64 cartrige in a Wii, you have to work with their online offerings. It's backwards compatible with Gamecube discs, but it it doesn't seem like the amount of Gamecube games that have stood the test of time is that huge. You've got your Smash Bros. Melee, your Zelda, your Eternal Darkness... I dunno, I think it starts getting thin pretty quickly from there. There are good exclusives on all systems, but I always thought that Sony gave you the most diverse range of options. It always had a lot of JRPG stuff, tournament fighter stuff, and just generally more offbeat stuff that didn't seem as represented on other systems. I've also found the Playstation style controllers, especially on the PS3 where they've extended out the L2 and R2 triggers a bit to be the most comfortable fit. Some of that might just be because I'm the most familiar, I dunno. Like I said, not a console purist. Play what you want.
Next up: Day 12 -- A game everyone should play
A couple of the games I've already mentioned would fall into that category, but I'll try and switch it up and come up with a new game to write about.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Month of Video Games Day 10: Best Gameplay
Nicely, this matches up with the runner-up from yesterday.
Day 10: Best Gameplay
Super Metroid
Admittedly, there are some notable ones that I haven't played through, but for my money, Super Metroid is the best side-scroller ever made. I've never played another game that so completely immerses you in the world it creates even though it lacks a third dimension. Some of the Castlevania's come close, but I don't quite think they match it. There aren't many 2D environments as fully realized as Zebes is. The attention to deal is amazing. In the opening area, before you get the morphing ball and the planet seems to "wake up," you walk through the ruins of the Mother Brain machine from the original NES game. How many games of Super Metriod's era had callbacks like that? Lights glow rhythmically in the background, old ruins will look eroded, insects will be crawling along a wall and then dart away: all of these details give the world an sense of plausibility even though it's completely flat. Aiding this is the cool as hell, ethereal soundtrack that oft times seems less like actual instruments and more like rhythmic noises coming from some deep nether-regions, like the drums in the Mines of Moria scene of Fellowship of the Ring or something. Every area has so much character, from the Wrecked Ship, still haunted by the ghosts of its crew, to the abyssal depths of Marida, to the Dante's Inferno-esque Norfair. The bosses are some of the most creative you'll see in any game as well. Kraid, who was in the first game, but here takes up two screens worth of space, which was pretty unheard of at the time. There's also Phantoon, a flying one-eyed squid that lets out a very human-like shriek when you hit it that's pretty much nightmare fuel. Speaking of nightmare fuel, there's the Crocomire, which you kill by pushing into molton lava and then manages to come back and try and kill you one more time after that only to have all it's skin burned off. And of course, Mother Brain comes back, except this time sprouts gets out of nowhere when you think you've killed it.
This is best gameplay, though, and none of the above would matter if the game wasn't also fun to play. It is. First of all, when you're playing the game for the first time or two and you're not familiar with it, the path to take is not at all obvious. You have to bounce between areas a lot and do a lot of backtracking. The game manages to do this without frustrating you though. You never feel like it's making you backtrack just to be a dick, and when you eventually progress, the new area is always a cool experience to make the effort seem worth it. Then of course you want to play the game again knowing what you learned the first time and shave time off your playthrough. Missile and bomb upgrades are scattered all throughout the world in unlikely places that, (if you're not using a FAQ) are not at all trivial to find. The game is the perfect example of "easy to learn, difficult to master." Not only does knowing where you're going help, but there are various tricks, like wall jumping (and some glitches) that open up shortcuts for you that aren't at all obvious when you're just trudging through the first time. Amongst games that are single-player only and don't have a lot of customizable elements, there aren't many with the sort of playability that Super Metroid has.
The way you can upgrade Samus throughout the game is fantastic, not just the amount of upgrades, but the diversity of them. There's no "your level 2 gun is now a level 3 gun!" Every item is unique in what it does and can be anything from the iconic morphing ball, where you literally roll up like a pillbug (I had to Google that), to a weapon that freezes enemies in place, to the Space Jump, which creates some sort of cyclone thing that lets you jump indefinitely. All of these work like they're supposed to, with fluid and intuitive controls. You can scroll through your missle and bomb weapons with one button, and other than that, you don't have to go through menus to "activate" anything (you can turn abilities off it you want to), it's all built into the existing controls. There are some exploitable glitches, but none that you really run into on accident. It's a very polished game, and a very, very fun one. One of my all time favorites (gonna have to way until day 30 to see if it is my all-time favorite)
Next: Day 11 -- Game system of choice
Day 10: Best Gameplay
Super Metroid
Admittedly, there are some notable ones that I haven't played through, but for my money, Super Metroid is the best side-scroller ever made. I've never played another game that so completely immerses you in the world it creates even though it lacks a third dimension. Some of the Castlevania's come close, but I don't quite think they match it. There aren't many 2D environments as fully realized as Zebes is. The attention to deal is amazing. In the opening area, before you get the morphing ball and the planet seems to "wake up," you walk through the ruins of the Mother Brain machine from the original NES game. How many games of Super Metriod's era had callbacks like that? Lights glow rhythmically in the background, old ruins will look eroded, insects will be crawling along a wall and then dart away: all of these details give the world an sense of plausibility even though it's completely flat. Aiding this is the cool as hell, ethereal soundtrack that oft times seems less like actual instruments and more like rhythmic noises coming from some deep nether-regions, like the drums in the Mines of Moria scene of Fellowship of the Ring or something. Every area has so much character, from the Wrecked Ship, still haunted by the ghosts of its crew, to the abyssal depths of Marida, to the Dante's Inferno-esque Norfair. The bosses are some of the most creative you'll see in any game as well. Kraid, who was in the first game, but here takes up two screens worth of space, which was pretty unheard of at the time. There's also Phantoon, a flying one-eyed squid that lets out a very human-like shriek when you hit it that's pretty much nightmare fuel. Speaking of nightmare fuel, there's the Crocomire, which you kill by pushing into molton lava and then manages to come back and try and kill you one more time after that only to have all it's skin burned off. And of course, Mother Brain comes back, except this time sprouts gets out of nowhere when you think you've killed it.
This is best gameplay, though, and none of the above would matter if the game wasn't also fun to play. It is. First of all, when you're playing the game for the first time or two and you're not familiar with it, the path to take is not at all obvious. You have to bounce between areas a lot and do a lot of backtracking. The game manages to do this without frustrating you though. You never feel like it's making you backtrack just to be a dick, and when you eventually progress, the new area is always a cool experience to make the effort seem worth it. Then of course you want to play the game again knowing what you learned the first time and shave time off your playthrough. Missile and bomb upgrades are scattered all throughout the world in unlikely places that, (if you're not using a FAQ) are not at all trivial to find. The game is the perfect example of "easy to learn, difficult to master." Not only does knowing where you're going help, but there are various tricks, like wall jumping (and some glitches) that open up shortcuts for you that aren't at all obvious when you're just trudging through the first time. Amongst games that are single-player only and don't have a lot of customizable elements, there aren't many with the sort of playability that Super Metroid has.
The way you can upgrade Samus throughout the game is fantastic, not just the amount of upgrades, but the diversity of them. There's no "your level 2 gun is now a level 3 gun!" Every item is unique in what it does and can be anything from the iconic morphing ball, where you literally roll up like a pillbug (I had to Google that), to a weapon that freezes enemies in place, to the Space Jump, which creates some sort of cyclone thing that lets you jump indefinitely. All of these work like they're supposed to, with fluid and intuitive controls. You can scroll through your missle and bomb weapons with one button, and other than that, you don't have to go through menus to "activate" anything (you can turn abilities off it you want to), it's all built into the existing controls. There are some exploitable glitches, but none that you really run into on accident. It's a very polished game, and a very, very fun one. One of my all time favorites (gonna have to way until day 30 to see if it is my all-time favorite)
Next: Day 11 -- Game system of choice
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Month of Video Games Day 9: Saddest Game Scene
Like the music post from yesterday, there are a lot of different directions you could go with this. My friend went for (SPOILER)
Tidus disappearing at the end of Final Fantasy X, which is a pretty good choice.
But like the music post I'm going to shun the more modern Final Fantasies and give Final Fantasy VI some love on back-to-back days....
(SPOILERS)
Day 9: Saddest Game Scene
Celes Tries to Kill Herself
Final Fantasy VI was pretty hardcore for a video game in 1994. There was the part where Cyan's wife and child are poisoned as part of Kefka's siege of Doma and he first has to walk in on their dead bodies, his son still in bed, and then later has to watch them board the train that shuttles people to the afterlife. There was also the whole thing where the protagonist is revealed to be the product of a human/extra-dimensional furry affair. There's not anything in the game quite as straight-up gut-wrenching, though, as the scene right after Kefka throws the world out of balance and Cid and Celes are alone on an island. Cid nurses Celes back to health but then gets sick himself and lies on his deathbed. Believing herself to be the only person left, Celes attempts to kill herself by jumping off of a cliff. It's only after she happens to not die and see a seagull with Locke's bandanna while sprawled out on the beach that she decides to go on living. There are a lot of games, RPGs especially, where things get pretty messed up. Chrono Trigger had you travel to the time period after Lavos had struck and the remains of humanity are living in squalor with no food. FF7 had a meteor almost destroy the world and before they made Advent Children it was kind of ambiguous as to whether any humans survived. But I'm not sure there's anything as straight-up brutal though, as the simplicity of someone believing themselves to be alone in a ruined world and deciding to just end it quickly. It's like Cormac McCarthy decided to help out on making a video game for a spell.
Runner-up: Super Metroid -- Mother Brain kills the metroid hatching
(2:00 in)
Because just... awwwww... whyyyyyy?
Up next: Best gameplay.
Tidus disappearing at the end of Final Fantasy X, which is a pretty good choice.
But like the music post I'm going to shun the more modern Final Fantasies and give Final Fantasy VI some love on back-to-back days....
(SPOILERS)
Day 9: Saddest Game Scene
Celes Tries to Kill Herself
Final Fantasy VI was pretty hardcore for a video game in 1994. There was the part where Cyan's wife and child are poisoned as part of Kefka's siege of Doma and he first has to walk in on their dead bodies, his son still in bed, and then later has to watch them board the train that shuttles people to the afterlife. There was also the whole thing where the protagonist is revealed to be the product of a human/extra-dimensional furry affair. There's not anything in the game quite as straight-up gut-wrenching, though, as the scene right after Kefka throws the world out of balance and Cid and Celes are alone on an island. Cid nurses Celes back to health but then gets sick himself and lies on his deathbed. Believing herself to be the only person left, Celes attempts to kill herself by jumping off of a cliff. It's only after she happens to not die and see a seagull with Locke's bandanna while sprawled out on the beach that she decides to go on living. There are a lot of games, RPGs especially, where things get pretty messed up. Chrono Trigger had you travel to the time period after Lavos had struck and the remains of humanity are living in squalor with no food. FF7 had a meteor almost destroy the world and before they made Advent Children it was kind of ambiguous as to whether any humans survived. But I'm not sure there's anything as straight-up brutal though, as the simplicity of someone believing themselves to be alone in a ruined world and deciding to just end it quickly. It's like Cormac McCarthy decided to help out on making a video game for a spell.
Runner-up: Super Metroid -- Mother Brain kills the metroid hatching
(2:00 in)
Because just... awwwww... whyyyyyy?
Up next: Best gameplay.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Month of Video Games Day 8: Best Soundtrack
Day 8: Best Soundtrack
So for a lot of these, I'd really had to struggle coming up with an answer. The challenge of this one is going to be picking one answer. Music in video games is territory that I've already covered here some. It's something that I've always loved. When it's well done it can bring the immersion that a game creates to a completely different level, and going back and hearing music from an old game you really love will give you an immediate rush of nostalgia, even if you're not actually playing the game. I love that there's kind of a secret handshake sort of quality to video game music. Anyone else who's played a lot of video games will know what you're talking about if you reference, but it's kind of an afterthought for people who don't really play video games. Nobody really has any idea who Nobuo Uematsu is the way everyone knows who John Williams is, even if they don't really watch a lot of movies. Really, I could spend about 6 hours just linking video game music. I'll try and keep it a little bit less ridiculous than that, but seriously, where to start?
Maybe I could start with the springy hip-hop in Jet Set Radio, or the haunting themes from the Metal Gear Solid games (or the delightfully absurd Bond opening parody that is Snake Eater). I could go with the cool ambiance of Super Metroid's soundtrack, or the gothic styling of Symphony of the Night. But really, eventually, if we're going to talk about some of the most well crafted and most memorable game music, we're gonna have to get into RPGs. I'm tempted to say either Chrono Trigger or Chrono Cross. Yasunori Mitsuda's brilliance is apparent in both games. In Chrono Trigger, he created a diverse and atmospheric soundtrack on primative hardware that's still good enough to listen to on it's own. There's the somber overworld themes of Peaceful Days, and Wind Scene, the fun-as-hell Frog's Theme, the etherial Shala's Theme, and the stone cold badassery of the Lavos battle music. Years later, Mitsuda came back to compose Chrono Cross with better the sound hardware provided by Playstation and created the gorgeous Scars of Time, and a bunch more amazing tracks to go along with it.
Final Fantasy, for me, is paramount, though, when it comes to RPGs, though, and Nobuo Uemastu's music throughout the series has always resonated with me. Again, how the hell do I pick a favorite? X had the somber reflection of To Zanarkand and maybe the best love theme in Suteki Da Ne. VIII, despite being uh... not as good of a game, had the blood-pumping Man with the Machine Gun. Then there's Final Fantasy VII, with the iconic, cataclysmic One-Winged Angel, the Main Theme, which is almost its own little story in how it progresses, the punch-you-in-the-gut sadness of Aerith's Theme, and the intro, which did so much to get you excited and draw you into the world of the game immediately. It was very, very tempting to settle on VII, but no, I'm going to go back one game prior...
Final Fantasy VI
Like what Mitsuda did on Chrono Cross, I think a of credit is deserved for the range and diversity that Uematsu was able to achieve on a little old 16-bit system that's now 20 years old. One of the seasons I'm settling on VI rather than VII is the more-with-less quality of it. But more than that, there's just really not a bad track on the entire soundtrack. All of the character themes are as lovable as the characters and seem to be instantly evocative of them. Even being comprised of simple synthetic instruments, Uematsu is able to create music that's genuinely emotional enough to match the emotional complexity of the game which, by the standards of 1994, was pretty much unmatched. And oh yeah, the game has an entire fucking opera in it.
Omen
The opening is a sufficiently operatic overture for the epic scale of the game, and has a great sinister and mysterious quality to it. You have to love the bellowing chimes going along with the strings. They sound positively apocalyptic. At the end, it introduces the somber Terra's Theme, which may be the single coolest theme in any game.
Locke's Theme
Breaks you out of your initial depression a bit after Terra's Theme. The perfect light-hearted, dashing rogue sort of theme.
The Decisive Battle
Best Final Fantasy boss battle music? Yeah, I think so.
Kefka's Theme
There are a lot of mentally unstable villains out there in video games, movies, and all of fiction, but there's nothing quite like an insane man dressed as a clown who takes over an Empire so he can throw the order of things out of balance and rule over a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's kind of hard to capture that in a piece of music, but Kefka's Theme does a pretty good job. If you've played the game before, you can hear his fantastic 16-bit maniacal laugh as you listen to this. I guarantee you can.
Shadow's Theme
The ultimate shadowy anti-hero gets a cool Good, the Bad, and the Ugly-sounding theme.
The Veldt
I think this might be one of the most sampled video game tracks out there, leading to awesome stuff like Overclocked Remix's Kefka Goes West. Cool as hell.
Forever Rachel
A lot like what Uemastu did with Arieth's Theme a game later. A great, sad piece, although maybe not even the best one, with the solumn guitar strings of Epitaph coming later.
Overture / Aria di Mezzo Caratte / Wedding Waltz / Grand Finale
Have I mentioned yet that the game has an opera in it? I didn't play Final Fantasy VI when it came out in 1994, but I think I can safely say that there had been nothing whatsoever like that in a video game before at the time and, really, I'm not really sure how many scenes like it have been made since. It was a pretty storytelling device, although if it didn't sound like a legit opera it wouldn't have worked nearly as well. Uemastu nailed it.
Relm's Theme
"Uncle Ulty! I'm going to paint you a portrait!!"
Esper World
Fantastically foreboding.
Battle to the Death
Sufficiently epic for a fight with Atma Weapon
Dark World
With the game at its absolute darkest point, Uemastu pulls out some of the most morose organ music you'll ever hear.
Dancing Mad
The culmination of everything.
There you have it. Final Fantasy VI was a game with one of the best cast of characters ever assembled. Every FF game has memorable characters, but VI's batch was a particularly great ensemble, and went to great lengths to develop all of them and tell the story of what had come before in each of their lives. Nobuo Uemastu's soundtrack perfectly complements this at any step of the way. You can't see a screenshot of Final Fantasy and not hear the accompanying music, nor hear a track from the OST and not see the scene. I'm a huge fan of Roger Ebert, and reading his reviews is a big reason why I started writing a blog that is oft-times about movies. Ebert, though, has developed this weird, wrong-headed idea that video games can't be art and has gone to great lengths to defend his position. As far as I'm concerned, though, Final Fantasy VI and it's score disproves his position, and this was a game made 17 years ago.
So for a lot of these, I'd really had to struggle coming up with an answer. The challenge of this one is going to be picking one answer. Music in video games is territory that I've already covered here some. It's something that I've always loved. When it's well done it can bring the immersion that a game creates to a completely different level, and going back and hearing music from an old game you really love will give you an immediate rush of nostalgia, even if you're not actually playing the game. I love that there's kind of a secret handshake sort of quality to video game music. Anyone else who's played a lot of video games will know what you're talking about if you reference, but it's kind of an afterthought for people who don't really play video games. Nobody really has any idea who Nobuo Uematsu is the way everyone knows who John Williams is, even if they don't really watch a lot of movies. Really, I could spend about 6 hours just linking video game music. I'll try and keep it a little bit less ridiculous than that, but seriously, where to start?
Maybe I could start with the springy hip-hop in Jet Set Radio, or the haunting themes from the Metal Gear Solid games (or the delightfully absurd Bond opening parody that is Snake Eater). I could go with the cool ambiance of Super Metroid's soundtrack, or the gothic styling of Symphony of the Night. But really, eventually, if we're going to talk about some of the most well crafted and most memorable game music, we're gonna have to get into RPGs. I'm tempted to say either Chrono Trigger or Chrono Cross. Yasunori Mitsuda's brilliance is apparent in both games. In Chrono Trigger, he created a diverse and atmospheric soundtrack on primative hardware that's still good enough to listen to on it's own. There's the somber overworld themes of Peaceful Days, and Wind Scene, the fun-as-hell Frog's Theme, the etherial Shala's Theme, and the stone cold badassery of the Lavos battle music. Years later, Mitsuda came back to compose Chrono Cross with better the sound hardware provided by Playstation and created the gorgeous Scars of Time, and a bunch more amazing tracks to go along with it.
Final Fantasy, for me, is paramount, though, when it comes to RPGs, though, and Nobuo Uemastu's music throughout the series has always resonated with me. Again, how the hell do I pick a favorite? X had the somber reflection of To Zanarkand and maybe the best love theme in Suteki Da Ne. VIII, despite being uh... not as good of a game, had the blood-pumping Man with the Machine Gun. Then there's Final Fantasy VII, with the iconic, cataclysmic One-Winged Angel, the Main Theme, which is almost its own little story in how it progresses, the punch-you-in-the-gut sadness of Aerith's Theme, and the intro, which did so much to get you excited and draw you into the world of the game immediately. It was very, very tempting to settle on VII, but no, I'm going to go back one game prior...
Final Fantasy VI
Like what Mitsuda did on Chrono Cross, I think a of credit is deserved for the range and diversity that Uematsu was able to achieve on a little old 16-bit system that's now 20 years old. One of the seasons I'm settling on VI rather than VII is the more-with-less quality of it. But more than that, there's just really not a bad track on the entire soundtrack. All of the character themes are as lovable as the characters and seem to be instantly evocative of them. Even being comprised of simple synthetic instruments, Uematsu is able to create music that's genuinely emotional enough to match the emotional complexity of the game which, by the standards of 1994, was pretty much unmatched. And oh yeah, the game has an entire fucking opera in it.
Omen
The opening is a sufficiently operatic overture for the epic scale of the game, and has a great sinister and mysterious quality to it. You have to love the bellowing chimes going along with the strings. They sound positively apocalyptic. At the end, it introduces the somber Terra's Theme, which may be the single coolest theme in any game.
Locke's Theme
Breaks you out of your initial depression a bit after Terra's Theme. The perfect light-hearted, dashing rogue sort of theme.
The Decisive Battle
Best Final Fantasy boss battle music? Yeah, I think so.
Kefka's Theme
There are a lot of mentally unstable villains out there in video games, movies, and all of fiction, but there's nothing quite like an insane man dressed as a clown who takes over an Empire so he can throw the order of things out of balance and rule over a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's kind of hard to capture that in a piece of music, but Kefka's Theme does a pretty good job. If you've played the game before, you can hear his fantastic 16-bit maniacal laugh as you listen to this. I guarantee you can.
Shadow's Theme
The ultimate shadowy anti-hero gets a cool Good, the Bad, and the Ugly-sounding theme.
The Veldt
I think this might be one of the most sampled video game tracks out there, leading to awesome stuff like Overclocked Remix's Kefka Goes West. Cool as hell.
Forever Rachel
A lot like what Uemastu did with Arieth's Theme a game later. A great, sad piece, although maybe not even the best one, with the solumn guitar strings of Epitaph coming later.
Overture / Aria di Mezzo Caratte / Wedding Waltz / Grand Finale
Have I mentioned yet that the game has an opera in it? I didn't play Final Fantasy VI when it came out in 1994, but I think I can safely say that there had been nothing whatsoever like that in a video game before at the time and, really, I'm not really sure how many scenes like it have been made since. It was a pretty storytelling device, although if it didn't sound like a legit opera it wouldn't have worked nearly as well. Uemastu nailed it.
Relm's Theme
"Uncle Ulty! I'm going to paint you a portrait!!"
Esper World
Fantastically foreboding.
Battle to the Death
Sufficiently epic for a fight with Atma Weapon
Dark World
With the game at its absolute darkest point, Uemastu pulls out some of the most morose organ music you'll ever hear.
Dancing Mad
The culmination of everything.
There you have it. Final Fantasy VI was a game with one of the best cast of characters ever assembled. Every FF game has memorable characters, but VI's batch was a particularly great ensemble, and went to great lengths to develop all of them and tell the story of what had come before in each of their lives. Nobuo Uemastu's soundtrack perfectly complements this at any step of the way. You can't see a screenshot of Final Fantasy and not hear the accompanying music, nor hear a track from the OST and not see the scene. I'm a huge fan of Roger Ebert, and reading his reviews is a big reason why I started writing a blog that is oft-times about movies. Ebert, though, has developed this weird, wrong-headed idea that video games can't be art and has gone to great lengths to defend his position. As far as I'm concerned, though, Final Fantasy VI and it's score disproves his position, and this was a game made 17 years ago.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Month of Video Games Day 7: Best Game Couple
Day 7: Best Game Couple
I imagine most people here would go for like a Zidane-Dagger or Tidus-Yuna, but I'm going to do for an unconventional answer....
Dynasty Warriors: Meg Huo and Zhu Rong
That is a giant man with giant bear claws. And his lovely wife that he carries around. Like most Dynasty Warriors characters, Meng Huo and Zhu Rong come from the kind-of-but-not-really historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I have no idea how they're portrayed in that work, but the Japanese people who made Dynasty Warriors, or at least the people translating the games into English, see fit to have Zhu Rong talk like she's white trash and Meng Huo like he's straight up crazy. Zhu Rong will say stuff like "That outta learn ya!" and "Get off our property!" whereas Meng Huo, after defeating an officer, instead of saying "Enemy officer defeated" like most characters, will say "Enemy officer devoured!" It is implied that he's eating people. Why does any of this make them the best couple? ...Honestly I really have no idea. They just amuse me with their weird mannerisms and obnoxious and most certainly ahistorical tribal getup. The extent of Dynasty Warriors gameplay is basically "hit square a lot until your special attack gague button fills up, then hit circle, then start hitting square a lot again," so the charm of the game is all about the characters, and they were always two of my favorites.
I imagine most people here would go for like a Zidane-Dagger or Tidus-Yuna, but I'm going to do for an unconventional answer....
Dynasty Warriors: Meg Huo and Zhu Rong
That is a giant man with giant bear claws. And his lovely wife that he carries around. Like most Dynasty Warriors characters, Meng Huo and Zhu Rong come from the kind-of-but-not-really historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I have no idea how they're portrayed in that work, but the Japanese people who made Dynasty Warriors, or at least the people translating the games into English, see fit to have Zhu Rong talk like she's white trash and Meng Huo like he's straight up crazy. Zhu Rong will say stuff like "That outta learn ya!" and "Get off our property!" whereas Meng Huo, after defeating an officer, instead of saying "Enemy officer defeated" like most characters, will say "Enemy officer devoured!" It is implied that he's eating people. Why does any of this make them the best couple? ...Honestly I really have no idea. They just amuse me with their weird mannerisms and obnoxious and most certainly ahistorical tribal getup. The extent of Dynasty Warriors gameplay is basically "hit square a lot until your special attack gague button fills up, then hit circle, then start hitting square a lot again," so the charm of the game is all about the characters, and they were always two of my favorites.
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Month of Video Games Day 6: Most Annoying Character
Hey, so how's that Zelda dungeon goin'? Having fun? Enjoying it? How'd you like to see the entrance of it again.
Day 6: Most Annoying Character
Floormasters -- Zelda
I'm assuming "most annoying character" can include enemies, and few enemies will piss you off more than floormasters in Zelda. Aside from the fact that they'll just kind of scare the crap out of you when you're not expecting them, they'll don't just do damage to you, but rather transport you all the way back to the start of the dungeon. How does that work anyway? Apparently they can maintain an iron tight grip on you and move you anywhere. Why not drop you in a pit? Do they just have a fixation on inconveniencing whatever adventurers might come their way? Or do they just want you to leave? Maybe I've been looking at this all wrong. Maybe floormasters are trying like a non-violent resistance type of thing and just trying to politely get you to leave instead of just straight up murdering you like most Zelda denizens.
I guess that's all I've got for this, so since this was a short one, here's some runners-up I was considering for this:
Zelda - Like-Likes: Similar idea in that they're annoying because they engulf you, steal your shit (oft-times your shield) and then spit you back out. Another enemy based around horribly inconveniencing you.
Zelda -- Princess Ruto: Actually mentioned yesterday, she's the annoying Zora girl who wants you to lead her through Jabu-Jabu's belly, she just doesn't want to walk around or do anything herself whatsoever.
Final Fantasy VII -- Ghost Ship: Annoying for the very specific reason that the enemy shows up as a possible 8th round encounter and has the ability to knock you off the screen, and so thus if it gets a turn it has a chance to instantly undo everything you've done to that point. Seriously, what the hell?
Super Mario World 2 --Baby Mario: Pretty awesome game, but seriously, that crying will gradually drive you insane.
Street Fighter 4 -- Seth: Capcom decided it would be an awesome idea for a final boss to take Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, stick a rotating marble in his abdomen, and give him a moveset that's basically a combination of the most annoying moves in the game: projectiles, Dhalsim's stretchy arms move, and a special where he basically sucks you into himself that you can't really do a whole lot about. Dumbest final boss ever.
Next: Day 7 -- Best Game Couple
Day 6: Most Annoying Character
Floormasters -- Zelda
I'm assuming "most annoying character" can include enemies, and few enemies will piss you off more than floormasters in Zelda. Aside from the fact that they'll just kind of scare the crap out of you when you're not expecting them, they'll don't just do damage to you, but rather transport you all the way back to the start of the dungeon. How does that work anyway? Apparently they can maintain an iron tight grip on you and move you anywhere. Why not drop you in a pit? Do they just have a fixation on inconveniencing whatever adventurers might come their way? Or do they just want you to leave? Maybe I've been looking at this all wrong. Maybe floormasters are trying like a non-violent resistance type of thing and just trying to politely get you to leave instead of just straight up murdering you like most Zelda denizens.I guess that's all I've got for this, so since this was a short one, here's some runners-up I was considering for this:
Zelda - Like-Likes: Similar idea in that they're annoying because they engulf you, steal your shit (oft-times your shield) and then spit you back out. Another enemy based around horribly inconveniencing you.
Zelda -- Princess Ruto: Actually mentioned yesterday, she's the annoying Zora girl who wants you to lead her through Jabu-Jabu's belly, she just doesn't want to walk around or do anything herself whatsoever.
Final Fantasy VII -- Ghost Ship: Annoying for the very specific reason that the enemy shows up as a possible 8th round encounter and has the ability to knock you off the screen, and so thus if it gets a turn it has a chance to instantly undo everything you've done to that point. Seriously, what the hell?
Super Mario World 2 --Baby Mario: Pretty awesome game, but seriously, that crying will gradually drive you insane.
Street Fighter 4 -- Seth: Capcom decided it would be an awesome idea for a final boss to take Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, stick a rotating marble in his abdomen, and give him a moveset that's basically a combination of the most annoying moves in the game: projectiles, Dhalsim's stretchy arms move, and a special where he basically sucks you into himself that you can't really do a whole lot about. Dumbest final boss ever.
Next: Day 7 -- Best Game Couple
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