GameSpite Quarterly and Some Amateur Spite

Got my copy of GameSpite Quarterly vol. 6 in the mail a couple of days ago. You can read all of the articles online here if you'd like, but I'd recommend grabbing the actual book if you've got the money to blow. Actually, I'd recommend grabbing more than one of the books, because individual shipping is pretty rough on the wallet.

While it's sadly in black and white, has some gutter loss in the otherwise nice two-page spreads, and features typos here and there (y'know, just to get all of it's CRIPPLING FLAWS out of the way), I really enjoyed it. I mean, I read all 230 pages or so in about three days, which, with my easily divided attention and increasing lack of free time, is saying something. The analysis of each underappreciated game is generally pretty insightful and engagingly-written.

More than that though, it accomplished something that I've wanted to see done for a long time. Whenever I read a gaming magazine with a nice feature, I almost always want to see it go on longer and deeper in depth. I understand why they don't - magazines just don't have the pages to devote to one feature. An article on underappreciated games in, say, GamePro would get maybe 12 pages max, but here there's 230 straight pages of coverage. It's essentially a feature that has all the room it needs, and when I was done I felt that the concept and each of the games had been well and fully explored. So that's great.

Also... it inspired me. Reading about the love for all of these overlooked games reminds me of one of my favorites, a game so mind-bogglingly great its ridiculous that it doesn't have a higher position of respect among players. Want to know what it is? I know you do! Read on!

What could it be?

Rocket Knight Adventures
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
U.S. Release: June 16, 1993
Format: Genesis

Lately we've been seeing a resurgence in the side-scrolling platformer. From big-budget commercial releases like New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Donkey Kong Country Returns to downloadable titles such as Mega Man 9 & 10 and Sonic the Hedgehog 4, we've been getting the sequels to the classics the way there were meant to be played, dammit. The industry is maturing; designers and publishers are coming to terms with the notion that older play and art styles are a worthwhile stylistic choice instead of a product of outdated technological limitations. Those same designers are also more and more often nostalgic for a childhood obsessed with Nintendo and Sega's 16-bit offerings, as are we all. It's great, yeah?

Exceppppptttt... It's not quite the same, is it? Play DKC Returns or Sonic 4 or any of the others, and you'll likely have lotsa fun, but... something seems off. Is it the physics? A sense of viscerality? Does the parabola of the jump seem stilted to you? They're different. You can feel it. Maybe it's because they have to be designed to appeal to the "old" and "new" gamer alike. Maybe the designers are focusing so much on nostalgia they feel more like remakes than sequels. Hell, maybe we're just misremembering the originals. Probably all, and more. Who knows?

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying today's new side-scrollers are worse than the ones most of us played as children. The gaming industry today produces experiences of the highest quality, convenience, and value of any time in history; anybody who tries to tell you that the good old days were objectively better is an idiot. What I'm saying is that the side-scrollers of our youth had a unique weight to them, and they're relegated to a time that's gone forever.

I say this all because, if you're looking for one of those excellent never-to-be-replicated honest-to-god "old school" platformers, dig a fiver out from under your couch and pick up a copy of Rocket Knight Adventures. You probably haven't played it, and that's a shame, because, at least in my opinion, it's the best platformer ever made. Better than Mario, better than Yoshi, better than DK, better than Sonic. It belongs with a handful of others in that upper echelon characterized by godly physics, gameplay, music, and art design. It's that good, people.

It's not that hard to see why people may have ignored RKA when it first arrived. It's hero, Sparkster, is a blue marsupial on a console more-or-less defined by a certain other blue marsupial and several dozen mediocre clones thereof, and the game's advertising campaign and box art didn't do much to distinguish him from all the wannabes with attitude. Ignore the marketing department; Sparkster doesn't even try to be cool. That's not who he is. When you go too long without pressing a button he doesn't stare you down to do something because he's got places to be you idiot. Instead, he gives you a big thumbs up and Genesis-chirps "Let's go!" We're on an adventure, man! Let's go see what's next! Not to say he doesn't take his job seriously; he has what Tomm Hulett described as "an earnestness in the fun cute protagonist that takes heroism dead seriously." He's easy to love.

Don't worry; Sparkster is Japanese happy, not American angry!

The design of his game can be roughly described as "Sonic meets Contra." It's got platforming, colorful worlds, and animal characters along with fast, relentless action and midbosses all over the place. Sparkster's basic attack is a sword that shoots flames a short way. Hitting directly with the sword deals more damage, leading to a solid risk/reward mechanic that encourages you to dash forward at the optimum moment and hack the boss' face off. The distinguishing mechanic of the series is Sparkster's rocket pack. By holding down the attack button a short while you can boost in eight directions or do a mostly useless standing spin attack. Hitting walls causes Sparkster to bounce around haphazardly, so platforming requires precision boosts and boss fights involve slamming into weak points and scrambling to reposition yourself before the boss starts attacking again.

The game is very short, about seven stages amounting to an hour or so of playtime, but don't let that put you off. It's short because it cuts out the bullshit. The game is constantly throwing new things at you. With one minor exception, enemies never repeat from stage to stage. You're being thrown into fresh situations often, such as platforming by using your reflection in a lava flow, running from indestructible robots, or engaging in some really good some side-scrolling dogfighting straight out of Gradius. These new wrinkles arise, are satisfyingly explored, and dissolve to the next wrinkle, keeping things fresh and surprising throughout.

You're up top, behind the crystals. Eh? Ehhhh?

The graphics are terrific for the Genesis, with lots of foot soldiers on screen, huge bosses, and helpful Contra-style slowdown. More relevant today is the art design. Your enemy is a nation of pigs, all of whom look like they enjoy the work of being evil. Like Sparkster's light-hearted seriousness, the green-armored ham soldiers are simultaneously menacing and mischevious. They're satisfying to smack around (and come to think of it, I've never really given credit to the game's wonderful smack sound effects). The bad guys have a steampunk aesthetic to their equipment and capital city, which looks like industrial Germany with wonderful pig-faced buildings. The other environments are lush, colorful, and filled with detail that's hard to appreciate when you're moving through them so fast and frequently, ala the Sonic trilogy.

The city of Hamburg. Hey-ohhhhhhh!

One thing I love about this game is its narrative structure. First off: don't read the official storyline, because the way the story is told in the game itself is so much more enjoyable. It begins with a cutscene of Sparkster standing on top of a cliff, drawing his sword, and staring down the leering, ghostly face of Lord Ham, manifestation of all that's evil and greasy. What follows is essentially, I shit you not, God of War for kids. For the rest of the game you're chasing the pigs down for kidnapping a princess, and note that you keep chasing and slaughtering them for two stages after you rescue the princess. You just keep going and going, crushing their armies, sacking their city, and blowing up their Death Star. Soldiers and robots and giant mechs are just chucked at you, and you just kill 'em and kill 'em and kill 'em. It's awesome.

You're not told much about Sparkster in the game itself, but just from the gameplay you know two things: he shows up to selflessly fight evil, and you do not want to fuck with him. Well, there's one more thing: you also know that there are at least two rocket knights. On the enemy's team is Axl Gear, the Knuckles to Sparkster's Sonic. He shows up throughout the game to mess with you, and you know, just from your own nation-crushing power, that a battle with another rocket knight is going to make for one hell of a boss fight.

He is, however, American determined

Also, the music. I can close my eyes and recall the theme for each substage in the entire game clearly in my mind. It's a Genny soundtrack up there with Sonic 2 and Streets of Rage.

RKA got two sequels before the 16-bit generation was up, one horrible, one passable, and recently got one of those new downloadable installments in the classic side-scrolling style. It wasn't very good even on its own merits, probably the worst of the revivas in its attempts to evoke nostalgia through surface replication of the original's themes, music, and gameplay. Another example of the fact that 16-bit platformers had a certain something about them that can't easily be replicated in today's gaming environment. Rocket Knight Adventures may be the last of those "classic" platformers that you haven't played, and, if so, it should be the last one you do. Right now.


...Oh goddamit, GameSpite actually covered RKA earlier here. I find it interesting that Mr. Nomali finds the game's stylings cartoonishly nonviolent, while I took away more of a relentless onslaught of porkstruction from the experience.

Serious Sam and his Amazing Friends

I've recently become aware that holy hell are there a lot of first-person shooters coming out this year. We've already gotten Bulletstorm, Crysis 2, Killzone 3, Conduit 2, Homefront, and Portal 2 (though that's more of a puzzler). Upcoming is Brink, Bodycount, F.E.A.R. 3, Red Faction: Armageddon, Duke Nukem Forever, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Resistance 3, Serious Sam 3, Battlefield 3, XCOM, and Rage. That's not counting really similar third-person shooters like Gears of War 3 and SOCOM 4, nor anything to be unveiled at E3 like a new Call of Duty or Halo, nor anything I forgot to mention. Most of them with XP-grubbing mutliplayer and DLC to encourage addiction continuous, long-lasting play.

Wow! I'm no FPS fan, but that's one hell of a lineup. Look at all those games. Their histories, their legacies, their stories and momentum, all intersecting at this moment. The long-delayed Duke Nukem Forever. The seminal third installments of several blockbuster console franchises. The first new IP from id Software since Quake. What's looking to be the real sequel to Deus Ex that fans have been waiting for for a decade. Serious Sam 3. Huge franchises, and promising newbies. Nearly every major FPS producer, from EA to id to Splash Damage, is throwing their hat in the ring this year, polishing their multimillion dollar baby, pushing those features that make them unique. So many circling, positioning, prepping their marketing campaigns, working long nights to give gamers the experience that will earn their finicky dollars.

What I'm saying is, there is no way all of them can be profitable. No. Way. These games are so huge and packed with content that you could play any one of them for months. It's too much even if you play FPS games exclusively, and won't buy any of the other huge 2011 games. No no, no way all of these get another sequel.

And of course, every single one of them is coming out on the 360 and PS3, a fact I love ribbing my PC-gamer brother about. I can remember when first-person shooters were rare on consoles, and more often than not derided where they appeared. But, not to disparage the fine other FPS games that have arrived before (Perfect Dark anyone?), the trinity of GoldenEye, Halo, and Call of Duty have pushed the genre inexorably to the forefront of the console gamer's mind.

Like I said, I'm no real FPS fan (though Serious Sam 3 is one of the few games I might buy new this year), but this confluence is really interesting to me, just from a business and cultural perspective. I wonder how it's going to shake out.

Whoops

It figures. Right after I post a drunken rant about the tragic loss of strategy guides in magazines, I find two at once.

The first is from the December 2009 issue of GamePro. This is one or two issues before the infinitely better redesign, so it's still basically the ultra cool GamePro of olden days. It inexplicably includes four random pages out of BradyGames' Uncharted 2 strategy guide. They're not interesting pages either, just a few spreadsheets detailing what you can buy in the store. Bizarre.

However! The fact that the reprint pages are produced by BradyGames leads me to believe that one route for getting strategy content back into magazines is to outsource it to strategy specialists, by which I mean publishers of strategy guides. Take that four-page Donkey Kong Country Returns guide I talked about earlier and am now starting to realize I desperately want. Let Prima repurpose information and screens from the strategy guide they already have and produce it for you. They get some kinda stipend and free advertising. They can also sell the "miniguide" at their own site; pay a dollar, print it out, fold it up and keep it in the game's case. Ta-da!

The other guide comes in the form of a Rift launch guide from the April 2011 issue of PC Gamer magazine. It's 5 pages, and this time it's produced in-house by the magazine's staff. It actually reads a little like an early review or preview describing the experience, but the point is it gives you a lot of tips on character selection, dungeons, and what to expect initially. Because apparently MMORPGs are hard to just jump into?

This brings to mind another way that magazines can best serve their customers with strategy. Consider magazines exclusive to specific consoles or formats, such as Official Xbox Magazine. They can rest assured that when it comes to the big exclusives, like Halo or God of War, a much larger percentage of their readership is going to be playing them as compared to the readership of a multiplatform magazine. Thus, when it comes to those exclusives, they're going to be best positioned to deliver magazine strategy. This also might be one of the few cases where online multiplayer strategy is justified; if readership continues to play, you can "update" them every month.

Yup. I wish I knew the business better so I could say if all of these ideas are half-assed and unfeasible. Well, at least unfeasible.

Put Guides Back in the Back!

Recently I was reminded about Square's mishap with their Final Fantasy IX strategy guide. In short, they didn't include all the information about the game in the guide, instead prompting players to use a password to access further (essential) information at Square's PlayOnline website. Now, assuming that you had internet access in 2000 (which was far from certain), you had to endure the frustration of having to pause your game, put down your guide, go to your computer, look up your information, walk back, and repeat. People who buy guides, outside of collectors, do so to have the information on hand as they play.

Which makes it odd, to me, that magazines, which used to be bimonthly 250-page strategy for everything monsters, neglect to include guides in their pages. The stated reason? People give them away for free on the internet. Ah...

Okay, okay, there are some not insignificant differences between the world of today and Square's FFIX fiasco. For one thing, everybody has internet access. For another, a lot of people have internet access through devices that they can set down in their lap when they unpause the game. Furthermore, game magazines have it a lot rougher than they did in the glorious mid-90s, forcing them to cut down on pages, rely more on freelance contributors, and really dig for stories that can't be found anywhere else, and strategy guides can be found a LOT of places else.

Still though, I think there's a place for them, if three conditions are met:

First of all, you'd only want to do guides for games that are guaranteed to be popular; Call of Duty yes, Saw II: The Game, no. You will not have a lot of space for strategy pages, so to best serve the largest segment of your readership, you need to provide coverage on the games they're most likely to play. It can't be like Nintendo Power in the 90s, unfortunately.

Second, you're probably going to want to stick with games that encourage the second playthrough and the score attack. You don't have enough space to cover basic information. The guide is there to help your players get the most enjoyment out of the game, and the 4-page strategy section is best positioned to highlight the stuff that might go over your head the first run through. For example, you're not going to want to waste pages talking about rolling, hovering, and the importance of keeping Diddy alive in a short Donkey Kong Country Returns guide; you're going to want to explain speedrunning tactics, the requirements to open bonus levels, and where to find the hidden stuff (or even cut that to the trickier to find hidden stuff) in each level, using little more than a small print paragraph and a screenshot or two. In a short Mortal Kombat guide, you're going to want to list the secret fatalities per character and provide a one page spreadsheet of all the unlockables in The Krypt. And so forth.

There's another benefit to focusing on "new game plus" guides: the magazine might not be on the stands by the time a player begins a new game, but it more likely will be by the time that he or she begins replaying it. There's a built-in lead time to second playthroughs that magazines can take advantage of. An expert guide can also encourage a player to pick a game back up, even if it arrives late (hell, if I had that DKC:R strategy guide I just made up I might think about going back and getting all those damned KONG letters).

Thirdly, you'd probably be focusing on single-player guides, simply because multiplayer is too immediate, with strategies evolving and changing fast enough to make a short, printed guide next to useless.

And there you have it: guides that serve the reader and the format. Now... I don't know how much work goes into guides as opposed to the other content magazines create, and I don't know how it would affect profits. It may just be a simple matter of more work for the same money. But we can say one thing for sure: all of this stuff was a bunch of things that I said.

The Kombat Keeps On Kontinuing

The new Mortal Kombat came out a few days back. Getting some good reviews. The general consensus is that it's a "return to form," although I seem to remember that being the general consensus around the release of Deadly Alliance, so I'm interested in seeing how this one's reputation holds up. I, personally, don't see the need to buy it right now, because they released a free demo that let's you play as Scorpion and Sub-Zero. Rounding up, that's the entire game.

There's something about Mortal Kombat. I don't think it gets the respect it deserves. I mean, gameplay-wise, it absolutely gets the fun-but-flawed respect it deserves, but when it comes to its historical impact and influence, it generally gets shrugged off as "popular because of the gore." Pardon my french, but that is utter bullshit. In it's 19 years of existence, Mortal Kombat has spawned 9 games, at least twice that many updates and spin-offs, a slew of comics and soundtracks, a stadium show, an animated series, a live-action series, an animated film, two theatrical films, and more covers of EGM than can be counted. Two TV series and two theatrical films people; on that basis you can make a claim that Mortal Kombat is the most successful game franchise of all time.

And it keeps going! There's the new game. And that kickass new web series. Despite gamers tending to look down their noses at it, Mortal Kombat is a huge franchise with staying power, and there is no way that it's maintained that kind of momentum based solely on the nostalgia for some badly-rendered gore from 1992. Something about its mythology, or gameplay, or characters is stuck in the collective gamer hive mind at a meaningful level, and to claim otherwise is ridiculous.

Personally, I think it's due to its place in the post-Street Fighter II fighting landscape and it's memorable character design. After Street Fighter II you saw clones, clones, clones, all with the same hand-drawn animated characters and basically the same gameplay. And they (almost) all totally sucked. Then Mortal Kombat came around. It's characters and backgrounds were live action and looked completely different. It's stylings and mythology were completely different. It's command motions were completely different. It's DNA has been significantly altered from the SF2 mold.

Most importantly, it had a viscerality that Street Fighter lacked. Street Fighter was slower-paced, floaty. When you threw someone, they slowly flew two dozen feet and took damage before they hit the ground. Not so in Mortal Kombat. When you kicked a guy, he would go flying quickly across the screen with a loud crack and a spray of blood. It had a sense of weight and physics to it, the blows had a real sense of the physical. You can still see it today; uppercutting somebody in Mortal Kombat is inherently satisfying. It was designed to stimulate us at an R-brain level. In short, it was both different and great, which were the two ingredients needed to have a shot at dethroning the reigning champion.

Also, unlike the other SF2 clones on the market, the characters were well-designed and interesting. Scorpion and Sub-Zero have a legitimate claim in the pantheon of some of the best game characters ever created, and Johnny Cage, his nut punch, and the rest aren't shabby either. It's a good cast, something that's weirdly getting harder to come by in fighting games today. Look at Super Street Fighter 4. Amazingly good game, but the new characters are pretty damned mediocre in design.

Also note that there were violent games before Mortal Kombat, and there were even more violent games after, none of which had the impact MK did on the world. Face it folks; the fatalities were just icing on the cake. Mortal Kombat was, at the time, an innovative, well-designed, entertaining game. That is why it has the staying power it has, making bags and bags of money to this day.

Also, apparently, the strategy guide sucks. This guide is subject to updates. SUBJECT TO UPDATES.

GameFan's Beautiful DK Desk

The recently relaunched GameFan magazine got its website up a few days ago. What I want to point you to is the header to their review of Donkey Kong Country Returns, and more specifically their Donkey Kong timeline. This looks to be the only instance of them posting pages directly out of the magazine onto their site as opposed to just the text, and good god. I'm thinking of tracking down the back issue just for a nice full-sized spread to hold in my very own hands, and if the art design of every review looked this good I would subscribe in no time.

Because this is terrific. This is layout that goes beyond presentation to become an individual work of art, not just information on the DKC series but a wonderful supplement worth owning irrespective of the game itself. It's saying something in its own right about the series, a commentary about its nostalgia and scope and the enthusiasm of its fans. It just oozes passion. It's mostly official Nintendo art and pictures of its consoles, boxes, carts, and so on, but... the way the artist used them to say what he or she wanted to say instead of what Nintendo intended those assets to say... "This is what DKC is, this is the series, to me," he or she says. This is absolutely as it should be. I've seen pretty layouts before, but layouts that themselves say something... nothing that's struck me like this has.

Heh, okay, not to get too deeply into it. But stuff like this makes me want to read print over iPad magazines just so I can get big, beautiful, 2-page spreads. Also, I want a poster version. Chop chop.

EDIT: Okay, I went out and bought the issue. Have only read the DK review so far; it's 8 pages, not counting the 2 page DK timeline at the end, so smothered in screenshots and concept art and little doodles and stickers that there's only about a paragraph of text per page. From flipping through, it looks like GameFan's strategy for dealing with the hard times print magazines find themselves in is to give you humongous, glossy pages and just go nuts all over them. I'm down. Oddly, for seven bucks you get about as many pages as GamePro with much better paper quality and a much bigger landscape. It makes me think that GamePro's cheaping out on us over here.

Variety!

Just saw a commercial advertising the only cereal with three kinds of raisins.

To this I say: there are different kinds of raisins?