Square Exit: Part 3

Particularly poignant this week after Friday’s release of the superb Xenoblade: Chronicles (which you should be playing), today we’ll talk about perhaps Square’s most famous prodigal son, Tetsuya Takahashi and the cats and kittens running the show at the Nintendo-owned Monolith Soft. Be sure to bring your DSM IV.

A lot has been said about Takahashi. Or rather, a lot has been said about his work. Straddling that razor blade-sized line between ambition and ludicrous hubris, Takahashi’s calling card for game making has been his penchant for Big Ideas. That isn’t to say his designs have been big, though Xenoblade certainly seems to counterpoint that argument. No, Takahashi’s work as a scenario writer and director seems hell bent on cramming as much psychology and religious allusions down the player’s throat they need only-released-in-Japan supplemental material to sift through it all. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Takahashi first started working for Square on Final Fantasy IV as an artist. Prior to that he worked on one game for Nihon Falcom before moving to the big leagues (that one game was released NA on the Tubrografix-16, and later remade for the PSP). And big leagues they were: concept art and design for Final Fantasy IV-VII, map designs for Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3 (with our dude Kikuta), and art design for the first Front Mission (with our boys from G-Craft). This career arc effectively made him a proto-Tetsuya Nomura (and Jeremy Parish?) as he went from art duties to eventually running his own shop.
 
Xenogears

…but not before making Xenogears first. Perhaps his most beloved contribution to gaming, Xenogears is still frequently cited in silly arguments over Best RPG of All Time for its sprawling story of Jungian psychology and Christian iconography. Released in Japan a year and a month after Final Fantasy VII, it made some minor headlines in the US over a non-controversy revolving around its religious tones and imagery and whether or not it was going to make the localization cut. Square, now flush with dough from FFVII and freshly coupled with Electronic Arts for distribution help in 1998, released a small slew of games that year in NA to strike while the iron was hot (this included the spectacular Einhander, something else that you should all be playing).

Big Ideas were prevalent. Not only was there religion and psychology, gamers got their first taste of Takahashi’s penchant for Nietzschean philosophy – something else that would live through his game designing career. Perhaps it wasn’t gaming’s first example of an ubermensch, his id, the out-of-body automaton experience and an incomprehensible ending, but it may have been one of the most compelling at the time. If that last sentence means anything to you, then the 80+ hours of cut scenes during your first trip through will rock your socks.

Time has not been so kind to Xenogears. The then-novel blend of traditional 2D sprites and 3D mech models and backgrounds looks even more disjointed now than it ever did. The story, though frankly more mature in tone and execution than most other JRPGs out there even today, is overwrought, a little pretentious, and about as easy to firmly grasp Masters-level discrete mathematics. At the time, though, many players and reviewers looked upon Xenogears as a masterpiece of forward thinking game writing (if not design). Plus, they still had something to look forward to: The ominous, “New Hope”-style declaration that you just finished “Episode V” during the end credits.

You can grab a GH version of the game on eBay for roughly $35, or you could just be smart and download it on PSN for less than a third of that.

Xenosaga Series

But Episodes I-IV never wound up materializing; at least, not at Square. Even though the game sold well enough to warrant a Greatest Hits rerelease in 2003, Takahashi and crew (including another ex-Square employee; His wife, writer Kaori Tanaka) left to form Monolith Soft with a publishing deal from Namco. With this deal, we can assume that Namco was really ready to take a big leap into worldwide RPG development in a post-Final Fantasy X PlayStation 2 world. The deal with Takahashi and Monolith promised a six-game saga spanning releases all the way until the PS2 was on its deathbed. Appropriately titled Xenosaga, true believers of Takahashi’s past work were flipping their collective (consciousness) shit hoping that it would be the prequels that would lead to Xenogears. But this didn’t turn out to be the case. The notoriously cagey Japanese development ethos of Takahashi and co. neither confirmed nor denied any actual connections to Xenogears until after its release, and by then, fans were starting to connect the dots while wading through hour-long cut scenes.

It turns out that since Square owned Xenogears, any true sequel/ prequel wouldn’t really happen once the developers left the company. Instead, the world received the first part of a spiritual successor in 2003 (NA), chock full of Nietzsche, robots, and religion like its forbearer. But not being connected to his career at Square wasn’t really Takahashi’s problem, the marketplace was.

While well reviewed, the first Xenosaga game sold well enough to follow up with a Greatest Hits edition to the game, a Japanese rerelease called Episode I Reload, and a supplemental “game” called Xenosaga Freaks (also only in Japan). So far so good. Episode II (2004 NA), though, effectively tanked Takahashi’s magnum opus all by itself with its reworked combat system, plodding and introspective story, and re-tinkered visual style. The game sold badly, Namco restructured the deal, and Monolith had to finish the series with the next game. Luckily, Episode III would be regarded as the most even of the series from a gameplay standpoint, but again, Big Ideas were kitchen-sinked into the game, with an appropriately head-scratching dénouement.

The first two games be can had for a song off of eBay or any used shop that still carries PS2 games (a Record Exchange literally gave me a copy of Ep. I just to cut down on the amount they had. Not kidding). Curiously, Ep. III has turned into something of a rarity on eBay, fetching between $35-50 depending on condition.

Baten Kaitos and Nintendo

While still under the banner of Namco, a second Monolith team began co-developing games with tri-Crescendo (of Eternal Sonata sorta-fame; and yes, it really is capitalized like that) for the RPG-dry GameCube. Released in 2003 (NA), the fruit of that labor was the card-based Baten Kaitos. As most games on the GameCube went, BK didn’t burn up the sales charts even with its favorable reviews, but a sequel was still planned for both the GameCube and the DS in the impending years, with only the GameCube game, Baten Kaitos: Origins, ever being released (also to low sales). But this was still a turning point for the developer. The first BK was published by Namco, but at a time when the Cadillac of their relationship was turning into a lemon that was stalling fast. Nintendo, probably realizing that they needed a capable RPG developer, tested the water with Monolith and published BK: Origins themselves in Japan and North America. Evidently happy the results, Nintendo then bought a controlling share in Monolith from Namco in 2007, and acquired them wholly sometime after.

Post Nintendo acquisition, Monolith has been surprisingly quiet, all things considered. Three games were developed for and published by Namco Bandai in Japan, with two being Super Robot Taisen games (one actually making it to the US), but none of them were helmed by Takahashi. His only game until Xenoblade was for the DS; an RPG called Soma Bringer in 2008 that hasn’t been localized. The same year Monolith developed Disaster: Day of Crisis for the Wii, but it was only released in Japan, Europe, and Australia.

Square Exit: Part 2

More of what Square hath wrought...

G-Craft
There isn’t a lot of info out there about the 90s Square defectors that would form G-Craft, the studio behind the first two Front Mission games and Arc the Lad I-III for the PlayStation. Honestly, the only tangible knowledge that we have that these guys came from Square at all other than the Front Mission connection is from old issues of Diehard Game Fan that previewed the first Arc game back around 1994/95 (and that’s not an exactly credible source). But even though there isn't a ton of info floating around about them, these were developers that worked, at least to some degree, with one of the biggest Japanese developers in the world.

Still, the Arc games are worth mentioning, especially now that they’re readily available for PSN download on the cheap. If the above information can be proven factual (and I'm pretty sure it is), then the acquisition of ex-Square staff at the birth of the PlayStation’s life was something of a coup. Remember that the PS was released in Japan in December of 1994. Square was still developing for the Super Famicom/ SNES, and RPGs were just starting to get some attention in North America. Sony had proven that they weren’t stupid with the launch of its first console and had a wide variety of genres represented at launch with a good supply of titles released and ready to be localized by the time the machine was ready for other regions in September of 1995. Even though games like Jumping Flash!, King’s Field, and Tekken were clear indications that Sony was more interested in 3D than sprite-based 2D, having a good old fashioned Square-developed RPG near launch would have lured away 16-bit holdouts toward the Next Big Thing. Logically, this makes good business sense.

Arc The Lad

What the Japanese players of the time got, though, was more like an extended tech demo than a full game. Though well animated and not without its charm, Arc I was a very short, almost toothless experience. A strategy RPG more akin to the Shining Force series on the Genesis/ Mega Drive, Arc I was definitely a product of its time complete with boy-hero-takes-on-evil-empire plot. Enemies on the field were overly aggressive and could be easily bated by the player, and some areas featured repeatable battles so one could easily power level the seven team members and steamroll upcoming foes. An optional, 50-floor dungeon was available to pad the length of the game, but it was the only minor diversion from grinding levels and finishing the main plot.

This isn’t to say that Arc I is bad. In fact, it’s a very competent game and still fun to play. In a move that may have influenced later PlayStation RPGs like Suikoden, clear data could be saved (after watching Arc I’s Empire Strikes Back downer of an ending) for further use into Arc II. The backgrounds still look very good after all of this time, too.

Arc The Lad II

If Arc I was an appetizer, G-Craft’s second Arc game was definitely the meal (and other overused metaphors). Substantially longer than the first and loaded with piles of side quests, Arc II is fair example of a game that took what was good about its predecessor and built something larger around that framework. The strategy RPG battles were still present and encounters were again repeatable, but now players had towns to explore and guild hunts to accept to flesh out not only some of the play mechanics (like monster taming) but also more of the plot – though it still isn’t exactly Dostoevsky.

As mentioned above, one of the better additions to the game was the ability to import your clear data from Arc I; essentially bringing in your wrecking ball characters from the first game. This turned out to be a downfall of sorts as these characters could basically shit all over your enemies while still gaining levels far outside of the team you already had, making them the only logical choices for most boss battles. Balance issues aside, though, the longer game and monster hunting (more on that in a second) makes it perhaps the best in the series. Plus, the main character wears the hood ornament of a Mercedes Benz as an earring. If that isn’t a sign of quality…

Arc Arena: Monster Tournament

Not much to say about this game other than what the title basically implies, Arc Arena is a small, though separate side game that allowed players to import their tamed monsters from Arc II to duke it out in arena battles. Players could also trade and import saved information for further, um, monster battling.
Remember: there are monsters. These monsters battle in an arena tournament.
There you have it.

Arc The Lad III

Along with the general lack of knowledge about G-Craft is a void of information concerning ARC Entertainment, the team behind Arc III, though it would be pretty logical to infer that G-Craft reshuffled themselves into a new studio. No matter; they made more Arc, and if Arc II was your thing, Arc III will give you the payoff that you’ll certainly dig.

Ditching the pleasant 2D art in favor of more contemporary 3D models, the core game didn’t change much and still offered an import feature to bring in your cats and kittens from the first two games, though a bit more limited in their involvement. Arc III also puts a period on the series in some ways as it ends the story of recurring main (and more often side-) character Arc before the license moved on to two PlayStation 2 games: the moderately successful Twilight of the Spirits and the more universally maligned End of Darkness (which, for some reason, was also an online game).

Both of the PS2 Arc games are listed on Wikipedia as being developed by a studio called Cattle Call. Again, without some concrete information we can’t exactly be sure of this, but it’s not so outside of the realm of possibility that that G-Craft was owned by Sony Computer Entertainment (the publisher of all of the Arc games in Japan), which begat ARC Entertainment, which then begat Cattle Call –something that happens all of the time with studios that work directly for large publishers (RIP Sacnoth/ Nautilus). Since the last Arc game was something of a flop (and not entirely loved by the Arc fan base, such as it is), we can also assume that Cattle Call was wholly absorbed by either Sony or another one of its second party studios, or disbanded altogether.

You can get the first three Arc The Lad games and Monster Arena on PSN, or get the whole PSOne box set (released by Working Designs in NA) in all of its absurdity on eBay for a pretty reasonable price, all things considered.

Square Exit: A corporate father and its rebellious children

 

In the gaming industry, it isn’t so uncommon that a studio or even a publisher dissolves, splits, goes bankrupt or finds another sad way to close its doors and cease operations. Thankfully, often times new studios rise from these crises to form new organizations, or maybe even find more creative outlets or vision for their craft than what they left. Maybe it was poor work conditions or the stress of churning out yearly high-profile sequels, but studios beget studios rather frequently these days. If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the last few years, you’re probably surmised that this happens all the time.

In the 90s, though, the concept of little guys breaking the shackles of their corporate overlords to form smaller, creatively-focused outfits was pretty new. In a Japanese-dominated world of 8-, 16- and 32-bit game design, it was almost unheard of. The Japanese work ethic may sound overly harsh to the outside observer, but corporate tactics on the other side of the Pacific breeds and then rewards a high level of employee loyalty. Then again, everyone has a breaking point.

Back then, Square had a hand in running Japan’s gaming economy, and was poised by the end of the decade to become a dominant force in the global publishing landscape. But that hand was something of an iron fist. Talented designers and programmers began a tango of quitting, reforming and selling out over the course of last 20 years. Some even went full circle to work with each other again, while others were gobbled right back up by the publishing giant after a minor success or two. Now that the company is beginning to finally move in a new direction, here’s a look at some of the studios that they birthed and some of their games.

Sacnoth

You may have heard of Hiroki Kikuta. If you haven’t, chances are you’ve heard some of his music. As a composer for Square in the 90s, he wrote the music for Secret of Mana, its sequel, Seiken Densetsu 3, and a never-localized PlayStation action/RPG called Soukaigi. What people rarely take into account is that Kikuta had coding chops as well as an artistic background; he was actually a manga artist before being picked up by the Final Fantasy factory. Shortly after completing Soukaigi, Kikuta jumped ship to form Sacnoth with other ex-Square staff and some financial backing of NEO GEO maker SNK. Wanting to be more hands-on with designs and believing that a smaller staff can make a more focused product, Kikuta made exactly one game with the developer before resigning from the outfit altogether.

Koudelka

The first game from the developer is something of a microcosm of their forward thinking ideas and financial, as well as internal, conflicts. Released in 2000 (NA) at a curious time when RPGs were becoming a small goldmine in the west, the publishing deal with SNK that staked the developer early was getting closer and closer to disaster as the SNK was collapsing under its own financial troubles.

An ambitious game to a fault, Koudelka was originally planned as something of a Resident Evil/ RPG lovechild. Taking place in the Nemeton Monastery in Wales, the game was built with atmosphere in mind, and given Kikuta’s history, sported a rich soundtrack to accompany his programmer’s dark and morose graphical choices. Environments were somewhat claustrophobic, adding to the horror nature of the game, but more free moving than the stilted, cylindrical crawling of the Resident Evil games. Battles were still random, though, and happened on a SRPG-like grid. Attacks were based on the position of your three-character team compared to their adversaries. Still only their first game, Koudelka laid the blueprint for the sort of left-of-center of RPGs that were still fairly uncommon to western players.

Koudelka tanked. Reports eventually leaked out that internal struggles at Sacnoth pitted Kikuta’s more action-oriented approach to the rest of the team’s traditionalist mind set, and the game absolutely shows it. Battles move at a painfully glacial pace, and feel almost out of place compared to the structure of the game’s more horror-centric elements. On a programming side, players were forced to wait after every combat action for character models and weapons to separately reload off of the disk before taking another action. Critics were unimpressed, citing an impressive story and graphics, but lousy gameplay. It didn’t help that SNK was only months away from selling off to pachinko manufacturer Aruze, too. Marketing for the game was minimal at best, and the poor critical response didn’t help to carry sales. Kikuta resigned, and Koudelka became an odd footnote in the RPG boom of the era.

Faselei!

Having the distinction of being the final commercially released game for the criminally underrated Neo Geo Pocket Color, Faselei! was originally released at the beginning of the millennium, presumably as part of the original publishing deal with SNK. Only a few thousand copies made it to retail in Japan before the game and the machine was recalled by SNK following their bankruptcy and sale to Aruze, it eventually made it to other territories in 2004 without proper retail packaging or even a manual.

Faselei! is a curious game, but nobody could possibly call it a fun one. A strategy game by design, players took control of a mech to do battle with enemy tanks and rival mechs in a story that you probably won’t really care much about (and you won’t if you play it) to begin with. Though turn-based, controlling the mech happened through a series of movement and firing inputs that played out over the course of one turn. Say you want to move three spaces up, turn left, and then fire on an opposing target. That means you had to place three “forward” inputs, one “left turn,” and finally one of the various attack inputs into a command prompt and then watch is it all happened. Then it was the computer’s turn. Then you came to your senses and turned it off.

To be fair, Faselei! has some redeeming qualities. Visually, it doesn’t exactly stand head and shoulders over some of the other games to come out for the NGPC, but it is impressive nonetheless. A lot of color is crammed into the handheld’s tiny screen, and brief cut scenes (though still kind of generic) are presented well. The game also has some depth if you can make it past the idiotic movement functions. The mech’s customizable weapon loadouts are fun to play with in anticipation for upcoming battles. It’s not the easiest game to pick up and play, though, and even though there’s a passable tutorial for playing it, this is one that greatly suffers from no manual to fall back on. Still, Faselei! continues Sacnoth’s mantra of doing things differently while still being confined to common RPG tropes.

Shadow Heats Series

Their best known work and strongest critically, the first Shadow Hearts would be the last game made under the Sacnoth name, as the studio restructured after being acquired by Aruze and renaming themselves Nautilus. Released the week before Final Fantasy X in NA, Sacnoth was easily overshadowed by its former masters, but remains as a competently-made RPG at a time when a tidal wave of them were being released in the west. Set up as something of a pseudo-sequel to Koudelka, Shadow Hearts still retained some its survival horror influences as players still had to find random key items to unlock the next area of the game or to move on to the next objective.

By and large, the Shadow Hearts games range from curiously quirky to batshit nuts. Its main gameplay addition, the Judgment Ring, gave a fresh twist to contemporary RPGs. The strength of player attacks against enemies was dependant on the timing of button presses on large disk. Hit the targets on the disk and your attacks will connect. As an added dose of risk vs. reward, smaller shaves of the disk were set aside for critical attacks, but were much easier to miss and can thereby stymie your whole turn. The ring was customizable by the player and open to negative modification by enemies, too, making the battles an absolute blast to play.

The plot and setting are where things take a left turn to crazy town, though. Taking place in an alternate early 20^th century, real life historical figures like Roger Bacon, Rasputin, and Al Capone blend with main characters that can blend with demons to lay waste to their foes. Machine-gun toting mariachi guitarists are aided by giant, drunk cats and ninjas wielding oversized fish. A family of vampires reappear as companion characters over the course of the three games, and one of them is a pro-wrestler the fights with a broken mailbox. There’s also collectible porn. Seriously.

The Shadow Hearts games are the definition of “cult.” The games are well-crafted and great to play, but just goofy enough to be pretty far outside of the mainstream. But doing things differently seems to be where Sacnoth’s (and later Nautilus’) heads were at.

feelplus Inc.

Nautilus eventually folded entirely into Aruze, whom dissolved the developer in 2007 after key staff left for AQ Interactive (whom, at one point, owned other batshit RPG developers Cavia until recently dissolving them as well). Newly formed as feelplus Inc. specifically to aid former Square honcho Hironobu Sakaguchi (whom you may have heard of) with his early Xbox 360 Mistwalker projects, feelplus worked with The Gooch on Lost Odyssey in 2007. Their influence is readily apparent in the title’s combat system, returning to the timing-based attack structure of the Shadow Hearts games. Today, they survive as something of a consultant firm, helping to either port games to various platforms (like the recent No More Heroes PS3/ 360 release) or to lend visual design help to the odd RPG or two (such as the DS Blue Dragon release – also with Mistwalker – and Star Ocean: The Last Hope).

Development work has brought them full circle back to Square Enix, having made the universally spat-upon MindJack PS3/360 and quasi-Strider revival Moon Diver for XBLA and PSN for the publisher.

A Requiem

People of the intertron, my PlayStation has come back to me. You probably don't give two shits, but bear with me for a second. For my wife, it was a happy day because she could finally watch that Blu-Ray of The Social Network that I bought two weeks ago. For me, I could finally get back to mowing down my neighbors in HD Remix.

Then the other shoe dropped. There is a cost to getting your PlayStation 3 repaired by Sony hatchet men, above the $140 you've already shelled out for them to muck with it. For those that have also had this done, they know of which I speak.

They're going to wipe your hard drive.

No, there isn't anything you can do about it.

While the bright side to this (if there can be one) is that you can simply get on the PSN and redownload stuff that you've already bought and conveniently leave out the junk that didn't belong there (I'm looking at you, Samurai Shodown. Like Kathy Ireland, you haven't aged well), all of those save files from games you had sitting on there for years are gone. Lost in ether. While it's true that, unless it's a BioWare game, this saved data is ultimately meaningless, to me they we're more appropriate trophies than the metagame BS that's attached to the console anyway.

So alas, I must say goodbye and continue in my stages of grief for all of the blood, sweat, and wasted time that I've put into the following games.

DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS (+DLC and Awakening)

This one probably hurts the most because of the impending DA2 save data transfer, but I went through this game four times. Four fucking times. That's a whole shitstack of Ferelden. Now, I loved this game an awful lot, and going through it now would be much, much shorter than the 75 hours or so that the first trip took me, but these were different characters with different endings making different decisions that I really wanted to see with DA2. Unless I simply decide to take an entire month off of work to reclaim all of that, there's no way in hell that I'll have the time to refill that vault. That's a lot of lost time, and it's driving me to drink.

DEMON'S SOULS

Similar to Dragon Age, I ran through DS roughly three times. The first time felt like I just finished a Ph.D. in thermodynamics. Subsequent trips through the game were not nearly as difficult, since further research led me to believe that I was unnecessarily tough on myself, albeit unwittingly, during the initial run (it wasn't a great idea to choose the Wanderer class, I guess). Yes, this game was pretty hard, but not so much that I wanted to kill animals like the internet seems to believe. The problem is that I got wrapped up in the larger world tendency events in the game and weapon forging to the point where I was spending absurd chunks of my life grinding for soul levels and loot. Think two characters at 150+ hours apiece kind of absurd. Just typing that makes me feel like an idiot.

Of course, I played a ton of DS over long weekends of chemotherapy recoup, so I don't feel as though that time was completely wasted. But when I say that save files are good trophies, I basically mean this solely in the case of Demon's Souls. That game made me work for it, man.

METAL GEAR SOLID 4

The first play through was a week-long blitz of long nights and painstaking detail sponging thinking that this was going to be the fitting ending I deserved from this series. It...kind of wasn't. So when I finally played it for a second time I skipped through most of the cutscenes and just enjoyed the combat with it's faux New Game+ features. I'll probably never play this again, but it was kind of nice to know that if I ever wanted to just go throug the superb opening mission in this game with added hardware I could. Oh well.

BORDERLANDS

Though I only completed the game once and was just getting around to the DLC, losing that character was a bit of a kick in the teeth. See, I'm not really down with first-person shooters. I don't dislike them, they just aren't for me. The only reason I was playing BL at all was because it was the only game that my friends that live great distances away and I could agree on to play together. I'm absolutely stupid for this game now, but starting from scratch to catch up with my pals kind of... well, it fucking sucks. I know that they can just run me through stuff, but that's just wasted time when we could be in the Underdome or whatever. Bunk, I say.

FINAL FANTASY XIII

I think this game is just a step below "pretty good" and just a hair above "piece of shit." Sorry, internet. In fact, I rambled on about it (a bit incoherently) at other places. Why am I sad that the save file is gone, then? Maybe it was a sign that getting old really does stink. My recollection of past Final Fantasy games is starting to get in the way of what they are actually becoming, and waking up to this fact is assy. FFXIII, once was enough, but I'm still sorry to see you go.

ROCK BAND 2

Yes, I know that it's not Rock Band 3; and yes, I know that there really isn't that much that's absolutely necessary to save since you can just unlock all the songs when you just want to quick play them (which is pretty much the only time I want to play Rock Band) in an option menu. The thing is, I have a metric shit ton of music that I need to download and install again. Frankly, I'm way too lazy for that shit.

ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION

This game for me was kind of like Disgaea on the PS2 -my white whale. I got so wrapped up doing other things in them both that I never got around to "finishing" the game. It was the kind of game that I would just pick up and play here and there just to dick around until I would grab something new or I would just quit out of disgust after it locked up on me again. It doesn't look like my character, Fuglypants, would be taking a nap in a random cave to gain a level any more. Them's the berries, I guess.

I'd like to say that these save files are gone but not forgotten or they're in a better place or blah blah blah. But gone is what they are.

Tatsunoko Vs. Schizophrenia

I guess I should have titled this Autism Vs. Capcom, because if I ever really get consistently good at this game I'll be able to do absurd mathematical calculations at Rain Man speed. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Yesterday, I told you that my PlayStation took a shit on me. In what I'm now thinking was probably disgust, I decided to play my Wii for the first time since... well, you know. Anyway, after doing what little research that I deemed necessary on the subject, it seems almost abundantly clear that last year was a pretty damn good year for Wii games: Super Mario Galaxy 2 is on many (many, many) best-of lists, Kirby's Epic Yarn has seen universally strong reviews, as have Donkey Kong Country Returns and Cave Story. And that's just the big stuff. A lot of people, though, seemed to have forgotten Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom.

This is fine, really. It did come out last January, and unless your name is "Mass Effect 2" then coming out in January means that folks are going to forget that you exist when the spring rolls around. This is where you also pour one out for No More Heroes 2. Sad, but I don't make the rules. Now, to be fair, this wasn't exactly a game that got completely looked over when it first hit retail. From what I recall, sales numbers were pretty good; at least good enough that Capcom went ahead with plans for Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 (which, and I could be wrong about this, but TvC was the deciding factor).

Now, I'll preface this by saying that I play a lot of Street Fighter. Notice that I didn't say that I was especially good at Street Fighter, but a SF game is played more often in my home than just about anything else by a landslide. My fundamentals are good, and I can hang pretty well online in 4 and HDR. When I finally met my local crowd of tournament players, I could hang with them, too. This is about where they decided to try and teach my Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 -a game I have never cared for. Too little choice at high level. Too frenetic. Too much. Not for me. Anyway, the guy whom I was learning from, a hepcat named Chris who runs a bigger midwest tourney called Seasons Beatings in October, told me completely straight faced that by learning MvC2, I would be good (or at least better) at every other fighting game I'll ever play. At first, I thought this was arrogant. After a while, I see what he meant.

Fast forward a year or so and we get TvC, a game I bought day one. Now I won't bore you by bringing up the common mud slung at it like "it shouldn't have been on the Wii" and "there's no competition, it's a dead scene." But I will level a few strikes against it now a year removed from a release date:

First, it is a misconception that there is not crowd or competition for this game. It isn't often that I go online with it and not find an opponent. The problem is that fringe players are gone at this point and we're mostly left with the hard core. This is something that you should expect; even Super Street Fighter 4 will ge to this point eventually. It just happened a bit faster in TvC's case, making picking it back up after nearly a year like climbing Everest without a rope. This being the first game I played when I decided to started playing my Wii again I knew what I was getting into, but I still needed to spend some time in Training Mode to get my thumbs up to snuff.

That brings me to the second major problem: there just aren't that many stick options. Yes, you can find the MadCatz Fightstick on the internet for around 40 bones (which is a pretty good deal), but your only other option is to get a PS-to-GameCube converter and plug in a custom (if you have one) or an older stick that may just have laying around. Me? I live in a smallish apartment with a wife and wifestuff (which is now a word), and the PS3 MadCatz TE stick is about all I can justify, especially if I'm not playing this game every night to get ready for a tournaments (which I'll probably enter as far as this game is concerned). I'm stuck with a classic controller. I am gimped.

Lastly, and probably most crushing, is that the Wii's online components just aren't that good. Now, I will say that I just started Monster Hunter Tri (we'll get to that later) and haven't fully tested that game's online portions yet, so TvC is really the only litmus test that I have, but it never feels like 100% to me. The thing is, the Wii is a wi-fi machine with no innate hard wiring. In comparison to playing online via wi-fi to my PS3 and Street Fighter 4, there are more consistent lag-free matches on the PlayStation (I tested this. You should have been there; it was downright scientific). After grabbing the USB LAN adapter for the Wii things got a little better, but probably 50% of the time I get a good, stable fight. This is a problem, especially if you want to get better at the game. If there's no level playing field, it's just about impossible to rise to the level of an opponent better than you.

But TvC is good. It's not as chaotic as its Vs. game predecessors, but still nuts enough that you have to be acutely aware of everything around (meter level, opponent meter, height of attacks, how much beer you have left, etc.). In flipping on the Wii after so long, I actually feel kind of bad that I let this game languish for so many months. I find myself back to looking up combo videos on YouTube and checking the Shoryuken message boards for the first time since Super SF4 dropped. As far as Wii games go, it looks pretty effing good. But I don't need to sell it to you.

All I need now is some local competition. Online, too. That's where you come in, I guess.

The Yellow Peril

So two weeks ago my PS3 decided to take a shit on me. Cruelly, right in the beginning of Armory DLC for Borderlands. Much, much more cruel, it was a week before the release of DC Universe Online; something I've been planning on playing with a large group for months now. For those not in the know, your game will freeze on you briefly before the machine shuts itself down, followed by the fuck-you of a blinking red light. When you try to turn the thing back on (because you can delude yourself into thinking that it simply overheated), you'll be greeted with something of a bitter rainbow of blinking lights as it cycles from green to yellow to red. See, the yellow is the writing on the wall; you get that and you may as well chuck the thing out the window and into traffic. If you plan on sending it back to Sony to fix, though, then a cat will do.

Shitty as this happens to be, it's hardly a surprise. Between my own gaming habits and my main squeeze's use of Netflix, the thing is basically on at any given moment when either of us are home. I'm (usually) pretty good about keeping it tidy and vacuuming the air vents, but this was bound to happen eventually. It isn't exactly a precedent, either. I sent my PS2 back to Sony twice for repairs back in the day, but at least they didn't charge me. It's $140 to fix a 60 gig backward compatible model. Do you know how many Snickers bars you can get for 140 clams? Well, none in your case. You just broke off a chunk of your soul that could be refilled with caramel and peanuts and handed it over to Sony via your credit card.

Now, as one of those nuts (there it is again!) that found the need to own all three of the current consoles, you would think that I would naturally just shift over to my 360, especially since the thing's only about 6 months old and I haven't gotten a ton of use out of it. However, maybe it's because I played it so much when I got it that I became burned out quickly. Or maybe that since I played all of the exclusive games for it right off the bat that I feel that there really isn't that much left. Maybe I'm spoiled by not having to pay for internet play with the PS3 and am still disgusted at the notion of it. Maybe I feel especially gun shy about it Red Ringing on me given what just happened. So I decided to play the Wii.

Sit down, because this is going to sound stupid: it was weirdly liberating to turn on my Wii and play it. Sure I'll occasionally flip the thing on when other people come over, but anybody that even comes close to reading about this stuff on the internet will agree that this is becoming an exceedingly rare occurrence. In fact, I'm not that far off in saying that the Wii takes its share of shit on the intertron almost daily. This always bugged me a little bit in that I'm pretty good about being impartial in my love for my console children. But since I never really play my Wii either, I can't help but to agree a little bit deep down in the cockles. Hitting the power button and seeing a field of downloaded games (good ones. I don't buy shit) after a pretty long stretch gave me an oddly warm feeling, though. Kind of like when you first buy a system and realize the scope of games you can pay now that you have one. Sure, it wasn't exactly like that, but still kind of close.

Outside of the normal "lose a little weight/ drink less beer/ stop getting into bar fights" bullshit resolutions, I think I finally found one to stick with: This year, I will rekindle the love affair between myself and my long-dormant Nintendo Wii. For the cynical, we can say that this year, I will rejustify having it hooked into my TV. As with all resolutions, we'll see how long this actually lasts, but I think I'm off to a pretty good start. I'll tell you all about it later.

Ok, So It's Been a Month...

... and since I've basically been mainlining Xbox 360 games lately, I think that now is a fine time to look back and reflect. Meditate, even. I think I might have mentioned this before, but I'm pretty lucky in that I have very giving friends (and even friends of friends of friends) that have been steadily unloading games for me to play like a Darma supply crate (or is that too soon?). It means that I've only actually paid for two games outside of the pack-ins that came with the machine; and I haven't even come close to touching those.

What have I touched? Perhaps more importantly, what has touched me? Lovingly? Well, shit, let's do some short reviews. It's my List Issue...

Halo ODST:
Again being the first Halo game that I've even considered playing, a lot of people are telling me that I started at the bottom of the quality totem pole and should have just started with Halo 1 and moved chronologically. After playing ODST, though, I'll say that I still really don't give much of a shit, but that doesn't mean that I didn't have a good time. The combat was fun and the first mission in the 'sploded city was pretty neat. However, it didn't really do anything that touched my soul like the many, many other Xbox people out there. Yeah, yeah, I know it's not fair for me to judge the series based on this one, seemingly weak game, especially since I just said that I liked it. But the setting and story just didn't really do it for me.

Plus, I'm too far removed to start playing these games competitively online. For one, it looks like a lot of work for me right now to really learn the ins and outs of the game mechanics for competitive play, and since I barely play first-person shooters at all to begin with means that I'd be almost starting from scratch. Thanks for the memories, Halo, but you may be on the way to the resale shop this weekend.

Mass Effect:
Being nearly the sole reason for me to buy a 360 that I didn't really need, it's time for me to suck it up and say that I was a little bit let down with its brilliance. Is that a sentence your noggin can't reconcile? Ok, then. I really, really dug ME, but it wasn't half as great as I made it out to be in my head. I think after hearing all of the good press that ME 2 has been getting and all of the Dragon Age that I've played since November pretty much made Mass 1 into a rock star that I met in real life that just didn't stack up to my idol worship. The lunar tank thing was a total drag to drive around, even stressful at times. The graphics were really good for a lot of it, but the backgrounds got pretty bland, pretty fast. And on that note, a whole lot of locations were recycled throughout the game that made me wonder how many original areas there really were. This game also had the misfortune (like Persona 3 and Final Fantasy XIII) of being one in which when the main character gets killed off its game over, even though your comrades get popped constantly and get up after the fight is over and they're totally fine. I get why, but still. Stupid.

Though there really wasn't that much to make me want to run through the game again (although I still probably will at some point), I did like the skill building system enough that I'd be interested to see how I'd use more weapons than just the assault rifles. The morality system of the game was fine but very binary. The good vs. bad choices were really easy to spot, and I climbed to number one on the Paragon charts (as well as number one in your hearts) steadily without much trouble. I didn't really use a lot of special skills and powers during my trip through the game since I found it easy enough to just rely on blasting people, but the few times that I used them made for some diversity from pointing, shooting, and hoping the craps game of RPG shooting landed in my favor. So to sum up, another play through as an evil female space wizard that packs pistol heat seems to be in my future. Yeah, that sounds about right.

On the absolute plus side is the stellar voice acting. I know that many prefer the female Commander Shepherd voice over the male, but he did a pretty good job if you ask me. The characters weren't as memorable to me as the Dragon Age ones, but they were still a bunch of cool people. I was surprised how pro-Christian some of the tone (and one specific character) of the game was, almost refreshingly so. Not that I think that a video game should be pushing a specific religion to the player, but since the topic of God is something either danced around (Xenosaga) in gaming or completely against (see Final Fantasy IX, X, and to a lesser extent, XII and XIII). Sure, Ashley turned out to be kind of a bitch by the end of the game, but I appreciated that faith was a defining character trait.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2:
The biggest video game release of all time. Ok I've gotten the requisite finger pointing out of the way. It was pretty fun for the same reasons that I liked Halo, but I honestly didn't have any idea what was happening half of the time. At least with Halo I was pretty good about keeping a level head, but if Modern Warfare 2 is any indication, I would be the worst infantryman in the history of armed forces: comrades would be shot on sight, running would happen in complete opposite ends of where objectives would be, and gunfire-induced panic would usually overtake me during the first 45 seconds of any mission until I died once or twice and got my head straight. Still, I can see why people like this game and it's brethren. The game certainly looks pretty and the online modes that I actually tried out where pretty fun, albeit overwhelming bloodbaths (I was never against anyone lower than level 43).

Ok, Modern Warfare. I get it. You're just not for me.

Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition:
Though I'm man enough to admit that I was more hungover than I usually am at 8am on a Saturday and that that may have played a part of it, I really didn't like the beginning of this game. After all of my friends gushed over how deep the customization was and how vast and varied the world was and blah blah blah, getting out of Vault 101 and getting my ass constantly kicked by monsters from the blue lagoon and Thunderdome rejects because I was better with a lead pipe than the fucking hand gun my stats said I would be fine with made the Fallout 3 feel more like work and less like fun. I like fun, and I sure as shit don't like work. Persevere, they all said. So I did.

Fallout 3 turned out to be one of the better games I've played since, well, Dragon Age. Though I didn't really think the story was as great as it could have been (though that ain't Liam Neeson's fault. He's a cool guy), turning my lowly vault-dwelling jive turkey into a walking death machine is one of my favorite things about RPGs, and by the time I was done with Fallout 3 I felt empowered with every single shotgun blast that killed my enemies. But maybe that just makes me weird. I'll probably go back and play the game again someday, especially since I only finished half of the packed-in DLC for the GOTY edition.

I also finished the game one night, and spent nearly eight straight hours the next day collecting all of the missed bobble heads if that tells you anything. Fallout 3 was really, really, really good.

Brutal Legend:
With my limited exposure to Tim Schafer games, I'm starting to think that he's a better writer than he is a full on designer. That isn't to say that BL isn't an alright game, but that's just what it is: alright. The single action goes out the window almost right away (one of the things I thought was stronger than the rest of the game) in favor of really jank RTS trappings that make it feel like a bastardized Overlord than a bastardized Starcraft. That's not a compliment.

On the flip side, the dialogue is really hilarious. Jack Black stood right at the edge of the annoyance cliff, but didn't take the plunge with a somewhat restrained performance, and the metal icon guest stars like Halford and Ozzy were surprisingly good actors. Sure, they were kind of just playing themselves (well, not really Halford, but still), but Ozzy in particular delivered his lines perfectly. I find that I can't really play this game more than maybe an hour at a time because I get stupid bored, but I finished it because of the characters, not the gameplay.

On Deck and in No Particular Order:
Bioshock 1 and 2
Gears of War 1 and 2
Mass Effect 2
Shadow Complex
Alan Wake
Blur
MagnaCarta 2
Forza Motorsport 3

So if you've been paying attention, that's two 360 exclusives and three multiplatform games. I probably wouldn't have gotten around to playing those multi- titles if the goodwill of some folks hadn't led them to loan them to me, and for that I'm pretty grateful. The BioShock games fall into that category. Not that I've ever been opposed to playing them in the past, they just happen to fall in my lap right now, so I'll be giving them a shot sooner than later.

Mass Effect 2, being on of the two games that I've actually purchased, is something I'm excited to play. Since I own it, though, I feel a little guilty about playing that instead of the shitload of stuff people have thrown my way. Same goes with Shadow Complex. I played a demo of it last night and was very happy with it.

I am morbidly curious about MagnaCarta 2. Reports from across the internet mix from "worst RPG of the last decade" to "most underrated game of last year." It's usually that kind of wadded up spaghetti press that attracts me to niche games in the first place. I own the last one for PS2 and even though it sure wasn't all that great, it still wasn't too shabby, so I'll probably grab this one.

Probably see you in a month. Go Comments!