The chance to play with time is gaming’s greatest gift to the world. It’s something no other entertainment medium offers and yet, when we rewind the last ten seconds of Prince of Persia, un-jumping a mistimed leap, it’s can seem like the most natural thing in the world.
In Race Driver GRID, a 150mph collision can be undone in an instant, fenders uncrumpling, engine rebuilding, broken faces rearranged with the squeeze of a trigger. In Braid, time can be inched forward and back, millisecond adjustments that solve four-dimensional puzzles impossible to experience outside of a videogame. And yet, with all this power – the power of a time lord, the power that inventors have hungered for throughout history – all we seem to use it for is fixing our petty mistakes.
Chrono Trigger’s time-manipulation has a higher purpose. Here you hold in your hands a seismic force, one whose mastery can bring about wars or avert them, can wipe out entire lineages or birth them, can right the wrongs (or wrong the rights) of generations. It’s a power that gives rise to new futures. In this world, a trivial act of kindness 600 years in the past changes the landscape of the present immeasurably, and you can be there to see it happen. And yet time travel is just the first of a hundred different ideas that make Chrono Trigger the greatest Japanese RPG ever made.
Released toward the end of the genre’s golden age on the Super Nintendo, Chrono Trigger brought together Square’s “Dream Team” of Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Final Fantasy, and Yuji Horii, creator of Dragon Quest, flanked by stars such as renowned anime artist Akira Toriyama and composer Nobuo Uematsu. Together they set to work on a JRPG that, in many ways, is nothing like a JRPG.
To begin with, the team kicked away the genre crutches that so rile its haters. Gone are the random battles, the tedious level grinding and the drawn-out battle animations. In their place, a breezy kind of combat, closer to Link than Cloud. Now you’re free to visit the final boss at almost any point, ending the game whenever you’re ready to be rewarded with one of fourteen different endings. Gone is the tedious, overblown storytelling, replaced by a tale told in the straightforward vocabulary of a classic children’s book. The game’s dialogue is universally accessible, its themes universally understood, its fantasy grounded in that truth that makes a good story a classic one.
The game opens in 1000 AD, introducing players to Crono (so named because removing the ‘h’ freed up much-needed cartridge space in the SNES original, although you can now rename him). Crono’s best friend, science nerd girl Lucca, has invented a teleporter that, when tested for the first time, turns out to be a time machine. The duo travel back and forth between seven periods, building a ragtag team of friends drawn from as far back as 65 Million BC all the way forward to a post-apocalyptic 2300 AD. Together they fix the mistakes of the past, watching as their butterfly wing actions turn history-making tornados across the millennia.
You can read the rest of the review over at Eurogamer here.
CEX Retro was an Aladdin’s cave of gaming obscurities.
Long and tall glass cabinets housed rows of exotic titles you’d never heard of, neat lines punctuated every now and again by a piece of strange Japanese hardware that relentlessly winked and bleeped back at its viewers. It was a store that existed for less than a year.
This was a time before ebay but soon after retro and vintage videogames had become interesting and widely-collectible, literally the only time in history when a central London retro games store would be a viable business prospect. Two years earlier and there wasn’t enough widespread interest to pay the astronomical rent. Two years later and the Internet would make gaming eccentricities affordable and available to anyone with a 56k modem.
But for those few short months this was a place I loved to visit. It was as much a museum and art exhibit as a retailer. I’ve visited Akihabara’s famous Super Potato retro games store a number of times now and CEX Retro was easily comparable in the range of unusual games and objects on offer, if not the prices (which were hiked into the stratosphere for Westerners).
It was here I that I played on my first Neo-Geo AES, saw my first Vectrex and held the only copy of a pre-Famicom Square game I’ve ever seen. But the reason CEX Retro still holds a special place in my heart because this was where I bought my first copy of Chrono Trigger.
“What’s that?” I asked the store clerk, pointing to a cellophane-wrapped box on the shelf behind the counter.
“That, my friend, is a mint copy of Chrono Trigger, Squaresoft’s most recent and greatest RPG for the Super Nintendo.”
“Wow. How much is it?”
“Sixty-five pounds.” He paused a beat. And another. Drama. “It’s part sealed you see. This guy sold it to us yesterday. He bought it brand new two years ago and slit the shrink wrap with a scalpel, an incision just long enough to be able to slide the cartridge out. When I say it’s mint, I mean it’s mint.”
He bristled with the kind of arrogant but warm pride that only an expert caught in a salesman’s job can.
“When he sold it to the shop,” he continued, “the seller said: ‘Tell whoever buys this to look after my stuff, ok?’”
He turned to a second store attendant who was standing next to him behind the counter, and both men laughed too much. I joined them, though I wasn’t really sure why. I love looking after my games.
Ten minutes later, as I turned the corner, now out of sight of the shop, I pulled the CEX Retro-branded plastic bag up to my face and whispered into it: “Don’t worry. I’ll look after you”.
Chrono Trigger was re-released for Nintendo DS this week in America. Check back here tomorrow for a review.
While browsing Flash games today I stumbled across Eco Battler, a horizontal shoot ‘em up with an ecological message.
Straight away I recognised the character portraits in the introductory movie as being from an old arcade game that I’d played a few times on MAME.
A bit more digging and it turns out that Eco Battler is indeed a quasi-port of Ultimate Ecology (a.k.a. Eco Fighters in the West), a 1993 arcade release from Capcom in which players battle a mega corporation that’s destroying earth via its polluting industry.
Of course, trying to reduce pollution via the medium of rocket-fuelled spaceships isn’t the most thought-through of plans, but I guess it makes for a better game than battling evil corporations on horseback or, um, in a Prius.
While Eco Battler appears to be a stripped back version of the original (I remember being able to angle the ship’s arm in the original), it clearly uses Capcom’s sprites, textures and, one imagines, a fair chunk of its code. Still, it’s an impressive feat to get such a pretty and fast-moving shmup running in browser, so kudos to creator Flash Beagle.
Tracking down the game’s origins reveals that Ultimate Ecology was designed by a Japanese player who won a game design competition sponsored by Capcom to have his idea turned into a game. I wonder if he ever saw any royalties from arcade sales? You see, far from being a piece of freely-given edutainment on the developer’s part, a visit to arcade flyers turns up the following incredible poster, circulated to arcade operators in a effort to get them to buy in the game:
“They Clean Up the Planet. You Clean Up On Profits.”
It’s a tagline that suggests Capcom hadn’t quite fully absorbed the wider themes of their new property…
The European arcade flyer is also a thing of great beauty, providing the indispensable information that your arch-nemesis in the game, the amazing Japlish-titled, Kernel Goyolk, is “estimated to weigh 380 kgs”.
Click here to play the Flash version of Eco Battler in a pop-up.
I’ve reached the final level of Call of Duty: World at War, my troops within spitting distance of the Reichstag, the last icon of Nazi dominion that must be toppled before we Russians can enjoy a quadruple vodka while watching the end credits roll.
In what’s become something of an annual sadism ritual, I’m playing Call of Duty through on Veteran, the toughest difficulty level. I’ve done this with every game in the series now, and each year I get bruises on my leg from where I’ve punched out my frustrations.
Last year’s Call of Duty 4, a masterpiece by most criteria, was a bitch of a game at Veteran level thanks to the way its enemy spawning worked. In every shoot-out, enemy troops would continue to reappear indefinitely, replacing those you’d shot down until you passed some invisible trigger point and the onslaught subsided. As such it became a game of charging forward, sliding to the ground behind a sandbag and praying.
When I sat down with Activision’s Noah Heller one of the first things I asked was whether the team at Treyarch had changed the way the system works, assigning each area of the game a set number of enemies who, once killed, would never reappear.
He answered:
“I can’t say that there’s no place in the entire game where enemies might be infinite, but believe me, it was a big concern to us. I’m pretty sure we reduced it down to nil in almost any situation. Except one, where from a plot perspective, it was important for enemies to keep pouring out to get the player to move on.
A lot of people are completists, and they want to kill every enemy before moving on, so we wanted to make sure that there was something for those players as well. Basically, we get it; we get that it’s bad gameplay when you show how the engine works to people.”
On this final point I disagree with Heller. Players absolutely want to know how the engine works because that’s how they come to understand the rules of the game.
The assault on the Reichstag is one of those places where enemies infinitely respawn until you’ve gained enough ground. You can shoot down out the grenadier on the building roof a hundred times but he will always be replaced ten seconds later. It’s immensely frustrating because the narrative of the game is telling you to clear out the enemy so you can storm the Reichstag, but the game system is telling you that killing the enemy is pointless and victory can only come from charging into the jaws of death while praying like a madman.
Mixing the two systems was arguably the worst possible decision because it confuses players as to what the rules of the game are at any given point. In every area you have to work out whether to act with a sniper’s patience and precision by removing threats one by one or to take the Rambo approach instead. It can be beneficial to create a game system in which the player isn’t always sure of how to approach a problem, but this is not one of those situations.
The Reichstag assault is comfortably the most difficult part of the game so far and I’m progressing at a rate of about one checkpoint per hour. The only reason I’m forging on is sheer bloody mindedness and the fact that I‘m now so invested and near to the final prize that I’ve convinced myself it would cost more to walk away.
When I do complete the level there will be no sense of achievement, just a wave of relief that I can at last move on. This is a ridiculous and tragic reason to continue to play a game, something highlighted by an excellent post on GameSetWatch from EA designer Brice Morrison.
The article outlines the reasons that games no longer appeal to him but it’s not all negativity. This line leaped out at me: “Games have the potential to not only be entertaining, but to have the player put down the controller and say, ‘Wow. I am a better person for having played this game. Those last few hours have contributed to my well being and will continue to enrich my life long after I’m done playing.’”
This point of view made me question the time I’m spending with Call of Duty 5 as, when I look back at my assault on the Reichstag, those last few hours have done the opposite of contribute towards my well-being and enriching my life. They gave me leg bruises.
In search of an antidote Brice is running a competition on his blog, inviting proposals for life-enriching games. He writes: The challenge is to design and create a small, simple, 5-10 minute game that is more than entertainment: a piece of software that actually enriches the life of the player. The deadline for the competition is Sunday so hurry to it. If you have even the germ of an idea, I urge you to take the time this evening to grow it into a word document. These conversations are important.
Edit: I just noticed that it’s a year to the day since I wrote The Difficulty with Call of Duty 4. This makes it look like I have a better handle on life and organisation than I actually do. Just thought I should come clean.
I’m a fan of all the other recommendations that the Game|Life team makes, from Leigh’s Sexy Videogameland through to the watchdog-like Magical Wasteland, so it is an honour to be in such company.
At some point in December I‘m planning a Top 10 Pieces of Game Writing from 2008, a follow up to last year’s popular list, something I thoroughly enjoyed putting together. The Internet, for all its great strengths, can’t help but bury good writing under the deluge of the next’s day’s content and the next day’s content and so on.
As such, it’s worthwhile to stop every now and again, haul out the gems and place them on show in a new and enduring context.
Feel free to make nominations in the comments. The list will be a collection of specific pieces – reviews, articles and interviews – rather than writers or publications in general, so be as specific as you can.
In the meantime, be sure to follow some of the links to the left. These are updated every week and are all worth your time.
“Um, hi. Do you think you could tell me anything about this game? I, er, found it on the bottom shelf back there.”
“Gunstar Heroes? Hmm. I’ve not heard of that one. Let me take a look.”
This is Mad Andy. We’re not friends and that’s certainly not a nickname of my invention. Rather, it’s the name Andy’s given himself and, by extension, his shop, an independent, second-hand video game store based in South London.
Mad Andy pulls a dog-eared phone directory from the shelf behind where he’s sitting, and plants it with a dull thud on the counter with that officious sense of purpose some men display when called upon to give advice.
Tongue peeking from the corner of his mouth, he flickbooks through its tatty pages, every now and again calling out the name of a game that catches his attention as it flits past his eyes alphabetically.
“Altered Beast, Another World, Bomberman, Contra, D,…”
The book’s a catalogue of every game ever, or so it seems to the thirteen-year-old me. More accurately, it’s a price guide compiled by goodness–knows-who, listing the buy and sell rates for games current and past. Armed with this tome, every independent videogame store knows how much to buy in a second-hand game for and how much to mark it up in order to secure fair but essential profit without undercutting market rates.
As well as prices, the book also boasts reviews, again, written by God-knows-which sorry freelancer. These pithy one-line assessments are accompanied by a score out of five, two pieces of information that gives the salesman everything he needs to issue customers with an authoritative recommendation.
“Elite, Frogger…Ga…Gi…Go. Ah! Here we go: Gunstar Heroes. Hmm. Well what do you know! It’s a good one. Look, right there: ‘Fast, frantic, frenetic scrolling shoot ‘em up. Five out of five.’”
Our sorry freelancer is a fan of alliteration.
“Whoa.” I look down at the back of the box in my hands. “Treasure? Never heard of them.”
Mad Andy and his shop are long gone but I still think about him and his staff from time to time. All gamers of my generation knew a video game store like that, a dealership they visited in youth with wide eyes and a fistful of pocket money. These were the places where dreams were met, the escapism dealers.
Everyone who has ever bought a video game at a shop knows how long the walk home can be. But that time between when a purchase has been made and before it’s played is never unpleasant.
Rather, it is in these delicious moments that you hold in your hands the perfect video game: one which has been invested in but which is yet to let you down. Unknown games are always the best ones because they are played in our imaginations, free of budgetary restraints, deadlines and the ten thousand other pressures that bear down upon the games of reality.
They are always stronger, funnier, cleverer and better-executed than their realities and so that walk home from the store, when the game is tangible in your hands but still imagined in your mind, is oftentimes the most potent moment in the videogame experience.
And yet it’s an experience whose days are numbered. If not by the next generation of hardware then certainly by the one after, all of our games will be supplied by digital distribution, the walk home from the shop with a new game box an anachronism, the weird necessity of supposedly poorer and simpler age.
This makes sense. While shopping for clothes on the high street will always be preferable to mail order – after all, clothes are tactile, need to be tried on and assessed in the atom dimension – video games have nothing to do with physicality. Discs are a means to an end, not an end in themselves unlike, say, an art book with thick pages that you’d want to leave open on a coffee table. Just as .mp3s make CDs obsolete so too will our broadband pipes and copious hard-drives dismiss hard media.
The long walk home will be replaced by a loading bar which fills as you browse the internet or make a cup of tea. And why not? Quaintness will always give way to convenience in technology’s inevitable advance and few things are so convenient as digital distribution.
The game manufacturers, ostensibly, win too. As their games exist only as digital copies, tied to gamertags and PSN accounts, so the second hand market console software will choke. No need to tie hardware to software codes, or to create long-view achievements to convince players to hang on to their games. There will be no other option.
But beyond the romance of reminiscing about the dingy independent game stores of our youth, there’s the very real disadvantage of not being able to trade old games in for new. How many game sales are made in part-exchange, trading spent old experiences for new ones, especially amongst younger gamers?
And what of those games that will be lost to time when they’re removed from the publisher’s servers? Bandwidth costs ensure that not every game released into the ether will be served indefinitely. When a game fails to make enough money month on moth to cover the cost of its hosting, what sensible business is going to hold onto it?
Will we need a videogame arts council, funded to make available those games that aren’t necessarily popular but are important and culturally improving, like those who work tirelessly to preserve the opera?
Video game retail is endangered, its removal from the industry supposedly a good thing, bringing publisher and consumer closer to one another and, perhaps, by removing the middlemen, helping to reduce the cost of games.
But the implications of the shift are far-reaching, will cost jobs, will bury games that have outlived their virtual shelf life and will make it much harder for 13-year-old newcomers to find buried Treasure, a sad thing indeed.
This column first appeared on GameSetWatch yesterday.
A few years ago my friends at thetriforce.com launched a get-rich-quick scheme offering £10 shares to 100 of their forum members. The idea was that the money generated by the forum would be invested in some sort of project – either for fun or profit but ideally a bit of both – the nature of which would be voted on by the shareholders themselves.
There were many suggestions for how best to use the money. How about a totally sweet party with a hefty tab behind the bar? Or, perhaps, a more prudent investment that could increase the value of the shares but not provide quite the firework display of fun that a blurry night out would. Some suggested we bet on horses, others still that we buy a stake in the football managerial career of one of the forumites.
Some years passed. The shareholders were, predictably, unable to come to a consensus on what exactly to spend the money on.
One evening I was at the penultimate Aereogramme gig with Ste, one of the three owners of The Triforce, owner/presenter of One Life Left, Europe’s leading/ only videogame-themed FM radio show and an accomplished delegator.
After the band had played I turned to Ste and said: “You know, I think we should put together a compilation record of tracks you’ve played on the radio show and release them on a CD. One Life Left records! It’ll help the show and it’ll help the artists. Everybody wins, right?”
“Yes! You should totally put that together,” he answered. Ste’s an accomplished delegator.
So we approached the Trifoum shareholders with the idea. The concept grew in discussion. Instead of releasing a compilation of songs previously played on One life Left, why not approach the artists and see if they’d be willing to record a track specifically for the record? And, to stay on message, why not ask them to theme the music around videogames or, better still, create it using videogame hardware?
Within a few months we’d managed to secure a decent line-up of artists willing to get involved and, unexpectedly, most of them went on to deliver tracks to us gratis. There were a even number of coups, in music terms, such as the chiptune version of Heathens by Bracken/ Hood, the awesomely-named track Materia Girl (about Final Fantasy VII’s Aerith, natch) from Projeckt A-Ko and all new tracks from Copy and Mark Denardo. One of the forum members designed the artwork for the record and another handled the duplication and thus Music to Play Games By was born.
So yeah, the Internet came together and made something awesome happen. I guess it had to happen some time.
It’s taken a while to work out what happens next but at last we’ve settled on a launch event. On Saturday week there will be a live One Life Left recording, a sweet party and copies of the CD will be available to buy for the first time. It promises to be a glorious celebration. You should come. Tell your friends.
Here’s Copy’s track, Playered, to get you in the mood and the full details are on the flyer at the top of the post.
Visit One life Left’s Music section in a couple of weeks if you can’t make the night but would like to order a copy of the CD anyway.
There are rules. Rhythm-action games, perhaps more than any other type, lay down their template in the first release and then treat sequels as little more than song expansions. There are tweaks to the systems but essentially the game stays the same while the soundtrack shifts around it. As such I’ve only listed the first release in a series (so no Rock Band 2 or Guitar Hero: World Tour, for example).
Also I’ve limited the list to rhythm-action games in the strictest sense, that is, games in which you time inputs to match prerecorded music. So there’s no Rez, ElectroPlankton or WiiMusic, titles in which a player’s inputs do create musical outputs, but not necessarily in a scored or timed framework.
This means that the list starts with Parappa the Rapper rather than, say, 1987’s Otocky for the Famicom Disc System, a musical shoot ‘em up designed by ElectroPlankto’s Toshio Iwai, and a direct precursor to Rez.
I also left off some of the more obscure South Korean Bemani clones because, well, they’re difficult to find exact release dates for, they’re rather obscure and, as straightforward copies, also a little boring. Don’t fret though, dancing game nazis, Pump It Up is in there.
Click on almost any game in the timeline to watch a video of it being played (bar, for example, Nana On-Sha’s impossible-to-find Tunin’Glue). Also, if you notice anything obvious that’s missing then let me know in the comments.
One way or another I own or have owned almost all of that games in the timeline, a thought that’s only slightly less terrifying than the fact PaRarappa was released 12 years ago and Bust-a-Groove ten. Going by those figures it won’t be long till I’m so old and creaky I can no longer beat Tsugaru on heavy
Anyway, it was all worth it just to rediscover the following advertisment, the first six seconds of which are basically the best six seconds of anything ever.
3D games have been doing this in replays for a while now and I’m not sure what ueful applications it would have in entertainment beyond the initial OMG-look-at-that moment, (after all, much of what makes film interesting is the restriction it places on a viewer’s point of view. How many of us ever used mutliple viewing angles on DVDs more than once?) but still, neat-o.
(Click inside the window once the video’s running to make it work, btw).
Eurogamer’s editor de-Edge’d the first few paragraphs but I prefer my original (I am SUPER biased) so here it is sans sub-edit. [/precious]
Animal Crossing is a world without death but that doesn’t mean it’s a world without loss. In this virtual life sim, bereavement comes not in life’s passing but in the passing of lives, the departures of those in-game neighbours who one day up and leave the game world.
Animal Crossing, as its name implies, houses a transient population, something we’re not used to in games that ask us to invest in relationships. So when Tiffany, the cute cat to whom you’ve been writing flirtatious letters and running never-ending errands for leaves the village on the next bus out with only a scribbled note by way of goodbye, there’s a sense of emotional loss that’s rare to games.
The feeling is heightened because, while almost all of the game’s residents are free to go as they please, heading off to new towns and lives on a whim, once you step off the bus and choose a house in which to settle, you’re here for good. This is where you’ll stay until you grow tired of the game and stop visiting the town, leaving the weeds to sprout and your relationships with the other villagers to wane. Until that point you are the local constant, the hick who’s never left its borders and there is some comfort in the knowledge that the places the other animals leave for can never be known by you.
Let’s Go To The City, the third Animal Crossing game and first for Nintendo’s Wii, punches a hole through these previous boundaries. Now you’re free to toddle along to the bus stop at any point and catch a ride to the big smoke. Sure, once there all you can do is a bit of shopping and character customization before your inevitable ride back home, but multiplayer aside, it’s the first time players have ever been allowed outside the confines of the village, a rare new feature in a game that otherwise exactly apes its forebears.
Indeed, for players familiar with the Animal Crossing series, much of Let’s Go To The City is like watching a favourite film for the hundredth time. You smile at the right places, giggle at the worn jokes, whoop when a much-loved character pops onto screen, celebrate the triumphs and feign sadness at the micro-tragedies. It can be a joyful experience but this is joy that’s comes from familiarity, not discovery. Despite the game-box promises of “new events to celebrate!” and “new items to collect!” despite the extended development time, the community features facilitated by the Wii, the option to play as your Mii character and, of course, the titular promise of a whole “city” to visit, there are few innovations beneath the topsoil.
Your adventure begins in the same way it always has, with a journey into a new beginning, a bus ride to a fresh start. There’s no background given, no great trauma that you’re fleeing from and no overarching mission driving you forward. There is no mention of a princess to rescue or a world to save. Instead you ride in the back of a rickety bus answering the questions of a friendly co-passenger, spoken in the cutesy burbling half-tongue language of all the game’s inhabitants. ‘Are you a boy?’, ‘When is your birthday?’, ‘Have you arranged accommodation for when you arrive in town?’. The answers you give here determine your character’s features, which are finally revealed when you step off the bus into your new hometown.
Moments later an officious raccoon, the local shop owner, landlord and general furry Godfather, Tom Nook, offers you one of four properties to call your own. From there in you have neighbours to get to know, letters to write, festivals to attend, fish to collect, bugs to net, fossils to excavate, clothes to buy and, of course, a mortgage to service. The game follows the Wii’s internal clock and calendar meaning that when it’s night in your world, it’s night in Animal Crossing, while the shops open at nine and close at six, and Christmas falls on the 25th December.
Let’s Got To The City has all of this. It is, in format and progression, a cookie cutter copy of Animal Crossings gone before, especially the first GameCube game. There are seasonal festivities; daily fishing competitions to see who can catch the largest Black Bass and challenges to see who can best match their home’s furnishings to the month’s theme. The lines of (brilliant) dialogue may have been rewritten, the visuals are sharper and brighter and, sure, your choice of four homesteads are now scattered around your town rather than in a cluster near the bus station, but it’s best to view Wii Animal Crossing as an expansion pack, both literally and figuratively.
The chance to play with time is gaming’s greatest gift to the world. It’s something no other entertainment medium offers and yet, when we rewind the last ten seconds of Prince of Persia, un-jumping a mistimed leap, it’s can seem like the most natural thing in the world. 
CEX Retro was an Aladdin’s cave of gaming obscurities. 
While browsing Flash games today I stumbled across 
I’ve reached the final level of Call of Duty: World at War, my troops within spitting distance of the Reichstag, the last icon of Nazi dominion that must be toppled before we Russians can enjoy a quadruple vodka while watching the end credits roll. 
Yesterday Chewing Pixels was voted one of Wired’s 
“Um, hi. Do you think you could tell me anything about this game? I, er, found it on the bottom shelf back there.”
Animal Crossing is a world without death but that doesn’t mean it’s a world without loss. In this virtual life sim, bereavement comes not in life’s passing but in the passing of lives, the departures of those in-game neighbours who one day up and leave the game world. 
