Last year, Klonoa’s publisher Namco Bandai sent its supporters a survey. “We are planning to remake one of our classic titles,” it stated. “Would you be so kind as to answer a few questions to help guide the development?” The recipient was then required to fill in some straightforward details: “Age”, “Gender”, “Do you have or intend to buy a Wii?” and so on. Then the questions became more pointed and peculiar, asking, for example, that respondents register their excitement about the concept of a Wind Bullet (a ring-like device that “fires a short burst of wind, used to inflate your enemies”).
Finally, the questionnaire presented two different character designs of the titular bipedal rabbit-cat himself. “Based on these two images”, it then asked, “please rate the following design characteristics on a scale of one to five: Ears, Face, Clothing, Shoes and Lack of Hat”. (The exact same order of criteria Eurogamer uses to choose a partner). Surely it was this final option that revealed the true purpose the survey, to finally settle a debate that had presumably raged for months between two precious designers: should the all-new Klonoa wear a hat or not? Well, that and the stuff about the Wind Bullet. It’s very important to know what your customer thinks about the Wind Bullet…
In the end, the pro-hat designer won out (as well he should: if you owned a sweet-ass Pac-Man cap, why on earth would you ever leave the warren without it?). If Namco had had any more general doubts about resurrecting this minor star of the 32-bit era, they were evidently quashed by the positive response to their inimitable brand of research.
It’s not surprising. Klonoa: Door to Phantomile was, on its original release in 1997, a cute, colourful and imaginative platform game, one that helped pioneer the 2.5D side-scrolling technique and whose influence can clearly be seen in contemporary heavyweights such as LittleBigPlanet. So despite one or two mediocre sequels, there still exists a good dose of nostalgic goodwill towards the charming character and the dream-world he roamed.
Time has done little to dull those charms. From the first touch, Klonoa feels like a crucial missing piece of the jigsaw of the Wii’s library: a side-scrolling platform game with assured, grounded, tried-and-tested foundations. This is an orthodox game that wants nothing to do with innovation. You move, in general, from left to right, defeating enemies, scaling and descending platforms and collecting things before facing off against a boss character with a life bar and one or two repeating attack patterns.
Visually, it’s a primary-colour paint-splat of art and design that’s just the right side of saccharine. Its character designs are esoteric but somehow familiar, its animations are economic but effective, its exacting Japanese polish and pedigree are impeccable.
Space, it turns out, was not to be Mario’s final frontier. Super Mario Galaxy 2 will no doubt offer players the chance to explore on uncharted planets, each with their own idiosyncratic colours and creatures and gravities. But it will be a case of extending our reach into the known universe rather than delving into a new dimension. By contrast, Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story breaks new territory, offering the chance to literally get under Mario’s arch-enemy’s skin and, for the first time, take to inner-space.
Here Bowser’s veins and arteries are the winding roads along which the plumbers travel. His organs are the boss-fights, his stomach lining the backdrop. But contrary to what you might expect, this isn’t a quest to take down Mario’s spiked nemesis from within. Rather, you must help Bowser overcome challenges in the outer world by stimulating muscles and latent ability from within. Mario and Luigi act as inverse parasites whose influence on their host body is critical to his success.
But the pair’s microscopic toil is hardly philanthropic. Mario and Luigi have been, rather obviously, ingested against their will and their overarching quest is to somehow make their way out of Bowser’s body (we can count six possible exit points…). So rather than acting like the foreign bodies that they are, they work alongside Bowser on their quest, his continued well-being key to their survival, their usefulness also key to evading his cleansing antibodies.
So when Bowser’s thrown a rope by a Frenchman stranded on an island and asked to haul the very ground back towards the mainland so he can get off, Mario and Luigi’s job is, via a simple mini-game, to stimulate his arm muscles, powering up Bowser’s strength to the task at hand as they work to pull their friend close while keeping their enemy closer.
The form and function of this, the third entry to the Mario and Luigi RPG series (as its known in Japan), will be familiar to players who enjoyed forebears Partners in Time and Superstar Saga. It would be churlish to describe the series as a Fisher Price RPG as its mechanics are surprisingly deep and its ambition different to the typical number-crunching grind of a traditional JRPG. Rather, you move through environments as in a side-scrolling platform game. Battles with enemies switch to a turn-based JRPG-style affair, albeit one that emphasizes timing and action over long-haul tactics and strategy.
Verse chorus verse: grunt, boss, grunt. In Sin and Punishment 2, rhythm and structure remains as traditional as it ever was. Fistfuls of insectoid enemies are thrown relentlessly at your face for five minutes, then ten seconds of calm before the storm of a mid-boss fight with a 10-foot tall strutting chicken called ‘Cock Keeper’.
As feathers flutter to the ground all around, it’s back to the business of machine gunning down conveyor-belt soldiers whose ambition reaches no further than to chip away at your health bar while providing fodder for your ballooning multiplier. The level heaves like an orchestra, gunfire the timpani in a build that rolls up to a dizzying crescendo: a fight with a giant flaming space turtle. Konnichiwa bitches, it metaphorically screams. You can pop that Milo video in the Recycle Bin and shove your MotionPlus in the drawer: Treasure’s back to remind us all why we play videogames.
In many ways the Sin and Punishment 2 developer is the antithesis of contemporary Nintendo. While each company’s games may be tuned and polished to an unusually high degree, this boutique codeshop turns out few titles that your grandmother would be happy settling down to of an afternoon. With deep combat, complex scoring systems and a talent for clothing twitch gaming in outstanding art direction that stretches the hardware’s technological boundaries, these are games for the talented and tenacious; gamers willing to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of high-score perfection.
So the marriage of Sin and Punishment to Nintendo’s hardware-du-jour is an unexpected one. Whether the decision to start work on this sequel came before or after the original N64 game found its way onto the global Virtual Console channel is unclear. Perhaps Treasure’s dazzling on-rails shooter sold enough digital copies to justify this sequel, or perhaps they just released it to a wider audience (the N64 version was Japan-only) to soften the ground for a sequel on which work had already begun. Regardless, what’s immediately clear is that Sin and Punishment 2 is an assured continuation of the spunk and spectacle of the original – one that, in the Wii remote and nunchuck, has at last found its ideal control scheme.
You point the Wii remote and squeeze the trigger to fire an automatic volley of bullets at the reticule on screen. This hail of trace-lined projectiles tears into the distance to whittle away at enemy hit points, killing them softly by chip damage increments. In contrast, the A button, when held down, stills your fire while filling a gauge built into the reticule. When this is maxed-out you release the button to paint the screen in a cleansing fireball.
Tap the trigger briefly and, depending on which of the two characters you’re playing as, you’ll either let go a flurry of sword swipes or flying kicks for close quarters combat. It’s intuitive in a way that its predecessor struggled to be and, after just five minutes with the new system, we were wishing Treasure had taken the time to rework the original control system when updating the game for Virtual Console.
In a similar way to other on rails shooters such as Panzer Dragoon and Rez, the camera moves along a fixed path – leaving you free to move your character around the screen using the nunchuk. In contrast to other on-rails shooters such as Panzer Dragoon and Rez, the camera wheels and dives with unmatched drama. The window onto the derelict Tokyo-esque city through which your character runs, tumbles and hoverboards zooms and pans frenetically. It offers three-quarter views on the potholed streets far below one moment then extreme close-ups as you squeeze between two dilapidated office buildings the next.
Read the rest of this hand-ons feature over at Eurogamer here.
With global sales approaching 50 million units, Wii Sports has comfortably overtaken Super Mario Bros. as the best-selling videogame of all time. Of course a great deal of that success can, as with the previous record-holder, be ascribed to the fact that the game comes bundled with the console upon which it plays in every country outside of Japan. But the link between Nintendo’s Wii and its number one sports game runs far deeper than a physical tie at the point of sale.
Just as Super Mario Bros. defined the NES so Wii Sports exemplifies the Wii’s functionality and appeal, along with its maker’s current vision and ambition, better than any other. Arguably the principle success of this immediately irresistible sport-themed mini-game collection has been in revealing to non-gamers why gamers play videogames.
With a barrier to entry as low as swinging the controller like a racket or bowling ball, anyone can experience for themselves the joy of digital cause and effect. In this way Wii Sports has broadened gaming’s boundaries and improved the mainstream cultural standing of the medium more significantly than almost any other title.
But who cares, right? The record-breaking stats and industry-redefining influence are irrelevant to players who felt let down by the brevity and shallowness of the Wii Sports experience. After extended play anyone can see that Nintendo’s digital puppetry makes us believe we have more control than we really do; the subtlety of our shots during a tennis match, for example, is simplified almost beyond relevance in the short journey from Wii remote to sensor bar.
Without a fun or thoughtful context for the mini-games, which were instead plonked within an abstract hub as if they were dry options in an extended tech demo, it was easy to feel shortchanged. Even though the game had come for free, the Wii Sports promise cost our expectations dearly.
“So I’d just like to start by thanking you for agreeing to help us out on this project. It’s very much appreciated by the team.”
“Well, that’s absolutely fine Mr… Mr? I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name”
“Caldwell. John Caldwell. I’m senior producer here at Eternity Games. It really is a privilege to have you here. We’re confident that the unique and personal insight you can provide us into this moment of history will prove quite invaluable to our product.”
The older man shifted a little in his seat, causing his walking stick to slide to the floor from its leaning position on the chair’s armrest with a resounding clack. “Well, I’m not sure about that Sir, but I’m quite happy to help out in any way I can. Your game is about… it’s about the war, yes? Are the kids really interested in that sort of thing these days?”
“Absolutely. And we think that by consulting some veterans we can add greatly to the verisimilitude of the experience we’re creating. This kind of thing makes for an excellent back-of-the-box selling point, you know. Young people are keen to learn what it was like to serve on the frontline and games like ours offer them a unique and realistic chance to witness both the horror and the glory of the battlefield.”
“Well I can’t say I especially approve of that Mr Caldwell, but anything that might help prevent a young person from going to war and having to see the things that I see is just fine by me.”
America’s Army, Full Spectrum Warrior and all the other military recruitment games flashed across Caldwell’s mind for a moment. But just as he started to wonder just how many young men had been drawn to real war by way of virtual battlefields, he tore himself off that thought trail and back to the matter at hand.
“That’s great, just real great. So, what can you tell me about that time? How did it feel to be a soldier in active service?”
“We were children and we should have been doing other things.
I mean that literally: we should have been elsewhere. The history books record the tactics of the distant generals, the broad brushtrokes of a war’s story as it heaves and builds… and the movies, well, they wring sentimentality from the mortars and the sod, all slow motions vainglorious deaths and weeping French horns. But there in the trench, in the dust and the detail of the moment, we were children and we should have been doing other things.
“I had a stammer then, and a hairline on the cusp of retreat. The other boys would joke that my moustache looked like a sooty thumbprint. Heh, at least it did till the officers made me shave it off. My uniform hung two sizes too large from – and don’t laugh now – the clothes-horse of a body I had back then. The very model of a modern soldier I was not. Few of us were. You get the army you pay for and, as conscripts we were a sort of factory-worker class, our inexpert labour fueling war’s insatiable factories.”
The veteran leaned forward in his chair and, from behind heavy eyelids, looked Caldwell straight in the eye.
“Our days were defined by constant unease. We would sit without stillness, lie without resting, sleep without recuperating. Our adrenal glands were shriveled from overuse, ears weary from the staccato rattatattat of the skies overhead, eyes salty from the dust of excavation. I was a tunneler, you see, digging under no man’s land, extending the reach of our allied warren. By day I’d dig, the men behind me shoring up each new length of cavity with sweat and timber. It was dark and hard work, not really like the sort of thing they show in Hollywood or write about in the Reader’s Digest. But it was important work, or so they’d tell me. During that time I lost my fingernails. Come to think of it, during that time, I lost my best friend.”
At this, Caldwell straightened slightly, as if scenting something of use for the first time. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “How did he die?”
“He was taken into the woods 200 yards behind our lines and shot by my commanding officers.”
“He was shot by our side? What for?”
“They found him sleeping while on patrol. That was a crime that carried the death penalty. We were children. We should have been doing other things.”
The veteran paused to take a sip of water. His hand and demeanour remained steady. Caldwell set down his pencil and took a deep but silent breath.
After a moment the producer said: “Thank-you for the background, that’s really super. So, can you tell me a little bit about the fighting? What sort of guns did you use? Did you ever kill a man?”
“I never faced the enemy, or, at least never saw the whites of his eyes. Those who did never lived to tell the tale. You went over the top, you never came back. Obviously the war ended before it was my turn. Or perhaps I was just too useful digging to send off to die. Still, I certainly had my chance to look full into the face of death. That day the weather was without drama: there were no stormclouds or sheets of rain to backdrop my horror. The sun shone and the breeze carried with it birdsong. Nature is joyfully indifferent to man’s endless altercations, you know.
“We’d been hit by mortar fire before, of course, but I’d never been so close to the aftermath. His body was flung from the crater. Though he was beyond saving when I reached him, his chest still heaved, saliva bubbling crimson at his lips with each shallow breath. In that moment I didn’t see a soldier or a hero or even a man, though he was just barely all of these. No, I saw an infant, suckling his mother’s breast, he lost in her eyes, she lost in his, both oblivious to this moment towards which his life would inexorably creep. By the time an officer arrived he was staring without seeing, lost and, in a sense, I with him.
“A week later we received word the war was ended. We trudged back from our frontline, each step the waking from a dark dream. We were no longer children and we were off to do other things…
Well, Sir, I think that’s about all I have for you for now.”
Caldwell said nothing, instead offering a weak smile.
“So, you really think you can get some of that into your videogame?,” asked the veteran, in a low and mournful voice.
“Do you?”
This short story first appeared on GameSetWatch, yesterday.
In Smax, Alan Moore’s masterful parody of the Tolkien-style fantasy adventure, one of the party’s dwarves (or ‘big-hearted folk’, as they’re tactfully referred to in the story) turns to another comrade and remarks: “You know, questing is really sort of miserable.”
“I know,” his friend answers. “In books you just turn a page and you’re there! But this just, like, goes on and on…”
As the breadth of videogame worlds expands ever outwards, ripping through the technological barriers that once constrained their borders, it becomes easier for the gamer to empathise with these weary dwarves. In the RPG genre, that subset of videogames that most closely follows the Tolkien template, forty-minute treks across rolling terrain have always been commonplace. But as graphics paint game worlds and the characters that walk them ever closer to scale, the sheer distance we’re asked to travel from town to town has increased in kind.
With this power comes responsibility on the part of the developer: as the length of our in-game journeys balloons, so the reasons and incentives propelling us from place to place must become more persuasive. And when the player arrives at their destination, HP and resources depleted, ready for a good night’s sleep and a cutscene at the local tavern, the beauty of the destination and the promise of new adventure and purpose it holds must be compelling. After all, if a designer is going to ask for hours of a player’s valuable time to be spent in passage between key events in the game, those events better be worth the walk.
It’s a balance that developers are still struggling to meet, something nowhere more evident than in Star Ocean: The Last Hope, tri-Ace’s recent epic but middling space exploration RPG. Here the sheer scale of environments is dizzying, with miles of land and searchable scenery stretching off into the draw distance. But it’s a horizon furnished by missions that provide barely enough reason to propel the player across them. One side quest late in the game not only demonstrates the weakness of some of the world’s leading designers in this area but, for me, threatened to put an end to every JRPG quest once and for all, so astonishing is its cruelty.
The set-up is a cliché, a small errand to deliver a note to a character’s long-lost brother on the other side of the country. Note in satchel, I headed out from the city gates to begin the long, by now-tedious business of traversing the game world, birds chirrupping joyful all around, oblivious to the wearying futility of my virtual toil.
I reached my faraway destination to be greeted by a man who offered the usual benign and banal chitchat of an NPC with no mission to give. Behind him, feet dangling in the water of the town’s port, sat my quarry, patiently awaiting the note I’d carried so very far.
But before I completed the delivery I chose to speak to the first man for a second time, to see if he had any other useful information tucked away in the branches of his conversation tree. No chitchat this time. Rather, he notices – or, more accurately, smells – the note I’ve so faithfully carried this far (for some reason the sender perfumed it in an act of gentle incest). Then, he snatches it from my bag before, in a single motion, stuffing it into his mouth, chewing the paper slow and deliberate while looking me dead in the eye.
It’s an astonishing act of cruelty on the designer’s part, as the only way to complete the quest is by traipsing back to the first city in order to request a second note. In that one moment the crushing futility of my overarching quest in Star Ocean 4 came into sharp focus, and with it the crushing futility of thousands of fetch and deliver quests with it, errands that tested nothing more than my patience and taught me nothing more than tenacity.
A generous commentator might suggest that the quest designer wanted to inject his game with a flavour of life’s random cruelty, to upset the player’s expectation that, if they always follow the rules and do what they’re told, they will eventually win the princess. Life doesn’t work like that, so why should games?
And that’s a valid message for a game designer to attempt to communicate, but it’s also a risky one. Many of us play games because their tidy, reliable chains of cause and effect offer comfort and consistency in a world that rarely provides either. We trust our game designers not to abuse us by having people chew up and spit out our quest items like so many sadist bullies. Breach that trust and you risk losing your player. After all, that’s the very same reason people give up on life’s quests, isn’t it?
SCAD student Bang-yao Liu’s project, ‘Deadline’, is a 1:54 tribute to glue, organisation and tireless patience.
I especially love the section in which he’s driving down an OutRun open road, while the clouds inch left across the wall high above: the post-its behaving as pixels writ large.
It’s a wonderful example of where cute concept has been matched by strong execution. Watch the ‘making of’ here.
‘The milk-first school brings some strong arguments, but I maintain that mine is unanswerable…’ Orwell weighs in on the quintessntially British question of whether it should be milk before the water or milk after the water when making tea…
…Far more sensible than crusty chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s technique that is…well, read for yourself (paragraph eight).
‘The next Jen’. Neat gaming culture shortform fiction, as ever, from Hit Self-Destruct.
Last year, Klonoa’s publisher Namco Bandai sent its supporters a survey. “We are planning to remake one of our classic titles,” it stated. “Would you be so kind as to answer a few questions to help guide the development?” The recipient was then required to fill in some straightforward details: “Age”, “Gender”, “Do you have or intend to buy a Wii?” and so on. Then the questions became more pointed and peculiar, asking, for example, that respondents register their excitement about the concept of a Wind Bullet (a ring-like device that “fires a short burst of wind, used to inflate your enemies”).
Space, it turns out, was not to be Mario’s final frontier. Super Mario Galaxy 2 will no doubt offer players the chance to explore on uncharted planets, each with their own idiosyncratic colours and creatures and gravities. But it will be a case of extending our reach into the known universe rather than delving into a new dimension. By contrast, Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story breaks new territory, offering the chance to literally get under Mario’s arch-enemy’s skin and, for the first time, take to inner-space.
Verse chorus verse: grunt, boss, grunt. In Sin and Punishment 2, rhythm and structure remains as traditional as it ever was. Fistfuls of insectoid enemies are thrown relentlessly at your face for five minutes, then ten seconds of calm before the storm of a mid-boss fight with a 10-foot tall strutting chicken called ‘Cock Keeper’.
With global sales approaching 50 million units, Wii Sports has comfortably overtaken Super Mario Bros. as the best-selling videogame of all time. Of course a great deal of that success can, as with the previous record-holder, be ascribed to the fact that the game comes bundled with the console upon which it plays in every country outside of Japan. But the link between Nintendo’s Wii and its number one sports game runs far deeper than a physical tie at the point of sale.
“So I’d just like to start by thanking you for agreeing to help us out on this project. It’s very much appreciated by the team.”
