Street Fighter IV wasn’t my game of 2009. Rather, 2009 was my year of Street Fighter IV.
It devoured time, of course, as the 350 hours tallied in the player’s record screen attest. But more than that, Capcom’s inspired, distinguished reinvention of its most popular fighting franchise demanded devotion, yoiking me from whichever other game was vying for my attention like a jealous, insatiable lover.
Because of this game I’d often find myself playing in Goodge Street’s Casino or Trocadero whenever passing through London, trying out in public arcades those virtual lessons learned in private. Because of this game I spent four months pursuing an interview with Daigo Umehara, the elusive Street Fighter world champion. Because of this game I spent countless hours watching YouTube videos of tournament matches, trying to pick up on the rhythms and techniques of the masters. But most of all, because of this game, I gained a new lens through which I view all videogames, where the medium has come from, and where it’s headed. Its significance to me is immeasurable.
If 2008 was defined by grand narratives, 60-hour epics played out across Fallout 3′s radioactive Washington or Fable II’s leafy Albion, then this year was about a single, recurring 99-second vignette: two characters sparring for dominance. It may be a short story with only two possible outcomes (three if you count the occasional Double KO), but it’s one told in a hundred thousand different ways, each with its own nuance and pace. From a relatively small palette of moves, players can express themselves in myriad different ways. It’s this combination of tight breadth and unfathomable depth that continues to make Street Fighter IV such an irresistible proposition, 10 months down the line.
Because, yes, for all the grand accolades laid at Uncharted 2′s hiking boots, few of us are still playing that game on a nightly basis. By contrast, last month, long after the game had any professional relevance to us, I found myself sitting in the South London flat of Capcom’s European PR manager, drinking cups of hurriedly-brewed tea and KO’ing till dusk. While we played we discussed characters, tactics and examined our individual strengthes and weaknesses in the game. This sort of thing rarely happens to people who write about videogames for a living, as becoming attached to a game after the potential to make money from the relationship has passed is an occupational hazard. But Street Fighter IV transcends mere product: it is a way of life.
In part the game’s success in my world can be attributed to combination of circumstance and convenience. As we grow older and responsibilities make ever-greater demands of us (and, after all, who else does Street Fighter IV primarily appeal to than the 25 to 35-year-old males driven into its arms by memories of the forebears it so carefully tributes) so the appeal of concentrated entertainment rises. This is a game that can be enjoyed in a 15-minute leisure window, delivering maybe 10 highly charged, satisfying and diverse matches in the time it would have taken me to plod through an RPG’s loading screens. While today’s gaming culture conflates value with expanse, my life’s circumstances ensure the most rewarding and valuable games are those that can be savoured in chunks in between changing a baby’s nappy, or hoovering the lounge. Brevity is often a virtue.
You can read the rest of this piece over at Eurogamer here.
36 years on and there’s still inspiration to be drawn from Breakout, Atari’s formative, blockbusting arcade game that helped define the very vocabulary videogames have been jabbering ever since.
A sort of inverse Peggle, with Bjorn the Unicorn swapped out for a missile-riding Tron nanobot, Reflect Missile does little to advance upon its primal inspiration’s simplistic visuals. Instead, it snuggles up to the primitive 8-bit aesthetic, placing cool monotone green or red Amstrad blocks atop school exercise-book graph-paper backgrounds and soundtracking them with chiptune lullabies. Only the tiniest flashes of contemporary flair are permitted here: fading missile trails that bisect the screen or pixel-art fireworks that bloom when a stage is completed.
No, at 500 DSi Points, Q-Games isn’t interested in turning Breakout into Virtua Tennis. Rather, it’s interested in taking Breakout, snapping it apart and putting it back together again with some of the pieces back to front.
The developers’ ability to take a building-block genre and simmer it down to a zingy concentrate has been proved time and again by way of its PixelJunk suite of titles on PlayStation 3, which have variously reduced and reshaped tower defence, racing and shoot-’em-ups. While Reflect Missile doesn’t bear the family name, it certainly shares the family likeness of its PSN cousins, adding a few precise rules and ideas to its inspiration to create something that’s at once entirely fresh yet entirely familiar.
You can rad the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here
In the ten years that separate the end of Bioshock from the beginning of its sequel, the underwater city of Rapture has deteriorated. It’s not that the place has necessarily decayed, though the art deco signage and once plush 1930’s fixtures and fittings exhibit perhaps a little more wear, tear and gunshot wounds than before. Rather, it’s those inhabitants that roam its deep-sea corridors who have worsened with the passing of time, their hellish mutations accelerated yet further by another decade’s worth of substance abuse.
ADAM, the curious, DNA-altering essence extracted from sea slugs and injected into the veins of Rapture’s bored and disillusioned citizens, has diversified and toughened the city’s monstrous population in terrible ways. If Bioshock was about the utopia project turned to dystopian ruin, then Bioshock 2 examines what happens when dystopias descend to hells. 2K Marin is quick to point out that Jack, the brawny but essentially human protagonist from the first game, simply would not survive in this cruel new world of heroin-chic splicers and ethically-bankrupt scientists.
So perhaps it’s just as well that this time around, you play not as a plane crash survivor who stumbles serendipitously into Rapture’s depths, but rather a prototype Big Daddy, one of the hulking creatures – part oversized diver, part portable drill bit – who plod its network of underwater tunnels. Known only as Subject Delta, your character has become separated from his little sister, one of the waif-like girls who accompany each Big Daddy around Rapture harvesting ADAM from its dead and dying citizens. Subject Delta has gained sentience and, importantly, a free will of his own. Unshackled from the whims of his creator, you’re free from the relentless task of hunting ADAM; free, if 2k Marin are to be believed, to become whoever you choose to become.
You can read the rest of this piece over at VG24/7 here
Half-Minute Hero is a two-fingered salute to anyone who’s ever complained that the Japanese RPG is too long and tedious to be worth the bother. From the moment your hero leaves his pastoral village to when he lands a death blow upon the world-threatening overlord, the game distills the traditional 60-hour play arc of Japan’s interactive fantasy epic into 30-second speed-run concentrate. It may be a single-note joke – building a frantic dash against the clock in the gaming genre least suited to the task – but it’s an excellent joke nonetheless. Moreover, in its self-assured execution and endlessly inventive subversion of cliché, Half-Minute Hero succeeds in becoming a masterful reinvention of that which it parodies, simultaneously celebrating the form while overhauling the function of one of gaming’s oldest templates to create something fresh and imaginative.
Like the Reduced Shakespeare Company, Half-Minute Hero appropriates the language and aesthetic of its influence (in this case, the 8-bit JRPG) but trims away the bulk. The result is a conveyor belt of ADHD-friendly bites of play. Entire plotlines are snipped through like shorthand synopses; random battles explode and vanish like double-time fireworks while your character levels up in the blink of a transition screen. The need for all this hurry is pressing: in 30 seconds’ time an evil overlord is set to whisper a spell to end the world. The aim (at least within the core game mode) remains resolute throughout: race from your home village to the overlord’s castle and defeat him within this improbable time limit in order to save the world.
While traditional random battles interrupt your progression on the world map, you have no direct control over combat. Instead, your character careers across the battle screen from left to right, bumping heads with enemies until one or the other’s health is depleted. Post-battle there’s no results screen. Any experience points gained are added to a hidden total and, if you earned enough, level your character up, ensuring the next battle is faster won.
An unflinching digital countdown timer is constantly stamped on the screen, revealing how many milliseconds are left till global annihilation, adding a near relentless pressure to proceedings. Time pauses only when you enter village safe havens, where you can replenish health, purchase better armour and weaponry or gather clues for how to reach the overlord’s castle. Step outside again, and the mere suggestion of sloth is enough to invoke the apocalypse.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here
