Is it possible to copyright a game mechanic? Many have tried. At the dawn of videogame time, Magnavox sued Atari for copying its rudimentary tennis game to create Pong. More recently, social game developer Zynga, creator of FarmVille, sued rival Playdom for allegedly stealing the ‘Zynga Playbook’, a document outlining valuable concepts, techniques and best practices for developing successful online games. While the first case was settled out of court and the second continues today, as yet unresolved, the line between inspiration and plagiarism is a fine one, yet to be legally clarified with regard to videogames.
Nevertheless, to describe Quantum Theory as merely “inspired by” Gears of War would be untrue. While it’s tiresome to draw attention to the great many ways in which Tecmo Koei’s game apes Epic’s multi-million-selling third-person action series, it’s necessary. The game is, in terms of its raw mechanics, nothing short of a direct copy.
Peel away the visuals for a moment – the hulking player character and his squadron, whose boulder-like torsos throb with testosterone, first cousins all to Marcus Fenix and his cronies – and in the hands, each game’s buttons map directly to one another. Raise one of your three equipped weapons – selected via the d-pad – and the reticule will tighten over your shoulder with easy familiarity. Run hunched while under fire and the camera drops, wobbling behind you, providing a war correspondent’s view of the action.
The cover mechanic, too, is lifted note-for-note from Epic’s games, as you snap to the nearest waist-high wall or column, sticking to the surface till you click away into a lunging roll towards the next piece of protective masonry. Dodge left or right and you’ll tumble with rare speed for a man of your character’s bulk, while the R-bumper reload stops just short of Gears’ timing mini-game to expedite the process.
Quantum Theory’s environments, while far less detailed and robust than those coaxed by Epic from its own Unreal Engine, share the same shadowy grime as their inspiration, the identikit enemies glisten with the same off-putting wax finish. While Quantum’s foes lack the variety or imagination of their Gears of War counterparts, they share the same ugliness, lacking that attraction-in-hideousness found in entertainment’s greatest monsters, from H. R. Giger’s Alien to the Elephant Man. No, these are childish embodiments of our fears, weak in Epic’s game, weaker still in Tecmo-Koei’s pathetic dilution.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here
In ‘Wily Travels’ it’s the PCs and LCD monitors used to book countless budget summer vacations. In ‘Marriage Makers’ it’s the necklaces and bracelets, sparkling pellets on display under the glass counter. In ‘Atlantica Casino’, it’s the tall chairs upon which patrons once sat and played the slots, or the discarded handbags around them, heavy with coins and make-up. In ‘Bennie Jack’s Barbecue Shack’ it’s the plastic serving trays, in ‘Venus Touch’, the bottles of shampoo and hair dye, in ‘Knokonutz Sports Town’ the dumbbells and basketballs. In ‘Toy Manor’, it’s the RC stunt copter with its sharp, rhythmic blades that can slice the head clean off a man.
Dead Rising 2 changes the way that you shop. In this night-terror rendering of Supermarket Sweep, the question against which any potential purchase is judged is not “Do I need this?” or “Does this product offer value for money?” Rather, it is: “How quickly would I be able to bludgeon the nose from a zombie with this?” In the case of the shampoo bottle the answer is: a really long time.
For George Romero, the shopping centre was the perfect locale for the zombie apocalypse because the routine, civilised familiarity, when used as a backdrop for an uprising of corpses, couched an abstract horror in the mundane and everyday. But in Dead Rising 2, the shopping mall has not been chosen as a commentary on dead-eyed American consumerism, nor even as a clichéd nod to cinematic zombie tradition. Rather, it’s been chosen for the smorgasbord of weaponry it offers.
Where else can you find an electric guitar, a rack of ribs and a chainsaw in such close proximity to one another? In a medium that uses guns as its primary means of player interaction, the chance to stave in a zombie’s head with a six-foot novelty liquor bottle is something to be celebrated. The mall has been chosen for the benefit it offers the game’s systems, not its story. Variety, it turns out, is the spice of death.
So this is a game about hitting, slicing, sawing or shooting groaning mounds of flesh with vicious, ridiculous, amusing or ironic everyday objects. And those interactive verbs – dumb, blunt and silly though they are – provide the short-term gratification in Dead Rising 2. You race to see what treasures of impromptu weaponry are literally in store around each corner before giggling at the silliness of using them against the horde while dressed in a one-piece baby grow or whatever other novelty outfit you’ve pilfered from the mall. The introduction of maintenance rooms, where you can combine two prescribed items to create a bastard weapon, only adds to the urge to experiment with the tools of undead murder.
But there’s a slower rhythm of play, too, an altogether more honourable heartbeat pushing you through Dead Rising 2′s veins. There’s no denying this is a game soaked in the juvenile: the gauche one-liners, the lingering shots of female characters’ legs, the zombie pratfalls and the gleefully immature spectacle of cause and effect, a cycle played out every time you find a new object for your arsenal before trying it out on the nearest zombie’s head. But beyond all that, Dead Rising 2 is a game for players with a saviour complex.
Last Window offers views onto several forgotten vistas. Immediately it paints a vivid picture of an American city at the dawn of the 1980s. Gleaming skyscrapers stretch at the clouds, each a pointed testament to the unshakeable wisdom of modern capitalism. Keeping their distance, on the outskirts of the city centre, tower blocks stand, heads down, providing temporary accommodation to the workers who turn the cogs of the sun-baked metropolis and the deadbeats who clog them. Rendered in stylish watercolor and black ink, the city scenes that run throughout the game are drawn in an anachronistic style, a manga-ish take on late 1970’s Americana that reinforces historical context through aesthetic.
It’s in one of these tower blocks that your character resides and, at this close distance, CiNG’s meticulous attention to period detail is revealed. Every prop is in keeping, the flares of the preceding year shrunk to skinny fit jeans, just as the telephones have ballooned to the size of shoeboxes thanks to their new fangled answering machine additions. Every aside about solar-powered pocket calculators that cost the earth, or pagers that shrink it, speaks of technology’s acceleration from a stroll to a jog, and the bulky gadgets on offer are as key to the ambiance as the Miami Vice-esque soundtrack and film noir direction.
The story that fills this scenery is a throwback too, another near forgotten sight that Last Window looks out upon. You play as a 34-year-old ex-cop, a stubbly private detective slouching in cars that are three feet wider than they need to be, working jobs several tiers of crime beneath him. Kyle Hyde, familiar to players of CiNG’s Hotel Dusk, in whose universe this game slots, is an amalgam of so many pulp fiction private detectives, from Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard to Policenauts’ Jonathan Ingram.
The narrative structure is simple: divided into ten chapters spread over the course of a week, you start by investigating why your landlord is evicting you and the other tenants of Cape West, and end by disturbing the murky waters surrounding your father’s death. It’s the kind of story rarely presented by videogames in 2010, and in this context the cliché is upturned to something fresh and unexpected.
In its systems too, Last Window presents a style of game long slipped from fashion, a point and click adventure game that limits innovation to its stylish presentation, leaving the mechanics of clue hunting and puzzle solving largely unchanged. For developer CiNG, whose modern adventure-style games have been well-received but sold poorly, the game represents perhaps the last opportunity to find an audience wide enough to sustain their passion. While the slow-paced storytelling and ponderous puzzle solving are an acquired taste, the confident execution ensures that game and its developer deserves just that.
Almost ten years into Square Enix and Disney’s marriage, and the tensions have only grown with time. Not that the union, first consummated in 2002′s Kingdom Hearts, was necessarily ill-advised. Both companies are committed to crafting modern fairytales filled with vibrant, marketable characters for younger audiences; they should make for easy bedfellows.
But the differences between Disney’s straightforward Western storytelling, in which the roles of protagonist and antagonist are always defined in primary colours, and Square Enix’s Eastern approach that focuses on inner demons painted in shades of grey have never quite been reconciled. The result is a series of action-RPGs that can feel fractured, little more than a parade of iconic characters inside a woolly RPG narrative. Square Enix is yet to fully unlock the potential of Disney’s treasure-trove heritage, no matter how many key-blades they throw at it.
Birth By Sleep, a prequel to the first game in the series, makes a number of concerted attempts to absorb the distinct Disney classics into a more unified story. Artist Tetsuya Nomura is still in the director’s chair, ensuring that the experience naturally veers toward style over substance, but a welcome overhaul of the game’s systems indicates the team’s desire to deepen the franchise as well as widen it. On this latter point, the game is a triumph. Combat is smart and elegant, pressing supreme flexibility into the player’s hand right from the off.
Basic offensive attacks with the key-blade weapon are augmented by customisable abilities, equipped in slots that increase in number as you level up your character. Skills are found in the treasure chests that litter the universe, dropped by enemies, or can be purchased at the Moogle store in each world and immediately inserted into your move roster.
Each skill levels up through continued use, with some offering further, permanent buffs to your character when maxed out. Battles are often a succession of flip-card messages informing you of new unlocks in your character’s development tree, and Square’s RPG pedigree shines here, putting so many recent action games to shame in its compelling communication of meaningful upgrades.
The problem is one of expectation. Players assume that Dynasty Warriors and its impersonators – of which Ninety-Nine Nights II is one – have to behave realistically. Not in the sense that they will recreate the bleak and bloody realities of the ancient battlefield without embellishment. After all, this is a videogame and the spectacle of bodies cartwheeling into the air as you guide your spinning top of a warrior through insurmountable odds is to be expected. A thousand Bushido Blade face-offs per mission would be a grim, tiresome prospect for even the most ardent fan of historical authenticity.
No, realistic in the sense that the endless waves of soldiers coming at you are expected to behave like, well, soldiers. Because, if you allow your character a moment’s respite during the action, then the hundred or so enemy soldiers around him will shuffle awkwardly, perhaps taking an infrequent, uninterested stab at him, but rarely causing anything like the sort of threat that their bulk and number suggests. Stop moving and the illusion breaks, revealing just how low the stakes of each encounter really are. The result for many players is disappointment. Why should I care about the enemy if they don’t care about me?
But this is to misunderstand the role of enemies in the game. In fact they move as a virus on the battlefield. In formation they are clusters of hostile germs, individually impotent and unthreatening but, taken as a whole, a very real source of danger. They exist not to defeat you in a single devastating blow, but to bring about death by a thousand cuts.
They live to slow you down, to distract from the real mission, and, in making you late to the endgame, they hope to rob you of that A Grade performance rating. They exist to fuel the fires of the game’s economy, releasing fistfuls of experience orbs into the air in their momentary death throe, currency necessary to increase your character’s abilities in the next intermission. Yes, they are fodder. But they are precious fodder.
Approach Konami’s latest without grasping this fact and your disappointment will combo upwards as quickly as your kill count. This is a game firmly within the Dynasty Warriors tradition, albeit with the pseudo-historical battlefield swapped out for a Japanese interpretation of Tolkien’s Mordor. Problematically, however, even with a full appreciation of the game’s aims and approach, Ninety-Nine Nights II fails to inspire in the way that it should.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
