The tragedy is that it became the punch line to a joke. Jokes, even. The one about Sega’s failing video game hardware business, for example, and how the only truly exceptional title for its Saturn – a PlayStation-beating shoot-’em-up, no less! – was released two years after the console war was already lost. Oh, Sega, hapless Sega!
Or the one about the men prepared to pay astronomical prices for fashionable imports: a £100+ eBay price tag evidence not so much of the game’s inherent quality as of the demented collector mentality, where scarcity + demand + competitiveness pushes prices beyond all reason. Look at those guys! You could buy 150 copies of Angry Birds for that money!
But the true joke is that Radiant Silvergun should have been punched by tragedy. Its pseudo-successor, vertical shoot-’em-up Ikaruga, may have enjoyed some vindication for its forebear’s misfortunes, fast becoming a cult classic and making its way around the world. But the Japan-only Radiant Silvergun is the better game, bringing together all of the themes of boutique developer Treasure’s oeuvre into one glorious, tightknit experience that invites long-term study.
It combines the colour-coded puzzling of Silhouette Mirage with the weapon mixology of Gunstar Heroes and the giant multi-part bosses of Alien Soldier in a way that transcends tribute, instead making a bold, singular statement of its own. It is mesmerising, fascinating and without question one of the only games of the 32-bit era that is still relevant today. And it’s now available in a new version on Xbox Live Arcade.
Radiant Silvergun also defies neat categorisation. Aesthetically, it’s an orthodox shoot-’em-up. But it evolves the genre in fascinating ways that, perhaps due to the dearth of companies still working in the area, have never been borrowed or stolen. First in its fulsome inventory of innovation is the fact that there are no weapon pick-ups in the game. Rather, full use of all seven primary weapons is pressed into your hands from the offset.
The palette of attacks is based on three ‘primary’ weapons: the Vulcan (a tight upward stream of fiery bullets), Homing (a splay of weaker green bubbles that zip to the closest enemy) and Spread (two brilliant white explosions that fire off at 45-degree angles, the most powerful of the three base attacks). Combine two of these attacks and you get a new one that mixes the properties of its components.
Strike all three at the same time and your ship swipes a tiny plasma sword out in front of it. This weapon has the capacity to absorb pink bullets and, when you’ve collected ten of these, can trigger a giant, scissor-like attack that swipes across the screen, rendering your ship momentarily invulnerable.
Each of the base weapons upgrade, not through floating pick-ups, but through usage, earning experience points with each takedown and ‘levelling up’ in turn. Focus solely on the Vulcan, for example, and it will hit harder and wider as the game progresses, leaving the two neglected attacks weak.
While seven weapons may seem like overkill, Treasure’s skill is in making each one perfectly suited to a particular situation, and very often the mind game is in choosing the right tool for the right micro-scenario. What initially appears overwhelming soon becomes second nature, and Treasure’s fine balancing of the weapons in the game outclasses any top-flight contemporary FPS you care to mention.
Next, every enemy in the game is color-coded red, blue or yellow. While it’s possible to ignore this element of the game entirely, score attack players must master the order in which they take down enemies in order to bank the largest number of points. Shoot a red enemy followed by a blue enemy followed by a yellow one and you earn a significant points bonus. Alternatively, chain together enemies of the same colour and the point rewards scale indefinitely until the chain is broken, each set of three adding a multiplayer that can push your score into the stratosphere (levelling your weapons much more quickly as it does so).
As such, the best way to play is often in knowing which enemies to leave alone. It is perhaps the only shoot-’em-up where restraint is rewarded as much as offense and, when it all clicks into place, the sheer ingenuity of the level design – essentially a kind of puzzle – comes into dizzying focus.
Dark Souls is the work of a creator willing to press responsibility into the player’s hands: someone who understands that with freedom comes agency, and that the very best video games are the ones that treat us as adults even as they allow us to believe in their worlds like children.
Even so, it’s tough not to see Hidetaka Miyazaki as kind of a prick.
Predecessor Demon’s Souls, 2009′s sleeper hit, quickly garnered a reputation for being one of the very toughest video games. And with this pseudo-sequel, director-producer-game-designer-tea-boy Miyazaki has only stoked the fires of infamy, claiming with some braggadocio in interviews that he wants Dark Souls to be harder still.
The opening few hours of the game certainly deliver on this cruel promise. You awaken, a knight in rusty armour slumped in the belly of a long-forgotten dungeon, to the sound of a carcass being hurled through a square of light in the ceiling. Check the body and you find a key to your cell, allowing you to lumber free of its walls and take your first steps into a world of relentless hostility.
Its punishments for failure are swift and unflinching. You will pound your fist on the table in infuriation every time you allow yourself to be overrun by a group of skeletons by rushing into a graveyard too quickly, or when you fail to roll out of the way of a giant cave troll’s club. Death comes easily no matter which of the 10 character classes you choose to play as – although pick ‘Deprived’, a character armed only with a fur thong, a club and an old panel shield (included, presumably, to allow masters to show off their mastery) and the mountain of failure will pile highest.
Your health bar isn’t chipped away so much as swallowed whole by the parade of enemies that come your way, while its offensive counterpart, the green stamina bar, empties after just two swings of a weapon, forcing you to defend while regaining strength for the next swipe. Every step must be considered – put a foot wrong and the game will make a mockery of your shortcomings.
But the truth is that Dark Souls is indifferent to your imperfections. It merely reflects them back at you with more clarity than almost any other game. That is what makes it so difficult to play. But more importantly, it is what makes it so hard to walk away from. It’s a game that offers you the chance to improve yourself.
It is, in many ways, also a game with the training wheels removed. The changes are as difficult to perceive as the emaciated heroin-chic monsters that lurk in the gloom of its first dungeon but – in the context of contemporary video games, where responsibility and freedom have been exchanged for handholding and free candy – they are profound.
For example, there is no pause button to offer a moment’s respite. Video games offer portals to new worlds but, outside of the arcade and online games, their makers have always given us the means to freeze them indefinitely, to take a breather in the safety of stasis. No more. If you need a toilet break while playing Dark Souls then you’d better find shelter behind a damp rock or under a shadowy bridge. Check the corners for bloodsuckers and phantoms and leave your avatar shivering wet while you sprint upstairs and back again as fast as possible, hygiene be damned.
Then there are the bonfires, those primordial gathering spots, used since time immemorial to ward off danger while giving out heat and comfort. So too, in Dark Souls, these glowing focal points recharge your energy and replenish your health. But they also reset all of the enemies in the immediate vicinity, ensuring that once you step from the fire’s glow, risk will follow reward.
“The way I see it, sometimes I’m the bug and sometimes I’m the windscreen.
“I’ll have a night when I’m unstoppable. I hit every enemy and every enemy misses me. Win after win. You ever get a night like that? I love a night like that.
“And then, you know, the next morning I can’t shoot for shit. It’s weird how that happens, right? I guess that’s life. Some you win, some – you know what I’m sayin’. Still, if there were that kind of money on the table… Well I’d be praying pretty hard for a night like that. Who wouldn’t love a night like that.”
“So, you’re not competing then?” I ask.
“Nah. They don’t give me a ticket. But I get to drive those that are competing from the hotel. That’s the closest I get to the inside. You’re from the UK, right? I can hear it in your accent. Anyway, I had one of your teams in the back of the limo this morning. They seemed pretty excited with how it’s going. How much must those guys have to play to get that good? I can’t even imagine. How is it in there anyway? What’s the atmosphere?”
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The 28-acres of Westside Los Angeles airfield known as the Hercules Campus was deliberately left off the map during World War II. It’s here that the American business magnate and aviator Howard Hughes established his headquarters, designing and building planes, helicopters and his giant waterplane folly, the Hughes H-4 Hercules, the aircraft with the largest wingspan in history.
Eleven of the original campus buildings remain from the 1940s. For 25 years they have been left largely vacant, occasionally used by movie studios (85% of James Cameron’s Avatar was filmed here) but otherwise offering little more than a drafty testament to bygone glories.
It’s inside these cavernous hangars that Activision has chosen to host the multi-million dollar monument to modern warfare that is the inaugural Call of Duty:XP event. Where once the hangar’s patrons deliberately shielded their activities from watching eyes, Activision hopes the event will cement its biggest franchise to the map, ensuring that no pretenders will be able to push it from sight.
Make that one pretender.
EA’s headquarters are not more than two miles from the hangar. Battlefield 3 developer DICE may rarely leave the confines of its Swedish office but it’s on their publisher’s Hollywood turf that Activision has chosen to make its show of strength (home too to Infinity Ward, whose offices are based on the north slope of the Santa Monica mountains nearby).
Be it for the lights, the cameras, the action or drama in the hills, Los Angeles is a suitably high profile locale for what is the highest stake game in the industry. This holiday season, Activision’s Modern Warfare 3 will do battle with EA’s Battlefield 3.
It won’t be a battle to the death. Regardless of who sells the greater number of games in 2011 it’s rather a battle for hearts, minds and market share, one whose repercussions will only truly be felt in the 2012 and 2013 holiday seasons when the inevitable sequels indicate who won the war.
While nobody will say how much this all cost, one spokesman admits the two-day event has a budget comparable to a US television advertising campaign. A conservative estimate would put that at $15 million. So this is an event, a game, that is all about establishing hierarchy.
Sometimes you’re the bug and sometimes you’re the windscreen.
COD:XP is a 28-acre, $15 million windscreen.
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Read the rest of this article over at Eurogamer here.
Many video games features death, but few appropriate it as their theme. For Jason Rohrer, the only video game designer to have been featured in Esquire magazine’s list of creative geniuses, it was a slender yet focused game about mortality with which he made his name.
“I was about to turn 30, about to witness the birth of our second child, and had just watched a neighborhood friend wither and die from cancer. As such, I was thinking about the passage of life – and my inevitable death. I wanted to make a game that captured the feelings that I was having: existential entrapment bundled together with a profound appreciation of beauty. These are feelings that are hard to put into words.”
And hard to put into a video game. They’re harder still to sell to audiences and yet, upon its release Passage spread fast around the world.
It is an unlikely success story. Here’s a game in which death is inevitable for the player, with no hope of respawn. Your character, who can only move from left to right across the screen, ages incrementally with each step. Whereas Jonathan Blow’s Braid tethered the passage of time to the passage of space to create mind-bending puzzles, Rohrer’s work offers no solution to the profound sense of inevitable demise.
The majority of video games are obsessed with the evolving of an avatar, pressing perks, augmentations and stat bonuses onto the player as rewards for progression. Here was a game that stripped away your speed, robbed you of your beauty, took away your loved ones and decimated your family, and finally yourself in step with progress.
Who would make a game like that?
“I grew up in Bath, Ohio, near Akron,” Rohrer says. “It’s a place of gentle rolling hills and forests. I spent a lot of time exploring the woods but I also bought video game system after system as I grew up. I have fond memories of the first Zelda and Metroid games on the NES, and also of Alien vs. Predator on the Jaguar. Wolfenstein and Doom on the PC also blew my mind, but we had a Mac at home, so playing those games was a rare pleasure. I also spent time poking around the world of King’s Quest, whenever I got myself in front of a PC.”
This twin obsession with the escapism in the outdoors and escapism in technology is evident in Rohrer’s life today. He and his family practice simple living, earning only what they need to live. He doesn’t own a mobile phone, a television or any other gadgets. And yet all of Rohrer’s professional life is spent within technology.
“A Luddite building the machines, I suppose,” he says, “It’s an ironic combination. But the way I live my life gives me more time and attention to work on making games. My life is cheap, so I don’t need a job to support myself beyond the income that I make from games.”
Adolescence
Rohrer’s first game was never released. “In 2002 I spent several years iterating on a game-like project called Subreal. It was an evolution simulator with genetic creatures competing in a shared environment. Each person playing the game ran a sub-section of the world, and these mini-worlds connected together in a grid through the network.
“If a creature moved off the edge of your world, for example, it would leave your computer and migrate onto your friend’s computer. I iterated through a bunch of different models for the structure of the world and the makeup of the creatures – 3D flying creatures in caves, cellular creatures, colonies of algae structures, and even a Turing-complete programming language that could be subjected to genetic recombination.”
“The problem, of course, is that watching life evolve is only interesting for about 5 minutes. What do you actually do in such a game? Even playing as one of the creatures, and trying to eat and mate, wasn’t that interesting. Then Spore came out a few years later, which was another reason not to keep pursuing a game about evolution. I think everyone had an evolution design on the back burner before Spore came out. It’s a pretty common idea.”
An esoteric point-and-click adventure in which you navigate dreams rendered in Polaroid snapshots, Trauma borrows the ambiance of sombre European cinema. It combines lingering night photography of Cologne, Germany with CGI motion graphics to haunting effect. Its lead character is voiced by a Björk-ish woman who wouldn’t sound out of place in an Ingmar Bergman film, while a soundtrack of ambient pianos that lose their train of thought mid-melody adds to the trancelike atmosphere.
For those who believe indie game visuals are limited to pixel-art homage or neon space vectors, Trauma offers a striking alternate vision: one that, through its use of photography, is rooted in reality, even as it attempts to uproot that sense of reality through composition and context.
But plunge through the swirling, opaque glass of Trauma’s aesthetic and there’s a focused, somewhat orthodox core beneath. It’s not clear whom you play as in this game, but your task is to save a girl from her recurring, trauma-inflicted dreams.
The opening film suggests she was the victim of a car crash, but at the moment of impact – if indeed that’s what happened – the world dissolves into streaky lights and the incessant blips of a heart monitor. It would imply a clearer objective than is given to say your task is to piece together her fractured identity. Rather, you collect snapshots of her past while trying to solve the simple mysteries of her dreams, a task that aids her recovery from the Trauma of the title.
The girl is troubled by four dreams – levels, in game terms – that must be navigated and ‘solved’ in a variety of different ways. Each dream has one main ending (rewarded by a short film showing the woman’s waking interactions with her doctor) as well as three alternate endings for completists. These are endings in the literal sense only: they end your progression through the dream, rarely attempting to make sense or order of what you have seen.
The dreams all take place on Cologne streets at night, in four distinct locations, each one mostly deserted. You move around the locations by clicking on hotspots in the environment, snapping your way forwards and back to the sound of a camera shutter going off, a little like moving down a road in Google Street View.
As you explore the dreams, the woman explains in abstract, ambiguous terms what you are seeing before offering echoes of objectives. She speaks not as an omniscient narrator but as a confused victim, uncertain of what needs to be done, offering clues toward clues, unsure of herself and her exact needs.
