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.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

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.

Lanseal Academy is a Disneyland boot camp. A 200-foot spire at the centre of the military school’s grounds jabs at the clouds, while far below a moonfaced clock tower leans heavy on ancient Doric columns. The building is seasoned with the intricate stone decoration of so many fairytale castles, an unlikely centerpiece for an institute designed for little more than turning tweens into cold-eyed soldiers.

Around the citadel, where your character, Avan, has enrolled in the hope of discovering the mystery behind his brother’s recent death in the grounds, tanks roll to and fro, while a timpani of blanks rattles around the buildings. This surrounding layout is more Sandhurst than magical kingdom, containing as it does Drill Grounds, an R&D centre and a Briefing Room, all arranged and spaced with uniform precision. It’s in this contrast of exaggerated fantasy with the orderly arrangement of a military barracks that Lanseal Academy, Valkyria Chronicles II’s central hub, communicates a great deal about the game it houses.

Because, on the one hand, this is the sequel to the smartest tactical RPG of the past five years: a Chess-like military sim built on layered order and immovable mathematics. You direct your handpicked squadron of infantry around each battlefield, flanking opponents in complex manouevres that can outclass even some of PC gaming’s most celebrated playpens for the armchair general.

Yet the fantasy elements that overlay this core – the heroic special abilities that trigger with anime fanfare in battle as a character is momentarily inspired, the super-deformed tanks, playground dramas or shrill squeals of female soldiers in victory – are a far cry from the sombre reality of this subject matter. It’s as if the Somme was remade as a High School Musical spin-off.

For fans of the first game, the unusual concoction will come as no surprise. The PS3′s Valkyria Chronicles was a game that blossomed in a hotbed of borrowed ideas from disparate influences. Somehow the marriage of crayon-effect visuals with stories of villages razed to the ground by heavy tank fire, or the mash-up of melancholic French Horns to mark the passing of a beloved soldier, and furious J-pop drumbeats to mark the arrival of the next, worked wonders. This sequel is no different, holding its ideas in awkward but endearing tension.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.

The Channel 4 adventure game, The Curfew, that I’ve been producing for the past 12 months with Littleloud is now live and available to play in your web browser for free. It’s been in Beta for a fortnight now, and with all of the big bugs squished, I’m comfortable pointing you guys towards it.

The Curfew is the spiritual successor to Littleloud’s BAFTA-award winning adventure game, Bow Street Runner. It’s been written by my friend Kieron Gillen, commissioned by my friend Alice Taylor, had consultation from my friend Margaret Robertson, and is directed by my friend Darren Garrett. Also a bunch of super talented artists and coders at LL. Isn’t it awesome when you get to make something with/ for your friends?

The Curfew is a game about civil liberties. But it’s also about videogames, immigration, CCTV, police brutality, manipulation of the media and washing dirty windows for small favours. It’s game that uses live actors (including libertarian comedian Mark Thomas doing a worryingly convincing turn as a Fox News-esque anchor), which might make you think it’s a bit like Night Trap.

But it’s actually more like Broken Sword crossed with Big Brother in terms of its systems. It features a dynamic solution that shifts according to how you play the game. There’s no preset ‘right’ answer in the endgame, despite what many players may think from their first play. I hope you enjoy it.

It’s been super hard work. The game clocks in at around 700MB, and finding ways to stream something interactive of that size to you efficiently has been tough. Not to mention the hundreds of man hours of placing actors into CG backgrounds, asset creation, location building, playtesting and the thousand other things that go into even the smallest game. Making videogames is difficult. If I ever write about one of your games, you should know that I do so with at least some understanding of the process. I don’t know if that helps or not.

For those with slow net connection, it looks likely that there will be a downloadable version released in September. So look out for that.

I’m off on holiday for a little now. When I come back, I’ll continue working part-time on Flash games while I focus more fully on my writing. I’ll announce what that means exactly soon, but it makes me happy thinking about it.

Onwards.

Tower Defense is gaming’s youngest genre and it shows: endless waves of clones clog up iTunes, many as irresistible as their inspiration but few displaying much innovation. That’s natural. Evolution requires a large gene pool before baby-step iterations begin to generate true diversification.

For that reason, Monday Night Combat’s giant leap forward for the genre is exciting. It’s like nothing seen before and yet, in its borrowing of game elements from a variety of other well-known titles, it’s immediately familiar.

Monday Night Combat is built upon an orthodox Tower Defence foundation. This much is made obvious in the first of the game’s two core modes: Blitz. All of the elements of the fixed path Tower Defence form are present here. Your base is known as the ‘Moneyball’, which you must protect from waves of enemy bots that approach it along fixed paths.

To fend off the attacks, you erect turrets in predefined build locations using what limited funds you have. They automatically fire upon attackers when anything enters their range, and can be upgraded using money you earn from the enemies they take down. Survive a set number of increasingly challenging waves without losing all of your Moneyball base points and the game is won. So far, so StarCraft mod.

The game’s first innovation is in casting the player not as some disembodied mouse cursor, clicking on build points like an abstract strategy god, but rather as a soldier, on the ground, running in between and around the turrets and attackers. You essentially act as a turret with legs, able to line up shots on bots as in any third-person shooter, yet also tasked with running up to build points and erecting static turrets to provide back-up.

Your character, as well as packing two projectile weapons, has three unique abilities to use on the playfield. Each of these can be upgraded with money from felled bots. This introduces a new layer of tactical consideration: should you spend your resources on building new static turrets, upgrading existing ones, or turn yourself into a more powerful weapon? Who do you trust more: the AI, or yourself?

All of this is made yet more interesting by the fact the game supports up to four players working together. With six character classes to choose between, each with their own strength and weaknesses, the raw number of different factors in play dwarves that of most Tower Defence games, even as the core objective remains constant.

You can read the rest of this feature over at Eurogamer here.

Scott Pilgrim is one of us. While Hollywood’s zeitgeist-chasing writers and directors clutch at game references in an effort to appeal to those born into videogames, Scott Pilgrim out-nerds even the medium’s firstborn by knowing the bass line to Final Fantasy II off by heart. Aged 16, he joined a three-piece indie band called Sonic and Knuckles in an effort to transcend his non-jock plebeian school status. He owns a Mithril Skateboard (+4 to Speed, +3 to Kick, +1 to Will), plays Tony Hawk to train, Bomberman to relax and saves tiny worlds on a daily basis.

His worldview is filtered through a Nintendo lens: health measured in Zelda sprite hearts, cans of soda replenishing HP in quarter increments. Girls are won by defeating boss-fight personifications of their issues. When Scott does battle, his puny, cathode-tan arms are transformed into Street Fighter weapons, his body all suspension-wire fly-kick shapes, silhouetted against a scrolling parallax sunset.

Scott Pilgrim daydreams in videogame verbs. He is one of us.

And therein lies the problem with his game. Despite looking like one of us, despite speaking our language and making references that only we could ever understand, Scott Pilgrim nevertheless represents some uncomfortable things about the state of gaming today. Ubisoft-licensed, it is the videogame of the movie of the comic book, its very existence reinforcing the idea that games are no more than a third-tier advertising revenue stream filled with product precision-timed to support the box office.

Viewed ungenerously, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is as much an example of adver-gaming as so many Watchmen, Transformers and James Bond tie-ins have been before it. Just because its protagonist is one of us doesn’t necessarily mean his game shares the same hopes and dreams for the medium as us. Does it?

“Winners Don’t Eat Meat”.

The parody of FBI Director William S. Sessions’ “Winners Don’t Do Drugs” slogan, seen at the start-up of all American videogame arcade machines in the nineties, is the first thing you see in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game. It’s a simple joke that speaks volumes. All six volumes of the Scott Pilgrim comic books, in fact; it’s evidence that developer Ubisoft Montreal has digested every page of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s lifework, and is confident to kick off with a joke entirely absent from the paperback series, and yet entirely in keeping with its spirit.

From thereon in, the knowing delights combo upwards: Paul Robertson’s effortless pixel art captures the essence of the 8- and 16-bit Japanese scrolling beat-’em-ups the game apes, while Anamanaguchi’s cute/dramatic/cute brand of chiptune soundtracks every flurry of punches with Casiotone arpeggios.

It’s the attention to detail that’s gone into this Final Fight clone that elevates it above a predictable movie tie-in. The world of the comics has been recreated in fine detail, each of the four (initially) playable characters –Scott, Kim Pine, Steven Stills and Ramona Flowers – communicating a great deal of their on-page personality in a handful of effective sprite animations. There are ten thousand in-jokes for fans of the books, the game offering players the chance to pay back Scott’s video rental fine ($504.25) or to eat vegan food to replenish health.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.

Videogames often mirror the values of the culture they emerge from. Tetris’ Eastern blocks must be stacked and tidied with Soviet efficiency, the endgame payoff a rocket ship – that highest of all Russian technological ambitions – finally setting off for the moon.

Lara Croft embodies the imagined adventuring spirit of the British aristocracy: old money funding trinket tourism, the pilfering of foreign tombs to bring back Elgin treasures with which to furnish our great nation’s stately home museums. Master Chief, meanwhile, is the all American hero, riding a warthog through the apocalypse to bring about the universe’s salvation, planting flags to mark the occasion with imperialistic glee to the applause of his square-jaw, five-starred general superiors.

So too does the Japanese RPG reflect the cultural values of its nation, with endless tales of adolescents charged with saving the world via a strong work ethic. If there were any doubt as to the message to young Japanese players that glory is born of industry, in Atelier Rorona, the metaphor is made explicit.

Rorona, the girl who you play as, is charged with reversing the fortunes of a failed village chemist. She is given 12 assignments to complete over a three-year period, at which point the council will decide whether the shop should keep its premises and continue its work, or be closed down, its staff deported from the land. It may not be the most scintillating premise, but Atelier Rorona may be closest a videogame has ever come to articulating The Japanese Dream.

As is right and proper for any young Japanese female, Rorona does not seek such responsibility but rather has it thrust upon her. A nervous and somewhat panicky girl, voiced by the sort of helium-voiced, simpering American actress who routinely gives voice to this anime archetype, she works for Astrid, the owner of the chemist.

Astrid, who wears a clutch of test tubes on her utility belt like some sort of Chemistry-themed action hero, is a lazy and disliked public figure in the community. At the start of the game, following the council’s pronouncement, she hands the business over to Rorona – who, despite having worked there for some time, appears to know nothing about how it all works.

Her lack of experience and knowledge is, of course, a device to allow Gust to explain the game’s systems to new players. The core objective of the game is to increase Rorona’s alchemy proficiency by harvesting ingredients from the local fields and woods and making recipes, or ‘synthesising’, in a giant cauldron.

You can read the rest of this preview here

A meeting room in the belly of a Parisian office block: Ubisoft producer Florian Granger stands to his feet to address a group of serious-looking, middle-aged men. These are some of the company’s most experienced game designers, artists and coders, veterans of Ghost Recon and Red Steel campaigns, architects of solemn videogames about war and tactics, strategy and death.

Granger’s job? To reveal the next assignment the assembled group will be working on. The project? A Wii game. A Wii party game. A Wii party game based almost entirely upon a mini-game that first featured in another Wii party game, months earlier. A Wii party game that, within 18 months of this meeting, will have gone on to sell three and a half million copies and knocked the record-breaking Modern Warfare 2 from its top spot in the sales charts. A Wii party game whose instruction manual also happens to also be its name: Just Dance.

“You’d think the team would have been cynical about the project,” explains Granger. “There was a flood of casual games coming out for the Wii at the time, all offering the same-old experiences with no innovation or real attention paid to the player experience. But there was immediately a sense of excitement within the group. I think that was because the codebase for the game was already proven, and the games we were looking to learn from and build upon were respected titles like Dance Dance Revolution. Our reference points were authentic.”

Just Dance began life as a music mini-game in the Raving Rabbids series on Wii, in which the player used the Wii Remote and nunchuk to ‘dance’ in time with a piece of music. Gregoire Spillmann, Just Dance’s creative director, enjoyed the mini-game, but wanted to explore what would happen if you removed nunchuk and strict Rhythm Action gameplay and allowed the player to dance more freely.

“The term ‘dancing game’ is usually a misnomer,” he says. “More often than not you’re not being asked to dance so much as push buttons – either on a dance mat, plastic peripheral or controller – in time with the music. Our concept was to inspire people to overcome their inhibitions and encourage them to actually dance. If you look at a game like Dance Dance Revolution, advanced players will often adapt dance moves to fit gameplay. We wanted to come at the game from the opposite approach, and fit the gameplay to iconic moves, ones that can then be taken by the player, and used beyond the game.

The way in which the Just Dance team achieved this effect was in direct contrast to the prevailing trend in music games, which increasingly employ complicated, expensive and lifelike peripherals to act as a bridge between player and game. “For what we wanted to achieve, peripherals were a distraction,” explains Spillmann. “In order to encourage players to be free we had to reduce the amount of hardware the game required them to use to a bare minimum.

You can read the rest of this feature over at Eurogamer here.

“I mean, deep down they function how we want the real world to function, right? There’s a set of rules and, if I follow them and do the right things in the correct order, success is kind of guaranteed. That’s true of all videogames, but in JRPGs there’s the story too. They have a set trajectory that leads me out of the bastard confusion of adolescence towards an endgame of maturity and identity and, er, status I guess. And all you need to do to experience that is follow the breadcrumb trail and keep turning the cogs…”

I’ve been wanting to write this piece since I turned 30. Thanks to Brandon Boyer and Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing for giving me a public platform on which to share what is, essentially, a private story about my relationship with videogames, especially JRPGs.

I’m glad I was able to write it down before I grew too old to be able to tell it.

I won’t reprint the whole thing here, as Boing Boing laid it out with such care and attention, I’d rather you saw it in situ. I hope you enjoy it.

And yes, that is a photograph of the map itself.

If Limbo, last week’s inaugural Summer of Arcade release, aspired to the art house aesthete’s choice – Braid through a glass, darkly – Hydro Thunder Hurricane is a hyperactive celebration of balls-out, dumbass, American videogame-ness. 25-foot racing boats, whose engines roar in Texan accents, roll and bounce through white water rapids. They gobble down speed boost capsules like froth-mouthed junkies under a maelstrom of distorted keyboards and six-foot snare drum clacks.

Delicacy and finesse be damned, screams developer Vector Unit into the wind and spray: videogames are about domination and high-speed spectacle; they’re about shaving a few seconds from the times of every last name on your Enemies List; about finding the odd secret bonus and, every three laps or so, making your jaw hang slack as a giant f**king sea serpent explodes out of the water and sends your boat ricocheting off into a rock face.

Videogames should exaggerate physics in search of perfecting the chemistry of play, the game argues. Spin out on a corner and you need only stab the back button for a rolling reset: combo the endorphins without pause for thought. If Limbo’s deadly waters represented a cloying quicksand to oblivion, Hydro’s undulating waves are ramps to the stars.

As such, ponderousness is, quite literally, for losers. Hydro. Thunder. Hurricane. A three-hit combo of elemental nouns, each threatening to whack you from your sofa into a squall of testosterone.

And why not? Microsoft’s decision to juxtapose Limbo with an uncomplicated speedboat racer in their scheduling demonstrates not only the publisher’s understanding that it takes all types to make a medium, but also exemplifies the full range of approaches their service has the capacity to house. Moreover, while Hydro Thunder Hurricane’s brash brand of interactivity has a different timbre, underneath the theme and colouring, the two titles sit together quite comfortably.

Both games demand trail and error, the former in feeling out its immovable solutions, the latter in feeling out the optimum routes to facilitate the fastest possible lap times. Both games demand lightning quick reactions for success. Both games offer neat twists on age-old tropes.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.