Oldschool Hard

Are you experienced?

Some games have all the luck – high critical praise, strong fan appreciation, and good sales. Most game companies would be more than happy with two out of three, as long as it’s the latter two. Unfortunately for a few of the games on my Top 25 list, due to a quirky and/or unique nature, they seemed to have the first two covered, but not the last one, and similar games are unlikely to ever be released. Games like Psychonauts and Grim Fandango reviewed well, have a rabid fan base, but just never seemed to be able to sell to a more casual audience.

Another one of these sales-deficient games on my top 25 list was Rez. Ostensibly a cross between an on-rails shooter and, to a lesser extent, a rhythm game, Rez is one of those games where the mechanics are fairly pedestrian, but the strongly Tron-like (but brighter and more colourful) ‘vibe’ and what it does with its simple mechanics is what sets it apart. Rez is set inside a mainframe computer run by a (now) rogue artificial intelligence having an existential crisis, which you must liberate it from by giving it back its ‘soul’. You do this by destroying viruses and breaking through a firewall in each level to get to the AI’s central core.

You can go through different stages of ‘evolution’, which transform the look and function your avatar, and serve as powerups and increased health. The game builds through 5 levels to the last boss rush, which deals with the crisis of the AI by (literally) throwing all sorts of existential questions at you. Possibly my favourite level outlines the entire evolution of life from the primordial soup onwards – not the sort of thing you see in most games.

Made with a sort of stylised wireframe graphic look, Rez‘s tagline is ‘experience synesthesia’. Synesthesia, if you’re not familiar with the term, is a condition in which senses can blend together, leading to things like the association of certain sounds with different tastes, or assigning colours to letters based on their look or sound, among other symptoms. The game tries to do this in a few ways: by using bright colours throughout most of the game, matching your shooting to coincide with beats and sound effects in the pumping electronic soundtrack, allowing you to have some control over the music in the game, and with the Japanese release of the game, there was also an option to buy it with an accessory called the ‘trance vibrator’ which, as you can probably imagine, was rapidly pressed into service by female gamers.

Rez takes some elements of Tempest 2000, Tron, and even (the also underrated and undersold) Frequency, and combines them with a sort-of more cyberpunk version of the Tron plot. Originally available on the Dreamcast, the version with which I’m most familiar is the PS2 version, although there is now a HD version available on XBox Live. Although it’s not really a long game, it is highly re-playable, with multiple game modes, and at around 10 bucks, I can’t recommend it more highly.

Image from bit-tech.net, cropped to size.

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From the sublime…to the ridiculous.

Apologies for the lateness of the post, Windows 7 decided to restart itself to install some update yesterday while I was away from the computer, eating the first version of my post, and I needed some time for the rage to die down, and to recreate the magi…who am I kidding, there’s no magic. I just needed time to sublimate the rage.

One of my favourite games of last year was Batman: Arkham Asylum. I thought the game was really well crafted and used the licence really well. The Scarecrow-drugged sequences were great, the sidequests were fun and easy to avoid if you didn’t care for them, the combat made you feel like a superhero without having to remember a million combinations of buttons, and it was probably the first game to properly combine the ‘detective’ and ‘crimefighter’ sides of Batman. Sure, it had its niggles (detective mode was a little too useful to warrant switching off much), but overall it was a great game, certainly in my top 5 for last year. A great example of what can be done in a licenced game. Now, by ‘licenced games’ I mean those whose ideas and characters are taken from other media – movies, TV shows, comic books, and so on – not arcade ports. I don’t have enough ideas that I can just roll something like crappy arcade ports into a post and not use it on its own, when there’s been so many crappy arcade ports over the years…

On the flipside to Arkham Asylum was Terminator: Salvation, one of my least favourite games of last year, more true to the track record of licenced games in general, and a 4-hour-long insult to full-priced games everywhere. I sat down to play this at a friend’s place, and before the afternoon was out, we were done. T:S joins a long list of shitty licenced games. If you want an example, look no further than the bottom 50 on Metacritic‘s XBox 360 review list. Names like Tron, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Pimp My Ride, and a number more names stick out – and they’re all from licences. I don’t doubt the situation is very similar on other systems, too. Licenced games tend to be the very definition of shovelware, hastily cobbled together to push out onto the more casual gamer who sees a name they know and like, and buy the game regardless of quality. Oftentimes, they’ll figure out before too long that they dropped good money on a turd, but by that point the publisher has already been rewarded for their half-assery.

It’s a marketing strategy that’s worked since the 8-bit days, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. I shall call it the ‘Ocean Strategy’, after the notorious English publisher famous for tons of crappy licenced games (and a few good ones). Ocean games were often known not only for being crappy, but for diverging massively from their source material – giant spiders in Rambo, anyone? Of course, a few games use a licence in a slight tangent to the source material to make a good game. Goldeneye on Nintendo 64 diverged from the movie slightly, but was close enough, and it pretty much incorporated all the set pieces from the movie along with the tangents. More often, though, a tangent to the source material ends up more like Superman 64 – a pointless set of hoops to jump through (literally, in this case) from trying in vain to make something ‘game-y’ out a licence, and failing miserably.

I know I’m probably preaching to the converted here, but please, please, please make developers and publishers -earn- the money that they need to pay back their licence fees. Rent, read reviews, play a friend’s copy – do whatever you have to do, but subject licenced games to the same scrutiny you would subject any other game to, whether it’s got your favourite superhero in it or not. To the Ocean Strategy, Oldschoolhard says NO.

Images from PlayworksOnline and Das Gamer, cooked up into this delicious stew.

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