|
We call this one,
THE MOST GORGEOUS SITUATION
Brandon Sheffield and I picked up Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh at a bus stop in Los Angeles on the eve of E3. Eric-Jon was in mostly good spirits. I say "mostly good" because we'd left him waiting in that bus station for more than three hours. When he was in the backseat of Brandon's car, the first thing he saw fit to tell us was that he'd had a dream the night before. He couldn't remember the exact events that transpired in the dream. All he had to go on was a scribbled page in his notebook. Apparently, he'd woken, scrawled notes on the dream, and then fallen back into sleep.
In the dream, so it goes, insertcredit.com receives "a gig of hits" on a dubious forum thread in which a man tries to sell his body to the internet. At one point, Brandon enters the thread and pronounces the situation "gorgeous." He then asks if it wasn't my fault.
The three of us, in that car, wondered exactly how the situation was pronounced "gorgeous." We guessed it involved Brandon saying, in a high-pitched, cartoon-foppish voice, "This situation is gorgeous!!"
I should have told Hideo Kojima about this, because he'd probably make a game out of it. On day two, I had a second interview with him for a story I'm writing for Wired magazine. My interview is going to be a little strange. There are interviews of Mr. Kojima that you can read on more conventional websites (like 1up.com) if you want information on Metal Gear Solid 3. That game, by the way, looks very nice. I didn't play much of it, because the circumstances were not ideal. I take my Metal Gear very seriously. I didn't want to play much of the game in the cramped Konami booth -- especially in one of the demo stalls in the plastic jungle set, with its flashing strobe lights and jungle sound effects -- so I didn't play it much. Instead, I played everything else. I am happy to say that Konami looks ready to bring back Famicom weirdness in a refreshing way. Now, allow me to say why this situation is so gorgeous.
I watched the Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater trailer some half-dozen times at E3 -- three times on the show floor, and three times courtesy of IGN at InsertCredit.com mascot Joe "Chutney" Barnes' house. It's a hell of a long trailer -- about eight minutes. In the trailer, we are told, mostly explicitly, that the main character is Big Boss, Solid Snake's father figure and personal hero-turned-enemy. We even see this protagonist with an eye patch, at one point in the trailer. I, personally, have (good!) reason to believe that the Big Boss segment is not even half of the game; when you die in this segment, the "game over" screen reads "TIME PARADOX," in that Snake's adventures wouldn't exist if Big Boss had died. It reminds me of the "FISSION MAILED" parts of Metal Gear Solid 2. Though Kojima didn't tell me outright, I think Raiden might be the hero again. Kojima really is that idiotically (and ingeniously) bold with his game-production. The biggest indicator is the show-floor freebie -- an envelope in the shape of an LP. Open it up, and there's even a record sleeve inside, and even then, a cardboard record. Clicked into the middle of the record is a CD with the theme song "Snake Eater" on it. I asked Kojima early in my E3 interview if a CD being contained within a piece of cardboard that looks like an LP is some kind of symbol of Metal Gear Solid 3 as a game, and the tired Kojima's answer was a smirking "Duh."
My first question to Hideo Kojima back during my historic February interview was simple: "Why does the President grab Raiden's crotch immediately after meeting him, in Metal Gear Solid 2?" Kojima's eyes widened at the question.
"That's the best first question anyone's ever asked me."
He then told me the reason why, and I exist now as a thousand-times-more-confused human being. I probably shouldn't have asked. Kojima knows I shouldn't have asked. He delighted in giving out the more-confusing (and entirely true) answer, and he delights especially in knowing that it will be published in a maybe-major story in a definitely major magazine. His pride for having been asked the question never wore off, during that long interview.
Maybe I shouldn't have asked the question. Asking it is a lot like asking why Super Mario grows bigger when eating a mushroom, or why Phantasy Star II's happy I initial overworld music makes me feel cold in the middle of my chest; Kojima's attitude toward his own game-making is that he makes games because he likes games. He got started making games because he likes games. This man, who has spent most of the first half of 2004 playing only Xevious on his Gameboy Advance SP, believes that games are best when full of odd little mysteries. Raiden's crotch being grabbed, dear reader, is one of those little mysteries, translated into a 128-bit game. You don't need to know the reason behind it. And, well, if you do want to know, you can always read that future issue of Wired.
Now know this:
There's a scene at the end of the trailer -- which ends three times, no less, starting up again each time, just as you think it's really over -- where the new main bad guy, a giant whose body is coursing with electricity, stumbles toward a military-saluting soldier. The soldier is, basically, Metal Gear Solid 2's Raiden in a soldier "costume." I say "costume" because I'm sure it's meant to be ironic. The hat, perhaps a sign of thrown-together cinematic rendering, sits on top of Raiden's hair.
The large man stumbles toward Raiden, mumbling "Kuwabara kuwabara kuwabara," which is both a Japanese ghost sound and a more-or-less equivalent of "Eeny, meeny, miney, moe."
The man stops in front of Raiden, and then savagely reaches out and grabs his crotch with a crunch. Raiden's salute wavers. The screen fades out. A title card reads "CAN MGS SURVIVE?" Then it cuts back to the scene with Raiden and the large man. Raiden reaches his hand down, and swats the large man's arms away. The large man takes another step forward, and grabs Raiden's crotch with another deafening crunch. The camera pans around to show the mad-scientist character staring at this scene in awe as a James-Bond-inspired crash of brass clangs over everything.
I asked Kojima, right at the start of my E3 interview -- what the hell is up with this?
His response was to smirk, fold his hands, unfold them, and point at me.
"I knew you'd like that."
He also has requested that a headline be placed on the cover of the issue of Wired where my interview is run: "HIDEO KOJIMA IS FINISHED WITH METAL GEAR SOLID -- AND HE'S NOT GAY." I told him I didn't know if I had that kind of power.
Now know this:
Metal Gear Solid 3, even if its odd-as-hell crotch-grabbing scene is included in the final build, is not nearly the strangest game Konami had to show at the 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo. No, we had Nano Breaker, Neo Contra and Rumble Roses, which I christen the "Three Most Insane Videogames of All-Time." I take it their design insanity has a whole hell of a lot to do with Hideo Kojima's position as vice-president of Konami. He is clearly an inspiration to all beneath him.
I have trouble, even now, determining which is the most insane of these three games. I will try to defend each one as the most insane, then.
Nano Breaker is Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi's slick little secret attempt to get his 3D engine straight. Most players agreed that Castlevania: Lament of Innocence had its problems. Igarashi, in the name of experimentation, is producing Nano Breaker, a game that uses pretty much the same engine, just to get a feel for producing games in 3D. I guess, when this game is out the door and the criticism is appropriately tallied, he will then begin work on a second 3D Castlevania.
In the meantime, Nano Breaker is, as a game, no less than fucking insane. You play as a guy with a sword. The goal of the game is to run around in 3D, slashing the mother-loving shit out of demons simply because they look scary. If Castlevania is soccer, Nano Breaker is hockey; only instead of white ice to glide around on, you've got a morbidly blood-stained battlefield. Eric-Jon gave the game a whirl while Chris Woodard and myself blazed through Neo-Contra, and his first living impressions were "I think the goal of the game is to cover everything with blood." This almost intrigued me. I played the game a little bit, and soon saw that the blood -- the plasticky redness of it, the thickness of its sprays -- was like something out of every American twelve-year-old's wet dreams circa 1994. The 3D melee combat is, at least, tighter than in Lament -- and perhaps tighter than in any of 2003's melee fighters, with the exception of Red's new Sword of the Berserk game, which vanished from earthly radar I know not the hell why -- and the game has that jump-in-and-play feel that Igarashi claims is more important to a game than faithfulness to storyline heritage. I'd like to think the game, unlike Lament, won't grow a shining layer of boring pretentiousness before its release, and that something about its easy to pick up conceptual nature will give birth to something addicting and/or overwhelmingly fun. As it stands now -- hell if I know. Wait for Tokyo Game Show, where I will play this one with deeper concern.
The demo cinematics, however, freaked me the hell out. The hero jumps and flies and slashes demons. Demons descend upon a city. A girl screams. Someone explodes. It reminded me, kind of, of the opening cinematic of Onimusha 3, which I witnessed at Tokyo Game Show last year with a dropped jaw, in an age where game graphics do little to inspire me. Nano Breaker's CG isn't quite as sharp as Onimusha 3's, and it sure as hell doesn't star Takeshi Kaneshiro (hoo boy, is he ever one gorgeous situation in and of himself!) or Jean Reno; yet, the heart is there. There's a scene where the hero swordfights a rival that looks just like himself. Sparks fly, shit explodes, blood splatters everywhere. It's a lot like -- to me -- what Capcom's Trojan would look like if given some inexplicable modern update a la Rygar. It has the early-1990s gusto of a Contra: Hard Corps print-advertisement -- you know the one I'm talking about: it shows a meat-grinder pouring out red, desecrated cow, and has some lettering warning players that this will happen to them if they play this game. If Igarashi knows his business, he'll keep Nano Breaker simple to play, yet ramp the difficulty up to near-impossible in later stages. He'll make the story utterly insanely inane, so that it doesn't matter if we don't take it all in. He'll make playing the reward for playing. He'll also make sure they never release a sequel. His goal with Nano Breaker should be to make a game that a college kid in 2013, beer-buzzed, will bring up in conversation with a stupid guy he calls "bitch" far too often: "Why didn't they ever make a sequel to that Nano Breaker shit?" His friend will reply, "Shit, bitch, they ain't need no sequel."
That would be postmodern game-making.
Neo Contra, however, might already be postmodern game-making. The game is nuts. It makes no sense. And at the same time, it is a perfectly standard overhead run-and-gun shooter. It recalls SNK's Ikari Warriors as often as Guerrilla War. It mostly feels like the late Data East's early Heavy Barrel cross-bred with Gunstar Heroes' fatalistic character selection, weapon combination, and quirky sense of character, with a dash of the bold-headed near-idiotic oddness of Contra: Hard Corps (referenced twice in this writing so far, yes, because I simply can't think of a more insane game outside these three (do I smell a . . . list-article idea brewing?! I'll write it! I SWEAR!! JUST GIVE ME THE MONEY AND I'LL FUCKING DO IT!!)).
Gunstar Heroes was insane because of "boss" characters like "Final Great Soldier," whose attack was listed on the in-game heads-up display as "Love-Love Dancing." "Love-Love Dancing" is, of all things, the standard animation a generic enemy soldier went through when he was dizzied. The designers knew this animation -- the robotic soldier swirling at the hips -- was funny to behold, so they made a joke out of it and threw it into the last main stage of the game. That boss gets thrown aside by the real boss before you have a chance to fight him, of course.
Contra: Hard Corps' insanity is not cute. It's an insanity that lets you play as a cartoon wolf with a huge gun and sunglasses in a first stage where most players will die within ten seconds on their first hundred attempts. The game is savage. When we see its little splashes of cute weirdness, we think: what business does that kind of thing have in such a hard game? The real question is: what business do we have asking such a question?
Neo Contra is, at this stage, not hard. The first demo level can be completed by anyone with a sense of twitch on the second attempt. It controls a lot like the two overhead stages of Contra III -- the ones where you hunt out specific targets with the help of a radar, only there's no radar, and no specific targets. That may change in later levels. For the first part, you're only looking for the entrance to an enemy stronghold. To find it, you shoot a lot of people. It's not too hard to find. I take it later levels might be more labyrinthine in structure; given the early obvious Hard Corps inspiration (a character named "Guerrilla Contra," which yes, is the most insane name for a videogame character ever, rides a spider-tank and smokes a corn-cob pipe is the first boss, and is seen in demo cinematics wearing a top hat, smoking a cigar, and dancing on helicopter blades), multiple paths aren't entirely ruled out.
The story, so far as I can tell, involves killing things. One of the guys -- named Bill Rizer, I think -- is your typical-looking white American marine, smoking a cigar. The other is a black man who is, for some reason or another, a samurai. One scene of the trailer shows the men marking their kills. The marine uses typical hash marks for sets of five kills. The samurai uses the kanji "tada," which is five strokes, and convenient for counting.
That's wacky shit.
As for the kills themselves -- well, the preferred method is shooting. There's really no other way. In retrospect, I kind of wish there was a close-quarters combat system. You know how in most of these run-and-gun shooters your character has a knife, or something? Like in Metal Slug, if you're close to someone when you press the fire button, you knife them? Well, you don't have this kind of attack in Neo Contra. Still, the shooting, as something you're going to be doing from the beginning of the game to the ending, is fun. Enemies don't die with one shot. They sometimes take ten, or twenty. You don't die when you touch enemies, either -- only when they shoot you. The on-screen bullets are flashing and slow, as in Heavy Barrel. The X button activates a roll, which avoids just about any bullet. Hold R2 to stop in place, allowing for a pivot shot. L2 lets you strafe. Whatever direction you're facing when you hold it down becomes your strafing direction. It works ungodly well.
As for guns -- and here's the part I like the most -- you make a selection at the beginning of the game, and get no opportunity to reverse it. Type A gives you a machinegun, a homing laser, and a flame burst. Type B's main weapon is a spread gun (short-range-ish). Type C gives you a charge-up shot and a flamethrower. Type C is the hard selection -- that charge-up shot, fired like a Megaman mega-buster, is hard to handle. It's strong, of course -- just hard to handle. The flamethrower is delicious, in that it requires you to get right up on your enemy if you hope to kill them. It also kills them quickly. The shotgun of Type B is a lot of fun, as well, in that it takes only a few shots to kill most enemies, and can hit a dozen or so of them at once. The machinegun of Type A is clearly the "easy mode" -- with the help of the strafe button, you can take out anything with its constant stream. The square button activates your normal gun; circle activates the other, more risky one. Triangle activates your sweeping lock-on weapon -- a homing laser or a homing missile -- which is curiously the only thing that can hit the majority of flying enemies. The mechanics, altogether, work well, and use all of the buttons on the controller without feeling pretentious.
That cut scene before the first level shows our heroes beaming down to earth from their spaceship, which is shaped like a giant pistol. They then run across translucent bridges that float over a futuristic city, shooting alien soldiers. The first mid-boss is a jeep. After that, you enter a warehouse, where you fight a giant alien monster. Then you roll down an elevator shaft, where you fight a spaceship with a sweeping blue laser. Then you hit the ground, where you fight Guerrilla Contra in his giant spider tank following a short English-voice-acted cut scene. This closes out the first level of the demo. The other level has you riding giant lizards down a highway in a scene reminiscient of level four of Contra III. I like it a lot. I look forward to playing it again and again with different friends and different weapon configurations.
This website's own Vincent Diamante says the game is shallow and too easy. I agree with him that the game is easy. I don't agree about its being shallow. I like the taste Konami gave me of it at E3, which was a taste prepared to endear the game to journalists rather than hardcore gamers; I look forward, with optimism, to the more complicated levels and harder difficulty settings that will follow the demo stages. Vince's comparisons to Shock Troopers are not entirely warranted; Shock Troopers is an arcade game, designed to suck money out of people. Neo Contra is a game for enjoying at home. Shock Troopers' characters are large and animated, cute enough to pull a young kid away from the Gameboy games at Torrance's Hyper Game Action (now Game House, yes) to waste a couple of quarters. Its levels are straight lines that look like they're not straight. Its vehicles are things the kids of 1994 will brag about boarding to their friends. Neo Contra is the grown-up amusing shooter; playing it to the end will reward you not as much as replaying it to entertain your own gamerly sense of challenge. Have some faith, Vincent Diamante, and you'll see a completed build that you will like muchly.
I told Hideo Kojima that I was impressed by this game. He nodded. I asked who'd made it. Eric-Jon and myself were under the impression that it might have been Treasure, or else a hell of a study of Treasure's game concepts. We laughed off the second suggestion -- no action game developer studies Treasure's game concepts. That's like suggesting a playwright prove that he's studied Shakespeare. The game must have been made by Treasure. All of the signs were there. Kojima shook his head. No, he told us. They're making it at TYO. That's his office. He said the game wasn't too spectacular, as far as he was concerned. He said they were working on making it more spectacular. I didn't know what to think of this. Kojima has a way of saying things I don't know what to think of. He's a hell of a guy for it. And TYO is a hell of a development house -- has the mainstream success of Ikaruga pushed some developers to (gasp!) actually look into the mechanics of a Treasure game? If so, and if Neo Contra turns out better than even I expect it will, this might be bigger news than Treasure involvement -- it could mean the beginning of worldwide confessed interest in Treasure, which could spark an action renaissance in an era of too many melee 3D action fighters.
I then mentioned Rumble Roses. "What's up with this game?" Kojima smiled a droll smile, and folded his hands.
"Ain't it awesome as hell?"
"It -- well -- y-yeah, it is."
The man was right, as always.
Rumble Roses is a wrestling game developed by Yukes, who develop wrestling games, though they did once develop a Sword of the Berserk game on Dreamcast, which almost everyone agreed was really good. The thing about Rumble Roses is that it doesn't star big, sweaty men. No, it's about young, cute anime girls in bikinis. Some of the anime girls are Japanese, and some of them are not, and one who is not Japanese is American. This American wears a cowgirl bikini. As in -- the fabric is printed like cow skin. The trailer is five minutes of glorious full-motion video in which girls jump off turnbuckles and punch other girls. Their breasts flop about. These images are intercut with scenes of a girl in a ninja-devil-S&M suit, chained to a wall and struggling. She eventually breaks free, jumps into the ring, and defends a poor little Japanese girl who's being beaten by an American. Then they show a mud-wrestling mode, where your bouncy anime girls roll around in flesh-colored mud.
Eric-Jon and I laughed our asses off at the trailer, the first time we saw it. We watched some kids playing the game, and deemed it the "most honest game ever made." A better description might have been "Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball without the volleyball." This description fits in more ways than one -- the same artists who worked on that game work on this one.
"You should play it with Itagaki-san," Kojima suggested. "See what he thinks."
Itagaki-san is, of course, Tomonobu Itagaki, rock-star producer of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden. I found him lounging at a table, alone, by the Tecmo booth. I wrote something about my encounter with him. It's at my livejournal site, if you want to see it. Just look around for -- what day was it? -- May 13th, 2004? I think that's what day it was. Anyway, there's no use recounting what happened here. The most I can say is that I didn't get him to come to the Konami booth and play Rumble Roses with me. So I played it with Eric-Jon, instead. A mister John Swisshelm of TokiDokiJournal.com took a picture of the two of us playing the mud-wrestling mode, and it inspired a picture-in-picture thread on the insertcredit.com forums. Contribute if you can.
John took that picture just moments before I turned around to see that Greg Fischbach, president of Acclaim, was standing behind us, watching the game with a jaw dropped in utter horror, like the horror a devout Christian must feel when he sees pornography for the first time and kind of likes it.
"That's a, uh -- that's a game right there," he said to me, as an ice-breaker.
"It is. It might be the most insane game ever," I said.
"It -- it might be!!"
He then ran off to play it with his brother -- the other Fischbach -- on another demo station. He took good notes, maybe. They were probably simple:
WORD TO PEOPLE WHO MAKE GAMES LIKE BACKYARD WRESTLING
(i can't be bothered to research if this is an acclaim property or not . . .)
1. Make the girls good-looking.
2. Get rid of the guys.
3. Make the game good (grab moves, hold moves, oh fuck the pin moves -- and everything controllable in THREE-DEE and customizable outfits and unlockable costumes OH MY GOD).
That's all there is to it. Do that, and you have a sure-seller. And get some good music in there. Chris Woodard watched the trailer for two hours of his life, and said that the music had become something he needed to live. It's a David Lee Roth song, he pointed out, now sung by a generic Dance Dance Revolution-wannabe singer. And it works.
Eric-Jon bestows upon this game his "insertcredit.com game of the year special vote" award. I look at his selection, and nod. I'd give it the same, if it were on Nintendo DS and playable with a stylus.
THAT'S A LITTLE INNUENDO RIGHT THERE.
(Or maybe a "Ninnuendo"? "Nintenuendo"? Oooh. I shall think on this more, and then get back to you.)
. . .
AHEM!!
So Kojima says Rumble Roses might have a topless mode. He says they're seriously considering it. I say -- why the hell not? The man already put a bizarre scene in his own game's trailer just because of a question I asked him months ago. So rest assured, I put in the good word for you all: yeah, I'm sure we Americans would like a topless mode. I mean, you might as well. Your game is already honest enough.
I still think the game would be better for Xbox. Either way, it's going to do something for mature content in videogames. BMX XXX was, in Sunday-school terms, a fucking joke; this is an actual game with undeniably, boisterously, vibrantly giddy sexual content. What's better, I can think of three girls, off the top of my head, who would play this game with me, giggling just as girlishly as Eric-Jon and I did when we played it the first time.
Insane, insane, insane.
PERHAPS EVEN MORE INSANE
Konami is bringing out Ys VI: The Ark of Naphistim in English, in America. Perhaps more insane than this -- Brandon Sheffield played that game for an hour on the E3 show floor, both because no one else was playing it (and he loves games no one plays!) and because he loves some Ys, and he loves it with not much difficulty. (HaHAH!) He played for an hour because the boss was hard as hell, and it took an hour of raising levels to beat that boss. I played for a half an hour, and didn't gain enough levels to beat that boss, and ended up poisoned without any antidotes, and I died. It's a solid game, though, and an RPG with an RPG story, and one with a nice, breezy feel that hearkens back to the day we all owned a TurboDuo, or wished we owned one.
Gradius V is damned hard, yet less so, at E3, for it was on free play. Vince already wrote some stuff up on that. All I'll say is that that game scares the hell out of me.
Suikoden IV looks really nice, too. The trailer makes it look like a simple RPG without anger or angst or assholery. So that’s nice.
In the end, I see fit to call Konami exhibitor of the year. That's my personal preference. I just think they did damned well, and of the five games I'd actually buy that I sampled at this year's E3, they made two of them. Which two games? Well, either look over this piece again or wait until the end, why don't you?
[next: illusions of E3]
|
