The Little Things

Back when I worked as a game tester, I remember there was one guy, nicknamed "Speaker Box," who would consistently refer to the stock PS2 DualShock 2, a wired controller, as a "remote."

"Hey Henry, this remote's not working."

For some reason, that always really ticked me off.

Persona 3

Although it has only lately garnered attention in North America, Atlus's Megami Tensei series has been a fixture in the RPG landscape of Japan since the Nintendo Famicom days. Usually set in modern Japan and starring high school students with the ability to summon devils, the venerable and prolific series distinguished itself early on from its D&D-inspired genre peers with its realistic settings and occult themes. For its longevity and originality, it is widely regarded as the number three RPG in Japan, behind Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.

Persona, the first Megami Tensei title to arrive in North America, was an offshoot about teenagers crossing over into a parallel dimension to combat demons that were quietly intruding on and corrupting the city. Instead of summoning devils to help them fight, the characters called upon their individual "Personas," phantasmal manifestations of their own psyches (very much like the "Stands" from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure). Persona spawned its own sub-series of games, most of which have actually made their way across the Pacific. Its breakout hit--indeed, the breakthrough title for the entire Megami Tensei meta-series outside Japan--arrived in 2007 (2006 in Japan) in the form of Persona 3 for the PlayStation 2. A "director's cut" released the following year, Persona 3 FES has been my introduction to both Persona and Megami Tensei, and I'm definitely interested in seeing more.

While not directly connected to any previous entries in the series, Persona 3's story follows the same basic premise as the first game--a shadowy otherworld is encroaching on an unsuspecting Japanese city, and it is up to a select group of high school students to stave off oblivion by evoking the power of Persona. The modern setting offers something refreshingly different from the typical Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or Tales game, while the occult elements further add a dark edge rarely encountered in the more mainstream JRPGs. A shocking moment during the opening scenes, when a character fearfully points a gun at her own head, sets the tone right away as something altogether distinct from swords-and-sorcery romanticism. As it turns out, shooting themselves in the head with gun-like "Evokers" is how the characters release their Personas, and that's not the extent of the perverse imagery peculiar to this series.

Where Persona 3 most differs from other JRPGs, including its Megami Tensei predecessors, is in how it is structured. In a typical JRPG, including even most of the best games, the experience essentially consists of a progression along a linear path and a repeating formula, from town to dungeon to boss battle to dramatic non-interactive story sequence. Players get caught up in many fights along the way and perhaps roam about a world map. In the better examples of this JRPG formula, the combat should be interesting enough that we can bear the repetitiveness, but really it is the last step, the story sequences, that alone makes it all worth it. Looking at all the JRPGs I've played, I can think of few where the rest of the experience was anything more than busywork. I find it hard to argue in favor of the formula, yet Japanese developers have mostly stuck with it for the last two decades. I think that the best Final Fantasy games and clones have been excellent in spite of their design, but I can understand perfectly the apathy of many Western gamers toward the genre these days. Persona 3 deserves far better than the sighs and eye-rolling that the term "JRPG" might elicit, however, because it is a Japanese RPG that bucks the trend.

Surprisingly, Persona 3 sets itself apart and revitalizes a genre by, of all things, borrowing elements of the Japanese dating sim, a genre that I've been unfairly dismissive of in the past. I still have no particular interest in delving deeper into that world, but I realize now that my misgivings were due, not so much to the concept, but to my perceptions of the typical motivations and marketing. Implemented into an RPG such as Persona 3, the mechanics show their potential as a means to convey story through non-violent interaction. Instead of just slaying monsters to earn those cut scenes, you spend a lot of time getting to know people, buying them presents, listening to their problems, and offering them advice and encouragement. Not only do the social elements give you a rare sense of a fleshed-out world beyond the central battle, but they make it easier to identify with the mute protagonist, since he is reflected in the company you choose to keep. Cleverly integrating the sim components with the combat, your relationships even appropriately enhance your Persona powers. True, the links you form, not only with romantic interests, but also with friends and other more complex relations, develop in fairly linear fashion, through scripted sequences and extremely limited dialogue choices. But the stories are thoroughly engaging, and choice still comes into play when you realize that you more than likely won't have enough time to pursue all of these relationships within a single playthrough (and of course, you may specifically choose NOT to be friends with some characters).

You see, the most brilliant innovation of Persona 3 is its calendar-based structure. Major events (i.e. boss battles) occur on scheduled dates once a month, but the game progresses one day at a time. There may occasionally be scripted events between the monthly missions, but on most days, you simply attend class in the morning and are then free to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening however you choose. You can work on your relationships, enter the game's one dungeon to train your characters, or take on some of the many optional side quests for rewards. You can even study to raise your "Academics" stat, which improves your performance in class and also boosts your chances at forming relationships with certain characters. You can only accomplish so much in a day, however, and time continually marches forward with little regard for how or how well you spend it. Persona 3 effectively eschews the typical JRPG formula, and standard combat and level-building only made up about half my experience. Yet this structure is about more than just the freedom to explore, which a Western RPG such as Fallout 3 might very well pull off better.

Transpiring over the course of a Japanese school year, it realizes the unfulfilled promise of Final Fantasy VIII, as a video game simulation of adolescent life. The mission gives the characters a reason for banding together, but you could almost do without the supernatural angle otherwise. For me, it was not the dramatic events but the day-to-day that kept me going. As the only ones aware of and able to combat the shadows, the protagonists carry a heavy burden. But like it or not, the enemy only reveals itself once a month on schedule, and as the characters wait, that is when life happens. Indeed the stretches of inaction may be the most stressful part for these teenagers, who still have to worry about school and relationships, their futures, with all the uncertainty that adolescents do. And even the dramatic moments must be met with a level of muted sobriety; when loved ones die, they do not get to skip the grieving or bury it beneath rage. Only time can heal those wounds, and this is one game that has the courage to put its characters through that.

Whereas so many blockbuster games today pattern themselves after movies, Persona 3 is a video game that feels like an accomplished novel, and closer to Jane Austen than J.R.R. Tolkien. That is not to say that it imitates the form of a novel, but its story enjoys a scope that rarely translates to film, and the experience has a weight to it that you carry with you even after the ending that leaves one emotionally exhausted. It's hard to put into words, but this is a game that you live with for 70+ hours (for real, it took me over 100!). At some point, it becomes a part of you.

I was no big fan of Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, about a man who loved life so much that he simply refused to die, but I could well understand the melancholy conviction that the fullness of life cannot be contained within a single human lifetime. I think it accurate to say that I read novels and watch television precisely because, through the experiences of fictional characters, I am able to live vicariously beyond the confines of my own transient existence. I will never be a detective, or a surgeon, a sailor, a cowboy, or a wizard, but these stories allow me to share in the lives of those who are. Thus, while I may have only one life, I am able to experience thousands of stories over the course of it. And like a Jane Austen novel or a Harry Potter, the experience of Persona 3 is all the more affecting because of its realistic attention to the passage of time, inviting us to share, not only in the big events that we sometimes mistake life for, but also in everything in between. After all, without the quiet and mundane moments to provide context, just a laundry list of achievements of even the largest life can become utterly abstract and meaningless. Atlus's game is one of the rare works to grasp that, and however accelerated the experience may have been, at the end of it I felt like I had a spent a year with those characters.

That said, I won't say the system is perfect. Although the dating sim stories always arrive at fulfilling conclusions, they do not impact the main quest in any way. No matter how close you get to a female party member, it will never affect their attitude toward you in the main storyline. The opposite is also true and even more disconcerting--your love interests at school will never remark on the mysterious happenings around the city, giving the impression, when things get dire, that they are unusually dimwitted. Worst of all, in most cases, after you "max out" a relationship with a classmate, they will still hang around at school, but there will be nothing for you to do with them, leaving you potentially months of just awkwardly passing them in the halls. Ironically, the moment the link graduates to a lifelong bond is the same moment that any meaningful interaction ceases. In fact, these characters thereafter become even less interesting than regular NPCs, since they will only repeat their maximum-I-love-you lines for the rest of the game.

You'll note that I have yet to get into the combat, except perhaps to imply that the game excels other JRPGs precisely because there is so much more to it besides fighting. That's because it's kind of a drag. It's not particularly worse compared to any other JRPG, but it is very old-school and repetitive. Very typical turn-based stuff, it is the only major disappointment in this game that is so innovative in other areas.

As noted, there is really only one dungeon in the game--a tower of 200+ randomly generated floors, with a non-story boss battle every few floors. The tower is divided into several blocks, and every month the next block will open up, usually not long after that month's scheduled event. It's also not at all connected to most of the story events and battles, so going there is technically kind of (but not really) optional. Frankly, because exploring it felt so pointless, I kind of slacked on it early on. That was the beauty of the open schedule, after all--that I was at leisure to go there only as often and for as long as I felt like it, which I quickly realized was never. As it turns out, the danger of such freedom is that it's hard to tell whether or not your characters' levels are where you will need them to be, until the next scheduled operation commences and you find out the hard way that your characters are woefully unprepared. The tower is essentially the training ground for getting your characters in shape, and if you can take out the highest boss in the current block, then you should be good to go for the next event battle. After I grew more familiar with the game, I started to just reserve two nights out of every game month for scaling the tower. Those would be some long nights, but I think it was still less dungeon-crawling than most JRPGs, and it freed up my schedule for unbroken hours of doing the things I enjoyed.

Combat plays out like a more severe form of Pokemon. Every normal attack and offensive ability falls under an element type, and almost every Persona and enemy is strong to some elements and weak to others. If you target an enemy's weakness, not only will the attack do more damage, not only will it stun the enemy, but you will get a free turn to move again. You could use that turn to stun the next enemy, which then grants you another turn. Repeat the process and you could potentially end up stunning the entire enemy party in a single round. Of course, the same rules can work against your characters, although enemies rarely have the depth of offensive abilities or presence of mind to stun multiple members of your party. But they really only have to stun your character, thereby robbing you of your turn for the round. Thus were there some brutal moments where I just happened to get caught wielding the wrong Persona against the wrong enemy, leading to agonizing minutes of complete non-interactivity, as I could only watch my inept teammates making all the wrong moves while the enemy chain-stunned my protagonist to death.

You see, the game allows you direct control only over the nameless protagonist, while your allies operate under loose directives (e.g. "full assault," "focus on healing," etc.). This reminds me a bit of the arcade NBA Jam, where, unlike in most sports games, you only controlled one player, even if your teammate had the ball. To an extent, it gave you the authentic sense of playing as a member of a team, instead of as the godlike puppet master of all units on a game board. In Persona 3, however, I would like to believe that the characters are not the idiots that they present themselves as when controlled by the AI in battle. Too often would I have to watch Mitsuru waste away her magic on pointless moves instead of just finishing off the enemy, or Yukari healing a single character instead of the party, or everybody failing to remove status effects unless specifically set to focus on healing, which I can't set them to now, because my character is the one berserked, leaving me no control over him or anyone else. And this is a game where a character at full health is maybe three hits away from death, so a berserk, confuse, or charm spell against the protagonist can completely turn even what should have been a routine victory against you. In fact, it happened to me two hours into the final boss fight. Oh, don't be too intimidated by the "two hours" thing--no other battle in the game is nearly that long. Plus, I was actually only a few strikes away from victory when everything went to hell, which, yes, only made it that much more frustrating. No, the game is not all that hard. In fact, it's my understanding that Persona 3 was partially conceived as a mainstream take on the notoriously hardcore Megami Tensei series. There is even an option to select an "easy" mode (which I should have chosen) before starting a new game. But I wouldn't call it a game for casual RPG players.

Having said that, I would still heartily recommend that any true gaming enthusiast give Persona 3 a try. It doesn't escape the grind, but it offers much more than fighting and effectively allows you to rearrange the formula as you see fit. More than any other game, I think it offers a glimpse into the future of RPGs, or even just non-violent narrative-based gaming, but it also happens to be a great story with great characters for right now. What began as a game seemingly full of too many empty periods for inconsequential side quests slowly became a schedule with not enough time to do all the things I had planned. As the days continued to tick by, I grew ever more sorrowful that there had to be an end, that I could not have just one more uneventful day spent sipping coffee or singing karaoke. Unless you absolutely cannot abide turn-based JRPG combat, this is as essential an experience as any other game released within the last four years. I hesitate to call it the greatest RPG of the same period only because I have yet to play Persona 4.

The Red Star

No, not the Eisner Award-nominated comic book by Christian Gossett, designer of Darth Maul's double-bladed lightsaber. Rather, I'm here to discuss the excellent PS2 game based on that comic.

Released in 2007 after years of delays, The Red Star was to have been one of the last games by Acclaim. Acclaim went under in 2004 while the game was still in development--a shame because it would have been the company's finest title by far--but at least, three years later, players were able to enjoy the finished product courtesy of publisher XS Games. An inspired mash-up of side-scrolling beat 'em up, bullet hell shoot 'em up, and top-down multi-directional shooter, it is simply one of the best arcade-style action games I've ever played.

The bulk of the game plays out like a classical arcade brawler. One or two players proceed, mostly from left to right, through linear stages. Every screen-length or so, a pack of enemies must be eliminated before the players may progress. Combat is mostly hand-to-hand, but the game's main twist is that the player characters also come equipped with guns. This combination of melee and gun combat is reminiscent of the Alien vs. Predator arcade game, probably the best of the Capcom beat 'em ups I've played. A more current comparison might be Capcom's Devil May Cry, with its mix of swords and guns, but The Red Star actually does a better job of balancing the practical effectiveness of each, encouraging constant and seamless switching between the two for more than just showboating.

Melee attacks are still the most effective offense, but you'll regularly find yourself chipping away with the guns for free damage from a distance or offering support to your partner on the other side of the screen. There are also certain enemies that can only be disposed of with bullets, and most enemy groups contain one or two foes that are themselves long-range fighters, forcing you to be just as flexible when taking on these diverse parties. Also, just like in Alien vs. Predator, the guns overheat if you hold down the shoot button too long, at which point you must wait for them to fully cool down before firing again.

The two player characters even kind of resemble Linn Kurosawa and Dutch, the non-Predator characters from Alien vs. Predator. Makita is the fast female character with quick melee attacks that can be strung into long combos. Kyuzo is a hulking brute with slow but powerful attacks and an impressive beam cannon super move. Beating the game unlocks an entirely unique third character, Maya, who favors ranged "melee" attacks. All three characters feel very different, and each offers more depth than the average beat 'em up character of yesteryear. The most disappointing thing about the game is actually that you cannot change characters during the campaign, except by switching controllers with your partner, assuming that you are playing co-op and you actually selected different characters to begin with. Not only are some sections blatantly better suited for specific characters, but it's a real shame, given how distinct the three of them are, that you do not even get to enjoy the variety on offer without having to start a new save.

At the end of a stage, a "FEALTY IS DUE" warning message will appear and the camera will tilt to a top-down view to signal the arrival of the level boss. Most stages also include a mid-boss or two as well. These bosses are usually mechanical constructs fitted with multiple cannons. It is during these battles that the game really becomes more of a shoot 'em up. Clearly influenced by such classics as Contra, Gradius, and even Ikaruga (there is a boss named "Ikarius"), these fights rival the best in the genre for intricacy and intensity, and it is in balancing these high-level tests of concentration against the more primal joy of the beat 'em up action that The Red Star creates something new and masterful. As enemy bullets flood the screen in manic arrays, your attention must turn to dodging while firing blindly back with your own guns. Melee attacks can still inflict damage, but the head-on approach is impractical at best, suicidal at worst. Early bosses can be outlasted with just a steady hand and attentive eye, but later battles are so hairy that they can only be survived by deciphering the patterns and perceiving the safe spots ahead of time.

Thankfully, as a game designed for home consoles, The Red Star is a good deal fairer than any of its arcade inspirations, albeit still harder than any modern Devil May Cry. Instead of falling in one hit as in most shoot 'em ups, player characters have life bars as in beat 'em ups. This allows a little room for error during those boss battles. On the other hand, the game probably expects you to take a certain number of bullets as a result, and since there are never health refills until after a boss or mid-boss, it can seem impossible having to take on an end-of-level boss series after having already been worn down by a difficult stage's regular enemies. Whereas in Ikaruga your craft is as able at the final boss as it began at stage one, in The Red Star it is quite possible that you will have to face a level's toughest section while at your weakest state in it. Knowing that you'll have to save yourself for the boss does make for a more skill-intensive game than any other beat 'em up. The difficulty doesn't really ramp up until the final quarter of the game, but, yeah, it does get quite hard. Some mid-level checkpoints would have been a nice, progressive inclusion to make it more manageable for today's console players, but like the best old-school arcade games, it can still provide a great experience even if you never make it past level 15 without cheating.

There are other ways too that The Red Star could have been improved. I wish there were a way to attack floored foes, because it has never made sense to wait for an enemy to get back to his feet before resuming the attack. Even more annoying, of course, is having to wait for an enemy knocked off the edge of the screen to shamble back into view.

Visually, the game's grayish look adequately captures the bleak, perpetual winter of Russia, but the polygonal models do not pop as well as the colorful sprites of, say, Warriors of Fate, and I consequently had trouble at times distinguishing my partner from the enemy (not that there is any friendly fire, thankfully). There is also a lot of foreground clutter that can obstruct the player's view without improving the look of the game.

The game is overall unpolished, which is most evident in the bare-bones menus and transition screens. The throwaway story distills the acclaimed source material into just a series of senseless text briefings between missions. Makita and Kyuzo don't even have any lines. All dialogue is between Maya and another commander, Urik, who doesn't even appear outside of those briefings.

While there is no doubting the development team's love of classic arcade games, there is, as well as the lack of budget, probably a lack of practical experience behind some of the design elements. The targeting system is the game's most problematic mechanic. Although you can fire in any direction, this is not a twin-stick shooter, and the only way to move while firing in another direction--a necessity in all boss fights--is to utilize the auto-aim feature. In order to lock on to a target, you must roughly face in its direction and then hold down the auto-aim button. If there is no target recognized, your character will simply fix his aim in that direction. Unfortunately you cannot target an enemy that is downed or in an otherwise invincible state, and it isn't always clear that you've "missed" the lock-on until your target moves laterally and you find your character failing to track them.

I would also question some of those boss bullet patterns. The level 15 boss--the first major stopping point that I faced--was especially difficult because its various guns fired bullets of different colors. Having to evade hundreds of densely packed, fast-moving projectiles of just one color is already a tough prospect that forms the basis for many a bullet hell shooter. Having to simultaneously track bullets of three or more colors and trajectories--that becomes a whole-brain activity that, in my opinion, demands a little too much of the player.

Like a cooperative Mario game, the idea of a brawler-shooter hybrid seems so obvious, yet it took generations for any developer to really attempt it. Sadly, with the closure of the studio behind The Red Star, we are left with a fun but flawed game with no followup on the horizon. But just as The Red Star took inspiration from the classics before it to deliver an experience simultaneously old-school yet far fresher than any other beat 'em up of the last decade, I would direct any developer to look to The Red Star for where to start with the next great arcade game. This game already came so close to getting it all right that I would think it would be a simple process for any developer to just take the work begun here and tweak it a bit--add support for two more players, tighten up the shooting, clean up the presentation--to create the greatest arcade action game of all time, if only somebody had the guts.

NonEssential #51: X-Men Legends I & II

You know how some movies can be so bad that they're good? The Uwe Boll Bloodrayne, for example, with its horrendous script, atrocious editing, and miserly production, should have made for a painful experience, yet the earnest amateurism made for a diverting sort of train wreck, and I could not help laughing even as I shook my head at Sir Ben Kingsley's slumming it. In fact, most video game-based movies probably fall under that "so-bad-it's-good" category.

I'm not sure if there is such a thing as a "so-bad-it's-good" video game, however. Bad games are usually so due to flawed design or mechanics, leading to a poor experience that is simply bad, never good. The greater investments of time and money involved in playing a game, versus watching a movie, furthermore make it difficult to recommend a bad game for any reason. And while bad movies can gain cult followings through home video and television, video games do not get such second chances. A good bad game experience would likely have to be very short and probably free, so that the player could still walk away laughing before their good mood dissipated.

Or perhaps otherwise perfectly playable games can have "so-bad-it's-good" moments. Such was the case with Activision's X-Men Legends series. These were some pretty good games--not great, mind you, but pretty good--that I nevertheless remember better for the things they did poorly than for those they did well.

X-Men Legends

The original X-Men Legends, developed by Raven Software and published by Activision in 2004 for all three consoles (GameCube, PS2, Xbox), was actually a very solid title. Essentially an X-Men-themed dungeon crawler, it attracted my attention with its four-player support.

Although it was marketed as a role-playing game, it certainly did not match my idea of an RPG, which was defined by Final Fantasy and other, predominantly Japanese-developed console RPGs. The overhead hack-and-slash action of X-Men Legends characterized a particular sub-genre of Western RPG that had its roots in PC gaming, although it also bore some resemblance to Atari's arcade classic Gauntlet. I wasn't very familiar with the design, which was nothing like Final Fantasy, and I approached X-Men Legends as more of a cooperative beat 'em up.

That worked pretty well in the early going, as I happily punched, kicked, and threw my enemies about the destructible environments. Occasionally I would mix in a superpower (although these puny attacks were not nearly as cool as they should have been). Then I realized that the boss fights were completely lame, and there was actually very little of either skill or strategy involved in the gameplay. Even Magneto, ostensibly the main villain for most of the story, was basically a regular dude in combat. The only difference between him and his underlings was that he had more health and did more damage. Fighting him still came down to just running up to him and punching him repeatedly until he plopped to the floor with no ceremony. When we faced him, he wasn't even the last enemy to fall in that fight, and, even as his lifeless body lay on the floor, the battle would not end until we took out one last stray subordinate.


The bigger problem with X-Men Legends was that it was not multiplayer at all times. Rather, the party size would occasionally be limited as dictated by the story. That was truly a shame, because the story was awful.

The Marvel superheroes were originally appreciated for the depth of character they offered over most of their antecedents. They were not just gods and lunatics but fleshed-out people, with dreams and anxieties, who would face realistic life problems both in and out of costume. In the case of the X-Men specifically, the Chris Claremont/John Byrne run of stories that remain the franchise's most enduring was full of melodrama to match the adventure.

None of that came through in X-Men Legends.

X-Men Legends implemented a very lousy conversation system that included an unconvincing false element of interactivity. When speaking with a character, the player would be presented with a list of questions to ask, each one resulting in a voice actor very slowly reciting an answer that sounded completely unnatural. This was not conversation at all; there was no branching or anything, so the "dialogue" consisted just of you selecting one question, listening passively as the character answered with their lengthy life story, then moving on to the next question in the list, which would yield the next chapter of that life story. There was nothing resembling a realistic interaction, so the story was nothing more than a series of dungeons and boss fights.

Worst of all may have been the player character's own dialogue. Because it was possible for the player to be controlling any of a number of different characters for most of the game, this dialogue would always be completely generic, yet it could also be oddly elaborate. Reflecting neither the specific character nor the player, it took you further out of the story when, after hearing a lengthy speech by Patrick Stewart's Xavier, you then had to read your own character's response in silence.

The closest thing the game had to a real main character was Magma, the young mutant recruited by the X-Men at the beginning of the game. Between missions, the player would have to control her while exploring Xavier's mansion, which was essentially the one town in the game, where you could shop, run errands, or just talk to the other X-Men. These bits of story worked a little better, partly because Magma didn't have to be saddled with generic lines, and partly because it made sense for her to ask the X-Men stupid questions since she was still new. What made these segments a real chore, however, was that they were strictly single-player and devoid of action. They were pretty much the last thing I wanted to see in a multiplayer brawler.

The Magma interludes provided breaks for freely roaming the mansion between missions, but the game was otherwise a strictly linear affair, and there was no way to back out of a mission once begun. If you saved in the middle of a stage that was beyond your team's abilities to survive, then you were completely screwed.

That was the game-killing prospect that I nearly faced when the Sentinels descended upon New York. After a few early ambushes, the Uncanny X-Men were down to just Wolverine--literally every other member of the team, including all reserves, had been KO'd by these Sentinels, and I didn't have the money to buy them back their lives.

After a narrow escape to catch my breath, I began to actually strategize for the first time in the game. Rushing in hadn't worked with four men, so a lone X-Man stood no chance. Instead, I would approach the Sentinels cautiously, luring them out one at a time. Although even a single Sentinel could kill Wolverine in two hits, I was much smarter than them, and, so long as I played defensively and carefully picked my chances, I would have the advantage in the one-on-one. If I did take a bad hit, I would simply flee to some distant corner and wait for Wolverine's healing factor to slowly restore him, after which it was back into the fray.

The last man standing, I had to take out a half-dozen of these steel Goliaths in that manner while my fallen teammates watched, depending on me to get them back into the game, and each time gasping when some punk robot landed a lucky blow. It was a slow and methodical process for me, and many times I found myself straddling the razor's edge, but finally, a graveyard of dead metal beneath my feet, I had earned enough money to resurrect a few teammates, though, after taking down a team of Sentinels by myself, I wasn't sure I even needed anyone else. With everything on the line, I had proven beyond all shadow of a doubt why Wolverine was the most hardcore of all X-Men.

Was that a great moment in gaming? Maybe, but it was also kind of awful, as, more than just Sentinels, what I was really fighting to overcome was progression-halting design that would be considered broken in any RPG.

X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse

Raven and Activision's sequel, released in 2005 for all major platforms, was where things really got crazy.

X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse improved upon its predecessor in many ways, but it was also a lesser experience in others, and overall it was just more of the same.

Rightly recognizing that the multiplayer was the first game's biggest draw, Raven included support for four players throughout X-Men Legends II. Along with this, they also removed the boring Magma segments, although I would gradually come to recognize this as a double-edged sword, as the loss of the rookie's perspective to relate to exposed just how exceedingly poor the narrative and characterization really were. Worse yet, as its title suggested, Rise of Apocalypse was based on the really bleak and ugly period of mid-80s and 90s comics, which, among other terrible characters, gave us the four-armed and head-bodied Sugar Man, who appeared in the game as a minor boss.

The major boss fights, meanwhile, were probably the area of most marked improvement, as they were all basically modeled after the one good fight in the first game--the very difficult final battle that required players to move together as a unit to operate several switches spread about a room, all while taking heavy fire from a giant foe.

But what I mainly remember are the bugs.

The first X-Men Legends was already not the most polished game, but the sequel must have been rushed to market after the original's success convinced Activision of its viability as an annual series. As a result, X-Men Legends II was riddled with glitches that ranged in severity from minor to completely heinous.

Like the original, the game was of course rife with text errors and other minor bugs, such as a character's name accompanied by a different character's face in the dialogue box.

At the end of the first mission, we came across the first more serious bug. As Juggernaut, I tried to initiate a conversation with Professor X, and what I got back was a completely blank dialogue box. Or, rather, it brought up the usual list of questions, but all the text was invisible. As I scrolled up and down the list of invisible options, I never even knew what question Professor X would be answering in response to each of my button presses. Panic nearly set in, however, when I lost my place in the list of questions. Unable to tell which was the bottom option, I found myself repeating questions and unable to find the one response that would just make Patrick Stewart shut up and end the conversation. A bit of patience got me what I wanted, so it was not too serious an issue, but it was such a bizarrely stupid bug that my brother and I even joked that maybe Xavier was giving Juggernaut a hard time because of their history of hostility in the comics.

That bug was just the beginning. At one point, my brother and I were flying around the city as Iron Man and Storm. During the course of the first game, it had become clear that flying was the preferred way to get around, to the point that we rarely played as non-flying characters. But I noticed that, while my Storm hit an invisible ceiling very quickly, my brother's Iron Man was able to soar much higher. This was especially odd because I knew that Storm had had more points invested in her flight ability. But Iron Man was a hidden character, after all, so maybe he was just special.

I knew something was not right, however, when he just kept ascending. As Iron Man soared ever higher, the details below him grew smaller, until eventually, like a scene out of Dark City, it was revealed that there was no outside world beyond the walls of that city, which became just a speck floating in a field of infinite blackness. Whatever designs he may have had on escaping were dashed, however, when he ran out of gas and plummeted to the ground, dying instantly on impact. As we progressed further into the game, the bug would recur many times. And it had nothing to do with Iron Man or that stage--it could happen anywhere and with any flying character.


A more freak incident occurred when our X-Men/Brotherhood coalition, led by none other than Magneto, went in half-cocked to lay siege to an enemy factory. Midway into the level, a gang of robots suddenly burst into the room and decimated almost our entire party within seconds. Once again, my Wolverine was the lone survivor, but even he could not win this fight by himself. Against the Sentinels, I had managed to reduce it to a series of simple one-on-one engagements, but here I was facing a large mix of fast and aggressive machine men. My only option was to flee.

Because of the overhead camera, I could not see very far behind me as I fled, but I could hear the metallic clangor of the stomping feet behind me, and, to my horror, the sound would not subside no matter how far I got. In this chase sequence more horrifying than anything in Resident Evil, all I could do was keep running and never look back. Their noisy footsteps did not stop following me until I got all the way back to the X-Jet and flew back to base to regroup.

But the machines' pursuit had not been the only sound echoing in Wolverine's ears.

The entire time I was running, I also had to hear Magneto's repeated cry of "I am in need of assistance!" But Magneto was dead! Right before I was forced to turn and run, I had seen it all clearly with my own eyes--a two-ton steel giant shattering Magneto's every bone with a massive backhand to send him flying into the wall, then the former Master of Magnetism's body sprawled motionless across the floor. I would never have left a man behind unless I knew for certain that he was already gone. More importantly, the game would not have allowed me to scroll a living team member off the screen. So how could he still be screaming?!

Then I looked up at Magneto's vitals on the heads-up display and noticed something odd. Although his health was completely empty, his portrait was not grayed out like the other dead team members. Some bizarre glitch had left him in a state that was neither living nor entirely dead, where the only thing he could still do was yell for help. It was all in vain of course. There were no resurrection potions in this game, so there was nothing Wolverine could have done for him.

I should clarify that even dying characters would not call out for help on their own. The dead Magneto was screaming incessantly because my brother, who had been controlling Magneto, was still deliberately spamming the "call for assist" button. The way the game operated, players would always have a party of four characters, with the AI filling in any spots not taken by human players. The AI would stick to conventional punches and kicks unless the player pressed the assist button, which would instruct the AI to use a superpower. Usually, this would be preceded by the player's character yelling out some stupid line calling for help. Magneto's clips were by far the funniest, as he would spout such improbable dialogue as "Help me conquer my enemy!" Alternatively, characters would also yell things out as they defeated enemies or used their own superpowers. Sadly, the most common sound was that of your character informing you that you could no longer perform a move because you had exhausted the special meter. This would result in the even more unlikely Magneto line, "I cannot do that because I lack the power."

But there was one major game-breaking glitch that was not so funny. A little over halfway into the campaign, our game locked up in the middle of a fight. After a little digging online, I found out that this most egregious of bugs was actually a very common issue among players of the game. The cause was all the item and health drops that scattered about the floor whenever we defeated enemies. In X-Men Legends II, these drops never blinked out. If you didn't collect them, they would just remain where they were until you did. And unlike in the first game, it was possible to return to earlier stages in X-Men Legends II, and, sure enough, the items you left behind would still be there. Add in the fact that enemies respawned and you could have potentially an infinite number of prizes littered across the game's maps. But the game console hasn't got infinite RAM; eventually the number of dropped items stored in memory has got to hit an upper limit, and then something's gotta give. It's common sense.

In X-Men Legends II, that breaking point was practically unavoidable because we simply could not pack everything we came across, especially since most dropped pieces of equipment were useless to us. Always we would be taunted by these "Nanobelts" or "X-Armors" that required us to be ten levels higher before we could equip them, at which point there would surely be some new "Nanofiber" that was twenty levels stronger than that. Eventually we just stopped collecting them. Big mistake. After the game-freezing bug hit us, we had no choice but to stroll backwards through the game to find and proactively destroy all stray items lying on the ground. The most disgusting thing about this bug was that it was so commonly encountered, and the cause so elementary, that Raven and Activision must have known about it, yet they shipped the game out in that state anyway.

Both X-Men Legends titles were seriously rough games, but they were also some of the best cooperative four-player experiences of the last generation, and though there may not have been a lot of competition in that category, that they were even generically mediocre still made them worthwhile. I had a lot of fun with them, but, crazy as it may sound, I remember them best and most fondly for the terrible (yet amazing) moments.

* * * * *

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

After the two X-Men Legends titles, Raven and Activision decided to expand the scope of the series to encompass the entire catalog of Marvel superheroes. The result was Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, released in 2006 for all major platforms.

I'm actually still in the middle of this game. I've been playing it on and off because the game is kind of a chore. The idea of X-Men Legends with a greater mix of Marvel characters sounded pretty cool, but I think, with Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, the series may have finally become just a bad game.

There are some improvements. The most significant is the inclusion of an "arcade" mode. Not only does it feature a fun arcade-style scoring system, but it makes for a less frustrating experience by allowing dead characters to automatically resurrect mid-fight after a short time, so long as at least one other player stays alive during that time. It basically prevents any encore of my "Wolverine vs. Sentinels" episode, although, taken another way, it actually puts a new spin on the "last man standing" strategy, only replacing Wolverine's healing factor with the universal resurrection element.

The tradeoff with arcade mode is that you can't have any AI-controlled characters in your party. While the AI may not be especially helpful, the downside of losing them is that you cannot spam the assist button to hear the ridiculous dialogue that has always been one of the best/worst parts of the experience.

Where the game suffers is in the lack of character variety. A more all-encompassing Marvel game should have taken the series in the opposite direction, but, in practice, the characters all feel largely the same because they do not have distinct functions as before. In the X-Men Legends games, you needed Iceman to create ice bridges, Jean Grey to telekinetically operate switches, and Colossus to move heavy objects. There is almost none of that in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. It's just a lot of fighting, and every character handles that about the same. I suppose, as part of the streamlining process, the idea is to spare players having to constantly swap out characters just to progress, but, while the intention may have been to allow players to use only whichever characters they like, the result is that I don't really care who I use, because nobody feels unique. For a game based around superheroes, that's nearly a deathblow to the experience.


The story is still crap, the dialogue terrible, and the game still extremely unpolished, but there has been nothing so interesting as the bugs in X-Men Legends II. The funniest one I've come across involves the background NPCs that will walk around in circles whenever you're in the middle of a conversation. Sometimes their paths will intersect with a static character's position, so, for example, while my Captain America is standing engaged in conversation, some dude might walk into him, and, instead of turning and going around, the guy will repeatedly bump his body and shake, as though he's humping Captain America, who seems so absorbed in the boring talk that he doesn't even notice what is extremely distracting to the player. This has happened more than a few times, and there's nothing random about it.

So far, the best part of the game was when the villain Arcade transported the party into a spot-on recreation of Activision's Atari 2600 classic Pitfall!, complete with blocky Marvel sprites and archaic platforming mechanics. It's a cool and unexpected moment, but, honestly, when the best part of a game is its inclusion of a much older game that I never liked to begin with, that's not a good sign.

As with the X-Men Legends games, I bought this mainly because there is a terrible dearth of even just competent local co-op games for more than two players. But this game is so lackluster that my teammates have completely abandoned me.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 just came out, but I think it's safe to say that I'm done with this series.

The Essentials #50: Shadow of the Colossus

2001's ICO was not the best-selling PlayStation 2 title, but the groundbreaking work of interactive art gradually came to define Sony's console as its most critically lauded first-party release. The system had other commercially successful and well-reviewed exclusives, but ICO was the one title that PS2 owners could always point to as a unique experience that could not be found on any past or contemporary machines. So as the PS2 approached the end of its life cycle, fans were eager to see what else Team Ico and director Fumito Ueda could give them. In 2005, the answer arrived in the form of Shadow of the Colossus (known in Japan as Wander and the Colossus), another transcendent game to redefine and essentially close the book on the story of the PS2, much as ICO had begun it.

Bearing more than a few similarities to Ueda's previous game, Shadow of the Colossus again tossed players into the middle of a foreign, seemingly post-human world with little exposition. The protagonist this time was Wander, a young warrior bearing a magical sword. His only living companion in the game's desolate setting would be his horse, Agro. This time around, the girl in the story was already dead before it began, so Wander's quest was not to protect her but to resurrect her. He would attempt this by striking a bargain with a disembodied entity, which would instruct him to slay sixteen colossi spread across the land. That was about all that the player would be told, and then it was off to hunt these behemoths.

Although it contained much more dialogue and also included a traditional heads-up display for gameplay purposes, Shadow of the Colossus was even more minimalist in its narrative than ICO. ICO told the player almost nothing about the characters or the setting, but, while the dreamlike world inspired many questions about the backstory, the action and events within the game were not too hard to follow, and the journey was largely self-contained. Ico and Yorda's partnership was one born out of immediacy. Perhaps they had lives before their meeting in the game, but the pressing concern that they shared, which the player also shared throughout the adventure, was to escape the castle that held them both prisoner.

In Shadow of the Colossus, the player and Wander were clearly not on the same page. For Wander, this was a deeply personal quest, but he would disclose little of what he knew to the player. As a result, the game would not grip the player as tightly, as instead of identifying with Ico, I began initially unable to empathize with Wander's circumstances, and consequently I felt a little lost while having to share in his arbitrarily herculean trials. Nor would there be any developments along the way within the game to really alter the narrative from those beginnings; Wander was basically just repeating the same task over and over, and although there were obviously a finite number of colossi to conquer, there was not much besides the decreasing number itself to indicate a progression. Most likely that was why the developers chose to include some tedious exposition at the beginning of the game. Like the voiceover narration in the theatrical cut of Blade Runner, this text did not feel very native to the whole of the work, which was so deliberately spare in its story, but it may have been necessary because otherwise players would never have had any idea what was happening.


Unlike ICO, which proceeded continuously along a linear path, Shadow of the Colossus was structured almost like an open-world game, although its massive environment offered no quests to undertake, no enemies to slay, other than the sixteen colossi. After every battle, Wander would restart back at the central structure, and his magical sword would emit a beam of light to direct him to his next foe. The sword drew only a straight path, however, offering no guidance as to what turns to take en route, and the crudely drawn in-game map was almost no help. The farther away and more hidden in twisted geography the destination was, the more tiring and aimless a journey could begin to feel. Frankly, this was one of my biggest complaints with the design of the game, as I wasted too many hours just trying to find the next fight. But at its most effective, the design gave the player time to pause and reflect as Agro carried Wander across the expanse.

As in ICO, the ruined yet still magnificent architecture littering the landscape would inspire questions about the world. More than that, while wandering to the next destination, the lengthy breaks between battles would provide time enough to wonder about Wander and his quest. In Gungrave, this was the sort of mandatory interlude that would give way to a revelatory flashback. In lieu of any such cut scenes in Shadow of the Colossus, it was my mind that wandered to consider theories for the backstory. What would motivate a man, armed with almost nothing, to scale these living mountains? This was not about saving the world, or protecting yourself or anyone else, or even pursuing revenge. The colossi were terrifying, but they were not terrorizing the land; it was Wander who would actively seek them out to pick a fight. Why? Of course it was to resurrect the girl, but what was she to him anyway? The game would not tell the player much, so the question eventually turned inward as I asked myself, what would I do it for?

The trial-and-error mechanics of many video games could be reduced to sequences of simple questions, but when I arrived at this one, what astonished me was the realization that I had never asked myself that question before. Other objective-based games would tell me my motivation, and even if it was silly or stupid, I would go along with it. This was clearly a game that needed a motivation but did not supply it, asking instead that the player find one by looking within. So the question became, not what the girl was to Wander, but what she might represent to me. A player who could provide an answer to justify the suicidal mission would quite likely find Wander suddenly a character easier to empathize with and more human than any of the nobler heroes in other games.


Shadow of the Colossus may have been pitched as a game composed only of boss battles, but the battles actually played out as puzzles not altogether unlike those that made up most of ICO. The challenge was never in dodging an enemy's attacks and landing your own, but in figuring out how to get on top of the towering colossus. Once you figured out the tricks, the actual sword action was usually very simple, as you would just stab their weak points until they fell. Seemingly testing your wits and resourcefulness, rather than your manual skill, the best of these were probably the most rewarding boss fights I'd ever experienced.

The problem was that many of the puzzles were highly unintuitive. ICO's puzzles also followed some peculiar logic that drew less from common sense and more from a player's video game experience--blocks are to be pushed, levers pulled, and bombs exploded--but at least both the tools' basic functions and the eventual objective would always be clear, and the fine challenge would be usually in how to properly order or assemble the pieces. At its heart, Shadow of the Colossus relied on even more arcane game logic--if it glows, whack it, or if anything seems otherwise conspicuous, it is probably the key to it all, even if you have no idea why. Thus would I find myself standing on a brown disc in the middle of a dirt field, waiting for something to happen, all the while having no idea what the actual plan was until after the result came to pass. Ueda and his team must have even realized at some point that it was just too esoteric; whereas ICO laid the pieces on the floor and left it to the player's imagination to put them together, Shadow of the Colossus would throw out clues in the form of text messages that would pop up whenever the game sensed that the player was just not getting it. These would range from enigmatic ("The armor it wears seems brittle...") to patronizing ("Grab on to the colossus's tail..."), but, much as the opening exposition seemed a concession to help ground players in a story that left them little to latch onto, these messages were basically an admission that the puzzles were not as elegantly constructed as they ideally might have been for an organic experience.

The puzzle-battles could be frustrating in that way, but the game was more downright infuriating in others. Shadow of the Colossus had many technical glitches that were forgivable because it clearly pushed the PS2 hardware harder than any other game, but it also suffered from more serious shortcomings.

As great an enemy as any of the colossi, the camera would almost always be inadequate to contain all necessary information. Because many of the colossi were so huge that, at close range, they took up most of the frame, it was very difficult to maneuver around them to an advantageous position on the ground. It was simply impossible for the camera to capture both what you were running from and where you were running to, so quite often you would be working with humongous blind spots. A pulled-back camera would have been easier to use, but Ueda and his team must have chosen the closer angle for dramatic effect. All things considered, that probably was the right decision for the sensations they wanted to excite, but sometimes the camera would also just wander for no reason during platforming sections. The recurring example would have me hanging from a ledge, needing to jump off and grab onto an opposing ledge, but, because Shadow of the Colossus employed camera-relative controls, as opposed to an absolute character-relative scheme a la Resident Evil, an unexpected change in camera angle would suddenly alter my jumping angle and cause me to miss my target.

I was also foiled often by the loose controls and physics, which were carried over almost exactly from ICO. Like Ico, Wander moved with very jerky motions, operated with delayed response to button inputs, and could only swim very slowly. But the most annoying thing was that, if he was knocked to the ground, it would take him forever to get back up. And instead of trying to make off with Yorda, the enemies in this game would hang around to target you some more. There was one colossus in particular that was not shy about exploiting this prolonged rising period, and it would repeatedly attack me just as I was getting up, leaving me no chance to do anything about it, until finally I ran out of health and had to start over. That was the sort of cheap that would break me out of the experience and leave me seriously wondering if whatever I was fighting for was worth it.

I suppose I should also discuss the horse mechanics. In Shadow of the Colossus, when you mounted Agro, you did not actually directly control the horse, but rather you continued to control Wander, who attempted to control Agro. There were buttons for acceleration and steering, but these were more like suggestions to the AI Agro, who, while never disobedient, could come to a screeching halt if, for example, you leaned too heavily on the stick to make a turn at high speed. The horse was not useful for much other than getting across the map, and its idiosyncrasies were more bothersome than endearing. It was surprisingly effective in select battles, however, where you could largely let it steer itself while you focused on aiming your bow and arrow.


Back to the game's virtues, the same camera that was so problematic when Wander was on the ground became central to the experience once you managed to get on top of the colossus. As it writhed about to shake you off, and you gripped the R1 button to hang on, just as Wander clutched for dear life to the hairs on the beast's back, the wild swings of the camera to track the violent motions of the living creature that had become the stage itself, along with music that transitioned deftly from ominous to triumphant, and even the game's use of the controller's vibration feature, combined to produce a thrill beyond any before felt in gaming. There was a rarely achieved sense of weight to the action, as the world shook and Wander dangled from one arm, and you realized that this Goliath was resisting just as hard as you had fought to get on it, and whoever survived now depended on who was more determined to defy the other. Then, in that moment when it could shake no more, and you could feel its life as though it were a tangible object in your hands, the feeling of victory was almost godlike. If a player drew nothing else from the experience, this sensation alone made it worth playing Shadow of the Colossus.

ICO was a flawed masterpiece. Shadow of the Colossus, in addition to inheriting most of its predecessor's blemishes, also introduced a large number of new and more serious problems. But there are those exemplary titles that approach perfection in their command of established mechanics, and then there are those that shatter expectations by creating entirely new experiences, and those latter are no less masterpieces despite the roughness that comes with the uncharted. It did not matter ultimately that Shadow of the Colossus did not succeed in all technical aspects, because it showed me things I'd never seen before. The case could certainly be made for it being the PS2's best game.

The Essentials #49: Gradius V

Konami has always been one of the biggest and best-loved of the Japanese third parties, but in recent years it has begun to feel more and more like just the Metal Gear publisher. If you're not a fan of soccer, Japanese rhythm games, or Lost in Blue, then the Konami catalog has been a pretty thin one thus far this generation. Castlevania has remained fairly prolific, but mostly in a niche handheld capacity. The increasingly mediocre Silent Hill series has been handed over to Western developers (and Castlevania may be headed in the same direction). Suikoden is in a limbo, with no clear direction nor identity anymore. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles license now goes to waste in Ubisoft's hands, but it was already declining at Konami. What about Konami's other classic franchises--Gradius, Contra, Goemon? Well, they've been struggling as part-timers ever since gaming moved to 3-D.

In the cases of Contra and especially Gradius, they are a tough sell now because, even though these were successful games in the 8-bit days, the experiences were inextricably tied to the 2-D form. The 2-D shoot 'em up may be (along with fighting games) the most perfect design in video games. That is not to say that the shoot 'em up is the greatest genre in gaming, but only that no other genre is so completely invested in its specific gameplay. Even in the case of a classic 2-D platformer such as Super Mario Bros., it was not truly the mechanics that drew people in, but rather the high concept appeal of running and jumping in a virtual space. The game had to work well to serve that idea, but the concept was broad enough that the mechanics could have gone in any number of different directions while retaining the same essence. Thus was Super Mario 64 able to maintain the Mario feel while adding one whole dimension to play in. In the case of the shoot 'em up, not only has there never been a successful 3-D take, but there isn't any modern genre that even really approximates the experience of playing a shoot 'em up. The fast pace and constant progression are what define the experience, and no 3-D perspective could possibly facilitate the simultaneous shooting and dodging at a high speed. But just because it could not go into 3-D did not mean that the genre came to a dead end. Otherwise, Konami could not have come out with Gradius V, a high-water mark for the genre, released two generations into the 3-D era.

Released in 2004 for the Sony PlayStation 2, Gradius V was developed by Treasure, which actually began as a team of former Konami employees who had worked on the Contra series. Treasure's Ikaruga was, in my opinion, the greatest vertically scrolling 2-D shoot 'em up ever designed. Likewise, Gradius V was quite possibly the finest horizontal shooter of all time.


The difference between vertical and horizontal may sound minor, but they have evolved into separate categories within the shoot 'em up genre, albeit some of the distinctions have always seemed arbitrary to me. Vertical shooters operate from an overhead perspective, so unless the stage is set in outer space, the background would be the actual ground. They may have obstacles set along the left and right walls, or even in the center of the screen, but they tend to focus the player's attention more on enemy formations and weaving through bullet hells. In the side-scrolling horizontal shooters, there can be both a floor and a ceiling, allowing for much spelunking in enclosed environments. They can often be platformer-esque in their demands on the player's ability to navigate the geometry, apart from any shooting. I personally greatly prefer the action in the vertical games, but I'll concede that, on average, horizontal shooters tend to feature more thoughtful and diverse level layouts. In great examples such as Gradius V, the stages themselves can seem as alive and hostile as any enemies.

Indeed, one level in Gradius V actually confronted the player with an organic wall with no clear path through or around. Rather, you would have to blast your own way through the rapidly regenerating stage. Another instant classic had players flying through an asteroid field. So dense was the distribution of asteroids that, again, the only way through was brute force, and the larger rocks would break up into smaller ones a la Asteroids. Even more hazardous was the green gas that filled a factory area. In this constantly tilting stage, the deadly clouds would spill from all directions, and the player would have to somehow erase it all before it could reach the ship. When you finally broke clear of that area, it would only be to end up in a stage that scrolled backwards, rendering your forward cannons useless.

The most memorable design, however, revolved around time travel. Near the beginning of stage two, your Vic Viper craft would come across a temporal anomaly, out of which would emerge another Vic Viper. In fact, it would be the exact same ship and pilot, only from the future, and for a brief section of that stage you would be able to fight alongside your own future self. Then in the final stage, you would naturally close the circle by becoming that future Vic Viper. Even though you would have seen it coming, it was still a great twist when you learned how and why it had to happen.

Although the plot may have included time travel, it would not have been correct to regard the game itself as a throwback. I've not been altogether impressed with recent nostalgia projects like Gradius ReBirth and Mega Man 9, or even Contra 4, which developer WayForward more or less acknowledged was a love letter to Contra III from a team of fans who grew up loving that game. While I do appreciate the challenge in attempting to authentically recreate the look and feel of a past era, I would have greater respect for a sequel that attempted to push a series forward. The aforementioned were projects motivated by a reverence for the past, but I think a true sequel must rather look to the future. Otherwise, the best you can do would only be as good as what your predecessors already achieved years ago. It is both lazy and arrogant to suppose that there can be nowhere else to go, nothing else to try. The whole "ReBirth" designation implies that 2-D gaming died some ways back, but the only limits to 2-D remain the ones that developers would impose on themselves in this manner. I applaud Treasure, as a developer that has never stopped making 2-D games, for letting its work alone make the case that 2-D has never died.


That said, Gradius V was still essentially a Gradius title, with plenty to please true fans of the series. The signature of Gradius was always the power-up meter that allowed players to decide in what ways to enhance their crafts--whether to increase ship speed, add missiles, upgrade cannons to lasers, etc. The most notable power-up was the "Option" or "Multiple" power, which outfitted the Vic Viper with up to four satellite guns that fired along with the player.

Gradius V evolved the mechanic by including a formation command that allowed the player to adjust the arrangement of the Options. The most powerful configuration was the "Direction" command, which allowed you to aim the Options in any one direction. This was a single-stick game, so you would have to hold down R1 to switch from moving your ship to directing your Options. It took a bit of manual skill, but, once grasped, it was a revolutionary addition to the Vic Viper's arsenal. As in just about every horizontal shooter ever, your main cannon could only fire to the right. The Direction ability, however, now let you cover angles never before possible, allowing you to go after enemies that you might have had to sweat out before because you could not hit them. Almost nothing was out of your reach so long as you had those Options. If you so fancied, you could even swing your laser beam around as though it were a sword.

Even so, the game was still brutally hard. The first stage was very simple, but the difficulty ramped up sharply from there. Like nearly all shoot 'em ups, it required more than just good reflexes. The game really demanded that you constantly replay stages in order to memorize the patterns and layouts. Then, even if you did know a stage, it would take only a single lapse in concentration to ruin your day, since the loss of a ship would mean also the loss of all upgrades earned for that ship. You could argue the case that such punitive design was archaic, but the experience would have lasted less than an hour had you been able to play straight through in one session. That is never the true experience of playing a good shoot 'em up. It is not a movie to be digested in one evening. It is an active and ongoing endeavor, to be conquered through study and practiced skill. Mind you, this approach will not suit every player or every game. I personally would never have put in the time to beat this impossibly difficult game, had it not been for the same encouraging continue system seen in Ikaruga, which awarded you an extra continue every hour just for sticking with it, so that eventually even the most hopeless player would get to see the end credits. Then, even after beating the game, players were encouraged to experiment with several unlocked weapons, which presumably were left out of the first playthrough because they did not mesh so well with the overall design of the game.

In the meantime, the game was made, not really easier, but marginally less demoralizing by the inclusions of a two-player cooperative mode, immediate respawns, and the ability to retain Options after losing a ship. The only upgrades that would not disappear along with a lost life, the Options would linger on the stage for the player to reclaim upon respawning. Since the default specs left the Vic Viper pitifully underequipped for the later stages, these floating balls would become your only lifelines, and I remember many a frantic moment in my co-op games, when my partner or I would have to make a daring plunge to scoop up someone's dropped Options before they scrolled off the screen.

Exceeding all previous installments, Gradius V gave genre fans something to truly cheer about. Moreoever, Treasure once again proved, not only that they were the masters of 2-D action, but that a great 2-D game was a great game, period. I'm not a hardcore shoot 'em up player, but my hours with Gradius V were some of the best I had with the PS2.

Mistakes Were Made

Previously:

"The Life Vol.2" in NBA 07, a late PS2 release, was much shorter, and the title defense story is never as exciting as the rise up. But the sequel did add an interesting twist by having players alternating between the parallel seasons of The Kid and his nemesis from the first game, "Big W." The rivalry comes to a head in a scenario that pits the two protagonists against one another in a mid-season game. The player plays the first half as The Kid, then switches to Big W to finish things off. The actual execution is kind of disastrous, since players basically end up kicking their own asses, but I know of no other game in any genre that allows players to experience consecutive phases of a single contest from opposing angles.

I have a confession to make: I was inadvertently kind of directly responsible for the disaster that was that episode of "The Life Vol. 2."

To begin with, let me describe how the scenario originally played out, before I meddled with it.

(Note: Although I have a copy of NBA 07, I don't have any save data allowing me to access these stages. After playing it through hundreds of times as a tester, I have no intention of playing it again on my own time. Therefore I am describing the following from memory alone. The details may not be exactly accurate, but the basic idea should hopefully come across fine.)

This showdown between The Kid and Big W actually spanned four consecutive stages. Each episode corresponded to one quarter of the same single NBA game, but the player could save and stop after each, just as with any other self-contained stages.

The first two quarters had you playing as The Kid's team. The first, starting from tip-off, was fairly straightforward. A player skilled enough to have made it that far into the story mode should have been able to meet all of the mission's required statistical goals with time to spare, at which point they would probably just run up the score, draining three-pointers to pass the time against the hopeless AI. The second stage was more of the same.

For the last two stages, the player would switch over to the opposite team to finish the game. The third was a one-play scenario that began players at the final seconds of the third quarter. The fourth was nearly a full quarter (Note: "The Life" ran on five-minute quarters) that required the player, as Big W's team, to win the game by at least six points, in addition to fulfilling other goals.

The issue that I originally observed was that there was no statistical continuity across stages, even though they were all the same game. In other words, even if, at the end of the first quarter, I was leading 50-2, the second stage would begin with a preset score that was closer to 21-23 (again, I don't remember the exact numbers). The minor issue did not detract from the playability, but it clearly made no sense and was therefore a bug.

I submitted a report on it, which was all I could do. Indeed, one of the more frustratingly unfounded accusations that reviewers often make is that a buggy game must not have been thoroughly tested. The reality is that testers can only find and document the bugs. It's up to the programmers how to fix them, or to the producers whether to even bother. In the case of this minor NBA 07 issue, they did address it, but the fix ended up more problematic by far than the original bug.

In the finished version of the game, the score did carry over from the first stage to the second, the second to the third, and the third to the fourth. But remember how I mentioned that the first two scenarios left the player ample time to establish a huge lead with The Kid? Well, now that huge lead carried over to the third stage, and in the fourth it became the unknowingly self-inflicted deficit that the player would have to overcome in order to win as Big W.

Theoretically, this could be a truly heinous, game-stopping defect. If the player had played their absolute best during the first two stages, then the fourth quarter would have been more than just a surprising challenge; the game would have become impossible, because stage four would have required them to be six points better than their best, in about half the time.

In practice, it was a major enough issue that the episode was specifically described in Aaron Thomas's even-handed review for GameSpot:

By far the biggest problem, and the only one likely to keep you from seeing the story all the way through, is the uneven difficulty. Some challenges are quick and a piece of cake, while others are lengthy and involve multiple challenging goals. One in particular gives you 4:51 to complete four dynamic goals, make 10 shots with Big W, and limit the opposing small forward to two field goals. You also have to win the game by at least six points, which means you'll need to outscore the other team by 18 points in that time span. Some challenges ask you if you want to temporarily drop down to easy if you fail repeatedly, but after failing over and over for 30 minutes in the case above, the game never offered any sort of mercy.

There was no scenario in NBA 07 that explicitly required the player to come back from a twelve-point deficit to then win by six. It's apparent that Thomas did not know know why he started that stage so far behind. Therein lay the true deviousness of it all. Unless the player were paying the same careful attention to statistical continuity as I had as a tester, chances were that they would never realize that they were burying themselves in those first two stages as The Kid. Because each of the four quarters was its own short scenario, because most scenarios were self-contained with predetermined scores to work from, and because most were easy enough that players hardly had to keep track of team scores, the average player would not have been conditioned to even consider that they had done this to themselves. They would have just thought, as Thomas did, that it was a particularly unreasonable mission.

Since a tester's work is ordinarily the stuff that you don't see when playing a finished title, I have to admit it was oddly gratifying to have something I was responsible for, albeit inadvertently and not proudly, mentioned so specifically in a published review. But this was probably a case where I would have done my job better by keeping quiet, where playability would have been better served by suspending logic. Of course, even if I hadn't pointed it out, I'm sure some young go-getter colleague would have noticed it eventually.

Furthermore, in my defense, there was actually one more bug contributing to the nightmare in the "fixed" game, which, had it been addressed, might have solved everything. Astute readers may already have spotted it.

Remember that the third stage actually only covers the final play of the third quarter. Yet the score at the beginning of the third stage is the exact score carried over from the end of stage two. In other words, neither team scores a single basket during the third quarter, up until the final play, which is the only part that the player plays. Even if both teams were putting up the most tenacious defense and deficient offense of all time, that's nearly a statistical impossibility. Yes, I wrote up this bug too, but, alas, there would be no fix this time.

The proper fix should have carried over the score from stage one to stage two, but then taken advantage of the elapsed "missing" time in the third quarter to balance things out in advance for the fourth stage. The programmers should have set it to automatically add twenty points to The Kid's score while boosting Big W's to, say, six points behind whatever that would be. So if the second quarter had ended with The Kid leading 86-12, the third stage would have begun at 106-100. Would it have been reasonable for Big W's team to have scored 88 points in under five minutes? No, but I don't think even I would have submitted that one as a bug.