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I have been hearing for years that The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is one of the finest JRPGs to be released in recent years. As a huge RPG fan, this high praise obviously piqued my interest, and despite never giving the Sony PSP the attention it deserved, it put Trails in the Sky on my radar as a game I should play. With the recent release of Trails in the Sky the 3rd in North America bringing the series to my attention once again, I have finally played the initial entry of this prestigious series!
Continue reading The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
Extermination
It's October again! And that means horror gaming! While noiseredux is really going above and beyond the call of duty with his excellent blog, with an ongoing featurette for this month covering the console and handheld world of horror, I figured I'd offer him some backup with another entry on that most terrifying of genres.
Extermination has the honor of being the first survival horror title released for Sony's PlayStation 2, beating out Silent Hill 2 by several months and Resident Evil: Code Veronica's PS2 port by just two weeks with its March 8, 2001, NTSC-J release date. The title was published by Sony Computer Entertainment and created by a team of developers that included several creators of Resident Evil. Reminiscent of the genre's flagship title and games like Carrier, the game has also drawn comparisons to the films The Thing and The Abyss.
[img width=400 height=300]http://www.vandal.net/previews/images/psx2/extermination/imagen6.jpg[/img]
The story revolves around Dennis Riley, a Sergeant in the USMC Special Forces Recon. Riley is one of a team being sent to infiltrate Fort Stewart, a secret research base in the Antarctic which formerly housed some of the United States' nuclear stockpile. With the end of the Cold War, the installation was converted into a research & development facility. As Riley's team approaches Fort Stewart via airplane in an ice storm, they receive a distress call from the base requesting it be the target of an air strike. But before they can respond, the plane malfunctions and crash lands, spreading the marines across the base. Riley and his combat buddy Roger Grigman are then forced to sneak into the base and meet up with the team.
While the Marines in the game come off as ballsy bad asses, the dialogue ranges from decent to absolutely terrible, and the quality of voice acting fluctuates throughout. Riley's voice is particularly bad, and at times he sounds like a whiny high school kid. The subplot involving his dead friend Andrew and Andrew's girlfriend Cindy also feels tacked on and unnecessary.
Riley must navigate the facility, facing strange mutations and living water puddles with his modular SPR-4, or Special Purpose Rifle. That weapon represents one of the most interesting elements of the entire game: instead of finding new guns to use, the player instead switches out attachments on the fly, so your weapon can always suit your situation if you have the parts. And those parts range from a sniper scope to an underslung grenade launcher, a forward grip with flashlight, enemy detector, night vision scope, and much more. The player can also switch between single round and 3-round-burst firing modes.
The ammunition system is also innovative: an infinite amount of ammo is found in dispensers through the facility, but only a limited amount can be carried, based on the number of magazines Riley happens to be carrying. If you want more ammunition, find more magazines scattered throughout the base. But the dispensers will not give ammunition for the variety of modular weapons to attach to the SPR-4, so once you're out of grenade rounds, shotgun shells, napalm juice, or whatever else you're using, you're out.
[img width=582 height=449]http://image.gamespotcdn.net/gamespot/images/screenshots/e3_2001/vg/extermination/extermination_790screen001.jpg[/img]
Adding to the action emphasis, the game features the use of a laser target, four years before Resident Evil 4 would implement its usage. And while The Ring: Terror's Realm predates Extermination with its laser sight by slightly over six months, Extermination offers far better control. Players can aim in third person perspective, moving the pointer around until it passes over a creature, generally auto-aiming at that target. But those that want to go for more precise shots can also enter a first person perspective which doesn't feature auto-aim. Unfortunately Riley can't move when his weapon is raised, and the sensitivity is too low to make it a truly effective tactic in close corners, but it's a great means for popping enemies from far off. The game also features two knife buttons, resulting in a slash or a stab, which don't require the weapon to be raised.
While this sounds like a good design on paper, it does suffer from some serious flaws. First, enemies are bullet sponges. Though that's not so bad considering there's ultimately infinite ammunition, dispensers are few and far between. To make up for this, enemies have glowing weak points that can be hit to drop them faster. Unfortunately they were designed to be hard to hit, and the third-person auto-aim feature does not automatically target them, making it difficult to kill some of the tougher varieties of mutants at close range. Aiming with the knife can also be difficult, so slashing minor enemies at one's heels can be a pain.
The camera also doesn't help as it can't be effectively manipulated, so the player can't swing it quickly to look around the corner or see an enemy right behind him. Instead, the player must turn and then either raise their weapon or press a button to center the camera behind them, wasting precious time.
[img width=582 height=449]http://image.gamespotcdn.net/gamespot/images/screenshots/e3_2001/vg/extermination/extermination_790screen004.jpg[/img]
The game's health system is also interesting, though cumbersome. The player has health, based on a 100-point numerical value, and an Infection rate. Every time an enemy hits the player, their infection goes up while their health goes down. And most healing items will not lower one's infection rate. Instead, the player must use vaccines to bring down infection, and the field-use variety aren't very common. If Riley's infection rate hits 100%, his max health decreases from 100 to 60, he takes damage over time, his character model changes, he starts taking damage from sources that previously didn't hurt him, and he can only be cured by using the MTS vaccine, which can only be administered at MTS beds...so if you wander too far from one and become infected, you won't make it back.
Extermination also features an unusual save system, revolving around battery power. Forget the ink ribbons of yesteryear, save stations now require batteries, which can be recharged at special power stations similar to the ammunition dispenser. And larger batteries will be found throughout the facility, so don't sweat saving. It's also a good idea to save often, as the game doesn't allow continues. Die, and you must reload.
[img width=640 height=480]http://ps2media.ign.com/media/previews/image/extermination/extermination05_640w.jpg[/img]
Extermination is a decent game with some solid ideas that never really rises to greatness. Horror fans who enjoy such titles as Resident Evil, Carrier, Dino Crisis, The Thing, or non-horror games like Syphon Filter and Metal Gear Solid will likely appreciate this game more than those looking for experiences similar to Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, or Haunting Ground. It's something I would recommend to players who have experience with the genre's big names and are looking for something more obscure. And while its ideas aren't always successful, they are interesting enough to warrant a look. Another nice perk is the game's low price tag: not including shipping, it can be found on eBay for as little as $2.
For those interested, here's the introduction to the game:
Thought that the Halloween month would be the perfect time to bring this topic up.
Gaming, like most entertainment media, is usually centered around conflict. Be it the two colors of Chess, mute crowbar wielding theoretical physicists against the oppressive Combine, or tetrominoes versus gravity, ours is a hobby always searching for good antagonists to toss against our Hiro Protagonist.
Now that our little Pongs and 2600s have grown up into PS3s and 360s and Grandpa has a Wii at the nursing home, the larger public conscious has honed in to the fact that us gamers have been shooting, stabbing, eviscerating, decapitating, exploding, maiming, impaling, jumping on, poking, and sticking our tongues out at a variety of things for decades. Our preference tends to go in waves; we've seen the loose Cold War allegories of space aliens, the patriotic duty to eradicate the Nazi regime, the ever present threat of technology turned bad in evil robots, the popular and topical terrorist scum, even the role reversal of revolutionary or anti-hero. With high-def digital representations of human faces to shoot/hit/punch/kiss replacing solid blocks of single color and a lot of imagination, our industry is now having to take greater care in literally choosing our targets for fighting.
EA's new Medal of Honor game recently came under fire for offering the ability to play as the Taliban against the U.S. military in the multiplayer element of the game, causing a name change to "Opposing Force." This is a pretty interesting development; while other games such as Counter Strike (released originally in 1995) allow you to specifically select 'terrorist' as the faction team to play on, in recent years our western mainstream media sensitivity has heightened so much that the U.S. military refused to sell the future Medal of Honor title at military bases. (As far as I could research, there was no such ban on Counter Strike or other similar games, past or current.)
Us gamers have mowed down countless men in uniform both online and off since before the days of Wolfenstein 3D, and while criticism of simulated violence is once again a hot political topic contested in court, the industry is always searching for the next perfect, generic, we-can-all-agree-to-kill-these-guys adversaries. Each classic set of virtual villainy has its baggage:
Space aliens can come in a wide variety of flavors, but often degenerate into cliched generic evil doers who have little connection to our reality and therefore become uninteresting. Or, they represent some human-themed agenda that reduces them to simply different people groups who are actually like us and we need to learn from (our generation can call this the 'Avatar Syndrome'. Our parents could have called it the 'Star Trek Dreck.')
The classic evil regime, such as rogue Russian militias, Nazis, terrorist factions, or demonic cults (or any combination!) can help with the overall 'obviously these are bad guys' mind frame, yet the recent push for realism in gaming demands that either this direction addresses our current world mentality in some fashion, or risks being dumbed down to nonsense or unattached silliness. The new Medal of Honor will likely fall somewhere in between these, as do the Call of Duty series.
With the ethical challenges opened by our rampant technology growth state, unfeeling robots and extermination-minded AIs are a ripe candidate for adversaries, even obvious given the very nature of our hobby. Yet while the meta-themes of humanity's own poor choices are often the real backbone of these narrative elements, the theme has waned in recent years because the very technology we would fear has become so comfortably entrenched into daily life. It becomes too much a stretch to wonder if our microwaves are really sentient machines planning world domination; more likely the burrito inside is the one with the sinister plot about to unfold.
Fantasy genres tend to give us good epic potential between worthwhile oppositions, but as with sci-fi, where there is an enormous potential for originality we are all too often given the same few characters, events, and battles repackaged with a different set of pointy ears, wings, or skin colors. The motivations behind our enemies are all too often either 'we didn't know you were actually doing this for the greater good' or 'wow, you're just an evil power-monger.'
I'm not griping about having to replay the same stories: we all know there's nothing new under, around, on top, or inside the Sun. Except Noby Noby Boy. But that becomes a particular challenge for game developers:
Who are we fighting, and why? Its a question most of us gamers have probably never really cared much about. Sure, we can get into a good story, maybe even invest in some of the characters, but more often than not the game simply has to point out that the other guy will shoot you if you don't shoot first. Most of the time we're fine with that. Some games are far more intriguing for making that mindless acceptance an introspective point to the game narrative (BioShock and the Metal Gear Series come to mind) but most games just except that gamers are more interested in the action in the conflict than the reasons for the conflict.
After all, it's just a game, right? Who cares?
Well, more and more people, in fact. Many of whom don't play games. It may have been fun to use good old Jack Thompson as a whipping boy, but now that his personal crusade has done about as much good for his cause as the actual Crusades, the vacuum created in his absence combined with the continuing mainstream acceptance of video games has brought our apathy of digital empathy to the limelight. Now gamers are being asked, as we blast away at the Locust Horde, slam sports cars off the road, and run over prostitutes in a stolen Hummer, what is the context behind our actions? And the common gamer answer of, "uh, I don't care, it's just a game!" is unlikely to hold up in the currently debated California bill that judges our industry's content as completely different than movies, music, and other media. An examination of the domino effect of that bill or the eleven other states that formally support it is way outside of the scope of this post, though I always welcome such discussions.
What piqued my thoughts on this actually stems from my gaming purchase last week. Without much thought about the related source material, I picked up Dead Rising 2 and Plants Vs. Zombies. It literally didn't cross my mind until I got home that I, a person who has absolutely no consistent enjoyment, fear, or real interest in zombies just bought two games in one day that featured said creatures as the antagonists.
You see, despite my absolute love of the Castlevania franchise and a few other 'horror' gaming staples, I've never really been a fan of werewolves, vampires, 'creatures of the night/darkness', or the undead. They just don't do anything for me; I have to overcome a certain mental apathy to them to enjoy the media containing them. Oh, there have been plenty of media featuring such things that I enjoy, but often that enjoyment is in spite of, or at least indifferent to them. The psychological underpinnings of a Silent Hill interest me far more than the camp-scare of a Fatal Frame, and I get much more out of the crisis survival piece of Left 4 Dead than the weird critters those survivors are pitted against. Which is why I'm beginning to theorize that zombies may be the perfect video game bad guy; if a person like me can have fun with pop culture's recent zombie fetish, it says a lot about their staying power.
And boy, is our pop culture going through a zombie phase. Resident Evil (films and games), 28 Days/Weeks Later, Zombieland, Romero's recent set, Planet Terror, Colin, Fido, Shaun of the Dead, World War Z, Monster Island/Nation/Planet, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising/2, Plants Vs Zombies, the list just goes on. We now have fast zombies, shambling zombies, biting zombies, mutating zombies, Nazi zombies, Hazmat zombies, zombonis, zombie meals with fries and a diet Coke. We're so obsessed with zombies we shoehorn them into completely different properties like Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption. We even put them into space and call them strange names like 'the Flood.'
They seem like the perfect enemies, don't they? No nationality to object to, no reason to sympathize, no moral issue with destroying what's already dead to begin with. That last attitude is a far more recent development; whereas the dead and things related to them were once treated with a great deal of dignity, respect, and cultural or religious sensitivity, our modern era has come to view corpses as biological shells and meat bags we medically treat to last for three quarters of a century or so. Upon release in 1968, Romero's Night of the Living Dead was unnerving and shocking, and still remembered today as a landmark horror film that pushed past taboo. Nowadays, we watch open heart surgery on daytime television that includes a thoughtful text blurb about content that 'some may find objectionable', and news affiliates paste up graphic crime and accident footage that 'may offend some viewers.' I wonder sometimes if the Roman Coliseum had the same warning billboards over the entrance, but I digress. :p
The cultural acceptance of the zombie concept is no more obvious than my recent purchases, Dead Rising 2 and Plants Vs. Zombies. Many gamers are somewhat familiar with these games: one of these allows the player to use everything from projectile weapons to lawnmowers to crush, burn, freeze, dismember, and decapitate a zombie horde. The other is Dead Rising 2. And while the latter is certainly far more gory, graphic, and easily offensive, Plants Vs. Zombies makes the onscreen action of similar events so goofy, sanitized, and endearing that it's hard to remember both games contain themes of cannibalism, heads popping off, limbs falling off, and eyeballs hanging loosely. It's just so darn cute.
The kicker? Plants Vs Zombies is rated E10. And I haven't heard anything about Congress putting publisher PopCap up on the stand to defend itself. (Not to imply I think they should.) If the cartoony presentation of Plants Vs Zombies were replaced with a different art style and the trademark humor replaced with a dour presentation, the game couldn't get by on that rating even if it remained relatively bloodless. Compare that with Dead Rising 2, whose M rating would be guaranteed just due to the violent content alone. Please don't think I'm picking on either of these excellent games, just pointing out that zombies are so ubiquitously accepted in our culture that these extremes exist in the first place. Parents flipped at the Atari 2600 VCS version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, yet now mommy giggles at the crunchy eating sounds (complete with screaming) coming from the house in PvZ.
So for now, it appears that zombies have earned their rightful place as our bad guys of choice, standing in line with Nazis, Russians, Space Aliens, and Congress. They can be ultra gory to satiate bloodlust or be cleaned up and painted in day-glo colors to hook housewives into spending countless hours on the family PC. We have our safe villain of the day, until the next wave crashes over and we forget why zombies were so big before, because obviously Corporations were our worst enemy all along.
Me? I'm just glad we're past vampires as the 'in' thing. Oh, hello new Castlevania...
 Remember, this week is GDC and the main show starts today. Well, here's the frist big news of the show: Nintendo has revealed the release dates for both Wii Fit and WiiWare, and oddly enough they are within a week of each other!
WiiWare hits first on May 12. The games that will launch on the service are not known yet, but Nintendo stated in their press release that some of the early WiiWare games would be Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King, LostWinds, and an episodic game series from one of my favorite developers, Telltale Games. Other known WiiWare games are Bomberman, Gravitronix, Pokemon Farm, Dr. Mario & Bacteria Extermination, IGF Grand Prize finalist World of Goo, and the amazing looking Eternity's Child. Pricing or size on the games are unknown, but I imagine we'll hear more as launch gets closer.
Nintendo has also announced a May 19 release date (just six days after WiiWare!) for their bathroom scale/game combo, Wii Fit. If you've been living under a rock for the past year and don't know what Wii Fit is, it's basically trying to further the Wii's reputation as a fitness machine (and as a gimmicky minigame machine). Honestly, I don't care one bit about Wii Fit, so here's a link to Wikipedia's article on it.
I'm really excited for WiiWare as this could be the breakthrough that the Wii needs to appeal to me. What I really hope to see is indie developers dream up imaginative ways to use the Wiimote and make innovative games that Nintendo would never think of. Hopefully we'll see more of a indie-driven, innovative and creative environment on there rather than a bunch of existing franchises made for the service. It's looking to be a mix of both with estabilished franchises like Pokemon and Final Fantasy, but those games will be mixed with stuff like Eternity's Child. If we get more games that are like that, then the WiiWare games might possibly end up being better than the actual disc-based games. One can only hope, I guess.
Anyways, be sure to keep it on RFG for all the important GDC news.
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