Blood Will Tell: Tezuka Osamu's Dororo (2004, PS2)

Games rarely care about contextualization. Nothing breaks a sense of immersion like an off-screen voice screaming "Press 'A' to dodge!" before an imminent explosion in any of many games about dodging explosions. I have no problem with the well-purposed self-reflexivity of the Metal Gear Solid games. Metal Gear Solid 2's finale is as brilliant a post-modern exhibition of snake-eating-its-own-tailness as Breakfast of Champions' ending. What I take issue with is "Press the analogue stick up to look up, Chief. Good. Now, look down. Good. Does that feel alright to you?"

Even before games could yell at players to look at their controllers, a more engraved form of immersion-breaking pervaded the gamescape: context-less character growth. "Leveling up." Learning skills arbitrarily. Progressive stat growth in RPGs represents the corresponding characters increase in strength and knowledge little by little, battle by battle. I get that. But what about killing his 128th Red Slime taught Lotto how to use Fire in the original Dragon Quest? He could not so much as summon a spark after Red Slime 127, but can conjure torrents of flame after 128?

Blood Will Tell is a game about a samurai whose body parts have been stolen by demons. It is one that incorporates the character's Flame-style epiphanies and sudden spikes in strength better than any I have seen since Final Fantasy IV. Contextualization is part of what made FFIV so memorable, and it's part of why BWT is still worth playing today in spite of its stage design problems.

When you defeat a major enemy in BWT, you reclaim an organ. Each organ comes with an increase in stats appropriate for that body part. An arm grants an increase in strength, for example. But what's more interesting is the accompanying ability. As a new arm replaces your robotic one, the way it handles a weapon changes entirely. New legs come with new dashing abilities. A new eye brings the game from its black-and-white beginnings into color. The esophagus brings with it the ability to speak--to issue quick commands to your sidekick character.

This contextualization gives every milestone and every boss significance. Fighting each major enemy, I thought "What body part will I reclaim and how will it change the game?" If Red Entertainment had the same capacity for ingenious contextualization as they did for level design, Blood Will Tell would have been a masterpiece. As is, it's a fun game that tantalizes in all the right ways.

Kururin Paradise (2002, Game Boy Advance)

I love all of the games I've posted about on Polygon Not Forgotten. I cannot say I love them all equally. If I had to choose just one to survive and the others to be eradicated from history, it would be Kururin Paradise.

Kururin Paradise is a game about moving a rotating stick through mazes, trying not to come into contact with the walls or obstacles. You use the directional pad to move the stick. You use the "A" button to speed up is movement along the map, "B" to slow it down," and "R" button to speed up its rotation along its own axis. This is the game I'd watch every other game in existence burn to save.

With a gameplay mechanic so basic, the only way Kururin Paradise could succeed is with flawless hit detection and ceaselessly inventive level design. It is by these that it does succeed. And on the topic of ceaselessness, the inexorability of the stick's clockwise rotation is the source of the game's tension. Corridors are typically not tall enough to accommodate a perfectly upright stick standing at 12:00 and 6:00. This means you area almost always on the verge of sustaining damage. One brush with a wall means your "Perfect" rating is gone. Three means game over.

Kururin Paradise, with its clean aesthetic, simple controls, and negligible production values, should be exactly the kind of game we see on cellphones. Its colors and characters look fresh out of a 2014 iPhone game, but its control and level design--that which cannot easily be copied--are strictly the domain of 2002 and Eighting, masters of rock-hard Japanese shooting games like Armed Police Batrider and whose employees would go on to found a little outfit called Cave. Yes, Mushihimesama and Dodon Pachi Cave. The same dedication to hit detection and difficulty that prevail in Kururin can be found in Cave's work of the same period. I just wish it could be found on my cellphone.

Highest Recommendation

Cubivore (2002, Gamecube)

 

Cubivore is the most unusual of all of the games Polygon Not Forgotten has so far addressed. That it came to the US at all, even during the salad days of quirky games, is a miracle and testament to the courage of Atlus, its US publisher. Its developer, Intelligent Systems, is better known for the Fire Emblem series without which we would not have the rocks-paper-scissors balance of contemporary turn-based strategy games. Cubivore innovated as well. Without it, we would not have Katamari Damacy or certainly not 2012's Playstation 3 cult hit Tokyo Jungle.

 

Cubivore is a game about adaptation. Your animal adapts to its environment, changing its attributes and conforming to what it kills and eats. Eating enough of a given animal means inheriting its legs or horns. Legs (and number of them) affect movement, essentially changing the rules of movement periodically as you defeat enemies. Horns affect attack speed, changing the rules of attacking. In addition to the animal, another entity is forced to adapt to changing environments: the player.

 

 

Cubivore never lets you get comfortable. What works against some enemies soon, diet-depending, will not work on others. Like in copycat Tokyo Jungle, the do-I or don't-I when it comes to eating an animal whose attributes you'd rather not inherit while low on hunger/health is a major source of tension. That the emphasis is on the environment and the obstacles it presents is evident in the Japanese title for the game, which is not Cubivore (emphasis on character and the act of fighting and eating), but Animal Forest. The forest gets top billing because the environment--not the character--is this game's star.

 

This willingness to subvert character emphasis was at its height in the '90s and '00s. The slew of Sim City and Rollercoaster Tycoon games symptomize this willingness to defer from a central avatar. Does the shift back to character-driven games, or perhaps even the switch in from Animal Forest to Cubivore say something about American egotism? I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that we've not seen anything like this part beat-em-up, part virtual pet, part dungeon crawler since.

Vib Ribbon (1999, Playstation)



No discussion of obscure or overlooked Playstation games should be without mention of Masaya Matsuura's Parappa and Um Jammer Lammy follow-up, Vib Ribbon. It's Matsuura's best game. Far from it, in fact. But it is the most daring and confident, two virtues that Polygon Not Forgotten holds in particularly high esteem.

Like Jammer and Parappa before it, Vib Ribbon is a rhythm game in which the player responds to audial and visual signals with a combination of button presses. Rockband and beatmania fit this description as well, but they're not quite the same. The Masaya games revolve around a character, Vibri in Vib Ribbon's case. Rockband and beatmania revolve around an interface. Their levels are like Excel spreadsheets. Matsuura's are like...well, levels--moving a charming character through a system of obstacles. I like to call them "Mascot Rhythm Games" to differentiate them from the Rockband-type games.

This particular Mascot Rhythm Game is special in its incorporation of custom soundtracks to which it designed levels all the way back in 1999. By replacing the Vib disc with a music CD, the game would throw pitfalls, spikes, and loops at Vibri to the bass, drums, and lyrics of whatever you felt like listening to at the time. It bears emphasizing that the Playstation did not have a hard drive. Its RAM was extremely limited even at the time of its release, which is why 2D games were unfailingly better on the more RAM-intensive Sega Saturn. If the Playstation was to hold all of Vib Ribbon's graphics and engine in its limited RAM while playing a music CD, those graphics and that engine had to be extremely simple. And like the restrictions of meter forcing a poet to produce his best lines, the PS1's RAM restriction squeezed an astonishingly inventive minimalist aesthetic out of Matsuura and company.

Vib Ribbon's call-and-response style of rhythm gaming may be outmoded, but its aesthetic is something that will always be special.

Highest Recommendation

Phantom Crash (2002, XBOX)

The cellphonization of gaming is, to many, anathema. Polygon Not Forgotten has condemned oversimplification throughout the blog. But simplifying is not a bad thing per se. Cutting the fat can, when there is fat to be cut, be the right design choice.

Before Phantom Crash, every mech combat game fell somewhere on a scale between "Boring" and "Utterly Impenetrable" for me. The action in Mech Warrior and Armored Core was alluring, but sparse, occurring between long intervals of menu-sifting, micromanaging, and trudging across empty game space. Phantom Crash cellphonized the class mech combat games, and that's not a bad thing. It made customization brief and engaging, streamlined mech controls, did not permit dialogue to interrupt gameplay by quarantining it to wholly skippable segments between battles, and, most importantly, has no empty space. Its arenas are small and heavily populated. In a Phantom Crash battle, you are always shooting, shot, or hiding from the shooting by using your mech's camouflage (a visual effect that still impresses over ten years later).

My point is that simplifying a game can often mean distilling it--shrinking the intervals between battles in Mech Warrior and reducing Armored Core's controls to only the strictly necessary commands. Playing Phantom Crash is like playing the trailer for Armored Core--it's only The Good Parts. That it has a licensed soundtrack whose high mark is a stone-facedly unironic inclusion of The Kuricorder Quartet  shows how much fun Genki had making this game, which, I imagine, was the only thing more fun than playing it.

Highest Recommendation

Steambot Chronicles, cont.

Steambot Chronicles is no reskinned Grand Theft Auto.

The colorful aesthetic is deserving of mention, but it is often all that gets mentioned. Yes, it’s something of a miracle that Steambot is an anime sandbox game that avoids both anime and sandbox tropes, but it surprises in another department: combat. Inside this sprawling world is a mini-Street Fighter. To fight an opponent with ranged capability is to try patiently to get in on Dhalsim. To combat a Trot with a shield and melee weapon is to try to keep Zangief out. Both necessitate judicious dashing—useful for avoiding an attack, but venerable. The Trot and its weapons, snappy and responsive, could easily carry a leaner, more traditional arcade-style standard action game. The only downside to how wonderful the Trot combat feels is that it makes the game’s other available money-making options (pool, archaeology, music, etc.) tedious by comparison. 

Steambot Chronicles wants to be played and is sad when it’s not, but it’s a relationship that takes a little work. The map is nondescript, loading times are frequent, exploration is encumbered by the constant need for refueling, and the camera can be disobedient. Today’s hardware and advances would correct most of these. So why haven’t we seen anything like Steambot since 2006? It did have a few quiet sequels that were essentially jankier, glitchier versions of the PS2 game. The 2009 PSP game, Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament, actually had worse load times. The planned sequel was announced in 2006 and spent several years in development hell before being cancelled alongside other promising Irem titles following the 2011 tsunami. Irem has not shown interest in developing another game. No other developer has voiced interest in carrying the torch.

The most obvious reason is that Steambot sold very poorly and mass murderfests like Grand Theft Auto and Assassin’s Creed sell very well. A proper Steambot sequel or even a serviceable copycat would be a huge gamble on something without precedent for profitability, requiring a large budget and programmers from more disciplines than typical of an action game. The amount of manpower and money needed likely precludes the indie development crowd, the only adventurous faction of developers left. For now, anyway.

Steambot Chronicles (2006, PS2)

I have a hard time getting into sandbox games. They’re structurally overwhelming and often gruesome. I recently tried Sleeping Dogs on a recommendation (and because it was a recent Games With Gold giveaway) only to shut it off after a character had his ear cut off within the game’s first two minutes. What kind of a welcome is this? I have no idea who the ear-cutters or ear-cuttee are and no investment in the conflict.

 

A woman finds a young man injured and hungry. She takes him in and feeds him. The young man traverses territory occupied by power-hungry revolutionaries  to get medicine for the sick woman's mother. This is one of three opening Steambot Chronicles potentialities depending on the dialogue choices you make in the first minute or so. One of the sandbox genre's great advantages is its capacity for letting the player go through the story at his or her own pace. So why rush into ear-chopping?

 I’ve spent much of the past week as a professional gladiator, a musician, an archaeologist, and a pool shark. I’ve spent none of the last week severing ears. That's because Steambot Chronicles is the warmest, most welcoming sandbox game ever made. It’s one of the warmest, most welcoming games period.

Steambot succeeds in spite of not only its genre, but its aesthetic. It may look like a Tales of… game, but screaming, starry-eyed anime clichés are nowhere to be found. And this is the thing I love most about the game: its characters and world are delightfully boring. NPCs are bakers, farmers, and artists trying to get by. Vanilla, the main character, is just a polite guy finding his bearings in an unfamiliar town (unless you take him down the path of supreme assholery). The game’s central mechanic, the piloting and fighting of mechs called Trots, is elegantly woven into the world’s fabric—Trots are a part of everyday life. You’ll see them with plows attached plodding through fields and supporting cranes on shipping docks and waiting at stop signs. Steambot’s story isn’t one of Vanilla and his mech versus the world; it’s a story of Vanilla and his mech in the world. “If Hayao Miyazaki made a sandbox-style game, it would probably look a lot like this,” says Hardcore Gamer via the back of the box. “If Yasujiro Ozu made a Virtual On game” is more fitting.

Otostaz (2002, PS2)

Otostaz was the future of puzzle games we were promised. Otostaz lied to us.

A first-party budget game for the PS2, Otostaz is a simple puzzle game with an effervescent paper cut-out style and a sizzling soundtrack. Underneath its ebullient aesthetic surface is a simple grid-based puzzle game in which, without going into laboring detail, specific pieces placed within proximity of each other evolve into building pieces. Those new pieces, placed in proximity with others, evolve into bigger buildings. This can be repeated six times, the reward for which is a confetti-sprouting Space Needle-esque structure.

This kind of tile-based gameplay is perfectly suited for the touchscreen controls if iPads an cellphones. I would go as far as to say Otostaz was ahead of its time, but tried to make the best of the traditional controls to which it was limited. But instead of clever tile-based gameplay and confetti-shooting paper cutout Space Needles, the crown jewel of touchscreen puzzle gaming is a hackneyed Bejeweled clone with paywalls and procedurally-generated content.

P.N. 03 (2003, Gamecube)

Capcom was on fire in the early '00s. The Dreamcast allowed for nearly arcade-perfect ports of their late 2D masterpieces Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Street Fighter III: Third Strike, and Capcom vs. SNK 2 in 2001. These games were stunning to behold and to play. Third Strike is regarded by many fighting enthusiasts as the greatest fighting game of all time. It was a tournament staple from 2001-2012 or so, and still commands a huge following on online emulators like GGPO and XBOX Live.

But the release of the Gamecube, and XBOX coupled with the success of the PS2 squished the Dreamcast around 2003, 2D gaming with it. It was obvious that Capcom could no longer get by on 2D arcade ports and was forced to enter the 3D action gaming arena. They did so with flourish. In 2002, Mikami Shinji announced five games for the Gamecube, each promising the ingenuity of Capcom's late 2D fighters. Those games were Killer 7, directed by an up-and-coming Goichi Suda; Dead Phoenix, a lush Panzer Dragoon-style rail shooter; Viewtiful Joe, still one of the most visually compelling 2D action game; Resident Evil 4 of which nothing need be said; and P.N. 03, no doubt the least-recalled member of the "Capcom Five" aside from the ultimately cancelled Dead Phoenix.

History's snub of P.N. 03 isn't entirely unwarranted. Today, there are plenty of mechanically better third-person shooters to play, not the least of which is Resident Evil 4. Compelling gameplay is not the reason you should play P.N. 03 today. Play Sin & Punishment 2 for a similar game better in nearly every way. I say "nearly" because of the one department in which P.N. 03 still captivates: its aesthetic.

Mikami Shinji games unfailingly have great, distinguishing senses of atmosphere. Resident Evil's barren mansion halls were unlike anything that came before it. Devil May Cry's gothic castle, with its high ceilings and expansive corridors, still inspires agoraphobia. P.N. 03's atmosphere was designed using the same medium: emptiness and sterility. The bleach-white halls are redolent if 2001: A Space Odyssey's. Everything in the game is metal--everything except for the skin of Vanessa, the player avatar and one of the most unfairly overlooked protagonists of the PS2 era.

Its not just Vanessa's flesh that sets her apart from her bleak surroundings, but the way she moves. The games enemies are stiff, expressionless robots. Vanessa, constantly in motion, stands out among them. She cartwheels, and backflips with fluidity. She gyrates her hips when executing a special attack. When idling, she taps her feet to the beat of the background music. Shots are fired and enemies spawn to the beat of P.N. 03's music. Everything in the game seems to be able to hear it, but only Vanessa is in conversation with it--her gyrating and foot-tapping are her way of contributing back to the music, talking to it, and talking to you.

Highest Recommendation

Tecmo Classic Arcade: Tecmo Bowl (1987, 2005, Xbox)

I know this is cheating a little, but bear with me…

I’ve spent most of this blog mourning. I’ve lamented the lost arts of obstacle placement and locomotion and the developer psychology of player psychology and of caring. Now I write about a game where nobody cared about any of these things, least of all caring. And it’s a great game precisely because they didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong. I maintain that all first-person shooter developers should aspire to Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima’s mastery of enemy placement and to Compile’s inventiveness and re-inventiveness. But that’s not to say these are necessary ingredients to a great game. Happy accidents can and have happened. The move cancelling mechanic that defined Street Fighter II and, as a result, all 2D fighting games, was a glitch. In 2002, the discovery of another Street Fighter glitch, roll-canceling to give moves unintended invincibility, reinvigorated a stagnant Capcom vs. SNK 2 scene, turning CvS2 into an entirely new game. In 1987, a game of serendipitous accidents would be released in arcades. It would be buried by the legacy of its sequels and forgotten until its 2005 Tecmo Arcade Classics release. Then it would be forgotten again.

 

That game is Tecmo Bowl (1987). Not the NES Tecmo Bowl (1989), the original arcade game. Tecmo Bowl was a relative arcade success, but on the rare occasion when it finds its name in print today, is typically written off as an ugly stepping stone on the way to the greatness that is the worshipped Tecmo Super Bowl series. But do not be seduced by Tecmo '89's licensed NFL teams or selectable plays or differentiable players or, uh, field goals, because Tecmo '87 holds up to competitive player better than any of the console Bowls because of its free-wheelin’, no-playbook-havin’ spontaneity--not being tethered to a scripted play kindles creativity. It’s also more balanced than '89: you don’t lose a down because your opponent successfully guessed one of your four available plays, and both teams—yes, there are only two teams—are identical. It’s also more intense: the inability to punt or attempt field goals makes every 4^th down a white knuckle affair. It's also more skill-based: fumbles weren’t coded into the game, mitigating luck’s influence.

The exclusion of fumbles, punts, field goals, and play books is what makes Tecmo great. These were not conscious, progressive design choices. These were mechanics that, as legend has it, were omitted because the developers didn’t understand them. The Japanese programmers at Tecmo weren’t football fans. Supposedly, their only reference point for the game was a rulebook. Dimitri Criona, former director of sales and marketing for Tecmo USA, testifies:

The guys who did the game literally sat down with an NFL rulebook and read the rules of football. And because of that, they were able to program a game without bias. If you take an American programmer, he is going to have some biases about the game. But if you take a Japanese programmer, he’s going to create a program that follows the rules. (Power Up, 219)

The idea of a football game without elective kicking being “a program that follows the rules” aside, there is something to be said for unfamiliarity, removal, and leaving oneself open to inspiration (more on this later), which I think is what Criona means by “unbiased.” An under-contrived game is less likely to be a good game than an over-contrived one, but it’s also less likely to be boring. Sure, Day Z and its ilk are objectively better multiplayer games, but what’s honestly more appealing: collecting sticks and rocks for use in heavy-handed crafting systems, or hurling a so-high-it-leaves-the-screen 4^th-and-28 Hail Mary to your buddy as he freestyles a route on his way to the end zone? Both games are about using limited resources creatively and the liberation of constraint (see also: writing poetry that conforms to meter). But I’ve seen a friend empty a celebratory beer over his head while playing only one. See if you can guess which.

It was the second thing. It was Tecmo.

 Highest Recommendation

Pochi to Nyaa (2003, PS2)

Compile’s Puyo Puyo series (Puyo Pop, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, and Kirby’s Avalanche in America) was a curious thing. Every iteration was more complex than the last while remaining just as accessible as the one that preceded it. Typically, puzzle game franchises heap new mechanics on top of gimmicks, diluting original concepts beyond recognition. There is a reason Tetris 2’s bomb mechanic was abandoned after one game. Bombastic buries Devil Dice’s elegance in trick pieces. Puzzle Bobble (Bust-a-Move) became so clogged with additions that the value of planning and placing a shot was subsumed by player knowledge of a given iteration’s recondite rules and tricks. But Compile beat the odds.

Every Puyo Puyo had a unique wrinkle. Some were better than others, but every Puyo Puyo was good. What’s more unusual: Puyo Puyo sequels never rendered their predecessors obsolete. Puyo Puyo~n’s (1999) character-specific attacks are fun. So are Puyo Puyo Sun (1996) unique sun pieces. So is working doubly hard to eliminate Puyo Puyo Tsu’s (1994) lead pieces. And so is delaying retaliation with Pochi to Nyaa’s (2003) detonators.

This is the way detonators work: matching colored pieces does not immediately clear them. Instead, clearing pieces requires a piece and like-colored detonator. You can change your piece to a detonator with a button press as it's falling. That’s it.

 

What does the addition of detonators accomplish? It heightens tension. Executing a combo built around a detonator (or two, or three) is potentially devastating to your opponent, but spending too much time orchestrating a combo leaves you at risk of having your detonators buried in “garbage,” defusing your combo and leaving you with a pile of problematic pieces to deal with. Unprecedented combo potential and the risk of its pursuit intensify the tension between risk and reward, between Do I and Don’t I. This is the kind of stuff great designers think about. This is the kind of stuff great designers think about you thinking about.

I write about Pochi to Nyaa not only because it’s a great puzzle game with a charming aesthetic and a challenging single player mode, but because it’s a great sequel. Sequels are too often designed by addition: more maps, more guns, more characters. This approach is boring and wasteful. Once Super Street Fighter IV was released, there was no reason to revisit Street Fighter IV. Pochi to Nyaa doesn’t offer anything more than the game that came before it, Puyo Puyo~n. It offers something different; something new. Compile was masterful in designing by reduction and by transmogrification. I am sad to see them go, but am happy they left with dignity. Pochi to Nyaa is their design philosophy, their creativity, their sense of whimsy, and their Teddy Ballgame last-career-at-bat homerun.

Highest Recommendation

Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima (2003, PS2, Gamecube)

             

Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima, released as Adventure Island in 1988 for the US NES after a 1986 arcade release (more or less) as Wonderboy, is your original “runner” game. It’s the Ur-Jetpac Joyride; the proto-Canabalt. Super Mario Bros. (1985) scrolled from left to right while obstacles moved from right to left first and Pitfall!! (1982) Pac Land (1983) before that, but I trace the runner genre’s Adam to the later Takahashi because it emphasizes something Mario and Pac Land do not: locomotion.

In Pac Land and Super Mario, there are two ways for the player to lose a life: he can succumb to an obstacle such a right-to-left scrolling enemy or drop into a pit. The Pitfall!! player loses score the same way. The other means by which a player can lose in any of these three games is by the timer reaching “0.” In Takahashi, a player loses a life for falling down a pit, but more interesting is what happens when he hits one of the games innumerable rock obstacles. He does not lose a life and does not lose score. He loses time.

Health and time are conflated in Takahashi. Colliding with a rock removes several timer bars. Collecting fruit replenishes several bars. It also ticks away on its own, and it ticks fast. It depletes so fast, in fact, that some of the game’s later stages require a foot on the gas at all times to clear. Playing Takahashi well means practically never stopping. To watch a skilled Takahashi player is to watch him turn it into Temple Run, a game where you can literally never stop.

Hudson Soft’s programmers recognized the urgency their health/timer bar instilled. Their level design anticipates the player who is always holding forward; at no point does Takahashi require you stop and wait for a platform or backtrack. The controls do as well. They know you want to run, so they do not require the holding of a button to do it. Instead, Higgins naturally builds momentum the longer he is kept in motion. The skateboard power-up pushes him forward even faster and on his own. Automatic movement defines the runner game. This is one of the earliest instances of it.

The Takahashi remake is more faithful than PC Genjin’s because of the original’s meticulous design. Shifting the placement of an enemy by a space or two could potentially collapse the design of the entire level if there were no way for the always-holding-right player to avoid it. In my PC Genjin post, I praised it for remaining within the spirit of the original without replicating it. I would argue that Takahashi, in spite of being a nearly pixel-for-pixel recreation of the original, is in the spirit of the original as well: painstaking obstacle placement is part of Takahashi’s spirit. Hudson, especially latter-day Hudson, had a knack for acknowledging what made their games great. It’s not by accident that making the longest jump possible while on the skateboard in Takahashi is nearly always safe. It’s the result of adroit design and rigorous testing. Like so many great games and movies, Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima is only making it look easy.

 Highest Recommendation

PC Genjin (2003, PS2, Gamecube)

Hudson Soft is dead. Long live Hudson Soft.

Here is a good-but-not-great game in the form of a ten-year-old remake of a twenty-year-old Mario competitor which was never, as much as I love it, as good as Mario. Why do I care? Why should you?

Consider the method by which long out-of-print games are brought to contemporary platforms today. Porting is tricky business, and I do not intend to undermine the efforts of AM2’s nearly flawless reproductions of classic Sega games (Wonderboy, Streets of Rage, Space Harrier) to XBOX, PS3, and 3DS. But they’re exactly that: reproductions, exactly the same at best and pallid imitations at worst. More recent 3D games are generally upscaled, smoothed out a little, and packaged and put on the shelves. While this can potentially make the old new again—ICO and Shadow of the Colossus finally play as intended at 60FPS—most games look just as dated as their sources or worse. Rendering decade-old assets in 1080p can accentuates flaws. Ten yeas ago, developers hid graphical blemishes in the gaps between a 480i/p display's lines. The low resolution had a way of smudging the images to conceal aesthetic blemishes. As so many newscasters would find out, hi-def gave blemishes no place to hide. Playing Devil May Cry 3 on a PS2 connected to a 480p CRT television is looking at your reflection in the soft lighting of your bathroom after you shower. Playing Devil May Cry 3 HD on a PS3 connected to a 1080p flatscreen is looking at your reflection in the blazing fluorescence of an Exxon Mobil restroom at 3AM. The only way around this is to overhaul the assets; to rebuild the game from the ground up. That takes time, money, and creativity, a combination few developers have.

 

And that’s exactly what Hudson did with their PC Genjin remake. The 2D sprites are now colorful, fluidly animated 3D models. The general shape of the levels is intact, but with secrets added to the original’s barren stretches and with some of its padding extricated. It’s a work by fans. It’s a work of love.

Hudson bestowed three other games with paeans in their Hudson Select line: Cubic Lode Runner, Star Soldier, and Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima (Adventure Island). Each has a distinctive look: PC Genjin’s backgrounds resemble the paper cutouts of an elementary school diorama (Little Big Planet would later perfect this aesthetic) and Takahashi's renders are Claymation inspired.

PC Genjin is still about a half hour too long. The difficulty of its bosses is disproportionate to that of its levels, and the enemies, while cute, cloy. But that it wasn’t a great game to begin with makes the remake even more interesting, because if it were perfect in the first place, what would a remake offer?

 

The Adventures of Cookie & Cream, cont.

There is a moment, midway through one of Cookie & Cream’s Music World stages, where a seven-key piano blocks the paths of both characters. When Cookie presses a button, a short melody of four notes is played. To proceed, the player must replicate the melody on the piano.

The challenge is threefold. Even if a visual cue denoted which keys must be pressed in which order, hopping from key to key without accidentally brushing an extra note would be difficult. The second layer of challenge is the Simon-esque memory requirement. The order of the keys must be instantly committed to memory to replicate it; only one attempt may be made. A mistake brings about a new melody, eliminating the progression through brute force trial-and-error and necessitating immediate memorization. The last layer is pitch recognition. The player must be able to transliterate the audial notes to the piano keys to which they correspond and replicate the melody perfectly.

The synthesis of three obstacles symptomizes an unwillingness to settle and a brave readiness to stray from generic conventions (a music puzzle in a platforming game) that is defines Cookie & Cream’s epoch and is too rare today. The only skill required to advance through most contemporary games is the ability to move a reticle over a moving target. To paraphrase Yahtzee of The Escapist, a first-person shooter is a point-and-click puzzle game where the solution to every puzzle is "Use Gun On Dude." The other end of the gaming spectrum, cell phone games, is worse: progression there is often gated behind pay walls.

I find myself playing games less and less often. I usually chalk this up to simply outrgrowing them. But after revisiting Cookie & Cream this weekend, I think it’s games that are outgrowing me. Their interests keep getting older and more “mature,” a games industry euphemism for “violent and sexualized,” and I'm still here, skipping cartoon rabbits over giant pianos.

 

The Adventures of Cookie & Cream (2001, PS2)

Next time you’re in a Best Buy or GameStop, try this exercise:

Go to either the XBOX 360 or PS3 game section. Survey a row of games. Look at their covers. Really look at them for a good thirty seconds. Ignore the man asking you if you’ve preordered the next installment of the Assassin’s Creed series. A pattern should emerge, one not evident when beholding games individually, but striking when apprehending a group of them. On how many of these covers do you see a white man of about twenty-nine years, usually with noncommittal facial hair, holding at least one gun, walking or looking out of a nondescript background straight at you, Consumer?

Variety is the spice of life.

Today, it is difficult to envision a time when no pattern at all could be discerned from such an exercise and harder to envision GameStop shelves as an explosion of color and a bouquet of characters. 2001 was one such time, pink was one such color, and a maraca-playing cartoon rabbit named "Cream" with an umbrella hat sprouting from her head was one such character. It was unremarkable to see a game like Cookie & Cream on Hand-to-God Actual Store Shelves, which in itself is remarkable.

While Cookie & Cream’s cover was not unique at the time of its release in 2001, its concept was. The player controls two rabbits to which the PlayStation 2’s analogue sticks were assigned simultaneously through short obstacle courses. The simultaneity made what would have otherwise been a prosaic platformer dizzying and difficult. The feeling of moving two entities at once is difficult to describe or draw comparison to. A hypothetical version of Pac Man where the player controls two Pac Men via two separate sticks or pads is the closest analogy that comes to mind. It’s a shame I have to resort to hypotheticals for comparison, but Cookie & Cream’s simultaneity concept has not, to my knowledge, since been pursued. Also, the Pac Man analogy does this game a disservice: it undercuts the interaction between the two characters necessary to succeed. One must press switches and pull levers that affect the other’s side of the screen. One might turn a crank to rotate a platform or pull a rope affixed to an enemy on the other’s screen, clearing his path. You're not competing against yourself; you're cooperating with yourself. Cookie & Cream requires two players: one half of your brain and the other.

Concept alone does not a good game make, however, and it’s Cookie & Cream’s pacing and difficulty that will hold the modern gamer’s attention long after the novelty of controlling two characters at once has worn off. The levels are short enough not to frustrate when failed and long enough to gratify when completed. The cute name and Dora the Explorer color palette belie one of the most difficult games ever, though anyone who notes the developer, From Software, will not be surprised by this.

While it never begat a proper sequel and its initial sales were quiet, Cookie & Cream and its developers weren’t entirely forgotten. The game developed enough of a cult following to be released for PS3 on SEN last November, most likely due to the reinvigorated interest in From Software following their first real commercial success, the Dark Souls series. Much of the Souls philosophy is found here: untraditional co-op, extreme difficulty, and dense level design.

Cookie & Cream is not always great—its hit detection is fastidious and perspective makes jumps difficult to gauge. But it is always interesting. More importantly though, it’s always trying, which is more than I can say for most of the games in the Front-Facing Stubble Gun genre, and it's the kind of risk a publisher today is simply not willing to take.

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