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.