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.