Today's article will feature little to no foreplay. We're diving right in, so make sure you're prepared.
we are still in no particular order
Wii Sports/Wii Sports Resort (Wii, 2006/2009, Nintendo)
A joint entry, because I feel each game is worthy of the list for specific reasons and there's a heavy debate on whether each is "full-fledged" enough to be a game. The second one certainly is. It is perhaps the party game of the current generation of video games.
Wii Sports ensured Nintendo an amount of success immediately with their Wii console and its new control scheme. It also proclaimed, without shying away from it, the new philosophy Nintendo was employing: "Video games are now for everyone."
The casual gaming movement is one that I feel at odds with, if for my own personal and selfish reasons. Wii Sports was not a good game. It was a glorified demo of what the Wii could do, and it deliberately underachieved. Its strong point was the cute, appealing graphics and the overall simplicity. Eventually, Wii Sports Resort came about, toting Motion Plus (...has it been used for anything worthwhile yet?) and more games, so people (myself included) bought it.
I still don't know what to think of it. I can't help but feel that somewhere along the road, we were robbed of something important. I had a lot of fun playing Wii Sports Resort with a few friends, fooling around, learning the intricacies that came with the increased accuracy of the Motion Plus add-on. It's not a game you're going to play by yourself, though.
What did Wii Sports want from us, back in 2006 when it was released along with the Wii console? It was a statement that we needed to be ready to put a bit more effort into our video game playing. There was no excuse now, we needed to move around. We needed to get prepared for the slew of motion control in games to come, whether it was warranted or not. Super Mario Galaxy had a somewhat neat, if underused pointer mechanic that could be used to launch collectible projectiles. It also had a spin, which was absolute bullshit. It probably took a group of twenty grown men, sitting around a big office table in a basement in Tokyo; they stared at the controller and they decided that if we shook it, it should "shake" Mario. To make it look less unnatural, they equated it to him spinning.
Why did he need to spin, though? Our group took a slight break and went outside, cramming up the back alley with their bodies and their cigarette smoke. Twenty minutes later, we had our answer. Mario had to spin because there was stuff, in game, that could only be accomplished by spinning. Fuck pressing buttons, we don't have nearly enough of them anymore. Every button we have on the controller is already doing something, so let's make the spin a necessary game mechanic. It can do everything! It can even...get this, break things like boxes!
One guy spoke up at this point, the only free thinker in the bunch. He asked why the punch from Super Mario 64 had been thrown to the wayside and that it would work perfectly for breaking things. He was promptly fired after being given the explanation: "It's too violent to punch things."
If I can praise Wii Sports Resort for one thing, it's adding a bit of challenge to my favorite activity from the first game; the bowling. Wii Sports was all about finding a position and an angle that worked, and moving your arm in the same way every single time. Resort makes it a bit more demanding. Not that it actually feels like bowling, but it's a much better approximation than I ever would have dreamt of it being.
The games are the first real sign of the accessibility craze, something that has permeated throughout the gaming culture. There's too much being friendly in gaming today. I want to be challenged, I want it to feel like the developer is testing me with their game, giving me something with depth that I have to figure out on my own, like an adult.
Demon's Souls (PlayStation 3, 2009, From Software)
The topic of difficulty is a beautiful way to move into the next pick of the list. I actually have not played nearly as much of Demon's Souls as I would like, but I've played enough to see its beauty and its merits.
When I started playing Demon's Souls, it would be safe to say I was a little unprepared for what I was getting into and a bit underwhelmed at what was transpiring, too. You're already in the thick of things when you start the game. I remember getting to the first boss of the game, located squarely in the very obvious tutorial level; and dying. Yeah, I died against the tutorial boss. I firmly remember my exclamation: "What...the fuck?"
Death is a huge part of Demon's Souls. It is that I should mention that Demon's Souls is not a game you can lose in the traditional sense. There is no possible way to get a game over. I mentioned in my Cave Story review while in a tirade that Demon's Souls was a game you lost only by making the decision to stop playing it. You lose for the duration, and when you put the disc back in your PlayStation 3, you immediately start winning again.
I'm judging from the fact that I was slain in one hit by the boss of the tutorial area that this battle was pretty much a loss from the start. In the Nexus, the realm of souls, is where we start Demon's Souls for real. We're given a bit of back story and five locations which we can choose, they are each a varying difficulty. We may choose the hardest area first and get absolutely devastated due to our lack of strength and preparation. Right away, we've encountered one of the game's endless learning experiences.
That's what the game is, after all. A gigantic learning experience. The rules are strict, but there's plenty of remorse when you sit down and think about it. The game uses a one stop currency known as "Souls"; you spend it to buy weapons and armors, spells, and to upgrade your character. You have to use them for everything, learning to spend them wisely is the first big hurdle you'll have to overcome. When you die, whether in Soul form or in your full human form (in which your hit points are not halved, which makes a world of difference!) you lose all the souls currently in your possession, leaving them at the spot of your death. If you can journey back to that location without dying again, you can regain them. It's a pretty fair system and in some instances; it is better to face death and come back, trying to reach that location with higher health or a better strategy in mind to take out whatever made you meet your fate the previous time.
It's all about learning in Demon's Souls, which I find is a welcome change. Have you ever noticed how so many games these days are all about telling us what we should do or how we should do it? I'm tired of that shit, man. I'm getting older and maybe wiser, I've become theoretically independent. I know it's maybe a little obnoxious, but I don't want to be told what to do anymore.
I feel it's only fair that I flesh out the last paragraph a little bit more, so that it's a bit easier to understand. A great example of the type of hand holding nonsense that I've come to hate is Super Mario Galaxy; and all it entails. You can't turn a corner in that game without being assaulted by help, whether it's subtle or not. I'm surprised the game doesn't give you unavoidable pop ups regarding when you should be taking bathroom breaks, "Mario thinks it's about time you took a piss. Remember to take your dick OUT of your pants."
I can't count how many times in my criminally ignored campaign of Demon's Souls I've died. A good 75% of these could have been avoided if I was just a little smarter, a little more prepared for what was to come. Some of these frustrated me beyond belief, and I may have screamed at the game more than few times. I thought it was unfair, I didn't think I was making mistakes or gross oversights, I thought the game was just screwing me for fun. It wouldn't shock me too much if that was the intention of the design team, to make us upset and frustrated. To take us outside of our comfort zone, in an age where most developers are afraid to even look the player the wrong way.
killer7 (Gamecube & PlayStation 2, 2005, Grasshopper Manufactures)
Our first glimpse of Goichi (Suda 51) Suda in North America. A simultaneous crash landing and one of the boldest successes in modern gaming. A video game like no other or an experience that defies classification, even as a video game. People have been analyzing it for its worth and its faults since its release, because there's so much to take in. I think it may be the most unique piece of media to come out in the last decade.
Having been sick the majority of this week, I found out a few days outside of social activity and work; mostly spent on bed rest, will make someone look a bit like a cocaine junkie. I need to shave, I need to scrub the muck off my face (good hard scrubbing). I really hope this bout with random stomach virus #21 has ended with me as the victor. I haven't eaten a good meal in days. I really wanted to declare, if but for a few days, that life sucks.
Progress on this article has not been optimal, although I suppose it hasn't been terrible either. The days, whether spent in sickness or health, seem to go by way too fast as of late. Add that with my urge to spend more time playing video games than writing about them, and you have a lazy writer. My playthrough of Final Fantasy XIII is going well, should be wrapping it up shortly; a review will follow, as has always been the intent.
So, killer7. It's hard to discuss killer7 normally, because it is not a regular video game, it's also incredibly difficult to not mention bits of the story that may spoil the game. Some were quick to label it as having no place in the wide world of games, it was a label breaker and a bad boy; its very existence was defying convention.
What we have with killer7 may be the future of video games, though. Not that everything will play like it, or try to be like it. That's not what I mean. killer7 is a once in a life time happening. Anyone who has played killer7 will never forget it and they'll never truly understand it. It is a paradox, an ever ticking time bomb.
It's also a really fucking hard game to talk about! I'm tempted to just write "go play it for yourself" and finish this article like that. That is terribly lazy writing, but it's how I feel. Let's call it this; killer7 is so important and so unique that you have to play it (holy hell this sounds pretentious). In five years, killer7 will still be perched on its pedestal as "the only game of its kind".
author's note: I do apologize for the lack of discussion on killer7 in this article, but it's a daunting task to talk about the game, it'd be near impossible to do it any justice. Every once in a while, I remember something about the game that interests me; right now, I'm thinking about food. Eggs to be particular. I'm thinking about my headache the size of a football stadium, giving small glances now and again to the black DS Lite on my bed and the new copy of Pokemon Heart Gold plugged into it, waiting for me to play it. I'm wondering why the fuck so many people play Farmville on Facebook, and what it means to be a video game. Are all video games made with a purpose, and what is the purpose of a video game to begin with? Is it to make the player have fun? Is it to make us think or to realize something, to send us a message?
There are people out there who take video games rather seriously. I'd like to mark the distinction that I am not one of those people. I love video games (not all of them, though). I'm optimistic enough to think that the medium is not dying; but it's not being used to its full potential. It's doubtful that it's been used properly since its inception, but I'm still pretty hopeful for it.
the remaining part four of this article is partially in the works already, and will hopefully be done in a weeks to two weeks time; barring sickness and any other distractions. i also want to make a half-promise that the next part of the article will be good (i felt this part was all over the place! but there's no turning back now). cheers
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