Goodnight and Good Luck from 61 Frames Per Second

Three-hundred eighty-five days ago, 61 Frames Per Second launched with the mission of providing readers with, as I put it then, discussion about the design, art, history, and message of the games we play alongside our own unique brand of criticism. The blog was intended to not only be smart, funny, and informative, but to demand more of the videogame medium and the dialogue surrounding their creation and cultural significance. So far, thanks to the work of 61FPS’ contributors, it’s been just that.

As of June 1st, regular posting will cease on 61FPS. Our parent magazine Nerve is relaunching next week for the first time in ten years. Nerve began as a magazine about love, sex, and culture and that editorial mandate is staying the same, but it’s becoming a more focused publication. As such, entertainment and cultural coverage is being shifted away from Nerve’s blogs like 61FPS, The Remote Island, and Screengrab, and reintegrated into the site. The blog archives will remain live online.

This isn’t the end of 61 Frames Per Second though. Most importantly, our readers will still be able to follow the work of Bob Mackey and Nadia Oxford in GameSpite, 1UP.com, and What They Play amongst others. Cole Stryker, our resident curmudgeon and games journalism police force, isn’t writing about games at the moment, but there’s no way he’ll be able to stay away for long. Joe Keiser has had a prolific career as a games journalist and you can bet your life that you’ll see his work well into the future. 61FPS has been Amber Ahlborn’s first job as a professional writer and she has been a remarkable success. I expect great things from her. As for me and Derrick Sanskrit, stay tuned. Don’t delete your RSS feed just yet. You haven’t heard the last from us, dear reader.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for writing. Thank you for listening.

See you soon.

-John

Here Comes the Sun: The Three Es

I’m getting on a plane at 7:30am on Sunday morning and flying to Los Angeles for the first time in my life. To be honest, I’m a little nervous. I used to travel quite a bit when I was younger but haven’t in some time. Life in New York tends to work in one of two ways. Either you’re a jet setter, one of those people that have some kind of crazy glamorous job that sends them all over the world for business and pleasure or you’re city bound. Make no mistake, it’s hard to get out of this place even just for a day. My favorite joke is that even if you walk over one of the bridges or through the tunnels, there’s going to be some gruff civil servant demanding two dollars to cross the border beyond the city limits. It gets comfortable though. Sometimes the city is a big enough world on its own. I don’t know what to expect from LA other than for it to be hot as hell, for the food to be expensive, and for the people to be a whole lot blonder.

Then there’s E3.

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The 61FPS Review: Bionic Commando, part 2

Be forewarned: Here be spoilers.

GRIN made a bold statement when they announced Bionic Commando, saying that this dreadlocked, be-wifebeater-ed fellow with the hotdogs all over his metal arm was the very same Radd Spencer from twenty years ago meant this game was a bonafide sequel. For most players, the story in a videogame is inessential, a throwaway. You and I, being the devoted weirdos we are, might care about the thousand-year continuity from Mega Man to Mega Man Legends 2, but the average hardcore videogame player doesn’t give it a second thought. The Legend of Zelda’s on to something. The series’ creators know that it’s character, setting, and a sense of history that’s most important for giving your tale weight, not an actual history.

Bionic Commando begins ten years after the NES game. Radd’s in jail and has been stripped of his bionic arm. He was, we are informed, married at some point in the past and his wife went missing. Super Joe, the legendary soldier Radd rescued back in the day, is now a disgraced figurehead. Turns out he ran the TASC, the military branch in-charge of making bionic soldiers like ol’ Radd. Those same soldiers, once relied on to blow up Hitler’s head, are now enemies of the state, feared by the powers that be for being too powerful and unstable. When a terrorist military made up of “bionics” blows up Ascension City, Radd is sent into the wreckage to retrieve an unnamed weapon of mass destruction the terrorists are after. In exchange, he gets his freedom and Super Joe promises to tell him where his wife is. By the end it’s revealed that Super Joe, in league with old Bionic Villain Gottfried Groeder (introduced in Rearmed,) was behind the evil scheme all along. More than that, it turns out that bionic enhancements like Radd’s arm were made from organic parts. The most effective soldiers were those augmented with organic parts they had a strong sentimental attachment to. Yes, Super Joe made Radd Spencer’s arm out of his murdered wife.

Now, all of this is told through mercifully brief cutscenes, text retrieved from hacked communicators, and in-game radio transmissions. There’s a lot of story given to the player and it doesn’t, for the most part, interrupt the flow of actually playing the game. It doesn’t, however, make a damn lick of sense. No character’s motivations are properly explained and while continuity is shoved down your throat throughout, the details of history are left out completely. When Super Joe turns evil, it’s never really explained why. He just wants the WMD MacGuffin to activate some giant secret base that’s never even mentioned until the last twenty minutes of the game. It is mindnumbingly stupid. Of course, the story in the old NES game was mindnumbingly stupid as well. This story’s offensive not because it’s hamfisted camp, but because it keeps you from actually playing throughout the game’s beginning and its finale.

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The 61FPS Review: Bionic Commando, part 1

Ever since Shigeru Miyamoto remade Mario into a bouncing mass of yelping polygons in 1996, game designers across the world have been asking the same question: how do we bring our old 2D games into the third dimension? This has never been a creatively bankrupt ambition. Videogames are, and always have been, an iterative medium funded by familiarity. The rules of a game are polished over time and mascots, franchises, brands are insurance on their evolution. Taking the fundamentals and characters of classic games to explore the potential of three-dimensional design wasn’t selling out; it was buying in.

Over the past thirteen years, only a handful of designers have effectively translated two-dimensional games into 3D. More often than not, old franchises have been modernized as completely different games. Team Ninja’s Ninja Gaiden games are about weighty melee play, not the vicious platforming gauntlets of the original series. Mega Man’s first polygonal outing was a kart racer, not a speedy run-gun-and-jumper. But games like Super Mario 64, games that truly capture and add a new dimension to their predecessors’ play, are rare. Retro’s Metroid Prime did it, managing to translate the rules, architecture and style of its 2D parent series perfectly, even while sacrificing the thrill of seeing Samus onscreen. GRIN’s Bionic Commando gets it right too. But in their effort to recreate the rock solid rules of 1987’s Bionic Commando, GRIN failed to make a complete work of art.

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Screen Test: Lunar PSP

Bob is not wrong. The world does not need a fourth version of Lunar: The Silver Star. The first version was a-okay, but inaccessible because no one owned a freaking Sega CD. The Playstation and Saturn remake was even keener. Victor Ireland and the rest of the Working Designs crew did a swell job of translating them both for an American audience. The Ubisoft Game Boy Advance version was less than ideal. You want to put Lunar out again, dump it onto the Playstation Network. Don’t pump out yet another PSP RPG. The system has plenty. Stop it.

That’s what I was thinking earlier today. Then I saw some screens of the remake. Got to admit, I’ve been charmed.

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Bionic Commando is Love: Spoiler Warning

SPOILERS

So. I finished Bionic Commando last night. I’ll save the nitty gritty for Monday’s review, and believe you me, there is more than a little nitty gritty to cover. The short version is that the middle of Bionic Commando is one of the finest unfinished 3D action games ever made and its sandwiched between a sloppy beginning and a borderline nonsensical ending.

The story in Bionic Commando makes less sense than the one in the original. Hideo Kojima will scoff when he plays it. But there’s one part of the story that I wanted to share with you.

This is Radd Spencer.

Apparently he was at one time married to a woman named Emily. She appears briefly in the game during abrupt flashback sequences. I would like to show you a picture of Emily.

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Bionic Commando is Love: Atmosphere and Theme in Game Soundtracks

Just two weeks ago, Brandon Sheffield wrote an excellent editorial on the failings of modern videogames soundtracks. As games have become longer, more complex, and, yes, more cinematic, their accompanying music has become more atmospheric than tuneful, more intent on creating a mood than a memorable melody. Sheffield made the point that the beloved songs from gaming’s 8- and 16-bit glory days are remembered first and foremost because players were forced to listen to them so many times. The technology available at the time afforded game composers only so much space and range so their songs were simple and short. Games were also played in shorter bursts and their difficulty was more demanding so repetition was an inherent aspect of sitting down with a game. We remember the Mario theme song not only because Koji Kondo was an excellent composer but because we heard it many, many times. If you were forced to listen to that brief a melody repeatedly while wandering Fallout 3’s nuclear wasteland, chances are you’d lose your damn mind.

Bionic Commando’s music strikes a careful balance between old and new. GRIN’s Simon Viklund, who composed the soundtrack for both the new Bionic Commando and last year’s remake Rearmed, is a man who remembers when videogame songs stuck in your brain. He actually used to hold a cassette player up to his television to record the soundtracks off his NES games. The new Bionic Commando’s doesn’t preserve the NES game’s tunes as faithfully as Rearmed’s club-beat-infused remixes, but it does house almost every original melody inside its sweeping songs. At the beginning of Bionic Commando, music is rare, fitting into the common mode of providing atmosphere. It was quite a disappointment. As the game has progressed though, particularly in its third level The Park, the music has become more constant and tuneful. The music that plays here shifts back and forth between a lilting piano melody and driving alterna-rock with very little dead silence in-between, and it does wonders for the overall tone of the game. The next level, a forest area preceding a boss fight, features a melancholic orchestral reimagining of the theme from Area 5 of the NES game.

Sheffield said in his essay that the key to memorable game music is to defy a player’s expectation with strange music unusual to games broadly, his examples being the licensed period-specific songs in Bioshock and Katamari Damacy’s eccentric J-pop. Simon Viklund has created another solution with his Bionic Commando soundtrack, songs that serve both atmosphere and theme, marrying the best of the past with today’s technology.

The Blatant Sexism of Cooking Mama and Science Papa

When VGCats’ Scott Ramsoomir drew the above strip back in February 2008, I laughed. Imagining Shigeru Miyamoto as a violent misogynist is amusing, what can I say. When Cooking Mama Ltd. announced that they were developing Gardening Mama just half a year later, the strip got a bit less funny. Then when they announced Crafting Mama in March, it got troubling. On April 21st, when Majesco filed a trademark for Babysitting Mama, it all got downright offensive. Given the popularity and growing familiarity of the Mama franchise, why not develop casual minigame collections on the Wii and DS based around activities that aren’t so explicitly gendered?

Now, Activision’s compounding the problem with their announcement of Science Papa, a rip-off of Cooking Mama Ltd’s minigame formula so explicit that it flat out lifts the brand name.

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Bionic Commando is… Hmm: A Troubling First Date

You’d think that after some twelve months of orgiastic pontification on Bionic Commando, I’d be telling you how my first two hours with the game helped me to lose weight, see the face of God, and to understand the fundamental nature of the universe. It didn’t. Of course it didn’t. I am going to shatter my character a bit right now… I know Bionic Commando is just a game. And I can say that, based on my first dabblings with it, it’s a good game. I’m just worried that it isn’t a great one.

A few bullet points.

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Trailer Review: SaGa 2: Goddess of Destiny

The Nintendo DS can make some fetching three-dimensional games. Even a launch title like the Super Mario 64 remake showed that the double-screened wonder could pump-out polygons better than the Playstation and Nintendo 64. It may not be up to Dreamcast standards, but the system can still make some mighty fine looking games. Square-Enix and their stable of developers, both in-house and freelance, have been particularly good at making gorgeous, elegant three-dimensional DS games. Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, Final Fantasy III and IV are stunners that put the likes of Nintendo’s own Chibi Robo: Park Patrol to shame. This new DS remake of SaGa 2 is looking like their finest work yet.

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