Chiptune Friday: The Mega Man 9 Mixtape

Wow, we’re just on a Mega Man streak right now, aren’t we? Far be it from me to break up a good thing.

Regular readers may remember back in April when I posted the mashup of Memphis Black’s “Like That” with Mega Man 4’s Skullman theme off of Tae K’s impressive Mega Man mixtape. Well less than a month later Tae K came back with a new mixtape using samples from Mega Man 9 and the results were more often than not fantastic.

I had a hard time trying to figure out which track to feature here; the opening theme with Lupe Fiasco, Hornetman with Eminem, Splashwoman with Q-Tip, or Jewelman with Kanye? Hitting an impass with this decision, I’ve decided to post the whole damn mixtape instead. Enjoy! Continue reading »

Licensing Tragedies: The Mega Man Comic

I don’t know if I can properly call Dreamwave’s Mega Man comic a “Licensing Tragedy.” It’s more like a licensing misfire accompanied by wasted potential. Either way, its mediocrity made my soul sad.

The Mega Man comic had four issues published through 2003 and 2004. It was illustrated by Mic Fong for its first three issues before duties were passed on to Patrick Spaziante (“Spaz,” who has illustrated the covers for the Sonic the Hedgehog comic series for many years). The art was passable, though Mic Fong’s character designs rarely ventured far beyond Anime Cliches 101 (when humans blush, the blood doesn’t elevate above their skin. It just doesn’t). The comic’s writing, however, was a flat tire. Brian Augustyn was the series’ chosen scribe. Augustyn’s work can still be found in non-offensive Ninja Turtle storybooks sold at supermarket check-outs. Now you have a good idea of the safe, oatmeal-flavoured plot that was dished up for gaming’s favourite robot.

Continue reading »

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.

Continue reading »

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.

Continue reading »

Don’t Hate On Your Fans, Square-Enix

Game developers have varying relationships with the fandoms that buzz around their products. Sometimes there is comradeship and communication. Sometimes there is a lot of spitting and twining in the manner of angry tom cats.

I’m always interested in the chemistry between a creator and his/her fans. Byproducts of games, movies, and books can ignite some pretty heated discussion: if you talk about fanfiction on a message board full of professional writers, you’ll be bombarded with more words than any human would care to read in a lifetime.

Game fandom goes beyond fanfiction and fanart. There is also the very popular, often scary world of ROM hacking. These usually don’t go far beyond some kid throwing a sheet over Mario and colouring Wart pitch-black and inexplicably sticking him in a Food Lion apron. Occasionally, though, ROM hacks bleed love and hard work, offering sustenance for fans who might feel like they’ve been forgotten on the tips of glaciers in the dimmest part of the world.

Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes was a 16-bit fan game five years in the making. Though loved by all the children of the world, Chrono Trigger is not a series that receives much attention from Square-Enix: Final Fantasy is clear into its teens, but aside from its recent appearance on the Nintendo DS with a couple of crummy bonus dungeons, Chrono Trigger hasn’t seen real action since the mostly-excellent Chrono Cross on the Playstation. It’s easy to see why the fandom was excited about Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes, and easy to understand why people think Square-Enix is full of doodie heads for shutting down the project at 98% completion.

Continue reading »

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.

Continue reading »

Spyborgs: You Know, For Kids!

It was almost a year ago when Nintendo and Capcom fanboys all across the internet cried out in protest against the announcement of Spyborgs, a Wii exclusive multiplayer action brawler with an emphasis on cartoon humor. I acknowledged the unfairness of the fans’ complaints while making them myself. Generally, people were not vibing with the artistic direction and narrative voice in the announcement trailer, and it was clear that Capcom were reacting to those concerns as the game disappeared for the better part of a year.

Earlier this week I sat down with Daryl Allison, a senior producer at Capcom, to play a bit of the most recent build and talk about the various changes it’s been through. Continue reading »

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.

Bionic Commando is Love: T-Minus One Week

This morning, I got to work and an envelope was sitting on my desk. I opened it. Then I saw this inside of it:

Then I was all:

And, well, after that… after that was private.

We’ve waited twenty-one years for each other. The bond of true love transcends decades and distance and now, once again, Bionic Commando and I will swing across the roof-tops declaring our undying devotion to the world. The game’s official release date is May 18th, which means that you’ll be able to walk into a store and buy yourself a copy twenty-four hours after that. Last summer, I wrote one post a day the week leading up to Bionic Commando: Rearmed’s release on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN. I’ll be doing the same for Radd Spencer’s rebirth for the next seven days.

To kick things off, I’d like to discuss the recent multiplayer demo released on XBLA.

Continue reading »

Ten Years Ago This Week: Street Fighter Alpha 3 on Playstation

What is true in 2009 was not true in 1999: Street Fighter releases are exciting. Street Fighter IV, Super Street Fighter II HD Remix, the impending re-release of Marvel vs. Capcom 2. These are games that have players of all stripes salivating for one-on-one fights. But ten years ago, the Street Fighter franchise was at peak saturation and just seeing the name was exhausting. Between 1998 and 2000, counting both new arcade releases and console ports, Capcom released over twenty Street Fighter games. It was oppressive. No wonder the franchise was dormant for close to a decade.

In 1998, Street Fighter Alpha 3 managed to embody both all of its parent series’ greatest strengths and its worst excesses. It’s a gorgeous game, its characters and backgrounds the perfect realization of the Alpha side-series’ vibrant anime aesthetics. The fighting itself was as precise and satisfying to play as it had always been. But Alpha 3 was woefully unbalanced, featuring a cast of twenty-eight fighters, all of whom could utilize three separate combo chains, including the grossly overpowered “V-isms” that allowed players to create personalized super combos on the fly. The new faces in the roster ranged from ridiculous (R. Mika) to bland variants of more popular icons (literal Cammy clones Juni and Juli.) Alpha 3 lived in the most awkward space in the Street Fighter pantheon; not as demanding or deep as Street Fighter III and lacking the simple equilibrium of Street Fighter II (or even Alpha 2).

For all of its gaffes, though, Street Fighter Alpha 3 was and is a good game. The closest it’s ever come to greatness, though, was when it was released on the Sony Playstation on May 1st, 1999.

Continue reading »