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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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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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.

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Dat’s Swagtastic: The Path USB Drive Is Delicious and Tempting

There’s just something about having something to hold. I just can’t help myself. To hell with you iPod, sucks to you Kindle, and to you, PSN, Virtual Console, and Xbox Live Arcade. Give me a box and a disc and a cartridge, cover them in glorious art that makes my imagination seethe with elaborate details that the works they portray can’t possibly live up to. Give me Zelda in gold, give me Turok 2 in black, Maximum Carnage in violent, 90s-blood red!

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Rumorang: First Footage of Beyond Good and Evil 2

There are two possibilities. One, this footage is an elaborate fake lovingly crafted by an animator of immense talent. And two, it’s real. If it’s real, it means that Michael Ancel has returned to us with a powerful fury, delivering a sun drenched modernization of his beloved science fiction adventure in grand style. Six years ago, Jade ran across the rooftops of a Hillysian metropolis and it looked like this.

In 2009, Jade’s brand of investigative journalism looks like this.

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