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Graveyard of Honor: A Tribute to the Gamer's Quarter

 
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seryogin
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 1:33 pm    Post subject: Graveyard of Honor: A Tribute to the Gamer's Quarter Reply with quote

So the Gamer's Quarter is dead. Our once proud little magazine; a bastion of freedom among a sea of despair has finally gone under the waves. Like that Elliot poem, we went out with a whimper.

Though we sure started with one hell of a bang. Kicking ass and chewing bubble gum, as it were. It's too bad we ran out of the kickass so soon.

Though we wrote well for a hell of a long time. And did work that, all these years down the line, shouldn't leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth. Anyone with a brain, anyway.

So here's my final attack, one last salvo straight from hell, designed to slap awake anyone who's grown too bored of the game writing up on the net these days. Like a black man pouring out a forty for his dead homies, this is my last homage, a farewell showcasing the esprit de corps that the Gamer's Quarter was proud to show off in its better days.

Good luck to everyone!
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 1:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Preaching the Truth from the Edge of Kefka's Tower: A Hymn to Final Fantasy VI

Whenever I think back to my wasted youth, I can't help feeling a tang of bitterness at not having had my fair share of sex and adventure. There wasn't much of that going on in my teenage years; nothing at all, actually, if we're talking about sex. There was a lot of shame in those days and that makes me want to curse the RPGs.

I want to curse them, but I can't quite bring myself to do so. I'm listening to the Final Fantasy VI soundtrack right now and realize that you can't quite argue with something this good. Sex is one of the few things that makes life worth living, I love fucking... Even so, you can't refute Final Fantasy VI , because the argument that it presents is unimpeachable. Yes, of course, the cool guy faction in my crania sniggers at this, they're mocking me as I write. But they are wrong. They know all too well about what can satisfy the body and the steps that need to be taken to make it so. But they are the enemy and will always be the enemy. Cool is the enemy of all that is good in this world. Cool will never understand the beautiful and runs from the truths of this cold, dark universe like a cockroach running from light. I'll ally with the cool to get laid, but that's as far as my allegiance will ever go.

Final Fantasy VI is pure refutation, an argument in 32-meg form against the vileness of this world. There are few artifacts of our generation that have withstood the test of time as well as Square's Super Famicom masterpiece. I can't imagine a single twelve-year-old of my generation with any soul at all smirking at it. It's way too serious a work for that to happen. It was something that millions of people would play and declare allegiance to. And it deserved all of it. One of the few videogames that did or does.

Where else could we have found such art? Movies? Well, the Americans of my day didn't have Miyazaki's stuff on file, so that was out. The Disney films seemed pretty profound in those years, but they haven't aged well. I have a hard time justifying my obsession for the Lion King back then. Music? There was no proper music for those who hungered for more. Classical music, you say? Well, classical music was boring and didn't talk about anything that we wanted. There was something cheesy about it, too. It didn't seem serious at all. Comics? We didn't have manga back then and the stuff that we did have was beneath contempt.

No, it was in videogames and in videogames alone that we could've found our arguments.

You just couldn't help but love those characters. They were better than most of the people you went to school with. They probably still are. They had honor and meant what they said. And their wonderful personal themes, composed by Nobuo Uemastsu at the height of his power, were something that you hoped you would have for yourself one day. I know now that that's impossible, but how great it is to imagine walking into a bar and hearing Shadow's reedy music playing in your head, drowning out the shitty rap that's trying it's best to make the bar seem like the “decadent club scene” from a bad American action movie.

Yes, THAT music, it's hard to write about it now because so many horrible people have expressed their appreciation of it. Yet, that's its strength and the strength of Final Fantasy VI as a whole. It is impervious to either praise or criticism. It merely sets up its argument, presents you with the greatest graphics, music, and story that you'd seen, heard, or read up to that time and asks you if you still want to continue on in the real world; a reverse Matrix.

Many a twelve-year-old heard that call, but few followed it wholeheartedly, boarded that Phantom Forrest train. Many more than was to be expected, though. I'm pretty sure that if you were to gather all the true believers in a single place then you could easily get a Tienanmen Square crowd scene going. I can imagine it now. Hordes of plump and skinny losers of all races, howling like mad, whacking the chained unbelievers on their way to the Gulag of the Cool with their FF VI cartridges, while a grinning “ice teeth” Hironobu Sakaguchi – Mao Suit, liberation cap – waves to them from the castle walls.

Though daydreams don't get you far in this world, so let's recall the characters, for our sake and theirs.

Make no mistake about it. They are still beyond you and will always be. If one can imagine a life as blissful and attractive as Setzer's, I'd like to hear it, lounging around a floating casino, taking his share of sex and drugs without a hint of nagging puritanism. As lame as it may look right now, that man was our libertine, our Byron. Then there's Shadow, a ninja loner, the idealized self-image of every boy that went through high school uncool, whose touching story of woe was presented with a minimalism that was ignored by RPG creators then and now. And like all good things, he was doomed to perish. You could never quite save Shadow, no matter how you may have wanted to. Or what about Edgar, who dresses like like a mix of a decadent 19th prince and a modern CEO, part chainsaw murderer, part ladies man. Kefka, while somewhat overrated as a villain, has many moments of delight as well, having the most fun of any JPRG character in history. Gleefully committing mass murder; an angel/ clown / punk rocker hybrid firing lasers from his trash tower. Yes, Square really sent in the clowns there and the clowns were scary. In fact, Kefka, despite being the villain, steals so many scenes, gets so many great lines – recall him laughing at your party during the final battle, calling them a bunch of walking self-help cliches – that you can tell that the creators' hearts were in the right place. It's no coincidence that Kefka's Tower is greatest piece of music on a soundtrack famed for great work. I don't know if it's scary or not that the appeal of Kefka is much more real to me now than as a child.

And then there were the set pieces. There are so many to recall that you can open up any random save from a copy of the game bought from a Japanese “recycle shop” and be assured of stumbling upon something wonderful. The big Moogle battle, the type of thing you kept in your head while playing Magic: the Gathering as a teenager, stuffed animals whacking werewolves on the head with maces. The struggle on the Floating Continent, with that great scene of Kefka kicking the Old Man of the Empire offstage like a bag of rancid garbage, followed by Shadow playing a lethal game of WMD goddess statue chess with our favorite clown.

Sadly, the same things cannot be said for many of the RPGs that came after it. Genius though it may be, Final Fantasy VI has given rise to many a false prophet ( though the critics rightly place the blame on the massive success of the game's Playstation sequel). The most offensive example of this is Xenogears: the pitiful banner of the most pathetic nerds of this Earth. It's so puerile that talking about it feels dirty and unsporting, like making fun of a cripple. It's just depressing to think about and that's that. It's not so much a game as the sad story of Hitler's Germany branded onto a CD: so much talent, so much great music and art wasted in the service of a laughable ideology, an insipid narrative.

Many other works have faired better. Persona 4 comes to mind, even though it's FF VI's direct opposite. It celebrates the cool, sneers at the nerds, and goes out of its way to glorify those loathsome high school days. As a counter-argument it works much better than I could have expected. Its music is poppy tunefulness compared to Final Fantasy's neo-romantic nobility, its story a big Yay !! for this world and its people. It's the closest that we've come in the Japanese RPG genre to “maturity.”

Make no mistake, I'm not mocking it. I love the game dearly, it's the only modern game that I can stomach playing these days. Though its worldview will most probably never inch out the one that Final Fantasy has instilled in me. I also have the utmost contempt for the perfunctoriness of its villain. It's a sad state of affairs that the game makers of today don't even bother making a halfway decent counter-argument against our world, won't even make the villain fun. The heroes' argument in Persona 4 boils down to the same thing that the popular kids prove wordlessly every day at school, “We're cooler and totally have more friends than you, loser.” A very bad way to cap off a game that had a lot of good in it.

The saddest thing is that we still don't have the vocabulary – nay, the poetry – to celebrate Final Fantasy VI properly. Most of the praise that this profound little anti-Earth has gotten is as clumsy as its criticism. The words aren't here yet, but we're coming close... they're somewhere, to be sure, stashed away in the brain of some basement-inhabiting uber-dweeb romantic, waiting for the right moment to emerge. Final Fantasy VI is like Lovecraft's Old Ones, bidding its time, influencing the aesthetics of the world in ways we can't – perhaps, won't live to – ever see.

The War of the Magi has never really stopped and Final Fantasy VI will no doubt continue its unseen jihad, unnoticed and unheard until our blessed day of reckoning. When the silly works of today will be nothing more than a footnote in the Final Fantasy-era of art history.
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 9:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah. This is a good eulogy. It's the kind of essay most people will never write because they don't have the balls, and because they're worried about looking silly. That is what the Gamer's Quarter published: fearless fucking writing.

I'm proud to have been part of this thing. What more could I possibly say?
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Mr. Mechanical
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 11:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That was good, Sergei.

ajutla wrote:
Yeah. This is a good eulogy. It's the kind of essay most people will never write because they don't have the balls, and because they're worried about looking silly. That is what the Gamer's Quarter published: fearless fucking writing.

I'm proud to have been part of this thing. What more could I possibly say?


Ditto. Long live The Gamer's Quarter.
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 11:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

And since Sergei started the ball rolling, I guess I'll put up my submitted article to issue 9 (may you forever rest in limbo). The last piece of writing I ever did for TGQ, warts and all:

Untitled
Bully - PS2
J. R. Freeman

I was bullied for a period during grade school. When I turned to my parents for help they told me to fight back and give the kid a bloody nose. I settled on nailing him in the right temple with a dodge ball instead. He still chased me around for a bit but after that I was mostly left alone. If I learned anything from the whole experience it was the ability to pace myself while running so that I wouldn't get tired as quickly. Also that bullies are usually just chumps with an inferiority complex. These days I can not help but look back on the whole thing as a positive growing experience, a necessary component in shaping me to be the person I am today. If more parents would just tell their kids to man up then I am convinced that approximately 98% of the worlds problems could be solved overnight. The ability to hold your own against others is an invaluable ability for a person to foster, not just physically but mentally as well, and without it a person can never become truly whole. After all, in the real world out there only the strongest survive.

In the autumn months of 2006, after much controversy and consternation from parent/watchdog groups, the videogame Bully was released to much critical acclaim. The game did not in fact celebrate the act of bullying as so many had worried, but was instead about fighting back against cliques of bullies that had overrun a private school in a New England state that most closely resembles Connecticut. Despite the worries of inspired violence no one in the game ever actually dies, as they just roll about on the ground clutching their bruised frames and groaning in pain until the player decides to move on. The protagonist of the game, Jimmy Hopkins, was a fifteen year old problem child whose mother had just remarried and decided to dump him off at Bullworth Academy while she and her new hubby took a year long honeymoon. Upon entering Bullworth, Jimmy discovers that cliques of students fight amongst themselves while the faculty turn a blind eye. After intervening during a fight against a jock and a nerd Jimmy then took it upon himself to put an end to bullying at Bullworth Academy once and for all. This is the setup for Bully and surprisingly the game manages to see it through to its logical conclusion without getting off track or losing focus in the process. In the end Jimmy saves the day from the game's main antagonist, Gary, who had been setting everyone up against each other. When the final chapter of the game, Endless Summer, rolls around Jimmy is big man on campus. Girls want to get to know him, the smaller kids look up to him, and now that all the troubles of the story missions are behind he is free to go back to competing in bike races, scavenging for blue rubber bands, and enjoying himself at the local carnival.

Structurally the game is a scaled back Grand Theft Auto, taking place in the fictional town of Bullworth. Starting off at the campus several sections of the town are blocked off until progress is made in the story portion. The town is fully realized down to the last detail, from the main square to the local carnival with its ferris wheel, rides, and other attractions to the football field on campus to the slums and trailer parks to the lone mental institution on the edge of town. Fisticuffs are the order of the day when engaging a foe, as well as slingshots and potato guns. There are several trinkets to collect, things to upgrade, etc. The player is free to roam about and do whatever they feel like, and a consortium of mini-games flesh out the fine details. None of these things are really that important though, because all you need to know about Bully is what you find out by playing it. The mini-games themselves are not particularly interesting or fun in and of themselves but when experienced in the greater context the game sets up for them they are absolutely sublime. Having to mow the lawn on a riding lawnmower in a certain amount of time is not that neat on its own, but having to do so for detention because a prefect caught you being mean to the little kids is a different matter. I never had a paper route when I was a kid but I had one in Bully and the money I made still felt just as well earned. Bully is more than just the sum of its parts, the game evokes a certain atmosphere that is wholly its own. Because, you see, Bully is not just a game. It is a direct feed into the parts of our brains that regulate those sentimental yearnings we often feel when longing for times past.

It's always the fall months that get me. When the air gets cooler and the leaves start falling I get this old nostalgic feeling that wells up from deep inside. I fondly recall that era of childhood, where the days seemed longer and the nights seemed darker. When fairy tales and myths were still based at least partly in actual fact. It is a dangerous feeling to get because I know that it can never be properly communicated to another person because the associated memories that trigger this feeling are different for everyone. For me they were the friendships forged in the lunchrooms and on the playgrounds, the runny noses of winter and balmy cafeterias where the Brown Bag Special was always on the menu. The comic books I drew in class and on my front porch with my fellow comic book geek buddies, or the flapping sound of a baseball card pinned to the spokes of a bicycle as it rode through the neighborhood in spring, the air flowing over my face and through my hair. That sense that the world was this really big mysterious place, being blissfully unaware of my surroundings, occupying myself for hours on end with nothing but the sheer power of my own imagination. Certain songs on the radio from a certain period of time.

I only get these moments in spurts though, before coming back to reality eventually. The longing sentimentality is still there, where I fondly recall days gone by and look back at all the things I did that I wish I had done differently and the things I wouldn't change for the world. Bully, with its visual aesthetic, characters (every student on campus is unique, no repeats), feel-good in-game music, and all the assorted shenanigans that go along with the exuberance of youth, is the embodiment of these feelings. It is a final chance for a rapidly aging young man such as myself to slip back into that mindset of old, in only ephemerally, and to hang on to those memories and relive them just a little while longer. Bully just feels like one of those games that remind you so strongly of a time in your life that you associate with certain things, at least for me. It's special that way. While I was playing it I never really felt like I was Jimmy Hopkins, I felt like I was there with him on his odyssey though. I was there every step of the way through all his successes and failures, through the good times and the bad, and I just wanted to be able to tell him "Hey, I understand. I'm with you, bro.". So silly, isn't it? That a mess of pixels made to look like a fifteen year old kid would be able to evoke these kinds of emotions. It's just testament to Rockstar's abilities at characterization, I suppose, that they could make this one character come alive so well. He almost bounces right off the screen and into your living room.

I suppose in a way, if you're the kind of person that cares enough about videogames to be reading an essay like this in a magazine like The Gamer's Quarter, then for you videogames generally serve, at least partly, the same purpose that they have served me. They give us a chance to go back home again, at least for a little while. They nurture that inner child that still senses a monster under the bed or a figure in the shadows. Bully is just one such game of recent memory that manages to excel so perfectly at bringing us back to that primordial state of mind. If you have a PS2 and you haven't tried Bully yet then I advise you to give it a spin on a rental sometime, and see if it doesn't draw you in the same way it did for me.
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 12:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm in too guys!

Putting the “B” in Bullet Witch

Bullet Witch – Xbox 360

Wes Ehrlichman

In our last episode of “The Life and Times of Cavia” (see Issue #3, Ghost in the Shell article) I praised mid-size Japanese developer Cavia’s Ghost in the Shell game for the way it delivers a Japanese version of the American action game by throwing in a beautiful, acrobatic big-breasted woman. In many ways, Bullet Witch is doing pretty much the same thing, but being on the Xbox 360 it has been strongly criticized for not living up to this generation’s quality standards. It’s hard to argue against this, but as I played through the game I had to wonder, does it really matter?

Bullet Witch opens with the player character - a sexy, black-clad witch named Alicia - standing in the middle of the street in a small, North American suburb. A few steps in front of her, three zombies, clad in army gear, whose skin looks to be falling off of their decomposing corpses stand around awaiting your attack. The first thing that struck me about this scene wasn’t the situation, but the lack of polish. All three zombies use the same character model, which, since the skin is falling off of each zombie in exactly the same way, comes off very unrealistic - the face has melted onto each zombie’s shoulder, their guns are held in their right hands, the same scuffs are on each helmet, the same fatigues on each zombie. It’s adequate, but it clearly doesn’t exude the graphical prowess expected of current generation games.
After noticing that all of the zombies looked the same I killed them and moved on, never thinking about this again. This is important. Other games use enemies that aren’t very distinct so that it’s not as blatantly unrealistic when you kill the same character model over and over again. That’s fine, but after the initial jolt of unrealism, does having the same distinct model for each enemy really make a difference when they all fight the same anyway? I don’t think so. In fact, I’m not sure that many people play games for their graphical prowess at all. People like games because they like the context. They want to play the Spartan God in God of War and the adventurous elf in Zelda. They want to feel like they’re driving a car in Gran Turismo. Graphic fidelity offers a feeling of polish and can improve realism, but no matter how good a game looks, if there’s no desire to drive a fancy sportscar, there’s no reason to play Gran Turismo. Bullet Witch is grounded in the idea that what really matters is concept, and all of the money and effort should go into the areas that an audience who wants to play a game about a hot scantily-clad woman who fights armies of Satan’s minions will appreciate most. There may only be a few variations for each enemy, but there are six alternate costumes for Alicia herself that can be downloaded for free over the internet that turn her into a sexy witch, sexy mummy, sexy schoolgirl, sexy butterfly, and so on. If that’s not an example of who they think their audience is, I’m not sure what is.

This idea of concept over execution isn’t limited to design, but can also be found in technical areas. As the game progresses, Alicia gains access to four screen-filling, kill-all power attacks. They all look great and actually effect the environment they’re cast in, but every single one of them causes the frame rate to slow to a crawl. Thankfully, they’re so big and chaotic that it’s easy to forgive. The story is also conceptually great, but gets lost somewhere in execution. Early in the game Alicia meets an army commander/love-interest who fights with his men alongside you for the game. This is good because it allows a few army men to fight alongside you in the game, but it’s bad because the commander’s stilted voice acting rivals that of the original Resident Evil. Luckily, the cutscenes where he actually speaks are sparse, and the plot itself enables the game to move logically from set-piece to set-piece and end in a way that is predictable, yet satisfying.
Tim Rogers once called Cavia’s games “workmanlike,” as if they are masters of solidity. I call this bullshit. There are problems in each of their games that greater developers with greater budgets and greater programming skill are clearly capable of getting around. On top of the aforementioned problems, Bullet Witch also has a share of clipping errors, frame rate drops, and massive slowdown. There are problems that would turn off any superficial gamer and have turned off many superficial reviewers. There’s one scene in particular where Alicia is on one side of a chain link fence and several enemy zombies are on the other. This fence can easily be seen through, and could easily be shot through in real life, but in the world of Bullet Witch (or the “engine” of Bullet Witch, if we’re getting precise) you can stand right behind it and use it for cover. This was clearly an oversight, and even more clearly a sign of rushed-game design, but it’s such a small thing when looking at the game from the user’s experience. Once a game has established its internal level of polish, as long as it’s consistent, the amount of polish stops mattering. Bullet Witch is consistent in its failures.

If every individual element is as borderline terrible as I make it out to be, you’re probably wondering why Bullet Witch is even worth talking about in the first place. I can forgive them because I think of Bullet Witch as having a lot in common with something like Sam Raimi’s seminal B movie, Evil Dead. Evil Dead was made with a small budget, but they put what small amount of money they had in the places it would have the biggest impact. It is crystal clear in some scenes of Evil Dead that they use low frame-rate stop-motion photography to move their monsters, and there’s one particular shot of a cabin in the woods at night where it’s blatantly clear that a moon graphic was pasted directly onto the film itself. These are obvious “flaws” in the movie, but they don’t get in the way of the context, and in some ways they only add to the heart. In Evil Dead they didn’t cut scenes or remove characters simply because they didn’t have enough money to do them justice, they simply did the best with what they had and hoped that the context would be enough to carry the idea through. It’s obvious that Bullet Witch was made using the same ideas and with the same amount of heart, and I respect that enough to look past technical and design shortcomings.
So given all of the obvious problems, how does one go about reviewing movies like Evil Dead and games like Bullet Witch? Are movies rated on their budgets and feature sets or how well they fulfill the promise of their premise? If we go by the second criteria, Bullet Witch certainly exceeds all expectations. The first stage finds Alicia shooting army zombies in the suburbs while giant floating brains put up barriers to prevent her progress, the second features an invincible 10-story tall demon with one arm made of three snakes and another that shoots lasers from the wrist, the third ends in a fight with a giant flying fish from atop a moving airplane while giant, semen-like eyeballs come flying at our heroin, and it only gets odder from there. The game is relatively short, but each stage features moments like those above, which make Bullet Witch’s world feel like an over-the-top B movie, with an overall production that screams of indulgence in the best way.

There’s a danger in demanding perfection from every area of a game. Perfection takes time, time costs money, and getting money requires an idea that can be sold to the mass market. Bullet Witch never had a chance of being that mass market game, but it’s the perfect game for the niche audience who can see through the low frame rates and repetitive character models to find the heart that shines through the game’s B movie-like world. If this niche audience wanted a game with AAA production values, they’d find that rather than getting the game they’re looking for, they’d simply have no game at all. That would be a shame because Bullet Witch deserved to be made and deserves to be played.
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 8:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I will be reading these today, but I should note that Shaper had solicited my Metal Man article from SB (with some edits) for this non-happening issue. I can dig up a link if anyone wants it.
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 12:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A shame about the forums, too. Aside from Quarter To Three, this was the only place I would read regularly and the only one I actually posted in.

I've read that Fusion Publishing is having some problems and that Geek Monthly isn't operating anymore, does anyone know if Play is still around?

Update: Welp, found out that Play is gone but that Halverson is relaunching GameFan.
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 14, 2010 9:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I haven't checked this forum in ages. Thanks, Sergei.

The funny thing is, I'm not sure why I stopped posting here. Pretty sure I bowed out before most people, but it's easily the best forum I've ever been a member of. And if we could get a core crew back together, I wouldn't hesitate to post here again.

PS Ryan! Sorry I didn't respond to your email, I totally forgot about it. Grad school is getting heavier and heavier, and I'm still ashamed I didn't review the last round of games, so I'm probably not a good pick to do so again for a while.
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 6:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah! I think about the Gamer's Quarter all the time. I come here every other day to see if there are any new posts. I will forever lament our lost Issue #9—more than EGM or any other magazine.

Speaking of which, I have my final article layouts from the unreleased issue; it was about local retro games shop A&C Games. The store owners, I think, felt I let them down when after all our work to get this done, the magazine never appeared. So, to bring the karmic world back in balance, here are nicely-huge JPGs of all four pages of this article:

Pages One and Two
Pages Three and Four

As Mathew Kumar very deftly carries the torch with his fantastic zine, exp, let's remember that our little publication had a pretty significant contribution to make, and we—and especially Shaper and Wes, of course—had the gonads to make it.
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 23, 2010 7:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I miss this magazine so much. Thanks for these articles!

What happened? Funding issues?
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Lestrade
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 23, 2010 8:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I think Shaper got abducted by the government. I will post some more neat stuff here when I get a moment. And Boojiboy, yes, dig up the goods! I think we should pull an EGM Now and post lost articles and curios.

Oh, and for the record, my favourite TGQ article title is "Crossing the Boobicon." Chime in, everyone!
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seryogin
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 2:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

My favorite title would have to be "Knee Deep in Legend," if we exclude the ones that are obvious quotes from something else.

I had two essays lined up in Issue FINAL. I might as well post them here.
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seryogin
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 3:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

War in the Pocket: Advance Wars


Whether it’s healthy or not, war has always fascinated me. I'm a bit troubled by my eager devouring of every grimy story out of the Middle East, but I suppose it’s just part of my nerd pedigree, a long-brewing fondness that sits proudly along such exalted pursuits as anime collecting and watching sentimental Korean love films. As much as I’ve put the painful snubs and snickers of college behind me, these tendencies towards brutal violence and weepy melodrama remain firmly entrenched in my mind as lofty artistic pursuits. Whenever I’m walking home at three in the morning from a long night of drinking, my mind invariably turns towards the various battlefields that I’ve been assembling in my mind for years, painstakingly selecting the weapons, the logistics, and overall structures of all these Walter Mitty wish fests. Like a masturbation habit, they just won’t leave me alone.

Though that’s simplifying things somewhat. My delight in war memoirs, documentaries, videogames and films is also a daily reminder that there are other modes of living across the horizon. Now, I don’t quite know if I’d like to be manning a trench on the Ethiopia-Eritrea border, driving a technical in Somalia, or pulling guard duty in Fallujah. I certainly know that I wouldn’t want to end my life as another body in a makeshift Kerbala morgue, swimming in the mounds of ice with so many other luckless bastards like some blood and guts slurpee. But I find it shocking and fascinating that there are places in the world where life is unsettlingly different from the office-and-consumer world of my adopted country. This certainly doesn’t make me a moral individual -- in fact it makes me sound callous and selfish -- though it’s quite in the matter of things, I assure you. Call of Duty didn't sell a trillion copies because it teaches us that “war is not cool.”

Advance Wars has always been a series that’s captivated me in theory. A cutesy, ridiculous anime representation of war is as quintessentially Japanese as having lunch at a place where the waitresses wear French maid uniforms and refer to their pimply nerd customers as “master.”

In the game, war is turned into a laughable activity no more harmful than a drunk night at karaoke. While the actual military campaigns are helmed by people ripped straight out of teen fiction. Advance Wars either makes me think that the samurai spirit has finally died, or it has to be tucked and hidden away through cute metaphors to be acceptable for the mainstream of this once warlike race. Either way, these are questions that are best left out of an essay on enjoying Advance Wars for the Nintendo DS.

The cuteness has its appeal. For one, I’ve always found 2-D cartoony graphics much more liberating than their 3D counterpart. It’s much easier for my imagination to go to work when I’m confronted by deformed figures in red fatigues. I imagine feeling the air rush past as my fighter planes bombard an air fortress. I imagine my tanks’ little treads throwing up pavement as they ride into an enemy city.

Most of the unit designs were inspired by real-life armies. It's quite a thrill for a war pedant to see a unit in action or a character portrait and knowing exactly where the influence for their look came from. For example, the commander of the Blue Moon Army is a short rich boy who’s dressed in an oversized Soviet general’s parade uniform. Perhaps this is ironic; I’m pretty sure it's not. The designers of Advance Wars just wanted something to look stylish.

The rest of the Blue Moon Army follows suit, their infantry units are minuscule Soviet Great Fatherland War troops: dressed in high boots, pilotkas, blouse-tunics, and armed with either PPSh submachine guns or RPG launchers. The rocket cars look like katyushas and the tanks have the silhouettes and conspicuous fuel tanks of the T-34 and its successors.

The rest of the armies follow designs based off the US army, the Imperial Japanese Army and – lighting crash – the Wehrmacht. If I were willing to give the game’s designers any credit for satire, then making the Wehrmacht the “Green Earth Army,” was deviously clever. Green Peace Uber Alles! Row upon row of bearded fascists in hemp tunics and Fairtrade-certified combat boots marching down a dusty Russian road with their commanders riding vanguard in solar-fueled panzers.

All of this wonderful historical detail makes the game’s main enemy that much more disappointing. The Black Hole infantry look like morons in fencer suits with ray guns. Their tanks are unimagined stacks of blocks and the same goes for all of their other units. Everything about the game denies them the slightest semblance of humanity and that hurts. Because I don’t like losing to aliens, getting killed by humans just seems that much more humane to me.

Putting aside aesthetics, the game acquired sound meaning only when I understood that time-tested strategic principles actually applied. While attacking units always have an advantage (even against cities!), crippling the enemy’s industry and supply routes, making sure that the enemy can’t produce any technology while flooding the map with your own cheapest units will usually lead to a quick and painless victory. And this leads to a pleasurable experience. Seeing your long-term strategy work out – even if they’re some surprises along the way – is a nice, calm ego-rush. The fireworks lighting up the map at the end of a battle make it sweeter. It often makes me recall the wonderful World War I poems of “mystical fascist” Nikolai Gumilev.

“And how sweet the triumph of victory
Like a girl in pearls,
As one walks on the smoldering roads
Of the retreating foe.”
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seryogin
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 4:12 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I wrote this three years ago. Let it be known that actually working in a Japanese public school has certainly diminished my enthusiasm for them. In any case, this is the last of my essays that was supposed to be published. This is Seryogin signing out.



Boys, Be Ambitious! Rival Schools: United by Fate

Among the many regrets of my life, the fact that I wasn’t born Japanese probably holds king. Don’t get me wrong; Russian suits me fine enough. Though I often like to imagine what my life would’ve been like under the watchful gaze of His Imperial Majesty.

And if I’d been born Japanese then I would’ve gone to a Japanese high school.

The more knowledgeable of my readers are probably grimacing at this point. Dumb wanker, they think, too much AV has rotted the poor boy’s mind. He probably imagines he’d be getting a thorough cock sucking every day of the week by Sailor Moon or some such nonsense. They wouldn’t be entirely wrong – this is a part of it, to be sure – though they’d miss the bigger fantasy at work here. I’ve been watching Japanese high school dramas and anime since twelve and that doesn’t all have to do with the uniforms, guys. Strangely, few genres leave me so hopeful as the ones that are set in Japanese high schools.

Over the years I’ve experienced them in so many forms: the encouraging kunstlerroman of Whisper of the Heart, the cruel hellhole in Blue Spring, to the days-gone-by melancholy of Banana Yoshimoto’s “Moonlit Shadows.” And while the depictions of this wonderful setting range from sheer contempt to nostalgic fondness, I’ve never been able to shake the belief that Japanese high schools are fundamentally decent, magical places where everybody has great dreams, lots of fighting spirit, and romantic triangles.

This is what compels me to examine my Japanese friends’ high school albums with such care. I’d often ask them to describe every character in the picture, enlarge upon his or her relationship with the person and discuss any things that they now associate with them. I’m very thorough about this, to the point of it being very tiring. Their tales, however weakly told, always let me enjoy – for a few moments anyway – the thought of being there with them. So I’m suddenly running next to bloomer girl in PE, shouting “faito – faito - faito,” or making dumb poses in a purikura photo booth, or eavesdropping on a girls’ conversation at the other desk about who was doing what and, more importantly, to whom last weekend.

I’ve tried many times to find the specific genesis point for this strange aesthetic leaning, and without fail I always see myself standing next to an arcade cabinet in an underground mall a few meters from the Kremlin walls. I’m thirteen years old and the title on the cabinet reads: Rival Schools: United by Fate.

Rivals Schools was a project born out of the popularity of Sakura Kasugano from Street Fighter Alpha 2 with Japanese teenagers. Capcom has a reputation in the industry for having a drug hound’s scent for unused money in the wallets of their target demographics. Thus, they went to work on a fighting game that would focus on the theme of “justice” brought out in the burning ideals of today’s high school youth. Perhaps intangible concepts don’t translate very well over cultures, though “justice,” in Capcom’s estimation, meant that students would spend lunch breaks throwing fireballs at each other, and ditching cram school to think up ways to one-up the evil beast man principal running Justice High, the game’s main antagonist.

I've always divided fighting game companies by the feelings that they evoke. Midway was all about gross-out violence, the lifeblood of every adolescent nerd’s mind. Midway was very American and very necessary for its time. I’d spend hours at the arcades, watching people play the Mortal Kombat series, hoping to see a newer, even more outrageous finishing move revealed. Namco handled its violence in a way that was a bit more refined: Tekken was about power, fluid movement and good fashion choices. You’d feel every punch and throw without seeing the gruesome effects of these things. It was a classy fighter for people who were very conventional in their choice of games. Tekken fit like a good dinner jacket or evening gown and with each installment the characters ended up stronger, faster and better dressed.

In a far more pathos-rich field we end up with SNK, whose games addressed the world with the vocabulary of regret in a thoroughly Japanese way. They were very sensitive towards mood and setting. The characters of Samurai Spirits were losers for the most part, patchworks of protagonists from Japanese historical dramas. And they fought each other in secluded bamboo forests with laser beams of sunlight cutting through the stalks, rainy old battlefields with tattered samurai banners sticking from the mud, and rocky shores with fireworks exploding in the distance: a very appealing tableau for bleak romantics, all things considered. And the fighting suited this perfectly. It was slow, methodical – like two hyenas circling a fresh carcass – and would erupt fantastically with effects ripped straight out of Japanese b-movies movies. Lots of flashy blood squirting, quick pauses to underscore a successful hit, with BGM that mixed synth guitars with the sounds of Noh and kabuki. Mortal Kombat was candy bar violence while Samurai Spirits was a five-dollar bottle of sparkling apple juice.

Where does this leave Capcom, though? If SNK was committed to providing a sense of Japaneseness, then Capcom’s games were very American in their outlook. Or rather they transposed American values through their Japanese lens. The Street Fighter games were pure Horatio Alger (forgetting the gloomier aspects of the Alpha series). Those who play Capcom games competitively can ignore this, but I’ve always felt that Street Fighter was much less about the fighting than the idea that training and honing your skills can somehow lead you to the top of the world, circumstances be damned. The battles weren't about violence; they were about expressing the character’s will. In the Capcom universe the Soviet Union never went out of business.

This unerring optimism and belief in one’s own power is what drives Rival Schools. For most of us, high school is where one first feels the limitations of the world and one’s self. Rival Schools succeeds because it's packed with the idealism of late childhood, where one feels that he can not only be everything, but is everything. It’s a time when you race around the country with your dog and no one else need bother you; you can eat the Earth like an apple and drink the sun for lunch.

The characters have this attitude and the skills to match it, wild exaggerations of whatever activities they excel at. Shoma is a plucky baseball player with a bat that brings Cloud Strife’s sword to mind. The rest of the students of Gorin High School are equally adept at sports. Gedo High School is the home of the wild delinquents: bosouzoku punks and punkettes. While the folks of Pacific High School are foreigners: anti-Japanese preppie Roy, bubbly wrasslin’ girl Tiffany and, uuhhh, black preacher-in-training Boman. They all seem to scream, “we’ve already become something by dedicating ourselves to our hobbies – whether they be sports, studies, or delinquency – and will only keep becoming something greater in the future.”

My own personal preference leans towards Taiyo High School, despite their obvious role as the series’ favorites. I’ve always admired Hinata Wakaba. Her white headband, gigantic sneakers, cyan vest and skirt; her short-sleeved shirt and light pink bowtie were my first proto-moe sparks that would later turn into a prairie fire; one that I carried all the way through high school and beyond, into age brackets where such things no longer seem harmless. And one mustn’t forget her victory dance, which looks both ridiculous and endearing. The other members of the Taiyo team – with the exception of Batsu, who plays the series’ main character – are just as stylish (I still consider Kyosuke Kagami the apex of Japanese high school poise and have had many dreams about him).

The overall presentation fits the characters perfectly: anime portraits in the menus and story scenes followed by polygonal 3D models during battles. I feel that this works, because you’re left with a good stylized image of the characters to keep in mind and carry through the 3D fights, which had nice, fluid movement performed by characters that looked a bit too ugly at close range. Without the anime styling, the battles would feel flat and pointless, like Virtua Fighter without the deep combat system, and would've made the game just another bland 2-D anime fighter.

And the 3D models made the outrageous combat that much more endearing. You really did need the camera angles that only 3D can provide to properly appreciate the tag-team attacks. My favorite has always been the team-up where one character launches the victim into the air, jumps up and spikes his or her body into Shoma’s bat, who hits them far enough to scale the camera way past the edges of the battlefield.

Some may find those battlefields uninspired (classrooms, gym halls, and school rooftops) but I loved them. This is party due to the great music; lots of synthetic guitars and pianos playing cocky, sun-filled tunes. It’s no accident that “On the Rooftop of Taiyo HS, ” along with Cammy’s theme from Super Street Fighter II, is one of the most consistent selections on Capcom’s Best of… arcade albums.

And that rooftop is what makes Rival Schools great. School rooftops are the preferred landscapes for high school drama denouements, whether it’s a girl revealing her feelings to the misunderstood loner or a climatic showdown between gangs. Fighting someone there holds a special enthusiasm for me. It communicates the feeling of what I always imagined an ideal high school would be: plenty of adolescent brawling and yelling, unrestrained as those ages tend to be, yet without the cruelty of actual high school.

I guess we need the Japanese to make games like this for us. Since they inhabit a system that may be far crueler than one that we actually live in. Or perhaps they’re just less inhibited about fantasies over there.

It’s best that I never went to a Japanese high school. Had I actually attended one, everything would’ve probably lost its gloss. And all the characters would’ve resembled the loathsome twerps that get blown away in Battle Royale. The past few years have been nothing but a straight series of disappointing refutations. Yet, I’m happy to know that for the time being, the kids of Japan are still fighting, starting each day with flaming kicks and uppercuts. Over there, going to school in 19th century Prussian garb is not just an acceptable fashion choice, but goddamn glorious.
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 9:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Here's my contribution. There's some definite things I would clean up in it now, but I contribute it here, warts and all.

I bought Mega Man 2 at the same time as Ducktales, a game based on a Disney afternoon cartoon that centered around a character from the periphery of the Disney canon taking care of his three nephews who were only invented to give Donald Duck something minorly logical to fume about. I was 8 or 9 when I bought these games, sometime in 1989 or 90, soon after they had both been released. I can explain why I bought Ducktales, as the cartoon it was based on was probably my favorite thing on TV at the time that didn't have Jean-Luc Picard in it. I can't explain what made me buy Mega Man 2. Maybe it was just the box.

Both of these games came in the Capcom box. It doesn't seem like too many companies are making "the box" for themselves anymore, certainly not like Capcom and Konami were back in the day. You knew a game from those companies (and in the Konami case, by extension, Ultra) right away. Even a kid like me, barely in the double digits of age numbering, could appreciate branding like that.

Thankfully, the Mega Man 2 Capcom box did not feature anywhere near the level of embarrassing art as the first game. Mega Man was still clearly a man, but at least now he wasn't drawn in the notebook of the kid who sits in the back of the class and gets his spelling worksheet done a lot faster than you. OK, so that kid might just have been me, but I know I can't draw. Never stopped me, but whatever. On the cover of the 2 box, Mega Man finally gets to wear all blue, and he is in some sort of futuristic lava infested construction site, trying to shoot Quick Man in the face and missing, much to the delight of Crash Man. Not that I knew at the time who any of these people were, but I did love shooting things. Mega Man is very obviously proportioned like a grown adult, or at least a teenager. In the game, in a discrepancy that never even registered on me until a friend pointed it out 15 years later, he is a kid. Probably a fat kid. Probably in pajamas and a football helmet. How you interpret this will depend on if you even notice it and if you think this kid is playing in his imagination, or somehow a demented boy running around killing things under the illusion that he is a robot built to save humanity.

This game plays like a Mega Man game should. Even this early in the series, it seems that the people behind it had some idea what a Mega Man game should do. Mega Man doesn't have the slide yet, since it doesn't get added until part 3, but he does get the 8 bosses (up from the six in part 1, and soon to be the standard number). Each of these bosses has a stage that briefly challenges him in some way relevant to the boss, so that Quick Man's stage makes him do something very fast, Heat Man makes him avoid a lot of lava, and so on. He can switch to all the bosses' weapons, beat the bosses using those weapons, and go to Wily's castle. Mega Man even gets some extra random items from Dr. Light (though no Rush yet either. Classic rockers of Canada mourn the absence).

Like every game in the series, there is an order to the bosses, and once you learn that, the game gets a lot easier. I never bothered to learn it. I had priorities, and still do, and they centered on one man, one myth, one cosmic legend: Metal Man. He is the main character of this game, despite what the cover may say. In a move that would only later be echoed by none other than Hideo Kojima himself, Metal Man is the main character of the game specifically by not being the main character of the game. He is always the first person I have to fight in the game, both by virtue of being the first robotic boss I managed to beat, and by having the most useful weapon ever put in a Mega Man game.

His level follows the pattern and is all conveyor belts and gears, a brownish factory where clowns ride gears and slinkies attack. Spikes drop and drills fly through both floor and ceiling all in a fairly simple attempt to protect their master. The music, in a game is noted for its soundtrack, is not even particularly good in this stage, but it works. The challenge of the stage seems to center around getting past the various metal parts of the factory. It seems, in reflection, kind of a stupid aesthetic for a stage in a game about robots, all of which seem to be made of metal, but whatever. Like all of the stages in Mega Man 2, the drive to get to the end and meet the master is soon fulfilled, and he appears with little fanfare, and you know...he sucks.

Yes, he sucks.

He is easily dodgable, easily beatable with just Mega Man's little non-chargeable pea shooter. He looks cool enough, with his brownish red and yellow costume adorned with a single tiny saw blade on his head. Actually, it just looks like a disc, but given that he chucks bigger saw blades at you, I always just extrapolated that the disc was just another blade. It is in his portrait on the level select screen, just not on his actual sprite. I bet it had a picture of the blade on his head in the book. I bought the game brand new, but I don't think I ever even noticed the book.

Metal Man gives you his saw blades. I had never played Mega Man 1, so getting a boss's weapon was totally sweet. I used the crap out of that thing. Every enemy in the game would eventual taste cold steel saw. Every boss would get that weapon tried first on him, and only a few of them could even be hit by it, let alone actually be weak to it. Two of them were even weak to it, though only one of those two made sense. Wood gets cut by saws, sure, no problem. Bubbles? I mean, yeah, a saw would cut them, no problem, but so would a pencil.

Metal Man is with you, always. He is your Iroquois Plisken, without the cutscenes. You know he was stronger than you, he was obviously better armed, and you can't quite get over the feeling that he is somehow watching you from beyond the robotic grave, knowing that each time you use his weapon, his ghost gets to haunt your body. His weapon replaces your own, and with the more time you spend wearing his colors, the more time you are not the Mega Man sent here by Dr. Light, but something new...different.

Though I could, through use of the trusty blades, beat all of the other stages, Quick Man and Heat Man were the source of my childhood shame. I never could beat the game, and they were the reason. I never made it to Quick Man. Even with the Flash Man Time Stopper to slow down the lasers, it didn't happen. I felt pathetic for it. I looked at every magazine I could find, every hint book published that had any little tidbit of information about Mega Man 2, and nothing. I couldn't do it. Heat Man's stage was hard, not too hard, but the disappearing platforms would cause a few problems. Knowing that I couldn't beat Quick Man, however, I just couldn't put the effort into Heat. I gave in.

I would eventually find a code and just skip to Wily's castle. I made it to the dragon. He killed me on my first try. I lost all heart and didn't pick up the game again for 15 years or so. During all of those fifteen years, I would never let Metal Man leave me. He was part of me, and in every opportunity I could, I brought him into my world. The first custom texture in my Animal Crossing town would be of him. My F-Zero GX custom decals were all initially related to him. Friends would all know about this minor obsession with the guy. But yet, I did not know his secret.

It wasn't until the arguably flawed (the button switch didn't bother me as much as it did others, since I hadn't played the game for years) Gamecube edition of the Mega Man Anniversary Collection came out that I touched the game again. I was eager. I bought the game fresh out of a UPS box at a local EBgamestopwhatever and popped it into my Cube.

The Cube, oddly enough, was hooked up to the exact same television that Mega Man 2 had dominated all those years past. This is the TV that would not die. It came into my house when I was 4 years old, in 1985. It was the first TV my parents ever bought for themselves, not inheriting it from their parents or anyone else. It was a 20 inch Technika, with AV inputs, and a tiny little remote. When I was in third grade and we moved into a new house, my parents gave me that TV, and that Christmas, my brand new NES would be hooked up to it.

That TV came with me to college in the fall of 1999, now with a PlayStation hooked up to it. It sat on top of the fridge in my tiny dorm room at the University of Dayton and when I transferred to OSU, it came with me, and I had my ass handed to me in Street Fighter Alpha 3 on it by a roommate named Bill who is an entire tale unto himself, even though we only knew each other for six months. This was the TV I played Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga on, the later in full tate, only to watch the reds and greens get reversed (I would later figure out that if I just let the TV discharge for about an hour, I could tate it with no problems at all). The image is slightly blurry, probably due to me turning down the sharpness on it when I would play NES games, because it made them look better to my young eyes. Today it has my PS2 and Gamecube hooked up to it, and you can only turn it on and adjust the volume with a remote, since the buttons on the front stopped working long ago.

So it was only fitting that this was the TV I renewed my love affair with Mega Man 2 on. It was harder than I remembered, or maybe I was just worse at playing it, but I could do most of the stuff I could do as a kid, and that included limitations. I couldn't beat fucking Quick Man's stage. A guy I worked with named Atari (not his real name, but a nickname he got in the Navy, as I recall) told me he could beat that stage without Flash Man. I tried this. I spent an afternoon at the best job ever working on this. I call it the best job ever because my boss told me to bring in video games to play because there was nothing to do. And she let me work 6 hours a day and get paid for 8.

I did it. I fucked Quick Man so hard he would have to tell his friends about it, because it was scarring. I went on and beat Heat Man. I went on to Wily's Castle. I went on to the dragon.

Though I didn't appreciate it as a kid, the dragon is a great moment in this game. Up until then, with the exception of the mini-bosses that were never much of a challenge anyway, all the bosses have been about Mega Man's size. Just other robots like him. The dragon is something different. He is almost the entire height of the screen, and he wants nothing more than to shove you off into the pit of oblivion in any way that he can. That he comes after the first forced scroll in the game only makes him more exemplary. I figured out pretty quickly that the Quick Boomerang was just the thing for this guy, but then there is a problem. I run out of ammo. I run out of lives. The stage begins again. When I beat it, I move on to the next part of the castle.

Wily's Castle is always an interesting part of the Mega Man games. From 2 on, whenever you beat a robot master, you get the password. So after each stage, ostensibly, you can stop playing. Not so much in the Castle. Not at all, actually. It's one sitting or nothing at all. Any time you stop, you have to start the whole castle over again. It's an act of dedication, as each piece of the Castle is harder than the last. The dragon falls pretty fast, but the next stage demands a bit more. The third boss requires you to use the Crash Bomb near perfectly, or you have to start it all over again. You do all this, and you get to the teleporter room.

I had no clue what to do here. They aren't marked or anything. They just are there. I hopped in one, and dispatched of the boss that showed up. I went back to the teleporter room, and teleported to the next fight, and there he was. Metal. He had come back. Like Snake rising from the grave to show up on Big Shell, Metal Man is there to remind how much everything I have done in this game has depended on him. It is like he knew exactly what I was doing for those 15 years, and he knew every place he had shown up in my mind. And he wanted to fight again.

I couldn't use the blaster on him. It just didn't feel right. I didn't want just a rematch of our earlier battle. I wanted to show him what I knew, that I had grown, that I was the better man/robot. But nothing was working. Other weapons damaged him, sure, but they didn't work any better than the peashooter. In a moment of desperation, I try the saw blades. They haven't failed me in the past, but surely the king of all Mega Man bosses would have steeled himself against the damage of his own flying steel.

It killed him.

In one hit. Though it would have taken two if he weren't softened up a little first.

I put down the controller. His final lesson is taught. It was there all along, but he needed to die to teach it.

In a video game, in Mega Man and any other, the only person who loses is you. The only person who can defeat you is you. When some enemy or another player beats you, you want to blame them. They were better than you. Faster. Stronger. Cheaper. Whatever. But in the end, only you can defeat yourself. Metal Man somehow knew that for those 15 years, it wasn't Quick Man stopping me. It wasn't the lasers blasting across the stage. It was me not getting better, not stepping up to the 8-bit plate and swinging at that ball till it left the park. When Metal Man takes the saw blade to the face, he is making his lost life a pure demonstration that the only thing that could defeat him was himself, in the end.

Or maybe he just sucks.

I'd like to think not. I'd like to think that somewhere in the minds of INAFKING and his crew at Capcom, someone woke up one day with a deep revelation about games themselves, and wanted to put it in their game. This probably isn't true, as we certainly have never been given an indication as such. The Mega Man series goes on to this day, with little to no hint that they even saw this as a moral for a game. I don't know that anybody really has.

I still feel like beating Metal Man there, with his own weapon, freed me from something. When I went on and beat Wiley, it was as my own person. My own robot, more accurately.

This isn't to diminish the final Wily fight. Wily has a few forms, of progressive difficulty, and when you finally feel you have beaten him, it seems that the game isn't over. There is another stage. In a game that has featured such an excellent soundtrack, the final stage is completely without music. In a game dominated by robots, the final stage seems organic. The stage is a cave, and the only antagonists aside from the boss are some red drops of slime falling from the ceiling, making tiny pings as they hit the rocky ground. After this creepy buildup, you are not surprised that Wily is in the room at the end of the cave. What is a surprise, however, is what Wily turn out to be.

He is an alien! WHAT?

The alien is weak to Bubble Man's weapon, which only fits, as it is easily the hardest weapon to hit him with as it falls out just in front of Mega Man and rolls across the ground. The alien flies across the screen above the ground, and the only way to hit him is to jump just near him and fire your gun. I eventually killed the alien, only to find a semi-predictable Oz-ish Wiley standing by a projector. Wily submits, and it is all over (OR IS IT? Of course not. There are, after all, 8 Mega Man games in the series proper, so you make the call.).

Mega Man 2 may have my favorite video game end sequence ever. Mega Man walks towards the screen, and there is a background image of a village, and the seasons pass in the village. As each season passes, Mega Man is the color of the robot master that matches the colors of the season portrayed. Notably, Metal Man is absent. After orange leaves (Heat Man), white snow (Bubble Man), pink cherry blossoms (Quick Man), and blue rain (Air Man), the town finally is sunny and green, and Mega Man is back to his original blue. The final shot of the sequence has expanded the view of the town to the full screen, and sitting on a hill in the foreground is the helmet of Mega Man, but he himself is nowhere to be seen. It recalls the opening screen of the game, where Mega Man is standing atop a tall building, helmetless, before the battle. Mega Man is free of the city now, and free of the helmet donned for the sake of a battle he knows he will fight again. He is a Capcom character, after all.

The credits are simple. They name each boss, and the person on the staff who designed them. Each boss is given a little bit of a personality just by this little detail. We know the names of the people who made them, and maybe we know those people just a little as well. The first robot listed is "No. 9 Metal Man" by Masanori Satou.

I want to find Masanori Satou and let him know what his creation meant to me. I don't know that I ever will.
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kirkjerk
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 25, 2010 10:17 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Man.
I keep thinking about the piece I had in mind, about how I did a homebrew original Atari 2600 game around the same time my marriage was (unbeknownst to me) heading into the rocks, and if there was any kind of cause/effect there - it was going to have alternating sections with a lot of techie details about programming and then more crappy emo "what to watch out for in your marriage".

Then I read "Racing the Beam" and saw what David Crane is doing on the iPhone ( http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=9017908 ) and don't know if it matters any more.

Yeah, I miss the community here. SB just has a different vibe.
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 26, 2010 7:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

kirkjerk wrote:
Yeah, I miss the community here. SB just has a different vibe.

I've had exactly the same thoughts lately. TGQ was pretty optimistic overall. We actually liked games. SB is completely the opposite. Reading Lestrade's twitter feed on Heavy Rain is like the polar opposite of reading the Heavy Rain thread on SB. over there it almost feels like everyone's trying to outdo everyone else in how dismissive they're being.

I think if dess and dhex came back I'd be the happiest.

-Wes
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 03, 2010 9:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, TGQ did have a lot more of the "we love games and aren't necessarily embarrassed by that" vibe that I miss from the old IC. Sb's overall bitterness (even when I contribute to it) can get really old sometimes.

Actually, half the reason I bought Deadly Premonition is that it seemed like the kind of game people could be happy about again. It's odd that it is making me happy about games again as well.
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 11:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

SuperWes wrote:
kirkjerk wrote:
Yeah, I miss the community here. SB just has a different vibe.

I've had exactly the same thoughts lately. TGQ was pretty optimistic overall. We actually liked games. SB is completely the opposite. Reading Lestrade's twitter feed on Heavy Rain is like the polar opposite of reading the Heavy Rain thread on SB. over there it almost feels like everyone's trying to outdo everyone else in how dismissive they're being.

I think if dess and dhex came back I'd be the happiest.

-Wes

Another thing is that TGQ actually banned trolls whenever they rolled around. I'm a big fan of banning trolls.

I think dess and dhex will come back if others do, so hey. Let's to posting!
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 2:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You know, one random thing that I secretly suspect is more than just symbolic about TGQ vs SB?

TGQ is white with black test, and by default SB is the opposite.

I don't know how people deal with that; seriously, the white burns afterimages into my eyes and the lines dance around. (at SB I crank it to that one generic white w/ blue and orange highlights set, so it ends up looking more like AtariAge than anything else)

Somehow I think thinks this sets or at least reflects the relative mood of the places.

That, and the banners. God damn I love the banners.
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 6:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The banners are a mighty force for good, indeed.
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 05, 2010 7:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

hi all. sergei threw me this way. i hope matt's still alive (i haven't spoken to him since last thanksgiving) and doing well in his studies, and that everyone else is still doing well in whatever they're doing. (or doing poorly, but in style and grace)

anyway, most of you guys forgot more about games than i could ever learn, which is what made the content so interesting. (and my posting so disruptive, as i am basically a dan brown fan writing letters to the james joyce quarterly.)

reading good essays about games i'd never even want to play, which is probably the opposite effect most criticism is supposed to have but experientialism is a bit more transcendent.

kudos to you all.
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 06, 2010 11:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dhex! Played any manly fps games lately?

-Wes
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 10, 2010 10:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

manly? well, i'm playing call of pripyat now between feedings and fits with the wee one, and there's absolutely no women in that, so i suppose it's rather masculinist. it's also excellent as all hell.
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 6:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

dhex wrote:
manly? well, i'm playing call of pripyat now between feedings and fits with the wee one, and there's absolutely no women in that, so i suppose it's rather masculinist. it's also excellent as all hell.

You had one of those too, eh? Really cuts into your game time! I'm wondering when she'll be old enough to play games how I can most effectively turn her into a game snob. I don't want her playing stuff like "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs".

Anyway, I bought Stalker but my computer couldn't handle it, so I'm SOL on those games unless they start coming out on consoles.

-Wes
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 11, 2010 1:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's pretty astonishing how young a kid can be and totally understand how to use a touchscreen. My kid was able to play memory matching games on my iPhone before he was two. Like, he was able to actually comprehend the rules and win.

Don't bother with the V.Smile Baby; even if you hack it and make your own games, babies don't seem to grok the interface at all. Even once they figure out, hey, pressing buttons makes things happen on the TV, it's really tough for them to understand that, hey, pressing that particular button makes that particular thing happen on the TV, because the buttons are so context-sensitive.

Board games are a good bet, though. Look forward to playing lots of Don't Break The Ice.
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