Opus of Loquacity (Part 1)

If I'm remembering correctly, Super Mario Bros. was the video game that introduced me to the concept of a level. You see, I'd grown up with nothing but the standard 1970s-to-early-1980s iterative games, the kind where you play on a single screen and, when you kill the last enemy on that screen or eat the last pellet or whatever, you're taken to another screen that's almost identical, even if the challenge is higher or the colors have changed.

My understanding at the time—please understand that I was three or four years old—was that the one screen was essentially the whole game; since the gameplay was almost identical the next time around, if you'd played one screen, you'd played them all. You could justly claim to have “beaten” the game, so I thought. This must have done quite a bit for my self esteem as a child. I can actually remember a childhood trip to a Pizza Hut where I finished exactly one screen of Centipede. When that last centipede bit exploded, I gladly turned away from the machine and beamed at my mom. “We can leave now,” I said, proudly. “I beat that game.”

Obviously, Ninja Gaiden was still ahead of me.

Anyway, since I didn't play Donkey Kong until after I'd gotten my NES, I had no idea that a game could be broken up into small segments of play that constituted only a portion of the whole. DK would certainly have gotten the message across; in its absence, though, SMB did the trick, and after I got to the end of World 1-1, slid down that flagpole, and went in the tiny castle, I was genuinely surprised to see Mario exit the castle immediately afterward and go down a pipe into another level. I mean, World 1-1 could have been the whole thing. I had no expectations for game length; as far as I was concerned, World 1-1 was quite long enough. It was certainly hard enough; my six-year-old hands had never had to work with such precision in a game. Sure, that whole “World 1-1” label in the corner of the screen should have clued me in that there might be a world 1-2 and perhaps even a world 2-1, but I guess I'll chalk that one up to the fact that it was a Christmas morning, and I was ridiculously overstimulated; not to mention, I still had this new Zelda game to play! I was in no condition to use my reason.

But as it turned out, Mario's adventure had just begun, and so had mine, and yes, that is the way I'm opening this thing.

So I learned about levels with Mario, but it really wasn't until a few years later—1990, in fact—that I learned that game levels could actually communicate ideas. If you think about Super Mario Bros., this isn't surprising; what does the level design in SMB communicate? SMB's level design doesn't communicate a whole lot. There's a clear sense of progress, paradoxically reinforced by the game's repeated use of four-level cycles, and there's a fairly vague sense of movement, as if Mario were traveling from province to province within the Mushroom Kingdom, but that really is about it.

I know I'm oversimplifying, but I'm going to try to boil level design for 2D platformers down to just two things, which I am lazily going to refer to as challenge and aesthetics. By “challenge,” obviously I mean the kinds of things that are purely related to gameplay: platforming challenges, enemy placement, that sort of thing. “Aesthetics” covers a broad range of considerations, but the ones I'm mostly interested in are those that involve the kind of real-world sense the level makes to the player experiencing it. Could this level exist in the real world, and if so, how would it work? Both of these elements are necessary, but the degree to which either one is necessary depends entirely on the kind of game a designer wants to create. Something like SMB needs just scads of challenge, because frankly that's what SMB is all about. The need for that real-world sense is way less important, since SMB is essentially a virtual playground with environments that don't need to (and don't!) make much sense at all. If the player can tell what's solid from what's not, and what's harmful from what's safe, that should just about do it. Anything else—end-of-level castles, occasional weather effects, all the other little things SMB happens to do—is just icing.

When you think about a game like Castlevania, the importance of the two elements is almost reversed. Thinking back on the level design for the first Castlevania, I don't remember anything like the sort of sophistication on the level of that “challenge” element, though CV is, duh, hella harder than SMB. It just isn't nearly as involved as a platformer. Thank god for that, too, because Simon Belmont is very nearly immobile; he might, in fact, be gaming's first asthmatic (or perhaps pneumonic) protagonist. On the other hand—and as so often I owe this basic observation to Jeremy Parish—the environments in Castlevania make perfect real-world sense. Think about it: there are so many games from the 8-bit era that are basic platformers. How many actually made those platforms make sense? Castlevania did just that; as Parish points out, “whoever crafted the levels actually took the time to make the platforms logical -- something of a first. Whenever there was a hole to leap over, it was clear by looking at the background that the gap was caused by crumbling masonry as the castle rotted with age.”

Castlevania's great achievement is that it marries these elements of challenge and aesthetics. Challenge, yes, is at a minimum, if only because the Belmonts suck at walking, to say nothing of jumping, but almost all of the challenging aspects of the game are justified by the game's strong aesthetic sense.

It's a brilliantly designed game, but it isn't the focus of this series of posts. I enjoyed the design of Castlevania when I was a child, but I also took it for granted; I could never have told you how well the game was designed, because it never occurred to me how much thought must have gone into crafting a game like that. However, there was a game that shook me from my slumber, not because it made me take notice of the way platforms were thought out, but because it got me thinking about the way levels were strung together to create a world.

This could have happened several times by 1990, but it didn't. In fact, Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse was the first game that really made sense to me as a cohesive collection of levels.

This isn't really too surprising; CVIII takes the already brilliant inclusion of the inter-level castle map from the original game and pumps it up a bit by adding the element of choice. Now, the player could take one of two routes to get to the innermost reaches of Dracula's castle. Further, Dracula's castle was much more varied now, with the environments covered in the first game comprising only the last quarter or so of the game. Dracula's castle was now more of a ranch, really, complete with swamps, dismal underground caverns, and even a pirate ship (!). The way that Trevor and his spirit buddies started out in a creepy ghost town in Transylvania—perhaps the same town haunted by the crazy old man right on the outskirts of the castle in Simon's Quest—and slowly made their way towards the castle, working their way in through miles of hostile territory, just made perfect sense to me. It also set Dracula's castle inside a world that felt real and varied. It wasn't just a castle that sat at the end of a tree-lined path, as in the first game, and its surrounding environs weren't the repetitive towns and wilderness areas of the second game. It was a fortress built on an island surrounded by inhospitable countryside, and suddenly, it made perfect sense to me why a game character would go through that opening town and attempt to make the straightforward crossing at the bridge only to double back to the swamp when the bridge collapsed.

In other words, the series of levels in CVIII told a story. It wasn't an involved story, but it was one that made a certain amount of sense. In games that were roughly contemporary, like Ninja Gaiden, characters bounced from place to place, and even the cutscenes that ran between levels did little to make these levels feel connected. CVIII, on the other hand, did next to nothing by way of explaining the transitions from level to level, but the game's world felt organic and real nonetheless. In fact, CVIII feels like the perfect run-up to the current “Metroidvania” school of CV design; replace the map screens (and the level breaks) with transitional areas and make it possible for Trevor and friends to backtrack, and all of a sudden there's little separating CVIII from a modern installment in the series. It isn't surprising at all that after the refinements on the CVIII formula in Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, the next CV game happened to be Symphony of the Night.

I have much more to say, some of which might actually be of interest, and I have some observations on genre I'd like to explore, but excuse me, because A) it's getting dark and bad things are out at night and B) my laptop's battery is about to go dead.

The above image comes from retrojunk.com

Rose-Tinted Twenty-Twenty Hindsight, Part 2 of 2

(If you're interested, you can have a look at the previous part of this posting)

So yeah, Final Fantasy II.

I find myself caught between revulsion and admiration for this bizarre game. The leveling system, combined with the glacial rate of advancement, almost invariably led players to stop living in the game and to start treating it like an SAT math problem. At the same time, the game also went to some trouble to try to make leveling something that made sense and mattered to the player, rather than just something that happened all at once after you'd killed a few hundred goblins. The problem wasn't that FFII's system was a bad idea to begin with, not really; it was that FFII's system went a bit awry.

What made me want to look more closely at FFII is that I think Jeremy Parish has been feeling the same way lately. He's been writing recently about the Game Boy in honor of the 20th anniversary of its launch, and one of the series he's talked about a bit on Retronauts and elsewhere is Final Fantasy Legend, the American version of a series called SaGa in Japan. These games are renowned for their obtuse and bizarre (much more bizarre than FFII) mechanics, and guess what? They were directed by Akitoshi Kawazu, who worked as a designer on FFII.

Parish has pointed out the spiritual connection between FFII and the FF Legend/SaGa games, saying that the original Final Fantasy Legend is essentially Final Fantasy II-2 (cf. Retronauts episode 69 and, I think, 71). The oddities in the designs of FFII and the SaGa games (which I can't get into here) seem like annoyances in the abstract, but putting a face to this work, and acknowledging the obvious links among these arcane RPG systems, begins to show that though this be madness, well, you know.

This is interesting, of course, but it's Parish's observation, not mine, and for the sake of this post, I was just as interested in Parish's change of heart. In the past, Parish has been as cool towards FFII as everyone else—in fact, I just happened to listen to episode 1 of Retronauts a few days ago on the way to work, and the scorn he heaps on FFII and the SaGa games there is the stuff of legend. But one of the secrets we keep about being worthwhile human beings is that no one is perfect, and as a result, we all get to change our minds from time to time (hint: don't tell your kids about this). And somewhere among the Retronauts podcasts and the GameSpite posts of the last month or two, Jeremy Parish has slightly redacted his old take on FFII, acknowledging the game's strengths without reversing his previous position on its overall quality.

This got me thinking: what if we'd gotten FFII back in the early 1990s? We very nearly did: if you ever tried to emulate FFII and FFIII for the NES/Famicom back in the day (back before we all knew that emulation was immoral and illegal and something none of us should ever, ever do), you might have noticed that for some time it was impossible to find an English-language FFIII ROM, whereas it wasn't nearly as difficult to find one for FFII. That's because FFII was actually translated into English (not to a finely polished sheen, but...) for a North America release, but guess what? FFI came out in Japan in 1987; it wasn't released here until July of 1990. The SNES came out a year and a month later here, and at that point, do you really think Square was going to release another Final Fantasy for the NES? Leave that to Enix, who would publish Dragon Quest III in June 1991 and Dragon Quest IV in October 1992! Not to mention that there were huge problems in adapting FFII into an English-language game, as you can see if you look at the Lost Levels feature I've linked to below. No, Square held out a bit and gave us Final Fantasy IV instead, in November 1991. Granted, it wasn't the real Final Fantasy IV, and it was relabeled as FFII, but that's another story.

Anyway, my question is this: is Final Fantasy II such a horrible game that, if we'd ever gotten it, we would hate it as much as we do now? We look at FFII with the advantage of critical insight and an increased sense of self-worth, after all. We know we're better than games that waste our time like this. I mean, I can remember early in my NES career playing games that, in retrospect, I realize are complete crap, like Deadly Towers, Hydlide, and Dragon Power (Dragon Power...shudder) and realizing there was something off about the whole experience and, because I was a naïve seven- or eight-year old, blaming myself for the games' failings. A few years later, I would be able to play even worse games and shrug off the experience with the help of those three valuable but now overused words, "this game sucks," and life would go on. But there was a time when I would slog through even the worst game with the worst mechanics and the worst design sensibilities, to the best of my abilities, never realizing it wasn't my fault I didn't like this particular game.

This meant that I finished a lot of games that were sometimes challenging, sometimes not, but which certainly wouldn't persuade me to waste more than a minute or two of my time on them now. It's just easier as a more seasoned gamer to see the difference between good and bad.

However, this sort of no-taste approach to gaming also meant that I put more time into games that, if I were to play them for the first time now, I might give up on as poorly designed. To be honest, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest is almost certainly of this kind. I honestly like that game a lot, but it's a bizarre, often idiotic game that expects leaps of intuition from the player that are just not going to happen. You need the Nintendo Power with the scary cover; you need your (weirdly knowledgeable) elementary school buddies' help. When a game expects you to fight even ridiculously difficult enemies for too-gradual increases in power, that's okay, I guess. When a game expects you constantly to check walkways for invisible pitfalls, that's annoying. When a game expects you to guess that you're supposed to crouch next to a lake for several seconds, that's ridiculous and unfair, and it doesn't make for an interesting game, it breaks the game. If CVII hadn't had the twin advantages of 1) coming out during gaming's (and our) youth and 2) being part of an important franchise, we'd all hate it now, I suspect.

Several other games fit this mold, too, I think. Zelda II might well be one; I love it, but think of the problems: inexplicably, you receive three lives, even though the Link is supposed to advance like an RPG character. Doesn't this mean you should have either no extra lives (like a FF game) or an infinite number of them (like any other Zelda game)? If you lose those three lives, it's back to the first section on the world map with you, even though all you'll have to do to get back where you left off is walk a while and maybe suffer a few monster encounters; that gets annoying over the course of an entire play-through. Still and all, I love Zelda II, but come now, is that because it overcomes its faults and ends up being pretty good in the final reckoning, or is it just because it's a Zelda game and it's one I loved as a kid? I honestly can't say.

You know what else fits the mold? Sad but true: Metroid. Gasp! But yes, it totally does. Granted, Metroid kept things much more in moderation than Zelda II or Simon's Quest or FFII, but there was no way to play through the game just intuitively and get all the stuff you needed; you'd have to bomb all the walls and floors you could to find it all. Or you got lucky and got a map somewhere.

And yeah, as I was saying, if we'd all had to press through FFII as little kids with lots of free time and little else to do with it, would we be so unanimous in our scorn for it now? Or would it be another one of these borderline games that are obviously pretty wonky but we just can't help loving? The old Famicom version of FFII is hard as hell, and it takes forever to level anything, but do you remember what it was like trying to save up the gold for spells in FFI? Or what it was like trying to learn how to survive act 6-2 of Ninja Gaiden?

I'm just saying.

FFII screenshot from The Lost Levels (www.lostlevels.org, and please also see this excellent feature on the canceled translation of Final Fantasy II). Metroid screenshot from Strategywiki's Metroid section. Ninja Gaiden level map swiped from The Video Game Atlas' NES section.

Rose-Tinted Twenty-Twenty Hindsight, Part 1 of 2

I'd been playing Final Fantasy II for all of thirty seconds when what's pictured above took place. Of course, this is a scripted total party kill, and it will happen to everyone who plays the game; it's part of the story. Everyone survives, but you start with four characters and lose one in this fight; he doesn't show up again until a good deal later. The point is, though, a game that kills all of your characters off as its first narrative act—that may be, as the saying goes, nature's way of saying "don't touch."

And Final Fantasy II is almost universally reviled. I did a little research before I wrote this posting, and I noticed that, well, reviewers' remarks about FFII are rarely bland. Here's a small sample:

"plagued by a fundamentally busted experience system that encourages you to attack your own party members
in order to beef them up. Truly bizarre." (from Shane Bettenhausen's EGM/1UP review of FFI/II: Dawn of Souls for the GBA)

"it is a terrible game, forcing players to attack themselves in order to increase their stats and bombarding them with
evil deities that could melt faces at the beginning of the game if they dared to accidentally wander too far" (Ashton Liu's RPGFan review of FFII Anniversary Edition for the PSP)

"Final Fantasy II - arguably the most messy and directionless game in the series ... originally Final Fantasy II was an utterly unforgiving experience, where hours of levelling up could be required just to prevent your characters from falling off the game's power curve" (Rob Fahey's Eurogamer review of FFI/II: Dawn of Souls)

The annoying thing about FFII is its advancement system, which implemented a bit differently could have been its greatest strength. I'll explain: unlike other FFs, FFII levels characters' individual stats based on what sorts of actions they take in the game. This plays out just a little bit like advancement in the old Hero's Quest/Quest for Glory games, though FFII's skill set is directed towards combat while QFG's is directed towards puzzle-solving. The hero in QFG, for example, might try climbing a tree ten or fifteen times until his climbing skill increased and he managed to get all the way up; a character in FFII might fight with an axe repeatedly until his/her axe skill increased.

This is actually kind of neat when it comes to casting spells. Unlike FFI and FFIII, where even spells belonging to the same family are purchased separately, or FFIV, FFVI, and so on, where spells are gained arbitrarily with levels, FFII features spells that level up with use. So if you have a mage who knows Fire, she only has to cast the spell a certain number of times until it becomes more potent, the equivalent of one of the other games' Fire 2 (or FIR2!) or Fira. This really does feel right in context, actually; a spellcaster should become more powerful with practice.

The problem is that FFII is a cruel, cruel game, and it requires a LOT of repetition of the player before it begrudgingly doles out rewards. It's no better for fighters, since they can't specialize in broad groups of weapons but must specialize in narrow weapon categories like staves, spears, swords, and axes. It can also be hard to have a combo weapon user/magic user, because intelligence and strength, the abilities that determine black magic ability and fighting ability respectively, are treated as opposites: one will deteriorate gradually with use of the other. Perhaps worst of all, FFII gives out health rewards based on the net amount of damage characters have taken over the course of a battle. This means, first, that a character who takes 100 HP of damage in a fight but receives 70 HP of healing will only get the benefit from the 30 HP of damage that is left unhealed; worse, this system encourages the kind of exploitation the reviewers above noted, where players would have their characters attack each other to boost the amount of HP gained at the end of a battle.

At its best, this makes for an intricate system that a player can really get to know and play with and (perhaps) enjoy; at its worst, it creates an obtuse mess of a game that favors the worst sort of power gaming, which is the death of all fun when it comes to RPGs. I think a person with a real love for game systems can't help but feel a mix of excitement and disgust when she looks over the various nuances of FFII's system, which HCBailly has more or less exhaustively detailed in his impressive and lengthy series of Let's Play videos on Youtube.

Layered on top of this weird system is a kind of cool dialogue-based mechanic which requires the player to learn certain words and phrases in conversation and repeat them later in the game to other characters to accomplish certain tasks. So, for instance, accosting an old man early in the game prompts the bizarre response, "I'm just an old man." Mentioning a certain password, though, gets the old man to reveal that he is actually a legendary blacksmith who will help the player by fashioning powerful items.

That's probably enough for one posting, so I'm going to call it a day. In the second half of this posting, I'll bring up a question that's been bugging me about FFII's reception since its first North American release (2003's Final Fantasy Origins for the PlayStation) and how that reception might have been completely different if we'd gotten the game much sooner.

Join the Nintendo Fun Club Today! Mac.

My wife just bought me the new Wii Punch-Out!! for Father's Day. Let me just say at the outset that what you're hearing is true; it is brilliant. The thing is, the genius of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, which was not a particularly long game, was that it forced you to learn its secrets through frequent repetition. It didn't take long to get to any given point in the game once you knew how, so it was always easy to summon the determination to go back and repeat a section that had you stuck. And some things, like punching King Hippo in the mouth, you could learn at the playground or explain to someone fairly easily, but many things, like how exactly to dodge and block to knock out Piston Honda or when to hit Bald Bull, were lessons much better left to experience.

The beauty of the new Punch-Out!! is that it works exactly the same way, and in fact, it rewards even a veteran's experimentation, since some boxers are just a little different from their counterparts in the NES or SNES versions, just enough that you'll need to work a few things out for yourself.

At the same time, it adds a beautiful new coat of paint to the old game. As Scott Sharkey points out, those fighters from the NES game aren't nearly as large as we remember them being. True, every last one of them, even wimpy old Glass Joe, towered over the 107-pound (!) Little Mac, but even on a 4:3 display, which was the only way to play the old game, there was lots of ring space they didn't fill. That's no longer the case, as all of the fighters, particularly the big guys like King Hippo and Bear Hugger, take up a good deal more of the space on even a 16:9 display. The camera also bucks around with Little Mac's actions, making it feel like there's much more for the camera to take in. One of my favorite touches in the game is the noticeable step up in atmosphere from circuit to circuit; that Minor Circuit ring looks shabby indeed, and the gradations to Major Circuit and World Circuit arenas make the corresponding upward trajectory of Little Mac's fame much more tangible than it's been in the past.

Anyway, naturally I thought I'd check out the old strategies to see if they worked on the slightly re-tooled versions of Punch-Out!!'s characters. Glass Joe and Von Kaiser are still pretty pathetic, at least at the beginning of the game, and I didn't feel any need to deploy any well laid strategy against either of them, so I skipped straight to the details on King Hippo, who now comes a couple spaces earlier in the progression (click to see the full-size, readable version):

Yep, that checks out, though if you don't uppercut the new King Hippo when he pauses after the two hand squish-move, you're wasting a lot of crucial opportunities for those tummy-punches. In fact, he'll be a much more difficult KO if you don't.

And what about Piston Honda, or "Piston Hondo," as he's (I guess) less actionably called these days?

Okay, that works too, I suppose, though the explanation's a bit more awkward than the more straightforward advice needed to get past King Hippo. As I said, for the most part, this was not a game that benefited much from playground shop-talk the way, say, Castlevania II did.

Ah, the olden days. Going back to that old Official Nintendo Player's Guide, the source of those hint sections above, made me want to look through the whole book, and so that was what I did. It got me thinking: there was once a time when I didn't know what Mother Brain looked like, when I didn't realize that registering your name as "Zelda" in The Legend of Zelda would allow you to start a completely different game from the one that most of us were playing. But it would:

See?

As Bob Mackey pointed out in a great column on 1UP recently (and see this post for an index to subsequent entries in this series), not all of us think too often about strategy guides anymore. Why spend fifteen or twenty bucks on a physical thing when you can just go to Gamefaqs and download someone's pride and joy, an obsessively compiled guide to anything and everything in a given game?

But there was a time when we weren't really thinking all that much about strategy guides simply because we weren't yet aware they were out there. I think that, with a few exceptions (some modern games need guides, because they really are just that hard or that vast), strategy guides had a brief floruit from the late eighties to the late nineties, a short period of time sandwiched between the dark times, when game hints were passed from master to pupil through a solely oral tradition, and the point at which the internet became the universal resource for gamers in trouble. Though it was hardly the first strategy guide published, The Official Nintendo Player's Guide nevertheless set an example that would eventually be followed by almost every console game guide published, at least in America. It may also have been one of the earliest, if not the earliest, examples of the screenshot-mosaic level map that remains such a memorable feature of classic Nintendo Power issues.

Thanks to the ONPG (as most people like to refer to it¹) and presumably the popularity of gaming magazines like Nintendo Power², the large trade paperback format, which was well suited to printing lots of screenshots and game-related art, won out over the, um, fun but somewhat less apt mass market format of such books as Jeff Rovin's How to Win at Nintendo Games or the Metal Gear and Castlevania II novelizations "created by F.X. Nine."

Anyway, this isn't an exhaustive history of the genre, though I'd love to see something like that, so enough with all that. The ONPG, which had somewhat in-depth coverage of twenty-four games and capsule summaries of fifty-six more, was, to this seven-year-old, a revelation from God. The God, yes. You see, there was obviously an omniscient being behind this Nintendo Player's Guide thing, because not only did it know how many missiles it took to beat Mother Brain and what she actually looked like (this, incidentally)

it had also apparently beaten goddamned Ghosts 'N Goblins.

The one thing the ONPG didn't have going for it was an entirely sound grasp of the Queen's English in all its idiomatic splendor. Not that there were too many real howlers, but the text was a little funny in some places. Ghosts 'N Goblins, for example, is described as "a very torcherous adventure." To be fair, there is a torch weapon in GNG, and trying to make it through the game with that piece of crap is an even more, ahem, torturous experience than usual, so maybe this was just a particularly witty turn of phrase, but I doubt it. Towards the end of the book, a capsule summary for Excitebike does a particularly good job of showing the book's flair for dipping into strange English as it grows nearly poetic in its dramatic intensity:

Your objective is revenge against your old adversary, Arch Rivale, who humiliated you at the last Excitebike race. You can still hear his taunting laughter as he rode over your foot, flattening it like a road bunny. Will you finally have your revenge? Or will Arch Rivale have the last laugh? Again.

I guess someone got bored and decided that Excitebike was in desperate need of a plot? Interesting choice.

Evidently, only the most glaring errors were cleared up in the ONPG's translation from Japanese to English, leaving quite a few oddities. The intro to the full-length review of Castlevania is pretty good (and I swear the following text, capitalization and all, is precisely copied from the book):

"You are the hero of this game! The Whip is your constant companion. Power-Up to Level Two and knock down the Monsters. Inside the castle you'll find Candles. Strike them with your Whip and important Items will appear."

For great justice! By the way, is "to knock down" a euphemism for "to murder" in Japanese? That would certainly explain that old line from Final Fantasy.

Some of the other fun bits are the frequent scare quotes in other games' capsule summaries that make it sound like the writers were choking back disdain at having to commit this stuff to paper:

"To defeat Ganon, you must find the eight pieces of the 'Triforce of Wisdom' which are scattered throughout the land."

"The cruel King Ligar and his soldier beasts have stolen Argool's 'Door to Peace' and have established an evil reign of terror."

"The pirates have hidden this 'Metroid' deep within the fortress Planet Zebes where they plan to make it multiply, and use it to destroy galactic civilization."

"Pick from three levels of play depending on your 'b-ball' skills, when playing the computer."

It's a fun book, moderately useful (if only half of the "in-depth reviews" didn't cut off halfway through their respective games!) and certainly an amusing read in places, and now it's a fun antique, pre-dating even the first issue of Nintendo Power. Wikipedia thinks it's in a direct line of continuity with those Nintendo Power Strategy Guides that came out in 1990, the ones that covered Super Mario Bros. 3 and Final Fantasy, you know, and that's kind of cool to know, considering that the more recent line of Nintendo Player's Guides, which covered almost everything and included the deservedly famous NES Atlas, ran almost twenty years, from the early 1990s to 2007. At any rate, The Official Nintendo Player's Guide is one of the really early examples of the form, and if there's such a thing as a strategy guide enthusiast, and if you happen to be one of those, the book really belongs in your library. And hey! There are fun stickers!

[While this week's pictures are mostly my own scans, I've also grabbed an image from Sydlexia.com's hilarious essay on memorable NES quotations; there's also a great article on how inferior the SNES Super Punch-Out!! is to its predecessor (and, I'd imagine, its new successor); that seems pretty topical. There are run-downs of the top 100 games on the NES and the SNES. In fact, many of Syd's articles are great, and it can be hard to stop reading the site's content once you've started, so you've been warned.]

¹Yes, I am being facetious.

²And it's worth noting that Nintendo Power published four "Nintendo Power Strategy Guides" as part of its print run in 1990, focused on SMB3, Ninja Gaiden II, Final Fantasy, and various four-player games for the old NES, with several sports games, Gauntlet II, and (ugh) Swords and Serpents.

A Pair of Fours

In the breaks between diaper changes, baths, mostly baby-related housework, and entertaining a few guests over the past four weeks, I've actually managed to get in a fair amount of gaming, almost all of it portable. I've particularly been focusing my time on the Nintendo DS remakes of Dragon Quest IV (Dragon Warrior IV, as the graybeards may still know it) and Final Fantasy IV (or II to the same crowd), both of which, yes, came out last summer and both of which I'll admit to having chipped away at gradually over the past several months.

It struck me as I switched over from FFIV to DQIV, and back again, and so forth, how very different these two games are, how different are the designers' intentions and the strategies required of the player, and I thought it might be worthwhile to put together some of my thoughts on how this has shaped my experience of these two games. I will warn you that this is one of those long posts. Sorry!

I should say at the outset that the two games do bear a certain family resemblance to each other. At the most basic level, these two games are both Japanese RPGs, which is actually a sub-genre unto itself. In general, the more "Japanese" an RPG is, the most it's like driving a train: the tracks are already in place, the train's already there; it's just a matter of moving that train from point A to point B. The alternative to a Japanese RPG is a so-called Western RPG, the most extreme example of which would be a game that is largely customizable and essentially non-linear. I guess that if we stick to the transportation metaphor, a Western RPG is sort of like setting out to go somewhere on foot. You have a general idea of the destination, though that could always change, and maybe you'll decide to turn evil before you get there, though maybe not, and you always have the option to buy a car or hitch a ride or ... okay, wait. Maybe the transportation metaphor doesn't work. To put the whole thing in its proper historical context, the Western RPG model, which came first, grew out of pen-and-paper RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, where all that's set in advance is the rules, and the experience is meant to be as much a product of the players' creativity as a product of the game leader's (Dungeon Master's) imagination. Japanese RPGs were sort of a natural response to this model that took the elements of RPGs and anchored them to a pre-written story. Some freedom was sacrificed in favor of an ideally more fully realized narrative.

That's kind of a lot to take in, but I promise there's a reason for my bringing it up, and that's basically to point out how particularly Japanese, or not, DQIV and FFIV happen to be. Both games came out of franchises inaugurated in the 1980s (1986 and 1987, respectively, in Japan); both franchises were progenitors of the JRPG model, and both of these fourth iterations were released (again, in Japan) in the very early 1990s: 1990, on the Famicom/NES, in the case of DQIV, and 1991, on the Super Famicom/SNES, in the case of FFIV.

The basic difference, which is probably what gives rise to the other differences I want to talk about, is between the two games' styles of storytelling. Final Fantasy IV is more straightforward in this respect: the player controls an adventuring party of, at most, five characters at a time. Throughout the game, the focus is primarily centered on Cecil, a knight from the land of Baron, who uncovers an evil scheme to steal the world's magic crystals and, well, you can imagine what else. In his journeys, Cecil meets up with a number of other characters who are fighting for the same cause who will join him and leave the party, sometimes multiple times, for various reasons, usually fake death. All of these characters are elaborations on basic character classes that had either already appeared in prior Final Fantasy games or would appear in Final Fantasy V.

Cecil starts the game as a Dark Knight, basically a fighter with a few special powers and abilities, and he later becomes a Paladin, a fighter with healing spells and other white magic. Cecil's girlfriend Rosa eventually joins; she's a White Mage. An old man named Tellah, who is essentially a Black Mage and can cast various destructive spells and curses, also joins in.

In the original game, at least, the player has no control over what characters are in the party or what their abilities are. Really, the player's only option is what sort of equipment to give any one character. Otherwise, the story knows right where it's going, and the player gets to come along.

Dragon Quest IV is pretty similar at first glance. A good half or more of the game focuses on a nameless (well, named by the player) Hero who is involved in a quest to keep demons from ruling the world or something. Like Cecil, the Hero meets several other characters, each with her or his own skills, who can join the Hero's four-person party and assist in the quest. The difference, though, is this: Final Fantasy IV plays out entirely from Cecil's point of view, with other characters' experiences outside the party left to asides made upon their (re-)joining the party. After a brief introduction, the first big chunk of Dragon Quest IV is divided in four pieces, each piece dedicated to telling the story of characters from one of four different regions of the world and establishing their interest in seeing the Hero's quest to completion.

Here's where my opinion comes in: I think that this unique approach to the game's narrative, which was completely innovative for a console RPG in 1990, both suggests and encourages a much more individualized experience than FFIV. First of all, the idea of seeing the game from four, or really five, different perspectives in itself opens up the range of experiences the player might find in the game. Yes, the focus is on the Hero for half of the game or more, but since some of these other characters will spend most of this span of time in the Hero's party, the player may find herself more vested in the story of one of the other characters. This is all the more likely considering how colorful each of these characters is, whereas the Hero is a blank slate until quite late in the game.

Secondly, by the time the player has found the other characters and assembled a full eight-person traveling party, she will find herself faced with a choice: she must pare down this group of eight to a smaller attack group of four; only these four characters will delve into caves and castles and fight with monsters. This is where DQIV's similarities to FFIV really begin to work well. Like FFIV, DQIV offers an array of useful character types. There's a seemingly frail old man who at higher level casts devastating ice-based spells, a pair of sisters who function as a healer and a fire-flinging mage, a powerful warrior who can use nearly any suit of armor and any weapon in the game, and a few more. There's even a bizarre fellow who rarely follows the player's commands but often blunders into critical hits or steals high-level weapons from unsuspecting monsters. Unlike FFIV, DQIV allows the player to select any three of these characters (as well as the Hero, whose skills are a balance of offensive magic, healing spells, and fighting ability) at any time in the game, tailoring the entire experience to her own tastes and skills.

And this mechanic is much, much better suited to the flavor of Dragon Quest. DQ games are not necessarily easy, but then, they are also the last games anyone would think to call sadistic. In DQIV, there are some mid-level random encounters with monsters that can cast spells that cause instant death, and a group of two or more of these can whittle down even a capable party in no time. But the worst that can ever happen if a fight goes wrong is that your characters lose half the gold they were carrying at the time.

The Final Fantasy games have always, um, gone a different route. In FF, a Total Party Kill is a Total Party Kill: the game is over. Hope you saved. This can be a source of real frustration, too. Whereas I don't suppose I've lost my party more than once or twice in DQIV, FFIV has some damned devious villains in it that will never go down if the player hasn't learned exactly how to kill them. DQ seems to work differently: hard work will always pay off in time, and usually just a few levels' difference can make an impossible enemy (even one with a bag full of tricks) into one that's only moderately challenging.

I'll give a couple of examples. At the end of Chapter 4 in DQIV, the player's 3-person party encounters an eight-legged lion-demon thing called the Marquis de Léon (Keeleon, old people).
The Marquis will kill the party every time during this confrontation; the average party will probably be around level 10, but the Marquis can and will kill any group of players that shows up, I think. But DQIV is the kind of game where it makes perfect sense that, about ten (quick) levels later and a bit further in the story, the Marquis goes down with surprising ease. DQIV's system makes the whole process feel rewarding; a turnaround like this becomes an incentive, and best of all, the player has several options for building a party that will be able to handle the Marquis, which makes the experience that much more rewarding.

FFIV, though, sometimes uses the player's party too much as a set of tools for advancing the story it wants to tell—to be sure, a hallmark of the JRPG model. About halfway through FFIV, Cecil and his crew confront Golbez, the villain who by all appearances is behind the shenanigans that our heroes are trying to stop.
Golbez is too strong for the party, just like the Marquis in his first appearance. However! Tellah the old wizard casts a spell called Meteor that apparently consumes both Golbez and himself. However again! Golbez isn't dead, and he shows up sometime later. In this second appearance, Golbez is ask-your-friends-for-help-at-the-playground tough. After the heroes have inflicted a little damage, he calls up a black dragon that casts an instant-kill spell on the whole party; only Cecil is spared. And although Rydia, a character who'd apparently died earlier, shows up more powerful than ever, she turns out to be useless unless you keep another character free to check Golbez' weakness, which changes after every hit Rydia scores. Attacks that don't target Golbez' weakness will actually heal him rather than damage him!

Now, this wouldn't be so bad, it would in fact be sort of fun, if that were all there was to it, but it isn't. In the midst of all this, you see, Golbez is inflicting devastating hits with his spells, including one that sucks out hit points at a ridiculous rate and another one that steals tons of magic points, rendering Rydia powerless. So you almost need three characters, Cecil to detect Golbez' weakness, Rydia to attack him, and Rosa to keep the other two alive. Of course, Rosa's already dead from the dragon attack, and while Cecil has items on her that can resurrect her, she only comes back to life with a few measly hit points, and if Golbez hits the whole party with a damage spell (and he seems to do this more often than not), Rosa will go down before she can be pulled back up to a decent level of health.

So fighting Golbez the second time is a lot like that old commercial with the cowboys trying to herd cats: every success begins to feel like a prelude to the next failure. Of course, if the player can get this system going, Golbez turns out to be fairly easy to kill, but getting to a point where it's possible to keep the party alive while juggling those other two spells turns out to be not the least bit easy, and FFIV pulls no punches to give you a chance to get to that point.

It's typical of FFIV, too, that when the player finishes this nasty, demoralizing, soul-crushing fight, she finds out it's time to slog straight to the enemy's fortress—conveniently located on the other side of hell. And guess what? FFIV's version of hell is filled with tricksy monsters, including these chameleons that can and will turn your whole party to stone. You lose when this happens, by the way. Really, FFIV reminds me of a story my mom once told me about a guy who lived on her street when she was a kid. Everybody in the neighborhood knew him and liked him, but there was this one kind of cruel thing he used to do: when all the kids on the street were out playing, he'd call them over to his front lawn and offer each one an Atomic Fireball. He'd challenge them to hold the Fireballs in their mouths until they'd dissolved all the way; any kid who could do it would get a prize. He made this challenge several times with no successes, until one day, one plucky little guy finally pulled it off. Guess what the prize was? Another Atomic Fireball. Yeah.

To be fair, I'm overstating my point a bit. Final Fantasy IV isn't that hard, but you get the idea.

So DQIV and FFIV are both JRPGs; both have a narrative you're tied to, and both are there to tell you their story the way they want to tell it. Still, DQIV gives the player just enough freedom to work through the game's challenges the way that works best for her; FFIV wants the player to approach challenges just so, and diversion from that method is strenuously punished. In this sense, FFIV comes off feeling much more old-school, in its way: you play and replay through a section until you figure it out, and then you advance and do the same thing again.¹ Anyway, this isn't to say that one or the other is a better game or that one or the other is too hard or not hard enough. FFIV is a classic of the SNES era that many players have fond memories of, some of those stretching back almost two decades; it may in fact be the standard that really defined what a JRPG should be, which would explain a lot about how this post came about, I guess. For its part, DQIV is one of the longest, richest console RPGs of its day, an innovator at the time and today still a superlative and wonderful game. Nevertheless, speaking from personal experience: man, I break into way fewer cold sweats when I'm playing DQIV!

¹It bears pointing out here that Americans' first experience with Final Fantasy IV, which back in the day we all thought was actually Final Fantasy II, was far less challenging than a playthrough of the new DS remake. That's because "Final Fantasy II" was actually a much watered-down version of the original Japanese edition. A later edition published in Japan, called Final Fantasy IV Easytype, was easier still. The real FFIV has always been a damn hard game, as console RPGs go.

Image credits: Final Fantasy IV logo: OMG Nintendo; Golbez battle: Gamespite; Dragon Quest IV logo: posted on the Dragon's Den boards by user Woodus; Keeleon sprite from Lord Yuan Shu's Dragon Warrior IV walkthrough (lordyuanshu.com); picture of FFIV party, um, stock photo from an online store.

Space and Structure in the Super Marioverse, Part 1

Since it was released, I've been trying to decide what I think of Super Mario Galaxy. I know that it's at least a very good game, and it exhibits the usual creativity and quality of the Super Mario games, but is it maybe even something more? Is it actually a revolution in the platform genre, as a number of reviews have said—and as the game's Famitsu (38/40), Metacritic (97), and Game Rankings (97.4) scores may suggest?

If you follow this blog, then you know that I'm probably not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about Super Mario Galaxy without first discussing its aged forebears, so I'll dispense with the pretext right now and get on with what this essay is really about, which happens to be Super Mario Bros. SMB certainly wasn't the first platform game—the first, um, good one was Donkey Kong, which followed a couple of less remarkable pioneers—nor was it actually the first scrolling platform game (and let's just leave it at that), but it was the game that happened to popularize the genre, and it has the added distinction of making it obvious to the American business world that home console gaming was a viable, permanently marketable, um, thing. As much as I do love the VCS, it's important to note that Atari had not managed to convince people of this by 1983.

I've written about this before, and I've said that I think a lot of this had to do with the way that early NES games distinguished themselves from the arcade experience in crucial ways, though admittedly I focused more on aspects of play control than the trajectory of gameplay. But let me reiterate that what post-SMB console games offered was not the arcade model, the iterative, short game with levels that the player experienced repeatedly and, most importantly, with no end to the procession of levels, unless it was a hardware-imposed kill screen. SMB was the catalyzing agent that popularized a new model of game design: games with actual goals. We might as well call these teleological games.

As is completely appropriate for an early representative of this "paradigm," SMB exhibited the marks of where video games had been as well as where they were going. While SMB had thirty-two distinct levels, grouped into eight worlds of four levels each, it is true that the levels were only slight variations on five basic types: simple outdoor levels, underground levels, high outdoor levels with advanced platforming challenges, water levels, and castle levels. As such, there was some repetition, but it was not the same precise iteration seen in titles like Donkey Kong or Gorf. And whereas these games would simply repeat the cycle of levels without any resolution (DK did have a minimal storyline, but this only played out in the first two levels), SMB was plainly over after the last of its thirty-two levels were completed. There was even a mechanism that marked the final castle level out as something different: rather than the Mushroom Retainers who appeared seven times before—and my six-year-old self, clueless as to the number of times I'd have to find out that the Princess was in another castle, came to hate these guys—Mario discovered Princess "Toadstool" herself, and that was that.

This became, I think, the prevailing paradigm for game designs throughout the console's life, and I think it's safe to say that, for the most part, this has been the case ever since. The titles most often associated with the NES, including the Castlevania, Mega Man, Legend of Zelda, Dragon "Warrior," and Super Mario Bros. franchises, as well as Final Fantasy and Metroid, followed this design model.

What this meant, though, was that games had to show not just the distinction between beginnings and endings but the whole spectrum of locales in between these two endpoints. SMB might only have had five distinct level types, but it used those types in ways that suggested change and progress: outdoor levels were often given a black rather than a blue background, suggesting a transition from day to night, and level 6-3 even changed the color of everything including the bricks, the tufty raised platforms, and the castle at the end, to shades of white and light gray, suggesting a thick snowfall; levels 3-1, 3-2, 5-1, 5-2, and 7-1 had trees with white-colored tops and white pipes that suggested, I guess, a lighter dusting of snow. All of this made levels seem more distinct during the experience of gameplay, and it gave context to the consistent four-level cycle that always culminated in a (futile) attempt to save the Princess from another castle.

For me, then, the move from "world" to "world" felt like a progression from region to region (province to province?) within the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario traveled gradually through the four stages of each "world," and when he reached each castle, always inexplicably in the "world's" most remote location, he discovered that, yes, he had to keep moving. The large castles that always appeared at the beginning of levels numbered 1 (excepting 1-1 for obvious reasons and, bizarrely, 5-1) gave a sense of continuity to the proceedings, and it reinforced the impression that Mario was on some sort of quest that, for all its repetition, was advancing in some sense.

So Super Mario Bros. was something of a tenuous first step. Only minimal differentiation existed between levels, but there was nevertheless a great deal of difference between Super Mario Bros. and earlier level-based games like Donkey Kong. Super Mario Bros. also distinguished itself from its few earlier competitors in the side-scrolling platform genre, like Pac-Land, by exploiting a repetitive pattern in such a way that its ludic and (admittedly thin) narrative qualities appeared to blend seamlessly.

Still, the world that Super Mario Bros. took place in was a product of cooperation, a construct of the player's mind just as much as it was a part of the game's program. It would still be some time before the Super Mario Bros. games managed to present a world that made sense on its own terms, and it is the progress towards this point, and the movement away from it that I think has occurred since, that I've set out to explore throughout the present series of essays. The next part will continue with the next two games, and there are a number of other issues I'm looking forward to bringing out, too. Please anticipate it (and, in honor of Chris Kohler's wit: bow).

All images come from Ian Albert's brilliant webpage, where the author presents several video game maps created from in-game graphics. Just like Nintendo Power, only all nice and stuff.

Gunpei Yokoi's Super Wonder Cross! Part 3

When I posted Part 2 of this series about a month ago, I blithely announced that in this post, I would be discussing "what the D-pad means." That's turned out to be kind of a tall order, or a weird thing to try to think about, but I think I was right to put it that way, because that's exactly what this post is about.

When video games became popular in arcades, there was an appeal to them that I think stemmed from two aspects of the experience: the communal and the visceral.

Cabinet versions of Pong were frequent fixtures in bars and restaurants before the concept of a video arcade ever really occurred to anyone; the game's huge success was largely a result of its emphasis on competition between live opponents. The game's minimalism, which I admit was not as hilarious in 1972 as it is now, left lots of cognitive space for players to focus on other tasks, like drinking or talking (see this SNL transcript) or yelling or betting or some other tomfoolery. We see the same thing now with games played over XBox Live Arcade, where the simplicity has been replaced with at least some sophistication, but the competition is enhanced with features like live voice chat (so that humanity can achieve its highest potential, shouting racial epithets at strangers halfway across the country). We may no longer have as many live opponents squaring off in bars, but we do have an analogue. And now we tend to think of home consoles as enabling and perhaps encouraging individual play, but it's true that in its first iterations, the home version of Pong was designed strictly for two players; there was no computer player to be found on those circuit boards.

I think it's fair to say that later on, arcades provided the perfect context for entire genres of games that just don't play as well without a second human player. I'm thinking particularly of beat-em-ups, the games where oversized characters walk through urban settings and hit mohawked individuals with lengths of pipe, and fighting games, where ninjas pull each others' spines out and then hold them up like giant fish. You know these games. They're fun in their way, but anyone who's played much of them at home knows that they are much better in a social context, and presumably they're designed that way.

Even games that were for one player, like Pac-Man, benefited from the presence of an actual arcade cabinet. As Jeremy Parish recently remarked on an episode of Retronauts, a game like Pac-Man is a lot more fun when you're able to play it standing up and leaning into the turns you're having Pac-Man make. The tactile experience of manipulating the joystick not just with your hand but with your whole body was enhanced, again, by the presence of spectators and competitors, particularly as Pac-Man, like most early games, isn't designed with a great deal of variation from level to level. Instead, it has an initial input screen where you can give yourself clever names like SEX and ASS and try to beat your friends' high scores. High scores became almost completely meaningless in single-player home games, which is why Super Mario Bros. still keeps score and, for instance, Super Mario Bros. 2 (the American version) doesn't. Some games, including subsequent SMBs, would continue to keep score into the late 80s and early 90s, but that vestige of the arcade was definitely falling away. There just wasn't as much point to high scores when they couldn't be used as recruiting tools for fresh starfighters.

Though I've seen a lot of players who still treat their game controllers like those arcade joysticks, rocking back and forth with their on-screen movements as if this would help matters; and though a lot of home games, particularly with online connectivity, are multiplayer, the communal and visceral aspects were toned down a bit, if they were not mostly scrapped, for the home experience. I think part of the problem with the second generation of home consoles (which includes things like Atari 2600/VCS, Intellivision, and Colecovision) was that the idea of what a home video game should be wasn't made clear. These systems all relied on input devices that were, and I think I'm justified in saying this categorically, either quite similar to arcade joysticks or basically dysfunctional, so there wasn't an effective dividing line that was drawn between the arcade experience and the home experience. Without much reason to think the home experience was anything different or special, gamers were left to decide for themselves what the difference was. By and large, the difference was better graphics and sound and more interesting gameplay in the arcade, because the second generation was an age of arcade ports and clones. Original games for the home consoles, like Atari's Haunted House or E.T., were often obtuse and strange.

I don't mean to say that the second generation was a dark time; it wasn't. But the third generation, which was led and, for about two years, carried almost exclusively by Nintendo, eventually emphasized a different sort of experience, one that set home gaming apart from arcade gaming in obvious ways. The crucial difference was a move toward a more complete, longer-lasting experience. As I've said, Pac-Man didn't have a real goal that meant anything in terms of gameplay; you could play until the game ran out of memory or numbers to count with (!) on level 256 and restarted itself. Donkey Kong did the same thing on its 117th screen. These were called "kill screens," and they were infamous among knowledgeable players because they were ridiculously hard to reach. The Donkey Kong kill screen is such a difficult goal to reach that there are only (I think) four documented instances of players reaching it, and I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure these four instances are divided between two players. Anyway, it's famous enough to warrant a t-shirt:



When the third generation really kicked in, however, home games began to have obvious goals. Super Mario Bros. had exactly 32 stages, and the game ended conclusively after the 32nd. There wasn't much of a narrative, but Mario began the game with the goal of rescuing the Princess, and he did exactly that in "World" 8-4. The Zelda games, Kid Icarus, Metroid, The Goonies (Japan) and The Goonies II, Castlevania, most of the games people who experienced the third generation associate with it, all had clear endings. The third generation was also the point where a lot of previously computer-based genres jumped to consoles, sometimes with crucial alterations. Adventure games like Maniac Mansion and Shadowgate crossed over from PCs and Macs and became Nintendo games; the RPG genre, previously almost exclusively filled with computer games, became a dominant console genre with ridiculously popular games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, and it's important to note that the most popular console RPGs focused more on complete narratives with beginnings and endings than on continuous dungeon-crawling.

It's not apparent how that connects to play control, but it does. Just as the new home games shifted to game play meant to last for an hour or more at a time and meant to move, for the most part, towards some final goal, I'd also say they shifted to game play that was more inherently challenging from the get-go. An older game like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong or Space Invaders starts off reasonably easy and gets progressively harder, and while games on the NES also had a learning curve, I'd say they also started at a higher level. From the first moment, a game like Super Mario Bros. required more precise control from the player; just landing a successful hit on the first goomba in the game was a feat far more difficult, I really do think, than anything required of the player in the first level or two of almost any older arcade game. And when the difficulty ratcheted up, it ratcheted up quickly. The term "platformer," which we use to describe the genre to which the Mario games belong, means a game that requires constant precision from the player, because there is a constant need to jump on top of and over obstacles and to avoid holes in the ground. Some levels in Super Mario Bros. present absolutely vertiginous environments, like World 4-3:

I think there's a strong psychological force at work when we play a level like this that makes it more difficult than it should be to navigate the narrow, apparently high platforms that are scattered throughout. Imagine tackling World 4-3 with an Atari 2600 joystick, having to try to stabilize that unwieldy square base with one hand and push the jump button with your thumb while controlling Mario's movements with the other hand via the joystick! I don't know if you've ever played on an Atari 2600, but those joysticks are hard to hold, and it is a constant challenge to keep them from wobbling in your grasp. Not the best thing for Super Mario Bros. A game like Metroid or Kid Icarus, where vertically-scrolling environments are just as common as horizontally-scrolling ones, would probably be even worse. Check out this video of the first world of Kid Icarus if you want to see what I mean. These games just have this precarious feeling to them, and when you're learning the ropes, it's not good to have a controller that's too slippery.

Fortunately, designers at Nintendo had the brilliant idea of adopting the cross-shaped design from the Game & Watch series for the controllers for the new Famicom console.

And two years later, the same design would be incorporated into the NES Control Pad (see picture at top).

These compact blocks were completely stable, since the thumb pressing on the cross pad braced the back of the controller against the player's fingers. Speaking of which, it probably seems unremarkable now, but Nintendo had transferred the work of controlling games from the fingers, used for pressing buttons and grasping the joystick in arcade games, to the thumbs exclusively.

Since the +Control Pad, as it's called in the early NES game manuals, or the D-pad, as we're going to call it, only had four arms, it only provided eight directions of control. This sounds miserly compared to the Intellivision's sixteen directions of control, but the simplicity it provided was far more appropriate to almost all of the games of the 8- and 16-bit eras, most of which called for simple directional commands. Furthermore, it was far easier to tell by feel whether you were pressing left or right as opposed to up-left or down-right than it had been with joysticks. The process of sweeping your thumb across the D-pad to move down rather than up is also swifter and more economical than the process of pulling a joystick downward from the up position; there's also no need ever to adjust your grip on an NES controller the way some people do with joysticks.

This was important for games that required expert timing, and maybe no game demanded that more from a player than Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (sic). RedHedgehog at Gamespite has done an excellent job of summing up the way it feels to play Punch-Out!!, and as he says, the game is very much a rhythm game. More to the point, by the game's end, the player needs to have an expert sense of rhythm, because Mike Tyson (or, sigh, Mr. Dream) relies on complex and fast (fast!!) movements to traumatize children of the 80s. This is nearly impossible with any controller, but I believe that it would be far more difficult with a joystick than with the quick, compact D-pad.

Finally, I'll return to the longer-format games I mentioned earlier like RPGs and The Legend of Zelda. The best of these games were played during the 8- and 16-bit eras from a top-down perspective, meaning that your character never jumped around like in a platformer; instead, up and down were directions your character could actually travel. These games presented worlds that played out like 2-dimensional maps, with the possibility of movement in a northerly, southerly, easterly, or westerly direction, or anything in between. RPGs tended to use a sort of tiled arrangement where characters moved from invisible square to invisible square on the map, allowing them easily to line up with shopkeepers and villagers for conversation or to negotiate environments; this mechanic worked wonderfully with the grid-friendly D-pad. As in the case of Zelda, some top-down games used a more complex system where the player could move seamlessly to any location on the screen not blocked by trees or rocks. Zelda used this top-down system for exploration and combat, so the player needed to be able to make precise movements in order to line up sword attacks, avoid fireballs, and so on. If you've ever tried to play the original Zelda with an analog stick or a joystick, you may feel as I do that it's far easier to keep Link where you need him with the D-pad than it is with a less precise control device.

In short, the release of the Famicom and later the NES, with their strange new controllers, sent a particular message: video gaming at home was a different thing from video gaming at the arcade. Games were going to be longer, more significant experiences, and they were going to offer a higher degree of challenge than arcade games; stacks of quarters wouldn't do the trick. These would be games that would demand a lot from the player, but the controllers packed with the systems you played these games on would be just the right tool for this new play style. It was a rejection of older, muddle-headed approaches to home video games and an embrace of a totally new mechanic.

Old Games I Hate (1/2)

Hydlide, screenshot from www.consoleclassix.com

I feel a little bad about taking so long in getting "Super Wonder Cross Part 3" up, when I know that at least one person (and probably exactly one person) is waiting for it. Rest assured, I am working on it even now! What's taking so long is, honestly, the process of sorting out what I need to say about the NES' capabilities from what I just want to say about them. Apparently two posts are brewing there. Also, I got distracted thinking about Atari 2600 Pac-Man; post forthcoming. Also, I have a job and a dissertation to write. Hold your horses!

So what I'm doing tonight is a little different. I thought I'd play a game. I've included screenshots from NES games from the first half of the alphabet that I genuinely despise for some reason. Some of them are quite wonderful games, but there are in each case major or minor reasons for my disgust that I just wasn't able to get over as a child. Some of these things I've gotten over in the meantime, and some of them I have not. Anyway, the game is this: can you guess what game any or all of these screenshots come from, working only from the scant clues I've provided? Please list your guesses by number in a comment at the bottom. The games all come from the first half of the alphabet, but they are presented in no particular order. I've borrowed all these screenshots from www.consoleclassix.com. Enjoy (?)


1. I hate this game more than any other. This was one of two games I played as a child that actually seemed to restart my game arbitrarily in the midst of play. Not in the sense you're thinking of! Not in the sense that the title screen came up and that was that, but rather in the sense that my characters zipped right back to the beginning of the game and every last bit of my progress was lost every time I got to a certain point. I was convinced it was an evil cartridge. In retrospect, I'm sure it was some weird timer function that I didn't understand. The reason for THAT is that this game was a rental, and I didn't have access to the instruction booklet.


2. Same issue as with #1. In this case, the game seemed to kill my character for no reason--no contact with enemies or any of the usual things. Again, I'm sure it was a timer thing, but where was the timer?! And where was that instruction booklet when I needed it?


3. I hate this game simply for having the audacity to be released for the NES when it could be experienced in vivid 256 color VGA (!) on a PC. With Soundblaster support. Two years before this version was released. Sorry, NES, this is one game you just weren't meant to play. But your renditions of Ninja Gaiden and Contra are wonderful! Superior to their arcade originals, in fact. So it's okay.


4. This game had a nearly intriguing mechanic built into it that was prominently advertised in its cover art, but in order to enjoy this, and I assure you there was not much enjoyment to be had, you had to suffer through the worst, least imaginative "platforming" experience ever. Worse yet: the already ludicrous gun your character was packing could (and would) run out of bullets, leaving you to swing the stock of the gun pathetically at enemies.


5. Too, too esoteric! What was this game, anyway? A destructive romp or a chess match? I still don't understand it. Another rental; another instruction-less game.


6. Terrible port or terriblest port? Or both? This was awful compared to its four-player (four-player!!!) arcade original.


7. Okay, as someone on Gamespite--hey, don't go over there and cheat!--pointed out, this is, in fact, the best version of this particular game, and that is saying something. The graphics aren't as good, sure, but what's really important here is that, as opposed to the PC original, this game was fully scored with great NES music. It was brilliant. But it's a painful game to have to play through with an NES control pad, as much as I love that little instrument, and it was censored more thoroughly than you might think for its conversion to the NES, as this vintage WIRED article shows. Don't go over to WIRED and cheat, either. Anyway, I hate censorship! Next!


8. I love this game. Love it! It has an interesting and I think basically unprecedented mechanic to it that allows the character to use all sorts of tools. However, I'm going to be horrible and say I hate it simply because the "Lamia"/Medusa at the end of level four was just too difficult for me the one time I rented it as a kid. Haven't been back to it since. My loss, I know.


9. Ugh. Does anything ever happen in this game? Except dying and endless vertical movement? I believe this game is where I got my recurrent nightmares of falling inexplicably from great heights, which have been with me for about twenty years now. Bonus reason for hating it: we were all secretly pronouncing the title incorrectly! Stupid Americans!


10. You know how in Fight Club there's that scene where Brad Pitt asks Edward Norton, "If you could fight anyone, who would you fight?" Then Edward Norton says probably his boss, and Brad Pitt says he'd fight his dad? Well, I'd fight the person who came up with the idea for the balls that drop from the ceiling in level two of this game. Some of them turn into snakes, and some turn into dragons, and others just explode and hit you regardless of where you're standing. I really do love this game, but I don't think I've cleared level two to this day.

And I believe that's it. So guess away, and have fun! I can't wait to see what people come up with; most of these are probably pretty easy, but at least two or three of these are awfully obscure. I think. I hope.