A series of posts where I’ll be putting some thoughts that aren’t worth their own post (or, more likely, I haven’t thought out in-depth enough to give them one) but I still want to put out there.
WARNING: LANGUAGE.
Continue reading “Reflections 01”Author: ognimod
Space Jam (PlayStation)
Year: 1996
Genre: Sports, basketball, arcade
Developers(s): Sculptured Software, Inc.
No. of players: Up to six (with a multitap)
Published by: Acclaim Entertainment, Inc.
The official Space Jam video game, based on the 1996 movie of the same name which recently had a -seemingly less financially successful- sequel, is both one of the biggest wastes of a movie license in relatively recent video game history, and one of the most inconsequential.
There is only one real reason I own this game, and it is because Lola Bunny, one of my earliest furry crushes ever, is in it. I love Lola. Lola is the closest we’ve ever gotten to having a character with the visual design of Petina deMouse in a kids’ movie. Not only is she physically attractive -you know she works out and has developed some perfectly-toned muscles, never mind that she’s never drawn with them-, but she’s tough, dominant, and self-sufficient while still showing major compassion for friends once in a while. She’s the kind of girl who just as soon would kick you in the teeth than cuddle with you and has no problem with doing either. Unfortunately, the only video game to feature her playing basketball -while showcasing none of her amazing skills at it- is this one.
And this one is not a good basketball video game. Not even within its specific genre of basketball video games. Let’s now check out why.
Continue reading “Space Jam (PlayStation)”Movie Review: Robot Jox
Original title: Robot Jox
Year: 1989
Genre: Action, science-fiction
Director: Stuart Gordon
Running time: 85 min.
Country: USA
NOTE: This review originally had embedded YT videos, but the text kept getting hidden behind them. I’ve deleted them for now.
Here is our second movie review, and it’s for a movie about one of my favorite things in the world: giant robots.
Robot Jox was a brainchild of its co-writer and director, Stuart Gordon, best known for his adaptation of “Herbert West, Re-Animator” but who could work in all kinds of genres, including sci-fi and comedy. Having seen that cartoons about giant fighting robots, such as Transformers, Gobots and Voltron, were all the rage, he wanted to be the first to take the concept into live-action. First he acquired a modest, but sufficient budget from Empire Pictures, run by Charles Band, a guy so “Z-grade” he makes Roger Corman look like James Cameron. Next, he got a good friend of his, Joe Haldeman, sci-fi author of “The Forever War”, to write the script.
And here’s where everything went sour, because Gordon and Haldeman clashed constantly over how to approach the movie’s story. Haldeman wanted to make “The Forever War” with robots; a serious, verisimile, believable reflection on the material and psychological consequences of giant robot fights on the robots’ pilots. Gordon wanted a movie about robots punching each other, explosions, and America winning the Cold War. Until today, Haldeman detests the movie, having described it once as “if I’d had a child who started out well and then sustained brain damage”. But worse was the bankruptcy of Empire Pictures, which caused the movie, finished in 1987, not to come out until both giant robots and the Cold War had gone out of fashion. It was a box office failure, and the few reviews it had were negative.
Today, it’s employed in comparisons with Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, usually to claim the latter as worse. But it has merits that I wish to exposit about next.
We are situated fifty years after World War III -they don’t say the exact year-. The world is divided between the countries that belong to “The Confederation” (USSR) and those that belong to “The Market” (USA). Wars have been outlawed; territorial disputes are now decided in combat with giant robots, piloted by the “Robot Jox”, people trained to fight in these machines.
The Market’s number one Jox is Achilles (Gary Graham), a “nice guy”, tiny brain but big heart; the Confederation’s toughest is Alexander (Paul Koslo), a maniacal, bloodthirsty Russian obsessed with killing Achilles. On the latter’s tenth and last fight, Alexander throws him against the bleachers and over 300 people are killed. The fight is declared a tie, but Achilles is so traumatized he quits robot fights forever. But he will have no choice other than returning when Alexander, still a death-hungry wacko, threatens to kill Athena (Anne-Marie Johnson) the genetically-engineered, first-ever female Jox, herself obsessed with replacing Achilles as the best of the best.
The movie is like RoboCop or Starship Troopers if they had been played completely straight instead of satirically. The characters are human cartoons -Alexander is a Rambo villain, the Market’s tac strategist is a cowboy stereotype complete with hat, Achilles is just this close to being from Buenos Aires and saying “kill ’em all!”, Atena is like Spock meets Khan…-, their motivations are more insinuated than stated, and their performers are on the bare minimum of skill -although I’m sure Paul Koslo had a blast faking a “Rosshan ecksent, komrahd!”-. There are curious background details, such as the US being called a “Market”, the birth rate having gone so low that there are awareness campaigns about pregnancy, Achilles having never read the contract which bound him to ten fights because he can’t read or write, or Alexander always killing his adversaries against the rules but never incurring a penalty; but they’re not there for laughs. Their purpose seems to be enriching the world of the movie, instead of ridiculing it.
I think it’s possible that this was intentional from the beginning. It creates the feeling that no one -except maybe Haldeman- realized the implications. It’s, at least, quite a curiosity to see a movie present a dystopian vision of the future just for fun, taking elements of (what, at the time, was) a critically damaged current-day society and simply putting them in a “cool, exciting” world, in contrast with pessimistic or warning visions both from before and since, such as Blade Runner, Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, The Matrix, or the aforementioned Starship Troopers.
And yet, I think this is a better movie than the other major Hollywood production about live-action giant robots: Pacific Rim. Unlike it, Robot Jox has a snappy pace which dedicates each phase of its plot -beginning, middle and end- just enough time; eighty-five minutes well-distributed between the introduction of the world/characters/robot fights, Achilles’ conflict with Athena, Alexander and himself, and the final robot fight at the end. The story wasn’t developed for more, so they didn’t try to stretch it out into more. (Pacific Rim, on the other hand, was a third act in two hours and a quarter, with even less story and even more cardboard characters)
Indeed, there are only two robot fights in the whole movie. -actually, there are only two robots in the whole movie-. They’re very short, but considering the budget they had to work with -according to Wikipedia, between 6.5 and 10 million, Empire Pictures’ most expensive movie ever-, they’re rather well-made. As expected of a movie like this, the real stars of the show are the art direction and the special effects. We have stuff like a hovering car, interiors of the robots’ cockpits, relatively well-disguised blue screens, and the robots themselves, made with stop-motion animation. The latter technique is better acknowledged in the work of Ray Harryhausen, but here the movement is highly fluid, and, by that fact, deliberate, creating the illusion of enormously heavy, hard-hitting machines. Although I’m a big fan of actors in suits filmed in slow-motion -most commonly associated with “tokusatsu”-, I found this movie’s approach pleasantly convincing. If only this movie had set a trend and more had been made like it with these effects back then!
It’s easy to see that the scriptwriter was a sci-fi author, because the robots’ controls are the best and most believable I’ve seen in fiction so far. I even dare say they might be a reality some day, if the technology advances far enough. The pilot, standing up, is secured by the waist with a metal harness, and then has to drag their feet over a metal sensor to walk and move a couple of joysticks to control the arms. The joysticks also have buttons for firing weapons. The robots, on principle, can walk, punch and fire weapons, so their functions correspond to their controls.
In conclusion: Robot Jox has a poorly-thought story without much of what the poster and trailer promise (robot fights) but which runs at a brisk pace and has a well-realized artistic direction. Recommended for seeing the robots in action.
Battletoads (Famicom)
Year: 1991
Genre: Beat ’em up, vehicle driving, platforming
Developers(s): Rare Ltd.
No. of players: 1-2
Published by: Masaya Games
NOTE: I intended to play as far as I could with two players so I could write how that is, but I basically didn’t think anyone but a handful of people -who were unavailable- would be up for it. I might update this later if I can get someone else to play with (netplay, of course). Also, I haven’t beaten this game yet because I haven’t gotten back to playing it yet -got pretty far, though!-. Also, I know the new Battletoads game is out now, but I haven’t played it, so I can’t venture an opinion on it.
In my Rocket Ranger review, I exposited about something I call the UK/European Video Game Design Model Of The 80s/90s. In summary, the UK/European Video Game Design Model Of The 80s/90s dictates that a good game must look and sound exceptionally well, but at the same time it has to be excessively and unfairly difficult to the point of being almost unplayable. Whether this was done because the developers were amateur, uncaring, or sadistic -many were one or more of those-, or to hide how short the games truly were, it just had to be done because it had to be done and that was the end of that. And in the days before Nintendo reined them in, Rareware inflicted the UK/European model on many an NES/Game Boy owner, while working for the likes of Nintendo themselves, Tradewest (the people who killed Double Dragon), Acclaim, and LJN.
It was Tradewest who published the game that would cement Rare in infamy for all time: Battletoads.
Fame and public preference are fickle things. One second you’re the biggest thing since sliced bread; the next, you’re either an Internet meme or public enemy No. 1. Between 1991 and 1993, Battletoads -one of many imitators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles during that time period- was one of the biggest and most popular video game series in history. Now it’s a punchline for jokes about difficulty, when it’s not being presented as proof-positive that liking old video games is immoral. It’s mostly its own fault. Its games have a very deserved reputation for being ridiculously difficult by way of directly screwing with the player, most infamously exemplified by their original NES outing. However, I have read on The Cutting Room Floor, and I have since confirmed, that the Famicom version of this game is much easier than the NES original; still damn hard, but not torture. On the 26th of July, 2020, I was able to reach level 6 in one sitting, and a day later I got to level 9! So let’s take a look.
The story, which I have taken from the instruction manual of the NES version, is some pretty standard fare. An evil, voluptuous intergalactic conqueror and sorceress called the Dark Queen has been recently defeated by the Galactic Corporation and her forces have made a strategic retreat. On board the Spaceship Vulture, the three Battletoads -Zitz, Rash, and Pimple- and their mentor, Professor T. Bird, are escorting Angelica, Princess of Earth, back home. Pimple, who probably has a bit of a thing for the Princess, takes her out on a joyride through space. Soon enough they’re snatched away into the maw of the Dark Queen’s flagship, the Gargantua, and taken to the planet known as Ragnarok’s World, where they will be held captive inside the Tower of Shadows. Rash (player 1) and Zitz (player 2, even though he’s the team leader) rappel down to the surface of Ragnarok’s World on a rescue mission.
The game is a platformer beat ’em up with some vehicular racing levels. Starting with the third one (the infamous Turbo Tunnel), the levels become long, point-A-to-point-B obstacle courses with checkpoints, while still being either platforming beat ’em up or vehicular. The combat is very basic; you only have a punch -can do combos with it-, a jumping punch, and a headbutt (double tap forward to run and then hit B), but the Battletoads have the ability to “morph” parts of their own bodies to deliver automatic, finishing “smash hits”, such as a giant fist, giant ram horns, a giant boot, or transforming completely into a wrecking ball. The real core of the gameplay lies with the obstacle courses, for which the game certainly gets major points in terms of variety; after Turbo Tunnel, you have platforming in an ice cave, followed by dodging wooden logs and mines on a surfboard, climbing on giant snakes to reach the top of rooms full of spiked balls, Turbo Tunnel again but with missiles and electrical barriers, an elevator shaft with moving girders which have gaps to jump up through, and the inside of a giant plumbing full of gears and killer rubber duckies (another rule of the UK/European Model is to include as much non-sequitur, I-wish-I-was-Monty-Python-esque humour as possible). It adds up to 13 levels, culminating in a final fight with the Dark Queen for the fate of Pimple and Angelica.
The difficulty lies in learning the order, exact moment, and speed at which the obstacles will come at you, and the correct way to dodge each and every single one with pixel-perfect accuracy. The majority of hazards in this game kill you in one hit, from spikes to toxic gas to the rubber duckies. Even the beat ’em up parts are hard; the most basic enemies possible might require upwards of eight to ten hits just to weaken, but they only need to hit you once to drain half your life. And the bosses are some of the most intense you’ll ever see; most of them have one-hit-kill attacks that you have to be extra quick to dodge. The only item that replenishes health are small yellow flies which you can swallow (no pizza or hot dogs here; these are clearly not your regular anthropomorphic animal heroes!), but which only replenish one health point each -you can only have up to six- and which fly across the screen for a couple of minutes before leaving.
To alleviate the difficulty for Famicom players, the speed has been reduced, the number of obstacles has also been reduced, the distance between them has been made slightly longer, and some have been removed altogther. In Turbo Tunnel, for example, there are less walls, and the ones there are are further apart from each other than they were originally, while the ramps have all been moved to the ground and to the center (no floating ramps and no ramps on the sides). On my first time reaching that level in this version, I was able to beat it with only the loss of one continue; in subsequent attempts, I’ve been able to beat it with only the loss of one life. Similarly, in level 6, Karnath’s Lair, the giant snakes are all slow, and there are less spiked balls. In level 8, Intruder Excluder, some of the sentry robots, toxic gas dispensers, and shredding ventilators have been taken out to make certain jumps easier. In level 9, Terra Tubes,, the giant gears that chase you have been made slower, and some more sets of spikes have been eliminated. And so on. The result is comparable to Contra; tough, but not completely impossible to most people -I presume that most people who play old video games are good enough to beat the classics, but not necessarily godlike-. Consequently, I enjoy it far more than the original, to the point that it has allowed me to see the inventive involved in some of its level ideas. Riding a maze of giant snakes and upwards platform jumping through moving gaps are some of the most imaginative ideas for challenges I’ve seen in an old video game.
Of course, this is a UK/European Model game, and that means the graphics and sound are top-est of the top notch. Graphically, the game shows off some neat visual effects such as the 3D ship from the introduction sequence, the movement of the tall robots’ legs, the smooth waving background of the vehicular part of Volkmire’s Inferno, and the rotating Tower of Shadows. Sound effects aren’t very convincing (the Smash Hits are accompanied by a wimpy-sounding “plap” that does not sound like the fist of an enormous, muscular creature), but the music, by Rareware composer David Wise, is some very hard-hitting stuff; the title screen, the first three levels, and the cutscenes all have catchy tunes you’ll be still remembering after many years.
In conclusion: I think this Famicom version of the original Battletoads is the ideal version of the game. Still a challenge to the reflexes and memorization skills, but not as demoralizing as the NES vesion. It hits a certain “sweet spot” between frustration and enjoyment that I think all the best action games on NES have. If you’re planning on buying the real cartridge, though, a word of warning: it’s not easy to find.
Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 64)
Year: 1996
Genre: 3D platforming
Developer(s): Nintendo EAD
Nº of players: 1
Publisher: Nintendo of America, Inc.
Recently, something happened which I greatly lament, although it didn’t exactly plunge me into depression or anything. Gustavo “Gus” Rodríguez, editor of Mexico’s official Nintendo magazine, Club Nintendo (“ClubNin” or “CN” to her friends), passed away on April 11 of this year at the age of 61.
“ClubNin” began publishing on December 1991. Much like the US equivalent, Nintendo Power, it had news, reports of such game expos as E3 and Nintendo World, previews and reviews of the latest games, cheats, walkthroughs, answers to individual readers, nostalgia sections and various other things, all of it directly related to the Nintendo universe. They had a colossal bias towards Nintendo -an imposition from “above”, i.e. the brand’s numerous distributors in Mexico-, which constantly made them contradict themselves -CD has always been the best format; Nintendo abandoned the SNES-CD; now cartridges have always the best format-, praising stuff they shouldn’t have -the Virtual Boy- and claiming some real nonsense -one time they claimed Lugia is a fusion between Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres-. But there was a good reason to overlook all of that; the writing style was humorous, complicit; it gave the feeling of a casual conversation between friends about video games, not just an adult gamer talking down to kids. There was no excess of that, nor the excess of snark that reigned supreme in European mags. Even if you didn’t own any Nintendo consoles or games, their camaraderie made it pleasant to read.
I have since understood this all had a great influence on my own writing style and my own aspirations for my retro reviews – to relate what the game is like, on an introductory level, and then giving my personal impressions of it while avoiding the “angry reviewer” and other mean-spirited stereotypes. I regret the loss of Gus, no matter the criticism I might have -and had- for the magazine, and I wish to make this review as a homage to him.
Keep in mind; all the games I review are usually emulated, because I can’t acquire nor maintain a huge game collection, but since Nintendo 64 emulation is terrible since 1999, I have to rely on physical hardware for it. So, if I don’t have an N64 game, I can’t review it. And this is Super Mario 64; the game that made me interested in video games. I gotta do it justice. But that’s another story.
For now, let us, as the commercials for the Game Boy Color used to say, “get into it”.
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The story of the game, as simple and sufficient as you’d expect from Mario, is as follows. Princess Toadstool, “Peach”, has invited Mario to her castle to eat a cake she’s just baked for him. When Mario arrives, he finds no one, except for Toad cowering in a corner of the lobby. Talking to him reveals what would be a discouraging situation for anyone but the heroic plumber: the evil Bowser, King of the Koopas, has kidnapped Peach. Again! But that’s not all; he’s also stolen the Power Stars that protects the castle, and with their power he’s created worlds filled with creatures -good and bad- and obstacles inside the paintings and walls. His goal is for his creations to overflow from their worlds and become an army he will use to take over the castle, and then, the entire Mushroom Kingdom. Mario is the only one who can enter these worlds and collect the Stars which are hiding in each, as well as the fifteen Secret Stars hidden by Peach herself before her capture, so that he may face Bowser and defeat him.
To be truthful, there is a 3D platforming game from 1990, six years earlier than this game: Alpha Waves, a French game for Amiga (called “Continuum” in the Américas). Don’t ask me if it’s any good; I’ve never played it -nor are my expectations for it to be good very high-.
Anyway. Super Mario 64 is a 3D platformer, a genre which had its moment of greatest popularity in the mid and late 1990s. In each of the large worlds, or “Courses”, of the game, there’s a number of Power Stars to collect for the purpose of opening access to more worlds -located behind locked doors with a number indicating how many Stars are required to open them-, in whhich to locate more Stars, and so on, until you reach the end. Peach’s castle serves as a hub from which you may access these Courses, while counting as something of a Course itself -the reason for the Secret Stars to exist-. These Stars are earned by accomplishing certain objectives: defeating bosses, solving puzzles, win races against other characters, collecting eight Red Coins -the recurring objective par excellence- and other stuff. One of the things this formula does stupendously is to have an “open” nature. It’s not necessary to collect every Star in every Course to proceed to the next ones, and it’s not necessary to collect them in a specific order either. In fact, it’s completely possible to defeat the last instance of Bowser and see the ending without having collected the 120 Stars there are in total -the only thing that’s different is Bowser’s final dialogue… and one other thing, but that’s for my readers to find out if they don’t know already-. Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario, once referred to this by assuring that anyone could finish his game, whether they were an experienced player or not -or at least, Club Nintendo claims he did-.
Mario has an impressive amount of moves, all of which are at his disposal from the very beginning of the game and often explained to the player through signs they can read, on the Courses, the castle and its grounds. Not only are you able to jump and run, but also punch, kick, trip the enemies, triple-jump (three successive jumps ending in a forward somersault), backwards somersault, side-somersault, and long jump, as well as crawlon the floor, pick up and throw objects, hang from certain ceilings, descend from poles, swim underwater, pound the ground with your butt (yeah), slide down slopes… And not just all of that; there are ways to find special Switches, which, as in Super Mario World, can be activated to make certain red, green and blue Blocks visible. These blocks contain special Caps which give Mario special, limited-time powers, such as flying, turning into Metal Mario -indestructible, so heavy he can walk on the bottom of the sea- or becoming invisible and immaterial to walk through walls. However, such classic items as the Mushroom or the Fire Flower are absent, and there are no equivalents.
You can also talk to pink Bob-Ombs so that they’ll activate special cannons, from which you’re able to shoot yourself like a human cannonball to reach certain places. In later worlds, it’s even possible for Mario to lose his normal cap -revealing a brown pompadour underneath-, which makes enemy attacks do more damage than normal and presses you to retrieve the cap as soon as possible.
Bowser is a boss three times; the doors leading to him are indicated with large stars, and lead to more linear Courses, at the end of each of which is a gigantic Bowser with a deep, growling voice. The fights against him -which are counted among the most memorable parts of the game- consist of managing to get behind him, grab him by the tail and rotate the Control Stick in circles to swing him around, until you throw him away by pressing B, like in hammer toss; the goal is to throw him at the bombs around the platform. When defeated, he drops keys which open doors to the castle’s basement, first, and the upper floors later. Later, in other encounters with him, he demonstrates more powers other than breathing fire, including teleporting and causing shockwaves by stomping his feet.
A 1996 fragment from the Mexican TV show “Nintendo Manía”, more or less the same thing as the magazine but in live-action. Hosted by Gus, his son Javier Rodríguez Ávila, and a rotating cast, the show ran from 1995 to 2000. Many more VHS recordings of complete episodes can be found on YouTube.
Another great aspect of the game is that, despite the enormous amount of crucial elements there are to gameplay on a basic level -a level from I’m writing this-, it’s never hard to learn how to play. Some Stars are harder to get than others; sometimes depending on the player’s experience -try to get a small child to face the Chain Chomp alone and see what happens-, sometimes because of Course design -my absolute most hated ones are 14 and 15, Tick-Tock Clock and Rainbow Ride respectively-, sometimes because of reasons which involve little logic -how come the only way I could climb on the roof of Big Boo’s Haunt was by crawling?). But the majority of the game’s rules and how to follow it is clear from the beginning. In any good game for general audiences, Nintendo’s primary trait, it is crucial that the player be able to “pick up and play”, and Super Mario 64 is outstanding in that respect.
Cover of the magazine’s July 1996 issue, commenting on that year’s E3 where the first N64 games were shown.
It’s not a perfect game, of course. One of its potential flaws may or may not be the recurrence of collecting eight Red Coins, and later, finding and stepping on five secret spots. After a while, someone might become bored and think “Isn’t there anything else? More bosses or anything?”.
But definitely the biggest problem -as it was of the game’s many, many imitators- is the camera. The camera is controlled by the yellow C buttons, which let you move it around yourself, push it close, pull it away, and look around in all directions from behind Mario’s head. But you don’t move the camera; you simply change its angle, for it’s only able to take you in from predetermined angles under the excuse that Lakitu -the turtle on a floating cloud- is a “seasoned cameraman” and knows where best to show the action from -one of my favorite moments from the game is when you look at yourself on a mirror and Lakitu is reflected with you-. Thus, many times you’re simply unable to put it in a comfortable angle with you; at the least, in a least inconvenient one; and on top of that, Lakitu tends to move on his own anyway (particularly when you’re walking on narrow bridges) leaving you unable to see where you’re going unless you’re constantly reining him in. Since “looking around” is moving Mario’s head while he’s standing still, you can’t look on all directions because you can’t spin his head that far (or else he’d be Regan MacNeil from The Exorcist).
And there’s one thing I really detest. Flying with the Wing Cap is enormously uncomfortable. Mario is constantly descending; you can keep him steady for a while, but sooner or later he’ll dive down by his own weight and immediately climb back up (with a yell of “Yippee!”), but you can’t ascend higher than that anymore, and manuevering in mid-air feels very, very stiff. Stars such as collecting the eight Red Coins on the Red Switch’s Course force you to get them on your first try perfectly.
In conclusion: Super Mario 64 is that rare, almost-unreachable ideal; an original that has very, very, very difficult to surpass. Nothing less could be expected from an adventure with Mario, a character with games so timeless that each new game of any of them still feels like the first one.
Rest in peace, Gus, until we, the Nintendomaníacos and Nintendomaníacas, meet you again.
¡Estamos en contact!
“Gus” Rodríguez
1958-2020
Spider-Man Games In Full Form
When it comes to two superheroes who share a great deal of history together, while having very little to do with each other, Batman and Spider-man are right up there. Not only have they had similar histories, but their overall personas are two sides of the same coin. They are also arguably the most popular superheroes in the market today. Similarly, their video games have shared a great deal of success and downfalls throughout the decades. Ever since the early development of video games, there were games for Spider-man and the caped crusader. Whereas Spider-man got his debut appearance in Atari 2600’s “Spider-man” released in 1982 and Batman made his debut in “Batman” released for home computers in 1986. This is prominent for the mere fact that several would draw the conclusion that Spider-man video games are largely knockoffs of the Batman games, which is not true.
Yes, there was probably some ideas gained here and there throughout development of both, but to bury the needle immediately without getting the facts is a mistake. Just because the combat system in the 2018 Spider-man game is very similar to the one in Arkham Asylum from 2009 does not mean that every single asset was ripped from the Batman game. Case and point:
Spider-man 2 (2004)
Hailed as one of the most unlikely gems to grace the wall crawler. Not only was this a free roaming sandbox, but it was also a movie tie-in game. Both of these elements normally spell immediate death for any game developer and whatever video game they were commissioned to produce. It went against the odds and not only survived, but thrived. It is still hailed as one of the best classic Spider-man ports of all time.
While it is not without its faults and glitches, the game is still very enjoyable as a whole. One highlight of the game is that you are able to travel throughout the entire city swinging your web just like the webhead himself. Beating up criminals is fast paced, fun and simple without making the game too much of a chore to learn. This is where much of the gameplay in question comes into play. As you are about to be hit by an opponent, your spider-sense goes off to tell you to dodge. The mechanics and the interactive fighting is not as polished as the Arkham games, but they still have their own charm. The graphics are bright and colorful, though, in retrospect, they didn’t age all that well. The people themselves look like blurry alien life forms. Still, that’s just how things have progressed over the years.
The boss battles are plentiful and diversified in their mechanics as no two are exactly alike. One of the more agitating ones is chasing Black Cat through the city, following her trail. However, in keeping with the movie storyline, Dr. Octopus is the man of the hour and his boss fights do not disappoint. There are other usual suspects from the Spidey rogue gallery, including the Shocker and Mysterio who don’t have so much to do with the plot. They’re more there to keep the energy up and the game a bit longer.
Much of the cast from the movie reprise their roles for the video game. Though the voice work is rather choppy in many areas, mostly due to the fact that they had limited numbers of voice actors, it’s not distracting from the overall quality. With a variety of side missions to perform and an overarching story, it’s still relatively short. What game there is will keep you occupied throughout. Though, one side mission that many have cited as a more dismal memory was “I lost my balloon!”
Spider-man (2000)
Though the name is not very imaginative, the game itself is very much deserving the name. Based on the 90’s animated series, what it lacks in three dimensional graphics, it more than makes up for in purely fun gameplay. Whether you prefer the N64, PS1 or Dreamcast version, it doesn’t matter. The wall crawling is still very easy to learn and the graphics are easy to get use to.
The game is a marvel of its time, featuring a vast number of Marvel characters throughout. It can get especially easy in some areas, for sure. However, if you’re just here to experience the game, it is quite the ride. Not only are you playing as the titular character, but you are also running from the police as you have been framed for a crime you did not commit. Now you must fight to clear your name with the help of allies such as the Captain America, Daredevil, Black Cat and Venom… wait what?!
Despite its born on date, this game has aged with some grace. Though, it still comes with the obligatory glitches and mechanical failures. For the year 2000, it’s quite the marvel. They may not have added the webs to his character model, but they brought numerous alternate costumes as a wonderful incentive to keep playing.
As you may have noticed, Spidey has gotten a lot of love from game developers who just wanted to do him justice. Games that had no business being as good as they were turned out to be classics that are still played and talked about to this day. Very few super hero games can do that for you. To be able to play a game and feel like you are the hero is a very rare quality, even today. The fact that Spider-man had games that could achieve even a fraction of that feeling back in the early 2000s is outstanding! Yes, he has had his fair share of the stinkers, every hero with his library size has.
He still has better games than Superman, am I right?
Spider-Man Games Through the Ages
Our favorite webslinger first appeared back in September of 1962 in Amazing Fantasy #15. Since then, he has been beloved by millions as one of the greatest heroes ever created. He is relatable, funny, dynamic and an all around decent human being… with radioactive spider powers. One draw to him is the fact that even though he is a superhero, he is not too overly powerful. He may be stronger than any normal human being, but there are several superheroes that are far greater in strength. He has his weaknesses and his quirks, but that only makes him more realistic and makes those tense scenes all the more fun to watch.
Being arguably the favorite superhero comes with yet another perk, though. The merchandise and paraphernalia are absolutely through the roof! You would be hard pressed to find some form of entertainment or toy where Spider-man is not prominently showcased in all his red and blue glory. Among these massively popular mediums is video games. Spidey has been featured in tons of games on a vast number of different systems (even systems you may never have heard about) and while some of them have the wall crawler at his finest, some of them simply missed the mark.
First, we can get into more dismal views of the webbed crusader. He has no shortage of terrible games in his library and many of them can be found in his less recent video games. There was an era of games where the concept of a Spidey game were rather raw and unmolded.
Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six
One of the most well known games in the old Spider-man era is the 1992 release on the NES, Master system, and game gear. We will be looking at the version of the NES console where we play a side-scrolling platform version of the old web-head. While the graphics are quite good for the time, that’s about all that can be said in a positive light. LJN is a company notorious for its bad video games and timely releases at the cost of quality. It boasts a great roster of villains, some of the favorites are showcased here, and while they shine in the comic-like atmosphere of the game, they are still overtly hated and despised for all the wrong reasons.
The controls of this game are absolutely atrocious! It is a very steep learning curve and the difficulty spike comes from the inability to pull off simple moves rather than the actual gameplay. The worst part is the hit detection. You can be right on target with your punches, which is your strongest attack, and still completely miss the mark. You have to be standing in an exact spot and execute it just right to get the desired effect. The boss fights are tedious and completely unfair, rather than sporting a fair challenge. You have a hit bar of four squares while your enemies have a hit bar of seemingly ten or twenty.
The real terror comes in the form of your hit bar and making sure you do not get damaged by enemies. If you get even two hits from the underlings early on, you may as well consider yourself on borrowed time. You have two whole lives to play with, and after losing the second time, you have to start all the way at the beginning of the game. With the hit detection, wonky controls and the fact that you have very little health in the first place, you need to get good and get good quick.
It is clear that the developers were trying to come up with a system that would make the gameplay harder in order to make the time played longer so that you feel like you get more bang for your buck. However, there’s just one problem, the game is not good. You can grow to like it if you really try, but the vast majority didn’t feel like it was worth their time to perfect their craft of playing the game. It was too hard, too tedious, and there were just better games out there that were more worth your time.
The Amazing Spider-man 1 and 2
Now, we can look at the gameboy entries of Spidey. These are some of the earliest titles in the gallery. The first one came out in 1990 and the next one coming out alongside The Return of the Sinister Six in 1992. Both of these games have been paired together for a reason which will become very clear very quickly.
The first game starts off with, once again, the controls. While we’re not going to judge it too harshly for the graphics (it’s Gameboy, guys, the graphics are going to be crap, get over it) we can very much lay into it for having some of the worst jumping mechanics ever made. Trying to jump over obstacles in this game are next to impossible in some cases, as you have to use a long jump in just the right amount of movement. This can be next to impossible when you are in between two very close crates and can’t gain up the proper momentum.
Once again, the game has been artificially elongated with overuse of difficulty in the form of close proximity in massive amounts of enemies! You can be on a screen for ridiculous amounts of time because of the line of birds above you and the men walking toward you trying to kill you all culminating in a frustrating conga line of stress. That added with the jump mechanic turn this game into a massive failure that is barely even playable from the start.
Spider-man 2 features Carnage on the cover. For those of you who are familiar with the comics, you will recognize the cover from Maximum Carnage in all its beauty and glory. After 2 years of silence, they finally come out with another Gameboy game to follow up the last one. This should be fu– oh who am I kidding? It’s even worse. Yeah, I know I said I wasn’t going to touch on the terrible graphics of the time, but I have an excuse. These graphics are even more abysmal than the first installment! Spider-man looks like he’s made of flimsy clay and his walking mechanic is one of the most awkward things to look at.
Without a playthrough to follow, you will get lost. You have to watch a play through very, very closely or you are going to bore yourself by searching through the same hallways and staircases over and over, scratching your head to figure things out. Now, I don’t know what your cup of tea is, but if you want a straightforward game with action packed mechanics, look away from this game. It’s a puzzle solving game. Yes, having Spider-man solve puzzles and use his wits to defeat the baddies is a good thing, but in small doses. You will be traversing these hard puzzles to get to the villains while clawing your eyes out.
The sad part about this is that the controls have improved somewhat. The hit detection is more well focused and the jump mechanics have changed to make it much more intuitive to jump over boxes and obstacles. However, we trade one horrific trait for a whole nother one as this game is ridiculously boring and hard to figure out. Is it worth your time? Well, that’s obviously for you to figure out, but this game will be hard pressed to appeal to the masses.
So, all in all, we see that Spider-man has had a rough past (thanks in part to LJN) when it comes to video games. What brought all of these problems about? Controls, of course. Controls and the limitations of video games to bring about a travesty of problems when it comes to depicting the hero in his true form. Spidey is a mobile hero. His agility, flexibility and quick thinking are what many love about him when it comes to fighting crime, and back in the old side scrolling days of videogames, they just couldn’t go about translating all of that into games. The limitations of game consoles back then made it nigh impossible to do him justice and the games suffered for it along with their players.
Join us next time as we travel through the ages to take a look at more video games featuring the wall-crawler and his entire host of villainous misfits! There’s a lot of standouts that feature Spidey and while we can’t get through all of them, we can certainly take a quick gander. Remember to stay a true-believer, and remember to drink water.
Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
Original title: Sonic the Hedgehog
Country of origin: USA
Genre: Comedy, action, adventure
Year: 2020
Running time: 99 minutes
Why, yes, I do movie reviews too! Not as often as I do video game reviews, but I do them. And here’s one I’m still very happy to be writing.
Yesterday I went to see the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie, which had raised so much -and so despair-inducing- controversy because of the title character’s look and having to go fast (ha! ha!) into his redesign. I won’t dwell on that, however.
I’ve liked the Sonic video games all my life, and I’ve always held on to the hope that the character’s public reputation (marred by a long string of video game installments ranging from “okay” to “abysmal” and a horrendous, insane mass of scum of a fandom) to rebound. Well, here’s the movie that may have just accomplished that. No; I’m certain that it did accomplish that. That’s right; I am giving a positive review to Sonic the Hedgehog, the movie that no one gave a dime for and which seemed doomed to fail. Keep reading and you’ll learn why…
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As is common, though not universal, in the microcosm of Sonic adaptations, here we have Sonic as an alien who falls to our world. At a very early age, Sonic discovered his amazing ability to run at the speed of sound -and with his body covered in lightning like he’s a Super Saiyan-. The enemies of his mentor, an owl named Longclaw, found him out, and to save him, she teleported him to Earth using a Ring -although it may not look like it, this is a reference to the video games; specifically, Sonic 3D Blast, where you had to gather birds and put them into Big Rings to teleport them out of danger.
Ten years later, Sonic has managed to live alone and secretly on a California small town called Green Hills, becoming familiar with its inhabitants and especially its police sheriff Tom Wachowski (James Marsden, whom I first knew as Cyclops in the X-Men movies), who is planning to move to San Francisco because he dismisses his own home town, where nothing ever happens.
Oh, Tom, are you in for a real happening! Because Sonic, since he can’t reveal his existence to anyone, doesn’t have any friends on Earth; which is what he truly wants and the cause of his biggest frustrations. Taking said frustrations out one night, he runs so fast that his power causes a PEM big enough to leave the entire Pacific Northwest without electricity, which attracts the attention of Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey), a government scientist extremely depreciative of society, who develops an obssession with capturing Sonic and use him to power his machines. Sonic ends up revealing himself to Tom, and together they head to San Fran to retrieve Sonic’s bag of Rings, which he needs to use to teleport to the Mushroom Village where Longclaw said he would be safe from her enemies.
When Carrey was announced as the villain, many assumed he’d be the only good thing about the movie. While he’s in good acting form -although not necessarily physical, nor, sadly, mental-, he’s not the best thing about the movie. The best thing about the movie, against all prediction. is Sonic himself. He’s been written as a sort of Roger Rabbit; wacky, but not loud; neurotic, but not unbearable; and, above all, optimistic. He spends the majority of the movie having the time of his life, making wisecracks and doing all kinds of fantastic -as in fantasy- stuff with his superspeed (his bar fight scene against a bunch of biker thugs is a total riot), and the viewer can’t help but join in his enthusiasm, never seemingly able to get tired of his antics. I think a good reason for this is precisely that they redesigned him into something that looked more like he does in the games, but I’m not saying this because I’m one of those horrendous, insane Sonic fans. I say this because it helps put the audience into the mindset that he’s a cartoon character, like Roger Rabbit -hence the comparison-. It’s a lot easier to take a cartoon character’s antics with a straight face when they look like a cartoon character. As far as I can remember, the last movie that did this with CGI was The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000), which I haven’t been able to see yet.
But the comings and goings of a Hollywood cartoon Sonic aren’t what drives me to recommend this movie.
The cockfighting between Marvel and DC movies has led Hollywood’s movie industry, its audience and its critics to believe that live-action adaptations of family-friendly material can only be done two ways; either “darker and grittier” like Christopher Nolan’s Batman, or “ironic” and prone to savagely making fun of the source material like Joel Schumacher’s Batman. Each form is approached -by both its makers and its audiences- from the assumption that any person who prefers the other is evil. Due to this, we have lost the tendency there was with Superman II, Batman 1989, or the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy; that of telling the stories with “sincerity”. That is; knowing that these are unreal stories about unlikely heroes saving entire worlds from the threat of demented villains with evil laughs, they tell them just the way they are, without the need to “justify them” or “ground them in reality”, nor to “constantly reassure the audience that we acknowledge that this is a very stupid thing that no one should care so much about”.
Sonic doesn’t do either of those things. Sonic is a movie about a cartoon blue hedgehog who can talk and run very fast, who beats down an evil scientist in red with a very bushy mustache, and saves the world. The argument is never told as if it was anything else. It has humor, but it doesn’t take potshots at itself the whole time. It has serious moments, but it’s not pessimistic. Its makers feel no shame about the material they’re working with, and therefore they make no attempt to justify its existence, nor themselves. They know they’re working with a character who doesn’t need to be one or the other to succeed. They know there’s a spectrum between grimdark and irony, and they have wisely put their movie within it.
This is why I recommend this movie. This is why I say my hopes of seeing Sonic vindicated have come true. And I know there are others like me, even if we won’t open our mouths to expose ourselves. And their hopes might have come true as well.
In conclusion: We need more movies like Sonic the Hedgehog.
Doom II (1994, MS-DOS)
System: MS-DOS
Genre: First-person shooter
Year: 1994
Developer(s): id Software
When I was a child, my parents wisely never let me watch any movies or TV shows I wasn’t old enough for (responsible parenting, what an idea!), but I deliberately avoided video games rated M, which my father gave me lots of trouble for. The two M-rated games I can remember tolerating were Duke Nukem 3D, and Doom II. Today, I tell you my thoughts on the latter.
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Doom games are usually extremely light on story; most of the bare-bones plot they normally have is told to you, rather than shown. id Software’s design philosophy is that nobody cares about story in video games, so there’s no need to develop one. It’s a philosophy that worked for the kind of games they used to make, and it certainly works here.
You, the nameless space marine (colloquially known as “Doomguy”), had to fight tooth and nail through an invasion of demons from Hell who had slipped through the interdimensional gates created by Earth scientists on Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars. You’ve just arrived back on Earth after escaping with your life. You thought the horror was over, but you’re about to discover the awful truth: the demons have invaded Earth, annihilated most of the human race, and mutated some of your fellow marines into combat zombies. It’s Hell on Earth! The last humans alive have boarded the last spaceship, but the demons have surrounded it with a giant wall of flame. Your goal is to reach the last spaceport, remove the flames and allow the ship to escape, while staying behind to finish off the invasion alone.
Doom II is an early first-person shooter. Each stage has the same objective -find the exit-, but each is a big, multi-layered maze full of doors, weapons, items, and enemies. These run from zombified marines to the enormous Cyberdemon, a cyborg satyr with a rocket launcher. To help you destroy them, there’s a varied selection of weapons strewn throughout the levels, which include a chainsaw, a handgun, a double-barrelled shotgun (the jack-of-all-trades weapon in any FPS of this age), a rocket launcher, a plasma rifle, and the screen-clearing BFG 9000, a thing so powerful and destructive it can kill enemies it’s not even being fired at. Items also exist, such as medikits and armor (to heal yourself and boost your protective armor, which shields you from damage to your health), small and large boosts to your health and armor (to make both go beyond 100%), the “Berserk” medikit (full health and makes your bare fists more powerful than normal), temporary invincibility, temporary partial invisibility, temporary anti-radiation suit (for walking unharmed in radioactive waste),backpacks with extra ammo, and -most importantly- colored keys. Many doors in the game are locked, but require you to find a key of the same color as the lock (the game will warn you, as you attempt to open them, that “you need the [color] key to open this door”. Finding the keys involves negotiating the big mazes that the levels usually are, and encourages exploring every single corner, which is also good for finding secret paths, rooms, and items inside the walls. You’re rated at the end of each level depending on how many enemies you killed, how many items you obtained, and how many secrets you found.
By its own admission, Doom II isn’t a very complicated game; it’s action-oriented first and always, but that doesn’t mean it’s mindless. Not only do you have to figure out which switches open which door(s) in each level, but you also have to know how to conserve ammunition, since the farther you get into the game, the deadlier the enemies become and the tougher weapons they die to. Whenever you can, you have to find ways to kill several enemies in one stroke; in the early levels this is done to zombies and Imps by luring them near the barrels of explosive radioactive waste (lots of radioactivity in this game, isn’t there?) and blowing the barrels up with a shotgun. The blast radius is usually big enough to kill most of the weaker enemies in one hit, as is that of the rocket launcher. Other times, you’ll have to know when not to fire a single shot; in the level “The Crusher”, for example, early on there is a bunch of Hell Knights standing on a platform. The Hell Knights are tough and you’re not in a position to just shoot them all down. What to do? Nearby, there is a switch, which lowers a portion of the ceiling down onto them and squashes them flat, killing them all in one stroke without you having to waste any ammo on them – hence the level’s name, “The Crusher”. Being a PC title from the days when PC players were assumed to be willing to put up with puzzle logic that was, at best, loopy -see also: almost all of the King’s Quest games-, the only clue you get is in the level’s name, and by then it’s more of a “Oh, so that’s why it’s called that!” than a “Oh, so there’s a crushing ceiling in this level!” situation. As the enemies get tougher and the odds more overwhelming, you may find yourself near-hopelessly stuck from time to time. The final boss, a giant mural of a demon’s head with an exposed brain (known as Baphomet, the Gatekeeper, or the Icon of Sin depending on who you ask), is an absolute pain to figure out how to kill, almost one as bad as actually trying to kill it.
There’s a matter that I’d like to initiate some kind of discussion about. You might recall the Superman review where I explained why “tank controls” weren’t the ideal setup for action games, where your reflexes are being put to the test and painstakingly turning yourself left or right to engage enemies isn’t the quickest response you can make. Yet Doom II has tank controls (the arrow keys are for front/back movement and turning while the , and . keys are lateral movement) and it plays like a dream. It had never occured to me before, and it helps me understand why tank controls became so commonplace in later years; because the classic Doom series was their model. Whichever Greek philosopher it was that said “I only know that I know nothing” was absolutely right.
I believe that I may have an idea of why this is the case. For one thing, Doom II’s controls are much quicker and more responsive than those of its imitators. For another, Doom II doesn’t require the player to jump, crouch, or aim up/down. Gaps are cleared by simply running across them, and if an enemy is in your sights, your gunfire will hit it. Attempts to incorporate most of this stuff into later games usually only contributed to their encumbrance; while the simplicity of the control scheme ensures that Doom II earns a place in the “easy to learn, hard to master” library occupied by plenty of retro classics in the vein of Super Mario Bros. or Pac-Man.
Graphically, it’s what you might expect from a game this old – an early 3D engine (which allowed for stairs and multiple planes, although not for multi-story buildings like LucasArts’ later Star Wars: Dark Forces) populated by 2D sprites, the kind that get blurrier the closer you get to them. The music, though – the music! – Classic Doom has some of the best music I’ve heard in a video game, from decadent “sinister hellish landscape” to Megadeth-esque material. Did you guys know that “Christian black metal” is a thing? The next game after Doom: Eternal should get on that!
In conclusion: You don’t always need a “cinematic experience” or a gripping storyline with twists and turns in order to have fun. Sometimes, all you need is a double-barreled shotgun, a bunch of monsters, and some hard music… and a little patience for mind-warping expectations -on the part of the developers- of your ability to survive.
Survival Horrors – Do’s and Don’t’s
Survival horror is perhaps one of the most slippery slopes in gaming. That feeling you get when you walk into a room you have never been in. You can barely see, the shadows in the room take on forms that look ominous, the silence in the room is louder than any noise that you will ever hear, and everything is still, motionless, eerie. There is a creeping feeling in your brain that tells you that you should not be there, and the darkness begins to take its toll on your nerves. There is a sudden flash from outside the black curtains in front of the window that makes you stop in your tracks as all of the forms of the room are brought to light for a single instant, but that only makes it worse as the darkness returns. One sudden motion, and your heart can skip a beat, you begin to feel the dreading that something is watching you, something is coming for you, something is about to crawl out from underneath the furniture that is covered in white sheets and grab your ankles, pulling you into a place unknown, a shadowy place of which there is no return.
It is up to the game developers to first capture that feeling in a setting for your character, and simulate that feeling of absolute helplessness. Do you have a weapon with which to defend yourself? Can you survive if something truly does lurk in the shadows? Well, that’s where we start to get into the true cusp of a much larger world, one that has captured the hearts of millions, but also caused some of the largest disappointments ever seen in the gaming world, rivalling that of E.T. for the Atari.
Truly terrifying horror games are some of the most difficult things to write and develop. While there have been some terrific successes, there have also been some horrific failures that completely trounce the number of good games that are meant to invoke fear. When you step out from the middle of the trees, and get a good look at the forest for what it is, you can start to see where the successes bleed together. They have certain elements in them that are worth noting and if used properly, can truly give the player what they came to see and feel, true terror!
Horror movie fans are normally the target audience. Those people that go to the theater to see a scary film, even if chances are it is not going to be good, they are willing to risk it. These are the ones that want to take that extra step further and live in that world. They want to interact with that horror movie and be a part of it. If you can make your audience feel like that, you have won the race that is called survival horror, and you will be greatly rewarded for your efforts.
Then there are attempts that just miss the point entirely, or do not have the means nor the know-how to truly make the player become engulfed in their dark, horrific reality. This could be from a lack of funding, a lack of skill, or just a simple lack of knowledge on the subject. Some people think it’s just as simple as shoving someone into a dark room and have people talk cryptic nonsense. Well, today we’re going to delve into some of the elements from certain games that got it wrong and right. In the next article we will go over some important items involved with making survival horror video games in detail. Stay tuned and be sure to keep an eye out.
Heavy Artillery: Do not get me wrong. There are plenty of games that give you weapons, and still maintained their stance in the survival horror world. However, the use of guns such as machine guns, gatling guns, sniper rifles, lasers, whatever they are; these are things that just do not belong. When you give your player the means to wipe out monsters with air strikes and missile launchers, that fear and dread you mean to invoke are just not there. A big bad monster comes out of nowhere. Oh, I shot him. Well that was fun, what next? These are known as action games. Do not slap the genre “survival horror” on a game and give your player a magical one-hit sword. Most of the time, it just really does not work.
Over Complicated Puzzles: Puzzles in survival horror are quite common, in fact, they’re in just about all of the noteworthy titles. However, there comes a time whenever you need to look at your overall story and ask yourself “How long will this puzzle take?” If you’ve done your job correctly, given your player a good amount of fear factor in an area, made your haunted house nice and spooky with that subtle tinge of fright, good on you! However, putting a Myst-level puzzle in the middle of a room with which to slow their progress is highly discouraged. After a while, you lose all feeling of uneasiness in favor of confusion. That confusion can turn into boredom very quickly if you are not careful. Then your player goes off to a walkthrough of the game and that just takes them out of the experience as a whole. Was it really worth it?
Fast and Easy Scares: Perhaps the most used and abused element of the survival horror genre. Before terror or eeriness sets in, we are treated to a big fat monster with scary fangs going booga booga! No… just no. There is a method to this, and popping out at the very beginning to scream at your player is not the answer. These things take time to build, they need to progress slowly before you jump the gun.
Atmosphere: Let’s face it, if you do not have the skills to create a truly unsettling atmosphere for your player to lurk, survival horror is going to be nigh impossible. This can be done in several creative ways, some ways need very little expensive backgrounds, but at the same time, the more creative you aim, the better you should probably be with your surroundings and the more time you should spend adding just that extra tinge of subtle paint on a wall that looks like it may or may not be blood.
The Antagonist: Perhaps one of the most important things you can get right and wrong is the main villain of the game. Dracula is a very hefty example of this, so let’s use him, shall we? Dracula has been depicted in thousands of ways, whether it be the ancient Transylvanian vampire or a new age, bleak depiction of the vampiric lord, he can be menacing, or he can be an outright joke. Say you bring him into the fray and he does his thing, but then in walks his father. The bigger, badder vampire guy with the aura of mastery will overshadow our favorite blood sucker, and then all credibility will be lost. You just killed any vibes you were aiming for in favor of a new, scary bad guy with bigger shoulder pads. Well, what about Dracula? If he’s sitting there trying to impress his daddy, why do we care?
Or, let’s say you go a little overboard with his villainous traits, give him that evil laugh that we all know, make him just walk in, spout out some threats and kill a kitten. Well, now we’re just sitting there saying “Okay, we get it, we want to kill you. You don’t need to rub it in!” Subtlety, that is the key to giving us a fulfilling urge to reach the goal, and it also makes us fear this guy. We need to be afraid of his fangs and his power, and once we get into that final boss battle, we can truly concentrate and wonder “Well, crap, what do I do now? I need to pay attention. OH GOD! PLEASE HAVE MERCY ON ME!”
Helplessness: This can be completely abused and horribly mistreated. However, when done right, it can be the kicker that makes your game truly great! If you truly feel helpless in the eyes of a terrifying entity, but have that chance of escape/victory, the urge to survive will come to you naturally. Hence the name “survival horror.” You want to survive, and thus you will play every facet of the game in order to obtain the ability to do so. Even if you are given a pistol with which to defend yourself. If that pistol does not stop the monster, though it may slow it down, the horror is heightened! “Crap! What do I do now? I need to run! Please don’t catch me!” Boom! You have just successfully upped the fear factor and made your game that much better.
Forced Fear: Finally, it is worth talking about one thing that many games seem to fall back on as a means to invoke some sort of reaction. Do not tell the player what they are feeling. Do not have a fear meter or some random character saying “This place is so scary!” We will be the judge of that! Telling us to be scared and driving it into our heads like you’re commanding us to emote just does not work. Yes, having the character we play show how scared they are can affect us, but that is only if it is done properly. There are tones you need to set, traits you need to build upon and relationships you need to cement into us before we truly begin to feel for what they are going through. Telling us when to scream is overstepping your bounds as a game, and usually draws an opposite reaction of perpetual eye-rolling.
You can have a great game with amazing game mechanics at your disposal. Good on you. However, before you start labeling your genre to the capacity of Lovecraftian horror of the survival variety, make sure you at least make an effort to bring us into that mindset. It is not easy, especially if you are aiming to truly make us bite our nails. You can throw in all of the jump scares you want, but unless you get us in that dark, abysmal place in our psyches that invokes those emotions we came here for, you have failed your mission. Pay attention to what truly brings out the scares and makes us delve into that world. You will be glad you did. But first, always remember to drink water.
Ognimod in English! 