When you’re a geek like me, there are certain generalizations people make about you. Let me clear some of these up: I have never played D&D, or Magic, or any form of table top gaming for that matter nor am I interested in doing so. I’m not enough of an anime fan to dress up as one of the characters (Video games on the other hand…). I also do not collect comic books.That’s not to say I just plain don’t read them, of course. Every once in a great while something might catch my eye and I’ll take a look at it. Two major problems I have with collecting is that for one I have a hard time taking care of fragile things, so most of the comic books I do get end up getting mangled, and two, I go completely OCD when I get into something and buying all those issues to see every possible story of a particular obsession would eventually put me on welfare.
But comics are one of the major foundations of video games, specifically for the last few generations. So it’s natural that not only would there be games based on famous comics, but stylized like them as well. Infamous, released last week, is a superhero story not unlike Spider-Man with still-shot cutscenes drawn in a comic book style. Japanese strategy RPG Valkyria Chronicles is cel-shaded in a way to look like a color pencil sketched manga, complete with sound effects being visually represented by comic style fonts. Before either of these however, Comix Zone on Sega Genesis went a step further by putting players in a comic book quite literally.
Overview
After the success of the Japanese developed Sonic the Hedgehog and the Genesis system, Sega quickly opened up a U.S. development branch, dubbed the Sega Technical Institute. They were responsible for making some of the Genesis’ biggest milestones, which even includes fan favorite Sonic The Hedgehog 2.
In 1992, STI game designer Peter Morawiec had an idea for a game, which he demoed for Sega in video form as a sort of prototype. The video, Joe Pencil Trapped in the Comix Zone, showed a character literally moving through a comic book, jumping between panels and narrating to the player via text balloons while beating up monsters that were drawn in by a sinister looking hand. The video impressed Tom Kilenski, the then Sega of America president, and the game went into production. In 1995, Comix Zone was born.
The game stars Sketch Turner, a comic book artist and rock musician, who’s kind of down on his luck in terms of money. One day while working on his art, a lightening bolt hits his drawing desk. Rather than his comic and desk getting fried, the villain of his comic leaps out of the page, grabs Sketch by the tuft of his collar and thrusts him into his own comic world. Now Sketch must battle his own creations if he hopes to get back home.
Pro
When I tell you that Sketch is thrown into his comic book world, I don’t mean that he’s just in that world that he created; I mean he is literally inside his comic book. Each level is a ‘page’ of the book, which is divided into panels. As Sketch either defeats all the enemies or solves the puzzle of that particular panel, he is then given a choice of which panel he would like to go to next. He even has to turn the page physically at the end of each level. How’s that for immersive presentation?
The game goes to impressive lengths to make it look like a comic. There’s special moves involving ripping the pages and using the paper against enemies, your nemesis draws in new enemies and obstacles ala’ Bugs Bunny in the Looney Tunes classic Duck Amuck, and even at one point sets a page on fire so you have to run to the end of the level. It’s all sealed nicely with impressive comic art drawn by now Ratchet & Clank art director Craig Stitt that gives it a mid-90s comic aesthetic.
I also especially like how they use the presentation to handle the narrative. There are no cutscenes outside of the intro and ending, but there’s still a good amount of story. The characters talk via comic style word balloons, regardless if it’s just you internalizing or conversing with an enemy that you happen to be beating the snot out of. The game actually manages to convey quite a bit of back story without interrupting game flow. Considering the amount of narrative, or the lack there of, in other beat-em ups like Streets of Rage or Final Fight, that’s quite a feat.
Con
The other difference between Comix Zone and its beat-em up brethren is that you can’t toward or away from the background; you are limited to the left and right. That means there’s a bigger emphasis on platforming and puzzles. This is fine, it’s a very well designed game, but it also makes it hard. I mean this game is hard as fuck and I still haven’t beaten it after 14 years. I’m not saying difficulty is a bad thing, but some of that difficulty feels very artificial.
For one, some enemies are specifically placed in very inconvenient spots such as by pitfalls or flames. And you don’t just jump back or fall over when hit, you go flying. Then there are some puzzles where the solution may not be so obvious, such as using your pet rat to rip the page and find a hidden grenade (with no indication that one is hidden, mind you) so you can knock a guy off a platform you’re trying to jump on.
The biggest crime however, and I want to straddle whoever made this decision, is that when you punch solid objects, you take damage. It’s only a little chip damage with each punch, but these objects take a long time to break. What’s worse is that there’s usually at least one block or crate that you need to destroy on every panel. Add that to there being little in the way of health items and by the end of the page, you’ve wasted most of you’re health beating up objects that you’re forced to hit, let alone all the enemies you’ve been fighting. I understand that hitting solid rock and wood hurts, but this is a video game about a guy who gets sucked into a comic book. Was this kind of realism really necessary?
Conclusion
Comix Zone is absolutely fantastic, there’s no doubt in my mind. It oozes presentation, originality and care that I don’t see in many next generation titles. It’s also an interesting historical piece like most of the STI developed games because of the then rare mash up of Japanese and American developers coming together to create such a stylized product. Hopefully we’ll get to talk more about STI games in the future, as they all were something special and a treat to talk about.
(All images borrowed lovingly from VGMuseum.com. Information source came from this Sega-16.com interview with Peter Morawiec. A fascinating read if you’re interested.)
Next week: As part of Ghostbusters month, we strap a Hoover on our backs to find our missing brother. Luigi’s Mansion is next.
Sorry guys. I’m tired of wrapping my head around things to say about Lost Planet, a game I thought I would give more of a crap about than I actually did. This would be the inherent problem about intending to write about a game before actually playing it. The Weekly Relay will continue next week with Comix Zone, a game I very much give a crap about. For now, I want to talk about another comic book style game, Infamous. So let’s talk about it
I’m a fair amount of the way into Infamous, and it’s doing a good job at dethroning Dead Rising as my favorite title of this generation of consoles (I’m not going to count Portal because 1. It’s a PC game and 2. It’s more of an official expansion of a five year old game). As with any hyped game however, Infamous has not lived up to the expectations I had or even the promises made by the developer or reviews out for the game. When I heard about the morality system of the game, I was told not to expect the clear black-and-white nature of good and evil as seen in the likes of Knights of the Old Republic and Fable. No, I was expecting complex moral choices, ones where, although bad things could result in my actions, the ends could ultimately justify the means in my head.
I should note that in these games, I always find trouble with being the ‘bad’ guy when I have the option. It’s not just because I find playing the dark and brooding guy to be an aged stereotype that should have died with ’90s comic books, but because the necessity of giving your character the option limits a game’s narrative potential.
Star Wars games are probably the best example because, with the exception of Anakin Skywalker and his redemption, the dark side characters are all the same set evil character type; that is to say all around unlikable douchebags whose sole motivation is to blow shit up and get more powerful by killing others above them. There’s nothing wrong with this when it’s a character in a movie who isn’t the antagonist, hence why they are normally used as foils. That’s why when you see a list of the greatest villains of all time, you don’t see Palpatine on it, you see the aforementioned tortured soul that is Darth Vader.
This is how the limited options in video games present a problem for really letting the player be a motivated villain; You can’t be Darth Vader, you must be Palpatine. See for example Fable, which relies on you to artificially raise your evil points by either making extremely messed up choices for no other reason than you’re a prick (Except on the occasion where you might get more loot, and then you’re a greedy prick), or kill a bunch of random passerbys because… well, you’re a prick. While some may think Fable can get a pass because you raise your character from child to adult, only having the option to be a demonic megalomaniac supervillain only serves to highlight how limited your choices actually are, undoing the very illusion of freedom it’s trying to create.
I don’t believe linearity to be a bad thing, and I’m perfectly fine with having a straight and narrow path. Actually, I prefer it rather than having an artificial morality system like described above (Don’t get me started on Fallout 3). What intrigued me about Infamous, however, is that it was the story of a particular individual and a pivotal moment in his life; a good man who gets power without asking for it and has to choose what to do with that power. When the game was first being made, the developer base said you would have the option to be a boyscout Superman-esque hero, or be more crude whilst disregarding the collateral damage, and your powers would reflect those actions. You would still be a hero for say, just one that people would like or dislike, hence, Infamous. I was really interested with the prospect of playing an angry guy who doesn’t know quite what to do with that anger and would learn as the story progressed. It seemed like a great opportunity for a video game to explore the dynamics of a character and see the different ways he could end up being. This is what we got instead.
In one of the early missions of the game, main character Cole finds a dead woman on the ground. Using his awesome electrical powers of awesome, he reads her mind which leads Cole to the location of her husband, whose holed up in the sewers blocking Cole’s way to a vital objective, refuses to open the door until he knows his wife is safe. Cole then monologues his options: “I can either fry this guy, or tell him the truth.” And… That’s it. No internal struggle, no justification. Just a clear black and white choice between being an asshole or a decent human being.
There’s no incentive for Cole being a dick either. We’re given the impression early on that he was ok, he had friends and just lived his life. So why just start being an asshole because you have powers? The result of choosing to be a bad guy creates a disconnect between what we know about the character going in. It’s a shame, really, because otherwise the writing for the game has been quite good and it would have only made a strong narrative even stronger.
Currently, Infamous isn’t so much an exploration at how someone chooses to evolve after a life-changing event so much as it is an awesome super hero game with a generic morality system. There’s nothing wrong with that either, but I wish I hadn’t been gypped into believing the game was something that it wasn’t. I also haven’t completed the game yet as a good or bad guy, but a trophy for beating the game as Infamous with the description “Powerful men always want more power” doesn’t leave me with high hopes that things will change for the better. We’ll see in time I guess.
You may have noticed there’s no Weekly Relay here, nor was there yesterday. Have I already abandoned my ambitions? And so soon?
Fear not, it has just been delayed due to extenuating circumstances such as health concerns (Nothing serious, just annoying) and the like. It will be up either today or tomorrow, and will not interupt plans for the next installment this coming Sunday. In the meantime, you can check out my Punch-Out!! review over at GameFAQs.
The Weekly Relay is a weekly article whose goal is to ‘relay’ information about a video game, for better or for worse. Each week, we’ll look at one game and specifically talk about what it does best, and what it does worst. It is not however, intended as a full review.
In the early days of gaming, innovative games were held to something of a high regard, so much so that anything that had a similar camera would immediately be labeled the derogatory term, “clone”. Hell, the term “Doom Clone” was being pasted on every first-person shooter to come out the door well up to the late 90s (Doom itself being built off the same engine as Wolfenstein 3-D, which itself was built off of Catacombs 3-D). That said, Legend of Zelda clones have it rough.
Does it seem hypocritical that I use the term clone when I just sounded like I despised the phrase? Well then I challenge anyone reading this to define a genre for Zelda. Seriously, what is it? Is it an RPG, an Adventure game, Action, Puzzle? It’s missing key elements of all those games that it can’t distinctly be placed in any of them, yet borrows from all of them at the same time. So from now until the end of time, it will just be Zelda. Zelda and its legion of clones.
That’s fine though. A clone can still be a good and legitimate game so long as it doesn’t rip something off wholesale, and nearly every non-Nintendo console has its respective Zelda clone that brings enough to the table to have something of a cult following. An exception however is Crusader of Centy, developed by Nextech for the Sega Genesis and published by Atlus in the U.S. circa 1994, which doesn’t have this kind of following and yet diversifies itself quite well from Nintendo’s legendary series.
Overview
By describing Centy as a Zelda clone, you already know that the usual tropes are there. You’ll be exploring a world map and its various exotic locations from a top down perspective while swinging a sword at enemies and acquiring new tools that will allow you to get past certain obstacles so you can continue to progress. So let’s start with what it does differently.
The game starts off with your character, the usual name-him-yourself silent protagonist, on his fifteenth birthday. As ritual for this milestone and in celebration of the hero from years past, you are now given a sword and shield of your own in hopes that you will fend off the monster menace that’s plagued the kingdom for an unspecified amount of time. Shortly after, a mysterious fortune teller takes away your ability to speak to humans while simultaneously giving you the ability to talk to animals, thus providing the game with its gimmick.
Along with talking to you, some of these animals will join you in your quest, making it the Centy version of Zelda’s tools system. Each animal has a certain power that you’ll need to progress. For example, Chilly the penguin can make your blade turn into ice, freezing water so you may cross. You can also hold two animals at a time, in certain cases making combinations like stronger spells.
Another difference from Zelda, aside from the handheld Link’s Awakening, is the ability to jump. This is exploited to great lengths, so the game has a bigger sense of ‘obstacle course’. In fact I’d say I probably did a lot more jumping around than monster slaying, something I soon discovered may have been very deliberate.
Pro
It’s easy to take storytelling methods utilized in the current generation of gaming for granted. 3D graphics and animation have come such a long way that now we can nearly replicate the same kind of direction and feel that we see on television and movies. These techniques are really only indicative of the last 10 years or so, and before that, developers really had to work for that kind of feeling. And while Crusader of Centy has to deal with many technical limitations that keep it from ever really nailing it, such as Genesis sprite animation and limited text box space, there are many times throughout where I’m legitimately surprised by the game as a storyteller.
The earliest example is also probably the strongest. At one point, our hero enters a mysterious forest and encounters the genre staple monster, the slime. Having already slain many of these throughout the game, I didn’t think much of it. Sword at the ready, I push forward on the controller and move the hero toward the slime. Almost at swing’s length, the screen suddenly flashed white, and suddenly I see myself running the other way and eventually off camera. Perplexed, I start pressing buttons to see what happens. The slime then starts moving. Apparently that particular slime had some kind of ability unlike the other ones I had fought.
So moving around with my little slime body, I eventually see a group of slime going around a tree. I approach them, figuring I could get some semblance of what is going on when suddenly they scream and run the other way into a small cave. I soon find out why; another hero from my village, a more revered and time honored one that you’d see as the typical Western fantasy stereotype of a hero, rushes from the woods and begins attacking me. Obviously the impediment of speech only adds to the misunderstanding that my new form has created, so quickly, I escaped to the same cave the real slime had retreated to. Inside, I find a family of slime who apparently are terrorized often by this ‘hero’ for no good reason other than they are, well, slime.
At this point, I actually had to stop playing for a second and reflect on what just happened. Ok, yeah, its one thing to show things from the other perspective, but it’s another thing entirely to put me in the shoes of the persecuted first. It’s simple, maybe even a little heavy-handed, but God dammit if it doesn’t work.
The monster-as-misunderstood creatures theme would later be used again in the PS2 strategy RPG Arc the Lad: Twilight of Darkness. The story in this game was handled like other RPGs do now, so it makes for a good comparison of two narrative techniques. In that game, you play two brothers, one of which happens to be half-monster. At certain key points in the story, you switch perspective to see what’s happening with the other brother. It certainly works at being thought provoking, but it all boils down into the same two five-minute cutscenes over and over, one saying “Damn the humans for killing us for being different! They will pay!” and the other saying “Those savages have killed so many of us, they must be punished!” ad nausea until the last 10 minutes when it becomes “We should respect each other for our differences.” At times this is effective enough to be compelling, but getting a sense of story through actual interaction the way that Centy does makes it more personal.
Thus Crusader of Centy’s strongest asset is allowing us to experience its story rather than just telling it. And that’s part of the reason we play games in the first place, isn’t it?
Con
If one of the reasons we play games is for the experience, the other is to be entertained as well. I don’t want to say Crusader of Centy isn’t fun to play, but it probably could try a bit harder.
See, Legend of Zelda games live and breathe on their level design. Finding secrets on the world map and using tools to open new areas is all well and good, but if what we find or see is without purpose or point, then the whole thing is about as much fun as exploring your neighbor’s garage. Centy is particularly weak in this area.
Generally, you just get the feeling that there wasn’t much thought or care put into the level/dungeon designs. On more than one occasion I found myself traversing hallways or big rooms that had no items, no enemies…. just walls and dead ends. It’d be one thing if they were shorter, but more often than not they end up becoming small hikes.
When you do get to see interesting stuff, it’s done fairly well. There’s a higher emphasis on platforming like I mentioned earlier, where you have to do long jumps, avoid spike pits and that sort of thing, but this also causes it to spread its innovation extremely thin. Your new powers just become new ways to clear old obstacles. For instance, first you’ll be jumping over spikes, then three hours into the game you’ll be using an animal that lets you sprint to jump over a lot more spikes, and then you’ll use an armadillo you can stand on to use as a platform to jump over… well, even more spikes.
Compare this to the Zelda series, which finds a lot of new and varying ways for you to use its toolset. You might need a bomb to hit two switches at the exact same time, or set off a line of bomb plants to blow up a structure, or simply blow up a wall. And Zelda’s been able to stretch this gameplay for over 20 years with it only recently becoming a bit stale.
I should note that I didn’t anticipate Centy besting Zelda. Alundra for the Playstation is probably my favorite Zelda clone of all time, and it’s not as solid nor entertaining as any of the other Zelda games (well, except Phantom Hourglass, but that’s an entirely different article all together).Yet while Centy still manages to be fun enough to get you through the about 10 hours or so of gameplay, it doesn’t feel like the designers cared enough to really give it that extra bit of polish.
Conclusion
Crusader of Centy isn’t a great game. In fact, it just barely pushes the boundary of above average, mainly for things I didn’t touch on, like the boss fights. From a storytelling perspective however, it’s still an interesting title that any serious gamer like myself should at least play through once. There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before, but I can’t think of many games that do those things quite the same way. It was enough for me to actually be emotionally moved by a title that didn’t grab me from the start.
Next week: We brave an arctic frontier to destroy native habitats with Lost Planet.
Yeah, so my writing could stand to improve a little.
This is something I ponder often while rereading something I’ve published on the site an hour or so after I’ve written it, noting logic inconsistencies and careless grammar and spelling mistakes. A lot of this is my own fault for not treating all of my work like it’s the best that I can do, but that comes as an unfortunate side effect to the whole education thing. All the time I have to do proper writing techniques such as outlining or rewriting drafts has to go into term papers that how best I can regurgitate information, rather than to a space I pay money for every month for my own personal amusement and self-betterment (Apparently betterment is a word. See? I’m improving already). Its summer break now and I’d really like to take this added time to both improve and treat this place like the website I’ve wanted it to be.
When I originally planned the Digital Relay, and this is going all the way back to the beginning of the century now, the idea was for it to be a community effort looking at all forms of media, be it video games or my other loves of movies, TV, books and music. It would start out with me and a couple buddies ranting and raving, sure, but through time and effort, other people would maybe get a kick out of what we were saying and possibly join in via a forum and, hey, who knows? Possibly some would get picked to do articles and features like the rest of us. This was probably fairly ambitious for a high school pet project, but I certainly had more time then to make it a reality than I do now, except possibly the whole money part of it all.
While I don’t know about making the DR a whole community anymore, as well as I need it to be more of a portfolio site than anything else, I do at least want to give it a bit more care as well as add/improve the content I put on it. That means there will be more content, and a lot more time will go into it all before it gets published to the site. The first wave of this content will begin this Friday, with a weekly column dedicated to whatever game I had been playing the previous week. I haven’t settled on a format for these articles yet, but I’m thinking I’ll focus on something really good about the game and something not so good. I just know it won’t be a review; I’ll be saving those for GameFAQ submissions to keep this place less cluttered. Apart from that, I hope to also do a lot more regular posts in between, not just talking about games but other media that I’ve been thinking about as well. I’m even going to attempt a theme for the month of June, so that will be novel.
So look forward to these changes, and leave me feedback to let me know how I’m doing. We’ll kick this off on Friday by looking at Crusader of Centy. Haven’t heard of it? Good, that will make Friday more substantial for both you and me.
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