I didn’t really want to miss two weeks of Weekly updates, but at least I can say they were justified. Two weekends ago I spent my time pushing knowledge of my company via manning a booth at Wizard World in Philly. Last week, the time spent was on something far greater: Setting up our new office.
I’m not sure how much I can tell the internet world other than my company, Island Officials, has sold our first game and that we’ve moved into our new office as of this Sunday. I didn’t get to stay for the full set up, but I got to put up some cubicles, desks, and partake in the first meal in our new break room. Mundane activities that seem much grander with the feeling that the past five years of my life now seem oddly justified.
Breaking into the game industry is hard, that goes without saying. It goes doubly if your skills aren’t tantamount to that of a genius in programming, art or music, so the odds were always stacked against me. Yet luckily, all of the pieces seemed to fit together; A game design program at a college not even 40 minutes away, a publisher for small developers around the corner from that, and a lot of shared vision amongst a key group of people. I won’t go as over the top to call it fate, but I am happy it worked out the way it did.
There’s still a lot of road ahead, however. We’ve got our break, now we have to prove that it’s justified. But at least now we have a comfortable work space to make progress go that much more smoothly.
We’re doing something a bit differently this week, namely because I can’t really think of a pro for this game. Instead, we’re going to just explore this particular game’s failings. It should be fun!
Whenever anyone busts out a Super Nintendo at a gamer party, you can be sure that at least one person there will ask, “Do you have Zombies Ate My Neighbors?” Seriously, test that one out. ZAMN has become some kind of hallmark in the party game genre, which is impressive because back in 1993, I didn’t think anyone but I knew the game existed.
No, that honor goes to Ghoul Patrol.
I’m not entirely sure how true this is, but the story goes that LucasArts was developing a game that wasn’t panning out so well. So instead, they turned this failure into a sequel to ZAMN by making the characters Zeke and Julie (the protagonist of the former) and BAM! An instant seller. There plans must have backfired though; I only knew of this game from a random mention in Gameplayers Magazine in 1995, about a year after the game came out.
The reason I have my doubts to this story is because Ghoul Patrol pretty much plays exactly like ZAMN. At the start of the level, there are a prerequisite number of survivors that the player must rescue before a monster takes them out. To find these survivors, players must collect keys to open doors, use a variety of weapons to take out certain threats and drink random potions to turn into a weapon of invincible destruction. Really, the game feels more like an expansion pack to ZAMN rather than a full on sequel, which would have been fine. Who wouldn’t wantmore Zombies Ate My Neighbor? A lot of people, apparently! So what went wrong? I believe that the game’s problems began with the title.
Ghoul Patrol doesn’t exactly have the same pull as something like Zombies Ate My Neighbors, does it? And this was back in 1993; most gamers back then were too young to know anything of movies like Night of the Living Dead, and this was two years before Resident Evil would make the zombie genre relevant to the culture.
It wasn’t just a unique title either, as it clued you into the aesthetic of the game. ZAMN has you fighting all varieties of pulp horror movie tropes, from mummies, werewolves, vampires, axe-wielding dolls, slime, living plants, mad scientists, aliens, mermen, giant babies and Jason Voorhees wielding Leatherface’s chainsaw. Similarly, Ghoul Patrol’s name pretty much clues you in to what you’ll be fighting: ghosts and demons. A lot of ghosts and demons. And while four levels across different themes such as metropolis and oriental have their own enemies, it never compensates for the lack of originality.
Even the weapons have no flavor. Your initial weapon in ZAMN is a water gun. Yeah, you get to fight zombies off with water guns. There were also popsicles, six packs of soda, silverware, footballs and other assortment of just plain weird objects to use against the monsters. Again, Ghoul Patrol substitutes creative ingenuity with blandness; you start off with a crossbow, and upgrade to machine guns, ray guns… pretty much other assortments of guns. And ZAMN also brought a little bit of strategy with its odd weapons by making certain enemies weak to corresponding weapons, because we all know werewolves don’t like silver, so why should they like silverware? I haven’t noticed any such attention to detail in Ghoul Patrol, but then your weapons are all just different types of guns anyway.
Ghoul Patrol represents the worst kind of quick cash-in, one that failed to achieve its goal. There’s absolutely no originality in either the design or the aesthetic. It was the kind of sin normally reserved for the vapid sidescroller, the early 90s version of the stock third person shooters we have today. If LucasArts learned anything from it, it must have been that yes, creativity does go a long way in the business world. It’s why we can all remember a game like Zombies Ate My Neighbors – and why most people will then ask “Man, why didn’t they make a sequel to that game?”
Next week: I had part of a slinky, but I straightened it. So I played Ghostbusters on Genesis instead. Screens courtesy VGMuseum.com.
In any industry, it is generally best to find ways to avoid risk. In terms of the video game industry, this is why the big boys are comfortable sticking to genres that they know sell well, with sequels, shooters and sports games arguably over saturating the mainstream market. This is especially true with titles that launch a new system, as familiar faces and experiences become incentives for players to slap down their hard earned cash for new hardware. With the GameCube’s release in late 2001, Nintendo decided to take a different approach by taking a popular franchise and making an experimental hybrid game.
Now hybrids are funny things. Sometimes, they spawn their owngenres, but mostly they just fade into obscurity, if not brought up every once in a while as an interesting experiment. So trying something new for a system launch, well that was almost unheard of, even by Nintendo standards. Still they thought the idea of mixing Resident Evil, Legend of Zelda and Ghostbusters may have just enough appeal to push out their new, oddly-shaped indigo system into the mass’s living rooms. Luigi’s Mansion was the result.
Overview
Also oddly being the first Nintendo launch to not include Mario, opting to use his under rated brother instead, Luigi’s Mansion has the plumber exploring a new mansion he has inherited from a contest he doesn’t seem to recall entering. A short investigation reveals the dark nature of the mansion as ghosts begin to swarm Luigi. Quickly rescued by an old man with a vacuum cleaner, Luigi and he rush to safety. The old man reveals himself to be Professor E. Gadd (E. Gadd, Egon. Get it?) and that the vacuum is his invention, the Poltergust 3000. He explains that the mansion has just appeared there within the week and that expecting paranormal activity, he wanted to clear it of the spooks. Worse, he tells Luigi that his brother Mario went in to investigate and has yet to return. Fearing the worse, E. Gadd straps the Poltergust to Luigi’s back and has him explore the mansion for him, hoping that he can solve the mystery as well as rescue his missing brother.
Thus, Luigi’s embarks on a very wash/rinse/repeat adventure of exploring a room, finding the ghost and sucking them into the Poltergust, collect the key and move on to the next room. To keep things interesting, the Poltergust is upgraded by collecting elements that let it shoot fire, water and ice that are used to solve various puzzles and fight different types of ghosts.
Pro
At its core, Luigi’s Mansion is a very exploratory game. The mansion has a total of five floors and each one has many rooms, and each room has pieces of furniture and items that can all be investigated either by shaking them, or using an accessory called the “Gameboy Horror” to go into first person and look at each one. It provides a good amount of depth and generally there’s always some new way of catching a ghost. Sometimes it involves sneaking around, sometimes it involves playing musical instruments in a certain order, sometimes it involves sucking up a particular item and tossing it at something. It’s a fun formula and even with the horror theme of the game, can actually be quite relaxing to just play around and see all the neat things that you can do.
Con
Or rather, it would be relaxing if the controls weren’t so God awful. See, Luigi’s Mansion for all intents and purposes is a survival horror, and until the advent of Resident Evil 4, survival horrors we’re also known to be exploratory games. For some reason, that meant they had to control very awkwardly, generally involving turning with the left and right on the control stick and moving forward or backward by pushing up or down. It certainly was not ideal, but personally I could live with it. Not here, however. No, I may have had to turn all the way around to shoot a zombie in Resident Evil, but at least Chris and Jill didn’t feel like they were trying to do so in a vat of molasses like Luigi.
But that’s not the real frustration of the game, oh no; Luigi’s Mansion makes full use of the two analog sticks. Let me take you through the necessary steps you must do to catch an ordinary ghost in the game. First, you have to shine your flashlight at the ghost in order to expose its heart. This is done by holding a button (The B button if I’m not mistaken). It’s not a simple matter of pressing the B button however; you have to make sure that your flashlight is RIGHT on the ghost, as the game works in 3D space. That’s where using the second analog stick comes into play, as it controls the flashlight or the Poltergust. First though, you have to make sure the ghost doesn’t know you’re going for the flashlight. So in order to do so, you have to be on that flashlight button as you’re turning. Otherwise, the ghost will know what’s up and disappear on you, making you start this process over again. Even when you do expose the heart, you only get a split second to put that flashlight away and bust out your Poltergust by holding the right shoulder button before the ghost disappears. If you do manage to get a ghost trapped in your vacuum, it’ll start running crazy like around the room, dragging you in tow. This part really isn’t that bad, but you have to make sure that you’re both tugging back in the opposite direction while keeping your vacuum on the ghost. It seems like its designed to make your left and right brains murder each other with all the counter thumb motions.
The last point of contention I have is with the aforementioned Gameboy Horror. Having the option to see the game world and investigate each object is not only welcome, it’s necessary. At one, I had to use it to see a switch on a wall the native camera was pointing away from. But like Luigi’s feet, it also moves extremely slowly. Turning the damn thing around takes a good 10-15 seconds if not longer. I understand making it fast and slippery might have been just as bad, but there’s only so much you can interact with, so would it have killed them to make moving the camera fast and simply snapping on to objects that you can investigate? Or even a button to cycle through the viewable objects?
Conclusion
For what it’s worth, Luigi’s Mansion was a fairly well received game. It was something different and had a lot of good ideas. I cannot in full fairness say that all of these ideas were executed well. For being a short adventure starring a flagship title, it’s controls are an unintuitive mess, almost the antithesis to Nintendo’s current philosophy of making the so called “Everyone’s Game”. A shame, really, because until June 16th of this year rolls around, it really is so far the most definitive ghost busting experience on a video game platform.
Next week: They tried to eat our neighbors, but we weren’t having it. Ghoul Patrol is next week.
It’s been a busy-yet-unproductive week thus far. But is that going to cause me to delay Ghostbusters Month until after the first week of June? Nay I say, nay.So yeah, welcome to Ghostbusters Month. At the end of June, The seminal movie (And quite possibly my favorite movie of all time) Ghostbusters will be having it’s 25th anniversary since its release, and also by that time, the new video game for the 360 and PS3 will be a little less than 2 weeks old. That means the DR will be featuring all things ghostbusting, from talking about the movies, the cartoon, the games and games kind of like the movie as well.
Normally this would be where you’d expect to hear about how I was introduced to the movie, but I can’t really tell you myself. I was born exactly one month after the movie’s release, so as far back as I can remember, Ghostbusters has just always been. I was even too young to remember when the cartoon started, all I know is that I watched it whenever it was on, and usually a month couldn’t even go by without me watching the movie at least once. Those were good times, I must say.
And while I still love the movie, nostalgia has nothing to do with it. Indeed, many things I used to think were flawless as a kid have had their effects wear off as I’ve gotten over (Case in point, Astyanax on the NES) yet Ghostbusters, among all of the hundreds if not somewhere in the thousands of movies I’ve watched since then (Side note: Life really needs one of those status counters you see in some games so I can keep track of things like that) doesn’t remain just as funny and entertaining as it did then, it’s even better now. I understand the jokes more, I feel the awesome chemistry amongst all the principal cast members and barely see any flaws at all in the movie.
So assuming I can collect my bearings after a seminal E3, we’ll start the festivities with Luigi’s Mansion at the end of the week, and start focusing on the movies as well as some of the classic games, all building toward the release of the new video game. I hope you’ll stick around; it should be a fun experiment if anything else.
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