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Sunday, March 20, 2005
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Bollocks. Now there's something else I want to write about here - Konami's Castlevania series. Goddamn bloody videogames collection, sucking me in for the nth time.
All I'm going to say for now is that Konami really should get around to releasing another 2D episode for the under-the-telly consoles. It doesn't matter how good they are, the GBA and DS versions can never live up to the promise of Ayami Kojima's designs and promotional artwork.
I mean, they're great fun and all, and the atmosphere is sort of there, but it's a bit difficult to empathise with a sprite which is so small it has no face and three frames of walking animation. Unfortunately, it increasingly seems that the only place we'll ever get 2D Castlevanias from now on is on handheld consoles. The three dimensional, polygon-based stuff? It simply cannot do this sort of thing, but Konami appear to have decided on a fixed release strategy here. Symphony of the Night looks doomed to be the last traditionally-viewed entry to the series that'll ever be played on a television screen.
PSP? I really hope so. Ridge Racers has already sold Sony's machine to me, but if that game didn't exist, the promise of a 2D Castlevania, on that beautiful screen with it's astonishing resolution, would have me stealing one at the first opportunity.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 04:04
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
On a more positive note, my neGcon just arrived. £3, brand-spanking new off eBay? Thank you very much. And it is brand-spanking new - box appears to have been opened to check that it's all there, but even the pastic cover was in it, unwrapped. And the original £39.99 Curry's price sticker on the box. Full of absolute shameless cunts as it is, eBay can still be way useful for the wary (skint) shopaholic.
Not had the chance to try it out yet, but my word this thing's got far more to it than I thought. The whole analogue 'twist in the middle' deal feels half natural, half alien, but that's much as expected. No, what's odd is that it appears to have a number of analogue buttons. Those two red facia ones are about a centimetre tall, hence the depression where they sit on the unit, so they *must* be pressure-sensitive. The same seems to be the case with at least one of the two shoulder buttons, too. It's also got a lovely build quality - the plastic feels extremely solid and smooth, like an expensive baby's rattle. Am most pleased with my new piece of kit.
Will be even more pleased when I know that it works. Rage Racer (on which more soon) is playable enough with digital steering in its early stages, but the later speed classes and the banked oval circuit demand the sort of precision that only analogue can provide.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 18:21
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Hmm. So Namco apparently told Edge that "the possibility of a PAL conversion of Katamari Damanci was complicated by 'technical issues'."
Wow. Really? Would you maybe like to expand on what it is precisely that makes KD different from every single other game in the world ever? Possibly it's the presence of the Cantbefuckingbothered chip in the PAL PS2 that's causing the trouble?
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 23:59
Actually, no. First of all, there's one other thing I forgot about Ridge Revolution. Over the last couple of years, I've become convinced that there are two things that every single game that can rightfully be called a classic does. Firstly, it allows the player to express themselves during the act of play - it provides the freedom to perform in a manner of their chosing (within the game's fundamental ruleset, naturally). Secondly, it actively rewards them for doing so.
This is what finally marks RRR out as a classic, as far as I'm concerned. Those 1080 degree spins that I was talking about before? Pushing the car into three consecutive doughnuts when taking a corner, then regaining the grip on the tarmac and immediately launching off, without any significant loss of speed? It's debateable whether, in the original game, that was an intentional design decision on Namco's part or just something that came about by accident, discovered by either their playtesters or players in the arcades once it was out on general release. A bit like Street Fighter II's combos, if you like. What is certain is that Namco were intelligent enough to realise how it could add to the experience - hidden away in RRR is Spinning Point mode, in which you race as normal, but performing a drift anywhere during the course of that race brings up a scoresheet, grading you on how impressive your drifting was. Full-circle drifts gaining the most points. Nothing's forced on the player, but it's there as encouragement and reward for experimentation.
If it came about through the developers' witnessing of this stuff being pulled out of the bag by normal arcade-goers, then it's even better - it demonstrates that they weren't so precious about their project that they were unable to include things that they'd never considered. They had enough trust and respect for both players and the game itself that they were able to acknowledge that an accident had resulted in an even more enjoyable game. More developers - including, nowadays, Namco themselves - need to take note.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 04:24
Friday, March 11, 2005
Friday, March 11, 2005
The camera swoops behind your vehicle. The blades of a helicopter can be heard above the cheering of the crowd. Lined up in front of you are your opponents, all decked out in brilliant primary colours. The girl signalling the league of the race you're about to take part in walks past the front of your car, the announcer begins the countdown. You start revving the engine.
3... 2... 1...
The bassline of the music hits your eardrums. A split second's panic as your wheels spin beneath you, then you suddenly burst forwards. Great start! Now go for the lead!
I never got into the orignal Ridge Racer. I'd bought a Saturn and didn't really see the need for a Playstation. When I eventually bought one - second hand off a friend - I hired RR out and ended up completely bewildered. It was uncontrollable. Months of Daytona and Sega Rally had got me used to drifting around the sharper corners of tracks - approach the corner, turn, tap the brakes or drop down a couple of gears to initiate the drift, step back on the accelerator, steer against the turn - but every single attempt to do the same here sent me pinging off the walls, swinging left and right like a pendulum. I couldn't do anything at all. It went back to Blockbusters pretty quickly.
But all the time in the back of my mind I suspected that I was missing out on something special. When the Saturn conversion of Sega Rally came out, it was reviewed in C+VG the same month as Ridge Racer Revolution, and Namco's game was given a glowing report. So, once I'd drained Sega Rally of all I could, I picked it up.
Stuck the CD in the PSX. Fired it up. The camera swept behind my vehicle, etc. I overtake one car before the tunnel, then panic at the first turn - how tight is it? Do I attempt a drift, or can I make it through without touching the brake? I drift. Wrong decision. I try and correct the drift. I swing out to the opposite side, then back again, then once more, before the tyres finally manage to grab the road and I go head-first into a barrier. And this happens for the first few attempts.
There are a number of things that make Ridge what it is, and one of those is the drift model. It's about as far departed from reality as you can get, and it takes some adjusting of your brain before you understand how it works and why it works that way. That moment when it all clicks will probably come when you start to wonder how far you can push it. The car seems to want to keep on turning when it goes into a drift, so what happens if you let it? Answer: it keeps on turning. And you suddenly realise what this means: 360 degree turns. Get in front of your opponent and rub the fact in their face by performing a full circle spin in front of them before leaving them with gravel on their face. Then you push it a little more - two full circles, three. Then you learn to use the pendulum effect to your advantage, swinging first one way then the other to get through S-bends unscathed.
Besides the handling, the other main barrier to entry with the series is the viewpoint. Most people, if given the choice, will opt to have the camera in a racer positioned behind their vehicle - chase cam - so that they can get a better idea of the dimensions of the vehicle they're controlling and a slightly more sedate experience. It's not wrong, by any stretch of teh imagination - if that's the way you prefer to play, then great. In the Rodge series, however, you *will* find yourself crashing into the trackside scenery every couple of seconds unless you go for the bonnet cam. The reason? Well, for some reason, the handling model is drastically affected by the switch to a third-person camera. Instead of being able to make slight alterations to the angle of steering, a tap on either direction while in chase cam sends you lurching right across the road. By contrast, control from the bonnet cam is consistently smooth and trustworthy. It's one that's always puzzled me, that - presumably, the developers always intended the game to only feature bonnet cam and felt pressured to stick the chase cam in when everybody made a big fuss of the alternate camera angles in Sega's Virtua Racing and Daytona. Third-person control in Ridge - any of the games up to the PS2's V, at least - feels like an untested afterthought, and should be treated as such. The player's instinct when approaching an unfamiliar racing title is to have the camera positioned behind the car - try and play Ridge like this and you'll be treated to a game which is quite honestly unplayable.
RRR is built for the rush. It's built for fun. It's built for showboating. It's built to make your brain try and escape in liquid form through your nostrils, and everything is tuned for this perfectly. It's an insanely appealing game - it stands alone in terms of its breathtaking use of colour (especially where that beachfront path is concerned), the absolutely mental happy hardcore soundtrack (one of my favourite tracks available here for a while) is second to none in the way it enhances the feeling of speed and elation when succesfully taking a corner with the front of your car at 90 degrees to the wall (in fact, the soundtrack is ripped to my Xbox hard drive just so that every racing game on Microsoft's console can be that much more fun to play), the unhinged commentator provides perfect feedback, praising you to the roof for skillful driving and ripping the piss whenever you stuff up, and combined with the handling, once understood, and the untouchable course design, it all goes together to make what remains one of the best videogames ever. Possibly the best racer ever, I'm not sure.
Yeah, that course design. Another of the big Ridge themes is having all the tracks based around one core area, each sharing certain elements and being visible in the background of the others. A lot of people have a habit of slamming this as a cheap move on Namco's part, reusing sections of track because they couldn't be arsed to create a number of completely individual tracks, but that argument falls down as soon as you play the games. The tracks share sections to throw the player off and to deepen their appreciation of the amount of thought that's gone into the layout. That shallow corner that you could take at full pelt on the Novice track suddenly becomes something much more frightening on Expert, when you know that you have to be lined up perfectly in order to enter the 180 degree turn immediately following it.
And it gets better the deeper you dig. Open up the faster classes and all of a sudden those exhilirating jumps that you experienced with slower cars become terrifying leaps into the unknown, now requiring you to actually think before your car leaves the ground and take your foot of the accelerator a little in order to prevent yourself from slamming straight into the turn that's come up much quicker than you were expecting. Then you get to the reverse tracks and you finally understand the full extent of the designers' skill. In other, lesser games, you might open up a set of mirrored tracks, exactly the same as the originals, only with right-hand turns now replaced with lefts and vice versa, like they've had a mirror placed to the side of them. Nothing so lazy here. Here, your car is placed on the starting line the 'wrong' way round and you have to tackle the courses backwards. And they're as good as they are the other way around, if not better.
Revolution also provides one of the stiffest challenges available to gamers - beating the Devil and Angel cars. Enter the time trials after a certain stage is completed and you'll see a new car parked at the side of the road. Half a lap later, it'll zoom past you. Another lap in and it's parked again, as if to rub your inadequate performance in your face. Impossible to beat even by performing perfect runs, the only way to reach the finish line before it - and open it up for your own use in the process - is to keep a constant eye on your rear-view mirror, blocking its every attempt to overtake you. Beating the Angel car becomes an obsession, and success is a mark of real skill.
It's a game which holds up remarkably well today, eleven years down the line. The gameplay will never age, in my opinion - Namco's refusal to try and ape reality and their decision to create their own set of racing physics means that it cannot be surpassed in terms of handling. Much the same applies to the visuals, which effectively create their own world of breezy island sunshine. Playstation 2 owners who've never experienced it's unbeatable highs are urged to go and buy that £3 used copy from Game right this instant.
Next: Rage Racer.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 21:43
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Thursday, March 10, 2005
A belated footnote to the R-Type post:
I recently heard the ending credits music from the Japanese version (courtesy of this excellent site, mentioned in a previous post), and it's *far* more suited to the game's actual end sequence than the track that western publishers saddled it with (or, at least, the first of the end sequences). You're floating in space, your ship sucked of power because of the measures you had to go to in order to defeat the last boss. There isn't going to be another rescue mission - you'll die out here, alone, when your oxygen supply runs out.
In Japan, this is accompanied by a sweet, sad pop ballad. In the US and UK, we get a blast of bland, identikit techno beats.
The motives and logic behind some regionalisation work will forever remain a mystery to me.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 18:44
Thursday, March 03, 2005
Thursday, March 03, 2005
As mentioned elsewhere, I recently got my modded Saturn back up and running (thanks to Boog at NTSC-uk). And if there's one thing that's striking about the Sat as a piece of hardware, it's just how quiet it is. I mean, stealth console quiet. The Xbox purrs away, the Dreamcast sounds like a muffled hovercraft, the Gamecube scrunches whenever it accesses the disc, and teh PS2... well, the less said about the cacophony that piece of tat bombards the ear with, the better.
But the Saturn - if it weren't for the LEDs on the front of it, you wouldn't know it was switched on. Can it really be so difficult to make a nice, quiet pice of hardware nowadays? I mean, I know DVDs have to spin a bit faster than CDs (they do, don't they?) but really, the difference between the Sat and everything else is just silly.
Anyway, yeah. So I fixed the console and have been enjoying some of the games again. Most notably, Panzer Dragoon Saga and Parodius. Both of which I might talk about here at some point in the future, if I can get out of this anti-blogging slump, but until then, have some links to some of the decent websites I've found since I started playing them again:
Gradius World - info on Gradius and all related game series (including Parodius and Twinbee). Also has ROMs of the arcade/cart versions for those of you who are emu'd up.
Hardcore Gaming 101 - much better than the name makes it sound. Great site featuring masses of info on some classic series, including three of my favourites - Paroidus (again), R-Type and Puyo Puyo.
PanzerDragoon.net - only just found this now, so don't know if it's any good or not. Certainly looks great and appears to cover everything you could wish for. Whether it successfully manages to provide answers to some of the series less decipherable mysteries is another matter.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 17:02
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Losing the fight against mediocrity for the last few years. Fire a volley |
