I started playing through Earthbound to see what it was about. There was a great little article on the original that never made it stateside in issue 5 of GameSpite Quarterly, the NES 25th anniversary issue. Just another reminder that I needed to play through this game! The only time I played it was back in 1998 on a SNES emulator, which barely ran on my 200Mhz Pentium 1 computer. Today, I’m running a much more developed version of that same Snes9x emulator, with a much better dual core processor and USB controller. No reason not to keep playing!

The first time I played, I only made it through the intro and a little farther after that. This time, I discovered why. Once the game opened up to the first town, it became a puzzle to determine what to do next. Back then, it was too frustrating with the choppy framerate of my slow computer. Now, I took the time to figure out what the game is about.

The gameplay of Earthbound is pretty much your typical Japanese RPG — think Dragon Warrior or Pokémon. You wander around locations and encounter random battles when you bump into enemies, similar to Chrono Trigger. You can obtain an advantage if you encounter the enemy from behind — and you start the battle at a disadvantage if they get you from behind. The battles are of simple menu driven variety. No cluttered menus and overly complex sub-systems.

What separates the game from everything I’ve mentioned is definitely the scenarios and dialogue. The scenarios are pretty random and wacky from what I’ve seen — from fighting thugs at their arcade hideout to fighting police. The dialogue is always on the side of humor and satire. It’s just goofy and funny! Makes me smile simply by reading it, wondering what was going on in the Nintendo translators’ heads in 1995. They did a great job! In addition to the writing, the game starts off with allowing you to answer questions from the NPCs early on. This will usually affect how they respond. But sometimes your answer affects your progress through the scenario. For instance, you may have to answer with the alternate response for something to happen. I got stuck at a part like that.

The music is great as well. I was like “right on” when they played a little reggae track when you enter a house. Great attention to detail with the tunes, it seems like they even sampled songs for many of them.

What I love about the game is that even though it’s so simple, it’s apparent that a lot of love went into it. I love that it’s not afraid to poke fun at it being a game. I even feel like if you took a lot of the gameplay out of it — like removing the battle system — it’d still be an enjoyable experience because of the definite world it creates for itself. Playing, I feel like I just gotta see what happens next.

Till next time…

-Bryson

Books are the most rich source of information and inspiration that game players don’t use. If you’re looking for some new resources, you may be interested in a short list that I’ve compiled. Each one is worth its own review and maybe someday I’ll do just that.

These books are guaranteed to give players a greater appreciation of their games and help developers make better ones.

Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin: A look at animal behavior, psychology, and emotion. Taking apart the fundamentals of animals indirectly reveals the hardwired and conditioned qualities of humans. Games prey on the subconscious levels of the human mind which are in many ways identical to their equivalents in less intelligent animals. Grandin’s language and presentation is simple enough that anyone can understand it and in depth enough that she leaves few questions unanswered. Temple Grandin is widely known in the areas of animal psychology (especially cattle and other herd animals) and autism (as a diagnosed autistic herself).

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The Art of War by Sun Tzu: A classic for warriors and wanna-be warriors alike, it presents warfare as a game of adaptation and design. It’s about understanding your resources, your environment, and your opponent and exploiting them to your end. This relationship exists between a game designer and a player. Each one attempts exactly that kind of exploitation. Don’t assume it to be a book about killing. In war, as in anything else, there is an unlimited variety to objectives, many of which cannot be satisfied with brute force. As a result, it is very pragmatic and generally adheres to peaceful means.

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Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein: Eisenstein is among the most important film theorists of all time and a favorite of mine. He treats art and science as one in the same and eloquently draws relationships between artistic mediums that would otherwise appear extraordinarily distant. His teachings are still the best foundation for artistic theory in the 20th century, and if you tend toward formalism you’ll love him. His most famous work is in regards to the concept of “montage” (often translated as “editing”). Eisenstein defines montage as the colliding of ideas (via images, words, etc), their destruction and the subsequent generation of new ideas. He applies it to film, literature, music and pretty much everything else. It’s just too bad he couldn’t live to see games.

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Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card: A pivotal sci-fi novel centered around the military training of a boy named Ender. His story is a series of war games which serve as an excellent introduction to the kind of analytical mindset required for playing and designing (I hear it’s recommended reading for Naval officers for the same reason). Besides its relevance to game design, it’s just a good book too (and I’m sure the movie will be much worse).

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The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship or The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating by Stephen Potter: Gamesmanship is a kind of meta-gaming. Gamesmen don’t bother to get good at the games they play, but they dedicate hours of practice and preparation to a psychological assault meant to undo the opponent’s advantages. This book is not nearly as meaningful as the others, but it still represents something to me. It was published in 1947 as a compilation of slimy gaming tactics developed by a clique of British aristocrats. What makes it special is its recognition of the powerful subtleties in a game; the impact of social forces, confidence, and rhythm. It also has what I consider to be a more “real” approach to games. Gamesmen exploit the “unspoken rules” of a game, separating themselves from sportsman which aim to follow those rules. In a remarkably ironic demonstration of British manners, Potter also introduces some of his own rules to discourage what is “bad gamesmanship” or simply not in good taste. Those tips defy the book’s apparent embrace of a game’s actual nature, but also reveal how difficult it is for a mind, no matter how unscrupulous to accept a world without rules and fair play. Gamesmanship very much reminded me of fighting player exploits in Battledawn.

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Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: This is widely recognized as one of the best American novels ever written and it is definitely one of my favorite books. Catch-22 may only relate to games in its philosophical content, in that it questions the rules of society, the military and human logic as a whole. In fact, it utterly humiliates them and does so hilariously. However, the recent argument over the importance of writing in games and the differing natures of the two mediums convinced me to suggest this book. It proves the power of writing and its versatility (most importantly, that it can be very non-linear) and with a humor and language that many can appreciate. By the way, the movie is good, but not half as good as the book.

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You may have noticed that I didn’t include any books about games. You don’t need to read any.

-Christopher J. Rock

Faxanadu might be one of the best games you’ll never play.

• Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
• Developer: Falcom
• Publisher: Nintendo
• Release: November 16th, 1989

“I’ve been on a long journey. I came back to my home town to
find it is almost deserted. The gate is closed, people are gone, and
the walls are crumbling. I wonder what happened?”

You’re a worn warrior returning to your home of Eolis, a village just outside of the World Tree. You have nothing but the ragged clothes on your back. You discover that the home you return to is not how you remember it. The lakes have dried up and it has become a monster-infested wasteland.

Sounds like the beginning of a grand adventure to me.

Faxanadu is a side-scrolling adventure game similar to Zelda 2: Link’s Adventure and Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest (both for NES). You have 2 action buttons, jump and attack. You’re given a fairly elaborate stat menu where you can equip your weapon, armor, shield, magic, and items.

Faxanadu’s Stat Screen

The game flow consists of killing monsters to get gold. Using gold to buy equipment and keys in town. Then going to a dungeon, defeating the boss or acquiring an item. Then repeat.

Gameplay’s rather straightforward. Kill the monsters and explore till you find what you’re looking for. You won’t find the puzzles or elaborate dungeon design of a Zelda game, but you’ll find a challenge. What’s notable about the game is the large continuous overworld, what people like to refer to as “Metroidvania-style” nowadays. You can travel back and forth between any points of the game, screen by screen. No such thing as a ‘warp’ here. Unfortunately there aren’t any alternate paths but it’s already amazing how much they packed into the NES cart.

A dungeon

I find much of the appeal of this game to be the world it takes place in. Faxanadu takes place in a dark and hopeless world. It’s often criticized for its drab color palette but it helps to create a feeling that you rarely get in an NES game. A problem with many NES games is that they often looked alike, using the same colors and styles. Each area of the game has a unique color scheme so you get a feeling of progression as you move through the world.

The music of this game is amazing. Composed by Jun Chikuma. I read somewhere that the soundtrack was haunting. I can’t think of a better word to describe it. Listen to Faxanadu’s Overworld Theme. If you like that, you can download the entire soundtrack here.

One thing that separates this game from a lot of games from that era on the NES is its translation. Faxanadu’s translation actually gets across a good idea what the story is about, unlike Zelda 2 and Castlevania 2. You can piece together the story of the game through the various NPCs that you find in villages throughout the game. I this way of presenting the story is interesting because it’s completely optional. If you feel uncomfortable not understanding why you’re risking your life to kill all these monsters, you can search for a proper justification to relieve your guilty conscience.

An important feature that was dropped for domestic release was the ability to save! Instead of a save, you’re required to input a 20+ character password anytime you want to continue your game. Upper and lowercase letters and punctuation as well (? and ,). As you may imagine, this kind of password can easily result in typos. The password factors into the difficulty of the game since I estimate you’ll lose 25% of your saves as the result of typos, forcing you to return to an earlier point in the game. That is unless you spend 5 minutes with each password proofreading it, running it through spell check.

Towards the end of the game you may feel unstoppable

One of the best things about this game for me was the feeling of awesomeness you have when you get to the end of the game. You start off the game wearing beat-up clothes and no shoes and no weapon. The first weapon you can buy is a dagger — a weak weapon with short reach that you can’t even attack enemies below your waist with. What’s cool about this game is that when you equip a weapon or armor in the game, you can see your character using it. So when you equip that dagger, you’re holding it. When you equip that shield, you’re holding it. Armor, you’re wearing it. So over the course of the game you transform from this hobo-looking Chuck Norris character to an armored dragon-slaying warrior.

The control is kind of clunky — incredibly clunky compared to the smoothness of Zelda 2. The battle system consists of mashing the attack and hitting the jump button every now and then. The enemy AI is pretty good, there’s a good variety of movement patterns. Most enemies have a trick to them to beat them without taking any or little damage but you’ll find yourself taking a lot of damage because a lot is just plain difficult to avoid because of the control. This is balanced by there being certain enemies that drop health that are placed strategically throughout the game. Otherwise you have to use potions or return to a town to replenish health. Jumping is a big problem with the control. There are parts in the game were you have to make precise jumps and these are always a headache, especially the sections where you have to go back a few screens if you fall. Even by the end of the game I find myself missing a large percentage of jumps.

This was one of the first games I got for Nintendo when I was a kid. I wanted it because it looked like Zelda 2 and I was a huge Zelda fan. I thought it was a hard game and I never progressed further than the second town for months. This game taught me the concept of a password, I was spoiled by battery-backup saves, and I don’t think that helped my progression much. When I started playing it with my friends and we would all sit around and start to figure things out, listening to what the people in the towns have to say and following their clues, I finally got a feel for the game and was able to get even farther. Eventually I got really into it and actually played it the whole way through. I’d never beat a Zelda game before. Yeah, I’m really nostalgic about this one! But I believe it’s still a game worth checking out because inspiration comes from everywhere. We’ve progressed far but at the same time we haven’t. One thing that I believe that all the *NEW* Castlevania’s are missing is the ability to leave Dracula’s castle and visit villages like in this game. Heck, even Castlevania 2 had that ability.

Here’s a video of the entire game of Faxanadu, beaten in less than 12 minutes (with a password). Check it out!

More Screens:

I was excited when this game was announced. A sequel to one of my favorite games. And Treasure never makes sequels. If you’re not familiar with the work of Treasure, I wrote some impressions on their title Radiant Silvergun a few weeks ago.

Unfortunately this wasn’t the kind of sequel I was expecting. This game retains many of the fundamental qualities that made the first one so great but it’s missing something. Soul. And that’s ironic because the ridiculous storyline in the game revolves around your character being possessed by the souls of the heroes from the first game.

The gameplay in a nutshell. Take your standard beat ‘em up. Give your player stats, like River City Ransom, that you can adjust between levels using the experience points you gain. Fill every screen with as many enemies as the engine can handle (even more, sometimes). Toss in some cut-scenes and dialog every once in a while to give an excuse for something crazy that’s about to happen. Repeat that for about 10 stages.

For fighting you’re given a jump, attack, and block button. Combine the attack and block button and you execute a magic attack, which drains your TP meter. TP is gained by laying the smackdown on your opponents. You can switch between 5 different magic spells with the ‘L’ button. As you get attacked your rage meter fills and you can let loose with a rage power-up that temporarily gives you invincibility and increased speed while your meter drains. Whenever you defeat an enemy they drop crystals on the ground which you can collect for experience points.

A cool thing they added to the gameplay is the ability to counter enemy attacks by pressing block before you’re hit. You can anticipate an enemy attack when they’re posing and a ‘!’ mark appears above their head. Timing can be tricky but I learned I can always pull this off by wildly mashing the block button before getting attacked. This works for any projectile in the game as well. There are a few sequences where some enemy’s firing a huge plasma ball at you and you have to deflect it back to do damage. It’s a good way to break the monotony of a beat ‘em up.

It’s very disappointing that they didn’t even bother to add any new enemies to the game. Not even any new moves for the enemies. The sprites are from the first game and were simply scaled down and redrawn. A bad habit with handheld developers it seems (Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin suffers from this budget-effective laziness).

The backgrounds are all new but they lack the charm of the original. In Guardian Heroes I felt like I was on an adventure, wandering through forests and exploring villages. The story in this game has you jumping around to all sorts of random locales for no apparent reason.

Jump! Jump harder! Jump like you mean it!

The game has some cool moments. Every once in a while they throw in these little action sequences where you’re falling through the air and have to jump from platform to platform by double-tapping jump. One thing the game does well is throw in crazy action sequences that help break monotony.

I found that the difficulty is bit unbalanced. The ‘easy’ difficulty actually starts off fairly challenging. But after you get halfway through the game you’re already unstoppable due to the leveling up and stat upgrades. When you die you get game over, but you can restart from the last checkpoint, with however much health you had. I ended up dying in a boss battle and had to keep retrying with only a sliver of life. No fun. The only way I could beat it was by not getting hit, or starting from the beginning of the game again. Challenging? Yup. I played it over about 6 times but I finally finished it. I didn’t like that bit of design because it brought back memories of a horrible scenario I got into when playing Xenogears, stuck in an area with little fuel and no way to fuel up. In that case I would’ve had to replay about 20 hours, ha.

In the end, I think it would’ve been a better idea to make a new intellectual property for this game rather than try to make it fit in the Guardian Heroes world. This game feels like a lame way to break their unofficial policy of never making direct sequels. I think it’s worth playing to see what’s going on in the gameplay, there’s some fresh ideas in action, but the game’s not very fun! I finished it today and I can’t say that I enjoyed the experience.

I was reading a GameSetWatch post about an interview with the Panzer Dragoon creator and I thought to myself, “Shit, I still haven’t managed to play Panzer Dragoon Saga yet!” If you’re not familiar with the game, it was the last installment of the series on the Sega Saturn, a 4-disc epic RPG. It’s regarded as one of the greatest RPGs but the catch is that it was released in extremely limited quantities in North America. I’ve heard rumors of something like only 25,000 copies were created since it was the end of Saturn’s life-cycle. Copies run for about $120 to this day.

So I went to find out if it was emulated yet. I managed to find a torrent of not only Panzer Dragoon Saga but Radiant Silvergun as well. Regarded as one of the best shooters ever but never released stateside. The game was created by Treasure. I became a Treasure whore solely because of Guardian Heroes but I never imagined what could be so great about a shooter game. Copies of this game sell for up to $200. I finally understand what the hype was about. This is an amazing game.

So you may have heard of Ikaruga, the spiritual successor to this game. It was released on Dreamcast and Gamecube, only on Gamecube domestically. I’ve played it on Dreamcast. I love it to death but it’s such a frustratingly difficult game. I mean look at it! Not only do you need great reflexes but you have to memorize patterns… white-to-black, black-to-white, back and forth, forth and back. I could only take so much before I had to move on. So tiring…

The first thing I noticed about Radiant Silvergun is that had the beautiful design and style that’s synonymous with Treasure. The game starts off fast and drops you into the action. In this game you have 3 bullet types that you can fire at any time. There’s no power-ups, but your weapons level up the more you use them. In addition to that, you can combine two shots together for 3 additional secondary shots. And if you combine all 3, you create a Radiant sword which you can swing around your ship to not only do damage but collect pink energy shots that enemies shoot. The shots you absorb fill a meter which allows you to perform a super attack.

So when I first started playing, I just shot like crazy. That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? I noticed that each of my bullets had a different color — red, yellow, and blue. And that the enemies tended to be either red, yellow, or blue. I figured that it was like Ikaruga where certain bullets were more effective against certain types of enemies. I’m still not necessarily sure if that’s the case, but certain bullets are definitely more effective in certain situations. The red shot fires straight ahead and is medium strength. The yellow fires two weaker homing shots. The blue shoots off 2 bombs at a wide angle that explode and does heavy damage to anything it touches.

So this game feels like the most tactical shooters I’ve ever played. It’s not only about memorizing patterns, and dodging bullets. You have to pay attention to what weapon will help you in each situation. And you have to think fast! The game throws about 3 bosses at you each stage. Each is divided into a handful of different parts. So when the fight begins you have to pay attention to the patterns and decide where you want to focus your damage. Some parts are incredibly threatening while some even help you (the parts that shoot the pink energy bullets).

A good feeling I get from this game is that old-school feeling of not knowing if I’ll ever beat it. I played through it 4 times in a row yesterday (each time ending in game over ). But I got a lot farther each time. Some of it has to do with the game saving my weapon level upgrades, but most of it was learning from my mistakes and the surprises the game throws at you. This is a fun and challenging game that I think I can actually beat with a bit of patience. Unlike Ikaruga, which feels like I have to devote my life to it to conquer.