God Grant Me the Serenity to Change What I Can, Accept What I Can’t, and a Shotgun for the Difference In Between: The Divide: Enemies Within

There is something instantly enthralling about the film Heavy Metal (1981) that completely sets it apart from many other genre films of its type. Sure, it has copious amounts of sex, drugs, violence, and rock ‘n roll, but so has every magazine from which it gets its name and inspiration. It’s not the move to full motion that was so exhilarating, but the amorality to this world. Nothing matters, there is no sense of right and wrong, and the concept of god can be disproved with nothing but a rusty axe.

Yes, Heavy Metal was a great existentialist work that wasn’t weighted down by angst and moodiness, but buoyed by huge lines of cocaine, naked chicks who totally wanted sex, and zombies. Lest we forget, the astronaut hero of the cool rotoscoped introduction gets killed off once his sequence is over.

This same dyspotic tone gets perfectly captured by The Divide: Enemies Within (1996) with an opening cutscene that lays out the terms perfectly well: you’re alone, totally alone in the universe. Your sole contact gets taken away, and its only after thawing from a deep freeze of interminable time that you finally get the chance to change your fate. But it’s a long, lonely road ahead of you, of dead ends and constant attacks by enemies that want to kill you. There’s no reason to keep trying, other than the other option is to just lie down and die.

By all rights, The Divide: Enemies Within isn’t as good as this premise provides. Basically it a game where you’re a broken down mech forced to wander the same mazes over and over again for the way out. And yet, games that are technologically limited take the initiative to set a specific tone in order to allow your imagination to take you the rest of the way.

We would be remiss in saying that there’s an extensive road left to take in The Divide: Enemies Within, and maybe after hours of repetitive gameplay, this inspriation can’t take us the rest of the way. And yet, for the dozens of uninspired Playstation games that aren’t any fun to play, this is a “feature” that they sorely lack.

For a film that doesn’t believe in anything, Heavy Metal does have an underlying message: in a world devoid of the arbitrary terms of good and evil, being strong isn’t enough to survive—only the badass will win.

But in a game as bleak as The Divide: Enemies Within, with its desolate environment devoid of compassion, your very existence is already a defiant thumb in the eye of a hostile world that would prefer badasses like you just fall down already.

 

How far I got in 20 minutes: After a long introduction that was able to convince me in five minutes what couldn’t be done in two hours of a completely white interior and copious amounts of smoking, I got somewhere. Honestly, in the end, it doesn’t matter.

The good: Can’t stress how much I enjoyed my upgrades when I got them. This game is more rewarding than putting points into an RPG skill tree.

The bad: Yup, it’s a lot of the same thing. But I guess the apocalypse is a bit on the repetitive side.

Will I play this game once this year is over: Yes, but only if the world still exists.

Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 50

The Dystopic World of Videogames Meets the Positive Push of Brand Marketing: M&M’s: Shell-Shocked

As a videogame historian/fancier of outdated and redundant software, it’s great to play a licensed game. Maybe it can’t quite be called a “pleasure”, but it’s easier to pick apart the  bones of a videogame rather then to dissect its bloated corpse that arrived dead on arrival at gamer’s doors.

M&M’s: Shell Shocked (2001) was a Playstation One game that was ostensibly in all ways a commercial that gamers can enjoy for themselves once by paying for it with their own money. As with many examples of its kind, the licensed part is the best part of the game as everything else is slapped together in a pleasing manner to shareholders and accountants, but not to anyone on the receiving end of this hot chocolate enema.

As there have been several M&M games over the past decade, it appears there must be some demand for this product. And yet, the term “fan of the genre” doesn’t really fit here. M&M has a core product to push before promoting any incidental merchandise. This game is nothing more than sharing brand awareness among a younger generation of Playstation players who don’t have better taste in games. And ironically, for a commercial, M&M’s: Shell Shocked doesn’t promote the consumption of its products like a commercial should.

The gameplay of M&M’s: Shell Shocked follows videogame logic that refutes marketing logic. Crates carrying the collectible players need to obtain are strewn all over the place, and in the driving sections of the game, this means all over the road. Despite the hazard to other drivers who can’t drive safely anyways, no one pays attention to these delicious crates free for the taking. Are M&M’s not delicious in the M&M universe where anthropomorphic candies advocate the eating of themselves and their peers?

Labor conditions at the M&M factory aren’t any better. Once Yellow decided to go on vacation with Red, the M&M Minis took control over the factory in the resulting dereliction of duty. The result is a perilous work environment that isn’t safe for its workers and the production of delicious M&M candy products.

Videogames need a dystopic premise on which to base the game on, but product marketing requires a positive message to encourage consumption. In combining the two together in one product, no one considers the resulting mess because “videogames are just toys for children”, just the low-rung on the ladder that M&M’s: Shell Shocked wants to be.

M&M’s: Shell Shocked is a rip-off of Crash Bandicoot, right down to the spin attack that is well-loved by underpaid animators. And yet, if we were to employ good writing for this game that would make it both acceptable to videogame logic and corporate interests, we would see that you’re ripping off the wrong game.

There already is a game about eating little dots that could be construed as M&M’s: Pac-Man. An M&M tie-in would be perfect with such a premise: Oh noes! Professor M&M has accidentally created a potion that has caused production of M&M’s to expand exponentially! With the world overrun by deliciousness, it’s up to you to keep the streets clear so that emergency vehicles can still operate unhindered. But watch out, evil supervillain Diet Beastlies is hot on your tail, and catching up! (It writes itself)

If they can’t get the rights to the voracious, eyeless mouth, then they can always go the way of the many Pac-Man clones we’ve seen over the years: KC Munchkin, Jawbreaker, uh, Ms. Pac-Man. Gamers should be reminded of how this product is a reward, and need to be consumed rather than represented by the videogame logic of crates that need to be smashed.

In the end, it’s probably just for the best that this correlation hasn’t been discovered, and that licensed videogames continue to perform poorly. Woe is the videogame industry when these games become the best examples of videogame art.

 

How far I got in 20 minutes: the second factory level, but then I got discouraged that I’m just playing a commercial that is a stupid game, and stopped

The good: You don’t have to watch some stupid TV show and wait for the commercials to enjoy the bickering of M&M’s iconic mascots.

The bad: For some reason, a hot chocolate puddle can be fatal to an M&M character, which is like saying a bowl of blood soup is fatal to humans. And, aren’t there any other shell puns available?

Will I play this game once the year is over: No. Neither this M, nor the other M.

Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 49

Licensed to Kilometer Per Hour: 007 Racing

Quick: what’s the best part of being James Bond? Is it the glamor, the high life, and the beautiful women? Or is it the fact that you wear a tuxedo as your work uniform? Or, perhaps it’s the fact that you’re contractually obligated to introduce yourself in the most pedantic fashion possible at every meeting?
A half century in fiction and film will weigh down any serialized character with shackles of clichés, but 007 Racing (2000) is betting that your favorite trope about M16’s most famous spy is the cars he drives. And, as this game would have it, nothing else as 007 Racing abandons all facets of spycraft like a how the BBC would abandon a cashcow, even one as fat as lucrative as those named Clarkson.
And much like shows about gears that always put on top, 007 Racing is complete car-centric. Like a trucker making his way across the country on just a handful of uppers and one Allman Brothers cassette tape, James Bond gets the entire job done sitting behind the wheel of his equally famous roster of cars, insinuating there must be one of those beaded mats adorned over the driver’s seat just as there be a huge drink holder for the Big Gulp housed there.
Of course these are ridiculous expectations of James Bond, but if he’s going to love his cars the way that we love our cars, which is to the point where we’ll play a car-exclusive James Bond videogame, then James Bond the driver is going to meet the harsh reality of stop and go traffic, price gouging at the pump, and squeegee kids trying to fish a dollar at a red light. But no, the idealized world of James Bond has him speeding along country road with great traffic conditions so that he can fight international spies without slowing down for construction or rubbernecking old people.
With the popularity of kart racers at this time on the Playstation One, I was fully expecting a game that featured oversized heads of the various incarnations of Bond and his many enemies throughout the ages. But unlike what the title may suggest, this isn’t a kart racer, nor is there any racing to be had. Instead of a high-stakes drag contest in which the fate of the world is determined a quarter-mile at a time, this is just a series of missions the player performs while behind the wheel of an Aston Martin or something.
Such a niche market makes the mind boggle at other James Bond merchandizing opportunities using tropes from other parts of the James Bond mythos. Coming next summer: James Bond Bartending Academy! James Bond Undercover Baccarat! James Bond Quip Generator!
Making only one facet of James Bond into an entire game is just as shallow, and cheapens the whole mythos of the franchise. As a fictional character, James Bond is a number of traits that can be boiled down to clichés, but he’s still a device to tell a story. If a car is all that represents him, this becomes an (albeit violent) episode of Thomas the Tank Engine. Sure, it’s possible to tell a story this way (although it will end with a quip instead of a moral), but a character isn’t a character trait. Sure, try telling that to Dead or Alive and yet they’ll still come out with more personality-enhansing breast physics in the next sequel.
This isn’t a story so much as it is a series of missions, or “races” as the title of 007 Racing insists upon. James Bond deserves more, but he’s still taking the lion’s share of the licensing profits.

How far I got in 15 minutes: almost completed the first mission, but didn’t know where to go.
The good: Spy Hunter was a good action game, wasn’t it? It was free to tell the recurring story of “get back to the red weapons van” without the need to tell a story.
The bad: Don’t think there’s any auto-erotic scenes
Would I play this game once the year is over: No. Double-oh-oh-negative.
Days so far in the year of the Play-a-DayStation: 49

Looking Back in Time To See the Future from Outdated Hairstyles: D

Space.
It’s the cosmos that provides all the answers, which is why any self-respecting reader of a newspaper will always turn to the horoscope section first. The position of heavenly bodies will be sure to fulfill a bunch of arbitrary ciphers that don’t mean anything by themselves until assigned one by its faithful followers.
But there’s another way to harness space as a future-forecasting oracle. Looking up at the stars is to look backwards in time, as it has taken millions of years for the light traveling from these stars to reach us. In a sense, being an astronomer is to be a historian, understanding our future by looking into the past.
And yet, for all the similarities between astronomy and history that make them closer relatives than, say, astronomy’s Roger Clinton of astrology, there is a big difference. While our understanding of the past increases as we get further away from it, our perspective of the universe is more or less fixed to one spot—Earth. Yup, while we’re whipping through space on this giant blue marble, our perspective is many limited to this fixed point, which may explain why we think aliens all speak English, don’t wear pants and want to get to know us through anal probes.
With time on our side, we should be able to better understand videogames by seeing them in a progression of their peers, unbiased by the influence of hype and spectacle. But unlike historians, we’re more like these myopic, leering astronomers (total pervs), who are stuck looking at the heavens from a humble Earthling’s point of view. As gamers, we’re completely obsessed with the way a game looks rather than how it plays, and thus making certain games ineligible from worthy consideration just because they’re old.
D (1996) is one such game. An innovative offering at its time that intertwined FMV video with gameplay and offered first and third-person perspectives, this hybrid puzzle/survivor horror/adventure game must have been mind-blowing to the geeks of the period.
But the passing of time has meant that geeks have changed (because evolving involves crawling out of the basement and adopting to an food chain that doesn’t involve collectibles). What was once mind-blowing is now simply embarrassing as graphics get better and better. And yet while we’re fed a diet of generic first-person shooters on gaming platforms and match-three-colors-in-a-row games on mobile phones, the blandness of the future could really use a change by looking at games from the past like D.
Once we get over how horrible it looks and how slow the pace is, there’s an enjoyable game to be found once we get rid of the prejudices of time, although I’m not overly fond of the arbitrary method of using mathematical elimination as a way to solve D’s puzzles. However, to take it for what it is, D is a visual Choose Your Own Adventure novel that you can enjoy at your own pace.
The comparisons to Myst is undeniable, but D does stand on its own. There’s an urgency as you need to solve the mystery of why your dad, the best doctor in the country and director of the Los Angeles National Hospital, has killed a bunch of people and has taken hostages at his hospital. And it becomes horrifying as you creep around its dark passages and encounter weird talking disembodied heads.
Maybe there is a resurgence in this kind of adventure game. Gone Home was a recent big hit as many players couldn’t get enough of looking at items from a first-person perspective. A slower-paced adventure game that uses the first/third-person perspective along a fixed path of D would be a breath of fresh air, from the past, no less.

How far I got in 15 minutes: I found a key, experienced an LSD experience with a scarab beetle, and made my way to the safe.
The good: Suspense without violence. Lots of skewered skeletons, though.
The bad: It looks awful. The prettiest looking thing in the game is the protagonist’s hair, itself an egregious reminder of how awful the 90s were.
Will I play this game once this year is over: Yes. D deserves a detour from all lo-fidelity deniers.
Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 47

Cat’s Got Your Ascott, Mascot? No Personality-Defining Tie for You?: Miracle Space Race

Mario was just a character used by Nintendo in a bunch of their games, but he wasn’t a bona fide company mascot for a long time. No, in the beginning, there wasn’t anything to get attached to. Mario was just our on-screen stand-in who we could make go left, right, up and down ladders, with a dedicated button for jumping. It wasn’t his engaging personality or ability to wield a hammer that won us over, but the excellent gameplay that endeared him to us.
As a mascot, the exact moment Mario won us all over when he said the immortal words, “It’s a-me, Mario!” Yes, by doubling down on Italian stereotypes, Mario endeared himself to all of us, and a corportate synergy between branding and marketing was forever sealed.
All the same, you can disagree and say that it was the moment he was given a name that made him a mascot. Or, the moment that he was given a moustache as a animation shortcut/personality trait—its all debatable. But somewhere in there, Mario hiked up the overalls that he’s been wearing since his first game and presented himself in as engaging a fashion as the gameplay in his videogames.
It’s a bit of the je ne sais quoi, and Miracle Space Race (2003) is having none of it.
Miracle Space Race is a perfectly fine game—if it was released about ten years prior to its release so late in the Playstation One’s life cycle. It’s a game that works in that things happen when you push buttons, and stop if you walk away to get a snack, but it’s not a game that has anything for someone to like. Even the title screen is boring.
The gameplay is perhaps the best part of this game because it’s not the graphics, sound, story or presentation. It’s not tight or rewarding, but then it falls into the category of games that are our version of the proliferation of zombie games: in other words, kart racers.
I suppose I would be much tougher on this game, but then all the drivers of the spaceships are animals with oversized heads. And I suppose I could actually relate to this game if there was any redeeming qualities for me to like them, as we all do with Mario. Like a catch phrase. Or a catchy name. Or a moustache. (On an animal? He’d be able to sway a jury and make it on time for last call at the animal drinking hole)
For many games, the most important part of the videogame is the experience itself, something most important if it is packaged as a kid-friendly kart racer. As an audience, we’d want to be part of a world that is fun and happy, and not just a bunch of animals racing each other in outer space without cause.
And after all, who am I going to get mad at when I’m hit by the Miracle Space Race equivalent of the blue tortoise shell? Jerry the hare? I hardly know the guy enough to hate him.

How far I got in ten minutes: Finished two races. Came dead last in both of them.
The good: I guess this what happens when you send up more than one Sputnik at a time
The bad: I still don’t get the “Miracle” part. I guess these are holy animal? I mean, outer space and all…
Will I play this game again once this year is over: No. Miracle Space Race will be miraculously erased from my brain.
Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 46

Capoeira-Themed Wolverine Game a Tough Sell on Kickstarter: X-Men: Mutant Academy

Love him or want to be him, everyone knows Wolverine. He’s the guy always charging at you on the cover of a comic book, gritting his teeth with his claws bared. He’s the hairy guy with a helmet/mask that fits his pointy hair (no such initiative for Hawkeye). He’s the best at what he does because it’s his favorite line of dialog.

With the top-tier status that he enjoys, Wolverine is universally renown. So if there’s one simple question that any true or even casual comic fan can answer, it’s this: has Wolverine ever kicked someone in a fight?

No. Of course not. And even if he did, what’s the point? It doesn’t look cool.

All the problems behind X-Men: Mutant Academy (2000) start and end here. Sure, it may seem like a superficial way to analyze this game, but Wolverine’s claw attacks is the whole point of Wolverine. He’s a guy who always has to do things his way, which is why he somehow ends up joining every Marvel team in existence, and he’ll be there, clawing his way to victory while wearing a uniform that consists of jeans and a wife beater. Wolverine simply doesn’t kick.

And yet, X-Men: Mutant Academy has given us control of a Wolverine that has three separate buttons to kick, modeled after the six-button Street Fighter layout. Instead of giving us six claw attacks (like Bison’s punches) we get a Wolverine that does a round house kick. Folks, this isn’t Chuck Norris we’re trying to emulate here.

It’s an inferior experience, and the rest of the game frustrates us with other emasculating situations. Why is Phoenix throwing punches and kicks instead of manifesting itself in weird animal-shaped psychic astral forms? Why are there no ricochet shots from Cyclops, easily the best thing about shooting a continuous force beam from you eyes? This may sound like griping for more fan service, but in truth X-Men: Mutant Academy is a crappy game that didn’t matter to the legions of gamers who bought it.

Yes, X-Men: Mutant Academy was successful enough to warrant a sequel the following yeat. It’s a game that looks pasty and “jutting” and is a chore to play with its boring moveset, but it seems that the X-Men movie that came out at the time and revitalized comic book movies may have been instrumental in this game’s popularity.

Watching Wolverine kick is like feeding stray dogs Vaseline for dinner: it gets the job done for someone who doesn’t know any better or have taste.

 

How far I got in half an hour: tried out arcade and training mode.

The good: the menu is full of X’s, great job on preserving the motif fetish.

The bad: Professor X is still a jerk like the back-stabbing liar he is in the comics.

Will I play this game again once the year is over: No. X this out.

Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 45

The Grind of Genre: How The Walking Dead is the Future of Videogames

I have seen just about every episode of The Walking Dead, right from the beginning up to this past week. And, if I’m going to be honest, I really only watch it for zombies getting smashed in the head.

I realize that there is more to The Walking Dead; I even understand that there are some people who love this show, and watch it together with their families. And that’s the strange dichotomy that arises from the popularity of genre culture: one actively likes it, one passively likes it. And, if we’ll use other examples of popular genre shows like Gotham and the recently-finished Sons of Anarchy, some viewers regularly tune into a show just to “hate-watch” it and see how far it will continue to slide past mediocrity into a “hot mess”, to quote another kind of genre.

The television network that broadcasts this immensely popular show, AMC , doesn’t care either way why people watch, especially as they’re preparing a spin-off to The Walking Dead that will premiere this summer. But the fact remains that a show like The Walking Dead can be two (and more) polarizing things doesn’t speak to the universality of the show, but to its extremely limited focus: The Walking Dead is a genre show, and all it will ever be is what its audience want it to be.

No matter how popular this show will become (and it has become really popular), all it will ever be is a zombie show, satisfying the trifecta of viewers like myself, the family that watches together, and the hate-watchers.

The Walking Dead has gotten a lot better since it first started. It’s currently playing out an interesting narrative in which Rick Grimes and his “family” of survivors are about to insist on a “reversal of fortune upon their doting guests. And yet, this is the same show that has made its characters more interesting from the deaths of other cast members (Always remember – T-Dog). This is the show in which seasoned veterans of the apocalypse are routinely surprised by zombie attacks. This is the show in which something always goes wrong so that zombie heads must get smashed in as many creative ways as possible.

It’s funny to hear people nitpick and complain about it, because they invariably are fans who want the show to improve. However, it’s not going to improve anymore – this is it. There’s no need to complain about all those logical inconsistencies – they’re part and parcel the logic of the world, that being the need to entertain us, the audience, who need to have our expectations fulfilled.

Speaking of my love for squishing zombie heads, I would have to admit that Zombieland was a terrible zombie movie. Watching it was an aggravating experience because, basically, “it’s not supposed to work that way”. And yet, everyone can agree that Zombieland isn’t actually a zombie flick, but a comedy; it’s just takes place in a zombie apocalypse. It dropped any trappings of being a genre movie to give us a wacky road trip with post-modern genre observations.

However, The Walking Dead will never be able to transcend such barriers. Even with the show currently taking place within a fortified town that is free from zombies, the show will be sure to include two or three zombie attacks every week. That way, fans like me can be satisfied, and the family can be entertained as they wait for important dialog and character developments to drop. This seems like a win-win situation for both groups, but this ends up hurting the development of the show.

The Walking Dead isn’t as terrible as it was earlier, but there doesn’t seem to be any point to getting emotionally invested in the characters when they live in a world in which they make stupid and irrational choices so that the audience may be entertained by the result (read: zombies). If we, the audience, are going to trap them within our expectations of what they should be, then at least we can set them free of the burden of disappointing us when they die (and they will all die).

It sounds like I’m saying “genre” means the same thing as “crappy”, but we can all be more honest than that. We can all agree that the success of The Walking Dead television show isn’t due to its stars, its dialog, or its story, but because it is committed to being the best zombie show it can be. And with all varying expectations filled of its audience, it’s already the best it will ever be.

As much this post was about the zombie genre and The Walking Dead, it’s also about videogames and the gamers who play them. We can try to imagine what the future of videogames will be like, but the future is already here: it’s the expectations we have for them.

And so it stands: for either a zombie television show or first-person shooter videogame, the very first judgment someone will have about both will be how well they adhere to established customs. Does a victim manage to get away from an attacking zombie horde just to fall down arbitrarily in the woods? Or does a headshot inflict a fatal wound, as compared to the genitals? By satisfying the audience’s needs, all genre pieces and videogames will ever be are more of the same.

Don’t Ruin a Beautiful Dream with Your Lousy Explanatory Words: Cubix: Robots for Everyone: Race ‘N Robots

What’s up with that Space Harrier? Why is there a guy hanging onto a rocket that shoots lasers flying through the air? What does a “Space Harrier” even mean? Whatever the actual reason is, the obvious answer is because “it’s awesome”, reason enough to disregard the story every chance the game gets.

With the game that we now have, what should it matter that the hero of Space Harrier engages in such ballistic behaviour? Who cares where he’s going, or where he’s coming from, or that there must be an easier way to fly rather than to put a rocket in a schoolyard headlock? Space Harrier is an awesome game that used breakthrough graphics of its time to engage the player in an immersive, if outrageous, experience.

There’s only ever one first impression. And then there are occasions when trespassing any further than the first impression will ruin the promise of what first impression represents.

I don’t usually do this for the games I play, but this is how I’ve come to understand Cubix: Robots for Everyone: Race ‘N Robots, a title so awesome it requires two colons so that we are more able to sub-categorize its greatness.

In this videogame, children ride on the backs of hovering robots in a series of races against each other. While in flight, the robots don’t resemble a humanoid form like normal, but instead are curled up in a form that allows the child to perch on top.

With a premise like that, questions arise: Why robots? Why are the robots “transformed” into a non-humanoid form for flight? Why do children do this? Isn’t it dangerous to be hanging on to the back of a flying robot?

And then the title brings up even more questions: What’s a Cubix? Are robots really for everyone, even children? Must robots be used for racing when there are girders for bending that require their attention?

I won’t hide it: I love Cubix: Robots for Everyone: Race ‘N Robots because it makes no sense. With an entire backlog to choose from, it’s these kind of oddities that interest me. Why would any player be interested in simply jumping barrels or shooting at invading aliens from space when they can be challenged with premises that are exceptional in their scope and daring.

Stories ruin everything when a premise is perfect the way it is.

How far I got in 10 minutes: Did two races. Have just about lost all the good faith provided in the game introductory video.
The good: The game uses a new kind of control scheme where you fly exactly where to you aim the analog stick, just as robots are wont to be.
The bad: It’s looking like Cubix: Robots for Everyone: Race ‘N Robots is just a top-down kart racer.
Will I play this game once the year is up: No. But it will live on in my dreams.
Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 44

I Can Tell You Love Me Because I Can See Your Exposed Heart Beating Out My Name: Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots Arena

You need to know this right away about Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots Arena (2000):
1. You play as a giant robot whose goal is to beat up and destroy other giant robots.
2. You can upgrade your robot with parts you can purchase or simply knock off of your opponent.
3. Said “rock ‘em sock ‘em” is taking place in front of a cheering crowd, effectively making these robots fighting for your love.
It’s only fair to mention these things as soon as possible so everyone is aware how awesome this game is; the argument is self-evident from these three points. However, the very next point that needs to be made is that Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots Arena plays just like your average mediocre brawler except with customizable robots that can’t jump.
And to lay the final rock atop the remains of this game, history has not been kind to Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots Arena. As awesome as the premise is, as it is clearly shown in the introductory video, critics and audiences just didn’t seem to like it. It was far too early for Pacific Rim and Real Steel, while kids were still getting over the awkwardness of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.
And yet, the year 2000 was the dawn of robot arena fighting. Several TV shows were created in response to the growing demand for robot-on-robot violence. Sawblades and flipping mechanisms ruled the day as fans passionately debated their individual merits as though “styles makes fights”, as Joe Rogan insists.
Despite all these things, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots Arena still couldn’t live up to its potential awesomeness, even as a licensed product with a massive cultural impact. As a humble consumer, it never makes sense to me how there isn’t more of these kinds of videogames, except of course its absence is filled in with games about zombies and facial-shooting. As much as Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots Arena remains awesome, it still falls within the generic bounds of what a gamer expects a fighting game should be instead of what this game could have become.
I’m totally a fan of taking liberties with the source material, but let’s be honest here: Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots is a toy about knocking your younger brother’s robot head off. We could use a little “going back to basics” instead of graduating all the way to bipedal robots that walk and shoot projectiles and energy force fields. The human element of the pride and shame of competition are as integral to the success of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots Arena as is the lo-tech enjoyment of humiliating your opponent.
This is why Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots Arena should never have been a tight, responsive fighting game featuring robots with cutting edge technology; instead, it should be a slow, lumbering beat ‘em up featuring robots of impossible design except for being made out of easily identifiable junk. Alternatively, it could be a turn-based strategy game where you have to outthink your opponent in order to knock his head off (seriously, we can’t stray from this key objective).
Another departure from your average fighting game is that robots aren’t people (the lack of breast physics gives it away), and so don’t need to adhere to such limiting rules as “rationality”. In a true Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots videogame, there is no blocking, but an average bout takes twice as long as a fighting game because robots have so much health. To compensate, the combatant inflict a lot more damage that can tear a robot inside out and still have a robot with missing limbs remain operational and dangerous (something something first Terminator movie).
A proper game about fighting robots should feature massive amounts of destruction to the point that it becomes the whole point of playing: to feature a screen full of smoke, fire, and stray parts from Radio Shack if it didn’t already go bankrupt. In fact, there should be a law that mandates every robot fighting game should allow players to tear one of them off your opponent and then beat them over the head with it.
And yet, this is what we have instead. It’s hard to be forgiving when a strong premise is wasted, but the point remains that I may just yet finish this game based on the fact that I’m playing a robot with a sword for an arm called Slamurai.

How far I got in an hour: Silver class. So many arms.
The good: The robots make daddy proud. Even the failed ones.
The bad: It’s clear the arm and leg customization is a crock as player should make choices based upon whomever they’re fighting, not to pimp their rides.
Will I play this game again once this year is over: Probably, but the world has moved on towards providing better examples of destruction and carnage, like any Burnout game
Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 42

Logically Sound, Argumentively Flawed: The Triumph of Anita Sarkeesian

The name Anita Sarkeesian brings up a lot of emotion in gamers, having come to prominence of late for espousing feminist ideals in videogames. Sarkeesian is responsible for a successful video series that makes feminist critiques on videogames, and for better or worse, a backlash that has grown in scope and toxicity.

As I’ve already wrote on the matter, Sarkeesian has successfully ensconced herself in the fortified position of already taking on a subject that automatically incriminates itself. As much as videogames and its fans are resistant to change, it seems the social change pressured by Sarkeesian is going to be the change they may not need, but are likely going to get.

As she has done so in her videos and at conferences to a room full of scholars, the woman makes a good point. Sarkeesian brings up example after example of noted cases of sexism and gender disparity that pile up like a laundry hamper of full of embarrassing unmentionables. She’s got lists for days if you’ll just listen to her, and, the people are.

Sarkeesian uses very simple reasoning to make her argument. She makes a statement, say, women are always treated as damsels in distress, or women serve as sex objects in videogames and are predominantly of one body type, and follows it up with clear examples from a variety of videogames. But while this makes total sense to some academic who has lived a life of “Because A, therefore B”, but this isn’t the way that a gamer understands these games because they actually play them.

The arguments Sarkeesain makes are devoid of an appreciation of the media she is criticizing. At a recent talk, Sarkeesian asked her audience, “In the videogame The Wonderful 100, there are many protagonists differentiated by different colors. Can anyone tell me what color the female hero is?” After a short interchange with the audience, Sarkeesian replies, “Correct! Pink,” and the audience laughs a knowing laugh.

I’ve never played The Wonderful 100, nor even have a Wii U (I am totally willing to sell myself out to endorse one if I can get it for free), and so I’m not qualified to talk about the game and what it is. However, I can imagine that the developers of that game could have had several reasons for allocating the color pink to the female hero: maybe all the other colors were already used up for heroes with corresponding powers; maybe this game is an homage to the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.

To continue would just be making excuses for the makers of The Wonderful 100, but it seems everyone is a critic when it comes to videogames, either ones with ratings out of 10 or social. The phrase “The people who made this game are idiots” is so commonly used by everyone that it’s clear that videogames are completely taken for granted. Somehow, making a videogame is a process that anyone can do, but is just left to lonely misfits with unresolved women’s issues. It’s not always a success, but a videogame is a process made up of many decisions that often result in “no”.

What videogames do for us as gamers is to provide a working world for its gameplay. It may be antiquidated, but this “game logic” that walking over a gun refills your ammo and pushing ice blocks into lava so that you can walk across it has been consistent for us. But not to an observer.

Sarkeesian has flipped back and forth on whether or not she’s a gamer, but it’s for sure that her arguments are not based on such a role. Her arguments and evidence are basically that of a person her picks and chooses incriminating examples of sexism and gender inequality without ever having played these games, the difference being that such a person (without implying that they need to be a hardcore devoted gamer) can appreciate a videogame in the context it presents itself.

To an outside observer, there’s no lack of incriminating evidence of sexism in videogames. No one makes the claim that sexism isn’t something that doesn’t exist in videogames, nor that during its short history as a burgeoning art form has such disparaging examples of sexism occurred on a frequent basis. But videogames operate on a different level of understanding that uses violence as a dialog and sexism as a shortcut. Videogames aren’t necessarily reflective of reality, and trying to put societal limitation upon them is to constrain videogame developers into making even blander videogames than they do now.

Sarkeesian’s use of examples of videogame sexism and gender inequality shows that she is advocating her agenda with a disregard to what the videogame itself is trying to say. You can do this with any one of her numerous examples, but here I’ll list the one that bothered me the most: the ending to Grand Theft Auto III (spoilers ahead for a 15 year old game that everyone has played).

Sarkeesian shows the very end of Grand Theft Auto III after the unnamed hero has shot down the helicopter with his traitorous girlfriend onboard, and is walking away with the woman he just saved, Maria. As the credits roll, Maria continues to natter away about this and that when the silent protagonist suddenly fires a shot, implying that he killed Maria.

To Sarkeesian and her converts, this is unspeakably evil, and a clear example of violence against women. To everyone who has played Grand Theft Auto III, this is incredibly awesome.

By playing Grand Theft Auto III, a person will come to understand the anti-hero that you control is a murderous psychopath with no loyalties whatsoever. For a game in which the unofficial way to play it is to cause as much mayhem before you get killed by the cops, it’s rather light on violence towards women. As memory serves, other cases of violence towards women are performed by other characters (the dog food factory, Asuka), while this is the first time it has happened during the story of the game.

As a character who doesn’t give a fuck, the anti-hero doesn’t care for the “damsel in distress” trope that is presented at the very end of the game when ex-girlfriend Catalina kidnaps Maria, a stand-in for a “girlfriend” who goes so far as to profess her love after being rescued. In a tense stand-off at the Liberty City dam, you must brave a gauntlet of Columbian gangsters in order to get your revenge on Catalina. Even though it’s presented as a cliché, saving Maria is not the point of the climax to Grand Theft Auto III —rather, it’s there to subvert the trope. Your character is silent, but speaks with violence; by shooting Maria, he’s living up to everything he’s been so far in the game. This is awesome.

We can all agree that violence towards women is terrible, and yet to criticize Grand Theft Auto III for this is to ignore the fact that it isn’t reality. Grand Theft Auto III is not reflective of reality when players can get arrested or killed and face no repercussions except to have their weapons taken away from them and face a hit in their virtual earnings. Weapons and collectibles aren’t scattered around the city in real life, spinning in place, surrounded by a glowing orb. Instead, it’s a fantasy, no matter how life-like, in which we can indulge our curiosities, whatever they may be.

The shooting of Maria is the ending of a narrative that doesn’t reflect the majority of its audience, but is the proper ending the story needed.

However, this doesn’t make for a good academic argument. Presenting this as evidence to a room full of scholars isn’t to make for a compelling argument. So as right and as righteous Anita Sarkeesian may be, she’s presenting a weak argument that gets accepted anyways. It would be nice to hear a stronger argument from hear so that she can make as much sense as her proponents thinks so does.