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

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

The “Beautiful Game” is the Simple One: Soul Edge

Extremists and radicals are responsible for fracturing the fraternity that exists between followers of the same faith the world over. And yet, as the violence they cause threaten disunity, a refusal to confront corruption from within the institution reveals a façade that is anything but harmonious.

I’m talking about football, of course. (“Soccer” is just another way to describe a hot mom.)

It’s the international sport with an international stage, one big enough to accommodate star players who can likewise kick and artfully display the result of the opposing team blatant foul. While such theatrics are just the tip of the iceberg that makes any enjoyment of the sport into an ultimately frustrating experience, the “beautiful game” does have one thing going for it: it’s deceptively simple. It’s so easy to understand that no time is ever spent arguing what the rules are, so that more time can be spent just plain arguing.

“Kick this ball into the heart of your opponent’s defence. And no hand-sies” is as straight-forward as you can get. And as this is one of the few sports that require no explanations *, it’s also one that can be translated into a video game instantly.

I’m not sure of when the first football video game was created, but with such clear rules to victory, all you needed are eleven similarly-colored squares kicking around a smaller square and hearing a spate of white noise whenever a goal is scored.

As exhilarating it may be to win the World Cup with your square team members, video games have become more life-like and relatable since then. Players have sprouted legs and arms and are animated to provide the best possible illusion of a human being trying to control a ball as another tries to stop him at all costs (yellow card notwithstanding).

Each new iteration gives us a new trick or feature, but in the end, it’s still just eleven guys on a field passing a ball among each other until victory, just like that first blocky game, because the rules to soccer have been perfect ever since it was invented.

It’s hard to compare video games with football because the latter has hundreds of years of tradition and history to make it what it is today. And yet, sometimes, the right people with the right idea under right circumstances make the perfect game.

That game is Soul Edge (1997). Almost twenty years later, the brilliance of this game has not dimmed, but instead confirms its place as a classic of its generation.

Despite the preference by gamers for sequels for being improvements upon a basic formula, Soul Edge is a game they got right the first time. Like football video games, all changes made in future instalments are cosmetic or improved features, but nothing fundamental about the gameplay has been altered.

Even though the roster would increase, cleavage would grow and the layers of cheese continued to build, later Soul Calibur video games all have have the heart of the original Soul Edge beating inside it: a simple-to-learn fighter with increasing complex combos to learn that graphically performs like a beast so you can enjoy every last moment of it—the bar was never set higher for fighting games than Soul Edge, and it’s a delight to watch it still perform wonderfully almost two decades later.

It is definitely much easier to see things in perspective once you get the advantage of seeing it as history, but alternatively, it’s much more exciting to discover something with the passage of time on its mantle. Players tend to eschew old video games, but they can’t ignore Soul Edge: it’s the “beautiful game” that was done right the first time around.

* Golf being the other one, in which it’s just like football except with no opponent, and the context is difference.

How far I got in 15 minutes: got my ass kicked as the ninja girl and the Greek
The good: It’s like looking a a star in the sky, looking back into million of years of history
The bad: no breast physics; apparently it’s a feature to be implemented for future generations
Would I play this game once this year is up: Between this and porn, I’d think anyone’s needs could be met
Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 20

Make Sure to Crossover the Streams of Revenue: X-Men vs Street Fighter

Shared universes are the new sequels. Instead of always having to start a franchise from scratch in order to set-up furthers sequels with diminishing returns, the modern trend in entertainment is to sell us pieces of a collective dream using recurring characters in different stories and contexts. It’s all the familiarity of sequels with none of the fatigue.

It’s nothing new, though. Video games regularly feature shared universes, such as fighters or brawlers featuring a bunch of characters with nothing in common except they are trademarks owned by the same company.

Maybe it’s a novel idea for audiences as a way to geek over obsessions for a protracted period of time. Maybe audiences can’t get enough of an actor in a starring role, and need to see them in another movie in a supporting role. It’s neat that the closed nature of movies is opening itself up to greater possibilities, but it still boils down to the reason why people watch big budget movies: for movie stars, and not as a way to substantially make storytelling better.

No, to shake thing up you need a shared universe between two unlikely participants whose meeting has earth-shattering implications. This is the crossover.

Long a staple of comic books, crossovers are when two genre franchises unexpectedly share the same universe in a single product, usually for the altruistic reason of deciding whom can beat up whom. The trend of crossovers in video games has been a Johnny-come-lately by comparison, but there are so many successful games that use this formula that it’s a wonder why there isn’t any more of them.

Such an example is X-Men vs Street Fighter (1998), the game that helped paved the way for the Marvel vs Capcom series.

While Marvel Super Heroes is more concerned with making cool poses, X-Men vs Street Fighter plays more like its latter namesake despite being a little rough around the edges. As it is, the really great thing about X-Men vs Street Fighter is that even without tight gameplay to really make it work, it’s a winning combination that is more than the sum of its parts.
Wow. The premise is so good in your head upon hearing it that watching it unfold before your eyes is like convincing yourself you have manifested your geek dreams come true.
The X-Men has a storied legacy of hard-fought battles, and to put them to a practical test with the video game medium’s most iconic fighters is no better context. In on package, the epic nature of comic books meets the instantaneous gratification of video games, and it could not have been better.

And the hits don’t stop there. Disney and Square-Enix made Kingdom Hearts, and added the grandeur and depth of adventure of the latter with the nostalgia and familiarity of the former. Soul Caliber IV gave us the chance to play as big daddy Big Bad Darth Vader, although most decided to go with a jumping Yoda.

Unfortunately, not as successful was DC’s gritty take on its characters in a team-up with a bunch of buzz-kill ninjas in Mortal Kombat vs DC. At the same time, the game disappointed fans by restricting its comic book heroes to perform a “Heroic Brutality’ at most..
It remains that crossovers are what audiences want. In this version of a shared universe, fun just happens from the ridiculousness of having two franchises intersect when they would otherwise suffer a loss of credibility.

This kind of thing may be out of the range of mega-franchises, but we can still dream: A cart racer featuring the gang from Top Gear facing off against the Toadstool Kingdom. A Parappa the Rapper remake featuring mini-bosses (!) Eminen and Dr Dre. A playthrough of the Sims encounters neighbors from Perfect Strangers, and the cast of Friends at the coffee shop. The new World of Warcraft expansion features NPC questgivers like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye the Science Guy who send you out to disprove evolution and Hollywood special effects.

Video game industry: please subvert our tastes. Please give us stuff we never thought we wanted. Challenge us, and win our approval through our money-bucks.

It’s all not as crazy as it can get, because it’s clearly not as crazy as we deserve. While an inter-connected universe is great for comic book movies, video games need more cross-overs to shake up a tired status quo.

How far I got in 15 minutes: I just got my X-Ass kicked
The good: Cyclops is a good fighter, not like how he is in X-Men: Legends
The bad: What, no Professor X?
Would I play this again once this year is up: Actually, I’m looking forward to Children of the Atom
Days so far in Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 19

Historical Figures Deserve Statues, Super Heroes Deserve Three-Point Landings: Marvel Super Heroes

The great thing about the Hulk is that he’ll never end a sentence with a preposition.

No one really liked Superman Returns. It wasn’t gritty enough, the optimism inspired by the original movies failed to be relevant anymore to a modern audience , and it failed to make Brandon Routh a star.

And yet, this movie remains one of the truest adaptations of comic books to movies. Besides telling a story in which a hero develops his character instead of fighting over a MacGuffin, Superman Returns understands the concept of flight from the perspective of comic books.

This is all from feet.

When you’re flying in a comic book, the position of your feet don’t matter unless the laws of physics demand it, such as rocket boots as seen in Iron Man. Superman could be able fly around in a cross-legged lotus position and it wouldn’t make any difference.

However, it does make a difference. The position of feet is terribly important to comic book characters because the position of the entire body is important to establishing the illusion of flight.

While it’s easy enough to make a guy look like he’s flying, it’s not easy to make audiences believe in the illusion. Superman Returns succeeded at this by showing us the positions a body would “naturally” go through when attempting make the softest landing possible. Even though people (and their super-powered equivalent) don’t have the power of flight, we know exactly what such a fictitious experience would be like from the flying scene between Superman and Lois Lane.

Director Brian Singer used the iconic, static images of comic books and translated them to the moving images of movies with restraint. The bent ankles of Superman and Lois Lane showed us that they weren’t just suspended from wires, legs dangling in the air, but rather truly experiencing the power of flight and reacting to the situation.

Comic super heroes depend on the iconic static image for the lasting appeal. It’s the reason why they can say such hackneyed dialog and always land in a clichéd three-point landing: because its cheesiness is what makes it good.

There’s been a lot of superhero video games; the one I enjoyed the most was X-Men: Legends just for its crazy, over-the-top action (choose Nightcrawler for the win). However, it’s video games like Marvel Super Heroes that provide better adaptations than comic book movies because it better understands the need for iconic poses, the primary delivery system of cheese in comic books.

Marvel Super Heroes retains this essential cheese factor by allowing its characters to linger at the end of their punches and kicks, giving them a fraction of a second to display poses familiar to any comic cover (or variant). With every press of a button, the player is creating a comic book moment as they play, each panel passing by at fractions of a second.

Comic book movies are saddled with movie stars that require close-ups as they deliver exposition in-between CGI setpieces. It’s directors like Singer who understand the power of comic books and deliver iconic comic images that are as indelible as a static image.

Poses matter to comic book heroes, while feet are hard to d. Just ask Rob Liefield.

 

How far I got in ten minutes: Got my ass kicked as Psylocke and Captain America

Would I play this game once this year is over: Probably, but Marvel Super Heroes vs Capcom is better

The good stuff: Psylocke is a ninja, but still manifests her psychic power with a pink butterfly over her eyes

The bad stuff: A jingoistic Captain America

Day so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 17

Breast Physics—As Retro as 8-Bit: Dead or Alive

Two guys… fighting each other? I mean, what’s the point?

Dead or Alive is a 3D fighting game that offered players a breath of fresh air when it arrived in arcades in 1995. Quickly establishing itself in an already crowded market of fighting games, Dead or Alive had game play focused on timing instead of the control  combinations that were de rigeur at the time. As well, it sported a countering system with which players could soundly defeat the practice of button mashing. Short of revolutionary, Dead or Alive was a fun new way to play a fighting game without the requisite fatalities and supers.

And, it had breast physics. Almost 20 years later, the ongoing franchise still has breast physics. After spin-off games were made featuring no fighting, a little bit of volleyball and a whole lot of voyeurism, it’s fair to say that the lasting legacy of the Dead or Alive fighting franchise is jiggling boobs.

It may have a tradition behind it, but with video games continuing to bear the brunt of public criticisms, breast physics are under fire for objectifying women as sexual objects. Frankly speaking, these heaving bosoms incriminate themselves: they’re ridiculous, insulting, and not essential to the game play. However, a proper understanding of where breast physics come from is essential to properly criticize it.

As an art form, video games are usually indulgent exercises in excess that are testosterone-fueled vehicles to reward its players. As a player, I enjoy breast physics the same way I enjoy bad voice acting, bad dialog, cheese, and gratuitous violence; it’s all part of a lineage that has defined the tradition of video games for several decades now.

It probably wasn’t the first example of breast physics, but Dead of Alive’s crude implementation was an “improvement” over its peers. Due to technological and audience limitation, features had to be exaggerated to create any kind of effect. As such, Lara Croft’s boobs were cone-shaped irregularities meant to represent a woman’s breasts.

However, some guy somewhere noticed that these breasts weren’t behaving as his experience, so Dead or Alive took the extra step to make them “better” than real-life. From then on, the presentation of breasts physics in the Dead or Alive series displayed a commitment to follow this video game industry joke to its unfunny end.

If you wanted better performance, you can turn off “Bouncing Breast” in the Options to free up more computational power.

As it is, there’s not that much more room for breasts physics to get better, already having achieved hyper-realism that elicits squeals of approval from fan boys. Alternatively, there’s a whole unexplored universe of trying to depict human females as they appear in reality that is ready for the taking.

And that’s the position that we’re currently in at the moment: a refusal by the industry to start developing other kinds of games that differ greatly from its established traditions because the market of gamers isn’t interested in buying it. Video games with breast physics are currently standing on the right side of history at the moment because puerile traditions are allowed to continue because there’s no other commercial alternative to take its place.

If others have long been warning of a modern day video game industry crash like that of the 80’s, it’s clear that the artistic expression in video games have long stagnated and is headed towards a breakdown of its own. What gamers need are great games that are fun, not necessarily ones that sell, and for this to happen there needs to be a continued evolution that allows games to become something greater than they are.

I’d be sad to see breast physics disappear completely from video games, but let’s see it for what it is: a joke upheld by a insular community that has been improved upon so much that it shows how outdated it has become.

Breast physics are retro, and should take its place beside 8-bit and 16-bit.

 

* the branch of science devoted to replicating the movement of bewbs for the enjoyment of gamers

How far I got in 15 minutes: Got my ass kicked as Gen-Fu, the tutorial-less era of the 90’s is getting me down

The good: The old Chinese man speaks fluent Japanese

The bad: the brave new world of 3D polygons feels about 40 years old at this point

Will I be playing once this year is over: something tells me the countering system would be good for a fighter game novice like me, but Fatalities…

Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 14

Win or Lose, This Classic is a Draw: Darkstalkers 3

Those birds are interactive.

Some artistic masterpieces contain a level of detail that are never noticed by the layman’s eye. da Vinci’s Last Supper hides the clues to a secret melody in plain sight, while Edgar Wright is audacious enough to divulge the entire plot to his movies in the exposition of his characters.

And then there’s the fleeting intricacies of Darkstalkers 3, a fighter game that contains so many details that I wish it changed genres and was a point and click adventure game instead. A weird wish, I know.

Beautifully animated, this fantasy and monster-themed video game keeps delighting its audience with the enormous amount of creativity it displays within the half a second interval of a button press.

Mortal Kombat has its gore, and Street Fighter has its legion of competitors, but what makes Darkstalkers 3 special is the open left field to which it makes all of its greatest hits.

My, what great big threats you have.

As a short example: one of the characters I picked is B. Bonnie Hood, a Little Red Riding Hood-type character that fully embraces its tropes as well as torpedoes them away with a bazooka power-up. In addition to her titular red hood, B. Bonnie Hood is equipped with an uzi as she double-jumps and dances her way across her defeated opponents with murderous intentions.

Even if you hate fighters or are as bad as them as I am, Darkstalkers 3 is a great game that deserves a playthrough. Darkstalkers 3 owes much of its relevance to being done in a timeless format that makes it look better than some of the 3D graphics of its more-advanced peers.

And with that, comes one last caveat…

Maybe it doesn’t matter to you, but furries are abound in Darkstalkers 3. Maybe half-human characters are more common in fantasy tropes in order to allow the audience to think about having sex with them. All the same, if you’re going to go halvsies, then make the other half some other animal. Whatever happened to manticores, griffins, or even platypus? Or is there not enough cleavage on a eagle/lion hybrid?

That’s a lot of video games. Do all her nine lives have part-time jobs?

How far I got within 30 minutes: Got halfway around the solar system with a lot of button mashing

Would I play this again: Fur sure

Numbers of days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 1