The trouble with good ideas is that unless they’re backed up by further good ideas, they might as well be bad ideas in the end. NeverDead is built on at least a couple of really good ideas, but before they even get the chance to shine, some bad ideas sneak up behind them, pull down their pants, shout ‘Check this out!’ then run away, leaving the good ideas looking rather stupid and embarrassed to be there.

The first good idea is to make the non-fatal dismemberment of the main character a key feature. It’s a good idea because it should be funny and because it ought to open up some unique gameplay mechanics. Unfortunately, NeverDead only occasionally succeeds in the first regard and almost totally fails in the second.

So, while on a purely aesthetic level it’s funny to see NeverDead’s protagonist, Bryce, literally going to pieces, the more you play the game the more apparent it becomes that the dismemberment system is actually little more than a really annoying, tedious, convoluted substitute for a health bar.

While Bryce, an immortal demon hunter, cannot ‘die’ per se, his head can be swallowed by a ‘grandbaby’ demon, which will then attempt in vain to digest it for all eternity. This constitutes a Game Over moment and therefore also constitutes, for all gaming intents and purposes, dying.

Grandbabies are an ever-present menace and the dismemberment of at least something almost always occurs whenever you take damage, so you spend more time trying to put your body back together before grandbabies start eating bits of it than you do going on the offensive. It stops being funny pretty quickly.

The worst idea of the lot is the ‘last chance’ mechanic you get every time you end up inside a grandbaby. Superimposed over a shot of Bryce’s head inside the grandbaby’s belly you get a slider with two markers going back and forth across it. If you can press a button just as the two markers align, then you escape. Miss and it’s back to the last checkpoint. It’s hard to think of a less exciting, less skill-based, more tedious way to make a last stand.

Action in NeverDead is an unpredictable, anarchic business, and when you do end up inside a grandbaby you’re usually well within your rights to blame bad luck, so when you ‘die’ it always feels like it’s because of one mistimed button push. Failing in games needn’t, and arguably shouldn’t, be a bad thing – it should inspire you to have another go. In NeverDead, it does not.

If only NeverDead had something akin to the controlled chaos of a Platinum Games release, or even of an emergent FPS like BioShock or Rage, then it might have worked. But it just throws exaggerated physics and zany game mechanics at you and shouts ‘Wahey!’ in the hope that it can make you have fun through sheer force of will, like an incompetent holiday rep in game form.

But, even on a bad holiday, it’s possible to set aside your frustrations and disappointments and find some fun for yourself, and this is true of NeverDead as well. There’s an upside to its chaotic nature, and the frantic combat can sometimes be quite fun and reasonably satisfying. The central game mechanics consist of very basic shooting and slashing, but with so much environmental destruction and dismemberment going off all around you’d have to be pretty stubborn to completely refuse to enjoy yourself.

Any active attempt NeverDead makes to integrate dismemberment into its gameplay falls pretty flat though. You’ll quite often have to pull your head off in order to pass through a small gap or reach a high platform, but it’s always totally prescriptive and really no different to any other bit in any other game where you have to send a small thing (a tentacle, a drone, et cetera) ahead in order to clear the way for everyone else.

You’re encouraged to use limb dismemberment in combat as well – supposedly some enemies will ‘fetch’ your arms and a dismembered arm can still shoot a weapon – but there are few, if any situations in which this appears to be a good idea. Even if you weren’t risking losing a limb to a grandbaby, and even if it were easier to see what your arm is actually doing once it has parted ways with your shoulder, it would always be much quicker and simpler to just hit things with your sword.

Speaking of simple, the other way to ‘die’ in NeverDead is for your boss and partner, Arcadia, to die. She seems a pretty savvy, strong, independent woman type during cut-scenes, but as soon as any gameplay segment starts she suddenly becomes as thick as two short fleshy stumps. There simply aren’t words politically correct enough to describe how stupid she is without causing some sort of offence, so let’s just say we’re talking about the kind of girl who’ll stand stock-still in the path of a speeding train (you can’t even attempt to tell her not to) and won’t shoot a grandbaby with your one remaining arm in its mouth even if it’s right in front of her and there are no other threats in the vicinity. So you have to get your arm back by hopping after the grandbaby and trying to headbutt it, which is undignified, quite frankly.

NeverDead’s only other saving grace, aside from being fun by accident sometimes, is that its overall presentation is fairly decent. The animation is clunky and below par, but the art direction is quite good, in a lowbrow, pulp comic book kind of a way. The script is trite, and music and voice acting both well below par, but you still couldn’t accuse it of being a technical shambles. Design wise, though, it’s formulaic, tedious and messy.

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Killer App is a new series of podcasts designed to celebrate the greatest games of the past decade or so and stars team members from games™, Play and SciFiNow. The debut episode kicked off with universally acclaimed Resident Evil 4, while the second episode concentrated on the more divisive Heavy Rain.

To listen to any Killer App podcast, tune in directly through NowGamer.com or subscribe through iTunes. To read more on the history of Metal Gear see issue 117 of games™ on sale now.

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4. The Making Of Metal Gear: part one
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The Making Of: Snake’s Revenge

Let’s get one thing straight: Snake’s Revenge is good. One of the biggest travesties in the series’ 25 years is the insistence of fanboys who claim otherwise. Although Kojima wasn’t involved, the game stays true to the spirit of the original, requiring both stealth and patience. It features diverse locations, standout visuals and great music – by all accounts it’s one of the best in the NES library and deservedly sold well. Gameplay is complex too, as you interrogate officers, use directional microphones, and manage a massive inventory. Additionally, not only was it developed by the Castlevania III team, but Kojima himself likes it. Without Snake’s Revenge the series would have ended in 1987. Its only legitimate negatives are a tricky opening level, side-scrolling areas which are out of place, and rather tough bosses. But you know what? Man-up and defeat the final boss and then say you don’t like it. A little effort will reward you!

The Making Of: Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake

Due to low sales Kojima didn’t plan a sequel to Metal Gear, instead starting work on Snatcher for the NEC PC-88. The US release of the NES port, meanwhile, did phenomenally well. In the November 1988 issue of Nintendo Power it ranked third after Zelda and Metroid, and stayed in the monthly top 30 until January 1990. Konami Japan was aware of this and asked several members of the Castlvevania III team to produce a sequel for the West. In an interview for the now-defunct Gamers Today website, Kojima explained: “When I was in the MSX division, this one guy in the Famicom division developed Snake’s Revenge. One day we hopped on a train together. We were talking and he says, ‘I’m developing this game called Snake’s Revenge, but I know it’s not the authentic Snake, so please create a new game of your own.’ That was when I decided to create Metal Gear 2.” And when asked what he thought of Snake’s Revenge, Kojima replied: “I thought it was very faithful to the Metal Gear concept. I enjoyed it.”

Wanting the inside story, games™ tracked down Toshinari Oka, who kindly answered questions through an interpreter. Some websites credit Oka’s first job at Konami as a contributor on the RPG-remake SD Snatcher, but the man himself is quick to refute such claims. “I didn’t work on SD Snatcher. I joined Konami in 1986, in April. Do you know Parodius? I worked on the MSX version. The very, very first version of Parodius. I worked on so many games; King Kong 2, and the MSX versions of Nemesis 2 and Castlevania.”

Thankfully, reports that Oka worked as a programmer on Metal Gear 2 are entirely correct. “Ah, yes, I was. When the project was launched, I was Kojima-san’s co-worker at Konami. We joined Konami the same year, at the same time. At that time we were friends, and when the manager of R&D decided to launch the project, I was chosen as the programmer.”

MG2 was filled with numerous great ideas, such as capturing a messenger pigeon, deciphering a tap-code to learn a radio frequency, plus different types of rations needed for specific tasks. Some of the best ideas were later re-used in Metal Gear Solid, such as a key that changed shape depending on temperature, a mysterious ‘fan’ who informs you of mines, an alert countdown, plus the now-iconic RADAR system which shows enemy movement. “I don’t remember the idea about the pigeon,” says Oka. “But we had team meetings many times. In these meetings we talked about what kind of ideas should go in, and some of the members popped up with suggestions. I can’t specifically remember which idea came from whom, but some of the ideas from the meetings were included in the game. But mostly, the main portion of design came from Kojima-san.”

Did anything have to be cut? “I think Kojima-san probably had more things that he wanted to include, but because of the hardware specifications, the limitations of the MSX2, not everything could be.” Which leads us on to the technical side of creating MG2. “The programming language was Assembler. The computer we used was Hewlett Packard 64000 hardware. An old machine,” laughs Oka, thinking back. “I liked being creative, and wanted to create something really impressive, so I enjoyed programming these games, although the work itself was really hard. It was a great experience.”

Were any difficulties encountered? “As a matter of fact, some of the portions of the programming were very difficult. But I wanted to realise the image that Kojima-san had tried to create. I did not want to say, ‘No, I cannot do it’ – I always tried to cope with a challenge. I thought that if I couldn’t realise all of the game ideas from Kojima-san, probably the game wouldn’t be so great, so I wanted to make everything possible.” Oka elaborates on his involvement: “I did all of the movement for the player, like the crawling scenes and crawling movement. I also programmed the transceiver sections, some of the movement of the enemies, and probably the RADAR too. It was a long time ago!”

Playing the game today, the attention to detail is astounding, with aspects such as Snake accurately holding a gun in his right hand whether facing left or right, and other graphical touches. “I really liked the transceiver sections,” says Oka. “You know where the character faces are shown on screen? I created the line, that little horizontal line which was moving, because I wanted it to feel realistic for the player.”

Interestingly, some things came about by accident. “I cannot say which specific part, because it’s a secret. But I made a mistake in the programming – it actually had an error, and some of the movement was wrong. Snake wasn’t supposed to make that kind of movement by himself. But another team member saw this movement and said, ‘That’s good!’ So eventually this way of programming the movement was used in the game. “I still have one of the first versions off the production line from right after the game was developed,” says Oka enthusiastically. “Each team member was so excited to buy a copy. It’s one of my treasured memories.”

Despite its quality, Metal Gear 2 originally missed out on a worldwide release due to the declining popularity of the MSX computer. It was finally translated into English, however, when Konami included it in 2006’s Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence on PS2, and it has since been recognised as a game that deserves to stand alongside any other Metal Gear in the series.  “I’m really glad to hear something like that, because there isn’t much information about our English-speaking fans in Japan,” says Oka. “I feel honoured to have been a member of a development team for the Metal Gear series, and really honoured that I could be a part of something that people were impressed by, not only in Japan but also Europe. It’s an old game, but I’m happy there are still fans playing it. I can’t believe it – I’m so pleased.”

If you’ve not played Metal Gear 2 yet, it’s well worth digging out, and is also soon to be included once again in February’s MGS HD Collection. It had a major influence on the entire series and, we’d argue, is one of the finest 8-bit games ever developed.

Part One

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Yes, many may see it as a fighting game, but the truth is that SoulCalibur has never really been a fighting game. Namco Bandai’s weapon-based brawler has always prioritised the spectacle of combat over the art of fighting – something far better demonstrated in its Tekken franchise – and while few would deny that this approach has led to some of the most explosive and colourful rucks of the last decade or so, such showmanship has tended to come at the expense of gameplay depth. There’s good reason for the lack of any significant SoulCalibur play on the competitive scene; while the series might have provided its fair share of hugely entertaining showdowns, a few game-breaking flaws and an emphasis on style over substance has seen it left in a horrible middle ground between hardcore fighters and anything-can go, mash-friendly action gaming with a competitive twist. But Project Soul has had an epiphany. It has decided to go toe-to-toe with the games its historical series so frequently gets lumped in with and in doing so, a lot has had to change. Some of it for the better, and some of it… yeah, not so much.

The character roster will be central in many a debate but there’s no one reason for this controversy. In jumping the timeline forward by seventeen years, SoulCalibur V’s roster is the most baffling yet. Some characters return almost unaged (Maxi and Ivy among them), others like Mitsurugi show some of those seven signs of aging those rubbish TV adverts squawk about while other popular characters send successors in their place – Natsu replaces Taki, Leixia steps in for Xianghua and Xiba’s podgy face replaces that of stick-wielding troll Kilik, though move sets don’t change all that much in the process. But with the narrative pushing the importance of newcomers Patroklos and Pyrrha to the point where each appears twice on the character select grid, and with three Mokujin-style ‘random weapons’ characters (one of which, bizarrely, is Kilik), you have to wonder if this roster couldn’t have been far better. Tourney favourite Amy is missing in action, interesting characters like Setsuka and Zasalamel are nowhere to be seen and old favourites like Seong Mi-na, Yun-seong and Rock also fail to make the grade. It’s not like the new additions don’t ensure a decent array of variety among fighting styles, though the entire bottom row of unlockable characters is disappointing – it both spits in the face of the fact that modern beat-’em-ups simply shouldn’t have unlockable fighters and offers precious little to suggest that any of the aforementioned absentees wouldn’t have filled those gaps better.

The method of adding these extra fighters to your top-heavy grid is equally dubious, with four of the six joining through the brief yet entertaining story mode and the other two tucked away in unlockable mode Legendary Souls, a super-tough run through a set of familiar faces and costumes which sports what may well be the cheapest fighting game AI we’ve ever seen. Almost every attack is Just Framed, almost every throw escaped and Just Guards are everywhere as you swear and strop your way through this seven-bout slog, with the pair of characters earned for persisting hardly even worth the effort.

And with both story and Legendary Souls modes out of the way, all that’s really left to do in terms of single-player is the Quick Battle mode. It’s a simulated online affair in line with the kind Namco Bandai has thrown into all of its recent handheld brawlers and while it’s celebrated in that environment, it’s slightly less impressive as the last bastion of solo longevity in a full price, triple-A console release. It’s still entertaining enough, a potentially endless string of created fighters and faux online opponents flying the flag of their favourite stock fighter but while it’s easy enough to kill an hour or so smacking up as many different virtual players as possible, it doesn’t have nearly the lasting appeal of something like Virtua Fighter 5’s sprawling Quest mode, where continued play is rewarded with more than just odd titles for your player card and a cluster of experience points here and there. These boost your Player Level, in turn yielding yet more irrelevant titles and the occasional smattering of creation parts, but beyond that, it’s a fairly empty excuse for a lasting single player mode – especially irritating since a meaty Edge Master-style mode is one of the things fans have cried out for the most.

There’s a lot SoulCalibur could learn from VF in its Pinocchio-esque quest to be a real fighting game, actually. The training mode, while full-featured and bursting with oddly labeled options, elects to run you through character specific advice in a text-only form rather than offering hands-on examples of why certain moves are useful and how they can and should be combined. VF4 Evolution got this so right that it’s almost embarrassing for every subsequent fighter to have overlooked so important a feature, and, while the Trial mode in Street Fighter IV and its ilk at least teach basic-to-intermediate attack strings, Evo’s all-encompassing training educated in terms of genre rather than just game. SCV teaches nothing in terms of mix-ups, option selects and pressure, seemingly content in offering generic advice along the lines of ‘A+B is a good move’ and leaving the rest up to experimentation. It’s a hurdle Project Soul will need to overcome if it is to take SoulCalibur back to the top tier and really take the fight to the likes of VF though to be fair, the studio has already done a lot of the much harder work already.

Mechanically speaking, SoulCalibur V arguably sees the series hit a level it has always promised but never really attained. It’s not without its curious design choices – such as having throw escapes do chip damage, rather than just making them less mash-friendly in their execution – but on the whole, the new engine makes for some absolutely stunning fights oth for players and spectators. Clashes are back, so two similar attacks can bounce off one another and reset the playing field once the sparks have dissipated. Double-tap sidesteps improve the 8-Way Run evasive arsenal, even if a lack of definition (read: something like VF’s categorisation of linear, semi-circular and full-circular attacks) sometimes makes it difficult to judge hitboxes in 3D space; even a perfectly timed evade can be stuffed by some of the annoying auto-tracking moves or falsely advertised area attacks, though most linear hits can still be strafed and punished accordingly.

Even the new Soul Gauge system, something so poised to fail horribly, actually works really well. Burning meter for old-school Guard Impacts makes sense when the catch-all parry gives enough time to land whatever you fancy afterwards, plus the Critical Edge and Brave Edge attacks offer combo potential that fighting purists will relish. The new (if tricky) Just Guard system also offers similar defensive potential to Impacts in previous games but with the added tech and flair of Street Fighter III’s Parry or a far stricter take on Battle Fantasia’s Gachi button – timing is harsh but it’s perfect for stealing the advantage at the end of a predictable block string or just showboating through multi-hit attacks for a healthy Soul Gauge boost and the respect of all onlookers.

It’s clear from the plentiful changes and refined mechanics that this is a sequel that has ideas on a genre that it has been mistaken for being a part of for some time. And it’d be straight-up rude to overlook such improvements due to a few teething troubles or the fact that solo players will have little to hit once the main modes have been conquered. Still, on a straight fighting level, SoulCalibur has never been better and although it might be a little anorexic for lone warriors, the multiplayer side offers more than any Soul title since the original Calibur made the Dreamcast a must-have. Which, in and of itself, provides irrefutable proof that Namco Bandai has given SoulCalibur a clearly defined genre once more. Welcome back, Stage Of History.

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5. Final Fantasy XIII-2 review

Imagine Publishing has launched a new digital-only, Multi-Touch ebook, iCloud For Beginners, specifically designed for Apple’s iBooks 2. Featuring slideshows, interactive images and more, it is one of the first ebooks of its type in the world.

Using iBooks Author’s revolutionary Multi-Touch technology, iCloud For Beginners teaches everything users need to know about iCloud, the free new back-up and sync service. From how to set-up your free iCloud account to sharing your information across your Apple devices, the ebook uses cutting-edge technology to deliver enhanced, easy-to-use tutorials.

“At Imagine, we’re always excited by cool new ways to deliver our world-leading content.” said Editor In Chief Aaron Asadi “iBooks Author is another great opportunity for us to create more products we love for a whole new type of audience. It’s this sort of game-changing innovation that makes us do what we do. ”

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Time travel. It is at once a writer’s best friend as a catch-all way to explain away pretty much any bizarre event and his worst enemy, an omnipotent tool that should technically render any hardship an absolute non-issue. ‘Quick, Hermione! Throw me the Time-Turner,’ yelled Harry… that’s how every one of young Mr Potter’s challenges could have been overcome had Rowling not written out the magical time travel device as quickly as it was introduced, while a preposterously young Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter playfully Melvin the rulebook, the mere suggestion of time travel is enough to paradoxically resolve an incident for comic effect with the help of a bin. But there is no rulebook (whoa) and, with no real-world guidelines to follow, depictions of time travel in modern – and indeed not-so-modern – media are riddled with loopholes, contradictions and paradoxes. Indeed, while stories that try to employ time travel in a serious manner often end up confusing audiences with mind-melting off-stage possibilities, those open to have a little fun with it often get away with playing the Time Goblin far better.

But even after finishing it, we’re still not entirely sure which of the two camps Final Fantasy XIII-2 falls into. It plays it straight most of the time – the talkative lead duo ever keen to gibber on about how changing the past alters the future, and vice versa – but occasionally, things descend into the kind of ‘remember a trashcan’ lunacy that raises both eyebrows and the possibility that Noel might actually be his own grandpa. Instead of slotting comfortably into either category, XIII-2 seems to opt instead for secret option number three, the notion that if it can sufficiently baffle the player with fractured timelines and locations that somehow exist in neither time nor space, we’ll all be too confused and embarrassed to ask questions in case it ends up looking like we just didn’t understand something which is, in fact, largely incomprehensible. It generally holds together in its own daft way, and the concept of mending things in the past to improve your odds in the future works well when pushed on you by the narrative, though on the flipside there’s not a lot of scope for the kind of minor Ocarina Of Time-esque tweaking between eras that would have really reinforced the concept. Similarly disappointing is the predilection for journeying into the future, every location set at a time after FFXIII’s ending when we’d have loved to have been able to delve into Cocoon’s past a little as well. Another missed opportunity then, but it’s hard to stay mad at Square Enix for long when XIII-2 shows such clear signs of its creative team taking feedback from XIII’s divided user base on board.

Picking up shortly after the original’s Leona Lewis-stained finale leaves off, XIII-2’s narrative quickly spirals out of control as it emerges that Lightning went missing shortly after the curtain fell. So with the help of future fop Noel, Serah takes off to find her sister on a brain-twisting tour of mostly familiar locations from FFXIII. Seeing these crumble, grow or change under the unfeeling boots of time’s relentless march is a joy, though with such a gap between each visit it’s only really the locations themselves and the effects of previous events that can be witnessed – only very rarely do you get to see a direct change in the people, making it kinda tough to get a real feel for the passage of time. That said, many areas have temporal anomalies tucked away in the deepest recesses, which can reveal people, objects and relics from another time to really confuse matters and make some of the side-quests particularly fiddly.

How so? Well, while most of the time gates pertaining to the main storyline are opened with bespoke artefacts, those that lead to extra-curricular locations – usually familiar places, just further up or down the time stream – can only be opened with Wild Artefacts, troublingly elusive (and barely visible) key items which are among the rarest items in the game. Even when you do luck out and find one, there’s no indication of where a new gate will take you until you spend your precious item. As such, following one particular side-story is more luck than judgment, though attentive players should be able to hunt down enough Wilds to open up a decent number of the additional areas by the time the story wraps up.

XIII’s combat was an action-heavy revelation in a genre obsessed with menu-driven battles, and XIII-2 evolves the ATB system further still, albeit with some pretty severe changes. For one, there’s no longer any need to select party members – Serah and Noel will be two of your three fighters for the entire game, the third slot filled by any of the monsters you manage to tame on your journey. It seems limiting but most JRPGs offer casts bulked out with filler characters, so all Square Enix has really done is saved you the trouble of going online to find out what the best party setup is. The duo soon grow to learn all six of the Paradigm roles present in XIII (and we mean soon, too – you can max out your first role in just a few hours) and although they each slots into particular preferable roles – Serah focusing on magic while Noel boasts a naturally higher Attack stat – there’s plenty of grounds for fiddling around with Paradigm decks all the same, especially with so many monstrous allies to recruit.

The method of taming monsters is oddly unclear, defeated enemies seemingly offering their souls up as a rare drop after battle. Each has one fixed role and falls into one of three growth categories – some develop quickly but peak early, making them great for short-term deployment, though more balanced monsters end up far more powerful, especially those late bloomers that require significant investment before they become usable. Instead of filling their Crystariums with CP earned from battle, monsters need to be fed special items in order to grow and again, several flavours of these allow you to either balance stats or push them in a specific direction, be it towards stronger attacks or a larger health pool depending on how you intend to use them. With only three creatures ever on active duty, you need to be pretty selective with which you pick. Early doors, a Medic monster is essential, as neither Serah nor Noel is capable of healing until a little way into the game, but the wider potential opens up soon enough, especially with the ability to have one monster absorb another to inherit its latent abilities and attacks.

Combat itself is tighter too, and slicker to boot. It’s chaotic, sure, but once you start flinging around AOE spells and unique abilities, the screen erupts in colour as your beautiful party dances all opposition into submission. There’s a lot more strategy in longer encounters too, thanks to a new type of damage. Many enemies are capable of inflicting Wound damage, which reduces your characters’ maximum HP for the rest of the fight and cannot be healed by conventional means. As a result, you’ll need to be really smart with your Paradigms and battle plans in boss battles (and similarly long fights with the game’s toughest enemies) – it’s easy to find yourself cut down to so minimal a health bar that a single powerful attack will end the fight. But at least losing your player character isn’t the end of the world now; as long as one of the two main characters survives, there’s some degree of hope to cling to as control switches to the survivor for a last-ditch attempt to claw success back from the jaws of defeat.

It’s also surprising just how much the cut-scene-heavy standard format of the genre is circumvented, and, while the story is still generally forwarded in the usual watch-along way, there are at least a few occasions where it’s a little more hands-on. QTEs aren’t quite so prevalent as pre-release bumph would have had you believe, though they’re still there, and while watching out for button prompts does pull your attention away from the typically flashy Final Fantasy cinematics, timings are generous and the icons are pretty hard to miss unless you’ve put the pad down and gone off to make a coffee. There are occasional decisions offered through button prompts too – having been conditioned to rush for the buttons on command, however, it’s easy to miss the point of these and just reach for whatever button your eyes are drawn to first.

But if this or any other mishap should occur, fear not – with time on your side, no change is permanent. By finding a key item in a time zone, that particular area of time can be closed off and rewound to how you found it (save for any items you’ve already claimed, which remain collected), and this is perhaps the game’s most baffling and worst-explained feature. In essence, it allows you to replay situations a little differently – returning to the first area with a powerful party, for instance, it’s possible to ignore the option to weaken the titanic boss and tackle it head on. This odd feature also means that bosses and one-off enemies can have rare drops and/or recruitment chances without making for missable items, the bane of every JRPG player’s life and the reason many can’t play without a Wiki open by their side.

XIII-2’s fragmented design means there’s little in the way of a structured post-game, instead foregrounding an emphasis on going back through areas with your ultimate team (which renders regular battles little more than a nuisance) while looking for things to do differently and mopping up side-quests which are now way too easy. Optional bosses and supercharged rare creatures make exploration ultimately worthwhile but end-game progression is a patient man’s game here – without a goal like the last game’s Long Gui to work towards (this game’s Oretoise is feeble by comparison), it can be hard to stay motivated.

But by this point, you’ve already had some fifty hours’ worth of enjoyment out of Final Fantasy XIII-2. The structure offers so much freedom in terms of exploration and approach as you work through the narrative that it’s hard to criticise its shortcomings once the credits have rolled. It’s a unique and interesting way of handling time travel in games too, and while XIII-2 might fall foul of all the usual time-hopping pitfalls (read: it’s really rather stupid at times) it’s hard to recall a sequel that makes such major changes to a great game and still manages to get things so right. If XIII was making a case for the quickest route from A to B being a straight line, XIII-2 instead argues that a time gate directly to your destination is both more practical and more interesting. We’re inclined to agree.

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Early on in Resident Evil: Revelations you happen upon an ominously locked door, chained shut and secured with a massive padlock. A single laser-aimed bullet shoots the lock off and the door blasts open, Resident Evil 4-style. But what awaits inside is actually much more reminiscent of Capcom’s very first foray into the world of survival-horror. The hulking bio-organic weapon that smashes his way out is gruesome enough, but it’s the tragic monster’s diary that resonates the most. Charting the once-human’s journey from self-imposed isolation, to infection and eventually madness as the zombie virus takes hold and causes a second person to grow out of his shoulder, the diary recalls one of the original Resident Evil’s most chilling documents and ends on a line almost as iconic as the classic ‘itchy, tasty’. Capcom has finally returned to its roots… Sort of.

The combat mechanics may fit right in line with modern Resident Evils but it’s clear right from the off that Capcom is keen to recapture the tone of its series early years with this hybrid offering; from the interior locations designed to evoke Raccoon City’s Spencer Mansion, to the voice acting so hackneyed it must be intentional. Original protagonists Chris and Jill return, alongside a whole new cast of BSAA members so STARS-like you can go through all the pleasure of guessing who’ll die, who’ll betray you and who’ll go on to become the new recurring villain of choice all over again.

Capcom even makes a modest attempt to recreate the structure of its first survival-horror. The self-contained nature of the Queen Zenobia, the ship that Jill and new partner Parker are charged with exploring, makes for a great non-linear playground, with grand halls to revisit, dauntingly familiar corridors to trepidatiously backtrack through, and enticingly locked doors that eventually spill their secrets. And while some areas, like the on-board shopping plaza, offer up the sort of non-linear arena combat typified by Resident Evil 4’s opening village, others are more like the hallway the zombie dogs leap into in Resident Evil, scaring you with the idea of what might happen as much as what does.

Even when you think you know a previous area, the designers change things up to make revisiting them interesting. Sometimes it’s a trick as simple as introducing new enemies, other times the game goes as far as to flood an entire section of the ship, calling upon Jill’s newfound Lara Croft-alike swimming ability and transforming areas into 360-degree rooms where threats can come from any direction. Puzzles, meanwhile, are admittedly lighter than in previous games and now more self-contained – such as the electrical rewiring minigame used to open locked doors. They’d be just as suited to Professor Layton as they are Revelations, but do feel right at home on 3DS’s touch screen.

New to the series, and perfectly in keeping with the blend of old and new design influences is the Genesis device. Not the sort of gizmo you’d use to bring Leonard Nimoy back to life, the Genesis is a handheld scanner used to analyse enemies and search for hidden items. The former use fits in wonderfully with the modern style action. Rewarding you with a green herb if you manage to scan enough enemies, it’s especially powerful against living things, filling up its meter much quicker if you scan a monster before killing it, and therefore creates a nice risk/reward mechanic as each slow scan leaves you vulnerable to attack. The tension it creates is palpable, but this is a device that serves ponderous play equally. Almost every room contains secret items, ammo and even handprints, linked to the in-game Achievement system, that can only be revealed by the scanner. It’s a nice mechanic that encourages more careful exploration of the environment than would otherwise be necessary.

It’s remarkable just how well each new addition allows Capcom to perform its delicate balancing act between old and new Resident Evil styles, which bodes well for the future direction of the series. But that’s not to say that Revelations is a complete success. Far from it. One of the biggest flaws is the episodic nature of the experience. Broken down into chapters of about 15-30 minutes in length, Revelations almost feels as though it was designed for the attention span of the average iOS gamer. Its bite-sized chunks of gameplay are well meaning in their consideration for handheld gaming but simply make for a shallow experience in practice. As for the plot recaps between each episode, they’re patronising at best, tedious at worst and ultimately unnecessary given the dearth of interesting narrative.

More damaging is the way in which the perspective cuts between the three groups of playable characters. It may make sense to offer a variety of play styles and plots, but constantly cutting away from the main quest – Jill and Parker’s exploration of the Zenobia – shatters immersion and breaks the contiguous level design that made the original Resident Evil so compelling to explore. The episodic structure, quite frankly, feels cheap. And it’s a problem only exacerbated by the tiring repetition of the same few enemies used throughout the game, the general lack of strategy or skill needed to take them down and the generally uninspired boss battles that leave you assuming there must be more left to play, just as the credits prove otherwise.

Handheld editions of big console titles often feel like straight to video sequels – looking the part but lacking the polish – and Revelations is no different. It nails the atmosphere in its hybrid design, but those crucial sparks of brilliance that make the series so great, no matter which of its eras you prefer… they’re as rare as a single use rocket launcher.

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4. games™ Issue 115

The Making Of: Metal Gear

Like a tiny serpent hatching from an egg, the Metal Gear series had humble origins. Although hoping to join a Famicom team, Hideo Kojima was assigned to Konami’s MSX division. As he explained to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, originally the project was not even his: “The company asked me to create a combat game. Actually, a senior associate had been in charge of it, but he was stuck, and I was asked to do it. You could not have more than four bullets with MSX, and you can’t make a combat game with that. So I came up with a game like The Great Escape, where a war prisoner had to escape.”

Wanting an extra perspective, we interviewed Tomonori Otsuka, programmer on the original, who explains the rivalry between Famicom and MSX: “I’m very pleased if my memory helps you. Most of the memories on developing videogames are going to be lost, so I hope your work plays the role of recording history. Konami had development teams for several platforms at that time, such as coin-op, Nintendo, MSX. The Famicom was launched after the MSX, and the MSX team had already released many titles. Famicom was the brand new platform and it was not determined successful yet. MSX also had a bigger market than the Famicom.”

Metal Gear was highly original, even down to the South African setting for the story. Though as Otsuka reveals, this came secondary to design: “I really didn’t know the game takes place in South Africa. It might be written in the [manual]. The story and character design were by Kojima-san. I didn’t deal with that kind of work. I don’t think Kojima-san likes South Africa especially. He was excited by the idea that soldiers have to hide from observation. The story was decided to emphasise the unique gameplay.”

Otsuka describes life at the time: “We developed two or three titles a year and the teams next door were rivals, because the number of companies that developed for the MSX2 was very small. We were very busy every day and didn’t think about the story of the games. I was a programmer and the work was to write the code [following the design] directions. I don’t remember how long the programming took; the work did not go as scheduled. However, the program was reused on several stages and creatures to save time.”

“I think the highlight of Metal Gear,” adds Otsuka, explaining the technical challenges involved, “is hiding from the view of cameras and enemy soldiers. The game screen is [viewed top-down from above] and users can see the position of the player and cameras. If there are some obstacles between the player and cameras, he must not be found and will succeed in hiding. It was very difficult to determine if the player is viewed by someone or not.”
As for Kojima, completing his first game came as a relief: “As the expectations for it were pretty low, I was just happy to finish the work. I had this pressure from my fellow workers, as I had been with the company for about a year, yet had not completed anything. People would tell me: ‘Hey, at least make something before you leave the company!’ I remember people started looking at me differently after finishing it.”

Metal Gear goes west

Although the MSX2 original was officially released in the UK, the real success in the West, and especially America, was the 1987 Famicom/NES port. We spoke to Masahiro Ueno, formerly of Konami Japan, who took on this daunting task when he was just 22 years old. “I was a fresh graduate when I worked on Metal Gear. I actually worked on an educational game for Famicom Disk System first, but it was cancelled. So Metal Gear was my second project, but the first shipped game. Muraoka-san, who has been the sound director for the Metal Gear franchise, worked with me on the NES project.”

Speaking with Ueno is a little melancholy, since he is reluctant to accept praise for something so important. “As you probably know, Kojima-san does not like the NES version. My team was asked to port the original MSX2 version to NES in three months, and we had to make some changes for management and due to the hardware limitations. Since Kojima-san was not involved and he does not like the changes we made, he does not think the NES version is an authentic Metal Gear. What I did was port the game as management asked, so I don’t deserve credit.”

Although Kojima has publicly criticised the NES version, this is unfair. Apart from the phenomenal achievement of programming a NES title in three months, it’s still a fun game despite the changes – like an easier remix. Significantly, it was Ueno’s version – and not Kojima’s – which created an American fan base and ultimately led to Kojima continuing the series.

We ask Ueno about the jungle area that was introduced: “Management wanted to differentiate the Famicom version a bit since the MSX2 version had already shipped. Having a different intro was the easiest and most efficient way for us to do so, since we only had three months.”

The other big change was the replacement of Metal Gear as a final boss: “This was simply due to the hardware limitations. It’s probably possible to implement the robot if we had used a better [mapper] chip such as the VRC4, but it was not available for us back then.” Although Kojima tried to disown the NES port, we now know better. It’s not as good as the MSX2 original, but it’s still very enjoyable and important to the long-term life of the series.

C64, PC and Amiga?

The NES port of the MSX2 original proved popular enough to be ported to the C64 and DOS. On the back of the IBM box were screenshots for an unreleased Amiga version. Charles Ernst explained the DOS port and unreleased Amiga edition: “I worked for a company called Banana Development. We ported a bunch of arcade titles for companies like Taito and Konami back in the 1980s. I was offered the gig porting the Famicom game Metal Gear. The initial version came on a floppy disk-like device and was in Japanese.”

“Typically, we ripped as much graphics off the ROM as possible, but in this case we weren’t able to. We also couldn’t get a debug version of the game so I had to play to the end – needless to say I videotaped everything. Overall it took about seven months to produce. Konami America was a great company to work for. Their input was:
‘Make it look and play as much like the original as possible.’

“There were plans to create an Amiga version but it was shelved after most publishers dropped the Amiga due to piracy. Our company was supposed to port the Amiga version and we did the [PC box] mockups to encourage Konami. Another brilliant programmer, Dave Kurensky, was the Amiga guru in our studio and would have been the one to port it. I am 99 per cent sure there is not an Amiga version floating around.”

Part Two

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There’s that character in the Truman Show, that director, played by Ed Harris,” says Will Wright. “Imagine if you had somebody like that behind you, trying to make your life more interesting and dramatic. That’s what I’d like to have.”

The veteran developer, mastermind behind such concepts as freeform urban sandbox Sim City and Spore – the latter of which enabled players to micromanage the evolution of a whole species from singe-celled organism to galaxy-conquering warlords – is attempting to describe his latest idea. Comparing it to the sinister puppet master behind the fate of a character imprisoned in a lifelong reality TV show might not be the most auspicious start, but hey, Wright reminds us: “You could turn it off if you want to.”

That’s still not much comfort, but Wright insists that HiveMind is a game – or rather games, as it’s actually a multifaceted experience across several platforms, including mobile and social networking – that seeks to intrude on our daily lives in an entirely benevolent way.

“One of the things I really want to do is have these games expose portions of reality to someone that they’re not aware of, but that are immediately accessible to them,” Wright explains. “If you imagine opportunities and things around you that maybe you don’t know about; there might be people you would meet or events you might go to, or places you would go check out. One of the key questions of this is ‘How do we make reality more interesting?’, rather than using games to distract you from reality.”

He continues: “We want to dig up a lot of information around you where you are, but in other dimensions, not just spatially but also to map from interests, map from time of day, the weather, how much money you want to spend, what’s on your schedule, all these things. If we take all these things into account, we can build a deep situational awareness abut the player. So we understand exactly what state they’re in, their mood, et cetera.”

It’s like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and a Voight Kampff test rolled into one and left to run riot in a gamified real world, with seemingly infinite possibilities. Wright is convinced that the gameplay element of sharing will encourage a serious amount of information surrender from players, as they trade personal data for gameplay.

“We have the ability to build this very deep situational awareness around the individual, and reflect that value. So we want them to feel like, every time they give us a little bit of data, they’re getting something back. So, we’re trying to get them on our side there; we’re gathering the data for their benefit and their entertainment, not just to target advertisers to them.”

“And it’s not always got to come from the user,” he adds, “In fact we can have people that know you, close friends and family, giving us data about you, if they’re part of some game experience you’re collectively doing together.”

Wright’s belief that all this will come good, and that people will throw themselves into his social experiment, seems to be inspired closely by the founding ideals of his general aims as a developer throughout his career.

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It was desperation, really. As publishers slowly chipped away at survival-horror over the years to create room for action to infiltrate, it was inevitable that an anguished yearning for what the genre used to be would grow alongside it. The slow creep of tension, the fragile vulnerability of your character, the twisted enemy designs; these are all elements that have been lost in the race for heart-pounding action. Amy had become the unofficial flag-bearer for survival-horror games by promising to bring those lost elements back.

If anything, this desperation simply highlights the crushing disappointment of Amy. As we follow Lana’s attempts to protect and usher Amy through a dilapidated subway, it soon becomes clear that the biggest obstacles aren’t the zombie-like enemies in your way but basic elements of the game’s design – the broken AI, the juddering screen tear, the stiff combat, the inconsistent stealth and the clumsy level design.

There are ideas plucked from Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Haunting Ground and other survival-horror games – such as hiding in cupboards and enemies you can’t beat in combat – but none of the ideas mesh together particularly well. The one original idea that Amy relies on is looking after the titular girl, yet there’s no real bond between the two – you’re not sure what Lana’s role is initially, and ushering Amy through vents to hit buttons is the kind of mechanic that soon becomes a chore. It’s an awkward patchwork of familiar elements, none of which are executed with any confidence or competence. It’s hard to shake the sense that Vector Cell was racing from idea to idea without ever stopping long enough to ensure its previous ideas were functional.

If Amy ever had a chance of keeping its head above water and surviving these problems, the awful checkpoint system ensures it drowns in them. Checkpoints are spaced out at an uneven pace, forcing you to revisit the same areas of each level far, far too often. Elements of game design where you’re forced to second-guess the right place to hide are bad enough; when you’re forced through the same ten minutes of awkward stealth gameplay over and over again just for another incorrect attempt at second-guessing the game design, it’s an assault on your gaming spirit few would be able to withstand. To add insult to injury, Amy only saves after successfully completing each of the five chapters, and will take away all your items after you die.

There was a chance for Amy to bring higher production values to downloadable games while bringing the long-rotting corpse of purist survival-horror back to life. Unfortunately, it doesn’t manage either, and only just achieves the bare minimum of being a playable game. The hunt for real survival-horror goes on, then.

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