Video Games

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's No More Heroes

Filed under: Video Games

Goichi Suda is – well, I wouldn't go so far as to say crazy, but he's the kind of visionary that tends to baffle the crap out of people, and that type of personality is pretty easily mistaken for craziness. As the head of video game development house Grasshopper Manufacture, he's probably best known as SUDA51 ("Goichi" = "five one" in Japanese), the luchadore mask-sporting cinephile and former undertaker who broke into the industry by writing a storyline for a pro wrestling game where the hero commits suicide. His most infamous game as of last year, the GameCube/PS2 title killer7, is easily one of the most bizarre titles released this decade: it became notorious for its disorienting, somewhat awkward trapped-on-rails gameplay, weirdly-colored, cel-shaded pulp-comic graphics, bizarrely stylized violence and a storyline that mixed David Lynch surrealism with Takashi Miike horror to deliver some heavy ruminations on the relationship between Japanese and American culture. Like many of his games, it sold poorly on both sides of the Pacific, so there’s a good chance his new Wii title No More Heroes only got greenlit thanks to one magic, unit-shifting phrase in the pitch: "Grand Theft Auto with a lightsaber."

Two things: the weapon's actually a "beam katana," and No More Heroes isn't much of anything like Grand Theft Auto at all. Yes, there's a city – hilariously dubbed "Santa Destroy" -- that you can explore, but aside from a couple shops and a few job agencies where you can accept missions and odd jobs, it’s practically lifeless: pedestrians ignore you, cars don't react to you and you can’t run around indiscriminately slaughtering people. On the surface, it's essentially just a convoluted menu system disguised as a free-roam sandbox. On a deeper, subtler level, though, it's another way to drive home the tone of the game: Santa Destroy is Southern California as it exists primarily in Tarantino films and skateboarding videos and the fevered mind of one particular Japanese pop-culture addict, and No More Heroes is the culmination of every geeky obsession that just about every kind of nerd everywhere has ever fallen for -- anime, pro wrestling, giant robots, Star Wars, samurai movies, porn, punk rock, and above all else, video games themselves.

In fact, so much of the entertainment in No More Heroes hinges on taking the pretense and pomp out of video games. Many gamers spent 2006 championing the Wii as a system for people who were fed up with flashy graphics and overblown production values and just wanted to play something new – and finally, after a year and a half of mediocre ports, cash-in shovelware and flailing mini-game gimmickry (and Super Mario Galaxy, thank God), they’ve got it, warts and all. Not for nothing has this been called a punk rock game; I love the idea that SUDA51 has given the industry the swift kick in the butt that it so desperately deserves by prioritizing new, rebellious ideas over re-refining the usual surface details. (And I'm saying this as someone who still prefers Led Zeppelin to the Ramones.) This kick in the butt happens to be accompanied by a sort of lo-fi sensibility, with cel-shaded graphics that detractors have compared to the circa-’99 offerings found on the Dreamcast and an often-tedious, low-tech "open city" that might as well be a ghost town. These problems eventually lose a lot of their relevance, and No More Heroes shapes up to become the video game equivalent of Robert Quine’s guitar solo on Richard Hell's "Blank Generation": abrasive as hell, but evocative in the places that actually matter.

Like, for instance, the protagonist. If killer7 was concerned about how the clash between East and West could damage a national psyche or two and bring about deadly cultural warfare, the undercurrent to No More Heroes is largely about goofy it is when those two cultures get along a little too well. The (uh…) hero of this game is a Johnny Knoxville-gone-otaku manqué named Travis Touchdown, a lippy little dipshit in aviator shades who seems to be the personification of what geeks think is the ultimate level of cool: he’s a flashy dresser in the classic trying-too-hard mode that most Williamsburg kids would opt to dial down a notch, he obsesses over an anime starring doe-eyed teenish girls (the show’s wait-what title: Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly), he drives a motorcycle that looks like something Harley-Davidson would sell in Akira’s Neo-Tokyo, and he apparently spent some time up in Canada training to be a pro wrestler like his dirty-old-man hero/sensei Thunder Ryu before giving up and heading back down to Cali. (Given how skinny Travis is, the likelihood of the WWE taking notice of him would be approximately zero.) How does a schmuck like this become a candidate to join the world’s top ten ranked assassins, fated to face challenger after challenger until, and maybe even after, he becomes #1? Simple: he won a beam katana on an online auction and decided that using it to cut rivals down would be the best way to get some of that elusive real-live-girl action that's apparently been so absent from his life. Ryu Hayabusa he ain't.

And Ninja Gaiden this ain't, either – good thing, because the last thing this world needs is yet another sword-based hack-and-slash game that takes its heavy, tough-guy violence way too seriously. Travis is a dork, but he's an entertaining dork, and he's frequently put in positions of hilarious indignity. (In one level, an underling discovers a unique way to overload the electronics in Travis' beam katana, and the subsequently-zapped Travis has to run around like a ferret on a hot plate in search of a way to fix it.) And sometimes, as he faces an adversary, he has odd little moments of unexpected maturity mixed in with the more dominant traits of self-absorbed selfishness and deluded arrogance. During the first boss fight, we get an extended internal monologue/voiceover where Travis starts planning his future as a successful assassin ("On the weekends, tanned babes knocking on my door every two hours... every day, full of excitement and luxury"), gets cocky about decimating the old guard ("Hypocrites lusting for their own desires get killed by young rookies like me. This is how it goes down. And for the old killers? They'll croak anyway"), then starts getting anxious about the possibility that he’s in over his head ("There's this sense of doom running down my spine like it's... like it's trying to suck the life out of me"). And there's more than one fight where his conscience gets the better of him and he drops his smartmouth badass pretense to show a bit of mercy or sympathy. Of course, most of this is treated with an irreverent tone and isn't taken 100% seriously -- eventually, when the game realizes Travis needs a backstory, it's delivered at the damnedest place and time and makes just about zero sense, as if to say that the motivation behind pressing all these buttons isn't as important as how much fun you're having while you're doing it.

All this emphasis on style and characterization might lead you to think that the gameplay itself is secondary, but it's only one of the less interesting parts of the game because the rest of the game's personality is so damned crazy. As it stands, No More Heroes relies on a perfectly entertaining control scheme of the easy-to-learn/hard-to-master school: sword slashes are handled by pressing the A button, you can switch your stance from low attacks to high (essential for bypassing an opponent's defenses) by tilting the Wii remote, blocking and dishing out melee attacks are pulled off by simple, eventually-reflexive button presses, and actual remote waggle gestures are saved for pivotal moments – like the enemy-bisecting finishing moves (a sweeping, one-directional motion with the remote) or the impactful wrestling suplexes you can nail stunned bad guys with (a combination of motions using the remote and nunchuck). It gradually becomes so natural and intuitive that it nearly becomes almost an afterthought, though higher difficulties put a bit more pressure on you to be more carefully aware of your actions. Upping your rank as an assassin usually means you fight through waves of weaker enemies before making it to the big boss, who usually has a series of special attacks and patterns that need to be figured out and countered – a time-tested and classic game mechanic that, upon each victory, nudges Travis’ name up a circa-1982 arcade game high score list. And in a dual poke at the vagaries of the day-to-day working life and the Wii's glut of frivolous little mini-games, making enough money to face the next opponent in the ten-strong line of specialized assassins requires undertaking a succession of inexplicably mundane odd jobs like collecting coconuts and retrieving lost cats.

No More Heroes is easily more accessible than killer7, though it still threatens to be a little too absurd to be as populist as other hack-n-slashers like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden. One good reference point you might want to keep in mind: NMH is to swordplay what PS2 cult classic God Hand was to hand-to-hand combat -- completely over the top, parodic, ridiculous and still packed with depth and challenge. (Suda does give it a sideways nod of sorts – next door to his in-game equivalent's clothing boutique is a store named 'Clover,' the name of God Hand’s development studio.) If you take anything away from this game - besides the reoccuring theme song, a little techno number that's the hardest thing to dislodge from your head this side of Super Mario Bros. Stage 1-1 music - it should be the idea that great games can break rules and follow them at the same time, undercutting both hardcore purism and casual shallowness yet still appealing to people on both sides of the hopefully-narrowing console demographic divide. No More Heroes may be irreverent, but it not-so-secretly loves the things it mocks - you, the player, included.

Posted by Nate Patrin at February 5, 2008 1:35 PM | Comments (0)

 

Burnout Paradise: No Particular Place to Go

Filed under: Video Games

Go to the GameFAQs review site for Burnout 3: Takedown – widely regarded as the best entry in the critically acclaimed go-fast-and-crash racing series – and note the number of laudatory writeups in both the PS2 and Xbox versions’ player review sections that say something like “I typically hate racing games, but…” or “this is the only racing game I’ve really liked”. (I hate to make you do the legwork there, but I personally gave up after about ten, not including the misguided soul who claimed to hate “realistic racers like Project Gotham” – apparently “you need to brake” is too strenuous a demand.) I tend to have a pretty uncharitable view of that whole outlook: usually when someone says something’s [x] for people who don’t like [x], 9 times out of 10 the people who really do like [x] will find out that there’s not a lot of substance for them beneath all the mass-appeal diluting. I try not to be one of those people that always gripes about the “sheep” who keep buying Halo and Madden titles, but as a racing game aficionado -- and by “aficionado” I mean “insufferable snob” -- Burnout is my one weakness: if it’s the only racing game you’ve ever made it a point to enjoy, all I can say is you’re missing out on a hell of a lot. Did you know that Forza Motorsport 2 lets you drop an all-wheel-drive Nissan Skyline drivetrain into a ’69 Datsun Z? How is that not awesome?

But the real problem I’ve always had with Burnout, which I’ve enjoyed off and on since the first game was released back in 2001, isn’t specifically that it appeals to people who don’t like racing games -- it’s that sometimes it seems to be made by people who don’t like racing games. Sure, each game in the Burnout series comes achingly close to matching the kind of all-out white-knuckle craziness one would hope for from a game so heavily centered around blistering velocity and the pyrotechnical consequences of directing said velocity into a bridge abutment. But ever since Burnout 2: Point of Impact, the breakthrough title that established the series as a populist success, each successive title saw someone at Criterion and/or EA usher in some huge mistake. Takedown had a notorious flaw where the AI-controlled cars would always hang right off your ass no matter how fast you drive and how many times you wreck them, but the moment you wipe out they get a 30-second lead that they never relinquish. Burnout Revenge was a bit less bullshit as far as AI went, but the challenge – which previously owed a lot to the encouragement of a daredevil weaving-through-traffic driving style -- mostly disappeared, thanks to the “traffic checking” feature which turned most civilian vehicles from a dangerous obstacle to a flimsy target you could bat away like a wayward aluminum can. And while Burnout Dominator put a bit more focus back on straight-up racing, it lacked much of the over-the-top havoc (and the mildly sociopathic, puzzle-esque 50-car-pileup-creating Crash Mode) that made the franchise popular in the first place.

So you might think that Burnout Paradise’s shift to a free, open world where closed circuits and linear routes are traded for a city street layout would follow this pattern of botching a perfectly good idea. While this kind of freeform exploration’s been pulled off successfully in other racing games – think Test Drive Unlimited and the Grand Theft Auto cousin Midnight Club Racing – neither of those games relied on the kind of blink-and-die speed or gonzo destruction Burnout thrived on. As a result, Burnout Paradise can initially be a frustrating headache. Criterion took the freedom of an open world as an excuse to do away with everything that would keep the game from being seamless, and a lot of basic practicality went out the window: there’s not much real organization of events and no quick and easy way to jump from race to race, thanks to an insistence on creating a menu-free interface that simply places the starting points for races at various intersections and makes you go all the way back to that point of origin if you fail and want to try again. My first race took me from the middle of a busy downtown to a distant section up in the mountains, and when I finished a few ticks behind first place – the natural result of having to take my eyes off the road to glance down at a mini-map or up at a blinking “turn here” indicator sign, thereby increasing my chances of smashing into something by about 800% -- I discovered that I was in the middle of nowhere and there weren’t any other nearby races to participate in. Fantastic. Might as well drive around aimlessly for a while.

“A while,” in this case, being a few hours. This is where the real fun of Burnout Paradise comes in: if you find something frustrating or poorly-implemented about the races in this game, feel free to abandon them and just dork around. Just like 90% of the people who play a Grand Theft Auto title, I eventually started straying away from the main missions and did whatever the hell else I wanted: searched for wicked jumps, smashed through billboards, busted through the chain-link gates that denoted shortcuts, and basically just took in the scenery. The locale of Paradise City is a fictionalized generic simulacrum of California that, despite a faintly desaturated and hazy color palette and the lack of any sort of day-night cycle, makes up in odd little hidden routes and secret stunt areas what it lacks in immediate personality. You’ve seen most of the game’s environments – winding mountain roads, busy interstates, waterfront docks -- in sandbox titles before, racing or otherwise, but the streets that funnel you through them tend to take you to unexpected places and often divert you towards some of the most batshit crazy stunts I’ve ever seen in a racing game.

Ever play San Francisco Rush and get stupid with glee when you found some secret ramp tucked away behind a building, one that launched your car over an entire city block? Paradise has a jump like that about every 50 yards, and the ones up in the mountains can send your car airborne for ridiculous stretches of time. It helps a lot in alleviating the boredom that might otherwise start rearing its head during your 15th trip to the junkyard (it is just about the opposite of convenience to make the player drive to a specific spot on the map just to change their car), and eventually all this aimless cruising around searching for ridiculous stuff to do will translate into a greater knowledge of the map’s layout. Throw in a few events that aren’t dependent on any specific destination -- Road Rage (run a certain number of opponent cars off the road in a certain amount of time), Stunt Runs (gain points by stringing together combos of stunts a’la the Tony Hawk games), Showtime (the lukewarm replacement for Crash Mode, where you can bounce the remains of your wrecked car around like a one-ton basketball and ricochet it into oncoming traffic) – and suddenly those races become less about trying to figure out where you’re supposed to go and more about getting there fast. Not that it’ll come easy, given how huge the map is -- it took me two weeks to get bored of Burnout Revenge; it’ll take me at least that long to start feeling like I actually know most of Paradise City’s ins and outs.

As long as it’ll take to learn how to best navigate Paradise’s streets, acquiring and mastering all of the game’s 75-plus cars could take even longer. Unlike most of the previous Burnout games, just about every vehicle feels different: each one is designated its own specific specialty (unwieldy but tough Aggression cars, fast but fragile Speed cars and agile, jack-of-all-trades Stunt cars), but they also have their own handling traits and personality quirks; some cars not only feel faster than others, but lighter, more maneuverable and easier to slide around corners. They’re unrealistic in some basic senses – the inexplicable lack of a speedometer makes it feel like each car’s going 300 MPH, and if you can keep the hammer down through a long straightaway, listen to all the upshifts and you’ll discover that your car has what sounds like a nine-speed transmission. (None of the cars have drivers, either – sure, it’d be uncomfortable to watch human bodies flail around in the game’s super-detailed wrecks, but their absence means that Paradise City appears to be overrun with Christines.) But there isn’t any perfunctory hovercraft handling here; landing one of those ridiculous jumps feels weighty and solid, and throwing some of the heavier cars around a turn with a bit of drift-braking assistance feels almost as forceful as the controlled chaos of Project Gotham’s balletic powerslides. It helps the cause of variety that these fictional cars run a diverse range of styles – hot rods, ‘30s luxury cars, ‘60s British GTs, Japanese tuners – some of which almost look like car-geek in-jokes: your first ride resembles the unholy union of a GTO and a Mustang Mach 1, and a later acquisition bears an uncanny similarity to the world-beating Ferrari 330 P3/4 that dominated the 24 Hours of Daytona in ‘67.

So all I really wanted from Burnout Paradise was the ability to go stupid fast and do wicked powerslides as my opponents disintegrate in spectacular slow-motion like Steve McQueen’s Porsche 917 in Le Mans. It gave me plenty of that, and rendered it all in spectacular 60 FPS debris-strewn hi-def glory. But dropping me in a huge city and simply declaring “here you are, go nuts” went from frustrating and disorienting to liberating pretty quickly – especially online, where me and a bunch of friends spent hours racing around, taking online challenges (jump x number of times; do a barrel roll over a specific spot; drive against oncoming traffic for a certain length) or just playing chicken and laughing like idiots. Sure, this could be a racing game for people who don’t like racing games – but it’s also a Burnout for people who don’t like Burnout.

Posted by Nate Patrin at January 29, 2008 4:36 PM | Comments (2)