Shining in the Darkness for the MegaDrive/Genesis

I got into table top role playing games before my trusty MegaDrive came along, and so was attracted to them as RPGs drip-dripped onto the system in the early part of its life. The problem was as larger games with battery back up, they tended to weigh in with a heftier asking price. Seeing the second and third installments of the Phantasy Star series come with £60 and £50 price tags respectively (in early 90s money!) meant I mostly got my gaming jollies in other genres, though I did eventually pick up Phantasy Star III.

When Shining in the Darkness arrived on these shores, it certainly looked good. Though my favourite magazine gave it short shrift, it was well received elsewhere. The screenshots were beguiling with some beautiful-looking visuals and, you would assume, quite a hefty adventure packed into the cartridge. Alas, I didn't partake because of the price tag. Ho hum. And now, 25 years later? To be honest, I'm glad my much younger self saved his money.

Shining in the Darkness is an important game because it kicked off the Shining franchise of Japanese RPGs for Sega, but that doesn't excuse it for what is and was at the time quite a shallow role playing experience. Don't get me wrong, the presentation and graphics are totally superb. The art style is consistently excellent and imaginative. There is some humour hidden here too and it doesn't take itself terribly seriously. The story is standard meh - rescue the princess and your dad who've been whisked away into a nearby dungeon, and slay the evil Dark Sol while you're at it. But it's the game. The game.

It starts off alright. You meet with the King, learn about the very basics of your quest, buy some rudimentary weapons and armour from in-town and off into the first person dungeon you go. Very soon you brush up against your first random monster encounter. Like most stats-based RPGs, combat is not a matter of skill but random number generation in relation to your attributes and those of the beastie. The menu icons for attack, casting a spell, using an item, or running away are animated, and is different but reminiscent of the Phantasy Star series. If you win, you pick up experience points and gold. If you fail, then you're transported back to the shrine in town and are resurrected sans a wadge of cash, Sword of Vermilion stylee. As per games of this type, experience means advancing through the levels with a resultant increase in your attributes. The mechanics themselves cannot be knocked, the system works well. Combined with the front end presentation, it actually plays well.

Then what's the problem? Unfortunately, it's the grinding. The first encounter will probably knock off half your hit points and drop you between three experience points and three gold pieces. That means an awful lot of running back and forth to the village tavern for healing until you're tough enough. And that, I'm afraid, is the game. The entire game. Even boss monsters work on the same principle. Yes, there are elements of this in nearly all turn-based JRPGs, but it's present here in extremis. Other examples of the genre have the good sense to alternate environments or character perspectives, but here it's just the replacement of one dungeon wall texture by another. You go in the dungeon, fetch something, come out the dungeon. In the dungeon, out the dungeon. New monsters are occasionally interesting, but the promise of a bit more dialogue at the tavern or in audience with his majesty is not enough to sustain 40 or so hours worth of interest.

Perhaps as a teenager with nothing better to do I would have persevered, but definitely not now. Do bear that in mind should you fancy giving this game a whirl.

Nevertheless, it does raise interesting issues from the standpoint of social theory and video games. A number of papers in the edited collection, Dungeons, Dragons, and Denizens: The Digital Role-Playing Game link the character attribute/levelling system to neoliberal subjectivity. It's easy to see why. In all RPGs, characters are acquisitive. Progress in Shining in the Darkness or something more up to date like Dragon Age III is contingent upon gaining experience and finding/buying better kit so you stand more of a chance next time you go out into the wild. The analogy with the self-expansion of capital is obvious. Enemies aren't obstacles, they are resources (albeit hazardous ones) that are utterly necessary for you to transform into the stuff that makes you more powerful.

While true, there are limits on neoliberal sensibilities in the case of Shining in the Darkness. To be acquisitive in some way is a necessary condition of neoliberal subjects, but is not sufficient by itself. Otherwise we're getting into the territory of claiming the Spanish Conquistadors as prototypical, as directs forebears to our contemporary ways of individual being. Bound up with neoliberal sensibilities is entrepreneurship. And here, in this game there is next to no scope for that. As a grind quest of kill monsters, heal, kill monsters, heal, there is little opportunity to take risks. By that, I mean doing something other than dawdle about dungeons and opening every chest you find. There is some experimentation when Pyra, the Elven magic user joins your party. You are invited to try out her different spells in battle, and any new ones that come along as she starts levelling up, but that it is. There is no opportunity for entrepreneurship, of testing out new things in which reward might end up outweighing the risk.

For Western and Japanese cultures now habituated to and exhorted to "do" entrepreneurship, it's small wonder that most people approaching Shining in the Darkness for the first time will find the game a complete chore. Engaging in never ending battles as you (very) slowly accumulate XP and money is too much like work because it's pretty much exactly the same as work for the vast majority of people. It's dull, it's demanding, it's repetitive, it's the trudge of having to accumulate to survive rather than thrive. At least for most of the game. In so doing, its plodding qualities stand much closer to the lived realities of the neoliberal workplace than the neoliberal designs for life disseminated by our institutions, discourses, and cultural artefacts. And in so doing, it suggests that a bit more care should be taken if folks interested in the sociological investigation and interpretation of video games are keen to draw analogies between digital game subjectivity and that abroad in real life.

Deep Duck Trouble for the Sega Master System

Or Deep Duck Trouble Starring Donald Duck to give this platformer its full title. This 1993 (relative) rarity was one of a clutch of Disney games Sega, or rather the developers the jobs were sub-contracted to, produced in the company's eight and 16-bit glory days. And (nearly) all of them are thought of quite fondly, retrospectively. Castle of Illusion with Mickey Mouse and Aladdin across the MegaDrive and Master System, World of Illusion and Quackshot on the former, and Donald Duck's Lucky Dime Caper on the latter. We definitely won't talk about Fantasia or Ariel the Little Mermaid. For the most part, Sega's Disney games were well-crafted, in part because Disney insisted on having input. After all, if you are licensing your cash cows the game they're pasted into better be alright.

Deep Duck Trouble was a late period entry onto the Master System, and as you might expect it's well programmed and avoids many of the issues that plagued the console. Namely flickering sprites and hideous tinny music. The adventure sees you assume Donald's mantle as you try and restore a necklace to its rightful resting place, all in order to lift a curse cast on Uncle Scrooge when his treasure hunting ways got the better of him. This involves platforming over five areas of a tropical island before facing off against the end boss and saving the day. It's all competently done. The standard zones common to platformers are here - jungles, water, caves, mountains, ice, temples (all that was missing was the desert). It wasn't the first time these themes turned up in a game, and were far from being the last too. Also, as a Disney game, violence had to be muted. Jumping on enemy heads Mario-stylee is okay, as is kicking blocks onto the bonces of baddies too. And, as per a Disney game, Donald cannot "die". Standard video game talk of "lives" is banished and replaced by "tries".

By this time, platformers were ten a penny with very little distinguishing one from the other apart from mascots/franchises. Deep Duck Trouble does at least make an effort in this regard. Rather than fight an end of level baddy, you're posed with a challenge. At the close of the first level you must keep sprinting to avoid coconuts thrown at you from a miniature King Kong who swings among the trees. Don't forget the spikes and the pitfalls too! Reach the end of the stage and he smacks into a tree. Likewise, the water level demands you do something similar, though this time you're frantically swimming up the screen to avoid the jaws of a very snappy shark. Definitely a nice switch from the usual fare.

As well crafted as the game is, there are very annoying cheap deaths from time to time, unnecessarily (and unfairly) tricky bits that see your life, sorry, try tally drop down. This is definitely the case on level five where a drop, which is something usually to be avoided, is actually the way through the level. Considering this was a kids' game on a kids' system, which is how Sega marketed the Master System once the MegaDrive came along, lazy misdirection like this is unnecessary. It's one thing to try and stretch the game experience out, quite another to effectively troll the player.

Going back to Goffman and the sociology of video games, point four of a digital reworking of his own scholarship on games notes how, for solo gamers, it is an outlet for presenting their (gaming) self to them selves - among a number of other things, of course. It's an act of reflexivity, a practice of being explicitly invited to monitor your own action as you respond to pre-programmed moves and, depending on the game, its artificial intelligence will likewise try and counter appropriately. There is none of the latter in Deep Duck Trouble. As an 8-bit title, the platforming action and attack patterns of the baddies are strictly scripted. It's as inflexible as the formations advancing down the screen in a game of Space Invaders. The fact it is quite easy once you get the hang of it is suddenly jarred when that unexpectedly tricky jump appears, ill-placed enemy, or hard-to-dodge obstacle. Getting beyond them means investing either a lot of time to familiarise yourself further with the game, which could add up to many more hours of repetitious gameplay (at least modern titles have much stronger narratives that simulate progression). Or, you could cheat.

Cheating in games has always been something of an ethical grey area, and what constitutes cheating has changed as games have changed. The sorts of things vintage gamers like me would have thought cheating, such as instant respawns and infinite lives, come as standard now. Which, I suppose, befits games' evolution toward interactive cinematic experiences. It goes without saying that cheating in multiplayer matches over the internet is very much frowned upon, but what about in the privacy of your own home? Naturally, no one gives a monkey's if you can unlock all the best weapons from the off. Indeed, for some players, cheating helps them get full value out of the game and therefore enhance the experience. But for simple 8-bit platformers? During my playthrough using the trusty Retron5 I am ashamed to say that save states came in very handy. Stupid mistakes or surprise deaths were and are much easier to avoid of time can be rewound to the point just prior. The application of saving to a game that was never designed to have progress saved fundamentally reshapes the experience. Game over no longer implies a tedious trudge back through the game to the sticking point, only for it to happen again - a cheap death is a momentary inconvenience. The advantage it has is time, especially as the number of tries it takes you to make that perfectly timed platform jump or avoid the tumbling rock from nowhere can be quite a few. Taking out the trudge saves time. If you only get past level four's swooping eagle on the 15th try, that's quite a bit of tedium cut out of the experience.

Does this matter when it comes to gaming reflexivity? It can. Cheating through saving is only an option and one the purists can easily avoid by sticking exclusively to the original hardware or exercising iron will power. For others, for me, because time is short (why play when blogging is the best game ever?) liberal use of cheating allows me to get through games I wouldn't otherwise have time to play. What does that mean when it comes to matters of skill, of the feeling of accomplishment, of meeting a challenge for its own sake? Something to ponder in a future post.

Truxton for the MegaDrive/Genesis

Taking a night off from the politics and suchlike, it's time we had a look at a well known MegaDrive title that's been in my sights for some time. Truxton, or Tatsujin as it was dubbed in Japan, is a vertically scrolling shooter that sees you operate a rocketship of doom against waves upon waves of dastardly aliens just begging to get blasted. Yes, as no frills shooters go, Truxton pretty much wrote the book.

As an early MegaDrive title, I remember its review back in t'day in jolly old Computer and Video Games. In common with nearly all of the initial crop of games, Tatsujin as we knew it then walked away with a massive pile of accolades. Remember, these were the days when replication of the arcade experience was the sine qua non of action-based gaming. The tiny number of screen shots jumped off the page and looked like something I'd only ever see at the sadly-missed American Adventure up the road. The graphics were crisp and crapped over all the shooters available on the 16-bit home computers, and the bosses were simply huge. I think this was the moment when I realised that the pennies I had hitherto put away for an Amiga might best go on Sega's machine instead - even though the official release was still over a year away.

Summer of 1991 came round and I finally had cash enough to sink into a MegaDrive. I started off with two games and spent the next year or so (very) slowly building up a collection. Truxton as it was now styled for Western audiences by this time wasn't something I particularly fancied, until the purveyor of cheapo console games on Ripley market introduce a swapping service. For a complete game and a fiver, you could have a new game. This is how I got my copy, stupidly swapping my original, complete and pristine copy of Star Control for it. Duh. And you know what, I was disappointed.

Truxton made a fantastic first impression in 1989, but three years later while it was old hat, even if considered a solid blast by the video game mag cognoscenti. I was forced to reluctantly agree at the time. It was tough - stupidly so, in places - and for a shooter, and a Toaplan-developed one at that, the thumping soundtrack I was expecting was curiously absent. The music still disappoints to this day. It hung around on my shelf for a while before getting swapped for Michael Jackson's Moonwalker (which, in its turn, later made way for Golden Axe). And that was it until a couple of years ago when I picked it up in my second wind of MegaDrive collecting. Did absence make the heart grow fonder?

Not this time, alas. Those first impressions formed 20 years ago all came back when it flashed up on my MegaDrive. The format, fly up a forced scrolling screen dispatching waves of enemies can be quite satisfying, but in Truxton's case it is marred by a litany of cheap deaths. Baddies suddenly appearing up your backside with little chance to avoid them. Exploding light bulbs (yes, really) that throw shards of death around the screen while trying to battle hordes of aliens are annoying. And, occasionally, those evil sods off screen throwing a bullet or two in your direction. This is partially compensated by the weaponry, of which there are three types obtained through power ups. The standard spread shot eventually develops a shield of bullets that prevent any kamikaze sneak attacks from the rear. But not helpful against the light bulbs. The "green weapon" is the most powerful but concentrates your fire in a strictly narrow column of death to the front of your craft. Excellent for bosses, not ideal for the rest of the level where enemies pop up from here, there and everywhere. And lastly there is the most awesome looking weapon, the lightning. On the screenshots it looks extremely impressive, and powered up fully five columns of electrical energy stream out to encompass almost the entirety of your screen. Problems? Sides remain vulnerable, the bolts can obscure exploding enemies, and there are nefarious mid-level bosses that use the beams to home in on your craft. Though word has to go to the Truxton smart bomb, which remains the most awesomely ostentatious explosion grace a 16-bit machine.

This might sound like a whinge (and it is), but it does make for a very frustrating experience. One moment you're basking in the near-invulnerability of total destructive power, and one cheap death reduces you back to a sluggish, underpowered vulnerable nonsense. Under these circumstances, you're sure to be less X-wing, more ex-wing. Yes, it's one of them. Truxton also has the annoying Toaplan characteristic of offering speed ups to the point of uncontrollability, making it nigh on impossible to effectively avoid enemy fire without careening into something else.

Despite being annoying and having rubbish music, Truxton managed to accomplish a few important firsts for the MegaDrive. The game helped cement its reputation as a machine capable of arcade quality action in the sphere of vertically scrolling shooting. Which, at the time, was (with its horizontally-scrolling brethren) the canonical game form - albeit one due to be replaced by the platformer. As far as I know, Truxton was the first game of its type for the MegaDrive. Second, it repeated the trick Altered Beast managed to pull by showing off (a little bit) some of the tricks the machine was capable of. There was some sprite rotation-y stuff on some of the enemies, and sometimes this was accomplished with many of them at screen on once. This was then a big deal, albeit one not picked up on at the time. Second, the game throws a lot of enemies at you without any slow down - again, a truly impressive feat of programming on then new hardware. Thirdly, Truxton also established the base standards one should expect from a game of this kind. Plenty of enemies, challenge, beastly big bosses - these were the standards by which vertically scrolling console shooters were to be judged. It wasn't a canonical game, but nevertheless the conventions it condensed were sublimated into reviewers' judgement criteria. As a rule, if a game didn't advance or innovate beyond what was on offer here it was destined to be a sure fire critical failure.

As games go, Truxton is now a museum piece. Worth a whirl certainly, but rapidly eclipsed at the time by other vertically scrolling fare Super Aleste as well as Toaplan's subsequent efforts on the MegaDrive.

Mega-lo-Mania for the MegaDrive/Genesis

God games. Oddly, there were a few knocking around for Sega's all-singing, all-dancing arcade conversion monster. Mega-lo-Mania started out life as a title from Sensible Software on the 16-bit home computing formats of the early 90s (Atari ST, Amiga), proved a bit of a hit (as well as scoring rave reviews) and made its way over to the consoles. For reasons unknown, the publishers decided to change the name for its North American Genesis release to Tyrants Fight Through Time, presumably as they believed it was beyond the ken of yanks to reach for a dictionary. Even weirder, for the Super Nintendo release they reverted back to the old name but gave it a ghastly sonic and graphical overhaul. If it ain't broken ...

Mega-lo-Mania is a God game. There's some piffle about worlds coming into being bearing intelligent life, and how the universe's deities cluster around and fight for the right to control it. The plot is hardly serious, but then it's not meant to be. Each level has three islands to conquer, and the player is endowed with a small pool of computer people to begin the task. Any left unused carry over to the next level, which is handy for the later stages where time is of the essence. You are then awarded a base, or tower, from which to direct your operations. You can assign folks to mining, designing technologies, forming armies and what have you. The aim is to develop weapons and grow your population so you have a hefty enough army to invade your neighbours' square until, in the words of the game, you've "conquered the sector!" Simple, right? The problem is you're squaring off against up to three opponents who are all trying to do the same and, terror of terrors, not all squares are as equally well endowed with resources. You might merrily and painstakingly build up a mine and a factory to manufacture cannon only for your base to be invaded by 50 spear men. The result is curtains for you.

The core game is simple. It's a matter of allocating numbers of people and growing them, and as you proceed through the game the rate of technological advance picks up. You start off in prehistoric times where the cutting edge technology of the day are rocks, and the game finishes nine levels later with Strategic Defence Initiative lasers and flying saucers. It's the later levels where things start getting tricky and you need to have saved some people over from earlier on. Levels seven, eight and nine are where nuclear weapons become available. It's usually a race to who can design and manufacture them first. If you win the production race you get to nuke your opponents and win. If not, you become the nuke-ee.

A further consideration the player must bear in mind is the end game. When your tower has reached 2001 (it was the future, once) and provided you either have other settlements or an army deployed somewhere, you can send your peeps into suspended animation. They wake up on the island of Armageddon at the end of the game to do battle with lasers with any opponents who also packed their folks into cold sleep. Generally speaking, because the AI isn't great the opposition are rubbish at doing this. During my playthrough 36 of my guys (out of 200+ who went into storage) survived. Only one other bothered earlier on in the game, and they must have had less than a dozen people to play with. The final battle was more a massacre than the promised mother of all battles, alas.

As an early real time strategy game, it is designed for quick play, of piling up your designs, manufacturing the most advanced weapons and taking it to the enemy. But when I was a little 'un determined to get full value of the £39.99, I quite liked playing long games, of slowly building up empires and military and toying with the much more stupid opponents. If you were the kind of kid that enjoyed tormenting ants, then Mega-lo-Mania is the game for you.

Mega-lo-Mania was noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, in a period where speech in video games was relatively rare, this was a positively verbose and came packed to the gills with samples. Diplomacy, which began and ended at the striking of military alliances, was mostly a jovial affair. Of the four demigods you could play as/against, Madcap and Scarlet sounded quite gruff and serious. Cesar was every inch the comedy Italian with an overblown accent. And everyone's favourite was Oberon, who in his best Carry On camp voice would ask "do you want to be on my team?". And if he was turning you down, there came a very John Inman-esque "no, I don't think so". As he shared his name with Shakespeare's fairy king, perhaps camping him up sounded like a good idea at the time. The MegaDrive, oft noted for not having a fantastic sound chip, nevertheless rendered all the speech as clear as the Amiga version. The second point is its importance to real time strategy games in general. When it came out, the roost was ruled by an ageing-looking Populous and the first Civilization game on PC. The former was an RTS but relied on growing your population to overwhelm your opponent, while the latter was turn-based but was organised around a tech tree. Mega-lo-Mania married the two and was able to prepare the ground for the likes of Command and Conquer, Warcraft and Starcraft, which went on to dominate the RTS genre.

Thirdly, Mega-lo-Mania was important for a less celebrated reason: console optimisation. The 16-bit computers lent themselves to quick-thinking RTS thanks to the mouse interface. Point and click was and is much less cumbersome than pratting about with a joystick or pad. For instance, the MegaDrive's iteration of Populous wasn't so optimised, meaning it was a pain slowly dragging your hand of God from one end of the screen to another. A good job that it isn't a fast paced game, really. While the problem isn't eliminated entirely in Mega-lo-Mania, each pad press automatically places the cursor on a control pad icon - a system much simpler than the ugly-looking menu system inflicted on the SNES version. Still, in both cases it demonstrated there was no reason why strategy games couldn't be modified to suit consoles, and today - though perhaps thinner on the ground then they once were - games of this stripe now all draw on the lessons learned then.

This begs the question, if Mega-lo-Mania was a big deal at the time, if it was an important milestone in the evolution of RTS games, and if it played a crucial role that influenced how control schemes need to work for strategy console releases, why is it largely forgotten? It could be that its creators, Sensible Software, met their demise at the close of the 1990s and so has sank into history as an orphan. That it never received a sequel, that the American name change nonsense damaged its ability to solidify a following around a brand identity. More likely, unfortunately, was while the game is very good it is relatively short and doesn't offer the kinds of variety Civilization and, to a lesser extent, Populous did. Whereas they required a variation in strategy and tactics (of sorts), you can complete Mega-lo-Mania by building quickly and attacking in overwhelming force almost every single time. Only the nuclear weapon levels offer a slight variation on the theme.

And that is a real shame, because Mega-lo-Mania does, if you'd forgive the clumsy allusion, deserve its place in the video game pantheon. It doesn't need worship, but its importance demands recognition.

Kung Fu for the Nintendo Entertainment System

Kung Fu, or Kung Fu Master as it's better known here in Blighty is one of my very favourite video games. Not just because it comes with a dollop of nostalgia - I spent many a happy afternoon round my mate's place with his Amstrad 6128 in the mid-80s - but because it is a simple, compulsive game. So when I spotted it going cheap for the NES earlier this year, one simply had to have it. And I am very pleased to say, this iteration is easily as good as I remember it being.

What's the deal? Kung Fu casts you as Thomas, and you're on a mission to save your girlfriend Sylvia from the clutches of the evil gang boss, Mr X. This involves walking your way through five levels of increasing difficulty to reclaim your woman and strike a blow for macho, insecure masculinity everywhere. The boring, video game fairy tale plot is simple, and so is the gameplay, but all the best games are easy to pick up. You just walk along and either punch and kick your enemies away. The standard goon just seeks to grab you in a hug, and your job is to batter them before they get close. Be sure these are manly hugs though, as they drain energy until you can shake them off. Other enemies feature knife throwers (two hits), dwarves (who sometimes leap up and bounce off your head), and falling pots containing snakes or fire breathing dragons. And don't forget about the bees on level four. Lastly, each level ends with a boss. The first is a stick-wielding hoodlum, the second a boomerang flinging footpad, the third a giant, the fourth a wizard with a detachable head, and then lastly the multi-moved Mr X himself.

Throughout you have three basic attack moves - a kick, a punch, and a flying kick. The latter is best deployed only against falling objects and bees, they're next to useless on enemies. Kick and punches are the staples. The kick has greater range, but a landed punch is worth double the score, and as you only receive an extra life after 50,000 points risking a bit more for close quarter fisticuffs is worth it. And, mercifully, each is mapped on to the controller's two buttons. The home computer versions had you toggling between the two by slapping the space bar. In short, Kung Fu is a game of timing first and reflex second. Just getting the time right to kick or punch an enemy isn't difficult, but it's a might bit trickier taking them on from both directions at once with a knife thrower, um, throwing knives at you. And the bosses aren't too difficult. Either getting in close and hammer away, hoping their energy bar runs down before what's left of yours, or moving in, hit, move out, rinse and repeat. This is really the only way Mr X can get taken down. There's very little hope of learning and avoiding their attacks.

Kung Fu isn't the most complex of games. Frustration can set in if you get to level five and lose all your lives, as there are no continues. And kicking the bucket before then means a return to the start of the level. That said, it shouldn't take long for half-seasoned players to make their way through it. Hence why it was probably included on the NES Mini, to draw in gamers who grew up with the old Nintendo and as a simple entre for newbies dipping their toe in the wonderful world of 8-bit software.

On several occasions, we've explored game mechanics that were interesting additions to established conventions, but never really went anywhere. None of that can be said about Kung Fu. As a well received game on the NES, the home computers and in the arcades, I cannot think of a single aspect of this game that didn't become canonical for beat 'em ups. Scrolling levels guarded by an end of level boss? Multiple baddies and different baddy types? Different attacks? An end-of-game baddy with a move set as varied as your own? And, from a plot point perspective, kidnapping? Why, all of these are replicated in nearly every subsequent beat 'em up and perfected in the likes of Streets of Rage 2. Kung Fu therefore is not just a simple game worthy of a quick play through now and then, it's a canonical title that defined the basics of an entire genre.

Aerial Assault for the Sega Master System

Awful games typically have rubbish graphics and sound, unresponsive/oversensitive controls, too easy/hard enemies, cheap deaths, and illogical level design. And don't get me started on broken games ... But how does one define an average game? For bland isn't necessarily bad, it's just a bit meh. Why is it that one title can grab you and pull you into its compelling universe, while another that is very, very similar and involves the same gameplay elements cannot?

These thoughts occurred while getting stuck into Aerial Assault, a relatively rare-ish 1990 number for the humble Sega Master System. The plot, which is as memorable as the game itself, basically provides an excuse to climb into a super advanced fighter and shoot all-comers: enemy jets, helicopters, air mines, tanks and rocket launchers. You know, all the nonsense you can expect from a military-themed shooter. As per normal, your craft starts off pitifully slow and is armed with but a pea shooter. Killing particular enemies yield power ups, some of which are very helpful. And there are others possessing the efficacy of a rabbit hutch made of carrots. Provided you don't pick up the dodgy weapons and make it through the level, at the end awaits the usual meaty nemesis.

Coming out shortly after UN Squadron made a splash in the arcades, Aerial Assault can be considered an example of me-tooism. That is a game "inspired" by a popular title and seeks to cash-in on its popularity. For instance, the trusty old ZX Spectrum was awash with Pac-Man and Space Invaders clones early in its life. When Street Fighter II was utterly inescapable a quarter of a century ago, it was hotly followed by a legion of one-on-one brawlers. There are similarities between Aerial Assault and UN Squadron, particularly with regard to its environments. Scramble against the enemy navy and end in a tussle with a battleship? Take wing in the upper atmosphere as you glide over a parallax of cloud? Fly into the enemy's secret underground base/factory to sort them out once and for all? Yes to all these things.

The one relatively (then) original feature the game has is denying access to the full game on the lower levels of difficulty. If you ratchet it to the top, unexpectedly you access a "secret" fifth level set in space. It's a touch tougher than your previous adventures (as one might expect), but this time you meet an end-of-game baddy who passes a resemblance to the final bad 'un in Toaplan's Hellfire. More "inspiration".

What makes Aerial Assault bland is, well, its blandness. It doesn't bring much, if anything, new to the table. UN Squadron for its part was packed with original features, including non-linear progression and RPG elements. Other shooters lacking these bells and whistles usually have something to commend them - interesting power ups, imaginative graphics and sound, a gimmick, playability demanding one more go. Alas, here everything is underwhelming. The boss battles are (mostly) quite easy. Enemy patterns aren't tough to learn, once you get over a few cheap shots here and there. It's the gaming equivalent of elevator music, the sort of thing you can breeze through without thinking much about it. Some games are simply forgotten because they are entirely forgettable. And that's Aerial Assault. It goes through the motions, reiterates the base mechanics gamers were already familiar with in 1990, but brings nothing new to the table. Therein perhaps lies quality of the average game.

Ghouls 'n Ghosts for the MegaDrive/Genesis

The Moon grimaces through the mist to cast a feeble glow on the cemetery, and something is astir. Beneath a moss covered tombstone, the soil is disturbed as one bony hand breaks the surface. It cloys the air, grasping, reaching for a root. With an ungodly sigh, it grabs hold and starts hauling itself out. The grave bursts open and a hooded, skeletal figure thrusts itself into the night. It examines its robe, and the flash of a scythe catches a sparkle of starlight. Sightless eyes scan the scene. It begins to shuffle forward ... and explodes into a pile of bones and dust. Picking up a lance from amid the debris is our knight in shining armour, ready to hurl it at other graves vomiting forth cruel mockeries of the living. If Ghouls 'n Ghosts for Sega's mighty MegaDrive had a pulpy opening, it would probably go something like that. Yes, it's All Hallow's Eve so it's time to cash-in with an opportunist post on a scary video game. After all, it's not like anything's happening in the world.

Before Sonic the Hedgehog came along and sold millions of machines for Sega, the MegaDrive's main selling point was its ability to host arcade conversions that were supposedly indistinguishable from the coin operated original. There were a few failures, but some very creditable efforts. But supreme among them was GnG. An arcade monster from Capcom, for a period on import it was then the most expensive MegaDrive game yet seen (weighing in at £44.99 in 1989 money). Probably because the cartridge was a whopping six megabits, which is a mammoth 768 kilobytes to you and me. Small, but as it turned out, perfectly formed.

Cast as Arthur, the hero of Capcom's 1985 arcade hit, Ghosts 'n Goblins, you're back again after the evil Loki kidnaps Princess Prin Prin and unleashes his army of demons and undead upon the world. What a swine. Your job, unsurprisingly, is to mount a rescue. This means fighting your way across hellish landscapes to do away with Loki's minions and, in the end, offing the Grand Poobah himself. The game is a mix of platforming and shooting things with a variety of mediaeval weapons - the aforementioned lances, and shields, daggers, blue flame, axes. A powerful sword with limited range is available, but truth be told the last three weapons are absolutely dire and can slow your progress right down. For, it has to be said, GnG is one of the trickier games in the MegaDrive's library. It seems deceptively straight forward. There's no reason why, for instance, you shouldn't be able to get through the first level in one piece but more often than not it hands you your ass on a platter. The stingy stamina allowed Arthur is part of the story. One hit and you lose your armour, forcing you to battle the legions of Hell in just your grundies. Another and your transmutation into a pile of bones is immediate. Things don't get better if you secure the fabled and endlessly useful golden armour. It looks swish, you can throw magic about the screen with murderous abandon, but a single brush with a foe is still going to reduce you to your smalls. It's not like the collision detection is off, the game cheap, or the attack patterns overly complex. It has something to do with the mass of the enemies and the unevenness of the terrain. Gamers familiar with its sequel on the SNES know what I'm talking about too.

Yes, the game is hard. Indeed, in the canon of hard retro games it can often find a citation or two. But what makes it particularly fiendish is a little trick Capcom include in the franchise's games. Picture the scene. Your armour is rusty with the ichor of demons. In each of the lands behind you, corpses of dead bosses and assorted abominations are attracting flies and carrion eaters. You fling the final daggers into the huge fly thing waiting at the end of the game. It explodes like so many others, the gates open and ... you're sent right back to the beginning of the first level. Yes indeedy, you have to go through the game twice to complete it. No, that's not annoying at all. The in-game narrative justifies it in terms of having to backtrack to acquire a weapon that can slay Loki - the wonderfully named Psycho Cannon. In truth, it's a fancy ball of blue lightning, but to have to go through an already tough game again is proper trolling.

What Ghouls 'n Ghosts does is make explicit a ludic strategy all game developers rely on: that of repetition. Repeating the game to give the impression of more value for monies exchanged isn't necessary here; a single play through is hefty enough (as well as an accomplishment in itself). Yet they do it anyway. In too many other games, lack of content is made up for by doing pointless tasks. All the crafting in contemporary role playing games fall into that category, for instance. In the RPGs of the day, it was grinding, or the appearance of very similar games under different titles. What the second playthrough of GnG does is underline its pointlessness, perhaps reminding the player that, ultimately, gaming has no meaning beyond that we bestow.

Ghouls 'n Ghosts was about as scary as games got in the late 1980s. But it also pulls the trick of binding existential dread up with rock solid gameplay. Terrifying.

Sword of Vermilion for the MegaDrive/Genesis

When you're a teenager at home and you're blessed enough not to have any responsibilities, time is a stretch of emptiness reaching toward the horizon, and is begging to get filled. In my case, at least in the early 90s, my beloved MegaDrive and collection of games were one time sink of choice. Unfortunately, most of my games were arcade-style fodder that, at most, would take a couple of hours to get through. For more cerebral or easy-going experiences, there were strategy titles like Populous and Mega-lo-Mania, and my trusty copy of Phantasy Star III - the only role-playing game I owned. And yes, it was a proper time thief. An interesting story, diverging plot lines, and four different endings, the first run through kept me occupied for a month or so. And so, quite unexpectedly, when I gave Sword of Vermilion a whirl, I wasn't prepared for a touch of the nostalgics. Despite their development by two separate programming teams with, as far as I can tell, no cross over, the art style of the in-town moments are very similar, as are the buying/selling and conversational mechanics. Even the font and text field are the same colours. It was like going back 25 years ...

Sword of Vermilion was a very early MegaDrive RPG, released more or less at the same time as Phantasy Star II to enthusiastic reviews. What marked it out, however, was its dispensing with the traditional RPG combat system. Whereas encounters with monsters and assorted bad 'uns were usually determined via random number generation heavily modified by character (and non-player character) attribute scores, Sword took a different path. You're endowed with certain scores which, as per normal, can be upgraded via the accumulation of experience points as one advances a level. But encounter a baddy and you're whisked to a combat screen. You walk over to the enemy (or they will bounce/fly/slither/float/walk toward you) and tap button C to smack them with your sword while trying to avoid physical contact. It's quite simple. Easy to pick up and understand, but it can get button mashy as you advance through the game and you're assailed from multiple sides. Luckily, your experience level makes you tougher and gives your sword strikes more heft. So them horrible Gorgon things that enjoy swarming you are instantly dispatched once XP bulks you up.

That is but one of three game modes. The combat and town/castle wandering runs off one engine. Another is a very ropey-looking outdoor/dungeon crawling 3D stages which, truth be told, look worse than the original Phantasy Star on the Master System. And the third comes when you're encountering a boss. Screenshots of these sequences back in the day looked very impressive and, if you have an eye for 16-bit graphical style and its limitations, they do look good. Assuming the form of a one-on-one scrap, Streetfighter stylee, you square off against a mean-looking boss but, ugh, the controls are stiff and your character is painfully slow. Thankfully, the baddies tend to be just as limited and follow a few basic patterns. Still, it is satisfying when you finally skewer something that large.

What's this all in aid of, then? The plot is pretty standard fare. An evil King invaded your daddy's domain, you're whisked away and brought up by a trusty servant, and when you learn the truth it's up to you to avenge your kingdom and reclaim your birthright. Practically, the game is a sequence of marching across the wilderness, finding a town, entering a nearby dungeon, retrieving whatever, heading back to town and then moving to the next one over for pretty much the same. Sounds dull, doesn't it? Put like that, it is, and such was the standard RPG experience back then. Yet in its defence, there was something soothing and relaxing about it, despite the frequent appearance of random enemies. Going back and forth on pointless fetch quests, it's almost therapeutic. There are no major plot points, nothing stands out - it's just a linear path from start to finish. The only twist, if it can be called that, is when a shopkeeper mid-game steals your weapons and money and you have to start from scratch again. But that later turns out to be necessary to the plot.

As mechanics go, despite being an action RPG there isn't much that stands out. Heal up by forking out for a night at the inn. Head to churches for save points (which us where you're resurrected should things go very badly wrong). Its most peculiar feature, I suppose, is Sword is a solitary affair throughout. There aren't many 16-bit RPGs that don't task the player with the acquisition of characters of varying abilities.

Is there a point to writing about this? Yes, it comes back to our previous video game outing and how the two aspects of the game, plot and play (or, narratology and ludology) work together to produce an experience. Modern games integrate dialogue, cut scenes, and gameplay to varying success. In Sword it's a bit more disjointed. The main vehicle of plot delivery is conversation with townsfolk and, typically, the resident royal therein. Once you depart and journey to the nearby dungeon to retrieve whatever, the residents will helpfully inform you about what to do next. It therefore gives you an incentive to seek out absolutely everybody in the hope the game, which is really just an endless grindfest to earn money and experience, imbues your repetitive activities with a little more meaning. There is a clearer separation of story and game, underlined by the different modes - dialogue is only possible in NPC scenes, not in one-on-one fights or the 3D wilderness/dungeon sections. You return to town not only to top up your health, but also on the story. I suppose it couldn't be done any other way when Sword got its Japanese release in 1989.

Retro game-wise, is Sword of Vermilion worth playing today? It depends whether you like 16-bit RPGs, I guess. Confession time: I hadn't properly played a RPG between the mid 90s and last year's outing on Phantasy Star for the blog, so haven't had my expectations modified by your Skyrims and Dragon Ages. Because my preconceptions and gaming habits are stuck in the past, I got plenty of enjoyment out of it. But Sword probably constitutes something of a specialist interest.

Space Marine for the Xbox 360

Modern games. They do things to me, man. Take your typical first or third person shoot or hack-a-thon, which pretty much is the established fare from the big studios. They either give me motion sickness, and so I can't play them for long. Or they leave me hyper-aggressively on edge, which might explain why so many of the dudebro manbabies crying about feminists "ruining" their video games with gender critical talking points come across as so, well, unhinged. I digress. The main reason I seldom play modern action titles is because they drive me to the frontiers of a nervous breakdown. And Space Marine, released in 2011, reconfirmed all that.

None of this is to suggest Space Marine is a bad game. It definitely isn't. A steal at a mere £1.50 from your local digital pawn shop, you are Captain Titus, dispatched to the factory (or, in the parlance, forge) world of Graia to stymie a sneak invasion by an army of space Orks. Yes, in the nightmarish future of the 41st Millennium - the setting for Games Workshop's brutally dystopian Warhammer 40,000 franchise - assigning a few of the Imperium's finest can see off mobs of aliens and other nasties. And so Space Marine has you merrily chopping and smashing your way through the green-skinned Orkoid hordes with a variety of melee weapons (knife, chainsword, power axe, a warhammer). For traditional shooter fans, there are plenty of ranged weapons from GW's 40k army lists to play with. The bolter offers your standard machine gun experience, but there's fun to be had with las cannon and plasma rifles too. This gives you a choice between play-styles, but at times using one or the other is unavoidable. The annoying big orks who come at you swinging a club are difficult to put down with gun fire (though a few bursts of las cannon sorts them out), and so mucho button mashing beckons. And, of course, this being a GW game Chaos has to be revealed as the real bad 'un machinating behind the scenes.

There's not much more to say about Space Marine as a game. It follows the standard fighting/cut scene/fighting/cut scene format to move the plot along, interspersed with a periodic boss confrontation and "shocking" plot twists. Oh, it also turns out the Titus is a bit special too. In all, an enjoyable if well trod romp that offered little new on its release.

What interests me about Space Marine is the question of lore. Pretty much every blockbuster title now must come with extensive back story to contextualise the game world and move the action along (though there is the odd notable exception, as well as most of Nintendo's biggest names). Even the most mindless blaster deems it necessary to be decked out in lore. You name it, Call of Duty, Halo, Gears of War, they have their worlds with novel, toy, and other merchandising spin offs. Yet none of these can compete with Space Marine, itself a spin off from almost 30 years of Warhammer 40k lore developed as a backdrop for GW's series of interlinked table top board and miniature-based war games. With that history, and iterations of rules, the passage of game time, and games designers and franchised novelists adding to and deleting bits of the 40k canon, it is the model video game lore aspires too. Its application in Space Marine automatically makes it an interesting artefact from the standpoint of video game criticism. Firstly, the 40k universe is simultaneously amoral and violent while also complex and shot through with grey areas - how can this be stuffed into a simplistic shoot 'n' stab everything-that-moves game? And second, it shows up how simplistic game lore often is.

By way of a quick precis for the uninitiated, the far future of the last decade of the 41st Millennium sees the human Imperium as the dominant power in the galaxy, with colonies scattered over a million habitable worlds. But this is a dark age of regression and superstition. There is little technological development as our descendants worship the manufactories, ships, and war machines bequeathed by earlier ages of space colonisation and scientific achievement. To make matters worse, the Imperium is a xenophobic and genocidal entity constantly at war with several alien races. And at its heart lies the emperor, an emaciated superhuman corpse whose soul stuff acts as a beacon that enables interstellar travel through the shifting medium of warp space. The warp is necessary for the Imperium, but represents its greatest threat. It is inhabited by malevolent forces who are made possible and powered by the psychic shadow humanity and other species cast in this parallel dimension. They typically manifest as the forces of chaos, of which there are four main powers representing war and blood, entropy and disease, pleasure and debauchery, and intrigue and change. The chaos powers have a physical presence in Galactic space, from which it sends out black crusades of its followers and champions to lay waste to the Imperium. Likewise, cultists worshipping these beings are active right across human space. Chaos is the terrifying id threatening to devour humanity, and the Imperium a theocratic and utterly ruthless super ego implacably and violently opposed to any and all its manifestations.

That's 40K in a nutshell, but there is much more to it. A dystopia scarred by unremitting war is, well, a backdrop suited for table top wargaming. But here, you can catch glimpses of the ambiguity of 40k. The Imperium is the most appalling regime that thinks nothing of sacrificing billions of lives and killing entire worlds if the ruling council back on Earth (or, in the lore, appropriately, Terra) wish it, for the good of the species, naturally. Chaos, meanwhile, is no exotic other as such - the four powers of chaos accentuate all too human traits. Khorne, the blood god, is simultaneously the patron of honour. Nurgle, the patron of decay, simultaneously valorises care and rebirth. Slaanesh is found not just in perversion, but all the pleasures of sense-endowed and sense-making creatures. And Tzeentch revels in diligence and intellectual inquiry as well as intrigue and messy change. Chaos then represents the freeing of human sensibilites, albeit at the price of destroying humanity and reducing it to the chattel of daemons, chaos lords, and other abominable unpleasantness. Literally, as appalling as the Imperium is, it's tough love and harsh medicine.

The Freudian overtones are pretty clear in 40k, but there is a black and white story underneath, of every crime committed by the Imperium is for the good of the species. We get moments of this in Space Marine's dialogue. Several times, Titus is exposed directly to warp stuff without ill effects when, normally, it would lead to death. His imperceptibility is taken as evidence of consorting with chaos rather than its heroic opposite, and come the end the Inquisition turn up and cart Titus off on the basis of this denunciation. Whereas previously, the appearance of chaos in the game is an outcome of a prideful Inquisitor capturing this warp stuff for use as a power source. Temptation, in the inquisitor's case, is sanctioned, whereas demonstrable resistance is cause for suspicion. Compare this with, say, Gears of War, Resistance: Fall of Man, and Killzone: good and bad are clearly defined, the humans are corn fed Americans from mom-and-apple-pie societies and their enemies are hive mind aliens (communists and zombies) or space Nazis. There is zero narrative complexity: the world has gone to shit so kill, kill, kill.

And yet these different narratives co-exist within broadly similar kinds of gameplay. This is because the cut scene/action coupling allows for the two components of the game to play out. In video game criticism theory, there has long been a debate over what is the proper province of commentary and scholarship beyond reviews: narratology, or how games tell a story, and ludology, the mechanics of the game and what is demanded of the player. They have unnecessarily been opposed to one another in a debate as fruitless as that between quantitative vs qualitative methods in Sociology because they mesh together, in greater or lesser degrees of accomplishment, that vary from title to title. Yet while working together, the narrative and the ludic can be analytically separated because the game makes that separation. It's how something like Space Marine can have a morally ambiguous and Gears of War an uncomplicated background at the level of story, while carving up wrong 'uns with chainsaws and riddling enemy bodies with bullets in the core gameplay. The game materialises and realises the story in the baddies to be killed, the setting, the weapons, armour, and other trappings employed and, if you're really lucky, with AI-controlled team mates who natter in the cut scenes, and the threads of the messy action are drawn together again by the cinematics.

Therefore this is suggestive of thinking about how story and gameplay support one another, and opens up questions around whether tensions exist between the two that conditions its functioning as an entertainment package (a game has to be good, after all) and its reception by reviewers, it sales, and the player experience itself.

No Man's Sky and the Political Economy of Hype

You've heard of GamerGate, right? The "movement" of online men-babies who harassed, doxed, and attacked women game developers and game firm employees because they were ostensibly upset about "ethics in video game journalism". No? Well here, knock yourself out. Anyway, "professional" video game journalism has another problem: a tendency to fall for the hype it generates. This reveals itself in the release of Hello Games' No Man's Sky, the much-trailed space exploration game.

What is particularly eye-catching from a game development/technical point of view is that its universe contains over 18 quintillion planets. These are generated procedurally from the developers' algorithms, which specify planetary formation, the distribution of sea and land, atmospheric composition, toxicity/radiation, and the appearance and behaviour of alien flora and fauna. Players wake up on a random world and start their exploration from there, with an official (but non-compulsory) objective of working one's way to the centre of the galaxy. Money can be earned from identifying the native wildlife and uploading your discoveries to the servers where, in the first 24 hours, players had "discovered" some 10 million species. These discoveries become fixed points in the universe which can later be visited by other players, but given its size ... And that's all there is to it. Explore, mine, trade, very, very occasionally shoot things, and follow the loose story threads weaved into the game. It's definitely the kind of game I avoid because I'd never have the time to inflict my writing on you. But my nearest and dearest is hooked. She might resurface in time for Christmas.

Not everyone is satisfied, though. Destructoid moaned that it's all a bit samey, and the differences between worlds are cosmetic. Slapping down a six-out-of-ten, Video Gamer made similar points, saying it becomes endlessly repetitive. The question has to be asked, after talking it up for so long, what were they expecting?

Since I was a nipper, hype has been part of any big game's pre-release. Game mags did then as games mags and websites do now. They wax lyrical about the game, bigging it up right to the release date. As far as the industry's political economy is concerned, it serves the interests of the game companies because interest and sales go hand-in-hand. And for the reviewers, it drives sales and web traffic as regular readers stick around to await the final verdict. You don't have to pretend a conspiracy between developers and reviewers, even though they have been uncovered in the past. Both have an identity of interests in the hype and will work independently of each to feed the machine. In No Man's Sky's case, Sony threw their full weight behind the project and have ensured it got plenty of coverage since its first appeared in late 2013. But unlike other huge games, Hello Games' Sean Murray has been scrupulous describing what the game is and isn't. Extensive previewing and interviews have set out the game world, what the thing entails, the slim chance of ever bumping into another player in the universe, and the very light plot elements. So to see it copping criticisms for "being boring" and not being a fast-paced first person shooter like Destiny, well, it's a bit like attacking Tetris for lacking platforming action.

It's not like we haven't seen this sort of game before. No Man Sky is more of a direct sequel to the classic Elite than Elite's official follow ups are. Back in the day on the trusty old Spectrums, BBC Micros, and the like the same procedural trick was pulled to produce a universe of just over 2,000 planets. Game play was about trading commodities between planets, upgrading your ship, shooting up space pirates (or becoming one yourself), and that was it. Completely without aim, it was a fundamentally open gaming experience that just wasn't available elsewhere, and is rightly regarded as one of the greatest games ever made. I have very fond memories of using the mining laser to light everything other than asteroids up. I have not jumped on every scrap released or leaked about No Man's Sky but, again, no claim has ever been made that we were looking forward to something qualitatively different to its illustrious ancestor.

And here lies the problem. Hype is inevitable when it comes to entertainment commodities, but time and again the political economy of reviewing inflates and distorts expectations. A preview creates a frame which is populated by all manner of wonderments and claims designed to generate interest in the game and its coverage, and it is through this distorted view that the game is subsequently evaluated. It's a bit like economists or sociologists creating models of the world, and then criticising real-life social action for refusing to conform. And in some cases, it leads to reviews that are egregiously off-centre and structurally dishonest. How about a critique within its own terms, like the mysterious absence of gas giants (when they dominate our own universe), or lack of variety among solar systems which, again, nowhere near match the diversity we've turned up in our own telescopes?

No Man's Sky is a refreshing change to the cavalcade of shooters, action RPGs, shooters, and action RPGs that are the lot of modern video gaming. If you want a change of pace, then approach on its own terms.

On the Nintendo Classic Mini

I didn't have time to reflect on the two big video game news stories of the last week or so. Interestingly, this blog's occasional bête noire, Nintendo, is at the centre of both. First was the gaming phenomenon of the year and probably the decade - the ubiquitous Pokémon Go. And the other is ... the sort of re-release of the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Excuse me, what? We've had occasion to scratch our heads at some of Nintendo's bizarre business decisions, so on the face of it putting out a system that turns 33 this year seems to lie in that tradition. And yet, it also makes perfect sense. Dubbed the Nintendo Classic Mini, what's being released isn't the endearingly unreliable breeze block of old, but a compact plug-in and play. No blowing on cartridges or wiggling them about in the hope of getting the bloody thing working, just wire it up and you're good to go.

Retailing at an as yet undecided figure (thanks to Brexit, likely to be a wheelbarrow of used twenties), buyers have the choice of some 30 built-in games. There are titles here that defined the NES and will be widely known - your Marios, Zeldas, Metroid, and so on. There's a handful of key third party games as well. Mega Man 2, Ninja Gaiden (Shadow Warriors to us PAL people), and Castlevania are well known and notorious in equal measure. There's some filler. Why Ice Climber and Galaga are there is something of a mystery. Tecmo Bowl was a well-received and popular American footy title over there, but I can't see it attracting many plays from UK purchasers of the Mini. I suppose Donkey Kong had to be on there (yawn), but why did Nintendo decide to license Super C over Contra (Probotector for us)? Perhaps the original game is too much of a money spinner for Konami on the virtual console. And there's a couple of titles that never made it over here, namely the original Final Fantasy and Star Tropics. RPG-tastic.

Okay, for sad sacks like me who are only truly comfortable playing video games from yesteryear (so much for the professed accelerationism), this could be a worthwhile purchase. Not all the NES games available on the Mini are easy to find or inexpensive to pick up. You'll find seven of these among my stack of carts, and I'm not willing to blow silly money on say Castlevania, which can go for over a hundred quid boxed and complete. Then again, I'm in the niche retro game market, and while it's of a size sufficient to support Retro Gamer magazine, specialist markets, and an ecosystem of independent stockists of old stuff, it alone probably isn't big enough for the Mini.

In America where, obviously, the retro scene is bigger, there's a larger core audience receptive to something like this. Lest we forget, the NES had the US video game scene locked down for years in the late 1980s. Beyond the retro freaks Nintendo is well positioned to pluck at the nostalgic heart strings of gamers who grew up with their machine. It could be one of those purchases "for the kids" that mum and dad end up spending Christmas Day playing, or something like that. And I'm sure the Mini will do well there. In Europe, which was never properly conquered by Nintendo, it's slightly different. The home computer formats, then Sega, then Sony carried all before them. In addition to retro folks, the Mini might appeal to younger gamers into their video game history and, ugh, hipsters. But enough for it to be considered a success?

As I've suggested previously, it's now possible to feel nostalgic about how we used to do nostalgia. Before the advent of popular streaming services, playing old games and digging out old albums often demanded a rummage through the loft or under the bed. This is exemplified in Umberto Eco's 2004 novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Leona. To help rebuild his memory, the lead character spends almost the entire book turning his grandfather's loft upside down to dig out the old comics and magazines he grew up with. Now, he'd just have to search for a few phrases and the PDFs of those old strips are at the end of a mouse click. Nostalgia then was dependent on a certain level of inaccessibility. Now, effectively, we're in the eternal present. Everything can be listened to, watched, and played as and when. Nintendo's Mini allows for the accessible to be a little more accessible by providing a reliable iteration of its classic machine. No loading difficulties. No hunting high-and-low for classic carts. No extra virtual console purchases necessary. It makes the convenient even more convenient, and adds to the effacement of nostalgia old-stylee. If you're vaguely into old games, and the price turns out to be okay, you too can do your bit in helping this process along.

Altered Beast for the MegaDrive/Genesis

"Wise from your gwave!" An entire generation of gamers were introduced to Sega's 16-bit wonder machine with those very words. Grab your pack-in copy of Altered Beast, slam it in the slot, hit start and straight away your spanking new console was making like Jonathan Ross. Bwilliant. For folks of a certain age, no introduction is necessary for this game. It's fondly remembered and hated in equal measure because of its ubiquity and simple beat 'em up gameplay. And if you didn't have a MegaDrive, it was hard to escape as it was one of those rare games that got converted to every machine going. Even Nintendo got a version (at least in Japan).

Altered Beast debuted in the arcades in 1988 using Sega's System 16 board, which was then noted for its state-of-the-art scaling effects. While the game made limited use of this hardware, it proved a hit with enough players to guarantee it an after life as a home conversion. For those unfamiliar with the game, you are cast as a centurion resurrected to rescue Zeus's daughter, Athena from the evil clutches of Neff (as a powerful deity in her own right, quite why she needs rescuing is never explained). There follows five levels of beastie bashing and zombie slaying. Perhaps an early attract was how the undead exploded into chunks of flesh after getting a battering. Nice. As you move along you acquire power ups from killing a blue Cerberus, transforming your character into an ever-more buff killing machine. When three are scooped up you change into a beastie of your own - two different kinds of fireball-toting werewolf, a flying dragon with electrical attacks, a were-bear who can turn opponents into stone, and a were-tiger with a singularly rubbish energy ball that dances up and down the screen. For his part, Neff throws legions of ghouls and monsters your way, as well as depositing the climax of each level climaxes with a compulsory boss fight.

And that's all there is to it. A simple thump-a-thon with a Greek mythology theme and interesting power up mechanic appealed to the punters, so how could the home conversions go so horribly wrong? But they did. Commodore's Amiga, the most advanced micro of the time, had this abomination served up. Sega's own conversion to the Master System was pretty awful too. And yet, perversely this worked to Sega's advantage. Altered Beast on the MegaDrive is by far the closest of all the conversions produced for the 8- and 16-bit markets, and plays well too. It's nowhere near as difficult as the arcade parent, and is a nut so soft even the most cack-handed of gamers could crack it with enough practice. Such low difficulty helped generate demand for a new gaming experience - one could not dine out on Altered Beast for long. Importantly, it set a new standard for video games by being almost arcade perfect. For whatever reason, this was much harder to achieve on the likes of the Amiga and Atari ST and so, side-by-side, the MegaDrive version blew them out of the water - even though pound for pound it wasn't as advanced as Commodore's machine in a number of areas. It was a teaser as well, the gaming equivalent of flirty fishing. Well not mind-blowing by the standards of the date, the whole package was carried off with enough aplomb - big sprites, smooth scrolling, parallax, clear speech (which was seldom achieved in later MegaDrive games, bizarrely) to hint at the potential snuggled up in the system's hardware.

Altered Beast's big problem, however, was its strength. As a simplistic title video game evolution very quickly outpaced it. Within a year of its release it looked tired and a wee bit drab. It became the butt of console mags, with buyer's guide scores ranging from the average to the distinctly dire. Small wonder Sega eventually dropped it for the much more impressive Sonic the Hedgehog - a title that remains a peak achievement of 16-bit programming and game design. Yet it served its purpose. Altered Beast accelerated the take up of the (then) new generation of consoles, cleaving and converting Nintendo adherents in North America and throwing down an insurmountable challenge to the home computer formats in Western Europe. It was the shape of things to come and helped establish the 'arcade experience' as the key hegemonic game playing value where late 80s/early 90s gaming was concerned. So if you ever pick upon a review, whether from the time or more recently that heaps criticism on Altered Beast, just pity the fools: it had a profound, if understated impact on gaming.

Do Violent Games Cause Misogyny?

See Breitbart, the noxious US import that has kept James Delingpole's career on life support? You can? Okay. Now imagine taking the Breitbart concept: unhinged right-wingery, stupidity, and dishonesty, and sticking it in the food processor. Get a face, say Louise Mensch, to front it up. And then people said product with content too dumb and churnalists too lazy for Breitbart. The end result is the political comment equivalent of what my cat has just visited upon her litter tray.

Heatstreet is Murdoch's latest go at being "relevant" to the tech-hungry, celeb-bothering, video-gamin' 20-somethings heavily into rabidly right-wing politics. Uncle Rupers might be happy to have Vice on the balance sheet as long as the cash keeps flowing, but he'd much prefer a successful brand that can do the business hawking repellent views similar to his own. Still, I'd managed to ignore this doomed venture until my Twitter feed tossed up this: No, Grand Theft Auto Doesn’t Make You Sexist. Video games and sociology, right up my street.

In a scholarly paper, 'Acting Like a Tough Guy: Violent-Sexist Video Games, Identification With Game Characters, Masculine Beliefs, & Empathy for Female Violence Victims' (read it here), the authors say "We hypothesized that playing violent-sexist video games would increase endorsement of masculine beliefs, especially among participants who highly identify with dominant and aggressive male game characters. We also hypothesized that the endorsement of masculine beliefs would reduce empathy toward female violence victims ... We found that participants' gender and their identification with the violent male video game character moderated the effects of the exposure to sexist-violent video games on masculine beliefs. Our results supported the prediction that playing violent-sexist video games increases masculine beliefs, which occurred for male (but not female) participants who were highly identified with the game character. Masculine beliefs, in turn, negatively predicted empathic feelings for female violence victims. Overall, our study shows who is most affected by the exposure to sexist-violent video games, and why the effects occur." They go on to argue in the paper itself that lack of empathy is the most significant predictor of violence against women, and so games that depress empathy could well be problematic. More specifically, broken down into variables there were statistically significant relationships between reported "masculine beliefs" and level of violence, and more specifically between those values and identification with a masculine player-character in what the research team classify as 'violent-sexist' games.

Now, remember, correlation isn't causation. At best it indicates that a relationship *in all likelihood* exists, but it doesn't necessarily point to the direction of these relationships. Was it the case that the young men reported a more sympathetic attitude toward masculine values after playing the likes of Grand Theft Auto because these views were already in place, or that they had been "caused" by the game they had just played. In all likelihood, as the authors claim, the former is more likely to be the case. At best the sorts of tropes on show in GTA would merely confirm and reinforce pre-existing dispositions. Nevertheless, there are some problems, not least being that the observed correlation only involved the 22 who played GTA (out of a total sample of 154 Italian high school students who played a variety of games). Because the group is so small it's not wise to draw any sort of conclusion beyond "more study needed".

None of this makes it into the dimly-lit consciousness of our HeatStreet writer. Instead of addressing, or even polemicising against the results, he writes "Is Grand Theft Auto sexist? Is killing a woman in a video game somehow inherently worse than killing a man? Well, maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but if women are tough enough to be president, fight in war and kick my ass ... they’re probably tough enough to be included in video game carnage, just like the men." This is not so much as missing the point as doing a very deliberate body swerve to avoid it. Where women feature as video game adversaries, historically speaking there is a tendency to represent them as overly-sexualised. In 1990s beat 'em ups, like the otherwise wonderful Streets of Rage 2, women typically appear in fetish wear as you smack them in the mouth. When things moved into three dimensions, Lara Croft of Tomb Raider fame led the way in svelte bodies and generous hips and boobs, and so did the baddies. And today there is not much variation in female body types available. How often do you spot overweight or small-breasted women in a game?

This isn't to suggest portrayals of women in games cause sexism. They don't, they reflect, feed back, and naturalise already existing views and assumptions - an effect that's quite subtle but nevertheless real. If there was no effect whatsoever, then why would a mainstream game centered around Nazi battlefield exploits, such as my Call of Duty: Heroes of the SS thought experiment, be hugely controversial? Might it have something to do with normalising and rendering banal a regime long-associated with truly foul crimes? 

In the real world, it is rarely a matter of something causing something or not, it's a matter of degree. If it applies to the in-your-face, it's also the case with the commonplace.

Super Aleste for the Super Nintendo

Let's have a brief video game interlude. Super Aleste, or Space Megaforce if one hails from North America, is a stylish 1992 vertically-scrolling shooter developed by Compile. For retro game aficionados, they were a byword for quality shooters in the vintage era of eight and sixteen bit systems. Their Aleste series of games were known for fast, frenetic action, imaginative game play gimmicks, and superlative programming. This was a developer at the top of their game and knew how to make symphonies on the machines of the day.

Naturally, Super Aleste is no different from its NES, Master System, PC Engine, and MegaDrive forebears. The plot is some nonsense about a metal sphere emerging from the depths of space to lay waste to the Earth, and only one ship can succeed where the combined might of humanity's air force and space fleet have failed. Thankfully, the plot is the only banality where this game is concerned. You ship flies up the speed with endless waves of baddies flying at you kamikaze-stylee, occasionally letting off a bullet here and there. To complicate matters there are various gun, missile, and laser emplacements that get really annoying as the game wears on. And come the end you can find quite imaginative and unusual bosses hanging out and concerned with stymieing your progress.

I know I'm still not doing it any justice, but there were more fresh ideas (then) packed into Super Aleste than virtually any other shooter. Take the power-up system, for instance. Lifted from preceding Compile games, it allowed selection from eight available weapons by picking up relevant icons as they drift down the screen, and their power can be increased via orange or green orbs left behind by blasted enemies. The problem is not all weapons are equal - some are awful, especially the multi-directional shot. But the variation between the levels mean you can't just power up to the max and breezily steamroller a way through. Also attached to this is a little mechanic that was copied, sorry, "inspired" similar in subsequent games. Super Aleste wasn't the first to link level of power ups with the number of hits the player character ship can sustain - get hit and you're knocked down four power levels, cop another bullet and you're cat food. But it was the first, as far as I know, that linked it to spawning locations. During the course of the game one acquires extra lives (standard) and "special" extra lives (not-so-standard) that restart you at the moment of your destruction. Once these have all gone it's back to the checkpoint, which is very annoying when boss-related pugilistics are the order of the day.

Unfortunately, this is a mechanic you're going to have to get used to because some of the levels are very tough. The one that used to drive me to distraction was the graveyard of humanity's battle fleet. Not content with kicking our asses, the dastardly aliens have booby trapped and turned those ships' weapons against you. Sauntering along and having  a huge laser beam appearing from nowhere to slice you up is not helpful. Nor is blasting away right next to a bit of scenery which then decides to explode. It's tough, but not impossibly tough. A little bit of skill, patience, and copious smart bomb usage is enough to plow through.

It also has to be said that Super Aleste is a stupendous technical achievement for the SNES. Considering its CPU was super weedy by the standards of the day, unlike the debacle of Super R-Type there isn't a hint of slowdown in this game. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to think both ran on the same machine. Dozens of sprites and bullets fly about the screen with gay abandon, and often times there's some very nifty mode 7 taking place in the background. The second level is most superlative in this respect. Hordes of enemies seek you out as a scaling rotating station, which doubles up as half the level and the boss, spins and zooms in and out in the play field background. It's impressive now, what gamers must have made of it in 1992 ... Pleasingly, the sound is no slouch either. Effects are standard blaster fare with a bit of badly-articulated trash-talking by the bosses, but the music is among the best on the SNES. I've never been a fan of the sound chip's faux orchestral reverb, but this time mixed in with pretty fine techno tracks it was definitely pleasing to my refined/snobbish ear.

Overall, Super Aleste stands out from the pack as being one of only two really good vertical shooters on the SNES, and is the apogee of a genre that has long become a niche pursuit. But for unthinking, reflex- sharpening, instinct-driven gameplay, the sunny old 16-bit Nintendo has few that can top this.