#0009 - Astra Superstars - 1998 - Sega Saturn - Sunsoft - Versus Fighter

So my wife was gone overnight to her sister's, which left me with some free time to pull out some games. Red Dead Redemption was obviously on the slate, but after about an hour I realized I wasn't exactly in the mood to spend ten minutes at a time riding across the landscape. I wanted something with instant gratification, something to pick up and play. Definitely something off the wall. I looked to Bayonetta but I wasn't in the mood for tons of completely obtuse cutscenes. I needed a one-on-one fighting game, the more obscure the better.

That was why I pulled out my album of Saturn games and found Astra Superstars, which fits all of those descriptions better than I had even hoped for. It made me realize just how long it had been since I'd played a game that was so...Japanese. The character designs are completely insane and feature mismatched names like "Lettuce"(???). But it works, of course, even with the singsong-y kids who introduce the fighters and the exuberantly expressive victory/loss poses. I don't know if its the fact that it's a Japanese game, a Saturn game, a '90s fighter, or all three - but again, it works.

I was also amazed at just how good the thing looks. For those of you who have an Action Replay 5-in-1 or a dedicated 4MB RAM cart, this game is one of the few that does support the technology in full for short load times and massive character sprites. What you get is a fighter that looks more like a Dreamcast game, which I guess just goes to show you how much life Sega's try-hard had left in it when it got the axe. Makes sense - I mean dang it, compare Legend of Mana on the Playstation to Dragon Quest VII or something and you'll see how much technology can progress on a single console system.

The last thing that Astra Superstars has going for it is that it's just so easy to play. Right off the bat it's unlike any other fighter I've seen - the characters are all witches and angels and stuff, so they float in the air and can 'jump' both up and down, so crouching is gone. And these jumps aren't the gravity-hobbled little bunny hops from Street Fighter II. These guys leap half the screen in a single bound, scaling bigger and smaller as they range out to the edges of the arena. It's great stuff, especially when you start chasing each other around the screen trying to land a hit.

The special moves are worth mentioning too. Since there's no crouch there's really no way to implement QCF and DP style inputs, so instead you get the ease of just smashing two buttons simultaneously: C+Z, B+Y, A+X. Each character has two offensive specials and a 'powerup' move that builds their meters. The specials are usually oriented along a left-right or up-down axis, and the big strategy is to stun your opponent with an attack and then follow up with a special from the right direction. It's great fun, and there's an added bonus if you make the other guy block too much: pinball mode.

Once you break down their guard bar, they start careening around the screen and smashing into everything, which is the perfect time to lay in extra damage. It is, of course, hysterical like the rest of Astra Superstars. Anyway, this is getting pretty long so I'll wrap it up. Suffice it to say that I had a ton of fun with Superstars, and it makes me want to check out Sunsoft's other fighters - Waku Waku 7 and Galaxy Fight. The biggest takeaway was just how ridiculously accessible the fighting mechanics were, and how friendly it was to button mashers. Last night at 2AM, it was exactly what I was looking for.

#0008 - Red Dead Redemption - 2010 - Multiplatform - Rockstar San Diego - Sandbox

I've always had a big affection for video games set in the Old West. I grew up playing Sunset Riders on my Sega Genesis and I got a big kick out of Red Dead Revolver and Gun for the original Xbox. When Redemption first came out I was pretty pumped but not sure if I wanted to drop $60. So I tried to rent it for a while - I say tried, because not a single place in the city had a copy for about a month after release - and eventually gave up on it. In fact, I'd almost forgotten about the game and had just subconciously written off buying it until it saw a price drop. But then GameStop/EBGames did their Power Hour deal that saw Redemption going for $24, and I had to pull the trigger. An hour of crashed servers and phone calls later, I'd gotten my copy ordered.

It showed up in the mail last week and since then I have cast aside all else. Assassin's Creed II will have to wait, as will Halo: Combat Evolved for the NeoGAF playthrough event. I'm too busy enjoying the game that Gun should have been - the game that takes GTAIV, cleans it up, and sticks it in the American West circa 1910 where it belongs. The stupid dating mechanics and tedium of GTAIV have been cut out, and exponentially huge amounts of options and variety have been stacked onto what Gun started back in 2005. I hear the campaign runs upwards of 30 hours on the short end, and I'm about halfway through, but I feel as if I've seen enough to comment on it.

What has really struck me time and time again in the first half of the game is the way the mechanics allow for emergent gameplay. Rockstar has given the player such a large set of tools/methods of interacting with the game world that it enables near-real-world level decision making possible. For instance: one of the side missions involved an NPC dying in the wilderness and refusing to go back to town. Since she wasn't cooperating - and this was after the mission was done and over - I went back to finish up. Using the lasso and hogtie mechanic I was able to throw her on the back of my horse and take her into town to see a doctor. It wasn't what I was supposed to do, and I don't know if Rockstar had provided for it. But the mechanics were just robust enough that it simply...happened.

Clearly these mechanics are only there because of the stupendous amount of attention to detail in the game. The RAGE engine and the art team have crafted a lovingly meticulous world - but you can see that through any trailer or gameplay clip.

I have two gripes - well, three - that I think would have made the game even better if addressed. First, there's no flexibility in the morality system. Sure, you can do horrible things, but it doesn't really matter. The story and cutscenes are all precanned, so even if you just knifed a whore to death in the street, you're going to talk to the shop owner with the same lines, and he's not going to bat an eye at the body in a pool of blood outside his door. Sure there's bounties and warrants and posses, but I wanted my evil actions to have an effect on the game. They didn't, so I didn't bother straying from the heroic line. Second, I think the wilderness and the sense of space would have been more powerful if there was a way to die of hunger or thirst. Make me gear up before I wander into the bowels of southern Mexico! Lastly, the combat was really easy.

Those things aside, I think we're going to be seeing Red Dead Redemption again at the end of the year on a whole bunch of "Game of the Year" awards. It took them way too long to get it out the door, but Rockstar has presented us with a lovingly detailed, revisionist take on America's favorite era. They've further cemented their position as the world leader in sandbox games, and they make me excited to think what their next-gen products will look like. You know at some point these guys are just going to reach critical mass - the games will be so huge they'll just never come out...

#0007 - Halo Wars - 2009 - Xbox 360 - Ensemble Studios - Real Time Strategy

Over at NeoGAF there's a sort of group-style "Let's Play" even going on in which Halo fans are playing through the entire franchise to commemorate the release of Halo Reach this September. I signed up along with a lot of other people, but I was one of the few to opt into starting off the marathon with Halo Wars. The game is (chronologically) the first in the series, and sets up much of the backstory of the Covenant vs. UNSC war by letting the player run through the adventures of the Spirit of Fire, one of the first UNSC cruisers to engage the Covenant invasion force. Though the story doesn't directly feed into Halo: Combat Evolved, you get a few passing references to some of the ships and people central to that game.

It's pretty illustrative of Halo Wars' place in the fan community that almost none of the guys over at NeoGAF were willing to play it. And I don't think that this is because Halo Wars is in any way a bad game, but rather because it's sort of the natural result of making an RTS out of a FPS franchise. It's hard to think of two genres of gaming that are more dissimilar - or have less overlap in fanbases. (Maybe pachinko games and Action RPGs?) On the contrary, I can unequivocally say that Halo Wars is the best console RTS game I've played, and that isn't just because its competition sucks. Ensemble got the controls right, they got the menus right, and they got the pacing right. I can't really tell if they got the difficulty right because I suck at these games, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Navigating the radial menus with the thumbsticks is a dream come true, and the different contextual uses of the (A) button make handling units efficient and functional, if not highly precise. Playing this game made me remember nightmarish times with earlier console efforts - Warcraft II and Command and Conquer on the Sega Saturn, Dune on the Sega Genesis. This game is a major step forward - heck, it was the first time with a console RTS that I couldn't blame my losses on anything except my own lack of skill. And if that's not the sign of a well-made game, then I don't know what is.

Not going to lie - the game was probably to short for fans of the genre. I have a pretty brief attention span with this sort of thing, though, and by the time the final credits rolled I was ready for it to be over. That's purely the FPS gamer in me speaking, and I feel guilty for it. I know that Ensemble did something great here: they laid out the final word on how to make an RTS for a controller, for a living room, and for a class of gamer not accustomed to the rigors of PC gaming. Is it dumbed down compared to the Red Alert games or Supreme Commander. Damn straight it is, and if you check around that's what you'll find to be the source of almost 80% of the complaints from the PC-born guys. "Too slow, too simple, too watered-down."

From my experiences, though, that was pretty much what had to be done, and Ensemble really stepped up to the plate to do it. I wish that they could have done it outside the Halo series, perhaps, as the Halo community probably wasn't the most appreciative of their success. So here's a word to those of you out there you hate/dislike Halo and have ignored Halo Wars for that reason: give it a shot! This game wasn't made for us, and that should definitely interest you. With Ensemble Studios disbanded and shuttered, Halo Wars stands as a eulogy to the makers of Age of Empires and a testament to their ability to innovate until the rug got pulled out from under them.