Curmudgeon GamerIf you ask me, gamers are a notoriously fickle bunch that hop around whatever niche fad is currently popular at any given time, flicking aimlessly around their singular objective like a moth to a flame - only this moth will threaten to kill you and make some sort of racist remark because you said whatever franchise he's currently cherishing isn't necessarily a divine blessing. This leads to some games being revered above and beyond the merit which caused their popularity in the first place. I would quite comfortably lump the original Ninja Gaiden into this category: a thumb-aching, testosterone-fuelled misogynistic charge that you'll enjoy playing but feel terribly embarrassed if a (hypothetically, as this is unlikely to happen to any of us) girl walked into the room when you were watching a cutscene.
The trouble is, Ninja Gaiden II has recently arrived and has reminded us that at the end of the day it's all just a game. People aren't happy with this.
There's lots of bandying around the word "cheap" to describe the whole affair. To some extent, this is true. Ninja Gaiden II is a victim of its own progress; in an attempt to appeal to the current trend of regenerating life bars and a greater sense of not dying every six seconds, your average encounter will end with your life bar filling up to a fair amount of its capacity. How, then, do Tecmo infuse their concoction with a sense of difficulty? By upping the amount of damage you'll be taking, and also turning the speed of the game all the way up to eleven. Things will fly at you in this game, and they'll take your life with it. But it's okay, you'll recover. Think Bruce Willis in Die Hard donning a skin-tight black ninja suit and you're in the right area. There's other things to consider, too. Money is now so easy to come by it's likely being fed intravenously into the game from the bank of Nintendo. There's also enough weaponry in the game that, come the denouement, you'll have enough stock to take on the in-game merchant at his own business.
All this adds up to create a different game from the Ninja Gaiden that came before. You can't blitz through a level without taking any damage and you can't cling onto your healing items like they're family heirlooms. You're going to be forced to use them. Maybe this takes some of the finesse away, but it creates a rougher, more brutal experience. Considering that limbs get lopped off in this game quicker I'll get killed in a game of Halo 3 online I can safety say that brutal is what the developers were aiming for. Every weapon and item in your arsenal is valuable and you're going to need to employ it all. There's also enough video evidence on the Ninja Cinema mode to prove that skill and tactics are still part of the game. The biggest flaw to Ninja Gaiden II is that, because of associations with its predecessor, it will be punished for trying out something new. That, and the Armadillo boss is a real sod.
Labels: curmudgeoning, fanboys, tecmo, xbox360
"[Violence is] one method that you can use to really bring a player into a game and make it more satisfying... It's one portion of making this game the best action game on the market, but it's not like we have a specific goal to [make this the most violent game ever]."I don't buy it. If you're making a game and you're thinking "in this game, we want the player to behead and dismember his enemies limb by limb" then it is technically true that you may not want to make the most violent game ever. But the effect will be the same.
It sounds like they're saying that their intention to make a game that extends the Extreme Combat genre is a defense, while the effect will be to make a game that has horrific imagery. Imagery like this description Graft relates:
Chopping off an enemy's arms won't necessarily kill him, for example, but will leave him with no way to wield a weapon. Chopping off an enemy's legs will drop the torso to the ground, immobilizing him, but he'll pull out a grenade and try to blow himself up along with you from his stationary position.Delightful.
What's the difference between a game that sets out specifically to let you brutally dismember a person and a game that claims it's about making fun combat and along the way rewards brutal dismemberment?
For the record, I have experimented with sadistic acts in games which allowed me to do it. There is a parking garage on the second island in GTA3 which is near your second hideout, and I recall spending time with Bob experimenting with the NPC crowds and explosives. For example, you could kill a bystander, watch the NPCs run up to help him/her, and then toss a molotov cocktail in amongst them, and more people would come over to help those victims, and so forth. Eventually, the game would punish you if you let your wanted rating get too high. Even then you could try to extract rewards, though. If you waited until the FBI cars showed up, you could escape in one of them, and keep it in your garage as a prize, provided you were skillful and lucky.
(Disclaimer: I have written and continue to write for Next-Gen.biz.)
The longer version is that we've reached the point where more graphic gore doesn't actually make games more appealing. You can have more blood. You can have more fluid-like blood. You can have severed heads and limbs that bump around the environment with amazingly realistic physics. You can even have those severed heads and limbs give off appropriately heavy or squishy sound effects in Dolby Digital 5.1.
But it's all for naught. I think Valve has put their finger on what matters: a visually appealing game that is (hopefully) fun to play. It will be more broadly appreciated. It's not that terribly far removed from Looney Toons that we've all watched as kids.
I don't know what a game like Ninja Gaiden really thinks it will accomplish with gore like that, but the one thing it won't achieve is mainstream acceptance.
I enjoyed the time I spent with Tecmo's Deception games on the PS1. I've spent about an hour with Trapt, a sequel of sorts on the PS2. I've seen exactly three features which distinguish it from the original trilogy:- Nice 3D graphics
- Decent sounding Japanese voice work
- Attractive women dressed in trashy leather clothing
Seriously, I am fairly sure that even the first few missions are exactly the same enemies in the same rooms that I played in Deception III: Dark Delusion.
Sad, Tecmo. Really, really sad. Then again...I did buy it.
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