Just a good dungeon crawl would do the trick.

The whole top down view, press a single button a lot, manage your inventory, and drink potions genre has kind of been ignored lately, and with good reason.  I just summarized it for you in that last sentence.  Still, there’s no reason why someone can’t make a well crafted version of the same type of game and have it stand out.  It’s not like the market is really taking chances with new franchises, developers and publishers might as well go back to some old standby titles.

I hear that Sacred 2 may fit the bill.

Although to be honest, I may start playing it and then just lose interest.  It’s entirely possible that this phase may pass.

Both M rated titles, and both on Nintendo platforms.

I played a good bit of Madworld, lumbering my way through a couple of the earlier levels before I really started to “get it.”  It’s really more like a puzzle game combined with a fighter, and a tiny bit of pixel hunt.  You’ve got to combine prop kills with environmental kills to really get things going, but sometimes, finding the props is difficult because everything is in black and white.

The exception of course, is blood.  Which is everywhere.

Madworld is the other answer to that knock knock joke.  “What’s black and white and red all over?”

Chinatown wars is well, it’s top down cel-shaded GTA on the DS.  It’s like a deeper version of the 1997 client.  This time, there’s a bit of Dope Wars (remember that on the Palm?) as well.  Money seems quicker and easier to come by if you’re running merchandise to different parts of the city.

It’s not bad although I’ll probably get sick of it around the impossible missions.

Madworld is just too over the top not to play through.

But, back to the I get a follow (on twitter) from someone I don’t recognize, but don’t really think anything of it until I check out who it is.  Turns out it’s the Environmental Art Lead for Dead Space.  So he shows me a couple of things I missed and then I notice a name I think I recognize.  It’s the guy that lived in our group house for a couple of weeks, a friend of one of my roommates.

I do some additional research and well, he is the same artist that painted the triptych sitting in my bedroom, awaiting framing.  He painted them 13 years ago as a thank you for letting him stay.

And he did UI design for Dead Space.

Small world, indeed.

Compare the following scenarios.

Movie: While the main character is investigating a broken console, a shadow quickly flits down the hallway to the right, but the main character notice it.  Everyone yells, “What the hell was that on the right?!”  Character continues to repair broken console oblivious to their doom.

Dead Space:  While the main character is investigating a broken console, a shadow quickly flits down the hallway to the right, but the main character doesn’t notice it.  Everyone yells, “What the hell was that on the right?!”  This time, the camera turns and the actor actually investigates the hallway to the right.

The art in Dead Space plays no small part in the movie like experience. The USG Ishimura, while abandoned, is believable as a large spaceship equipped to house over a thousand people.  It has a work areas, living areas, engineering, and most importantly, a tram system and a zero G basketball court.  A shopping mall and even a virtual brothel are insinuated by advertisements that are strewn about the ship. There are trash cans and bathrooms.  Luggage is found near the flight deck but not near the mining facility.

In short, it’s a believable set.

Which is what makes it more unsettling for the audience when they find out that there doesn’t seem to be anyone on it.

If you look, really look at everything in Dead Space, the environment is telling you a story.  Literally.  The strange graffiti on the wall?  That’s all Unitology script that can be decoded because they created an alphabet for it.  Thomas Holt pointed that out to me and, I would have missed it because it was such detail.

I was avoiding Dead Space.  It came out in November of last year and I just was not sold on it.  I was done with the survival horror genre.  I had heard about it, and read favorable reviews, but then attributed those reviews to fans of Resident Evil.

Then, slowly, I was worn down by praise from people I knew and finally asked to borrow a copy from a friend.

I played three chapters on a Friday night, followed by a marathon session on Sunday because it was so compelling.  For the rest of the day on Sunday, I was accompanied by a friend of mine who was a fan of movies like Event Horizon.  She loved it not only because of the storyline, but because of the interaction and the feeling of immersion.

I’d like to see someone try, as a social experiment, playing Dead Space with an audience, a chapter a night say on a movie night.

For a long time, the control has made absolutely no sense to me.

Left stick moves.  Stand still to aim and shoot.  No sidestepping.

Dead Space controls make sense to me.  Left stick moves, right stick is the camera and aiming.  Not much to say about it, however there are a lot of comments being thrown about regarding the Resident Evil 5 control scheme and how it adds to the tension of the game.  The main contention here is that you cannot strafe while aiming.  I am not a big fan of this particular design decision.  I have played the demo and Chris Redfield is incapable of sidestepping while aiming a weapon.  This means he cannot ready a weapon while turning around a corner.

This is a weakness not only in the gameplay design, but in the writing.  What they are telling me, with their icy, necrotic grip on an outdated control scheme, is the following:

Chris Redfield is a paramilitary special agent who cannot aim a weapon down a corridor whilst turning and walking to go down it.

By comparison, Isaac Clarke is a communications engineer in a space suit wearing grav boots who can.

An engineer.

The producers of Resident Evil 5 claim that their control scheme adds to the tension.  They claim that if a player can just run away easily, it destroys any pretense of immediate danger.

Dead Space absolutely destroys that argument.

Isaac, while not a ballerina, handles like a third person shooter persona should.  Left stick strafes, right stick aims.  Left trigger brings up the gun to aim, and the controls remain the same.  He can aim a weapon at a corner and then carefully, very carefully creep up around the corner until he can see that there’s nothing there to be afraid of.

Before being eviscerated by the necromorph that has silently climbed up the railings behind him.

I would like to state that building tension in a game should not generated via an artificially difficult or non intuitive control scheme.  What you are building with that design choice is frustration.

Resident Evil did start the current survival horror renaissance, but it over five (well, more than five really) iterations, it has yet to truly evolve it.  Which is funny, considering that a lot of the storyline of the Resident Evil has to do with an evolving virus.

Really.

I’ve finished Dead Space and I’m on my second playthrough, and while I’m doing that, I’m thinking about how it does a lot of things right, how it brings innovation to a stale genre, and how the survival horror experience can be enhanced as a social activity.

First the game is fun.  There are a lot of elements to this, but first and foremost, the game is a good time.  It grabbed me from the beginning with the cold opener, with Isaac and the crew of the Kellion quickly realizing the straightforward repair mission is turning into something bad. The story, while nothing groundbreaking or thought provoking, is on par with a good science fiction suspense movie.

The UI.  I don’t really talk about the user interface in games.  Mainly I’m a happy person if the UI is out of the way, or subtle in some fashion so it doesn’t detract from the gameplay or the immersion of the title.  I’m going to say this now, when I saw that they were telling the story through the user interface, that was the moment when I decided I was going to purchase Dead Space.  It’s a singular moment, early on in the game where one of your fellow crewmembers contacts you over the radio.  In typical sci fi fashion, this is a video call.  In atypical video game fashion, it’s part of the UI.

Isaac is wearing a RIG, which simply, is a “space suit.”  The RIG has a holographic UI, so whenever Isaac needs to access anything in game, it projects a hologram into the world so he can see it.  This is hard to explain, but is incredibly awesome once you see it in action.  An innovation in storytelling immersion that really only works here in the space horror genre, but very well done and executed in Dead Space.

To be honest, I feel like it belongs in an art museum, one of those high ideal “interactive journeys” that would be placed between the room sized ceramic Chuck Taylors and the minature wrought iron diorama of Main Street USA in the 1980s.

There would be several stations, each with a monitor and some headphones and a simplified gyroscopic controller with one button instead of a PS3 control pad.

Really, it’s that esoteric.

I don’t think that the mainstream gaming audience is ready to drop $10 on an experience of this nature.

Made by the fine, fine people that brought you Cloud and Flow, the people who work at That Game Company.

You know, that one.

I know.

But, back to the game.  There is a feeling of coming back home, while also finding out that while you were gone, some incredible remodeling took place.  The new Street Fighter IV is a 3d fighter with a true 2d feel.  It just feels like street fighter, but with this fantastic aesthetic with some great special effects.  The collision detection for the fighting is great, and I never feel like an attack should have hit when it didn’t.  Soul Calibur and its sequels had that issue sometimes.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great 3d fighter.

There’s just something about coming back to a two dimensional fight plane. 

It may be nostalgia, it may just be simplifying the game mechanic, but whatever it is, it just feels solid.  And it’s fun.  So far, it’s great fun.  The characters are expressive caricatures (sterotypes?) from different countries and they fight each other.  An interesting addition is 2d animated sequences before the start of each character’s arc in the arcade mode.   This attempt at story is really only interesting the first time through for each character.  After that, it just becomes another reason to hold down the start button to skip through and get to the fighting.

My experience my be somewhat biased, I think it’s a great game.  This may have something to do with the fact that Street Fighter II, and fighting games in particular, were no small part of my high school experience, and to a certain extent, my college experience.  I spent many hours in front of arcade machines, and on couches with a controller in my hand playing a lot of fighting games.  It’s something I still like to do on occasion, but since I no longer live in a group house, the opportunities to engage in video fisticuffs are not as frequent.

Street Fighter IV taps into the nostalgia center of my brain, sure, but it’s not simply a rehash.  There are EX Modifiers for special attacks, Focus Attacks, Ultras, and Revenge attacks.  The revenge attacks are somewhat similar to the Desperation moves from the King of Fighters series, only command inputs are straightforward.

My experience is also biased by the fact that I’m using the MadCatz tournament edition stick.  It’s awesomeness also my be affecting my perceptions of the game.  I find I even use the Japanese layout and it works for me.  I may convert the “ball” style of the stick to “bat.”  What’s great is that it’s made so that you can do that.  It was the intention that you could change parts afterwards.  The stick is well made, solid to the point where I could classify it as heavy when sitting in my lap.

I’ll have to try out the online mode that replicates the arcade experience by allowing outside opponents to interrupt your single player arcade game.  That sounds awesome, but I can’t seem to get decent latency so my games never connect.  Until I figure that out, I’m looking forward to reliving the arcade experience at home.  Not only with the graphics and controller to match that of the arcade cabinet, but possibly some of the community as well.

Update:  The MadCatz tournament edition stick is $150.  a 360 is $300.  Street Fighter IV costs $60.   A Street Fighter IV cabinet costs 2,394,000 yen.  Which, when converted from space dollars, is $23,000.  I feel like I’m coming out ahead here.

It does work very well for the PSP, but there needs to be more on offer.

Like the entire catalog of PSP games, for starters.

But back to the DSi.  It’s quite different from the two other iterations of the DS.  It’s thinner, for starters.  There’s also a new OS.  The two screens are larger now by a quarter inch each.  Two VGA cameras, one on the hinge and one on the outer face now adorn the case.  These have been used for a photo manipulations application on the Japanese model, but if they’ll be utilized for games in the future is anyone’s guess.  WiFi capabilities (hello WPA) have been enhanced, or rather brought up to date.  An SD card slot has been added, which is how I’m assuming the app store will work.  I guess Nintendo learned their lesson from the Wii.

Dear Nintendo:  Don’t offer an application store if your device does not have sufficient storage to handle more than 35 apps.   I’m just saying.

Backwards compatibility for GameBoy Advance games, is gone.  So those other two models aren’t quite obsolete just yet.  It’s not that they took it out per se, but they did remove the GBA slot, so it’s more of a physical limitation than the hardware is incapable of it.  I’m not going to miss it.

That’s wha the GBA Micro is for.

The system firmware can finally be upgraded, which can be both a blessing and a curse.  Patching is something I really don’t need in my handheld gaming, but seeing as how the previous DS only supports WEP encryption for WiFi, I’ll take the ability to update firmware over none.

The DSi is scheduled to be stateside on April 5th, in black and blue models, for $170.  I’ll post something once I get my hands on one.

I spent way too much time editing the “stealth concept” article.  So, visit GiantBomb.com and be sure to listen to the podcast.

Those guys are great.