Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People: Episode One

I find these days on my Wii I'm spending more time with downloadable content than I am with games that come in a box.

Case in point is Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, which is available through the WiiWare service. It's by Telltale Games, the people who delivered the recent Sam & Max games, and it's more or less up to their usual standard.

The game's based on the Homestar Runner website, and it's pitched at people who are already well familiar with Strong Bad and his wacky crew. If you don't know the difference between Homestar and Homsar, or understand how Strong Bad can type with boxing gloves on his hands, then most of what's going on here will go straight over your head.

For Strong Bad fans, though, the game's a treat. Like the Sam & Max titles it's a classic point and click puzzle-solving outing, but it makes pretty good use of the property it's based on. All the cast have their original voice acting (i.e. The Brothers Chaps plus Missy whatserface). Locations you can visit include the House of Strong, Bubs' Concession Stand, and the King of Town's Castle. You can spend some time with classic Videlectrix 8-bit gaming, in this case Snake Boxer 5, and you can even design your own Teen Girl Squad comic, which is probably the most awesome minigame in the history of minigames.

One of the traditional problems with point-n-clicks is that while they can be a lot of fun, they rarely offer replay value. Strong Bad's Cool Game etc goes some way to addressing that by including both a number of achievement-style trophies, and an "extended play" mode that lets you keep exploring after the credits roll. Unfortunately there's not much guidance on how to achieve the trophies and the extended play option seems to be a little buggy so you'll probably end up consulting an FAQ to get the most out of the game.

This is, obviously, just the first episode out of several that Telltale plan to release. If it's anything like the Sam & Max games, they'll almost certainly improve over time as Telltale get comfortable with the license, so I have high hopes for future titles.

I played this game on the Wii, but it's also available for the PC. The game works well with the Wiimote but it does take up a sizeable chunk of your hard drive. It'll be interesting as future episodes come out because I don't think the Wii has enough on-board memory to store a whole season at the same time. The sooner Nintendo patch the system to let you boot from an SD card, the better.

Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney 3: Trials and Tribulations

There's few things more satisfying than seeing a good trilogy come to a satisfying conclusion, and Phoenix Wright 3 on the Nintendo DS is an excellent example.

If you're new to the Ace Attorney games then you're out of luck. Trials and Tribulations assumes you're already familiar with the rules and characters of Phoenix Wright's world, and spends most of its time resolving the hanging plot threads from the first two games and bringing the continuing storyline to a rousing finale. The original Phoenix Wright is all but impossible to find in stores now so getting into the franchise as a newcomer can be a tad difficult.

Series fans, though, are in for a treat. This is easily the best of the three Phoenix Wright games, and it delivers everything a fan could hope for in style. Not only do you get to play as Phoenix, but you'll also fight a couple of short flashback cases as Mia Fey, and for an all-too-brief segment you'll even get to control former prosecutor Miles Edgeworth. You'll get to see Mia's traumatic first case, foil the plots of scheming matriarch Morgan Fey, and solve the mystery of the missing master of the Kurain Channelling Technique.

There are five cases all up this time around, although two are quite short, and they're tied together with a much tighter overarching plot than in previous installments. You'll want to have played the previous titles, as the game wastes little time reintroducing characters like Franzciska von Karma, Larry Butz and Adrian Grossberg, instead assuming that you know the score and are ready to play. Similarly, the basics of cross-examining witnesses, producing evidence, and breaking psyche-locks are glossed over even within the tutorial case.

The game's legal system is still as silly as ever. To defend your clients from murder charges you'll need to not only establish their innocence but uncover the real culprit. You're opposed by a range of hostile witnesses and flamboyant prosecutors, and only sharp wits and a keen eye for contradictory evidence will get you through.

The logic may occasionally be rubbish, but it's internally consistent, and once you've got a feel for the way the game "thinks" you'll be able to progress fairly smoothly. You'll occasionally run into points where you just have to try every option available before finding the right one, but they're few and far between.

Like Phoenix Wright and Justice for All, this installment was originally released in Japan as a GameBoy title, and has been ported to the DS for Western release. The art and sound assets are, therefore, not spectacular, but they're perfectly suited to the gameplay and do a great job of conveying drama and character.

The real star of the show, as always, is the writing. Silly courtroom antics aside, these are tight, challenging murder mysteries. They're beautifully paced and solidly plotted and despite a wide roster of guest characters you'll be moved to really care about the characters you meet and their often bizarre dilemmas. If it occasionally feels more like you're playing an interactive novel than a video game, you won't care, because it's a really good novel.

In the end everything comes to a head in a fantastic final case. Trials and Tribulations delivers a compelling climax to the first Ace Attorney trilogy and will leave you feeling very generous towards the franchise as a whole. If Phoenix Wright is already amongst your fandoms then you absolutely must play this game, and if you haven't yet experienced the magic then you should start tracking down the first two games just so you can eventually finish this one.

SoulCalibur IV

SoulCalibur is still the best sword-on-sword fighting series around, and with SoulCalibur IV the core gameplay is better than ever. If you're as much of a fan as I am, that's more than enough to carry you over the disappointing lack of trimmings.

SoulCalibur IV is actually the fifth game in the series, the first being 1996's Soul Edge. Despite twelve years, five iterations and one disappointing spin-off, very little about the series has changed.

The premise is simple. You take one of a number of fighters loosely themed on 18th century history and proceed to use their distinctive weapon-fu to beat the tar out of all comers. With a winning concept like that you don't really need a plot, but for those who care it's all about one of those ancient clashes of archetypal forces you hear so much about these days. There's these two swords, see, and one's horribly evil, and one's not quite so evil, and...

Actually, if you want to know more than that you're out of luck, as the SoulCalibur narrative is completely missing from SC4's Arcade Mode and is given only the most rudimentary service in the horribly missnamed Story Mode. Context is overrated anyway - the important thing is weapon-fu, which I swear is absolutely a real phrase and not in any way made up.

Pretty much every series favourite returns; they're joined by SC3 bonus character Amy (now appparently balanced) and lance-wielding newcomer Hilde. Also, you get a handful of Star Wars guest characters, consisting of The Force Unleashed's "The Apprentice", and Yoda on the XBox 360 and Darth Vader on the PS3.

Gameplay-wise, the big changes are about penalising blocking. Each character now has a Soul Meter; blocking reduces your Soul Meter while successfully landing hits charges it. If your Soul Meter is fully depleted, you enter a threatened state in which your opponent has the opportunity to perform a "Soul Crush", which will destroy an area of your character's armour. In addition, Soul Crushes can be followed up by Critical Finishes, which are essentially one hit kills.

That's great and all, but unless you're some kind of guard-spamming coward it's a part of the game that's never going to worry you. And once you carefully put all of that Soul Crush nonsense into a cupboard and forget about it you can get right down to enjoying the fact that SC4 is otherwise exactly the same as whichever of the previous SoulCaliburs you loved the most.

The game's at its best when you're playing against other people. It works just like it always has if you've got a bunch of friends in your living room, but you can also go online for ranked or friendly battles. Sadly, the matchmaking is rubbish and likes to try and make friends by giving each player an extra-large helping of lag. And it just wouldn't be online gaming without a large selection of ass-clowns, who in this instance take a special delight in dropping out of matches if your play history is anything other than a perfect streak of losses. Don't get me wrong - online play can be fun, but you should definitely put on your Frustration Pants and Tard-Resistant Hat before signing in for a ranked match.

So in short the versus play is good. By which I mean that it's awesome, because I'm a total SoulCalibur fanboy and I want to have its babies. True story. But even while slavering at the mouth I have to admit that the single-player game is a mite lackluster.

In my mind, I picture the people responsible for developing the single-player component as 14 year-old boys who were too busy doing backstroke in giant tubs of money to get around to any actual game design.

Straight up, there's no option to set the difficulty. Story Mode is ridiculously unchallenging for even novice players, while Arcade is initially frustrating but quickly becomes old hat. I should say, too, that most of the difficulty in Arcade comes from a single fight against guest character The Apprentice, who is so comparitively hard he makes the other characters look like they're made of jello. Still, with this sort of game you improve, and it would be nice if the game could keep offering up challenge past the point where you become comfortable with grinding the Apprentice's whiny face into the dust.

Actually, the Star Wars characters as a whole are more of a curse than a blessing. They don't fit well with the feel of the game, and their mechanics are so different from the regular cast that they really throw you out of your flow. Yoda, for example, is totally immune to throws and high attacks.

In a similar vein, it's hard to hear about SC4 without noticing the new direction that the character design has taken. By which I mean, of course, enormous frikkin' mammaries. Practically every female character in the game now appears to be ridiculously well-endowed and the game is obviously set during a period of history prior to the invention of the bra. Fighting-games-with-boobies is a corner of the market well covered by Dead or Alive; it's disappointing that SC4 went down this path and it takes away some of what made the SoulCalibur franchise feel special.

One nice improvement is to character creation. There's a great character customisation system that lets you re-skin existing fighters or create your own based on one of the pre-set fighting styles. You can do almost anything, visually, although in practice your fighter will play exactly the same as whoever you based them on. But seeing a Cervantes-style fighter in a giant cat suit or the Hamburglar wielding the Soul Edge is priceless every time.

Having set the armour, you then get to have it knocked off you through the Soul Crush system, which occasionally yields sensible results but more often turns things into a game of Strip Calibur. Watching characters beaten down to their underwear varies between entertaining and disturbing, but on the whole it feels more like bad fan fiction than serious gaming. This is something SoulCalibur could do without.

The game's short on modes, too. Options from previous games including Survival, Time Attack, and Tales of the Sword are all absent or have been folded into existing game types. There's no branching storylines, there's no special encounters, and when it comes down to it there's not much to unlock other than a stack of additional costume items.

Look - I make a lot of complaints about SoulCalibur IV, and for good reason, but this is still one hell of a game, and as a casual multiplayer title it's something I'm going to continue getting value-for-money from for a long time to come. SC4 is at the peak of its genre and will thoroughly entertain veterans and newcomers alike. Get it now.

Talkinator

I'm trialling a new chat interface in the margin called Talkinator; if you're actually on the site rather than reading the RSS then you can real-time chat with other readers. There's no login or authentication so beware of people pretending to be other people, i.e. me. Just assume everyone's a fraud and you'll be well-served.

As a side note, if you install Talkinator on your web-page using the same room name you'll be hooked into the same conversation, which is awesome.

Yes, I know it's just IRC tarted up for the interwebs. Stop killing my buzz, man.

Wanted

I went into Wanted with low expectations. It seemed reasonable that Wanted might be about as crapulent as the mediocre-but-watchable Jumper.

I set the bar too high. Way, way too high. Wanted is garbage from beginning to end.

The development of the movie goes as follows: noted comics writer Mark Millar (The Ultimates; Superman: Red Son) created a comic called Wanted. Later, a wandering tribe of barely pubescent orangutans made a completely unrelated film with the same name. Angelina Jolie stars.

To Hollywood executives that must have sounded like a one-hundred-proof bottle of win, but as so often happens they were so massively wrong that they tore a hole in space/time that even now remains in the ruins of their LA apartment gradually consuming our universe from the inside.

The plot follows white-collar worker Wesley Gibson. Wesley is what you'd get if Edward Norton's character from Fight Club were played by Hayden Christensen. No sooner has Wesley delivered a painfully whiny narration about his annoyingly pathetic life than he's inducted into a mysterious fraternity of super-assassins.

These assassins, descended from (I kid you not) homicidal medaeval weavers, are busily involved in killing off random citizens on the instructions of their magical loom. Wesley is put to work in the service of the all-powerful-loom, while simultaneously training to take down a powerful former assassin who's now gone rogue.

That may seem like an abridged version of the plot but if you make the mistake of seeing Wanted you'll realise that, no, that's the full monty. Super-assassins. They can curve bullets, which would be awesome were it not used so absolutely ludicrously. Also, their hyper-adrenaline lets them slow down time, which you would think would be a good excuse for gratuitous bullet-time effects but in actuality leads to a lot of tedious regular-style slow motion. With the possible exception of Angelina Jolie, no one in this film looks good in slow motion. There's not a lot of awesome slow mo fighting but there is a lot of non-awesome slow mo fat-bounce and jowl-wiggle. It's really quite disturbing.

The writers of Wanted clearly thought that they were both funny and awesome. The director thought it too, and helfpully inserted lots of pauses for the audience to laugh and gasp in. The writers, though, are not funny, and they are very definitely not awesome. Morgan Freeman is in this movie, and his wittiest line is "Oh, fuck me." When Morgan Freeman is in your movie and you still can't pull off witty or urbane then there is something deeply, deeply wrong.

I think some people will get enjoyment from Wanted but those people will be able to get equal enjoyment from throwing rocks at other rocks, which is cheaper. For the rest of us, this is an absolute no-go. I give it a solid rating of "not even if you liked Jumper."

Gamespot Interview Former Censor

Gamespot are currently featuring an excellent interview with former Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification Deputy Director Paul Hunt. In the past it's been notoriously difficult to get straight answers from our censors on exactly how they do their job; here we see a pretty good selection of the most sought-after answers.

It's a great piece and it deserves your attention. It turns out Mr Hunt has been thinking what we've all been saying, or vice versa:

I think we need an R18+ classification, and I always have thought this. Not having this classification is dangerous, naïve and stupid. It's a policy based on misinformation that treats one area of entertainment differently to the others.
- Paul Hunt

Read the full interview: Inside the Classification Board: Q&A with a former depty director (Gamespot)

House of the Dead Overkill Trailer

It's a new House of the Dead, and it looks like it's functionally identical to all of its predecessors, but still... that's one hell of a trailer. Grindhouse-tastic.

Updates! Oh Such Updates!

Okay, so I've moved house. I'm in Hackett now. The new house is awesome as it has carpet, which is a definite evolutionary step up from walking on naked dead trees. Plus it's not across the road from a bar, which means that there's no particular reason why I can't get to sleep before midnight on a Sunday night. It also has bay windows and a dedicated library, and costs about $100 a week less than where I was living. Definite win. So that's why the blogging has been short and infrequent.

Those who like to see what I have to say about games will note that I've been featured in the following places:

PALGN's podcast 40 features an interview with me, which is great and needs listening to regardless of how little I like hearing my voice recorded.

BigPond GameArena also has an article by me entitled A Gaming Australia. Give it a read.

Also the SimCity 4 challenge has been and gone, which was a huge success and thanks to everyone involved.

There's also an interview with me coming in an upcoming issue of Hyper Magazine.

The campaign rolls on; Canberrans can hear me on the Mike Jeffreys show at 7.10 am this coming Thursday morning.
UPDATE: Change of plans; this Thursday you'll be able to hear party president Darren Churchill. I'll be featured on a later date.

Gaming-wise things have been interrupted by the house move but I owe you reviews of Braid, Phoenix Wright 3 and SoulCalibur IV. Can I save you some waiting by saying SWEET JEEBERS YOU MUST PLAY BRAID.

That is all.

Said The Raindrop To The Seed

If you'll allow me the brief indulgence of going off-topic, I'd like to draw your attention to the above video. It was featured on YouTube a few days ago so I'm hardly posting from deep in the music underground, but that doesn't stop it from being rather good. Granted my tastes run naturally towards solo female vocalists but give it a listen. Her name's Jess Chalker and she posts on YouTube as as alleycat82.

Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2

It's really hard to believe that there could possibly be a game filled with more win than Geometry Wars Retro Evolved. But there is, and it's called Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2.

Developer Bizarre Creations puts the "2" in superscript as if it's an exponential, which would normally be hugely pretentious but in this case is totally justified. This game is to its predecessor as some kind of robot ninja would be to neanderthal man.

For those not familiar with previous iterations of Geometry Wars, these are games where you fly around a constrained two-dimensional playing field blasting the holy heck out of everything that moves. You move with the left analog stick, and shoot by aiming the right stick in the direction of your target. The genius is firstly in the ridiculously immense number of enemies on screen simultaneously, and secondly in the insane particle explosions you generate whenever you're introducing bullets to faces (which is all the time).

The first Geometry Wars for XBox Live Arcade was intensely addictive, but this time around Bizarre have offered no less than six game modes, several flavours of local multiplayer for up to four players, and a better paced and more challenging game experience across the board.

To unlock all the game modes you have to play through each one a few times, which is undemanding but initially off-putting. However, once you've got the drudgery out of the way, which takes all of half an hour, you're set to experience the full worship-inducing madness of Retro Evolved 2.

"Evolved" mode is the classic experience from the original, with a few new enemy types thrown in. "Deadline" is a version of Evolved where you have infinite lives but are struggling to get the highest score possible within three minutes.

"King" places circular "zones" on the playing field that enemies can't enter. You can only fire your weapons while inside a zone, but zones shrink and vanish over time. "Sequence" pits you against 20 pre-set patterns of enemies with no random elements involved and the difficulty turned up all the way to "crippling". "Waves" sees you blasting through screen-spanning walls of enemies which come at you from every direction.

The best of the new modes is "Pacifism", wherein your weapons are entirely disabled. An unceasing cascade of enemies pour after you, and you need to avoid them while crossing gates. Passing through a gate detonates it, which will destroy your closest pursuers.

The excellent leaderboard implementation from the first game is retained and expanded. Also, your highest scoring friend's name will now be displayed in the top right corner during play as the "score to beat", which is great for closely competitive friends but a little intimidating if someone on your friends list is a latter-day gaming wunderkind.

A significant change throughout all game modes is the way your score multiplier is handled. Whereas before it was based on the number of enemies you'd killed, and reset when you died, now it's all about collecting green sparkly things left behind by defeated enemies, and you retain your multiplier through death. The need to collect these things changes the dominant strategy significantly, which is an interesting if not particularly momentous alteration.

If you liked Geometry Wars, or just if you enjoy old-school arcade action done exceptionally well, then Retro Evolved 2 is absolutely worth your time.

You Don't Know Jack - Interactive Conversations

Y'all are aware that free Flash-based episodes of You Don't Know Jack have been regularly released online since 2006, right?

I'm talking about the best interactive quiz game ever created, and I was sadly ignorant of its revival myself until someone on my RSS feed drew it to my attention. If you've never experienced the magic you should absolutely go get yourself some Jack RIGHT NOW.

Seriously, I'll wait.

The thing that's always made YDKJ work so well is the presenter. The games unfailingly deliver the sense that the presenter is speaking directly to you, the player.

That's no accident. YDKJ creators Jellyvision know what they're doing. Interactive conversations are their niche, and in addition to pimping Jack they're also busy producing all manner of neat widgets for business. You should try some of them out - I'm not the least bit interested in architectural design software but Jellyvision's applet delivers a significantly more entertaining conversation on the subject than I'd expect from your average human.

Where I'm leading with all of this is that this is first-class game design theory. They've boiled their genius down into some easy-to-understand maxims that they like to call "The Jack Principles", which they've placed online for the unfortunately-named Joe Public to read at his leisure.

It's so refreshing to see game designers who actually understand why what they're doing is working. Big round of applause, everybody.

And then go play some Jack.

The Club

The Club is very nearly awesome. Very, very nearly. But close only counts in horshoes and hand grenades, and in leaping for the balustrade of amazing it ends up falling face-first into the rosebushes of mediocre, badly hurting itself in the process.

Ostensibly The Club is a first-person shooter, but it's developed by Bizarre Creations, the people behind Project Gotham Racing and Geometry Wars, and it's got far more in common with those games than it does something like Gears of War.

The game's actually structured a lot like a racing game. The game's broken down into eight "tournaments", each set in a different international location, and each tournament has six or seven courses. The aim of each course is to complete the course with the highest score possible. The premise of the game is that you're involved in some kind of underground deathsport, so you'll find the way to build points is to make kills. Each successive kill notches up your kill multiplier, which makes the points come in even faster, but if you can't keep your kill rate both high and steady your multiplier will gradually drain away.

This means to get the high scores not only do you have to kill quickly and accurately, but you have to stay on the move, progressing forward down the course and bringing new targets into your sights. Some game modes really go all out on this aspect by subjecting you to punishing time limits as you sprint for the level exit.

Completing the eight tournaments isn't particularly challenging, and you can do it within a day if you're so inclined. The real meat of the game is intended to come from revisiting past levels to try and beat your high scores.

That's fun to a point. As anyone who's played Geometry Wars, Guitar Hero or anything made in the 1980s knows, there's real satisfaction to be had in seeing your skills improve. Unfortunately, The Club provides very little in the way of structure or incentives to motivate you to seek those high scores. You can watch yourself work your way up the leaderboards, but other than that there's no real sense of progression once you've finished the basic single player experience. Tossing in a bunch of unlockables and providing a few more sub-goals would have really helped flesh out the score-hunting aspect of the game.

There's also a multiplayer mode, which is best described as "decent". In the unlikely event you find anyone online playing the thing, you'll be treated to some of the deathmatch antics that we've all seen in ever first person shooter ever. It's not an awful experience, and if you're lucky enough to be matched against someone over the age of 14 it can even be a barrel of fun, but I'm of the personal opinion that everything there is to say about deathmatches has already been covered by the combined works of iD Software and Epic, and there's certainly nothing new here.

For me, probably the biggest sadness is that the game doesn't have more story flavouring. It opens with a cutscene introducing each of the eight selectable characters, and does a great job of making them seem like genuinely interesting people. And that's really the last you see of the plot, other than a ten-second outro at the conclusion of story mode.

Also, the levels could have used a bit more variety. About half the game has a "ghetto industrial" feeling, while the other half has a "European city" theme, and that's pretty much the extent of what's on offer. So it's great that bland now comes in two flavours, but on the whole the artistic ball was very definitely dropped.

The Club isn't a bad game. It's a pretty decent one, and it certainly has incredibly unique gameplay. But it's not a special game, either, and even genre enthusiasts aren't likely to find room for it in their top ten or twenty games of last year. Keep an eye out for it in the bargain bin, because if you spot it for around $30 AUD you'll find it perfectly priced to please.

Sim City 4 Challenge

There haven't been many posts to The Dust Forms Words over the last few days - my apologies. That's been largely as a result of all the campaigning that's going on.

On that topic, I'd like to invite you all to All Bar Nun at the O'Connor shops this Wednesday 13 August at 7pm, where I'm taking part in The RiotAct's Sim City 4 Challenge. I'll be facing off against EA's city management sim over the course of a few hours to promote the ACT Democrats campaign and show that the electoral process can sometimes be a lot of fun.

Everyone's welcome, and I understand all the nail-biting action will be visible on All Bar's big screens. You should definitely come and have a beer while watching me tackle situations ripped from today's papers, such as the ever-present threat of giant monster invasion. I'm pretty sure the major parties are shaky on giant monster policy; that's a weakness I aim to exploit.

Halo Theme On Animal Emergency

Spotted on tonight's episode of Animal Emergency on WIN TV: music from Halo.

During the segment about the dog with the infected eyeball, the producers apparently selected portions of Martin O'Donnell's score for Halo 2 as their background music (it's the track that plays over the game's main menu). It's presumably chosen for its poignant and emotional qualities but it wouldn't surprise me if most of those involved had no idea where the music was sourced from.

Another sign of our gaming Australia.

Game Publisher Profit & Loss

Via Kotaku, profit and loss margins for the 20 top game publishers. On its face this reflects what might be thought to be common sense; publishers who produce quality make a profit, while publishers that make rubbish pay for it.

It's not quite that simple, of course. The numbers include hardware divisions, so Microsoft shows a large loss representing their ongoing efforts to advance their market share. I seem to recall that Microsoft actually posted their first games division profit last quarter so next year's chart might look very different. Sony, of course, were more focused on launching Blu-Ray than they were on winning the console war this time around so their massive losses are less of a defeat than they are an investment in the company's ongoing future.

EA have recently come out and said they made a mistake by not backing the Wii as the winner in this console generation; their somewhat blinkered focus on the PS3 and 360 hasn't helped them over the last year. Ubisoft, on the other hand, are doing quite well, probably deriving both from their excellent Montreal and Montpellier studios, and from the way they were astoundingly quick to fill the Wii market with shovelware.

Atari, Midway and Sega are all victims of their own poor quality titles. These companies couldn't find quality gaming if you shackled it to their wrist.

My guess on Take 2's dismal performance here is that it's got something to do with their ongoing legal troubles. Take 2 of course includes Rockstar, whose games sell like hotcakes but can't seem to stay out of court. It's probably also worth noting that the chart above caps out before the release of Grand Theft Auto 4 so the profits from that are obviously not included.

Namco, Capcom and Squeenix are all excellent examples of producing good games based on original IP on a regular basis. We like what they make, and we pay them money for it. Everyone's a winner.

Vivendi is of course just another way of saying "Blizzard and Sierra"; most of that profit you see there is World of Warcraft alone. Vivendi's now merged with Activision so it's not unreasonable to expect a monster result next year from the resulting juggernaut.

Konami's interesting in that it feels like it should be down next to Capcom and Namco but instead they're storming the market. It's especially interesting as this chart predates the release of Metal Gear Solid 4. Konami's doing unusually well for a company that's shown such partisan support for this generation's console loser, the PS3. Does anyone have insight as to what's going on here?

Disney comes as a surprise to hardcore gamers; this is mostly just licensed games being made dirt cheap and sold by the truckload. It's a bit depressing that this kind of rubbish is so very profitable. Disney does own a few smaller studios like Lumines creator Q Entertainment, though.

And finally Nintendo tops the chart; they're the only company currently making a profit (and a fairly massive profit at that) on their hardware division, through both the Wii and the DS, but they're also the major developer for both those platforms, and platform-exclusive games like Super Smash Bros Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy spent significant periods of time at the top of sales charts across all consoles. Nintendo was making a profit even during the lame-duck years of the Gamecube, and now that they've actually got quality hardware on the market they're unstoppable.

Mechner To Make New Karateka

Joystiq is reporting from the San Diego Comic-Con that Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner is looking to revisit his first ever game, 1984's Karateka.

I loved that game to death, so I'm absolutely thrilled. Modern audiences might not get so much out of the original, though, as it's brutally short. If memory serves (which it often doesn't) you can complete the thing in the time it takes to cook dinner.

The new Karateka project is likely to be reimagined for modern audiences, though. In relation to reviving the brand, Mechner says, "I can safely say it's not going to be in the way you expect."

The original Karateka was what might loosely be termed a brawler, and saw you travelling deep into the heart of a forbidding oriental fortress to rescue a captured princess. Along the way you had to bust loose your martial arts skills in order to overcome an evil warlord and his black-belted goons.

The jump between the original Prince of Persia and Ubisoft's Sands of Time trilogy was nothing short of stunning so I look forward to seeing similar magic worked here.

Super Paper Mario

Sometimes a game can try so hard and still be so very tedious.

Super Paper Mario for the Nintendo Wii has a long and complex family tree. It's the distant descendant of the 1996 Squaresoft-developed Super Mario RPG, which combined traditional Mario jumping action with gameplay elements like equipping items and levelling up.

Super Mario RPG spun out into Paper Mario on the Nintendo, which was an absolutely amazing game that everyone should play. Paper Mario continued the RPG elements, while introducing the conceit that Mario and most of his world were actually constructed out of paper in a wierd scrapbooky kind of way. Paper Mario in turn birthed the Mario & Luigi games, which scaled back much of the RPG in favour of more jumping and platforming.

So that's where Super Paper Mario comes in. Almost all of the RPG content is gone; the two-dimensional star of the game is challenged to a whole bunch of easy, easy platforming action with some unique twists based on the fact that he's wafer-thin.

As far as the roleplaying elements go, you can collect items, which are mostly one-shot deals which heal your characters or hurt the enemy. Also, you get experience and level up, which gives you more health and lets you do more damage. But all of that will happen more or less regardless of your input and there's no meaningful choices for you to make about how your characters grow.

Mario's part of a four-person team this time around. As well as everyone's favourite plumber you'll also control Luigi, Princess Peach and Bowser. You can only use one at a time, though, and swapping characters requires a trip to the menu. In addition, you'll be accompanied at all times by a "Pixl", who are anthopomorphised geometric designs which float along behind you. Each Pixl provides you with one unique ability (such as being able to lay bombs, or to reveal invisible aspects of the level). Again, changing Pixls requires a trip to the menu.

The most innovative part of the game is also its fatal flaw. Early in the game, Mario gains the ability to rotate the world into 3D. The traditional 2D Mario plane becomes a wide pathway, which allows new options of movement. For example, if you come to a giant pillar blocking your progress, you can move into 3D and walk behind or in front of the pillar. The 3D version of the level also holds additional secrets, like coins hidden behind platforms or pipes to secret areas behind stairways.

On its face it's a very clever conceit. However, it absolutely ruins the game's pacing. Only Mario can flip into 3D, and he can only stay there a few seconds without losing health. You'll feel compelled to check every area of every level in 3D (in fact, on occasion you need to do this to proceed) which slows down play as you walk forward a screen, flip into 3D, flip back, walk forward another screen and repeat. It gets even worse when you take into account the Pixl who can reveal invisible objects. Using that Pixl requires pointing your Wiimote at the screen and waving it slowly back and forth to see if anything shows up.

The game uses the Wiimote exclusively, which is good from the point of view of simplicity, but terrible when you consider how desperately it needs a button to let you change characters and Pixls on the fly. A single level can require the abilities of all four characters and many of your Pixls; each time you want to switch you'll need to pause the game and select the change out of a menu.

There's plenty of charm in Super Paper Mario, but being a Mario game the plot's not exactly a work of art. You won't be hooked on the story, and the gameplay is just shallow enough to make it hard to drag yourself back to the game for another session.

Super Paper Mario doesn't live up to its potential or to the standard set by its predecessors. It's not awful, and there's some fun to be had, but it's not a must-buy title and the vastly superior original Paper Mario is still available on the Virtual Console for a quarter of the cost.

Q&A on Game Classification: Bad Questions, Terrifying Answers

The video above is from last night's episode of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Q & A, which allows audience members to pose questions to a panel consisting of politicians, community leaders and the media. This segment deals with the question of games classification, and represents two profound failures: firstly a failure of our leaders to have even the most basic working knowledge of the issues involved here, and secondly of the Australian gaming community to effectively represent itself and its position.

Featured here are Heather Ridout, Chief Executive of the Australian Industy Group; Independent South Australian Senator Nick Xenophon; NSW Labor Senator Mark Arbib; Queensland Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce; and Christine Jackman, journalist and author.

The discussion in the clip uses the recent example of Besthesda Softworks' Fallout 3, a narrative-driven game in which survivors of a nuclear apocalypse struggle to adapt to The World The Bomb Built. While many details of the unreleased game are still under wraps, it is known that the world of Fallout 3 is a largely lawless one, and that the player is challenged to find their own unique way of interacting with it. As part of the suite of choices available to the player, the player may choose to buy, use, and sell a range of pharmaceutical substances, either as medicine or as stimulants.

The Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification recently refused classification to Fallout 3. This means that the game was deemed too mature to fall into the OFLC's "M15+" rating and has the effect of banning it from sale. Australia has no R18+ rating for games. It is believed that the OFLC's decision was largely related to the game's depiction of drug use.

In the clip above, the audience member is technically accurate when he agrees with the moderator's description of the game. Fallout 3 will offer situations that can be resolved by combat (among other methods), often resulting in the death of other characters in the game. One option in approaching these battles is to use stimulants to get an "edge" in combat. Other ways of overcoming problems in Fallout 3 would include negotation, trade, and avoidance. If Fallout 3 stays true to previous games in the series, these options would for the most part have realistic consequences, with violence damaging the player character's reputation and drug use leading to addiction and ill-health.

It is fairly clear from the clip that neither the panelists nor the moderator have any direct knowledge of Fallout 3. It doesn't stretch belief that in fact none of the panellists have played a videogame of any sort.

There are currently 5.2 million current-generation gaming consoles in Australia. That's one between every five Australians. And that doesn't include multi-purpose tools with gaming functionality including personal computers and mobile phones. This is not a minority. This is not a niche market. This is a gaming Australia. It's an Australia that's completely unrepresented on the political stage.

The range of opinions expressed in the clip above is frankly terrifying. Mark Albib seems happy to take the view that "because it's banned, it must deserve to be banned". Barnaby Joyce doesn't know the term "avatar", confuses it for the title of a game, and then suggests that the classification issue is in some way related to sex crimes. No one present seems to have an understanding of Australia's current classification system and not once is it raised that game censorship is a freedom of speech issue. Nick Xenophon reaches out to a shallow and inconclusive pool of evidence but doesn't quite know what to draw from it.

Christine Jackman fairly reasonably poses the question to the audience member: "Why do you want to play this game?" Said audience member muffs the answer; he begins to cite the merits of the game.

The correct answer is simple: because I want to decide for myself.

Censorship is odious because it removes community choice. Censorship says that the thought is the action; that the common person can't distinguish between depiction and actuality. Censorship says, "I know better than you." Censorship says, "Let me decide who talks."

And games are talking. They're talking very loudly, to a great many people, in strong and clear voices. They're speaking in places that have never read a newspaper and in houses which have never listened to politicians. It's okay to be worried by what games are saying. It's okay to disagree. But it's not okay to stifle those voices. It's not okay to kill the game.

Don't be afraid of ideas. Just present better ones. Engage in the debate.

Classification is about allowing the community to make informed choices about their media exposure. Under our current system, not only has classification been suborned into censorship, but Australians are being deprived of accurate information for deciding what games are suitable for themselves and their family.

Support an R18+ rating for videogames in Australia. Let's hear what games have to say.

Madworld Trailer

There was some discussion down in my E3 post about Madworld, a heavily stylised ultraviolent action title currently in development by Platinum Games. It's not a game that's had a lot of press to date so I thought I'd direct your attention to the official trailer. Never has bowel-churning brutality been so hilarious.

The Stairway

There's no such thing as too hard.

I'll say that again: there's no such thing as too hard.

It's perfectly acceptable for a game to require players to have savant-like intellects, superluminal thumbs, and a latent ability to predict the immediate future.

That's the beauty of games. Doing what we never thought was possible. Threading the eye of the storm with perfect lucidity. That's the gaming high, and it's the reason we keep coming back for more.

The catch is this: difficulty must be a stairway. Games must start at the bottom and they must introduce each new concept incrementally. Every escalation in complexity and difficulty must be discrete, and each plateau of challenge must be eminently reachable from the one below it.

If you set the bar low and raise it by slow and unflinching degrees, you'll soon have players vaulting higher than they could ever have imagined.

This is part of the unheralded genius of Guitar Hero. From a beginner's standpoint the songs on Expert difficulty look impossible, but as you play through the game skill sneaks up on you and soon you're ready to go toe to toe with sequences that previously moved too fast for your brain to process. The songs themselves teach you the skills you need; if you haven't learned how to do hammer-ons by the time you hit "Jessica" on Hard, you'll discover an unthreatening environment that trains you in them just in time to put them to use in "Freebird" a couple of sets later. Similarly, your fingers learn simple note progressions in early songs that are repeated faster and longer as you enter the higher tiers.

It's also what made Guitar Hero 3 not quite as good as its predecessors. Note maps are apparently set out with the intention of thwarting players rather than challenging them, and ridiculously hard chokepoints are inserted amongst comparatively forgiving peers. I speak from personal experience when I say it's possible to complete every normal song on the Expert difficulty and still be blocked by the end boss of Hard.

There is no limit to what you can train players to do. Aiming high is the mark of a memorable game. But once you've set those goals, you then have to bring your players to them, and suceeding at that is the hard part.

The ambitious game builds a long and epic stairway. But in the end the good game - and I mean the really good game - walks beside you while you climb it.

Please visit the Round Table's Main Hall for links to all entries.

E3 - What Looks Good

This year's Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) has come and gone, and I understand that I have to make at least a passing reference to it in order to maintain my status as a gaming blog, so here's a round-up of some of the more interesting titles that have caught my attention.

New Pikmin Game: Presumably Pikmin 3, presumably for the Wii although a DS title isn't out of the question. Nintendo didn't have a lot to announce at E3 so Shigeru Miyamoto's vague comment that "We're making Pikmin" was really the most interesting thing coming out of The House That Mario Built.

Animal Crossing: City Folk: Definitely for the Wii. Lots of WiiConnect 24 usage for exploring other cities and receiving special holiday gifts. Those without the internet can download their town onto a DS to take it travelling to Wiis owned by their friends. No retro games to collect this time (which is sad but unsurprising) and for those who care you'll now be able to design shirts which have a front which is different to their sleeves and back. I still don't know why I love these games so much but I'm nevertheless looking forward to once again clashing swords with that no-goodnik raccoon Tom Nook. Oh yes, vengeance will be mine.

Left 4 Dead: I've mentioned this one before. Valve (Half-Life) is involved in the development, it has zombies, and it's got four-player co-op. The playable version at E3 looked reasonably good although I have to admit it's really only Valve's participation that has me trusting the game will make the jump from "average" to "awesome". Coming to PC and 360, I understand.

Portal: Still Alive: While we're on the subject of Valve, there's no Portal sequel until next year at the earliest, but XBox 360 users can tide themselves over with Portal: Still Alive, coming to Live Arcade. It's the original Portal as a standalone game, plus some extra non-plot-related puzzle levels based on the 2D Flash version of the game that did the rounds a few months ago.

Final Fantasy XIII: Did I mention it's coming to the XBox 360? And how I totally called it? I did? Excellent.

New Prince of Persia: I was initially not optimistic about Ubisoft Montreal's new Prince title, but the latest gameplay trailer has sold me on it. It's got storybook-style visuals reminiscent of Okami, it features a new Prince and a new storyline, and it looks like it's got everything you expect from Prince of Persia, with the possible exception of the last trilogy's time-related powers. Coming to XBox 360 and probably some other platforms.

Lego Batman: The fourth of Traveler's Tales' Lego games is based on the Caped Crusader and seems to draw more from the comics and the 90s movies than it does from the recent Christopher Nolan interpretations. I know we all love Lego and we all love Batman but based on the downward trend of this franchise to date I'm going to disappoint you by calling this one in advance as bollocks.

Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway / Call of Duty: World At War: I don't care what you say: as far as I can tell these are the same frikkin' game. Admittedly there's only so many ways you can portray the nightmarish devastation of the Second World War, and also bits of World at War are set in the Pacific theatre and voiced by Kiefer Sutherland, but to all practical purposes they look interchangeable. Interchangeable, but really, really, good. Both coming to practically every next-gen platform under the sun. (Maybe not the Wii.)

Guitar Hero: World Tour: Big track list, includes drums and vocals.... *yawn* I mean, it'll be great and all, but it still looks kind of like Rock Band Lite. Although there's a good chance that Australians will be seeing it on shelves before the original Rock Band finally gets here. Real versions coming to 360 and PS3; crappy ports heading to Wii and PS2, more than likely.

Rock Band 2: Which looks more awesome than words can describe, but will probably suffer the same fate as it's predecessor and get lost somewhere in the Pacific Ocean on its way Down Under. Again, real versions for 360 and PS3 and cheap knockoffs on other platforms.

Dead Rising Wii: You can't say that Capcom doesn't listen to its fans. Dead Rising is coming to the Wii but it's a completely different game. You've still got the same open world but the time-limit nonsense is done away with in favour of structured missions. Also the rubbishy photography minigame is gone and the save system is fixed. This could well end up being the definitive version of the game.

Braid: It's a platformer based on time-control that's heading to XBox Live Arcade. The achievements are apparently already on the network so it should be out any day now. The visuals look nice enough but the brilliance is apparently in the puzzle design. Somehow the thing's won awards before it's even released, so there's got to be something worthwhile under its hood. I reserve judgement, though, as platformers and I have a long and contentious history and this may end up being another supposedly "clever" timed jumping nightmare a la N+.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: Fusion: I loved Ultimate Alliance; it's one of the most thoroughly worthwhile four-player co-op titles I've experienced. It might not have made you feel quite as heroic as Justice League Heroes but it did a pretty excellent job of having each of its 30+ licensed Marvel characters play differently. If the sequel delivers more of the same I'll be a happy man. I'm a little worried, though, about this "fusion" concept which apparently involves giving powers from one character to another. It feels like a watering down of the pure Marvel-ness of the title. I want to play Spider-Man or The Hulk, not some kind of Spider-Hulk. ... actually, that sounds kind of awesome. I have the distinct feeling that we wouldn't like Spider-Hulk when he's angry.

Rune Factory 2: Given how poorly reviewed the first installment of this franchise was I'm surprised they're making a second. Apparently someone out there has an appetite for dungeon-crawling Harvest Moon clones. *shrug*

Bayonetta: Oh man, this has Bullet Witch written all over it and is likely to be just as appalling, but you can't help but be impressed by its moxy. It's from Devil May Cry creator Hideki Kamiya and he's worked out how to go one-up from his own two-guns-and-a-sword DMC formula. How can Devil May Cry possibly be any cooler? Well, what if the protagonist was a hot chick and instead of having guns in her hands she has guns in her hands AND feet and instead of killing things with a sword she instead uses her magical teleporting hair. That's a recipe for awesome right there. Presumably coming to 360 and PS3.

Halo Wars: Yes, it's a Halo real-time strategy, but did you know it has a three-player co-op campaign? No? Well, it's got a three-player co-op campaign. Alright, Bungie, fine, you win, I'm interested in Halo Wars now. Serve me another helping of your derivative and frustrating franchise like the rabid fanboy that I am.

Afro Samurai: The Afro Samurai anime was a tremendous victory of style over substance, and the game appears to be more of the same. It looks gorgeous, with a fantastic cel-shaded aesthetic that you can't help but be enthused by. Plus it's got Samuel L. Jackson reprising his voice acting. But the actual combat, while not awful, seems a little short of what we expect from the games that it's clearly imitating, such as God of War and Devil May Cry. Still, they've got time to improve it, right? Coming, I think, to all next-gen consoles.

Madworld: I want this game to be good so much. It's this ultraviolent black-and-white thing for the Wii which crosses the look of Sin City with the plot of The Running Man. I'm a sucker for anything that stands out of the crowd a little, and this game looks like nothing else out there, but my hopes were dashed to the ground and stomped on when I saw that the developer was Sega. *sigh* Oh well.
UPDATE: According to commenter Matthew, Sega are the publisher, not the developer, and it's instead being created by former Clover Studios staff, now calling themselves Platinum Games. I loved their work on Okami but I was less thrilled with Viewtiful Joe so although I'm doing a happy little jig right now, I'm doing it cautiously.

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood: Speaking of Sega, it seems like the only way to get a decent Sonic game out of them is to have someone else develop it. The Dark Brotherhood is Mass Effect developer Bioware attempting to do for the World's Fastest Hedgehog what Squaresoft did for Mario with Mario RPG. The Dark Brotherhood is a western-style RPG for the Nintendo DS - featuring blue hedgehogs - and by all accounts it hasn't yet been tempted into a one-way trip down Awful Lane. I'm cautiously optimistic.

That's my off-the-cuff list out of E3. PS3 owners will probably be glad to get another Resistance title too, although I can't quite get excited by it. Plus obviously there's a new Gears of War, but I'd had about enough of that franchise by the time I finished the first one, which was only a month ago, so it'll probably take a while before my enthusiasm for more Gears builds.

What about you? Have you spotted anything coming out of E3 or the surrounding events that got you interested? Leave a comment, let me know.

Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures

It's rage-inducingly frustrating, its comedy is hit-and-miss, and it's packed with gameplay and interface problems that could probably have been fixed by a team of reasonably talented monkeys, but the XBox 360 version of Lego Indiana Jones still manages to be a pretty fun game.

This is the third attempt by developer Traveler's Tales to mix the superficially disparate fields of "Lego" and "Harrison Ford", the first two being Lego Star Wars and its sequel. Lego Star Wars was a heap of fun, largely because it saw "difficulty" and "challenge" as outdated concepts that got in the way of busting up Lego with lightsabers. The second Lego Star Wars was not quite as unexpectedly good, thanks to levels that I'd like to call "bafflingly misguided" but which a layman might describe as "cheap".

Lego Harrison Ford 3 takes everything that was a bad idea from the last game and does more of it. If you're the sort of player that likes unhelpful camera angles, single-hit kills, unintuitive controls, poor targeting, and frustrating jumping sections, then buying this game is going to make you feel like magical pixies have invaded your house and installed platforming heaven in your media centre.

If you're the other sort of player, though, you'll probably feel a little let down. Only a little, though. Because Lego is still awesome. That's a scientifically proven fact.

For those who've never played a Lego Harrison Ford game before, here are the basics: you take control of a little Lego character (in this case Indiana Jones or one of his friends and enemies) and you run through 18 platform-centric levels based on the plot of three movies (in this case the first three Indiana Jones films). In each level the primary task is to reach the end, but along the way you'll fight angry little Lego enemies, bust up a bunch of Lego scenery, build a selection of Lego objects, and perform assorted ancillary tasks like deciphering glyphs, posing as a Nazi, or digging for buried treasure. You can die as many times as you like; the only penalty is that you lose a portion of any Lego "studs" you've collected so far on the level.

At all times you're provided with a companion. In single player games you can switch between the characters on the fly, and indeed you'll need to use both Indy and his sidekick to solve many of the puzzles in the game. Getting to try out a bunch of different characters is one of the high points of the game and it's as fun this time as it was in the Star Wars titles.

You can also play two-player co-op. Multiplayer sounds like an excellent idea in theory but in practice it's a great way to lose friends. There's no way to turn friendly fire off, so you'll regularly be accidentally killing your partner. Both players have to stay on the same screen, so most of the time either the camera will be zoomed so far out you won't be able to see what you're doing, or the camera will "drag" the slower player along behind the faster one, usually into some kind of lethal trap. Also, whereas the computer is capable of performing tricky jumps perfectly every time, with two human players each of the athletic sequences becomes twice as frustrating because a failure by either player will bollocks your attempt.

The story of the three movies is told largely by Lego cutscenes. There's no voice acting so the dialogue is done through Lego-themed mime. These interludes can be cute, but unlike the Star Wars games they're actually rubbish at telling the story. If, like me, you haven't watched Temple of Doom in a while you'll be left scratching your head as to exactly what the heck is going on. That's important, because a lot of the game's "puzzles" are actually less about deduction than they are about remembering what happened in the movie and copying it. The final puzzle of The Last Crusade, for example, is childishly simple if you've seen the movie but nigh-on unsolvable merely by reference to what's present in the level. Still, it's unlikely you'd be keen to buy an Indiana Jones game unless you had at least a passing familiarity with the movies.

While the game may be regularly frustrating, it's never actually hard, and even the most inept player won't find it difficult to reach 100% completion. There's about 12 hours of gameplay all told, which is great because it means you'll see all the content before getting to the end of your attention span.

Finally, many casual players seemed to find the second Lego Star Wars game far less annoying than I did, so it may be that if you're not a frequent gamer you won't even notice the many irritations that plague Lego Indy. If so, you're in luck, because you'll be able to enjoy the fun without wanting to beat the developers with a two-by-four.

Gripes aside, Lego Indiana Jones is a colourful, accessible and entertaining game that's suitable for all ages, and if it's not quite as good as its predecessors then that still leaves it in a better position than most of its competition. I give it a firm rating of "probably fun".

Greg Tannahill For Canberra

It's been a poorly-kept secret in other forums that I've had something big cooking over recent weeks. Those with eyes and with ears have probably already deduced the relevant facts for themselves.

The time of speculation is at an end. I am incredibly proud to announce that I have received pre-selection as the ACT Democrats candidate for the electorate of Molonglo at the upcoming Australian Capital Territory election this October. I'm campaigning for the ACT Legislative Assembly, with the aim of restoring accountability and democracy to Territory politics and helping to create the better Canberra that its citizens deserve.

Those who regularly visit this site will know that I'm a vocal campaigner when it comes to the politics of video gaming. I've said often that Australia needs action at both Territory and Federal levels to implement an R18+ classification for videogames. I've spoken many times against the poorly-informed and reactive way in which politicians approach the growing gaming community. And I've made it clear that the ACT Government needs to seize opportunities to make Canberra a national leader in an industry that turns over more money than Hollywood.

But beyond all those issues, Canberra is a city I'm very honored to live in, and running for office is my way of standing up for those things I love about my home. Canberra was designed from the ground up to be the City of Tomorrow, but under a long string of lackluster governments it seems that Tomorrow has never really come.

I have to ask: Where is the efficient, affordable housing that we imagined? Where are the state of the art public schools that we were promised? Where is the world-class public transport system that we deserve? From my perspective our politicians have stopped building the future and just settled for the mediocre present.

I would hope that readers here would support me in my campaign. If you live in the Molonglo electorate of the ACT, vote for me in the ungrouped column on October 18, and tell those you know to do likewise. If you're not able to vote for me, then you can still help through word of mouth. Blog about me, link to posts, and join my Facebook group. The key is to let everyone know that this October they don't have to keep digging the same hole, that they don't have to keep accepting more of the same. Let them know they don't have to select from two equally bad columns. To those with eyes and with ears, be vocal. Let them know that there is an alternative.

- Greg Tannahill
O'Connor, ACT

Great Gaming Music

Great games are very often made by great music. Over the past few days I've highlighted some of the best single tracks in the rich history of videogaming. Here, in no better order than the one in which I posted them, are all twenty. Click the links to see the post.

1: Kiss Me Sunlights
From Zone of the Enders

2: Sanctuary
From Kingdom Hearts 2

3: Halo Theme
From Halo

4: One-Winged Angel
From Final Fantasy VII

5: The 7th Guest
From The 7th Guest

6: Metal Gear Solid Main Theme
From Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance

7: Max Payne Theme
From Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

8: Silent Hill
From Silent Hill

9: The Secret of Monkey Island
From The Secret of Monkey Island

10: Still Alive
From Portal

11: Katamari On The Rocks
From Katamari Damacy

12: Hymn Of The Fayth
From Final Fantasy X

13: Overworld Theme
From The Legend of Zelda

14: Theme 4
From Lemmings

15: World 1-1 Theme
From Super Mario Bros

16: Type A
From Tetris

17: Legacy
From Full Throttle

18: Atom Bomb
From Wipeout XL

19: Bubble Bobble
From Bubble Bobble

20: Hell March
From Command & Conquer: Red Alert

Great Gaming Music #20: Hell March

As this series of Great Gaming Music posts nears its end, people have not been shy in offering opinions about what classic tunes I've missed out. I was initially prepared to ignore them all and treat you to the main theme from the original Wing Commander but sadly YouTube hasn't been able to come up with the goods.

Therefore I'm instead caving to popular pressure and directing your ears to Frank Klepacki's scores to the Command & Conquer games. Featured here is my personal favourite, "Hell March", which is the opening theme to Command & Conquer: Red Alert. It's a game based on the premise of Hitler being assassinated by a time-travelling Albert Einstein, and Hell March manages to convey the simultaneous ridiculousness and awesomeness of that concept.

Vegas-based Klepacki has produced the score for a number of games by Westwood, its contemporaries and successors, including The Legend of Kyrandia, Dune 2, Blade Runner and Universe at War.

By the way, those under the misconception that "Mechanical Man" is the superior piece of C&C music can find it here, but while they listen to it I'll be quietly scorning them.

FF XIII Coming To 360

News out of E3: Square-Enix flagship title Final Fantasy XIII is coming to the XBox 360, for simultaneous Western-market release with the PlayStation 3 version.

I'd like to point out that I TOTALLY CALLED IT. And not just in an "I own a 360 and not a PS3" kind of way, but with reason and logic. That muffled choking noise you can hear is a forum full of doubters and dissenters eating their collective hats. I hope they remember the bitter taste of headware next time they suggest that my industry analysis may be less than stunningly on-point.

Now, while you all recalibrate your internal calendars to deliver daily reminders that my prescience borders on the paranormal, I'll be quietly basking in the warming glow of my own self-satisfaction. Would anyone care to fetch me a refreshing cocktail?

Great Gaming Music #19: Bubble Bobble

Bubble Bobble may not have the most powerfully moving soundtrack in gaming history, but considering that it storms through a hundred levels using only a single 45-second loop of sound, the fact that it doesn't drive players screaming from their computers is a minor musical miracle. In fact, I often find myself humming this even when not attempting to trap critters in floating bubbles.

Featured above is the theme from Bubble Bobble as it appears in the Amiga version of the game.

Great Gaming Music #18: Atom Bomb

The Wipeout series is known for delivering thrilling high-speed futuristic anti-gravity racing. While superficially similar to Nintendo's F-Zero games, Wipeout distinguishes itself through an extreme sense of speed and a history of trance soundtracks featuring big-name artists, including Orbital, The Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Prodigy and Fluke.

The soundtrack to the Psygnosis-developed Wipeout XL was heavily promoted in partnership with Red Bull Energy Drink. Stations running the game were set up in nightclubs and an extensive marketing campaign was set in motion. The soundtrack album spawned a single, "Atom Bomb" by Fluke (featured above) which reached #20 on the UK charts. "Atom Bomb" also appeared on Fluke's fourth album Risotto and represents one of their most successful creations.

Great Gaming Music #17: Legacy

This is Legacy by the Gone Jackals as featured in the opening to Lucasarts' Full Throttle. The music played an integral part in selling this biker-themed point-'n'-click adventure to a skeptical audience. The hard rock and hillbilly soundtrack helped smooth over the occasional rough patch in the game's pacing and allow players to experience the frequent moments of genius on offer.

The Gone Jackals released three albums between 1990 and 1998; Legacy is featured on their second album, Bone to Pick. Despite attempts in 2000 and 2003, sequel projects to Full Throttle entitled (respectively) Payback and Hell on Wheels have never gotten off the ground and as of today no attempts to continue the franchise are on foot.

Great Gaming Music #16: Tetris Type A

It's hard to believe that a game as widely played and insanely popular as Tetris only shipped with three pieces of music. Thankfully all three were brain-infectingly catchy and able to withstand marathon play sessions without driving players insane.

Featured above is the Type A music from the Game Boy release of Tetris; it's an instrumental arrangement of Russian folk melody Korobeiniki.

Passionate Tetris players may be interested to look at John Brzustowski's thesis on the question of whether one can play Tetris for an indefinite period, entitled Can You Win At Tetris?

Great Gaming Music #15: Super Mario Bros - Level 1-1

There's something of an internet tradition of competing to see who can create the most oddball rendition of the Super Mario Bros theme. Currently my vote goes to the version above, played on wine bottle and remote-controlled car. Second prize, though, would definitely go to this version played on duel Tesla coils.

The Level 1-1 soundtrack from Super Mario Bros is another of the works of Zelda composer Kōji Kondō. It's the definitive Mario theme and is probably the most well-known piece of gaming music ever created.

Great Gaming Music #14: Lemmings - Theme 4

Psygnosis' Lemmings was a fantastic game for any number of reasons, and despite many attempts has never really been replicated. A key element in the fun is the catchy soundtrack, created by Brian Johnston, brother of developer Scott Johnston. (No, not the AC/DC Brian Johnston.)

Due to worries about music copyright, most of the Lemmings songs were either arrangements of existing public domain music or "borrowings" from other Psygnosis games such as Shadow of the Beast. Despite this patchwork design strategy, the finished music retains a unique and memorable flavour.

Great Gaming Music #13: The Legend Of Zelda - Overworld Theme

This iconic track first appeared at the title screen and throughout the overworld of the original Legend of Zelda and has since featured at some point in every Zelda game since, with the notable exception of Ocarina of Time.

It's composed by Kōji Kondō, who has worked on all the Nintendo-developed Zelda games. He is also the chief composer for the Super Mario franchise and is responsible for the beloved Mario theme. Kōji's other works include Duck Hunt and Star Fox 64 (known as Lylat Wars to Australians).

The version of the Zelda Theme above is as performed by Zack Kim on dual guitars. Another very excellent electric guitar arrangement can be heard by clicking here.

Great Gaming Music #12: Hymn Of The Fayth

Final Fantasy X might be called the last great hurrah of the Final Fantasy franchise, before the disappointing outings of X-2, XI and XII. While it's a valid criticism that FFX had an overly linear first and second act, it successfully used that focused early-game experience to flesh out the moody, spiritual world of Spira.

Integral to that experience was Nobuo Uematsu's soundtrack. Featured here is his Hymn of the Fayth, a recurring musical theme throughout both this game and Final Fantasy X-2.

Great Gaming Music #11: Katamari On The Rocks

Naaaa-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, Katamari Damacy.

Yu Miyake's theme to Katamari Damacy is like a particularly tenacious brain weevil, in that you just can't get out of your head. Despite how intensely strange the game is, it's music that nevertheless captures the spirit of the franchise perfectly.

As far as I can tell, the Katamari games are Miyake's only work as a composer, although he has acted as sound director on the Tekken games for Namco.

If, like me, you just can't get enough of Katamari On The Rocks, then you'll probably get a kick out of this somewhat dodgy a capella version of it.

Great Gaming Music #10: Still Alive

Jonathan Coulton's catchy end theme to Portal became an overnight pop culture phenomenon following the game's release last year. The song was so good that, as one YouTube commentor put it, "it makes love to you in your sleep".

Not only was the song excellent, but Portal's short length and forgiving difficulty meant that almost everyone who acquired the title ended up seeing its appearance over the end credits. It achieved the three goals of being good music, being a satisfactory conclusion to the game, and managing to stay in character (it's sung by Ellen McLain, the voice of the game's primary antagonist, GLaDOS).

It's hard not to speculate whether the game would have been quite as crazily successful were it not for this particular piece of soundtrack. Coulton, a self-described geek-rock troubador, is also famous for tracks such as "Code Monkeys" and "Re: Your Brains".

Great Gaming Music #9: The Secret of Monkey Island

The Secret of Monkey Island is one of the greatest games of all time, representing a rare gathering of creative talent including, among others, Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman, Steve Purcell and Orson Scott Card. Included in that number is Michael Land, who composed the game's fantastic Caribbean-influenced theme.

Land went on to collaborate heavily with Lucasarts between 1990 and 2000, working on the scores to the subsequent Monkey Island games, X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and The Dig.

The version above is the mt32 MIDI mix of the main theme, as played during the opening sequence of the game. The later CD edition of Monkey Island came with several bonus audio tracks, notably an excellent rock remix of the theme which unfortunately does not seem to have made its way to YouTube.