Episode 53
Timecode: 4:18: OMG, it's the original broadcast ad for... BEEE 17 BAAAWLMEEERRRR
! This was an overhead war game for the Intellivision console, utilizing the “Intellivoice” peripheral. For some reason, the ad sounds like it's narrated by the great John Hurt.
6:29: Oh gosh, it's Seaman (Dreamcast, 2000)! This is the strange pet sim game narrated by Leonard Nimoy where you could talk to Seaman through a microphone attachment on the Dreamcast controller. Now, a Seaman starts off life as a cute lil' Seaboy with a child's voice, who says things as charming as,“Play play play!” (d'aww). But eventually, due to the cruel cycle of life, you will be left with only one snarky little Seaman. One of the more fun things the footage shows is how one can use the cursor to make Seaman dizzy and roll over, saying, “Woah... woah! Gonna puke.”
10:39: New Roomania (PS 2), a port of the very obscure SEGA Dreamcast game that is supposed to be... a roommate simulator. The music sounds upbeat, and the game seems to have a cute, comedic tone. One of the screens shows your roomie crying with a smile on his face, though... whatever could that mean?
16:24: The intro of Suikoden Tactics (PS 2). I lost interest in the series after they went 3D, but the music for this intro is absolutely beautiful. The characters look cute; not showing any creepily hunchbacked, anthropomorphized cats is a good start. Those things freaked me out in SuikodenIV.
Episode 54
0:12: ”A man has a choice. I chose... the impossible. I built a city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the great... would not be constrained by the small. Where the scientist would not be bound by... petty morality. I chose … to build... Rapture.”
This was the opening of one of the big, early trailers for the first person masterpiece, Bio Shock (multiplatform, 2007). Albeit prerendered and not completely representational of the gameplay, it still introduces the concept of fighting Big Daddies – the guardians of the precious Little Sisters. After defeating a Big Daddy, the player can choose to harvest or rescue their Little Sister. Harvesting nets you more ADAM, the precious substance that allows one to splice Gene Tonics and Plasmids into their genetic codes, than rescuing does, but can you live with the consequences?
In this trailer, it looks like the main character, Jack, would attempt to harvest the Little Sister – but the Big Daddy wasn't quite dead enough, and retaliates by impaling Jack from behind with his drill. The Daddy then holds out his hand to his Little Sister, an image that is reused for the good ending, although in a different context. It ties in to this wonderful, nurturing theme very well.
I learned about Bio Shock and the Little Sisters in greater detail through a Game Informer cover story in early 2006. I promised to rescue all the Little Sisters. I kept that promise in both that and Bio Shock 2; it was worth it. I can't wait to see if Bio Shock Infinite will be similarly evocative; I have little doubt that it will.
4:55: “I remember the night of my 21st birthday. That was the first time I died.” A trailer for The Darkness (multiplatform, 2007), an FPS from the developers of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, based on the Top Cow comic book. It's the story of Jackie Estacado (Kirk Acevedo, who lived through his formative years as an up-and-coming enforcer for “Uncle Paulie” (Dwight Schultz), the nasty gangster who adopted and raised him.
On the same night of his 21st birthday, Uncle Paulie inexplicably makes an attempt on Jackie's life after he fails to retrieve money for him. But unbeknownst to all, males in the Estacado family have the curse of the Darkness (Mike Patton), an inscrutable supernatural force that gives them powers once they reach the age of twenty one. With a newfound lease on life, Jackie kills his would-be assassins and attempts to discover why Uncle Paulie would want him dead. However, he learns the hard way that the Darkness has its own designs on increasing its power over him by limiting it at a crucial moment...
The Darkness was one of the best comic-based games ever with a fantastic story and performances (some of the best ever in video games), and in how it utilized the Darkness' twisted abilities.
6:58: The intro for Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha (PS 2, 2006), an entry in Atlus' long-running and incredibly awesome Shin Megami Tensei series of games. Descendants of the main character, Raidou Kuzunoha, appear in other SMT games.
8:29: A cutscene from the snowboarding game Amped 3 (2005, Xbox360) that parodies bad anime and translation tropes: cheap yet slick animation with spiky-haired characters, and hammy yet stilted dubbing that struggles to work around lip flaps. There's also a narrator that speaks Japanese-accented English.
9:25: A Japanese trailer for Drag-on Dragoon 2, or as Americans reading this may know better as Drakengard 2. Drakengard has to have some of the darkest themes, plots, and characters ever put into a video game, almost bordering on Sick and Wrong. Any detailed plot summary of the game is destined to make jaws drop. Of course, the game's highly critical reviews (Official Play Station Magazine US in particular had a hateboner for it) probably chased off a majority of gamers from discovering that on their own. See some of the madness for yourselves, in the fifth of the game's endings.
Drakengard 2 supposedly had better gameplay than the original, but a more generic storyline and characters.
13:46: A cutscene from God Hand (PS 2, 2006), the notorious brawler from Capcom's Studio Clover, before they shut it down. This cutscene... how do we put this gently? It shows two flamingly gay stereotypes, Silver and Gold (named for their favorite colors, apparently), dressed up like Vegas showgirls trying to menace hero Gene by asking him who their boss is (a dude named Elvis, apparently). The conversation is so bizarre, it almost seems like it was conceived through a game of mad libs. It Makes Sense in Context, maybe?
It would seem that God Hand is partially responsible for the questionable reputation of gaming review site IGN. They gave it a bad review, apparently for being too hard, but gave other games — generally considered inferior or more niche than GH — higher ratings. Salacious!
14:08: Once upon a time, Simon & Schuster decided to make a game called Panty Raider: From Here To Immaturity, in which the player is tasked with snapping pictures of women in their underwear so some aliens who discovered human skin mags don't make the Earth blow up. But how to introduce such a high concept? Easy. Make an intro out of “motion comic” style panels and write a country song to help narrate it! For some reason, the aliens' noses look very... suggestive, and they seem to have Hispanic accents. It's almost like something out of Heavy Metal.
To help him in his task, leading nerd Nelson is equipped with a camera and... “Goop”, “an amazing substance that just eats clothes”. “So throw Goop for all you worth/Or we'll destroy the planet Earth!” sings the aliens. Then they show the tiniest clip of gameplay where Nelson has just photographed a chick that looks like Emma Frost, and he says, “Hey, don't let the woody fool you. I'm doing this for the planet!”
16:47: A clip of someone known as “VTF: INO” playing a Japanese Ikaruga arcade machine, with two ships, at the same time. The clip actually has four different views: one of the game, and three of the players' hands as they're playing. They don't lose a single ship.
In Ikaruga, the main gameplay gimmick was switching your ship from black to white. All of the projectiles and enemies were black/white, and could only be destroyed by the opposite color. In this clip, you could see how the player used one ship to shield another during a boss fight, while the other ship assailed the boss with fire as it hung back.
Allow me a minute to gush over Studio Clover's reincarnation, Platinum Games. Bayonetta and Vanquish are amazing. Play them. Please.
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