Subatomic Brainfreeze

Tekken 6 again: How to grind money in Scenario Campaign mode

I know, I know, it's a lot of videogame posts in a row. My regular readers who only do anime are probably yawning or crying or something by now. Anyway, since T6 came out I've been getting a ton of hits on the post about Scenario Campaign and how much it blows. The searches are either about a) how the mode sucks or b) the fastest way to get fight money so they don't have to play this crappy mode anymore. For the players' benefit, I will post the fastest (but still slow) way to get fight money. Protips after the cut!

An open letter to Namco: FIX TEKKEN 6

While I have little faith in the company, given their track record, I noticed that Namco was taking suggestions and took the opportunity to write them. Being as I just complained about this game, I thought I would put this up as a follow-up. The letter's after the cut.

Dungeon Fighter Online: QUICK, FIND A WAY TO MAKE THIS NOT FUN ANYMORE

(I guess now this blog will be the Shitty Things About Good Videogames blog for now)

MMOs are a tough enough proposition when they're subscription-based. The more you play, the less fun the game becomes and the more obligated the player begins to feel. This is why I don't take them up for longer than a few days: I have fun at low levels, and once the game starts to look boring, I can leave it alone forever. The twist with Dungeon Fighter is that it's an MMO beat-em-up in the style of 90's arcade games: the closest comparison is if somebody were to make Capcom's classic Dungeons and Dragons arcade games into a full-fledged MMO.

This is key for me: the big thing MMORPGs miss, in their scrambling over stats and loot and meta-gamey stuff, is that the key activity isn't any fun. Clicking a monster and sitting back as my guy fights it is neither very involving nor very exciting. Actually punching hordes of monsters? In their faces? Sounds to me like somebody's made the fun connection.

So Dungeon Fighter and I had a pretty good run, especially when my character became Dudley from Street Fighter 3. My character was getting noticeably stronger, new stages to fight on came fast, and I always had a side quest to take care of while I juggle comboed goblins and golems and knights for days.

Unfortunately, like many MMOs, the rate of progress eventually hits a brick wall. Quests stop appearing, new maps stop showing up so often, and the only way to level up is to play the same stage over and over again. On the next level, you hope the game gives you a sidequest or a new map or something, but nothing ever appears and before you know it you're stuck grinding.The game is satisfying enough to play for its own sake for a little while, but you try running the same long level in Streets of Rage five times in a row and tell me if you're still having fun, because that's what happens in Dungeon Fighter.

Something felt wrong and unnatural about the way the game had just quit on being fun, so I decided to do some research on the game's boards. Here I found out that it wasn't just me. The entire player base was livid about two things in particular: the tedious rate of leveling up and the ludicrous costs of cash items, both of which have been adjusted substantially from the game's Asian versions. I'd only been getting half the experience points all this time!

There were no quests because aside from turning down the dial on XP, the people running the game didn't bother to think about how such a major change would affect the game flow. Of course, it throws a wrench into the whole thing, crippling advancement and leaving the player with nothing interesting to do for long stretches. Goes to show that game design changes are best left to actual game designers.

As for the cash items, this is the same burn that every "free-to-play" game performs: it's free to start, yes, but if you want to use certain basic functions that every regular player is going to want, it will cost you. "Free-to-play" really needs a relabeling: it's not that it isn't possible to play for free, it's just extremely impractical to actually do so. Selling items to other players (a major source of income) costs a little bit of money, extra storage space costs a little bit. It's nothing backbreaking-- you can get a perfectly good setup going for $10-- but the higher up you go, the higher the costs rise. And, of course, buying items for this game costs way more than in its Asian equivalents.

Clothing items, for example, are bought via an in-game gashapon machine that gives you something you may not even want for your $2.50. (Korea gets to choose, Japan does not.) Unwanted items can be sold to other players, which is funny, because paying a huge amount of gold for the item you want is the better choice by a mile than throwing real money at the game in hopes of getting it at random. In the highest-level fuck-you, endgame players are charged a shocking $25 to go back and tweak their skills for player vs. player play: this is an essential step for the PvP player and they charge what they do because it's a "gotcha by the balls" situation. Free-to-play is dangerous, man.

Players complain about these issues, but the staff engages them infrequently, if at all. When they do, the results aren't encouraging, as seen in this GM thread, where GMs acknowledge that the problems exist while not actually displaying any intentions of fixing them. These guys seem to have been complaining for a while to no avail, so I don't expect things on DFO to get better any time soon. I'll probably come back in a few months and see if anything's been fixed, but Nexon appears kind of greedy and incompetent. Doesn't exactly inspire any confidence. Maybe I'll give the Japanese version a shot.

Tekken 6: Scenario Campaign Mode is THE WORST GAME I WILL PLAY THIS YEAR

Hey kids! Want to know how to get fight money fast in Scenario Campaign? Take a look here!

Well, guys, my store broke street date, and I have Tekken 6 a couple of days before I should. Barring online mode-- which I presume will be patched in when the game actually launches and the servers are up-- everything is in my hands. Considering the situation, I figured it would be cool to write something up. I haven't played Tekken with any enthusiasm since the mid-90s, so you'll have to excuse me for knowing very little about the game. But this post isn't really about the home version of Tekken 6, it's about the terrible, boring thing that Namco decided to tack onto the game. This post is about Scenario Campaign mode.

God, that name. It sounds like it went directly from a marketing guy's bulleted list to the game. "We'll have a, uh, Scenario Campaign mode! For the longevity!" Scenario Campaign mode has but one design goal: to make the average buyer's experience with Tekken 6 longer. Whether it's fun or not isn't really the issue: it's about keeping your ass in the chair long enough to keep you from selling the game to somebody else (or at Gamestop, if you're a sucker). It's filler.

Now it's common practice, and usually a good idea, to puff out a home port of an arcade game with extra modes and content. Blazblue did this very well with it's limited edition package and big story mode, Street Fighter IV did it lazily with unlockable items that were more a chore than a gift for the player, and Tekken 6 has this. It tries harder than, say, Street Fighter IV did, but that's not saying much. Even if they were trying, this idea would be fundamentally flawed: it tries to shove Tekken 6 into a genre it's just not suited for.

Namco's been doing this since the Tekken Force mode in Tekken 3 about ten years ago, and they haven't gotten it right any time since. This wasn't much of a deal back then, because Tekken games have been overstuffed packages for years and Tekken Force was but one of many silly bonus features every game got-- I believe Tekken Tag had a volleyball mode? I'm particularly harsh with Scenario Campaign because it gets this game's top billing: it's the first item menu, and the whole rest of the game is practically hidden in a sub-menu. Most of the achievements, even, are things you will do in Campaign mode. The people who put together this port of Tekken 6 expected that everybody who bought it would play Campaign at some point. As such, there's really no excuse for how lousy it is.

Tekken 6 is a one-on-one fighting game, as you probably know. Scenario Campaign mode is a one-versus-many fighting game. From a design point of view, these genres have to be handled in completely different ways: control, character design, stage design, everything. That is, if you want the game to be a quality piece of work, you do that. If you're Tekken you just lazily graft one onto the other and call it a day.

The resulting game is really sloppy and uncomfortable: because your character wasn't designed to deal with a big crowd, you typically have to take guys down one at a time. As in a fighting game, you're locked in a straight line to your target. The problem with this is that you've got five other guys locked on straight lines to you too, and you can't very easily move around them. Fighting game controls are great for getting to one guy and beating him up: they are not great for getting around a room. Get ready to find yourself unable to reach that too-close, too-far lifesaving weapon or health item... repeatedly.

On top of that, the fixed camera is working against you, regularly making it unclear where to go, where your dumb AI buddy is, or where the enemy you're supposed to be fighting right now is. If you've got guys in front of you you're often completely unable to see yourself. Also, the one-button targeting system often picks the wrong guy, and inexplicably doesn't shift from enemies you've already killed. And don't get me started on what happens when you're too far away from a guy with a gun! Level and enemy design are essentially the same every time, and there is one level for all of the game's 40 (!!) characters.  It grates, and it grates fast. Little annoyances like this pile up on top of each other until you're pulling your face off. Especially if you're me, and you're running through it really fast so you can tell your internet friends about it before the game formally comes out.

And then there's the story: this is the story mode, after all. If you're absolutely obsessed with the Tekken storyline (which, like most fighting game stories, is total nonsense not worth telling) and don't mind long cutscenes about it, then you're the target audience for this and maybe you won't skip the majority of them like I did. I never skip story cutscenes in games, but when I realized that the ten-minute history of the entire Tekken series was only the first cutscene, and that three more cutscenes followed, I started hitting that skip button, and hard.

In a nutshell, new protagonist Lars Alexandersson, the Scandinavian, illegitimate son of Tekken patriarch Heihachi Mishima, goes out on an adventure of revenge with his moe robot girlfriend, Alisa Bosconovich. They're always posed the exact same way as they talk before every level. With the ridiculous costume items you put on them to improve their stats (yes, there are tacked-on RPG elements too), they kind of reminded me of the protagonists of a very dry gag manga-- a Cromartie or something. Except instead of a delinquent and a monkey, it's a spiky-haired Japanese videogame hero and a space hooker wearing star-shaped sunglasses and a cowgirl hat. Perhaps they're more like the Fuccons?

So this mode kind of sucks, is what I'm saying. Games shouldn't try to be all things to all people, because shit like this happens. If I could just avoid it, I would, but I can't. See, the game has this "fight money" system going. If you want to customize your character (ie. dress them up and make them fancy), you need a ton of fight money: there are single items in the in-game store that cost more than I got on my entire run through Campaign mode. The fastest way to get fight money, as far as I can tell, seems to be to keep playing this crappy game. Actually playing Tekken 6, the pretty solid fighting game, gets you peanuts by comparison. Even beating Arcade mode repeatedly-- this is still boring, but at least the game you're playing doesn't suck-- yields relatively small gains.

It's that much worse because not only will I have to play this thing, I'm going to have to play it a lot, when I'd much rather be playing the real game. You know, the one-on-one fighting game that's a distant memory by now. I grudgingly accept a little grind here and there, but this is just not acceptable. It's poor design, plain and simple. I'd be surprised if Bandai Namco, greedy fuckers that they are, didn't charge people five bucks to unlock the items without the work. I'm going to go ahead and call that a prediction. Watch it happen.

(My second prediction, by the way, is that Tekken 6 gets great reviews in the mainstream gamer press for Scenario Campaign because it adds replay value and hours are very important. The PS2-grade graphics will probably be the main complaint.)

11.8.09 Update: I was wrong about the second one, by the way! Nobody in the gaming press liked Scenario Campaign either. This is like that time I said "A $200 videogame? They're crazy! Rock Band won't sell!"

Raiden IV: YOU WILL BE SHOT AT

I like Raiden because there's no gimmick, nothing special about it. It's an old-fashioned shooting game. You fly a ship, you shoot the bad guys, the bad guys shoot at you. The deeper gameplay of the games varies, but the aesthetic and the basics tend not to. Some people call this bland-- perhaps it is-- but Raiden is consistently well-made, and that trumps aesthetic every time.

This arcade port of Raiden IV is pretty standard: a couple of levels and ships have been added for the home version, along with the usual score attack, boss rush, and online leaderboards, but that's about it. There have been some complaints about the way you get the other two ships, which is by putting down a dollar for each. This probably wasn't the smartest way to do things, but a dollar isn't really backbreaking for new ships either. Because there doesn't seem to be a lot about the ships online, I'll go ahead and describe them so you can decide whether or not to pay.

The Raiden Mk.II is the original ship from the old Raiden games, and it plays exactly the same as it did. It's as slow as the old ship, too, which limits its usefulness to people who really know what they're doing. By contrast, the Fairy is much faster (and, I'm pretty sure, harder to hit) than the other two ships, making it a potential beginner choice, and a lot of fun. It's not overpowering like in Raiden Fighters, though. If they'd been over a dollar I probably wouldn't have bought them.

The scoring gimmick goes like this: the faster you kill the enemy when it appears on the screen, the more points it's worth. However, if you go without firing for about a second and a half, your ship glows and you can fire a charged volley of missiles (a flash shot, in game terminology): every one of those missiles that hits something is worth 500 points, which can come out to a lot in the right situation. The trick to scoring is figuring out when and where the enemies come in so you can get them as fast as possible, and then to figure out when you can take a break to fire the flash shot.

Meanwhile, of course, you're being shot at. This is different from, say, a Cave or Touhou game, where enemies simply fire with no particular sense of where you are. In Raiden, enemies are actively gunning at you, and you need to be moving at all times. From the second level on, you're dealing with a ton of bullets, and you really need to worry about leading their fire and not getting trapped. The difficulty scales up a lot faster than most shooters I know, but if it puts you off, there is an Easy mode, and a "no shooting at me" mode if you really want to be bored.

This is a good game, but it's not really a purchase for the casual genre fan: it is $40, and you can get Raiden Fighters Aces and its three fantastic games for $20, not to mention the small array of shooters available on the various download services. If you liked Aces, on the other hand, you should (probably already have) give this a look.

New York Anime Fest 09: THINGS THAT AREN'T TOMINO

Well, I'd better get all this out of the way before I forget it happened. New York Anime Fest was last weekend: this is the con's third year, I pretty much knew what to expect coming in, and I got exactly what I thought I would. Let's go through the pros and cons of this convention really quick, as they are the same every year.

As an NYC commuter I'm obviously very happy to be able to go to a con where I don't have to put down a couple hundred for room and board, but the convenient location comes at great cost. Everything that's wrong with NYAF is something that can't really be helped. They don't have enough room in the Javits: to visualize how crowded the place is, imagine Otakon numbers walking around in a space a quarter of Otakon's size at best. Of course, the Javits is really expensive-- during the CPM retrospective our host guessed that it was probably a couple hundred bucks a minute just to be in that room-- and high rent is just a fact of NYC life.

Side note: food prices are through the roof ($2.50 Coke cans!) in the building, so I advise anybody going to anything at the Javits load up on food beforehand. I did this at Go Go Curry on the first day and Subway on the second.

Because this is a for-profit con, the dealer's room is really the main attraction, with panels running on the side. Nothing really unusual there: one booth was selling really obvious bootlegs (HK DVD box sets and Prince of Tennis figures that weren't quite Sader but were really bootleg-ugly) and another had a ton of old VHS that I might have put up the cash for if it had been a buck or two cheaper per tape.

Behind the dealer's room was the World Cyber Games. A pro gaming league-- especially one that deals primarily in real-time strategy and first-person shooters-- is kind of out pf place at an anime convention, and for its part WCG made no attempt to reach out. Anime con people didn't go into WCG, WCG people didn't go into the con, you get the idea. I stopped by here a few times because they were playing nationals for Virtua Fighter 5 and many of the players are friends. I woke up a little too late to catch the finals though. I regret it: just watching the guys play really made me miss the game, and it was an even bigger bummer thinking about what's up with VF5R. It's so bad that every time I talk to one of my old VF buddies, we talk about jumping ship to Tekken 6 when it comes out for consoles. Sega, Sega, look what you've done to yourselves!

On the side, you've got your maid cafe, which has always been peculiar. The law ensures that the maids can't actually serve food or drink, so they're more all-purpose entertainers: last year we chatted with a maid while we rested from the con, and it was nice. This year, probably to avoid crowding, the event stage and the maid cafe were put together, to pretty ugly results. See, having a stage there means having huge, loud speakers there, and this means that the area was no longer a place to relax and get away from the con. We sat down for about ten minutes before getting hit with the maids yelling at people to come up and dance on the speakers, and we left juuust when they started Boom Boom Boom Boom (I Want You In My Room). Later, we would find that escaping the con entirely and sitting at the tables at the closed food court was what the cool kids do.

You kind of want to get away from the con after a couple hours of it, because man, the kids are really out in full force, being as obnoxious as they wanna be. This is a given at any anime con, but it's worse at NYAF because unlike many fan-run cons, nobody's come up with such wise rules as "no hug me signs", "no yaoi paddles", and "stop running and screaming and flailing and swinging that fucking ridiculous thing you bought at the dealer's room around". In summary, a cosplayer raised a sign inviting us to a con orgy on the way out Friday.

The only not-Tomino panel I went to was the CPM Retrospective, which was loads of fun and really deserved to pull more people. Did you know that when CPM hired you, they'd show you a highlight reel of their most atrocious porn (my buddy who used to work for them said he'd seen all these shows before) and then plop a "I am not offended by this" form in front of you? Because that's how they used to roll.

Highlight of the panel was definitely the anecdote about the host, his boss, the CEO, and a lawyer standing around watching Night Shift Nurses and trying to figure out if they were going to sell it. They were on the fence about the pissing, but CEO John O'Donnell decided "If it's in Penthouse, it's fine!", sent a secretary for a Penthouse, and sure enough, there was the pissing. Or maybe the time they took Utena's Kunihiko Ikuhara to a trashy bar where the hot chick bartenders made out with each other, and Ikuhara was all "RESBIANS!!" God, what a company. It really makes you wish they were still in business. Also, there was an apology for the Patlabor dub and that fucked-up Slayers DVD box, which I appreciated. I described this panel as both "owns" on Twitter while I was at it, and then "owned" on Twitter once I had left. This is the proper use of a Web 2.0.

The only anime I saw was Cencoroll: produced by one dude (Atsuya Uki), the story is basically JD Salinger's Pokemon. An antisocial young man and his pet shapeshifter fight another antisocial young man and his pet shapeshifter, and visual fireworks ensue. There's probably more creative animation in this half-hour than there is in many anime TV series' entire runs. People in the crowd after the movie were complaining that everything wasn't explained and spelled out to them, and to these people I say "go back to Jump and leave the animator alone".

I didn't take a ton of pictures but I'm going to go ahead and authoritatively pronounce that Maetel and her luggage (and, yeah, the Bumblebee guy) won cosplay.

Mushihime-sama Futari is region-free: MAYBE YOU SHOULD GET HYPE, BUT THERE ARE SOME CAVEATS SO BE AWARE OF THEM BEFORE YOU DECIDE TO FEEL ANY HYPE IN YOUR BLOOD

I've posted here before that it's very hard to be any sort of aficionado of Japanese arcade games unless you actually live in Japan and go to the arcade there, and the situation is even worse for the guys who play arcade shooting games. But let's review: while PS3 games are all region-free, making importing simple, Microsoft offers Xbox 360 developers the choice of whether or not they want to region lock their games. Japanese developers have unanimously decided to lock their games, meaning that you can't play legitimate Japanese imports on an American 360 without actually modifying the hardware. Unfortunately, many ports of arcade games exclusive to 360 remain in Japan, like many of Cave's recent shooters and that Idolmaster thing all the pedophiles like.

This is obviously a pain in the ass for people who want to play these games outside of Japan. These guys actually have to buy Japanese 360s, create Japanese Live accounts, and pay import markup for XBL points because their Japanese accounts won't take their foreign credit cards. Many of these people have been Cave fans: Cave fans around the world are pretty well-known for being nuts.

Cave has taken notice of the pleas of their foreign fans, and while they haven't set up a US distribution deal--the Gamestops and Walmarts of the world would not be thrilled to stock 2D shooting games that they definitely won't be able to sell-- they have, for the first time in their history, done something for these long-suffering individuals. The coming home release of Mushihime-sama Futari will be region-free. You can just pop it into your 360, and it'll work. This is the first time I can recall offhand where a Japan release that wasn't immediately coming out in the West was region-free. This coming from the company that used to say to their foreign fans: "We sure hope you can come to Japan and play our games soon!" I'm not even that into Cave games, but I'm going to buy this because I want to see these companies figure it out already and make the smart choice.

That said, here is probably what will happen with download content: material for Japanese games, from demos to videos to in-game content, only appears in the Japanese Xbox Marketplace. You need to make a Japanese account, download the stuff, and then log into your real account to use it in the game. This is the only ass pain you will likely experience when playing this game. I've also heard that 5pb's ports of earlier Cave games were really bad, but Cave seems to be doing this themselves so there shouldn't be a problem.

Hopefully Japanese companies making niche games will realize the foolishness of region-locking on any platform, though recent developments with that pedophile game hint otherwise. Even from their point of view, all I see region-locking doing for a publisher-- especially these niche guys who need every sale they can get-- is losing them a small number of sales around the world and pushing those same people that much closer to just pirating the damn thing. Did I mention that DS piracy is really, really easy, to the point where everybody I know but me does it, and they constantly ask me why I'm not doing it the moment they look at my DS? Because region locking only helps that situation, Namco.

As a side note, if anyone can sell me a cheap copy of Mahjong Fight Club DS, hook a brother up: I'm not paying $70.

Knights in the Nightmare impressions

I've had this game sitting around for quite some time, but it's so intimidating that I didn't write it up until now. Sting's Knights in the Nightmare is a pretty amazing game that not many people are ever actually going to be able to appreciate on account of its complexity. This is a real-time strategy RPG with 2D shooter elements, it's unlike anything you've ever played, and it's a tough game on top of that. I imagine their designer was given free reign to do whatever the hell he wanted, because he seems to have gone completely mad on this game.

Knights in the Nightmare is so complicated that the first option you see when you start, before the choice to actually start your game, is the tutorial section. If you're on a brand new copy of the game and you try and start playing without watching the tutorials, the game warns you. You can go on if you want, it says, but you should really give this stuff a look. And for once, the game is absolutely right. You will not figure this game out. You will not have the slightest idea of what is going on unless somebody tells you, and even then, it will not quite be clear.

So you look at the tutorials, and there turn out to be more of them than one could ever possibly get through in one sitting. There's the "first steps" section, which is the long, essential how-to-play, after which you will only vaguely understand what you have to do. Then there's the larger tutorial, which is more like an ingame manual on every possible topic, and then there's a tips section, which goes into even further detail. All told, there may well be a hundred of these. This should give you an idea of what kind of game we're dealing with here.

Here is the gist of it, as best I can describe it: the premise is that the player is a wandering spirit (the Wisp) who summons the souls of dead knights to fight for him. The battle takes place up on the top screen, and you use the bottom touchscreen to move the Wisp, which serves as your cursor, around up top. The Wisp directs knights when, where and with what to attack, as you can imagine. Enemies walk around the map freely, and attack the Wisp, rather than the knights, by shooting bullets at it. You dodge these the same way you'd dodge bullets in a 2D shooter. Imagine having to worry about your cursor being attacked in Starcraft, or hell, on your computer. It's like that. Get hit by enough of these bullets, and you'll lose time, and eventually your turn will end. Maps have to be finished in X amount of turns, or it's game over. I'm not going to get much further into it than that, because there's much more to it than that and this game is completely crazy. Here is Atlus' tutorial: you're probably gonna need that.

This game combines all the stuff I love in videogames: it's a tough arcade experience that demands serious attention and skill, and between levels there's some very involved character and item building. Knights in the Nightmare takes a lot of determination from the player, but as far as my tastes go, the best videogames are the ones where you get what you put in.

The Dark Spire impressions

Everything is connected, guys. I wrote an article on Colony Drop about the Wizardry anime because I was playing The Dark Spire. One day, as I was checking my anime source of choice, the name Wizardry came up. And I said "I'm playing Wizardry right now!" Because I am.

If you're interested in an old-fashioned dungeon-crawler RPG on the DS, look up the Etrian Odyssey games. They're great! It's intimidating to start with, but as your guys get stronger, the game becomes a breeze. If you're played Etrian Odyssey, on the other hand, and you think it goes too easy on the player, what with its low difficulty curve, and the way the game tells you where you are on the map-- how am I even going to get lost-- then look into Dark Spire. It's ten bucks nowadays, and it's not hard to find. Nobody really wants it but you.

Dark Spire is so old-school that you can actually switch the game's graphics down to "classic" mode, replacing the 3D dungeon with a monochrome outline of itself, the music with bleepy chiptunes, and the enemies with sprites from the 8-bit era. I turned this on as soon as the game started and I haven't switched it off: if you're gonna do this, you gotta do it all the way.

Dark Spire is so old-school that you can't even see how strong your weapons are: you just have to look at the price and the results and decide whether or not one piece of equipment is better than another. Armor uses the old Dungeons and Dragons "armor class" system, where lower is better, and swings in the almighty dice roll can, in one shot, determine your fate, usually in the direction of death. This is not a game you're going to be able to run through as fast as you can: you're going to spend a ton of time on the very first floor of the dungeon, both exploring and grinding for money and experience. This isn't even a fair game: keeping multiple saves, and saving every few encounters, is advisable. There are so many situations where even if you survive, loading up your last save is preferable to continuing to play. If you're in the mood for a challenge, then by all means, go for it.

Speaking for myself, the game got me with the flavor text. The game's on a really low budget, and a lot of the time it doesn't actually illustrate what's in front of you, instead dropping you into an empty room and saying, for example, that this is actually a fully furnished bedroom. You're allowed to check around, and the game will tell you in great detail what you don't see in front of you. Especially in the minimalist classic mode, touches like this actually create a weird sort of immersion: because every corridor, every room looks exactly the same, you start to fill in the blanks in atmosphere with your head. Atlus' excellent localization job on the flavor text just helps along this mental effort. I usually play my DS games on the subway, but I feel like that would ruin this one. Dark Spire is a game for right before bed, with all the lights off.

Policenauts is out in English, IN CASE YOU LIKE HIDEO KOJIMA

After years of work, the Policenauts Translation Project has finally achieved their goal: Hideo Kojima's 1994 adventure game Policenauts-- a game famous mostly for the fact that non-readers of Japanese couldn't play it for so long-- is finally fully translated into English. Check the "patch" section of the site, and then follow the helpful instructions included with it. No, I will not provide tech support.

This is important to you, video gamers, and this is important to you, anime fans. If you don't know Kojima (unlikely, if you found a site like this), he's a pretty big deal in videogames. A long, long time ago, Kojima created the Metal Gear series, which was resurrected in the late 90's as Metal Gear Solid, which in turn grew into to one of the Japanese videogame industry's only blockbuster videogame franchises. Since then, Kojima-- despite repeatedly expressing interest in doing other stuff and saying that every MGS game will be the last he works on-- just cannot get away from Metal Gear. It's so successful and so important that it's cursed the man. Policenauts was Kojima's last project before Metal Gear Solid, and it was nearly as ambitious.

Policenauts is a spiritual successor to Kojima's other adventure game, the cult classic Snatcher. Now Kojima always wanted to be a film director-- he just ended up a game designer, is all-- and on top of his games cribbing from his favorite movies (Snatcher from Blade Runner, Policenauts from Lethal Weapon), Kojima's also made a concerted effort to make games more like films. Snatcher is often referred to as a "digital comic" because of the way scenes were displayed onscreen as panels. Policenauts is something of a technological evolution from Snatcher: it's an adventure game that presents the illusion of playing a movie, with as little intrusion from the game as possible.

Everything is at least a little animated in Policenauts, and it's done lavishly by AIC, who you might remember from Tenchi Muyo and a wave of products that were like Tenchi Muyo but a little bit different. Major conversations are all voiced by a cast that some of you are going to remember from anime: Kikuko Inoue and the late Kaneto Shiozawa spring immediately to mind. Mechanical designs are courtesy of Hajime Katoki, for you robot lovers in the room. It wouldn't be too off-target to call Policenauts an anime that you play, but with infinitely higher production values than you'd see in the visual novel, which merely passes for playable anime these days. Since adventure games-- and 2D graphics, for that matter-- were already on the way out in the 90s, there really aren't very many games quite like Policenauts.

This cinematic quality in Kojima's games is a strength and a weakness: in Metal Gear, Kojima's famously overblown dialogues have regularly been criticized as getting in the way of the action game that takes place between them. But Snatcher and Policenauts are adventure games, and since you're explicitly playing for the story, you get what you came for: a big, heavy story that takes place in a seriously detailed world. Even as an MGS fan, I think these games suit Kojima more than Metal Gear does, and I wish somebody at Konami would let him make another one, even though I know it wouldn't sell. But until then, why not play this? Then go back and play Snatcher, too. You won't regret either one.