System Shock 2

Platform: PC
Developer: Irrational Games and Looking Glass Studios
Released: 1999
Genre: First Person Shooter, Action Adventure, Survival Horror

The Game
In the original System Shock, a hacker was hired/blackmailed into removing the ethical constraints on an artificial intelligence named SHODAN, who ran a space station for the megacorporation TriOptimum. In return, he received a set of military grade cybernetic implants, and the surgery kept him in a healing coma for several months. When he woke up, he found that SHODAN had gone completely megalomaniacal and intended to use the resources of Citadel Station to take over the world, wipe out all current life, and start anew with herself as Earth's malevolent goddess. He raged against the machine that he had let loose and eventually destroyed her using his new implants and his genius hacking abilities . . .

Nearly half a century later, TriOp is still struggling to regain the prestige it held before the incident on Citadel. In a massive PR coup, they manage to land the contract to build the first faster-than-light spaceship, the Von Braun. For its maiden voyage, it is to be accompanied by a military ship, the UNN Rickenbacker. Nothing could possibly go wrong, right?

A soldier wakes up in a med bay of the Von Braun with no memories of how he got there. A voice speaks to him, telling him that he volunteered for a surgery that would give him experimental cybernetic implants in order to combat a strange force that has taken over the ship . . .

System Shock 2 is the highly acclaimed sequel to a highly acclaimed game, both of which initially released to underwhelming sales and only later were discovered and became known as cult classics. Though perhaps not as well known and/or popular as other FPSes of the time such as Half-Life (which released the previous year) or Deus Ex (which released the following year), both were extremely influential games in their own rights and have extremely dedicated fans. Dedicated enough to actually make the game playable on newer systems, where for many years it was infamously difficult if not downright impossible to get it to even start unless you had a Win98 machine or older. And thank goodness they made SS2Tool, or I might not be doing this review right now!

But yes, influential. How was it influential, you ask? Well, the most concrete instance of this is the Bioshock series, which stands as an official spiritual successor to SS and SS2. Or if that's not your cup of tea, supposedly Dead Space was originally going to be an actual direct sequel to SS2. And even if that isn't true it's still evident that it was heavily based on many of the elements from the earlier game. And all you folks who think Portal is the ultimate of FPS gaming due to GlaDOS and her crazy turrets probably have a great deal of thanks to give to System Shock's SHODAN and XERXES.

So the question is . . . does SS2 actually stand up to all the hype that seems to surround it? Well, that's what I'm hoping to suss out here, of course. But before I really begin, let me just warn everyone:

BIG FAT SPOILER ALERT!

This game has a lot of stuff in it that may be best experienced by an actual play through. Two of the main secrets of the game (though one of 'em isn't much of a secret if you're paying any attention at all) are gonna be blown right in the very next section. This game is chock full of spoilery twists and stuff otherwise as well.

Proceed with caution.

The Characters
The main character of this little venture is generally known only as the Soldier, since he's just a random soldier picked out from the military forces of the Rickenbacker. He's your standard silent hero with little in the way of personality or back story. This jibes with the original game in which the main character was only known as the Hacker and had little in the way of personality or back story. The only real defining characteristic of this character is chosen by the player him or herself, that being whether he's in the Marines, the Navy, or the OSA (psi-corp).

He's also gained the fan nickname "Goggles" because the cyber-implants on his eyes look like goggles. I'm not very partial to this name myself, so I'll be referring to him as "Soldier" for this review.

Anyway, who cares about what the boring ol' hero is like, right? In this game, it's all about the villains! And in this case, those villains are . . . the Many.

"Villains" in the plural is a bit misleading in this case, however. The Many (and this is one of those spoilers I was talking about) is actually a biological mass of various semi-autonomous creatures that share a single hive mind. They were found several light years away from Earth on Tau Ceti V and brought on board the Von Braun to be studied as the first concrete evidence of alien life on other planets.

Though these creatures come in several different forms, the primary strain is the parasitic annelids that burrow into people, gestate for a bit, burst out of their chest, and then angle back to burrow up through the neck into the brain, whereupon they take complete control of their host's motor functions. The poor human this happens to has some awareness left of what has happened to them, but is unable to do anything about it.

That's just your basic foot soldier in the Many's army. There's worse out there. Way worse. And they're all looking to either add you to the mass of the Many or destroy you for opposing them. And that is basically what the Many is about. They want to expand their glorious nature, to absorb more minds into its own consciousness, to exult in the warmth and pleasure of the flesh. Which is not as delightful as it may sound at first. And their ultimate intent upon the Von Braun upon finishing their preparations is to sail the FTL ship straight back to Earth and assimilate the entire population.

Opposing this is - surprise of surprises! - SHODAN, the AI Who Would Be God. She guides the player's actions throughout most of the game as she attempts to use him to destroy the Many. But wait! How did she survive the destruction of Citadel Station so many years ago? Why does she want to destroy the Many? Well . . . those I'll go ahead and leave as spoilers. You'll just have to play the game to find out!

Who else is there? Well, the only other sort-of notable character is XERXES, the AI running the Von Braun and - to some extent, it seems - the Rickenbacker. After the whole SHODAN incident, AIs became extremely restricted, so Xerc was purposefully built with no self-awareness. He was also built and programmed for cheap, since TriOp is still trying to get their financial legs underneath 'em. Both of these elements together lead Xerc to be easy pickings for the Many, who reprogram him into their digital slave. This spells bad news for the Soldier since the wayward AI runs the security system and the various robots on the ship and will send waves of enemies to attack whenever a camera spots him. He gets some of the best lines in the game, though, since he's still trying to run the ship like everything was normal while adding in bits like "glory to the Many, glory to the mass" every once in a while.

And then there's the crews of the two ships. Eeeeeh.

Don't get me wrong. It would definitely have been to the game's detriment if these characters hadn't been included . . . it's just that compared to the show-stealing trinity of the Many, SHODAN, and XERXES, everyone else is sort of forgettable. I will give special mention to Bronson, tho'. She's a hardass.

The Writing
One of the main draws of this game is the writing, and I really think it's from there that a lot of the other elements that make it so wonderful spring.

Both SHODAN and the Many are wonderfully written characters with well-defined personalities, modes of speaking, goals, and attitudes toward the player. Even the generally forgettable background characters all have distinct personalities and characterizations. XERXES, like I said, gets some of the best lines ever, but just about everyone gets at least one moment of absolute awesome in their dialogue. Let me just give you a small sample . . .

"Anatoly, there's only so much corporate calisthenics I can go through before I start to feel a little queasy, so let's get down to brass tacks here. We don't like each other. We each have our own motivations for undertaking this mission, so let me give you a little warning. I cannot be circumvented. I cannot be tricked. I cannot be manipulated. And I cannot be bought. You come at me straight and keep the fancy maneuvers for your next board meeting. Just because my father swam with the sharks doesn't mean that I do."

That's from William Bedford Diego, captain of the Rickenbacker, leader of the military forces on the mission, and son of the CEO that hired the Hacker to hack SHODAN in the first game, by the way. He's a bit of a badass.

There are tons of neat little twists throughout the story as it goes along. Some are rather predictable, but that doesn't make them any less awesome. Learning the back story of the Many and how SHODAN got all mixed up into things is pretty trippy.

And there are a lot of little side-stories here and there that nevertheless tend to tie in seamlessly with both the overall plot and the gameplay itself, mainly in the form of cleverly placed clues that help you advance in the main storyline or simply point you toward much-needed gear and how to get to it.

Unfortunately, there are a few plot holes, I won't lie. Fortunately they're mostly ignorable should you even happen to notice 'em.

Like the previous System Shock almost all of the back story and a healthy chunk of the currently running story is told through the use of recordings that the Soldier finds littered throughout the ship, mostly work and personal logs left behind by the crew members. Most of them are found in a jumbled order, sometimes detailing what happened after the introduction of the Many to the ship and sometimes before, but always progressively revealing bit by bit what exactly is going on. As long as the player takes the time to seek these logs out and listen to them, a masterfully designed story of mutiny, betrayal, horror, and emergence will unfold.

The Gameplay
SS2 is not your typical FPS. There's a reason why the "Genre" listing near the top of this review lists three types of game that are generally considered to be quite separate from each other. These are the three, by the way, that Wikipedia lists for SS2, but I'm sorely tempted to go ahead and add "Role Playing Game" in there as well. In order to ease the description of the gameplay, I'm gonna break this section down into those three genres.

Ah, well the hell. I'll do all four!

First Person Shooter
Perhaps first and foremost, SS2 is indeed an FPS. It's the way most people tend to categorize it, I understand, though it's really just as a shorthand since it doesn't cover the full scope of the game.

Anyway, yes, the game takes place from the main character's viewpoint, and you go around shooting the shit out of whatever is stupid enough to stay in the center of the screen long enough. It follows many of the standard FPS conventions, such as a selection of the basic weapon types (pistol, shotgun, bludgeoning melee weapon, assault rifle, laser pistol, etc.), lots of switches and buttons to flip or press, and some minor platforming sections.

One interesting addition to the standard FPS model is the introduction of different types of ammo as well as different firing types. For example, the pistol and assault rifle - which use the same ammo - have three different types of bullets: standard, anti-personnel, and armor piercing. The first is your basic, balanced pew pew, of course. The second is best used against the squishier members of the Many, and the last is primarily good for taking down rogue robots, turrets, and other metal-covered monstrosities.

Each ranged weapon also has two different firing modes. The rifle can be changed from single shot to full auto fire, while the energy pistol can go from normal blasts to overcharged shots that do a lot of damage all at once, but it takes a while for the pistol to recharge for the next shot. These add a wide selection of options on how to proceed through the game, and often has the player having to switch ammo on the fly during fights, adding to the tension.

Action Adventure
Exploration is a large part of the game. The Von Braun is a sprawling ship with lots of twisty, curvy pathways that lead all over the place, sometimes seemingly at random (justified in-universe by TriOp hiring really cheap ship designers), and several areas seem to exist solely for the sake of said exploration and finding hidden caches of weapons and other equipment. Since getting around the ship isn't really a strict case of "getting from point A to point B", it sometimes feels a lot like a Metroidvania game. And even though it's easy to get lost a lot of the time, the areas you might find yourself in are often quite interesting anyway and have lots of neat stuff to grab up!

There are plenty of puzzles to be had. Though still simplistic by today's standards, they were still fairly sophisticated for FPSes at the time, and many of them involved using combining facets of the inventory, stats, and mini-games elements, as well as making heavy use of the previously mentioned exploration aspect.

There's a lot of stuff to pick up in this game. Weapons, ammo, armor, medical supplies, technical tools, mission items, random pointless junk . . . tons and tons of stuff. An inventory screen (which also serves many other purposes which will be described further on) is therefore provided, based on a grid system. Weapons take up three spaces while most everything else in the game takes only one apiece, and how many spaces you are provided with is based primarily on how strong the Soldier is. So that's the "adventure" part. Where the "action" part comes in is that the inventory is accessed in real time, meaning that while you're trying to move stuff around, there still might be some nasty nasty monster trying to chew through the back of your neck in the meantime. It adds a sense of urgency and amps up the feeling of paranoia and danger . . . you're not safe, you're never safe, not even in your own inventory screen.

Survival Horror
Past the FPS bit, this is probably the part that everyone remembers SS2 for best. Virtually everything about the game is designed to make you feel as if you're trapped and doing everything you can to make it past insurmountable odds. Unless you're very careful and know what you're doing, ammo is very limited, especially toward the beginning of the game. Inventory space can be very hard to come by, and you often have to figure out what you're going to keep and what you're going to drop. You often hear monsters well before you see them, and this early warning is far less comforting than it is creepy as hell.

Oh, and your weapons degrade with use. And having one of your guns jam right in the middle of a fight without warning? Very unnerving. You have to use the maintenance skill every once in a while to keep your weapons in good repair, otherwise you might be up the creek when they fail you. Unfortunately, in many cases they degrade a little too swiftly, and the developers have mentioned that that's their fault entirely . . . they'd meant for them to wear out fast, but not quite that fast. Still, as long as you pay attention and know what you're doing, the problem will remain only just enough to keep you sweating, not enough to frustrate you completely.

Part of this is somewhat mitigated by the use of Quantum Entanglement Devices, which when activated can resurrect the Soldier at their location for a small amount of nanites, the in-game currency. This can damage the "survival" part of the game somewhat, since once you can find a QED on your current deck, you're effectively immortal and death is merely a minor setback, but fortunately it doesn't quite shatter the illusion completely. And considering how often and in how many ways you can die in the game, the QEDs are pretty much essential to getting further into the game.

Role Playing Game
The inventory screen isn't just for inventory! It also gives access to all the audio logs you've picked up, your character's stats, and other useful tidbits. All of the Soldier's abilities are dependent on his stats. Depending on how you built him up during the training portion of the game, he already has a few points in various abilities, but all the rest are increased through the use of cybermodules, which are SS2's version of experience points, gained after completing certain objectives or (on occasion) found randomly about the ship. By accessing certain terminals around the ship, the Soldier can use these modules to improve his stats and skills, becoming a better hacker, getting more psionic abilities, or gaining the ability to use certain weapons.

There are four special terminals found throughout the game that also give a selection of perks that the player can choose from, as well as software upgrades that give bonuses to the Soldier's technical skills and implants that while powered up can improve his stats and skills or give him new (and sometimes surprisingly disgusting) abilities. In all, it's a very in-depth system for an FPS, and it works extremely well.

One particularly interesting bit is the research skill. Occasionally the player will run across objects that have no description and must be researched before they can be utilized. Toward the beginning of the game, these come mostly in the form of organs taken from the bodies of the Many, and when fully researched, a damage bonus is then conferred against those particular enemies. Later in the game, unresearched weapons and implants can be found. Besides needing an appropriate level of researching skill to figure them out, the player has to search out certain chemicals that can be found on the various decks of the ship in order to complete their research.

Overall
System Shock 2 has a lot of different types of gameplay going on all at once, but it never really feels cluttered or too busy. Each segment fits perfectly into a larger whole and works together beautifully. It many ways, it almost deserves to have a new category all its own.

The Challenge
There are four difficulty settings: Easy, Normal, Hard, and Impossible. These are all pretty much exactly what they say on the tin. I usually play on Normal myself, and once upon a time this gave me a decent challenge without being too horrible frustrating, but now after a fair amount of practice, I may need to move on up to Hard.

Regardless of which one you're on, however, the survival horror aspects of the game are still in there, making sure things aren't too easy on you.

The Sights
The ship itself is beautiful. Horribly designed (though that was by design), but beautifully textured. It's extremely atmospheric, very dark and creepy looking, and has lots of interesting stuff to look at. The lighting is especially well done . . . a bit too dark at times, but that's what the gamma adjust in the options is for. Either way, it's best played with all the lights around you turned off, not just so you can see better, but to help the mood along.

The character models, unfortunately, is where the game's graphics fail. Looking outdated even for the time, most of the NPCs (corpses, primarily) and creatures (the human-looking ones, anyway) are extremely angular and have low-grade textures. It's a bit of a shame, but what're ya gonna do?

Well, what you're probably gonna want to do is get some mods. As I said before, SS2 has a very dedicated fanbase, and there have been several mods made that upgrade the textures of the characters as well as the ship itself, all without effecting gameplay at all. About a third of the way into this last play through, I installed the SHTUP (objects) and Rebirth (NPCs) mods. While I won't say they can match the cutting edge graphics you'll find today, they certainly go a very long way toward prettying the game up. And since the game was already rather pretty in the first place, it's pretty much going from "Nice!" to "Spectacular!"

The Sounds
The music soundtrack for SS2 is primarily techno. Cyberpunk, after all, is all about the techno, so there's plenty of high-speed drumbeats and synthesizered sounds to be had. Personally, I love it and have most of the music downloaded to listen to while I'm writing. While playing the game itself, it's particularly fun to zoom through the engineering section to the heartrate-increasing beat jamming out of your computer speakers.

The voice acting is . . . varied. Some of it is absolutely wonderful. SHODAN, of course, is famous for her particular mode of speech as well as the charged dominatrix tones provided by Terri Brosius. XERXES excels with his deadpan deliveries of truly disturbing lines. The Many's mix of various voices is weird and discombobulating, just as it should be. And a number of the folks doing the audio logs are surprisingly good, considering most of them were just plucked from the ranks of the game's developers, programmers, artists, and such. But sadly, some of them sound exactly like they were just plucked from those ranks. Flat lines, cheesy accents, and so on. It's not horrible enough to ruin the game or anything, but it can be a bit distracting at times.

But where the sound really comes together for this game is in the ambient sounds made by the various monsters in the game. It's not just what they're saying (though a lot of the things they're saying are weird as hell), but the fact that you can often hear them but not always see them. Not until they're suddenly all up in your face and trying to tear you a new one, that is. Even for a lot of experienced players - like me - this can lead to a whole lot of "OH GAWD WHERE IS IT WHERE IS IT" and swinging the mouse wildly around in an attempt to find an eliminate the source of the noise. You can hear things on the other sides of walls, floors, and ceilings as well, meaning that even if you can figure out that the tromping and synthesized burbling is coming from the floor above you, you're still going into the situation knowing that you don't know exactly where on the floor above you it is. And in SS2, not knowing can get you murdered horribly.

Perhaps the most disturbing of the monster noises are those made by the protocol droids. Like XERXES, they seem to be under the impression that everything is still just fine, and all they want to do is help you, sir.

The Bottom Line
So I was at a buddy's house one day, and he asked if I had ever played System Shock 2 before. No, I told him, I hadn't even heard of it. So he took me to his computer, installed the game, and then sat me down in front of it. On his way out of the room, he turned off the light.

Approximately six hours later, he stuck his head in the door and asked if I was doing alright. My exact answer was to turn around briefly and drool "buuuuuuuh" before going back to the game. I think he laughed briefly before leaving me to it again.

He knew. The bastard knew what he was doing to me, and he didn't warn me! Well let me warn you, if you haven't played SS2 before: This game lives up to its hype, it is absolutely frickin' awesome, and if you're not careful, it will take over your life for long periods of time. It wasn't until much later that I read this Penny Arcade strip, and I can obviously tell you that it is not in any way an exaggeration. This can actually happen to you. It is that good and that immersive.

After playing it "briefly" the first time, I eventually borrowed the game from my buddy and played through the entire thing a couple of times before giving it back. Then, years later, I managed to find a copy of it just sitting on the shelf at a local used game store for forty bucks. While I did happen to have the money on me at that time, it was supposed to be my food money for the week. I stood there and agonized for several minutes, but in the end I walked away with my very own copy of System Shock 2, and it was totally worth every penny and the near starvation.

Is it the best game ever made? Well, probably not. It does have a few unfortunate downfalls. But it is definitely one of the best ever made, and very high on that list besides. If you don't have it, find it. If you can find it, play it. It doesn't matter how you get it. Buy it, copy it, steal it, whatever you have to do.

System Shock 2 fucking rocks.

Beyond Good & Evil

Platform: Playstation 2
Developer: Ubisoft
Released: 2003
Genre: Action Adventure

The Game
Things are looking down for the mining planet of Hillys. Its population is under attack by an alien menace known as the DomZ, which is snatching folks up into space for undoubtedly nefarious purposes. The citizenry is nominally protected by the Alpha Sections, an elite army task force that holds Hillys under the grip of martial law. When freelance photographer Jade takes on a job in order to pay the shield energy bill for her lighthouse home, she ends up involved with an underground resistance intent on exposing both sides for what they really are and taking them down once and for all.

Beyond Good & Evil is the creation of Michel Ancret, the mind behind the popular Rayman games as well as a number of more obscure titles. For a time, it seemed that BG&E would also languish in obscurity as its initial sales run was very poor despite receiving many high reviews from critics. It has since gained something of a cult following, however, and it has been announced that a sequel is in the works. Whether this will further develop into the full trilogy that Mr. Ancret originally envisioned or not is yet to be seen.

The Characters
Jade is our main character, an intrepid freelance journalist who lives in a huge lighthouse with her "Uncle" Pey'j and a whole bunch of li'l rugrats, orphans of DomZ attacks that she and Pey'j have taken in. She - as with many of the human characters in the game - has a very interesting look about her in that she doesn't have a specific ethnicity. I originally pegged her as Asian, but she seems to be a futuristic mix of all sortsa folk-types. Lineage aside, her gender is definite . . . she's a fine, foxy lady!

Past her appearances, however, beats the heart of a strong, caring person. She watches over the children that live with her as if they were her very own kids, and her bond with Pey'j is as strong as any familial tie. She's also quite the butt-kicker as well, being a tough martial artist that specializes in staff fighting. Her reporting skills are top notch as well, from all indications. She's kind of like Superman, only a hot lady in the future.

Pey'j is one of a number of humanoid animals running around the game, in his case an anthropomorphic pig. He's a short but boisterous old fellah who is nominally Jade's uncle but acts more like a father to her much of the time. He acts as a general handyman, mechanic, and tinker around the lighthouse, but proof gets dropped every once in a while that he's actually way more brilliant than he lets on.

Double H is Jade's partner in the resistance for the latter half of the game. She rescues him as he's undergoing brainwashing in a DomZ controlled facility, and as a result he's kind of loopy for a while. And for the rest of the game, for that matter, but it's eventually revealed that his regular personality is that of the big tough guy with a heart of gold and a strict code of honor (the Carlson and Peeters Handbook, to be precise). And he definitely is a big tough guy, the premiere agent of the resistance before Jade comes along and forever clad in Hillys militia armor.

The DomZ (pronounced "doms", as in multiple dominatrixes) are the primary antagonists in the game, and it is them or their agents that Jade has to face off against throughout. Very little is explained about them, even at the very end, but that's really to be expected considering this is supposed to be part one of three parts overall. There isn't any cohesive appearance to the DomZ other than a certain Giger-esque aesthetic, and they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. About the only thing most if not all of them share is an orb-shaped part of their body which often turns into a pearl after they are defeated, signifying some sort of connection between them and the pearls you collect to buy certain items with.

The Alpha Sections are a military faction that have basically taken over the government and declared martial law on Hillys in response to the DomZ attacks. Right from the beginning, however, it becomes apparent that not all is as it seems with them, and Jade is hired by the resistance to seek out what their true motives are. The Alphas are the stock enemies of the game, particularly in the first half.

Secundo is . . . eugh. I'm just gonna go ahead and say it. I don't really like this guy. He's the artificial intelligence in Jade's SAC (a mini-computer that doubles as a "bag" that holds items by digitalizing them and then later reconstructing them), and he's . . . well, I don't want to say "useless", but he's close to it. He gets a short scene near the beginning of the game where he jabbers on in his bizarre almost-French almost-Spanish almost-Italian accent, then doesn't show up again until almost the very end of the game to pull off a big deus ex machina maneuver. He does pop in on occasion with various "Way to go!" voice overs when Jade picks up a new item, but he has no actual presence in the main game whatsoever. He doesn't even act as a tutorial for the game (mostly because one isn't needed), and if he were cut out completely, I doubt anyone would have really noticed. I almost hope that his existence is justified by having a larger part in the upcoming sequel(s), but then I remember how difficult it is to even understand what they guy is saying most of the time and all hope is lost.

The Writing
Not bad! Well, if you don't mind the open-ended nature of it. Not a lot is explained, and even when revelation seems to be coming fast and furious at the end, we're left hanging with several unanswered questions. What are the DomZ, really? What's the full nature of the connection they seem to have with Jade and Pey'j? Why does Peeters of Carlson and Peeters spell his name with an extra E?

An unfortunate side-effect of this and the shortness of the game is that it only scratches the surface of the true plot. There are definitely hints of hidden depth, but for the most part we are only allowed to see the shallows up until the very end. For the most part, it's a pretty basic and predictable story of conspiracies and revolution.

But for all of that (not that any of that is actually bad of course), it's still well constructed and presented. Predictability be damned, each and every plot twist was still brilliant and intensely moving, especially the very ending. The dialogue and characterization is quite vibrant and clever, making me feel very comfortable with these people in this world. Pey'j and Double H are especially good in this aspect, between the one making various pork product jokes at his own expense ("Thanks, Jade! I'd've ended up on a silver platter with an apple in my mouth if it wasn't for you!") and the other constantly quoting cheesy lines from his special agent handbook ("D.B.U.T.T.! Don't Break Up The Team!").

The Gameplay
As is usual with action adventure games, there's a lot of running around, smacking things around, and moving stuff around. It's all very simple, and everything you really need to know about controlling Jade takes about two minutes total to learn in the game itself, so I won't bother getting into it here.

These controls, however, are deceptively simple, I think. Unlike some action games that will give their characters a million and one abilities, 90% of which players never actually use under any circumstances (including the circumstances they were put in specifically to deal with), BG&E actually gets a great deal of use out of its limited repertoire. The solutions for all the puzzles in the game may only utilize the same four or five abilities over and over again, but they'll each use those same abilities in unique ways or combinations. It makes for tight yet varied gameplay that I rather enjoyed.

And even though you change modes of transportation every once in a while (by foot, by hovercraft, and by spaceship, to be specific), most of the basic controls remain the same for each. R2 makes you run/fly faster, X makes you attack with your staff/blaster, square makes you jump, circle activates an item, and so on. Hoping into a vehicle, therefore, doesn't make it feel like you suddenly hopped into an entirely different game as well, allowing for a smooth transition without having to learn a whole new control scheme.

Along with the action and the adventure elements are the stealth sections. These . . . are interesting.

Normally, I despise stealth games and anything to do with them. I'm not going to say they were my favorite thing here, either, but I will say that I despised these stealth elements the least of any game I've played so far. Just like the rest of the gameplay, the sneaking around here is very simple. Instead of having it take over huge swaths of the game, each section that requires stealth is usually contained to just a single room. Even if there's a series of several such rooms one after the other, once you get through one of those rooms, you don't have to worry about it again just because you fail in the next room. Failure is not rewarded by snatching away your previous successes. Which is nice. You usually only have to deal with one to three guards as well, and escaping is as easy as running into another room. The Alphas and the DomZ are apparently of the "out of sight, out of mind" mentality and don't spend more than a couple of seconds searching for you before resetting to their regular guard behavior.

And in the end, there are only a few sections where stealth is absolutely mandatory. Most of the time, if you either run out of patience or have an overabundance of bravery, you can run right on out and try to have a go with the guards face to face. It some ways it much more difficult than sneaking past (them guards is tough dudes), but in others it's pretty satisfying almost to the point of being cathartic. So the game typically doesn't punish you for wanting to play it as a straight action adventure game. Which is also nice.

The Challenge
Eeeeeeaaaaasyyyyyyyyy.

There were only a very few parts that felt more than a little challenging, and most of those were only tough until I figured out whatever simple trick there was to it. Most of the enemies pose little problem, falling quickly under Jade's whirling staff. The stealth sections never reach anything even close to thinking about possibly approaching Metal Gear level. The races - racing being something I hate even more than sneaking games, by the way - are laughably easy to beat. Even the extra special bonus stuff is no big thing. I collected all of the animals and pearls in the game as well as all of the Mdisks save one without even really trying hard. Well, for the most part, anyway. The last couple of animals gave me a short-lived fit, but it only took a few minutes to figure it out in the end.

BG&E definitely strikes me as something for the casual gamer, difficulty-wise. In fact, with all the other good things going for it, it would make an excellent introduction to the video gaming scene for people who had never picked up a controller before.

The Sights
Based on the name and the way people seem to salivate ever so slightly over this game, I've long held this image in my head of this massive, epic game with impressively stark settings and tough looking characters showing how gritty they are by having grimacing contests in seedy bars.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I plop the game into my PS2 and find that it's basically a action adventure Saturday morning cartoon. Main character Jade herself is at least somewhat realistically portrayed, but almost everyone else in the game has the exaggerated proportions of a cartoon character and/or is an anthropomorphic animal. Much of the setting is beautiful European-style architecture, and even the grimmest and grittiest parts of the game are pretty brightly lit.

Not that this is bad! No no no, perish the thought. The story itself was also lighter than I expected, and the imagery suits it quite well. BG&E is very visually appealing, and its aesthetic of bright and vibrant with just an undercurrent of darkness fits perfectly. The characters are all well designed and memorable. Even if their personalities hadn't been as well defined as they were, I would have been able to easily tell them apart and tell who was who based on their looks alone.

This is a very pretty game packed with a great amount of detail, and it's great that the main character carries a camera around, 'cause you'll be wanting to take pictures of every damn thing in the game. Heck, even the in-game password system has a delightful design, both functionally and graphically.

The Sounds
I started grooving the second the music started and continued to groove all the way to the end of the credits. The music in this game is, in one word, phenomenal. The rest of BG&E be damned, if there's any one reason to go out and buy your own copy, it's the soundtrack. I guarantee I will have "Propaganda" at the very least stuck in my head for the next week solid.

The voice acting is top notch as well. Half of what makes Pey'j and Double H such great sidekicks is not just their dialogue, but the way in which that dialogue is delivered with such absolute gusto. Secundo's weirdness aside, everyone did an exemplary job.

The Bottom Line
As I mentioned before, BG&E has something of a cult following, and the latest announcement of BG&E2 being on its way has sent quite a few folks into a frantic fervor. While I am not exactly frothing at the mouth or anything, I do find myself greatly looking forward to the sequel. If it's even half as good as this game, it will be well worth picking up.

And ladies and gentlemen, Beyond Good & Evil is indeed beyond good. It has a few black marks (too easy, Secundo needs to go away-o), but those are more than made up for by tight gameplay, beautiful graphics, wonderful characters, the beginnings of what looks to be a stellar story, and an absolutely rocking soundtrack. This is a great game, and I highly recommend it.

Goof Troop

Platform:  Super NES
Developer:  Capcom
Released:  1993
Genre:  Puzzle-based Action Adventure

The Game
While out on a relaxing fishing trip, Pete and PJ get kidnapped by dastardly pirates and carted off to the nearby island of Spoonerville.  Goofy and Max give chase, determined to save their neighbors.  To do so, they have to work their way across the island, solving puzzles and whacking pirates across the noggins with barrels, potted plants, or anything else they can get their grubby mitts on.

Goof Troop the game, for the uninitiated, is based on Goof Troop the cartoon series, which was part of the 90's Disney heyday, back when both their TV shows and animated movies didn't suck major balls.  It was part of the same great lineup of Disney TV toons as Darkwing Duck, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin, the last two of which (in my own personal opinion) managed to equal or even outshine the movies they spun off from.  How the big D's TV branch went from creating top notch entertainment like this to making crap like Cinderella II: Dreams Come True (originally the pilot for a TV series which got nixed, bumping it to direct-to-DVD) is beyond me.

The Characters
Goofy is . . . well, Goofy.  I think we all know Goofy.

Max, Goofy's son, is thankfully here the younger, fun-loving TV version and not the whiny emo teenager brat from A Goofy Movie.

Pete is Goofy's greedy, sour neighbor and (often backstabbing) sometimes friend.  When it turns out that the pirates kidnapped him because they mistook him for their long lost captain, he milks it for all its worth, ordering the pirates about and generally living it up.

PJ is Pete's kid and Max's best friend . . . and about the only thing he does in this game besides get kidnapped and then later saved is worry briefly what's going to happen to him and his dad if the pirates figure things out.

And finally there's Keelhaul Pete, the real captain and the final boss of the game, who's mighty unhappy with the impostor who's shown up in his absence.

Oh, there's also a bunch of pirates, who are trying to stop Goofy and Max, as well as the peaceful villagers of Spoonerville island, who . . . man, I dunno.  I figured they were there to give hints and clues and advice or whatever, but mostly they just spout needless exposition.

The Writing
Very simple, very basic, but surprisingly true and authentic to the show.  The only dialogue and narration is in short cutscenes at the beginning and end of the game as well as between each stage, but I can see what little there is being used if they'd actually had an episode of Goof Troop about pirates kidnapping Pete and PJ.  The characters are in character the whole way, and that's pretty cool.

The Gameplay
Pretty damn good, I must say!  And not just for a licensed product, but just as a general game!  I'm as shocked as anyone might be!  That's why I keep using these exclamation points!  Wow!

The game is primarily puzzle based, trying to figure out what combination of tools (wooden planks to close up small gaps, bells to make the pirates follow you, grappling hooks to grab things, stun pirates, close up large gaps, etc.) you need to get past an area, or what order you need to kick blocks around into the holes so that doors will open.  There's some minor inventory management puzzles, as you can only carry two items at a time, which are surprisingly not annoying and are relegated mostly toward the end of the game, where they add a little more challenge.

There is action involved, what with the pirates that are coming after you, but oftentimes said action is part of the puzzle as well.  Some doors won't open until you've defeated all the enemies in the room, and the game will force you into coming up with inventive ways of dealing with the pirates instead of just straightforward bashing their skulls in.

All in all, big thumbs up!

The Challenge
There were a few puzzles that had me scratching my head for a few moments, but for the most part everything - both action and puzzles - was easy and quite simple.  This is unsurprising and perfectly understandable, however, as the game was almost certainly created primarily for younger children, for whom it would provide a good deal more challenge.  And even though I zipped through the game with little to no problems, I was having more than enough fun that the low difficulty was entirely forgivable.

The only point where I actually did find myself sitting up and taking notice was the final battle against Keelhaul Pete.  It still wasn't all that hard, but he's a mean old bastard, that's for sure.

The Graphics
The design of the characters and rooms was great, marred only by spotty textures.  Being a game based on a cartoon, I think that it would have benefited much more from having mostly flat colors, similar to the visuals in The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past.  The pseudo-realistic feel that they seemed to be trying for didn't really work out so well.

Still, it wasn't an eyesore or anything.  I probably only noticed because, y'know, I was trying to pay attention to that kind of stuff for the review.

The Music
Catchy, pleasant, and inoffensive.

Y'know . . . Disney music.

The Bottom Line
Wow.

I really didn't expect to like this game, but I do.  I really really do.  Looking it up on Wikipedia after beating Keelhaul Pete revealed that it has a cult following, and I can see why.  It's simple, fun, and potentially addictive.  It doesn't fall into the same trap as most other licensed games, as well, that being to just make a crappy little half-made game and slap an already existing property onto it.  Capcom could definitely have made this game with original characters and no one would have known the difference, but the fact is that both the Goof Troop setting and the mechanics of this game work rather well with each other, making it where two things that are perfectly good separately have been combined to make something great together.

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Platform:  Game Boy Advance
Developer:  Konami
Released:  2003
Genre:  Metroidvania (Action Adventure)

The Game
During an eclipse in the year 2035, Soma Cruz and Mina Hark- er, Hakuba get sucked into Dracula's castle.  Finding themselves trapped, Mina stays by the entrance while Soma explores the building, trying to find a way out.  He meets several people tied to the mystery of the castle along the way, begins to display powers he never knew he had, and gets inexorably drawn into a dark destiny that's been waiting for him his whole life.

Aria of Sorrow is the second GBA Castlevania made by the folks who created Symphony of the Night, and it is the third and last Castlevania game made for the GBA overall.  It has a sequel, Dawn of Sorrow, which was made for the DS.

The Characters
Soma Cruz is our protagonist, ladies and gentlemen.  He's your typical white-haired Japanese pretty boy type, but he still manages to be a pretty interesting character for all that.  He's got the powers, the destiny, and the dark secret that even he doesn't know, which all gives him some pretty decent inner and outer conflicts.

Mina Harkne- dangit, did it again, I mean Mina Hakuba is his childhood friend (there seem to be a lot of those in Castlevania) and one of the keepers of the shrine from which the two of them get transported to the castle.  She spends most of her time giving hints (provided by one of the other characters) and healing Soma when he stops by to see her at the castle's entrance.  Basic two-dimensional support character.

Graham Jones is the primary antagonist for most of the game.  He tries to buddy up with Soma at first, but once he realizes that the younger man is absorbing the powers of the castle's monsters, he gets ticked.  Why?  Because he was born on the day that Dracula was last defeated (supposedly forever) back in 1999, and he intends to be the one to absorb all those powers, as well as the very essence of Dracula in the hopes of becoming Dracula himself.  He's kind of a jerk for the rest of the game, but even then he's pretty affable, since he believes his ascension is inevitable and that Soma is a minor speed bump at most on the path to his destiny.

Then there are a few minor characters wandering around . . .

Yoko Belnades is a member of the church who meets up with Soma a few times to encourage him and help keep him focused.  Genya Arikado is a dapper man in a suit who provides Soma with information about the castle, mostly by passing along hints through Mina.  He's also Alucard, Dracula's son.  I'm not really spoiling anything there . . . very early in the game, Yoko (I think it was Yoko, anyway) nearly calls him Alucard before correcting herself.  The shortly named J is an amnesiac wandering around the castle.  The only thing he's certain of is that he has some connection with what's going on, and he's right.

And then . . . there's Hammer.

Hammer is quite possibly one of the worst human beings in existence.  He's an American Army guy that was ordered to go to Mina's shrine, but once he gets trapped in Dracula's castle, he almost immediately abandons his ill-defined mission and decides to start selling crap that he's found to Soma for a profit.  So to start off with, he's a greedy wuss.  And he's also something of a stingy greedy wuss, since everything he sells is swords and spears and the like.  You're an army guy, dude!  Where's your machine gun?!  Your grenades?!  I'll buy 'em all!  Sure, I might need some sort of magic sword when I'm fighting Dracula Jones or whatever, but when I use the single Handgun in the game, it seems to perforate the regular monsters just fine!  Hell, the Zombie Soldiers throw grenades!  What, you couldn't find any extra grenades to sell me?!

And to cap off his being a useless greedy wuss, he's also got rape face.  I'm gonna show you a picture to prove it, but don't look too long or he might steal your soul . . .

There is absolutely nothing about that expression that doesn't say "YOU GOAN GET RAPED".  And yes, I know that might be profiling or whatever, but after Yoko gets injured and has to sit out the rest of the game unconscious at the main gate where Hammer's set up his shop, he asks Soma about her and says that she's his "type".  Yes, Hammer.  I'm quite sure that the unconscious woman who has a nasty knife wound is definitely your type, you sick fuck.

Sweet Jebus.

The Writing
Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and say the story is good.  Betrayal, dark destinies, good vs. evil, some enemies become friends and some friends become enemies, blah blah blah.  But it all seems to move so fast.  It might be a translation thing, I dunno and I'm quite willing to believe that's all there is to it, but a lot of the characters just seem to jump to certain (correct) conclusions pretty damn quick.  At one point, one of the characters asks Soma if he knows anything about "the predictions".  Exactly that.  Absolutely no clue as to exactly which predictions out of the millions or billions that have been made in the past, or even which of the lesser but still substantial numbers of very famous predictions made.  But Soma automatically divines that they mean the future insights of Nostradamus and is told "Exactly!".

And this sort of thing happens several times throughout the game, to the point where I started to believe that everyone in the castle had somehow gained either telepathic or precognitive powers.  A minor thing, but annoying nonetheless.

The Gameplay
Soma is sloooooooow, ohmigaw he is slow.  Not so slow that it's frustrating or annoying, really, but still slow enough that I noticed it almost constantly.  He doesn't get a proper dash maneuver until almost the very end of the game, so most of the time I was walking every damn where.  Fortunately, there are portals spaced somewhat evenly throughout the castle, allowing quick and easy transport from one area to another.  Also fortunately, his lack of speed doesn't adversely affect the combat for the most part.

I like the weapons system of Aria.  The Vampire Killer whip is cool, don't get me wrong.  But after playing around with nothing but that whip in Harmony of Dissonance, it felt good to get a nice variety of weapons to choose from.  Soma gets to choose from hammers (powerful but slow), spears (swung from underneath), and two kinds of swords (stabbing straight out and swinging down from above), as well as a nice selection of specialty weapons that work in various ways, such as the Whip Sword (acts like a whip, natch) and the Handgun (which shoots things from a distance, also natch).  The spears and hammers annoyed the hell out of me, so I stuck mostly to the swords which, thankfully, were the most plentiful weapon type in the game.

While I liked the weapons and most other aspects of the game's combat, I'm kind of on the fence about the soul system.  Much of Soma's abilities come from absorbing the randomly dropped souls of the monsters he kills.  There are three types, those being Red (one-shot attack abilities, activated like subweapons in other Castlevanias), Blue (sustained abilities, with a mixed bag of results covering attacks, defense, and movement), and Yellow (support abilities).  While I certainly like the depth of the system, allowing you to have a wide variety of power combination, I don't like that circumstances in the game often force you to change these abilities on the fly.  I don't know about anyone else, but I feel that if you end up spending as much or even more time in your menu screen switching out abilities as you do fighting monsters and, y'know, actually playing the game, there might be a small problem with the way the system is set up.

The Challenge
Aria of Sorrow sits right on the good side of frustratingly difficult for me.  There were a few times when I started to get truly annoyed at the cheap shit that kept getting thrown at me (the Disc Armors, green Medusa Heads, and most of the flying enemies were especially nasty about this), but overall I found the game to be decently challenging, especially after the slaughterously easy Harmony of Dissonance.  I found myself having to actually come up with different sets of tactics for each new monster I faced . . . hell, the fact that I had to come up with tactics to take any of the monsters out is in itself pretty cool, and points to good AI programming.  They weren't just buffing up monsters later in the game with more HP and MP, they were actually giving them unique abilities and behaviors that I had to take into account in order to get ahead.

So kudos on that!

The Graphics
It may be just me, but it looks like this game took a step back from Harmony in the graphics department, especially in the lighting effects of the lamps, candelabras, and the like.  There's also a few odd bits here and there that I noticed, such as the wavy fog cutting off oddly at walls.  As a trade-off, the character models - which was one of the few things I faulted Harmony on in the graphics department - have been much improved.  Soma isn't surrounded by a neon blue aura, his walk cycles make it look like he's moving with a goldurn purpose, and everyone actually appears like they belong in a Game Boy Advance game.  I really think-

GAH!  Jeez, okay, that's one graphic I definitely could have done without.

The Music
I decided to actually try and pay attention to the music for this game, and I found it very easy to do here, 'cause I like it!  If I was the type to buy soundtracks to things, I might possibly someday perhaps consider maybe buying the AoS soundtrack.

The Bottom Line
Yah, I complained about a few things, but they were mostly minor.  Overall I feel that this is a good and definitely very solid game.  Played once, would play again.

Metroid Fusion

Platform:  Game Boy Advance
Developer:  Nintendo R&D1
Released:  2002
Genre:  Action Adventure

The Game
Some time after the events in Super Metroid, Samus Aran goes back to SR388 (the home planet of the metroids, which she scoured clean of the little buggers back in Metroid II: Return of Samus) with a group of scientists from the Biologic Space Laboratories (aka BSL).  She encounters and is infected by an organism that becomes known as an X Parasite.  The X attacks not only her but the organic parts of her suit, several sections of which the scientists have to surgically remove and later send off to one of their labs for study.  Just as Samus is about to shuffle off this mortal coil, someone hits on the idea of using some Metroid cells to whip up an antidote, and it works!  Samus can never be infected by X again, but it has irreversibly changed her cellular structure.  After she has mostly recovered, she gets a call from the Galactic Federation, sending her to the BSL space station on which her infected suit parts were being studied.  Seems there's been some sort of mishap, and they need Samus to go check it out . . .

Metroid Fusion is the fourth game in the primary Metroid series (despite the "Prime" in their name, the Metroid Prime series is a side story that happens in between Metroid and Metroid II), and the second to be on a hand-held system.

The Characters
Samus does a lot more gabbing in this game than she does in most Metroid installments, though we still don't get too much info on just what she's like.  We know that she's basically pragmatic, resourceful, determined, and has a problem with authority . . . but that could be said of virtually any action hero.

Fusion introduces a new character into the Metroid universe, an artificial intelligence that Samus eventually nicknames "Adam", after a commanding officer of hers of which she was somewhat fond.  He's an interesting character, and I actually look forward to seeing more of both him and his namesake, the latter of which is slated to appear in the upcoming Other M.

The best character in the game, however, has to be the X Parasites themselves.  They've turned out to be a very interesting new foe for Samus, a worthy successor to the space pirates and metroids of the previous games.  I found the way they work to be very well thought out and executed.  After infecting and absorbing the cells of a host creature, killing it off in the process, the X has the ability to duplicate the form and abilities of that creature.  In their natural form, they appear to be a giant floating mass of plasm.  If this had been another series - say, System/Bio Shock instead of Metroid - I could see how they could have turned into something extremely dark and creepy, which gave them a nice edge.  Not that they aren't kinda creepy anyway.

Speaking of creepy, and representing the best of the best, is SA-X.  SA-X is the X Parasite which infested the organic parts of Samus' original suit, and it has used that and the bits of Samus' DNA that it absorbed to turn itself into the ultra ass kicking machine that Samus was at the end of Super Metroid.  This scary bitch truly is creepy, and dangerous, and every time she comes on the screen, the game lets you know it.  She is also, of course, the final boss (or at least the last one to really count), and extremely good at it.

The Writing
Fusion's story is great.  The struggle against the X is well done, and the sequence of events through the course of the game is well plotted.  Though Metroid isn't really a series that particularly needs a lot of plot, this one makes the absolute best of what it's got.

But while the story is great, the writing is not.  Props on a good idea, but several million points off for terrible execution.  Firstly, I feel that the game would have been better serviced if the intro had been playable.  It would've helped give the player a better connection to Samus' predicament if her infection by the parasite had been part of a playable battle sequence instead of about three seconds in a cut scene.  As it is, the whole intro just kinda feels like "Okay, sooooo, a bunch of stuff happened . . . and now it's game time!"  Why couldn't it have been game time while that bunch of stuff happened?  I mean, we got to play the part where the infant metroid was taken by Ridley at the beginning of Super Metroid, after all.

And second, much of the backstory stuff in Fusion feels extremely tacked on.  I don't mind backstory exposition and I don't mind flashbacks or references to it, but I do mind it when it feels like it's just coming out of nowhere and sounds like it was just made up on the spot and doesn't fit in with anything else.  As much as I would like to know more about Adam and the Adam AI, both elements have just that sort of feel to me.

The Gameplay
The controls are spot on.  Steering Samus around in this game feels smooth and comfortable, very close to the way it was in Super Metroid.  The rooms are nice and spacious, allowing for even better movement and fine control.  It shocks and dismays me that they took this wonderfully constructed engine and turned it into the lurching horror that is the Zero Mission engine.

There are changes both big and small in the way Samus' abilities work from previous installments in the Metroid series.  The changes - such as the Ice Missiles instead of the Ice Beam - took a little getting used to, but it's not so bad or so different overall.  I look forward to seeing how the new suit's powers develop in future games.

The Challenge
Fusion manages to hit that sweet spot that so few games seem to do.  It doesn't take the super-easy route where walking from one end of the map to the other is a cakewalk and I barely even notice that I'm trodding on the gashed and bleeding backs of my enemies.  It doesn't take the super-hard route where I die time after time after time and feel that there is no Earthly way of getting past a certain point.  Instead, I died every once in a while, but in ways that I could see were my own fault, and that if I tried just a few more times, I could eventually get past it.  Winning involved neither luck of the draw nor simple button mashing; it involved learning the skill necessary to advance.  And I like that.

The place where this was most evident to me was the final battle with the SA-X.  I believe I tried beating her at least twenty times, but none of those deaths left me feeling discouraged in the least.  I gradually got further and further with each fight, learning the moves needed to keep one step ahead of the SA-X as I went along.  There wasn't any hoping that she didn't randomly use this particular ability and wipe me out with one shot, there wasn't any relying on a particular glitch or weakness that the game designer hadn't anticipated . . . it was all me, baby.  And that's the way it should be.  No cheap outs for the game's AI or for the player.  No attempts that end within three seconds of the fight because Samus got hit once and THERE ARE NO ROOM FOR MISTAKES, DAMMIT!

I wish more game designers would learn to set the challenge rating of their games like this.

The Graphics
Mostly based on those of Super Metroid, so verrah nice.

I didn't think I would, but I'm digging the design of Samus' new suit.  In the end, it doesn't really look that much different from the original, anyway, except for having a more organic than technological look.

I love the level design of Fusion.  Running around underground in caves and planet-based pirate bases is great and all, but the shift to a space station is a nice change of pace.  I really enjoyed the more logical, structured form of the station compared to the sprawling, organic feel of the previous game maps.  When the computer first opened up the elevators for the six main sections, all lined up in a tidy little row, I though, "Oh, hey . . . this is gonna be neat."

The Music
No complaints here.  Sounded a lot like Super Metroid music to me.

The Bottom Line
I have to admit, when I first started reading about Fusion way back when it originally came out, I was a bit leery.  Samus is in a weird new suit?  She's fighting some kind of Parasite organism that isn't a metroid?  Eeeeeeh, I dunnoooooo . . .

I'm thankful to say that as I progressed through the game, these feelings were quickly abandoned by the wayside.  The whole "new suit" thing wasn't nearly as much of a departure from the original as I had built up in my head, and I won't mind seeing it again in Metroid 5 or whatever.  The X Parasites were also pretty dang snazzy, and I find myself hoping they might pop up again later on.

In the end, I'm gonna place Metroid Fusion as my second favorite in the series, right after Super Metroid.  It's a damn good game in my opinion, and one that I'll most likely end up playing through again at least a few more times.

Metroid: Zero Mission

Platform:  Game Boy Advance
Developer:  Nintendo R&D1
Released:  2004
Genre:  Action Adventure

The Game
Once again players take on the role of galactic badass Samus Aran as she takes on Mother Brain and the space pirates in an attempt to take back the Metroids that the pirates done stoled.

This is a . . . well, I hesitate to use the word remake, since so much has changed from the original Metroid.  It's sort of an update crossed with a reimagining that still uses the same basic framework as the original while changing almost everything else around and adding on a whole bunch of new stuff.  Despite their similarities, in most ways Metroid and Zero Mission are two completely different games.

The Characters
Samus Aran is pretty much the same as she ever was, with the only addition to her character from the original being a couple of pages of monologue setting up the story.  Her design, while updated for the newer technology, is still more or less the same.

Ridley, Kraid, and Mother Brain, while still as lacking in characterization as ever, have meanwhile gotten massive design upgrades to bring them in line with their appearances in Super Metroid.  Mother Brain is now sportin' a wicked looking cycloptic eye, Kraid's gone on a bulk-up program, and Ridley is larger and more monstrous-pterodactyl-like than ever.

The Writing
For the most part, it's basic boilerplate, same as the original.  The Samus monologues don't really add anything other than allowing the player to pass on reading the story section of the instruction booklet.

But for the rest part, there's been a new mission added to the story!  And I hate it.

I understand that with this "remake" they wanted to add in a bunch of new and exciting stuff.  I applaud them for putting an extra section into the game, as it gives the folks who already played the original Metroid that much more reason to bother playing this game.  What I have a problem with is how they did it.  First off, it was placed after the end of the game, making it feel so extremely tacked on that I swear I could see the thumtacks sitting right at the edge of the screen.  What they should have done, in my opinion, is expand their other main addition to the map, the Chozo Ruins, even further.  Put in a few more mini-bosses, maybe even a whole new Ridley/Kraid-like sub-boss or something.  Y'know, integrate the extra mission into the overall game like Super Metroid did with its new sections instead of making the player go "Yay, I won!  I . . . aw, what?!" at the very end.

The Gameplay
On the good side . . . there's a map!  Oh, sweet merciful heavens, there's a map!  And it tells me where my next major goal can be located!

On the bad side . . . jeez, Samus, did you eat bricks for dinner or what?  This isn't the high-flying daredevil gymnast Samus Aran of Super Metroid to be sure.  And that could be understandable as this is earlier in her career, but the thing is, she was nice and agile and loose in the original Metroid.  So I'm gonna have to peg this one on badly designed character movement.  Driving Samus in Zero Mission is like driving a rock in water, and there's really no excuse for that.  Especially since - and this is truly baffling - it used a modified version of the Metroid Fusion engine, and Metroid Fusion's controls were absolutely wonderful.  I guess "modified" in this case is another word for "ruined".

Adding to the frustration is the claustrophobic feel of the corridors.  The original had its tiny spaces, to be sure, but compared to Zero Mission's hallways you might as well have been leaping around a twelve acre bit of flat land without any trees or other obstructions.

The Challenge
On the good side . . . the main game isn't Nintendo Hard anymore!  Save for the problems caused by Samus' wonky movement, playing through the game is challenging without being hair-pullingly annoying.  Fighting Mother Brain was about the only point where I was ready to start throwing things, but that's understandable really since she's the last boss of the game.

Oh, wait, right, the extra mission thing.  That brings us to the bad side . . . it's straight back to Nintendo Hard again!  Samus starts this mission off bereft of her suit and thus virtually all of the abilities that she's painstakingly garnered over the course of the game.  And to make matters worse, this mission turns Metroid into a sneaking game!  I hate sneaking games!  I just don't have the patience for them.  I wanna kill, and I wanna kill now, and simultaneously forcing me to sneak around while also turning my badass character into a wuss with a tiny little stun gun isn't going to do anything but piss me off.

Sure, eventually Samus regains her suit and you get to tear through the pirate ship like a flamethrower through rice paper, but I don't feel it really makes up for the betrayal that this extra mission pulled on me.  Screw you, pirate ship!

The Graphics
Based almost directly on the Super Metroid graphics, so all good there.

The Music
No major complaints.

The Bottom Line
Many of the problems of the original were ameliorated for this version (ooh, "version" . . . I like that better than "remake"), and for that I'm glad.  Unfortunately, it also brought with it a whole new batch of frustrations.  Overall, I'd say Zero Mission is better than the original Metroid, but it's still pretty bad.  Worth a play if you're a heavy Metroid fan, but otherwise I'd say give it a pass and play Metroid Fusion or Super Metroid instead.

Metroid

Platform:  Nintendo Entertainment System
Developer:  Nintendo R&D1
Released:  1986
Genre:  Action Adventure

The Game
Samus Aran, an agent for the Galactic Federation (and who just happens to be a fine lady underneath her futuristic space armor), has been given the task of retrieving life forms known as Metroids, which have been stolen by a bunch of no good, low down, just plain rotten space pirates who plan to use the creatures as biological weapons.

It is, of course, well known at this point that Samus is a woman, but back when this game was first released, it was a well guarded secret.  The original Japanese instruction manual used gender-neutral pronouns, which was sneaky, and the English translations used male pronouns, which is kinda cheating but understandably necessary.  Either way, it rocked a lot of gamers' worlds when they found out that the whoop-ass space pirate-killin' fightin' machine that they had been controlling the whole time wasn't a man, baby.  Whether because or in spite of this, Samus has become not only one of the top ranking heroines in video games, but one of the most popular video game heroes regardless of gender of all time.

The Characters
Not much can be said about this crew, since both protagonist and antagonists are pretty silent.  We've got our resident ass-kicker Samus Aran, who has started receiving a little more personality and backstory as of late.  We've got Ridley and Kraid, the sub-bosses of the game, who basically just sit in their little rooms and wait for their fights with Samus to start.  And we've got Mother Brain who . . . well, signs point to her being a corrupted organic computer or something like that.

The Writing
Um, well, what I wrote up above is pretty much it.  Not big on the writing, most of these early NES games.

The Gameplay
To these old hands and this old brain, the controls for Metroid feel hopelessly outdated.  You can't shoot down, you can't switch from shooting up to sideways while you're jumping or vice versa, you can't shoot any lower than your waistline, and so on and so on.  But compared to games at the time of Metroid's original release, the controls were basically all good.  And even without that modern flexibility, Samus still controls like a dream.  She's very gymnastic, fast, and smooth in her movements, especially once she gets the High Jump power-up.

And speaking of power-ups, Metroid has a great system for upgrading Samus' various abilities.  There's a nice amount of depth to her powers, with the only unfortunate part being you can't have the Ice Beam and the Wave Beam at the same time, which sucks because it would help so damn much.

The Challenge
And now it's time for me to break down into serious rant mode.

I used to think that the original Metroid was kind of neat and a halfway decent game.  I no longer think this.  It is an unforgiving bastard of a game that almost seems to dare you to play it.  I hate it forever, and the reason is quite simple . . . it's too damn hard.

Now, I should make a couple of things clear before I continue.  The thing is, I'm not afraid of a challenge.  I'm one of those gamer types who likes to beat a game without any outside help.  No cheat codes, no strategy guides, no walkthroughs, no maps, no other person standing over my shoulder and telling me how to beat this section, so on and so forth.  Once I've actually beaten the final boss and am going back to find all the secret stuff, or if I'm play through for a second time or more, then fine.  I'll grab every single one of those things I can get my hands on and soak up every bit of cheating knowledge I can.  I also hate it when games are too easy, and I'll complain heartily about that as well.  I like that nice little spot right in the middle where things are just challenging enough to keep things interesting while not so difficult that I start throwing things in a fit of rage and start truly believing that there is absolutely no way any human being could possibly be expected to win under the circumstances.

That said, I eventually had to break down and seek out a Metroid map.  It's bad enough that the place is huge and completely wide open compared to most NES games, but it also has to have tons of corridors that are exact copies of each other, a million and one secret areas - many of which are actually vital to proceeding through the game - which take hours to find through trial and error, and not even a vague indication of a general direction in which you might should maybe be heading.  While the map I found was helpful in that it also showed where missile tanks, energy tanks, and the various power-ups are, I wouldn't have particularly cared if it hadn't because all I really needed it for was so that I wouldn't get lost for days on end!  Seriously, before I looked it up, I often found myself going in circles over and over again without even realizing it for about half an hour or more.  This does not seem like good level design to me.

Further, Metroid was obviously one of the earliest games that helped create the term Nintendo Hard.  This normally wouldn't be a problem for me because I grew up playing nothing but Nintendo Hard games for many years.  But Metroid is just unforgivingly difficult to the point of ridiculousness.  It's great that they don't give you a certain number of lives or continues so you can just keep going with all the stuff you've already collected and without having to start all over from the very beginning of the game, but transporting you all the way back to the entrance of the section you died in with only 30 Energy, meaning that your only real choices are to either hope you find an energy tank before you face something particularly dangerous or spend the next half-hour to full hour grinding for health bit by tiny bit?  Who's bright idea was that?!  The game's difficulty level is bad enough without having to resort to such cheap tricks to make it even harder!  It only becomes tolerably challenging once you get the Screw Attack, which finally keeps you from getting killed while trying to walk across a room.  A tiny, crawlspace-sized room with a monster flying around in it that only moves to where you can reliably shoot it for a split-second before it's suddenly all up in your grill and your suit explodes and AW DAMMIT BACK AT THE LIFT AGAIN.

And to hell with Mother Brain.  That's all I'm gonna say about that.

Also far too frustrating . . . the password system.  Thank goodness future installments of the Metroid series finally added the save feature, because part of the horrendous difficulty of the game is simply putting in these 200 character monstrosities that the world's leading cryptographers are still trying to figure out decades later.

The Graphics
As stated above, many of the corridors are clones of each other.  They're different from corridors in different sections of the map, but within each individual section, you might end up running back and forth down the same monster-studded hall for ages before you even notice you're not actually getting anywhere.  The visuals look great, don't get me wrong, it's just that they're the same visuals over and over again.

The baddies of the game are all visually interesting, even after seeing their updated designs in other Metroid games, and Samus' suit is, of course, a classic.

The Music
Nice and equal parts science-fictiony, actiony, and 8-bitty.

The Bottom Line
Like I said, I used to like Metroid, but now that I've actually played it all the way through, it has earned my neverending hatred.  I'm glad that it spawned so many other wonderful games, especially since if I ever get a hankerin' for some Metroid action, I can just go play them instead of this infuriating blood pressure cooker.  All of the good points it has got buried underneath the cavalcade of deaths and setbacks I had to endure.

Fuck you, Metroid.

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance

Platform:  Nintendo Game Boy Advance
Developer:  Konami
Released:  2002
Genre:  Metroidvania (Action Adventure)

The Game
Juste Belmont, grandson of Simon Belmont, is drawn into the fight against Dracula when his friend Maxim returns from a long journey having lost both a huge chunk of his memory and Lydie, his and Juste's childhood friend.  Together, the two men retrace Maxim's steps until they come across a strange castle filled with monstrous beasties.  Over the course of the game, Juste comes to find out that it is Dracula's castle (duh) and that the spirits within now threaten not only Juste and Lydie's life, but Maxim's very soul.

This is the second game created by the people who made the widely acclaimed Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, making it one of the earliest installments of the Castlevania series to help bring about the fan term "Metroidvania".  It also pulls some thematic inspiration from Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, as you go around the castle collecting the same body parts of Dracula that Simon grabs up in that earlier game and they are intimately tied into the mystery behind the bond between Maxim and the castle.

The Characters
Though there is an interesting story to be had, like most Castlevanias, characterization is fairly sparse, the worst instance being Lydie, who doesn't really progress beyond being your typical damsel in distress.  Juste is more or less your standard hero type, his emotional range staying pretty well within the "angry-concerned-jovial" trilogy of action hero acting.  Maxim is the one who comes closest to approaching interesting, since he's the only one to have any real motivations and internal conflict, but he's only seen on a handful of occasions throughout the game.

Still, the lack of real characterization doesn't really detract from the game, as it's more or less just a basic framework upon which to hang the other elements of the game.

The Writing
As with the characterization, the story is a fairly basic tale of rivalry, betrayal, action, heroism, self-sacrifice, and good vs. evil.  Nothing to get too excited about, but it does its job adequately.

The Gameplay
The gameplay is where Harmony of Dissonance truly shines.  Juste moves extremely well, and gains several power ups that improve his maneuverability even more.  Considering the scale of the castle and that you'll be spending a massive amount of your time just moving from one section on one side of the map to another section all the way on the other side, this is a good thing.  Without the dash and slide abilities, I would most likely have given up after the third or fourth time having to walk through any given section.

Though Juste's primary attack (the whip, natch) stays more or less the same throughout the entire game, I like the depth they gave to the subweapon system.  You've got all your standard Castlevania mainstays such as the Dagger, Axe, and Holy Water, but you can also mix and match them with the five spellbooks you can find throughout the castle for varying effects.  The one I ended up using for the most part was the Wind Book + Cross combo, which caused a shield of flying crosses to whirl around Juste in a wide circle, damaging any creature hit by it.

The equipment system is pretty basic, but solid.  Most items are rare, but you rarely ever even use them, so it's not a big deal.

The Challenge
If there's one spot I can point to and definitely say "I'm not happy with this" without any qualifiers, it would have to be that Harmony of Dissonance is too damn easy.  I explored 200% of the castle (there's two castles, by the way, just like in Symphony of the Night), got all three endings, found almost every single findable item in the game, beat every mini-boss . . . and I died a total of two times.  And it wasn't even because the guys I was fighting were particularly difficult.  It was because I'd gotten so used to just flying through every obstacle that I stopped paying attention to my health meter most of the time.  Things jumped to being a little bit tougher in the second castle and I hadn't been prepared for just how much life each hit would take from me.  After these two deaths and after just a few minutes of collecting better gear, I was able to go right back to coasting through the entire rest of the game.  Even the end bosses ended up going down like little bitches.

Yawn.

The Graphics
Stellar.  The castle is beautifully atmospheric, looking just like Dracula's castle should in a Castlevania game.  The monsters, both the classic and the new, have wonderful designs and well-made sprites.

Unfortunately, this cannot be said of the human character sprites.  Juste, Maxim, and Lydie are all very muddy and ill-defined, looking more like they belong in the NES era than the SNES look that the GBA usually achieves.  Further, Juste is inexplicably surrounded by a blue aura that trails behind him as blue afterimages of himself.  Now, I know that Alucard had a similar shadowy effect on him in Symphony of the Night, but in SotN, it looked cool and wasn't very obtrusive.  In HoD, it's this terrible flat neon blue that looks horribly out of place and is, frankly, an eyesore.  An eyesore that follows you around the entire damn game because it's attached to the player character like some sort of super-resilient bioluminescent fungus.

The Music
I typically don't pay attention to game music unless it's particularly bad.  Since I didn't really pay that much attention to it here, I've just gotta assume that it wasn't bad enough to attract my notice.  The only points at which the music did catch my ear was during the file naming screen (a funky beat that I rather enjoyed) and in the save rooms (there didn't seem to be any music, and the sudden lack of audio output caught me off guard and annoyed me every single time).

The Bottom Line
The creators of Harmony of Dissonance, it seems, wanted to try and make lightning strike twice by crafting what would basically be a portable version of Symphony of the Night.  For the most part, I would say that they succeeded.  It's of a smaller scope and naturally limited by the platform that it was created for, but still a very entertaining play and, in my opinion, worth wasting a few hours on.  I just wish that it had been a little more difficult and that the hero wasn't lined with dayglo shoelaces.