Ntuple Indemnity

It’s official: Nintendo is cleaning up at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo.

The first major revelation at their pre-show press conference yesterday was the Nintendo DS, a handheld as powerful as the Nintendo 64 and consisting of two screens – one in the clamshell lid, and a touch-sensitive one nestled in the middle of the SNES-style control pad. That’s right – the X and Y buttons are back at long last. The second screen is itself usable as a control apparatus; for example, one early demo was of a new first-person Metroid game, Metroid Prime: Hunters, wherein one can aim Samus’ beam weapon with the stylus and tap to fire. The device also supports wireless LAN over 802.11, which means multiplayer support.

Of course, a system is nothing without some games. Two words and an acronym: Animal Crossing DS. Think about it – it’s perfect. The keyboard-intensive letter-writing and the inventory system currently require scrolling around, and could benefit immensely from a point-and-click interface. The wireless support means that visiting other players’ towns and trading fruit and furniture will become more viable than ever. It’s a dream come true.

Speaking of dreams coming true, Capcom’s listed as having Viewtiful Joe DS in development, and moreover, Nintendo is finally developing the Mario game I’ve been awaiting since about the same time as when the Flames (which are on fire, by the way) last made the playoffs. It’s a traditional Mario side-scroller – that is to say, a real Mario game – but with a 3D-generation look, and of course, dual-screen capabilities.

In addition to this, the DS is backwards-compatible with Game Boy Advance cartridges. It looks like holding off on picking up a GBA SP is paying off after all.

There are a few things I’d still like to know. One is battery life, which will hopefully not be an issue. The DS, unlike the SP’s one major oversight, had better also include a standard headphone jack. A reliable place to store a stylus is something I assume will be a given. There is also the matter of the price, but that only concerns those of you whose Christmas lists I’m on.

Sayonara, PSP – the DS is almost certainly the next-generation handheld to buy.

While on the subject of giving Nintendo money, the other bomb they dropped yesterday was a teaser trailer of the latest incarnation of The Legend of Zelda – no, not the upcoming Four Swords Adventures or Minish Cap, but an entirely original GameCube adventure. This one has a whole new look and feel, going for the photorealism and cinematic tone of The Ocarina of Time but incorporating aesthetic elements that came out of The Wind Waker, particularly the expressiveness in the character animation. Look at Link’s eyes, those pretty, pretty eyes. What more could you ask for, combat on horseback? Oh, wait – they’re doing that.

With Nintendo regaining momentum, one can only hope that their systems will sell like hotcakes. It’s high time for the video game industry to return to where it belongs.

Let me tell you about a little game called Animal Crossing. It is a life simulator where you are a cute little tyke with horns whose task is to collect furniture, decorate a house, pay off a mortgage and talk to animal neighbours. The passage of time in the game is synchronized to the real world: if you play at six in the evening, it is six in the evening in the game. If you play at two in the morning, the shops are closed and the neighbours are asleep. If you play on a statutory holiday, special festivities occur – which, of course, entails special furniture.

Any video game that rewards catching bugs and fish with puns (“I caught a red snapper! That was a snap”), includes an alligator named Boots who calls everyone “munchie”, lets me paint a fish on my front door, and makes interior decoration a mountain of endless fun, clearly deserves some credit. This goes without mentioning activities like hunting for treasure, listening to a street musician, playing vintage NES titles like Excitebike, writing letters and planting money trees. The whole experience is a lot more addictive than it looks on paper.

Now, back to checking to see if any cool new furniture is in the store and what turnip prices are like on the “stalk market”.

Breaking news: the second-best video game of the 128-bit generation (behind The Wind Waker, of course) is officially getting a sequel. Capcom has officially announced Viewtiful Joe 2, which promises more varied environments, co-op play as both Joe and Silvia, additional Six Machine levels, and a new “Replay” VFX power. There are some initial promotional images that, while not from the body of the game itself, are absolutely gorgeous and entirely in line with the VJ aesthetic.

For those of you unfamiliar with the GameCube original, Viewtiful Joe is probably best described as a melangé of everything that works in video games – the Matrix-style bullet-time effects of Max Payne, the style-point grading system of Dance Dance Revolution, the beat-’em-up approach to wave after wave of enemies like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games of old – and best of all, a return to the two-dimensional side-scrolling format that has been so sorely missed on home consoles since the days of the Super Nintendo. It even has a Star Wars spoof level. The basic concept is that you play as a superhero fighting evil in the world of the movies, where you have spatial manipulation powers such as slow-motion, fast-forward and zooming in – all of which have physics-bending effects that have to be employed strategically. The mix of American superhero values and Japanimation-inspired designs make this a game I wouldn’t be surprised to be playing ten years on, not unlike the SNES classics I buy off eBay every now and then.

Personally, I want to see the return of the planet-stomping Gundam-bot “Six Majin”. That, and a lengthier experience – the first Viewtiful Joe had only seven “episodes”, which were further divided into a grand total of about twenty separate levels from one save point to the next – never mind that some of them took forever to beat. Hopefully more VJ2 details emerge at the E3 Expo next month, but right now, I’m putting it on top of the Christmas wishlist based on precedent alone.

Alas, it appears that my personal ambition to direct the world’s first A-list movie based on a video game may be in jeopardy. John Woo, who has emerged the Hong Kong to Hollywood transition with only mild vocational injuries compared to the likes of, say, Tsui Hark, has optioned the rights to Metroid. John Woo will never read this post, but here are some comments regardless.

Metroid is a unique challenge in that the games are a series of solo pieces with no character interaction – just a silent heroine running around exploring a mysterious and atmospheric sci-fi environment and shooting up silent enemies. The plots are voyages of discovery, an expository technique that does not transfer well to a film placed in front of an audience with no control over what is going on.

This is an opportunity to establish a video game movie renaissance – though I suppose “renaissance” falsely implies that game movies have ever been worthwhile – not unlike the market’s current saturation with comic book adaptations. The reason why the comic book movie is such a popular genre right now is because for the most part, the material is treated with respect and visual acumen; let’s ignore the Halle Berry pseudo-Catwoman for a second. Marvel Comics saved itself by entrusting its franchises to the likes of Sam Raimi and Ang Lee, directors with a track record of knowing a thing or two about visual communication. This is why the hottest comic book property in development right now is Batman Begins: Chris Nolan knows how to make a movie. John Woo is the first really estalished director to attach himself to a video game franchise, so this opportunity had best not go wasted.

The other reason for the success of the current rebirth of bringing comics to film, regardless of how watchable the films are themselves, is because the showpieces in the genre capture the colour and vibrance of the comic book medium without treating comics as silly, juvenile or inferior. If something is to be stylistically faithful to its source material, it must respect its source material’s medium and adjust accordingly. For instance, The Lord of the Rings worked on the basis of taking a fantasy world very, very seriously.

Yet some frequent mistakes on the part of comic book movies are similarly in need of being rectified, should Metroid go ahead. We are essentially talking about an adventure starring a solo costumed hero, so there are two approaches. One, the 1989 Batman route of diving right into the hero’s mission and carrying it through the entire movie, with only passing connections to the hero’s origin. This is the preferred route. The danger with the second approach – the Superman and Spider-Man method of focusing on the origin story for half the movie, and leaving fully-fledged good-evil conflicts to future instalments – is that it tends to result in movies that are heavy in the first half. Superman and Spider-Man delivered their best in the origin stories, leaving paper-thin hero-villain conflicts underdeveloped. This basically ruined the first X-Men, but thankfully, X2 picked up the ball. However, Metroid does not have the guarantee of a sequel. If there is no attempt to gamble on a multi-part franchise right from the beginning – and there probably shouldn’t be one – we need to see Samus make it all the way to Mother Brain in the span of two hours. The titular character of Daredevil made it all the way to Wilson Fisk in ninety minutes, origin story included, which killed any prospects of developing either a story or a franchise.

Now, nobody pretends that in the public at large, the Metroid franchise is intrinsically a ticket-selling franchise. In terms of name recognition, it is equivalent to a Hellboy or Punisher at best. That should give Woo some room to manoeuvre when striking a balance between an atmospherically faithful adaptation (i.e. not Super Mario Bros.: The Movie) and making a coherent film. However, everything about John Woo’s development as a director since his entry into the American system rings alarm bells about his possibly ending up with the equivalent of a Hulk on his hands, a movie that moves in the right direction but goes further than what a mainstream audience can handle, and stumbles into the gap. Mission: Impossible 2 is one such red flag.

Metroid is one of those projects that needs to be a success. Having Woo’s name attached indicates potential, but that also represents a potential danger. Let’s see how this all unfolds.

Fourteen rounds of Scrabble does strange things to you. This week I played in the 1200-1600 division at the annual two-day Spring Tournament in Calgary, finishing with a 7-7 record and a negative spread. According to the Ratings Calculator my rating will stay about the same, rising from 1251 to 1255. The actual change will likely be slightly different, as in two-day events, intermediary rating changes are calculated after the first day – in this case, the first eight rounds, after which I was sitting at 5-3. (The player rating system is a variant of the Elo system used in chess, and is explained in this document.) Stay tuned next week for an update concerning the first tournament ever to be held in Northern Alberta, a one-day event at Sherwood Park in which I will be playing in Division 1.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles has been selling ridiculously well for a gimmick title that absorbs US$600 if you want to set up a four-player game. But already being in possession of two Game Boy Advances, it was not considerably pricier than what I usually pay for games, which is in itself too much. The game is of the old “fight monsters, don’t die” formula, but pulls it off quite well because of the teamwork element involved when several players are managing inventories and eyeing distinct radars on the GBA screen while conducting battles on the television connected to the GameCube. There is the occasional frustration that comes from leaving all the healing spells in the hands of a teammate who is a little slow to the punch, but that just adds to the social atmosphere. Social video games are an endangered species in this day and age of going online, but that’s a diatribe for another post, another day.

Calling a spade a spade, Chronicles is closer to a beat-’em-up than an RPG in terms of genre, but relies on elements of both and does not excel at strictly one and not the other. Aside from the overhead, the use of GBA-Cube connectivity deserves some credit, and it should be interesting to see how this technical feature unfolds in Four Swords Adventures.

Speaking of Zelda, be sure to read this transcription of Eiji Aonuma’s keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference held last week, wherein he discusses at length both the history of the franchise and the depth of the design process. It’s a fascinating read that covers everything from dialogue writing to the timing of the “success chime”.

CUSIDnet is back online, albeit under a new address, probably due to however the new host, GlobalServers, handles subdomains. If this remains the case, I will likely go back and update the various hard links to the CUSID forums to reflect this. Actually, don’t count on it; too much work. If this remains the case, I will likely see what is up with the subdomain issue, it being my new job and all.