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English “hello” to all audience. My name is Vladimir Vladivostok. I am Moscow citizen. I am here to spread information of glorious Russia Hackteam, number one e-sport fight club out of Nikolai Bulganin Internet Cafe in Moscow, Russia. Found in 2005, Russia Hackteam possess over five member. Building that is once torture chamber for enemies of Russian mafia is now torture chamber for all gamer who believe hack is cheat. But hack is not cheat. Is only hack, not cheat.

Let us create beginning from start. According to father Alexei Vladivostok, I was born of no-good woman name Evpraksiya. Alexei little explain how baby occur. Claim is shameful moment where Alexei treat woman with respect.  Father Alexei claim that after baby pouch eject Vladimir Vladivostok into Russia homeland, Evpraksiya join wolves and vow revenge. I little believe this story. Why wolves allow inferior species join them? Why wolves tolerate woman nagging?

Okay, Russia Hackteam is sure you have many question by now. First question ask: “Why Russia Hackteam treat woman with disrespect?” Many woman rights group claim boycott of Russia Hackteam. All story have two side like coin. Russia Hackteam have many respect for woman. Is true story. For example, woman lock in basement of Nikolai Bulganin Internet Cafe keep building very clean. Make little noise when police inspect Nikolai Bulganin Internet Cafe since know what is good for her. But other side of argument? We are do favor for great Russia! Woman is dangerous! Need science fact? Chechnya is most dangerous country on planet.  More dangerous than United States.  Is true story.  Recent Russia government report claim that over half of Chechnya is woman.  Fifty percents!  My argument is prove.  Russia government is state sponsor of all belief and action of Russia Hackteam. That is why woman is ban from gaming in Russia and cannot ruin legend of Russia Hackteam.

But woman is not important. Important story? How does Russia Hackteam become legendary e-sport fight club out of Nikolai Bulganin Internet Cafe in Moscow, Russia? How does become such legendary that all anti-cheat device ban Russia Hackteam on sight?

Is long story. Go back many year to 1991, at height of Russia communism. When little boy, I travel to United States with father Alexei. I am shock and confuse. Many American fat. Mistake hamburger for oxygen all human breathe to survive. I plead with father Alexei: “Why America not work hard? Why spend all money on food? Why claim is number one when constant ask for number two on value menu?” But Alexei is calm. He explain in Russia patriotic terms: “Now you know why visit America. America have mighty tradition of chocolate pork on stick. Russia have mighty tradition of Stalin. Stalin ask all Russian to become giant grizzly man. And he do not care how you become grizzly man. Continue tradition of Russia supremacy and you will create many respect.”

That is why formation of Russia Hackteam. At first, like American who jog fifty meter, is tough struggle. Win few games. Even team down street named Sasha Killers defeat Russia Hackteam in bloodsport. And leader of Sasha Killers take cock in ass from many animal! What is Russia Hackteam to do? Yuri Yablonski, vice president of Russia Hackteam, create suggest: “Name is Russia Hackteam. Why not use hack?” I am caution. Is not hack cheat? Many player claim is so. But Yuri intelligent explain: “Is only hack, not cheat. Allow explain: Is monitor cheat? Monitor make game easier to play, but not cheat. Therefore, hack is not cheat.” Is undefeatable logic from Yuri Yablonski. He is right. Russia Hackteam will use hack.

That is how Russia Hackteam become legend. Like exercise, fear by all American. But most important, fear by all gamer. Russia Hackteam win at all major video game for ThePirateBay Entertainment Systen. But Russia Hackteam get little tournament invite! Why is?

Explanation is here: Andrei Kirilenko is Russia national basketball hero. Best player in world. But National Basketball Association say “Must play with team! Cannot play alone!” Why is such? Because basketball is racist against Russian player. Andrei Kirilenko would win all championship. Great dynasty would be Chicago Bull, Los Angeles Laker, Boston Celtic, Andrei Kirilenko. So they ban him from play one-versus-five basketball. They not let Andrei Kirilenko play to strength. That is same for Russia Hackteam. E-sport fight scene know Russia Hackteam would win all tournament, have all sex with beautiful woman. So make bullshit rule. Claim “hack is cheat”! And Russia Hackteam never invite to tournament. Is bullshit!

For many year, this was okay.  Russia Hackteam dominate online play instead.  But now, same thing happen in online game!  One time during play Call of Duty, Yuri Yablonski use M16 that shoot Conficker virus instead of bullet. Hearty laughs and many enjoyments is share by Russia Hackteam as fatty fat fat American complain. But all of sudden, game makes an angry! Says is hack! Disconnect and ban Yuri! I complain on Infinity Ward forum and people say I am cheater! But hack is not cheat! Allow explain: Is switchblade cheat? Switchblade cause blood loss that lead to heart failure. But is legitimate strategy! Where does say “stab opponent is cheat”? Only “stab ally is cheat”! Therefore, hack is not cheat. It is like say “warp zone is cheat” in Super Mario Brothers! If I want use warp zone I can use warp zone and if I want use hack I can use hack! Nintendo ban player for use warp zone? No. Maphack is preference that make game more fun.

And that is current story of Russia Hackteam.  Future will include many more victory and many more wealth.  Russia Hackteam is always look for best gamer in the world.  If wish to apply for Russia Hackteam, send follow of information:

Name
Address
Social Security Number
Name of Greatest Country on Planet (To Confirm Is Not Spam Bot)
Body Fat Percent (To Confirm Is Not American)
City
Credit Card Number
Country
Woman Maiden Name

Many applicant has had question about application: Why must give Social Security Number? Is that not create of wise choice? Is Russia Hackteam commit identity theft? In opinion of Russia Hackteam, no!  To ease fear, we will send RUSSIA HACKTEAM HAT with each Social Security Number. Hat is made from finest skin of Ural Mountain Rat.  Is glorious product! If you have many Social Security Number, you will get MANY RUSSIA HACKTEAM HATS.

Thank you much time for read of message statements!  Russia Hackteam e-sport fight club continue dominate.  Lady Russia and mighty Stalin will lead true light.  Let no American claim greasy hand on glory of Russia Hackteam!

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By Michael Lowell

Originally published on May 16, 2010 as “On Challenge and Difficulty: Challenging the Days Quote ‘When Gaming Was Hard’”, revised and re-published on December 22, 2010.

Debunking the Cult of “Nintendo Hard”

Note: This is an extended version of an article that was originally published in May of 2010. All comments prior to the publication of the revision have been retained.

Let me start this conversation with a couple of disclaimers.

I’m not a PlayStation child. I’m not a Nintendo 64 child. I’m not mocking older games for holding their childhood memories to their hearts. I grew up on a Nintendo Entertainment System. I started playing Nintendo games when I was two years old. This is not a “it happened before I was born so it must have sucked” rant.

I also have a level of respect for Twin Galaxies, whose organizers and followers busted ass to become the authority on competitive retro gaming. They did for little reason other than “passion for the product”. Look at the effort I’ve put into this web site. You think I have room to play the “takes gaming too seriously” card? I’m also not claiming that with some time and effort, I could trump their records. I’ve said it before: It doesn’t matter what genre it is. You need some moxy to become the best at a single video game or genre. I’m not calling out retro gamers to a duel. I’m calling out retro gamers on their philosophy.

I can sum this discussion with a quote from Walter Day, who collected data from arcades to post a “National Scoreboard” in his Twin Galaxies arcade. Day seems like a decent human being. He has a really cool beard, I’d buy him a beer, and so forth. We’re both fans of competitive gaming. You’d think we would be on the same boat. According to his wisdom featured in the 2007 documentary The King of Kong, we ain’t.

“Those [Golden Age arcade games] challenged eye-hand coordination, mind-body coordination, fast reaction time, comprehensive thinking, on a level that modern games don’t.”

If you’re into gamer culture, you’ve heard the story. There is a belief that twenty-plus years ago, video games required a greater range of skills than they do today. That brutal death penalties, a lack of proper save systems, and a range of unintuitive or confusing game mechanics (all collectively known as “Nintendo Hard”) built better gamers. Let’s think about that. Retro gamers (those with a preference for the product developed during the Golden Age of Arcade Games and the Nintendo Entertainment System) swore off video games as they became increasingly and depravedly complex during the mid-nineties. Amongst many claims, retro gamers argue the games got too easy. To affirm this, the most competitive of retro gamers began dominating the record books for the video games they grew up on. They are still dominating those games as they reach their mid-thirties for little reason other than “they’re the only ones playing the games”. In the competitive gaming communities with significant turnaround (the communities still attracting new talent and young players), the best players are on the downsides of their career by the time they hit the age of twenty-five. And somehow, the “big fish, small pond” community of retro gamers convinced the world that becoming a skilled gamer has gotten easier since the Nintendo days. That is complete bullshit.

Do not argue with The King of Kong’s graphics overlays. You are wrong.

Debunking the cult of “Nintendo Hard” is only daunting if you don’t know your video games. This story is part game design, part technology, part psychology, part perception. Technology and the internet rewrote the rules of game design, which redefined the roles of challenge and difficulty. Today, “Nintendo Hard” sits in the back of the bus while “Jaedong Hard” and “Daigo Hard” get all the girls. And by willfully ignoring the evolution of video games, retro gamers never came to terms with that. Sound complicated? It probably is. This ain’t no eight-bit storytelling.

—

Before the history lesson begins, we need to talk about challenge and difficulty. These terms are tossed around and nobody knows what they actually mean.

Later installments of Dance Dance Revolution feature what is ironically known as Challenge Mode. You play four to six songs in a set order. Every time you score below “Great” on a note, you lose a life. You have three lives to work with. Sound tough? It damn sure can be. This health system is far less forgiving than the game’s standard life bar, which offers more margin for error and allows the player to regain health. Challenge Mode is a substantial increase in difficulty. But it is no more challenging because you are using the same skills to conquer the same songs with the same gameplay mechanics.

Quite simply, “difficulty” is the restrictions imposed on the player by the game. How little margin for error does the game grant the player in completing the task? That’s why they call them difficulty levels. Difficulty levels adjust variables. How hard enemies hit, how many lives you get. Difficulty is an integral part of game design. The proper difficulty level encourages and facilitates the intended use of the game mechanics. If the game is too easy, you end up with Cave Story, where you can ignore the game’s fascinating weapon mechanics and gung-ho your way through the game world. If the game is too hard, players will shun diverse combat schemes in favor of the “cheapest” attacks, a reboot of Ninja Gaiden where the Flying Swallow becomes your only friend.

“Challenge” is the range of skills required to master a game. Think reflexes. Pattern memorization. The ability to process information quickly. The ability to memorize and execute strategies. The more skills that are required to master a game, the more challenging it is. (This doesn’t mean games with a shallow challenge level are easy to master. The rhythm game genre is deathly primitive. But you’re not topping that flawless playthrough on YouTube. You can’t, you won’t. Don’t bother trying.)

The debate over Nintendo Hard is a fundamental split in the opinion of what makes a video game enjoyable to play. Video games in the eighties used difficulty as the test of skill. Even though Nintendo games required a small range of skills (typically limited to pattern memorization and reflexes), they required players to master those skills. On the average, video games are less difficult today. There’s absolutely no debating that. I consider challenge to be the test of skill. That proving you can master a wide range of skills is the meal ticket. And in the twenty-plus years since retro gaming became a cultural statement, technology and complicated gameplay systems have redefined the beast. Games have become far more challenging. I consider that to be a very good thing.

—

Video gaming in the early eighties had a serious technology issue. Home console gaming was bad enough. But even the arcades were years away from universal arcade motherboards. The chipsets were still being hard-wired into the cabinets. Retro gamers will insist that video games were more innovative for this very reason; that the limitations of technology forced developers to milk every transistor for the exuberant prices that they were worth. The developers of the day were so innovative that video game market crashed under the weight of crappy knockoffs in 1983.

Let’s talk about what actually happened. Three decades later, Ms. Pac-Man is still a classic. And until the release of 2007′s Pac-Man Championship Edition, Ms. Pac-Man was the undisputed king of the maze genre. Wait, what? Maze genre? What the hell is that? All you knew is that lady Pac-Man had some game.

Pictured: Mother fuckin’ innovation!

That’s right: Video game developers were so creative that they all ripped off Pac-Man. Let’s put it into perspective: Blizzard Entertainment has zero recourse against the Chinese makers of “World of Lordcraft” and social gaming empire Zynga never found an idea that it couldn’t steal. Namco Atari (Editor’s note: Whoops!  Atari had the home console rights and they were the ones to drop the hammer.) successfully sued Magnavox for their release of Pac-Man clone K.C. Munchkin. In fairness, Munchkin was a pretty good game. So were Ladybug and Mouse Trap (pictured above). But eventually, it got so bad that dog-food maker Purina commissioned a maze game by the name of Chase the Chuck Wagon*, a product based on a series of famous commercials run by the company. Why? Because it was a video game. Some guy in a suit thought it would sell.

Why was the maze genre so popular? When the famous French movie director Georges Méliès introduced A Trip to the Moon to the then-fledgling medium of motion pictures in 1902, it was completely unlike anything most people had ever seen, an epic tale of the moon-and-back clocking in at an unprecedented fourteen minutes. Approximately a decade removed from the first commercial video games, Golden Age programmers were doing their best Méliès impression. They simply didn’t have the technology to realize massive worlds or complicated gameplay systems. But more importantly, the programmers didn’t possess the body of knowledge. Their body of knowledge was built around making the most profitable product for the most profitable distribution method of its time, the arcades. And developers learned one lesson very, very quickly: If a player could master a game with twenty-five cents, what incentive would he or she have to come back and play it again? There wasn’t any. So developers did what they had to: They cranked up the difficulty level. They cranked it as high as audiences would tolerate. Years before the Japanese unleashed the Nintendo Entertainment System on American audiences, the world of “Nintendo Hard” was born.

Then 1983 occurred. The American video game market imploded under the weight of Atari’s horrible business decisions and a saturated market. Two years later, the Japanese released the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States and won back audiences with massive, colorful worlds. The maze genre died a horrible death, but the body of knowledge built by arcade developers did not. Developers now had the technology to realize larger universes. But in the world of fifty-dollar, pay-to-own Nintendo games, arcade economics lived on.

As the SomethingAwful gag proclaimed, games earned the Nintendo Seal of Approval by requiring that “players die enough to make the cost of the game equal to the amount they would have spent beating it at the arcade.”* Developers had to justify the cost of a fifty-dollar video game. A perfect playthrough of Contra takes about twenty minutes. And you’re not getting a new video game until next month. Your mom bought that Nintendo to babysit your ass. So the player got a handful of fuck-ups to beat the game. And if you didn’t own a Nintendo Power? Too bad. Your mom doesn’t care if the game “cheated” or not. The only way you’re exploring any new worlds on your Nintendo is to shut up and get better at the game(s) you already own.

The Nintendo Entertainment System milked this philosophy to earn the most impressive American market share of any home console until the PlayStation 2. But the arcades? They were in serious trouble. And not just in the States. The tech superiority of the cabinet was being trumped by the convenience of being able to play the games in your own home. And nothing was going to stop it. Arcade developers could only stop the bleeding. The format needed a shot in the arm.

In 1987, developer-publisher Capcom released a game by the name of Street Fighter. It was probably designed to cash in on the popularity of 1984′s Karate Champ, then a rare example of a financially-successful head-to-head arcade title. Street Fighter wasn’t much of a game, but it had a solid gameplay base. Standardized health bars (Karate Champ used the karate point system), a wide cast of characters, and “special moves” that could be executed with a specific button combination. The problem? Street Fighter was a single-player experience where you could only play as a single character. Four years later, Capcom released the sequel. You could play as eight different characters. Oh, and you could play against human opponents. And it played very, very well. Street Fighter II blew up the fucking bus and changed the medium forever.

Everybody forgets that multiplayer dominated the industry’s earliest years. The pre-commercial history of game development is highlighted by 1958′s Tennis for Two and 1962′s SpaceWar!. And after 1972′s Pong rendered 1971′s single-player Computer Space a historical afterthought, the video game market (at least its electronic and home console segments) transformed into Pong and Pong knock-offs. Limited gameplay aside, it’s probably why multiplayer fell off a cliff after the release of 1978′s Space Invaders and 1979′s Asteroids. Those games were breaking new ground after six-plus years of Pong. And more importantly, these new single-player games were making lots and lots of money. Why buck an emerging model if it’s making people rich?

1991′s Street Fighter II brought multiplayer back and cornered a market that no game had been able to touch. It let nerds know what it was like to punch another man in the face. And it did it with the unapologetic competitive aspect that got nerds thrown in lockers to begin with. Yeah, you could play against the computer. No problem with that. But anybody could plug coins into the second slot at any time and make you play for the machine. By adopting the “winner stays” rule seen on any basketball court in the United States, you could theoretically earn hours of practice on a single play. After years of settling differences with “high scores”, your optimal performance, players now had to bring their game every time somebody called them out.

Head-to-head multiplayer saved the arcades for nearly a half-decade, allowing developers to reap billions in quarters and then strike their own iron with a delayed home console release. Street Fighter would eventually have its selling point justified by the first-person shooter renaissance of the mid-to-late nineties. But even as Street Fighter was changing the culture of competitive video games, the soon-to-be-fading mentality of single-player competition persisted. One only had to watch as Nick Arcade followed in the footsteps of Starcade and Video Power, affirming the long-standing legacy of head-to-head, “beat the score” competitions.***

It didn’t take long for players to discover the true selling point of head-to-head multiplayer. At first, multiplayer could prove frustrating. Nobody understood Street Fighter, or Starcraft, or Call of Duty, or whatever game got their interest. In the early play history of a competitive video game (single-or-multiplayer), it appears a single strategy can become a panacea for any situation. And many considered these strategies cheap. Hey, single-player games “cheated”. Why couldn’t another human opponent? The games that couldn’t hold up to human input fell to the wayside. The rest? Their player base collectively sounded like this:

“Throws are bullshit. Complete bullshit! I hit the block button and my guy doesn’t block them! Oh, wait. What if I…hey, that counters throws. Maybe they’re not–what the fuck? He countered my counter-move! How the fuck am I supposed to beat that? So wait, if I do this, and…oh. This is why this game is so much fun to play.”

Knowing the moves wasn’t enough. Knowing the combos wasn’t enough. Knowing the optimal strategies wasn’t enough. Why has chess endured for over eight-hundred years? Enter the metagame.

The Tiger Woods fetish and track and field the exceptions, every major sport utilizes head-to-head competition involving two or more athletes competing directly against each other. We love the human element. At the highest levels of play, raw skill isn’t what separates great athletes. It’s whether they have the ability to understand and adapt to adversity. That’s what sells tickets. There’s little drama in “man versus machine” unless “machine is finally catching up to man” becomes the storyline. And after Deep Blue finally got the better of Garry Kasparov in 1997, people stopped caring about chess-playing computers and got back to watching Michael Jordan push off Byron Russell.

Did Michael push off? If he was called for the obvious offensive foul, would
the Bulls have won game seven? Why are the only black in Utah currently
on the floor? It’s the human element, people!

Starcraft and Counter-Strike have the best-established spectator audiences of any competitive video game on the planet. That’s because they have blindingly obvious metagames. You can watch competitive Starcraft without knowing a single thing about the game. You can know that if a player’s head-first ground attack is being pummeled by siege weapons, the attacking player may want to change things up. And then it’s up to the defending player to anticipate that change in strategy. For anybody who’s played or watched sports, “What will X do to stop Y?” has a very familiar feeling. (That’s why competitive fighting games have a nasty habit of leaving outside audiences in the dark. Their metagame is occurring so rapidly (and across so many character-versus-character matchups) that you need to know the intricacies of the games in order to understand the action.)

Once man learned how to trap the centipede in the game of the same name, that game’s competitive lifespan was saved only by those who declared the tactic unethical. Against the eight-bit brand of artificial intelligence, it’s inevitable that one will eventually discover the “best build order” or the “best set of moves”. Hell, the existence of tool-assisted speedruns is predicated on that philosophy. No hacker ever saw a static security system that he couldn’t beat.

And even with today’s computers, there’s little demand for Call of Duty scrimmages against competent artificial intelligence. Not as long as online gaming continues to be a major selling point for consumers and a line of subscription revenue for developers. As dumb as most humans are, they can still do it better than an electronic brain. The only way for computers to keep up is to increase the difficulty level to the point where bots can shoot you through walls from the other end of the map. (Or as they call it in Counter-Strike, “BuyMyAimBot is cheating.”) In the eighties, gamers were matching wits with circuit boards that had less power than what you’ll find in a modern wristwatch. We now compete head-to-head against dynamic intelligence provided by other humans, and trumping that psychology requires a more diverse skill set than any Nintendo game could ever offer.

It’s best exemplified by the Moto Box, named for one of the most famous moments in the history of competitive Counter-Strike. The semi-finals of the Counter-Strike event at the 2004 World Cyber Games between Team 3D and SK Gaming was played on De_Inferno. On this map, there is a crate located next to one of the bomb sites. If you jump behind it, that’s the last movement you’re making for the rest of that round. You’re pinned against the corner of a wall. With such an action long declared suicide by the Counter-Strike community, Team 3D leader Dave “Moto” Geffon put the gun to his head. Seconds later, his teammates were wiped out. But SK Gaming had no idea Moto had hidden behind the crates. Who would be dumb enough to do that? At this level of play? And the rest was history.

Team 3D won the whole damn event and Moto’s accomplishment became so famous that the crate became known as the “Moto Box”. Moto won his spot in Counter-Strike history by considering all of his available options and then choosing the worst of them.

Walter Day lauds the eye-hand, mind-body, reflexes, and game knowledge required to become a Donkey Kong world record holder. Starcraft, Street Fighter, and Counter-Strike share all of these skills. But thanks to the metagame, you’re also competing against short-term strategy and long-term strategy all being guided by your opponent’s best poker face. These competitive outlets are so challenging that there is simply no room for a Billy Mitchell who holds records on Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Donkey Kong Jr. at the same time. This is a universe where you’re lucky to become a world-class player with any of Warcraft III’s four factions.

“But Mikey Lowell, I thought you said a video game with a shallow challenge level can still test skill!” It can. Rhythm games do that. Bullet hell shooters do that. They can do it because they have adaptable difficulty levels, where Dance Dance Revolution can feature thousands of songs that test players of all skill levels. That’s how a hate crime like 2008′s Ninja Gaiden II can still attract audiences and talented players. Pac-Man features two difficulty options: Adjust the lives, adjust the number of points required to earn an extra life. Technology in the eighties strikes again. The developers of the eighties had to strike a compromise on their difficulty level: They had to choose one. That single difficulty level had to appeal to an entire audience. Unfortunately, the games ended up being too easy for their prodigies and too hard for everybody else. One half of the retro gaming audience boasts that Donkey Kong is impossible and its superior side brags about reaching the kill screen.

Today, game developers only need to create games where the player becomes both the difficulty and the challenge level. Single-player is now designed to introduce the player to the weapons and concepts that will be used in online multiplayer; where Call of Duty’s single player campaign can be a demo for the pay-to-play Xbox Live experience. And retro gamers never got that memo. But why? Part nostalgia? Sure. Everybody’s got their nostalgia crutch. But it’s also a matter of pride, and a matter of misunderstanding how big the world of video games has really become.

The 2005 release of Guitar Hero popularized the rhythm game genre in the United States and became the current video game universe’s lone tribute to the Golden Age of Arcade Games. Guitar Hero II’s most difficult and challenging song is Jordan by Buckethead*. After the game’s November of 2006 release, its player base triumphantly declared that nobody would ever achieve a full-combo (no missed notes) on Jordan. But in late-2007, players realized they could convert Jordan’s brutal mid-round guitar solo into a piano lesson, using both of their hands to play the fret buttons on their guitar. In January of 2008, Jordan was beaten. A barrier had fallen. Next up was Through the Fire and Flames, Guitar Hero III’s tribute to the bosses of eight-bit legend. After Guitar Hero III’s October of 2007 release, the community declared this song was also unconquerable; that nobody could full-combo Dragonforce’s assault on the electric guitar. Seven months and a couple days later, Chris Chike (iamchris4life) got it on tape.

As milestones dropped, Guitar Hero fans realized the ginormous timing windows in the American-developed rhythm games assured there was no music on the planet that couldn’t be defeated. (Nothing anybody would want to play, at least.) In 2006, most Americans were very, very new to the guitar game. They had little exposure to the rhythm game. They didn’t know that Guitar Hero’s scariest looked like candy and rainbows when stacked aside Beatmania’s death marches. But by 2010, audiences were mature enough and skilled enough to understand the limitations of Guitar Hero’s gameplay model. Guitar Hero’s toughest music has since surpassed the difficulty of both Jordan and Dragonforce’s now-famous boss music. But those two epics were the ones that made the impression. They were the first challenges that Guitar Hero fans got a taste of.

For gamers who grew up on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the video game universe gave the same impression. Only this time, it extended across an entire video game lineup that was powered by an incomplete body of development knowledge. Gamers didn’t know the difference between challenge and difficulty, and neither did the developers. All players knew is that “There’s no way anybody could beat this level! It’s impossible!” With time and experience, those players got better. And if they played video games beyond the eight-bit era and got acquainted with Devil May Cry or the Ninja Gaiden reboots, there’s a very good chance they conquered single-player titles that were harder than what they played in the eighties. But for a large number of players, the Nintendo Entertainment System presented them with their first true tests. So those are the challenges that  people speak of in awestruck tones.

And in 1987, there was no internet to agree or disagree with our opinion. The internet was a smattering of university messaging systems. So in the same way that Kimbo Slice rose to fame by dooking on the hobo boxing circuit, climbing the ranks of Punch-Out! and defeating Mike Tyson meant a very real possibility you were the only person you knew that could do it. In your little pond, you were a fucking legend. If the internet was around in 1987, “I Beat Mike Tyson!!1″ brag threads would be met with “Yawn. That’s nice. Now do it without taking a hit.”  But without an internet, nobody was taking the breath out of your accomplishments.

The internet changed gamer culture. “I can beat all of my friends” used to be a statement of fact. Today, if you say it with any conviction, you will be laughed off of any message board or out of any game lobby. Most importantly, the internet took the Americans’ me-first discussion of competitive gaming and threw it out of the window. Americans no longer ignore the accomplishments of the Japanese, the Koreans, most Europeans, and any part of the world with the infrastructure and the talent to play video games at a high level. And if you know anything about rhythm games, nearly every real-time strategy game, and fighting games played on both sides of the ocean, you would know that Americans are very good at getting their ass kicked. Foreign accomplishments are no longer irrelevant like they were in the heyday of Twin Galaxies.

Today, the sheer sample size means there are a hell of a lot of gamers who are better than ninety-nine out of a hundred. Millions of amateurs now play Call of Duty on a daily basis. The best competitive games maintain communites that remain unwavering as presidents and politicians come and go. The best competitive gamers sustain modest-but-livable salaries to play video games. As in “they get paid to play these games seventy hours a week”. The internet did to competitive gaming what the National Basketball Association does to its bottom-feeders, where fans victimize and deride bench-warmers as “bad players”. “Bad players” who would score thirty-five points in your friends’ pick-up game to eleven. We now live in a world where Greg Fields (IdrA) is the on-and-off laughingstock of professional Starcraft, a player who gets as much recognition for his talents as  his  hates-to-lose attitude, practically lifted from the professional wrestling playbook. And he’s the best Starcraft player in the United States of America.

In the retro gaming community, the two decades since Street Fighter never ever happened. They won’t believe it. They didn’t see a fundamental change in how the industry conducts business. They’ve interpreted the introduction of multiple difficulty levels, “Super Guides”, and infinite continues as proof that video games have been “dumbed down”. (And if you’re going to claim that video games are “dumbed down”, that’s not where you start.) Retro gamers have locked themselves in their castles and declared “I didn’t lose any of my three lives not being able to hear you!” And thanks to modern technologies such as matchmaking systems that pit players against opponents of similar skill levels, the people who think “video games are too easy these days” will never ever know what it is like to get their ass kicked by a gamer worth their salt. All they’ll know is “That one Nintendo game was so hard, and nothing could possibly top it!”

—

Let’s reiterate: I’m not claiming I could swipe Billy Mitchell’s records. It’s not happening and that’s not the argument. What’s happened is that retro gamers are putting the video games on the throne. That “this game” or “that game” is unbeatable. They should be placing the accomplishments of the players on the throne. Where Jang Jae Ho (Moon) and Manuel Schenkhuizen (Grubby) dominated an exceptionally-talented competitive Warcraft III scene for over half a decade. I consider that a hell of a lot more impressive than programming a video game to stack the odds against the player. Especially when many programmers do it to cover for their sloppy game design. And until hardware manufacturers can mirror the intelligence of the human brain with a computer processor and attach it to affordable video game hardware, the players will get my props. Because beating those players requires a greater range of skills than any retro game ever did.

So let’s have a contest. Front me Defender. Front me Abadox. Front me a video or arcade game that I couldn’t possibly master.

I’ll front you Daigo Umehara (Daigo), the most famous Street Fighter player on the planet. He doesn’t play because he can make money off of it. He just does it because he enjoys fucking you in the ear. And we’ll see who conquers their machine first.

There’s going to be a lot of trial and error involved. So if you’re one of those retro gamers who grew up on “Nintendo Hard”, it may be your idea of a really fun time.

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By Michael Lowell

October 5, 2011

Super Meat Boy
Xbox 360, PC (reviewed on PC)
Developer: Team Meat
Distributor: Microsoft (Xbox 360), Steam (PC)
Released: October 20, 2010 (Xbox 360), November 30, 2010 (PC)

Note A: This is a re-review of 2010′s Super Meat Boy.  Somebody is going to notice very shortly that I refer to this web site as “gospel” on the front page.  That person will call me out when I change my opinion on a video game.  Meh.  I care.  Not really.

Note B: Huge credit to reader and commenter SriK, who dressed down my original review and made it clear that quality control did not do its job.

Update on October 11, 2011: Paragraph edits have been made for readability.

My first review of Super Meat Boy was published to this web site in December of 2010.  I may have been the first person on the internet with the balls to call Super Meat Boy an average video game. During the last ten months, I was uh, I’ll say, “educated”.  I learned some knowledge.  Through overwhelming force of opposing opinion, “Super Meat Boy is an average game” became a completely indefensible opinion.  Average game, my ass.  “Would be one of the ten best games of 1988″, my ass.  I should have never said that.  1988 should have come out of the time warp and sued Super Meat Boy for misrepresentation.  The venerable world of side-scrolling platformers should be rather concerned that the platforming genre is under assault by Canabalt, and 1-Bit Ninja, and a host of other shallow platformers that are making a name for themselves on both mobile phones and “indie gaming” web sites.  Super Meat Boy has become an indie wunderkind and a figurehead for that movement.  It’s my duty to knock this laughable revolution down a notch and I’ll start by shooting one of its leaders in the head.

When I laid down my original opinion, here’s what I failed to understand: Super Meat Boy was sold to the public on a premise that video games now suck.  Apparently, video games are “way too easy” these days and they used to be a hell of a lot harder.  (This is actually bullshit.  The Cult of Nintendo Hard has long failed to understand that the most prized achievements in today’s video games often require the player to outwit and outplay a skilled player in a competitive multiplayer game.  But anyway, we have a platformer to discuss.)  In Super Meat Boy, you’ll die a lot, and then you’ll die some more.  Surprisingly, people were okay with this.  People called the game “Tough, but fair.”  Right there, anybody with some common sense should have raised an eyebrow.  If Super Meat Boy was actually a difficult game, nobody would have played it.  So what the hell was going on here?  I discovered a disconnect between the perceived difficulty level and the actual difficulty level.

The largest, most expansive levels in the Super Meat Boy universe can be completed in under a minute.  Most clock in at fifteen to twenty seconds.  Some can be completed in fewer than ten seconds.  It’s a bite-sized difficulty level.  You only have to play the game flawlessly for half-a-minute at a time.  I was one of the fools who thought this constituted a high difficulty curve.  Then, somebody hit me over the head with a hammer a couple of times and I finally figured it out.  Super Meat Boy is built for the moron who loads up a Super Nintendo emulator, opens Super Mario World, and hits “Save State” every ten seconds.  In this twisted version of the Super Nintendo platforming experience, no difficulty level exists because the player is never punished for sucking ass at video games.  Instead of beginning at the start of a level or the checkpoint, the player hits a key and picks up right before the chasm that just wiped Mario from existence.  Guess what?  In Super Meat Boy, the player has unlimited lives.  Death is punished with “restart at the beginning of that incredibly short level”.  Once you complete a level or a world, you can move ahead.  It doesn’t matter if you succeed on the first try or the hundredth try.  The game doesn’t discriminate against the skilled player or the bad player.  That’s not difficulty.  Super Meat Boy advertised and continues to advertise itself as Retro Platformer: Tournament Edition.  In reality, Super Meat Boy is Save State Emulator Whore: Tournament Edition.  No difficulty level exists in Super Meat Boy because no meaningful punishment for failure exists.

If you grew up on video games in the eighties, think about your experience.  When you lost all of your lives or failed the mission or whatever, you were often grateful when a development team gave you continues or a password system.  Very often, developers would say “You suck.  Until you prove to us that you don’t suck and that you can beat this game, you get to start from the beginning.”  If the continue systems in 1986′s Super Mario Bros. 2 (Famicom Disk System), 1988′s Ninja Gaiden, 1991′s Battletoads, and the Mega Man series weren’t exceptions to the rule, then they certainly weren’t the norm.  Even with the help of those continue systems, every one of those “retro games” became benchmarks for skill and ability because they required lengthy stretches of flawless play.  (And if you were a real freak of nature, you ignored the continue system, anyway.  You pulled the equivalent of an arcade “one-credit clear” on your video game console.  That’s because you were a badass.)  Nobody is going to tell me that any level in Super Meat Boy requires a longer stretch of flawless play than the eighth world in the Japanese edition of Super Mario Bros. 2.

So right there, Super Meat Boy has already committed a sin.  The finished product is already in a dire situation.  In Super Meat Boy, flawless play must only occur for a long enough period of time where even the least competent gamer can trial-and-error his way through the entire game, where he then rushes to GameFAQs and shares his incredible story with all of his middle school friends.  (Meanwhile, nobody dares to connect the dots and realize that Super Meat Boy shares an awful lot in common with 2009′s mobile phone figurehead Angry Birds, another trial-and-error clusterfuck built around miniature levels and unlimited continues.)  And even when the Steam and XBox Live achievement systems for Super Meat Boy reward players for sustained levels of play, Team Meat missed the damn point.  The game’s vaunted “Impossible Boy” achievement requires the player to complete the final world in its “Dark World” incarnation (best described as “Hard Mode”) on a single life.  That actually sounds like a reasonable accomplishment.  That is, until the player realizes he can play the twenty levels in any order and get the hardest levels out of the way before focusing on the easier levels.  Even when the game demands a no-death run from its most talented players, the player can undertake it at their own convenience.

But let’s make an assumption that we would use an emulator to play through any of the Nintendo games listed above, using save states to compensate for an incredible lack of player skill.  These games would still be more entertaining than Super Meat Boy.  There’s a reason for that.  The setting, narrative, and motif in Super Meat Boy are all built around an eponymous block of meat that is out to save his beloved Bandage Girl from the evil Dr. Fetus.  This less-than-subtle parody of Super Mario Brothers is complete with the mandatory “evil twin”, the single-room boss fight where the enemy takes up the entire screen, item-collection mechanics that can also be retrieved and achieved through trial-and-error level completion, and alternate routes through a set of levels that provide no suspense in exploration.  From the moment you load a new game world, you know it has twenty levels.  You know each of those twenty levels will feature one or two “Warp Zones” that require no exploration or creativity to discover.  Super Meat Boy never bothers to provide the awesome feeling that came with finding hidden levels in 1990′s Super Mario World.

The character has no direct method of attack.  You’re not supposed to be assaulting levels, you’re supposed to be surviving them.  Whether that entails getting from Point A to Point B without a scratch, waiting for a gate to unlock so you can escape from a nasty predicament, or outrunning the falling ceiling of death has all been determined by the level design ambitions of Team Meat.  Ambitious these ambitions are not, with the developers readily recycling and reusing these tropes throughout the game’s 250-plus levels.

To achieve positive (i.e. successful) outcomes in Super Meat Boy, the player is limited to a run button, a jump button, and movement buttons.  It doesn’t even do these simple controls correctly.  A good chunk of my experience with video games has been spent watching players manipulate the dated game mechanics in 1998′s StarCraft and doing it flawlessly.  For that reason, I’m cautious to label controls as “inconsistent” or “poor”, especially when you can find video footage scattered across the internet demonstrating that players can beat the toughest levels in Super Meat Boy without a hitch.  (Fortunately, I think anybody can agree that these controls are light years ahead of the 2008 flash game predecessor Meat Boy, which may have the worst controls ever programmed into anything claiming to be a video game.)  At the same time, I would never go around telling people that the controls in 1993′s Bubsy: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind “are fine, deal with it” because I actually managed to beat that game so many years ago.

The problem in Super Meat Boy seems to be a complete disconnect between run inertia and air inertia.  Mid-air control of the character is quite awkward and rather inexcusable in a game where completing a level requires minimal margin for error.  All of this is then made worse by the inconsistent mechanics for wall-jumping.  If you’re standing directly next to a wall, Super Meat Boy will hug the wall and proceed to slide up the wall, rather than simply jumping straight up.  (Every other platformer I have played requires the player to push in the direction of the wall to initiate a wall-sliding mechanic.  Super Meat Boy is the exception.)  This is critical because these two states of animation (“wall-sliding” and “falling”) maintain different rules for gravity.  And since the only way to cancel a wall-slide is to jump, you can expect to die numerous times before figuring out that the game should have never been programmed this way.

Those inconsistent controls seem almost inconsequential when you consider that Team Meat has actually done the impossible: In parodying 1985′s Super Mario Brothers, they have actually created a video game that is less complex than the father of the side-scrolling platformer genre.  “Oh, you’re just being crazy here!”  Let’s think about it.  The title character in Super Meat Boy can’t defend himself, because the entire premise of the game is that you’re nothing more than a stupid block of meat.  Clearly, that was a far more interesting concept in parody than application.  Super Mario Brothers allows you to attack enemies.  It gives you numerous ways to kill enemies.  You can jump on them, you can set them on fire, you can destroy them with an invincibility item, you can even kick enemies into each other!  You can’t do any of these things in Super Meat Boy.  The game has to establish complexity and depth somewhere else.  So, you would think that Super Meat Boy could use his speed (and he has a hell of a lot of speed to work with) to turn the tables on everything that tries to kill him.  Enemies, projectiles, and monsters can’t be killed ever.  (Even the boss fight in the fourth world ends after the boss monster has gone through his pre-programmed animations and inflicted three successful attacks on himself.  You do nothing to create that outcome.)

Player movement cannot be used to turn projectiles against their creators or other enemies.  Enemies can’t be coaxed into attacking each other.  Anti-gravity devices can’t be used against your opponents.  Portals can’t be manipulated and can’t be redirected into more favorable outcomes.  The only thing you can do is keep running, moving, and wondering why the hell you have absolutely no right to interact with the game world that’s trying to murder your block of blood.  That’s not the only place Super Mario Brothers has the advantage.  That game even made liberal use of what today’s gamers call “destructible environments”.  It used these destructible environments in conjunction with power-ups, hidden items, hidden blocks, and half-a-dozen enemy types that were all used to create diverse, complex, and memorable levels.  And that doesn’t even include any discussion of subsequent Mario games.  By 1988′s Super Mario Bros. 3, over fifty enemies and over a dozen power-ups were used in the creation of sixty-plus game levels.  Compared to what?  A dozen enemies, a couple of terrain palette swaps, and level design featuring the bare minimum for meaningful environmental interactions?

This complete lack of complexity rears its head in Super Meat Boy‘s level design.  Think about Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World.  Whether you mastered those games or merely played them to completion, I can name a stage number or a stage name and you can immediately build a reasonable recreation of that level in your own head.  5-3.  6-10.  Soda Lake.  Butter Bridge.  Choco Island 2.  Nintendo has never been shy about building single levels around a single new concept or gimmick, and these games remain classics for a reason.  (2009′s New Super Mario Brothers Wii continued that trend with less successful results, but it was still a damn good game.)  Stages and level design in Super Meat Boy don’t become more complex and more interesting as you advance through the game.  By the second world, most of the level design concepts have already been introduced and leveraged to their most interesting extents.  As you advance through the game, the levels simply get longer.

While the best games in the eight-bit era of video games won fans by taking their diverse roster of moving parts and placing them in locations that became more devilish with each level, Super Meat Boy does not have the legs to sustain memorable and diverse level design past the one-hour mark.  Super Meat Boy does not have enough moving parts.  The “final level in the game” (Dark World 7-20) is an obvious example.  It’s one of the longest levels in the game, clocking in at an incredible forty-five seconds.  In this level, the ceiling is falling.  To escape from the ceiling, you must navigate a gauntlet of circular saws.  Now, you would think that by this point in the game, Team Meat is doing some particularly evil things with these saws.  They’re not.  You are using the same timed jumps to conquer the same moving saws that you saw in the first and second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth worlds.  The final level in the game doesn’t apply any new concepts. The first thirty minutes of the game exploit every mechanic you’ll ever face.  I guess somebody thought this was “level design”.  So no surprise that in playing hundreds of levels, I can remember perhaps a dozen of them.  Very few of the levels are memorable because they’re never complex enough to become memorable.

(“But the personal computer version of Super Meat Boy has a level editor!  You can make larger and more complex levels than McMillen and Refenes ever dreamed of!”  Big deal.  It does nothing to fix the issues.  By the fifth year of Doom level design, map creators were doing things that the Doom game engine was never ever designed to do.  They were creating three-dimensional levels and putting the best work of John Romero and American McGee to shame.  There were options for players to be creative in extending the shelf life of Doom, Quake, Descent, Hexen, and Heretic.  What good is a level editor when your most painstaking decisions are cosmetic decisions (what your level looks like) and what good is a level editor when the actual rule set is so small that even its creators couldn’t find ways to continue making diverse, complex levels with it?)

That’s what makes the visuals in this game so bewildering.  The entire game is built on the absolute vulnerability of the player-character.  So immediately, one would think inspiration could be found in the bloody world of survival-horror video games.  (Or, in the case of a game with less-than-realistic graphics, you could pull your inspiration from violent cartoons.)  One would think the first consideration in art design would be “How can we design a world that becomes even more disgusting every single time the player dies, ultimately transforming the environment into a monument of blood and guts dedicated to the incompetence of the player?”  That should have been the primary focus of the art design.  What actually happened was different.  Team Meat built an entire game around the premise that our hero is a wretched, weak, worthless piece of meat.  However, whenever Super Meat Boy dies, he explodes into a harmless splatter that’s been long outdone by the trails of blood that wash onto everything the player touches.

From there, it’s not difficult to figure out that the visual design of Team Meat is limited by “proficiency”.  Their art design is not a stylistic decision.  Their art design and their ability to create that art is simply limited.  The 2011 release of the bloody Zelda-roguelike-whateveryouwannacallit The Binding of Isaac should affirm that.  Much like hundreds of aspiring mobile game developers, Team Meat looked at their limited art capabilities and decided they could market these limited art capabilities if they called them “retro graphics”.  So while companies such as VanillaWare and Arc System Works are creating beautiful game worlds with beautiful, hand-drawn art, Team Meat can simply claim they are appealing to the childhood video game memories of those who grew up in the eighties.  In doing so, an awful lot of players have given them a free pass.

Well, here’s their fatal flaw in “We’re just being retro, we promise!”:  Super Meat Boy‘s “hidden” Warp Zones and Minus Worlds replicate the limited color palettes of the Nintendo Entertainment System.  Team Meat even uses these bonus levels to replicate both the color clusterfucks seen in software for the Atari 2600 and the monochrome graphics on the Game Boy.  By extension, we can conclude that Team Meat wants their game to be compared favorably with the sixteen-bit video game consoles.  And upon an immediate inspection, Super Meat Boy does not even compare well with 1990′s Super Mario World and 1991′s Sonic the Hedgehog , the two platforming experiences most closely associated with video games in the early nineties; two games designed to showcase the potential of the hardware, two games that saw their graphical fidelity outdone by dozens and dozens of other products during the course of the hardware’s shelf life.  Super Meat Boy doesn’t even achieve the bare potential of art schemes that were done over twenty years ago by developers that were just starting to stick their feet into the sixteen-bit swimming pool.  If you’re really looking for a recent videogame that satisfies your unconditional love for the style of pixel art present on the Super Nintendo, Super Meat Boy is a grand leap behind 2010′s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game, a game that throws a nod to its eight-and-sixteen-bit influences and then firmly carries itself on its own legs.

Super Meat Boy is a rather unremarkable world of washed-out-yet-saturated colors, a game whose only creative leaps in art design come an even more liberal use of saturated colors, where everything in the foreground is painted black and placed upon the background.  That color saturation only becomes worse when you’re dumped into one of those retro worlds.  And while the music can actually be quite good from time to time (the World 5 music is a particular standout), the chiptune music in the Warp Zones will shoot straight into your ears and steal your soul.  Not to even speak of the meager sound effects that lack a required “oomph” to convince the player that every level is a menacing, grinding, terrifying chamber shop of horrors.  Quite simply, the sound and visuals are a step back from what we expected in 1991, even when compared to the rather wretched world of “indie game development” that has spawned Super Meat Boy.

So here’s a decision that you have to make: Super Meat Boy has been marketed as an absolute rejection of modern video games.  Yet, it doesn’t even aspire to stand against the games that created its damn genre.  And even if this game played like a perfect wine, even if the controls were perfect, even if it rejected save state checkpoints in favor of a punishing system for extra lives, I would still be hard-pressed to find much value in Super Meat Boy.  I couldn’t claim it has more interesting level design than New Super Mario Brothers, is more complex and challenging than Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, or that it’s even a better game than fellow indie attention whore Braid.

Contrary to what mainstream video game journalists have declared (journalists that apparently started playing games about four or five years ago), you can’t toss average controls, wonky physics, and sloppy graphics into a pathetically simple game model and call it a 2010 Game of the Year candidate.  Not in my America.  If you think that I’m being a tad savage in this re-review of the game, I apologize.  If anybody thinks I’m being mean to the “indie” developers, then you’re part of the problem.  When I think of “independent video games”, I don’t think of Super Meat Boy or Cave Story or Braid.  I think of Doom, Quake, Super Mario World, StarCraft, Warcraft III, Psychonauts, Portal, Bayonetta, Vanquish, and I probably missed a couple hundred more.  I think of some of the best video games that have ever been created.  I’m not going to give a small development team a pass because they have limited resources and limited manpower.  Smaller development teams have proven capable of creating some of the best works in the history of this industry, and they did it while being judged against gigantic companies and their gigantic budgets, not just a bunch of amateur projects that pop up on Newgrounds or TIGSource.

When I reviewed this game the first time around, I simply didn’t know better.  Apparently, in making their first commercial game, neither did Team Meat.

1 out of 5

(Games rated one-out-of-five have problems. Big problems. Unplayable? Possibly not. But even the target audience won’t find much to like.)

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By Michael Lowell

December 13, 2010.

2010 Spike Video Game Awards Sing-Along Guide

Conventional logic says I should ignore the Spike Video Game Awards instead of giving it undeserved attention.  But there’s no rule saying assassinations need to be silent.  I’d like to place a very vocal bullet in the brains of this two-hour-long advertisement.

“But the Academy Awards are a tribute to movies!  Why can’t the game industry have their own ceremony!?”  An industry is entitled to ceremony.  They are not entitled to use ceremony as advertisement.  Not without being called out for it.  E3 cuts the crap: They are a gaming expo where the endgame is to steal the funny green paper from mommy’s purse.  The Academy Awards conducts itself with some subtlety.  Yeah, the dress was provided by a famous manufacturer and the “Best Picture” category will send people running to the rental store.  But the Academy doesn’t peddle Michael Bay’s latest explodathon in-between announcements.  And when Jack Black wins “Best Voice”, he doesn’t ask Arkham Asylum how his ass tastes, mock “Uncharted Poo”, and feign outrage as the “producers” yank him off-stage.  As happened at last year’s Spike Video Game Awards.

This “event” is about “honoring” as many video games as possible and then promoting the sequel; where Uncharted 2 can win Game of the Year while losing out on Best Action-Adventure Game.  It’s not about ceremony.  It’s about visibility.  And by the time I’m done punching this show in the groin, you’ll believe me.

(I would love to fill this space with video of the event.  But Viacom has actively gone out of their way to remove all traces of this travesty from YouTube.  The beginner cynic would claim the VGAs were so bad they simply don’t want anyone to see it.  But come on.  I’m more delusional than that.  The expert cynic would recognize that a YouTube search for “video game awards” or “vga” currently yields all the “world-premiere trailers” from that television show.  You know, the fancy computer graphics that make you want to buy the video games.  Ain’t that funny?)

8:00 p.m. – Check me out everybody!  I’m dancin’!  I’m dancin!

8:01 – Our host is Neil Patrick Harris.  Yeah, the dude who played Doogie Howser.  It’s not a good thing when your most famous acting job is built on “You’re the guy who played that doctor with the really stupid name!”   But Doogie speaks!  “What, what was that?  What, what the singing and the dancing?  What the fuck do you think this is, the Tonys?”  Doogie downs the dance troupe with his plastic, dual-wield AK47s.  This is going to be a very long night.

8:02 – “Hi, I’m Neil.  Welcome to Family Hour on Spike.  Could we get this cleaned up?  I’ve got a show to host!” Unfortunately, this isn’t Japanese wrestling.  The audience is not being silent out of respect for the performers.  This is television on Spike TV.  This is what happens when a bunch of old white guys walk into a board room and discover young adults love to fuck women and drink beer. The next two hours will an emphatic explanation for why women don’t want to work in this industry.

8:02 – Voiceover: “With world premieres from…Arkham City.”  Hah.  I guess they forgot that Batman: Arkham City was revealed at last year’s event in an opening act that consumed half the show’s budget.

8:02 – Voiceover: “With appearances by…Tony Hawk.  Michael Chiklis.  The cast of ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’, Olivia Munn, Sam Trammell, Rutina Wesley, Dominic Monaghan, Chris Hemsworth, and more.”  I won’t dissect the guest appearances that have nothing to do with video games.  If it’s like last year’s event, most of those guests are here to shill the next Spike television event that will be canceled after six episodes.  Alright.  Tony Hawk.  He’s the father figure of the extreme sports video game, face of a franchise that died with last month’s release of Tony Hawk: Shred.  Way to stay relevant, Spike.  And Olivia Munn?  At least Morgan Webb plays video games.  I doubt there is any woman who has achieved “gamer girl” status with less knowledge of the medium.

8:03 – Harris: “Tonight is for you, die-hard fans at home, and all you amazing programmers and storytellers here [author's emphasis on "here"] who have crafted these incredible worlds”.  So this is an industry event?  Oh boy.  This will not end well.  You will understand why in a few short moments.

8:03 – Harris: “These games are becoming so lifelike it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.  I mean, am I the real Neil Patrick Harris or just a computer simulation of Neil, a computer simulation of Neil, a computer simulation of N–of Neil of Neil of Neil, error 453.”  And the crowd goes dead!  News flash to the writing team: You started off the monologue well.  You acknowledged your audience.  You thanked them for their hard work.  Then you launched a punchline that openly insulted them.  As if they hadn’t heard that one before.  Bonus to Doogie for cutting straight to the next joke.  When the crowd doesn’t bite, you acknowledge the joke sucked.  You don’t continue reading the script.  This is what happens when you get a dramatic actor to perform your opening gag reel.

8:03 – Harris: “I’ve grown up playing video games.  We all have.”  Olivia Munn hasn’t!

8:03 – Harris: “These games have been part of our life and we celebrate the incredible advancements of gameplay.  So think about it.  Think about how far we’ve come from like…Atari to now.  Now there’s friggin’ Kinect.  Kinect!”  Haha, oh man.  This industry is fucked.

8:04 – Harris: “Pretty soon, we’ll see like…Kinect TSA Patdown.”  He then explains what the objective of the game would be.  He then demonstrates how it would work.  I don’t know who this is more offensive to: Those in the audience who took a plane to this event, or the first-time Spike TV viewers who are wondering why this joke had to be explained to them.

8:05 – And it’s time to announce the first Game of the Year candidate.  I hope it’s one of those tactical military first-person shooters!
8:06 – Harris: “More people bought this game in its first week of release than any form of entertainment ever…[a]nd the hundreds of millions who’ve experienced its heart-pounding action.”  Yes, that’s not a typo.  He said “hundreds of millions”.  He did this without skipping a beat.  The next time Doogie professes he is a serious gamer, you will call him out on his bullshit.

8:07 – Random hot chick Maria Menounos: “I will be your eyes and ears backstage in the VGA Green Room.”  A quick Google search reveals she has no video game acumen of note.  She voice acted in a James Bond game.  That’s it.  I expect this will be a recurring theme.

8:08 – And here’s your “world-premiere” of Arkham City.  During the monologue, Doogie noted that the event would feature pre-rendered graphics visible only to the television audience.  Know how football broadcasts feature a computer-generated first-down line?  Yeah, same thing.  Congratulations to the live audience, who has nothing but empty air and spotlights to feast their eyes upon.

8:11 – Studio of the Year
Nominees: Bioware, Blizzard Entertainment, Bungie Studios, Rockstar: San Diego.
Winner: Bioware.  Small problem with this.  And this is where this show will fall apart.  Each of these studios has only released one game during this calendar year.  And this isn’t like last year, where Rocksteady came out of nowhere and delivered what is possibly the only good Batman game ever.  Thus, you have stated that Bioware’s Mass Effect 2 is better than Starcraft II, Halo: Reach, and Red Dead Redemption.  You will be held to this as the night moves on.

8:13 – Oh, it’s Dane Cook.  Yeah, he sucks at comedy, but he gets paid to do it.  He couldn’t deliver the opening monologue?
8:13 – Dane Cook: “So when someone says ‘Mario’, you think of an Italian plumber with a mustache who eats shrooms, jumps over barrels, and probably loved it when I had to blow in my cartridge for him to work properly.”  Oh, okay.  You suck at comedy, too.  Those jokes weren’t funny when the internet adopted them in 2006.
8:13 – Cook: “Me, Q-Bert, and his brother Q-Dave used to get stoned while playing Goldeneye.”  Derp.

8:14 – Yes.  Ezio Auditore da Firenze, the lead protagonist in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, is accepting his nomination.  In-character.  Seriously.

8:20 – Sorry.  “Druids and random chanting” is only cool when The Undertaker is about to come out.  And that’s only because The Undertaker curb-stomps people because it his job.
8:20 – And this is to introduce Todd Howard?  A video game designer?  What the hell?

8:21 – It’s a promo for The Elder Scrolls V.  So let me get this straight: Microsoft Flight Simulator is boring because you’re exploring vast nothingness but The Elder Scrolls is a Game of the Year candidate in any year the franchise is published.  I understand.

8:22 – Harris, commenting on The Elder Scrolls trailer:  “So uhm.  That looks cool.”  The funniest thing you say or do all night will be of the “unintentional comedy” variety.  Congratulations.

8:22 – Harris: “Since the gaming industry is bigger than movies…” Please don’t lie to yourself.
8:22 – Harris: “It’s only a matter of time before the porn industry makes X-rated versions of the games we love.”  This is why nobody is going to take your “passion for gaming” seriously.  Your show implies gamers are so desperate for sex that they will fuck the holes they punched in their bedroom wall.  By your own narrative, they would know adult video games.  They know they’re out there.  What, you think Tomb Raider sold because of quality platforming?

8:22 – Harris: “So I decided to come up with some titles of my own.  For example, Halo: Reach-Around.” Yup.  There are 414,000 Google results for “Halo: Reach-Around”.* The first result is dated from March of 2010.  We can conclude Doogie is the first person to use this joke.  And you are making this joke in front of an audience that works sixty-hour weeks to make sure people take their product seriously.  But don’t worry.  It gets worse.
8:22 – “World of Whorecraft.”
8:22 – “Call of Booty: Pre-Ops.”
8:22 – “Grand Theft Auto: Erotic Asphyxiation.”  God dammit so much.

8:23 – Harris: “Here’s a special announcement from Mortal Kombat”.  I didn’t know the name of a video game franchise could directly speak to an audience.
8:24 – And just to eliminate any suspicions that this show is not an advertisement, the audience is informed that they can pre-order this new Mortal Kombat title at GameStop.

8:25 – Hey, Kratos!  What you up to?  Oh.  You’re having sex in Aphrodite’s love shack.  Again.  No, seriously.  He’s assumed the position.  It’s so not suitable for work.* What a place to accept your Character of the Year nomination: The lowest point of God of War 3 and one of the most shameful gaming moments of the last decade.

8:25 – 90210 actress AnnaLynne McCord: “Sometimes, the most powerful weapon can be found at the local Home Depot.  I’m talking about a hammer.”  A wink, nod, and hand on the hip follows.  What are you waiting for, nerd?  That hole in the wall isn’t fucking itself.

8:26 – McCord: “This is Thor: God of Thunder.”  I like playing a game with release trailers: Guess the MetaCritic score.  So what do we have?  Movie-tie-in.  Game based on a comic book property.  Area-of-effect abilities used for cleaning the screen instead of crowd control.  Quick-time events that require polished production values in order to have any impact.  Graphics that are nothing home to write about.  The over/under on MetaCritic is 64.5.  I’m taking the under.

8:27 – Best Action-Adventure Game of the Year
Nominees: Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, God of War III, Red Dead Redemption, Super Mario Galaxy 2.
This is an excellent time to mention that Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood was released two days after the nominees for this show were announced.  According to Destructoid writer Nick Chester, the actual voting occurred a month earlier.  Nominations of the November releases were based on beta versions of the product.* I.e. unfinished video games.
8:28 – Winner: Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.  So continue to follow the logic: This awards ceremony has just stated that AssCreeBro is a better video game than Red Dead Redemption and God of War III.

8:29 – Voice-over: “But who is the strongest [video game hero] of all-time?  You debated this question on Spike.com, and the strongest heroes are: Master Chief, Samus, and Marcus Fenix.”  Oh.  Well.  That obviously settles it.

8:34 – Hey!  Denise Richards!  Didn’t your career topple head-over-feet after playing a nuclear scientist in that Bond movie?  Or was it your terrible performance in Starship Troopers?  Refresh me.
8:34 – Oh.  I see the problem.  You made your living as an actress and can’t convincingly read lines off a teleprompter.

8:35 – It’s My Chemical Romance.  And they’re singing.  I don’t know why they’re doing it here.  This is a good time to mention that we are thirty-five minutes into the show and only announced winners for two of the thirty categories.

8:39 – Menounos: “Now, trash-talking is a huge part of gaming.  So can you give me your best trash-talking?”
Comedian Nick Swardson: “It’s a huge part of gaming.  I’ve had accounts banned on Xbox Live for Code of Conduct, so…”
Menounos, feigning the last response any sane woman would give: “Really?”
Swardson: “Yeah, so I’m very adept at talking smack.”  No, getting banned means you suck at it.  You’re doing one of two things: You’re either throwing the first punch (which is usually unnecessary) or being a general nuisance.
Swardson: “So my thing is just to say stuff that’s really disturbing…[a]nd I was playing Black Ops with a group of guys, and I told this guy that I was going to cut his mom’s head off on Christmas morning.”  Oh wow, I’m good at predicting the future.  This guy says things that have gotten numerous gamers thrown in jail.**

8:42 – Host (couldn’t make out the name): “Mass Effect fans had to wonder what Bioware would do next.”
8:43 – What could Bioware do next?  Another Mass Effect game, of course!  What a circle-jerk.

8:47 – It’s a trailer for Homefront.  It’s an urban military shooter with a twist.  It’s set three, maybe even four years in the future!  And where can I pre-order the game?  Thanks, GameStop!  I was going to pre-order five copies of this game.  But now that you’re throwing in an exclusive in-game shotgun, I’m getting six.

8:48 – Not that the cast of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia belongs anywhere near a video game event, but damn.  It’s no wonder the show is as sick and twisted as it is.  These guys have some friggin’ chemistry.  Nice work.

8:49 – Best Shooter
Nominees: Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Bioshock 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo: Reach.
Winner: Call of Duty: Black Ops.  I’m shocked that the game with the largest user base won the award.  So keep following the logic train: AssCreeBro beat out God of War 3 and Red Dead Redemption.  Call of Duty: Black Ops just beat Halo: Reach.  By that logic, the only two candidates for Game of the Year are AssCreeBro and Black Ops.

8:51 – Phony gamer girl Olivia Munn: “Hi everyone.  If there’s anything I like more than acting in ‘How I Met Your Mother’, it’s playing video games.”  This is why people shit on you, Olivia.  The only thing I can buy is that you’re an attention whore. And guess what this particular “comedy segment” is about?  Munn just locked Doogie out of his dressing room so that she could host this segment.  Fitting.

8:51 – Olivia: “I was a video game reporter for five years.”  Haha, oh wow.  She’s really pushing it.
8:52 – Olivia: “And also, I was on live television, in a bikini, choking down hot dogs to give gamer dudes around the world boners.”  The audience applauds.  The American video game industry is Japanese anime fan service in its human form.  Pathetic.

8:54 – I’d like to remind everybody that we are fifty-five minutes into a commercial for the best of video gaming in 2011 and have seen zero video games that were based on an original property.

9:01 – Come on, Swardson!  You’ve established Internet Tough Guy status.  Show us what you’ve got!
9:02 – Swardson: “While you were sitting at home, stoned, playing the game, like ‘Hey Kyle, we’re out of weed man!  No I didn’t take it!  No you did!  I don’t smoke weed, oh wait I have a problem!  Maybe it was an elf.’  In that stoner haze you were actually learning something about Ancient Greece.” Not all gamers smoke weed.  God damn.

9:05 – Look, I haven’t played a Call of Duty game since the original Modern Warfare.  What could a fictional character in a Call of Duty game do to deserve getting a Character of the Year nomination?

9:06 – Best Performance by a Human Male. As opposed to what, a non-human male?
Nominees: Gary Oldman, Sgt. Reznov, Call of Duty: Black Ops; John Cleese, Jasper, Fable III; Martin Sheen, Illusive Man, Mass Effect 2; Nathan Fillion, Sgt. Edward Buck, Halo: Reach; Neil Patrick Harris, Spider Man, Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions; Rob Wiethoff, John Marston, Red Dead Redemption; Sam Worthington, Alex Mason, Call of Duty: Black Ops.  It’s worth noting that only one of the four Characters of the Year are nominated on this list.
Winner: Neil Patrick Harris.  A.k.a. “You come host the show and we’ll give you an award.  That work for you?”

9:09 – You know how Conan O’Brien did those segments where he would “talk to a celebrity”, clearly someone’s mouth imposed on top of a picture?  Yeah, Doogie is arguing with Spider-Man.  He is arguing with the character he voiced.  Doogie totally didn’t know he was winning this award.

9:10 – Voice-over: “New level unlocked for Tony Hawk.”  In what?  How far his career as a video game spokesperson can fall?

9:10 – Prototype 2 promo.  Number of sequels announced: 73.  New games: 0.

9:18 – Doogie explains the instructions for “Angry Birds Live”.  Don’t know what Angry Birds is?  It’s a dumbed-down version of Worms.  In the mobile gaming community, that’s good enough for twelve million downloads.  Well, Doogie’s gonna play it “live”.  They painted a bunch of pigs green for this segment.  Doogie is “preparing to launch” a live chicken at them.  The audience is horrified.  As they should be.  This show is making me feel sympathy for PETA.

9:18 – Director voice-over: “Listen, PETA called, we gotta shut this down.” Yeah, acknowledging the insanity of this segment does not allow you to save face.  You still painted pigs green.  You still paraded a live chicken in front of a live audience.  And none of it was funny.  It’s like writing a comedy sketch mocking cancer patients and claiming it’s okay because the main character got AIDS.

9:18 – Menounos: “[Olivia], who would rather date: John Marston or Ezio, quick!”
Munn: “Marston because he smells like horses and cowboys are sexy!”  Good to see the ladies are asking and answering the questions that gamers want to know about.

9:19 – Guillermo del Toro: “[t]he stubbornness of an industry, the movie industry, that doesn’t allow to conceive a video game as anything other than ancilliary product.”  You’d be happy to learn that the Chief Financial Officer of gaming’s largest third-party publisher got his start in Proctor and Gamble, a company designed to sell you consumable products year-after-year.  And Call of Duty is now the most popular commercial gaming experience on the planet, a franchise that gets a new product every single year.  Incredible stuff.

9:20 – “A new terror from Gullermo del Toro.”  Oh, this is wonderful.  Read any trade site dedicated to the video game industry.  Your Gamasutra, your GamesIndustry.biz.  The developers and programmers who carouse those sites will firmly state that if you don’t have a game programming pedigree, you need to shut the fuck up.  It’s eerily similar to athletes who won’t listen to your opinion unless you played the game at a very high level.  But I guess this rule doesn’t apply when they can attach a high-profile movie director to their product.  Where Steven Spielberg can give creative advice for Boom Blox, when del Toro can create his own vision.  It’s no surprise that the game attached to a famous movie director is the first reveal of the show that can be considered an original release.

9:20 – Best Independent Game
Nominees: “The nominees are: Joe Danger, Limbo, Super Meat Boy, and The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom.”  No, seriously.  Del Toro announced them all in succession.  No montage.  No trailers.  We obviously can’t let these games get in the way of the God of War fuck-train.
Winner: Limbo.  Eh, didn’t play.  It’s an indie game.  Why bother?  It can never match the creative genius of Bobby Kotick’s Activision.

9:22 – “Most Anticipated Game” as voted by the Spike voters?  How the fuck is this even an award?  A couple years back, I did a fake review of “Halo 4″.  One of the “positives” was “Advertising campaign got us really hyped to play the game.”  It was supposed to be a joke.

9:24 – A tribute to those who have died throughout history in video games.  Yeah, it’s confusing, I know.  One of the deceased is Beatrice.  Yes, from that Dante’s Inferno video game.  The video game that transformed one of the most famous pieces of Western literature into a God of War rip-off.  Her obituary states “Wife, Who cares she’s naked”.  It’s times like this I wish I worked in the video game industry.  So I could have made a scene and walked out of this travesty.  And I would be a hero.

9:26 – It’s now time to take a break from the failed ambitions of unfunny comedy writers.  Let’s announce some of the winners!  Don’t worry, it’s nothing important.  It only includes Best Role-Playing Game (Mass Effect 2).  Nothing you’d be interested in.

9:32 – “[Red Dead Redemption] has already garnered two VGA awards, Best Original Score and Best Original Game.”  Brainfart?  Doubt it.  This industry spent the last two months trying to convince me the re-re-rerelease of Dragon’s Lair was new and exciting.  It’s very possible they expected us to completely forget that Red Dead Redemption is based off of 2004′s Red Dead Revolver.

9:35 – Menounos: “You play Jim Powell on No Ordinary Family, you can jump over buildings, you’re fire-retardant, and you are uber strong.  But can you bench-press a Menounos?”
9:35 – THE PANTY SHOT DETECTION ROBOT HAS DETECTED A PANTY SHOT. Sadly, I can guarantee you that this was planned.  Hole.  Wall.  Fuck it.

9:36 – Dominic Monaghan: “I wanted to do a kick-ass cast-on for you to tonight, tires screeching, pedal-to-the-floor, gears-out kinda cast-on.  But then I remembered I drive a hybrid.”  Silence.  “‘Cause I’m green.”  Silence.  “Chicks dig it.”  Silence.  “I’m reading this, not sure–”  Anyone remember that episode of The Simpsons where Krusty was getting his ass kicked in the ratings by Gabbo the Dummy?  So Krusty gets his own dummy and proceeds to further horrify the audience with every subsequent action, eventually throwing the half-melted, half-an-eyeball plastic horror show into an audience full of children?  That’s what this show feels like.  I almost feel bad for those involved.  Except for the writers.  And Olivia Munn.  She completely deserves this.

9:43 – They’re now spoofing TMZ’s daily round-up.  I shit you not.  “Kratos, the God of War, eatin’ at The Ivy…it looks like a Greek Salad.”  This is reassuring.  World Wrestling Entertainment isn’t the only place where failed sitcom writers go to die.

9:48 – It’s absolutely depressing that a promo for the sixth SSX snowboarding game is one of the night’s most refreshing trailers.

9:55 – Character of the Year
Nominees: Ezio Auditore da Firenze, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood; Kratos, God of War 3; John Marston, Red Dead Redemption; Sgt. Frank Woods, Call of Duty: Black Ops.  I’d just like to point out that all four nominees for Character of the Year are bearded males.  And with the exception of Kratos, all of the characters have brown hair.  Isn’t focus testing wonderful?
Winner: Frank Woods.  Yeah.  User voting.  Most popular game.  Fanboys.  Rinse.  Repeat.

9:59 – Game of the Year
Nominees: Call of Duty: Black Ops, God of War III, Halo: Reach, Mass Effect 2, Red Dead Redemption.
Winner: Red Dead Redemption.  “But Michael, shuldn’t Black Cops haev won!?”  Nope.  You’re now beginning to understand how the Spike Video Game Awards work.  This event is designed to show that everyone in the video game industry has made an awesome and incredible game that you simply can’t miss out on.  Ubisoft published Assassin’s Creed.  Electronic Arts published Mass Effect 2.  Microsoft published Halo: Reach.  Sony published God of War III.  Rockstar Games published Red Dead Redemption.  And would you look at that?  Those five publishers combined to win a bevy of awards!  What, you think this is about integrity?  This shit ain’t about integrity.  It’s about blowjobs.  It’s about what looks good in a press release.  These are the actual results of this show:

- Red Dead Redemption lost to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood for Best Action-Adventure Game.
- Red Dead Redemption lost to God of War III for Best Playstation 3 Game.
- Red Dead Redemption defeated AssCreeBro and God of War III to become Game of the Year.
- Mass Effect II earned a nomination for Game of the Year over Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty.
- Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty defeated Mass Effect 2 to become PC Game of the Year.
- Call of Duty: Black Ops defeated Halo: Reach to become Best Shooter.
- Halo: Reach defeated Call of Duty: Black Ops to become Best Multi-Player Game.
- BioWare defeated Rockstar: San Diego to become Studio of the Year.
- Rockstar: San Diego watched their product become Game of the Year, defeating BioWare’s title.

I hope this show and its “awards” explain why the pay-to-own video game industry is going to shit a brick in the near-future.  Think about it.  If you didn’t know a single thing about video games, you would have watched this show and come to the conclusion that Assassin’s Creed, God of War, Halo, and Call of Duty are the only four meaningful video game franchises on the market.  That’s the problem. Instead of addressing criticisms that the industry is becoming deathly stagnant, they’re going to try and elevate their existing franchises to god status and hope nobody notices that the next generation of great video game characters are not being produced.  This is one way they’re going to do it: A television award show that openly insults its audience and the developers who make the games.  And not a single industry force will call this multi-publisher-organized trade show out for what it is.

Tell me how that works out for you.  I hope it works out better than this show did.  Not really.  This show made me want to see things burn and the video game business model would be a nice start.

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By Michael Lowell

December 7, 2010.

Starcraft II: The REAL Patch 1.2 Trailer Teaser

So I published a “Patch 1.2 trailer” back in October.  Everybody loved it.  The problem?  That meant I had to deliver a second time.  Well, the previous patch ended up being Patch 1.1.2.  Here’s the real Patch 1.2 trailer teaser. What do we have here?  A parody of Clerks: The Animted series?  Spoiler: Activision-Blizzard is going to sue me for ten million dollars.

Parody is hard work.  Damn.

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By Michael Lowell

December 2, 2010

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX
PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 (reviewed on PlayStation 3)
Developed and Published: Namco Bandai
Released: September 17, 2010 (Xbox 360), September 23, 2010 (PlayStation 3)

Five years after Pac-Man won the internet in 1980, Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov unleashed Tetris on the godless communists and beyond.  Of course, there was that slight issue of Pajitnov going for over a decade without making a dime from his landmark creation.  You know, Soviet government and all.  By the time he got the rights to his child back, he had a small problem: How do you sell Tetris all over again?  Everybody who wanted Tetris already had Tetris.  Crazy answer: The Tetris Company’s licensees dumbed down Tetris.

The original versions of Tetris were rather unforgiving.  A single mistake was bad enough.  Stack that mistake against a ruthless random tetromino generator and death could come very quickly.  The fear of losing isn’t what makes Tetris fun.  Clearing the playing field is.  So goodbye to random tetrominoes and hello to pieces that could be placed in a reserve capacity, manuevered indefinitely, and maneuvered in ways that defied common sense physics.  And developers side-stepped any complaints of the reduced difficulty by changing the rules of engagement.  “It’s not about scoring as many points before you hit the top of the screen.  It’s about clearing lines as quickly as possible.  Period.”

Namco has clearly learned from the evolution of Tetris.  2007′s Pac-Man Championship Edition was the first leap forward.  And now, 2010′s Pac-Man is the affirmation.  To cliche the hell out of this situation, Pac-Man Championship Edition DX is bigger, faster, stronger.

Taking a nod from its Golden Age roots, Namco does the right thing and doesn’t complicate the situation.  It’s totally Pac-Man.  This round, the playing field is split in two.  Clearing all the dots on one half of the playing field will spawn fruit or another consumable on the opposite side.  Eating the fruit will transform half of the playing field into a new layout, complete with sleeping ghosts that will join into a train of death as you alert them.  Play your cards right, and they’ll grow longer and longer until you can inflict genocide with a power pellet.  Keep eating everything in your path until the time is up.  High score or fastest time wins.  Plays simple, but good luck mastering it.

What’s incredible is how DX is more faithful to the 1980 original than 1981′s superior Ms. Pac-Man.  You could conquer Pac-Man’s pattern-drivien artificial intelligence by adhering to a series of pre-set paths.  Ms. Pac-Man set a long-standing high point for the maze genre by pushing smarter ghosts into the mix.  Under optimal circumstances, the progression and paths in DX never change.  If you follow the path, you’ll get the high score.  You won’t have to worry much about evading ghosts, as their artificial intelligence is also pattern-driven.  But the game’s frenetic pace demands you’ll have to work your way out of some tough situations.  And once you take a substandard route, all bets are off.  Pattern memorization becomes secondary.  (Take note, modern video game industry.  This is how you do tightly-scripted single-player campaigns.)

If you’ve ever played a turbo-activated version of Ms. Pac-Man, you know what you’re getting into.  It’s fast.  Really fucking fast.  Sensory overload is in full-force.  DX almost feels analogous to a puzzle game, where your brain is firing as rapidly as your fingers.  You have to keep an eye on patrolling ghosts, you have to keep an eye on the evolution of the board, and you have to quickly determine the quickest path of action.  Good luck doing all of this while managing the finesse to navigate Pac when he’s going all jetplane through the maze.  And should you manage the quality feat of mastering one playing field and its alternative game modes, you have eight more boards to conquer.  Retro gaming had a rather unseemly habit of testing a narrow range of skills (namely pattern memorization and reflexes) and it’s rather wonderful to see one of its classic creations boast a decidedly-modern challenge level.

It all works because this brand of Pac-Man isn’t about cheating death.  The game’s most devout fans learned how to do that very early on.  It’s about effiency.  It’s about getting a high score as quickly as possible.  That may sound very obvious, but it’s central to how the game functions.  Take death.  You die.  The punishment isn’t losing a life.  You get plenty of those.  The punishment is shaving several seconds off your playthrough as Pac respawns in the place where he died.  Take bombs.  They reset all of the ghosts in the playing field and return them to the middle of the board.  You can score as many as a dozen bombs in a single game.  Does it dumb the product down?  Hardly.  Like death, bombs also cost you valuable seconds.  Sleeping ghosts won’t make chase unless the train is following behind you.  And if you complete a section without earning their anger, they’re gone for good.  That’s a lot of points to give up.

In a game where optimal routes and optimal timing are everything, a couple of wasted seconds are the difference between a high score and nothing special.  Namco has parlayed the exceptionally accessible Pac-Man game model into a neon-lit monster that demands the player cannot take a second off.  Downtime is dead.  The tension of losing your last life has been replaced with the tension of shaving seconds off your previous run.  And the already-wonderful world of Pac-Man is better off because of it.

Yeah.  Game of the Year shit goin’ down in the maze, y’all.

5 out of 5

(Games rated five-out-of-five are events.  Among the best the year offered.  If you can’t put aside a couple bucks for this, give up gaming.  It’s not going to please you.)

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Special Thanks To:

GameSpot’s Screenshot Gallery For The Pretty Pictars