Haunted Mansion

Let's take a little time to talk about licensed games. Now, in most conversation, unless you happen to be a kid, talk about licensed games boils down to "fuck that, it's garbage." Why the hostile attitude? Well, for obvious reasons, our jaded minds embrace the harsh reality that no one else will. Licensed Games = void of creativity.

This is unfair for a number of reasons. Some of the greatest works made have been remixed versions of someone else's. Most of Disney's early movies, for example, wouldn't have existed without someone creating those tales and characters prior. Taking a licensed show/movie and translating it into a game has a lot of potential, as you're translating fairly linear storytelling into a playable experience, which sometimes, but admittedly not often, outdoes the original, or at least captures its spirit.

There's no better example of this than Disney's Haunted Mansion game.

It was released around the same time as the Eddy Murphy movie, but thankfully not an adaptation of it. The game itself is an action/adventure title, with some light shooting elements, and heavy puzzle solving.

Surely that's all it is? Cut and paste a genre into a licensed skin. Well, that couldn't be further from the truth. To start with, the premise, look, and atmosphere of Haunted Mansion are all dead on with the ride. The spooky yet comical atmosphere remains intact, and the story is absolutely nothing to snort at.

Alright, alright. That's it though. An awesome atmosphere and story that nails the ride, but still, standard gameplay?

Hell no. Haunted Mansion does things not only impressive for a licensed game, but impressive on the scale of the entire medium. The mind-bending, pathway twisting puzzles, no matter what you think you know, will be more than you bargained for.

Unfortunately, literally no videos I could find do the game proper justice. You'll just have to trust me when I tell you there are elements in this game that are still groundbreaking for the medium, simply because no other game has done as much with them since. (That I've seen as of yet)

Video Game Heaven

This is the home page for a videogame store, probably long deceased. Apparently the site has been visited a whopping 26,000 times, which is more than a little surprising, unless Video Game Heaven was once incredibly popular, which seems doubtful.

When one clicks enter and visits the website itself, it's pretty bland, and barely functional. There are listings for PSX, PS2, Dreamcast, and N64 products, with another section labeled imports that exists entirely for Japanese Dragon Ball fighting games.

The very last game listed on the site is X-Squad, a pretty fun -if not exactly outstanding- shooter. The site promises more games are coming soon, but unless they've gotten lost in a time loop, it seems that the site died down in 2000. 12 years later, sadly, there's not a whole lot to the website.

Although I did learn quite a few things about games from their site indirectly, using their listings. I had no idea there existed a videogame simply called "One", or that a bizarrely surreal horror game called "Sentinel Returns" existed, with a musical score by John Carpenter.

Really, what is this?

Among the weird stuff, there were some genuinely good looking games that I can't believe I hadn't heard of, like Rival Schools, Grandstream Saga and two games in the Rampage series.

I'll TAKE TWO. Get it?

If I hadn't stumbled upon Video Game Heaven's site, I probably wouldn't have ever known about these games. So props to them for listing so many weird-ass products on their site, and props to Vysethedetermined for talking about VGH in his Santa Claus Junior video, and by extension, Neon Studios for making Legend of Kay so I could look up that they also made Santa Claus Junior.

Could I have lived my life without knowing "Roscoe McQueen: Firefighter Extreme" existed? Probably, but I can't say this hasn't been interesting.

I need this.

Open World Driving Games and The Case of The Low Blow

For those who don't know, both the Driver series and Grand Theft Auto are open world driving games. Both started out on the PSX/PC, and eventually graduated to the PS2, where their open world aspects got more fleshed out.

GTA III was the first to test the new waters, and to put it simply, it changed gaming. That's not what we're here to talk about though, so I'll leave it at that. In GTA III, there's a mission where the player is tasked to kill "Two-Face Tanner", an undercover cop.

Tanner is the name of the Driver series's protagonist, and also an undercover cop. Cute little reference? Things get a little bit (hilariously) more hurtful during the mission description.

"Our source in the police has informed us that one of our drivers is a strangely animated undercover cop! He's more or less useless out of his car, so we've tagged it with a tracer. Make him bleed!" - dialogue from GTA III

They are referencing Tanner's almost complete lack of ability to do anything useful outside of his car in Driver 2. They even gave him a female running animation to mock the strange way he moves. Ouch.

Driver didn't get its PS2 installment until well after Rockstar released GTA: Vice City. When Driver 3 (spelled Driv3r officially) finally did get out of the gate, apparently the developers, Reflections Interactive, couldn't let go of a grudge.

This good fellow right here is named Timmy Vermicelli. He may look a little bit like Vice City's protagonist, Tommy Vercetti. A little bit. Reflections Interactive is no more mature than Rockstar, and as you can see, placed water wings on Timmy to mock the fact that Vice City does not allow the player to swim.

Adding even further insult to injury, Tanner is able to swim in Driver 3.

Both games have since branched off into almost entirely distinguishable series, but apparently there was a time when the town just wasn't big enough for the two of them.

Demos

Lately i've been lost in a sea of demos. Double Dragon Neon has convinced me to give the Playstation Store a harder look, so I did. I've downloaded demos for everything from Blade Kitten to Rochard, and most of what's been sampled is impressive. It's become almost an addiction.

It probably seems kind of cheap to write about demos instead of full games, but I'm still working on playing those six or so I mentioned earlier, and this is what I've been doing otherwise.

If there were two games that stuck out, they'd have to be Rochard, and Sideway: New York.

In Rochard, you're a space trucker and miner who's gone four years without hitting anything worth digging. Eventually, you find a pretty strange structure underground, and all sorts of hell starts breaking lose.

The game is a puzzle/platformer, and the puzzles, at least in the demo, are fun as hell. The main mechanic in the game is a gravity gun, used for some pretty nifty tricks and treats. It works well, and if the game keeps up where it's going, Rochard could easily be something really special.

Sideway: New York is a platformer where you play as living graffiti, and platform inside and around walls and rooftops to save the girl. The game has some really nice visuals, and the controls feel fluid and just plain good. The demo didn't show too much, but I was impressed with what was there.

Others, like Blade Kitten or Rush N' Attack, were fun enough, but they don't grab attention as easily. BK is a platformer in the vein of Run Saber and Strider, while RNA is a stealth/action game focused on dark visuals and, well, stealth.

Either way, demos have proved to be an entertaining, and free, pastime.

The Wonderful End of the World: Perhaps This?

"You can't save the whole world. It's going to be eaten by a mythological demon with the head of a fish. But as a puppet that absorbs all it touches, you can try to rescue as much of Earth's greatness as you can before the end arrives. In the beginning, you roam the Earth, capable of absorbing only the tiniest of objects."

I'm sold. Where do I sign up?

TWEotW is a Katamari inspired game with the above premise. You gotta suck up everything beautiful and right in the world for preservation. It's an amazing idea, and I'm in love with it.

But, Katamari also had unique audio, and a unique and quirky visual style. I wasn't too certain those were things  TWEotW could mimic. Well, I was wrong to a decent extent. The visuals in this game look damn fine.

They're nothing absolutely stunning, but they get the job done, and look good.

 It may be hard to tell from the promotional screenshots, but in the game, you control a giant marionette. The marionette has similar properties to a Katamari. Still sound great? It should. Let's look at a first impression of the audio.

This right here is pretty damn cool.

It's the kind of focused audio direction the game needs to give itself a specific style and feeling. Everything so far sound great? Good.

I'm sorry to say it just doesn't all add up right in the final product.

To be perfectly clear:  TWEotW is by no means a bad game. In fact, I recommend you go and download the demo right now, as it's worth seeing the game yourself. That being said, it's still not nearly what it could be.

TWEotW has some pretty big flaws in some very key areas that serve to bring down the production by quite a large notch. The audio only lasts as long as the title screen before falling apart, and what at first I thought to be vocal (or at least reasonably emotional) tracks turned out to be some of the oddest, out of place audio I could find anywhere.

This music is pretty much entirely pointless, for example. It doesn't serve to make the player feel anything about the stage, or about the game in general. It's just there.

That's not the main issue, though, as the gameplay itself falls short of expectations, too. The game tries really hard to emulate Katamari Damacy, but put simply, the levels and overall atmosphere of the game feel hollow in comparison. It doesn't help that, instead of trying to do something new or different with Katamari's absorption mechanic, the game attempts to copy it almost completely.

That's enough about the bad, though. I don't like making a habit of talking smack about games, and truthfully, as rough as this game can be at times, it isn't horrible by any stretch of imagination.

What I'm here to do is try and show you what  TWEotW could've been. I think the easiest place to start would be the core gameplay. Now, as I've said many times, TWEotW  tries to emulate Katamari. No secret there, and the developer will openly admit to it if you ask, I'm sure. The problem was that it was uninteresting and empty by comparison to its inspiration. How do we fix this?

Simple. Do something different.

 Katamari is known for being a happy, quirky, and relatively easy-going game. You remember when I said TWEotW's star was a human shaped marionette?


Take a look at this.

Now, apply that range of movement to the marionette in TWEotW, and we've already got something to talk about. Add that range of movement to the premise, and we have a game where I could be dashing around Paris, careening through an outdoor eatery, sucking up customers and tables, before jumping into an art fair to collect and preserve priceless paintings.

A game where the stages take place in some of the most notable cities in the world, as you dash around on rooftops and through crowded streets, slurping up everything in your path? That already has a lot more going for it.

To further separate TWEotW from Katamari and give the game its own feel, quick-paced, objective based gameplay could be implemented. Not so quick as to make the player feel rushed, but quick enough to remind them that the world is going to be eaten by a mythological demon with the head of a fish.

You could even add in a stylish announcer, like Viewtiful Joe, or a feelgood bonus area that just has a whole ton of small, sparkly objects to run around and collect. If you're imagining the same thing I'm trying to make you imagine, it should be reasonably awesome as hell, and I think it would do this game's premise, and the idea of other game's with Katamari mechanics, a lot more justice.