The Geek Beat: RETRObituary - April 2015

Welcome to RETRObituary: May Edition
Written by @VertigoDC and @Shaune_Gilbert

Welcome meine Freunde to another edition of The Geek Beat - my almost weekly blog regarding matters of geekdom. This week sees the return of the RETRObituary, a monthly look back at classic video games of yore, from celebrated game-changers that broke the mould to dusty gems, rejected and forgotten; self-exiled hermits that have all but disappeared from the world... like Obi-Wan Kenobi languishing on Tatooine or Sean Connery retreating permanently to his tax haven after he realised he'd unwittingly said 'no' to four hundred and fifty million dollars worth of wizard's gold to play Gandalf in 2001's The Fellowship of the Ring. 

Connery never really recovered from turning down the chance to play the permanently off-his-head wizard, his refusal coming because he reportedly didn't understand the script. Perhaps it was the regret at rejecting such an celebrated role: one more iconic triumph to sit aside his definitive Bond and the creepy guy from Zardoz on his acting mantlepiece; more likely it was because he'd turned down an offer that included a generous percentage of the film's gross earnings and lost out on enough money to buy Scotland. Like, all of Scotland. 

Pictured: Icon

He would return briefly to acting for a couple of starring roles, once as Alan Quatermain in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - considered by many to be a critical and commercial failure. He'd also return playing himself in a pseudo-Braveheart style appearance during the Scottish independence referendum, crying for 'Freedom!' This too was a bust and Scotland was forced to remain as part of the UK. Probably a good thing really, the way things are in the UK at the moment, I reckon half of northern England would have donned tartan and claimed that it was Scottish as well, if only to escape the perils of British citizenry. 

Still, it isn't all bad: we're have a nationwide general election today as I pen this blog. Ah, the thrill of democracy in action! Unless of course you subscribe to Benjamin Zephaniah's view that 'democracy means that everyone gets a vote then the criminals get in anyway.' Social action has always been so much easier in video games - take Final Fight's Mike Haggar for example. As mayor of fictional Metro City he knew when the political solution had failed and when the time for cracking skulls had begun. Suplexes speak louder than words, as they say. If you follow me on Twitter you'll know I was live-tweeting on this classic as I beat it last weekend. It occurred to me as I was guiding the big man through the slums and
skyscrapers of the crime-ridden city that you wouldn't see our Prime Minister, David Cameron or the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband taking to the streets and engaging with crime in such a visceral manner. And that's why when I go along to vote later I'll be vainly hoping that the voting slip for my local constituency contains the Capcom legend's name. 

Prime Ministerial wannabes take note: literally punching evil in the face turned out to be a pretty shrewd career move for Haggar. After defeating the world-eating Galactus in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and presumably becoming the most popular politician in history, Haggar became President of the U.S.A. with none other than Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man as his Veep. 

  Okay, so maybe he hasn't mastered Obama's flair-filled rhetoric yet but he throws a better piledriver. Stark can do the talking, his press conferences always go well...

Imagine those two as a political pairing? All repulsor rays and spinning clotheslines? It'd certainly make politics interesting again. But I digress. We're here to talk about retro classics that celebrated a birthday this month and Final Fight isn't one of them. The classic brawler, originally conceived as a sequel to the original Street Fighter turns twenty-six this year, but not until December. 

Following me on Twitter has other benefits besides knowing which 90s arcade brawlers I'm beasting in my spare time. (Tecnos' 1991 WWF Wrestlefest at the mo!) Last week you may have borne witness to my live-tweeted meltdown when I lost the entire contents of April's RETRObituary. Twice. (Yes, I did save it periodically. No, I don't know what happened...) The prospect of writing it a third time with a hangover was too much so I abandoned the blog and took to Twitter to vent my wookie-like fury. April's edition is gone then, lost to the ravages of time and the failings of Blogger. Thanks to the kind messages of a few readers over the last couple of weeks (Thanks MK! Thanks Mr B!) I somehow found the inner strength, the mental chi to rebuild the RETRObituary - Harder. Faster. But probably not that much better. So here's May's edition. Let's begin with a classic from my ever faithful companion and RETRObituary regular, Shaune Gilbert:

2010: RED DEAD REDEMPTION - PS3, PC
@Shaune_Gilbert

If you ever wanted to be in a Sergio Leone spaghetti western world, playing a Clint Eastwood-like  ‘man with no name’ character or maybe an Emmett 'Doc' Brown (sorry!) then look no further than John Marston and the badlands that comprise the world of Red Dead Redemption.

Red Dead Redemption is an open world game set in the Western frontier in 1911. You play as John Marston (still thinks it sounds like a beer to me) looking for revenge on a group of outlaws who did you wrong.

Think of this game as a western version of the notorious GTA games, but instead of cars and trucks there's horses and wagons; instead of highly populated city scapes there's two-bit towns and vast plains; instead of trains there's…well… okay, there's trains, but they're steam trains... 

Make no mistake, this game is beautiful, from the dusty roads and drifting tumbleweed, to snowcapped mountain populated by grizzly bears. It's the atmosphere in this game that really sells the frontier to me, with the dusty dry barren land, heat distortion blurring the horizon and the occasional eagle cry in the distance. This, accompanied of course by the great score which is very much in the flavour of the composer Ennio Morricones' ‘Dollar Trilogy’.

I remember playing this game and loving it -  the story is compelling, the side tasks were mostly fun if you were going for 100% - it could drag for on a bit but Then you could always go punch a grizzly bear in the face, just to see what would happen.

'Draw, you yellow-bellied varmint!' Seriously though, people don't use 'varmint' enough. Let's bring it back people!

In the main story you’ll learn to shoot and horse ride, lasso and hogtie, hunt and cattle drive, the gradual build up of skills slowly evolving you into the complete cowboy, making you a total badass from hat to spur. During play you’ll learn about ‘dead eye’. This is a system that slows down time allowing you to take aim with precision or to hit multiple targets, killing in a quicker and deadlier fashion. You’ll need to master this if you're to survive the occasional duel at High Noon.  

Now we all know that with great powers come great responsibility;  that said, in this game there is a morality system in which you can choose your destiny, be it honourable or criminal. Certain actions you do can result in certain changes to the game either positively or negatively depending on if you, for example bring in bounties alive and help strangers or if you randomly kill people or hogtie damsels in distress and leave them on the train tracks ..classic. (you got to try this at least once..LOL).

As for side quests there's plenty to do as I said you’ll hunt, gather herbs, be a bounty hunter (by taking down wanted posters), a treasure hunter, you’ll play poker and liars dice (the game that’s seen in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest’) or there's the five finger fillet game (the knife game Bishop plays in Aliens). Oh and horse shoe throwing which I personally found difficult at times.

This is a 3^rd person shooter and as you’d expect from Rockstar the story is fulfilling, the characters you meet are unique and well developed - my favourite character has to be Seth Briars, this guy has a plethora of problems ranging from being on the edge of insanity to grave-robbing while having a casual chat with the deceased he’s robbing. I like to think he’s a distant relation to GTA V's Trevor Philips,  another Rockstar whack job.

The game also had a memorable ending, allowing Rockstar to make use of their ability to use cinematic tropes without sacrificing player control. It's probably the best ending to a western since Woody and Bullseye live happily ever after in Toy Story 3. That was a western, right?

Honourable Mentions:

2005: FORZA MOTORSPORT - Xbox
@VertigoDC

Back to me now, the mighty DC. Full disclosure: I’ve never played a Forza title. My experience of racing sims begins and pretty much ends with the original Gran Turismo on the first PlayStation. I played that game to death with my buddies, pitting the might of their all-conquering Dodge Viper against my British-built TVR Cerberus as we did battled through endless loops on the oval track.

Eventually, we moved onto other things and apart from a brief flirtation with GT5 when it released to great fanfare, I’ve never really returned to the genre. In truth, I’ve always been more of a fan of the coin-guzzling arcade racers. I seem to remember having my first moment of teenage trouser excitement whilst speeding that open-top Ferrari Testarossa through the first stage of Sega’s Outrun, the iconic Splash Wave soundtrack giving me weird tingles.

But that was probably just a coincidence. I seem to remember getting a lot of trouser tingles around that time.

Going back to arcade racers for a moment, maybe it’s the more forgiving A.I in those games, or perhaps it’s that the cars were more fun to drive, no matter how unrealistic their handling might of been. I’d written a review of Sega’s Daytona U.S.A. for April’s aborted blog, talking about how it might just be the finest arcade game of all time when hooked up to seven other cabinets – I’m a child of the arcade 80s and 90s and it’s kind of hard to articulate how it felt to be given a fistful of twenty pence pieces and let loose in what was essentially, gaming heaven. When all you owned was a Spectrum that could display two colours at a time, an eighties arcade was something akin to the Star Trek holodeck.

Pretty much everything appeared in the arcades first and as such they were considered to be sacred sites – holy shrines to be spoken about reverently in hushed tones when you saw your friends back at school on the Monday morning. Huge titles from the biggest publishers like Sega and Capcom, blockbuster movie tie-ins, sit-down cabinets that replicated driving or even flying… even virtual reality in its original form appeared in the arcades first. I don’t know, I suppose it was a bit like getting a glimpse into the future.

Anyway, I digress. 2005’s Forza was very much a racing simulator, Microsoft’s answer to the all-conquering PlayStation exclusive, Gran Turismo. And what an answer it was. Although the first iteration didn’t have as many cars and tracks as Polyphony’s title, critics praised it for the wonderful game mechanics and the depth of features that it offered. In many ways it was considered to be superior to its racing rival although this wasn’t a total critical eclipse. Lots of reviewers found that whilst it was a better game in some ways such as its excellent online functionality, it didn’t deliver quite as well as the GT series in other ways such as the sense of flat-out speed and the inferior number of vehicles and courses. Reviews however were unanimously positive; the game stands at a princely 92 on Metacritic. Naturally, it has spawned a number of sequels, each of which are anticipated feverishly. Not bad at all.

Honourable Mentions: Not a lot else. That’s why I’m waffling on about a game I’ve never played!

2000: PERFECT DARK - NINTENDO 64

In 1997 Rare released GoldenEye for the N64 and the first-person shooter genre was transformed forevermore. Even if you were only knee-high to a grasshopper back in the heady days of the nineties when Cool Britannia was booming, (or perhaps you weren't even born!) the odds are high that you've heard of this modern classic. Its deathmatch mode was nothing short of legendary, its potential for addictiveness equally so. It's a surety that there are fully grown men out there whose career paths never quite reached the trajectories they hoped for because they spent their university years playing 'Git Coltrane* and all but forgot about getting a decent degree; I'm willing to bet that there are young adults out there who've grown up without Daddy because GoldenEye was named as the principal reason for separation in the divorce papers.

It was quite a game. Perfect Dark, the spiritual successor to GoldenEye released in North America three years later in May 2000. Some of you may remember it; some of you may have never heard of it. What seems unfair to me is that Perfect Dark is a significantly better game to GoldenEye in every way. I played them both to death first time around and whilst the Bond shooter rightly receives a ton of plaudits, it was the follow up that broadened the horizons of the genre and pushed the N64 to its very limits.

The story beats are very Deus Ex - appropriately enough it was actually released in the same year that the Eidos franchise was also spawned. Cyberpunk stylings were prevalent in the costumes, the weaponry, the settings and the narrative - Rare actually turned down the opportunity to make the next Bond instalment in the series (Tomorrow Never Dies) because they were bored of the franchise and wanted to stretch their sci-fi wings. Freed from the constraints of 007's universe the developers really let loose with their ideas: the story itself was fairly run of the mill; the usual cyberpunk corporate conspiracy malarky but where the game really excelled was with the breadth of its imagination. Every aspect of the gameplay was riddled with ambition - Dolby surround sound, an option (through the Nintendo Expansion Pak) to play with higher resolution graphics and exclusive modes that could be switched from the discrete Game Boy Colour Game Pak to the different N64 version via a Transfer Pak. (I think everything Nintendo released contractually had to have the work 'Pak' on it. One of those weird Japanese traditions maybe, like inemuri, where workers are encouraged to fall into exhausted slumber at their desks or the infamous kakou vending machines.) The ambition didn't stop there however; the multiplayer options were mind-boggling - whilst GoldenEye had popularised the deathmatch, Perfect Dark not only expanded on this game mode with a slew of new options but it also allowed full co-operative play through the game's campaign and introduced an option where one player could control the enemy A.I. in the game's single player storyline whilst the other player controlled Joanna Dark, the game's protagonist.

The game's central character was a step forward too; although Tomb Raider's Lara Croft preceded her by a couple of years, it was still good to see a game developer committed to putting females first. Rare also used the sci-fi setting to create outlandish alien weaponry and a host of exciting levels and even though they set themselves the monumental task of topping the quality of GoldenEye, somehow they achieved it. Not to suggest that Metacritic is the be all and end of critiques but GoldenEye currently sits on a 96. Perfect Dark however, averages a 97. Although not remembered as fondly as the Bond shooter, Joanna Dark received an Xbox sequel that was actually a prequel back in 2002 and then the N64 original got a HD remake for XBLA in 2010. Perfect Dark not only excelled as one of the final FPS games on the fading Nintendo console, it also lived up to its promises to be one of the most ambitious shooters ever. This in comparison to Daikatana, another N64 FPS that released in May 2000, heralded by big promises and an advertising campaign where developer John Romero promised to make players 'his bitch'. The game failed to deliver whereas Perfect Dark did everything it promised and more. Something one or two game publishers these days could learn a thing or two about.

*'Git Coltrane was a multiplayer game mode involving three players chasing down the fourth who would play the oversized Robbie Coltrane character through a series of levels, usually with power weapons. It was a terribly unfair game mode but horrendously sadistic fun. Kind of like fox-hunting if you're a posh dickhead, only with less stupid red jackets. 

(Dis)Honourable Mentions: Daikatana - N64, PC    

1995: J.R.R. Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS, Vol. I - SNES

May, 1995 proved to be a packed month of releases with some amazing games making their debut. I however, have plumped for something a little different. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I on the SNES wasn't an amazing game. Its graphics were average, its gameplay let down by an over-reliance on too-huge dungeons and overly-long fetch quests. But it's Lord of the Rings! Before the amazing films came out; before the amazing hack'n'slash games of the films came out; before the ultra-disappointing Hobbit prequels came out, this was a real Tolkien experience. Based loosely on the 1978 Bakshi animated adaptation, this RPG offered fans interactivity with Middle-Earth on a scale they'd never encountered before.

I first came across this game when a buddy loaned me his SNES and Magicom, a magical device that allowed you to play more games on the console than you ever knew existed. I remember booting it up one Sunday afternoon when I should have been doing a pile of homework for the next day- at this point I hadn't even read the book; that happened about a year later and in truth, I found the game a bit hokey. I wouldn't get into RPGs for many years afterwards until 2003's KOTOR and the irresistible lure of playing a jedi. I was about to turn it off and get on with my homework when my dad came into my room and asked me what I was playing. At this point I should point out that my dad used to be a Tolkien nut; at one point during my childhood he actually tried to program a Lord of the Rings text adventure on his Commodore Vic 20 computer - at least until he ran out of memory after four screens. That's right Youth of Today, that old machine had less memory than a tamogotchi. Wait... if you really are Generation Millennial then you probably don't know what that is either. Never mind.

Anyway, being a Middle-Earth Lorekeeper Extraordinaire meant that my pops was a natural at the game and he was soon guiding me handily through the caves and hobbit-holes of The Shire. My father navigated, dispensing little nuggets of lore as we progressed. I remained on the SNES controller as my dad wasn't too handy with anything that required more than one button. (He did however enjoy a gaming renaissance when the Wii launched and became a force to be reckoned with on Wii Sports) As fun as it was to be on a quest to save Middle-Earth with my dad, I was facing armageddon at school the next day if I didn't turn off the SNES. By now though my old man was really getting into it and we'd somehow entered into a compact as formal and far-reaching as the Fellowship itself. 

By this point we'd found the Gaffer's glasses, recruited Sam and Pippin and had left Hobbiton and I was facing a long night. I needed out. Quickly. Having no magic ring to suddenly make myself disappear I instead opted for gaming suicide. As we approached the Brandywine Bridge a swarm of permadeath-promising black riders appeared, blocking our way. My dad instructed me to head south towards the ferry and safety but I saw my chance. I plunged headlong into the seething mass of Nazgul, dodging their lethal touch by millimetres. I don't think the game allowed you to move diagonally so the whole encounter suddenly became a zanily fast chess match, something akin to a light cycle duel in Tron. Amidst the dark tumult my gaming urges suddenly focused and instinct kicked in... I wanted to live! In a stunning feat of video-game dexterity that I've never managed to repeat I somehow crossed the supposedly uncrossable bridge... and effectively broke the game. On the other side was Rivendell or something but none of the NPCs would talk to me because I didn't have any of the gear that I should have collected from playing the game properly. The bridge still teemed with dark riders. There was no going forwards and no going back. My dad sighed and said something about getting the dinner on. 

Just like that, the Fellowship was broken.

               My finest hour.

And so the tale ends. I'd like to say that I got the homework done and all ended well but I probably just found something else, like Super Star Wars or something. It was really cool though, having a dad who was into playing video games with me when I was a nipper. He used to try and get me into learning how to program Basic on my Spectrum and I wish I'd listened more. Maybe if I had, I'd be creating the games rather than simply writing about them.    

To dads. Wiser than wizards and cooler than rangers.

1990: WORLD CUP SOCCER - NES

Erm... what to say about this one? Frankly, it's not very good. Considering that in 1990 football reached its apex in my eyes - England reached the semi-finals of the FIFA World Cup in Italia '90, eventually succumbing to West Germany after a harrowing penalty shootout and I trudged to bed crying, the sound of Pavarotti's 'Nessun Dorma' haunting my dreams. I watched the season finale of Daredevil earlier tonight and that song played - it still haunts me all those years later.

The game was sooo bad that the pitch selection screen was the most interesting picture I took.

This game doesn't translate football into the emotional rollercoaster that it should be. Shaune and I played it during our last retro session and frankly, even by 1990 standards, it's a bit pants. Especially when you consider that Technos, the developer was responsible for the hugely popular Double Dragon games; only a year afterwards they would release WWF Wrestlefest which is still a quality coin-op brawler now. 

So, onwards then. The less said about this one the better.

That's all from The Geek Beat this week folks. Any inaccuracies are a failing of my memory or bad Googling. 

Head back this way next week to see what's new with The Gutter - Comic book goodness!

Until then be sure to follow me making plans and hatching schemes @vertigoDC on Twitter. Many Bothans died for those plans. But who cares about that? Also be sure to follow our journey to get a film and comic book project out to the masses @The_ANA_Project. Later... And thanks for reading!