video games

Sonic CD

So, the final part of my three part video game opinion piece. I've already outlined my favourite Mario game and my favourite Pokemon game, so it stands to reason that I should write about my favourite Sonic game too. And there is no better Sonic game than Sonic CD.

Back in 1993 the Megadrive got an upgrade, the Mega-CD. It was the first ever CD-based games console and Sega were rather pleased with it. Thing is, for gamers at least, it didn't really have anything special about it, other than a new storage medium. The only games that came out for it were early FMV-based games - most of which were awful - and slightly enhanced versions of older Megadrive titles. I personally only really remember two games on the Mega-CD being any good. Snatcher was one, and Sonic CD was the other. OK, so Sonic CD did fall into the category 'enhanced version of earlier Megadrive game', but it was the only game to do it right. And boy, did it do it right.

Take a simple concept like Sonic the Hedgehog's smooth speedy platformer. Now let's add a few things that require a lot of extra data space to accommodate - graphical enhancements are old hat, a CD-quality soundtrack, meh. OK, let's produce the CD soundtrack properly with an actual band, and lyrics and stuff. Commonplace nowadays, but at the time it was something special. Now let's add a few extra special stages, some FMV intros and endings - it's still just Sonic with bells on. Then someone came up with the idea... hang on, Sonic can run really fast. How about having him outrun time itself?

Getting to, and beating the last level in Sonic CD is actually quite simple - seven zones, three acts each with a boss at the end of each zone. But that'll only get you the 'bad' ending - to get the good ending you need to not only collect all seven time gems (similar to the old Chaos Emeralds), but in every act you need to somehow travel back to the past, undo all of Robotnik's wrongdoing, and then return to the present to ensure a good future. In order to do this you need to pass a 'past' or 'future' emblem and then maintain top speed for a few seconds, which is a lot harder than it sounds on the later levels which become more and more claustrophobic and maze-like as the game goes on. Each non-boss act has a past, a present, a bad future and a good future, and the boss acts have two versions each depending on whether you managed to successfully alter the zone's destiny in previous acts. In total, that's 70 levels! Remember that soundtrack I mentioned? Each time period for each zone has a different theme tune. There were also a hell of a lot of graphical enhancements and dozens of new sprites (including a mini-Sonic for when he gets shrunk in the second half of the final zone.) Basically, Sonic CD served as a masterclass for Mega-CD developers at the time on how to really stretch the new hardware's capabilities and make a wonderfully fun game at the same time. On a personal note, Sonic CD contains possibly the most difficult boss level in any Sonic game for years to come - the high speed obstacle race between Sonic and his robotic counterpart at the end of Stardust Speedway is infuriatingly difficult, and a welcome change from most other Sonic bosses which simply involve twatting one of Robotnik's vehicles enough times to make it explode.

Of course, like all good retro-games, the game is still available today. It's been re-released on the Playstation 2 and the Gamecube as part of various Sonic multi-game collections, but was re-made in 2011 and re-released on Android, iOS, Steam, Windows Phone and XBox 360. The updated version adds a few enhancements, such as being able to play as Tails, the choice of Japanese or US soundtracks, some cosmetic changes such as a higher quality FMV opening and Sonic 2's spin dash physics which hadn't actually been written at the time of the original game's development. So if you want the best possible experience of playing this game, rather than finding an emulator, grab yourself an Android device, preferably one with a USB port so you can plug in a proper control pad. You can always try and get hold of an original copy for Mega-CD, but good luck with that one, I'm certainly not selling mine.

Pokemon GoldSilver

It's part 2 in my series of video game articles in which I choose my favourite entry in a long-running series of games. This week we're looking at Pokemon.

Possibly the only Nintendo success story to not involve Mr. Miyamoto, Pokemon is the brainchild of Satoshi Tajiri and was based, I'm told, on his childhood love of collecting bugs. Whatever the origin, Pokemon was, and remains, pretty damn popular. The original game was released on the Gameboy (in black and white!) and was quite clever in that it came in two different flavours, red and green (green was renamed blue in the west for some reason). It soon spawned a toyline, a TV show, several movies and an unholy amount of merchandise, but the game came first. The game is a role-playing game in which you control a nameless character (who became known as 'Ash' in the TV show for some unknown reason) who wants to be the Pokemon champion. Pokemon (short for Pocket Monsters) are little critters who can be caught, trained and pitted against each other. There are certain parts of the game you can't get into unless your monsters are a particular strength, which can only be increased through fighting. Occasionally you find a gym and get to fight its leader, allowing you to proceed even further into the game. By the time you get to the end you'll no doubt have a strong team of monsters with which to battle the Pokemon Master and become the best in the fictional land of Kanto. But that's not all, because once you've won you can still keep training your monsters by fighting friends in two-player mode and also trade your monsters in an attempt to collect all 151. The whole point of having two different coloured versions of the game is that some monsters can only be caught in red and others in green, so in order to truly win you need a friend who has the other version.

So that's Pokemon in a nutshell, but it didn't get truly good (and hasn't been nearly as good since) until its first proper sequel, the gold and silver versions. Red and green were followed by a couple of remakes, blue and yellow, but gold and silver were a brand new game, and for the first time presented the world of Pokemon in full colour. It takes place some years after the original in a different country, Johto, and follows broadly the same idea - you're a young lad who wants to collect and train pokemon. There's 100 new monsters indigenous to this new land, although some old favourites come back after a while. You can also trade with older versions of the game in order to transfer your winning team from red and green over to gold and silver. But there are other new things in the second generation of the game. The game is more realistic; you now not only have to keep your pokemon strong, but also happy, and there's a real-time clock built in. Some events only happen at certain times of the day, and the concept of nocturnal pokemon was introduced. Five new 'legendary' pokemon were introduced, all with different methods of catching them, and some pokemon from later games were given infant or adult forms.

But new features are added in every generation of pokemon, so why is the gold/silver generation so much better than the rest, I hear you ask? Well, it's basically a game developers' masterclass on how to do a sequel properly.

Remember I said how in the first game you could complete the quest and there was still more to do? Well this time it's taken to a whole new level. Yes, you can beat everyone in Johto and become the champion, but once you've done that the game isn't even half-complete. You then get a call from one of the characters in the first game, who invites you over to Kanto. So you now get the free run of both games' playing areas. You can then go through the bosses and gym leaders from the original game and beat them again, bearing in mind it's set some years later so they've all got a lot stronger since. Effectively, gold and silver contain a tougher version of red and green as a freebie. Finally, after beating the previous game, you gain access to third, final area in which you get to fight and catch some outrageously powerful pokemon before taking on the ultimate challenge - the protagonist character from red and green, who has since become stupidly difficult to beat. His Snorlax still gives me nightmares. And then when you've beaten him, you still have 251 Pokemon to go find before you're done. Basically, gold and silver raised the bar so high that all subsequent pokemon games were a massive disappointment. Sure, all pokemon games are basically the same, but no sequels since have added more to the overall gameplay than gold and silver, choosing instead to add gimmicks or massive amounts of new monsters.

I've actually played Gold through three times, once in Japanese and twice in English, and my current record is 239 of 251 pokemon caught, so all these years later I've still not truly completed the game, and probably never will because I no longer have any friends with whom I can trade. And now I've started again with Heartgold and Soulsilver, the improved remakes for the Nintendo DS. Both have identical gameplay to the originals but feature better graphics, a new game engine and one or two extra additions from later games.

So to conclude, if you are a game developer with a surprise hit on your hands and fancy doing a sequel, take a look at Pokemon Gold and Silver versions and learn how it's done. Many Pokemon purists insist that only the first generation counts, but I strongly disagree. Later Pokemon games deserve criticism for simply being re-hashes of the first, with so many monsters it's impossible to name them all. Gold and silver did introduce 100 new monsters but that was a minor point compared to all the other cool stuff that was added. Definately the best in the series in my opinion.

Super Mario World

OK, I admit, this website is positively grumpy these days. So I've decided to start writing some gumpf about things I like. I'm going to begin with a series of three blog posts reviewing my favourite entries in long-running video game series.

I'll start with Mario. Many consider the original Super Mario Bros on the NES to be the best Mario game. Younger players may consider New Super Mario Bros on the Wii to be the best. Many of my peers consider Mario 3 to be the best. I disagree - my favourite Mario game by far is Super Mario World, the first Mario game for the SNES.

It's very similar to Mario 3 in gameplay style - rather than going from level to level it actually had an ‘overworld' mode which allowed you to choose which path you took through the game - except this time the nonlinearity went into overload. There are so many hidden secrets in this game it's almost impossible to find them all. You can simply go from level to level completing them one after the other and eventually end up at the end, but you don't get anything like the whole game if you do that. I believe the total number of levels in Mario World is 96, but I could be wrong. As I said, I've never actually found them all.

The other major addition to Mario's universe from this game onwards is Yoshi. Yoshi serves as a companion character and if you find him in a level you can ride him to the end. Unlike Mario Wii you can actually take Yoshi between levels, although you can't use him to fight bosses or navigate ghost houses. As the game progresses, you'll find four different Yoshis - the green one we all know and love, a red one that can spit fire, a yellow one that can stomp and create earthquakes, and a blue one that can fly. Yoshi is actually essential for reaching some of the secrets. And sometimes it's emotionally scarring, such as the hidden exit from Cheese Bridge which requires you to dismount Yoshi mid-flight, allowing Mario to access the hidden goal and poor Yoshi to plummet to his death. Interesting piece of trivia: Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of nearly every decent game Nintendo have ever put out, claims that he always wanted Mario to be able to ride a dinosaur, but he had to wait for the SNES's superior hardware to be able to program it without sacrificing speed or gameplay.

As if finding hidden exits to levels in order to progress on a different route wasn't complicated enough, Mario World has ‘switch palaces', which make extra platforms appear in other levels. The first switch palace is near the start and quite easy to find, but the others are hidden quite well, and some hidden sections in early levels aren't accessible until you activate a later switch palace, meaning that you need to revisit levels you thought you'd completed. And for the pro players there's the hidden star world, allowing teleportation to all other zones, and the special zone which adds an extra eight levels to the game. Using the star world it's actually possible to complete the game and beat Bowser in only 12 or so levels, if speedruns are your thing. This game has an outrageous level of depth, and even when you've completed it, you haven't actually. I still play this game some 20 years later.

So for those who like Mario games but haven't played Super Mario World, you could do a lot worse than have a go. You can get it on the Game Boy Advance (as ‘Super Mario Advance 2') or if you have a Wii you can download it from the Wii Shop as a Virtual Console game. Obviously if you're into true retro you can get a SNES on eBay and get the original game, or if you don't mind breaking the law you can probably find a ROM somewhere, there are SNES emulators for pretty much anything these days, including most phones.

The Kinect really is awesome

...and not just as a game platform. This article (hat tip to Nik for pointing me to it) describes viSparsh, a system for assisting blind people which is made from a modified Kinect. The Kinect's depth awareness allows the device to determine how far the wearer is from an object and feeds back a series of vibrations, a bit like a car's reverse sensor. Over time the wearer learns to judge distance using the vibrations, allowing them to walk around much more confidently.

The use of a Kinect for good reminds me of the robot built by researchers from the University of Warwick, which uses a Kinect's 3D imaging capabilities to locate trapped survivors in the aftermath of an earthquake.

There are two things to learn from these stories. Firstly, the Kinect is wasted on video games. It's genuinely groundbreaking technology. Secondly, both these stories are examples of the good that can be done when a tech company opens up their hardware to homebrew developers and hobby hackers. Microsoft have very publically announced [eff.org] that they encourage people to use the Kinect in whichever way they see fit, a very different attitude from Sony, Nintendo and even one-time proponents of freedom Apple, who all frown upon the use of their kit for anything other than its intended purpose, and go to great lengths to ensure it doesn't happen.

It's game time

Not done a video game post for a while now. While the Wii and now the XBox360 attempt to do away with traditional controllers, here's two novel games I'm quite looking forward to playing.

Firstly, Ghostwire. Augmented reality is something that's been floating around universities for a while now, and what with smartphones with built-in cameras and accelerometers becoming the norm there's been some rather cool apps that use the technology. I've yet to see anything truly useful, but there's loads of really cool stuff. Ghostwire uses AR as a game mechanism - it runs on the Nintendo DSi, which has a back-mounted camera. You play by wandering around the room or wherever you happen to be, and the screen shows your actual view. Sometimes you'll encounter ghosts, some friendly, some nasty. Not sure if the game has any kind of plot or online play, or if it's just a tech demo disguised as a game, but it's definately cool not just because it's using an emerging technology but because it's actually a really novel way of engaging the player within the game.

On a completely different note, Sega have surpassed themselves with their novelty items. As if a video game based entirely around shaking maracas wasn't mad enough, they've now developed Toylets, a game probably not coming soon to a urinal near you (unless you live in Tokyo). Basically, the game consists of a small screen above a urinal and a bunch of sensors, and you play various mini-games by pissing. Which is nice. You can use your urine stream to clean a wall of graffiti, try to fill a bottle, or if you have a particularly powerful stream you can attempt to lift a young lady's dress, Marylin Monroe style. Amazingly, each device has a USB port so you can save your highest scores and take them home.

Guitars are so last year

It's Rock Band III... making the keytar cool again. [arstechnica.com]