Offroad Extreme and Being Special

Offroad Extreme! Special Edition

System: Nintendo Wii

Developer: Data Design Interactive

NA Release: November 2007

[NOTE: This post is part of the first Review a Bad Game Day. Witness others endure the horrors of gaming's mistakes at http://www.reviewabadgameday.com.]

Mr. Rogers made it a point to say that everyone is special, and I'm certainly not going to argue with the legend. I will posit, however, that “special” does not always mean a grand thing. The Titanic was a special voyage, Ed Wood was a special director and Offroad Extreme! Special Edition is certainly a special gaming experience.

Even the cars look depressed to be in this game.

From what I've been able to find, Offroad Extreme! is a “special edition” because it's a port of a 2004 PS2 game updated with Wii remote tilt controls—for some reason at the expense of the original button controls. This is highly unfortunate as the motion controls are outright horrendous and almost seem selectively sensitive, choosing not to overreact to your tilting only when you're heading straight toward a yawning chasm. It's difficult to see why they couldn't have included both control schemes, but I like to imagine the discussion went something like this:

LACKEYS: Boss, we really need to put the button controls back in the game.

BOSS: But the motion controls are what make it special!

LACKEYS: That is technically true, sir. But, well, the motion controls are terrible!

BOSS: You're not understanding me, here. If we return the button controls, we give players the option to use them, yes?

LACKEYS: Yes.

BOSS: And if the motion controls are bad, players will use the button controls instead, yes?
LACKEYS: Yes!

BOSS: But the motion controls are what make it special!

LACKEYS: ...

The sad part is that Offroad Extreme! feels so lazily constructed as to have so little merit to deserve the moniker “special”... that it somehow manages to go full circle and madly becomes “special” again. A few more ways in which the game shines:

• Your rival cars sounding like bees in a dryer at the starting line, which is about the only time you'll ever hear them as they eventually leave you to your wiggly-driving stupor—oh, except for the one or three that always relentlessly slam into you at the beginning and pin you mindlessly to the wall. It's like the developers could make AI for these cars, so they just programmed a brick onto their accelerators.
• The apparent love of using a rain effect over the dull, brown, N64-quality courses, even though you never actually see the rain hit the ground, the sky often looks blue and sparsely clouded, and it does not stop raining when you enter a cave.
• The way the announcer tells you to “Start your engines!” with just enough of a threatening tone as though he knows you're thinking of running.
  
  
  
  
• How the camera will reverse angle when you try to back up from yet another slam into the wall but wont always return to facing frontward when you hit the gas again, often turning the simplest of maneuvers into that underground tunnel cart scene from Austin Powers.
• The collectable dollar signs that litter the tracks like a poor rapper's Geocities page and are all worth exactly one dollar. What did you get for fighting busted controls, crappy physics and broken cameras for three laps? $27! Extreme!
• If you take too much damage, which is nigh guaranteed, your vehicle explodes into an cheaply overlayed fireball animation of Birdemic-caliber laughability—twice. I can't actually cite this one as a fault, though. I could never find myself able to change one poorly rendered piece of this glory.

It is bad enough to face the cheap, unplayable pile of shame that is Offroad Extreme! Special Edition, but it's especially egregious to know this was all part of the now defunct Data Design Interactive's (DDI) business model. Wanting to take advantage of the growing family and casual markets, the company squeezed out as many abominations of gaming as it could, sacrificing any semblance of quality in an apparent attempt to take advantage of novice gamers' ignorance. They even copied and pasted large swaths of code in what they called their GODS engine to speed the process, making their games figuratively inbred.

But do you know what the worst part of this sordid legacy is for me? It's not that DDI helped pox the reputation of the Wii as a shovelware system, nor even the fact a bunch of kids got screwed over on birthdays and Christmases by well-meaning family members who were suckered into buying malfunctioning dreck. Those are certainly bad, but what outright haunts me is that Mr. Rogers was right: everyone is special, dammit, and there could have been some specially talented designers working for DDI.

We laugh at and pan shovelware, and that's often healthy. But there could've been people just trying to find a foothold to get noticed who ended up strapped down by the paltry budgets and push-it-out-the-door timetables of a company that was in too much of a hurry to milk another buck out of an unsuspecting grandma to take the time to make sure IT STOPS RAINING IN CAVES. These people's time and talents could have been wasted, and now they have pangs of hesitation and regret every time they think of writing “Data Design Interactive” on their resumes.

It is my great hope that, if this rings true for anyone, they are working at a place where the true meaning of “special” is known and acknowledged.

Earthbound and Getting the Girl

EarthBound

System: SNES
Developers: HAL Laboratory, Ape, Nintendo
NA Release: June 1995

[CAUTION: This post contains mild spoilers to the endings of EarthBound and the movie The Big Year. One you should really play if you haven’t. The other is just wasting time that could be spent playing the first.]

I sat down recently to watch The Big Year and came to some surprising revelations:

1. If you want to make a stale, plodding movie about birdwatching, then by gosh you can! It doesn’t even matter what fantastic comedic talent those evil Hollywood executives will try to foist upon you, you have the God-given right to underutilize them and ride your anemic, beige starmobile all the way to the Dullard Nebula. Yeah, America!

2. Even boring bird movies will make me think of EarthBound.  

Admittedly, though, even I’m surprised how this thought train circled around. Enduring The Big Year not only called me back once again to the most iconic game of my childhood, but it finally brought into focus this one tiny part that always stuck in my mind.

Upon defeating the final enemy in EarthBound, the credits don’t start rolling. You actually get the chance to walk around and explore the whole world to see what changes have happened as a result of your journey. Your other two companions, Jeff and Poo, go off on their own, leaving you to escort Paula, your first teammate and the only girl, home.

So the game is winding down, it’s just you and her, and you finally bring her back to her doorstep. The pixellated air is dripping with the potential of a big scene, and she says this:

Ness...
Thank you for escorting me home.
…..
...There was something I wanted to tell you, but I’ve forgotten it.
I’m sure I’ll remember by the time I see you again.
Well, I guess this is it...
Good-bye.
Uh...
...So long
...See ya
...Bye

And of course Ness just stands there like a dummy in true RPG main character form, but it further adds to the awkwardness. Even my naive, 12-year-old self felt something was off about the whole thing, so when Ruffini the Dog, possessed by the spirit of the game designer, provided an address to send questions and comments (have I told you I love this game?), I actually wrote in asking what it was Paula had meant to say, thinking I might’ve missed some sort of plot point. Things aren’t supposed to just drop off in these sorts of situations, right?



Sixteen years later, I’m watching Jack Black’s character in The Big Year going on his own quest to spot the most species of bird. Stuck in a job he hates and with little money, he makes sacrifices and maxes out credit cards to pursue his dream.

He falls just short of being the top birdwatcher in the end, but still tells his friend Steve Martin that they came out winners. And indeed he did. He became a seasoned traveler, visiting sites many will never even know existed. Not only that, but he finally earned the respect of his father, who initially thought he was wasting his life by not pursuing a lucrative career. It’s a very touching scene--or it would have been if they had made any allusion that this is what Black’s character was talking about.

No, this entire time he’s making eyes at his new girlfriend, played by That Woman from Parks and Recreation. She’s introduced and developed for about 5 minutes of the movie, then conveniently dumped out of the plot by the revelation she already has a boyfriend. We see nothing of her until 10 minutes before the movie ends, when she calls Black to say she and Nameless Other Guy broke up.

I am aware this sort of thing happens in many other movies, but perhaps it was my desperate attempt to suck whatever marrow of significance I could from this movie that made it strike a chord with me this time. What a crock! There was so much else Black’s character could have emphasized, his father being arguably the most important, yet they employed some arbitrary love interest as if all his other accomplishments weren’t enough--as though we can’t completely accept happy endings otherwise.

And that’s when it all came into focus. In EarthBound, a relationship between Ness and Paula was never really developed. Really, there was little more than the occasional NPC saying they looked like a cute couple and Paula’s parents keeping an eye on you. It just feels like they should be together because we’ve come to believe that has to happen; that to completely find oneself means finding love too, and that’s just not right. Ideally, that should come after one is confident and set in who they are. It can be a side effect of the process, perhaps, but it is not the necessity we want it to be.

Shigesato Itoi, writer and director of EarthBound, opened the entire world at the end as though he wanted players to realize the breadth of Ness’s influence and the effects those places had on him. It’s cool to think that Ness and Paula could end up together, but to have emphasized a relationship in the end would have detracted from so much more that the game and its characters were about.

So thank you, Mr. Itoi, for not taking the easy road. Because of your thoughtfulness, I remember more of your story after nearly two decades than that of a movie I watched less than a week ago.

Super Meat Boy and the Days

Super Meat Boy

System: Xbox 360

Developer: Team Meat

NA Release: October 2010

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume? --T. S. Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Super Meat Boy is a crash course in balls-to-the-wall berzerkerism and trying again in spite of the odds. Dying feels somewhere between 99-99.9% of this game; something it lovingly reminds you of by playing all of your attempts on a stage at once when you finally beat it. Scores of little, hopping, optimistic meat beings are put through the grinders, exploding in a mix tape of squishy demises until your one success remains at the end.

Are these ballets of carnage a cheap shot at your lack of skills or a badge honoring your perseverance? It probably depends on what kind of player you are, but thinking about it recently made me surprisingly philosophical for such a corporeal game.

Imagine every day of your life plays out at the same time, just like a replay of Super Meat Boy. What would we see? Now certainly we won't start in the same spot every time, depending on moving to new places, waking up with no clue where you are and the name “Chris” ambiguously scrawled on a napkin in your underwear, etc., but odds are there will be a lot of overlap. Some events, like your morning commute, might look like a blur of yous. The various beds of your night might look like a deranged Tetris block of yous for 7-8 hours of each period, if you're lucky.

Is that depressing to think about? Again, it might depend on what kind of player you are. Personally, it's bittersweet. For each representation of us on these replays, there's a near infinite number of routes he or she could have gone, mostly depending on our desire to break routine and break from our imposed obligations. Some of those choices could have brought us incredible gains. Others, who knows? They could've put us in the path of a drunk driver, or put many of our next days out on the street.

Because when that one “you” of each of us blinks out, it's all over. Maybe it will be in a bed at a nursing home. Maybe it will be on that same blurred line we took successfully to work so many days. You can play the statistics but it's never possible to know for sure.

We're the opposite of Meat Boy and many other video game characters. While they expend their lives endlessly for the pursuit of that one time at the goal, we nurse ourselves along in hope of reaching the goal as many times as we can. Each new day we receive, in essence, is an extra life—our reward for surviving yesterday's level. But if we don't live with that Meat Boy berzerkerism sometimes, are we truly winning? 

Stacking and the Constructive Sandbox

Stacking

System: Xbox 360

Developer: Double Fine Productions

NA Release: February 2011

The most memorable puzzlers allow players to take familiar concepts and accomplish goals well outside the realm of real-world familiarity. For me, however, the true joy comes in knowing that while I gain a great sense of accomplishment in mastering the physics of Portal, I can feel just as much of a genius by farting into a ventilation shaft in Stacking.

Let's try to keep it as classy as possible in here.

You never quite know what to expect next out of Tim Schafer's Double Fine studio, and Stacking plays much like a cross between Ghost Trick and Scribblenauts. As the smallest in a world of living Matryoshka dolls, you are able to climb into—and essentially possess—progressively larger dolls, using their individual talents to solve the various puzzles in your way. Each problem has several different ways to approach it and, like Scribblenauts, you are encouraged to wrack your imagination and find them all.

It is games like these that make me a bit sad to think the term “sandbox game” is largely commandeered by titles that emphasize speed and violence more than anything else. Not that there is anything wrong with those games. It's just that when I think of a sandbox, I see the greatest freedom in the minds of those using it; not the sand. Stacking fires the synapses by setting its toys in the box and asking the player to use them for more than their original purposes. The fact it's designed like a goulash- and Little Rascals-fueled fever dream adds just the right whimsical element that goads you to be a little more “child-like” in your cleverness.

The Fine Art of Seduction in the world of wooden dolls.

Perhaps one of the concerns we first had as gamers was feeling too childish in the shiny new sandboxes developers made for us, so we started off happier to run about kicking and smashing cities in an ironic showing of "maturity." And really, who doesn't want to have fun and blow off steam that way at times? But we've also come to learn that it feels better sometimes to sit down, take some time and actually be more like a child in heart; imagining, building, and feeling free to play in more fabricated worlds. Thankfully, games like Stacking, Scribblenauts and Minecraft are giving us chances to do that as well.

To the Moon and Chasing Catharsis

To the Moon

System: PC

Developer: Freebird Games

NA Release: November 2011

Something about sad stories tends to draw us in. Perhaps by empathizing with the tragedies and mistakes of others, we allow ourselves an oft-needed rendezvous with our own mortality and humanity. We often consider grief a negative emotion, but its release can have a healing or edifying effect after we experience it. At least that's a better theory than us all being a bunch of emotional masochists.

How deep our connection to a sad tale goes relies greatly on how deeply we know (or feel we know) those involved, and this element is where To the Moon by Freebird Games most brilliantly shines.

Graphics are relatively simple, but offer a fitting Chrono Trigger vibe.

The mere premise of the game can be enough to make your heart twinge: two scientists explore the memories of a dying man, Johnny, with the goal of producing a new set of fake memories in which he is able to do the one thing he has requested, but was unable to accomplish, in life: go to the moon. That alone is enough to let many people begin to relate to the man, but the masterfully woven story of To The Moon adds layer upon layer to Johnny and his loved ones as the scientists travel backward from old age to his early years. What at first was a story about the fulfillment of a dying wish becomes much more complex as reasons beget reasons and others' lives intertwine with Johnny's. We feel we eventually come to the core of Johnny and his desire, and the ending explodes outward like a cathartic megaton bomb, consuming each layer of the story back to the beginning.

Oddly enough, I believe it is fiction that gives us this best chance to explore this way. The stories we come across as spectators in reality are often just beginning to scrape the surface, like the beginning of the game. We know when something is poignant, of course—that there is some emotional or spiritual significance—but we can't delve into all the memories and souls that led up to it. We can't see the layers as the scientists in the game come to see them. And yet sometimes we seem to crave that deep, tragic connection. Look at all the people who come out when a popular figure dies because they feel “connected” to a person they thought they knew intimately, even if much of what they felt they knew was a facade.

A happier memory, but how does it fit in?

In reality, we just don't try looking into others' lives that far. When I covered a tragic story as a news reporter, I could tell you what the mother of an Iraq soldier who lost his legs told me on the day their family learned, but I couldn't tell you everything that was behind her exhausted, wavering voice; why she was trying so hard to be stoic that I had to go cry in the bathroom after talking with her. Really, I would not have wanted to, nor would I have had the right to out of simple respect and dignity. Even Johnny asks about his privacy in the game, but fiction gives us that key to tread freely. We must know for the experience to be as powerful as it is and we are more comfortable doing so in fabrications. In essence, we build our own experiences to reach a goal much like the false memory tracks of the scientists' design.

To the Moon reminds us that we are inherently complex creatures built of simple needs and desires. When we look into others to find meaning and significance we can relate to, we are often like the scientists, starting at one point and only able to see a couple clues just beneath the surface. The ways in which the game demonstrates the true depth of life are amazing, and I have not dared share any here in hope of not spoiling this experience for anyone. Highly recommended. 

Commander Shepard and Captain Planet

Mass Effect 2

System: Xbox 360

Developer: BioWare

NA Release: January 2010

Back when neon was king and Paula Abdul was coherent, environmental matters were an issue of great media attention—by which I mean exploitation.

The global warning debate barely garners a yawn on the airwaves anymore, but the '90s bombarded us with tons of bright, whimsical shows and games that fell along the same general lines: Nature good! Big greedy dirty corporations and their machines bad! Evildoers—you could tell because they were ugly and often voiced by Tim Curry—sought to take over worlds by pillaging them of their resources and overrunning their dry, smoggy husks with metallic contraptions. These plans, of course, would be foiled in extreme '90s fashion by wildly colored characters like Captain Planet, Sonic the Hedgehog and Widget the World Watcher.

You know! Widget! The World Watcher? Ah, forget it.

Setting things in space does change things significantly. In the Mass Effect series, the metal of ships and stations becomes a primary means of life, with the natural settings of planets mere specks compared to the grand void of it all. Still, I had to muse how the influence of environmental messages has seemed to wane as I shotgunned probe after probe onto every planet I could find to satiate the game's never-ending demand for natural materials.

Mining in Mass Effect 2 is a simple matter of scanning planets from orbit and firing probes onto locations that spike the readings. Whatever needed materials are found there are automatically added to your store. Ores include Irridium, Platinum, Palladium and “Element Zero,” which is probably what powered Ma-Ti's heart ring.

Even he knows his useless ring's going to get him hurt.

On the surface, probing is a fun little mini-game, but go deeper and the propensity for environmentally based backlash rises right along with the likelihood of making dubious metaphors. For a series that enjoys delving into moral quandaries so often, I'm surprised I haven't come across any sort of tough choices in this department. Firing probes at a planet from space can not be the safest means of exploring. Many of these planets are noted as being inhabited, so it would only be a matter of time before you hit something important. It's much the same reason they banned lawn darts, only now you're playing it in someone else's backyard with stakes the size of the Eiffel Tower.

"I'll build on that Palladium deposit!" I said. "Who's ever going to need Palladium?" I said!

And how do the materials instantly transport to your ship? It doesn't look like the universe has teleporters yet or else you'd be Star Trekking all up in this place. I can only imagine a long, Dr. Seussian hose snaking out of the Normandy and onto the planet, sucking all the elements up while fluffy Neptunian dodos or what-have-you shriek and flee in terror.

Of course Mass Effect shows that the universe has a lot of gray areas, but when my '90s kid mind sees me hopping from planet to planet, depleting planets of their metals in order to fabricate weapons and war machines, I'm suddenly Dr. Shepbotnik. I just can't get around it.

Perhaps I've missed a scene where mining is brought into question or one is coming my way, but I think it would be an interesting subplot. Trust me, though; even if it's not, this definitely isn't the end of the world for me. I can only shudder to think of what Mass Effect could have been if media's extreme '90s environmental push was still alive today. We could be playing some cross between Star Fox and Awesome Possum.

Remembered so it may never happen again.

Phoenix Wright and the Fallacy of Infallibility

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

System: Nintendo DS

Developer: Capcom

NA Release: October 2005

Ace Attorney is a series I would follow to the grave. I freely admit that its logic can feel a little spacey at times its representation of the modern justice system is about as solid as Taco Bell's representation of Mexican food, but engaging mysteries, a cast of extremely likable characters and the exciting back-and-forth nature of its courtroom battles more than makes up for any shortcomings.

Ace Attorney is obviously not a “standard” game series in terms of action, but it's still easy to assume some basic tropes. Each case is primarily a “Point A to Point B” affair, with the end goal being the acquittal of your client, the defendant. You accomplish this by “defeating” your opponent, the prosecutor, in the legendary ways of defense passed down by your forebears, Perry Mason and Matlock.

Pictured: The former face of edge-of-your-seat courtroom action.

Of course, as this is a game, you always want to win, right? And since earning the freedom of an actual murderer would besmirch the essential nobility of your character, that means all of your clients have to be innocent, right?

It would have been easy enough for that to have been the case. A course of constant victory is so expected in the medium that hardly anyone would have ever batted an eye if a flawless record was in fact the goal.

But then a case comes up (I will not go into specifics as to which) that threatens to throw this concept out the window. It's a powerfully played twist that drives home the stories and connections between the characters—by far one of the series' strongest points—over simple criteria for winning. Playing Ace Attorney is not so much about reaching specific endpoints as it is about uncovering the truth in each case and the threads that tie them together and to the characters; and often the very rivals you face, by serving as the voice of opposition against your imperfect character, ultimately become partners in arriving at this greater good once they eschew their own desires to be perfect.

Which is not to say you won't still take sass from them.

Now, let me pull back and give you a number: 1,071. It probably doesn't ring a bell, but it's a big, shameful figure. This is the number of days (as of April 4, 2012) since Congress has passed a real budget for the United States instead of a steady stream of stop-gap measures. Being unable to work out something so essential to one's country for nearly 3 years is horribly embarrassing—or you would think so, at least. However, Republicans felt wise in trumpeting the 1,000-day mark without a budget in an attempt to hurt Democrats, even though they are very much responsible for this mess as well.

Ideally, the government system was set up as a means of debate and resolution with the greatest good in mind. Today we're lucky if we get a few bi-partisan bills on weak subjects, and are even luckier if they actually make it through the legislative houses. Instead, both parties seem so locked on being “the ones who are right” and scoring superficial zings on their opponents that they can't see their self-made arena is collapsing in on them.

So yeah. A video game starring a bumbling defense attorney and his burger-loving assistant understands more about tact and compromise than the most powerful government in the world and its parties' most stalwart supporters. Think about that this November--or heck, just the next time you're arguing with someone.