[Game Review] Guitar Hero II

There was no shortage of rhythm games when the original Guitar Hero made a meeting place of your local Best Buy (if you, unlike me, had a local Best Buy, that is).  Parappa the Rappa and Dance Dance Revolution had given us simple QTE's in music form before, the latter of which even came with its own peripheral in order to properly play, so when Guitar Hero came out it wasn't so much a surprise as much as a logical continuation of a trend entering its middle age.  Dance Dance Revolution added in the silly social element of watching your friends excel at something difficult while making them look like fools, but its popularity in arcades and at home was beginning to wane (only a few years later, once motion controls hit it big, the series would be replaced outright by Just Dance).  The dance mat was a brilliant idea, but the novel goofiness of flailing madly around a mat as euro trance blares from a colorful screen had gone, and a Japanese game by the name of Guitar Freaks was picking up steam on the other side of the world.  Red Octane, the company behind the plastic guitar peripherals used in Guitar Freaks, decided to do what Samsung did to Apple and make their own version for the states.  They hired a game company experienced in rhythm games, Harmonix, to create the software, while they supplied the controller.  The controller was simple enough: a plastic guitar with a whammy bar to bend held notes down, five colored buttons - one too many for your hands, allowing for an expertise range to those who learned to switch hand positions - that when held down could be "plucked" by clicking the strummer, a plastic bar that you would click up or down where one would pluck a guitar.  It felt like a guitar in a lot of ways, and easily narrowed the distance between the reality of the hunk of plastic in your hands from the fantasy of being the rockstar on screen.

Guitar Hero turned into a huge smash hit, despite the high price tag on account of the controller required to play.  It almost immediately become a social center piece - "want to come over with some beer and we can play Guitar Hero?"  The original game had many of the classic tunes you'd expect from a rock-centric game: Iron Man by Black Sabbath, I Love Rock and Roll by Joan Jet and the Black Hearts, I Want to Be Sedated by the Ramones, etc.  There were a handful of more taste-specific choices like Cowboys from Hell by Pantera, or Thunderkiss '65 by White Zombie, but largely it was a traditional affair.  Likewise, as the HDTV market was finding itself in more and more households, the lack of a video/audio calibration feature pretty well limited the game's functionality to CRT TVs exclusively.  Guitar Hero was the birth of an idea, albeit one riding the crest of a wave, one that was still climbing and only faintly showing signs of a curl.

Guitar Hero II was the execution of the first game's promise.  Calibration was a feature now, allowing it more functionality on future TVs (although this calibration has always felt a bit shaky to me).  Likewise, hammer-ons and pull-offs (where you only need to pluck the darker notes, and can simply finger into the lighter ones) were made much more generous on timing.  But where Guitar Hero II did the most was with a far more eclectic soundtrack, which is an odd thing to say for a game whose final song is Freebird.  Primus, Lamb of God, Suicidal Tendencies, The Butthole Surfers - the choices for style had expanded to the more obscure and cult status mainstays.  I was in my latter teenage years when Guitar Hero II came out, and it forced me into a familiarity with stuff I wouldn't have looked for on my own until years later.  It was like a gateway drug into the alt-rock scene, into screaming vocals and punk rock, a genre I ignorantly refused to give a shot at the time.  Guitar Hero II feels like more of a list of favorites than a list of stand-bys, and so feels more personal than commercial.  Little touches like asking you to confirm multiple times that you are absolutely sure you want to play Freebird at the end help give the game a certain character, one that was certainly in the first game but feels far more confident here.

Guitar Hero II is, however, a glorified song pack.  It's DLC shipped as a completed game.  Graphically the game is nearly identical, reusing character models and guitars from the previous game, but adding new ones as well.  The highscore screen in II is exactly the same as in the original.  Guitar Hero II came out at the tail end of the PS2 generation (it was notably also ported to the Xbox 360 with a few more songs, to give you a time frame), so DLC was a novel concept and things like this weren't totally uncommon in the games industry.  That said, it feels like they could have added returning songs from the previous game at the very least, but sadly none of that is here.

None of this makes Guitar Hero II any less fun, just less original.  The gameplay is virtually the same, with one or two tweaks given to make playing a little more forgiving, and allowing competitive split screen a new mode.  You still pluck the notes as they come racing towards you on that musical highway, you still get star power from playing a string of special notes without messing up, and using star power still works as an "oh shit" savior for when you're bombing a particularly hard part, allowing you to basically fudge your way through a guitar solo by charisma alone.  If anything, Guitar Hero II's biggest plus is that it gave you a reason to pick up another guitar controller to play with friends, being that paying a hefty price for a plastic guitar that only plays one game isn't particularly attractive (something later entries would make worse by adding a myriad of other instruments).  Bundling a new guitar with a new game not only gave you more to play, but if you had purchased the original, you now had 2 controllers.  There was of course a game-only version for those that didn't care abut friends, and there would be for all future entries in the series.

Despite Guitar Hero II's lack of originality, I find myself liking it far more than just about every other game in the series (although my favorites are still in the Rock Band series of games).  It had the better track list, it came out in time for everyone else to have held back so much anxious want to play that it far outsold the original, making it far more ubiquitous among friends, and it was just before the market would become diluted by sequels, imitators, and more plastic instruments than any one person could ever need.  The rock rhythm game genre would find itself stepping up even further with Rock Band and Rock Band 2, but the Guitar Hero franchise would find itself flattening out by Guitar Hero III, being no worse but no better, before nose diving with the rest of the various games in the genre.  Harmonix wouldn't make another Guitar Hero game after this one, instead moving on to make their own Rock Band series and being better for it.  The legacy of the rock-centric rhythm game is still rather culturally fresh despite being over a decade old at this point, but it's one I think will be remembered much more fondly in the coming years.  It doesn't quite topple the true classics in rhythm games, as anyone with a history with the genre will gladly tell you (a little to gladly, a little too smugly), but it deserves its place among them.  Guitar Hero II to Guitar Hero was Nirvana's In Utero, it was Joy Division's Closer, it was Aphex Twin's Richard D. James Album, that other work that was great and far more experimental than their classic "original", and the one that rewards going back to more than any other.



9.0

[Game Review] Gorogoa

What puzzle games do well is to light up that part of our brains that likes to obsess about patterns.  Looking at a puzzle usually tells you all you need to know about the rules.  Symbols need to match up, shapes need to fit snugly together, a through path needs to be created or shifted between points.  The rules may be simple, but it's the execution that can send our minds into an obsession, toiling over pieces we can't quite fit together despite the signalling of an underlying pattern.  In real life, puzzles come in all shapes and sizes, from trying to figure out your finances to tumbling over the mistakes of your past.  It makes sense, then, that somebody would eventually wrap a puzzle in themes about the past, in overcoming that past, and in a future that cannot seem to let go.

Gorogoa is a unique puzzle game in that it's function has more to do with how you move pieces around than in your actual goal.  Usually, puzzle games are created with a goal in mind, and the rules in which that goal is attained changing or becoming more complex as the game ramps up in difficulty.  Gorogoa comprises of four panels that can hold four images.  You start with one image that has clickable areas within that allow you to zoom, or move, or otherwise explore different parts of the image.  Sometimes clicking a door would send you through it, or clicking a picture on the wall or a thought bubble could send you to a completely different world within.  Each image is like a Russian doll of different areas and images.  At some point, however, you will reach a dead end, where you can no longer go forward, or where going back is blocked.  Here, you may find a thought bubble you cannot click on, or a doorway that you cannot go through.  Dragging the picture from one of the four panels to another will reveal that there is an image underneath yours, a cutout where that doorway or thought bubble windowed an image underneath, and suddenly you have two images to explore.  Here is where the main game opens up, where you will be tasked with trying to find how to either connect different images, collapse them into one,  or divide images up to four.  Functionally, the game's goal is what shifts, where the rules themselves stick to one of these few rules of exploring images, separating images, or collapsing images.

The overarching objective is to help a young boy in collecting five orb-like objects and putting them in a bowl.  The boy explores a mostly war-torn world that often jumps between different periods, from during the war, after the war, and early stages of rebuilding.  The boy will look for doors to walk through, or will require you to line up panels to walk between them.  The trick in getting this done is in understanding where architecture lines up between the images.  Sometimes an image can have one type of architecture to its left side, and another to its right, allowing it multiple connections that must be sequenced properly in order to get the boy where he needs to go.

Explaining the game is difficult because of how the game utilizes form.  Gorogoa wants you to think about the images in front of you, making connections between the images to make changes that allow you to explore more.  This can be as simple as lining two images next to one another in the panels as stated before to allow the boy to travel from one image to the other, or as complex as lining up gear-like objects with gear-like architecture in order to rotate objects in different images.  The complexity of the interplay between panels lends itself to showing rather than telling, and explaining any of these puzzles is worse than just leaking the air out of what makes this game great, rather amounting to a tedious description of architecture and surreal imagery.  That is to say, this isn't a game that is fun to talk about, but the reason it isn't fun to discuss is precisely what makes it so effective.  There is an intuition the game plays on, that same pattern recognition that allows for you to know the rules of a puzzle when you see it, but in the inverse.  Often times, you don't know exactly what you are aiming to do, just that patterns are making themselves apparent and you want to see where these connections lead.  This sense of pattern exploration effectively plays on the game's themes of past horror and reflection.  You want to see how things connect, and the most satisfying moments in the game are often where you finally get to where all four panels collapse into one, your stresses of juggling several micro-worlds becoming a place of rest.

The boy in Gorogoa wants to find five orbs in order to call some odd cosmic God, a metaphor for making sense of horror through reflection.  Collapsing panels is paramount to being able to compartmentalize whole chunks of history into something linear and digestible, and the separation of frames trying to piece apart what the mind boggles to understand.  The game's depth is less than its resonance, a game about the emotional journey through one's past without necessarily benefiting from analysis, a puzzle about exploring connections without much in the way of formal rules or complexity therein.  It's a game that asks to be played and felt, not thought about.  And there is something special about that.



8.0

[Film Review] The Foot Fist Way

Lately, I've become more and more interested in the work of Danny McBride than when I was closer to the intended demographic his stuff is geared toward.  I've recently bulldozed through the promising The Righteous Gemstones, his at times hilarious, at times grossly offensive Eastbound and Down, and his nearly brilliant dark comedy show Vice Principals, and I've come to grow a sincere respect for the way McBride and his regular cohorts in crime, Jody Hill and David Gordon Green, do character work.  There is a sincerity beneath their repulsive character quirks, or the rampant vulgarity oozing out of every corner of the frame.  McBride and co. aren't just interested in offending you or grossing you out.  What they really want is for you to empathize with someone you'd never want to meet in real life.

Those listed above sans David Gordon Green worked on the incredibly low budget indie cult film The Foot Fist Way, which follows McBride as Frank, a delusional Tae Kwon Do instructor as he deals with the collapse of his marriage while trying to convince himself he's still the greatest man on this earth (except maybe for his idol, Tae Kwon Do champion Chuck "The Truck" Wallace).  It is the debut film of writer Danny McBride and writer/director Jody Hill, who has worked on and created nearly all of the work and shows Danny McBride has had creative control with.  Together with writer Ben Best, they weave private hells for Frank, who just wants to run his dojo and get the respect he thinks he deserves.  Unfortunately for him, his trashy wife gets a new job where she drunkenly gives a handjob to her boss.  From there on, Frank doesn't confront his overly masculine self image as one would expect given the first Act's build up, but rather bends over backward attempting to retain it.  He leaves aggressive and pathetic messages on his wife's voicemail, he sexually harasses one of his students in a completely inappropriate (and rather reprehensible) way, and he beats the hell out of a kid who shares the last name as his wife's boss (who isn't, it turns out, the boss' son as he originally thought).  He is not a good person by most common standards, but smartly the writers realize that the only thing we find worse than a reprehensible human being is when we see any human being punished unfairly.

To continue on, spoiler warning, as I will spoil the whole movie from here on out.

One of the funniest things I've heard about The Foot Fist Way is in a one sentence description for the film's entire plot:  a man sells his beloved car so he can pay a man ten thousand dollars to beat him up and fuck his wife.  It is a hilarious premise when worded like this, but far more painful in action.  For all that is wrong about Frank as a person, his one maybe admirable trait, which is at least sympathetic, is naive sincerity.  Frank is a simple man with simple pleasures.  He enjoys teaching Tae Kwon Do, he enjoys watching Tae Kwon Do, and despite his vulgarity and egotism that is virtually all he wants.  He deserves a lot of comeuppance for his atrocious attitude and behavior towards others, but his punishment is in losing trust for the one person he had trust for.  It is just unfortunate he trusted someone who is so plainly untrustworthy to begin with.

Frank's wife is never depicted as being anything positive throughout the movie except attractive (or at least I think she's supposed to be attractive).  Their relationship is relatively toxic, where she has a blatant disrespect for his passions and he minimizes the effect of any of her efforts.  Frank resents her trying and is depicted as a right prick to her, but likewise she is depicted as having lazily attempted at a better life, making his mocking not so much justified as not entirely wrong.  "I made a list of people most likely to shoot up the office, which pissed everyone off" she says after her second or third day of work.  She is in no way making friends, and afterward says this was "the highlight of my day".  She is impulsive and selfish, but she also does not deserve to be treated the way she is by Frank.  But Frank gets some comfort from her, knowing he has someone he lives with that he can talk to and with, even if he isn't particularly supportive of her or she of him, so when he finds out about the handjob she gave her boss and she leave him after they fight, he is absolutely torn from that comfort he thought he had into absolute chaos.  His attempts to get back on track amount to him doubling down on his most repulsive qualities.

During the mid-point turn, Frank finally meets his idol Chuck "The Truck" and convinces him to do the belt testing for his class . . . at the cost of ten thousand dollars.  Outside of Frank's attractive wife, the only other thing he has in his life that could represent the identity he thinks he has is his car, a 1975 or so Ferrari 308 GTS (I don't know cars well enough to tell you which of the production runs this one is, sorry).  He sells the car to pay "The Truck" to come do testing, and his wife returns to him to make up for cheating on him and leaving for a few weeks.  When "The Truck" comes by, Frank relishes in the fact that on one side he has his wife, and the other his idol, sitting on his couch watching one of his idol's movies (much to Chuck's annoyance).  Before the movie even gets going, however, he has to return to the dojo to teach another class, and you can see where this is going.  Frank comes back to his wife aggressively fucking his idol, and in a fury challenges Chuck to a fight outside in the backyard.  Chuck beats the hell out of him, to which Frank runs away crying and bleeding until he passes out next to the road.

Frank eventually beats Chuck much later, and when his wife tries to get him back (while simultaneously trying to blame him and his dumb life for her cheating), he tells her to fuck off and pisses on his wedding ring.  Frank's resolution isn't in maturity, it's in just not allowing himself to be swept up in blame he doesn't deserve.  He's extremely flawed, but he didn't deserve what happened to him, and largely that is the appeal to these sorts of dark/cringe comedies.  We don't root for the protagonist, we root with the protagonist in what we deem is fair or unfair, separating our personal taste from the conflict that befalls them.  Shows such as Eastbound and Down play this differently, making Kenny Powers' horrible nature partially the fault of his conflict, and not excusing him so much as watching in bewilderment at how so many people could put up with him for as long as they can.  He abuses everyone's patience to the utmost degree, until they either want to kill him or want nothing to do with him, and he is forced finally to change in his own, stupid way.

What I like about character work such as these is in how it requires us to reflect on what sympathy means to us.  We aren't sympathetic because the person is good, but because we believe in a sense of fairness, of morality that itself is concrete enough to apply to even those that do deserve a little balancing out on the karmic scale.  We don't just want to see them suffer randomly because they are awful - although a lot of comedic catharsis comes out this way - but rather we want to see them suffer from their awfulness.  We want cause and effect, and when this is distorted or disturbed, it makes us anxious.  What we really want is to see people learn their lesson, and random acts of conflict or torment aren't lessons learned, but empty catharsis applied.  Catharsis is attractive, it's fun, and it's addictive, but it is empty in the end.  The Foot Fist Way isn't a classic by any means, but it is an incredibly digestible and often hilarious execution on what makes dark, unpleasant characters so rewarding to watch. 



7.0    

[Game Review] Tony Hawk's Pro Skater

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is one of the few in the video game canon that was able to pierce the American culture at large independently of its stake as an important game.  Like Final Fantasy VII or Ocarina of Time in its contemporary age, it attracted those that would not normally be attracted to the gaming world.  Largely, this was due to its incredibly easy to pick up nature, its difficulty in fully mastering, and in its appeal to a burgeoning subject in the American consciousness.  Skateboarding and extreme sports were spiking in popularity, and with it several other cultural hangers-on like punk and metal music, the punk or metal aesthetic in clothing, attitude, and cultural disposition, and in the familial relationship found in the skate park.  THPS was able to capitalize on most of these, if not in game than in the culture around those who had played it.  And just about everyone had played it.  suddenly bands such as Dead Kennedys and Primus were becoming more mainstream, and punk bands such as Goldfinger owe a large part of their following to their inclusion in the game.  As a cultural touchstone, rarely does any medium produce something so omnipresent as THPS, and what is more amazing is in how good this game actually is at its core.

The controls are incredibly tight, allowing for growth without too steep a difficulty curve.  Goals give you incentive to learn different aspects of the game in place of things like tutorials or hand holding.  Your goals vary depending on what you are planning for a given level.  Each level is usually loaded with five VHS tapes to collect, each tied to a certain goal to attain in the 2 minutes allotted to you through Career mode.  Multiplayer and Free Play are each variations of what is found in Career, so discussing Career mode is paramount to talking about those other modes.  Each of these five tapes are the same across each of the tape levels: get the lower high score in order to table for the given level, get the absolute high score for the level, collect the letters in SKATE across the level, find (usually) 5 of a given object in a level, and find the secret tape, usually hidden in a difficult to get location that requires some know-how in playing THPS, such as grinding gauntlets.  Collecting tapes unlocks further levels.  There is another type of level as well: the competition.  In competition levels, you want to rack up the highest score of all those competing in order to win one of 3 medals (gold, silver, or bronze).  Winning medals will also unlock certain levels.

Playing THPS feels like a combination of racing games and fighters, where speed, finesse, and quick action are paramount to success.  You are perpetually moving forward on your skateboard and must chain together tricks in order to get the best score possible.  To better allow you creativity, THPS has states to vary the kinds of tricks you can do.  When in air normally, you have a state for kick flips and grabs, but when coming off of the lip of a half pipe, you get a variant state for different flips and grabs.  Likewise, there is a grind state that can increase your speed if done properly and allow you to gain access difficult to get places, and each of these states can be chained together to create huge scores.  To encourage your creativity rolling, repeating tricks will yield lower and lower score, requiring variance to rack up points.

When in a perfect flow state, THPS feels like composing, an irreverent jazz-punk of tricks and overwhelmingly 90s aesthetic.  The Tony Hawk series of games only lasted for a little less than a decade before it wore itself out, but its early entries still hold an incredible amount of fun.  As a snapshot of a time and place, few encapsulate the late 90s the way Tony Hawk Pro Skater does.



9.5