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Technological Determinism (Star Fox)

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Quietly and behind the scenes, far from the watchful eyes of most of us, Nintendo was systematically fucking absolutely everything up. The long term result of this would eventually be the cataclysmic end of Nintendo’s dominance over the video game industry. The short term result was Star Fox.

The problems began, in many regards, in 1988 when Nintendo partnered with Sony to create an add-on for the SNES using the newly standardized CD-ROM format. This was by and large a defensive move – NEC had a CD-ROM expansion for the TurboGrafx-16 out in Japan in 1988, and it reached the US in 1990, becoming integrated in the standard release of the console in 1992. Work on a CD peripheral for the Genesis began almost as soon as the format was standardized, and saw Japanese release in late 1991, coming out in the US a year later and immediately attaining infamy due to having Night Trap as a launch title. And so Nintendo essentially had to follow suit.

The device was to be announced in the summer of 1991 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. But shortly before the announcement Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi got cold feet over the degree to which the deal with Sony would give them licensing control over the new CD format. Since control over the cartridge supply had been a key plank of Nintendo’s business model, especially in the US where the “Seal of Quality” was a rhetorical device to counter fears of an Atari-style crash, this was ultimately deemed unacceptable. And so Nintendo made an audacious move, quickly arranging a new deal with Phillips and announcing it at CES the day after Sony unveiled their “Play Station,” which would combine a SNES cartridge slot and a CD-ROM drive.

Almost every part of this went badly for Nintendo. Sony eventually repurposed their CD unit into the stand-alone Playstation, decisively winning the fifth generation of console. The Phillips device never materialized (and indeed Nintendo would not release an optical-disc system until 2001), but as a consequence of that deal Phillips was allowed to release a raft of shovelware featuring Nintendo properties for their moribund CDi system. And worse, the Super Nintendo had no upgrades that would allow it to compete with its rivals on technical grounds for the remainder of the 16-bit era.

The response to this state of affairs was the Super FX chip, designed by British developer Argonaut Games, who produced it to enable a Super Nintendo version of their acclaimed Starglider series. The chip was a cartridge-based auxiliary graphics processor for the Super Nintendo that dramatically increased its ability to handle 3D graphics.

Implicit in this is a vision of the future, namely that video games would someday be 3D. This is a significant change from how basically all games on the NES and, thus far, the SNES had worked. Those games had all been based on two-dimensional sprites. This was the technological innovation offered by Mode 7 at the SNES’s launch – a new set of ways of manipulating sprites that allowed for things like Super Mario Kart where the track was, in reality, a background layer being manipulated via Mode 7, with the actual cars just being sprites that were resized up and down to produce the illusion that the car was moving forward or background.…

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My Feet Erase the Path of All Arrivals (Soul Blazer)

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Soul Blazer forces us to confront a simple question: is it better to have a world or not?

At its most elemental level, this is a simple question of whether existence is desirable. This is also easy to answer: of course it isn’t. Non-existence does not long for existence. It does not long for the continuation of its non-existence either, it is true, but it is… content. It wants for nothing. Existence, meanwhile, wants non-existence. It may evince a certain contentment with its existence, and even a sort of crazed and paranoid desire to cling to this state of affairs, but its actions over the long game reveal a clear desire for annihilation. Such is the way with games; they constantly work towards their own end.

But this is not the question Soul Blazer asks. Indeed, it’s a meaningless choice, offered only to God on the occasion of the Big Bang. The reality is that existence has been chosen for us. The cartridge has been jammed into the top-loading slot of the universe and the power switch has been thrown. We may prefer otherwise, but it is not so. The only version of the question that can be asked given that is whether the continuation of existence is desirable. And given the nature of existence, this question is in practice whether the world should be destroyed or not.

At first glance this would appear to also not quite be the question Soul Blazer asks; the Freil Empire has already fallen to Deathtoll in it, after all; the world’s destruction is as inevitable as its existence. It would also appear that, despite this, the game has a straightforward answer: Deathtoll is, after all, named Deathtoll, and is the unambiguous villain of the piece. His consumption of the world is presented as an act of evil to be undone. The world, evidently, should not have been destroyed. But this is not as obvious as it might seem.

In truth, much as existence is generally a process of protesting one’s desire for existence while working inexorably towards its termination, Soul Blazer, for all that it suggests destroying the world is wrong, is fundamentally a game about doing so. The main action of the game is the systematic clearing out of six dungeons; dungeons that are created by Deathtoll as an alternative world to the one he destroyed. This already calls the straightforward analysis into question; Deathtoll is as much creator as destroyer.

But more than that, it casts the player as world-destroyer. A dungeon is just as much a world as a town, after all. Indeed, the main mechanic of the game – monster spawning tiles that the player must seal – combined with a sword swing that takes the side-swiping of A Link to the Past even further – means that dungeon clearing becomes a sort of tactical assault. One explores the dungeons and unlocks paths while endlessly finding places to stand whereby monsters can safely be picked off as they emerge.…

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You’re On the Global Frequency (Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge)

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Comments are going to be temporarily disabled across the site for a few hours this evening due to some site maintenance. Relatedly, you should be sure to check back here tomorrow.

I had three great loves in childhood, and though I have forgiven them, they all betrayed me. Doctor Who I have, of course, written about at length; it turned on May 12th, 1996, the day before Super Mario RPG came out. Comics, a topic relevant to this game, were a more gradual process, with no clear moment the line was crossed from a certain tension between us to outright betrayal. The beginning of seventh grade, in any case; around my twelfth birthday. Mortal Kombat II, perhaps, or Final Fantasy III. And then there are video games. 
It’s hard to count how many times I’ve been betrayed by video games. There is, after all, a high potential for it. We’ve discussed already how the basic model of business games relies on the idea that they’ll be fun for a decent number of hours. There is nothing, then, quite as awful as the phenomenon of the shit video game. To buy a game is not a small thing; there are ultimately a finite number of moments in a year where you’ll get to do it. Picking a bad one is awful.
Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge is an example – a crushing, awful disappointment waiting to sting anyone foolish enough to be seduced by its branding. It is as though they took two-level demos of five games deemed unworthy of further development, reskinned them to include Marvel characters, and released them as an omnibus. The connections between levels and the five playable superheroes are often tenuous at best. Cyclops is randomly thrown in a mine-cart level. Storm is trapped underwater, seemingly mainly so nobody would have to figure out how to get good controls for a flying character. Wolverine is fighting evil clowns. Controls are sloppy and imprecise.
But in another sense, video games betray you from the start. It’s how they work; their central dynamic. The resistance of rules to will. We bind our very nervous systems to them, and they twist away and sever us, leaving us staring at the sudden amputation of the Game Over screen. Even today, Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge exists within me. I have not touched it in a decade at least, but when, in the first level, I drop down a shaft and find three paths that I can go down, there is an deep instinct, beyond even a memory, of what order to go in. In yet another, then, it’s only ever one big betrayal: an ongoing process of being repulsed by what defines you. 
I am about fifteen minutes from most of the places I grew up, halfway up Morris Ridge, overlooking downtown. Summer is breaking on the shores of the shrinking days, but retains the high ground for now. The sense of oddness that has permeated the weather for years persists; it feels as though it didn’t used to be this hot in early September.
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Fight Every Fight Like You Can Win (Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest)

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By Anna Wiggins

So here we are. Final Fantasy. I often say that Tolkien was my “first fandom”, but I don’t actually know whether I was introduced first to Bagginses or Chocobos. At any rate, Final Fantasy is a part of my personal mythology, signifiers and metaphors that are wired into the way I think, stirring oddly specific sense memories during my mind’s idle moments.
The Final Fantasy franchise is peculiar. Despite the games (mostly) bearing sequential numbers, the games in the series are not sequels of an ongoing narrative. For the most part, each game takes place in a different fantasy world, with its own cast of characters and internal logic. There are occasional references between games, but these are more akin to easter eggs than any attempt at continuity. Instead, the Final Fantasy games have a shared iconography that grows over the history of the series. Crystals, giant riding chickens, magic that comes in colors, astonishing liberties taken with world mythology; Final Fantasy is a set of common stylistic elements that is eternally being rearranged into new shapes.
Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest is the first Final Fantasy game I have detailed memories of. I know it wasn’t the first Final Fantasy I played; I have vague memories of Final Fantasy II and even Final Fantasy. (And its contemporary, Dragon Warrior. There’s a secret history there, a moment in 1989 or so when I swore fealty to one of two rival houses without knowing it. But that’s another story.) But practically speaking, Mystic Quest was my jumping on point. And I remember being excited about Mystic Quest because it was a Final Fantasy game. Luckily for me, in 1992 I hadn’t really developed the ability to discern quality yet.
Because Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest is not a good game. Playing it, I get the impression it isn’t even trying to be a good game. The story is thin, even by the standards of early 90s poorly-translated RPGs. The visuals are less detailed and interesting than earlier games from the same company. Instead of being difficult and rewarding tactical thinking, skill, or even memorization, the game punishes the player arbitrarily, with unavoidable instant- or near-instant death doled out according the whims of the random number generator. There are few choices to make, and the overall experience feels hollow and pointless. It is impossible to feel any sort of connection to these characters or events.
(What I didn’t know at the time is that this game was created to be an ‘entry-level’ game, an attempt to make the Japanese-style RPG experience appealing to Western players, where the genre was faring poorly. Whether Squaresoft executives actively thought Western players wanted less story and characterization, or if this was just a phoned-in effort, is unclear.)
And yet 8-year-old me was riveted by this game. I had to realize, on some level, that this game was not as interesting or as fun as its predecessor. And yet I played this game eagerly, consumed it.
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I Can Lock All My Doors (Super Mario Kart)

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It feels as though we are only ever going in circles or hurtling off cliffs.

For most of the Super Nintendo originals so far we have seen series that originated on the NES, and then found more refined forms in the 16-bit era. Super Mario, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Contra, and Zelda all had fantastic games on the Super Nintendo that were either the equal of their NES forebearers or their better. 
Here we have something new; a franchise that begins on the Super Nintendo. These days Mario Kart is one of the tentpole releases for a Nintendo platform; just as they all must have a Zelda and a Smash Bros. Here it exists in its primal form, as much a piece of history as Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda. 
Time has done it no favors. Almost everything there is to hate about later Mario Kart games is here, along with flaws idiosyncratic to this version, while little of what makes some of the later games classics had been honed here. The rubberbanded AI is at its most cloying, adding a sense of futility to the player’s actions. The race is as capricious as ever, not just in the way that small mistakes are amplified brutally, but in the same infuriating “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” way that makes every game in the series such a hazard to controllers. Here it’s  aggravated by the way in which AI opponents can simply spam you with infinite projectiles, often leaping over yours in ways you can’t do to theirs, an asymmetry that gnaws constantly, as opposed to things like the last lap blue shell, which is at least a rare occurrence. 
Unique to Super Mario Kart, the increase in difficulty from 50cc and 100cc is completely out of whack. at 50cc the race is tolerant of numerous small mistakes like clipping a wall, and often even of a big one like falling off the course. At 100cc, even small mistakes are likely to cost you victory. Meanwhile, the handling is sloppy; the drifting mechanic that would define every subsequent iteration of the game did not exist yet. Played today, it has a frustrating roughness that is not so much difficulty as alienation. It’s just not much fun.
In 1992, it was a very different kettle of fish. For one thing, not only was it not yet the progenitor of a classic line of games, it was a sequel in all but name. Like F-Zero before it, it is a racing game based on using Mode 7 for the track, creating a pseudo-3D effect that was quite striking for the time. But F-Zero was something of an empty suit of a game; a tech demo without content that became a classic almost in spite of itself, much as Anna described. 
Super Mario Kart, then, is the refined attempt – the same gameplay mechanic, only fine-tuned so as to entrance the player far more deeply in it’s spell.
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The Mouse and the Gun (Super Scope 6/Mario Paint)

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The Gun
The first light gun was a 1936 amusement park game called the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite. Its design mirrored that of the technology’s most iconic form, the NES Zapper, at least in practice: you hunted ducks. In theory, however, they worked quite differently. The Ray-O-Lite was accurately described: it was a gun that emitted light, which was in turn detected by a target-mounted sensor – a vacuum tube, in its case. But with the turn to screen-based games, as opposed to the physical targets of the Ray-O-Lite, the technology shifted. Light guns such as the Zapper are, in fact, essentially cameras – pulling the trigger causes the screen to momentarily cut to black and then flash white in the valid target areas. If the photosensor within the gun’s barrel sees the flash, it registers a hit.
On one level, the Super Scope is simply explained as the SNES equivalent of the Zapper. And this is a true story; given that the Zapper was an iconic part of the NES experience, a Super version of some sort was effectively inevitable. But there’s more to the iconography here. The Zapper was an oversized handgun, and its defining game, Duck Hunt,  was about shooting cartoon ducks and being laughed at by a dog. (Duck Hunt was covered by the Nintendo Project here.) The Super Scope, on the other hand, is a fucking bazooka. 
This is not a decision justifiable in any sort of gameplay or design sense. The Zapper was an easy to use item. The Super Scope, on the other hand, was physically exhausting; it was not as though it was too heavy to lift or anything, but hefting the thing on your shoulder for an extended time was genuinely tiring. There was far more of it than there needed to be, for reasons that had nothing to do with anything other than the idea that a shoulder-mounted gun seemed cool.
The aesthetic continued into the packed-in game, Super Scope 6, a return to the multi-game cartridges sold with the bulk of NES systems, which were either Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt if you bought the Action Set, or Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet if you bought the Power Set. In each case, however, the setup was basically that of a pop single – a clear a-side in Super Mario Bros that had hours and hours of replay value, and a pair of peripheral-centric b-sides that were generally fun for a few hours.
Super Scope 6, on the other hand, is all peripheral based, and lacks any sort of headlining game, instead offering six disposable minigames in two categories, called LazerBlazer and Blastris. The former is the headlining category, with all three of its games demoing first if the game is left to run without starting. All three are about fending off an alien invasion, shooting down missiles in the first, and spaceships in the other two, and match the general aesthetic of the Super Scope with hard, angular, metallic designs.
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Faerie Tales (The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past)

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So we imagine ourselves to be, what, the heroes of our own stories? The protagonists of whatever story we think it is that’s being told? Or worse, some sort of god with the privilege of directing the protagonist; a consciousness that’s been put in charge of a body in the world, tasked with saving it, redeeming it, making it so that there was a purpose all along.
The bulk of our task is to find soft places in the world. Places where we pass from the seen Overworld to the hidden Underworld, and plumb the depths of dungeons to excise monsters that lurk beneath the surface of all things. This, at least, is classic Zelda, but A Link to the Past introduces a second sort of soft place in the form of portals to its bespoke gimmick, a shadow world with its own dungeons and monsters. 
The portal to faerie is a common enough image; the eccentric space where the border of the world frays. That space when you push through the bushes at the back of your yard, or the room in the basement of the school, or the corner of the store where the Nintendo used to be. The dungeon is one example, certainly – a space that opens up into a vast interior whose dimensions are utterly unsuggested by its mere gateway. But this is a different sort of example – not a cave carved into the world, but the world’s shadow; the Dark World; the second quest. The place that is not here, where we are not ourselves. 
As such, we are the only person there. The only one who knows our sins and our triumphs. Only us, our arms stretched outwards, amputated stumps grasping desperately for some means of controlling the world. All of this is predicated, of course, on the idea that some means of controlling the world exists, as opposed to the likely reality that we are in fact just the chaotic after-images of a sufficiently complex algorithm. 
It’s a matter of curious existential fact that the childhood of the Legend of Zelda series is, in Zelda canon, a discarded dystopia caused by a failure to beat the 1998 release The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. A game I have never beaten because, ultimately, I was pissed off that it’s possible to blow the Skulltula quest before you actually get the quest. I played through that hell in 93 with the bonding plant in Return to Zork, thank you. Which means, I suppose, that this really is my world. The truth of who I am, created by my own later gaming inadequacy.
Certainly it’s a memorable game. A fundamental aspect of my childhood, so essential to my sense of self that it is difficult to quite believe in the possibility of a human consciousness that has not played this game. How can you be truly human if you are not shaped by the precise cultural influences that produced me, after all?
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Me Gun Goes Click, Me Gun Goes Bang (Contra III: The Alien Wars)

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At its heart, Contra III is a game about guns. This does not particularly distinguish it within the world of video games, nor, for that matter, within the world of America. Nevertheless, it is firmly the sort of game Contra III is. Like Super Castlevania IV and Super Ghouls and Ghosts, its central mechanic involves offering players a variety of weapons, each with advantages and disadvantages suitable to particular moments in the game. Contra III’s twist on this mechanic is that Jimbo and Sully are insta-killed by any hit and lose their actively equipped weapon (you can have two weapons, one active at any given moment) upon death, which creates an inherent tension between the desire to have a strong weapon equipped for tricky bits and the desire not to lose a strong weapon to a tricky bit.
One way to put this, then, is that aliens are literally coming to take your guns. This is a crass and largely unhelpful reading, admittedly, although the fact that “losing your gun” means being reduced to a mere machine gun is, in this reading, terribly entertaining.
But equally, it’s impossible to quite separate the iconography of Contra III from the militarized paranoia implicit in it. The first two levels are indicative – bombed out cityscapes through which the player must run, eventually dodging fireballs that burst from the asphalt. This is the iconography of urban decay – the city as a collapsing, rotting space, often described in the fundamentally racially coded terms of the jungle, which was, notably, where the Contra series got its start. This, in turn, was a fundamental image of the Reagan era, where it served as an object of fear that justified the conservative project.
But it also served fundamentally as a fantasy. Like any jungle, the collapsed city is a place upon which fantasies of white militarism are projected. Its untamed wildness requires the puissant white man as a steady hand. Which, of course, Contra III is all too happy to provide via the sumptuously Aryan Jimbo, whose manly poses decorate the interstitial moments between levels.
Being a video game for a Nintendo system, however, some amount of this must be displaced. And so the bombed out city is destroyed by Gigeresque aliens, an all-purpose Other conveniently separate from any material entities, and defined entirely by its inhumanity. Enemies in Contra fall into two general categories – either they are overtly robotic, or they are creatures of grotesque flesh. In either case, the emphasis is on the fundamental antipathy towards the very idea of humanity, which makes the aliens a maximally nightmarish force for the manly heroes to assert themselves against.
This intensely xenophobic setup means that the unreconstructed macho fantasy at the heart of Contra III gets to carry on without undue complication. The resultant ethos is perhaps best captured in the game’s opening, where Jimbo and Sully, following the devastating alien attack, get their sole dialogue in the game, as Jimbo proclaims, “it’s time for revenge,” and Sully concludes, “let’s attack aggressively.”
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The Bloody Pantomime In Which You Have Enslaved Yourselves (Lemmings)

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They move ceaselessly forward. Always forward. They cannot do anything else; their nature is set. At best they may be acted upon by outside influences, but still they are like water. They may be diverted and rerouted, but there is nothing that actually stops the flow. They will walk until they drown.
It is the same with us, really. Time’s riptide pulls us all under, drowning us all beneath the waterline of history. We are perhaps more complex than the green-haired mascots of Psygnosis’s 1991 multiplatform classic, occasionally making what appears very much like a choice. But our choice is just the removal of all the other options; We are set within a system of rules and defined by outside influences. We are not protagonists; not individual avatars of some demiurgic player-souls. We are but part of the flock, buffeted by outside forces.
(And yet the outside forces cannot, strictly speaking, be described as “causal.” The path of history’s flow is defined and knowable, and yet nobody actually follows it with any precision. To use a specific example, we might successfully root the development of the masculine “gamer” identity in the Sega Genesis’s attempt to counter Nintendo’s family marketing with a male-skewing notion of coolness, but it is not as though every Genesis household spawned a Gamergate supporter, or as though there are no misogynistic fuckheads who owned a SNES.)
Perhaps one separates from the crowd. Often this is accomplished by literally elevating him above the rest, designating him with two of the three (or arguably four) permanent traits, namely Climber and Floater, which allow him to scale walls and subsequently parachute down from great heights. This newly minted ubervole will be forever marked as such, appearing under the cursor as “Athlete.” He will strike out and explore the vast landscape, reshaping it to whims that he no doubt imagines are his own. 
But this great reshaping’s only purpose is, in the end, to provide the path that the crowd shall flow through, so that his individuality is subsequently lost in the tide that follows. Indeed, the functions of reshaping –  Builder, Digger, Miner, and Basher – are all temporary roles. When the tasks are completed, whoever performed them simply recedes back to the faceless crowd, reclaiming their identity as “Walker.” The landscape has no author. Nobody made it this way. It simply is. 
More chilling is what is revealed about the the landscape itself when it is altered. Once it has been Dug or Mined or Bashed, or even Blasted, it is simply removed, and the shadows and texture remain fixed around it. For all the intricate play of light and shadows with which it is rendered, it proves flat, an illusion that can be torn through and scraped off. Individual points of landscape may be resistant to destruction or fatal to the touch, but it is all the same substance – a trompe l’oeil painted upon the world. 
This is the state of things: a world designed only so that a mass of people can flow deterministically through it, and a mass of people who exist only to sluice within it.
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Time’s Dead Flowers (Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, Super Castlevania IV)

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The Super Nintendo Project is brought to you by my backers on Patreon.


Today we have a clash between two of the major companies of the NES era, Capcom and Konami, each with the 16-bit iterations of their classic platformer-horror franchises. We have talked fleetingly about the status of the platformer in the 16-bit era, but this seems an important point to expand on. The platformer is not a dead genre by any measure, but it is a genre that at this point exists primarily as a retro one. Its period of greatest cultural dominance was probably the 8-bit era, which, we ought recall, overlaps the 16-bit era by a solid few years. 
Although 3-D versions exist, the iconic version of the platformer is a side-scrolling action game that involves some measure of jumping among, well, platforms. Super Mario Bros. is fairly obviously the platformer with the most influence, and is probably single-handedly responsible for the genre’s reign. And as I suggested in a previous post, the 16-bit era is interesting in terms of platformers because it both contains several absolute zeniths of the form and is the era in which the genre’s terminal decline began and it lost its place as the predominant genre of video game. 
Mechanics are of course central to the platformer, a statement that can be made with more or less equal validity to most genres, but which comes to the fore in the platformer, since there’s relatively little variation in the basic “run, jump, and shoot” mechanics, such that the change tends to come in the particular control mechanisms for each of those tasks, with innovation coming in the form of small refinements to each of them. For instance, both Super Castlevania IV and Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts feature single-speed running, in contrast with the acceleration mechanic that defines the Mario series and that Sonic the Hedgehog stretched to its logical conclusion.
It is in jumping and shooting that Super Castlevania IV and Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts distinguish themselves, however. The former is not a particularly jumping-focused game. All platformers are at least somewhat jump-centric, but there has never been particular artistry to the Castlevania series when it comes to jumping. Simon’s jump has a defined arc with limited in-air course correction. It’s fairly meat and potatoes, as such things go.
Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, on the other hand, features a jump mechanic based on carefully defined restriction. Once Arthur jumps, there is nothing he can do to alter the course of that jump – he’s on a completely pre-determined trajectory that will end only when he collides with another object. This is the most limited form of jump – the one that Miyamoto abandoned from Donkey Kong when revamping his Italian plumber protagonist “Jumpman” into his more famous iteration. But complicating it is the fact that Arthur has a double jump so that, at any point during his first jump he can jump again. On the one hand, this makes the jump dramatically reworkable – your second jump can be an exact reversal of the first, in fact.
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