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There are a lot of excellent space-based science fiction universes out there. Well, it is space, after all; it’s a (possibly) infinite realm of neat stuff just ripe for an active imagination’s plucking. Many such universes, be they wrapped up in a TV series, a movie, a book, or a video game, are story- and character-driven epics that tell tales of humanity’s encounters with beings and forces very different from those we are familiar with. The technology and the breakthroughs in physics that makes such encounters possible also tend to take the spotlight as the writers have a grand old time imagining all the cool gadgets that may or may not lie in our future.

Although story-driven sci-fi video games  are a topic for another day, the introductory paragraph was meant to be a segue into a niche that one Samus Aran holds firmly in her iron grip: sci-fi video games that create immersion through isolation and exploration. Samus’s adventures are told through a style of storytelling that is incredibly minimalistic when compared to many fictional universes; you’re taking control of a powerful, well-armed bounty hunter with a fierce sense of justice, an awesome arsenal of gizmos at her command, and a horde of nasty beings  to face down. That’s all you really need to know. Installments in the Metroid Prime branch of the series flesh out the history of the planets, creatures, and organizations involved in the saga, but even then, most of this information is gleaned through the optional scans you can conduct of flora, fauna, objects, and databanks that you are completely free to not bother with at all if you’re so inclined. That’s the beauty of Metroid: so much of the universe’s richness comes from the little discoveries you make.

That brings me back to the post’s title, because the open-ended, map-based gameplay of Metroid is the backdrop for these exciting discoveries. This compelling game structure has resulted in some of the most venerated games out there. I’m sure you can name a few. Exploring the 8-bit depths of the planet Zebes way back in 1986 is where it all began, and the art of open-ended labyrinths was arguably perfected in 1994 with Super Metroid. The ambience it conveyed through its subtle, haunting music, diverse subterranean environments, and almost entirely hostile cast of characters–barring an etecoon here and a dachora there–has been matched by few games.

Even more story-driven efforts like Metroid Fusion and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, in which all-out exploration sometimes takes a back-seat to the plot, are filled with hidden rooms and crevices containing items that are just waiting to be added to an enterprising hunter’s arsenal. The joy of becoming that little bit more resilient and powerful with each new upgrade makes exploring going out of your way worthwhile for those who don’t care much for exploring for exploration’s sake. And then there’s the joy of testing out the new beam, missile, grappling hook, or morph ball form that you just discovered, which is a joy that perches on a plateau of its own.

Even boss fights contribute to the immersive, organic feel of the exploration experience. Most games give you a pretty good idea as to when to expect to battle your next big bad guy: whenever you reach the end of a stage or have climbed to the top of a tower, you know it’s time for a big throw-down. An interconnected world, being generally much more liberated from the need for plot devices, might not have such a clear formula. You may rightly suspect that at some point in the flooded caverns you’re currently exploring you’ll have to fight the biggest and nastiest thing living there, but the exact when and where are not so clear. In that way, bosses are just another wonderful surprise that the sprawling world contains; a surprise that wants to kill you.

The next time you’re thinking about humanity’s future, think not of faster-than-light travel and being beamed up by dudes named Scotty, but rather of all of the fun we’re going to have exploring the depths of alien planets, blowing up their freakish inhabitants, and finding missile packs hidden in blocks.

There are monsters. They come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and crimes against anatomy.

There are also mascot monsters. They tend to be infectiously adorable, mesmerisingly awesome, and capable of sparking cultural crazes.

As you read on, ponder how much better your life could have been if one of these three game culture heavyweights had been your high-school mascot. Then stare at their likenesses to make yourself feel all better again!

Met: Mega Man series

Likes: Playing peek-a-boo with bullets.

Dislikes: That New York baseball team, the fact that Dr. Wily didn’t make their face out of the same metal as their helmets.

What would Mega Man be without Mets? Nothing, that’s what. These adorable little robots, with their big googly eyes and indestructible hardhats, have been featured in nearly as many Mega Man games as the blue man himself. Seemingly able to adapt to any environment and situation, you can always count on the Mets to find a way to turn it to their advantage, whether through a pop-up propellor on their helmet that’s good for a fly-by shooting, a diving mask complete with flippers, or the coolest mech suit ever (see Exhibit A). They’d take over the world, if only their mad creator didn’t have some strange obsession with giving everything he designs some sort of glaring weakness.

Jack Frost: Shin Megami Tensei series

Likes: Hee-ho!

Dislikes: Martin Short, Michael Keaton, B-movie serial killers

Jack Frost is a strange being who personifies winter in English folklore. He’s known to some as Father Winter, Old Man Winter, and the dude who leaves those icy crystal patterns on your window on chilly mornings. But most of all, he’s the ridiculously cute Atlus mascot extraordinaire. You’ll find him in pretty much every Shin Megami Tensei game and spinoff series out there, along with his associates Black Frost, King Frost, and Pyro Jack. Not content to merely be the frosty face of this mostly M-rated series, which is by itself totally awesome, he has a funny habit of making an appearance in whatever Atlus game he feels like appearing in. Jack Frost teaches us that even the most grim and hopeless situations can always be faced down with a little hee-ho. Thank you, Jack.

Slime: Dragon Quest series

Likes: Perpetuating urban myths about Dragon Quest game release dates being restricted by law to holidays and weekends to prevent mass outbreaks of the epidemic known as “hooky”.

Dislikes: The fact that those myths really are just myths.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Slime knows. Eyes that stare, unafraid, into eternity. An enrapturing grin that could melt the heart of evil itself. Do you feel your soul being sludgified? Do you feel your mind melting into ooze? If looks could kill, you’d be dead right now.

The blue slime and its multicolored ilk are all but synonymous with Dragon Quest, and their irresistible visages are undoubtedly a very good reason for the series’s deathgrip on Japan’s RPG market. Easily among the most recognizable mascots out there, these little globs and the game series they star in are beloved for their simplistic yet undeniable charm. Anyone who thinks artist Akira Toriyama’s legacy is limited to drawing slight variations of Vegeta and Gohan obviously hasn’t had enough exposure to Toriyama’s monsters in his or her life, and that ought to be a slime… err.. crime comparable to skipping work to buy the latest Dragon Quest title. They’re bright, they’re bouncy, they’re blue, and, recently, the English localization team for Dragon Quest has them speaking in ooze-related puns.

“Stare too long into the slime, and the slime stares back into goo…”

- Friedrich Wilslime Nietzsche

Are they always wonderlands, though? Welcome to my first talk on the many themes that are commonly used to create the places of interest that you’ll visit during the course of an adventure. This category of posts is all about what these themes are, why they might be used, and the atmosphere and unique challenges and puzzles they bring to the games they’re used in. From jungle islands to volcanic continents to casino planets, I’ll cover ‘em all.

Snow Cones for Everyone!

In the course of my strolls around the Internet, I’ve found that icy areas are pretty popular with the gaming community. There are as many reasons for this as there are different approaches games may take to the snow n’ ice theme.

Some games feature ice worlds with a soothing stillness about them that makes them really relaxing spots to explore, no matter how many rabid penguins, killer seals, sentient snowflakes, and falling icicles you might have to contend with. Such areas often make use of subtle music with whistling glacial winds and light shakes of a tambourine to convey that arctic mystique. Others are not so subtle about the mood they want to convey and attempt to capture the Christmas magic with a livelier presentation, going all-out with festively-decorated spruce trees, holiday sweets, bouncing music, and a jolly soul or two.

Either way, ice worlds tend to be comparatively pleasant stops in any epic quest  if only because there’s at least a sense of cheer or tranquility in the air as your enemies hunt you down.

Black Ice

Of course, ice doesn’t have to be all relaxation, jingle bells, and popsicles. Ice has a dark side, and it can be used to evoke an atmosphere of bitterly cold desolation. A frozen wasteland can be a chilling tomb, a dangerous and harsh land far from the relative safety of civilization. A game may make an effort to hammer home the feeling that you’re all alone on a sprawling vista  of snow and ice; nobody will  come to your aid if you get into trouble, and you’ll be lost to the vast emptiness forever if you fail. Not the most relaxing of thoughts.

Popular Mechanics for Ice

When discussing ice in video game culture, you simply can’t forget about the punishing platforming mechanics it can bring to the table — even if you want to. It isn’t just about creating an atmosphere when it comes to ice and video games, as side-scrolling platformers will happily remind you. When ice is introduced into the standard platforming equation, tricky leaps over wide gaps become all the more life-and-death as you fight to remain in control when you land; your character will be slipping and sliding all over the place as the physics you were growing familiar with over the course of the game do a faceplant. I think we all have our share of horror stories that have a platformer’s ice world as their setting.

Blocks, walls, and other structures made of ice can feature heavily as puzzle elements of some sort, whether you’re pushing them around, melting them down, or shattering them, all for the sake of finding hidden goodies or a secret doorway. Learning to detect subtle differences in different ice structures and deal with them accordingly is often the key to a successful exploration. There may also be blizzards to weather, as this fierce force of nature can bring to a game the dangers of reduced visibility and the frightening possibility of getting lost in the snowstorm. Fortunately for video game characters, they’re usually led by the “Powers That Be” to the beginning of the area with a bit of health chipped off instead of being left to die in the howling storm.

Whether you love them or fear them, ice worlds will always be there to lend their capabilities for beauty, bleakness, and brutality to video game mythology.

Now, far be it from me to speak for everyone, but I think it’s fair to say that boss fights are revered as one of the finest features of video game culture. One of the most exciting and memorable aspects of a video game can be its boss battles. After all, if a good deal of the joy of video games can be derived from beating the tar out of ninjas, robots, and aliens that are trying to stop you from saving the president and/or the world, then the biggest and baddest evildoers around are bound to be the most memorable.

So what exactly does it take to make a boss fight truly thrilling? Well, there are as many answers to that question as there are people in the world. Nobody is going to have the same “Top <insertnumberhere> Boss Fights of All Time” list, and that’s because everyone places a different value on the different facets of a fight. Some may not want to suffer the frustration of twitch-based showdowns that require attempt after attempt to get a good feel for them, while others are bored by cinematic sequences and quick-time events and would much rather have full control over every projectile leaped and shot fired.

Then there are RPGs, where some people love powering themselves up to the point that they can pretty much snuff out any poor sap’s life with with a glare, while others embrace the challenge of seeing how greatly they can stack the odds against themselves and still triumph.

How much enjoyment a player gets out of a boss fight comes down to how closely the fight matches the experience he or she wants to have. Do you love that overwhelming sense of accomplishment when you finally understand just how to make that robot master dance for you and you bring him down without taking a single pip of damage? Perhaps you yearn for a more cinematic experience as you harpoon a lake-dwelling grossly-mutated salamander.  That’s not to say that people don’t enjoy a bit from column A and a bit from column B, of course. To put it another way, what fits the needs of the Mega Man experience probably won’t fit the needs of a Resident Evil experience.

Here are the three main factors that I look for in a good boss fight, presented in alliterative “three ‘Ds’” format for your reading pleasure (design, diversity, deadliness). How do they compare to your own criteria?

1. Design: To briefly turn this into an anglerfish analogy, a boss’s design is sort of like the dangling, luminescent antenna, and I’m the hopelessly curious prey. If a game can intrigue me with bosses that boast over-the-top and unconventional designs, I’m going to be drawn to it and very curious to learn more. Are they larger than life, literally and/or figuratively? How many flailing tentacles and gnashing maws do they have? Do they have faces only their mothers could love? Do they even have faces? All important questions! Another aspect I give consideration to that would fall under the general term of “design” is how well the boss is written into the story and, by extension, the buildup before the fight. This aspect of the design matters a lot more for story-driven games as compared to games where the narrative is little more than a formality, of course, but it’s certainly a factor worth considering.
2. Diversity: Much more than the number of boss fights that the game includes (although “as many as possible” is usually pretty nice), diversity deals with how unique each fight feels. Are there interesting patterns to be learned, or are they all just throwing a bunch of lasers and fireballs around? Does that RPG boss have some really creative ways to ruin your day, or is it a simple pattern of attack, heal, repeat? I’ve played plenty of games with awesome-looking bosses that could have been so much more if only the fight was even half as compelling as the design.
3. Deadliness: Great risks and great rewards are often part of the same deal. That reward can even be something as simple as a sense of great accomplishment and I’ll be perfectly happy. Not only does a challenging fight boost the sense of accomplishment I get, it also helps flesh out the boss as a legitimate threat that must be eliminated for the sake of world peace. I’m always disappointed when the boss that impresses me the most from an aesthetic standpoint turns out to be a frail wimp when it comes time to throw down.  As I said earlier in the post, not everyone wants to repeat a fight over and over again until they get it just right, but capturing that sense of accomplishment is really important, even if it’s a matter of allowing players who are struggling with a fight to eventually win and move on with the story but handing out ranks and rewards accordingly.

And so this post ends, but not before I provide a link to a compelling argument (in youtube video form) for the power of boss fights to help ignite that spark of life in a game. It may not surprise you to learn that my example hails from Shadow of the Colossus, a game that absolutely everyone with even a passing interest in video games ought to experience. If you have never played it before (or if you need a reminder), check out Gaius, the third of the sixteen massive creatures you must bring down over the course of the game. No need to catch your jaw on the way down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnNuDwJ_ils

There’s only one way I could ever kick off a blog about video game oddities (see my “About” page if you would like the whole song and dance on this blog’s subject matter), and that’s through something that is, in my humble opinion, a somewhat overlooked aspect of what makes games truly unique as a form of entertainment.

It’s no secret that charismatic villains and great entertainment often go hand-in-hand. With the occasional exception, most stories revolve around a conflict between a protagonist and an antagonist, with a bunch of supporting characters on each side. Video games are, for the most part, no different in that regard. Yet games in which combat is a key focus of the gameplay experience present a unique complication; their length. Your average action game clocks in with at least ten hours these days, and  RPGs have always been monstous experiences that span the course of tens to hundreds of hours.

Then there are many of  the games of generations past, those short n’ deadly all-out action fests in which non-interactive story segments often took a definite backseat to blazing guns and whirling whips. The “story” in those titles unfolded through the many weirdos you had to tangle with on your way to the next boss.

In any case, you aren’t going to go and try to clean the big bad guy’s clock right off the bat, that’s for sure.  You’re too weak for that. You need help! You need to upgrade your abilities! You need to make your way through a bunch of stages that may or may not be relevant to your ultimate goal! So who are you going to beat up on between the opening cutscene and the inevitable final standoff? Who are you going to test your abilities and the might of your allies against? Who are you going to crush underfoot in your tireless march through every volcano and jungle in the land? Why, the unsung heroes of video game culture, of course; the henchmen/henchmonsters!

There are plenty of ways to introduce  small-fry badguys into the action. Sometimes they are direct subordinates of the big cheese; members of their personal army, if you will. In other cases, they’re the animals that populate the land, and, unfortunately for them, they’re between you and your goal for whatever reason. In other games, perhaps the big badguy’s meddling with time, space, and other such things has had the nasty side effect of unleashing the forces of Hell or unspeakable cosmic terrors upon the world. Some games don’t even bother explaining where these hideous demons, aliens and mutants came from, or why they would want to take the time out of their day to stand between you and your destiny; all you really need to know is that that they’re in your way and you’ve gotta blow them up.

Some would argue that they’re all a bunch of glorified stepping stones. So why do I think they’re so great? It’s all about the charm. Video games just wouldn’t be the same without them.  My favourite games often find a way to incorporate the personalities and presences of these enemies into the game’s mythology and atmosphere in ways that bring the whole package to life. The minimalistic shapes of Kirby’s foes fit the brightly-colored world of Popstar and beyond like a glove.  The contorted monstrosities of Silent Hill games give you something to be very afraid of when your radio starts freaking out on you; they’re so disturbing, so unnatural, that the idea that they’re near you is just as frightening as whatever it is they’re going to do with you if they catch you. Dr. Wily’s goofy robots, from flying magnets to umbrellas with eyes, help make Mega Man games a joy to play and really help to hit home the theme that each robot master has going for him (or her!). You can count on future posts to delve into much more detail on what individual games’ crews of baddies contribute to the game experience as whole. It’s a subject that I have a lot of interest in, to say the least.

I think that there’s a veritable gold mine of untapped potential to be had in making interesting situations and characters out of the many strange beings that populate the worlds of video games. Given how tired many people seem to be growing of the same ol’ archetypes, I’m surprised more games aren’t experimenting with these possibilities. Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, which puts you in the shoes of one of Dragon Quest’s famous slime monsters (fine, they don’t actually have feet, sorry), is a great example of the quirky fun that can be had with an unconventional cast of characters. Come now, Square Enix, where’s my “Malboro’s Mission: Dentistry Discoveries”?

This blog will leave the ground very soon. To anyone who has been watching and/or looking in, know that signs of life will be emerging this week, come hell or high water. Preferably neither, though.

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