Kusoge Sunday - Dark Summit

My first two Kusoge Sunday posts featured games that were indisputably kusoge. I knew that, sooner or later, I would have to branch out from that, though, and take on games that are less universally reviled. While I’ve been known to really dislike some critical darlings like Super Mario Galaxy and Uncharted 2, I can at least get some sense of why others would have raved about them. Some games, though, are so bad that even positive critical consensus can’t save them from being labeled kusoge.

Enter Dark Summit, a 2001 snowboarding/adventure game developed by Radical Entertainment, who are responsible for a lot of relatively respectable games, as well as Mario Is Missing! Dark Summit could easily have been nothing more than a quick cash-in on the success of SSX, but to their credit, the people at Radical tried to strike out in a new direction, giving their snowboarding game a story and basing its primary missions around advancing the plot. However, every aspect of the game’s production works against its goals, from ill-advised character designs to boring level layouts.

The presence of a story is the most obvious way in which Dark Summit departs from the SSX formula. However, this is about as perfunctory as game stories get. Heroine Naya decides to trespass on a ski slope that doesn’t allow snowboarders, and gets involved in some vague black helicopter conspiracy nonsense. A shady group wants her to stop the shady plans of...some other shady group. Honestly, I’ve never been clear on exactly what’s supposed to be happening, as the game’s audio presentation is incredibly muddy, and the dialogue is pretty tough to decipher through the constant wall of techno music.

Whatever the story is actually about, it seems clear that Dark Summit wants us to buy into Naya and the other snowboarders who help her unravel the mystery as hip young rebels. That’s impossible, because there’s nothing hip about these characters. The ones who don’t look like extras from a Mountain Dew commercial circa 1998 look like they took up snowboarding as part of a midlife crisis. This is especially true of Naya, who looks like a cougar dressed up for a rave circa 1996.


Even worse than the character designs are the level designs. The supposedly exclusive ski resort at which the game takes place is littered with pools of acid, rusting cars, electric fences and even naval mines. Naya’s drive to ride on such a course might be explained away by her being totally extreme, but why would rich people pay to ski here? We already accept more bad writing in games than we should, but no amount of shouting “It’s just a game!” can excuse this sloppiness. Adding injury to insult is the game’s color palette of sickly browns, greens and yellows, which make you yearn for the crisp blue skies and sparkling white slopes of the SSX games.

Capping off the Dark Summit experience are cumbersome controls that feel designed to keep the player at arm’s length from the action. Any trick more complicated than a simple grab or spin requires a string of button inputs that have no connection to what’s actually happening on screen. Successfully entering the inputs triggers a canned animation that can’t be combined with flips or spins. The significant lag in the controls combined with the rare opportunities for big air mean that you’ll spend a lot of time watching Naya transition from the canned trick animations to the canned falling animation. Speaking of which, the developers couldn’t even be bothered to make unique falling animations for different situations. Dropping off a cliff triggers the same loop of Naya flailing around as running into a wall.

It’s hard to tell how seriously Dark Summit takes itself. It usually feels like the game really wanted to be cool and exciting, but most of the design choices work against that. Like another Radical Entertainment game, Prototype, it feels as though the team recorded a brainstorming session, then transcribed it to be used as a design document. Just as Prototype was constantly introducing new powers that rendered old ones moot (without taking the old ones out of your arsenal), Dark Summit throws out design choices that are at odds with other design choices, until the game is just a mess of contradictions.

Why Dark Summit received largely positive reviews at the time of its release is beyond me. It shouldn’t have, as even by the standards of its time, it was a bad game. But that’s just my opinion, just as the positive reviews were just the opinions of a few critics. The lesson, if there is one, is that game reviews are neither consumer advocacy nor an attempt to uncover the Truth about a game’s quality. They are, and should be, entirely subjective. And Dark Summit’s should have been far more brutal than they were.

Yar's' Revenge(s)

Yar's Revenge is a re-imagining, and re-punctuating, of the great 2600 shooter Yars' Revenge. The latter is one of the few 2600 games that can still hold your attention for more than a few minutes, so I really hope the reboot will be good.

But how this

became this

cries out for explanation.

I don't envy any designer the task of having to update a game as old as Yars' Revenge. Most of the story for 2600 games was told through box art and instruction manual text, which themselves often had very little to do with what players saw onscreen. The graphical and mechanical choices that programmers made were determined by the strict limitations of the hardware. Yet in the best cases, of which Yars' Revenge was one, the results were iconic.

Still, what was iconic on the 2600 usually doesn't make much sense in the context of modern game design. Look at the recent remake of another 2600 game, Haunted House. Having the character turn into a disembodied set of eyeballs every time he walks into the dark is an allusion to the eyeballs that served as the player's avatar in the original Haunted House, but in the modern context, where we want an explanation for most of a character's body disappearing, it's more distracting than endearing.

Now personally, I think a giant mechanical fly is a more interesting main character at this point than yet another anime girl in powered armor. But I'm not going to begrudge the people at Killspace Entertainment their creative license. What mattered most about Yars' Revenge was the gameplay; better to focus on getting than right than worrying about how to render the Qotile in 3D. And in the context of a Panzer Dragoon-style rail shooter (which Killspace namedropped as an inspiration), the basic mechanics of Yars' Revenge could actually work pretty well.

So well, in fact, that people may even forget that they're not playing as a badass space fly.

Everyone Is Clones

The people behind the Indie Games Winter Uprising are promising to provide an alternative to the “massage apps, clones and garbage” that (apparently) make up the bulk of the Xbox Indie Games Marketplace. Let’s set aside for a moment the sour grapes underlying the whole premise (which again undermines the notion, beloved of game journalists, that indie devs are a bunch of cool guys who are above the usual games industry nonsense). What’s so bad about being a clone?

Try to think of a completely new style of game. Go on, really try. Don’t just mix genres, or come up with a scenario that nobody has used within an existing genre. No, try to think of something that nobody has ever done.

Can’t do it? Don’t feel bad, most people can’t. Moreover, most people don’t really want to, including the people who developed the Winter Uprising’s line-up of shooters, RPGs and adventure games. They were happy to work within existing genres, but they also seem happy to take cheap-shots at others for doing the same.

There’s nothing wrong with being a “clone.” For years, all first person shooters were called “Doom clones,” even by people who liked them. Dungeon-crawls like Shiren the Wanderer and Zettai Hero Project are called “Roguelikes” because they’re like Rogue, the progenitor of that particular type of RPG. If you wanted, you could call the seemingly endless parade of modern dual-stick shooters “Robotron 2084 clones.”

None of this is insulting. People like Shigeru Miyamoto, David Crane, John Romero and John Carmack, Roberta Williams, and so on weren’t necessarily the most creative game designers of their time—they were just in the right place at the right time to get their ideas out there first. That others explored the same concepts after them may make them “clones” in a strict sense, but it doesn’t necessarily make them uncreative.

People who think that being unoriginal is necessarily bad are deluding themselves in a couple of ways. First, they think it’s possible to do something that nobody has ever thought of before. Miyamoto’s game designs are original as far as games go, but they borrow ideas from popular fiction like King Kong and Alice in Wonderland. Second, they’re ignoring the long artistic tradition of imposing limits in order to spur creativity. Are poetic forms like the sonnet less creative than free verse? If you’ve ever attended a bad poetry slam, you know the answer.

As for massage apps, Justin Le Clair’s original entry into the genre, Rumble Massage, was just that—original. It was followed by a number of clones, and while I haven’t played any of them, I’m willing to accept that most of them are garbage. But it’s not necessarily true that all of them are.

So what is the uprising really against, since it clearly isn’t really against clones. If it’s against low quality, then more power to those behind it, but they’re being elitists by pretending that it’s impossible for certain products (e.g. massage apps) to be high quality. And if what they really want is for XBIG to contain nothing but traditional gaming experiences (like RPGs and shooters), then they’re actually against originality, since those traditional games are, by definition, derivative.

Anyone who is enthusiastic enough to make a game is probably enthusiastic about games in general, and therefore can’t help but be inspired by the work of others. In other words, everyone is ripping off something, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with slamming your peers for a lack of originality while promoting your own entries into well-worn genres as somehow better.

Kusoge Sunday: Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu

Color Dreams, the developers of numerous unlicensed NES anti-delights, is not normally thought of as a publisher. But publish they did, in between coding classic kusoge like Menace Beach and Baby Boomer. One might have expected them to put their limited resources behind a game that represented a step up from their usual garbage. Such expectations would be misplaced, as Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu makes abundantly clear.

Developed by Sachen, a Taiwanese developer whose unlicensed Famicom games were similar in reputation to Color Dreams' NES games, Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is an unqualified disaster. It should be enough to say that the game seems to have taken its primary inspiration from The Legend of Kage. Its main character (who I suppose is Master Chu) looks, jumps and fights like Kage, and the title screen even has him standing on a high tree branch.

The similarities are all superficial, though. While The Legend of Kage is no masterpiece, it is playable. As nearly as I can tell, there is no way to progress past the third stage in Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu. The object of each stage is to collect eight hidden yin-yang symbols, which opens a door to a boss room. Levels are small and scroll left and right, and there seems to be no way to uncover all the yin-yangs in one trip across the screen. Rather, there are a limited number of hiding places which turn up a different item each time you shoot them, so opening a boss door requires running back and forth through the level a few times, shooting the same spots over and over until all the necessary items show up.

If you think that sounds awful, you're right. But it gets worse. Both characters (Hu is playable in the two player mode, but controls exactly like Chu) are woefully underpowered; it takes three or four shots to put even the weakest enemies down, and bosses feel almost invulnerable. Pressing B causes Chu to swing a fan, which on a few random occasions blocked projectile attacks, but either timing blocks is completely unintuitive, or the mechanic is simply broken, because attempting to block the projectiles that stream out of bosses usually just led to dying.

It's hard to say whether Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is an improvement over Color Dreams' own attempts at game development. On one hand, it looks worlds better. Even though the level designs are depressingly bad, the characters at least don't look like google-eyed monstrosities. But as floaty and loose as the average Color Dreams game is, at least it feels like you could, with enough practice, acclimate to the controls and win the game. Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu, on the other hand, feels like it was released before they coded the bit where your attacks actually damage enemies. In short, it looks marginally better, but is essentially unplayable.

Call it a wash. Just don't let Color Dreams' rare moment of inspiration in renaming this game trick you into actually playing it.