I’m trying to have rational thoughts this morning, but before my brain was even all the way switched on, I saw the trailer for No More Heroes 2 – Desperate Struggle. So that pretty much nuked my ability to have a normal conversation with just about anyone (with a brief interlude to make sure that everyone else found the season premiere of South Park to be as lame and re-tread as I did). Unfortunately, the trailer is only available as an embedded file right now, and the damn thing is choppy as hell. But it’s No More Heroes 2. So we both know I don’t care.

Granted, No More Heroes wasn’t perfect – far from it. But there was so much that was fantastic in that game, and I have faith that Suda 51 can get a lot closer to his original vision than he was able to on the first pass. Hell, even Yahtzee liked No More Heroes in spite of its flaws. Enough to tell you to play it, anyway. So far, the trailer doesn’t give away much, and considering how much the final product differed from Suda 51′s original Heroes trailer, it’s awfully hard to make a serious prediction about the game.

Admittedly, my only fear is that the subtitle “Desperate Struggle” is a sly allusion to the fact that this will be a DS game. Not that it wouldn’t make a good DS game, as I can see a stylus interface working well here. But what made the original No More Heroes so engaging was the balance that Suda 51 created via the control scheme. It was a sword-based brawler that actually made clever use of the motion based Wii controls without causing a severe case of Wii Shoulder. It will be interesting to see if he embraces the Wii Motion Plus or if he retains the feel of the original game. Hopefully the amazing (and surprising) reception this game received from gamers will give Suda 51 a bigger budget to work with and grant the game more coverage as it is developed.

Either way, Travis is back, babies.

So, I’ve been saying from the day Pit was announced as a Brawler that a new Kid Icarus game was in the works. And as soon as I fully understood the relationship between Factor 5 (makers of Rogue Squadron, Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, and Rogue Squadron III: Let’s Go To Hoth A-fucking-gain) and Nintendo, I called it that Factor 5′s new project would be Kid Icarus for the Wii. Apparently, the company’s foray into PS3 land with the tragically crippled controls of Lair was primarily the result of Nintendo being so tight-lipped about both the hardware limitations of the Wii and the motion-sensitive controls.

And on some level, I can’t blame them. Sony already tacked on their tilt controls at the last moment (currently due for execution) and rumors now abound of Xbox motion sensor controls on the horizon. However, it was most definitely not in their best interests to alienate a studio as talented as Factor 5. Especially considering that Factor 5 stuck with them, continued to produce for their console despite it being in third place last generation, and worked technical marvels on the Gamecube. No studio outside of Nintendo can even compare to the graphical feats that Factor 5 squeezed out of that little purple box.

At any rate, news of the new Kid Icarus is already unofficially official, and the developer is apparently so obvious it need not be named. Factor 5, for their part, confirmed they are working on at least one new already existing IP for the Wii, and that it would be neither a Rogue Squadron game nor a joint collaboration on a new Star Fox (which, just so we are clear, needs to happen). The only IP that could possibly fit those criteria, and would be significant enough for Factor 5 to work on, is Kid Icarus. And truth be told, it’s a great match. The original Kid Icarus featured very little actual flight, but the new Brawl version of the wide eyed angel suggests a much more fluid, maneuverable game experience. Now, sure, I could be wrong. Maybe Factor 5 is all pumped up because they are working on Festor’s Second Quest or A Man And His Blob. . . but I doubt it.

Kid Icky is coming back, and if Factor 5 can accomplish on the Wii the level of production value they repeatedly offered on the Gamecube, it should be a hell of a ride.

Attention Electronic Arts! When Mass Effect comes out for the PC, I am going to pirate an illegal copy of it. I don’t really want to. In fact, I was more than happy to pay you fifty of my hard earned dollars in exchange for this game. It is a fantastic RPG, designed and then improved upon by a studio that I remember fondly. It is in many ways an upgrade to the already brilliant (if slightly flawed) Xbox 360 version of the game. Everything about Mass Effect makes me want to play it.

However, the copy protection is quite simply a function of the game that I am utterly unwilling to tolerate. After ten days of inactivity, Mass Effect is going to connect to the internet and verify with your server that it is legitimate if I want to play it again? Fuck you. That is unacceptable. That locks this otherwise brilliant game into the subcategory of “people who are reliably online”. It also puts a sunset on the game tied to whenever you stop validating it, despite it being a single player RPG. The way I see it, if you’re going to treat me like a god damned thief, I might as well enjoy the benefits of thievery.

I really wonder what good this is supposed to do. Everyone reading this is aware that there will be a crack for this new version of SecuROM before the game even makes it to the shelf. Absolutely no piracy is being prevented with this awkward, byzantine game of packet ping pong. It does make me wonder if the box for Mass Effect will have a “requires internet connection” sticker on it. And to be honest, it’s not really the danger of being offline that pisses me off. It’s the presumption that this sort of behavior is even remotely acceptable.

DRM systems like these are notoriously buggy and even exploitable. The whole Sony Root Kit fiasco should have been the slug in DRM’s brain, and I thought it was until I installed Bioshock and was rendered unable to play it for two days because it couldn’t connect to its server and verify that I was not, in fact, a criminal. I neither want nor will allow software on my machine that phones home to check in with mommy on a permanent, ongoing basis.

It makes me question, on a larger scale, the type of insults that gamers are willing to put up with. No other consumer market gets shit on by its suppliers as much, or in such fine detail, as gamers do. Imagine if you had to get your car “certified” by your dealer once a month to prove that you legally own it, or else the engine will fail to start. To say nothing of the thousand other paper cuts that gamers are dealt. No other type of product is sold so woefully incomplete, with the understanding that it will be finished via “patches” months after money exchanges hands. To use the car analogy again, that would be like purchasing a car that didn’t have brakes, with the understanding that in a few months, when the brakes are ready, someone will come around and install them.

This type of DRM, which punsihes the legitimate, paying customer while preventing absolutely no illegal activity, is so pervasive now in all forms of media. Music publishers telling me where I can listen to the songs I’ve purchased. Movie studios setting time limits on how long I’m allowed to spend watching a film. But this new obscenity, where the product you buy routinely checks in with its own publisher to make sure it hasn’t been stolen, that’s just too much.

And part of the problem is that all of the trust is on the side of the buyer. There are real problems now with DRM-based video when the “parent server” goes offline – sometimes permanently – and consumers are locked out of content that they legally purchased and wanted to view. Is Electronic Arts promising to keep their Mass Effect validation server online until the end of time? What happens if people stop buying Madden every damn year and Electronic Arts goes out of business? Are they going to give a shit about me not being able to play Mass Effect? Doubtful. Will I be screwed out of my fifty bucks? You betcha.

And so, Electronic Arts, please be aware that I intend to illegally download a cracked, fully functional version of Mass Effect once it comes out for the PC. Not because I am greedy, not because I am cheap. Not because I want to do harm to the developers and the game designers – quite to the contrary, BioWare is one of my favorite game studios. And not because I’m a no good crimial. I am going to pirate Mass Effect because the official version of the game does not meet my minimum standards for quality and acceptability. You are releasing a gimped version of an otherwise exceptional game. A version that crosses some very ethereal and paranoid boundaries concerning ownership and authority. And I am unwilling to pay you for the experience of being treated like a thief.

Interestingly enough, I can get that for free.

You know who is a really weird mascot? Mario. Seriously. It’s not just that his origins are muddled and absurd. I mean, he’s been a circus hand, a carpenter, and most notoriously a plumber. Nor is it that he always seems to square off against large, oddly named anthropomorphic enemies, from Donkey Kong to Wart to Bowser. It’s that really, other than his propensity for stomping on stuff and his ridiculous voice, we don’t really know anything about him as a character. Yet we all know who Mario is. In the quirky, eight-bit era, where games could star miniaturized Japanese dancer/ninjas or baseball playing robots, that was about as much depth as people were looking for in their gaming protagonists. But the field is very different now, and whether you are looking to macabre titles like Alice, noir adventures like Max Payne, or thought provoking excursions like Metal Gear Solid (itself derived from a very bare-bones eight-bit ancestor), our gaming heroes are all expected to have personalities, back histories, and even deeply rooted flaws for their narratives to exploit.

Not that Nintendo has always been known for its deep character sketches. Amongst its most popular icons, Link’s emotions are often superficial and obvious. Even Samus Aran, the only central Nintendo heroine to have a consistently linear (if staggered) time line, reveals exceptionally little about herself over the course of her ten various titles. But none of them have as little going for them, from a character standpoint, as Mario. He’s an Italian plumber that never does any plumbing, doubles in size when he eats fungus, likes stepping on turtles, and shoots fire out of his fingertips. He is absolutely surreal and, if you get right down to it, a bit creepy.

Yet he stands for something, clearly. He’s the flagship icon of the longest running and arguably most successful gaming company in the history of the business. And despite being cartoony and almost cuddly, even those gamers that consider themselves hardcore enjoy Mario games. And yet if you ask most of them about Mario, they’d probably tell you that they wish Nintendo would change things up a bit more and invent some new IPs instead of trying to bleed their old stanbys dry. Personally, I think the idea of Nintendo presenting a series of new IPs is an awful, awful idea.

For one thing, Nintendo doesn’t have a reputation for deep character analysis, so I don’t even know if they’d get it right. But to a much larger extent, Nintendo’s cast of characters serve as shorthand for the games they star in. I mean, it’d be one thing if every Mario game played out exactly the same. The same levels, the same control schemes, the same gameplay and so forth. Quite the contrary, Nintendo’s original games take familiar architecture and present it in new and different ways. Sometimes it works brilliantly, as in Mario 64. Other times, it isn’t quite as clever a game, as in Super Mario Sunshine. And while we’re on the subject, while I didn’t especially enjoy Super Mario Sunshine, I still contend that part of its mediocre score was because it had to live up to the mythos of Mario 64. Had Sunshine been an independent IP, it probably would have sold fewer copies, but gotten friendlier press.

Nintendo’s mascots set the “given” quantities for their games. You know Mario can jump and stop. You know Link will get a boomerang and a bow. You’re aware that Samus can roll into a ball. But every time they present these characters, things are different. The characters are baselines on which to expand. They are the control group in the game’s scope of experimentation. Nintendo isn’t pulling a Madden on us – releasing the same game over and over with miniscule variations to the gameplay. Rather they are using their mascots as a context for what sort of game people can expect.

And that is taken to a whole other level with the Mario characters, since they star in so many non-platforming games. They play sports and race buggies and engage in life-sized board games. Mario sports titles tend to be goofy and eccentric – not a genuine recreation of a sport but more of a caffeine fueled head butt to the sport they are playing. They are wild and absurd, while still retaining the core sports mechanics. Those of you who have played Strikers know exactly what I mean here. Or look at Mario Kart – in theory, it should be infinitely less popular than Nintendo’s other racing offering, F-Zero. And while the F-Zero series still has its fans (as it well should), you can’t argue with the phenominal success of Mario Kart.

So why does a game like Mario Kart work, even though the racers are all out of context and the premise is incredibly arbitrary? Well, for one thing, it’s no more arbitrary than an Italian plumber who stomps on evil mushrooms to save a princess from a fire breathing turtle. In many ways, simply the inclusion of the Mario IP frees Nintendo from the consistent burden of realism that so many games insist upon. But more than that, the game provides its players with so many known quantities and so many understood mechanics.

Gamers know that if they pick Bowser, they are going to be slow but strong. If they pick Toad, they will be light and agile. If they pick Mario, they will be well rounded. Gamers know what a koopa shell does, more or less. They’re aware that getting the star is something that they really want to do. Could Nintendo have invented a completely different racing game, with all new characters that no one had ever heard of before, instead of treading out their standard mascots to race go-karts? Absolutely. And once again, it was called F-Zero. Guess which series is the greater success.

What Nintendo is suggesting by re-using its mascots is that the window dressing is only that. It doesn’t really matter what your character looks like or what your objective is, as long as the gameplay is solid and engaging. Nintendo IPs exist as a sort of quality guarantee on a game. You see Mario on the cover, and you have some idea of what sort of game you are going to be playing. If the game stars a dude named Link, you’re aware of the sorts of adventure / puzzle elements you will come across. With very few exceptions, Nintendo has taken care of its stable of mascots and icons. Think about it. Which game would you be more likely to shell out $50 for: Super Mario Touchdown or Wacky Fun Time Football?

All of this brings me to Super Smash Brothers Brawl, a game that originally wasn’t going to star Nintendo’s mascots. The original idea was to create a different kind of fighting game, where health gauges weren’t the cut-and-dry indicator of victory or defeat. And, more specifically, to rework the Street Fighter II formula so that more than two people could play at once (since the N64 came with 4 controller ports). It wasn’t until well after the game was in development that the choice was made to have it star Nintendo’s established gaming characters. Some tellings of the story even suggest that because the game didn’t have any graphics worked up for it yet, Mario was used almost as a placeholder.

But once again, the inclusion of Nintendo character game Super Smash Brothers a baseline to work off of. People could pick up a controller and have some idea of what characters they were playing and how they could expect them to interact. And Nintendo routinely plays loose enough with its characters – especially in these non-canon style games – to make sure that the inclusion of their icons doesn’t get in the way of the fun of the game. I mean, let’s be honest. In a “fair” fight, Samus Aran would be able to splatter most of the other characters in SSB into smears on the floor in a matter of seconds. Hell, if the game were forced to stay true to the very loose storylines of its respective series, there’d be no reason to ever rescue Princess Peach again – she could just kick Bowser’s ass and be done with it. Instead, Nintendo has set up an interesting and damn near unique pseudo-world with Smash Brothers, where their established avatars retain their appearances, abilities and concepts, but those concepts are fitted around the greater architecture of their new game. It’s sort of like a great big Nintendo-fueled game of Rifts.

Nintendo’s original IPs will always have a place in the mainstream of gaming so long as Nintendo takes care of them, prevents them from being exploited for awful schlock, and consistently uses them to show us something new. One bad thing you can’t say about Super Mario Sunshine is that it was the same old Mario platforming game all over again. You may hate the look of Wind Waker and get bored by the constant sailing, but it was a radical departure from Ocarina of Time. Though perhaps no departure was more severe, more risky, or more well received than the Metroid Prime games. And it looks like there is, in fact, a new Kid Icarus title in the future (my money is on Factor 5 as the developer).

Long live Mario.

Super Mario Galaxy really is an exceptional game. I know, as revelations go, that’s right up there with “Water is wet”. But I’ve been on a serious SMG kick for the past few days and I know I haven’t really addressed the game here despite it being, truly, a Wii flagship title. So here’s my review: If you own a Wii, and you don’t own Super Mario Galaxy, you are criminally retarded.

So much for the review. But not so much for the game. Because for me, what Galaxy speaks to is the confusing way in which gaming has evolved over the years. The basic premise of the game is that Mario has to fly to different galaxies collecting (what else?) stars. The more stars he collects, the more worlds he is able to fly to. Once he acquires sixty stars, he will be able to fly to the final boss battle and save the Princess. Except, there are one hundred and twenty stars in the game. So you really only need to acquire half of them in order to win.

And understand this well – the game is not linear. In fact, if you do very well on the earlier boards, it is entirely possible to skip right to the boss battles for the last several worlds, bypassing all of the interim stages. Essentially, that is Galaxy’s answer to warp zones, which is another Mario staple. And yet, in the earlier Mario games, warp zones served a very specific purpose. Because you could not save your game, and because extra lives were scarce, warp zones were often the only way that many players could hope to beat the game. Gamers didn’t see them as a cheat but rather as a trick. Hell, I must have beaten the original Super Mario Brothers a dozen times before I ever saw World 7-1.

But in a gaming era where running out of extra lives is either neigh impossible or simply isn’t an option, and where you can save your game to complete it over the course of weeks or months if you care to, what function does skipping content actually provide? Certainly completing every star in Galaxy would be beyond the call for some gamers, as many stars are acquired by performing rehashes of previous levels with the situation altered (the enemies are faster, or you die the first time you get hit and so forth). Additionally, many of the hidden stars are so bloody well hidden that it would be unreasonable to expect younger or more inexperienced gamers to find them.

But if you do find them, you can essentially skip the second half of the game. And on some level, I think I have a problem with that. Content means a very different thing in games now than it does twenty-odd years ago. Nowadays, content is a commodity that is traded and paid for rather than a challenge to be overcome. Expansion packs, map packs, and now even weapon packs all cost extra cash, and what you are buying is a longer or more enriched experience. Well, that’s the theory, anyway. In an MMO, content is often locked by progression, or doled out in patches throughout the year. Some people will grind their characters for week, months, even years so they can be rewarded with new content. In Super Mario Galaxy, apparently, the reward is being able to skip that same endgame-style content.

It also raises the question of whether or not a game is about the ending or the experience. Perhaps for a game like Galaxy, where the plot is so unabashedly paper-thin that you could probably act it out with sock puppets, the game has to be about the experience – even if you accept that part of that experience is the final boss fight. And yet if the game really is measured in the sliding scale of “percentage beaten” rather than the simple pass/fail metric of reaching the end, then would a person who only achieved 99% of the game’s content be said to have not beaten it?

And to be fair, the content in Galaxy is skippable on a scale that most games would never consider. Even other Nintendo offerings, like Metroid Prime 3 and Zelda: Twilight Princess required you to at least put in the bare minimum amount of effort in every stage to progress to the next one. Sure, you didn’t have to get every last missile expansion or wolf down every last Poe, but it wasn’t as though you could skip entire planets or dungeons, either. But as far as raw content goes, you were still skipping part of the experience. And where Galaxy takes the adventure game and distills it to its most raw concepts, it’s mostly comparable.

Consider sandbox-style games like Grand Theft Auto. I know plenty of people that haven’t beaten all of the Grand Theft Auto III series, some not at 100% and some not at all. Yet they own all three titles. Which is to stay that after actively failing to play all of Vice City, they still anted up for San Andreas. Content upon content, all locked and unbeaten. For that matter, what about a game like Mass Effect – where there can be 20 hours of content or 100 hours, depending on your investment in the game. I know plenty of people who didn’t come close to beating all Mass Effect had to offer, and yet they were excited, almost irrationally so, over the downloadable content for the game.

I suspect I’ll revisit these thoughts in a few weeks when I finally sit down at tackle Assassin’s Creed, which also features a wealth of optional content. But Galaxy is still in its own league not just in terms of how much of it is skippable, but because a lot of that skippable content is extremely good. That may be the difference. Even casual players are going to unlock some of the hidden stars in Galaxy. A number of them practically bludgeon you over the head as you pass through the stage. So it won’t be tedious collection quests or annoying escort missions that players can skip. It will be some of the most challenging and engaging levels the game has to offer. It does create a line where the concept of skipping content is quite different than the concept of warping past it.

And there are probably a few people who think this entire discussion is absurd. That they just want to beat their game so they can catch the game, or go out to a show or, in the case of us addicts, load up their next game. For those players, I wonder, where exactly is the end of the game? I know for myself, I usually start out trying to acquire all of the content before beating the game – and if beating the game with 100% of the content unlocked yields a better ending, I almost follow through. But some games seem to think they can add extra play-hours by not giving you any bloody clue as to where the remaining content is. If the game world takes me an hour just to cross, and I have 99% of the collections and content finished, my desire to spend another week looking for the one little gem (or ghost. . . I’m looking at you Zelda team) that I missed? Not really there.

I guess the answer is that completionist gaming is great – until it pisses me off. More on this topic after Altair and I waste some dudes.

The new logo for Suda 51′s Grasshopper Manufacture is a mixmash coat of arms, which clearly reads across the bottom “Punk’s Not Dead” and it would seem that No More Heroes is Suda 51′s very real effort to prove that fact. The game is loud and garish and completely over the top, from the cutscene dialogue right down to the half motorcycle, half tank that protagonist Travis Touchdown drives. No More Heroes is about breaking the rules.

But not just in the obvious ways. The game breaks a lot of design rules as well. Unfortunately, one of those rules is, “In the year 2008, it is completely fucking unacceptable for objects and scenery to ‘pop’ into existence at a walkable distance.” Luckily, that rule only gets broken in non-combat areas. But that’s really a technical issue, and I mention it first as a personal irritant. There are many more important rules that No More Heroes breaks, such as the ubiquitous need that games have lately to try to disguise the fact that they are games. It started, I think, as 3D graphics began making serious advances. When characters’ hands had actual fingers instead of being blunted trapazoids with lines on them. When skin suddenly had texture. When clothing moved like actual cloth instead of plates of cardboard.

Studios were spending all of this money trying to make their games look more realistic. They still are, obviously, and with the advent of real physics engines in games, that’s going to continue to escalate. But somewhere along the line, it became common wisdom that the graphics were a function of the realism, and that realism was the goal. So the gaming industry began cramming all sorts of ridiculous tropes into games that they didn’t need in order to keep them realistic (where the term realistic can encompass worlds where aliens invade, zombies walk the earth, and World War II never bloody ends). The idea is that you can increase the realism if you prevent people from remembering they are playing a game.

And in certain genres, that’s a good thing. Part of what made Resident Evil 4 such a success was that despite thinking about aiming mechanics and ammo collection, there were plenty of moments where a enemy leaped out at you and it scared you pissless. A game like RE4 had to strive for realism in order to achieve its mood and feel. But now it seems that every game is doing this, many to the point of either hiding the user interface or else trying to make it part of the scenery. The new Ghostbusters game, for example, will not have a UI at all, but rather all of your relevant statistics will be indicated by the lights on the back of your proton pack. And don’t get me wrong, that’s cool as hell. But for every game that does integration brilliantly, there are another ten that do it like crap. And then you still remember you are playing a game, because you are struggling with the UI. So the realism is lost, and on top of that, you’re annoyed at the developers.

No More Heroes doesn’t give a rat’s ass if you remember it’s a game. In fact, it goes out of its way to remind you that you’re playing a game. All of the on-screen indicators, from waggle information to locations on the map, are indicated with huge, square, three dimensional pixels. The UI is this insane compilation of a digital watch minimap, a rolling slot machine, a battery life indicator, a large, beating pixel-based heart, and a lounging 8-bit tiger. Even as you progress through the ranks in the game, that progress is tracked via a “High Scores” list that looks like it was pulled from a 1980′s Galaga clone arcade machine. The mini-missions and side quests are designed to both be non-realistic and poke fun at the arbitrary side quests that are accepted as gaming convention. I mean, you’re an assassin with a laser sword, but you earn cash on the side pumping gas, cutting lawns, and even picking up litter with over-the-top animations and arbitrary time limits. It’s all Suda 51′s way of telling you, “Hey, asshole. You’re playing a game. Remember?” He leaves the fourth wall just barely in tact.

But he goes beyond simply making the game-ness of No More Heroes obvious. In a lot of ways, what Suda 51 has created is a living embodiment of the idea of a modern video game. It’s the caricature that people accusingly point their finger at when ridiculing games. It’s unrealistic, the violence is so gratuitous that you can’t even take it seriously (you can slice people clean in half, and they literally erupt in blood and coins like you just blasted open a very bloody, wealthy fire hydrant). All of the female characters are exceptionally hot, wear almost no clothing, and flirt with Travis (even the one who’s missing a leg). Though Suda 51 paints Travis as such an out of touch geek that nothing ever comes from it, and actually manages to work some character development into that otherwise obvious internet cliche.

When irate pundits on Fox And Friends decide they need something to be outraged about, and begin talking about the violence orgies that all video games clearly are, those of us who play just shake our heads and sigh. No More Heroes stops and asks the question, “Well, what would happen if you did get extra points for cutting peoples’ heads off and breaking their spines?” The first answer is that it would be hilarious. The second, less obvious answer is that it would actually make the violence itself much less realistic. It removes the hightened sense emotional charge from combat that you get in a game like Resident Evil 4, while still keeping the combat fun, satisfying, and completely over the top. That is the other way in which No More Heroes retains its punk lineage. It says to the world, “This is what video games are, eh? Well be careful what you ask for, bitches, you just might get it.”

And just a note on the combat – yes, if you walk around randomly mashing the “A” button, you can probably slog through most of the normal enemies on easy mode. But that’s true of most games. Most enemies in Twilight Princess could have been killed by rushing up to them and flailing the Wiimote like an idiot. But the combat system can be a game of finesse and style if you want it to be. Certainly, on larger packs of enemies and bosses it quite literally has to be if you want to progress. The inclusion of the “killing blow” mechanic, where you get an arrow telling you which way to perform your kill strike, and you must swipe the Wiimote accordingly, gives me just enough sword swinging action to keep me satisfied without making my arm tired after a few hours of progression.

As for the graphics, which I know I’ve already criticized? They are what they are. Sometimes, they look very cool. Other times, you’re running around a large mansion thinking, “Oh, there’s that ugly ass texture again.” Honestly, I think the first stage where the tutorial takes place was a very poor choice because it’s probably one of the least interesting looking stages in the game (until you reach the boss). The style is like a very updated version Killer 7, in that it’s both textured and cell shaded, and the characters are slightly cartoony while retaining mostly realistic animations. It is supposed to look like an underground comic book, and in that sense it finds success. And the special effects themselves, the combat lighting and the explosions, look very sharp. In other words, it’s not going to be Bioshock. But thankfully, it’s not Daikatana, either.

A lot of people have been writing that if you liked Killer 7 (and in that case, welcome to my very small minority), then this game is for you. But I’d expand that, because even I can admit there was a lot not to like about the brilliantly flawed Killer 7. Instead, I think it’s fair to say that if you wanted to like Killer 7, then you will like No More Heroes. Not because they are the same game – far from it. But because No More Heroes does a lot of the things that Killer 7 wanted to or should have done, but was simply unable to accomplish. It fulfills the promise of the early Killer 7 previews, while managing to remain light hearted and amusing. And for sheer stress relief, I don’t know if I’ll ever find a game where hacking through a pack of baddies with a great big laser sword will be quite as satisfying.

The game does take some adjustment. I first played it for an hour or so, beat the initial mission, then put it down to do some other things. I enjoyed it, but the compulsion to continue playing wasn’t quite there yet. Then I picked it back up about an hour and a half later and played it for almost half of a day straight. Maybe I needed that time to process what I’d just played. Who can say? Being only half-way through the game, it’s possible that my final verdict will be different (and I certainly will have a completion post and review). But for those of you wondering if No More Heroes is worth your $50? Well, that probably depends. If you want to play Grand Theft Lightsaber, don’t bother buying No More Heroes. If you refused to play Wind Waker because it didn’t use reflection maps on Link’s sword, skip out on Suda 51′s latest. But if you like games, and have an actual sense of humor? I’m officially making No More Heroes your next mandatory purchase.

So, when talking about video games, and especially online type games, there is always the eight hundred pound gorilla known as World of Warcraft lumbering in the backdrop of the conversation. I don’t think anyone could have predicted how popular of a game WoW became – Blizzard certainly didn’t when they launched it with a fraction of their current server backbone. But even their frantic upgrading couldn’t have anticipated the seven to nine million players they currently collect monthly fees from.

I won’t belabor the WoW popularity discussion, as it has been done to death. Blizzard released a high quality product with a very thoroughly populated world that was easy to play and difficult to master. And more than anything else, they were able to largely hide the grind of the classic MMO behind the dressings of quests and instance runs. And when the grind couldn’t be completely hidden, it was at least directed and partitioned off into little bit sized chunks – no matter how you feel about having to collect eight lizard scrotums so that Dorko the Chef can make you his famous Lizard Dangle Crumbcakes, it’s no where near the monotonous dread of say, killing nothing but blue crabs for several real-time days worth of your life in Final Fantasy XI.

There are all sorts of reasons, though the sliding scale of involvement is clearly one of them. I know people who play just to tinker with alts, and that’s a reasonable way to play. I know people who play only together, slowly picking away at pairs or groups of characters to get them up to level 70. And I know people that take an alt from creation to outlands in a surge of grindgasmic power leveling. The game supports all of these play styles. It tells casual players that there is plenty for them to do, and it tells hardcore players that endgame content will (for various reasons) be their exclusive playground. And while both of those decisions pinch the players in the middle, it’s a full enough world to support them.

In short, World of Warcraft is a huge success. Too huge, for some people’s tastes. Especially other MMO developers. Because so far, no one has been able to make even a slight dent in Blizzard’s insanely large player base and market share. Sure, the numbers fluctuate, but it’s hard to attach those numbers to the rise of an alternate MMO. Part of the problem is that the gaming industry has an in-built fear of innovation. Of trying something different. A brief tour of your local GameStop will confirm that fact. For example, as Yahtzee recently pointed out over at Zero Punctuation, the Medal of Honor series has been going on longer than the actual second World War.

So when companies try to take on the MMO market (which means taking on Warcraft) their primary method of attack is to examine what is already on the market and try to make small improvements to it. In theory, that should work, since it’s how World of Warcraft was originally designed. Blizzard freely admitted that they were sifting everything good from the MMO market and dropping everything bad. The idea was to make WoW a highlight reel for the genre, and in that respect they largely succeeded. Of course, they’ve moved beyond that concept now, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work again since the MMO market – and even Warcraft itself – has changed so much since the fall of 2004.

The problem is that it’s not working. Now, some of the blame lies on developers who have neither the time nor the budget to polish their offerings the way Warcraft has been polished. And many of the titles that come out are just not as good as Warcraft is, even when you consider the title’s faults and shortcomings. I was very ramped up for Tabula Rasa, and when I started playing it, I compared it to all of the other MMOs I’ve played. That it’s UI reeked of Star Wars Galaxies didn’t help, but in the end I found that most of its originality was just a crappier window dressing on the same old grind. Even the chat channels in Tabula Rasa were over-run with Warcraft discussions.

Here’s the thing. Even if you had the budget and the capacity to produce a game that was everything Warcraft currently is, but also 15% “more” Warcrafty, your product would still be a mediocre success by comparison. I heard endless hype that Lord of the Rings was going to bounce Blizzard’s cash machine on its head, and no such thing happened. I heard that story told before Tabula Rasa launched, and the game is a piecemeal slog at best. I am hearing the same thing about the new Conan MMO, and expect equally unimpressive returns. There are things that game developers just don’t seem to understand about Warcraft, so it’s up to me and my huge, huge ego to explain it to them.

1) The majority of World of Warcraft players are not deciding between Warcraft or another MMO. They are deciding between Warcraft or SportsCenter. Or Warcraft or drinking. Or Warcraft or watching a movie. Simply put, the vast majority of the game’s player base isn’t comprised of enthusiast gamers. That was the unexpected factor in WoW’s original success. These players will never be lured away from Warcraft to another similar MMO because there is no return on that investment for them. I’m willing to bet that better than 75% of Warcraft’s player base has never played another MMO, perhaps doesn’t even know of any other MMOs currently out on the market.

2) The gaming market does not need another shoddy remake of World of Warcraft. Please stop making them. Part of that problem is the fantasy setting (which has been done to death, and which is probably the only reason I gave Tabula Rasa the time of day). Part of that problem is the formula. And part of that problem is the pacing of the game – FFXI players who have tried Warcraft know what I mean here. Take a look at your MMO and, without employing any of the phrases used by your PR department, try to explain to a casual gamer why they should quit Warcraft, give up their army of alts and their progression (to say nothing of the group they play with) to play your MMO instead. Can’t do it? Then don’t make that game.

3) The next MMO to have a major impact on the gaming market will be decidedly different from Warcraft. And I don’t just mean setting it in space or forcing PvP or just some other lame re-hash of the current MMO parameters. It’s not as though Warcraft is free of faults and problems – it has plenty. But no MMO seems interested in capitalizing on them. In fact, most other designers seem unable to understand them at all. Yet Warcraft has enormous, troublesome issues that never get properly addressed by Blizzard because the rest of the game design prevents them from being so addressed. And by looking at these issues, our theoretical “next MMO” starts to materialize.

First off, Warcraft has been out for over three years now, and the character classes are in a constant state of flux. So much so that Blizzard seems to have given up trying to balance them, and instead chooses to purposefully overpower them rotation-style, so that every class spends part of the year overpowered and part of the year gimped by comparison. What started as a one-time “class review” to fix these issues has turned into a constant swing of buffs and nerfs, to the point where reading the next set of patch notes either elicits cries of joy or torrents of profanity from most players. Blizzard has turned this problem into a way to keep the classes feeling new and fresh, but in the end, it’s maddenly frustrating for many players.

Most of the WoW players I know long for more stability in their characters – especially those players that are more engaged than casual gamers and yet not hardcore raiders. This is a group of players that comprises a huge portion of the total player base, and is the target audience that any future MMO needs to entice. A brief scan of the WoWJutsu main page shows that less than 5% of the players in the game have seen the inside of Black Temple and Mount Hyjal, and an even smaller percentage have actually completed those instances. Even the previous tier of raids, Serpentshrine and The Eye, have been completely beaten by only 7% and 5% of the total player base. And ing the next patch a new Sunwell instance is being released that will come after Mount Hyjal in the progression.

So what we have in World of Warcraft is a game where well over 80% of the player base – doesn’t get to the end of the game. In fact, they don’t even make it near the end. Admittedly, some of them just don’t have the skill required (we’ve all been in parties like that), but many of them lack either the blockable time or the sheer manpower necessary to seriously get into the raiding portion of the game. And for many players, joining a serious raiding guild simply drains the fun out of the game to the point where it becomes more stressful and less rewarding than their actual job – you know, the one they get paid for?

For some reason, Blizzard can see the difference between their casual and hardcore players, but they are utterly unable to see the players in between. Again, as WoWJutsu shows us, over 90% of the scanned 70′s have at least entered Karazhan, the first 10 man raid in the game, and better than 60% of them have beaten the entire raid. And while the “serious” raiders may scoff, that still requires coordination and teamwork for a group of players with no raid gear and probably little raid experience. I know firsthand that working in a small to medium sized guild, juggling players, schedules and real life attentions, many of those players are probably capable of much more, but simply don’t all have the time, or the matching hours, or in some cases the sheer number of best-case-scenario players to go after the larger content. But they are also uninterested in leaving their own guild to grind through someone else’s DKP system.

So even if you take that 60% of the player base that has completely cleared Karazhan, and remove from it the 15% that has made any serious dent in Serpentshrine or The Eye, you’re still left with almost half of the World of Warcraft player base that is likely interested in more actual game, but is kept from that content by the structure of the game itself. The players that are neither casual nor hardcore. The people who can’t spend Tuesday through Sunday raiding, but also yearn for more than welfare epics. So if you woud permit me a second list in a single posting, here’s what the next breakthrough MMO needs to feature in order to compete, on any serious level, with World of Warcraft.

1) First off, it needs to figure out how to deal with the grind, and in terms I can understand that means hiding it. Warcraft was able to disguise the grind with a lot of content, and no MMO that hands out randomly generated “kill this” quests (SWG) or, worse yet, has no questing system and expects XP parties to form and wander around killing the same three monsters for hours at a time (FFXI) is going to attain significance. Basically, the new product can’t be worse than Warcraft in any way – although it could easily be harder, since the middleground player demographic doesn’t need their XP spoon-fed to them. It just needs to be fun to attain. And while the Bind on Pickup and Instancing systems for loot helped WoW avoid much of the economic ruin that other MMOs have suffered, the randomness needs to be scaled back somewhat. Nothing kills the thrill of victory like the realization that no one present can use the loot, and as soon as that sort of group content becomes a grind in and of itself, it also becomes a failure.

2) Secondly, obviously, the mechanics and the UI need to work well. Warcraft opened the MMO market up to the modding community, and most of what works about the Warcraft UI was originally tacked on by the player base themselves. It’s a brilliant way to develop a UI (literally allowing players to decide what they want on their screens, letting them build it, and then just copying that design). But beyond the interface, obviously, the game content needs to be there. Again, this all falls under the major topic of “at least as good as WoW”, and is practically assumed over the course of this discussion. I’m looking at you, [insert Sony Online Entertainment product name here]!

3) Classes needs stability. Warcraft’s skills and talent points are an expansion from Diablo II’s talent trees, and that’s a fine source to draw on. However, Warcraft so badly mismanaged hybrid classes that it took an expansion and the planned obsolescence of all pre-expansion content to fix them, and anyone who plays the game can tell you they are not truly fixed. I know my hybrid started as a nuker, finished the old world as a healer, and is currently a tank, all according to the random whims of how Blizzard decided to shift the classes (and often their misleading descriptions). Compare the classes in World of Warcraft to the much more single-serving classes in Final Fantasy XI, and the difference is clear. And while I think FFXI has far too many DPS classes compared to its tanks and healers, those classes all perform their tasks in their own interesting ways and with their own unique styles.

4) There also has to be some way to make tanking and healing more rewarding tasks, a problem that no MMO has truly resolved yet. Bluntly put, tanks and healers have more difficult jobs than other classes in any MMO on the market, and yet they get the crappiest rewards in terms of gear and progression. About the only thing going for those roles is that they are in demand – because so few people enjoy performing them. When is the last time in any MMO that, when asked to join a group, you checked first to make sure they had enough DPS? In WoW, that is laughable. In FFXI, that’s tooth grindingly obnoxious to even read. And the truth is that I don’t know how to solve this problem. You can’t give tanks and healers the same damage output as DPS classes, at least not at the same time. Maybe role shifting mechanics need to be part of tanking and healing. But if you don’t give them damage capabilities, they will always be seen as less desirable roles. Even in non-MMO games, tanking and healing roles are seen as being less fun (join a Team Fortress 2 game at random – the team that wins always has Medics, but you never see people knocking each other over to play the class). The closest I’ve ever seen an MMO come to this was City of Heroes, but even that title had a long way to go.

5) Endgame content has to be accessible to smaller groups. Not under-geared groups, and not groups short on skill, either. But I contend that the number one reason for middleground players not reaching endgame content is the player requirement, plain and simple. If you want to raid big, Warcraft will always be your game. And yes, there are some encounters that were only engaging and possible because of the size of the raid. But again, there’s already a game that fields those encounters, and it is called World of Warcraft. A game that allows smaller groups of players to enjoy endgame content at their own pace, on their own schedule, and without recruiting a stable of random strangers will attract the many middlegrounders that are tired of gearing up newer players or grinding alts out of boredom. And it’s not as though there is no model for this style of play. Heroic Dungeons in WoW hinted at this concept, but didn’t go nearly as far as they could have. But that was by design.

Now, some people would accuse these ideas of taking the “Massive” out of “Massively Multiplayer Online”. Well, accuse away, because the idea doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I know the best times I’ve had in any MMO I’ve ever played were cutting through instanced content with my closest group of gaming buds and leveling up small clusters of characters in static parties. To be honest, the best time I’ve ever had with any MMO was taking my first character up from 30 to 60 at the same time as a friend of mine. Then, of course, we reached the outer whispers of endgame content, he specced Prot, I specced Resto, and we more or less had to travel in different circles to see the next stage of the game. At which point we both largely stopped playing.

But that’s my point. I think most players, and certainly all of the middlegrounders I know, would rather play with the five to ten people they like the most than with the twenty-five to forty people who are online the same nights they are. What separates MMOs from other genres of gaming is the concept of cooperative play towards a greater persistent goal. The current way most MMOs are organized deters or otherwise prevents many players from reaching those goals without sacrificing at least some of the aspects of the game that they value most. Remove the brick wall from between your player base and the game you’ve so lovingly crafted, and players will thank you for it – to the tune of $15 per month each.

So, I’ve had the Child’s Play banner up on the site pretty much from when Penny Arcade started up the project again this year, and I just thought I’d drop a little line about it here. As a gamer, I feel like it’s my duty to take part in Child’s Play. But it’s a duty I am both proud and happy to perform. I usually take part in a few different toy drives anyway around this time of year. But there is none I am so pleased to contribute to as Child’s Play.

It’s Gabe and Tycho’s creation, but it belongs to all of us. It is unique in that it is a charity drive supported almost entirely by the gaming community. And on some level, yes, it is our statement that despite being scapegoats for every whackjob that brings a gun to church or a bomb to school, that stereotype neither represents nor defines us. But it’s so much more than that. It’s a triumph of generosity and spontaneity and the incredible good that can be done when so many individuals rise to the occasion.

But more than any of that, it’s about the kids. Now, if you read my site, you know that I discredit just about anyone that uses “Think of the children!” as an excuse for their own personal motivations. But that’s because so many people hide so much false charity and concern behind that empty slogan. What’s great about Child’s Play is that they have almost no overhead. The toys and the money (which then gets translated into more toys) all wind up in the hands of kids who got dealt a lousy hand. The Child’s Play website has an entire page full of letters and testimonials they have received – and if you haven’t donated yet, a few of those letters will definitely put you over the edge.

Plus, you know, there’s the fact that Child’s Play has a very legitimate shot at breaking $1 million in donations this year. The mind reels. The heart swells. And the mouse clicks.

Okay, so I just want to get something out of the way right now. However silly you look playing a normal Wii game, it is necessary to multiply that by a factor of at least twenty when playing Guitar Hero. I don’t care what sorts of decals you have on your controller, or how awesome your stereo is, or whether you are wearing your tightest leather pants at the time. Every one of us looks like a sugar-rushed three year old plunking away on a Fisher Price noisemaker, and that’s before we get excited about the game and start gyrating along with the song itself.

With that out of the way, Guitar Hero III is quite outstanding. And while I wish more bands would give up their master tracks to be included in the game (I’m looking at you, KISS), the ones that are present are exceptional – I will admit that I performed all of the afore-mentioned visual atrocities while playing the actual version of Paint It Black. I haven’t yet unlocked The Devil Went Down To Georgia (hey, a guy has a raid schedule to maintain), but I am looking foward to losing a vast number of hours to that one song alone. The one complaint I really do have about it is that it works better as Guitar Hero than Guitar Hero III. If taken compared to its predecessors, it doesn’t offer a terrible lot of “new” aside from online play. But the quality of what it does offer is first rate.

I’m also happy to report no Wii-related problems (at least with the offline version of the game, I haven’t gone online yet). The Wiimote fits nicely into the guitar, though I suggest socketing it in before you start the game up. I had the guitar face-down on the floor to install the Wiimote and it threw off the calibration of the whammy bar until I reset the game. You can also leave your Wiimote socketed inside the guitar between sessions, as the buttons themselves work fine from inside the housing and the thumb pad on the guitar face allows you to move the Wii menu pointer when you first start up the system. I’ll admit I was a bit worried that the Wii version would be a rush job and a short shaft, but so far it’s played just like I’d expect any version of Guitar Hero to play.

So what is it about a game like Guitar Hero that makes it so compelling? I’ve been asking myself that question for three titles and several expansion packs now, and I’m still not sure I have an answer that fully satisfies. Obviously, the hardware is part of it. The game just wouldn’t be quite as much fun if you were holding down frets with your right thumb and strumming with a trigger. Why we allow ourselves to feel like rock stars while doing something so very uncool is a bit of a mystery. And again, make no mistake about it. Clicking away on a plastic toy while watching notes little circles move across a guitar neck is about as far away from being a rock star as one can get. Yet it really grabs people.

Maybe it’s the immediacy of music. And it’s probably somewhat a matter of favoritism (we all perform better on the songs we know by heart already). I originally expected Guitar Hero to be a sideshow affair for the musically deficient, but that’s not the case. In fact, most of the people I know that play Guitar Hero the the most are actual musicians that can make actual music with actual instruments, and have no need for placebo style interfaces like Guitar Hero. Yet they seem to take even more pleasure from the game than I do.

And it’s not like Guitar Hero is the only concept based game out on the market. It uses the same principles as the Donkey Konga games, or even a variety of smaller games such as Boom Boom Rocket on X-Box Arcade. And yet none of them have really caught on in the same way that Guitar Hero has. So why does a simple timing and rhythm game that makes you look like a tool while you play it latch on to people so completely? Is it really just that we’re craving a different experience, and this happens to be one of those rare examples of difference and great intersecting? Or is Guitar Hero just Dance Dance Revolution for lazy motherfuckers?

Personally, I think it speaks to the fact that so many gamers are getting burned out on the same game over and over again. There is a vast amount of recycled content out there, to say nothing of recycled design. It should be no surprise that upstart companies and, in some cases, homebrew projects are garnering so much attention. Way back in the day, Counter-Strike was nothing more than a modification for Half-Life, as was its WWII brother Day of Defeat. These were simple, defined, rule-oriented games built with someone else’s tools, and yet Half-Life hardly even needs a multi-player component because of their popularity. And even as I type, there are probably hundreds of new player-made Portal levels in the works (and I’ll be joining those ranks once the SDK has proper Portal support – I’m just too much of a lazy motherfucker to rig it to work right now on my own).

Even Nintendo is getting in on the act, including a level editor for Smash Brothers Brawl. Players will be able to design their own level concepts, trade them with friends, and submit them to Nintendo, which will publish the best of those submissions as downloadable freebies. Now, a cynic might say that Nintendo is just cashing in on the hard work of the gaming community. But when the community is so eager to produce its own content, why should they be denied the tools to do so? And using the CS and DoD models, it can potentially open the door for designers and artists who have the creative capacity to make great games, but simply lack the toolset or the engine or, in some cases, the coding staff.

Now sure, there are limits to what a mod team can accomplish. Some of those are imposed by the engine they use, and others are imposed by reality – after all Guitar Hero wouldn’t exist without the controller, and you can’t exactly fabricate that out of thin air via a download. But if these cheap-as-free mods cause the gaming industry to realize that gamers are interested in variation and novelty (so long as that novelty has playable value attached to it), then really that’s good for everyone.

After all, gaming executives don’t always know what is good for them or their product. The president of Epic Games had originally wanted to kill the Mad World trailer for Gears of War. Now, I have a unique experience with this very odd game trailer which features no sound effects and no overabundance of heavy guitar, but rather a short clip of Marcus running through a ruined cityscape. Specifically, the first time I saw it, I was in a bar. It was playing on a television monitor with the sound turned all the way down, and there were no subtitles. So all I saw was the video. Over and over and over again. I must have seen that commercial about twenty times before I left. And the one unique feature of the commercial was lost on me, since there was no audio to be had.

And a few days later, when I heard everyone talking about the ad spot, I didn’t understand why it was any good. Because in my mind, I imagined the typical “thrashing guitar” soundtrack generally associated with action games (think Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but with less tact). So it was a genuine surprise when I finally YouTubed the thing and watched it play out to a very soft, sad soundtrack as opposed to the thundering thrash of metal and bass. The commercial is brilliant, and highlights the fact that you can convey emotion with something as culturally dismissable as a video game.

But the spot almost got nixed. And why? Because the song was from Donnie Darko, and it wasn’t a new movie. So even though the match of the video and the audio was clever and almost touching, the song was from a soundtrack that was a whole five years old. And since gamers only have an attention span of seventeen seconds, none of us would understand the commercial. It wasn’t even an issue of relevancy so much as of cross-branding. What was on the screen wasn’t even assumed to exist in its own context, nor was it assumed that gamers could appreciate what was being shown to them. No, everything marketed to our subculture has to have the desperate rebellion of a G4 television spot or else it will be too highbrow for us to understand.

What far too much of the gaming industry doesn’t understand is that, yes, we are all dorks standing in our living rooms playing other people’s songs on a fake guitar. But we’re also the vehicle for the medium that they are producing in. It’s the geek subculture (at least as much as the porn subculture) that has pushed the internet forward. And yes, we’re the idiots posting things like l2pkthxbye in response to otherwise grammatically correct communication. But we’re also the people who create and explore in this medium. We’re the poets and the bards of the gaming niche. Most of us turned to gaming because traditional entertainment either underwhelms or underestimates us. And when games begin to do the same thing, we will either find yet another alternative or we will once again create our own.

You know, about a month ago I turned to a good friend of mine and said, “You know what franchise they need to bring back in a major way? Bionic Commando.” Of course, when I said that, I was envisioning some Wii-tastic bionic arm whipping, probably in an attempt to purge the still repugnant odors of Spider-Man 3 from my travel-via-extendable-latching-device palette. But really, I’ll take the return of Bionic Commando on whatever platform it’s available. Even if they fail to include a fat, balding Hitler! The one fear I do have is that they will disregard everything but the concept, which I think would be a mistake. While I don’t want to be named Radd, and I don’t necessarily have the urge to fight Badds and Gereralissimo Killt, I don’t see any reason to drop the whole New World Nazi theme from the game entirely. If there’s one thing we’ve all learned from George Lucas, it’s that everyone likes killing Nazis.

On the other hand, the original Bionic Commando, whether in Nazi-killing Japanese mode or watered-down American mode,  has plenty of problems in terms of modern day requirements on plot and believability. It would be an incredibly delicate balance to take the original source material of Bionic Commando and draw that into the modern franchise. Though it’s been done before. The original stories for Metal Gear and Metroid were equally absurd and campy, yet Metal Gear Solid and Metroid Prime are two of the most beloved modern action game franchises today. Though that success more a result of purely brilliant talent (thanks, Hideo Kojima and/or Retro Studios) than it is of hokey nostalgia. So either way, Bionic Commando still has me psyched.

As for titles that are coming to the Wii, we’ve got a double header of PS2 ports in Rygar and Okami. I’m excited about these titles because despite being exceptional, neither of them found a good home on the PS2. It could be because they came out at odd times in the system’s life cycle, or because they simply got lost in the avalanche of other games for that system (hey, regardless of how I feel about Sony, the PS2 did have an insane number of great games, many of them exclusives). Okami looks to be a straight port of the PS2 title, where the designers are calling that choice “faithful” instead of “lazy”. I was hoping the straight port days were done, and only forgave Capcom because they started pricing those sorts of titles below $30. Still, Okami is such an exceptional title, and the Wii is so dry in terms of adult friendly games, it’ll probably do well regardless.

And then there’s Rygar. While Okami got in right under the PS2′s relevancy buzzer, Rygar is a much older title, and the PS2 version shows that age. Thankfully, it’s getting a full revamp as opposed to just a new control scheme, and so far it looks like one of the darker, prettier games coming out on the Wii. It sounds like it’s going to be a sort of “re-imagined” version of the original, in much the same way that Resident Evil 1 and Metal Gear Solid got re-imagined on the Gamecube. The genesis of bringing Rygar to the Wii came from the design team toying with the Wiimote and literally thinking, “This would have been perfect for Rygar!” and that fills me with hope. Too often Wii games are just normal games that make you shake the remote like an idiot. Hopefully Rygar’s control scheme will have more depth than that, and the design team in question isn’t completely new to the Wii, which also helps.

No More Heroes. My morbid fascination with this title continues, largely because of my equally morbid fascination with Killer 7. Suda 51 is probably the weirdest, craziest, and potentially the most artistic game designer you’re going to come across – especially on this side of the Pacific. And if you think Killer 7 isn’t enough street cred to make No More Heroes seem interesting, it’s worth pointing out that he’s apparently good buddies with the aforementioned Hideo Kojima. Heroes looks like lanky pulp anime on the wrong side of an acid bender, and might just be the first game to strike the proper balance when flailing the Wiimote around like an idiot during sword fights.