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Notice, above, I described a tutorial mode. Maybe you were thinking I was being boring. Maybe you thought, even, that I was being boring on purpose. Well, to those who thought the latter -- that's correct. There was purpose to my being boring. The purpose was that I was explaining to you everything the game allows you to do. There is no situation in the game that cannot be solved by running, jumping, jetting, punching, kicking, lasering, or special-moving. In fact, it might be safe to say that there's not a single moment in the game where you need to use that pelvic-machinegun. In the same way, you'd most likely be able to beat the game thoroughly, like with a wiffle ball bat, without ever using the charged-up finger-laser move. If you know your shit, and you're able to beat Gunstar Heroes in one life, you might be able to kill every enemy by merely punching. Or you could put a twist on your play style, and try to only kick everything.
I've written elsewhere, before, that the original Super Mario Bros. is genius because, right at the beginning of the game, you become familiar with everything you're able to do. Mario stands just left of the middle of the screen, facing right, and when you begin to walk to the right, you see blocks and an enemy who is moving to the left. The enemy is visible as an enemy because he is a darker color than you, and because he is moving to the left as you move to the right. If you try to move to the left, the game's scroll halts and freezes. This is telling you, like something out of "The Matrix," "You've been down that road before, Mario; you know where it leads." Press one of the two buttons available to you, and Mario jumps. Jump on top of the enemy, and he dies. Jump beneath a block, and you find nothing happens. Jump beneath a block with a "?" on it, and a coin comes out, piquing your curiosity to jump beneath the other block, revealing a mushroom, which speeds toward the right, in the direction you're already moving. Grab it, grow big, jump beneath another block, break it, jump over pipes, proceed to the right, and win the first stage. The game, very early on, teaches you how to play as a natural part of the game. This is a very Nintendo way of handling things.
Sega, a company whose Saturn console would allow you to store game saves in an internal memory (as long as you remember to replace the batteries the correct way every five minutes), whose Dreamcast controllers had big ugly gaping holes for memory cards so you could see the absolutely unnecessary animations on those memory cards, was born into a world where videogames were already videogames. Sega's baby Master System was free of the technical constraints that forced Nintendo to give Mario suspenders as a way to animate his arms, white gloves because they showed up, and a hat because hair would have been too expensive. So it was that, one could argue with the right philosophical set of morals properly selected from life's title screen, that Sega's first attempt at a lovable mascot, the monkey-faced Alex Kidd, got Sega nowhere because he was so free in his character design.
The director Ryuhei Kitamura points out that the Grand Theft Auto games are full of restrictions because the game promises you freedom; Hideo Kojima, who began his game-making career on the MSX when all he wanted to do was work on the Famicom, learned his own personal games philosophy the hard way: liberty is more important than freedom. Give the player liberty, freedom within a certain set of rules, and so long as the person behind the making of the game understands those rules down to the letter, this ensures a game that is compelling to play.
The "liberty" in a game like Metal Gear Solid comes dripping through in parts like when Snake is told, by a character crushed beneath the Metal Gear's foot, to shoot a stinger missile; the player is then shown the stinger-missile-firing heads-up-display, only to hear Snake mutter "No! I can't!" every time he presses the button. In this case, the "liberty" in Metal Gear Solid stems from character. In the case of Astroboy, though the character was certainly designed with liberty -- all the liberty Osamu Tezuka could express in black-and-white manga form -- the bulk of the game's liberty lies in letting the player decide how to play the game for himself. Letting the player decide, of course, requires that the player is familiar with every letter of the game's rules. This explains the tutorial mode.
The game that issues forth from the tutorial mode is very much Treasure. You walk from segment to segment until the screen stops and enemies pour in from all directions. Kill all of the enemies however you choose, and you are then prompted to continue. Sometimes you'll be fighting enemies on staircases, sometimes in an area with a low ceiling. Sometimes the enemies will be robots that merely walk toward you. Sometimes the robots will have the power to fire slow-moving bullets, which you can dodge with a jump. Sometimes the enemies will be robotic bumblebees which fire lasers out of their stingers. Sometimes the bees will be tiny; sometimes they'll be ten-times huge, with mild pixilation visible like something out of an early Super Nintendo game. No matter how big or how small, all of these enemies can be killed with a standing or jumping punch or kick, or pinpointed with an across-the-screen finger laser.
Every once in a while, you'll fight a boss that fills the screen, or a boss that gradually grows from Astroboy's size to a size that fills the screen. Many times, you'll be able to take memories of the characters behind these bosses into your "Atom Heart," and use them to upgrade whatever skill you want to upgrade.
I play with upgrades on "life" and "punch." Because I love punching stuff almost as much as I love kicking stuff. There's something more-than-satisfying about kicking an enemy flying down diagonally toward you so that he careens back up in the direction he came from, tackling every other enemy lined up waiting for a piece of Astroboy. There's nothing like doing this over and over again while running from one side of the screen to another.
Eventually, the speed of the flow of enemies increases. This makes the game harder. Sometimes, you'll bear witness to conversations between Astoboy and other good guys, some of whom seem to be just thrown into the dark caverns of certain levels because they're from the manga, don't belong elsewhere in the game, and you need the damned opportunity to power up your in-the-dark sensor. Sometimes, Astroboy won't have that damned surprised face in the dialogue scenes, and you'll be able to count these times on one hand, if you have a big hand. Some levels are like side-scrolling space shooters, except your ship -- Astroboy -- is oriented vertically (with . . . blue rocket thrusts visible beneath his boots). In these levels, your only weapon is the finger laser, which is fun for chiseling away whole rows of spinning robot-pieces.
At a point, the game gets very, very hard, and then it ends without annoying you. When you choose to play again, it's because you want to play again.
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The game is very much a Treasure game, as I've said. And I mean this not because every half-second of the game is blest with that very Treasurey attention to perfect hit detection and indescribable sharpness, nor do I mean it because a sign on a building in the background of the first stage reads "GUN STARS." I mean it because of Astroboy himself.
It seems like this license has been lying in wait for Treasure for all these years. As I've covered elsewhere, a Treasure game is always endowed with an undeniable cleanness of character or of concept. Wario World, a recent failure, bogged down by a bullishly ugly character and a concept (punch bad guys, jump, move on) perhaps too clean, left many of the people speculating if Treasure hadn't lost their touch. Astroboy confirms that the Treasure that gave us Bangaioh and Guardian Heroes is still very much alive and capable of producing games full of mandatory hits that, upon further skill-honing, are found to not really be mandatory hits at all.
Astroboy, as a character, is something very videogamey. He's a robot with human characteristics, created by a white-haired professor in a lab coat, a la Megaman. Yet, unlike Megaman, with his blue and blue design, traversing levels full of enough red and yellow to compliment him, Astroboy is mysteriously skin-toned in color, with three points of black hair, a black underwear-shaped pelvic area, and splashes of red and yellow in his belt and boots. He almost completes that red-yellow-blue primary-colored character design trend; in his first level as a modern videogame character, he's traveling a white highway before a silver futuristic city in broad daylight. The colors don't all perfectly hinge together into something we'd expect. That, and Astroboy himself looks different from in the manga and the anime. His head is bigger. His arms are a little shorter in a way I can't put my finger on. Treasure has taken Astroboy, the original kid-robot of cartoondom, and made him into something of an original videogame.
Konami's recent Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for Gameboy Advance is an example of one direction the action games on the system are heading, and I say this with the deep concern of a man who has been playing much of the system lately.[1] Aria of Sorrow is a rather large game in the Metroid vein, with an adventure that can be completed to most gamers' satisfactions in four to six hours. What keeps Aria of Sorrow playable and replayable are the tiny segments. Gamers are able to select, with mild prejudice, rooms or entire hallways they like above others, and then walk up and down those hallways fighting monsters. My favorite room happens to be the one with the one Catoblepas and the many floating viruses -- and the Axe Armor knight on the platform above all. I like seeing how quickly I can conquer this room. I played it so many times, on a train to Akasaka one day, thanks to reader Philip Kollar, that I came up with four Axe Armor souls. Souls are that game's way of enforcing replay value on a player. Beat a monster enough times, and you get a soul which lets you use its ability like a weapon in any other Castlevania game. These souls can be traded with other gamers via a link cable. In this way, I take it there are some obsessive Japanese kids probably three feet tall who have ninety-nine of every soul in the game, and a maxxed-out game clock.
Metroid Fusion is another route in Gameboy action game design. When you replay the game, you're doing it either to better your time or your percentage of items recovered. Beating it at a certain speed awards you with a view of the heroine in fewer clothes than in the rest of the game. It is rare that a player can beat the game in such a way as to see the most skimpily-clad heroine and maintain a 100% item recovery rate, though I don't doubt that someone has done it. Still, I stand firm that, for the most part, when you replay Metroid Fusion, you must first make a choice to either play it for speed or for completion. The game is short because it is a portable game.
Astroboy is the least-traveled route of portable action game design in that when you play it again, you play it simply to see yourself playing it. It's almost like, by the third time you play through the game, you're looking over your own shoulder as you play, commenting on how good your finger-laser is going to look when you power it up in the Atom Heart again. There is no story here that fanboys will argue tirelessly on internet forums, nor is there a chance of seeing your hero naked at the end credits. As a game, it is free of constraints, and its bosses can be screen-filling giant chameleons, and not necessarily robots with names ending in "~man." Astroboy does not gain new selectable weapons from his defeated foes, as in Megaman; rather, he gains a chance to increase the strength, range, or usability of any of his other moves.
This all brings us back to the tutorial. The tutorial at the beginning of the game tells us all that we will need to know to play the game to completion. Not only that, it allows us a chance to select which moves we'll prefer over the others. It's perhaps because Treasure is the developer most intently involved that Hitmaker isn't allowed to exert any of its evil jargon-filled Virtual On influence, that allows even a player who understands the idea of twin sticks very well thank you very much -- I mean I played Namco's Cyber Sled and everything -- to make grievous mistakes and feel, on many repeated occasions, that he has no idea what he is doing; to wonder if the joystick motions he is making are having any impact at all in what's happening onscreen.
Treasure's Astroboy Tetsuwan Atom Atom Heart no Himitsu ("The Secret of the Atom Heart") is a game where we always feel like we know what we're doing, because we do. And we have Treasure to thank for always knowing what they're doing.
[Next: More than a bunny?]
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