The type of snow falling now is the kind rarely seen in anything but movies: Large, round flakes fall slowly in uniform patterns and stick to the grass and pavement alike — perfect for making footprints and snowmen.

At this time of the night, all the shops are closed, and darkened storefronts display attractive arrangements of seasonal items. It’s a few days before Christmas, and the reflections of multicolored lights hanging from the snow-covered roofs of houses give the night is given a dream-like glow. The only sound comes from the snow crunching under my feet and the occasional acoustic guitar strum through my headphones. There isn’t much to do at this hour, but there’s a certain romance I feel wandering this sleeping town on a winter night.

Back in the real world, it’s hopelessly green outside this December 24th. Some stubborn, dirty snow clings to the corners of parking lots, and it’s entirely too windy and cold to lure me outside for any reason. It certainly doesn’t feel much like the type of atmosphere promised by all of the holiday films they’re showing on T.V. this week.

Perhaps this is what prompted my return to my digital town of Brahms, a place I used to come to daily with unwavering loyalty a few years ago. Returning to it now after so long yields a strange feeling of familiarity and foreignness: I’ve been here before, but it’s not quite the same as it used to be.

Everything is where I remember, but the occupants of the houses are all different. My own home is filled to the brim with cockroaches, and scruffy patches of clover punctuate the snow-covered ground over every square inch of the town…doesn’t anyone else know how to pull weeds in this place?

Clearly, this is not the same pastiche of clean modern living observed in Nintendogs: Your home and surroundings grow dirty and unkempt with neglect in this universe. Yet there’s something about the music that takes me back…

In Animal Crossing, each hour of the day has a different song associated with it. While not immediately obvious, there is a subtle difference between the jaunty music that plays in the afternoon and the more slow-paced tunes of the early evening, which finally blend into minimalist and sparse warm tones for the late night. These subtle changes in tempo and instrumentation give each time of the day a unique feeling that helps to lay the foundation of the basic game experience. It’s odd to hear a musical cue and think to yourself, “It’s 3:00 a.m. already?” But it’s something that starts to happen when you play Animal Crossing enough.

It’s not difficult for a video game to evoke a feeling of nostalgia in me or many of my peers. As part of the generation who grew up with the Nintendo and Super Nintendo, it generally only takes a few 8-bit bleeps or a particular sound effect to whisk me back to a childhood spent in front of a television at my grandmother’s house where a small rectangle wired to a dumpy gray box were my truest definition of happiness. Although, there are very few games that take me back to a specific time in my life.

For example: The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker always makes me think of the summer before I embarked for a semester abroad in Australia. There was something about the feeling of the unknown and adventure the game captured so perfectly for me in those long, meandering sailing sequences; the feeling all humans must experience at some point when they stare at the blue horizon of a large body of water and feel — if only for a moment — a sense of wanderlust and romantic longing for exploration and discovery larger than themselves.

Animal Crossing is one of those games, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly why. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that when you play, the time in your virtual town corresponds to the actual time back in the real world. As soon as I hear the opening chords of the start screen, I immediately recall spending some time every night in my bed after everyone else had gone to sleep and exploring a similarly sleeping town. Looking for something to keep myself busy in the real world led me to the game, and in there I found myself wandering around looking for people to talk to or items to find to keep myself busy…a sort of recursive loop that further assisted the blending of my cold, darkened bedroom in the winter to the snow-covered virtual town of Brahms.

For those unfamiliar with the game, it is essentially a small-scale world that you move into and inhabit. You can tweak the accessories your little villager dons, but compared to other “virtual world simulators,” the player’s choices of avatar customization are sparse. The real meat of the game is collecting things. Fossils, furniture, shirts, letters, decorations, fish, or bugs — almost everything you see displayed in Animal Crossing exists for the sole purpose of being collected, catalogued, and perhaps displayed in your virtual house: a sort of consumerist wet dream.

You can, of course, interact with the other villagers of your town, but most interactions inevitably lead to you getting more stuff. As someone who derives a strange pleasure from seeing lists of optional items in games checked off (recipes in Paper Mario, figurines in Minish Cap, Gau’s rages in Final Fantasy VI…the list goes on), there is an immediate knee-jerk draw.

But there’s something else about this game that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It doesn’t even take long to see through the veil of your virtual town and identify Animal Crossing‘s hard limitations: Non-player characters start repeating strings of text interactions, the store in the town stocks the same items over and over, the same holidays and events come up every couple of weeks, and you keep bumping into the same visitors again and again.

There’s an unmistakable thrill about finding a new fossil or seeing a new type of bug that kept me coming back for much longer than it should have. Barring this, the general layout of the game is simply attractive and suitable to the type of bite-sized gameplay that makes you come back time and time again. Bored in the real world? Pop in Animal Crossing and see what’s going on there. It’s meditative just to pick some apples or make a snowman for a few minutes before going to sleep.

But the formula wears thin after awhile. For myself, I suspect it took longer than most before diminishing marginal utility finally made the pleasure derived from playing the game not worth the time it took to do so.

So why bother to even dig out the cartridge tonight? I knew pretty much exactly what to expect: All the same buildings and objects exactly where I left them (there’s that dapper shirt inexplicably buried next to the palm tree by the shoreline), villagers with new faces but who have one of the same five pre-selected dispositions and personalities as those who used to live there, a few letters in your mailbox from the town hall asking where you went, and a whole mess of weeds.

I haven’t really thought about it since I stopped playing, but now that I do I find myself thinking that it feels like even when the cartridge isn’t in your system, there is still a tiny world going on inside of it waiting for you to come back and visit in a moment of nostalgia, boredom, or curiosity.

And so tonight, I did.

Sure you can point your finger at the many fighting games that follow this formula and declare me wrong – Capcom vs. SNK, Marvel vs. Capcom, even Namco X Capcom, etc.  But these are games where the characters clearly have something that unites them in the terms of game logic: Ryu vs. Wolverine seems a much likelier fight than Pac-Man vs. Dig-Dug, especially since the former pairing already has character sprites and moves for the purpose.  The adaptation of characters who have nothing to do with fighting games to the genre is one of the most exciting and creative aspects of Smash Bros

Mostly for the benefit of poking fun at the shitty companies and terrible games I fondly remember from my youth, I’ve compiled this thought experiment of a game.  Gentlemen, I present Sunsoft vs. Data East.

Mmm, what a gorgeous title screen!  Let’s see which characters from each beloved company made the cut.

In the red corner, we have Data East. Chances are good that if you grew up playing Nintendo and Super Nintendo games, you played at least one Data East title. Unfortunately, most of them were pretty turdy compared to classics companies like Nintendo, Capcom and Konami were pumping out. Here are the characters who will be fighting for team D.E. – sorry if your ‘favorite’ didn’t make the cut!

The Eponymous Bad Dude from the title screen of Bad Dudes.

Yeah, I know he wasn’t actually one of the playable characters, but I guarantee more people remember this Duke Nukem-lookin’ bad ass than any of the other cookie-cutter characters in the game.  His main attacks consist mostly of taunting and eyebrow furrowing, the bottom half of his body never appearing on the screen.

The Chef (Peter Pepper) from BurgerTime.

Okay, I take back some earlier slander about Data East – BurgerTime was a pretty good game. The fast-paced gameplay of assembling burgers and avoiding sentient murderous weiners, lemons and fried eggs prepared an entire generation of youth for jobs in the food service industry. Peter Pepper comes equipped with his pepper power-up, but it can only be used a limited number of times per round.

Hev E. Baryl from Heavy Barrel.

Not much to say about Heavy Barrel other than that it was the poor man’s Ikari Warriors. I couldn’t find the name of this guy, so I used my superior intellect to come up with the name listed above. Hev comes complete with two button functions – “shoot” and “don’t shoot.”

Joe & Mac from Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninjas.

I don’t care what anyone says – Joe & Mac was a sweet SNES game. Not only do you fight dinosaurs with all manner of “caveman ninja” weapons like a club, fire, bones, boomerangs and the wheel itself; you also do battle with the Dark Lord Satan as the final boss inside the ribcage of a living T-Rex to rescue your brigade of fine-ass Caveman Honeys. I’m serious! Clearly an attempt to tie together and explain Christian mythos with the fossil record on Earth. This might also be the game that started the trend of the two player characters fighting at the end of each level they complete, with the winner receiving a kiss from a Cavewoman that restores health.

Karnov from Karnov.

This guy is the real deal. Everyone knows that this was pretty much the ultimate NES game. It’s obvious that Super Mario Bros. was just a palette-swap of Karnov. Apparently Karnov could breath fire, but mostly I just remember the game revolving around climbing ladders and wearing diving helmets outside the water thanks to an obscure and poorly explained item equip method. It’s no question that Karnov would beat the piss out of any other character listed here – the only match for him being of course, Zangief – but if you need further proof, here’s a solid fact unearthed from the history books: “He was originally based on a middle-ages legend, Karnov the Firespitter. According to the myth, Scottish villagers would call forth Karnov to chase gypsies from the area. The legend stated that Karnov would use his fire breath to burn gypsy wagons and eat their babies as food.”  AWESOME.

Hook Pinball Machine from Real Life.

 Data East also manufactured a lot of great pinball machines back in the day, including Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, The Last Action Hero and The Simpsons. In an unprecedented first, the entire Hook pinball machine appears as a playable character in Data East vs. Sunsoft. Hook Pinball is only selectable if a Wii Remote is active while the game is being played, with the only available attack being “Tilt.”

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A fearsome lineup to be sure!  Let’s see what awaits in the Sunsoft corner of the ring.  I think you’ll be surprised at some of the titles Sunsoft had the rights to at some points in time…

Aero the Acro-Bat from Aero the Acro-Bat.

Following hot on the heels of the ‘mascot with an attitude’ trend of the 16-bit consoles, Aero the Acro-Bat’s corpse now rots in a garbage dump with the likes of Bubsy the Bobcat, Awesome Possum, Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel, Izzy of Izzy’s Quest for the Olympic Gold,  Gex, Crash Bandicoot, Punky Skunk, Wally Bear and the No! Gang, Rocky Rodent, *take a breath at this point, we’re not done yet*, Blinx the Time Sweeper, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger and Socket (a Genesis game featuring a duck with an electric plug coming out of his ass). Luckily, Aero has been revived to compete in the grand spectacle that is Data East vs. Sunsoft!

SOPHIA THE 3rd from Blaster Master.

I’m just as surprised as you are that this chubby, pink little tank actually has a name. I thought it was the titular “Blaster Master”Anyway, if you recall, the pilot is named Jason, and he is searching for his pet frog.  Combining side-scrolling shooting, overhead room maze exploration, huge bosses and a catchy soundtrack, Blaster Master is a game I legitimately think was somewhat ahead of it’s time.  I would love to see an HD update of the original. Sunsoft made a terrible Playstation title with the Blaster Master name, but hit none of the aspects that made the first so satisfying.

Uncle Fester from Fester’s Quest.

You know your parents didn’t love you if you owned a copy of this game as a kid. Featuring the world’s ugliest box art, chunkiest sprites, slowest character movement, impossible mazes and infinitely respawning enemies that took upwards of 40 hits to kill, Fester’s Quest would have made even Sartre reconsider his idea of what Hell truly is.  If you meet someone who claims to have beaten this game, run! This person is either a pathological liar or a murderous robot from the future. Fester appears in Data East vs. Sunsoft with his trademark green splotch-shooting blunderbuss. You know, just like in the TV series.

Fun fact: Fester’s Quest runs on the same overhead-shooting engine as Blaster Master!

Male Human from Final Fantasy Legend III.

Despite having absolutely nothing to do with the other Final Fantasy games, the Legend series was solid for Game Boy owners looking for a portable RPG fix.  Legend III in particular had some kooky ideas that have since not been repeated in any game to date, among them the option to consume meat or robot parts scavenged from fallen enemies in order to transform your characters into completely random monsters or cyborgs with the same abilities as whatever enemies they become.  The meat from Legend III appears as an item in Data East vs. Sunsoft during battles, transforming Male Human into other characters at random.

That little falling dude from the cover of Myst. He’s right above the title! You can’t miss him!

Yeah, OK, I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel here. Apparently Sunsoft was responsible for the Sega Saturn version of Myst. I don’t know. Would you rather play as some kind of knob or geometric shape? Perhaps some Brian-Eno-inspired ambient noise? I didn’t think so. We’ll call this guy “Mystbert” and move on with our lives.

That Car from Spy Hunter.

I’m running out of ideas. Sunsoft really didn’t release that many memorable games. I guess you could get excited that Spy Hunter featured the same music as “The Blues Brothers,” but other than that, there’s not much here to write home about. Holy shit, did you know that John Woo was making a Spy Hunter movie for awhile?

Mudman from World Heroes.

World Heroes was officially made by ADK, but Sunsoft was responsible for the Super Nintendo port, which is how I’m justifying putting Mudman in the roster. You have to hand it to a game that sets out to not only clone Street Fighter II, but make the characters even more racist. ‘Ol Muddy hails from Papua New Guinea and has a variety of blue spirit summoning attacks. World Heroes also featured mad monk Rasputin, a pirate, a viking and an American football player who throws “ghost” footballs…actually, that’s really sweet. I hope we get a Street Fighter IV-esque remake of this sometime soon.

- Artwork by fan favorite Akira Toriyama!

- Unleash the power of the Epoch to travel to the end of time… and back!

- Over 60 hours of mind-blowing gameplay!

- Multiple endings mean the story never ends!

Since the rise of the RPG in the western world, marketing divisions of software companies have forever been parading out similar claims formatted as bulleted lists on the back of game boxes.  One game will supposedly keep you enchanted for hundreds of hours while another will blow your mind with a new exciting spin on the classic turn-based battle system.  It wouldn’t take any seasoned gamer long to figure out what game the “back of the box” blurbs above are describing.  However, there’s something different about Chrono Trigger: a game that holds a special place in the heart of almost everyone who has played it. What sets it above its contemporaries?  What makes it so memorable that it barely takes more than two notes of the introductory music (or a literal swing of a clock’s pendulum) to send you back to a place where a 15″ color TV and grubby gray Super Nintendo controller were the truest definition of happiness?

You could cite any number of things: the active time battle system that allows you to see your enemies before initiating combat with them, the aforementioned double and triple techs, the memorable characters and unique time-travel based plot, the gorgeous music and graphics, etc. but at the risk of sounding like the back of a box – nothing more than an attempt to “sell” someone who hasn’t played the game yet or heard of it before. Suffice to say, all of us on The Rumble Pack have played this game at some point in our lives. Instead of telling you what an amazing game it is or why we should treasure it as a classic, I’d like to share some of the reasons the game is so memorable to me. Surprisingly enough, most of them are small details that seem dwarfed, even insignificant compared to the grandiose claims made above. The point I’m trying to make is that there is a lot more to some games than one can describe with a list of features, an assessment of how good these features are, and a letter grade or number.

[Note: contains a fair amount of spoilers, mostly minutia, and is not intended for those who have not completed the game.]

1. The Millenial Fair

It’s a known fact that institutions like this tends to destroy me when it comes to RPGs.  I’ve gambled away my last gold coin in the casinos of Dragon Quest more times than I can count, and as far as I’m concerned Final Fantasy VII comes to a satisfyingly happy ending the moment you reach the Golden Saucer.  There’s something about visiting these places that sets them apart from being just another town or village to upgrade your equipment at, and I can’t stop until I’ve done everything there is to do. I feel like I’m doing my characters a favor, letting them relax from beating up hobgoblins for a few hours to guzzle some sodas or get laughed at and subsequently japed by a floating clown face.

The fact that I could get all of this over with at the beginning of a game instead of the middle makes me owe Chrono Trigger a debt of gratitude – otherwise I don’t know if I ever would have completed it. To put it simply: I barely remember the whole reptite subplot or the fact that Schala was Magus’ sister… but I’ll be damned if I can’t sing Gato’s song on my death bed and distribute 15 silver points (later revealed to be dollar bills with my face pasted on them) with my final breath.  Honestly, the best part about the entire fair, I daresay entire game, is eating that old man’s lunch.

The lunch that launched a thousand ships…

            To put it into perspective, there was a fountain in the original Final Fantasy that, when “spoken” to, said something like “COME! HOW FILTHY YOUR FACE IS.”  (Which as a kid, delighted me to no end… was this supposed to be the fountain chiding me in the booming voice of an aquatic god or merely the reflections of my own apparently filthy-faced party of three warriors and a monk? No other inanimate object in the game spoke to you like this, and in a game where most of the dialogue consisted of “WATCH ME DANCE” and then a twenty second long unskippable jittering of pixels, this was a mystery worth considering.)  I would talk to that damn fountain at least a dozen times every time I visited the village it was in. Well, to me, that guy’s lunch held the same allure. Often while traveling through time, I would purposefully make a pit stop in 1000 AD just to eat it. Which bring me to…

2. The Trial and Subsequent Prison Escape

…the fact that there were consequences for eating that lunch. As a kid, this shocked me.  Typically when playing RPGs, as the hero your behavior consists of barging into as many residences as possible, smashing every treasured family heirloom and clay pot you come across, jumping into unknown beds fully clothed in your dirt-caked leather armor, and stealing absolutely everything that wasn’t bolted down. Which, other than that one bald shopkeeper in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (who MURDERS YOU if you steal from his shop… talk about scaring the bejesus out of a 8-year old kid) most NPCs seem to be completely chill about. But in Chrono Trigger, when you are tried for bogus charges of kidnap, the fact that you acted like a dick comes back to bite you. I loved playing through again and again trying to see all of the different testimonies leveled against you by other people at the fair or to try and get a not-guilty sentence. It still kills me that this feeble old man would haul his ass all the way to the courthouse to testify for your execution for eating his lunch, bag and all.

The only consolation being that, as a dear colleague of mine once said: “After you escape from the prison, the game pretty much becomes a no-holds-barred lunch munch adventure.” Case in point, my countless pit stops in 1000 AD I’m sure Crono found difficult to explain to his comrades were completely justified to me. The rest of the busting out of prison sequence is especially memorable for the bridge battle against the tank dragon, which takes place on a 2D plane instead of an overhead view. Like I said before the list, nothing startling by today’s standards or even those of yesteryear, but these are the things that really stick with me 12 years after playing.

I half expected Dr. Wily to pop out of this thing after you defeat it…

3. Robo’s 400 Year Wait

            RPGs have a way of trying to make you feel for the characters which sometimes works and sometimes does not.  It’s a given that, during the course of a long game, you will grow to like certain characters and not care about others.  It’s a matter of personal experience, but I was never particularly attached to Aeris or some of the other obvious love interests/tragic figures these games try to scrape off on you.  But man, do I remember Robo. Even though I never really used him in my party (let’s face it… he was kind of shitty…shh, don’t tell him) I thought he had some of the best story scenes.  My favorite being when he agrees to stay in 600 AD to help replant a forest while your party travels into the future, agreeing to meet up with him later.  After he leaves the party, he appears on the world map, chugging away and clearing space for a forest to be seeded.  Then it’s just a matter of jumping through the Epoch to 1000 AD to re-collect him.  Now, to the player, Robo only leaves your party for a few minutes. But I could never help but imagine the implications of his 400 year wait… did he ever wonder if Crono and the gang would get sidetracked or just plain forget about him?  (One can’t help but think of the scene from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the robot Marvin is forced to wait until the end of time itself to meet up with the main characters again.)  Plenty of RPGs are full of omnipotent or immortal characters who have lived for a very long time and who are very eager to tell you all about it, but Robo carries with him a sort of quiet grace. He was given a job to do and he did it.  When you do finally come for him, now battered, rusty and enshrined in an overgrown temple, a touching scene follows where he gives Lucca a piece of pressure-hardened amber he created over a hundred years, which always implied to me he never lost faith that his friends would come back for him. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but I’ll take this over a hundred Aeris-bucket-kicks anyday.

4. The Fake Save Point

I would love to see some kind of callback to this in a current-gen RPG, I just love how cheeky this concept is. Your battle-weary party slogs through the sewers and finally, spotting the hopeful glint of a save point in the distance, makes a break for it. But the second you touch it, a bunch of monsters pop out and rape you instead. Brilliant! I like the ways you could interpret this – either the enemies are clever enough to set a trap for you and bait you in with a decoy save point (as in this case) or, pushed by positive natural selection in an RPG universe, a monster eventually evolves to resemble a save point that lures in weary travelers.  It’s taking the concept of a Mimic Chest just one step further, I love it.  I guess that would be kind of like an animal that evolves to perfectly resemble a Taco Bell and waits off the side of the highway for hungry drivers to pull over… OH GOD WAIT, what if there was a monster that evolved to resemble that old man’s lunch at the beginning of the game and…okay, sorry, I’m done.

5.  Crono’s Clone and the Titular “Chrono Trigger”

            Character deaths are nothing new in video games, but few games have the balls to outright kill off the main character, which might as well be “you” in general.  Especially for players who always name the main character after themselves.  But the fact that you can go back in time and replace Crono, moments before the fatal blow strikes him, with what basically amounts to a mannequin made of straw, a bucket, and an old spiky mop is hilarious.  It’s like in those really cheesy B-movies where it shows a character about to get hit by a car or something and then cuts away to a soft cloth dummy being hit instead.  It’s literally one of the oldest tricks in the book and Lavos falls for it.  Not only that, but it completely pats you on the back for being enough of an idiot to waste the first half of the game testing your luck in Norstein Bekkler’s Tent of Horrors.  For  me, a great personal victory, as I was afraid the only thing I would have to show for this “hard work” was a house stuffed to the brim with cats.

The game also gets huge points in my book for the title actually meaning something.  I know there are plenty of straight-forward game titles (Elevator Action, Mega Man, Duck Hunt, etc.) but it always irks a tiny part of my soul that I never found out what The Illusion of Gaia really was or why there are now thirteen Fantasies that cannot logically be Final.  Shit, I never even really understand what The Secret of Mana/Evermore was supposed to be.  That the mana tree was still alive?  That a dog, when transformed into a toaster, is capable of wreaking havoc in ways not previously thought possible?  Hell if I know.

A very real man (not a dime store mannequin at all) being destroyed in a manner most brutal.

6.  Jerky: The World’s Most Precious Natural Resource

            This is one of my favorite “out of the box” solutions to be featured in an older game.  The setup: you place something called the Moon Stone in a spot of eternal sunlight in the distant past, then travel forward into the future to re-collect the now fully powered Sun Stone.  The problem: it is now gone, somehow falling into the hands of some town Mayor who attempts to hide it, ignoring the fact that his house is pouring out enough sunlight to build hydrogen into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.  The solution: BEEF JERKY + TIME TRAVEL.

The solution to all life’s problems… that’ll be $10,000 please.

            Yes. Instead of traveling back in time far enough to before the mayor was born and nabbing the stone or fooling him with some whimsical Robo-induced distraction long enough to find it in his house and grab it, you instead travel back and give his ancestors beef jerky.  Apparently this beef jerky is encrusted with precious jewels or something, because it sets you back 9900 GP, roughly the cost of 990 tonics.  If each tonic heals 50 HP, the jerky should presumably heal almost 50,000 HP when eaten.  A metaphorical “spicy meatball” indeed.  But his ancestors, so moved by your act of jerky-giving, promise to teach the value of sharing down through posterity. The result? When you travel forward in time again to meet the mayor, he happily hands over the stone. For keepsies.

7.  Catching the Gold Rock

            This is a quick one, but it always makes me smile when I think about it. In the Denadoro Mountain area, there are these enemies on the map that throw rocks at you to initiate combat.  However, if you visit after Frog receives the upgraded Masamune (a completely arbitrary requirement) you somehow become enough of a bad ass to catch them instead of being pelted mercilessly.  Apparently some baller-rich baddies live in this area and are fans of “making it rain”: not content to throw regular pebbles they instead hurl rocks of solid gold that allow Marle, Robo, and Frog to team up and do the Grand Dream triple tech.  2D RPGs have somewhat of a tradition of allowing limited interaction outside of the battle screen (a pre-emptive “SHUT UP” to anyone who mentions Final Fantasy Mystic Quest) and this is a notable exception which results in a most pleasant surprise.

8.  The Developer’s Room

Speaking of thins I’d love to see again in a current-gen RPG, not only did Chrono Trigger have over one million god damn endings* but if you were enough of a pimp to defeat Lavos at the very beginning of a New Game+ (or in the Ocean Palace when you are supposed to lose to him) you are taken to a secret area where you can speak to all of the people who worked on the game.  I love to see things that pay tribute to underappreciated staff who work hard but don’t garner the same fan following as the big wigs like Mitsuda, Kojima, Uematsu, Miyamoto, Sakaguchi, etc.  They really went the extra mile by literally placing themselves in the game to wish the player well, a strengthening of the bond between creator and player that isn’t often seen and a reminder that teams of real people work on these games we love so much.

Oh Keisuke, you kidder!

* Okay, only a baker’s dozen of endings. Plus the new one they added. Still, that’s a lot.

*Note: Although there isn’t too much to really “spoil”, I will refrain from going into detail about any plot or character details that would be considered such.

As the Good Sir Tony will agree with me, the experience was not a bad one. In case you are unfamiliar with the concept of Cloverfield, I’ve included this handy and highly scientific equation for your benefit. Excuse the large size and my poor skill with image editing…

I’d say this accurately sums up the concept. Godzilla (giant monster currrently destroying city) plus The Blair Witch Project (film presented as “real” amateur footage) minus Godzuki (I wanted to put a pile of crap as the picture here to symbolize the overall awfulness of The Blair Witch Project, but Godzuki seemed so much more poignant) equals Cloverfield.

Your enjoyment of the film will depend on a few factors. First of all, I don’t think this is a movie that will translate so well from the theater to the home-viewing experience. Despite being shot in the style of a home video, the largeness of the screen combined with the crowd aspect of a theater really sells the concept. Second, your mileage will vary based on how much you are willing to buy into the experience as a whole. If you go into this movie ready to critique every line of dialogue and camera angle, your opinion of the movie will not be too high. However, if you go in willing to accept the concept that what you are watching is in fact real footage, or at least willing to project yourself as an audience member into the situation of the on-screen characters, you will find yourself swept up in a very intense experience.

Whereas The Blair Witch Project was fatally flawed with unlikable characters who made unrealistic decisions, Cloverfield doesn’t stretch the boundaries between real person and movie character too much. The dialogue and actions of the characters feel very natural, and it seems like much of the film was ad-libbed or improvised by the actors as they went along – reacting to situations as they themselves most likely would. Any kind of extraneous explanations of what is going on are avoided – the film doesn’t talk down to the audience in that the characters don’t feel the need to explain exactly what they are doing at all times because, due to the chaos of the situation, most of them have no idea what they are doing. Additionally, almost every action and decision made by the characters doesn’t fall under the thematic ‘veil of retardation’ that seems to plague most characters of horror and sci-fi films – these characters want to stay alive as much as anyone would in their situation, and act accordingly. In designing the monster and plot, the writers were careful to eliminate any easy escapes or solutions the audience may think of. I won’t spoil anything, but let’s just say that hiding out in a safe spot isn’t an option for anyone unfortunate enough to be in the city during the attack for numerous reasons.

The “home video”aspect of the filming works well. In the same way that first-person video games can be engrossing, Cloverfield draws you in. However, the lack of control of where the camera is pointing will likely divide viewers. Either you will get frustrated of the constant shaking camera and inability to see all of the action at once, or your frustration will become part of the experience – the fact that you can only see through the eyes of a character helps put you in the scenario and every obscured or blurry shot leaves you hanging, wanting just a little bit more to be visible (which, more often than not, is soon revealed). Concept aside, this is a big budget feature film, so the limitations of a home video camera are buffered with great crowd scenes, settings, and effects. The first time you see an entire building collapse is almost unnerving – there is no big wind up for the destruction that movies like Independence Day have trained us to wait for, rather it is sudden, violent, and has immediate consequences for the characters.

A final observation: anyone expecting a full explanation of the monsters sudden appearance, motivation for destroying the city, and exact mechanics will be disappointed. These are aspects of any film like this, but in this case the director realizes that the core of the film he is making remains unchanged regardless of these details. Besides, has there ever been a fully rewarding explanation for monsters like this in past films? Cite any number of explanations: radiation, nature punishing mankind for abusing it, an experiment gone wrong due to disaster or hubris. The end result is always the same. A giant pissed-off monster smashing a city. The important difference is that unlike the cardboard cut-outs and hollow buildings of Godzilla, the city in Cloverfield is no different than the one you live in. Full of life, friends, and people just trying to get by, real people who are excited about getting new jobs, meeting new people, or just having something to do on a Saturday night.

But not for long.

1. Games 

I’m not going to spend too much time discussing the big titles of this past year. We’ve already gone over and praised them many times, and they deserve every ounce of that. 2007 saw a lot of big franchise titles including Call of Duty 4, the two Guitar Hero releases, Metroid Prime 3, Pokemon Diamond/Pearl, and Halo 3 just to name a few. However, this year was also marked by a lot of new properties as well: Assassin’s Creed, Bioshock, Rock Band, Zack & Wiki, and Portal immediately come to mind. While I don’t necessarily hope for sequels to all of these newcomers, it definitely kept the gaming world fresh not to just rotate around a few big name releases. I’m glad to see how much coverage these new games got – obviously games like Rock Band don’t need a huge campaign, but it was great to see IGN advertising and supporting Zack & Wiki so much to keep people from overlooking it.

At no point during the year did I not have a portable game to work on. The DS has so much momentum at this point that I’m finding it very difficult to keep up with all the games currently released, and there are a few games such as Etrian Odyssey and both Sonic Rush games that I’m still missing the boat on. I had a grand old time with Lunar Knights, Contra4, and of course, Phantom Hourglass. Of special note for being almost permanently jammed into my DS since July is Picross. This unassuming little $20 grid game ate up so many spare ten minute chunks of my life, and I still find myself going back for more.

Finally, the PS2 proved it still had some lingering sputters left in it at (at least for the first half of 2007) with the release of Odin Sphere and The Red Star in the summer. I was hoping no one else would mention The Red Star so I could be the first, but I keep seeing it pop up on the message boards. It’s the perfect mix of the challenge you would expect from a traditional SHMUP like Ikaruga but without the frustration (mostly) and also without being a typical top-down shooting game where you play as a ship. I can’t say if they did justice to the comic book source, but the gameplay is rock solid. I wish I had more to say about Odin Sphere, but regrettably did not have the perseverance to make it through the game. It does get major props for the gorgeous 2-D sprites, great animations, and entertaining voice acting.
2. Movies

I don’t think I can remember another year that I spent so much time and money at the movie theater. I don’t have quite as much to say about the rest of the categories other than games, but here’s a quick rundown of the most entertaining (not necessarily “best”) movies I saw this year.

300 – the manliest film of the year, full of more yelling and kicking than you could ever hope for. Special points for featuring a guitar playing goatman, a brief cameo appearance by Voldo himself, and a trip to Caketown. By no means an enduring American classic, but I’ll be damned if seeing this with a large group of friends wasn’t the most fun I’ve had in a movie theatre. Ratatouille – refer to Justin’s post from the summer about how magical this movie is. If he liked it that much, you know it has to be something special. Transformers and Harry P. were the obligatory popcorn blockbuster movies of the summer, and certainly did not fail to disappoint in terms of sheer entertainment. TMNT – “not a complete turd” according to a succinct over-the-phone review from Justin, and he turned out to be right. Good for him. Hot Fuzz – part of the whole reason I wrote this entire post. There are still people who haven’t seen this, and shame on them. What I originally thought would be a mildly entertaining movie good for a few laughs before the inevitable after-movie Denny’s run turned out to be the best movie of 2007, and I couldn’t have been happier to be so surprised.

Shoot ‘em Up – I originally didn’t see this, but was later told that it was basically tailor- made for me personally to enjoy. As a dollar theater aficionado of retarded movies, I did my duty and saw it on the big screen. Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti hamming it up to the tune of a thousand gunshots and explosions, and oh the one-liners… it was like some sort of glorious spiritual successor to Commando. Which is a good thing. I promise.

In the non-explosion littered side of films… I know Nick and I mentioned it earlier in the year, but The King of Kong is also definitely worth seeing. Combining an unorthodox movie subject (the world of top score competition in classic arcade games) with a surprisingly interesting story and a few truly bizarre characters, it’s a movie that draws you in more and more once you realize that these people are serious – it’s not a fictional story. No Country for Old Men (aka Metal Gear Solid 4) also impressed me quite a bit. Even if it sounds like the plot synopsis isn’t up your alley, see it anyway. There’s more to it than you think.
3. Television

Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. You’ve heard the news. Heroes was pretty awful this year. I’m sorry. Obviously I’m drawn in enough at this point to keep watching next season, but…

HERE IS THE PROBLEM AREA. Right in this general area here. However, using a complex algorithm, I have come up with two replacements for these characters that I feel will drastically improve the show. Close your eyes, make a wish, and… presto-change-o!

Who doesn’t love Cousin Skeeter?!

Ahhhhh. That’s much better. Bobby’s ability is that he can appear in any number of short lived Nickelodeon sitcoms and/or the movie House of Wax. The aforementioned Cousin Skeeter’s ability is to be a puppet made of soft felt. This is much more intellectual than anything offered by the Micah storyline in Heroes.

In the realm of good television, Nick and I finally got on The Office bandwagon and couldn’t be happier. This is the best show since Arrested Development, and I think I may even like it more.

4. Music

I am woefully out of the current music scene, but a big recommendation for anyone who likes electronic or dance music – the album “Cross” by the group Justice released in June tops my chart for album of the year. This is what you wish the last two Daft Punk albums were, and may even be as good as the first Daft Punk album Discovery.

And, just for laughs, check out the fan album 8-bit Bullshit available for free download at http://www.scrubclubrecords.com/music/8bit.html – not all of the songs are quality, but I’ve never heard a better rap about the NES game Wild Gunman. The Zelda, Punch-Out!!, and Metal Gear songs are worth a quick listen as well.

“I got bullets ‘n buckshot loaded in the barrel

I’m lookin’ damn fine in my baby blue apparel

Ten gallon hat – you got a problem with that?

My dual revolvers make your head go splat“

5. Books/Comics

Oops, didn’t read anything except Harry Potter this year because I am an uncultured prick. However, as far as new comic series go, the first collection of The Dark Tower is certainly promising.

Back in the real world, it’s hopelessly green outside for December 24th. Some stubborn, dirty snow piles cling to the corners of parking lots, and it’s entirely too windy and cold to lure me outside for any reason. It certainly doesn’t feel much like the type of atmosphere promised by all of the seasonal films they’re showing on TV this week.

Perhaps this is what prompted my return to the digital town of Brahms, a place I used to come to at least once a day for a good amount of time roughly a year ago. Returning to it now after so long yields a strange feeling of familiarity and foreignness – I’ve been here before, but it’s not quite the same as it used to be. Everything is where it used to be, but the occupants of the houses are all different. My own home is filled with cockroaches and weeds and clover patches punctuate the snow-covered ground over every square inch of the town… doesn’t anyone know how to pull weeds in this place? (Clearly this is not the same pastiche of cleanly modern living seen in Nintendogs: your home and surroundings grow dirty and unkempt with neglect in this universe.) Yet there’s something about the music that takes me back…

In Animal Crossing, each hour of the day has a different song associated with it. It’s not something that is immediately obvious, but there is a subtle difference between the jaunty music that plays in the afternoon and the more slow-paced music of the early evening, blending finally into minimalist and sparse warm tones for the late night. These subtle changes in tempo and instrumentation give each time of the day a unique feeling that helps to lay the foundation of the basic game experience. It’s odd to hear a musical cue and think to yourself “This really feels like 3:00am.” but it’s something that happens when you play Animal Crossing enough.

It’s not difficult for a video game to evoke a feeling of nostalgia in me, or many of my peers I imagine. As part of the generation that grew up with the Nintendo and Super Nintendo, it generally only takes a few 8-bit bleeps or a particular sound effect to whisk me back to a childhood of kneeling in front of a television at my grandmother’s house (yes, she had an NES and is possibly the most awesome grandma ever) holding a rectangle in my hands attached to a gray box. But there are very few games that take me back to a specific time in my life. [In example - The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker always makes me think of the summer before I left for a semester abroad in Australia. There was something about the feeling of the unknown and adventure the game captured so perfectly in those long meandering sailing sequences, the feeling all humans must feel at some point when they stare at the blue horizon of a large body of water and feel, if only for a moment, a sense of wanderlust and romantic longing for exploration and discovery larger than themselves.] Animal Crossing is one of those games, but for the life of me I don’t understand why. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that when you play the game, the time in your virtual town corresponds to the actual time. As soon as I hear the opening chords of the game, I immediately recall spending some time every night in my bed after everyone had gone to sleep, exploring a similarly sleeping town. Looking for something to keep myself busy in the real world led me to the game, and in the game I found myself wandering around looking for people to talk to or items to find to keep myself busy… a sort of recursive loop that further assisted the blending of my darkened bedroom in the winter to the snow-covered virtual town of Brahms.

Yes, you can talk to that penguin.  It’s exciting.

For those unfamiliar with the game, it is essentially a small-scale world that you move into and inhabit. You can tweak the accessories your little villager dons, but compared to other ‘virtual world simulators’ the players choices of avatar customization are sparse. The real meat of the game is collecting things. Fossils, furniture, shirts, letters, decorations, fish, bugs… almost everything you see displayed in Animal Crossing exists for the sole purpose of being collected, catalogued, and perhaps displayed in your virtual house: a sort of consumerist wet dream.

You can, of course, interact with the other villagers of your town, but most interactions inevitably lead to you getting more stuff. It sounds so trivial, but there is something about this game that really grabbed me and I’m still trying to put my finger on it. As someone who derives a strange pleasure from seeing lists of optional items in games checked off (recipes in Paper Mario, figurines in Minish Cap, Gau’s rages in FFVI, etc.etc.etc.) there is an immediate draw. But there’s something about this game that adds up to more than the sum of it’s parts. It doesn’t even take long to see through the veil of this virtual town and identify the games limitations – it doesn’t take long before NPCs start repeating strings of text interactions, the store in the town stocks the same items over and over, the same holidays and events come up every couple of weeks, and you keep bumping into the same visitors again and again. But there’s an unmistakable thrill about finding a new fossil or seeing a new type of bug that kept me coming back for much longer than it should have. Barring this, the general layout of the game is just attractive. Bored in the real world? Pop in Animal Crossing and see what’s going on there. It’s meditative just to pick some apples or make a snowman for a few minutes before going to sleep. The formula wears thin after awhile… for myself, I suspect it took longer before diminishing marginal utility finally made the pleasure derived from playing the game not worth the time it took to do so.

So why bother to even boot it up tonight? I pretty much knew what to expect – all the same buildings and objects exactly where you left them (there’s that dapper shirt I inexplicably buried next to the palm tree by the shoreline), villagers with new faces but who have one of the same five pre-selected dispositions and personalities as those who used to live there, a few letters in your mailbox from the town hall asking where you went, and a whole mess of weeds. I haven’t really thought about it since I stopped playing, but now that I do I find myself thinking that it feels like even when the cartridge isn’t in your system, there is still a tiny world going on inside of it waiting for you to come back and visit in a moment of nostalgia.

And so tonight, I did.

Edit: Still the Master of Unlocking after six months of not posting. My apologies. Look forward to this space becoming a bustling spaceport of rambling bullshit and/or a dumpster full of empty away messages. Thank you.