AEW Fight Forever

When All Elite Wrestling (AEW) launched in 2019, its main goal was to bring back traditional professional wrestling, providing an alternative to WWE’s monopoly. As such, AEW's in-ring product focused more upon athleticism and physicality than the story and character-driven “entertainment” offered by the dominant yet creatively stagnant WWE. Moreover, AEW sought to be internationally informed, welcoming a diverse array of styles and cultures from Mexico, Japan, and the various wrestling “territories” of the United States. As of 2023, AEW has succeeded in all of the above-mentioned aims.

From its very inception, there was talk of an inevitable AEW video game. In accordance with the company's founding philosophy, this game would move away from the sclerosis and the stagnation of the yearly WWE 2K games. Way back in 2019, AEW headliner Kenny Omega stated his desire to see the prospective game follow after AKI's WWF No Mercy, the 2000 N64 classic that has gone unrivaled in terms of playability and fun factor throughout the two-plus decades since its release.

Now, after four years of tantalizing teasers and deflating delays, not to mention an agonizingly slow trickle of game-related information and a heap of speculation (see, for instance, this blog's "preview" from four years ago), AEW Fight Forever has finally been released. And it is worth the wait. True to the spirit of All Elite Wrestling, Fight Forever sticks to a multifaceted approach and successfully draws the good from a number of notable wrestling video games.

Fight Forever vs. No Mercy

The most burning question among video game wrestling fans is obvious: does Fight Forever play like WWF No Mercy? The answer is, for the most part, yes. No Mercy and other AKI-made N64 wrestling games such as WCW/NWO Revenge (1998) and the oft-imported Japanese classic Virtual Pro Wrestling 2 (2000) are distinguished by their weak and strong grapple system. Weak grapples are performed by tapping A and then keying in a minor hold or strike to wear down the opponent. Strong grapples are performed by holding A and then keying in a more devastating maneuver to set-up the opponent for the finishing blow. Finishers become available when a wrestler's “spirit meter” reaches full charge, and this allows for a fleeting window of time in which said wrestler can initiate a strong grapple and then tap the analog stick, setting in motion a truly devastating move. 

This is, effectively, the system in Fight Forever. Weak and strong grapples correspond respectively to tapping and holding the main action button and then keying in a hold or a grapple-based strike. Fight Forever also utilizes a spirit meter. When this meter maxes out, specials are then executed in familiar fashion via strong grapple and a flick of the right analog stick. This process feels virtually spot-on when compared to the AKI N64 originals (which this reviewer was playing mere hours before firing up Fight Forever). In addition, “signature” moves have been added, serving as the precursor to specials. They are executed by pressing the D-Pad when the spirit meter is flashing “signature” just before full-on “special” status begins. 

With these welcome similarities to the AKI games, there also come differences. In Fight Forever, most specials and signatures occur from a front-grapple or, barring that, are turnbuckle activated. That is to say, there aren't really specials from positions like back-grapples and ground grapples, at least not like in the N64 AKI games, where every grapple situation opened up an opportunity for a special move when the spirit meter was maxed out. In Fight Forever, equipping multiple specials is a skill assigned to particular wrestlers, and the creation suite (see below) allows you to endow your create-a-character with this ability.

Also, standing strikes are now covered by two buttons, one for punches and one for kicks. This differs from the one-button strike system in the N64 AKI games, where tapping and holding the strike button corresponded to weak and strong strikes, which could be either punches or kicks. This change is appreciated.

On the whole, AEW Fight Forever is best described as No Mercy-adjacent. It feels like a veritable approximation of what the AKI games might have become had they continuously evolved from No Mercy in 2000 through to the present. Though many wrestling titles have tried to emulate the AKI games, this one does it the most effectively. For comparison, Fight Forever feels more like No Mercy than Def Jam Vendetta (wherein rap artists fought with a version of the AKI engine souped-up for the Gamecube and PlayStation 2). Fans of the AKI titles will find the timing almost precisely in tune with their beloved classics, even though the animations are, admittedly, somewhat quicker. The more rapid animations give the game a WWE Here Comes the Pain vibe, but this isn't a bad thing, as many fans consider that title the silver medal among wrestling games behind No Mercy’s gold standard. Whatever game you prefer, you'll approve of Fight Forever.

An Anything Goes Aesthetic

Fight Forever is also reminiscent of another wrestling game, and for some readers, this may come out of left-field. Yet undeniably, Fight Forever has something of a Wrestling Empire quality to it. Wrestling Empire is, for those who don't know, an independently built game authored by one man, the incomparable M. Dickie. Wrestling Empire delivers a so-bad-it's-good experience on account of a very fluid grappling system and madcap presentation, with exploding props and ridiculous arenas such as bathrooms and airplanes. Every match is a free-wheeling extravaganza, and Fight Forever has a bit of this feeling. Indeed, Fight Forever offers an exploding barbed-wire death-match option, which, as you might imagine, gets crazy in a hurry. Blood spills liberally. In no-DQ matches, you can hurl literal bombs at people, which explode in the ring. You can also grab a skateboard and go skating around the arena, doing ollies over felled opponents. 

Perhaps most progressively, Fight Forever allows players to put male wrestlers into competition against female wrestlers, a feature that hasn't been in a WWE game for nearly two decades. While WWE has opted for a sort of prudery in the matter of male/female in-ring interactions, Fight Forever lavishes in intergender action. For example, the game inserts women randomly among the entrants in Casino Battle Royale matches, amping up the arcadey, anything-goes feel. All told, once you get men and women facing off in barbed-wire matches with blood all over the canvas and explosions happening left and right, Fight Forever starts to feel like Wrestling Empire, but with a far better game-play system.

Customization

From the AKI-era onward, robust customization options have been a must in wrestling games. While nobody expected Fight Forever's creation suite to meet the standard of 2K23, which has evolved over two decades, the create-a-wrestler mode is still highly serviceable. In a matter of minutes, you can fashion a unique and visually arresting character with a compelling entrance.

However, the day-one iteration of Fight Forever doesn’t offer a lot of opportunity for fine-tuning with regard to facial features and body morphing, and so creators looking to make detailed versions of wrestlers from other eras and promotions will face considerable difficulties. On top of that, the creation suite has strange quirks. You can, for instance, have your character wear a T-shirt to the ring, but he/she/they can't wear it during the actual match. T-shirts are standard fare among death-match wrestlers worldwide, so a creator is limited then, when they want to make, say, a Nick Gage or even a Kevin Owens. 

Additionally, while the move-set editor has an abundance of maneuvers available to choose from, particularly the innovated signatures of AEW stars, it still feels like there's a paucity of moves in the game. To Fight Forever’s credit, there are plenty of variations of basic wrestling moves, but this seems to make up the bulk of the move-list at the expense of more esoteric holds. While Fight Forever’s move-list will not leave you hurting like the anemic offerings in Arcade Action Wrestling, the AEW title does not pack nearly the amount of moves as in 2K or Fire Pro Wrestling W (the latter of which benefits enduringly from its “Move Craft” feature).

A Matter of Consistency

If this reviewer has one true gripe with Fight Forever, it’s minor, and it involves the character models. Though the graphics have a generally agreeable look, the character designs display inconsistencies. While wrestlers like Penta El Zero Miedo and Jon Moxley look photorealistic, Kenny Omega appears very arcadey and almost kittenish, for lack of a better word. In real life, Omega is an agile heavyweight. But in Fight Forever, the impressive thicknesses in Omega’s frame, particularly in his upper torso and thighs, have been streamlined into a litheness. His Fight Forever representation gives the impression of being like unto a puppy-dog version of the real man. That said, the slightly uneven graphical style doesn’t detract at all from the fantastic gameplay.

Conclusion

Altogether, AEW Fight Forever marks a must-buy for the video-game wrestling fan, as it draws a plethora (to borrow Taz’s favorite word) of excellent elements from many memorable grappling games. 

Some reviewers have compared Fight Forever unfavorably to WWE 2K23, saying that the AEW game simply can’t compete with the WWE juggernaut. To those reviewers, this reviewer says that Fight Forever doesn’t have to compete with 2K. If the 2K games are, say, Grand Theft Auto, then AEW is akin to Saint’s Row. It’s an alternative take on a genre that contains its own uniquely appealing look and feel. In real life, AEW offers wrestling and WWE offers “sports entertainment”; in the video game world, WWE provides a “simulation” of “sports entertainment” and AEW delivers wrestling action that’s actually entertaining to play. WWE 2K23 is deeper, yes, but it’s also convoluted and alienating to the uninitiated. Fight Forever, by contrast, has achieved its goal of providing an accessible video game wrestling experience on-par with the classic AKI games, and that is no small accomplishment. 

Many wrestling games (most notably the reprehensible TNA Impact!) have attempted to recapture the No Mercy and Revenge experience, but every single one has missed the mark. AEW Fight Forever has hit near the center of the No Mercy dartboard, and it has added to the AKI experience in the process. This makes it necessary playing not only for the wrestling fan, but also for the non-fan. More than a few people who otherwise detest wrestling will enjoy Fight Forever’s pick-up-and-play style, which is far less involved than WWE 2K23. Just as the AKI games brought non-fans toward wrestling in the late 90s and early 2000s, Fight Forever might be able to do the same in 2023.

Fighter Maker

At first blush, Fighter Maker might seem equivocal in name. Despite what its title might imply, Agetec’s 1999 PlayStation offering does not have a create-a-character mode where players can design the look of their fighter from the feet up; instead, one must choose from twenty-odd stock bodies. Moreover, you do not actually make a fighting game; instead, you design a single fighter's move-set and logic, the data filling up an entire memory card. But don't let the arguably false advertising of the title deter you—Fighter Maker is a landmark PS1 game.

The depth of character design in Fighter Maker unequivocally boggles the mind. In building your fighter, you can choose from more than twenty fighting styles ranging from Taekwondo to Pit Fighting. Among these are two different types of Jujitsu, multiple varieties of Karate, and three different types of professional wrestling. It is your task to assign strikes, throws, poses, and counters by style, and the possible combinations are staggering. How about a guy who mixes kickboxing strikes and superhero throws? How about a gal who blends high-flying lucha-libre holds with annoying Eddy Gordo-styled Capoeira strikes? With Fighter Maker, you can make it happen. You can also designate the probability of a fighter using a particular move in any given situation, and the degree of detail here could potentially confound the neurotypical. Much of the fun of Fighter Maker involves mashing up fighting styles and then watching the logic take on all comers, seeing how far the strategies you've developed can advance your character against the in-built logics of the CPU. 

And if that's not deep enough, Fighter Maker allows you to actually animate moves. Players who are detail-driven and pathologically patient can go in and build moves and taunts frame-by-frame. This level of customization was almost unheard of at the time of the game's release. Indeed, such a robust move editor would not be found in a fighting game until the "Move Craft" add-on was introduced to Fire Pro Wrestling World in 2020. Fighter Maker was ahead of its time by more than two decades. In all honesty, the sheer time-sink of the frame-by-frame animation probably turned off more people than it drew in back in the late 90s. Admittedly, your present correspondent really only uses the move editor to make minimal changes to the pro wrestling moves such that they all have botched landings where the victim is dropped awkwardly on his/her/their head, neck, or face (see image). 

Sure, Fighter Maker likely would have been better if it gave you the ability to edit fighter attire. The available body options are themselves rather banal, the characters mostly looking like knock-offs from established fighting game franchises of the time. There's a kickboxer who looks like Joe Higashi from Fatal Fury. There's an army guy with a haircut reminiscent of Guile or Paul Phoenix from Street Fighter and Tekken, respectively. There's also an army lady who looks like Sonya Blade of Mortal Kombat. There's an African-American man in a natty 70s-style suit who channels Tiger, Eddy Gordo's alternative skin in Tekken. (Alas, there is no tiger-headed rip-off of King from Tekken.) There's also Street Fighter EX's Skullomania, licensed directly from Capcom. And the default body type is an Asian guy in Kung Fu gear who blends all the stereotypical traits of a Ryu or a Liu Kang or, for that matter, a Bruce Lee. It's all quite predictable. But as you delve deeper into the software, the generic who's-who becomes less of a deficiency. For in the process of assigning and editing moves, your character's personality starts to emerge. In time, this body you’ve animated with life starts to grow on you. For instance, your correspondent gave the Guile-like guy a bunch of botched piledrivers and powerbombs, and what emerged was a reckless, irresponsible hotshot whom your correspondent sort of fell in love with. What’s more, the fighting styles you create are not locked to one body, so you can apply the move-set saved on your memory card to any character. That means you can see Joe Higashi or Eddy Gordo or Bruce Lee botch piledrivers, if that interests you.

You can edit your fighter's profile in detail, 
but none of this shows up in actual gameplay.

The only real downside to Fighter Maker is the fact that, with just the two memory card slots, you can only have a pair of custom characters going at any one time. If you're playing through the one-player mode (which is just six straightforward fights sans story), it'll be your choice of those two saved fighting styles versus the default logic of the stock characters. And if you want your two custom characters to face off in a simulated fight, it's more than a little tricky. First, you'll have to have two controllers hooked up. Then you'll have to go into VS mode and use the separate controllers to pick the player 1 and player 2 characters and manually set each to "CPU." Even then, there are sometimes bugs: your correspondent tried the above method on his PS3 and, in several cases, the player 2 AI was unresponsive, as if no one was playing the character. Truth be told, the PS3 is the best way to experience this game at present. With the virtual memory card function, you can create dozens of memory cards, each of which contains one of your custom logics. It must have become very expensive for old-timers playing this game back in 1999 on PS1, having to buy physical memory cards every time inspiration struck regarding ideas for a new character. 

All told, Fighter Maker epitomizes ingenious software that was way ahead of the curve. And though the learning curve is steep, especially when developing logic and animating moves, the effort is worth it when you see your unique brainchild kicking ass against the CPU. Fighter Maker marks one of the best examples of the true power of the PlayStation 1 compared to its console contemporaries. Fighter Maker shows just how far down the rabbit hole a disc-based system could take a gamer—it may have even taken the average gamer too far down, at least for 1999. But now in 2022 (or whenever you are reading this), where neuroatypicality is celebrated, you should take the time to go down that rabbit hole and give Fighter Maker the appreciation it deserves.

Waterworld

French intellectual journeyman Roland Barthes identified the essential element of photography as "punctum." Punctum refers to the object or image that jumps out at the viewer within a photograph. It is sharp, and it stabs and wounds; it is a personally touching detail in an image that establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it. Punctum transcends the "studium" of the photograph—that is, the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretations of its contents. Punctum does not have to be limited to photography and images, as it can apply within or between any composition (or series of compositions) in an oeuvre, whether it be literary or musical or dramatic. Nor does punctum have to be complicated. Punctum means, in Latin, the "point," and that is just what it is: the point of the piece that is, ideally, so profound in its connotations that it conveys something far beyond the limitations of words or gestures or even musical notes, something that almost doesn't need to be (or can't be) explained. By no means does punctum have to be triumphal or "good"; indeed, punctum is often about tragedy and pathos (in the latter context, the film The Room comes to mind).

We can search to find punctum in video games, too. As a visual medium, video games could and should be replete with punctum. Indeed, individual games often thrive on account of unique artistic styles. Moreover, video games can in some sense be said to have transcended words, at least insofar as they are often poorly written. Punctum may be there in abundance, should we take a concerted look for it.

Your correspondent has looked and has found Waterworld for Virtual Boy. The game, based on the 1995 dystopian Kevin Costner film of the same name, was released for multiple platforms, but it is the Virtual Boy version that brims with punctum like no other. The movie Waterworld was a would-be blockbuster about a future in which the polar ice-caps have melted, covering the globe in water. It cost an exorbitant amount to make, but was at best unconvincing throughout its bloated 2.5 hour entirety. Consider: the world, in this particular future, was covered in water, but everything was utterly filthy. In the hindsight 2020 affords us, Waterworld looks prescient now, what with the gaining effects of global warming, but it didn't resonate with audiences in 1995, and failed miserably at the box office. The tie-in video game turned out as bad or even worse than the movie for all platforms upon which it appeared, as it amounted to little more than a shooter of the Gladius type that is set, of course, in water. That being said, the Virtual Boy version is a truly special, nigh transcendent kind of awful. 

Nintendo released the Virtual Boy in 1995 as its "32-Bit" system, though it was markedly unlike any handheld or console system released to that point. Supported by two pronged legs, the system was a headset meant to sit upon a desktop, with the expectation that the player would hunch up their neck and shoulders to look down into the twin lenses. The graphics were red monochrome, meaning that every game was effectively rendered in red and black. Extended periods of play, on account of the neck-scrunching and constant exposure to rubicund graphics they involved, could make for a curious breed of vertigo—an enduring hallmark of the Virtual Boy experience. In view of these health concerns, not to mention a slew of critically-lambasted games, Virtual Boy was a colossal commercial failure. It is still widely considered one of Nintendo's greatest mistakes.

Waterworld for Virtual Boy, then, is truly remarkable among terrible video games. It throws all the flaws of the other versions into stark relief, highlighting especially the slow controls, haphazard collision detection, and repetitive adversaries. There are no backgrounds apart from the sunset. Save for the occasional atoll, the water is an uninterrupted sea of black, the red monochrome stripping Waterworld of the one remotely redeeming feature it might have had—the majestic blue of its aquamarine setting. 

So with Waterworld for Virtual Boy, we are left with one of the worst video games ever made, based on one of the worst mainstream movies ever made, on what may very well be the worst video game system ever made. It encapsulates failure across multiple mediums and domains. No more need be said; perhaps too much has been said already. The phrase "Waterworld for Virtual Boy" and, of course, the game itself, stand in tandem as signifiers for "ill-conceived beyond imagination." This latter clause reads like redundant studium, in fact, beyond the immediate, outcropping signification of the game itself. I submit, simply, that Waterworld for Virtual Boy is pure punctum.

***

Ergo, your correspondent has found the ultimate punctum, the ultimate bad game. And now, in the vertigo that comes after having stared into its rubicund, red-monochrome void, it is time for him to put down the controller, and, with that, to drop the third person "your correspondent" schtick. We've travelled three years together, and we've made it from Chrono Trigger to Waterworld for Virtual Boy. Now I must turn my sights toward the ultimate "must-find", that illusive trio of unity, purpose, and meaning in a world increasingly willing to accept that all of what surrounds us might just be a simulation. And right now, on account of a virus, the simulation is getting really rough. It's all hands on deck, which means any hand that can be pried off a controller can potentially be a helping hand. Staring into a CONTINUE screen with the digit diminishing ever closer to zero, I sign off. But this is not GAME OVER...

Horizon Chase Turbo

A good racing video game is a mystical experience. A bad racing game is a brutally accurate simulation of operating a motor vehicle. Horizon Chase Turbo is certainly not the latter, and, at its best, it often does feel like the former.

Realistic HCT is not. It is unapologetically video-gamey, drawing heavily from earlier racing templates, calling to mind Cruis’n USA for N64, or even Outrun for Genesis. The 8- and 16-bit influences are particularly strong. In this spirit, the graphics are adorably jejune, the designers giving us an abundance of bright, treacly, primary colors on cartoonish cars that cough out polygonal exhaust clouds while conical trees go whizzing by. Some of the rural racetracks in Chile look like unexplored planets in No Man's Sky. Some of the tracks in Japan are classically Orientalist. Some of the best courses are aglio e olio—just the track and cars in the black of night. Turn up the lovely soundtrack—dreamy techno infused with 8-bit melodies—and the experience is blissful.


HCT's eschewal of realism is most helpful with respect to controls. Handling can kill a racing game: get too real with the steering, and your car is all over the course. With HCT, you barely have to take your foot off the gas as you enter a turn, and rarely if ever will you be compelled to brake. This allows for pure concentration on the velocity—indeed, the speed is very vivid in HCT. Open up on a straightaway, and pretty soon it’s just you and the track. Let your nitro boosts fly, and all at once you and the track are one, as are your hands and the controller. You will ask yourself: "Is it my car that's moving? Or is it the track?" And unlike previous 8-bit racing offerings, that blending won't be a negative. Rather, it will be a positive affirmation of the numinous transcendence that HCT offers to the player, however fleetingly.

Needless to say, it's easy to play a game like this. To some, HCT might sound too easy. Admittedly, HCT is fairly simple, in that it's little challenge to finish third right off the bat. However, starting out, it's difficult to win or finish second. You'll need to earn some upgrades for your cars before you can win consistently. Car choice happens race-by-race in HCT, and for this reason, the game is not entirely devoid of strategy. Faced with such a vast variety of tracks, the car you choose has serious bearing on how you finish.

In sum, HCT is not realistic, but it is so fun to play that it’s almost unreal. Just how good is it? It’s better than Cruis’n USA. It outguns Outrun. In fact, your correspondent would be so bold as to say Horizon Chase Turbo is Pro Race Driver good.

Cruis'n USA

You probably expect your correspondent to tell you how Cruis'n USA has aged terribly. In truth, it has aged like fine wine. It's still fun and accessible, with a palpable sense of speed and precarity. You play on the edge of your seat as you encounter the constant head-on traffic. There are lots of crashes, but also lots of lead changes. Some of these derelict drivers come out of nowhere, swerving all over the road—apparently, in the vision of Cruis'n USA, the American highways are replete with drunks. From the west coast to the eastern seaboard, Cruis'n USA is a nice virtual road-trip through the United States, chock full of landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Redwoods, and finally Washington DC. Some levels are charmingly detailed, as is the case in the cornfields of Iowa, where buzzing bugs incessantly hit your windshield. With other levels, some serious liberties have been taken: to wit, the "Grand Canyon" level ends, after a minute and a half of racing, at Mount Rushmore. Creative license aside, Cruis'n USA is a ludic love-letter to American geography. It's also an excursion into an abiding American hetero male fantasy, as Cruis'n USA is all about the women from start to finish.

Indeed, the only thing that perhaps hasn't aged so well about Cruis'n USA is the pixelated bikini girl who’s there to wave the starting flag with dutiful enthusiasm at the outset of every race. Your correspondent refers not just to the in-game pixilation or the sag of this woman’s various appealing parts that has undoubtedly taken place in the twenty-plus years since the game's release. Rather, socioculturally speaking, your correspondent is pointing towards the distinctively male desire—the male gazing—that unmistakably drove the game's designers to digitize her scantily-clad figure and include it in the game in the first place. The gazer-cum-player-cum-driver is undeniably presumed to be a heteronormative, American male.

And all the way through each and every race, the player is accompanied by an unseen female who is along for the ride. She serves as your backseat driver, your guide, and your cheerleader. She tells you to "check it out" as you pass whatever landmark you're at, adding comments like "Wow, the Grand Canyon!" Her wonderment is tireless. When you pass another driver, she tells you to "take it!" She "oohs" and "awws" constantly. In fact, one of the recurrent background songs is a techno mix overlaid with rapid-fire samples of this woman’s "oohs" and "awws"—the whole thing is obtusely sexual. Apparently, this woman fulfills the fantasy of touring the USA by sports-car with an enthusiastic female in the backseat.

Finally, at the finish line, you are greeted by more pixelated cutouts of bikini girls, all of them with arms flailing in celebration. There's also a dude with long hair, jean shorts, and no shirt who’s credited as "Beefcake Boy" and played by one Sal Divita (who also did mo-cap for Mortal Kombat). If you win the race, the image of a thick-thighed girl in a mini-skirt and t-shirt combo rises up onto the screen and then she shimmies on a short loop with a trophy held out for your gazing requirements. She’s played by Anutza Herling, better known by her nom-de-porn, Shyla Foxx. This is what awaits you at the summit of your all-American automotive quest.

The American Dream presents itself

Cruis'n USA, then, is above all about a fundamentally American goal of being constantly accompanied and encouraged by fawning women. But it is more than that, and this is where the Beefcake Boy's inclusion is absolutely crucial. It's not just about the women. Rather, it's about enthusiastic bikini girls and porn starlets in the majority, and whooping, shirtless bros in the minority—this is the optimal proportion in the American calculus of fame. This is the American dream: impressing women and simpletons—one sector has intercourse with you, the other pays money to consume the licensed products wrought from whatever overvalued skill you possess. These are the people you are vying to impress in the USA. Being a winner is about exhilarating the easily pleased, satisfying people who don't wear shirts or pants. This, dear reader, is America at its fullest.

Harlem Globetrotters: World Tour

The Harlem Globetrotters are world famous for their hardcourt exhibitions—gymnastic spectacles and capering antics that are so carnivalesque and "worked" that they are to professional basketball what professional wrestling is to amateur Greco-Roman grappling. For over a century, the Globetrotters have barnstormed mid-sized towns (mostly mid-western) to promulgate their hardwood hijinks, beating up on enhancement talent teams ("jobbers" in pro wrestling lingo) like the New Jersey Reds, the New York Nationals, and the infamous Washington Generals.

Inevitably, an institution so enduring would receive its own video game, and the Globetrotters have been around long enough to have attained that milestone twice over. The first virtual foray into sports-entertainment basketball was a five-on-five affair for the NES, released in 1990. While solid enough graphically, the game was fairly light on theatrics and heavy on the hardnosed simulation elements. In fact, it was so hard, it was not uncommon to lose by 50 points to the CPU—and that was when playing as the Globetrotters against the Generals on the easiest difficulty. 

Thankfully, the Globetrotters got the game they deserved 16 years later. This was Harlem Globetrotters World Tour for the Gameboy Advance. The game features a two-on-two, arcadey format very much inspired by the NBA Jam and NBA Hangtime style. This feels truer to the Globetrotters' unique sports-entertainment experience. And, also in fidelity with the Globetrotter's MO, when using the titular titans in World Tour mode or exhibition, the human player can absolutely destroy computer opponents like the LA Lashers, London Lords, and Shanghai Spirits (the Generals are, sadly, absent from this game). A one-sided game is fun at first, but by the fourth quarter it starts to feel a bit sadistic. Elsewhere on this blog, your correspondent has often championed the overly easy game, given that such offerings alienate no one; that said, with World Tour, things are a little too simple. If you're looking for real challenge, try challenging the Globetrotters with one of the jobber teams. With some divine intervention, you might do what hasn't been done since January 5, 1971—that fateful night in Martin, Tennessee when the Generals beat the Globetrotters.

If there is to be a third Globetrotters' game, the developers might not necessarily have to make the competition fiercer. Rather, they might focus on the Globetrotters' wrestling-esque approach and take a page from squared-circle simulations. The best of all wrestling games, Fire Pro Wrestling World, does not measure a player's success in wins and losses, which are somewhat immaterial in the world of wrestling. Rather, Fire Pro judges matches based on their quality—that is, the story they tell, and the high spots they hit—all of it digested in a "match rating" awarded at the end of a match. Perhaps a future Globetrotters game could leave victory for the Harlem side as a foregone conclusion, as it most always is, and focus instead on ability to pull off a sufficient numbers of behind-the-back shots, hot-dog dunks, and ladder-aided layups. That would better encapsulate the timeless Globetrotter experience.

Pro Race Driver

Pro Race Driver is the best racing video game ever made for any system, bar none. Forget Gran Turismo, Forza, NASCAR Thunder, or Flag to Flag. Forget F-Zero. And for god’s sake, forget Mario Kart.

Released in 2002 for Xbox and PlayStation 2, Pro Race Driver was the newest iteration in Codemasters' consistently stellar TOCA touring car game series. While maintaining the precision control and realism of previous TOCA iterations, Pro Race Driver adds a revolutionary story-line element. You control the principal character, steering him through increasingly prestigious auto-racing series, all the while building his driving competencies. You'll go from slumming it in NASCAR-esque stock cars to styling and profiling in esteemed car types like unto F1. On account of this RPG-styled progression, Pro Race Driver has sometimes been referred to as a "Car-PG."

You learn to love your main character. He's not just a faceless driver. His name is Ryan "Octane" McKane, and you are given the opportunity to make him all your own by editing his nickname before embarking on a campaign. The immediate temptation is to go perverse while keeping the rhyme scheme: your correspondent went with "Shit Stain"; your correspondent’s associate decided upon "Come Stain." Either way, the matter of how Mr. McKane earned a nickname so evocative makes for intriguing ludo-narrative possibilities.

These cosmetic considerations aside, the appeal of Pro Race Driver is that you are directing a real man with flaws and vulnerabilities that you encounter over the course of the many raceways. Yes, Ryan McKane can be shrill at times, but he's also persistent and exacting. You see this in the car and on the infield, and you also see this in his dating life. Indeed, one of the subplots has you courting racing groupies (is the term "race rats"?). As you learn more and more about Shit Stain McKane, the man, over the course of various races and relationships, you start to wipe away the flaws and polish up the propensities.

Also worth noting: the graphics are photo-realistic

Each championship series consist of around six races, approximately seven laps each. This is just the right length, not too long or too short. The controls are velvety and user-friendly, and the competition ultra-forgiving, so you'll move through the game breezily. Less time redoing all the racing leaves more time for relating with the ladies (at least in-game).

Given its variety of car-types, its innovative RPG-styled story mode, its realism, and its accessibility, Pro Race Driver is a must-own of the highest order. Beyond all this, it possesses a personality—an unvarnished humanity—that all other racing games lack. This gritty verisimilitude sets Pro Race Driver apart as the greatest of all time. Pro Race Driver outpaces present-day racing games and, best of all, few game sellers realize this—as such, it's easy to find for cheap.

Bushido Blade

Video games have been treated as ephemera more often than they have been treated as art. We use video games as entertainment, but then we are done with them, and then they are forgotten. Only a few video games have been contemplated as artworks.

Bushido Blade might be art, it might be history, and it might be something more. It is, conventionally speaking, a fighting game, centered upon realistic one-on-one weapons-based combat informed by the Bushido tradition. Bushido refers to the honor codes of the samurai, dating back to sixteenth-century CE Japan.

Bushido drew from many sources, including Zen Buddhism. As a Mahayana Buddhist tradition, Zen was an interpretation of the teachings of the ninth-century CE philosopher Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna articulated the doctrine of emptiness. This doctrine holds that everything and anything is empty of own-being. No conventional thing, from the human soul to the setting sun, has an essence independent from everything else. Everything, like any given video game, arises then passes away. Even emptiness is empty.

This realization about everything's emptiness is essential to enlightenment. Part of the Buddhist project then, was about clearing the mind of conventional thinking so as to make way for this insight. In the Zen school, insight can happen suddenly. For that reason, Zen masters tried to disrupt conventional thinking to spur conceptual breakthroughs. This could involve sharp, sudden vocalizations, or even unexpected blows from sticks—a technique sometimes referred to as "Zen kindness." Less dramatically, the focus on clearing the mind also informed an aesthetic of minimalism in Zen. This aesthetic is embodied by the Zen garden—rocks and shrubs surrounded by “rivers” of raked sand—and Japanese line drawings—trees and mountains done entirely in black and white save for the vivid red cherry blossoms.

Bushido Blade's graphics and gameplay appear to be informed by these Zen sensibilities. With just the two combatants and a sparse background, be it a hall or courtyard or cherry blossom grove, and sparing soundtrack making room for little more than the duelists’ footsteps, the game's artistic style is minimalistic. (Likely, the original PlayStation's limited graphical capabilities informed this backdrop.) On the gameplay side, Bushido Blade is not about button-mashing; indeed, "mashing" is a gerund rarely connected to art. Rather, duels typically end after two or three well-placed blows. Sometimes, a single blow will end a contest via instant death; victory or defeat, like enlightenment, can happen suddenly. This does not necessarily mean that duels end quickly—rather, the contestants may circle for quite some time before attempting an attack. This makes playing Bushido Blade a strangely contemplative experience—almost a meditation in itself.

Each duel, then, carries the possibility of insight. The duel is non-dual. The defeated duelist passes away. In the end, there is only one combatant. The combatant is no longer a combatant, however, as he has eliminated the adversary that constituted him. He fights again, and if he loses, he too is proven empty. If he beats the game, the game is over, and it, too, proves to be empty. The player turns off the game, and it is empty, like everything else. In its capacity for spurring this insight, Bushido Blade endures.

Emptiness is empty, said Nagarjuna. What does this mean? Many interpretations have been offered through the centuries, spawning many Mahayana schools. For our immediate purposes in this review, your correspondent suggests it means there is hope. Indeed, a game like Bushido Blade gets turned off, only to get turned on again and again. If everything is empty, then the concept of "ephemera" is also empty. Some things have the potential to live anew and to in that way endure. And so there is hope for some video games as art. Turn on Bushido Blade again and realize as much.

Until Dawn

In 2006, your correspondent got into an argument with a friend of a friend who claimed that video games were a better story-telling medium than movies. Your correspondent deemed this position audacious and preposterous, and argued against it as such. This was a no-brainer. Movies were made by directors and auteurs with aesthetic formations, with the goal of entertaining any given person who chose to watch could be entertained (whether that involved education, amusement or horror). Video games, by contrast, were less accessible, the domain of only the most manually adept, and rarely consisted of more than a series of rote tasks cobbled together by computer programmers. These comp sci types had, for the most part, cartoonish sensibilities and a limited pool of stereotypes around which they based their characters. Arty games like Ico were the rare exceptions. Nonetheless, my opponent, growing agitated now, kept citing Metal Gear Solid as evidence for the insurmountable literary merit of video games, claiming it was a "morality play." Your correspondent counter-cited the films of David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and Orson Welles. Blue Velvet blows Metal Gear Solid out of the water—Frank Booth trumps Solid Snake on all axes. To this day, your correspondent still holds that he won the argument, hands down.

If one were to have this argument again in the present, however, the winner isn't so cut and dried. Now an overwhelming number of popular movies are based on comic books and video games, and so they draw from the cartoonish sensibilities and limited pool of character stereotypes that used to be the province of video games. But things have changed in the video game development world as well. In 2010, developer Quantic Dream gave us Heavy Rain, a gripping movie-styled crime-drama whodunit where the player steers several principal characters through major decisions and out of various tight spots. Plot-holes aside, Heavy Rain was a masterpiece. Quantic Dream followed up with several titles of comparable style and quality, most notably 2014’s Detroit, a game that moved this innovative gameplay genre toward a science-fiction narrative space. In between, Supermassive Games released Until Dawn, a ghoulish grab-bag of terror tropes that turned out to be better than most horror movies.

Horror movies don't usually do it for your correspondent. Don't get him wrong: you correspondent has seen hundreds of horror movies and considers himself an aficionado of the genre. However, aside from The Ring, horror movies don't give your correspondent the faintest bit of horripilation. Watching a horror movie, then, is usually an exercise in disappointment or, at best, an appreciation of well-done gore effects.

Until Dawn gripped your correspondent by the throat. That grip is icy, and fittingly so, as the story is based around a gathering of nubile teens in a castle-like cabin in the woods on a mountain somewhere in Canada. Time and again your correspondent's heart palpitated, his throat went dry, and his eyes popped out of his head. As he proceeded through all the familiar horror movie set-pieces, he had a physiological reaction as if encountering them all for the first time. In having to manually carry out via the controller do-or-die tasks for characters he had (for the most part) grown to care about, your correspondent was totally engrossed. If the horror movie is measured by its capacity for evoking reaction, Until Dawn's frisson goes on and on, and so in this way it succeeds. Indeed, Until Dawn has reinvigorated and reclaimed the horror genre. It does this in large part by making so much of the genre its own: to be sure, the game has what we might call an "Omni-horror" aesthetic, mashing up slashers, monster movies, and supernatural scare-fests all into one. The movie synthesizes Saw, Friday the 13th, The Ring and perhaps even the newest Blair Witch in commendable fashion. All the while, it is shaped by the gamer's own internal horror-scape, as therapy sessions interspersed throughout (and hosted by the incomparably creepy Peter Stormare) help determine all the little devilish details, such as what kind of mask the killer will wear, and what kind of fate will befall the various characters. There are dozens of conceivable plot-developments and endings based on the player's choices and competencies, and so Until Dawn delivers almost innumerable horror thrills.

Peter Stormare as the more-than-a-little-off psychiatrist

Until Dawn, then, pushes forward the concept not only of a video game, but also of a horror movie. The game moves past the passive observation of a movie by permitting participation. Film, however, is not the only medium it outperforms. Until Dawn eschews the repetitive task management of your average video game (especially a Dead Rising, for instance) in favor of an ever-advancing story. And in its active, hot-medium participation, Until Dawn also outshines horror novels, not just because of the variety of conclusions it’s organic narrative style permits, but also because the continual joystick work is a more engaging interstitial activity than reading the tangents that fill up most books (many of which are just padded novellas). All told, the type of participation that Until Dawn affords proves to be oh-so crucial for the horror genre. Just how many horror movies (and books) have left you indifferent to the plight of the characters? In Until Dawn you have to care about the characters, because you are the guiding force impelling them onward. If movie games have been a triumphantly innovative sub-genre within video gaming, then horror games, apotheosized by Until Dawn, are the sub-sub-genre triumph.

Until Dawn didn't relinquish your correspondent from its grasp until his surviving characters made it out of the cabin. In his initial play-through, only two of the eight principal characters survived. Herein lies your correspondent's only conceivable criticism of the game. The two survivors made for a less than satisfying ending. On the one hand, the goal of having more or all of the characters survive makes for some replay value. On the other hand, the second play-through probably won't have the unwitting frisson that came with the first. Perhaps more crucially, it bothers your correspondent more than a little that there is an "ideal" way to play through the game in which all the principal characters survive. The question is worth considering: is it really a "horror" game if no one dies?

Video games paled against movies ten or fifteen years ago, but, in the hindsight synonymous with 2020, we have to re-evaluate this position. Your correspondent won the argument in 2006, but he might not hold the same position now, at least in certain genres. Until Dawn was better than a horror movie could ever be. Moreover, it was better than watching a Marvel movie, which can often feel like watching someone play a video game. As such, Until Dawn embodies the limitless potential for games as story-telling and story-experiencing mediums, and suggests that video gaming is a medium that should drive movies, rather than being driven by them.