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.

Tecmo Super Bowl

In the January 1997 issue of GamePro, Tecmo ran an ad for the PS1 adaptation of Tecmo Super Bowl, the sequel to the company's most famous sports game. The ad spans two pages, the left presenting a drawing of an Oakland Raiders' ball-carrier emerging from the Tecmo Super Bowl jewel case, the right bearing the phrase "It's UN-BOWL-IEVABLE" atop four columns of text in 10-point font. The text is arranged under nine sub-headings. The ad is text-heavy, to put it plainly, and it reads like it was written by someone's CEO dad, who figured that explaining the appeals of the game very rationally, lucidly, sensibly, and at times laconically, all in a tone that is one part inter-office memo, one part life-lesson, would be the best way to sell Tecmo Super Bowl. The content of this advertorial-styled text is what will concern us here, as the game essentially reviews itself therein.

The text starts by promising that "Tecmo Super Bowl allows the user to trade any player, to any team, at any time. With this feature you have the ability to create your own Super Team. Just be careful when you're playing a friend. You had better make sure he [sic] didn't set you up. The only advice we can give is check your opponent's roster." The author(s) then goes on to the audio: "Tecmo Super Bowl's announcer gives true Play by Play [emphasis in original], not just an occasional phrase or two. If perhaps you think he's an idiot, you always have the option of turning him off." Then there is tournament mode, to which the author adds a dash of laconic levity: "Over the years Tecmo Super Bowl players have let us [the developers, presumably] know about the friendly competitions which sometimes take place. This version has a built in tournament mode for a total of 8 players playing one on one till one of the players wins the tournament. Chips and drinks are sadly not included." There are then four full sentences dedicated to the difficulty levels: "Knowing that some people haven't been playing Tecmo Super Bowl for years we've included 3 difficulty settings. Easy, Normal and Hard. Our football game gives you the ability to grow with the game. Internally we call this a screen save 'cause you don't have to throw a rock through the TV screen when you get frustrated with the game." Again, the writer—his or her hand presumably guided by someone in senior management who did not play video games, nor set foot in middle-class households—scrabbles to get the tone right, as is evident from the apostrophic shortening of "because." The wry wit returns for the description of instant replay: "If you want to analyze the last several seconds of play, simply pause the game and start the instant replay. In addition you can go frame by frame to fully analyze all of the action. Then again, you may not want to see the interception again, and again, and again, and again." By this point, having detailed the rather rudimentary feature of instant replay, which had been in football video games for approximately five years by this point, the advertorial seems just a bit condescending. The ad moves on to the game's statistical capabilities: "Tecmo's stats engine has always been unsurpassed. This year we've added the ability to keep the stats from any player in any position even if it's only for 1 play during the entire season. Here's your one and only chance to re-write the record book." Okay. And as for the play-calling capabilities: "From the game play menu, you now have access to the entire playbook for the immediate play. ...for [sic] more plays than you can possibly want, use, call, send-in, modify, change, and/or run as the case may be."

To this point, none of these features seem particularly revolutionary. Only when it comes to weather does the advertisement (if not the game itself) speak to something original: "Ordinary football games sometimes have weather conditions. So far as we know, Tecmo Super Bowl is the only game to actually change the weather during the game. So one minute it could be raining, and then it could start snowing, or then again stop or actually it's too variable to give you all the possible scenarios." From here the advertorial-cum-term paper moves into its conclusion, under the heading "MORE, MORE AND MORE": "We've tried to highlight some of the most important new features of Tecmo Super Bowl for the Sony PlayStation. Obviously, there are more features than we can possibly list. Tecmo Super Bowl is one of the most realistic and sophisticated football simulators ever created. Aside from all the technical improvements, think about the following: [...]." It is at this point that the advertorial switches its mode of persuasion from rhetorical to mathematical, providing this formula: "1 TECMO SUPER BOWL/1 SONY PLAYSTATION/1 Television + 2 OR MORE PLAYERS = GREAT FOOTBALL FUN."

For those rationalists among the gaming crew, this straightforward, detailed explanation might have us wetting our lips. But rationalism died out in advertising in the 1920s. Even if your game (or any product, really), lives up to the arguments and overall thesis you put forward in the advertisement, it will do little to sway a consumer. Since Edward Bernays introduced psychoanalytic principles to public relations and advertising, desire has been all the rage in selling products. In that sense, Tecmo's ad-staff and CEO were about seven decades behind the curve. They fare better when it comes to football video games, as they’re only a several years behind. Tecmo Super Bowl does not even live up to its description. Graphically, it’s a pixelated nightmare, even compared to contemporaneous offerings of Madden and Gameday. Moreover, the announcer is minimalistic. The only redeeming feature is the ability to trade any player to any team. Regardless, Tecmo Bowl for NES this is not, and reading the above description, you almost feel as if you don't have to play the game to know that. Rereading the ad in the context of Tecmo Super Bowl’s failings, it comes off more like an argument justifying the game’s existence, rather than attesting to any merit it might actually have. It is, in sum, not "GREAT FOOTBALL FUN", but more like MODERATE FOOTBALL FUN, at best. Tecmo Super Bowl, then, is one game that reads a lot better than it plays.

Soul Calibur IV

Soul Calibur IV is an unparalleled aesthetic accomplishment, and, over a decade after its release, it endures as a digital apotheosis of beauty. Perhaps it is shallow to begin a review with a discussion of graphics, but, true to the Soul Calibur series, the fourth iteration is a truly stunning game, and the depth of its bright and glossy visuals abidingly occasions amazement. So many different materials are rendered convincingly here, ranging from metals to leathers to textiles. Future iterations of the series have not drastically overhauled the graphical style, and with good cause, as SCIV is among the most aesthetically satisfying games ever made.

SCIV had—and has—perhaps the best create-a-character in all of video games, another feature so stellar that it has only been slightly tweaked for sequels. The editing suite provided on SCIV is nothing short of a triumph—what can't be created here? The textural and sartorial variety are so vast, it is difficult not to create a character with personality. You can realize virtually any classical warrior archetype: samurais, knights errant, ninjas, barbarians, cowboys, nurses, Nazi werewolves—they're all here, vividly imagined and waiting to be drawn out from the creation suite. Beyond that, you are able to equip your creation with a wealth of classical weaponry drawn from across historical periods and civilizations. It would take multiple master's degrees and PhDs in the humanities to know if it's all historically accurate—indeed, the majority of it is probably not. But placed in a tapestry as beautiful as that of SCIV, it all feels accurate. And if we've learned anything from history, it's that the inaccurate take is usually the most entertaining and awesome one.

You come to love your creations. Indeed, their top-class rendering and texturing gives them a strangely alluring character. The zaftig and/or callipygian female form is particularly well-rendered in SCIV. "Women have always been a visual mystery to men," Hollywood director Brian De Palma once offered. "They don't have to say anything—they just look." In SCIV, the women look, but they do so much more. They brandish battleaxes and wield bullwhips and kick ass and quip at par with their male counterparts. The characters are comely no matter what gendering you prefer, and so alongside your buxom bombshells, their breasts bound up firm in metal bodices, you also get square-jawed, stubble-chinned Adonises, their packages snugly girded. And the editing suite is not limited to just the two genders or just the one species.

Soul Calibur IV's gameplay is as lovely as the visuals. The controls are smooth enough that you can button mash and still have success, even feeling graceful while doing so. It all comes together, historically and aesthetically, in Soul Calibur IV, which stands as the best weapons-based versus fighter in the chronicles of video gaming, hands down.

But it goes beyond history. Soul Calibur games from II onward have included guest warriors, usually famous licensed characters from other franchises, the most notable being Link from Legend of Zelda. For Soul Calibur IV, Namco managed to land the most prestigious of all licenses: that of Star Wars. And so, the capacious Soul Calibur universe welcomes Yoda to the Xbox 360 version of IV, and Darth Vader to the PS3 offering thereof. For a small fee, owners of either system could download whichever of the two Jedis they did not get with their version of the game. The incorporation of the rival Jedis rendered Soul Calibur IV an absolute must-buy at the time of its release, and certainly, the collector who does not own the game would be remiss not to seek it out.

The question remains, then: if you are a retro gamer with both the Xbox 360 and the PS3, and you don't want to mess around with downloads for an outdated system, which version do you buy? The simplest response is that you buy both. But for the sake of argument, let's say you can only have one. So which is it?

The answer is PS3. Darth Vader, your correspondent submits, fits the Soul Calibur aesthetic impeccably, as he is multi-textured, with cloth cape, abdominal dials, and spit-shined headwear. Moreover, Vader helps SCIV fully realize its aspiration to present a trans-historical menagerie of warriors. Darth Vader is the future,* but he is also the past with his Samurai-inspired, glans-shaped helmet. Yoda, though he is formidable, will always feel like a bit of a novelty character on account of his diminutive stature and croupy, mangled elocution.

But this Star Wars debate is immaterial. Buy Soul Calibur IV and every other iteration of the series. Of course, for the truly discerning gamer, such an imperative is redundant.

NOTES:

* I realize it all happened "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" but, nonetheless, Star Wars still looks futuristic from the perspective of our own time.

AEW Wrestling (Preview)

Any wrestling promotion worth its salt needs a video game, and the higher ups at All Elite Wrestling (AEW), the newborn potential competitor to the heretofore hegemonic WWE, seem to apprehend this. Evidently, no one understands this better than Kenny Omega, AEW's sine qua non who is widely renowned for his transcendent in-ring performances. Omega has not only flagged a good video game as a necessary part of AEW’s future, but he has also publicly stated that this hypothetical game should be built around the legendary AKI gameplay system.

This only further confirms Omega's aesthetic discernment. The AKI engine, with its grappling system based on weak and strong tie-ups, is widely regarded as the benchmark of videogame wrestling schemas. Though it relies on button-mashing, to some degree, and may not have the precision of Fire Pro Wrestling's timing-based system, the AKI mechanic is considerably easier to pick up and play. Flagship AKI N64 titles like WCW/NWO Revenge (1998) and WWF No Mercy (2000), as well as the Japan-only Virtual Pro Wrestling 2 (2000), are still being played at present, holding their own against—and even outperforming—contemporary wrestling video games. 

That said, the AKI engine has not appeared in full force in nearly two decades, the 2000 release WWF No Mercy representing the last true iteration of the schema. Modified versions of the AKI system appear in Def Jam Vendetta (2003), Ultimate Muscle: Legends vs. New Generation (2003), and (to some degree) WrestleMania XIX (2003), but these games were little consolation for diehards, who have been consistently clamoring for a proper AKI sequel throughout the entirety of the twenty-first century. Said diehards have even kept afloat a dedicated modding community, which has produced many a buggy bootleg classic, including WCW Feel the Bang.

The AKI engine would be a perfect fit for AEW, as the company has predicated itself upon pleasing precisely this kind of diehard fan. With that being said, the system is not too involved so as to alienate newcomers, and thereby strikes a crucial balance between the uninspired WWE 2K games and the hardcore, sprite-based Fire Pro. As this sort of happy medium (and high medium at that), the engine can also help AEW court non-wrestling fans who might otherwise dismiss "entertainment" of WWE’s ilk. The AKI engine's minimal learning curve made the games eminently playable, and actually brought people to wrestling. Even wrestling skeptics couldn't deny the appeal of four-player AKI battles royal. As such, an AKI game could be an effective means by which AEW can create positive associations with its product and expand its fan-base, generating enthusiasts wholly unsullied by WWE.

A number of difficulties stand in the way of AEW's AKI game, however. First off, there is the fact that AKI doesn't exist anymore. Rather, it has rebranded itself syn Sophia, and mostly just releases fashion games for portable systems. Secondly, were AEW to convince syn Sophia to resurrect its wrestling engine, it remains to be seen how a schema so closely tied to the N64’s controller and graphical style will translate to the current generation. Graphics were never the main appeal of AKI grappling games (they rarely are for good wrestling titles), and the animations, in their purest form, might not satisfy the ragdoll-obsessed visual sensibilities of current-generation gamers. That said, an AEW game could be done up retro-styled with N64-era visuals, and this would still make for a highly appealing download. 

No Mercy, Revenge and Virtual Pro 2 quintessentially encapsulated peak historical junctures for the WWF, WCW, and All-Japan promotions, respectively, saving for posterity little dispatches from an era when wrestling was achieving its full potential. Can an AKI-styled game help hoist AEW to the pinnacle of professional wrestling? The question will remain unanswered for a while, as an AEW game by any company is at minimum two years away. And if AEW cannot compete with the WWE's lackluster but nonetheless entrenched product, the promotion itself might not even be around in two years.

Rollerball

Rollerball is a pinball simulator released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988. It is not a video game adaptation of the 1975 film Rollerball directed by Norman Jewison. Had it been, Rollerball (1988) might have been better off—indeed, the game is a fairly bland virtual rendition of pinball, divorced from the smells and bells of the arcade that made pinball salvageable. Moreover, Rollerball the film would have translated deliciously to the video game format, as it depicts a futuristic sport for which the rules are indeterminate, if even existent. Irregardless, Rollerball manages to incorporate roller-skates, metal balls, and motorbikes, all on an ovular track. While the rules are unclear, the bloodshed is plainly obvious. Ultimately, the toll of the game is death to the opposition. The movie inspired numerous game designers, and several companies attempted to put forward similar futuristic imaginings of sport; among these titles are Speedball, Powerball, Rageball, and Deathrow. And while some of these games are great, no single one succeeded in capturing the sheer brutality and insanity of the movie that inspired them. It's still not too late for a virtual adaptation of Rollerball the movie—even a semi-competent rendering would far surpass a new and improved version of Rollerball, the pinball game for NES.