With more time and care, these could’ve helped the old games
This post was originally supposed to be about different archetypes in anime, though I’m delaying that to sometime in December as I don’t yet have enough research to discuss those in full detail. This week, however, I’ll bring up something that has crossed my mind before, but not with enough frequency to expand upon: forgotten plot points from the 3D Mortal Kombat universe.
The original idea came from a MojoPlays video that I couldn’t f[head rip]king find until a few minutes before writing this because I misremembered the title. Abandoned Story Threads instead of Forgotten Plot Points; potato, potahto. Either way, the video can be viewed on the MojoPlays channel through the link below.
Credit: MojoPlays
The gist of the video is that throughout the series, the Mortal Kombat games have introduced plot points that were about to heat up only for the devs to go in a different direction. With over 30 years out on the market, you’ve got your pick of the litter to choose from. For this week, it’s the 3D games from MK Deadly Alliance to Armageddon. Here’s the f[scream of pain]king short version: starting with Deadly Alliance, Quan Chi escaped from a fiery ass-whoopin’ at Scorpion’s hands, discovering the Dragon King’s “undefeatable” army in the process and bringing these mummified warriors to Shang Tsung where they formed a bond based on ignorance.
Context:
Channel: Kamidogu
After the Deadly Alliance is formed, they remove all obstacles that would block them from ruling all existence. Not happy sucking up to Shao Kahn for millennia, they kill him in his throne room then make their way to the Wu Shi Academy where Shang Tsung finally gets to consume the soul of the greatest warrior in Mortal Kombat History: The Great Kung Lao I mean, Liu Kang!
OGs can’t be beat!
So with Liu Kang and Shao Kahn dead, they operate a tournament under false pretenses in Outworld and use the defeated to return the mummified army to life with the goal of marching on Earthrealm with malicious intent. Raiden saw this from the heavens and organized the remaining warriors across the realms to stop them. Fun fact, you can find archived websites and forums debating the plot points of then-upcoming games, like this website MKSecrets.net, which for some reason still looks like it was made in 2001 even though it has details on MK1 (2023)… I thought that was most Japanese websites…?
Anyway, MK: Deception picks up from the premise of Deadly Alliance only the sorcerers were too powerful for all of the warriors (could’ve probably sent them all as a group, but MK9 proves that that wouldn’t have helped much) and so at his wits end, Raiden challenges them himself. Not even a thunder god could defeat the sorcerers and realizing that their goals were nearly complete, what was left was the amulet Quan Chi stole from Shinnok in MK4. He hangs onto it defeating Shang Tsung in the process, only to have Onaga reborn (hinted at from Reptile’s ending in the last game) and return to reclaim the army that the sorcerers so generously returned to life with the souls of conquered fighters.
All three men realize that danger was marching towards them and while they managed to temporarily hold them back, Raiden uses a last ditch attack on the Dragon King. It failed to even scratch him and he grabs a hold of the amulet which will be needed to form the six Kamidogu into a single entity.
Channel: MKIceAndFire
As for how Onaga acquired the Kamidogu, well it involved tricking a young boy named Shujinko and leading him across reality by the nose for 40 years. If this game were canon, that would’ve come back to bite Onaga in the ass, only for Shujinko’s efforts to go unrecognized as redemption and still get punished by a Dark Raiden. This will become important later.
Shaolin Monks was a bit of a beat ’em up remake of MKII (kinda) and I’d already talked about that before, so we’re skipping it considering it has nothing to do with the 3D trilogy anyway.
Armageddon was supposed to cap it all off and the more I’ve thought about it, the more it felt like a final send off before Midway got the crappy ideas out of the way in time to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010.
Let’s not be too harsh though, it did help pave the way for the Injustice line.
Story-wise, the protector god of Edenia, Argus, is made aware that between the actions of the sorcerers and Shujinko being duped for that long, the warriors of the realms were learning more about the construction of the realms than the Elder Gods would be comfortable with and proposed to Argus to come up with a solution. He suggested total annihilation to protect the realms from their own residents, but his wife Delia suggested depowering them all since there were many heroes who fought tooth and nail to defend the realms from evil, not the least of which was Shao Kahn and Shinnok (whom we learn later was banished to the Netherrealm for eternity for treachery, leaving Quan Chi to do the heavy lifting through the Brotherhood of Shadow).
They’re granted the power to do this and choose to do so by making a competition of things for their sons Taven and Daegon. If things went to plan, the two men would engage in a friendly competition, grab their weapons and armor and race to defeat their mother’s firespawn (half-brother?) Blaze to achieve full godhood as both of them are demigods. In reality, the two brothers, under the watchful eye of a pair of dragons, Orin and Caro, are set on a different path. Caro, who was the guardian dragon of Daegon, lost contact with Blaze believing it to be an early sign to set him on his path. Instead, Daegon forms the Red Dragon clan in Caro’s name and signs off on unethical science experiments for the purpose of choking existence into coughing Blaze up. The way its presented makes me think of Unit 731 in Manchuria and its surgeon general Shiro Ishii. If you don’t know, look it up at your own peril.
This makes Daegon the antagonist of the Konquest mode and through no fault of his own Taven loses sight of the purpose of his quest. And his frustration and confusion at this whole course of events is best reflected at the several times he’s questioned and even considered abandoning ship. The quest stopped being fun for him as he lost the things he cherished. Blaze appeared at the end to catch him up to at least what the true purpose of the quest was and Taven is a hero if we compare him to the Ancient Greek model similar to Perseus or Theseus. Self-serving at times, but the guy still knows the difference between good and evil. Daegon’s descent into evil seems random until he learned that he was supposed to lose the quest and decided to take matters into his own hands, hence the birth of the Red Dragon.
Dropped and abandoned plot points are still a problem for the series as it’s developed a reputation for introducing points and leaving them to collect dust. We barely get five minutes with the concept before the devs (read: Ed Boon and John Tobias) moved onto something else. You could say the fandom is also to blame for this as dedicated fans have asked (demanded) the team to release canonically deceased characters as DLC, but staying with the 3D games where the problem expanded, there’s more to say about it during this era than anywhere else in the series.
Starting with Deadly Alliance, Shao Kahn was established to be killed in the intro to this game, with Deception and Shujinko’s story acting as a prequel taking place some years before the events of Deadly Alliance where it all converges. Shujinko himself was invited twice by the White Lotus Society and later by Shang Tsung himself to represent Earthrealm in the tournament but couldn’t attend for different reasons. The White Lotus got tired of waiting for him to power up (never mind that the tournament is hosted every 50 years) and due to his cleansing journey with Nightwolf, he had to go back to the Netherrealm to gather more hatred, from none other than the ghost of Hanzo Hasashi.
This part doesn’t necessarily screw around with the timeline as egregiously as following plot points, but Armageddon is where it all breaks down. Canonically dead characters are resurrected off-screen and based on what we know we can connect the dots, but often the devs are a bit cagey when it comes to showing how, who and/or why characters are returned to life. The 2011 continuity shows that Quan Chi has brought Noob and Sindel back to life and claimed the souls of those killed by Sindel herself in the eleventh hour, but it’s not shown whether he brought Shao Kahn back to life or if he did why he’d do so, or even why the rest of the villains would agree to this arrangement.
Channel: BruskPoet
I’m not saying this moment in the story is bad, I like it a lot. But the nonexistent explanation for how all this can come to be is what sours me on it somewhat. I’d say there’s no care for a consistent timeline especially in a fighting game (something that doesn’t escape Tekken), but I think it’s more along the lines of the devs wanting their personal favorites to shine brighter than the others, which is why the franchise works better as video games and toy lines than it does movies.
Most of the time…
For what it’s worth, the characters have been mostly consistent with a few touch ups here and there, but if you ask people like The4thSnake, there’s a lot under the hood that could use some light to heavy rewiring from individual characters to whole ass f[swords clashing]king plot points, like what I’ve been writing about here. I’m a bit torn personally, because it brings a charm not found in other series, but this many plot holes treats the timeline like a redheaded step child. Doesn’t stop people from trying, as I’ve stated before, I rewrote MK: Shaolin Monks myself like it was Dragon Ball as that was what I was watching at the time.
Why bother with the 3D games, though? Well, of all the plot points introduced and left by the wayside, the 3D games did it the most and the worst of any other era, which seems to be the result of developmental inconsistencies prior to release on store shelves. It certainly hasn’t stopped people from trying though and it likely will keep going for as long as there is a Mortal Kombat to fix. Nothing too serious at this point, but it’s both fun to expand on what was and offer critique for one of the series most tumultuous times in its history.
I call this one a humble brag of sorts as I look back to the games I had available on my old PS2. From the day I got it (c. 2003) to the day I canned it (March 2013), I had a large library of games. Not exactly enough to fill a whole bookcase, but large enough to dedicate one of the shelves of the bookcase to them for storage. My ever reliable memory may fail me here, but I’ll go ahead with the ones that I remember dedicating the most time to, starting with this.
3D Mortal Kombat Games (2002-06): Starting with a classic series, you might be surprised to learn how I got into Mortal Kombat. My mother actually was a fan during the 90s’ 2D era Mortal Kombat games.
Considering the steps the franchise has taken since and now with a new game debuting in the middle of September, it’s nostalgic to look back at these 2D sprites of digitized martial artist-actors and think that this was the first of a phenomenal and influential video game series. The blood, the characters, the story, the moves, and best of all the fatalities; something this popular and this controversial — so much so that it helped birth the ESRB — was not lacking in graphic content, nor even imitators for that matter.
There were always fighting games before, during, and after MK’s big debut, but I’m not sure if any other fighting franchise can boast about having as many imitators as MK did at the time, and probably still does. Then again, a few come to mind…
MK’s transition to 3D in 1997 wasn’t without its missteps however. It tried its best, but Ed Boon even admitted that Mortal Kombat 4’s quality wasn’t up to snuff, and this isn’t even mentioning the media getting in on the then-hyper realistic graphics and their supposed influence on the impressionable and possible contribution to real-world violence–an accusation that video games couldn’t seem to shake off for years. But nevertheless, Midway trudged on and met the 2000s swinging at the fences.
Although Deadly Alliance came first in 2002, the first MK game I had was 2004’s Deception. The simple numbering system for sequels isn’t concrete giving way to creativity most of the time, but an average consumer without even a bit of knowledge in what they’re buying may not notice until after they buy the game. Fortunately for us, Blockbuster Video was a popular rental store for those who wanted to test an entertainment medium before committing or just didn’t see themselves owning it for good.
This was how I found out about Deadly Alliance. Being a bit older than Deception, most of the features in Deception aren’t in Deadly Alliance. It did have the 3D animations, fighting styles, and arenas that followed it into Armageddon and MK vs DC Universe (I personally don’t count this as an MK game), but what it was lacking in is what makes Deception look like an upgrade by comparison. This doesn’t mean Deadly Alliance was barebones, far from it. It’s Konquest mode was a great big tutorial for how to move and maneuver the characters and their combos, the endings were all unique with some connecting to others, the krypt had loads of secrets and collectibles to find, and the soundtrack stands as one of my favorites in video gaming.
On the later end of the 3D era, Armageddon had the same fighting mechanics of the last two games with several more added features, several mini-games and an in-depth plot about the fate of existence like that of Deception, and has possibly featured nearly every character ever introduced in Mortal Kombat since its inception 14 years earlier, but seems more than a little bit barebones compared to its predecessors. The previous two games gave the characters two fighting styles and a weapon, an arsenal of special moves, one fatality in Deadly Alliance and two in Deception including a Hara-Kiri/suicide move. Deception and Armageddon fixed the error that Deadly Alliance committed by omitting the stage fatalities, but committed some of its own cardinal sins.
Technically, it’s possible to have mastery over two or more martial arts styles. I was never the biggest fan of the old style-branching combos with so many of them being so difficult to pull off in rapid succession, but for the most part, the variety they added to a fight by chaining multiple combos between styles and sometimes ending with a strong weapon attack was the definition of a power move, or dare I say, a pro gamer move.
So while they might be gone from Armageddon, at least the characters feel and play differently: males apart from females apart from creature-types like Motaro or Baraka apart from the literal beasts like Goro, Onaga or even Blaze himself after the glow up from his addition as a secret character from MK Deadly Alliance.
The other cardinal sin committed, one that’s less forgivable or defendable is that of the fatalities. If you’ve played these older games, you’ll know that the window of opportunity was notoriously unforgiving and the combos so precise that one slip-up could turn a head ripper into a slap in the face which some would say added to the reward. I actually discovered Armageddon’s fatality system by accident after trying to finish a character off by way of special move only to unintentionally dismember them and squeeze his head. Yeah, Armageddon got lazy with the fatalities.
No room for practicing something difficult anymore, everyone regardless of physicality is capable of committing many of the same fatalities and input combos, with different tiers depending on what’s done to the victim. Single moves aren’t anything special where as a full-on prolonged dismemberment and maiming before the big finish creates what the game calls an “Ultimate Fatality.”
I can call this a lot of things, but part of me used to believe the titling of Armageddon was a glimpse into what was going on behind the scenes. Just now, a Google search revealed that there was more going on under the hood that resulted in Midway shutting down in 2009, not the least of which was an overdependence on Mortal Kombat along with financial mishandling, so while I wasn’t off the mark, I wasn’t entirely accurate either.
3D Grand Theft Auto Games (2001-2006): This brings me back to an arguable bygone era of RockStar Games, a time when the next game was literally a few years or even months away than a full-on decade and change. Think about it: the last GTA game will turn ten years old in less than a month as of writing this. Also, the most recent release was an ambitious project that lived up to its purported hype if not beyond and RockStar is seeking to abandon it.
But we’re getting off track. The most iconic games of the GTA era were released seemingly back to back between October 2001 and October 2004 and have set the precedent for 3D gaming ever since, finding the solution to a complex problem. For GTA III, full 3D graphics have been realized and helped struggling developers hit the ground running when they eventually tried it in their own IPs (though I argue this was also perfected in another game published that year, Max Payne). For 2002’s Vice City, while admittedly an asset flip that has helped with the influence of future methods of lazy rip-offs and asset flips (arguable again, I can’t put fault for all of that on one game), it added more to the GTA franchise and gaming in general with the setting, plot, characters, star studded voice actors and features. Finally, for 2004’s San Andreas, the features present in that game got an even bigger boost across a much larger open-world game. It incorporated several RPG-like elements regarding character customization, had expanded on bonuses featured in prior entries, expanded on the ownership of assets from Vice City and many more features that are too numerous to name.
Additionally, there were spin-offs set in between these games like Vice City Stories and Liberty City Stories, both of which I’ve covered on this blog earlier this year. From GTA III to 2006’s VCS, the 3D era games show the most innovation and imagination to me. GTA III walked so the succeeding games could sprint, to the point that in lists describing games that have aged poorly, GTA III consistently places in the middle for what the succeeding games have that it didn’t.
It’s hard to say when silent protagonists lost their favor with developers with them becoming more rare as personable protagonists became more commonplace, but Claude having no voiced lines would make him forgettable if it wasn’t for his attire. Green cargos, a leather jacket, and what looks like navy blue Nikes or Vans; at least he’s recognizable. But without a voice, players are left with his actions to characterize him. The Professional makes a case for him being a textbook psychopath. Although the game is majority player-driven, Claude not even second guessing his own actions before nodding and blasting sounds like a worry spot for criminal profilers to watch out for.
His successor, Tommy Vercetti, was much more animated and well-acted, which may have something to do with his voice actor.
An ambitious move on RockStar’s part, hiring A-list actors for main roles was an ingenious move that continued well into the 2010s to help shape the numerous protagonists going forward. Tommy Vercetti is an embittered ex-mobster who was given all the freedom to screw over a boss who wronged him ages ago. To this end, he’s mostly stuck working with a hapless, cocaine-addled lawyer whose voice lines whenever you get busted by the cops are some of the most humorous in the game.
He was initially supposed to go down to Vice City, Florida to make money for the mob and send the earnings back to the Forelli family, but with all that’s happening in VC thus far, coupled with a complicated past of betrayal, Tommy’s choices are clearer than they were. Forget the mob, Vercetti’s the big boss of this neon-lit city, and the ownership of assets from a cab company to a print shop to a cocaine distributor masquerading as an ice cream factory reflects this. It all comes to a head when the news and not the money reaches the mob’s ears and thus comes the final mission paying homage to the 1983 remake of Scarface.
I’m not kidding, this is a remake of a 1930s movie.
Anyway, GTA: San Andreas’s use of RPG elements was peak customization. VC allowed you to change your clothing, but SA gives you way more freedom. Whole outfits can be created by changing a simple article of clothing, the player can ink themselves up, and get any haircut they desire. There’s also a sort of leveling system based on how often you perform such an action. From my own experience, I’ve employed what some could consider a Call of Duty method to shooting. What I mean is, most of the time, my accuracy in shooting got a boost each time I crouched down and took aim. So I started on the AK firing at the hip and ended the game firing it from the shoulder as God intended.
Relationships also got an upgrade. The protagonists of the last games had more business partners than personal friendships, but CJ sets this apart since he’s a native San Andrean coming back to settle debts with friends and old gang members, especially when corrupt LSPD officers Frank Tenpenny and Eddie Pulaski (voiced by legends Samuel L. Jackson and Chris Penn respectively) instruct (read: coerce) them to do their dirty work. Interestingly, the inspiration for much of SA’s plot comes from the 1992 L.A. Rodney King riots and the Rampart scandal in the LAPD. There’s a chance an Angeleno who witnessed either or even both of these personally got an ugly reminder of these events while playing the game.
Of all the games from the 3D era, due to them being released before the internet and multiplayer games caught up with each other, these were the ones that got remastered more than the other games between their respective ten-year anniversaries and GTA III’s 20th anniversary culminating in the largely reviled Grove Street Games definitive edition.
Take my opinion for what it’s worth as this section of this week’s entry as well as opinions made earlier this year have made it quite clear where I stand on games this old, but not only was this a black eye to the image of a company that might be doing too much with one franchise while neglecting another and moving too slowly to get a long-awaited sequel out, it was also somewhat unnecessary. In the lead up to the Definitive Edition’s release, the originals were all delisted on Steam. Fortunately for me, I managed to blaze through the originals on PC. I bought and beat VC on Steam before that happened, I pirated and beat GTA III and I managed to snag San Andreas for free from the RockStar Games Launcher. So, have at it RockStar.
Naruto: Ultimate Ninja and Uzumaki Chronicles Games (2002-07): The influence and spread of the Naruto franchise at the outset is not to be understated. It did not take long for cartoon distributors to air it soon after getting the green light. Naturally, this lead to widespread marketing across the western world, even with western toymakers like Mattel, some of which I owned myself. The video games themselves each centered around different arcs from the series. 1-3 covered the whole of Part 1, 4 and 5 covered about a fifth or so of Shippuden, though only Japan and Europe got a hold of the fifth installment of the Ultimate Ninja series before it got another chance as the Storm series, finishing all of Naruto and adapting the Boruto movie in the game.
As for the rest of the game, with the entirety of the main arc being relatively easy to clear, there were game exclusive arcs that could be boiled down to an OVA. In UN2, after Tsunade returns to the village to become the Fifth Hokage, Orochimaru returns to again coerce her into healing his arms after getting his sealed during his fight with the Third, even going as far as using forbidden jutsu like the the Gedo Mark and Reanimation to destroy the Leaf Village until she capitulates. Interesting from a plot perspective but ignorant of established lore with its own set of plot holes.
Ultimate Ninja 3 had its exclusive arc adapted into an OVA to promote the game. In it, Tsunade hosts a battle royale featuring Leaf and Sand shinobi with the promise that the winner can put up a regulation of their own choosing for a week. You don’t know what everyone’s is, but the biggest one is the one that eventually becomes canon and sits in the background while Naruto’s son does the plot things. Rather than precede or even succeed any of the adapted arcs, it’s its own separate thing altogether.
Ultimate Ninja 4, has its OVA-like arc before Naruto and Jiraiya returns to the village. Arguably, one of my favorites, Naruto and Jiraiya are wrapping up their training with a final lesson. Naruto wears weighted beads on his wrists and ankles for an extended period of time. They change color as he goes on. Meanwhile, he and Jiraiya stumble on a village that made use of its mining industry at the expense of safety. An ancient spirit from within dwells within and takes regular sacrifices, one of them being a little girl that Naruto tries to Talk no Jutsu into coming back to her village. As he learns more about her and her motives, he eventually comes through to her, aids in her predicament and makes a new friend. However, due to her being non-canon and this being Naruto, he got used to not being able to keep her as a friend. Then the rest of Shippuden happens all the way up until Gaara is taken back to the Akatsuki hideout.
The fifth game includes that and the Tenchi Bridge arc but North America wouldn’t be able to witness that through conventional means, culminating in this:
For the gameplay, it was on a pair of 2D planes with one acting as the background and the other the fore ground allowing players to transition between them whenever they desired. As for move sets, unlike Mortal Kombat, the same buttons do the same things across the games: there’s one attack, one charge, one ultimate move button, a jump, and a throwables button. This sounds like the games are one note, but most of the move sets are unique to the characters and true to their depictions in the series.
It was a working formula for the games, but according to the Naruto Wiki they were pumped out at a breakneck pace which may explain the issues with continuing it past Number 5 and getting it to the rest of the world. Fortunately, Ultimate Ninja Storm fixed what was broken and gets to a proper, more complete adaptation instead of simply cutting corners.
I think it was for the best that Ultimate Ninja got the boot. Rapid adaptations before the series is even finished is good for marketing, but if the game catches up to the series, it tends to force the devs to get creative. Unlike original IPs like GTA or MK or even Mario for that matter, adapting something that exists isn’t always easy. In the case of Naruto, it allegedly made things easy by way of all the fillers it has separating the canon from the actual plot, but for something that was still in serialization, Bandai Namco seemed to have struggled in some areas.
Earlier when I mentioned the UN2 exclusive arc about reanimation and forbidden jutsu, if you don’t know, powerful jutsu often demand large chakra reserves and a critically crippled Orochimaru trying this even through Kabuto shows his desperation but there’s a fine line between desperation and suicide. According to the lore, it should’ve killed him. Then again, Kishimoto’s method of storytelling was by way of drip feed then downpour, so are the devs still at fault for that arc? Well, I don’t think so. It’s all fiction anyway.
Racing Games (2000-07): I’ll close off with the racing games I played with. Back in April (time surely flies), I made a post about my top 3 racing games from best to worst and in that order mine were Midnight Club 3, Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 and L.A. Rush. Thanks to a video by the YouTuber BlueTag, I was reminded of how much I hated the last of those three. But just because those three were the most memorable doesn’t mean those were the only games I engaged in regarding racing. I vaguely remember the Gran Turismo series though I don’t remember engaging that much with it. L.A. Rush definitely turned me off of that game for reasons expressed many moons before.
Midnight Club however motivated me to check out the earlier entries and while they weren’t bad, they reminded me of what I wrote about GTA in this post. The succeeding games got better and better and better and as a result the older games aged so badly that you have to get used to a whole new set of rules, like transitioning from horses to cars but backwards in this case. Also, a feature that is underappreciated is the freedom to cruise around a given city. I remember Midnight Club 2 incessantly reminding you to race other racers, whereas in MC3, you could do what you want in the world. The racers and races and tournaments were there, but there was almost no pressure to knock them all off the streets as fast as possible. Above all, the series always harped praise and reward on you the player to be the best racer ever and get 1st place all the time. MC3 to me was the easiest game to 100% complete.
On the other end of the spectrum, skill and learning have almost always been a cornerstone of EA games as I found out playing Battlefield 1. It takes some getting used to but once you get the hang of an EA game, you’ll feel like a master in no time. NFS: Hot Pursuit 2 had a noticeable difficulty curve and didn’t always drive you (get it?) to be number 1 all the time. By working on a points system, it carries over from race to race, so there’s no pressure to be 1st all the time, but it does help. Tournaments and knockouts also make a difference regarding the rules of the race, so few races played the same.
The downside though was that the customization wasn’t as extensive as MC3. If you’re a creative or artsy type of person, the cosmetics in Midnight Club make it feel as though you’ve walked into God’s personal workshop ready to design your greatest fleet of dream cars. As part of an experiment, I played MC3 last winter on PCSX2 without a controller. Thanks to my abnormally long fingers I was able to 100% the game and unlock all the collectibles on the keyboard. But it was so tedious that I resorted to using a program that tricks Windows into thinking my PS3 controller was an Xbox controller and haven’t really looked back since. Even now that I got Flight Simulator working I used the controller for that among others. So the game and whichever program I’m running will depend on what control scheme I need.
As far as my library goes, I mentioned all these games on this nostalgia trip but it’s not an exhaustive list. I didn’t even mention the Dragon Ball Z games, Ribbit King, Max Payne, other anime-esque games and puzzle games that my mom really liked, some of the arcade collections; as I said, my memory is unreliable and bound to fail me once again. I might do this for other game systems I had, though I’ve gotta reach deep. Some are iconic, others are weird and obscure.
Looking at this now reminds me of most of the anime from the early 2000s just by the art style. Oh, how the times change before our giant anime eyes.
The last recommendation for the month of August is DashieGames a.k.a. DashieXP.
This is a throwback for me. I was introduced to DashieXP through a friend while we were looking for gameplay of the new Tomb Raider reboot and after pushing me to check out the rest of his content, I was momentarily obsessed with catching everything he put out, truth be told. I don’t watch everything he puts out and occasionally go back to select videos and gameplays for old time’s sake. DashieXP actually has his start as a rapper and skit actor of sorts online. His skit channel DashieXP was where he started with a bunch of different parodies and whatnot. After a year on that channel, he started DashieGames in 2011 and gradually turned that channel into his main one with all the time it steals from him.
The comedy style is a bit of an acquired taste. When I was in high school, his schtick would glue me to the computer but as I got older, I found other channels and my tastes have matured a bit. I do still have a soft spot for the guy, but thankfully he’s not the only YouTuber I watch anymore. If you’re interested, give him a watch.
Whether you play it or not, you likely know at least a few things about the Grand Theft Auto series: 1) it’s pretty much an organized crime simulator, 2) it’s violently comedic, 3) and the character Big Smoke exists to this day as a meme machine.
The more knowledgeable of you may also know some fun facts about the series as a whole, not the least of which involves the series’ humble beginnings. The concept of the game was under the working title of Race ‘n’ Chase with a release date set for sometime in 1997 by Scottish developers DMA Design. The original goal was top-down street racing with an added bonus of a police response that would become common for series like Midnight Club and Need for Speed.
The point of divergence for the concept was a tough-to-patch glitch. The police cars were extraordinarily relentless in pursuit of the player and most of the time, the devs couldn’t correct the issue, so instead they decided to team up with the madness and make it an action-adventure game retitled Grand Theft Auto. Across all the games, the skeleton of the objective is the same: the protagonist changes with each game, but they’re all tasked with completing a set of tasks for increasingly high payment with proportional risk to the player. As the games progress, the player unlocks new weapons, safe houses, locations, and in some cases clothing options. The police wanted level has influenced the game and others across the industry — the response is often proportional to the crime from mild disturbances having a single cop car investigating to high level crimes involving stand-ins for real life federal agencies like the FBI. Up until GTA V took away one of the stars, the military would be called for the highest wanted level of six stars all just to take you down. A look on YouTube may find you some compilation videos of the police partaking in the Darwin Awards, or interestingly analysis videos on the police in GTA games. My favorite comes from Game Theory where they experimented on whether real-life instances of brutality have been programmed into the game. In a serious tone, this is a debate best suited for a platform better equipped to make comment on it, so this is more of a comedic tone.
GTA and GTA 2 in 1999 were both 2D games despite the late 1990s being the era of the emerging 3D graphics market. Almost every developer was launching a video game with full 3D graphics with resounding success stories like Medal of Honor and GoldenEye 007 coupled with lackluster releases like Mortal Kombat 4 and what would’ve been Star Fox 2 if it came out on time.
One can argue that Grand Theft Auto III’s 2001 release was somewhat later than what was expected of games at the time as RockStar’s formula is to one-up itself with each new release and GTA III came swinging at the hip, guns ablaze. The graphics and mechanics at the time set the stage for a ginormous change all throughout the gaming industry and one of the first notable examples of GTA’s influence was the many clones, though I doubt the men in charge of RockStar cared all that much. Leslie Benzies and the Houser Bros., Sam and Dan, were busy making games and as shameless as some of the clones were, taking elements from a proven success story isn’t the end of the world. Other devs could do what they wanted while RockStar Games released, 2002’s GTA Vice City, 2004’s GTA San Andreas (which to this day is the reason the PS2 sold well over 150 million units), 2006’s Vice City Stories — one of two underrated GTA games that I talked about months ago on this blog, and one of the most expensive games at the time, 2008’s GTA IV.
Coupled with DLC content in the form of The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony expansions, GTA IV signified a change in the GTA series. The HD era was upon us and the next generation of consoles was its home. Better graphics, a more serious tone, new mechanics, and reimagined cities and locales. GTA IV’s Liberty City looked more like the Big Apple than its 3D rendition, and a lot of small details from older games have remained unchanged or were tweaked to fit the era.
As we all know, RockStar’s prize success story is that of GTA V in 2013, which reimagines Los Angeles and some surrounding areas in the HD universe, but before that, there was another HD game in the 2D style: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.
I was originally going to mention how much of a difference there is between this game and the two GTAs released before and after it, but every GTA game differs in some capacity so that would’ve been a useless metric for the game. The basic plot of this game involves Hong Kong immigrant Huang Lee who flies to Liberty City and is welcomed with violence. He arrived in the city to deliver a sword to his uncle Wu “Kenny” Lee, but things turned sideways when he was ambushed at the airport, so now he has to work to make up for the loss of the sword. Obviously, there’s more to this story and if you want to look at the series from beginning to end, The Professional, GTASeriesVideos (a RockStar fan channel), and Willzyyy are your best sources of gameplay on YouTube along with some other channels.
Now the plot is the standard, started at the bottom, now we’re here fare, but the most notable difference was that when it released in March of 2009, Nintendo allowed RockStar to publish it on the DS.
Yeah, the same company that heavily censored Mortal Kombat in the 1990s and lives and breathes by Super Mario and Kirby allowed a notoriously violent video game on one of their star handheld platforms. Granted, 2000s Nintendo was far removed from 1990s Nintendo. There was still the family-friendly image on the face of the company, but at this point Nintendo was letting the chains loosen a bit on the family friendly image by allowing Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 to be played on the DS as well. It’s a large company with a large history, run by a council of suits and while there’s nothing detailing how this arrangement came to be in detail, the main connecting element is extensive use of the touchscreen function in some manner.
This might have been part of the deal to get certain types of games on the Nintendo DS: design it in a way that the touchscreen doesn’t go ignored, and while that works well for touch games like the Touchmaster series, third parties are hit and miss. From best use to worst use in my personal experience, it’s Chinatown Wars at best, Mortal Kombat in the middle, and Call of Duty at the worst. Or rather just awkward for that last one.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the rest of that deal included a lap dance of some sort. For Chinatown Wars, it might be a good example of a game whose mechanics are tied to the touchscreen, but not necessarily dependent on that feature. Certain minigames and combat sequences make good use of the feature and it flows naturally enough into gameplay that you won’t really notice it as much half the time. Don’t quote me on this, but I don’t think this was actually the first time a GTA game was on a Nintendo system. Prior to GTA III, there was GTA Advance available for the Game Boy, and once again, I doubt attempting to research that arrangement will net me anything interesting, unless I use a time machine or the wayback machine.
Some mechanics in Chinatown Wars that use the touchscreen include filling your own bottles of Molotov cocktails at the gas station; rigging stolen cars by way of screwdriver, hotwire, or PDA hacking (sidenote: this was most likely the last time in the modern era that PDAs would ever be important in any medium); assembling the sniper rifle for certain occasions, like a story mission; and controversially, drug dealing.
Grand Theft Auto belongs to a list of media properties that courts controversy like Casanova rounding third base for the fifth time in a week, and until recently, RockStar Games themselves have been known for their controversial money maker. Seasoned veterans of the series who skipped over this game may be curious why the drug dealing specifically was a sore point for critics to look at when the game was released. Well, another part of what makes the game different from the others was the player’s direct involvement in the drug dealing. For the most part, the protagonist is merely a glorified middleman who moves things from A to B, rarely having a role in the direct purchase or sale of such things save for cutscenes.
Chinatown Wars breaks away from that and allows the player to do so in their free time away from missions and sometimes as a prerequisite to activate a certain mission. Of course, it comes with its own set of risks. Sometimes the dealers — who come from multiple different gangs and factions — meet up in locations where a police camera is. The presence of the camera can help determine whether a deal is about to be busted, but its presence also raises the prices of a certain product. Minimizing the police response by destroying the cameras is also an option, but the price of the drugs bought or sold also takes a hit. This mechanic makes more use of the high risk, high rewards system that GTA is usually known for.
And I’m certain this is needless to say, but no, video game violence doesn’t lead to real life violence. There was one incident in 2003 when Alabama teen Devin Moore went on a rampage inspired by GTA Vice City that left three people dead and put him on death row where he still sits as of writing this, but if that were the metric used to judge games based on their content, then laws around video games in the US would closely resemble what Australia has on the books which was why GTA III was banned their for over twenty years.
This guy knows how it feels.
This is the part where after reviewing a game and listing its gameplay in detail, I’d encourage you to track down a copy and a working console to play it, or find an emulator to use, but unlike Warner Bros. who practically force us nostalgic types to emulate the 3D Mortal Kombat games, RockStar’s been a big fan of anniversary releases with GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas all getting updates every ten years to correspond with the games’ respective release dates, and GTA Chinatown Wars is the same being made available on smartphones as of late. There’s also a PSP version that adds another character, the opportunistic journalist Melanie Mallard as an extra character. To my knowledge, the smartphone versions are upgrades from the original DS version so, I guess it’s a matter of personal preference.
I had both versions available to me at the time and I personally recommend the PSP version for the extra character and extra music stations alone. Admittedly, there’s no voice lines in this games, except for the DS version where the game says a short dialogue line when the DS is closed and then opened, so the cutscenes are a bit like a visual novel or, since we have precedent, the cutscenes featured in 1988’s Ninja Gaiden on the NES.
As I said, gameplay videos exist on YouTube and however you experience the game is all up to you.
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