Before Phase Paradox...

Due to a falling out with Sony,
Kenji Eno had Enemy Zero's
tradeshow event preview feature
 a PlayStation logo that morphed
 into the Sega Saturn symbol as
 a way of snubbing his former
 business partner  

Enemy Zero (or "E0", as it is sometimes stylized) is probably the scariest game ever made on the Sega Saturn.  Brainchild of the now deceased Kenji Eno, an eccentric and multitalented artist (R.I.P.), it's easy to see where this game draws its inspiration from.  The films "Alien" and "Blade Runner" are the two biggest influences, but there are also bits of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and even "Forbidden Planet" if you look hard enough.  

The story takes place aboard the spaceship "AKI" (which looks like a large mass of metal with four parallel towers sprouting out of it).  The player takes the role of Laura, a character who shares the same name as (although no relation to) female protagonists found in two of Kenji Eno's other games.  Anyway...this pale blond-haired, blue-eyed woman awakens from hypersleep to discover the ship is crawling with hostile lifeforms and still a long way away from its destination - Earth.  Does all this sound familiar?   Just in case it doesn't yet, there are a total of seven crew members on the AKI and the ship's engineer is even named Parker.  Incidentally, let me pay my respects to the incredible actor Yaphet Kotto - may he also rest in peace.  As these things tend to go, the crew start getting bumped off, one by one.  The thing about the hostile organisms in Enemy Zero that differ from everyone's favorite xenomorph though is they are almost always invisible.  Now, I know what some readers might be thinking, "Ha!  That's a good way to save some development resources."  Well...not really, because the creatures do become briefly discernable when they get taken down by one of the several energy guns found throughout the game.  The presence of guns might make one think more of "Aliens" than "Alien" but these weapons aren't exactly pulse rifles.

The first weapon acquired
 looks like a precursor to
 those found in the 
Mass Effect series 

If anything, the pistol-like weapons found while playing Enemy Zero have more in common with flamethrowers than firearms.  More specifically, they have a very short range and limited number of shots before needing a battery recharge at one of several power stations tucked away in different parts of the spaceship.  Additionally, the guns have a significant charge-up time.  This mixed with the possibility of an overload, due to holding a charged shot for too long, means that timing is crucial.  Worse still, if one of the monsters get close enough to Laura it's an automatic game over.  Yeah...this isn't an easy game, but players do have a motion senor of sorts in the form of an earbud the protagonist wears that emits chiming tones indicating an enemy's proximity based on how frequently the sound repeats; a very slow rate means the threat is far away while a fast one means it's nearby.  On top of this, if the beeps have a rising intonation it means that the distance is closing while a descending sound means the gap is widening.  To help out further, one of the four CDs that comes with the game (humorously labeled "CD Zero" while the others are 1, 2 and 3) is basically a training simulator that allows players to hone their audio detection skills.  Only about half of the game takes place in these cat-and-mouse corridor challenges though.

The first puzzle is a bit strange it that
it requires simple trial-and-error to solve

The other half of the experience is made up of interactive FMV sequences featuring 3D modeled characters, rather than real life actors.  These segments of gameplay remind me a lot of Myst or The 7th Guest in that they mostly feature puzzle solving and cutscenes.  The voice acting and character animation is very cheesy and dated by modern standards, but for the time was quite impressive.  Incidentally, one of the animators who worked on "E0" was none other than Fumito Ueda, who would later go on to head the development of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian.  Another contributor of considerable talent was Enemy Zero's music composer, Micheal Nyman.  While I confess I'm not much of an authority on these things, my understanding is this Englishman has considerable renown as an opera writer and pianist.  Kenji Eno, himself had significant music talent as well, composing the scores for several of his own games.  How he got such a widely respected composer to help him out though is a strange story that I will let readers discover on their own.  Needless to say though, the melodious music is an interesting juxtaposition to the harsh machine-like sound effects heard throughout the game.

The dark, cramped environment
 aboard the AKI spaceship helps
 compensate for the limited
 rendering capabilities of the 
Sega Saturn

One last gameplay detail I want to mention is the rather unique save system.  The closest thing I can think of to it is the typewriter ribbons in early Resident Evil titles.  To put it simply, the main character (Laura) has a audio recorder that functions like a mobile save point.  However, it has a limited power reserve that drains every time the player saves or loads.  There's no way to recharge it in-game and once the power is depleted the player has no choice but to make it to the finish or die and start over from the beginning.  How much power the device has (and uses) depends on the difficulty setting selected at the start menu.  That might sound rather harsh, but Enemy Zero realistically only takes a couple of hours to complete if you know where to go and what to do.  

During its initial launch twenty copies of the game were sold in Japan as special collector's editions for roughly 2,000 USD each.  These twenty copies were delivered by Kenji Eno himself and came in a crate containing the kinds of stuff you typically associate with these sorts of boxed sets.  The noteworthy difference being it was for a game that came out in 1996.   Eventually, Enemy Zero got a PC port.  While generally receiving critical acclaim, like Kenji Eno's other titles (namely "D" and "D2"), "E0" failed to reach a wider audience.  So even though it isn't as unheard of as Phase Paradox, this Japanese horror/sci-fi video game definitely qualifies as obscure even for fans of the sub-genre.

Black Tiger, Hidden Agenda

Steam has a serious problem with shovelware.  To Valve's credit though they don't really promote any of the garbage that is steadily overcrowding their library of games.  PSN, on the other hand, has gone out of its way to advertise the abomination that is Life of Black Tiger.  Right off the bat, would-be-players might notice the banner art for the game is actually just a slightly reworked version of a freely available background wallpaper image.  That in itself isn't a big deal, but it gets worse.  Watch the trailer and you might notice some music playing in the background.  It's actually a cover by "JackonTC" of the OST song "Next to You," for none other than the anime "Parasyte" ("Kiseiju," in the original Japanese).  So what?...you might think.  Original art and sound assets aren't necessary to make a good game, right?  Technically...yes, but Black Tiger isn't a good game by any stretch.  It has graphics comparable to a PS2 title, despite being released on the PS4.  It also has audio issues, non-existent collision detection, clunky controls, and English localization text that reads as follows:

It's full of smell with blood of wolves today and the smell is stronger than a few days ago.  I can't bear with it. Let's kill every wolves found.

That's just one of the less jiberish-laden examples, but believe me if it hadn't originally came out for the Android three years ago I would have given it this blog's "Engrish Award" for 2017.  Another point worth noting is the Android version of this game is absolutely free, while the PSN version costs 10 USD.  Horrible, I know, but even worse is the fact it's not the only game on PSN that has done this.  Horse Racing 2016  (which actually came out for the PS4 in 2017) is a dollar on google play...but...well, let's just say it goes for a bit more on PSN.

Generally speaking, Black Tiger is considered to be one of the worst, if not the worst game currently available on the Playstation Store.  A number of people strongly believe Sony is pulling some kind of elaborate joke by curating this game.  I've also seen accusations of nepotism (the developer must actually be the son of a Sony CEO or something along those lines...).  The publisher is a company called "1GAMES" which, as far as I can tell, has pushed out a fair amount of trash over the years.  However, I haven't been able to find any specific names attached to this particular title (perhaps for somewhat obvious reasons).

The last thing I want to mention about Black Tiger is the reviews...particularly on Metacritic.  Of course there are plenty of 0/10 scores that are fairly honest about their impressions of the game, but the real enjoyment comes from reading those 10 out of ten perfect ratings.  They are, in the vast majority of cases, being deliberately sarcastic about the quality of the game to the point that it can be pretty entertaining to browse through some them and see what people wrote...at least more so than actually playing the game.

Duelology

For reasons I don't quite fathom (it probably has to do with money) entertainment media likes to do things in threes, or sets of three.  Video games are no exception to this trend.  Mass Effect, God of War, Gears of War, Dark Souls, The Witcher, they all have a trilogy associated with them.  However, this isn't always the case.  There are tons of games that never get a sequel, and there are also a lot of games that blow right on passed the number three mark.  Final Fantasy is up to its fifteenth iteration while Resident Evil is fast approaching it's seventh installment (and that's not even counting all the spin off titles each franchise has).  Considerably rarer is the duelology, or pair of games, so in this blog post I'd like to highlight one such example - Condemned.

Split between Criminal Origins and its direct sequel, Bloodshot, these two first-person action/horror games are a bit unique in that they are set in the modern era, but focus on melee combat.  The player takes the role of Ethan Thomas, an FBI agent attached to a special serial crime unit.  His assignment is to track down "Serial Killer X," a serial-killer killer operating out of the fictional rust-belt urban sprawl known simply as "Metro City."  While investigating the scene of a murder, Ethan's sidearm gets swiped by the lurking Serial Killer X, who then proceeds to use the weapon to murder two police officers, thus framing Ethan for the crime...I guess...I mean didn't they check trigger for fingerprints?  It's not like Serial Killer X wears gloves...that, and I'm not sure how Ethan is supposed to clear his name if it involves murdering a bunch of violent homeless people...

Glaring plot holes aside, Condemned does an excellent job of setting the mood.  Whether it be a subway, library, museum, burned out doll factory *shivers* or huge cabin in the woods (b-b-b-bear?), players will spend the majority of the game poking around abandoned, rundown buildings, mostly at night, while fending off attacks by deranged squatters.  It's never clearly explained in the first game why these individuals are so psychotic, the police dismiss them as being drug-crazed.  However, there are some subtle hints early on that it isn't a simple narcotics induced crime wave.  Dead birds turn up all over the city, and odd bits of metal can be found hidden everywhere.

During development, this game was entitled "The Dark," which is an apt name considering how many foreboding, poorly lit and claustrophobic environments there are in the game.  It also featured a much stronger supernatural element.  The player could even cast spells in the game that would open doors or steal a weapon out an opponent's hands.  A tiny bit of this made it into the final product in that Ethan seems to be gifted with clairvoyance, or some similar psychic power.  I kind of like how they ultimately chose to ground the setting though since, in my opinion, preserving the plausibility of the premise makes the experience a lot more terrifying.  It's a pity the developers backtracked on this when in came to the sequel.

As I said before, the storyline was not one of Condemned's strong points, but what it did excel at was the gameplay.  Guns are rare and have severally limited ammo, so the player has to depend a lot on improvised melee weapons such as fire axes, sledgehammers, crowbars, flat head shovels, chunks of rebar, locker doors, boards with nails in them and pretty much any other bludgeoning object you can possibly think of.  The AI is no slouch either.  Enemies will seek out ambush points, block and even feign attacks to throw the player off.  Breaking up the action is an occasional forensics segment in which the player must locate clues regarding Serial Killer X in order to advance the story.  It's fairly straightforward stuff since Ethan's lab partner, Rosa, does most of the analytical work, but it's a welcome addition nonetheless.  The sound design is also great (an often neglected feature in video games).  Here the incomprehensible ranting and raving of adversaries mixed with the sickening crunch of a lead pipe to the face add a lot to the already creepy atmosphere.  What little music there is in the game is also a perfect fit for the setting.

The now-defunct Monolith Studios was responsible for this duelology, and it's easy to see the DNA of their big followup franchise, F.E.A.R. (empty structors, clever AI, a gifted protagonist, and a mixture of action and horror thematic elements).  Unlike that FPS though, Condemned drew inspiration from movies like "Silence of the Lambs," "Se7en," and directors like David Lynch rather than "Ringu," "Akira," and John Woo.  Although...is it just me or does Ethan Thomas look Asian American?  I guess he's not given his appearance in the second game.  Too bad...it would have been a lot more interesting if he had been something other than yet another generic 30-something, scruffy white guy...

Damage Models

When it comes to simulating destruction, video games have more often than not borrowed a page from their table top fore bearers.  If you're not sure what I'm getting at here, two words for you - "Hit Points."  Honestly, I couldn't find fault with this mechanic back in the 8 and 16-bit eras (or 286/386 for PC users).  CPUs back then lacked the capacity to handle anything more complicated than the most rudimentary location damage tracking.  As processing power increases though I feel like abstract methods of measuring damage are increasingly obsolete artifacts of simpler times.

As of yet though most games still rely on HP bars and the notion of critical existence failure when it comes to actual gameplay.  Granted, driving games have been dabbling with vehicular carnage for quite a while, a practice that has culminated in BeamNG Drive (and it's soft body physics/collision system).  If you really want to see robust damage models though look no further than the simulation genre.  Even back in the aforementioned early days of PC gaming there were some impressive attempts at pseudo-realistic damage models.  Games like Mechwarrior and Wing Commander had rather brutal systems resulting in all sorts of woes including smashed weapons, shattered armor, crippled engines and fried sensors.  Despite all the destructible subsystems though these games still had to depend on a finite supply of hit points in order to determine when the death blow was dealt.  Additionally, there was very little in the way of external visual feedback aside from a bit of smoke or a trail of sparks.  Granted these games came out a long time ago, but it's still surprising just how few games have tried to improve upon existing mechanics.

Simulation titles such as Navy Field, World of Warplanes and Mechwarrior Online are all fairly derivative in terms of damage modeling despite being relatively new releases.  However, there are a handful of games that strive to punch through into new territory.  Rise of Flight has some very nice methods of handling structural damage.  While high speed crashes perhaps don't look as dramatic as they could, it is cool to see aircraft frames and wing spars warp and break apart when subject to severe punishment.  Another good example is War Thunder.  Still far from perfect, it does do a lot to represent the effects of ballistic impacts on a variety of machinery.  Every vehicle has a double digit number of location specific subsystems, each with its own unique qualities.  I particularly like how they went to great lengths to include forms of damage such as a ruptured fuel tank, oil leak or punctured radiator (the kind of things that don't result in instant destruction, but still need to be dealt with expeditiously).  External damage is usually clearly visible as well in the form of rends, holes, flames or in some cases pieces being blown off entirely.  Sadly, here's where I talk about some failings of these systems.

Progress has been made but there's still a lot more that can be done.  Window screens don't crack or shatter, and aircraft fuselages are visually pretty much indestructible (although they sometimes fall bellow the ground texture giving the impression that the crashing airplane disintegrated on impact).  Being able to see bullet impact marks is neat, but despite detailed ballistics tracking the textures don't always correspond to the damage inflicted.  Sometimes the transition from undamaged texture to damaged texture is awkward looking as well.

While a bit gory mechanically speaking, I think it would be cool to see "bleeding" coolant, oil, fuel or hydraulic fluid along with white vapors (when appropriate) instead of spewing black smoke exclusively.  A common criticism I hear brought up against more detailed damage models is that they require a great deal of computational resources.  While I agree that detailed simulations require a lot of calculation, it's exactly the kind of thing modern computers are designed to do (not to mention the ubiquity of multicore CPUs these days).

Graphics are offering diminishing returns, AI is a tough nut to crack and sound in video games is much more of an art than science at this point, but despite all of these potential dead ends there remains a lot of straight forward things that can be done to improve the simulation aspects of games.  I keep hearing people online calling for all games to have 1080p and 60fps this console generation, but I'd much rather see more in the way of destructibility whether it be vehicles, buildings or even digital people.  Now excuse me while I go watch some old Godzilla flicks.

Sagas both New and Old

I should confess right away that I'm not an expert when it comes to Norse Sagas.  However, I have read Njáls Saga, Laxdæla Saga, Ölkofra Saga and Völsunga Saga.  Normally, I'm not the kind of person to take much interest in literature written over five centuries ago about events close to millennium old, had not a humorous adaptation of the plot from Star Wars (told in the viking tradition) sparked my interest.  By all means check it out (it's called Tattúínárdǿla Saga).  In particular, I found the treatment of the prequels to be more entertaining than the actual films.  Then there is The Banner Saga which, unlike Candy Crush Saga (or pretty much any other video game with the word "saga" in the title), actually has some connection to Scandinavian folklore.  It's not perfection, but before I start to criticize, let me give this game some much deserved praise.

The art direction is beautiful.  Static as most of it is, I love the Eyvind Earle influenced stylization of the landscapes along with the character portraits and rotoscope animation that hearkens back to the glory days of Ralph Bakshi and Don Bluth.  The music is also excellent although I would have liked a bit more of it.  Then again the sparseness of musical cues suits the sober setting.  The combat mechanics are also surprisingly deep, and while I've seen a significant amount of grumbling about the counter-intuitiveness of the turn order system, I enjoy it.  The system's strengths are twofold; it nominalizes the effects of numerical superiority while simultaneously ensuring that the standard approach of focusing-on-one-target-until-it's-dead doesn't always apply.  Outside of combat there's a wealth of role-playing opportunities.  One of the annoyances about supposed morality systems in video games is their ham-handed "be good," "be evil" or "be indecisive" approach to decision making.  Thankfully, The Banner Saga avoids this pitfall for the most part by making pretty much every important set of choices come back to haunt you in some way, shape or form.  Stripped down to it's bare bones, the player's only real choice ends up being which way they'll get screwed.  Again, I think this is appropriate given the circumstances in which the characters find themselves...cynical me also thinks this is rather consistent with real life.

A number of reviewers have called the Banner Saga a mix of Oregon Trail and Final Fantasy: Tactics.  I can definitely see the similarities to the former, but the combat in particular reminds me most of Betrayal at Krondor.  If I had to choose a Japanese parallel, something from the visual novel genre seems like a closer match to me.  While we're on the topic of text driven games, I should mention that I don't like poor writing any more than listening to bad voice acting.  Luckily, the limited use of voice acting is done well here and the text is passable although strangely lacking in Ye Olde English.  Then again the Icelandic sagas (at least those translated by the awesomely named Magnus Magnusson) are in sparse modern prose, albeit somewhat more archaic in terms of expression and presentation.

So, what's my main gripe with this take on ancient Norse literature?  In a word - clothing.  Don't get me wrong, it's all very period and thematically appropriate, but in the case of the Varl, I can't figure out how they could possibly put on a pullover tunic without ripping it.  Just look at the horns on these giants!  How the heck do they get dressed without snagging one (or both) of those pointy noggin spikes on their shirt fabric.

Other than that nitpick though The Banner Saga is a great game.  Especially when you consider it was an early kickstarter project made almost entirely by three ex-Bioware employees working out of a shack somewhere in Austin, Texas.  It's cheap, it's indie, and it's easy to tell a lot passionate effort went into making the game.  In future installments I look forward to sailing longships, slaying wyrms, meeting shieldmaidens, and sending berserkers into combat (hopefully on battlefields that are more than just flat open spaces).

Old School Tunes

Arguably the single best entry in the Metroid series, this SNES title also has some of the best music on the console.  Exploring the underworld of the alien planet Zebes is not for the faint of heart.  It's a foreboding place filled with underwater caves, subterranean jungles, hellish magma chambers and a haunted derelict spacecraft all infested with  horrific creatures.  Thankfully the heroin, Samus, is a fearless professional willing to risk the hazards as the opening theme illustrates rather nicely.

I actually prefer the 64-bit version of Star Fox a bit more than the SNES version if for no other reason than all the hammy one-liners.  That said, the original Star Fox has some of the best 16-bit starting level music out there.  It does a good job getting the player into the high intensity gameplay as well as selling you on the idea that the FX chip can produce fun games to play even if the graphics are kind of crude.   

I've mentioned the music score for Target Earth once before, but I'll mention it here again because, yes, it's that good.  While the title theme is the example I chose to highlight here (as before), the truth is pretty much the entire OST is great.  By all means check out the other tracks, particularly the ending song.

I'm cheating a bit with this one.  Rune is actually only 14 years old at the time of this posting which makes it nearly a decade newer than some of the oldest music pieces on this list.  The reason I added it anyway is twofold.  First, I wanted to include something that was on the PC.  Second, as far as Norse themed tunes about Icelandic sagas and epic journeys go this belongs on the must-listen-to list.

Streets of Rage (or Bare Knuckle as it is sometimes called) belongs on everyone's top five list of best "Beat'em Ups".  It also has some of the finest music you can find on the Sega Genesis.  The number of memorable tracks are too great to choose just one, so I defaulted to the first stage theme...which actually does a good job of expressing the franchise rather well, I think.    

If you thought Rune was too new to be here, your going to really be annoyed with this final choice.  Hotline Miami is hardly "old school" having came out in 2012.  However, it is set in the same approximate time frame as when the other games on this list were released.   Better still, the soundtrack takes a lot of inspiration from that time period.  So while not chronologically appropriate it is stylistically a good fit.  Enjoy!

Food for the Soul

Music is an invaluable asset for establishing the tone of a video game.  Often the melodies we hear set mood better than words or images.  As such it might come as a shock to younger readers that PC gaming didn't have fully integrated sound and music until the late 1990s.  Before then dedicated sound cards (much like 3D graphics cards) had to be purchased separately for most rigs.  I can still remember trying to fix an IRQ conflict with my first "Soundblaster" back in the not-so-good old days.  Regardless, I think it was well worth the money and effort simply because hearing those tunes improved the quality of so many gaming experiences.

Allow me to show you a few examples:

Right as the main menu comes up players of Rome: Total War are treated to this little melody.  Evoking images of huge battles, lost glories and heroes of old all faded in the mists of time, I still think it surpass any of the music found in any other Total War game (Even Rome II).  

Command and Conquer: Red Alert wasn't my favorite real time strategy series, but I have to admit that the opening credits song does a good job of making you feel like a badass leader.  Incidentally, I wonder where they got that audio clip of the officer shouting orders?  It sounds like something out of the first World War...

Persians in space would be one way to describe the music of Homeworld.  While the original is still my favorite, Homeworld: Cataclysm was a worthy successor if only for the terrifying foe you must face.  Forget Dead Space!  If you want a horror game set in a science fiction backdrop this is the game for you, but I digress.  Choosing one song is difficult since all of them are all so excellent.  For the sake of brevity though here's the track from the first level.

MechWarrior 2 could have gone with something generic and still gotten four out of five stars, but rather than settle for OK the composer opted to give the game a distinct vibe with tribal sounds.  It's quite a unique score (especially for the time) and actually has a large number of distinctly memorable tracks.  Here's one of the first you'll hear when you climb into the cockpit of a clan battlemech:

While supposedly inspired by the "Black Company" series of fantasy novels by Glen Cook, Myth: The Fallen Lords always felt to me like an answer to the question; what if Frodo and Sam failed in their task and Sauron was able to reclaim the One Ring?  That's the plot in a nutshell, and boy do they ever do a good job of capturing feelings of melancholy and desperation from the moment the game starts.  There's more to it though, under the sadness runs a current of hope, bravery and grim determination in the face of overwhelming odds.

Moving on to something a bit more light hearted, here's the main menu music for Saints Row: The Third.  Personally, I'm more of a Grand Theft Auto guy, but I have to admit this music is a great way to get players psyched up for what's to be found in this series.  A perfect blend of the coolness of rap mixed with the enthusiasm of rock, superbly represents what it's like being one of the Steel Port Saints.

This last entry is pure nostalgia so take it with a grain of salt.  The Space Quest theme predates dedicated sound cards so what your going to hear is a remastering of sorts.  Nevertheless, it still represents the original very well; complete with adventure, mystery, intrigue as well as an undercurrent of whimsy that makes this venerable collection of titles distinct.

I should conclude by saying that tastes in music are highly subjective.  So while you might not find my choices particularly agreeable, I imagine you will find they reflect a certain kind of preference when it comes to music in gaming.  Especially since it can be (and often is) one of the things we remember most after setting down the controller...er...keyboard and mouse...?  Well, you know what I mean.