Strider (8 out of 10). Double Helix Games/Capcom, Xbox 360 version.
A guest review by the one, the only…VOURBOT.
Last year at PAX, I stumbled across the single most exciting piece of video game news. Capcom was (pretty secretively at the time) working on a redo of Strider. It was going to be a cheapo Xbox live redo, but I had high hopes. Well, it’s out, and I got it. Here’s my thoughts and review of Capcom’s hard work, starting at the beginning.
When I was a sixteen year old kid, my mom would pay me five bucks to drive my brother to his guitar lesson downtown, and I’d drop him off and head straight to the arcade (remember those) at the mall and spend the five bucks before his guitar lesson was over.
One time when I was there, I saw a tall skinny guy with a fro, who had a t-shirt that said “strider” on it, and he was climbing over a golden dome amidst a clusterf@#$ of lazers, bullets, flips, robots, and what I considered to be just an absolutely mind-blowing display of impossible visions. It was “Strider”, the coolest game I had ever seen. I didn’t even dare to play it for a long time. I just watched the demo over and over. Between every glimpse of levels, the screen went black with the simple, small bluish-white words in the middle of the screen that said, “NO ONE HAS EVER BEATEN THIS LEVEL”.
Next, I bought Strider for the Nintendo. It was a very glitchy and classy game. I recommend it to anyone who wants to see a particularly far out Nintendo game, that pushes some boundaries. Boundaries in cool music, boredom, glitchiness, excitement, plot, the Strider character.
Next, I bought Strider for the Genesis, and oh my god, it was amazing. I lied that I was sick and stayed home from school and just PLAYED it, not being able to imagine how anyone else my age could ever appreciate the wonder I was enveloped in. Since I was to scared to play it in the arcade, that was my first chance to truly see what was going on with the game. And the version is excellent. A landmark in it’s own right. The first 8 meg cart. For a quick review, you got this: Seriousness turned up on the Hiryu sprite, and some of his animations. EVERYTHING just great. A few let downs in the jungle bark. The only real let down is the wimpy sword flash, almost made up for by the cooler looking main character (that’s Hiryu himself for all you newbs who didn’t recognize that when I said his name earlier). Anyhow, VERY sweet representation of the original material. Such a good version.
Next, I grew into a man, and bought the arcade game. Strider is the best arcade game ever made. Done and Done. You could criticize it for this or that, but fundamentally, you could not criticize these design elements, as they are blunt and clear in every fucking second of the game- and not a SECOND of the game is wasted:
1. It’s designed to challenge you and teach you and love you at the same time. The entire game pretty much plays out as one drawn out stunt once you learn it, and it still stays dynamic. Check a Strider speed run to see.
2. The music is excellent. Each track lasts ten seconds because each “stunt” takes 10 seconds. It is a blast of exciting music keeping pace with the frenetic pace. The sound effects are phenomenal. The incredibly loud “shing shing shing” of the cypher is the LEAST of the magical sounds of this game. Speech up the ass. Russian accents. John Wayne for christ sakes. The overlapping jibberjab of the tight cut-scenes do nothing but make you incredibly scared and stoked about what’s going to happen next.
3. The gameplay is phenomenal. This game contains the “inertial jump” that made ghouls’n’ghosts, castlevania, and any other game that that contains it great. It’s where you have to plan your jump, execute, and deal with the consequences because you can’t change direction in the air, like in real life, DUH! That amount of anticipation makes games good. There you go. And you can also slide, hang and climb any surface, and the gravity changes upside down sometimes, and everything. Combine that with a limited proximity SWORD weapon, and the game is….. perfect.
4. Combine all those together, pretty much to the ultimate limit, and you’ve got a game that feels ridiculous because things are going too fast, out of control because it’s just set piece after set piece in a never ending string, wasteful, because a beautiful robot gorilla boss takes 2 seconds to kill, and every enemy is HEAVILY articulated, drawn, and animated, yet vanishes in an explosive flash pretty much the instant they appear- Actually, every boss and enemy takes 2 seconds to kill if you know how- the boss music is cut off at almost the first riff- the score music rips in, the cut scene races you to the next scene, it’s like this paragraph- comma- comma- comma- dash, dash, dash, comma, comma, end. Then you feel in control with this articulate character, out of control with the “inertial jump”, bamboozled by the constant string of booby traps, cheated by the rapidly increasing difficulty rank…
Does this make the game sound dumb? Well… it is kind of dumb for a lot of those reasons, but one thing that I’ve never really seen done in any game as well as this is…. pause for gravitas… COMPLETE VIDEO GAME TRANSCENDANCE. It’s not just a game. It’s a work of art composed in the video game medium. The game was designed, with no compromise, to follow this priority structure:
1. Drama, imagination, posturing and concept (violent cyber-punk ninja techo Russian evil world-take-over)
2. Fast paced action
3. Powerful, immersive, and physically fun gameplay
4. Lots of repetition of that
Now PLEASE notice, that most GREAT games prioritize that list in the OPPOSITE order. Only the artistic masterpiece that is Strider did it in THIS order.
In the manual that came with the arcade game, the pitch to the the arcade operator goes something like, “Thanks for purchasing this game, your patrons will appreciate a game that is just like a cartoon action movie”.
For more perspective on this, I bought Strider 2 on the genesis later: Repetition was priority one. Drama, priority 4. I bought Osman/Cannon Dancer for the arcade (spiritual sequel to Strider- I think same director/different company): Alienating story, Repetition just one notch above Strider, some ball-drops on repetitive levels- pretty fast pace, but it ain’t no Strider. Strider 2 in the arcade and on playstation: Very good, and very much on the mark of the original, plus with loading times and cuts between the levels, so it’s pretty much all for nothing. Why?? In the arcade, at least, it’s like they TRIED to break down the continuity, which is pretty much the key factor to the success of the original game. So dumb.
Anyways, that leaves us at 2014 with “Strider” on the Xbox 360. I’ll sum up my review as bluntly as possible.
1. Unlike some other modern remakes where nerds are in their cubicles, dinking around with reinterpretations of these ancient games, to no real purpose but to have their dream jobs in the computer arts (like with the Flashback character vocalizing his distress, “No way, dude! Gnarly!”, wtf?”, and the Rush’N’Attack cell shaded explosion of “hallway, hallway, hallway, hallway, hallway, ad naseum” (you know, I bet the same people worked on Strider as Russian Attack, or at least went to the same computer college), I think it would be IMPOSSIBLE to remake Strider without much respect to the things about it that are so obviously wonderful. And that is the case. It is incredibly clear that the designers went to great lengths to honor the original action with great love. Every scene bleeds sentiment for the original. They really tried to make it as exciting as possible with level design, general feel and enemies and such, and where the designers really went ballistic is with character gameplay. Your dude, Hiryu but with ear muffs and a 15 foot long scarf, is an icon of total control. Eight directional slash, with enemies always in all eight directions, he sticks to anything and spends as much time hanging as anything, double jumps, slides, eight-directional dashes: he just wiggles and flurries around the screen wherever you want. And you are in a shower of enemy bullets most of the time, getting shot, with an urgent desire to rush’n’attack. Usually, I’d prefer more defined dodging and action to a constantly eroding energy bar, but in this case, the rush to curtail the erosion is pretty compelling. You know, you can only tolerate about 100 laser burns on your skin before you just can’t take one more and you just explode.
2. It is “metroid-vania-esque”. The first time through, it is checkpoint to check point, and they go far to keep you on a linear path, but in the end, it exists in a sprawling world with a huge map and there is backtracking over the whole sprawling world. Each moment of that world is pretty tight, though. In the end, it’s more like a youtube of AFHV ball hits then a single episode of Full House, like the original Strider was, if you catch my drift.
3. It pays great homage to the original NES Strider, in long levels as well as music remixes. Actually, when I heard some of those NES melodies playing, the remaining 90% of the music was an incredible let down. I wanted complete strider remixes blasting the whole time. What I got was what I describe as incredibly-insipid-modern-videogame-background-techno which is HOW they make games now.
4. Great graphics, combines with cell-animation smoke and special effects. How come they didn’t just go real? Don’t they now that cell-animation is anti-video game art? They have tight realistic-leaning polygon models that are modern and almost look like real pictures, and they’re colored with these dump cell-shaded poofs. Weird art decision.
5. Fake-ass plot. The original referenced future cold-war russia. There’s no more cold war for the kids realistic video games now, so this one takes place in fake russia. Or maybe it’s North Korea with russian accents. Who knows. I don’t really know what’s going on.
6. I’ll admit! I can’t finish the game at the time of this writing, It’s too hard. Actually, after a long journey of NOT HARD, punctuated by the occasional heavy challenge (tied together by a string of check points and running, running, running), I hit a part that is waaaaaaay hard. Like way harder than anything. So that’s a point against. There is a “challenge mode” where you just kill kill kill in one arena, and I think you’re supposed to master your skills in there, but what I think I’ve done is played the “adventure” version of the game, and then they hit me with this “Masters only” section right at the end, and I’m supposed to spend some time in the challenge mode and become a master before I go on. Dang, what a surprise, I didn’t know I was wasting a lot of time on this extended, fake version of the game. Can’t I at least have a fake version ending?
7. The gameplay really is incredibly tight. After visiting the challenge mode, it’s clear that they expect you to really master some incredibly tight and meaningful control- switching swords on the fly, zipping and dashing and charging up and every-directioning at a very lightning fast pace. It’s almost like a human version of, duh, you know, arena shmups. And that aspect of the game is it’s true victory. It’s fantastic and truly above-and-beyond. And it really does honor the sentiment of the original game with true love. However, and I originally intended to write this whole review just to articulate this single criticism: You use, only, the analog stick, so it is all for nothing. Yo, Capcom, don’t you know that an analog stick is not an 8-way controller? By definition? And by design? A joypad is. A joystick is. I can master eight directions of perception and attack and action. I don’t think I want to master the muscle memory for eight points on an analog dial. End of discussion on that. That’s dumb.
So, to sum it up, these guys have played Strider before. Maybe not when they were 16 and impressionable, but they definitely understood that it was something special. The nerds at Capcom have crafted some amazing video game gameplay in Xbox’s STRIDER, and the arcade action is intense. These guys have obviously never been to an arcade, though. Or, to be more specific, maybe your just really not allowed to make arcade games on modern home systems, because this is an amazing arcade game stuck in a legitimately long and boring modern Xbox game, so it’s all for nothing. And I wouldn’t say it so harshly except that the source material is to strictly the opposite, even at every expense. And it’s an eight-way game played only on a million-way analogue joystick, so it really is all for nothing. And why did Capcom miss those marks, and go to great pains to dumb down an ancient masterpiece into a modern time-waster? Why did they give the source material this interpretation? Well, in a culture where any hundred hour, open ended, written on the fly seasonal TV show is more important that any two hour movie that has a start and a stop, what can you expect?
-Vourbot