Latest thing I've been up to. Emulating some stuff. Finished Capcom's Shadow of Rome (2005) a couple of nights ago, and started LucasArts's 'Gladius'.
I posted some Shadow of Rome screenshots in the virtual photography thread already.
It's a game of which one significant part is controlling a guy who looks like Miura's Guts in a series of gladiatorial battles in which you have to win stylishly and violently to impress crowds. The game is interestingly constructed to be somewhat challenging, as you're usually outnumbered and constrained to similar rules and tools as your opponents, and to be full of potential to mess around with, because you're meant to win
interestingly, not just play to survive. So you can do things like chop parts off of people, throw any kind of object into the crowd, throw people at each other, off of high places, into pits full of spikes. These arena battles are enclosed spaces full of potential.
But this isn't the full game.
You also play as this Raiden lookalike in an oddly similarly but completely different experience and plotline. Several elements are shared with the arenas. Dense environments, complex interactions with many characters, an emphasis on objects and freedom to do lots of things with them. Only it's a "stealth" game. Particularly a 2000s one. There are no ferns to hide in. And if you are seen you will be cut down dead very quickly if you don't get away. But it's also Japanese. The Japanese understand that "stealth" as an abstract interaction with virtual people is always going to end up somewhat retarded, and they're quite willing to embrace that. This game might do so more than any other I've ever played. It's an entirely slapstick experience.
Here is Not-Raiden dressed up as a maid, holding a jug. The plan of course is to shatter it over the unsuspecting guard's head like a looney toons sketch. Other tactical options include banana peels, which can create incredible destructive human pileups via tripping, and throwable rats and frogs, which are used to scare women into distracting guards.
But this isn't even all. The game is not a "gladiator" game, or a "stealth" game, or one which alternates between the two. These pieces are sort of like the "dungeons" in something like The Legend of Zelda within this game. A significant portion of the game takes place in and around Rome in more general sequences of narrative and freedom which feel more like moving around in a JRPG city. I mention this because I believe that something the Japanese do well with many games is that they want to give you an experience of being a person who does a thing, rather than just making you do the thing. Sneaking, or fighting in an arena, are organically integrated into a greater narrative and world experience for you, as the player, and integrated into a greater life experience of the characters. The Gladiator character's plotline actually starts with him fighting as a soldier, using the same fighting mechanics that will be applied in the arena later. It's a very cool transition into what one would expect to be the main premise of the game. The gladiator plotline is only introduced at the end of the first act of the game.
Something I say to explain what I like about a lot of Japanese games, I do like it, I also say it to encourage lateral thinking, is that the approach feels very
multimedia anime. This game is more than a game, a contrived challenge. It's a lot of things. It uses contrived challenges at points to give you entertaining things to do and frame certain elements of its story and experience, but it's really about a Japanese vision of Rome, as a city and cultural experience. There's just rich attention to detail all over this thing which couldn't really be done in any other medium and is really best appreciated if not approached entirely as a
game either.
Brief note on the story. It's an anime conspiracy-plot about the murder of Julius Caesar. It's very cool to see how figures from Roman history get interpreted into anime archetypes to make the plot work.
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About the two aboveRaiden is Octavian, Guts is Agrippa