The X Button

Shoot the Corps

The biggest news last week came from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, though the important part had nothing to do with actual games. It had everything to do with TH*Q angering local residents by releasing scores of balloons to promote HomeFront. Though the balloons are biodegradable, it's still an unfortunate blunder for the company.

I could comment further on this, but instead I'll just remember the days when game advertising embarrassed itself merely on TV and in magazines. For example, here's an ad for the Turbo Touch 360 controller.

This ran in several magazines back in the early 1990s, and I'm still surprised that it was conceived, drawn, approved, and published without anyone thinking it could be taken the wrong way. Or perhaps, unlike TH*Q, the people involved in promoting the Turbo Touch 360 knew exactly what they were doing.

SKULLGIRLS IS A 2-D FIGHTER WITH GIRLS. SKULLS FORTHCOMING
Not a bad time for 2-D fighting games, is it? Even after setting aside Marvel vs. Capcom 3, The King of Fighters XIII and other big names, you'll find a host of lesser-known fighters in waiting: Sega's Chaos Code, French-Bread's Under Night In-Birth, Examu's Arcana Heart 3, and 07th Expansion's Ougon Musou Kyoku. Unfortunately, most of those aren't easy to find, and only Arcana Heart 3 is coming to North America so far. Skullgirls, on the other hand, is far more accessible. It's a Western take on the Japan-bred idea of anime-infused, all-female fighting games, and it's coming to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 this summer.

Skullgirls seems different from the norm at a glance, as artist Alex Ahad gives the characters a thick-lined, cartoonish look with vaguer-than-usual manga overtones. Of the combatants shown so far, two are routine archetypes with creatures called Parasites attached. Fillia's a schoolgirl in thigh-highs, but there's a shadowy, fanged horror named Samson riding on her head. Acrobat Cerebella wears a revealing costume like most fighting-game women do, but she's also sporting a hat that's really a massive-armed monster called Vice-Versa. And then there's Peacock, a deranged killer apparently spawned from old Silly Symphonies shorts.

Developed by fighting-game enthusiasts, Skullgirls adopts a six-button array for attacks, and it's all very friendly toward combos. The game's tag-team mode imitates the likes of Marvel vs. Capcom, with players swapping between characters or calling a reserve partner out for brief attacks. Yet Skullgirls offers more options: players can choose a more powerful version of a lone character instead of two fighters, and they can customize a reserve fighter's short strikes however they choose. Being the creation of tournament players, Skullgirls also discourages cheap, endless combos and allows opponents to escape repeated attacks easily.

Skullgirls clearly has a few more characters to reveal, but it'll be playable at the upcoming PAX East this month. And when it arrives in full this summer, we won't need to live near Japanese arcades or pay import fees to experience Skullgirls.

SHADOWS OF THE DAMNED IS FULL OF DEMONS, DIRTY JOKES
Shadows of the Damned drew some notice last year on account of its creators. Goichi “Suda 51” Suda is known for playing jokes on entire sections of the game industry with his No More Heroes titles, and Shinji Mikami earned his place by creating Resident Evil and the recent action-shooter Vanquish. A collaboration between the two shouldn't go ignored. Especially not when it stars a demon-slayer named Garcia Hotspur.

Mr. Hotspur descends into hell itself in search of his girlfriend Paula, and he's armed with a machine gun called the “Boner.” Because it shoots bullet-shaped bones, that's why. This isn't his only weapon, as monsters are also vulnerable to light, whether it's from hellish streetlamps or the Boner's under-barrel photon thrower.

The game is heavy on macabre imagery interspersed with rather crude humor, from Hotspur's informative Johnsonpedia guide to profane posters scattered all around levels. That's the Suda 51 we all know, and there'll be plenty of his influence showing when Shadows of the Damned arrives on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in June.

MOON DIVER HAS A RELEASE DATE
I was worried about Moon Diver for a little while. The game looked impressive when it was first announced as Necromachina in the West, but it dropped out of sight for a few months, and I started wondered if Square Enix had canceled it in some fit of financial panic. But Moon Diver, as it's now called everyhwere, is still around, and it still shows promise as a ninja-action title from Koichi “Isuke” Yotsui, the man responsible for a lot of what made Capcom's Strider arcade game so awesome. Moon Diver technically isn't Strider, but look at that familiar sword-slash aura. C'mon.

Moon Diver has something Strider didn't: a four-player mode, with each player controlling a different color-coded ninja assassin. It's all part of a war between mankind and an army of evil, formerly inanimate objects. That idea lends itself to all sorts of crazy enemies and boss encounters, and I really hope Moon Diver makes the most of it all. It already has cool team-up attacks called “MoonSaults.”

And Moon Diver now has a release date: March 29 on the PlayStation Network, with an Xbox 360 debut not yet pinned down. Until then, Strider fans can just play as Sayuri in Hard Corps: Uprising. Speaking of which….

Developer: Arc System Works
Publisher: Konami
Platform: Xbox Live Arcade (available now)/PlayStation Network (March 15)
Players: 1-2
MSRP:1200 Points (Xbox Live)/$9.99 (PSN)

Hard Corps: Uprising is a game without a home. It's technically tied to Contra: Hard Corps, the best and most experimental of Konami's blisteringly hard action-shooters. Yet Konami and developer Arc System Works balked at putting “Contra” in Uprising's title, intending to give the Hard Corps line its own identity. And they're right: Uprising really isn't a Contra game. But it's still a side-scrolling shooter of cruel design, and it stands upon that fine line between a challenging game and a dose of pure masochism.

Both a prequel and a retcon to Contra: Hard Corps, Hard Corps: Uprising finds four soldiers facing the military strength of the oppressive Commonwealth and its dictator, Tiberius. This resistance cell is led by the former Commonwealth soldier Bahamut, who was (perhaps) the villain in Contra: Hard Corps, and Krystal, an eyepatched survivor of a vicious Commonwealth attack. They're accompanied by two characters available as extra downloads: the sturdy, pompadour-sporting Harley Daniels and the swordswoman Sayuri. There's a bit of exposition before each stage and a little plotline involving one of Bahamut's former comrades, but let's be realistic: Uprising's all about the chaos of combat, and the destruction players can bring to the army that the Commonwealth throws at them.

In facing the Commonwealth, the characters are doled out a standard set of Contra weapons: the Machine Gun, the Spread Gun, the slow-and-powerful Crush Gun, the charge-able Heated Plasma flamethrower, the bullet-bouncing Reflector, and the heat-seeking Chain Laser. Each can be upgraded twice, and two weapons can be carried and switched out in battle. Arc System Works also gives the Uprising cast some new abilities: they can double-jump, dash in the air or on the ground, strafe enemies, and fire in any direction without moving. The game's Arcade mode sticks to these basics, but the Rising mode allows players to buy new abilities: automatically powered-up weapons, extra lives, speed boosts, triple jumps, bullet-deflecting moves, and various dashing attacks.

Yet there's an unpleasant sluggishness to the characters at first. They're slower and larger targets than the usual Contra heroes, and they start off with only a weak rifle. The best Contra games had sense enough to give players a machine gun as a default weapon, but Uprising sticks you with a limited peashooter. Other annoyances arise: you can only deflect enemy fire when you're standing perfectly still, and that opens you up to all sorts of damage. The game may have the weapons and giant fortresses of Contra, and yet under the surface Hard Corps Uprising has a lot more in common with Dolphin Blue, a lesser-known arcade shooter that Arc System Works made in the style of Metal Slug. Dolphin Blue was vaguely fun, but it was also loose and unfair in its structure. Uprising has better control (and diagonal firing), but its shortcomings still bring down the experience.

That's because Hard Corps: Uprising is terribly difficult, and not always in a rewarding way. The first stage unleashes cunningly aimed projectiles and limitless supplies of dense troopers, and it only gets tougher from there. This is a game all about memorizing enemy patterns, devising strategies, and then counting on pure reflexes to pull you through. The Commonwealth army boasts all sorts of soldiers, creatures, and transforming boss mechs, always with some new way to kill you. Concessions are few: the continue checkpoints are forgiving, and characters have life meters instead of dying from one hit. But there's no lack of dangers, and if you fall down a pit after being struck, you lose one whole life anyway.

There's nothing wrong with a nastily hard game so long as there's clever design to make it all worthwhile. Hard Corps: Uprising doesn't always deliver that design. For every insane, edge-of-your-seat boss battle or enjoyable spate of carnage, there's a dull stretch. The first level ends with a memorable speeder-bike chase and a pitched battle against a robotic sandworm, but then the second stage drags on through a jungle war where you face repetitive arrays of snipers and toxic plants, with a bland helicopter boss thrown in the middle. The later stages show off a brutal highway duel on hover-boards and a missile-riding ascent through Commonweath headquarters. Yet there's also a laboratory raid that includes sneaking around and an escort mission, two things that have no place in any chaotic action title.

Uprising has remedies for its stiff gameplay, but they must be earned. Yes, players have to spend points on things that should've been part of the game from the start: a default machine-gun weapon, a decent walking speed, and a dash that's actually useful. Upgrading characters adds a lot to the game, but Arc System Works hid a little too much and made everything a little too expensive. What's more, upgrades are unique to a character: if you turn Krystal into a powered-up, fluidly controlling character, none of those improvements will apply to Bahamut. You'll just have to go through the game with him.

Also up for purchase are two extra characters: Harley and Sayuri. Biker-cool Harley isn't all that different from Bahamut and Krystal, apart from resisting more damage. Sayuri, on the other hand, changes the entire game. She's limited to sword-swipes and charged energy shots, counting on her powerful attacks to neutralize enemies before she's damaged. Sayuri turns Uprising into Strider 3, making the game slightly easier, but considerably more interesting. And that's well worth the extra cost.

Uprising looks surprisingly clean for a game about battlefield mayhem. The characters are mostly 2-D sprites, from the masked stormtroopers to the snapping robot alligators, while the major bosses and backgrounds are 3-D. They don't clash in appearance as much as they do in style: the hand-drawn characters are animated and designed well (some soldiers even surrender, just to make you feel bad). The backgrounds, on the other hand, can be strangely empty, and some of the more organic bosses would be better if they were hand-drawn. The soundtrack's a huge pile of marvelous heavy-metal shrieking by Guilty Gear creator Daisuke Ishiwatari, and it fits both the game and the delightfully ridiculous animated intro. In contrast, the voices are terrible, as though Konami deliberately wanted to evoke a stiff '80s arcade game. It's strangely hilarious to hear one boss's stilted laughter or Krystal's robotic readings of quips like “I thought beautiful women didn't get tickets.”

So Hard Corps Uprising really isn't Contra after all. It's just not tight enough or fair enough to match the best in the series. Yet it's also better in some ways, with a look that breaks away from the typical Contra revamps. It has plenty of enjoyable moments and the intriguing bonus of Sayuri, making it easy to forgive some poor design choices. It's a stylish bundle of the highs and lows that make run-and-gun games what they are: brutal, messy, and somehow compelling through it all.