This Week in Games

Burn It All Down

Man, this sucks. I was all ready to write a really fun column this week about all of the new fighting game character reveals alongside an interview for a game I'm really looking forward to, and maybe talk a little bit about how great a character Nagi in NEO: The World Ends With You is, which I'm almost finished playing through. It was gonna be nothing but positive vibes all around!

Then the news about Activision-Blizzard hit, and I just deflated. All of my joy simply went right out the window.

UGH, NOT THIS SHIT AGAIN

The State of California has filed a lawsuit against the company for what is being called “frat boy culture,” but that phrase, to me, minimizes the abuse far too much. Several women have reported sexual harassment, unwanted groping, unequal treatment, being deliberately passed over for advancement, discriminatory treatment due to pregnancy/parental needs, and a whole lot more. I'm not being super-specific here because it gets really, really bad. If you want some detailed examples of things that are alleged to have happened at ATVI, you can read more here, but it comes with a MASSIVE content warning.

This has been the talk of gaming twitter for the past day now, and it's frustrating as hell that yet again another massive western AAA publisher has been doing terrible, abusive things to its employees for years on end and is only now getting some form of comeuppance. People have been scarred emotionally for years on end, and at least one person is dead from this. That's absolutely unacceptable. A few folks are debating as to whether the bulk of the bad behavior happened on the Activision or the Blizzard side of things, but does it really matter who did it worse when it's awful all around?

Of course, Activision PR was quick to put out a statement refuting the charges. Reading it is downright infuriating, as it addresses nothing and even blames one of the victims. Instead, they spend time whining about the half-assed anti-harassment measures they instituted that clearly did nothing. It even implies that employers being held accountable is why companies are leaving California? WT actual F?

Plenty of folks are rightfully mad about all of this. As I speak, there are in-game protests happening in World of Warcraft, where players are literally “sitting out” their remaining subscription time to raise awareness of the issue. (Many of these players had already pre-purchased subs months in advance before these issues came to light.) Several streamers I follow are refusing to play or discuss any Activision or Blizzard games going forward. Educating more people about what's going on through protest is certainly a noble move, though I don't know how much ATVI's bottom line will be hurt by it. Ultimately, I think the fear of a government intervention might be the only thing that could possibly set things straight here – but I feel like no matter what can be done to course-correct here, Activision-Blizzard's culture, and AAA development culture in general, may well be beyond repair.

In that case, burn it all down to the ground.

WELL, THAT WAS DEPRESSING AS HELL! LET'S TRY TO LIGHTEN THINGS UP WITH SOME FIGHTING GAME NEWS

Oopsies, looks like SNK un-privated this week's King of Fighters XV character reveal earlier than they should have! Or maybe they were trying to beat out the Guilty Gear Strive reveal. Who knows! But guess what, Tizoc's back in the ring!

Oh, sorry, who's Tizoc? Not this guy, he's clearly an evil dinosaur. The KING of Dinosaurs, which is one step above being the King of Fighters if you ask me.

Meanwhile, things are starting to heat up with character trailers as Melty Blood Type Lumina's fall release date approaches. I hesitate to call any of these characters “new” since this is basically a remake, but there are still quite a few characters whose shiny new HD sprites haven't been seen yet. Like Kouma Kishima, for example! Here's his reveal clip:

Finally, we have Guilty Gear Strive, which is really hitting its, uh… strive… right now. The first DLC character reveal was promised for this month, and Arc System Works was here to deliver on Tuesday. Oh boy, did they ever deliver.

Goldlewis Dickinson here was highly speculated to be one of the first wave of DLC characters by fans, but even if his inclusion wasn't a surprise, his methods of fighting certainly are. He's a big, heavy-hitting type of character with a unique “security level” mechanic that affects the power of his specials. He's also got a massive coffin emblazoned with the logo of Area 51 that contains some sort of cryptid. Did I mention he's also the US Secretary of Defense?  

ArcSys was quick to release a follow-up video showing off his attack repertoire and gameplay, but you won't have to wait too long to add him to the roster: Sir Dickinson will be available come July 27^th for season passholders and July 30^th for everyone else.

In recent years, we've seen a few old, thought-to-be-lost games re-emerge from archives to be finished and officially released. Starfox 2 is perhaps the most famous example, but even more are re-emerging thanks to the current resurgence of interest in retro games: Taito's lost fighting game Dan-ku-ga is seeing an official release on their upcoming Egret II Mini device, and a Kickstarter to finish and release Game Boy Color RPG Infinity will be launching next month.

Among arcade and classic platform games fans, one particularly legendary lost game is Westone's Clockwork Aquario, created by many of the veteran staff behind the Wonder Boy games. Despite being nearly complete and put out for location testing at Japanese arcades, Clockwork Aquario was shelved and its data believed lost. But thanks to the folks at ININ games, an effort was made to not only recover as much data as possible, but to fully remaster Aquario on current platforms with the aid of many of the original staff.

I was offered the chance to chat a bit over email with Ryuichi Nishizawa, the brains behind Aquario and the Wonder Boy series, about the game and its history. Read on for a look at restoring a long-lost game for a new age and new audience.

Can you tell us a bit about the concept behind Clockwork Aquario? Does it tie into the Wonderboy universe at all?

Aquario is a side-scrolling action game for arcades developed by Westone in 1993. It was developed with the aim of exploiting the graphics capabilities of the SEGA System 18 arcade board of that time to the limit. The world setting is completely original, a Sci-Fi fantasy set in modern times, with no connection to the Wonder Boy or Monster World series.

 I would like to know about the original Westone staff members who made the graphics, music, game design, etc. for Aquario. Please tell us about them, and if they're working on the current Aquario project.

The character design for Aquario is done by Mina Morioka. She also drew the illustration of the woman who appears on the title screen of AURAIL. The main program is by Kurihara, who also worked on Monster World 3 (aka Wonder Boy in Monster World), and the music is by Sakamoto, who worked on the first three games in the MonsterWorld series. These three people are also participating in this restoration project as supervisors.

What was the original reason for the game's cancellation? Were platform action games not popular in arcades anymore?

In the early 1990s, there was a huge boom in fighting games in Japan. Game consoles dedicated to fighting games were lined up at game arcades, attracting a different kind of customer. Despite these changes in the market, we remained faithful to the genre of platform action games, in which we had always excelled. We thought that the fighting game trend would eventually come to an end, but it never stopped and became more and more popular. As a result, Aquario did not perform well enough in the location tests, and we had to make the decision to cancel its release.

What sort of development equipment was used to make Aquario originally? How does it compare to a modern game development environment?

Aquario is a game for SEGA System 18 arcade board. At that time, the programming language C was not yet available, so the game was developed in Assembler. I think we were using ICE for debugging; ICE is a device that emulates the CPU on the target board. System 18 is a peculiar model of the previous generation System 16 with a Mega Drive GPU. It was a complex and difficult hardware for programmers because they had to control two graphical functions with one 68000 MPU. This project is completely different from modern game development that uses a game engine, as we were only using the source code to restore it. This is a highly challenging development project that requires a very experienced programmer.

How were the development materials (graphics, music, programming, etc) for Aquario stored (i.e. on floppy disks, hard drives, etc)? What did you need to do to retrieve the data?

The source codes for Aquario and other games developed at Westone were stored on MO disks. When floppy disk drives became unavailable in the past, we copied them to MO disks. Nowadays it's difficult to find a device to read out MO disks, but I asked a friend who owns a MO drive to copy it to HDD.

What data from Aquario was still missing, and how are you remaking it for this new release?

For this project, we focused on faithfully recreating the original. Fortunately, the soundtrack for Aquario was released in 2006, and we were able to use the sound data that we had stored at that time. During development, it was discovered that some of the background graphic data (title screen, some of the game stages, ending, etc.) were missing, so we had to make new ones for these parts. The content of the game is still the same as the original, but it has been updated to support modern input devices and various rules in order to run on modern platforms.

Have you decided to change anything from what you originally planned for the game for this new release?

The work of creating a new background image was completely unplanned. It took a lot of time because it was quite a complicated job to draw something that resembled the touch of pixel art of the time. I think it's similar to restoring Jakuchu's sliding door paintings from the Edo period. (Laughs)

*Jakuchu Ito is a famous painter from the Edo period. Born in Kyoto.

What in particular do you hope players will enjoy about Clockwork Aquario?

I think it is an extraordinary case that the images of Aquario, which were created to maximize performance within the limitations of technology, are being shown for the first time to people of the future, without being seen by people of that time. As a witness to this unique event, I hope you will enjoy this new retro game that has jumped through time and space.

Thanks to ININ Games and Nishizawa-san for their time! I'm very excited to play Clockwork Aquario, if you can't tell. Also, if you want to read more interviews from me, I had a nice chat with the NEO: The World Ends With You design team, so please give that a read as well!

That's it for now. Yes, I know a few other things have happened this week, like the announcement of a Dead Space remake. Some folks would say I should focus more on the good stuff that happened this week, because games aren't all bad. But much as I want to be upbeat and positive and talk about fun things instead, we simply cannot afford to ignore the ugliness and dark parts of gaming that have hurt so many, so it's important that I put things like the ATVI story front and center. We can do better.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you all again next week.