Uplink 11

The Portable Gaming Issue

January 2008

Contents:

• Holiday Roundup

• Handheld Gaming: DS and PSP

• Revenant Wings

• Metal Gear Update

Introduction

Last year was a banner year for the videogame culture, as unit sales and revenues skyrocketed 30% or more. More importantly, gaming is finally beginning to acquire a semblance of mainstream credibility. After a brief roundup of the holiday season, this issue of Uplink focuses on the mass market of handheld gaming -- why it’s important, and where it might be headed in the future.

We also have a review of the North American version of Revenant Wings, Square Enix’ handheld sequel to Final Fantasy 12, released last year for the Nintendo DS. Last but not least, we have an update on one of the most anticipated titles of the PS3, Metal Gear Solid 4.

Holiday Round: Nintendo Roars, Sony Soars, Microsoft Floors

The year 2007 will go down in history as a watershed for videogames. Records were set for total consoles sold, software units moved, and revenues earned. The industry racked up close to $40 billion in annual sales and rentals, putting videogames on track to eclipse DVD sales and rentals as the single largest market for recorded media in the world within two years.

While Sony and Nintendo both have reason to celebrate, Microsoft didn’t experience the holiday cheer they were hoping for. Uplink argued all the way back in June 2006 that Microsoft needed to drastically revise its strategy if it ever hoped to compete effectively in the game market. By contrast, most of the major Wall Street analyst firms and investment houses -- the same geniuses, incidentally, responsible for hawking the Internet bubble of the late 1990s and the US mortgage bubble of the 2000s -- banked on an easy Microsoft win. To hear Wall Streeters tell the tale, those clunky Japanese hardware manufacturers couldn’t possibly compete with nimble Seattle software whizzes.

Interestingly, the same imperial hubris afflicted the US mainstream media. The same geniuses responsible for hawking neoliberalism in the 1990s and the criminal invasion of Iraq in the 2000s fell over themselves badmouthing Sony’s PS3, sneering at the Nintendo Wii as a kiddie toy, while praising Microsoft’s 360 to the skies. (For those unversed in Greek antiquity, hubris is the classic precedent of Nemesis, the goddess of richly deserved retribution, a deity which residents of the disintegrating US Empire are going to become painfully familiar with over the course of the next decade.)

The holiday numbers are in, and prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Uplink was 100% correct, while Wall Street and the mainstream Anglophone media were 100% wrong.

Microsoft is being pulverized in the game market. The annihilation is so total, it’s almost painful to watch. For a year and a half, Uplink has argued that while the 360 was a superb platform, Microsoft’s console strategy had crucial weaknesses which no amount of spin could paper over. The 360 ran too hot, didn’t have backwards compatibility, had worrisome signs of unreliability, and had no next-generation recording capacity. Nor did Microsoft have the first-party studio networks which Nintendo and Sony slowly and patiently built up over the years.

The first storm-clouds for Microsoft appeared this summer, when the firm admitted the 360 had severe manufacturing flaws, and booked an astounding $1.1 billion loss to cover the cost of replacing defective units. This fall, Microsoft tried to make the best of a bad situation, ballyhooing a $50 price cut and the September release of Halo 3. While sales of the 360 did pick up, the boost was short-lived, and confined almost exclusively to North American markets.

Now that the holiday numbers are in, though, it’s no longer possible for Microsoft to conceal the full extent of the disaster. Here are worldwide unit sales of home consoles over the past three years (all data courtesy of VGChartz, an independent fansite which does a fine job of tracking videogame sales):

-- DRR

Handheld Gaming: DS and PSP

While handheld consoles are one of the fastest growing sectors of the contemporary game culture, they are also one of the least appreciated or analyzed. There were two main reasons for this. First, handhelds were, until quite recently, a Nintendo monopoly (95% of units or more). Secondly, the limited processing power and cramped screens of handhelds drastically limited what game artists could do.

All this changed in the mid-2000s. Sony entered the handheld market, and handheld devices rapidly evolved into powerful, sophisticated consoles, ranging from high-end cellphones to dedicated consoles. To give you a sense of how important handhelds have become to the game culture, here are unit sales of handhelds from 2002-2007 (all data courtesy VGChartz):

-- DRR

Revenant Wings

When Revenant Wings was finally released by Square Enix for the Nintendo DS in 2007, hopes were high that this would be a handheld classic. The game had a stupendous sound-track, featured a vast game-world, and hosted some of the greatest characters ever devised by the artistic imagination -- namely, the cast of Final Fantasy 12.

Unfortunately, while Revenant Wings is an above average game, it never fulfills its promise. Instead of soaring into the post-American skies, Revenant Wings sinks into a neo-national swamp of dubious neo-national father-figures, questionable storyline decisions, and regressive gender roles. Revenant Wings also has some game-play issues, which prevent it from being much more than a niche product for real-time strategy fans.

While the editors of Uplink can live with flawed game-play, the storyline and character issues border on the irremediable. One of the most refreshing features of FF12 was its willingness to smash the gender stereotypes of the role-playing genre to pieces. Each of FF12’s three main female characters -- Penelo, Ashe and Fran -- were tough, savvy, intelligent, and as capable and multifaceted as the male characters.

In Revenant Wings, Penelo is reduced from heroic adventurer to stereotypical cook, nurse and dancer. (One especially outrageous cut-scene shows her performing a dance, and zooms in for a close shot of her rear end.) Similarly, Ashe is transformed from spirited national resistance leader into uninteresting ice queen. Only Fran retains some of her original wit and charm, but she is largely written out of the story.

One of FF12’s savviest moves was to place Fran and Balthier at the emotional center of the story, allowing Vaan and Penelo to be the rapidly-maturing youngsters they indeed were. Revenant Wings casts Vaan and Penelo as the leading duo, but provides no character development worthy of the name. While Balthier and Fran do provide a welcome breath of fresh air to the later chapters of Revenant Wings, even their best efforts cannot save the storyline from itself.

This micropolitical regression is matched by a regressive geopolitics. Early in the game, certain scenes make overt reference to the violence of colonialism -- e.g. rogue sky-pirates plunder and enslave humanoid airborne creatures called the aegyl, and the player-characters must save the latter. But the aegyl are never given any narrative agency. Instead, they quickly turn into threats to the player-characters, as bad as the sky-pirates themselves. The one apparent exception, Lluyd, an aegyl who becomes a playable character, confirms the rule. We learn nothing about Lluyd’s history, culture, or perspective. The aegyl remain a blank cipher, who need to be rescued and civilized.

This matters, because colonialism has been the single most dominant experience of modernity for 80% of all human beings on this planet. If you exclude the historical experience of that 80%, your narrative is very likely to fall prey to some terrible form of political regression.

This regression is most palpable in the villain of Revenant Wings, Feolthanos. Feolthanos is the recognizable spin-off of Tidus’ transfigured father in Final Fantasy 10, i.e. the avatar of a pre-industrial or cyclical mode of production, which must come to an end for any sort of historical progress to begin. This potential allegory of the capitalist transition, which might have furnished the materials for a rich meditation on anti-colonial resistance movements and neocolonialism, is sabotaged by the primary subplot of Revenant Wings -- the fact that Feolthanos’ chief minion turns out to a viera (a famtasy-race of humanoids with rabbit-like ears) named Mydia.

It’s important to stress that the viera in FF12 were people of color in both senses of the term, i.e. they symbolized the achievements (and limitations) of the Third World anti-colonial movements, as well as the resistance movements of immigrants and people of color within the First World. Alas, the whitening of the viera in Revenant Wings is part of a generalized regression to imperial whiteness.

As it turns out, Mydia is a member of a sub-group of fair-skinned viera, who were exiled long ago from the rest of the viera and live far off in the mountains. In the storyline, Mydia falls in love with a human soldier of Nalbina, who dies in the Empire’s war on Dalmasca. Seeking to wrest her beloved from the clutches of the afterlife, she falls under Feolthanos’ evil spell and unwittingly launches an orgy of destruction, eventually wiping out her own group of fellow exiles. This deeply problematic ideology of racialization takes an explicitly eugenic turn when we learn that these doomed viera (including Mydia herself) are nothing less than Feolthanos’ distant descendants. That is, Feolthanos was a human who had children with a viera, before his transformation into a vampire-like semi-deity.

Add it all up, and the micropolitics of the storyline boil down to this: (1) races shouldn’t mix, because when they do, the result is a bunch of mixed-up, mixed-race kids who will fall in love with the wrong crowd and go into exile anyway, and (2) women with sexual agency are dangerous trouble-makers, who incite the genocidal destruction of their communities.

Never mind the fact that Fran and Balthier utterly and flagrantly contradict and countermand both of these rules -- but that, of course, is precisely why they are sidelined in Revenant Wings. Whereas FF12 dared to critique whiteness and indeed to critique the US Empire in its late, decadent phase, Revenant Wings regresses to fantasms of benevolent neoliberal interventions on behalf of that Empire -- not the Bush-era Terror War, so much as the Clinton-era bombing of Sudan.

Adding insult to injury, Revenant Wings also suffers from a crucial game-play weakness. Revenant Wings is not a true role-playing game, it is a modified real-time strategy (RTS) game. The player-character controls various units, endowed with various strengths and weaknesses, which do battle with other units. However, something important was lost during the transition from role-playing game to real-time strategy game, and that is the all-important category of game balance.

In a nutshell, the final two chapters of the North American version of the game are impossible for the average player. They are so difficult that only a small group of hard-core real-time-strategy fans will ever see the game’s ending. This is a classic example of a misguided port: what works for a console system, with its complex control scheme and space to situate and move units, does not work on the crowded screens and intermittent game sessions of a handheld. Characters break for cover in unpredictable ways, you cannot move the stylus fast enough to trigger crucial spells called “quickenings” when facing ultra-powerful opponents, and the sheer mass of characters on the screen creates confusion.

By contrast, the Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Jeanne D’Arc, titles for the DS and PSP respectively, get everything about handheld gaming right – but that’s a subject for a future issue of Uplink.

-- DRR

Metal Gear Update

It’s a privileged experience to play an epoch-making videogame. It’s an even greater privilege to watch a great game being put together. Yet this is exactly what is happening with legendary game designer Hideo Kojima’s magnum opus, Metal Gear Solid 4, due to be released in spring of 2008. Each trailer for MGS4 represented a quantum leap forwards in audio-visual creativity, while the production of the game is being copiously documented by assistant producer Ryan Payton’s excellent and comprehensive KojiPro podcast.

There’s been a vast amount of commentary in the gaming press downplaying the importance of MGS4. Stealth games, so runs the argument, are an acquired taste, and always sell far less than first-person shooters such as Halo 3 or adventure games like Grand Theft Auto 3.

You can throw out the trendlines from those past MGS games, though, because this Metal Gear is going to be different. It will not inflict frustrating, counter-intuitive control schemes on the player. It will not have a meandering, half-baked storyline which raises more questions than it answers. It will not have player-perspective and viewing issues. It will not have tacky pop music marring its opening cinematics. Most of all, it will not be limited by the processing power of past home consoles.

What it will have is a seamless game-world, accessible controls, state-of-the-art geopolitics, epic characters and even more epic boss battles, eye-popping visuals, a geopolitically savvy storyline, and astounding voice acting. What Valve’s Half Life, Remedy’s Max Payne and Neil Manke’s They Hunger did for the shooter, and what Final Fantasy 12 did for the role-playing game, is precisely what Metal Gear Solid 4 is going to do for the espionage thriller -- transform a marginal cultural form into powerhouse multinational classic.

-- DRR

Stay tuned for Issue 12: The MGS Issue, April 2008!