Mike Oldman from Eidos.

Many of our listeners may remember him from our muffled interview at the London MCM expo when we talked about Batman: Arkham Asylum. We’re very pleased to welcome back to the show proper; Mike Oldman – Community Manager for Eidos (The European development house behind Tomb Raider, Hitman and Kane and Lynch).

As it turns out, there’s a lot more to Mike’s job than simple PR and a lot more to the man himself. He’s one of the most interesting guests we’ve had on in terms of where his career has taken him. It was great to get a fresh perspective from the other side.

We talk about Batman in more depth, looking at character portrayal, also Just Cause 2, Metacritic, the Eidos/Square Enix deal and where that leaves the company, plus Mike’s answers to our classic eight questions. There’s also the Battlefield 1943 online debacle, the summer of pricey XBLA titles, what we’ve been playing and reader mail. All that, plus a special announcement for something incredibly cool for us.

You can find the Eidos Website here. Mike’s website here. His twitter here and most importantly an ancient pre-Red VS. Blue Halo machinima named Strykeforce here.

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With Tales of Monkey Island just released on the PC and the Wii, the re-skinned original Secret of Monkey Island imminent on PC and XBLA, Sam and Max tearing up the charts, Wallace and Gromit breaking new ground and the success of Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, fans of the point and click adventure game have reason to be very happy right now. Lucasarts also just announced the re-release of ten more games on Steam, among them SCUMM classics Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Loom, The Dig and Full Throttle.

If you’ve never heard of SCUMM you’re in for a treat, or you might be nonplussed at how archaic the interface is. It’s hard to tell how new people will react when all you have of these games are fond memories. Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (the first of these games from Lucasarts) is basically a way of clicking on an object and then selecting from a set of actions; PICK UP, PUSH, PULL, OPEN, CLOSE, TALK TO etc. It was created by Aric Wilmunder and Ron Gilbert in 1987 and was simple but devilishly effective in giving you an open world that was filled with possibilities, puzzles, oddball characters and usable (stealable) objects. The system was also uncharacteristic for a video game in that it was often entirely non-fatal. One of the greatest strings to its bow is that Monkey Island won’t kill you; the flipside is that you can find yourself completely stumped with a chicken in your hand, unsure of how to open a locked door or get past a stubborn pirate.

It’s all different now. No more thumbing through magazines to find the walk-thru. We can access the FAQ with a few mouse clicks, and YouTube has our backs for visual aids to the point where we don’t even need to play, but as any SCUMM veteran will tell you, that completely defeats the point of these games. The joy is in working out what Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert’s twisted sense of humor could convey into a puzzle. Once solved they were all mostly logical, but there were a few that simply boggled the mind and made you wonder how you were expected to come up with the solution on your own. These were usually solved by a tip from a friend or magazine or simply trying everything with everything. SCUMM was revised into GrimE in 1998 and Grim Fandango brought adventure games into more of a 3D plane. It’s very interesting that nearly the entire genre has been defined by the output of this one studio. They were arguably the Harmonix (and Neversoft) of their day. Their legacy lives on with Telltale Games, a studio comprising of many of the original creators.

Clearly, right now, to answer my own question, the adventure game IS back; it’s whether it will maintain that’s the more pressing issue. Many of these games have been legitimately playable to those that know how for years using SCUMMvm, on PC and emulating DOS, but now the big consoles and Steam are getting a taste, and the accessibility is rocketing outwards. Every classic, from Day of the Tentacle to Zack McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders could be re-released on every platform and a whole new generation can sample them, along with misty-eyed folks like myself, remembering our days hunched over an Amiga 500 or Commodore 64 in fusty, curtained bedrooms. I’m personally very glad I never went outside or I wouldn’t even be writing this, but after that, I’m wondering where Telltale Games and others will take the genre. Will the new crowd get tired of this relatively untapped but unarguably obtuse style of game? Even more unnervingly; will the old crowd find themselves unable to plow through on what might be nostalgia alone? The flourishing market says otherwise. There are opportunities to evolve, but should they be taken? Arguably the worst Monkey Island was the PS2 adventure Escape from Monkey Island, which attempted to bring Guybrush’s story in line with current tech. Or will we see smaller creators or Telltale themselves making smaller, retro projects, the games we never played? Or it could be a balance of the two. Classic controls (albeit regularly with a controller and not a mouse) and polished up graphics, like the Secret of Monkey Island Redux. Gilbert has given it the thumbs up and with Brutal Legend, Schafer could very well become a more prominent figure in the industry. Prominent enough to be able to do whatever he wants? We can only hope.

There is a new hint system in the overhauled Secret of Monkey Island that may just keep everybody happy. Personally, I’m just relievedwe get to see these Adventure games again at all. Anything else is a bonus. It’s also pertinent that I was considering buying (the by all accounts God-awful) Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings on the Wii, purely because it has Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis thrown onto the disk like an afterthought. Now I don’t have to because it’ll be on Steam. Thank you Lucasarts!

Welcome to our new site, which has been constructed by Commander Tim of GameHounds on Platform Nation.

If you’re reading this then you might notice a few kinks that need ironing out. There are no replies to the posts as these are not transferable from the old site, some words are corrupted and need to be altered to make them readable. Most of the post artwork is missing and there are a few site features yet to be implemented.

These things will be dealt with shortly, but what we have here gives you a good idea as to the finished site and the direction we’re heading.

Look out over the coming weeks for some exciting additions and potentially fantastic shows.

Alex and Tony

This week we welcome Chris and Kelly Brown AKA The Married Gamers. They’ve been podcasting several years, have a loyal and incredibly friendly fan community and are part of the same Platform Nation family as Gamehounds.

We got them on to talk about balancing relationships with video games. Not only do they lend their considerable expertise, but we found out a lot about them that we had not expected.

Not only did we have them on as guests but immediately afterward took part in their latest show (also weirdly episode #112) as guests ourselves, which was a first for Digital Cowboys.

We absolutely recommended you go check these guys out on iTunes or their website. You won’t find a warmer, pair of married compulsive gamers anywhere else.

Their latest episode should be up Sunday afternoon sometime.

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It’s hard to recall but this was one of the big PS3 releases, drumming up massive E3 excitement over the rolling demo several years ago. On first glance it’s just Godess of War, twin blades twirling, quicktime eventful and featuring an epic, mature, Conan-style fantasy storyline. To be absolutely honest, the first impressions aren’t too far off. This is every bit as action-packed as Kratos’ journeys, if considerably less gruesome. What sets HS apart is the level of elegance, both in the games heroine, and the design and flow of the game itself. Rather than just mashing the buttons and flailing the blades of Chaos, there’s a little more Ninja Gaiden-style switching of stances and timing of blows. Hammering square will get you blocked and killed fast. You have to time and counter. Nariko arcs about the screen, a lady-shaped death-machine, but each button-press has to be managed. There’s no hand-holding here. You have to earn your awesomeness.

The reason this game stands out in the mind, and why when you’ve finished it, it will stay with you and leave you wondering why other games don’t do it that way is the performances turned in by the mo-cap and voiceover actors. Gollum himself; Andy Serkis plays Bohan the tyrannical and brawny villain, injecting every line with easy, almost likable, poisonous charisma. He’s not some gloating D-lister with pretensions on being Emperor Palpatine, this is an award-winning actor at home in a digital role. He’s more like the terrifying man you meet in the pub and pray you’ll get away from before he snaps and you get a pool cue in the eye. The man who would be Kong also took up the role of dramatic director for the rest of the cast, and it shows. Every line is committed to, every emotion feels true. If every voice director in gaming took this much time and effort to get his crew emoting then games would honestly be further down the road to being taken as seriously as films. Nariko, Bohan, Kai, Shen are all excellent characters, none of them stereotyped, all of them interesting, with strengths and frailties making them far more human than we’re used to in this medium.

Looking back on the game, it’s really a pretty slick but standard slasher. Golden Axe brought right up to date (and not like the atocity that was Beast Rider) but the reason to find this game again is that if you own a PS3 and if you’re looking forward to God of War III for reasons of story and character as well as action then you owe it to yourself to get this played in the meantime. It has some annoying sections involving crossbows and catapaults and the sixaxis controls, but a little perseverence, aiming first and keeping a cool head will get these completed. Criminally overlooked on release and not likely to see the sequel it probably doesn’t need, this stands alone as a time when Ninja Theory (They of Kung Fu Chaos) truly excelled and made an action game with a bit of heart and soul for a change.

If you recently sold your DS Lite and bought a DSi, sorry pal, you’re a sucker!

Don’t get mad at me, get mad at Nintendo. They promised you an upgrade. The ability to buy brand new mini games and a sleek form-factor with a slightly bigger screen. All they took was that useless old GBA slot that was taking up so much room. Unfortunately for you, that means you traded the best SNES games and frankly some of the best handheld games for Mario Clock, Mario Calculator and the ability to buy small, or “express” portions of other games. On consoles we call these demos and don’t pay for them (Yet… God I hope I didn’t jinx us) It was, in effect, a downgrade.

Tell me, with your hand on your heart that DSiware is what you hoped it would be right now. Obviously it’s early days, there’s so much Nintendo could do with this new market. But if you look at their track record for the past year of WiiWare, they’ve yet to even approach the signpost for the parking lot to the ball-park of quality that some of the titles you lose in this transaction equate to.

Here’s just the briefest of lists of games you can buy as GBA carts cheaply on eBay.

• Super Mario Brothers 1,2,3, World and Yoshi’s Island (Advance)
  
• Zelda: A Link to the Past and Four Swords and The Minish Cap
• Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission
  
• Golden Sun 1 & 2
• Final Fight
• Street Fighter Alpha 3
• Warioware Twisted
• PoKeMoN Ruby and Saphire
• Fire Emblem
• Final Fantasy VI and Tactics
• Mario Golf
• Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
• PLUS Guitar Hero on the DS
  

By all means add your own in the comments section. You may not want to buy games second-hand. If so, Nintendo loves you and you will probably be able to buy all the above again legitimately. You may also still have a GBA,  I have a GBA SP for when my wife’s using the DS, but the screen isn’t as bright. You may simply not care about these games. If that’s true of all the above, why do you own a handheld at all? Now in a year’s time, look back on this article and it may be that I’m dead wrong. I’m sure a few good games could come out. Nintendo could even pull some classics out of their magic hat to rival even A Link to the Past, and the others from both the shining days of the SNES and the quirkier inventive streak that the GBA development cycle represented, but let’s face it, it’s not likely.

Whatever your feelings on the demise of the king of pop, if you’re in your mid-twenties or older you’ll remember this game. Moonwalker was based on the movie, itself a collection of music videos and montages culminating in a lengthy,  naive adventure- tale involving Mike trying to save three kids from the evil, drug-dealing Mr Big, played by Joe Pesci. The centrepiece of this is the fairly spectacular video for Smooth Criminal. This imagery formed the backbone of the Sega arcade game and shortly afterward; the Genesis and Master System versions.

The arcade cabinet was an isometric beat-em-up that saw Jackson trawling the streets, rescuing children and throwing magic bolts at hoodlums, armed guards and robotic dogs. Utilizing the dance button activated a smart-bomb style dance attack that forced every enemy to get in behind Mike and dance along with him before expiring suddenly. The home console versions followed the same premise, only with a 2D platforming engine, more suited to the hardware.

The game was decried by many as a crappy license but think hard. How many other games feature singers kicking the crap out of thugs and then coercing them into highly coordinated dance routines? Most music fighters are rap-based and one-on-one. I’m thinking Def Jam Icon here and Wu Tang: Shaolin Style. There are simply no others. So in that way, Moonwalker stands alone. Also it contained digitised, chip-tune versions of Mike’s music. Smooth Criminal, Beat It, Bad, Billie Jean and the obvious choice for the graveyard level; Another part of me. (Licensing, precluded the use of Thriller outside Japan). It was plinky-plunky and exemplary of the limitations of the Genesis, but still funky and recognisible and it gave the game a musical identity.

It was simple stuff. Smack about bad guys and rescue the kids from around the levels. Bubbles the chimp then comes and sits on your shoulder and points the way to the boss, which invariably turns out to be a bunch of goons. Very occasionally you’d get a shooting star that would turn you into a missile-spewing flying robot. It really wasn’t bad at all… well it was Bad… in a good way. Licenses may mean this game will never see the light of day again, but I would encourage Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to consider it for their online marketplace. It will obviously sell and for the youngsters who weren’t around when it came out, (before the premise of Mike hunting for children took on an objectionable aspect), it’s a great fun title with challenge and replayability. Well worth the 400 points or equivolent it would cost.

Michael appeared later in Space Channel 5 (parts one and two) and as a secret character in Ready 2 Rumble Round 2, both on the Dreamcast, so clearly his relationship with Sega and indeed video games stayed healthy. I would not be surprised if a Jackson-themed Singstar tore up the charts this Christmas. We gamers have definitely not seen the last of this man.

We’re very happy to welcome Leigh Alexander to the show this week. Leigh is the news director for Gamasutra, pens a monthly column for Kotaku and has written for Slate and Variety. Her personal, more casual blog is Sexy Videogameland. It becomes immediately apparent on meeting Leigh that she can talk, virtually nonstop on a professional level about the things she’s passionate about. Social and cultural issues surrounding games, as well as games themselves, music, twitter, the works. We decided she’d be perfect to tackle the tricky business of women in gaming; how they are portrayed, how they are marketed to and how they are percieved by the other half of the gaming species. To put it mildly, we got a great discussion out of her. Ms. Alexander kindly stuck around to chat about the news and what we’ve been playing and we got some great banter and points of view from that too. I’ll be honest, it’s one of my favourite episodes.

The news about Michael Jackson’s death came to me while I was editing the show and I was sorely tempted to make some reference, but it wouldn’t have worked in context so I held back. You can probably guess what the not-so-random game of the week will be for #112.

Link’s to Leigh can be found here. Many thanks go out to her and she’ll be welcomed back any time.

Gamasutra
Kotaku
Sexy Videogameland
Twitter

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It’s always been very easy to look at video games and find the obvious female stereotypes strewn across our thirty year history. Since we’ve been able to identify adventure characters by gender, they’ve been largely male. Pitfall Harry, Jet Set Willy, Mario, Link. In fact the big revelation at the end of Metroid (Samus was and remains a woman) was pretty groundbreaking back in 1986. When females turned up it was usually either as damsels in distress to be rescued (Final Fight, Mario, Zelda) or weaker, faster fighters to balance the mediocre man and the beefy guy (Streets of Rage, Golden Axe). Then with Street Fighter II we got Chun Li, the token female who was actually pretty good at holding her own and was followed by Cammy and eventually a deluge of lady Street Fighters, each tougher than the last. But women still hadn’t too often been the stars of games.

So it’s 1996 and Lara Croft is up on the posters, her gigantic polygonal mammary glands making all the adolescent boys dribble, and giving developers ideas. The move to 3D meant everything changed for one (well two) reasons. “Hey, let’s make some games with a sexy girl as the star,” they said. “I mean who wants to follow a guy’s tight, supple buttocks around for ten hours? Certainly not girls, they don’t even play these things.” And nobody thought to ask why. Surprisingly following Croft, developers actually managed to hit the mark a few times with slightly more well-formed female characters. So we got Jill Valentine (Resident Evil), Aya Brea (Parasite Eve), Darci Stern (Urban Chaos), Hana (Fear Effect), Cate Archer (No One Lives Forever), Joanna Dark (Perfect Dark), and Heather (Silent Hill 3). It wasn’t the done thing to have girls play the damsel in distress any more and the sexes became equals of sorts, albeit that women were still often the weaker choice with the bigger pockets. Until finally we started getting some real characters that weren’t just eye candy and sometimes the fact that they were female played into the story and had a real effect on their character progression; The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3 probably being the best example of this.

But despite this short-changing of 51% of the species, I’d like to argue for the other 49% for just one minute. Looking back on these games it’s pretty obvious that men get just as rough a time of things as women. Possibly more so, because developers don’t even have to think, “Hang on, what does this say about how we view this gender?” they just pump up his muscles, stick a gun in his hand and send him down the chute into the battlefield. Chris Redfield in all his lumbering, sweaty glory exemplifies this point. His arms may look like condoms full of walnuts but does he ever say or do anything memorable? In contrast, Sheva of Resident Evil 5 at least has a back-story and some motivation other than simply, “Umbrella bad, Chris SMASH!

It’s embarrassing to say but video games in general, still being a medium on the brink of maturity, means that both genders are portrayed in broad brush-strokes and that comes down to lazy writing and a lack of focus on characterisation. But look to the best stories and you’ll find a better class of woman and man. Metal Gear may be absurd at times, and might not rank alongside the best cinematic storytelling, but Solid Snake is as great a male character as The Boss is a female one. Heavenly Sword pitches a girl born into the role meant for a boy in a male-dominated world and though she’s an incredibly strong fighter, her best characterisation comes in the form of her vulnerability. The mistake most inexperienced writers make (myself included at times in my shady past) is trying too hard to make characters look cool, tough and near-invincible. That’s very often boring as hell and impossible to relate to. Our flaws are where the reader and subject join up. Karla Valenti in Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit to my fellow Europeans) for example, is incredibly claustrophobic, a fear which impacts on the game itself as you struggle to push her through a darkened, cramped basement. In this case, it didn’t really matter that she was female, and some games have capitalized on this manner of storytelling.  Mass Effect pulls off the perfect balancing act because it’s absolutely immaterial which sex you pick, everyone reacts to you the same. And guess what; my female Commander Sheppard, with all her hard-bitten lines, scarred face and equally damaged personality is the best female I’ve seen portrayed yet. Taking the gender issue out is not the answer every time, but in this case it works perfectly. Clearly BioWare took a hard look at the story of Ms. Pac-Man and saw an equality they could relate to. So in conclusion, it’s not that games are sexist. It’s not even that game developers are gender-biased. It’s that bad writing is just that. When games get consistently good stories, written by mature adults, both men and women will be portrayed in a better light. We will get the rounded individuals who resemble real people. We just have to hold on through all the meat-headed heroes and buxom, gun-wielding vixens until the culture catches up with our ideals.

Our guest this week is indie podcasting legend Bobby Blackwolf. We talk about two hot-button topics; has the rhythm-action genre been exhausted this year and the state of piracy in gaming. Strong opinions, problems and solutions fly about like flaming arrows, which is what we love about this podcast.

Plus the eight questions we ask every guest, along with reader mail and random game of the week.

You can catch Bobby’s two shows here and check him out LIVE every Friday and Sunday. http://radio.allgames.com/radio/blackwolf/

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