Fighting for the Skull Heart and Your $15: Skullgirls

It's rare that I get to hop on a game right after it releases, and I am glad that I chose to do that with Skullgirls this Wednesday.  It's a 2D fighting game, with the 2D part pulling double duty: it's a two-dimensional fighter with a 2D cartoon art style.

I won't dance around this: the game is beautiful.  I love the visuals, the music, the presentation, all of it.  The game's spirit is great, too.  The characters are memorable, and when they fight there is just enough "What the hell is going on?" to keep me interested without overwhelming me.  They also sit wonderfully on a vertex of originality, parody, and homage.  Peacock (my fighter of choice) is a wonderful example of this:

She's the one calling in a bomb flying an airplane.

Click the picture for full-size; the picture here doesn't do it justice.  You can look at her and see exactly what she's supposed to be: an homage to old-school cartoons.  The top hat, dress, gigantic bow, puffy-gloved hands, and blacked-out eyes all point to it without shouting it from the top of a building.  But look at her smile (a character in the game asks if she brushes her teeth with metal polish), combined with those creepy eyes on her arms and you can see a hint of something darker.

And then we see why her name is Peacock.

Same thing, full-size this baby up.

In her story, she is found near-death and given two parasites, the Argus (the eyes and peacock thing) and the Avery (a reference to cartoonist Tex Avery), the thing that gives her those crazy cartoon powers.  Probably.  It's not heavily explained.  I'm pretty okay with that, because it's one less thing to distract from the actual fighting.

And like most reviews for Killer 7 will show you, it takes more than a slick style and amazing art to be a successful game.  Unlike Killer 7, though, Skullgirls is getting pretty good reviews all around, especially for a new IP.  It has a small roster, but so did the first Mortal Kombat.  And Skullgirls comes equipped with two decades of fighting game experience (including knowledge of what works and what doesn't) with it.  I love the option of choosing a team of one to three fighters, something I remember from watching my much more skilled friends playing Capcom vs SNK 2.  Tight controls are absolutely necessary for any fighting game, and Skullgirls nails it; when you lose (like I do, a lot), you don't feel like it's the game's fault.  Unless it's the final boss, because GOD DAMN she lives up to the expectations of ridiculous boss fights set forth by the likes of Onslaught from Marvel vs Capcom and Gill from Street Fighter III.  And it feels very good when you win.  After thirty tries.  Not even playing on Hard difficulty.

Parasoul has elite guards whose specialties include diving in front of...bowling balls.

In short, Skullgirls is a very good fighting game with a style that sets it apart.  The all-female cast (it's called SkullGIRLS for a reason) of unique characters and the hand-drawn art style makes me want to keep coming back for more and more.  I have a couple issues with the online mode, but that has more to do with my internet speed and the fact that no one wants to play with someone with my ping.

Should you buy Skullgirls?  I'd say yes.  At $15, it's hardly a life-changing purchase, and this is quality gaming for a budget price.  If you like fighting games or want to get into them (their training and learning mode is very welcome), I would like to point you in this direction.  It's a much cheaper investment than Super Street Fighter IV Ultra Turbo Director's Cut Arcade Edition and Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, and while I take nothing away from those games, both of which I love, I have no hesitation in naming this as my new fighting game of choice.

Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV, and the Attraction of Difficult Video Games

I'm checking my Steam stats right now because I would hate to be inaccurate.  On my Top 10 games as far as play time, Super Meat Boy is in fourth place at 28.5 hours, Cave Story + sits in sixth place with 21.7 hours, and VVVVVV is in tenth at 15.8 hours.  My complete list (including my shame at not having played some of those games yet) can be viewed here.

So why talk about these games?  Well, I recently picked up (downloaded) a copy of Tough Sh*t, Kevin Smith's new book (Kindle copy for me) about how shitty life is.  Just kidding.  Kind of.  But in between the good life advice and cum jokes (there is no shortage of them here), I read a detail that hit home for me.  This is kind of odd, because I listen to SModcast nearly every week and I've heard this story a couple times, but reading it made it click differently I suppose.  The short version goes like this: Kevin Smith hit a funk after Zack and Miri Make a Porno did... less than spectacularly in the box office.  He locked himself away in his office, smoking weed and watching a collection of unwatched DVDs that would likely make many gamers look like amateurs.  

Hmmm... Something doesn't quite seem right here...

In his pot coma, he watched a box set of DVDs called Hockey: A People's History (I think I'm linking the right one).  And for about 10 pages or so (I'm reading on a Kindle, so your so-called pages are irrelevant to me) he goes on about hockey and Wayne Gretzky with such fervor that Jesus might be asking Zeus where he hid those lightning bolts for a smiting.

It isn't the weed I related to (never smoked in my life), nor the idea of watching a box set of sports history, which sounds just... long and never ending.  I've been to like two hockey games in my life, and while I had fun, I can't imagine watching THAT MUCH HOCKEY.  But I did relate to experiencing that one thing that just clicked.

In my younger days, I was practically raised by a Super Nintendo.  Not because my parents were neglectful or anything like that, just because I loved playing video games.  But I was like five and had no subscriptions to magic video game magazines, and the internet was just crawling out of its dial-up phase to get to a place where you could have something as potentially unpopular as a blog, especially about video games.  So my parents bought mainstream Super Nintendo games for me.  Luckily, they were almost always great: Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, Mega Man X, great stuff.

Pictured: A video game hall-of-famer.

And that last game I mentioned is important.  Even though I would miss out on crazy-good games like Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid, Mega Man X was the game that set the tone of a lot of my life.  I was playing Mega Man X with our neighbor, a fourth grader, while I was in second grade.  I looked up to him, probably because he was older and more experienced than I was and he could kick my ass at Chess, a game which I love and have never been good at. So we were playing Mega Man X, specifically Storm Eagle's stage.  I can go back and play that level over and over, get every hidden item, and overall wreck Storm Eagle now, but then?  I was having a really hard time with it.  I had heard a rumor that there was a helmet upgrade for X somewhere in the level, and I was searching and searching for it.  I don't remember the details of the conversation, but what stuck with me was this generalization he told me: "The harder a game is, the better it is."  And me responding without even thinking about it, "Yeah, definitely," representing maybe one of my two (three, tops) moments of stupid bravado in my life.

That conversation stuck with me though, at first to live up to it, but later because I began to feel it become more and more true.  So let's fast forward to today. Super Meat Boy is a whole new level of difficult.  If you play each level just right, you can beat just about all of them in under 30 seconds.  Hell, I'd wager that you do a majority of them in under 20.  Each level is a small puzzle that you need to solve, working your way up to get to the end in the most efficient way possible.  But there is a difference between this game and other puzzle games like Portal 2.

See, In Portal 2, an excellent game, when you solve the puzzle, you can move on.  Now this has some exceptions and I am overgeneralizing like  madman, but at its core, you are trying to solve the puzzles that GLaDOS has put in front of you.

Alternate Box Art

In Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV, you are similarly given a puzzle.  And that puzzle in Super Meat Boy?  The one that you should be able to beat in 20 seconds?  It can take you hours to execute it correctly.  Every course (SMB) and room (VVVVVV) presents you with a simple puzzle.  We'll look at an example using a VVVVVV screen.

At this point in the game, you know that those lines reverse gravity.  Now, since the whole game works around that mechanic, you know that you need to reverse gravity from the starting point and then pass through each line without hitting the spikes.  It's a pretty simple puzzle.  But the game says "Oh neat.  You know what to do.  Now let's see you do it."  Mess up the timing even a little, and you'll go straight for the spikes.  Move too slow, spikes.  Move too fast, spikes.  And this is a pretty easy room for VVVVVV.  Now let's take a look at Super Meat Boy.

As you can see, this is a fancy pants visually-appealing level in Super Meat Boy, but with the magic of Microsoft Paint, I can highlight the hazards and the path towards victory.

The blue circles indicate saw blades, which will kill you, the yellow indicates rolling lava balls that bounce and roll like barrels in Donkey Kong (which will kill you), and the green is Meat Boy and the path you have to take to get up and save Bandage Girl.  And because Team Meat is a sadistic duo of death and sadness, pretty much everything is perfectly timed to kill you as you make your jumps.  Those two saw blades in the middle move, too.  Like I said about VVVVVV, there is a puzzle to be solved here: "How do I make it to the top?"  The solution is easy to say: "I jump past the saw blades, dodge any lava balls, and wall-jump my way upwards until I get to Bandage Girl."

I played that level for sessions of about a probably an hour each over the course of multiple days.  When completed, it took me about 9 seconds to beat for the first session, and about 15-16 seconds if I got the bandage hidden in the middle of the level.  This level wasn't even 100% necessary to beat the game; it was in the optional Dark World.

Hell, that's another thing worth mentioning.  I beat Super Meat Boy a long time ago.  I defeated Dr. Fetus and saved Bandage Girl (this all must really sound weird if you have no familiarity with the game).  I took a screenshot of my victory on September 28, 2011.  According to most measures of winning games, I was victorious in the story mode.  The Dark World offers levels similar to the regular Light World, but increases the difficulty.  You'd be shocked at what the addition of two more saw blades can do to your perfect run.  And yet I can't stop trying to beat these levels.

Part of it, I think, it the promise that I can beat them.  These levels were designed as part of a video game which is meant to be completed, so there  HAS to be a way I can.  Even more diabolically, Super Meat Boy gives you a Grade A+ for beating it under a certain time.  So now you have an already notoriously difficult game telling you, "Yeah, that was pretty hard, but that guy over there did it in nine seconds."  And so my inner ghetto goes AWW HELL NAW and has to beat them.

And I think that's the key of it.  We see this thing that says, "This other guy did better AND I THINK HE JUST SAID SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR MOM."  And you aren't going to take that lying down.  After probably a thousand deaths, I beat Super Meat Boy.  The same figure goes for VVVVVV; I died with a three-digit number, but just barely.  I clocked in my first playthrough of VVVVVV with 998 deaths.  About 200 of them were made because a shiny trinket (a collectible which might not even do anything) was placed in front of a tiny wall.  A nearby computer monitor said that no one would be able to get that trinket, and I was committed from there on.  There was NO WAY some punk ass monitor placed by a Swedish video game maker was going to get the best of me.  An hour of flying through about six rooms, landing on a disappearing platform, and going BACK through those rooms in one jump with hundreds of deaths later, I had my trinket.  It was glorious, even if I was the only one celebrating.

I lost many hours of my life fighting this block, and it was worth it.

In video games, we can be David fighting Goliath.  And the bigger Goliath is, the greater the glory.  Kratos fighting Kronos was an incredible fight in God of War III, but Captain Viridian vs. the four-pixel high block might be the most epic battle I have fought.  And I came away victorious.  One of those Vs has to stand for Victorious.  And if it doesn't on your game, it does on mine.

Oh, but Cave Story can suck a dick because goddamn that last level to get the good ending is hard.  My soul breaks every time I play it, which is pretty goddamn often.  It's like a spicy food challenge; you know it's going to be awful, but you suit up and fight because you JUST might be able to beat the odds.

I JUST GOT HERE THERE ARE SO MANY DEATH SPIKES HELP :(