Controversial Classics: "Custer's Revenge"

Today's entry into my Controversial Classics series is heavy on the "Controversial" and light on the "Classic." I'll go ahead and say it's not a game worth defending by any means, but that above must be the best box art ever.

It's not a belated April Fools' Joke, no, "Custer's Revenge" is an actual 1982 game for the Atari 2600. There are a surprising number of pornographic games from that period, when you consider just how terrible the games look, sound, and play. There are very few now, (unless you count Japan, like the still-controversial "RapeLay"), which probably has more to do with the high cost of making a serious game now, rather than the presence of a market for this sort of thing. A gameplay video is embedded below, which I must warn you is crude in every sense of the word (well, it's not oil, but--).




If you don't want to see the video, or if you're not very good at charades, "Custer's Revenge" lets you play as a pantsless, erection-sporting General Custer as he evades arrows to rape/maybe-have-consensual-sex-with an Indian woman. That last distinction is important, for this vague depiction of... whatever was most controversial for depicting rape, even though maybe it's not, who can tell with so few pixels?

Wikipedia is a very entertaining source for this story. One cited source from Wikipedia claims that this game "generated many gang rapes of Native American women," following that quote up with a story about a Native American woman who was attacked by two white men, who apparently suggested that she play "Custer's Last Stand" [sic, I guess?] with them while assaulting and I assume raping her. I find many parts of that story bewildering, but let's move right along...

The game went through a number of other versions, including name changes to "Westward Ho," (heh, real funny) "The White Man Came," (dear lord) and a version called "General Retreat" in which the Indian woman apparently chases down Custer to have sex with him (empowering?). Trying to find the right gameplay video on YouTube, I found so many different versions of the same game, I can't even begin to count. The Indian woman was even made to beckon for Custer in later editions of the game, to guard against rape allegations.

As is usual with these controversial classics, the hoopla over the game's content actually served as a boon for those who made it. This was the best-selling game by far made by the porn game developer Mystique (they wouldn't last through the mid-80's game crash, though). I'm kind of sad for everyone involved in this game, including those who protested it so vehemently.

And Now... A Swiss Game Ban

Switzerland has now ratified a violent video game ban, but, according to an article translated by GamePolitics, a rather selective one, akin to Germany's current situation.

The ban will not blindly ban all violent video games (a difficult definition to pin down, when you consider fringe cases like "Madden" and even "Super Smash Bros.") and it will not ban games based on the PEGI rating standard, which acts like the ESRB for Europe. No, instead they will follow Germany's example, banning specific games that display "cruel acts of violence."

According to the article, this means that "Mortal Kombat" and "Manhunt" will be banned, but not "Counter-Strike." My first reaction to those examples is, of course, why must we always talk about such old games? Only "Manhunt" is from the 21st century, and it was released in 2003! "Mortal Kombat" developer Midway Games has gone bankrupt and become WB Games Chicago! It is incredible that such an old game can still be considered controversial, and it likely only reveals how clueless the politicians are who are ratifying the bill.

The violence standard here is a little odd, too, and doesn't really reveal their standard of "cruel acts of violence." "Manhunt" makes sense, given its snuff film stylings, and I can see how it is considered more harmful than "Counter-Strike"'s shooter violence. However, again, "Mortal Kombat" makes very little sense. If we're really talking about the original game, the pixellated fatalities are no more harmful to today's kids than "The Great Train Robbery" was to film-goers in 1903. More recent "Mortal Kombat" titles aren't really worth worrying about either, as the violence level actually hasn't significantly increased. There are much worse things to worry about.

Heavy Rain Retrospective

"Heavy Rain" has now been out for a little over a month, so it's time to look back and see the wake left by the game meant to change the industry as we know it. How was it received?

Critics: "Heavy Rain"'s Metacritic rating is 87. There's a mostly constant wave of review scores from 100 on down to 70, with three reviews giving scores in the 40's. If you consider that a 70 is about as low a score that reviewers will usually give a serious title, these scores run the gamut. Many reviewers loved it, many hated it, and so they resolved nicely into an above average score.

Positive words and short phrases critics used to describe "Heavy Rain": momentous, revolutionary, incredible, emotionally engaging, transcends the current definition of a video game, ground-breaking, not just a masterpiece but an ingenious step of its own

Negative words and short phrases critics used to describe "Heavy Rain": flawed, disappointment, technical issues, plot that's shocking but not sensible, not good enough, mediocre to bad voice acting, unexplained plot twists, the spectre of what might have been

Sales: I hate VGChartz because their actual sales numbers don't seem transparent enough, so I can't tell what's real, what's current, etc., but I don't have any other reliable way of finding sales for any game. Regardless, VGChartz has "Heavy Rain" as having sold a little over a million copies so far. Which puts it already at exactly the same sales that "Shenmue" had over its entire lifetime. So I'd say the sales have been pretty decent for an "artsy" video game.

Peter Molyneux: But of course, reviewers and sales don't matter when Peter Molyneux ("Fable," "Black & White," "The Movies") has an opinion! Molyneux the game offered a glimpse of the future, but he was unable to play it for more than 90 minutes because the game world was too dark and emotionally engaging for him. That last bit is what makes Molyneux a bit like Fry in "Futurama": His stories always go on one sentence too long.

Heavy Rain and Stanley Kubrick

Just a quick observation from playing "Heavy Rain" and being a huge Stanley Kubrick fan: I had heard before that Heavy Rain director David Cage was a Kubrick fan, and the game appears to have two clear allusions to Kubrick films.

First off, Norman Jayden sees an odd red-suited character while inside his ARI alternate reality system he uses to solve crimes. You can see what I'm talking about just briefly within the first thirty seconds of this video. Now, compare that to the bartender, Lloyd, who talks to Jack in "The Shining," pictured above. Start this video at 1:24 to see his role in the movie. Given that Cage is a Kubrick fan (in this interview, he says the game is inspired in part by Kubrick), this cannot be a coincidence that two semi-imagined characters in similar roles look so similar.

Now, there's also a similarity between "2001: A Space Odyssey"'s Louis XVI room at the very end of the film and Ethan Mars' fifth trial room. Skip all the way to 6:18 on this video if you want to see the final trial room, which I'll try not to spoil too badly here. Anyway, the room is completely unlike any of the other trials, being instead completely pristine and white. And if you compare the rooms side-by-side between "2001" and "Heavy Rain" it's just impossible not to see a similarity in their architecture and furniture.

The typical theory as to why the room at the end of "2001" has Louis XVI architecture is that the protagonist Bowman is trapped in an alien zoo that has tried to build their best idea of a human habitat. So why does "Heavy Rain" use the same sort of thing? Without spoiling it, I can't even begin to guess, and I'm not sure myself, anyway. Interesting, though.

The Game Review Timesink

I read about this little news story recently about Gamespot publishing then taking down a review of Global Agenda, an MMO. The game got a low score, and some readers apparently complained that the reviewer had not played the game for long enough to get any real sense of it. The reviewer had said he'd put in 15 hours of gameplay, but his data was online, and it turns out the real number was closer to six hours of evaluation.

In any video game without a natural story arc, it is very interesting to decide how long is long enough to have evaluated the game fully. I've reviewed the Baseball Mogul series before, in which case there are any number of variables to consider when making this decision:

• The game lets you go through it at any speed, from watching every pitch of a major league season to simply setting general lineups and simming the whole season in ten minutes. This choice is left completely up to regular consumers, and everyone has their own style. The game is naturally very different depending on which way to play it I choose, so do I have to try them all out, even though I know which way I enjoy the best?
• Playing through an entire season at my usual pace would take months. And a lot of the satisfaction of the game comes after playing through two or three seasons, as you start to see your draft picks develop and odd players set records.
• You can play any team from somewhere around 1900 on, or create your own fictional teams. Baseball has not been at all the same game over those periods, and in fact, the increased realism of older periods is a selling point to the game. How much of that do I need to evaluate?

The list goes on and on and on. Realistically, I won't be able to answer every question, well, ever. I am never going to play through an entire season, calling every pitch. I am never going to play a deadball era season.

So what did I do, in the end, writing without pay, mind, for a rather small reviews site? I played through six months of a Seattle Pilots '69 expansion team and played through six months of the 2009 Atlanta Braves' season. So I did not in fact complete a season until after the review was published. But I spent more than twenty hours just doing that much, and it wasn't really enough.

I've also reviewed movies, it turns out, and doing that feels like a breeze compared to reviewing a video game. You know exactly how much time you're putting in, probably between 90 and 180 minutes. Compare that to the timesink for reviewing a video game, which could easily be anywhere between 180 and 1200. For games without a storyline, 1200 minutes may not even be enough, but you have to stop somewhere. There are plenty of story-driven RPGs that will set you back more than 1200 minutes as well, especially if you have to be thorough like a reviewer, but 1200 is plenty enough to be shocking.

If the movie is bad, don't worry, you'll be out of there and ready to have fun ripping it apart in less than three hours. If a game is bad, and especially if a game is ridiculously freaking hard, then you don't know how long you've got left. A walkthrough may not even exist, because you're playing this before or at release time.

Sonic & the Black Knight was my least favorite game to review ever, and unfortunately, my review was for Kidzworld.com, so I couldn't really say whatever I wanted about it or use nasty humor or something. I just had to plod right through that crap, which was at first easy to the point that I thought I was missing something, then eventually became difficult in a really idiotic way. I just felt like I was wading through shit, playing levels that had zero fun content for the "reward" of cutscenes that made my childhood want to puke. Why, Sonic? Why? Then on the second or third-to-last level, I just couldn't move on. There was a point with insta-kill drops that I just couldn't move past, especially because I was already so infuriated with playing that piece of garbage. So, I threw the Wiimote down, and just wrote the review right then and there.

Thankfully, I didn't send it in immediately, because upon waking up and reading it the next day, I realized the review wasn't really appropriate for Kidzworld.

What's the answer, then? How can we reform video game reviews to make this process either more complete or more tolerable?

We can't.

Civilization V Announced: Is Canada in the Game?

"Civilization V," a new entry in perhaps my favorite video game series, was announced today. It will be released this fall. The details announced so far provide essentially no idea of what is new in this game, besides three pretty screenshots, and the announcement that this game will use a hex grid rather than a square one (which I am for). So, as you can imagine, the speculation on the 2K Games forums is crazy. My favorite thread is the one wondering who the 18 civilizations in the game are going to be. Why? Because of the arguments about Hitler and Canada.

In Hitler's case, some forum users want Hitler to be a playable leader of the German civilization in the next game. He hasn't been a leader in previous titles, even though other horrible leaders like Stalin have been. I can say pretty safely right now, though: Hitler will not be in "Civilization V." If he were, the game would be banned in Germany. German laws are very strict on the matter of keeping Nazis out of even historical titles, unless the game beats you over the head with the belief that Nazism was a bad idea. That's why there are no swastikas in the "Hearts of Iron" series.

More hilarious to me: There are tons of forumites who want Canada to be a newly added civilization. The first to make this comment knew it was an impossible suggestion, saying things like "Being a Canadian I also would love for this to happen. Poor Canada " and so on. But then, as people pointed out that Canada is probably not one of the eighteen most important civilizations in history, it got militant.

Someone said that Canada was unimportant, and really just a mixture of English and French civilizations, and the reply was: "Well it just so happens that Canada is very important to MY history. By the same Token the USA was just a British colony that gained independence, why should they get their own civ?" Others chimed in on the exact same note, saying that America was only a former British colony.

Another supportive opinion: "Canada has contributed as much to the world as America has and has been instrumental in some of the largest areas of modern life, from involvement in overseas military action, to political and economic stabilization in second and third world countries."

...and another one: "Canada should for sure be included.
It should have a high diplomacy factor, diplomatic unque building, and an idea for a unique unit is the pioneer!! Have the pioneer the same as any other settler but with an extra movement and defense point!
Canada and America were both colonies that gained independence..... THe only reason America is "stronger" is because of their greater population.....
PS: another idea for a unique building... ODR.. the outdoor rink "

It got more tangled from there. Someone recommended that we all see "Strange Brew" to find out why Canada isn't a civilization. My favorite anti-Canada post:

"Also, for those mentioning the great nation of Canada, be serious.

Russia- Great Revolution, Socialism/Communism, First in Space
America- Nuclear Bomb, Landing on the Moon, Hollywood
Britain- British Empire, Magna Carta
Canada- Bacon ?"

Great stuff.

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