last skeleton post for 014

hello!

thank you for sticking with me through the trials and tribulations of this year
if you'll notice my posting and creativity dropped after the start of the year; i didn't mean for anything like this to happen it just sort of did.

as we move forward, one husk of bone to the next we'll be re-evaluating how we produce content aimed at all bone fans and skellymen (and skellywomen) for another year of festivities and pride

The image of Dante

There exists very little concept art for Devil May Cry 2. That in of itself is kind of interesting, because it means somewhere on some corporate hard drive is the only record of how the game and the often cited bland-uninspired look it has took shape.

As it presents an interesting conundrum that's worth touching upon albeit briefly. That there's no real "record" of the development of Devil May Cry 2 publicly available tells us we're not yet at a place where videogames are seriously archived in a way that film is. All we really eventually come to care about is the finished product.

So as much as I'd like to break down the art and see what kind of changes took places through development, the art that exists of Devil May Cry 2 is all very closely tied to the finished product and there's very little information on what creatures or characters might have been cut from the game.

There's really no way to follow the game through its development like I've done in the past with Remember Me, or even the first game in this series.
I'll cover and notate how Devil May Cry 2 looks in the actual final review of it, but there's a more important thing that the game plays with I want to talk about: how the player perceives Dante.

The Dante of the first Devil May Cry is this hilarious dude who doesn't take the game seriously or the world he lives in because he doesn't have to. It's not until the end of the game that anything actually challenges him directly. The challenges Dante faces as a character are completely separate from the challenges you face as a player.

This is immediately noticeable if the player picks up that Dante seldom flinches or grunts during combat when attacked. The player is meant to feel like they're sharing some of Dante's power and in exchange a little bit of his devil-may-care attitude.

Who wouldn't want to play a character with so much swagger? We don't get tired of Dante in the first game because we spend little time watching him do anything, and a hell of a lot of time making him do things.

You never get sick of Dante no matter how ridiculous he looks because that swirl of his red trenchcoat when he turns around or the way he raises a single foot off the ground when you use the move Stinger right before sliding across the floor like it's coated in fresh wax and he's wearing socks.

Devil May Cry 2 changes all of this and forces us to re-evaluate how much we like to play as Dante. Sure, the game also introduced concepts like running on walls and more methods of attacking and controlling enemies, but in changing the way not only the character looks but those actions look, it meant Dante was no longer fun to play as.

Dante Sparda post-rock 

I like to use "hollywood" as a good adjective to describe Devil May Cry 2. In many ways, even more then the actual western reboot that the games would later recieve; Devil May Cry 2 seems like the developers trying to force western sensibilities on the game.

Just examine the way he looks in the above  image compared to say, one of the more recent live action adaptations of Superman. The characters palette has become muted and the red is deep. Where once the function of the costume was much like a superhero utility belt Dante's armor is now much more evident and other parts are stylistically downplayed.

This isn't something that comes down to an outfit looking 'practical' versus 'stylish' but it follows a very similar trend as many modern hollywood superhero movies do.
What are the most essential parts of the design? What is unnecessary juvenile fluff?

Let's note too that compared to the first game, Dante's changes are more in the department of how he's actualized. In the promotional art for Devil May Cry 2 (and more importantly the ingame engine) Dante is rendered as being of a darker persona. He grimaces and covers himself in shadow.

What the game did is balance his colors: his boots are more prominent and his coat is tucked underneath a piece of black bodyarmor. The prominence of his guns and gloves are played up more than his sword.

also, he glowers

Just by looking at Dante and not drawing any conclusions to how he's portrayed in the game, we can tell this is a character that is older and more mature then last time we saw him. Players are meant to immediately know that this is not the same character from the first game - he has been deeply changed by something.

This is where we can bring up some of the first noticeable problems with Devil May Cry 2, not just as a videogame but even presented as a story removed from the context of its mechanics.
Whatever happened between Devil May Cry and Devil May Cry 2 is never shown to the player or mentioned - we have no clue if this is simply how Dante evolved as a character or if something is meant to have changed him.

As a character, it removes a great of the characters journey which should be the core to any part of a story.
Devil May Cry 2 depicts a Dante who is at the end of his rope. But we, as players, never take part in the journey that took him there.

This makes the characterization that we're exposed to through what part of the series existed by this point seem like it was meant for two completely separate characters.
At no point is there a moment meant to unify the two characters in our head! This is a huge problem, because it means we have to reconcile the differences between how he's depicted in our own hands with no help from the storytellers.

Our image of Dante goes from one of a somewhat troubled angst ridden young man used to the world being no match for him and covering his woe with humor to one of a still-troubled older man who has let it all consume him.

But this is only an observation we can make from the way he acts in the second game -
If we were to follow only evidence given us in Devil May Cry 2, all we know about Dante is that he's more serious then the events happening around him and that his father is Sparda.

A common (and true) criticism levied at Devil May Cry 2 was that Dante's new characterization was a poor choice for the game and left it with little to no personality. Dante is made simply too serious for the events of the game - catapulting them above the bizarre tone that the first game used to its advantage into outright silliness.

The 'image' of Dante has much more to do with the way the character is depicted by the story then it does the way he looks. Sans his respective outfit, Dante is still expected to be the same character at his core.
The directors of Devil May Cry 2 made a critical misstep - but would later go on to rectify things with the third game in the series.

Devil May Cry 2 exists mainly as a stop in the road we can examine as a definite concrete way a franchise can mishandle representation of a character without having to use a ridiculous extreme as our example.

DEVIL MAY CRY REVIEW

What separated the first Devil May Cry in the terms of storytelling and mechanics apart from every other action game that would use it as inspiration? While it's hard to sum this up in a short sparing of words, I want to do my best to take a second and lay out how I feel about things:

Devil May Cry speaking in just terms of combat and how it relates to the rest of the game is more mechanically sound than a lot of derivatives. Every move that bolsters Dante's arsenal has some practical reason for being there. I could start listing off attacks but I don't want to do that because I feel there's too much ground to cover for it being a backup point in this article.

Those mechanics are then laced up real tight right next to the skin that holds the rest of the game together: Its tone. While it's been accused of having tonal dissonance, I'd like to try and reccuse the game of it in this article. Devil May Cry may not take itself seriously, but it does so intentionally because it wants the player to get involved.

Devil May Cry opens with a now infamous scene of Dante's quiet bar being disturbed by a blonde woman on a motorcycle crashing through the front door and setting it ablaze. Dante reacts nonchalantly, in away that was copied by everyone from Nathan Drake to Sly Cooper by shrugging his shoulders and staying kicked back in his chair.

Dante was responding with a sarcastic nod and reluctant acknowledgement years before a console generation of grizzled men with short brown hair would do the same thing collectively.
People since have criticized Devil May Cry and its introduction scene for being completely ridiculous. As if expecting a game featuring a protagonist who wouldn't be out of place in a highschoolers first attempt at writing a work of fiction was going to be the game that was true art.

Back when Dante did it it was cool and stylish though - that's kind of how the game works.
Everything that happens in Devil May Cry from start to finish is audacious in how extreme it takes a preference of style over substance.

In that audacity everything that happens in the game is completely necessary. Dante becomes a different guy if he acts like the cock of the walk in every cutscene but the player can't juggle an enemy in the air with a pair of handguns or rocket across the floor and impale someone with a sword.

It would be hard to accept Dante could have white hair and not be laughed at if rocketing across the floor of a Gothic cathedral and plunging a six foot blade into the chest of a puppet monster wasn't a core part of the game. Dante's appearance and mannerisms are completely over the top, true. So is the rest of the game and the world that the characters inhabit.

castles would become pretty reoccurring 

So when Devil May Cry opens with one of the silliest and most over the top scenes that might have ever been used to introduce players to a world, it serves to paint a picture of every interaction the player has with the game after that point.

Before I go onto combat and the rest of the game, I want to segue to talk about God of War for a minute. If you're not familiar with God of War, it's David Jaffe's baby that he worked on for years on the Playstation 2.

God of War as a single game or a series whole has been called a lot of things by different publications. A cursory Googles earch for "Epic" and "God of War" in the same sentence returns results that immediately support this.

God of War is a tale of revenge in much the same way that Devil May Cry sets itself up to be. Unlike Devil May Cry though, we're aware of Kratos' intentions from the very first part of the game. God of War sets itself up as a grand tale of revenge. There's no humor to be found and Kratos switches between the only emotions he can grasp (angry and furious) as much as the writers will let him.

God of War wants you to take all of its pumped up machismo absolutely straight faced. Kratos grimaces into the camera and shouts "ARES!" with all of his might before the player even knows why he's supposed to be angry.

The rest of the game is a violent mess where things are gritty and epic for the sake of being gritty and epic. There's never anything to ground Kratos' journey in a way that when it becomes a world-spanning tale of revenge that you notice. Kratos gets skirted from videogame level to vidoegame level and there's no focus on a sense of scale.

Devil May Cry attempts to build up that Dante is on some journey of redemption or retribution for his family and brother that were murdered. The player doesn't know how much of the game is going to be about Dante seeking revenge until almost the end of the game.

The game employs what I want to call a minimal setup. As soon as we know who Dante and Trish are and a moment after we're introduced to Malet island, there's no time wasted before you're thrust into control of Dante.

At it's outset, Dante didn't really control like a lot of other protagonists. He runs at a pace that's not any faster than the characters in a Resident Evil game. He jumps straight up into the air quickly and with a minimal arc that's not really meant for platforming  as it is for combat.

The game introduces the player to its aesthetic before it introduces them to how the player is involved with it. You explore the giant Gothic castle for minutes before you ever have a combat encounter.

If you compared the first game in the series to alter entries it could be seen as being cut from a different cloth. Devil May Cry is a game populated by these moments of quiet between combat where the only company the player gets is the flash of lightning through a window, or a droning organ.

This is, again, contrary to God of War. A game which form start to finish wants to constantly wow the player. Every vista has to be underneath glittering sunlight or pale moonlight, every monster is introduced with a howl and brutal display of violence or aggression.

God of War has none of the moments of quiet that help tie Devil May Cry together. You don't go around expecting a fight in every room even thought you want it that way because of how the game is structured.

Malet Island feels like an actual inhabitable physical space, despite the weird geography. There's never any moment where something is too beautiful or too creepy that you couldn't reasonably picture it. Those quiet moments help drive home the island as a physical space.

There are rooms upon rooms that only exist for Dante to wander through, but are still filled with the kind of details you would expect to find in a space the designers designated as "important"

This design choice is completely deliberate for the particular style that Devil May Cry is going for. Malet Island has to be a seemingly-real place where things have happened before Dante got there. If it were a boringly designed gGothiccastle like in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence then Devil May Cry would have been a joke.

Instead, the player gets to revel in how ridiculous of a concept Devil May Cry is but it always feels like you're laughing *with* the game, as opposed to *at* it. Even when every line Dante says in the game is ridiculous it actually lends a sort of strange credibility to the game.

What's special about Devil May Cry is right there: It clearly knows what it's doing. Really - you can only criticize the game as being 'style over substance' if you've never spent a long period of time picking it apart.

Everything in Devil May Cry is completely deliberate. Hideki Kamiya's other titles actually more or less apply a very similar philosophy from Resident Evil Zero to Okami. 
There's little sense in the original Devil May Cry that anything was included as an afterthought or to satisfy some third party.

A quarter of the way through the game roughly and Dante receives the powerful sword Alastor.
The weapon plays out in one of my personal favorite cutscenes in a videogame, but the weapon itself is notable for satisfying the player in a way they don't expect.

When you first receive Alastor, it doesn't open up combat in any way at first glance. It comes with a second set of combos that all have their own important uses, but it only builds on what's already there rather than add new depth to the combat system is whole.

Alastor of course introduces Devil Trigger, something the player doesn't even know they're going to crave in every installment in this franchise that changes your approach to combat.

the form bears some likeness to its namesake

Devil Trigger is a functionality that allows Dante to go all blue and blowing and demonic when his magic meter is full - at the players choice of when and how to use it. Devil Trigger bestows on Dante increased speed, resilience and strength. It has no downsides besides never seeming to stick around long enough, and even refills his HP.

Right around this time, the game is no longer shy about throwing much larger groups of enemies at you. The real meat of Devil May Cry happens right around the time Dante acquires Devil Trigger.

A mob of enemies in Devil May Cry provides a unique challenge. Dante does pretty poorly when he's surrounded by multiple enemies much like our bro Gene in Godhand. So it's up to the player to decide how to break a crowd of tough foes apart on the same hand as judging when to use Devil Trigger.

Popping it too early could leave the player struggling through the hardest part of a difficult encounter or not having it at a critical moment between victory and defeat. Devil Trigger becomes a push that can change the tide of almost any encounter.

Devil Trigger had a lasting influence on the design philosophy of the rest of the series, and each game has taken its own approach to slightly playing with how it functions. Because of the nature of how Dante's inventory is set up in the first game, it means that for most encounters the player is stuck with one Devil Trigger transformation.

While Devil May Cry might have an inventory system that can be seen as aging poorly - it could also be seen as a deliberate choice that uniquely works for the game. I say so because it forces the player to become intimately equipped with the differences of play style between Dante's different weapons.

If it seems like the game wants you to stick with one weapon through an entire situation, that's because it does. It's the focus of how combat works in the original title and I feel that it's unfair to hold it against the game just as it would be unfair to say that Devil May Cry 3's insistence on the player rapidly switching weapons in combat could ever be considered a misstep.

also later in the series he literally fights with buttrock

While you're acquainting yourself with Dante's application of what i'm sure is a long and varied job history of cutting apart Devils, the game switches gears and has you do it to a soundtrack of rock-and-roll guitars with the occasional operatic beat thrown in for good mix.

If it sounds silly, that's because it kind of is. Yet Devil May Cry's soundtrack jumping from mostly atmospheric to hard rock is one of the perfect examples of deliberate design choices that I mention earlier. If the game had made an attempt to have the player fight backed by opera or orchestra the joke would be too on the nose.

Instead, it makes you think you're inhabiting a slice of Dante's world. This is a guy who probably orders pizza every day and can pull off a screaming red trenchcoat with cowboy boots as acceptable wardrobe choices. If Dante had an iPod it would have Opeth and Slayer on it and probably not much else.

It's kind of dumb but the player likes it anyway. Devil May Cry's soundtrack is the vodka added to your soda. Maybe not a good choice you think while it burns your throat but later you're so drunk that anything that comes on the radio starts to sound good.

Other games tend to not deviate from the works that inspire them at all, or wear their inspirations directly on their shoulders. With Devil May Cry it almost seems like Kamiya set up a a work he expected to be copied.

Taken as is, even for all that it has aged, Devil May Cry holds up spectacularly well. It's because of how everything in the game seems like it was meant to be included, from the smallest detail to the largest.

Earlier this month I combed through some of the game's promotional material and concept artwork and it definitely shows that there was a lot the developers either decided was unnecessary completely or just didn't fit the tone of the final product.

While the third game in the series is a great deal prettier and much more refined mechanically, Devil May Cry as it stands originally is a great way to contrast the host of games that pulled from it that other developers would later release.

(this post was written for blood donated by EA games and a trip to the Mountain of Hell at the duress of Activision. this blog post was written with the help of my good friend https://twitter.com/REALMANNGAMMER)

at the beginning of this month
sorry
let's go back

in the last two weeks of september i'd started a project i had been looking forward to for a long time right now, going so far as quitting the other place i worked for (http://dccomicsnews.com) temporarily so i'd have time to write it
this was in due terms a little while after gamergate had already started recieving traction
i wasn't invovled at the time even though a couple of my wonderful friends had already started recieving harassment. with reason i was kind of following it at arms length.
right around the beginning of october the last place i actually worked for to pay my bills decided to kind of screw me over on my paycheck

don't ever work for a resort company

anyway

the start of october was right about the time that gamergate became personal for me
and unfortunately when you have friends that are being harassed and you're trying to give support to people who really need it it gets hard to keep writing large format posts about videogamees.

a lot of the discussion i've had with gamergaters usually pertain to

ATTACKS ON "GAMER" AS AN IDENTITY

http://kotaku.com/we-might-be-witnessing-the-death-of-an-identity-1628203079

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400/Gamers_dont_have_to_be_your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php

these are posts (opinion pieces) by two writers for two different websites
that clarify an insistence that as a cultural identity, 'gamer' is dead
i don't disagree with them

what they did though was divide a group of people that read these writers every day into a camp taht agrees and a camp that didn't agree. the camp that didn't agree of course is mostly comprised of people that identify themselves as gamers. they feel that journalists went out of their way to characterize 'gamers' as aggressively unwashed neckbearded white dudes

the people that disagreed are everything FROM aggressively unwashed neckbearded white dudes to transmen and transwomen of every caliber, genderqueer folks and many people of color that embody the movement of #gamergate feel like this is a slight against them

it isn't, but i wont call them out for reading too far into something meant to start a surface level discussion about something important. what they are is primarily a call of notice AGAINST people that embody the identity as outlined in those articles. other "gamers are dead" articles have even gone to point out that it's a huge cultural identity but that it shouldn't be used to only represent a white boy majority.

a lot of #gamergate manifestos that list what they mean by "journalistic ethics" are yelling for an apology from all the writers that penned "gamers are dead" pieces and some manifestos are even calling for those writers to be removed from the industry.
gamer is an identity that is shared by a lot of people, but instead of being mad at the people that have co opted that identity and taken it to a dangerous place by supporting an industry that repeatedly shovels out lowest common denominator software that is sometimes really racist and often times misogynistic - those people have turned their ire towards writers (not journalists) like anita sarkeesian that would see those things criticized

wow that's weird it's almost like a subset of people with important opinions they want to vocalize have been spun against the people they should be vocalizing with, and not against

anyway the answer to this: gamer is still dead as a cultural identity and you're probably only killing it more

STOP POLITICIZING GAMES

the second item on this list is another one of the things #gamergators repeatedly bring up: that a cabal (that word is actually used frequently) of "sjw" leaning journalists has for the last few years attempted to inject their own moral hangups into the things they write about. writers like leigh alexander are repeatedly made reference to when they bring these sorts of articles up

for starters: that's dumb as hell. criticism of an art form (which gamers want videogames to be considered as) has to entail significantly more than just surface level criticisms that dictate what you should buy and how much fun something is.
criticism is scrutiny, and that scrutiny is now starting to extend not just to a mechanical brief of how enjoyable the game may be, but also all of the content represented therein. for all of a the yelling about "journalistic integrity" there seems to be a huge call for shutting down actual works of journalism. 
what people mean when they say "stop politicizing games" is the same thing bigoted people tell anyone who does not represent as straight or cis that brings themselves + their identity into a public space which is: Stop Making Me Uncomfortable.

that's all it is, because a call to remove politics from games journalism (if such a thing were even possible) is a call for actual censorship because it would mean silencing tons of voices that only now can receive compensation for taking time out to research and report on all of the terrible stuff ingrained into the videogame industry.

so "stop putting politics in my videogame journalism!!" is more of a call for the status quo to remain safe and friendly to an apparent majority of people that are reading games journalism right now.

INDUSTRY COLLUSION 

there's a lot more about this then i feel like writing that has been covered by other writers
the short version i'll list here is that "industry collusion" is a buzzword that a group of #gamergators coined as it pertains to games journalism because it turns out it's particularly hard to get a story signalboosted by yourself so games journalists have been helping each other do it

this is
not a bad thing
here's another writer that mentions it:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/gamergate-is-an-attack-on-ethical-journalism/

WE DON'T SUPPORT HARASSMENT 

a conversation I had with some #ggators went as follows: i brought up that harassment was more than just directed namecalling. a bunch of dudes proceeded to tell me i was trying to claim that anything (including criticism) was harassment. i joked that that would be absurd because i myself am a critic

if you mention that gamergate is misogynistic or harasses people with the hashtag attached on twitter
Well expect to be interrupted by a great deluge of people telling you that no, you're wrong. gamergate condemns harassment and harassers and goes through great lengths to report harassers

people from this camp are coming from reddit. understanding gamergate entails knowing that there's decidedly two camps of the movement right now: the reddit camp, and the 4chan camp. for all efforts intended, the reddit camp is trying to steal the direction of conversation away from the more violent side while still being just as despicable and naive in its own right

gators don't generally support harassment might be a true statement. however they still want to reap the rewards that come from harassing individuals (especially individuals that want to speak up against them) like silencing/censoring opinions and fear-mongering to control the tide of discussion.

i say this because it's an apallingly common brief to read that "#GAMERGATE DOESN'T SUPPORT HARASSMENT" in many of their manifestos while still claiming Erin Jabroni's blog post as the center tentpole that raised the movement.

i don't need to say anything more about that because what i'm getting at there is self evident

#NOTYOURSHIELD 
tho this ties directly into what i mention above about the "death of the gamer identity" what initially started as a shade for the 4chan camp to stem the discussion by having people create fake "sjw" or poc/queer/trans twitter profiles and proceed to rally behind the gamergate actually became The Real when those real communities started doing it

#NOTYOURSHIELD works because I see a lot of anti-gg writers still assuming that gamergate is one collusive mass of people that share the same identity. this is not true and is an incredibly dangerous thing to assume and part of why the hashtag is so effective.

people speaking out anti-gg expecting their own self confirmed notion of gamergate being the same kind of individual are caught off guard and frequently have no ammunition to stay in the debate with someone that does this. i know: it happened to me one single time before i had to get my head out of the game for a day and think about what this meant

the answer to that is pretty simple: my concept of social justice doesn't match a lot of other people's concepts of social justice. just because that is true doesn't mean it's impossible to make these people see a different side of things then they may be used to or even better help them recognize what they should actually be talking about and who they should be talking about it with.

FIN
anyway

i'm hoping the devil may cry stuff can continue later this month/ next month because i really want to write about DMC: Dumpy Man Comboer as it pertains to the rest of the series.

Devil May Cry Concept Art

Devil May Cry had a curious journey as it went from a prototype for Resident Evil 4 for what it would eventually would become. Because of the nature of how popular Resident Evil 4 ended up being in the social consciousness, the journey that Devil May Cry made has had less investigation than the many different iterations of Leon's solo outing.

Double unfortunate is that the only concept art of Devil May Cry that really exists on the internet appears to be the handful of pieces available on the HD collect release disk. Most of these for the original title are just promotional renders of Dante and the different enemies in the game.

Let's make some observations based on what I've found available online:

At one point in time it looks like Dante had some sort of supporting cast. Since this picture in particular involves what looks like two police officers/detectives, I think it's actually concept art from when the game was still being pitched as the fourth Resident Evil.

This is a neat tidbit because in the actual series itself, Dante is never around anyone that could be considered a 'normal human' except for a brief bit in the introduction of the fourth game in the series. As the concept would have gone, in the Resident Evil series Tony Redgrave might have represented a fantastical element out of the norm, whereas in Devil May Cry Dante is representative of the closest anchor we have to reality.

Also worth pointing out: Dante's outfit might have been the first thing really established about the character.
A piece of art I haven't been able to find online is a concept artist trying out several different color combinations of Dante's coat before looking like they finally settled on the red outfit.

Above and below is more concept art of Dante. I'd like to key into how the character is represented in these pictures as when we might be able to determine if this was "Tony Redgrave" or "Dante" we were looking at. The top most picture is most certainly from the era after Kamiya was given the green light to create a wholly original product. Dante's outfit might be similar to the bottom picture, but is rendered with a more stylish flourish. He looks like a character that wouldn't have been out of place in Vampire Hunter D.

This picture is more hard to say, but judging by how para-military Dante's outfit is I think this is from the "Tony Redgrave" design of the character. Notice that while in an undefined style, certain details are already set in stone: regal detailing on his vest, and a combination of motorcycle and street wear.

Despite Dante's flamboyant attire, this outfit wouldn't seem too out of place among the likes of Oswell Spencer or even Wesker post him seeing The Matrix. Dante's outfit merely stands out more because it is a great deal more complex than the simple button up coat Wesker eventually dons.

Before moving on to area and equipment concept art I've found: This is probably the most interesting piece of art for the original Devil May Cry. Mostly because of the character standing between Dante here, wearing an outfit near what he wears in the final game, and Trish. Was this character a last minute cut? Or simply did Mundus originally appear in the game in a more human form.

Devil May Cry has an incredibly small cast. The top-most picture in this article already details that there was originally more of a supporting cast for Dante when the game was still connected to Resident Evil. Maybe this third figure was a last attempt on delivering on that idea before it was finally abandoned?

In the original concept for Resident Evil 4 that Kamiya worked on, it has been noted that Tony Redgrave was either the son of Wesker, or the son of someone directly related to the Spencer family. Supposedly this is an image of Sparda (judging by the twins in the crib) but here he looks unlike any of the ways he's depicted elsewhere in the series. 

Sparda's role the in the series is an interesting one: His demonic visage frames the opening of the original Devil May Cry and is references throughout the rest of the series. Yet there's never been a true depiction of him in the games outside the above mentioned alternate costume in Devil May Cry 3.

The only possible thing that could shed doubt on that character being Sparda is the existence of artwork of the above man - who bears a striking resemblance to Dante's alternate costume in the third game but is still markedly different. I think there's evidence that more of the series' storyline was already present than we're aware of before the game took on the moniker Devil May Cry and this art points to it. At some point, this became the art that future references to Sparda would be based on. 

Above is concept for an area the player encounters super early in the game, below it is the final product as the area appears in Devil May Cry HD collection. It's immediate that you'll notice the concept art depicts a much gloomier and spookier area. The final area, with the exception of a single boss fight, retains a brightly lit aesthetic for the duration of the game. Also worth pointing out is that in the concept art there's a much more of a bizarre wildlife concept present, whereas all that remains in the final version is the vines below the fountain and a few trees.

This is one of the first areas in the game you'll lay eyes on if you play Devil May Cry. Much like the original Resident Evil has the iconic opening hallway that introduces the player to the mansion this area serves to tell us as much as it can about Devil May Cry and its gothic aesthetic. While there's more color apparent in the conceptual design of this room, the finalized area comes off as pretty close to how it was envisioned.

I especially like how much care was to taken to bring in the spacial arrangement as close as to the concept as possible. The horseback rider dominates most camera angles here, and when it doesn't the camera lingers in tight corridors or on the giant statue of what players will later discover is Mundus towards the climax.

Finallly - an area from the end of the game that borrows elements form many different areas of the game in the final product. Out of frame in the lower screenshot is the fact that the final product keeps the warped, organic pillars that throb like veins. Yet

Unfortunately, even though there's yet more concept art for Devil May Cry none of it really answers the question of how much of the game remains unchanged from its original format. Just looking at some of these area designs there's still some Resident Evil influence. In many ways the castle that Devil May Cry is set in has the sort of bizarre somehow lived-in atmosphere that the Mansion and Police Station in Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 had.

As the franchise went on it's a feeling that was eventually lessened over time. While there's strange occultism present everywhere in the castle Dante journeys through in Devil May Cry it still feels like a real inhabitable place. This is contrary to the environments in later games of the series that while well designed still feel like wholly digital environments. They become Hell Castle or Ancient Temple.

DEVIL MAY CRY OCTOBERFEST AT SKELETON PARTY

While it may no longer be fresh in our minds, the original Devil May Cry marked the death knell of the 3D action game as it was. Gone would be the stilted combat systems only added as an afterthought so the player might explore an area in 3D. Instead, it delivered action games to a whole new level of mechanical brilliance and essentially lay the groundwork for the modern action game.

Even games like God Hand came from lessons that team members learned from Devil May Cry and it's approach to making combat a cornerstone of design and not just an afterthought. Some of the only legitimately important titles in the same genre that could be considered cut from the same cloth like Shinobi are only so because they decided to embark in a separate direction entirely.

Devil May Cry was an odd experiment for its time that just happened to crawl kicking and screaming from the womb of creation and grow into a full on franchise. It's a series that's left it's mark with a host of imitators in the realm of videogames as well as dozens of homages and shout-outs in comic books, anime and film.

Appropriate for a game that was so inspired by all of the above that it in turn was able to leave a deep cut in all of the things that inspired it. Devil May Cry wasn't just a breakout hit on the Playstation 2 - it was the result of a creative decision that likely wouldn't fly in a major studio these days.

If you're not familiar, Devil May Cry was a pretty big creative gamble for Capcom. The director, Hideki Kamiya had previous experience but still was given the ultimate go-ahead to create a new title completely separate from one of the studios' most popular franchises instead of trying to tie it in to that pre-existing series.

So goes the back story of Devil May Cry: Around the turn of the new millennium Shinji Mikami tasked Hideki Kamiya with creating a new entry in the Resident Evil series. Kamiya decided to go in a different direction then the survival-horror trappings of previous Resident Evil games, and instead wanted to make a stylish action game.

Eventually the scenario that was planned by Shinji Mikami and Nobooru Sugimura (a scenario planner for Capcom a the time) was deemed to have gone in too different a direction then would be fitting of the Resident Evil moniker, so ties to that series were severed and our hero Tony Redgrave became the eponymous Dante.

Even though Devil May Cry became it's own creature apart from the monster that is the Resident Evil Series, it always had a little familiar glimmer of Resident Evil in its makeup.
Whether it was in the design of the devils bearing the same eyeball-obsessed sinewy look that many Resident Evil monsters would share or the many dark corridors Dante would walk down, Devil May Cry and Resident Evil always had the faintest of connections.

In honor of that, I'll be dedicating the end of September and, more importantly, October to an examination of the Devil May Cry series of videogames (including DmC) in an attempt to not just find out what makes the individual games tick, but more importantly because I'm on the hunt to find out what keeps the series from being true horror and instead be left in the realm of 'spookiness' along with Jack-O-Lantern's and spider-webs.

Of course, my ultimate goal is to do a critique of the newest release/reboot of the series, DmC: Devil May Cry. I feel like the game has been critiqued before, but not in how it relates and draws from previous games in the series in a kind of schizophrenic way. What I mean (if you haven't played DmC) is that the game had an unclear idea of just how much it wanted to draw from previous elements of the series. Anytime it does wholeheartedly, it seems a little bit apologetic in the way it re-hashes elements players were familiar with before.

Before we can make that criticism of DmC seem sound, I'll be covering every other game in the series from what I hope is as close to the ground-up as I can possibly get.


NEXT -> FROM A WORLD OF THE UNDEAD TO A WORLD OF DEVILS: Concept art and it' relation to the final look of Devil May Cry 

on the previous week or two

A common sentiment read this week: Videogames are at a position that comics were in the 90's. That position is one of pandering. A market unsure of where to expand next, just as well bolstered by marketing to the kinds of people that devour tales of male chauvinism as it is by those of creators who value equality and better representation.

Videogames are such a massive industry now that if not for the massive amounts of money companies make off of things like movies and cartoons, it'd be easy to say that videogames by themselves surpass the size and scope of the comics market. Yet even though massive in size, they have yet to supplant comic books in terms of storytelling and representation.

A woman in a videogame (Resident Evil)

Nowdays, comic books attraction to the idea of the male power fantasy has started to become something of a running joke. It's less likely to happen outside of the realm of superhero comics and even there the idea of a story offering better representation of marginalized groups is usually welcomed by the people that actually buy comics (not so much the people that complain about them).

People who buy videogames though couldn't apparently more different. What I mean by 'people who buy videogames' is not the same thing as people who necessarily enjoy them or want the medium to develop or grow at all. I mean a particular set of people that have a stack of posters ripped out of old copies of Electronic Gaming Monthly who, when prompted about what game could offer a truly cinematic experience to rival that of film will tell you God of War.

Not to say that people who read comics are inherently better. For every person that buys a comic like Saga there's probably two or three people who don't see why anyone would want to read anything that doesn't involve a man in a cape. Comics march on without those people though - they are starting to become a minority rapidly losing its voice.

What we're seeing this week with what's been going in the realm of games journalism is like taking a time machine to the end of the era of 90's comics. I don't doubt for a second that when more 'indie' comics started getting higher marks at reviews and more creators concerned about using comics to give more credence to stories that weren't specifically about straight white protagonists showed up that if comic fans in the early 2000's had the benefit of websites like Tumblr and Facebook that we would have seen a reaction that was just as violent from comic fans.

A woman in a videogame (Parasite Eve) 

For the people living under a rock: This week, a particular game developers jilted and emotionally infantile ex-boyfriend posted details of her relationships with other people online for all to see under the cover of "revealing" some "corruption" in games journalism. I wont link the article here because the person doesn't deserve any traffic or notoriety. Instead, we talk about him as if he doesn't exist. In the article itself he stretches the limits of proof only when it's necessary to manipulate the reader into getting on his side. Maybe he'll give up on videogames as a hobby and go to work for a billion dollar game company as a marketer.

I'm not going to call gamers "The gaming public" because they certainly don't represent me even if I used to be someone who would have seemed terrifyingly similar to the lot of them. What they are instead is a group of people who likely feel marginalized by culture at large because they tend to lack any amount of it. In any case, these people quickly stuck to that particular writers claims and were only fueled by the latest Feminist Frequency  video releasing around the same span of time.

The purported scandal along with Sarkeesian's timing was the one-two punch that rustled the jimmies of grognards everywhere. Not only did Sarkeesian's harassers come out full force, but a small community grew around the initial blogger in the claim that somehow game journalism was corrupted or invalidated.

 Ella Guro writes a spectacularly apt take on the whole ordeal as it occurred over the last week and a half or so. That might be a more level headed place to get caught up on the rest of the details of what happened and who exactly was involved.

Violence, particularly the kind of violence people have to constantly be surrounded with if they want to interface with being a part of videogames at all has started to permeate almost every interaction between content creators and their audience.

Abuse seems ingrained in the monster collectively referred to as "gamer culture" as if there were anything we could pin down outside of some vague association with green soda and Call of Duty. Gamer culture, like comic culture, is impossibly large compared to what any of the things it's defined as would have you think.

In a slightly heavy handed and hyperbole filled article, Andrew Todd of Badassdigest pretty accurately surmises that for one reason or the next, abuse is thoroughly ingrained in gamer culture because of how the descriptive "gamer" actually came about.

A woman in a videogame (Dreamfall)

While I want to say it was a long long time ago, it really wasn't more than a few years ago that I was locked into the marketing machine's clutches. I ate it up. I say Andrew Todd's observation that gamers see themselves as the victims is pretty correct because I used to embody that line of thinking.

To put it all on the table as ugly as we possibly can: gamers are the opposite of fucking self aware.
Gamers are, to be blunt, generally miserable people that victimize themselves as outcasts of society because they generally lack any sense of empathy or good graces required to actually take part in it. Gamers favorite characters are fucking Kratos and probably Travis Touchdown. Two characters that are completely morally reprehensible.

For Travis Touchdown though, that's the joke. Hardly anyone who is a fan of No More Heroes is proficient enough in understanding parody or literary devices to even know that the character isn't supposed to be liked for any of the traits he exhibits in the games.

The thing about this, the biggest thing and I can tell it's affecting other people covering the story is that there are just so many victims, so many martyrs now. We're reaching a point where as much as it's nice to consider the idea of "gamer culture" being in it's death throes that we can't even keep track of who to stay mad about anymore.

The conversation about what happened has gone on for little over a week and a half now, with all sorts of people beyond the world of videogames starting to chime in. Yet very few people are bothering to raise concern about what the next step is other than continuing to speak up and hoping these people drown themselves out (when evidence points to reasoning that they never will.)

We talk so much about the symptoms lately that the idea of a cure is never presented other than waiting things out and hoping for the best. As much as it's nice to tell ourselves that these are indeed the death throes of a giant and terrifying beast at the same time it sounds an awful lot like we're still trying to convince ourselves that's the truth.

A woman in a videogame (Beyond Good and Evil)

Part of the problem is that any time something like this happens the first part of the dialogue that has to start before any others is convincing people that don't deal with this sort of thing on a daily basis that there's even a problem at all. Even against cries that we're somehow coming for videogames as a medium to uhh make them a better place or something every conversation starts the same way

Over at The New Statesman Ian Steadman gives us a harrowing recap of the many ways so called gamers have tried to discredit Anita Sarkesian and it's much the same as the jilted ex-boyfriend who made a campaign of harassment against a noted game developer. Steadman pretty thoroughly examines the criticism levvied at her and how it's anything but sound - and how referring to straw man arguments as "criticism" undermines any actual criticism that could be levied against the videos (of which I don't think there's much at all)

I don't think the core group of gamers that repeatedly become harassers in the face of having their beliefs challenged are well connected enough or intelligent enough (in a way beyond armchair philosophy) to construct an argument that seems baseless but would have the larger effect of invalidating further works. It's a nasty side-effect of having so many voices cry out together.

A woman in a videogame (Mirror's Edge)

To work towards a solution required better volume control from people capable of doing it. There are a lot of people that could be using their voices to boost the volume of women like Anita's own statements rather than attempting to control the dialogue themselves. Certainly, there are people doing this very thing but it's not enough yet. Telling people that it's not enough is important too, because it makes them keep striving for change.

Finally, at Gamasutra one of my favorite writers, Leigh Alexander, offers her own insight into the situation.
In her article she laments that nobody needs to make games for "gamers" anymore because they're a group that to be blunt, is being erased. Leigh wastes no amount of words saying how much this isn't a problem for videogames but possibly part of the solution.

I've seen a criticism of this specific article that in writing about gamer culture that the article has become a piece that's self evident and is fully apart of gamer culture. This is laughable in a new kind of way. It makes me imagine a horde of grognards chasing a writer down to the chant of "one of us! one of us!' desperate for any lasting amount of validity that the most basic criticism they can leverage at something is it exists in the same space.

As players, it's our space now.


-SKELETONS

SELLERS REMORSE

"I have too many videogames." In an age of programs like Steam and Origin, I see that phrase parroted around by my friends particularly often (and particularly around summer sale season) these days. A common observation is that Steam as a platform has enabled people to buy more videogames than ever before, and with an easy to use digital-only platform the observation definitely rings true.
Could that be taken as a critique, though? That in changing the way we purchase and in the quantity that we're maybe missing out on part of the experience of owning a title?

People are buying more games now - or maybe more people are buying games. Either one of those is probably an apt take on the matter. My personal stance on it isn't that people are buying more. Rather, I think it'd be fair to say everyone has so many titles in our backlogs because we can no longer get rid of our older titles. There is no "Bargain Bin" that appears when a user has discarded a Steam title because there's no way to discard them.

So I have thirty games I never intend to play again. There's really no 'easy' way I could give those titles to another person that wouldn't result in my entire library being completely invalidated by being banned. Otherwise, I can 'hide' them and they vanish from my Steam library and are relegated to being a cold nagging that tugs at the back of my mind.

confronting your own habits in a videogame - PC/PS3/Xbox360

My guarantee is that if we, as players, had every game we had ever bought on any system we would all have massive and possibly literal libraries of games. With so many different ways of purchasing games online - and lately fewer and fewer ways of getting rid of them outright or simply letting someone else have them has essentially meant there is no "letting go." Did you buy DMC? Too bad, because now that game is going to haunt you into your grave.

Of course consoles still depend on physical media, but that line is getting more blurred with each iterative generation of hardware. Even just little over a year ago there was the possibility that software for the Xbox One would be 'locked in' when it was loaded on the system for the first time, prohibiting people from trading or borrowing games.

 Microsoft fortunately made the wise decision to scrap that feature (I love it when negative components of design are still referred to as features) before release. It was only awhile before that, and hardly a long while to boot, that a digital-only console would have been considered a novelty. Let's not mention the Xperia play here.

Stores still widely featured PC games on shelves (in actual boxes!) and if you had a ton of games on your system it was probably because you went out and bought them. Which was of course accompanied by the sight of a lot more looming towers of jewel cases (if you're a retro collector like me) or the black-box clam shell packages.

Of course it's not like those things went away, but companies have gone a long way to make it even easier to purchase titles digitally. When I first started collecting videogames I made it a point to collect anything "interesting" that either went against established industry norms, or had something to offer besides bland storytelling and flashy instant-reward gameplay. The first victims of my rush to get rid of things were anything that had to deal with God of War, a decision I still don't (and never will) regret. If anything, getting rid of anything remotely associated with that franchise was probably the closest experience I will ever have to a Zen awakening. "Finally, no more bad videogames" I say, my chakra aligning.

Anyway.

One of the first franchises I took an interest in was Legacy of Kain. It's Vampires for Videogames, written through the language of Shakespearean play for an audience that grew up rolling their eyes any time someone mentioned that Anne Rice was like, totally cool.

From a mechanical standpoint, in the entire series, Legacy of Kain always skewed more "interesting" than "good". In an entire series that remains sadly unfinished, there's probably one game that's wholly enjoyable to play from start to finish. Legacy of Kain is however, one of those series' that set out to do something interesting and tells an incredible (and incredibly convoluted) story from beginning to end.

It was for that reason that I set out to collect the entire series, at a time when I enjoyed videogames as a medium but didn't necessarily understand them. My obsession started with Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, a depressing and somewhat nihilistic open world action game for the original Playstation.

Soul Reaver was an easy pick because it was in the ballpark of games that have A) never been re-released and are B) still regarded as cheap to acquire. No need to pay hundreds of dollars for a factory sealed copy, when you can find them on eBay for  just a couple of dollars.

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 (PS2)

Eventually I'd acquired almost the entire series, save the original PlayStation title and genesis of the series.
I even made an effort to play the entire series that I owned up until that point.
Now, this isn't meant to be a critical condemnation of the series, but at the time these games were made before 3D action was the norm for titles. With no Devil May Cry to base themselves off of, the series had a relatively simple and frustrating approach to combat, with more focus on exploration and "puzzle solving" (because this was also the days when dragging cubes was a puzzle) with little regard to how the rest of the game worked.

Why I wanted to collect the Legacy of Kain series more than anything, even the writing, was the fact that it was one of the few contemporary series to evolve fully with trends that the rest of the industry worked under. The series progressed from an overhead dungeon crawler at a time when they were vogue to becoming a Devil May Cry style action game.

I was, at the time, misguided. For all of the interesting design choices the series showcased, that inherent 'gameplay' was never the focus the developers intended. It was always about the story they were trying to tell of two characters struggles against causality

Legacy of Kain was always trying to stay relevant at a time when there was generally several gaps in years of production. It had to effectively grow with the changes the industry made to whats popular, but I don't think the core team of developers strong point was ever mechanical refinement.

Maybe in an alternate universe, the creative team hired someone like Shinji Mikami to give directorial input on the franchise. Alas, Legacy of Kain had the misfortunate in being developed in a time when there was seldom cross-polination of Japanese developers in Western studios.

Oh well, I decided it wasn't worth it. Bad investment, why did I buy these games? So even though it took me an incredibly long time to track down Blood Omen 2 in a presentable manner, I traded them out for fuckin' Radiata Stories or some other basic PS2

Why do I beat myself up about Legacy of Kain and its all of the hella weird design choices it exhibited over the years?

Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen

 It's that sinking feeling of sellers remorse calling after me. It was one of the first - and last- opportunities I'd get to experience the feeling.


If you're a lucky one who's never let go of anything under the pretenses of a fair sale, Sellers Remorse is the strange regret you feel when you think the sale you just made was a bad decision. Maybe the thought crosses your mind that the person you've sold it to isn't going to appreciate it (the person who bought Defiance from me said "So it's like God of War with vampires right?) or even you're simply upset that it no longer belongs to you.

When I was "Building My Collection" (I still kind of am) I ran into this all the time. I would trade one game for another one that I absolutely had to have. I absolutely hate the sellers mindset. I've only ever bought a videogame I wanted so that I could enjoy it, not so it could sit on a shelf. Yes, I own Parasite Eve II because I thoroughly enjoy it. That's just my bad taste overriding rationale.

But I handed almost all of the Legacy of Kain series to a guy who wanted to buy them because he needed to fill a space on his shelf marked with the name of the series. I remember the schlub so well because I tried to hold and interesting conversation with him about where videogames were going as an art form and he was convinced that Infinity Ward was going to be the future and that videogames needed to draw from cinema.

Why did I do that? I'm a terrible judge of character and I hate collectors but not enough to not trade with them, that's why. Yet with every time a game like Suikoden II is re-released on Playstation Network, it drives the cost of the original games  down and people that actually want to play them in their original format can finally enjoy them.

Videogames second hand market is collector driven. As an industry (art form?) videogames have no "criterion collection" unless the original publisher themselves decides to re-release a title. Sometimes this is even impossible because of how content rights in the world of videogames work, as in the case of Mega Man Legends 2. A game which can probably never be re-released unless Capcom is willing to re-record every bit of dialogue.

Legacy of Kain: Defiance

So, in an example I use all the time: If you want to play it be willing to pay hundreds of dollars.
Or emulate it, which is a crime.

Now, with Steam we're seeing a different kind of market play out. I own dozens of games and I know people that sometimes own hundreds. Not only are we purchasing different, but there's really no way for us to "get rid" of games by trading them to someone else.

The market for PC titles now is being consumer driven. We're really driving it with our dollars - through things like Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight. Both of those models do have huge problems with them, but there really needs to be an equivalent for classic games.

Sellers remorse isn't some 'big deal' but it does highlight an outlaying problem with archiving of videogames. At one point it is possible there might not be a way to re-visit older titles. With the way the ESA cracks down on emulation sites and these days, and how few titles are actually being re-released we're facing an absolute loss of history.

So my sellers remorse isn't because the dweeb that I traded games with wont appreciate them. It's because I'm worried that I wont get to experience them again, despite the impact they actually had on the rest of the medium. The videogame industry isn't respecting the medium enough to have people actively engaged in it enough to worry about this kind of stuff, either.

If the most popular videogames are all some God of War / Uncharted level monstrosities, I wouldn't exactly consider them a "serious medium" either and would have no interest in thinking them being cataloged and retained could have any artistic merit.

What kind of future am I looking for? an entirely digital one, or one that still heavily relied on physical media? That's a question that isn't going to be answered if just one person is asking it. Sellers remorse itself isn't a thing I have to deal with very often and is quickly becoming the kind of problem only collectors run into.

I can never get rid of the Magicka franchise, bought on a whim once during a summer sale, and that's almost as bad as giving away something I really enjoyed.

AUTHENTIC console EXPERIENCE

   I don't remember exactly how old I was when my brother was showing off one of the first things he'd ever downloaded on our old dial-up connection. I was about eight, maybe ten - I dunno, but I remember the little severed hand mouse pointer fondly.

  The program was NESticle, and I remember it because it was my first foray into emulation. I had no idea how it worked and my oldest brother was loath to explain it to me. Maybe he considered being able to work out how a computer program functioned to be my rite of passage.

(One of the first NES emulators)

   I grew up with an NES, but videogames hadn't been something that was readily available when I was a kid. Even when my brothers had convinced my parents to buy a Playstation, most of the stuff we afforded was all second hand or purchased when the local video-store stopped renting older games. There was the occasional trip to Software Etc, but by the time that was happening the Playstation was an old fad to my brothers.

   We never had a whole lot of cash when I was a kid, so in many ways being able to trade games and especially being able to trade PC games contributed a lot to me playing videogames as a kid. I grew out of Zelda and into games like Anachronox, which is still one of my favorite games.

   I was absolutely starstruck, sitting there watching my brother play Castlevania on our incredibly old PC. I was enamored with Quake III Arena when he brought it home - but there was just something utterly amazing at finally having acces to all of the games I had only ever gotten to read about.

(Anachronox)

   Sometimes I get asked the question what games I "grew" up with. I mostly tell people Zelda, but what I generally leave out is that I grew up only playing Zelda. It was one of the few games my parents had for the Nintendo they had bought. Sometimes I would even watch my dad - who is a through and through cowboy, sit and navigate the caverns and forests of Hyrule.

   By the time our first computer rolled around, we didn't have a working NES anymore. My brothers had moved onto the Playstation. As far as older consoles go we'd had a Sega Genesis but there wasn't anything about it that interested me. Telling, I also had never owned a single Sonic The Hedgehog game for our Sega.

   When my brother had finally drug me to the computer the day he showed me NESticle I probably sat for a good six or seven hours after he relinquished control of it. I spent time with Zelda and Mario, Megaman and all of the games I'd only ever gotten a chance to read about.

It was a weird validating experience of my childhood, that at that time was starting to give way to being worried about acting old enough. By the time I learned enough about computers to surf on the waves of the net and metaphorically "hang ten" with data, I mostly wasted afternoons trying to download Metal Slug X off of Edge Emulation.


   Yes: emulation was kind of a big deal. I was "that" little kid that was super into videogames. I bought Tips & Tricks monthly, Playstation magazine. It gave me a chance to have a dialogue with my older brothers, and I felt included. One day I went from sitting on the floor watching my oldest brother beat Castlevania to trying to do it myself while he watched. He did quite a lot of laughing, too.

  Eventually I got more interested in emulation than any of my brothers were. If I could experience the NES, what was next? I never had an Super Nintendo as a kid, instead I had to make do with occasionally renting it, or playing Secret of Mana with my cousin. Either way, it mean a whole lot of sitting on the floor in peoples living rooms.

(Secret of Mana)

   It would also be my oldest brother who would help my personal foray into the world of emulation. Help me sign up for my first forum, too - though I doubt he remembers it (The forum was Edge Emulation!). It was weird, thinking about it now, how much my life on the internet as a kid and a younger teenager kind of mirrored his. He'd signed up for internet comedy megastars Something Awful, I settled for Arch-Nacho and Tortilla Godzilla's Quality Roms (second forum, after Edge shut down)

   It was through that website, that I started to see that emulation was more than just a way to play old games. Emulation, the argument became, was a legitimate way to archive and support the proliferation of older titles. It's an easy argument to make, too.

   As an example, Megaman Legends 2 is basically considered one of the mega classic videogames, but if you want to play it now it's going to cost you upward of two-hundred dollars. Closer to a hundred if you're just gonna buy the disc by itself. Videogames are a collector controlled second hand market. What that means is that prices for second hand games aren't controlled by actual demand, but artificially made desirable by collectors offering titles at ridiculous prices.

   Megaman Legends 2 is ascribed that value because it's particularly rare - losing it for cheap would be considered a bad investment. I doubt most of the people that think it's a particularly mega cool game have even ever played it - but it had a limited print run and it wont ever get released. So if you want to play it, you're going to pay for it.

   Unless there were some magical workaround that meant someone could just allegedly acquire it and play it for free. Oh wait that's emulation, no big deal. I played Megaman Legends 2 through an emulator, and countless other games. The ESA - who does very little to archive or allow copies of videogames to proliferate, considers me a criminal.

(Megaman Legends 2)

   If you're not familiar, ESA stands for Entertainment Software Association. They've existed for quite awhile, but it was only during the 2000's that they really started to have an effect on emulation: Telling hazily legal websites which titles they could offer and which they couldn't. This is weird, to me, as a person who doesn't work in the industry, that it would happen.

   Videogames are not "film". For various reasons, videogames in the past were hardly ever re-released. If you wanted to play Super Metroid legally before the Virtual Console existed, you needed to buy an SNES and find someone selling a copy of the game, hopefully for an affordable price.

   Even though we now do have resources that allow players to legally experience some games, and not just experience them but do so in a way that supports the original developer, there are still titles that will never be offered through these avenues.

   Developer incompetence, or licensing issues? (If involving Capcom, the former).
Either way, emulation continues to be a bit of a hot button issue. It's getting harder and harder every day to find roms that are quality like you used to. To say nothing of losing SnesOrama's incredibly valuable trade forum - which had titles that are literally impossible to find physical copies of.

   When was the last time you heard somebody get excited about fuckin' The Granstream Saga?
It doesn't really matter, but there's an argument to be made that just like film, every videogame is important to discussion and understanding of the medium. Less so to groups like the ESA, who consider the very cataloging and archiving of these titles a heinous affront to nature and culture (probably).

(Twinkle Star Sprites)

  I could seriously go to jail for wanting to play the NEO-GEO version of Twinkle Star Sprites. That's a very real thing that could happen. That doesn't seem weird to anyone else? I understand the argument against film piracy, because a lot of the time the original creators are still profiting from re-releases. That's not something that's true about videogames, though. I doubt Takashi Takebe saw a dollar of the Playstation Network re-release of Grandia II.

   Irrespective of it's legality, emulation has affected an entire age group of people who play videogames. Fitted somewhere in the "generation y" aspect of our society are the people like me who might've grown up playing an SNES or Sega CD on their computer, rather than the authentic console experience. Some of these people might even be the age where they could buy a gamepad meant to work with their controller, at least recreating part of that classic experience. Some of them might even have played them sitting on their carpet.

   I doubt I'd have the interest I do in videogames - artistically or even in terms of the enjoyment I get out of them without emulation. It was EPSXE, which I spent days and days trying to get to work, that I was finally able to play Vagrant Story through. This was before it was offered on Playstation Network for 4.99.

(Vagrant Story)

   I could have bought Vagrant Story no doubt! Just who's hands would I have been putting my hard earned dollar in though? In the hands of another player, no doubt, but how much I wanted to experience Vagrant Story far outshined how willing I was to pay some collector more money than I felt comfortable with.

  Today, Vagrant Story is still on my list of favorite videogames. It's a mess of half-imagined game mechanics that don't always work the way they need to. Vagrant Story's real charm is right there in the title: There's not a better example of a well crafted narrative on the original Playstation.
I played it through emulation and it influenced the kind of games I'd like to go on to make, it also influenced the stories I write about and what kind of quality I want to see more games aspire to.

(Vagrant Story)

   My interface with EPSXE was an old digital keyboard on my parents computer that didn't quite work all of the way. Mapping out the original Playstation's controls to it was a nightmare, and finding a way that the game ran comfortably even more so. I was also running a plugin pack that made the game seem a little sharper and eliminated the original Playstation's fuzziness.

   There was no "authentic console experience" with Vagrant Story. I played a game independent of slowdown issues, stuttering sound being played back through crusty hardware or jagged edges from a stressed graphics chip. I played a version independent of the real one, and to be honest, I would take it 100% of the time.

  Now, at 22, I've had plenty of time to go back and play some of these games in their original forms. What I've discovered is that there's really no "more valid" way to experience older videogames. You can tell someone that the best way to experience Casablanca is in an old dusty theatre somewhere, but you can't discount their opinion and relationship to the film because they didn't see it that way.

   Even in spite of events like the shutdown of SnesOrama's popular trade board, people continue to collect, share and archive older videogames. Maybe some of them do it just so they can play them, maybe some of them have a full hard-drive waiting for the day the old discs and cartridges stop working so they can say "Hah! I told you!" either way, I owe a love of videogames as a medium to a lot of those people, and to my brother for helping me take those first steps.

-SKELETONS