Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

a videogame that regards itself highly. It has
characters designed carefully and a completely
idiotic story thrown together in such a psuedo-
random fashion that one might mistake it for ar-
tistic. In it, the intertia of natural gameplay has
been stripped out, and all we do is aim a gun at
zombies. There’s no joy of running and changing
direction, sliding on your heels. You move by
pressing a button, and change your course by
choosing an item on a menu. It is bloody and
disturbing, and though it looks exactly as the
producer must have wanted it to, I can’t help
getting the impression that if I had to pick one
game to play on my birthday, I’d rather play
SMB3.
I beat the first stage, save, and turn on
Namco X Capcom. That one, I played for two
hours.
Namco X Capcom’s box indicates in a
lovely fashion that it belongs to the “other”
genre. With a battle system like Final Fantasy
Tactics meets Xenogears, remixed music that
punctuates Street Fighter II themes in all the
right places (seriously the best mixes I’ve heard
of Street Fighter music), excellent, exuber-
ant sound effects and voices, and a story that
begins with two special police officers in the
year 20XX getting caught in a confused crossfire
between Chun-li chasing Cammy’s flunkies and
Shion Uzuki and KOS-MOS chasing the Gnosis
aliens from Xenosaga to Hachikou Crossing in
Shibuya - well, it’s kind of idiotic. To think that
M. Bison’s Shadowloo forces could be conspiring,
across the galaxy and over many millennia, with
the Gnosis aliens! How this comes to include
Arthur from Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts fighting against
Dmitri Maximoff from Darkstalkers in a grave-
yard, I will not reveal.
Every spring here in Tokyo, when the
cherry blossoms bloom, and they only bloom for
a limited time, company offices and gatherings
of friends and relatives alike have parties in
major parks. These parties are called “Hanami.”
“Hanami” means “flower-viewing.” You’re not re-
ally viewing the flowers, however; you’re merely
gathered, with the good excuse that flowers
84 The Gamer’s Quarter Issue #3
which bloom once a year will be all dead in just
a week’s time, drinking as much as possible in
the presence of people you either haven’t seen
since last year or won’t relax with in such a
fashion until next year. Though you may be a
man cheating on your girlfriend with a secretary
in your office, and though your girlfriend, who
works in another office, might be in Ueno Park
on the same night at a hanami of her own, the
fact stands that there are just too many people
around, too much general chaos for anyone to
notice if you kiss that secretary right there, or
even if you punch your boss. Yes, the hanami is
often called the “one time of the year when you
can punch your boss.” None of this is the point
of the hanami, however - not the floral tragedy
of the crisp-aired evening, not the secretary’s
lipstick on your collar, not the drinking, not the
boss-punching - the point is that it is this jumble
of loopy chaos, no matter how the motives
and the paths one may take are always clear:
drink that beer, eat that croquette, watch that
screaming guy with the guitar when he waltzes
in front of your party, laugh appropriately when
so-and-so throws up on such-and-such. After
two hours’ experience playing it, I was able
to declare Namco X Capcom the videogame
equivalent of a hanami.
Yet, hours later, deep into the night, I felt
broken and bruised. None of the playing fields in
the game had any terrain. The characters - I...
didn’t like any of them. That’s the most impor-
tant point of this entire piece: taken out of the
contexts of the individual games that made
them famous enough to remember in the
first place, none of these characters were
people I wanted to invite to my birthday
party. I felt tricked by so many things, inside
and out, and delirious, as my fever broke and I
let loose a torrent of sweat all over my blanket,
I felt very stupid and insignificant and used, like
Miyamoto Musashi felt every night when he laid
in bed with his sword thinking about the path of
the warrior. Only - what did I have to similarly
aspire to? I decided many years ago that my
only goal was to grow up to be a great man,