by Ryan Smith

Some critics have pointed out the surprisingly complex and nuanced narratives of many top recent video games as signs that the medium is progressing as an art form and may soon be seen on par with movies and TV shows as far as storytelling goes. Grand Theft Auto IV, for instance, frequently asks tough questions about our ideas of morality, Mass Effect broaches racism like no game before it, and Metal Gear Solid 4 might as well be part of a philosophy course on the ethics of war. But alas, if you’re worried that video games are becoming a little too “arthouse” or highbrow, there are always titles like Ninja Gaiden II.

In this quasi-sequel to the 2003 Xbox title, (if you don’t count Ninja Gaiden Black or Ninja Gaiden Sigma, that is) the main female character’s heaving breasts are more developed than the story. The plot revolves around the Spider Clan Ninja’s theft of the so-called “Demon Stone” from the safekeeping of protagonist/super-ninja Ryu Hayabusa. The Spider Clan awakens the “The Archfiend” (they might as well call it ‘The Final Boss’), demons take over New York City and use the Statue of Liberty as some sort of evil base and create general mayhem. The only person that can stop them is Ryu and his badass ninja skills with, of course, assistance from Sonia, the aforementioned busty CIA agent who looks like she might have stepped off the cutting room floor of a Soulcalibur sequel.

This isn’t exactly serious thought-provoking fare, true. But it could be reasonably argued that with Ninja Gaiden II being an action game, and more specifically a ninja action game, the story is deservedly perfunctory. It’d be like judging a hot-dog eating contest based on table manners.

That said, if intense and bloody martial arts action is art to you, Ninja Gaiden II could be your Mona Lisa. As Ryu you seem part assassin, part frenzied ballerina, furiously hacking, slashing, slicing and dicing hordes of baddies in style with a dizzying array of slashes, flips, kicks and flying attacks. Human enemies actually lose limbs often (sometimes it made me wonder if I was actually fighting piñatas) at the deadly blades of Ryu, but rather than silently accepting their fate and laying down in a pool of blood, they just become crazed kamikaze attackers. For instance, sometimes if a one-armed attacker is able to grab you, he will set off a suicide bomb killing him (and maybe you) in the process. On the other hand, if you get close to a de-limbed ninja enemy and hit the Y button, the camera will dart to a close up shot and feature a gruesome final decapitation blow, complete with splattering blood and the not-so-sweet sounds of ripping tissue. It’s the kind of violence-porn cinematography that would make Quentin Tarantino weep with joy.

Luckily, not only does the action look good, it controls well too. Using a weak and strong attack button, a trigger to block and a jump button, you can pull off an insane amount of acrobatic attacks in a short period of time and the faster you use your right thumb, the more explosive Ryu can be. Wall jumping and other platforming skills are also done in a way that it feels intuitive and not impossible to pull off.

But just because the controls are smooth and easy doesn’t mean Ninja Gaiden II isn’t challenging. It’s quite the opposite actually. After the first couple levels, the game drifts into sometimes maddingly frustrating territory. In some ways, it’s nice that the designers make you earn your keep because in most hack ‘n’ slash games, mindless button mashing is enough to get you through the game. In Ninja Gaiden II, repeatedly hitting the X button into oblivion will make you nothing more than demon fodder. On the other hand, cheap unblockable combos from enemies and bosses with massive super attacks that take 60 percent of your life bar do get old.

Then there is the worst enemy of all, the camera. From a visual perspective, it’s cool that the designers want you to see Ryu in all his black spandexed glory, but the camera often fails to show a useful view of the action and where the other enemies are on the screen. You can be hit by a shuriken or a fire arrow and have no idea where the damn thing came from. Sure, you can adjust the camera to a default angle with a flick of a button but in a game when a split second can be a matter of life or death, having to constantly change the camera can lead to many frustrating moments.

The bosses can also be a source of frustration. No doubt they look impressive and are designed well, but some of them are hard enough that they make you want you to throw your controller out a window. I had to fight the giant wormlike boss over 15 times before I beat him, and every time he crushed me against the wall, I barely stopped myself from shouting curse words at my TV.

If you like action games, however, and you can get over the wonky camera, the gratuitously ridiculous story and the soul-crushing difficulty, Ninja Gaiden II is one of the best out there.

Sasquatch Journal Interview: Alex Seropian, Founder of Wideload Games

Alex Seropian

In a gaming industry increasingly dominated by a handful of sprawling media giants, Alex Seropian is a bit of an iconoclast. Bungie, the development company he co-founded in college, became extremely successful after Microsoft acquired them and the rights to the studio’s Halo game in 2000. But instead of sticking around to reap the benefits of the “Halo” cash cow, Seropian left Bungie in 2003 while the sequel was still in development to move back to Chicago with his family.

He and several of his associates soon started a new independent game development company in the Windy City called Wideload with the intention to do things differently than Bungie and most of the industry by hiring a small staff that outsources much of its work to other companies around the world.

And,of course, there are the games themselves. Wideload’s first major release was the underrated Stubbs the Zombie for the Xbox, a black-humored game in which the title character attacks enemies by farting and spends a level urinating in a major water source in a 1950s-era suburban utopia.

This month, Wideload released “Hail to the Chimp,” a slightly subversive, family-friendly party game. On the surface, the game resembles some of the cute, colorful fare aimed at kids for the Nintendo Wii but “Chimp” features a lot of sly parodies of politics, news media and pop culture.

In a recent interview, Seropian talked about his company, the challenge of making a game, and releasing a presidential election parody game in the midst of the country’s fascination with real-life presidential politics.

Q: How is the way Wideload makes games much different from Bungie?

Alex Seropian: We grew up Bungie to be a typical game developer where we ended up with about a hundred people working on a game over three years, and that’s a fairly common model. But when we started this studio, we didn’t want to do that, because in that model you fail. It’s expensive and there’s lots of other factors. So we took a page out of the filmmaking model and we decided, OK, we’ll start our team with this small core group of people and we’ll just keep the team this way and we’ll run the production of the game and we’ll staff up with contractors and external developers and people we know in the industry for production, and when we’re done with production we’re still that small team. Also, everybody here contributes to the creative process on a regular basis. Over the last five years, we’ve actually come up with a couple hundred game ideas that we’ve developed in one way or another. It’s not like there’s just one guy inventing everything. It’s a very collaborative environment that way.

In this creative process, do you have specific meetings?

Oh yeah, regularly. Probably six times a year. The simplest thing we do is..we say, “OK, we’re having a game day, so bring your ideas.” And we bounce ideas back and forth. Sometimes we’ll take an idea that somebody had and rework it and bring it up again and sometimes and we’ll take some of the ideas and say “lets take three of these, and take a day trying to exploring those.”

Where did the idea for Hail to the Chimp come from?

This game, like other ideas, started out as a one-page idea and it was actually really simple: We wanted a multiplayer social game where you have four people on one couch playing. The only really specific thing we had in that one page was this idea of teaming up. We also decided we wanted all the characters to be animals because back in that one pager we decided that your mom has to like it, so, you know...you hand your controller to your mom and she plays and she’s not offended.

Sounds like a far cry from Halo.

Look, the game industry says, “Yeah, we’ve surpassed the box office, we’re bigger than Hollywood,” but honestly it’s a load of shit because games cost 60 bucks—that’s 10 times the amount of a movie ticket. There’s huge potential for the market to grow, and the only way we’re going to get there is if there are games available that address an audience beyond the core gamer. So we said “OK, we can take everything we’ve learned making games and we can apply it and have high production values and make a game that’s family friendly, but something that core gamers will also like because we’re core gamers ourselves.”

Was this game inspired at all by the current presidential election?

No, [lead writer] Matt Soell actually came up with the idea a couple years ago. He said, “Hey, maybe they’re having an election and it can be covered by this 24 hour cable news network,” and we started looking at it like that. Think CNN, and then we started seeing all the things we could do. If you go on YouTube and type in political attack ad, you get all these hits and you watch this stuff...if you see them on TV, they’re not supposed to make you laugh, but…

Did you do that type of research then?

Oh yeah. I’d go down to my basement, get on my Stairmaster, and I’d go watch CNN, just to see the language, the visual language they use and how the anchors talk to each other, and the kind of commercials they have. I took all the fake ads and I put them in QuickTime and gave them to my kids to watch, and you’d think kids wouldn’t like it, but they were, like, rolling on the floor.

Were there lots of challenges you faced when making this game?

Every time you make a game, you’re using new technology. Imagine you’re a director of movies and every time you go to make a new movie, you have to use a new movie camera and your cinematographer doesn’t know how to use this thing. That’s what we’re faced with. We got triple-whammied: We’re using a new piece of software and using the Xbox 360 which is a new piece of hardware and the PS3, which is a completely different piece of hardware. A lot of things we’re figuring out...this technology, we’re doing things with [the Unreal Engine] that no one, including Epic, has done with it before and so we’ve found some problems, so we’ve had to work with Epic to try and solve some of those problems. Some are easy to solve, some completely impossible.

How do you feel about the end result of the game?

This project has been really gratifying to work on because the gameplay is way different from Halo and Stubbs, because you know, they are linear games, and you visit each place once. Each level is one path. In this game, it’s like all of these concentric circles...We put a lot of money on the screen, put a lot into the characters, the environments, all this stuff, there’s just a huge amount of production value in the game. I have to think it’s the most in any party game ever and it’s very gratifiying to, you know, raise the bar for a game like this.

Are there certain perceptions people have about working for a video game company?

Yeah, I get asked “uh...do you play games all day?” Which...I don’t. (laughs)