Quite possibly the only Shadow Madness web site on the Internet.
I've been toying with the idea of writing a giant thing on the hugely underrated PS3 shooter Haze for a long, long time, and this morning I came to the realization that it comes from the same place that made me obsessed with Richard Kelly's Southland Tales and a million other ambitious failures. It's what made me want to create a Shadow Madness fan site in 2002. The site no longer exists on what is called the "Live Web," only on the Dead Web. You can visit its grave site on archive.org, linked above. I actually updated the site in 2008 or 2009, but the Wayback Machine never caught it before I took the site down.
I'm not going to defend anything written on the site. I probably wrote a couple thousand words total and it's full of mistakes and "cutesy" internet grammar and casual misogyny. That's how old I was. That's just life man, and you have to get over it!
Niche PS1-era titles like Alundra, Galerians, and Destrega are so close to the core of my personality that if I met you and you claimed to have completed any of these games I would immediately trust you enough to let you babysit my 18-month-old daughter. If you make a Legend of Legaia joke in my presence you might just end up in my will.
What I'm trying to say is that I'm always looking for a niche club. I'm always shying away from large groups because I'm afraid of competition. I'd rather feel like a victim, subjugated to live in this hellworld where no one remembers Future Cop LAPD along with a small band of survivors, tasked with the burden of preserving this knowledge for future generations. So, the Haze article casts a shadow over my future like the shadow of Nectar addiction cast over Shane Carpenter.
Until then, here is the only letter I ever received on the subject of Shadow Madness Classic, a fan site inspired by my internet friend Brian Carper, who runs FFClassic, a thriving community revolving around the original Final Fantasy for NES and its endless remakes. The letter came to me during a dark period in 2009. I'd made some decisions that made me question who I was as a person, decisions that I don't regret to this day but will always remember painfully (not unlike the decision Shane must make to abandon his PMC compatriots at Mantel Corp in favor of the technologically inferior but morally righteous resistance fighters). And in the first week of September 2009 I was living right in the deep dark gooey center of all that uncertainty. And then, out of the blue, my Fake Life, a life I'd all-but-abandoned for years, bubbled up to the surface, and everything was okay for like a day.
Mike,
I saw your website and I thought it couldn't be real - nobody would make a website around Shadow Madness.
It is a funny coincidence that I discovered your site. I was cleaning out my closet this weekend and ran into some old games - one of which was Shadow Madness. I was going to sell some of these games on ebay and googled SM to see if I could find some used copies, to get an idea of how much I should sell it for. Your site was about the fifth one down.
I was shocked that there existed a place on the internet that was devoted to this game and that your site had been updated within the last ten years. What really surprised me was that you found this game as intriguing as I did. I rented it back when it came out, when I was thirteen, and about three years ago bought a used copy while walking through a mom-and-pop game store. I replayed the game and found that it held up better than I thought. After finishing it I discovered that the story and the writing really held up, keeping me engrossed til the end and oftentimes making me laugh out loud. In fact, my old roommate watched me play the whole game and commented that it was one of the best games he'd ever read (laughs).
To this day there isn't really a game like Shadow Madness. The graphics weren't particularly good, though pre-rendered 2D backgrounds help keep the game looking decent after all these years. What really helps keep the game semi-current is the music (orchestral and dark) and the story (surprisingly deep and well written with excellent dialogue) . I saw in your 2009 update that you said "you'd be scared to play it again because you fear it hasn't aged well." Whether the game has or hasn't aged well really depends on you. Let me say that if you overlook the gameplay and focus purely on the story - pretend the game is more of an interactive novel that requires occasional button mashing - you'll find it enjoyable. I know that sounds weird, it is a game after all, but the story, writing and music were Shadow Madness's strongest parts since it came out ten years ago.
I feel privileged that there is somebody else who shares my appreciation for Shadow Madness. We are probably the only two people on the planet who are still talking about this game. If you're still looking to get into it again, trust me - set the difficulty to easy, blast through the battles and focus on the story, dialogue, music and enviornments. I am confident you'll get something positive out of it after all these years. Also - find a FAQ on the internet to help you with those maze parts...beating them quickly helps you get back to the story faster.
Thanks for the memories.
- Paul
If my middle school History teacher got internet famous for writing a Final Fantasy VII rap album I wouldn't waste all my time trying to make something of myself I'd just retire then and there. Checkmate life.
This album is amazing because it takes the movie-credits-rap genre and applies it to a 70-hour game, resulting in an album-length, hyphen-inspiring nostalgia bomb. So I thought I'd put it on tumblr. So...here it is. CASUAL FRIDAY!~
This post originally appeared in the VGX blogger July 17th, 2012.
CAPCOM sent me a review copy of GHOSTS 'N' GOBLINS in 1986, when I was about a year old. I'm a stickler for Videogames Journalism Ethics, so I decided not to run a full review until 1) I had learned to read, 2) blogging had been invented and 3) I had completely finished the game. Amazingly, all three of those criteria were met last month when I completed both playthroughs required to achieve the "real" ending to the game. The gulf between that time and the publication of this review can be attributed to slackerism.
I've been playing GHOSTS 'N' GOBLINS ever since I was able to sneak into my sister's room when she wasn't home and operate the NES on my own. It's probably a testament to CAPCOM's amazing arcade sense that I never felt the need to quit forever after dying countless times on the first level for most of my life. I was twenty-two years old the first time I beat the first level. It was one of those moments that just felt like magic. I wracked my brain for half an hour trying to come up with the name of someone that I knew who could possibly care about this achievement, so that I might tell them about it. Sadly, this mental exercise proved fruitless.
It's not that I'm bad at games, necessarily, but I've never really been drawn to challenge. In video games, or in life. I play RPGs that don't require much of me, Adventure games that I already know I'll be good at, and an endless line of AAA titles that have smoothed out the learning curve so well that there's really no hope of frustration. I've kind of been floating around for the last few years, afraid to really pick up anything if it's outside of my immediate comfort zone. Since I moved to Charlotte a year ago, I've been applying to crappy little jobs because I'm afraid of failing if I try anything really difficult.
I'm twenty-seven years old now and, spurred on by a smattering of recent professional failures, I decided to sit down and actually complete GHOSTS 'N' GOBLINS for the first time in my life, hopefully to simulate the feeling of actually being good at something in this dark, indifferent world.
The first thing you'll notice about GHOSTS 'N' GOBLINS is its delightfully retro 8-bit pixel art style. That seems to be the trend these days in the Indie Games Scene (of which, as a Games Journalist, I am an intrinsic part). This game has hipster cred up the wazoo, in fact. It's a sidescoller where you fight zombies. You play as a white guy with a beard and ironic heart-pattern boxers who must go out and gentrify the land of the dead to find your girlfriend with spears, knives, and fireballs (it kind of breaks down by the end there).
I will never forget the first time I watched the opening cinematic to this game over two decades ago. Arthur and his as-far-as-I-know unnamed girlfriend are having a picnic in a cemetery because they're a bunch of godless liberals with no reverence for the sanctity of life.
So, when an evil flying demon straight out of my tiny child nightmares swoops down and steals his lady friend, I'm thinking to myself, "justice has been served!" Also: "Am I too old to be shitting my pants in terror right now?" At the age of four, this is what I was lead to believe would happen if you were to spend significant time with the dead at night time with an evil castle in the background. I watched this segment countless times in my life, and it's done me no small amount of psychological damage. I could talk about it for days. But no, there's a whole game after that point.
Which is fine. I will love this game forever for one reason and one reason only:
This is one of the top five compositions in the history of music (among such giants as Mozart and the Bubble Bobble theme). I recommend you listen to it for about five hours at a time like I do. It creates a feeling that simulates the true madness that must have been required to compose it in the first place.
The Controls
If there is one aspect of the game that people have a right to complain about, it's everything about what the controller buttons do when you press them. There are two types of jumping: jumping straight up in the air, and jumping slightly to the left or right. Other sidescrolling games of this time period will generally give you a wider range of movement options, such as a running jump, variable-height jump, or after-jump controlling. These little touches can do a lot to give the player a sense of control, in that they allow the player to have the on-screen character move to the place that they need to be in, rather than a totally fixed place on either side.
This is actually not that big of a deal in the first level, which is probably why I didn't notice it for about twenty years.
As you can see, Level One is mostly just a flat surface with a couple dual-level ladder sections where you can choose to go to a higher level for a minute, having zero effect on the actual gameplay except for one or two enemy placements. I think there's one tricky jump, but it's onto a static platform and it's no big deal.
Uh, but then shit like this happens. Imagine being twenty-two and realizing for the first time that your favorite impossible game has shitty jumping mechanics and a LOT of mind-numbing moving platform sections that require precise timing and placement or you get sent back to like five minutes ago. It was kind of heartbreaking. Level after level, I was struck dumb by the sheer gall CAPCOM displayed creating more and more situations where Arthur had to do any jumping, at all, ever.With jumping that terrible, you'd think they'd want to hide it. But no. It's there, prettymuch on every level.
The Levels
There are levels in this game. It's not just that first level. I was as surprised as you.
And, it turns out, these levels correspond to that pre-gameplay screen that shows up every time you die! Every number represents a boss character that you have to fight.
I know I keep harping on this, but there really are different levels to this game. And this is proof!
Bosses
So, some of the bosses are annoyingly easy.
Sometimes they just give you two of the same boss. I didn't get a screenshot of that but it was basically the same as above except there were two of them. Uhm, actually this is super easy with Photoshop
DONE.
Some of the bosses are nightmares of twitch timing with very little strategy involved, but who nevertheless take about half a million tries to defeat because I am a terrible human being and I hate myself why am I playing this game? Why? WHY???
And at the end of the game, you have to fight all the bosses again.
Oh, I forgot to mention, there's a point in the game where I get to fulfill a childhood dream:
I get to kill this son of a bitch.
Twice.
And, I know what you're thinking: "Not with that Axe, you're not!" And you'd be right. It turns out that, just before your final conflict with Satan (this is apparently CAPCOM's name for this flying demon, which for some reason makes me feel better, and not worse), the game non-randomly drops an Axe in your path, which you may then pick up. That's cool and all, except for the fact that THE AXE DOES NO DAMAGE AGAINST THE SATAN DEMON. THERE IS NO WAY TO LEARN THIS IN THE GAME EXCEPT TO FIGHT SATAN OVER AND OVER FOR A HALF HOUR UNTIL YOU THINK TO JUMP OVER THE AXE THAT WAS PUT RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. There isn't really any place to learn that different weapons do damage to different enemies with differing values, because it hasn't been an issue up to this point. Apparently you're supposed to fight the dragon with the lance, and fight the Satan with the "shield," and just jump over the axe entirely. And, if you accidentally collide into this non-random item pickup that is placed right where you need to walk in order to beat the game, you have to do a huge, difficult level all over again from the beginning.
Wow.
So, eventually I did it. And I find out that the Satan Brothers are not actually the final bosses of the game, but merely a prelude to...
My battle with Astaroth, the crown prince of Hell, was short and sweet. It's the only point in the game that allows you to walk back and forth while facing the same direction. So, basically, you can spam the shield attack like crazy, dodging his own attacks pretty easily, until he dies almost immediately. I should probably feel less empty after killing this beast, but something's missing. Uhh, it's the Princess.
When I kill Astaroth, the screen goes black and I get this text:
Not only did no one read that before it was put in a game cartridge and duplicated half a million times, but I don't think anyone wrote it.
Oh, and then it kicks me back to the beginning of the game. Yeah, to get the "good" ending, you have to beat the game a second, slightly harder time.
So, I did that.
I had to.
There was something I needed from this game that that horrible line of partially translated text on a black background could not give me. I wouldn't call it pride, but there was something.
I'm not going to bore you with the details. I'm going to show you the ending so you don't have to play it. That's where I am in my life right now. I don't have any witty quips or whatever. There is no joy in this. I'm just done with this shit. I can move on and do something else. Focus on something else. That's all I care about right now. I spent my whole life playing this game and this is the ending. That's the joke. That's funnier than anything else I could possibly say.
But then, the final screen hit me in a way that I didn't predict.
The game nightmarishly boots you back to the first level at the original difficulty. You know, in case you want to chill out for a while. But that unintelligible gibberish message kept repeating in my head.
Challenge Again? Maybe that's exactly what I need.
GAME TALK: THIS BLOG IS NOW ONLY ABOUT MARIO AND DEPRESSION
About ten minutes ago, I came up with the title above, and ran over to Google to Image Search some Deviantart representations of depressed Mario. Unbeknownst to me, this pairing of topics has been thoroughly explored by the internet. Why did I think that might not be the case? This is a Mickey Mouse-level marketing entity that's based on self-medication in a fantasy world where you're saving princesses and jumping on turtles, and so much of the fanbase is 35 year old gross balding bitter feckless--
What ground am I breaking by connecting these dots? None. Nothing. I've spent the last half-hour at this point looking at lovingly-created depictions of doughy Italian men in the loneliest, darkest moments of their lives, living out all manners of horror and depravity, and I'm still happier than if I had spent the same amount of time reading about Microsoft's E3 press conference.
I'm beyond glad that we're being treated to more footage of Sunset Overdrive gameplay, but what good does that do a worthless dirtbag with no hope of ever affording a piece of computer equipment ever again for the rest of
HEY GUYS! I just drank some really strong COFFEE! Let's look at some funny depressing Mario pictures!
The world of Mario and Sonic fanart is so thoroughly mined by so many great minds. I'll never write a blog post as meaningful or informative as some of the ones I've seen on the subject. Who could ever love such a monster? How do I show my face in public, knowing how little I have to say about the world of Tumblr and Deviantart? What am I supposed to do? How do I proceed?
I've been playing a little Uncharted recently, on the PS3. That game is kind of cool. I like the idea of a game that's like "What if there was a DUDE Lara Croft?" I'm so down with bold new ideas like that. I'm so down with life. Down with life.
I can't believe they delayed the cancellation of The Last Guardian AGAIN. What do you think is up with that? I certainly don't know.
I really think it's just that Mario has a funny face and it's funny to see him sad. I know what that's like. Let's talk more about this later.
theartofmadeline
