One of the games I’d been strangely interested in is The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy. I had heard it looked like it was a cartoon side-scrolling cooperative brawler, which was some of the most exciting gaming news I’d heard lately. Unfortunately, Gamespot says in their preview it’s more like Power Stone, which from what little I saw of that series is more of a fighting game like Super Smash Bros. That’s a little disappointing, because I think the market (at least the boutique market of the demographics I’m in) is ripe for a new one.
There’s a long history of brawlers, back (in my mind) to River City Ransom on the NES. I found a few others in my gamestream, such as Double Dragon II and my favorite arcade games of all time, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Simpsons brawlers. While the genre isn’t outright forgotten, to ask the question “Why do today’s brawlers suck?” With every other game and genre being “revisited” with new games and sequels, why don’t these classics get the adaptations they deserve?
Perhaps that’s why everyone I asked was so excited about Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006. A short animated film honoring the classic brawler with a knowledgeable parody, it was the greatest thing EVAR when it came across IRC or the Channel Frederator feed. Pirate Baby flaunts the recommendations in GameDaily’s article—the action is definitely adult and soaked in pop culture references—but this is exactly the game that the maturing audience who loved the games I named above would love to play. (If this logic doesn’t show I should never be a game producer, I don’t know what would.)
In my perfect world, we’d be getting Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2007 for the DS. Add a tap-to-attack interface to the same dark pop humor, stark black-and-white design, and action from gushing to creepy, and the game would sell itself to all the latte-swilling web 2.0 hipsters who both loved the short film so much and play the DS. Cornel Wilczek’s original soundtrack could be supplemented by Joel Petersen of The Faint and Broken Spindles. It would undoubtedly be the second Mature game for the system, and what a glorious game it could be.
Pirate Baby gets another part exactly right: multiplayer. Part of the draw of the brawler is the cooperative nature. Unlike fighting and wrestling games that pit players against each other, brawlers tend to put multiple players together beating down an endless stream of baddies together. But even ignoring brawlers, where are the cooperative games? Steve Eley of short science fiction podcast Escape Pod asked listeners for cooperative game recommendations, because he and his wife couldn’t find enough games to play. While Steve prescribes cooperative gaming for couples (not to whom I’d recommend a Pirate Baby game), I tend to have the problem that I’m much worse than my multiplayer partners at pretty much every game there is. Competitive games give me a chance on occasion to not have my face ground into the mud for solid minutes on end.
Eley mentions they were still playing Guild Wars, which hints that perhaps some of the cooperative play has moved into the broader social landscape of massively multiplayer games. I have to admit I’ve never really played any MMOs for myself, but from what I’ve seen and read, games like World of Warcraft can offer a certain experience different from the classic coop game. It seems hard to organize actual friends for massive activities, and more likely you’d pick up a quest with whomever in your guild is available at the moment. That the games are RPGs also makes the games much more involved. It’s much more work to keep your level up with your co-questors, making the involvement required for WoW very different than for twenty minutes of kicking generic computer-generated ass with a friend.
So while I dream about Pirate Baby 2007, more than six and a half million people currently subscribe to World of Warcraft. Perhaps I’ll just give River City Ransom for the GBA a go until the side-scrolling cooperative brawler wakes up.
I'm going to start viewing this blog daily. It seems very informative. Keep it up. :)
Posted by: Evan | 25 July 2006 at 03:50 PM