If you've purchased a digital edition of SCROLL through MagCloud (as opposed to the direct links I use on this site), you have a slightly greater incentive to use their iPad app, which was given a facelift this week.

If you're not familiar with the MagCloud app, it's an easy way to browse and download any of its magazines with digital versions, but only the free ones. In SCROLL's case, that's just issue 02. Despite being totally updated for the first time in almost two years, the app has yet to let you buy -- much less show -- the paid magazines in it.

However, the aforementioned incentive comes in the one all-new thing they did add: accessing all your paid downloads. So, while you can't buy a magazine in the app, you can buy a digital edition on the MagCloud site, sign in to your account on the app, and download any and every magazine you've purchased. 

That's nice, but it's still lacking for an app that hasn't been refreshed in almost two years, and is kind of a letdown for people like me who still can't quite handle paying at least $100 a month just to get an iPad app the easy way.

...But they're still great for getting SCROLL in print!

Recently, the most SCROLL-ish article I've written yet didn't put in SCROLL was published today at 1UP: The Hysterical History of Portable Consoles (I do take full responsibility for the awful title), which is, as it says, a history of all the different attempts to shrink game systems into utlimately expensive portable units, and revists such "gems" as the Top Guy (which I had almost forgotten about!), the TurboExpress, the Nomad, and all the other failures in between. Not to mention the recent wave of retro handhelds like the SupaBoy, which I doubt are demonstrably better than the old '90s attempts, but they're all goofy regardless.

In the past week or so I've been playing Ridge Racer Unbounded, a game I've been interested in for the better part of the year, and not always in a direct manner. When it was first revealed, It was shockingly amusing to see almost no one share my measured interest, and instead spew a lot of angry kneejerk responses -- mainly just repeating "fuck Namco" -- as if the company had made some bold proclamation that they wouldn't make any more Ridge Racer games except this one. I wrote about this episode in SCROLL 02's end-of-issue editorial to frame a larger point about pre-entitled people getting their panties in a twist over a game they just found out about and won't get to play for at least a year. But now it's almost a year later, Unbounded is finally out, and the reviews from critics and impressions from folks online are largely positive, or at best, not very mean.

I'll admit that the initial anger towards Unbounded was, to a degree, understandable. Word of it came just a little while after Capcom announced their Devil May Cry reboot, which went with a different kind of hero and a general tonal shift that didn't meet anyone's expectation. The pervading view was (and, er, still is) that Japanese giants are scrambling to keep up with the West by tossing their beloved franchises to Americans and Europeans who hang a little too long onto the word "reimagining." And so the collective gamer mood swings continue every quarter, all based on childish fears that someone new will come into their club and squeeze them out. Yet for every blatant molestation of a dormant series, there's a perfectly respectful treatment that everyone can agree on (unless they're insane).

For me, Unbounded sits somewhere in between. Besides some music tracks borrowed from older Ridge Racer games, Unbounded is not a Ridge Racer game in the least. But to an understanding guy like me, it's still kind of uncomfortable. The graphics are bleak, the cars are generic, the shoehorned "story" is never heard of past the intro movie, and the physics feel too realistic, focused on a drift button that immediately gets you swingin' along the road. Even if you nail that, the game's challenges are needlessly difficult from the get-go, almost devoid of the curve Ridge Racer games usually have, with cutthroat AI opponents that can toss you off the track even before lap one gets started. A course editor is a welcome addition, but when the developer-made courses are obviously cut from the same cloth, with the same road shapes dressed with the same patterns of buildings, the main campaign loses a bit of its appeal. Compared to its immediate competition -- Burnout, Split/Second -- it's just average. So why worry?

But is it actually fair to compare Unbounded to the rest of Ridge Racer? Given that it's obviously supposed to be something else, does that mean it automatically fails at being the original something just because it has its name on it? I don't think so.

Slow and steady...

Ridge Racer fans get a lot of guff, usually indirectly, in reviews of recent sequels that call the games samey, too traditional, and other well-worn platitudes. And like other "threatened" fans of things, they have a standard set of defenses, and one of the main ones is the claim that RR games are just simple and proud arcade racers like always, and that the games themselves have always been just fine. I agree with that, but that's because I love arcade racers, so of course I'm going to recognize and deal with sameyness, because I still want the fun that I know I can rely on.

But I'm also starkly aware that Ridge Racer games have not been putting butts in seats. Since the PlayStation 2, they've only come once a generation, right at the beginning, and then never on the same system again (except Ridge Racers 2 on PSP). At the PS2 launch in Japan, Ridge Racer V was pretty much the best game you could get (and Tekken Tag), because the rest of the lineup was unanimously decided to be crap. With the Western PS2 launch, that wasn't so much the case, because then you had SSX, Madden, and several more worth caring about. It was even less the case when the PSP arrived: most people talked up Lumines, Wipeout and Metal Gear Acid. And now even less so with the PS Vita, where people are drawn in by Uncharted, Wipeout (again), Lumines (again), Rayman, Marvel, and the 20-or-so other launch games. And it's extra precarious, too, because the newest Ridge Racer has been widely panned for having no real single-player modes, not running at 60 fps, and relying on paid add-ons to pad out what's otherwise a husk of a game. That may be expected and even work with Ridge Racer Accelerated on iOS, but could Namco not foresee RR Vita averaging two out of five stars on the PlayStation Store user ratings?

Nevertheless, when "fans" voice their opinion about Unbounded -- and I put that word in quotes only because I can't prove how exactly loyal everyone's been to the series over the years -- the underlying question is, why put the words "Ridge Racer" on it in the first place? The answer doesn't really require a communications degree. Ridge Racer, despite a glacial slide into irrelevancy, is still a brand a lot of gamers recognize. If you like racing games and were big into the PS1, this is a given, and you don't need to play any new ones to remember the name. This is what Namco banks on, and they still make Ridge Racer games, so it makes business sense.

And if they wanted to sign on Bugbear to make a racing game, what reasonable choice did they have but to include the brand of their only active racing franchise? Frankly, this isn't 2004, when everybody was trying to make their own Gran Turismo. Capcom and Konami had theirs, but Namco had the most, and kept throwing in racing games with wild abandon. Ridge Racer! MotoGP! Alpine Racer! Street Racing Syndicate! Not to mention R: Racing Evolution, a sort-of-not-really Ridge Racer spin-off that tried to be more like a sim, but ended up so thorougly boring that it evolved itself into the bargain bin. And that was the one they really tried to push -- ports on every console, ads all over the place, and almost no payoff. 

Since then, the playing field has leveled out, and that's just made it even harder to get a foot in. Racing games, at least on this side of the world, are a two-course meal at this point: You play either Gran Turismo or Forza, and those wanting something less realistic are playing Need for Speed or more often than not, Real Racing HD. With an ever-dimming spotlight for racers that aren't simulations or at least have real cars in them, if you were a Namco executive, you'd probably start looking for workable options elsewhere, too.

Basically, Ridge Racer is the Dynasty Warriors of racing games. They're both around for system launches, their sequels rarely have any sweeping changes, and they both have a marginalized sect of loyal fans that grumble amongst themselves when a big website predictably gives new installments a bad review. And they're both still around, with no clear end in sight. I don't see Unbounded changing that whether it succeeds or fails, especially when Ridge Racer's lack of change has only made it more unique. The hyper-stylish cars plastered with names of Xevious enemies, the gorgeous track designs, and the insanely unrealistic drifting are what's remembered most, not another game where you break stuff. You should probably get used to paying $5 for new cars, though.

You might remember the beginning of Valiant Comics, when their first big titles were under the "Nintendo Comics System;" officially-licensed comic books featuring Super Mario, Captain N, The Legend of Zelda, and a few others. It was potentially a great opportunity to get original stories from games that deserved them, but the comics were essentially extensions of the TV cartoons -- obviously Captain N, but even Mario and Zelda took more elements from the shows than the games. That said, they were all better than you'd expect, with the Mario stories in particular being genuinely funny, sometimes even deadpan. Their four books continued apace for just one year, when Nintendo parted ways, and Valiant continued on with their original superhero titles. Meanwhile, Archie scored Sonic the Hedgehog, which is the longest-running video game comic in the Western world.

I bring this all up to frame a recent development in game comics that had me thinking of Valiant: ShiftyLook, a comics site/imprint/thingy owned by Namco Bandai, but with the comics themselves done by contributors from Udon and Cryptozoic Entertainment. ShiftyLook's current lineup re-imagines three old Namco games (and one new one) as twice-weekly webcomics. And these really aren't Namco games that the average comics reader or gamer would remember. You'd have to be some retro game nerd who makes his own magazine to recognize or give a damn about Xevious, Bravoman and Sky Kid comics in this day and age. Given that, I was interested in what ShiftyLook was doing, and started reading what they have so far and thought I'd share some impressions. (Note that I base all this on the first month of strips, so whatever I describe may change one way or the other as months go on. Maybe I'll revisit them here in the future.)

One of Cryptozoic's strips is Xevious, which is pretty much my favorite Namco franchise, so I was drawn to this comic first. The setup is familiar: aliens are attacking Earth, starting with Peru (so far the only reference to the Nazca Lines in the game), but everything else about the story seems to take a sharp left turn. The hero is Oscar, nickname "Mu," a young guy from Argentina who joined the national air force to fight the Xevious (why not "Xevians?" They're aliens from the planet Xevious!). And apparently the Argentinian air force are the ones who fly the Solvalou ships.

The first strip has a tongue-in-cheek air about it, or maybe that's just the utterly strange dialogue coming from Oscar. Regardless, that doesn't seem to be the actual intent once you keep reading. Oscar left his almost-fiance Eve to join the battle, but then discovers she joined up right after. How did he just now find out? Was she drafted really quickly? There isn't enough time and not enough panels to find out, because the next skirmishes are just around the corner. Despite some liberties in the characters and setting that make this comic look and sound like G.I. Joe plus emotions, it seems to be progressing towards something closer to the actual Xevious backstory, as Mu and Eve are both figures in the original "mythology" -- methinks I'm not the only one who's read the HG101 article.

Sky Kid is one of the Udon strips, and is ostensibly the most faithful to the game, with its world of anthropomorphic birds in endless dogfighting combat. Humorously, the comic is tonally similar to Xevious, opening with serious introspection and touching flashbacks, and me once again not knowing exactly if I should be taking this seriously or not. 

Bravoman might be the "webcomic-est" of the whole lineup: it's kiddish and features jokey two-character dialogues with distressing regularity. It sits in between Sky Kid and Xevious in terms of faithfulness: Bravoman and the Alpha Man and Dr. Bomb and most everyone else in the game are here, but it doesn't follow anything else about it. What started out normally is now mostly just character introductions to familiarize people with Bravoman again. The comic feels like it's just playing with a toy box of characters, and that's probably because the writer had never heard of Bravoman before. My question is, will Pistol Daimyo show up? How about the talking telephone box? I mean, really, you guys should've given me a call.

Alien Confidential is the other Cryptozoic strip, and is based on a Namco game that isn't even out yet -- an iOS game with a more serious look than the comics -- so I don't really have much to say about it. Essentially it's a slightly goofier version of Alien Nation with a little bit of Men in Black, told through flashbacks of a former alien-busting agent. It is the fastest-moving one of the lineup so far, though, with the flashbacks being mini-arcs of only a few parts each. They just don't seem to be tied together, though that could be the point.

Artistically, there's nothing wrong with these comics: they're done by professionals who clearly know a thing or two about ink 'n' color (iffy dialogue aside, I like Xevious and its slight watercolor look the best), and are written with relative creative freedom -- all good starting terms for a tie-in. Is that freedom bad, though? I'm not entirely sure yet. Valiant's Nintendo comics were based on the cartoons more than the games, and when they had to get creative, it mostly worked out. And years before that, game comics had to get extra, uh, interpretive because the games had practically nothing to work from (that link is Galaxian, by the way). If ShiftyLook's comics simply run long enough to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end, that's fine. Rather, I think the immediate issue I have is with the concept of serialized, serious, short-form comics. Soapy superhero arcs are bad enough in the trades, but to have them portioned out daily in syndication is maddening, because more often than not you have days where absolutely nothing happens, or a tiny something happens and ends with a pregnant pause, and you have to wait at least 24 hours for the next one (48, in this case). Furthermore, not everything has to be serialized: Bravoman looks like it's meant to be a regular gag-a-day strip, but then it keeps introducing characters. And introducing, and introducing... It doesn't have to be Garfield, but Garfield was ready to go by strip two.

Nevertheless, ShiftyLook stands out immediately because its comics are based on games that no one outside Japan would care about -- no better way to get attention from me, anyway -- and on the whole, that's kind of what's bad. While I can understand the creators wanting to introduce characters and slowly build up the story as weeks go on, they're still making comics about unappreciated games with stories where not enough happens on a regular basis. It's worth noting that the site launched alongside a few big Namco and Namco-related releases: Soul Calibur V, Tekken 3D, and Street Fighter X Tekken, any and all of which would have made perfectly fine serialized comics, and in Udon's case, would be right up their alley.

Plus, if the site doesn't have ads or any other way to make money, then just what are they trying to accomplish? This is Namco we're talking about here; a company routinely criticized by their "fans" for doing more harm than good by overdoing DLC and making questionable sequels and reboots. Where and how do free webcomics fit? Well, to paraphrase ShiftyLook pre-launch, they want to re-expose these franchises with the possibility to expand them into other media, be it animation or even new games. And as another promotional image read, "No character is too obscure. No franchise is too dead. No husk is too decrepit. They can all be revived. Your voice will be heard." OK, well, I challlenge them to make a Phozon comic.

Buy Now:
Print $11
PDF $5

Cover Story

The Japanese dating sim is one of the most characteristic and most ridiculed of the country's gaming world. The category eventually flatlined on the path of mediocrity for nearly 20 years until Konami gave it new life with the debut of Love Plus on DS, a game with communication features that brought as much controversy as they did innovation. But what was the dating sim like before that, and just what was Love Plus' impact? In this issue, we explore exactly that in three features that observe the Love Plus imprint on game culture, and give a guide to the latest installment, New Love Plus on 3DS. Elsewhere, we take a look inside "Genesis," a recent retro game bar in central Japan, with a four-page photo feature.

Also in This Issue

7th Dragon 2020
The Island of Lost Hardware
Fullscreen: Cool Boarders 

- - - - -

44 pgs.
Contributors: Alex Fraioli, Janine Dong 

Click for slightly larger sample