May 11–18, 2000

naked city

Arcadia

Maken me sleepy: Maken X should have less chatter and more blood splatter.

Ah, premises. They are double-edged swords indeed. On the good side, they let you know what’s going on and what you can look forward to. But they can also be unnecessarily complicated and verbose. In video games, as in newspaper articles, a lengthy opening exposition can set the tone for the entire experience. You sit there, controller in hand, wishing you could jump ahead to the part where you get to fight something, anything. Just like you’ve probably already skipped ahead in the article to the parts where we make jokes about sex, and quite possibly, turds.

Right after you turn on Time Stalkers (Sega, Sega Dreamcast, $49.99) you can take a nap, fix a sandwich or fold bath towels. Because the first 15 minutes or so include nothing more than a movie about the game’s irrelevant premise. No amount or sequence of button-pushing will let you jump through it.

The player-controlled portions of the game are beautiful and complex, a landscape of cleverly designed floating houses and fantastical structures. And the interior landscapes randomly generate, meaning you can’t coast through boards you’ve been through before. What a waste. All the 3-D flash and panning p.o.v.’s can’t make up for the meaningless, unsatisfying wandering Time Stalkers wishes to inflict on you. After a while it becomes obvious the game hates you. And you hate the game. Then the game hates you some more.

As the player, you take on the role of Sword, a pompous, pointy-eared guy whose primary weapon is, hmmm, a sword. Clues about the purpose and parameters of your various silly missions can be acquired through cumbersome, subtitled conversations with the diverse population of the patchwork town you live in. Among the characters present to bore and confuse you are face-painted native types, some guy seeking a special toothbrush and a woman who says she likes to dissect things. Probably, after whittling your life away playing this game, you find the toothbrush, or things for the lady to cut open. Most of the time you find yourself caught in planned battles with goblins and crap like that. At no point does anybody stalk time.

Overall, this game is a lot like that bimbo from high school. Time Stalkers is enthrallingly gorgeous, 8 of 10 on the prom queen prettiness scale, really. But when it comes right down to it, the play is unfulfilling and uninspired, a mere 2 wieners in a 10 hot dog hallway.

Time drain: In Time Stalkers, you don’t get points for wasting a lot of time, but you should.

But if you want to talk about flimsy premises, the foundation of Maken X (Sega, Sega Dreamcast, $49.99) is about as sturdy as a house of cards on an air hockey table. The game booklet’s intro is full of lots of New Agey mumbo jumbo about Psi (a sort of metaphor for a being’s soul), Chinese/ American socio-political hoo-hah and God stuff. But as far as we can tell, the sorta-interesting but similarly protracted intro — in which a Soviet-era zombie robot with an unhingeable jaw and dagger-shooting tongue bum-rushes the show at a research lab — has very little to do with the very run-of-the-mill slicey, dicey sword fighting that ensues.

The perspective is kind of interesting. Rather than seeing your character’s entire body, Maken X (pronounced Mockin Exx!) takes a more first-person approach. Just like in real life, all you can see are your hands as you battle with a rather large sword that has a little tiny Maken living in it. As far as we can tell, having a mini-me inside of your rod neither helps nor hurts you. Apparently if you’re really good you can get to a point in the game where you can perform a "brainjack," which allows your little Maken (or maybe it’s your Psi, who can tell?) to learn new stuff and allows you and your friends to ponder whose Maken es mas macho.

After playing this game for several hours, we’re still not sure what the hell a Maken is, so despite the featurette-length intro, this gets a 10 on the Rosetta Stone scale for absolute indecipherability. The action’s a bit faster-paced than Time Stalkers, but the fighting and graphics just aren’t spectacular enough to overcome the fact that there seems to be no real point at all to this game, which is always an important consideration.