My Generation Memories: My Kingdom For A Temjin

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRGH!

…alright, alright, let me back up a bit. That's probably not the best way to start a memoir. It does, however, set the mood pretty well as to what kind of frustration I'm about to relate to you. I will assume that as the Internet and gamer generations are mostly the same group of people, you the readers all have some sort of hidden, unloved gem in your collection or that you remember playing at some point. Hell, this isn't just a gamer thing: if you're passionate about anything and surround yourself with a lot of it, from books to music to movies, you've probably got memories of an obscure, great title or single. You all know the one: the amazing title that should've gotten a sequel but never did, the song the band played but never changed their style to really capture, the comic book that the author's generation tried but failed to imitate. Then you know what it's like when you look for it, can't find it, and then look for something to capture that same magic. If you're lucky, you rediscover it or find a spiritual successor that gives you that same magic.

I was unfortunate enough to fall in love with a particularly obscure mistress: the Virtual-On series. This was created by a bunch of Sega's arcade wizards known as Sega AM3. The original game debuted on the arcade and enjoyed a run on the Sega Saturn disc system.

It's a giant robot combat game memorable for its unique twin-stick controller, and had more star power behind it than the AM3 group. The man behind the design of many a Gundam, Katoki Hajime, had a hand in designing many of the robots, known as Virtuaroids, including our Gundam for the evening, Temjin. The twin-stick controller had easy-to-grasp, but hard-to-master controls, and the fights were (at least in the first two of four installments) fast, sharp, cerebral shootouts that were exactly the sort of thing one would expect of a giant robot game meant to emulate the high-speed battles that Mobile Suit Gundam made famous. Before it became a sort of cult title, it became a phenomenon, but the costs of special arcade cabinets, the unique twin-stick controllers, the mediocre Virtual-On Force arcade-only tite and the frankly embarrassing PS2 title Virtual-On Marz wrecked its hopes for future games, with Marz signaling the last VO game that would probably ever be made outside of the rerelease of the original in a Sega Ages collection and the rerelease of the superb Virtual-On Oratorio Tangram for download on the Xbox 360, which was originally an arcade and Dreamcast title. I know all this, but I only ever played Marz in a game store as my only real contact with a game series I was too far young to understand when it was in its prime,  never mind the fact that I had a Dreamcast at the time and missed out on Marz otherwise since I didn't have a PS2.

So without my muse, as it were, I started searching for gameplay videos on YouTube to see how the pros would've played it back in the day. I was hypnotized by just what it was I really was missing. It haunted me, consumed me. And after a while it just wasn't enough.

So began my search for a Virtual-On clone, as at the time I had a computer that would've curled up and died if I tried to emulate anything more complex than an SNES game. Now, here's where this memoir turns from dramatic to pretty funny, because this would've been two My Generation reviews if I didn't decide to tell this tale of my epic chase for the ideal of perfection…or at least a good 3D anime-style robot arena game.

Okay, first off, a briefing for the uninitiated: Virtual-On is a 3D mecha fighting game, like I said. You typically use a twin-stick controller to control a Virtuaroid of your choosing and blast your opponent to Char Aznable's doorstep and back. Each stick has a top button, known as the turbo button, and a trigger. The turbo buttons are used for dashing when moving, and either trigger controls a weapon each: left trigger is the left weapon, right trigger is the right weapon, and pulling both at once gives you a center weapon, which is often your heavy hitter. When you close into a certain range, all these weapons become your melee attacks, which are all really cool, over-the-top hand-to-hand techniques.

It gets more complex from here: attacks are context-sensitive depending on your movement or position rather than being flat weapons or requiring lengthy control or button inputs like most other fighting games. So if you were jumping, dashing, ducking, whatever, the same weapon will do different things. It was pretty intuitive: you wanted to keep moving, and you wanted to move properly so you could dodge and dive around your opponents while forcing them to stay on the defensive, taking damage while you pressured them to destruction. It was simple, intuitive, and distinctive: just one reason quite a few imitators sprouted up over the years.

With my PC not an option, I used my iPod Touch to fuel my hopes that I'd find a mecha game that Virtual-On could've passed the baton to. I've got two. Technically, I've got three, but that'd be stretching it a titch because one is a sequel to the other one…alright, what the heck, more the merrier. I've got a fourth one I could yak about, too.

Let's go chronologically, from the first one I downloaded to the last.

The first one I had is interestingly enough, the last one to come to memory when I wrote this. It was called Robofighters, so you couldn't blame it for getting right to the point,  and its icon was a picture of Not-A-Temjin in a goofy Kryptonite green for some really dumb reason, so they were promising mecha that looked like the robots from Virtual-On itself! This had to be a proper Virtual-On spiritual successor, right?

Yeah…well kind of…erm…no. Here, let me walk you through Robofighters.

Like the original Virtual-On, you have two anime-style robots in an arena shooting it out until one falls. Like its inspiration, movement is important, but this is where the similarities end. You can't jump, for one, and you can't dash. You also only get two weapons, and no melee attacks. Okay, fine, so it's greatly simplified. That's kind of excusable seeing that it's a game made for older iPod Touches and iPhones and such. What wasn't was the whole movement thing. I kid you not, here's how it worked: first of all, you moved everywhere by tilting the iPod. This is great for a driving or flight sim game, but for this, using it in lieu of a virtual stick was a really stupid idea. It was like we weren't so much piloting as feeding our robots suggestions while they're busy texting or posting on Virtuaroid Twitter about what Fei-Yen's wearing this week or whatever giant robots do when they're not listening to what you tell them to avoid being blown up. Using tilt controls with no visual analogue to suggest you're tilting far enough in one direction or another meant clumsily barreling around at full speed, whacking into every bit of cover jutting out of the ground in every arena. Dodgy controls were nothing compared to the real limitation Robofighters set on your movement-not the whole jumping thing, but this bizarre rule: you have a movement gauge. This bizarre thing depleted whenever you ran anywhere, which you always did since you couldn't control your speed without a lever, a carpenter's level and a few protractors, and if you ran out, you crawled like a snail. The only way to recharge this was to stand still-yes, in the middle of a gunfight! You'd better have hoped the AI was feeling merciful, because if you blew your movement, you weren't just punished like getting tagged with a shot when you mess up a dash in Virtual-On, we were blasted to pieces. Yes, the video game based entirely on strategic movement and positioning was now based on not moving because if you moved too much, you bogged down. It's Virtual-On, except every ten seconds, adorable little Fei-Yen sinks into the floor as the arena she's been dashing around on suddenly turns into quicksand.
Argh.

Right then. So Robofighters clearly isn't the spiritual successor to Virtual-On. Onward and upward, to the game that had the most ingredients to remind me why I so fell in love with the distant, badass Virtual-On: the creatively-named Mech Gladiator. This free download could've been the thing I was looking for…erm, never mind the fact that these mechs were blocky and headless, the screenshots looked promising! And it was free, so it was gonna be guilt-free!

On the face of it, I picked a winner: you had two robots dashing around in and out of cover blasting one another with four attacks each, all of which could be used to keep your opponent constantly on the defensive. Just like Virtual-On, then. You had far more than four basic attacks to work with even in the original Virtual-On game, which were more like three attack types that had numerous attacks each, but a free clone's a free clone, yeah?

…actually, for a free game this was a pleasant surprise. You had every tool you could need to defeat your opponent at your disposal: a dash, a jump, cover to hide behind, and four attacks: a gun, a melee attack, a dashing anti-air attack and an aerial ground attack. If you string together jumps, melee dashes, and air and ground shots together, you can actually do what you do in a typical VO game, although definitely with none of the grace or variation of Virtual-On. You had three head-to-head single-player matches before fighting a boss enemy. This boss was even kind of Virtual-On-ish, as it was an octahedral wireframe thing with a glowy red orb inside of it in space surrounded by bits that would shoot at you and…sort of orbit it? It was also paradoxically smaller than your mech as it lacked arms, legs, a gun, or any of that nice stuff, and it had none of the wow factor of everything from Z-Gradt to Jaguaranadi to…a Guarayakha or…uhh…a bag of Doritos, really. And when you killed it, it made popping noises which sounded more like I was being given sarcastic applause for my victory, then it exploded into fireworks. Uhhh…alright, whatever, fine. It was a boss and that's all I could've asked for. Free game! I was desperate!

…really, really, REALLY desperate.

How desperate? I was ready to overlook some really big problems with a free game…or the problems with this game aiming to be Virtual-On in any regard and missing. You didn't choose a robot so much as you customized one, which wouldn't be so bad if the Not-Virtuaroid you customized was more like the robots in the title it was attempting to emulate: slender, nicely-proportioned Gundam-esque fighters rather than one of three near-identical stump-legged, headless things that lacked the grace, distinctiveness, wow factor or…hell with it, this isn't even near being a bad Virtuaroid kitbash. Imagine an Oratorio Tangram version wherein the only playable VR is a malnourished Dordray built with no reference to the instructions, which were printed in Klingon and were actually the assembly guide for some IKEA furniture.

Alright! Fine, fine, fine. Let's talk about the gameplay. You didn't have distinctive robots but you could at least customize the one you had: you could change what it was colored, so I guess it had something in common with Oratorio Tangram, and to arm it you had choices of three guns, which only differed in terms of fire rate and individual bullet firepower, two possible dash attacks which weirdly had you choosing between a brace of homing missiles or Raiden's sliding-frisbee ground bomb thing which is ostensibly meant to be an anti-air weapon despite the ground bomb being the last thing you would expect as an anti-air weapon. What, does it detonate and your target just kind of agrees to fall over and get hurt because it's sporting? Meanwhile, your aerial attack was either a shotgun-like airborne blast which was kind of difficult to connect with, and a much easier-to-connect-with exploding single projectile (which didn't really help much because you couldn't control your ascent or descent in midair which meant it wasn't a very good tactic), and a melee attack that amounted to you dashing forward,  then hitting the attack button to stick your hand forward and punch your enemy. Oh, yeah, and it's impossible to connect with in anything that would resemble a melee fight, so your only choice is to chase down your opponent and punch them in the ass with an attack that doesn't do more damage than any of the far more reliable projectiles you could be tagging someone with. Then there was the music: there were only two tracks you heard during battle: one for normal battles and the other for the boss battle. Both of them were tinny and really cheap-sounding, and when it came to combat, let's hope you like floating concrete tile floors in the middle of nowhere that have random columns sticking out of them with no elevation changes and no option to land on the columns for high or low ground, because that's all the arena choices you get! Oh, sorry, no, I can't tell if you can choose stages in single battles because you don't get any single one-player battles! And guess what-nobody plays this multiplayer! How embarrassing could it be to pull this out and have to explain this, Virtual-On, and its whole story to someone else in the vague hopes that they will play this bizarre little game with you?!

Then there's the single-player combat: the AI was only really a challenge that paced the game fast enough to be kind of like Virtual-On on hard mode, which is one of a grand total of two single-player modes in the whole damn game, and neither it nor you didn't really have all the tools to make fights fun or memorable for more than several minutes. Without making too big a deal of "it's not Virtual-On I want Virtual-On waaaaah," it's an okay game which is burdened by having all the style and flair of mayonnaise on untoasted white bread and all the longevity of a really good fart, and it's about as pleasing to listen to and has roughly the same amount of replay value.
…argh.

That was more than a year ago. Since then, Oratorio Tangram has been going strong on the Xbox 360, which is a console I still don't own, and I thought I'd dropped the search for a good Virtual-On clone. But like an itch that just won't go away, my love of mecha called me back to my quest and I happily took it up anew. My hunting grounds were, as ever, the App store, and to my surprise I found that the studio/guy who made Mech Gladiator, the "Act1 Corporation," made a sequel: Mech Gladiator II. You could imagine my surprise, and probably a little of my joy.

"Ah-HA," I thought. "A sequel! The devs must've listened to what few downloaders and reviews they got for a free app and made a brand-new Not-Virtual-On game! And look how many weapons and single-player challenges they're counting! And everything's shiny now! This is gonna be the Oratorio Tangram of the series!" I downloaded it, partly because I found Mech Gladiator so…adequate.

But mostly because I'm an idiot.

I really should've known better than to trust the App Store description. Every developer's trying to sell their product on the App Store, and with, as far as I know, a no-refunds policy, that means getting a sale doesn't require anything like honesty or talent. Just ask shovelware hawker Good New Games. I'm not making this up: Mech Gladiator II fell from the Sequelitis tree and hit every branch on the way down with its one, and so far, only pay-to-download title. It only took me a few hours out of a couple days to come to my current conclusion with a mountain of proof to support me.

First, I could certainly say that MGII added to the original Mech Gladiator, but it added things in all the wrong areas. It updated things the game never needed, like adding shiny reflective surfaces, dynamic lighting, and particle effects that replaced all attacks. Yeah, that's cute and all, but how does this make the game any better than the original title? Did Virtual-On ever need enough particle effects to sink a cruiser? Would a mech fighting game really be enhanced by using ragdoll physics for the knockdown animations? Is that something I'm missing? Does ragdoll physics in any fighting game that doesn't have "Fight Night" in the title somewhere really mean the difference between three stars and four stars?

Then there's what the game removes, like all the music. Yes, the music was dorky, but Virtual-On's music was kinda cheesy too. And sure, Virtual-On's music  was actually melodic and endearing, but come on, a little music is better than no music! The single-player challenges are no better, either, just being 15 sets of three matches each, five of which are against one opponent, five of which are against two and the final five being against three. So now, in all honesty, it's imitating Force and Marz-widely regarded as the weakest entries in the four-game Virtual-On series! It's even committing the same mistake Force and Marz did of slowing everything down and dumbing down weapons, while your opposition has now become slow and stupid enough to, I don't know, pause to make themselves sandwiches in between moves. The customization options also ensure that this game is further and further from Virtual-On and closer to Armored Core, which is a great title, but guess what-if I want to play Armored Core, I'm at least a PSN download away from playing me some actual, non-clone Armored Core!

The punchline is that really, there are only a few more guns than there were in the previous Mech Gladiator, most of which came from an update that thankfully wasn't DLC for sale, and all the touted 50 weapons were just upgrades to the same basic weapon types. The aerial attacks now required you to be annoyingly close to your opponent, at such a range where just dashing forward and socking them one would've really been more effective, and some of them aren't even complete: one gun shoots but has no visible projectiles! The bullets travel slowly, too, so it's not like you can dash out of a line of sight and get away. God forbid you face an opponent carrying one, which you'll never see in single-player since your opposition isn't coded to use these new update weapons, and I can never find someone playing this online to play against, so once again I'm pretty sure nobody plays this either! As a final insult, the robots still look blocky and ugly, and unless this thing updates itself into a far, far better game, I'm going to feel really ripped off.
ARGH.

So there went the most hopeful title out of them yet. I continued searching and actually googled the subject, realizing that most of these Virtual-On clones were either Japanese, bad, actually Armored Core clones, or all three. I hit a brick wall.

Or at least I believed I did. I heard about some Wiiware that hit the App Store recently: this game known as Overturn which was branded a Virtual-On clone by a few online forums. It looked promising, and besides, it was Wiiware! That meant it would've had some credit behind it: after all, it means Nintendo would've looked at it, seen it was up to their standards, and then greenlit it! The App Store version would've been much cheaper than the original, too! How could I pass this up?

I wish I knew how before I downloaded it, that's for sure.

Here's a Virtual-On clone that was ostensibly Japanese, actually an Armored Core clone, and BAD. Imagine an Armored Core version wherein your only leg choice is the hover legs, which means you control at all times like you're on ice wearing bowling shoes, and that lacked the automatic targeting feature of either Virtual-On OR Armored Core, which meant you and your opponent were desperately skidding around trying to swivel to aim at one another. This would've been alright on a Wiimote, but it really failed on an iPod when far smoother control setups already existed…for FPSes, mind you, but a control system's a control system, whatever. Let's be optimistic here. Like, Spongebob Squarepants-level optimistic. How are the weapons? Uh, they're Armored Core weapons. Add to that a really useless version of AC's energy  mechanic, which had you spinning helplessly in midair playing a puzzle minigame to fix yourself while your opponent took potshots at you, confusing, crowded controls, and lag that probably would only be remedied on a latest-gen iPhone or iPad and you have a game that is so far from Virtual-On that I don't even know why I'm talking about it here, in my search for a Virtual-On clone!
ARGH!

…that's my quest so far, and my, was it a glorious train wreck. A lesser fan would've thrown in the towel, and a richer and far less idiotic fan would've just gotten an Xbox 360 already, but not me. There's only ever been one game series in the end that did what Virtual-On does, and that's Virtual-On itself. You'd think it'd be easy to make a clone or homage or something but I suppose some things are easier said than done.

Until then I can only look at replays, look for more Virtual-On copies and hope. And go "ARGH" a lot. For the one that got away, the hidden gem, the Dulcinea of my gaming life, I'm prepared to tilt at windmill after windmill until I get my satisfaction.

…whiiich, given all the Gundam-esque stuff going on in Virtual-On, may turn out to be Neo-Holland's Nether Gundam.

It's just about embarrassing enough to fit right in.