The Mammon Philosophy

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I’m starting with the only development in No More Heroes that actually matters to the continuation of game design: Goichi Suda solves the problem of how best to control sword-swinging with the Wii remote by effectively saying, “screw it!” and assigning it to the A button. This leaves the player free to waggle for other activities, such as winning melees against enemies or back-flipping scorpions into a bucket, while simultaneously making elaborate attack combos seem more natural. I think there’s something of the uncanny valley in the level of near-reality the Wii achieves; if the hand motion is merely close instead of exact in its on-screen replication, the player feels ripped off and not in control. Whipping my arm around while Link went “hoo-hah-yah!” in Twilight Princess certainly made me feel like a twat, and trying to match the exacting demands of katana battling in Red Steel was simply frustrating, though perhaps not as much as the rest of the game. Likewise, the nunchuk is used to best effect as not only the placeholder for a joystick and some extra buttons, but also as the player’s left hand, particularly noticeable when using wrestling moves — and without the “forward shove” motion that so rarely seems to work properly in other games.

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Last night, we were up late with a fridge full of various beers, and the host gave us a stern talking-to about throwing away our bottlecaps. “Last time we did this, I was all over the house looking for those things.” Kind of like hunting for hidden packages in GTA, I thought, and not exactly like hunting for the Lovikov balls — items in No More Heroes that you can give to a drunk Russian in exchange for new skills — which produce an ethereal hum whenever one is nearby, making them much easier to locate. This led to a spirited discussion of implanting microchips into bottlecaps, the sort that play “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” when your grandfather opens his overpriced birthday card.

There are a few other variations on the scavenger-hunt theme in NMH: a vibrating accessory for your beam katana that helps you find buried treasure, and a part-time job as a minesweeper. The problem is, while the balls are above-ground and the music plays from any direction, the underground stuff seems to lead you on unless you’re practically on top of it, and even when looking for things is made easier, it’s still just looking for things. When did running all over San Andreas looking for two hundred different hidden secrets become an acceptable substitute for actual gameplay? Who are these people on GameFAQs who spend all their time finding the secret items so that they can list them for everyone else? I’m all for extras and bonuses, but not when they have to be earned by picking through every corner of the map and every shadowy cranny. That’s why the added elements in NMH are so welcome; they take an activity that wasn’t fun before and improve on it. And isn’t that the point of gaming in general?

Having spent most of the week waiting for Ubisoft to print some French manuals so they could finally sell No More Heroes in Canada, I’m now in the curious position of wishing I hadn’t even read it at all. I even feel a little uncomfortable talking about it; like its spiritual predecessor Killer7, it feels like the sort of game that should be experienced personally rather than vicariously. Little stylistic elements pop up and amaze out of nowhere; dialogue that would be stilted in any other game is clever and even charming when viewed through Travis Touchdown’s sunflower-tinted glasses. The overworld suffers a bit from Big Field, but having a personal rocket bike (thus cutting off the GTA-style necessity of carjacking every time you need to cross the map) removes some of that frustration.

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