A good dream - A 1UP classic from August 25, 2005

About 20% of my dreams are about videogames. Some of them classic, many on the arcade, some of them new, but the majority are about games that have never existed. Two nights ago I had one of the most vivid game dreams I've had in a while.

Now you have to use your imagination because I can only draw in 2D. The game in my dream was all in 3D and high definition I might add!

It all started out with these soldiers running up a hill in a quiet suburban neighborhood. There were few houses, a great mountain range and nothing but wide open spaces.

I don't play RTS games and especially not war games. My older brother loves RTS games and his favorites have been Advance Wars and he's looking at getting Batallion Wars now.

The character designs of the soldiers were stylized. Somewhere in between the Advance Wars and Metal Slug designs. Are you starting to visualize my game a little better? Great. Now back to my dream.

As I pan the camera back I notice that the soldiers are advancing to something way in the background. The draw distance in my dreams is always exceptional! The ground was shaking and about 3 miles away Godzilla was fighting with Rodan!

In my dreams I have about 4 seconds to figure out the control scheme before the game ends. I pushed some buttons and noticed that I could zoom into the troops, select them and move them around with a few button presses. I guessed that my job was to slow down the advance of Godzilla and keep him from wandering into residential neighborhoods. It seemed easy enough since Rodan was keeping him busy and we were fighting way out in the boonies.

I clicked on the soldiers and noticed that there were specialists mixed in with the infantry. These are the characters I remembered. A demolitions specialist, a medic, machine gunner, flame thrower and general.

As the game progressed (there was no loading time). Godzilla and a different monster would begin a new fight and they'd drop the troops in the middle of the action. Way off in the distance I could see the lights from the city. I figured that sooner or later the harder levels would be taking me closer and closer into the city.

I would get to call in air strikes and artillery against the rampaging monsters. As the levels progressed I was able to get more special weapons to use such as the electric cannons on the beds of diesel trucks and even the flying Super-X.

The units under my command became more and more advanced the closer Godzilla got to the city. Eventually I got to use G-Force members, the elite task force called in when everything seems hopeless. They had access to special weapons that regular army folks didn't have, such as phaser rifles, the Super-X and even Godzilla's son Minya.

There was even a way to control the alien invaders that had brought some of the monsters to Earth. If you've ever seen the old Godzilla movies you'll remember the aliens were the people with curly toe shoes and razor thin sunglasses. With access to their UFO's, lightning rifles and ability to move some monsters around they added a whole new dynamic to the game.

Right before I woke up one of the last levels was starting up. King Ghidora flew into Tokyo to challenge Godzilla. Right away buildings were being toppled as monsters were being tossed through them. Too bad I woke up because the camera angles and particle effects of the buildings collapsing were great.

I can trace where most of the concepts in my dream came from. Aside from Godzilla movies, Metal Slug and Advance Wars I was a big fan of the King of the Monsters games from SNK - Neo Geo. I liked the first one more because it was a wrestling game, the second was more of a side scrolling brawler like Final Fight.

The second game that influenced my dream must have been War of the Monsters by Incognito. I've played that game backwards and forward and have unlocked everything and figured out all of the combos by myself. So there's no way I could give you and exact amount of hours spent playing that title. Needless to say the scale and scope of my dream was much bigger than what ended up in any other game. Ah, too bad I couldn't have recorded it!

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My favorite Games of All-Time #20: State of Emergency - Originally published on 1UP - March 31, 2006

State of Emergency (SoE) by the now defunct Vis is my guilty pleasure. It is considered one of the shortest, lamest and easiest games ever published by Rockstar. In the all-time top games list of every magazine and website SoE is not even a footnote.

I rank State of Emergency higher in this list than any Zelda game, Shadow of the Colossus and God of War. I'm either insane or maybe I see something special in the game that most gamers overlook.

SoE first made news at the 2001 E3. Vis and Rockstar earned some respect for delivering up to several hundred people onscreen at the same time. Most PC developers said that the PS2 could never support that many characters at once.

The game was memorable for the characters, mechanics and plot. You are one of several revolutionaries fighting against "the Corporation." There is an ex-cop, lawyer, hacker and escaped prisoner that you can use in your missions. Each character has their own special attacks, strengths and weaknesses. The most well known revolutionary is the chubby gangbanger Hector "Spanky" Solada.

SoE features tons of weapons including assault rifles and axes that players can use plus various missions to accomplish en route to toppling the Corporation. Adding to the running and gunning of the game are the crazed levels. The game is set in the middle of a riot. It is easy to get lost and even easier to evade authorities in the mass of people looting.

The Corporation runs a totalitarian regime in an undisclosed country. The artistic direction and visual clues help set the tone from beginning to end. The characters are highly stylized and a bit cartoonish, however it works in this game. The charm of State of Emergency lies in capturing the chaos of a revolution and turning less into a console game and more into an arcade experience.

That is assuming I can call a revolution charming. You can ask anyone in my family, I find chaos exciting. Riots, explosions wild police chases... I love that stuff. SoE is non-stop chaos and I can't get enough of it. My brother says I need to play more GTA if I'm about the running and gunning. I tell him that I don't want to mess around with a wanna-be game. If I want guns, explosions, gang wars, riots and mass chaos then I cut to the chase and play SoE. From the first level to the last SoE is all about the sensory overload. If I want high speed chases and better car physics than GTA I play Driver. This all goes back to my definition of a great game. Vis identified the element that makes action shooters work and multiplies that tenfold and then wraps it in the middle of a chaotic environment.

This is why I call SoE my dirty little secret. There are very few games that can chill me out when I have to blow off some steam, SoE might be the best at it. Blowing stuff up is fun in the game, it could be called the Katamari of chaos because nobody does it better. There is something visceral about SoE that transcends most game design.

That visceral sensation is primal. The human psyche is tuned to either fight or flee when presented with images of a revolution, the rioting and chaos it brings out. We are reduced to our survival instincts in a mob mentality. As a group we can only be pushed so far by brutal regimes. We can tolerate only so much suffering and human rights violations before we begin rebelling. It is the struggle between freedom and power, the balance of order and chaos that goes back thousands of years. Whether you want to admit it or not, chaos it is as much a part of our humanity as order is.

The fight for freedom is a theme that keeps returning. Most recently in the game Getting Up and the movie V for Vendetta. No game before or since has captured that frenetic energy better than State of Emergency. For that reason alone it will stay on my top-20 favorite games forever and ever.

Viva La Revolucion!

PS. My character Avery won the Capoeira Fighter 3 character contest.

I found out about it earlier this month, but the hosted site had been down for a while. It should be up if you visit. HOLY SMOKES, have a great weekend!!!

I’d like to hear your personal top-10, top-20, top fighting games, top sports games, or top games in any genre. Let me know in the comments section please. As always if you would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!

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