I'll be the first to tell you that I'm not shy about my being a "Gamer". Fortunately, the explosion of the gaming industry and community has afforded me, and people like me, a great deal more social recognition than we once enjoyed. In fact, it's almost at the point now that you're weird if you aren't a gamer, be it casual or hardcore.


Devin Aoki (far left) goes from Sin City to just plain sin.

I think this embracing of the geek by popular culture is thanks to a number of things. I mean, aside from the fact that geeks are largely to thank for the fact that our world continues to operate smoothly in this age of information technology. In particular, I think that successful film adaptations of popular comic book series have certainly helped shed some light on what it is comic book fans find so damned appealling about the sources of their obsession. However, similar attempts by Hollywood to capitalize on the growing gaming community have, in most cases, been ill-received; both by the general publice and the gaming community alike. Fortunately, there are some bright spots on the horizon. For example, Silent Hill actually did a damned fine job of paying tribute to its source material. Other recent efforts, while not necessarily Oscar worthy nor true to their sources, have nonetheless done well enough not to heap too much scorn from the general public upon the collective head of the gaming community.


I can't tell if this is fighting or interpretive dance.

And then there's this; a surefire way to drive us back five years in our struggle for social recognition. As though some weren't dismissive enough of our culture, we now have to combat the stereotypes that a movie of this sort will only reinforce. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for the continued adaptation of great games into movies, provided that the transition is facilitated by someone who is intimately tied to the source material. But remember, I said "great games". That is to say, games with deep and intricate plots, set in universes worthy of further exploration and investigation. Dead or Alive [insert any number here] is no such game.

As a game franchise, the Dead or Alive series never needed to be scrutinized for its lack of a cohesive narrative. As a 3D-fighter, it simply needed a loose backstory to provide flimsy justification for the fisticuffs that comprised its gameplay. Fans of fighters don't need the gameplay to be validated by complex plotlines. Not only that, we're often more than willing to make allowances for even the most ludicrous of attempts at such a validation.


I'd be pissed if I had to play Zak too.

Once you undertake the foolish task of transmuting such a game into a movie you then become responsible for infusing it with all of the justifications that the gaming community is willing to do without. Suddenly, you need to have a fairly legitimate excuse to explain why all of these attractive, scantily-clad women are grappling with one another in all of these exotic locations. The fact is, you can't; at least not in a way that's going to be palatable to any audience with an iota of good taste. In the end, people will walk away from the experience in utter confusion and, most likely, agitation that they paid to see such a travesty of cinema unfold. In the end, impressions like these will further fuel existing misconceptions about the gaming community. Personally, I could do without the negative publicity.

Any one who has played the demo, looked at screenshots, or read the reviews from major gaming sites knows that Tenchu Z is anything but a next generation gaming experience. But that doesn't mean that it should only be reviewed on account of what it isn't. It isn't a killer app. It isn't a groundbreaking stride for the franchise, much less the genre. What it is, however, is a helluva lot of fun.

I guess this post will be part game review and part editorial on the state of game reviews. And, to be honest, after listening to FASA Studio's Mitch Gitelman express his disappointment over the lukewarm reception that Shadowrun has met in the review community, I have a lot more conviction in my feelings on the subject. I think Tenchu Z is a perfect vehicle for conveying my growing contempt for the game review industry; because, let's face it, it is an industry. When I read IGN's review I can't shake this feeling that the author audibly groaned when the assignment was handed down to her. There's nothing veiled in the contempt that laces nearly every paragraph of her review.



The fact is that you will often have a reviewer who just doesn't like the genre or can't look beyond one ore two nagging issues. Once that happens, objectivity goes right out the window. Reviews in general are purely subjective, no matter how much people in the business would like to claim otherwise. I mean, if you told me to review a game like WWE: Smackdown vs. Raw (forgive me if there's no game bearing this name. I don't play wrestling games), I'd probably give it a vicious ball-breaking simply on account of the fact that I don't "get" the genre. In truth, it doesn't matter what game I'm reviewing; my own personal tastes and idiosyncrasies will bleed through. And who am I to say that my opinion matters enough that it should influence your own?

Such is the case here. Like many other reviews, the IGN piece on Tenchu Z just doesn't seem like it really gave the game a chance. Complaints in the gameplay department range from disappointment in the lack of variety (because Madden 2007 and Call of Duty 3 just exude variety) to lamenting the shoddy enemy AI. As I've paranthetically illustrated, the first argument just doesn't hold water. If we're going to mark games down for this type of thing, I'd best not see a near perfect review score. Ever.

Now, the second complaint I can concede to. Tenchu Z's AI is horribly stunted. Enemy routines are both easy to predict and unnaturally stupid at times. But the examples used really just tell me that the reviewer rushed through the game (another complaint that I will address) so that they could convince themselves that they gave the game its fair shake. When a reviewer tells me that enemy AI "...fail[s] to notice bodies strewn across their path....or ninjas hiding a mere foot away in sparse shrubbery" I can't help but bristle over the contradiction that it strikes with my experience. Maybe it's just because I play Tenchu Z on the highest difficulty setting, but I'm pretty sure the enemies in my game noticed corpses. I'm also sure I've been spotted while peeking around a corner or three in my time with the game.



Now, I'm not here trying to paint the enemy AI as great. I don't even think I could call it good. Collectively, they all seem to have the memory of a goldfish. But when I read stuff like this it just really calls into question what kind of stock I should put into the "professionalism" of the review community. It only gets worse when I read that they've taken marks because "[i]t's also possible to walk about in plain view as long as you're outside [the enemy AI's] vision cone." Last I checked, enhanced Genome Soldiers in the Metal Gear series seemed to share the same vision plan as Tenchu Z's motley crew of ronin, ninjas, and Portuguese explorers. Then again, the latter aren't even the products of a Super-Soldier program, so they at least have a reasonable excuse. Still, something tells me I'd be hard-pressed to find a disparaging remark made of Solid Snake's antagonists' "lack of vision". I guess I'm just trying to say that we shouldn't have double standards.

A lot of reviews also seem to take issue with the fact that you can run through maps to complete your missions, as though the reviewers' own impatience and failure to immerse themselves in the experience is something that we can hold against the game. Actually, you'd think they'd appreciate the fact that this "feature" was there to help them meet their precious deadline. Personally, I'd love to see multiple objectives put in play, but pining over what could have been has never prevented me from enjoying what Tenchu Z does have.

See, I love me some Ninja Gaiden, but when I think of a ninja I have to check my surroundings to make sure one isn't waiting to drop from the ceiling to cut me in half. That's the kind of ninja that the Tenchu series has always given us. The franchise is really a goldmine of pure unbridled potential. In fact, if you visited the little utopia that resides inside my head you'd find a Tenchu that's been married to the technical assets and development team that Sam Fisher has always enjoyed. Unfortunately, I don't live in that world, so I have to make do. But if I were to base my opinion of Tenchu Z on its failure to capitalize on its own potential, that'd just be unfair (mainly because you can't give a game a negative score). I can only go on what is available.

Graphically speaking, Tenchu Z feels incredibly dated. It's a last-gen offering with a thick layer of gratuitous bump maps slathered over it. The lighting engine is anything but dynamic while the environments' blocky edges and sharp corners look decidedly out of place in the company of the sort of eye candy that 360 gamers have come to expect. Character models are also too sharp, and their animations are robotic and rigid. When you add shoddy collision detection and an overall lack of environmental variety (you'll often play the same maps on different missions) to this equation you get a really muddled visual experience that no amount of shiny bump maps will ever manage to make up for. Still, there are times that Tenchu Z actually manages to look decent (as in "okay"), but these glimpses are easily swallowed by the rest of the graphical quagmire.



On the gameplay front, you shouldn't go into this experience expecting a lot of variety. Over the course of its 50+ missions you can expect to do a lot of shadow-lurking while you wait for the opportune moment to end a roaming guard's life. You also shouldn't expect much in the way of a fast-paced experience. Unlike the Splinter Cell franchise, Tenchu hasn't really crept out from the shadows during its evolution. The game is all about being the silent assassin that the ninja is renowned for being. You'll spend a lot of time scrabbling across terra cotta rooftops and peeking around corners. If, by chance, you get spotted you can stand your ground and fight, or run and hide. If you choose the former, you should know that there's a reason that Tenchu Z standard melee combat is awkward: it encourages you to play it the way it was meant to be played. Ninja Gaiden this is not, folks.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the amount of enjoyment that you'll get out of Tenchu Z depends on whether or not you like the genre as a whole. It also depends on whether or not you're keen on the concepts that the game brings to the genre. If you like the genre and you have the patience and imagination to appreciate Tenchu Z's own take on it, you shouldn't have any problems overlooking its many shortcomings, especially when you throw in the online cooperative play. I can tell you that if you didn't like the demo, you won't like the game since you're just going to repeat that experience 50+ times. But if you did, there's a lot to love about Tenchu Z. Sadly, the $60 price tag is not one of them.