It's time to hit the history books again, kids. Just like I tried to clearly explain Nintendo's relationship with innovation to clear up fanboy arguments about who stole what from who, now it's time to discuss why Capcom's recent Devil May Cry and Lost Planet ports shouldn't have been the shocking surprise they were for most fanboys out there.

Capcom used to be two things in the early days of home consoles: the Mega Man guys and the Street Fighter guys. Mega Man wasn't as big as Mario, but fans of tough platformers loved the little blue guy. Plus, he could shoot, which was a cool feature in the NES days. Just shooting straight. It looked cool. Seriously. One could say MegaMan aged poorly, but in a different sense than most other classic franchises. MegaMan ages poorly because it failed to evolve. Every game is still a remake of the first, great NES game. More on that later.

MegaMan was a Nintendo franchise. There was no doubt about that. It was a NES game. Not that it mattered much, NES already had Mario, and games back then were too similar to each other for a single game to make you feel you were being left out. Then came Street Fighter II, and Capcom as it is today started.

SF2 was out in the arcades for a long time before we started hearing rumours about a console version, and people like me, who owned a Mega Drive/Genesis but not a SNES felt it was bad news. Final Fight was a SNES exclusive and, even though I preferred Streets of Rage myself, Street Fighter II was the best fighting game around, no matter how you looked at it. Sure, the Genesis had scored a hit with the superior Mortal Kombat version a few months earlier, but Street Fighter II? How could you fight THAT? All over the place (not the Internet, an actual place, or magazines. There was no internet, but there were already fanboys) SNES owners bragged about their superior hardware being able to move those huge sprites while the Genesis would probably explode trying, and their console having six buttons while the Genesis couldn't even fit all of SF2's attacks on its 3 button gamepad. And we all thought they were right, too. The SNES version came out and it was all everybody expected it to be. Huge characters, good animation, tight controls (even if the shoulder buttons were a bit hard to use for special moves)... the Genesis was humbled.

Until the Genesis verison came out, that is.

Sure, it was months later, but it still felt good. The characters were a bit smaller, but the gameplay was all there. You could even play with your three button gamepads. Hitting start switched the three buttons between punch and kick. It didn't matter much, though, because there were six button Genesis gamepads out there by the time SF2 came out. And even though the SNES version looked a little better, having the six buttons in two straight rows, just like in the arcade, instead of those awful shoulder buttons was a huge advantage when comboing and pulling off special moves. Plus, the Genesis version was SF2 Turbo, with all the extra characters. People who had bought the original SNES without controllable bosses or extra characters felt ripped off, even if Turbo came out on the SNES, too, since buying the same game twice was even less usual back then. My house was the main hub of fighting game glory once again, as it had been with Mortal Kombat. Everybody had SF2 for the SNES, but I had the ultimate SF2 lover's wet dream: a huge Genesis joystick with six buttons I had bought during a school trip to the UK. That thing handled just like an arcade joystic and it had a huge, very stable base that would remain perfectly level even if you rested it on your knees. I let my friends use the joystick and prove my SF2 supremacy by beating them to a pulp using a 3 button gamepad. Good times.

That was the start of Capcom's multiplatform strategy.

Think about that for a second. Street Fighter 2. That's ancient history. Most fanboys today weren't even born when I dropped my first coin in a SF2 arcade machine. Yet here they are, making a fuss over a 360 version of Devil May Cry.

The trend continued in the next generation, but nobody cared much. Capcom was stuck putting out barely revised versions of SF2, MegaMan and Final Fight, and though money seemed to keep flowing, their image as a developer was suffering. When they got the Marvel license and started putting out superhero fighting games people found it cool, but it was hardly a system seller or a betrayal that the Saturn version was a bit smoother (the Saturn was well over the PsX in 2D games, but nobody cared about those at that point), or that there was a PSX version out there, too.

Then came the PS2 and something happened. It was called Devil May Cry.

When DMC first came out there were two things we had yet to see: good PS2 games and competition for Sony's black beast. The Dreamcast wasn't doing well and, while early PS2 games looked like crap, they were still obviously something that the DC couldn't even dream of (well, the PSOne could probably do things like Dark Cloud and Ephemeral Fantasia, but you get my point). Some people still thought that quality games like Shenmue, Rez or Soul Calibur could save Sega, and even that the two consoles weren't that far apart in horsepower. Then Gran Turismo 3 came out and Sega closed shop. GT3 and Devil May Cry. Those were the first two games that proved that the PS2 was in a different league. GT3 was pretty much reality turned videogame, and that was cool, but DMC was fantasy. The Matrix wasn't just one more action movie yet, you see. DMC was the second coolest fight coreography we had ever seen in any medium. We went crazy for it. Capcom was back on the map. And now, for some reason, despite a couple of Capcom 2D fighting games on the Dreamcast, everybody thought Capcom was a Sony partner.

It was no such thing, of course. There simply was nothing that could run DMC out there besides the PS2. Even PCs couldn't do that. That's the truth of why DMC has been a Sony exclusive so far. That, and DMC2 being a critical and commercial failure that didn't need porting. Capcom did put out a Chaos Legion PC version, though, which was good enough for PC fans who hadn't played DMC yet, and a DMC3 SE on anything that could run it. They made Resident Evil ports, too. Up to RE:4 coming out for PCs and Wii this year.

And that, of course, takes us to the Capcom 5.

Capcom signed a deal with Nintendo when the Gamecube came out. Again, Sony fanboys managed to block out everything I've told you so far and freak out over the fact that Capcom was going to do 5 exclusive new games on the Nintendo Gamecube. This was back when the Cube seemed to be a viable option and everybody thought that the Xbox was going to end up like the Zune. Now, three things happened here: First, the Cube died. It became obvious that it wasn't going to be a PS2 killer (it did tie with the Xbox 1 worldwide, though, despite common belief that it was a total failure). Second, the Capcom 5 ended up coming out on the PS2 as well. This time it was Nintendo fanboys' turn to be outraged... with slighty better reasons than the rest, since there was plenty of media hype over the exclusivity of those games. Third, Capcom didn't release 5 games, but 4: Killer 7, Viewtiful Joe, Resident Evil 4 and Viewtiful Joe 2. Whatever happened with that deal legally, it seems to have lived more in the hype machine and the minds of the fans than in real life. In the end, Capcom's strategy remained consistent with its previous history. The games were better than usual, though, thanks to the bunch of radical artists in Clover and Suda 51's Grasshopper Entertainment.

And that takes us to this generation. Capcom has been working all over the place. Dead Rising was a 360 exclusive (I predict a PC port in the future, though), and so was Lost Planet... but both were developed in the year hiatus between the 360 and the PS3's launch, so again there was no other system that could have run them properly except the PC, which is going to get a Lost Planet port after the usual 9 months wait, now. DMC 4, announced or assumed to be a PS3 exclusive is now a multiplatform game. Again, a PC port wouldn't surprise me at all. Rumours of Microsoft buying Capcom arised when two "exclusive" Capcom games appeared on the 360. Capcom was a Sony supporter in the minds of those who spread the rumours. If they were working with MS and having financial problems, that surely meant they were going to be taken over my MS. Of course, as so many times before, Capcom was just doing what it's been doing for 15 years: make games for any platform that will turn a profit. What else? Trust me, the only reason why there's no Wii port of Okami is that Capcom closed Clover before they could contractually force them to make one.

Then again, as long as the games are decent, who cares about them making a buck? If EA or Ubi managed to keep the average quality standard of Capcom games I wouldn't hate them half as much. But that's another story.

What Sony can do to make me buy a PS3, eh? Well, they could give me a job so I could pay for it. That'd be a start.

Other than that, I do think the PS3 is a nice deal that will only get better with time. If and when BluRay becomes something I'm interested in (more or less at the same time I buy myself an HDTV), the PS3 will have become a bargain. But the one thing Sony needs to improve and market better, I agree with the GS staff, is their free multiplayer.

Let's be honest here for a minute, I'm not going to pay a single cent to MS to play online over Live Gold. I'll be caught dead before I pay a fee to play Need for Speed or FEAR online when it's free on the PC. Gear of War? Yeah, it's nice, but it's already 60€, I'm not going to add more money ont top of that for the online portion. Maybe if MS gave me back my fee in Live Arcade stuff I'd think about it, but turns out I have to pay for that on the side. I'm a pay once play forever kinda guy. I don't like microtransactions and I don't like monthly fees. Much less monthly fees to unlock features in games. I'm not the only one, either. By MS's own accounts, 40% of 360 are online but just below 20% pay for Gold. That means 80% of 360 owners don't want to pay to play online or don't want play online at all.

Now, Sony gives me that for free. That's good. But nobody's mentionng it. Sony should be there yelling "You know? By the fourth year you own a 360 you'll have paid them the price difference in monthly fees, so save up a bit, buy a PS3 and stop wasting your money every month". But they're not. They just come out and babble about Home and how rumble is last gen "cause I say so". Of course, their online service isn't nearly as good as MS's at this point. If they fix that AND keep it free, that'd be a major selling point in the US (not so much in Europe and Japan, I think). Maybe they should learn from Nintendo, not Microsoft. Nintendo kept their systems easy on the DS, and it seems the Wii one will be identical. Basically, they stopped trying to manage huge user databases and matchmaking. They gave players a big red button with the word "Online" on it. You hit it, you're playing online. No lobby, no nothing. Of course, the prize to pay was friend codes to play with specific rivals, but that annoying, unreasonable detail aside, that model works for me. Instead, Sony seems to have tried to do everything MS is doing without knowing exactly how. They'll probably get there, eventually, but the time it'll take will probably work in MS's favor.

LucasArts has been showing off its new toys every chance it gets. They now have physics and procedural animation technology beyond anything else out there. Good for them. The only problem with Euphoria and DMM? They're being used in Indiana Jones and Star Wars games, and only in those games.

Of couse, the tech will spread, it looks impressive, but right now Lucas could do everything they wanted with it... and they're using it to do another cookie cutter, franchise milking licensed game.

Whoever manages IP at Lucas needs to be replaced. Disney is back from the dead thanks to a pirate movie trilogy and what is Lucas doing about it? Sitting on the only pirate comedy IP that's well known and loved out there, doing nothing with it; or rather failing to do anything with it, despite having tried in the past. Letting Telltale finally appear on the map with Sam&Max episodic content after wasting resources trying to develop the same thing twice, only to get shut down by internal politics. Of course, they're making money. People buy the SW,  Indy games, almost regardless of their relative artistic qualities, but Lucas could have become a main player in the industry, had they known how to adapt after the demise of the adventure genre. Instead, they outsourced development and became a small publisher with a couple of nice licenses doing with them exactly what Activision, Ubi or EA would have done.

One way to prove my point is this: I could name a whole bunch of people working for LucasArts (LucasFilms Games, back then, actually) even when I was 13 years old. I knew who Ron Gilbert was, or Tim Schaffer. Lucas was actually one of the first developers to prominently and properly credit their developers and writers, both in the box and in the game itself, in a time when Japanese designers were alienated and forced to use aliases.

Today? I'm pretty much an expert and I couldn't tell you who was the lead designer in Lego Star Wars if you gave me half an hour on the Wikipedia.

EDGE magazine started talking about a "Lucasarts rebirth" months ago. I'll believe it when I see it.

Gears of War writer (gamewriter?) Susan O'Connor gave a speech on the GDC this year. Gamespot summed it up in three key points: Mirror neurons (players wanting what the characters want), throughlines (sounds like a theme+character arc kind of thing) and backstage storytelling (let the story go on in the background as you play). It's this last one that I don't agree with. It certainly works in GoW and plenty of other action games, but it's not THE way to write a game.

Storytelling shouldn't be the foreground, probably, but neither should it be the background. It should be the game. Granted, ludologists and narratologists alike have asserted that interactive storytelling is probably a contradiction in terms, but storytelling through gameplay has been done properly before. Fahrenheit comes to mind, or Blade Runner. Even Silent Hill, despite being a clssic online sequence/offline sequence game (i.e. "gameplay bit+story bit") managed to incorporate the action into the story.

And everybody always blames storytelling for the hardships of telling the story in a game, which is wrong. It's not all the storyteller's fault, it's the gameplay's fault, too. Take Gears itself. How can one create a truly interactive storyline when the only interaction the player can do in real time is shoot? There's no way. Games will become interactive stories when we start allowing game characters to interact with the world and characters in ways that are beyond physical struggle and destruction. You need characters to talk interactively, think interactively, feel interactively if at all possible. I have some high hopes for Mass Effect in this regard. I'll give O'Connor that the player should be playing while the story is going on, but he should be playing because he's an actor in the story, not because it's going on through background noise while the gamer shoots aliens in the face.

Let me give you an example of how this can happen in a clssic game format. I've mentioned Silent Hill, and this will be spoilers for SH2, so if you haven't played it and don't want it spoiled, stop reading (and go play it, it's a great game).

At the end of the game, Pyramid Head is revealed to be a representation of the main character's guilt over having killed his agonizing wife, cursing him to relive her death over and over again. You are given clues to this throughout the whole game, and when the main character finally realizes what's going on (a little after you, the player, do) there's a cutscene with the character accepting his guilt, then standing up and telling two Pyramid Heads "I don't need you anymore". Then the cutscene ends and, for the first time in the game, you are given the chance to kill the bastards who've been giving you hell for the last 8 hours or so. Then you face the ghost of your dead wife, who turns into a monstrous representation of herself tied to a bed. You take her out and she drops to the ground in pretty much the same position the agonizing wife was in the cutscenes. She calls out your name and the game leaves you no choice but to shoot her.

To me, this is one of the greatest narrative sequences in gaming, both for the reasons O'Connor mentions in her speech and for a couple different ones. Let's look at it in depth.

First, "mirror neurons" indeed. The designers give you an invincible monster and make you run away every time he appears in the game. Then a character develops internally, which gives him a tool to kill the monster, which is now revealed to be a representation of the character’s feelings. By the time that limitation is gone you want to shoot the things so bad that the final battle becomes incredibly climatic. You don’t only have to kill them to make the story go on and get to the ending, you *want* to kill them because you have a score to settle with the sword-wielding suckers, as a player. Granted, you can’t have every bad guy in games be a personification of the protagonist’s feelings, but that’s how it is in SH2, and it works beautifully. The fight becomes a meaningful turning point in the main character’s arc, solving a common problem in game narrative: The characters develop in non-interactive cutscenes, while the gameplay stays the same.

This concept is taken even further in the next sequence, where you don’t just feel the need for revenge. When you kill the final monster and the game drops it to the ground, leaving you no option but to shoot her point blank to end the game, they’re making you do something you don’t really want to do, effectively putting you in synch with the main character’s conflicting feelings. If this part was done in a cutscene it wouldn’t be half as strong. They’re making you pull the trigger. They’re making you not only interact, but act. Play the part.

That’s how it’s done. Not in cutscenes, though they work better than “backstage storytelling” most of the time, but in the gameplay itself. Acting during gameplay is best case scenario, the best place to put narrative in a game. Cutscenes are second in my book, then comes background story through sound bits or text.

O’Connor’s speech was actually a sample of what game writers currently think, at least in the west, so it was a sample of why game storytelling is awful overall. This is the baseline we need to rise in the future.

Square went to GDC to talk about the game business and they came out with a press release about their Brain Training clones, but that doesn't mean they don't have a point.

Serious games is a good concept, it's just that I don't think it means taking the gameplay out of the game. Games could become serious by becoming a mainstream art form, like cinema and TV did early in their life cycles. So far games have restricted themselves, not only by designing gameplay structures that appeal only to a niche market, but also by creating stories and looks that appeal to that same niche.

Finding a way to tell stories through things other than competitive interaction with an AI (like FPS and current RPG's) is the next step in order to make games mainstream. So far, simulations, games that focus on creating a sandbox requiring little risk or skill, like Nintendogs or The Sims, have broken the niche, but narrative gaming has yet to achieve the same.

I do believe it can be done, though not by sticking to big men with guns or complex battle systems featuring what I can only describe as sexually undetermined teenagers. Games probably need more 30 something people trying to find the right person in their lives and pay the rent. They need family dramas, courtroom dramas (no, Phoenix Wright doesn't really count), and romantic comedies. There just aren't any stories beyond the stereotypes of Holywood action movies in the west or Manga science fiction in Japan. We need more. It's perfectly possible that games in the immediate future become a mainstream thing, like most people having pictures on their walls, but narrative games never go beyond comic-book geeky audiences.

The problem with that, if you just felt the impulse to say "fine with me" is that the moment those other, non-narrative games become reliable, profitable, and wrapped into a solid distribution environment, budgets for narrative games could go down with their sales and market share. Square is already opening a serious, casual division. Nintendo started it all with Touch Generations and you can be sure that there'll be more to come. And what's the point in a bigger and better Xbox if the real money is going to be on a Q&A game about interior decoration?

I don't think this trend will be easy, or even possible, to change, but when the second games crack happens and we're all stuck with text games, don't say I didn't warn you.