1942 Review — The Laziness of Shooter ‘History’

by Jed Pressgrove

Note: This review is based on an emulation of the 1984 Capcom arcade game at game-oldies.com. The emulation was played using the analog stick of an Xbox 360 controller.

Recent accounts about 1942 have zero insight. Whether dull or facetious, these writings fail to consider the gravity of packaging great spectacle in unimaginative propaganda. Designer Yoshiki Okamoto is a video-game genius for his work in not only 1942 but also Street Fighter II, the rightful benchmark for fighting games. But genius should not be divorced from responsibility. 1942 is a significant entry in a trend of naive history that continues to this day (see 2014’s mediocre Wolfenstein: The New Order and its lazy moral superiority to imaginary Nazis).

In 1942, you control a World War II American fighter plane on a virtual solo mission to destroy every Japanese plane you can. This theme deviates from that of vertical shooters like Space Invaders, Galaga, and Xevious, but it doesn’t deserve exaggerated praise like the following: “1942 sets itself apart with extremely balanced gameplay and a real, historical situation as opposed to the then-cliche space shooter scenario.” This nonsense misses that 1942’s lone-wolf grind is far from “real” and “historical” despite its pandering WWII heroism. (At least Street Fighter II’s ethnic stereotypes speak to the fighting pride of multiple nations.)

Okamoto does place 1942’s masturbatory premise in a technically outstanding frame. As in Xevious, the enemies in 1942 fly in at specific cues, but their flight and fire patterns during these cues can vary from game to game. 1942 also excels at enemy entrances. While enemies fly in from the top and sides of the screen as they did in previous vertical shooters, 1942 sends slow but sizable enemies at the rear of your plane from the bottom of the screen, which explains why your plane can’t fly to the very bottom — a logical reprieve from cheap, instant death. Before you play 1942 enough to memorize its enemy cues, the entrance of large planes introduces a considerable element of surprise and requires you to coolly fly out of the way and develop a new strategy for avoiding fire and taking down enemy craft, all the while dealing with the fact that you can’t fly on most of the top half of the screen. The large planes from the bottom of the screen eventually start shooting bullets at regular intervals, so you have to wait in safe parts of the screen and anticipate these bullets for evasion before flying below the ships to take them out as they deliberately rise to the top of the screen. The smaller, more common enemies in 1942 are comparable to the pests in Galaga that circle you when you don’t destroy them on first sight. When 1942 sends waves of these familiar planes from the top and sides of the screen along with bigger planes from the bottom of the screen, your patience and nerves are tested the most, which also means the potential for kinetic art is at its highest.

Weaved into 1942’s straightforward shooting — there are no enemies on the ground as in Xevious, Dragon Spirit, and TwinBee — is Okamoto’s articulate emphasis on maneuvering. The primary button in 1942 shoots; the second gives you temporary invincibility, sending your plane in a looping pattern. This evasive tactic can only be performed three times for each life (more opportunities can be gained through power-ups), but the beauty is that you can still control where the plane flies during the maneuver, which creates one of the most exciting illusions of flight and handling in vertical shooters. This brilliant stroke from Okamoto demands care, though: you must become aware of how long this evasive tactic lasts, as your plane can drop directly into enemy fire once the maneuver ends, meaning that you can die immediately if you don’t carefully place your reentry to the normal field of play.

This intoxicating design is ultimately a distraction from 1942’s incoherence. The soundtrack trades the alarm of Xevious for a sense of duty. The percussion and whistling in 1942 evoke a soldier rightfully taking orders. This righteous tone raises the question: is the WWII theme only a commercial ploy, or does the lone American hero against the Japanese horde reflect any of Okamoto’s feelings on his country’s part in the war? Considering 1942’s bland history references, it would be foolish to assume how Okamoto feels. At the same time, the game provides no convincing reason as to why it takes place during World War II. That war was not black and white, yet 1942 registers as mindless propaganda where destruction of a past political enemy is exaggerated. At best, the use of history is superfluous, as the game could have worked the same with simple allusions to military technology. For those who want to talk about marketing, let’s do it: 1942 and its ilk offer a knucklehead’s history.


Betraying First-Person Action Norms

by Paul Schumann

A respect for history, faith, and humanity separates Betrayer from many of its peers. Like other first-person action games, Betrayer features a variety of ranged weapons — bows, flintlocks, and tomahawks — but the most important gameplay function doesn’t involve violence: a listening mechanic allows the player to seek out key sections of the map for audio clues. This mechanic makes Betrayer more aesthetically pleasing, as there is no minimap or obnoxious arrows leading from one objective to the next. Listening also adds to the atmosphere as cursed totems beckon the player in for a trap and lost souls weep into the ether. This design fulfills the purpose of Betrayer’s storytelling.

In the 17th century New World, you play as an anonymous settler/adventurer washed up on the shores of Virginia, the sole survivor of your vessel. You discover you are not alone: a mysterious girl stalks the woods warning you to avoid these lands, a shadow world of ghosts, demons, and skellingtons. You gradually discover how the lives of the former colonists demonstrate the foibles, passions, and potential for brutality of human nature.

From time immemorial, going back to the Garden of Eden, human beings have had the potential to do good or evil. To Betrayer’s credit, the lost souls aren’t presented as backward sods just because they lived centuries before us. They all have their own motivations, whether based in pride, lust, anger, fear, greed, patriotism, faith, or despair. There’s the Catholic who came to the New World for a new start away from the religious persecutions of England, yet he comes to find religious conflict inescapable. There’s the mother who is driven to despair after her son accidentally dies by his own hand. There’s interracial liaisons between settlers and natives. There’s the threat of conflict between marauding Spaniards, hostile natives, and English settlers. Very real human tragedies all.

The manner in which the stories are told further develops Betrayer’s approach to fallen human nature. The truth is only gradually revealed. The first wraiths you encounter can hardly remember more than their names. The ghosts tend to recall only the best parts of the people they were, but pieces of their lives return as you find clues.  One ghost insists his friend died by accident until you reveal evidence showing foul play. Another ghost reminisces about warning his son not to play with a firearm and his sickly wife going for a walk. Finding the graves of his wife and son leads the man to remember that his son had shot himself and that his wife committed suicide in her grief.

The poor souls in Betrayer are cursed to walk the earth until they’ve come to terms with their guilt. The theology is a bit iffy, sounding more like the legend of the Jack O’ Lantern — a soul stuck between heaven and hell — than traditional Catholic eschatology. In that sense, it’s almost fitting that the non-denominational Protestant colonists are cursed to such an obscure fate. The story also explores apparent demonic activity and the supposed presence of witchcraft. The natives regard the deep woods as a dangerous place, not merely for hostile tribes but for evil spirits. Moreover, an accused witch is executed by burning, but the game reveals that nothing supernatural is at play, just mere skulduggery. Betrayer’s handling of witch hunting has historical merit: most instances of witch burning took place under Protestant authority, in contrast to the various Catholic Inquisitions that took a more measured and lenient response to such accusations (see work by sociologist Rodney Stark).

Betrayer’s ideas about treatment of the dead can be traced back to ancient Greece. Daniel Mendelsohn writes in the New Yorker: “The souls of the dead were thought to be stranded, unable to reach the underworld without a proper burial.” From The Iliad and The Odyssey to Sophocles’ Antigone, the necessity of burial as a sacred rite is clear (the protagonist of Antigone states “Hades requires these rights.”). In Betrayer, some ghosts cannot rest because evil spirits have stolen their skulls from their graves.  The endgame of Betrayer begins when you discover the source of the darkness — the brutal double murder of a young woman and her unborn child. The woman’s sister Allison (the sole survivor of the settlement) informs the player that she had attempted to burn the corpse to set her sister’s soul at peace. Yet this was not enough. The sister’s spirit wandered the woods near the scene of her death exacting vengeance on the flora, fauna, and natives.

To resolve this predicament, the player is advised to set the souls of the other settlers at rest before dealing with the sister. What follows is not theologically orthodox but makes for a thought-provoking conclusion. You return to old sections of the map to conclude their stories once and for all. You give the spectres an ultimatum to realize what’s done is done, to leave their haunting grounds, and to face their judgment: “You cannot undo what was done. You must surrender your regrets and be at peace.” The protagonist may sound forgiving or pitiless but is clearly not deciding their fates. At the same time, Betrayer doesn’t show what happens to the souls condemned to torment (as opposed to the souls you release). Likewise, your fate is never revealed. Allison, however, finally buries her sister and releases her to meet her maker. In some respects, Allison resembles Antigone, who uttered these words in Sophocles’ play: “I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living, for in that world I shall abide forever.” Allison will also remain among the dead in the woods, though she still walks in the land of the living.

Wrong-headed and clumsy use of religion in games is usually a point of annoyance for me, but faith and the supernatural in Betrayer are treated without undue scorn and with just enough accuracy to blend into a believable historical backdrop. The game succeeds not with its attempts at theology but in its humanistic insights to the passions driving our choices. Betrayer shows that the fantastical fails without human experience.