Kameo: The Dreamer
Kameo: The Dreamer is an adventure/action-RPG title developed by Rare and published by Nintendo. The game is TTL's version of the OTL game Kameo: Elements Of Power, taking elements from that title and combining them with elements from The Dreamers and Dreamscape, two Ultra Nintendo adventure platformer games which themselves were based on Banjo-Kazooie/Project Dream. While Kameo: The Dreamer does share many elements from the Ultra Nintendo games, it has a completely new storyline and a completely new protagonist: Kameo, a teenage fairy girl with the ability to capture, nurture, and fight alongside elemental creatures. Kameo is a human-sized fairy, like the fairies seen in Fairytale and Haze, and uses both magic and physical attacks to battle enemies. The battle system itself is VERY similar to OTL's Kingdom Hearts, without the Squaresoft tropes but utilizing pretty much everything else, including jumping, non-combat movements, guarding, and fighting alongside AI controlled companions (in this case, Kameo fights alongside three monster companions). Kameo utilizes a glaive in battle, and also has telekinetic abilities that can blast enemies, throw them, manipulate objects, and more. She can capture monsters in a variety of ways: some monsters she finds and befriends in her travels, some she can buy, some she has to defeat, others she is awarded by fulfilling certain conditions, etc. There are 120 different monsters in the game, corresponding to one of 12 different elements. Each monster has a "child" form, then evolves into an "adult" form, and finally into a "mature" form, for a total of 360 possible monster forms in the game. Like Pokemon, some monsters evolve through leveling up, while others evolve through different means.
The 12 different elements present in the game share much in common with the OTL Kameo, though some have been changed to avoid redundancy. They are:
Fire
Ice
Water
Plant
Lightning
Rock
Wind
Acid
Sound
Spike
Arc (corresponds to light)
Shadow
The player usually controls Kameo, but can switch between monsters using the shoulder buttons to fulfill certain functions outside of battle, the player can also switch during battle but only for a limited time. It IS possible to capture all monsters during a single playthrough of the game, though a few monsters are missable forever. The game takes place in a massive open world, though it's not an open world game per se, as many areas are closed off until certain prerequisites are met. The game itself makes no secret of being an RPG: enemies now freely give experience points and gold in battle, and the game itself is described right on the box as an action-RPG. Though Kameo does not look as pretty as it did IOTL on the Xbox 360, the game is still one of the best looking Nintendo Wave titles, not just up to 2005 but overall. Steve Burke, who did the musical score IOTL, also does the score for the game ITTL, though he is joined by Grant Kirkhope, and the game's soundtrack has a more "epic" feel than that of previous Rare games. The voice acting is done primarily by British-based unknowns, though there are a few in the cast who would be more well known later on (more for voice acting than for anything else), as Rare used most of its voice acting budget for the later Velvet Dark: Synthesis. Still, the game's voice acting is considered quite good, on par with most of Rare's other recent games.
The game's plot has a few similarities from OTL's game, primarily the villainous troll, King Thorn, who returns ITTL as Kameo's primary antagonist. Kameo's evil sister Kalus does not appear in the game, and instead Thorn primarily works alone, sending his minions after Kameo as the game progresses. Thorn and his trolls have overrun the kingdom of the fairies, and have captured most of the survivors, including Kameo's family. Kameo escapes the overrun fairy kingdom and sets out on a mission to free her people by storming King Thorn's mountain and defeating his minions. In order to do this, she must assemble an army of monsters and allies, which she must accomplish by completing missions and raising hope amongst the people. As Kameo journeys, she begins to get a reputation as the "queen of dreams", as she is the only one left in the realm who has any hope. Her reputation makes her a frequent target for Thorn's minions, and he and his legion of trolls disperse throughout the realm to try and stop her. Kameo meets a few trolls along the way who don't work for Thorn, but she initially doesn't trust them, and must learn not to see all trolls as enemies, because there are some friendly trolls who will become valuable allies along the way. Kameo manages to rescue a few of her family members as she journeys as well, including her older brother Arkham and her younger sister Melodia, who become valuable allies in their own right. She also rescues numerous cousins, each of whom have their own quirks and ways of helping Kameo. Eventually, Kameo has fomented enough hope throughout the realm that she is able to raise up a rebel army, who storms Thorn's mountain and gives Kameo an opportunity to make her way to the summit. Kameo does battle with Thorn alongside her friends and family, utilizing the monsters she's captured along the way. She defeats him and saves the realm and her family, freeing the fairy kingdom in the process.
Kameo: The Dreamer is released on August 2, 2005. It is received very positively at release, certainly better than OTL's Kameo: Elements Of Power, and on par with the previous two games in the Dreamers franchise. It gets a lot of comparisons to Fated To Rise for its plot and gameplay, though Kameo is definitely more RPG-ish than Fated To Rise was, and with a more open world and less twisty plot. One of the Wave's most hyped games of the year, it sees outstanding initial sales and strong legs throughout the rest of the year, making it a far bigger commercial hit than OTL's game and maintaining the Dreamers franchise as one of Rare's strongest.
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Velvet Dark: Conspiracy
Velvet Dark: Conspiracy is a first person shooter title and the third mainline game in Rare's Velvet Dark franchise. It picks up about a year after Synthesis left off, and sees Joanna Dark and her AI sister Velvet working together to stop a conspiracy of high-ranking government officials from destabilizing the world. The game is a bit of a return to the series' roots, after Synthesis played with enhancements and RPG elements. Conspiracy is more of a straight-up FPS, and includes many of the game enhancements from OTL's Perfect Dark Zero, including the third person cover system, a recharging health meter (though like in OTL's game, only a small amount of the player's health refills, making it a bit similar to the system used in OTL's Bloodborne), and evasive dodge rolling. In this way, Conspiracy presents a more action-based FPS title in line with many of the current third person hits on the market such as The Covenant, Squad Four, and Blackheart. Velvet returns in an advisory role but does not directly interact with the player this time around. In fact, Velvet is directly playable in her own right in a few missions, with some missions involving the player switching back and forth between them to make progress through a level. The game also has secondary functions for virtually all of its weapons, though unlike in OTL's game, the player is allowed to carry unlimited weapons in a level. There are a number of weapons unique to Conspiracy that don't appear in OTL's Zero, including a mind control dart gun, a heatseeking freeze ray, and a weapon that deploys a shrapnel mine. There's also an energy weapon with a number of functions suspiciously similar to Symmetra's energy gun in OTL's Overwatch, including a proximity-based damaging laser and the ability to plant laser turrets that fire at close range. Velvet Dark: Conspiracy was a collaboration between both British and American game developers, and a number of young developers got some of their very first work on this game, while some would continue to work for Rare, others would move onto other companies such as Blizzard, and still others would go on to form companies of their own. The game's graphics are substantially better than those of the Ultra Nintendo Velvet Dark games, though of course not as good as the graphics in OTL's Perfect Dark Zero. Still, like Rare's other big 2005 project Kameo, Velvet Dark: Conspiracy is held up as one of the best looking Wave games before or since, and is considered to be perhaps the best looking console game ever at the time of its release. There are a lot of tight, cramped levels in the game, which increase the amount of visual detail that can be devoted to objects and scenery. The game was also the first to utilize an American-based voice cast, including the casting of John de Lancie as a returning Daniel Carrington, Crawford Wilson as young teenage hacker Scam, and also the controversial recasting of Joanna and Velvet Dark. Though Eveline Fischer, who herself was not a voice actress by trade, had been considered excellent in the dual roles and had even won an Interactive Achievement Award for her portrayal of the twins in Velvet Dark, she would be replaced in the role by actress Rebecca Mader. This was partly by choice (Fischer wanted to focus on her music composition work), and partly the desire of Rare to use a more accomplished actress in the role. To her credit, Mader performed excellently as Joanna and Velvet, and is generally considered by critics to be the better of the two actresses in the games, but fans still reacted with some harshness to the new voice.
The plot of Conspiracy sees Joanna now working as head of security at the Genesis Institute, where her sister Velvet also works as a benevolent AI liaison meant to promote the company's work. AI is gradually being reintroduced into certain facets of ordinary life, though it is now heavily monitored and restricted after the events of the first game. The first mission sees Joanna overseeing the installation of a Genesis AI at a government facility, but she must also pursue a hacker who is trying to get the data and who has activated military robots to stop Joanna. After Joanna evades the robots, she is about to catch the hacker but is pursued by another shadowy figure. She manages to catch the hacker anyway, who reveals himself as Scam. He accepts responsibility for the robots but says that the shadowy figure who attacked Joanna wasn't one of his and was from the government. Joanna orders Scam taken to prison and goes back to the Genesis Institute to ponder recent events. She's contacted by Daniel Carrington, who has a job for her. She initially refuses, but Velvet asks Joanna to do it and she finally agrees. The job concerns a troubling bit of code that one of Carrington's techs stumbled upon in a London office. Joanna investigates the code, only to be pursued by shadowy figures like the ones from before, and barely makes it out alive. Joanna and Velvet gradually learn that some kind of rogue code is being planted into AI systems all around the world. Carrington thinks it's a rogue AI, and wants the Genesis Institute to terminate their work. Velvet agrees, which surprises Joanna: being an AI, Velvet has always been an advocate for AI proliferation. However, Velvet is afraid, and Joanna realizes she's experiencing trauma from the experience of having her body hijacked and her code overwritten during the events of Synthesis. Meanwhile, Joanna thinks Scam might have more information about what's been happening, but he's been transferred to a secure prison and the government isn't letting Joanna see him. She decides to bust Scam out with Velvet's help. Scam reveals that numerous government officials have been conducting hacking operations, and when he stumbled onto it, they tried to kill him. After the Genesis Institute is raided by a special ops team, Joanna's suspicions are confirmed and she, Velvet, and Scam relocate to a secret Carrington facility to continue to unravel the conspiracy. At first, it seems like a straightforward case of the government being corrupt and working to steal AI secrets and destroy its competitors, but soon Joanna and Velvet discover something even more sinister: a conspiracy of humans and AI programs working together to trick the American government into accomplishing its goals. The AI conspirators are led by an agent called Janus, a computer program designed as a spy. Janus is perhaps the most human-like AI program to be developed since Velvet, experiencing the same grief, fear, and trauma that Velvet is capable of experiencing. The human conspirators are led by a man named Paul Wilkensen, the Secretary of Defense, who believes that the government is too cautious in its approach toward AI, and wants to gradually replace all government officials with AI programs. While there are other agents, both human and AI, involved in the conspiracy, Wilkensen and Janus are the ringleaders. What becomes apparent is that the two of them think they're manipulating the other, forming a tangled web of subordinations and alliances within the conspiracy itself, and raising the Blade Runner-esque question of whether or not the humans know their humans or the AIs know that they're AIs.
As Joanna, Velvet, Scam, and Carrington work together to take down the conspiracy, they're assisted by Mala Hendrix, Carrington's new "best" agent, after Joanna (in fact, he calls her Perfect Hendrix). Mala is the one who discovered the code that Carrington alerted Joanna about, and she is a skilled and brilliant agent in her own right (in fact, Scam flirts with her and the two seem to have a bond for most of the game. However, about 3/4ths of the way through the game, Mala reveals herself as the true architect behind the conspiracy. In addition, she reveals that Wilkensen is no longer human, but an AI robot that Mala created after killing Wilkensen months before and uploading his mind data to a computer. Soon after revealing her treachery, Mala wounds Joanna (fatally, though she ends up surviving because she gets immediate life-saving treatment from Velvet) and flees, taking the Carrington Institute's entire data cache with her. After being nursed back to health by Carrington and Velvet, Joanna leaves to try and take Mala down once and for all. Mala's motivations are fairly simple: she wishes to create the most advanced superintelligent AI ever, and mindlink herself to it in order to gain supreme power over the entire world. She replaces Wilkensen with herself amongst the conspirators and uploads Carrington's datafiles into Janus. Meanwhile, Velvet has figured out what Mala intends to do and is horrified. Uploading Carrington's datafiles into Janus will destroy his mind, because those files have all of Velvet's memories, and Velvet's mind is consumed with trauma. Velvet has learned how to handle this trauma, but Janus has not, and the upload will drive him insane. "Can you really drive a computer insane?" asks Joanna, to which Velvet replies "if you know what I've been through, you'll know the answer to that question." Joanna and Velvet race to stop Mala. Joanna engages Mala in fierce fight and Joanna seems to have the upperhand, but Mala uses Janus' functionality to retake control of the fight, and is about to kill Joanna once and for all. But in her moment of triumph, Mala screams as Janus' computing power overwhelms her mind. Janus has been driven mad with pain and revenge, and uses his power to kill Mala by literally erasing her mind. Janus then turns on Joanna, but before he can attack her, Velvet launches a containment program and Janus is forced to re-download himself into a robot body. Joanna and Velvet fight their way out of Mala's base, but Janus has made his way to Washington, DC, in order to carry out a vendetta he had when he was initially an AI spy: the military gave Janus another AI program to fall in love with, then deliberately "terminated" the program in order to provoke a vengeful response which would make him more ruthless in battle. Joanna tries to stop Janus alone, but is unable to defeat his superior functionality. With Scam's help, Joanna is able to defend herself, but she can't defeat Janus without Velvet. Instead of using force on Janus, Velvet reasons with him, using her own trauma to try and provoke a sympathetic response. It doesn't stop Janus completely, but it causes him to have a programming conflict, enabling Joanna to kill him with a shot to the CPU core in his skull. The threat from Janus now ended, Joanna has once again saved the world, but this incident puts AI back in a negative light, and the traumatized government officials decide to terminate all AI research effective immediately. Joanna and Velvet, with the help of Carrington and Scam, go underground. Almost immediately, Scam discovers evidence of another conspiracy...a conspiracy to put AI technology in a bad light. Almost everything that happened was set into motion by another, unseen force, leaving a cliffhanger ending as the sisters ponder their next move.
Velvet Dark: Conspiracy, like the games that came before it, gets an outstanding critical reception. Critics do note that the plot does have some similarities to Blade Runner, with one critic summarizing the series thus far as: "What if Blade Runner took place in a 2019 that wasn't a grimy dystopia?" The game's multiplayer mode, which is largely based on the multiplayer from the Ultra Nintendo installments with the addition of online play, is criticized a bit for not being very innovative, but most critics take an "if it's not broke, don't fix it" approach, and do appreciate the stability of the servers, enabling what they call the best online shooter play since Tom Clancy's Delta Force. The game is released on September 27, 2005, and is one of the fastest selling titles of the year, making it one of the most successful Ultra-to-Wave transitions to date.
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"IT'S OFFICIAL: NINTENDO PURCHASES RARE FOR $450 MILLION"
-the title of a Kotaku.com article posted on October 14, 2005
"Nintendo, was smart, I think, to lock Rare down when they did. I don't mean when they bought them last month, I mean when they signed that contract back in 2001 I think it was to keep them around for the next five years. We were close, I think, to moving in, especially after we knew that The Covenant wasn't going to be an FPS. We were thinking, well maybe we'd do a Velvet Dark game. But then Nintendo, wisely, I might add, locked them down, and that was the end of that. Still, I think we got just as good a deal buying up Psygnosis, because Cyberwar has been really lucrative for us, for sure. And now we're working with Valve, so we're in a good spot to where we don't really need Rare. Would have been nice to have a company like Rare, but we'll do just fine."
-Bill Gates, in a November 2005 Forbes interview
"And a lot of people want to criticize us for not buying up, say, Rare when we had the chance. At the time, Nintendo's stake in the company meant that it only had to fork over half a billion dollars to buy up all of Rare. For us, it would have been nearly a billion. It cost us a billion dollars to buy Sega. I don't care who you ask or how much you like Velvet Dark or Conker or whatever, that company was not worth as much as Sega. Go ask any kid who he recognizes more, Joanna Dark or Sonic The Hedgehog, then come back and tell me with a straight face whether or not we should've paid a billion dollars for Rare."
-Steve Jobs, in a 2011 interview with Wired.com
