Spartan Total Warrior: The Joy of Movement
Why is it fun controlling The Spartan?
Because I can kill dudes. Lots of Dudes. I mean, a LOT of dudes.
Let me give one example.
Holding the buttons “R2” and “X” on my Playstation 2 controller causes The Spartan to roar and any nearby npc(non-playable character) begins to back away slowly. Once The Spartan has finished his blood-curdling yawp he shoves his sword, or swords, into the torso of the closest npc who will scream and then literally explode into a pile of guts and bones that will disappear into the ground. Some number will appear in the upper left-hand corner of the screen indicating that that kill was like, totally sweet dude. Like, seriously, that shit was was cool.
Then, once I’ve killed more dudes, I can do this again.
Controlling The Spartan is fun because moving him is like moving Pac-Man, which brings me to the actual point.
I had barely finished my essay about Pac-Man and movement before I realized that I could probably write a series of similarly themed essays. Which is a way of saying I recognized that I had a pretty solid framing device. Finding games to write about is not really an issue for me since I’ve spent a fair amount of my life playing and replaying various video games, but trying to write something meaningful or intellectually interesting can be difficult because nothing bores me more than reviews that are drawn-out textual excuses to give a game a numerical rating.
There’s nothing wrong with ratings, for the record, I read plenty of them when considering purchasing anything. I’m just also a nerd who inhales multiple cups of coffee a day and likes thinking about things more than the average (normal) person probably does in a way that is still considered healthy.
It’s not a phase mom, it's a mental illness.
Get with it.
Thinking about motion in videogames somehow led me back to a game I played originally on Playstation 2 because I played a similar (but also totally not similar) game on PC called Rome: Total War. I’ve mentioned in several previous essays in passing (though never writing a full essay about it for some reason) that I really enjoyed the PC game Stronghold Crusader and that in turn led to an interest in other RTS(real-time-strategy) videogames like Rise of Nations and the aforementioned Rome Total War. The latter game was one of an ongoing series of PC games set in various historical periods and locations that ranged from Shogunate era japan, Enlightenment era europe, ancient china, and most recently ancient Egypt.
There’s also a few Warhammer games in the series, but I don’t know where they fall in the canon, so we’ll just leave them out of this particular essay for now.
I spent hours playing Rome: Total War on my PC while I was a teenager, and I even downloaded it to my iPad two or three years back when I discovered it was on the app-store.
Fun fact: It’s still really fun.
Another fun fact: they didn’t get rid of the cheat-codes.
My obsession with this game was, on the surface, because it was about history when in fact it was usually just the sandbox option that would let me throw unit after unit of roman soldiers against armies of Carthaginian elephant riders. The game was low resolution, and the human-figures that would move on the screen were like paper-dolls due to their low-poly rendering. Regardless I could have them fight in any way that I wanted, and move them anywhere I wanted. I had, symbolically speaking, discovered the digital equivalent of plastic army men my father had enjoyed playing with when he was a young man.
All of this background is explanation then why, when I visited my local Hastings and saw a videogame in the console section titled Spartan: Total Warrior, and recognised the same little blocky army-dudes dressed in corinthian helmets, I rented the game and then bought it once I found a copy in the resale section months later.
Spartan: Total Warrior in a hack-and-slash, action-adventure game that skirts the line between historical fiction and fantasy. And I’m not just saying that because you fight a three-headed hydra at one point. Players control a man known simply as “The Spartan,” a young spartan warrior(omg, I just got that) who receives messages from Aries, the Greek God of War(before that dude got his own game series). At the start of the game the city of Sparta is being invaded by the Roman army which controls a giant mechanical warrior, seemingly endless soldiers, and at one point the creature Medusa who’s hooked up to an energy beam that’s used to turn Spartan soldiers to stone. Through a series of battles, the Spartan hacks and slashes his way through the legionaries of Rome (all while shirtless and sporting pecs and abs that made this young bisexual writer feel “funny”). Though Sparta wins the battle, The Spartan is told by Aries to find the Spear of Achilles to ensure his people’s safety. With his companions Elektra (an amazon princess), Castor, and Pollux, The Spartan travels to Troy, locates the spear, and returns to Greece to discover Rome has destroyed Sparta. The remainder of the game involves The Spartan attempting to avenge his people by killing the Roman Emperor Tiberius, fighting a literal Minotaur, using a solar-energy based lazer made by Archimedes, fighting a Roman aristocrat/wizard and his priestesses, and then fighting a literal god in a roman coliseum.
The Spartan is, despite all of this uber-male-macho presentation, not an indestructible and unstoppable killing machine. He’s close to one, and that’s one of the reasons why he’s such an enjoyable avatar to control.
He’s also really hot.
That’s not important to the story or mechanics, I just wanted to point it out.
Dude is FINE.
The primary mechanic of Spartan: Total Warrior is combat; combat is the main “flavor” of the videogame. Combat is easy to engage with because it relies on just two buttons to do most of the actual fighting. There’s the “X” button which will swing the sword, swords, hammer, and/or spear that The Spartan uses and this will target individual enemies. The “Square” button will do a wider charge attack that will hit multiple enemies. There are also power moves that use the “R1” and “R2” buttons on the back of the controllers which make these previous attacks more powerful and cause more mayhem on the battlefield. However, these details aren't as important as the ease with which they are employed. That’s to say, I don’t have to rely on an advanced targeting system, I only have to be near an enemy and the software handles the rest.
This is a long way of saying the software makes fighting intuitive.
Swinging a sword or a hammer into an enemy only requires one or two buttons, and I can adjust the flavor of the attack by incorporating one or two other buttons. Like Street Fighter 2 or Soul Caliber, Spartan: Total Warrior lets the player experiment with button pressing to get into a flow of combat that’s maddeningly addicting. I note that some players felt the combat was repetitive, and in their defense it can be…if you allow it to be. At 7-8 hours total run-time Spartan: Total Warrior is hardly a lengthy affair. To be honest, I never found the combat repetitive, but then again I’m biased.
And the Spartan also had nice pecs. That goes a long way.
What keeps me engaged is that while the actual battles between The Spartan and enemy NPCs can be repetitive there are narrative driven puzzle exercises interspersed between battles. For example, in the third level The Spartan has to fight roman soldiers while nearby there are towers where archers are shooting arrows down upon the spartan army. Each tower has a bottle of flammable liquid that can be used to set the towers alight, and once they explode creating new platforms the player can move to the next open square where the process repeats. Rather than just let killing dudes be the entire playthrough experience, Creative Assembly provides moment-by-moment challenges which allow me to move The Spartan across battlefields. These little tasks all require movement and battles, more movement, more battles, more movement again, another battle, and the process repeats.
The flow of attacking enemies while moving from scene to scene is one of the most fluidly executed interfaces I’ve ever played in a videogame. And what’s most addictive is when this flow is interrupted by the battles themselves.
As I play through the main storyline the general rabble of Roman soldiers (and a few barbarians) is steadily replaced by soldiers who will not only resist my weapons, but then will actually block them. This is usually because they have shields. Some Roman soldiers will carry wide shields, and when The Spartan swings his sword into it the weapon will bounce back immediately. This rebuff by itself would be enough to break the flow of combat I’m enjoying up to this point, but Spartan: Total Warrior obviously took lessons from Pac-Man when it came to the importance of sound design. Attacking a shield doesn’t just bounce my sword back, it triggers a sound file that makes a loud metallic clang.
It sounds like slamming a steel pipe against a car’s hood.
It sounds like dropping a steel drum onto concrete.
It sounds like, well, a sword colliding into a large metal shield.
The cacophonous “Twu-wang” of the sound cannot properly be expressed in any available onomatopoeia I have at my disposal. What’s important is the way it hits my ear.
Like the death throe of Pac-Man, the sound of The Spartan’s sword, hammer, and spear colliding with a heavy shield is a beautiful effect because it disrupts the flow of the game. Eventually I will learn how to overcome enemies like this (either knocking them back in a 300-esque spartan kick, or just running behind them), and the game will then generate tougher enemies who will likewise resist my weaponry and I will once again have to learn how to overcome them, all while relishing in the sounds of swords stabbing dudes.
Spartan: Total Warrior is one of the best fighting games I’ve ever played, and I’m not the only who had this opinion. Tim Rogers of Action Button Reviews actually wrote a review of the game and published it on his website on 14 August 2008 (six months after I had graduated high-school(fun fact)). In the article, simply titled Spartan: Total Warrior, Rogers provides a break-down of the controls, notes the rather unfair critical coverage the game received upon its release, addresses why it was regularly (and unfairly) compared to Dynasty Warriors, and then argues why the battle’s are as fun as they are. He writes:
In Spartan, none of the enemies want to die. They will rush at you. They will slash. They will block, parry, repel; they will spar and box with you. They will not go down easy. The goal of a “battle” in the context of a “war” is, quite simply, to eradicate all of the enemies, and Spartan may well be the only battlefield brawler common-sensical enough to allow every on-screen character to understand this. Spartan‘s battlegrounds are fascinating bloody fishbowls of animalistic ping-ponging AI, undulating brazen warrior backs gleaming in the yellow sun. If an AI of class “A” sees an AI of class “B”, he will usually attack it until it is dead or he is dead, whichever comes first. If a soldier on one army is outnumbered, he will run to try to regroup with more of his kind; if a soldier of one army sees another soldier of his own army outnumbered, he will try to join with him. And so the congregations of soldiers ebb and flow. Spartan — you — the Big Man on the battlefield — stands in the middle of it all. You choose your own adventure.
It’s kind of vaguely insulting, actually, how simple it is to get war “right” in a videogame. All history tells us is that the enemies shouldn’t want to die and that they should also want to kill all of the good guys. It’s not “artificial intelligence” so much as “artificial common sense”.
Having played enough RTS games, as well as a number of actual war games, this passage rang painfully true; too many games about combat simulation fail miserably at the realities of combat. As much as I love Dynasty Warriors, the combat AI that controls enemy npcs is woefully inadequate compared to Spartan. And while I love the sensation of moving Lu Bu or Guan Yu across a battlefield and mowing down armies of dudes and swinging my glaive like a heavy-metal fly-swatter, controlling these avatars is never as satisfying as controlling The Spartan. Even Rome: Total War, the game that served as the original impetus for me playing Spartan in the first place, often would portray combat at two blocks of dudes colliding and then limply throwing hands until one side lost enough dudes to trigger a retreat.
What made Spartan: Total Warrior as fun as it was, was because the software behind enemy (and friendly) npcs made sense to actual combat. As I moved through the battlefield I would find myself outnumbered, or at times helping a few men fight one lone enemy who had failed to rejoin his compatriots. All the while The Spartan, the main dude, hacks and slashes his way through countless enemies that actually pose a challenge and force me to move around the battlefield, and that’s the point: The Spartan is moving constantly.
The goal of Spartan: Total Warrior is to move from one point of action to the next, and to perform a series of actions while in this new location. Fighting is movement, running is movement, performing mission quests and sub-quests involve moving. Compiled together, at some point the act of playing this game is akin to a marathon.
At this point I want to return to the important question : Why is it so fun to move the Spartan?
Because he’s just like Pac-Man.
Just as I navigate Pac-Man through the network that is the maze, I will move The Spartan through the maze of combat. Pac-Man must contend with four ghosts trying to stop him, each of whom have unique AI guiding their own movement. The Spartan must contend with endless dudes (roman, barbarian, and even monsters) all of whom are trying to kill him and stop his movement to the next stage of combat. Pac-Man consumes power-pellets which let him consume the ghosts and move unimpeded. The Spartan acquires power points which let him literally stab a man with lightning.
Playing Spartan: Total Warrior is a game that compels movement in literally every line of its code. The question then is not why is The Spartan so fun to move, the better question becomes, why would I ever want to stop moving?
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
4.15.2024
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