Maximo: Ghosts to Glory Review

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            Maximo: Ghosts to Glory

Review by Skinny MinnieApril 2002

The Fable: King Me, Check Her!

Once upon a time there lived a spunky young king named Maximo who ruled over five colorful and whimsical three-dimensional lands.  Whenever this king was off fighting distant wars to protect his kingdom, the court at Castle Maximo was controlled by a council of four lovely Sorceresses. At these times, court advisor Sorcerer Achille would watch over Princess Sophia, Maximo’s betrothed. 

After emerging victorious in battles far and wide, Maximo returned home one stormy night. Unlocking the gilded gates to his illustrious abode, he had nary a clue that his beloved lands had recently been cursed. A reality smack came from just inside his front door in the form of Sorcerer Achille’s magical scepter, which killed Maximo and sent him hurtling into the afterlife. In Maximo’s absence, Achille had forced Sophia into unholy matrimony and set himself up as the new king, locking the four governing Sorceresses away at the farthest reaches of the kingdom!

Achille had also used his powerful magic to drill an immense hole right down to the underworld. He drew up all manner of souls and created an undead army to help him protect his unrightfully claimed lands. This upheaval to the Hereafter did not escape the notice of the sarcastic but amenable Grim Reaper, who also witnessed the untimely demise of King Maximo. Grimmy, realizing that his own job could soon be in peril as there were less and less souls to govern, struck up a deal with the great warrior. Grim would send the king back to his own world, in exchange for the promise that Maximo would stop Achille. Besides sparing his life, Grim promised that an additional debt of gratitude would be paid if Maximo was successful. Our hero was also told to find and free the four imprisoned Sorceresses, as they would be his best chance of help with this Herculean task …

Game Play Heyday …

After the graphically impressive and intriguing opening cutscenes, our charismatic 3D hero is deposited into the first transformed world, now known as the Boneyard. In this foggy burial land you will find classic platform “koins” scattered about, but as soon as you direct Maximo in the third person toward them for automatic pickup, the thrills begin! Mountains lurch up out of nowhere or the terrain cracks wide open right underneath our hero’s boots, revealing fiery lava pits that require quick reflexes to avoid falling into! New secret passages are unearthed and the previous ways blocked or lost in sudden landslides. Bell-clanging stone towers spurt up as Maximo approaches, tossing dangerous groups of glowing purple skulls that crunch as they bounce down hills. Black tar acts as quicksand if Maximo pauses as he strides through it, and deadly, bubbling red lava contains bobbing paths of floating wooden coffins.

As you progress through this game you will also encounter many of Achille’s comical, cartoon-like, brightly rendered minions.  Cackling, cloaked wizards pop out of treasure chests and cast temporary, colorful bubbling spells on our hero that turn him into a limping old man or a creeping baby. Plant pods rise up from the bogs and burst open to reveal facetious, long-haired hippie creatures! Purplish sections of cemetery land sport bony remains that break through the earth and try pulling Maximo in as he passes. Lush tropical jungles harbor both mobile thorny overgrowth and giant purple flowers that arise and spit forth spinning, chomping, red and yellow fish! Goat devils attack on green plateaus, and doomed souls lift Maximo off golden masonry suspended over fire and brimstone, depositing our wriggling hero into deadly endless voids! Sword-wielding skeletons spontaneously generate from underground, sporting colorful shields or even pirate attire. Translucent green waters ripple with scaly crocodiles and bomb-throwing swamp zombies.

There are, however, redeeming qualities to this fighting even if you are an inexperienced or unwilling action gamer. Enemies have limited areas they patrol and they will stay confined to these places for one thing. You can often lure them to the outer fringes of their little territories one by one to make confrontations easier, or you can run out of range entirely for a breather. Baddies do not regenerate once felled, so Maximo will then be free to explore an area fully or even backtrack to a scene later for hoarded power-ups. You can even choose to send Maximo running or jumping right past the baddies and they won’t follow him very far, though you’ll miss a lot of pickups (and lower your score for a level) if you do. Finally, there is a complete lack of gore in this game, making it more suitable for families.

Your coordination and strategic abilities will not only be tested in battling Achille’s otherworldly armies, but also in leaping on to both static and moving objects like tortoises, coffins, tree trunks, statues, slippery ice, and abominably shaped stones.  Even as these objects must be landed on, you will be leaping to them over deadly boiling lava, fiery flames, claw-snapping traps, oceanic whirlpools, and tentacle-laden marshes. As challenging as some of these areas are, Maximo himself does give physical and aural warnings should he be on the verge of potentially plummeting to his doom. Even if he does wave his arms around, yell “Whoa!”  and then fall off of a large precipice, quick reflexes on the jump button while spinning him around will land him back on the solid ground from whence he fell. Although the amazing Maximo can begin a jump even if he is already falling in midair, short plunges to his doom usually can’t be recovered from.

Try Some Puzzles for a Spell …

Plot-twisting, steadily increasing, pulse-pounding action does abound in this title, but puzzle-solving and thoughtful, thorough exploring are also keys to your success. Certain secret pathways can only be discovered by jumping from tombstones, fountains, trees, hills, or bridges up to barely accessible heights and surveying the surroundings from above. Temples have rainbow-colored stained glass portraits that can be broken and leapt right through, revealing hidden rooms and power-ups. Certain gates harboring treasures can be unlocked with keys found on expired baddies, but others require the use of brainpower to discover alternate entryways.  There are stony hills hiding blocked caves that can reveal goodies when slashed open. Other treasures are secreted on tough-to-reach precipices. Pickups can also be found in buried treasure chests that Maximo can unearth by jumping around randomly at various locations, and still others are dropped by fallen enemies.

The pickups themselves include armor, specialized keys, diamonds, and red hearts that represent extra lives. You will also occasionally find coveted sword enhancements like the Frostbiter, the Flame Tongue, Armageddon, or Pure Blade, which deplete with use. Special magic spells are also dropped by extinguished enemies; these can produce unique magical attacks or even temporary invincibility.  The hard-to-find Mask of Sorrow, for example, can be used when maximum armor is worn. This temporarily turns Maximo into a green demon who is able to extinguish whole groups of enemies instantly.  With the Shield of Midas, Maximo can draw diamonds or koins into inventory that would otherwise be out of reach. Some sword enhancement refills and armor can also be bought if enough koins are collected.  You can “lock in” limited numbers of magic spells to keep them, but you will lose all others any time Maximo dies, so choose wisely. The game is intuitive to jump right in and play, but the amount and sheer variation of powers available as you progress adds greater complexity and strategy to this title.

Every land also has differently shaped “spirit containers,” appearing as bubbly tombstones, glowing toilet bowls, blue flame-spouting brass vases, and cute, icy snowmen with pirate hooks! Breaking them open reveals blue angel spirits that can be caught and turned into red koins that the Grim Reaper will take in exchange for another chance at life, should Maximo lose all the extra lives he has gathered. Beware though, as blue angel-stealing ghosts lurk about who will attempt to pass through Maximo and raid his angel inventory!

How the King Is Reigned In …

As you control Maximo through each of the five vividly detailed 3D lands, you will use simple PS2 button commands. These cause Maximo to jump, slash with his sword to attack Achille’s minions, and block enemy blows with his shield. Maximo can also throw his shield like a long-range boomerang at a distant or hard-to-reach enemy, and he will catch it again automatically. The left analog stick moves Maximo in all directions at a walk or a run depending upon how hard you push it. The commands are basic, can be repeated quickly for a double jump or double slash, and can be combined for more complex overhead or spinning strikes. Special magical power-ups taken into inventory are used with these same four buttons.  One additional trigger button centers the view back directly behind Maximo a little more quickly than the camera would normally follow, and another trigger can be used to look around without other movement.

Not One Bungle in the Fungal Jungle …

All five vast worlds to be conquered are unusual and exceptional, not just in gameplay but in graphics and sound. Besides the foggy, stony spookiness of the Boneyard, there is Great Dank (a gorgeous tropical jungle complete with flowing green water, stone temples, bamboo huts, and pretty trees sporting coral fungal “steps”), Frozen Wastes (a blue and white arctic backdrop of snowy mountains and icy caves with a large skeleton-pirate ship), Realm of Spirits (a fiery underworld setting for pig devils, dragons, swirling axes, and swinging pendulums), and finally a siege on Castle Maximo itself.

Excellent sound effects and visual clues are used optimally as regards each unique enemy’s groans and gurgles; you will see bubbles in the swamp and hear a crocodile’s growl before it emerges. You will see a neon green haze and hear the “Polterghost” moan, the wind he stirs up whispering along behind him, before he soars through Maximo and casts his vertigo/sleepwalker spell on the king. Other sound effects offered include swords clanging, water rushing, bluebirds cawing, and skeleton bones crunching as the skeletons run! The unforgettable music matches each land to a “T,” being whimsical yet spooky for the main burial land hook, then replete with jungle sounds and voodoo drums in one land or full of yo-ho-ho pirate-like adventure in the next.  No matter what, the score is always extremely appropriate and highly entertaining.

This Land Is Your Land, this Land Is My Land … So Beat It, Achille!

Most lands contain five levels as well as a final boss. The first four lands’ oversized bosses guard one each of the four Sorceresses, and all bosses require different tactics to eliminate. As you rescue the Sorceresses, each one in turn will offer you advice and a gift: a kiss (collecting all four kisses and locking them in will garner you a special prize at the end), armor, or an extra save. You won’t face Achille and his demonic drill or rescue Princess Sophia until all lands and other bosses are conquered first.

Each land also includes one place you can return to at level’s end to save your game, which costs 100 koins per save. Before any level ends, you are subsisting on checkpoints that you lose once all your lives are depleted and you visit the inimitable Grim, passing him more red koins with every few visits. Every time you finish a level you are given statistics on what percentage of it you discovered compared to how much there really is. If you want to better your score on any finished level of a land you’re in, you can travel back for a replay from the save area without penalty. If that level is in another land, you can still access it but it will cost you 100 koins for travel each way.

The Plot Does Thicken …

One thing I loved about this high-octane game was that the plot was continually referenced in cutscenes as the Sorceresses were rescued one by one. At the end of one level, Achille punished a skeleton captain for failing to kill Maximo. Achille brought that skeleton back to life, then commanded his forces to torture said captain until he died once more! In another level, three of the rescued Sorceresses were together when Achille magically appeared. He was holding the fourth Sorceress, Sephonie, whom he had just murdered! As Achille made off with Sephonie’s body, an angered Grimmy appeared and helped Maximo to follow Achille to the spirit world (Realm of Spirits) so Maximo could attempt to retrieve the Sorceress … The final ending was a real lulu as well … Speaking of which, was that actually a spiky black tail I saw poking out of Princess Sophia’s dress, or was it just a hallucination brought on by my perpetual state of hyperventilation?  Don’t you worry, because the plot did indeed twist more times than the hips of Mamba Marie the Swamp Sorceress, and Grimmy said he’d owe you big time when all was said and done, remember?

No Matter How You Slice it, King Maximo Rules!

Maximo: Ghosts to Glory is one of the most addicting, angering, exciting, and unforgiving-as-all-get-out (when jumping onto moving targets) games that I have ever played! There is never a dull moment, and it truly sparkles with creative, unique, progressively more challenging twists and turns around every corner. I never played Capcom’s original NES Ghouls and Ghosts or Ghosts and Goblins games on which they loosely based Maximo: Ghosts to Glory, so I can’t compare them, but I’ve heard the originals were more difficult than this new offering. You may find anyway that you must replay a level multiple times to complete it, and completion may be barely by the seat of Maximo’s adorable heart-print boxer shorts at that! Maximo can sport up to four levels of armor, which in my case got cut right down to his skivvies by enemy blows more times than I care to remember!

As a matter of fact, I would have had this review finished far sooner, except my sword kept slicing up the paper too much! Somebody please help me; I just have to put this game away! If I don’t, I’ll be inexcusably late for my Maximo Anonymous meeting … The End

The Verdict

Coveted One-of-a-Kind Sparkly Gold Star!

The Lowdown

Developer: Capcom Publisher: Capcom Release Date: February 2002

Available for: PlayStation 2

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      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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