Oldschool Hard

I am on the road crew. This is my stop sign.

Happy birthday, Psychonauts. Today you are 5, and if you got through kindy ok, played nicely with the other children, showed appropriate motor-skill development, and did not set anyone on fire with your psychokinetic abilities, you should just be settling into your first year of school.

My, they grow up so fast, don’t they?

Now, I can understand why people don’t quite get what a special little person you are. Your charms are not necessarily immediately apparent. Quite frankly, you are not aging well, looks-wise, even at the tender age of 5. You have good bone structure, but a new haircut wouldn’t hurt, and the best of your personality only comes out after some time spent with you. However, among other heartwarming moments, the way you traipse through that city and your wonderful friendship with the Milkman show you truly are a special individual, and if only people would give you a chance, they would see the care put into your upbringing. More people should spend an evening in your company, especially now that you make such small demands on their wallet.

Yes, yes, you can start opening your presents. But please stop trying to enter my mind, and for the love of Jebus, you need more control before you start trying to light the candles on your cake with your powers. There’s only so much scorched buttercream I can take the smell of…

****

In more current news, hol-eeeee shit, Blizzard has made, by estimates, somewhere in the realm of $3-5 million USD from ethereal sparklehorsies. They couldn’t make money more easily if they became an outpost of the mint. As for me, I’m gonna hold off until the /mountspecial is changed to shitting rainbows, thanks.

Annnnnd, we’re having that ‘are games art?’ hand-wringing competition again, are we? Oh, joy. This is such a useful conversation to have, because, without fail, it always changes the minds of those criticising games, and doesn’t look at all painfully insecure.

Yeah, most games probably don’t approach ‘art’, just as Hot Tub Time Machine is never going to be used as an example of the singular artistic vision of a cinematic auteur. It’s entertainment. ‘Games are not art’ does not have to be extrapolated to ‘games have no value/legitimacy’ every time. Games are usually fun. That’s enough. However, once again we (as gamers) rise to the bait like a dolphin at Sea World. Well, maybe with slightly more or less chattering, but to the untrained eye I imagine it looks quite similar.

Roger Ebert doesn’t get it, what a surprise. News at 11, old man doesn’t understand technology/a medium that rose to popularity after his own youth! It’s just like my grandpa using ‘back in my day…’ to rail against anything he doesn’t understand, without actually judging it on its own terms. Fuggedaboudit. For more, refer to my prior comments about seeking validation from those who are in no position to give it.

Image from Double Fine’s official site.

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Are you experienced?

Some games have all the luck – high critical praise, strong fan appreciation, and good sales. Most game companies would be more than happy with two out of three, as long as it’s the latter two. Unfortunately for a few of the games on my Top 25 list, due to a quirky and/or unique nature, they seemed to have the first two covered, but not the last one, and similar games are unlikely to ever be released. Games like Psychonauts and Grim Fandango reviewed well, have a rabid fan base, but just never seemed to be able to sell to a more casual audience.

Another one of these sales-deficient games on my top 25 list was Rez. Ostensibly a cross between an on-rails shooter and, to a lesser extent, a rhythm game, Rez is one of those games where the mechanics are fairly pedestrian, but the strongly Tron-like (but brighter and more colourful) ‘vibe’ and what it does with its simple mechanics is what sets it apart. Rez is set inside a mainframe computer run by a (now) rogue artificial intelligence having an existential crisis, which you must liberate it from by giving it back its ‘soul’. You do this by destroying viruses and breaking through a firewall in each level to get to the AI’s central core.

You can go through different stages of ‘evolution’, which transform the look and function your avatar, and serve as powerups and increased health. The game builds through 5 levels to the last boss rush, which deals with the crisis of the AI by (literally) throwing all sorts of existential questions at you. Possibly my favourite level outlines the entire evolution of life from the primordial soup onwards – not the sort of thing you see in most games.

Made with a sort of stylised wireframe graphic look, Rez‘s tagline is ‘experience synesthesia’. Synesthesia, if you’re not familiar with the term, is a condition in which senses can blend together, leading to things like the association of certain sounds with different tastes, or assigning colours to letters based on their look or sound, among other symptoms. The game tries to do this in a few ways: by using bright colours throughout most of the game, matching your shooting to coincide with beats and sound effects in the pumping electronic soundtrack, allowing you to have some control over the music in the game, and with the Japanese release of the game, there was also an option to buy it with an accessory called the ‘trance vibrator’ which, as you can probably imagine, was rapidly pressed into service by female gamers.

Rez takes some elements of Tempest 2000, Tron, and even (the also underrated and undersold) Frequency, and combines them with a sort-of more cyberpunk version of the Tron plot. Originally available on the Dreamcast, the version with which I’m most familiar is the PS2 version, although there is now a HD version available on XBox Live. Although it’s not really a long game, it is highly re-playable, with multiple game modes, and at around 10 bucks, I can’t recommend it more highly.

Image from bit-tech.net, cropped to size.

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Problems with new games: not enough floating skulls.

Tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of the release of one of my top 5 games of all time, Planescape: Torment. This game, following a trend among many of my top 25 games, never sold very many copies, but has almost universally excellent reviews. Admittedly, these are the same publications that called GTA IV ‘perfect’, so you can take that with a grain of salt if you like.

Unlike most Dungeons and Dragons games that are set in the elves ‘n’ dwarves high fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms, Planescape: Torment, as the name suggests, is set relatively obscure multiverse of Planescape, where many different planes of existence meet, and the nature of multiple universes can be changed by particularly strong-willed individuals. The game revolves around you playing an immortal, in the sense that you can die and will rise again, not that you are unkillable. You forget the events of your previous lives upon reincarnation, and must wander the multiple planes of the setting to reclaim your memories, often coming across characters who have you at a disadvantage, knowing you, without you knowing them – and a lot of them are pissed off with you.

You can choose to work for a range of factions and with a range of characters you meet, although one character, Morte, a sarcastic floating skull, is with you the whole game, and picks up insults NPCs fling, later to use them against you. I might be easily impressed, but damn, a talking smartarse skull. Niiiiice. The multi-plane setting of the game universe means you come across all sorts of creatres, from demons to deities, although not any of the Forgotten Realms familiars (like elves ‘n’ dwarves).

The game starts with you waking in a morgue (like one of my other favourites, the SNES Shadowrun). Death is a central part of the plot, and often dying is the only way forward. This is a zero-sum resurrection – some poor bastard has to die to provide for you to live again. Through each death, you rely on other characters or notes you have tattooed on your body (yes, this came out pre-Memento) to work out who you are and what you need to do. There’s a line early on in a conversation, after you find the person who made you immortal, that really sums up with the game is about: ‘What can change the nature of a man?’ Without giving too much away, there’s a reason you were made immortal, and you have a notoriety throughout the planes. How you choose to deal with that directs where the game’s plot goes.

PC:T one of the most ‘adult’ games I’ve ever played, and not in the ‘titties and blood’ sense – there’s not a lot of combat, and quests are often better solved by careful thought and the right course in conversation, and there’s no one ‘right’ choice to solve any particular problem – no easy answers nor obvious immediate impact in the choices that you make. It’s one of the earliest RPGs that I can remember where the protagonist is not a font of virtue or a good man in a bad land, the choices you make influence both your character and plot greatly, and the experience is not diminished by choosing to be a ‘bad’ character.

Slow-paced, with combat like a retarded Baldur’s Gate, and mountains of text, it’s not a game for everyone, and I can see why it didn’t grab people browsing on a store shelf or reading reviews – it looks drab, brown and grey – and long existential conversations aren’t exactly everyone’s idea of a good time. That being said, it’s possibly Black Isle Studios’ crowning achievement, and that says a lot when you consider that they also developed the first two Fallout games and helped Bioware with the Baldur’s Gate series. Although showing it’s age now, particularly with a hard 640×480 resolution, if you can pick up a copy on eBay at a non-exorbitant rate, I highly recommend it.

Picture ripped from Gamespot. Yeah, I do that.

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Mmm, River City Ransom. “BARF!”

My last post probably gave you some idea of what sort of games I like.

So you can get even more idea of where I’m coming from, and can decide now if we’ll never agree and you can thus make a graceful exit (door opens outwards), here is a list of my top 25 favourite games. There’s a few that are stiff to miss out, but this is basically it. I originally drew up a huge list of my favourite games on each platform, it was long and boring, and I won’t subject you to it.

Bear in mind a few things: I keep both a literal stack of unplayed games that I get cheaply, and a figurative stack of digital files from steam weekend discounts, impulse sales, and so on, and the pile is currently up to about 80 games. Also, I could only own one console per generation before becoming an adult and being able to buy as many systems as I want, so I may have missed your particular favourite. My exposure in particular to non-RPG PS1 games, XBOX games, and Sega games post-Megadrive is limited, because I never owned the systems. Lastly, these are my personal favourites. I may have played -better- games, but sometimes something about a game just sticks with you.

River City Ransom
Crystalis
Mutant League Football
Shining Force 2
Snatcher
Shadowrun (SNES)
Super Mario Kart
Zelda: A Link to the Past
Planetfall
Wasteland
System Shock 2
Knights of the Old Republic
Vampire: Bloodlines
Planescape: Torment
Deus Ex
Fallout 3
Grim Fandango
Psychonauts
Baldur’s Gate/2
World of Warcraft
Super Mario 64
Shadow of the Colossus
ICO
Rez

Why yes, I do like cyberpunk, post-apoc, Tim Schafer, and Bioware. Why do you ask? I generally like moody FPS games, western RPGs, quirky adventure games, the unique, and anything with some form of experience and/or loot grind. Mmm, purplz.

This month, all going to plan, I will sit down with Brutal Legend, and Dragon Age: Origins, both of which have the potential to be in there, based on my usual preferences. Something like Diablo 2, Mass Effect, Majora’s Mask, Okami, Metal Gear Solid 3, Half-Life 2 or any of a host of other Infocom text adventures could be in there if I wrote this on a different day.

But I didn’t.

So they aren’t.

What about my least favourite games? Well, I don’t really have the patience to tackle JRPGs anymore, unless they review very, very highly. It’s not active hate, I just don’t love them the way I did as a kid, when the longer the game, the more the value.

Real Time Strategy is another genre I don’t have much love for – I enjoyed Company of Heroes and World in Conflict, but I tried to play through Warcraft 3 to get more of the World of Warcraft background story, and I just couldn’t do it. The style of play seems foreign to my gaming skill set and just not enjoyable to me.

I don’t like 1 on 1 fighting games, either. I don’t want to remember a million moves, I don’t enjoy the blocking techniques, and I don’t like getting my shit fucked up by a guy hitting an 80-hit combo that I can’t do anything about.

Perhaps my biggest pet hate crosses genre lines: aggressively mediocre games. I’m not talking about the truly crappy like Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, E.T. or Altered Beast, but the games like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, that have a framework of competency that leads you to believe they could have been something good, but have all the life sucked out of them.

My least favourite game? Halo. I’m not fond of FPS on a console at the best of times, so take this with a grain of salt, but I found this game massively uninspired. It had a colour palette like it was CGA all over again. Its way of ‘extending’ the game (and thus the value) was to make you run back through the levels, in reverse. And this was the company that made Marathon. They had a good track record. They knew better. Of course, it sold by the truckload and has a devoted team of fanboys. The series sells massively. It rated well. What do I know?

Picture shamelessly ripped off from IGN.com. If it makes you feel any better, I cropped it myself.

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