Ever onward, ever onward. I know how much you all cherish these entries.
• DROD: The City Beneath (2007): Caravel Games (Seattle, WA / Provo, UT / various) [54 hrs]
Picking up from last time, after playing hundreds of hours of DROD: I proceeded to play even more DROD.
Third full game in the series, and the last one that I’d already played; everything from this point on will be brand new to me. My first playthrough of this one was only 4 years ago, but damned if that helped at all. Some of the hardest stuff, toward the end, seemed vaguely familiar when I got there, but a substantial portion of this felt like I was seeing it for the first time. That’s not a reflection of how interesting it is — this is in fact the kookiest and most eventful of the games thus far. It’s mostly just an indication of the degraded state of my memory-formation in 2014. Pretty sure things have improved on that front since.
Story-emphasis gets even more extreme in this one. On my previous pass I found that off-putting, but this time I was into it. Bring on the folk-art weirdness, I say! For whatever reason, I’m eating it up. Meanwhile the puzzle elements branch out in all kinds of wacky directions. This is a game that experiments and expands on its own design right before your eyes. There’s something thrilling about that.
Also, after a decade of defiantly unschooled and unpolished music by the game’s designer — which, I grant, was fairly engaging in a gawky “outsider” sort of way — this one suddenly has a soundtrack by an actual established synth musician. And it’s pretty good! (It better be, if you’re gonna spend 54 hours with it.)
• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 8. Devilishly Dangerous Dungeons of Doom (2008): Roger Barnett [8 hrs]
I promise: this is the last one for now. A few interesting rooms here but overall I found this set of puzzles tended toward the irritating. Ah well. You better believe there’s more DROD to come but I think it’s time to mix it up again.
• Fish Fillets 2 (a.k.a The X Fillets II) (2007): ALTAR Interactive (Brno, Czech Republic) [50 hrs so far…]
Yes, I know how it looks. But contrary to all appearances, this is absolutely terrific. If you can set aside the chirping nonsense of the trappings — and you can — this is as good and as hard (hard! HARD!) as puzzle games come. The original Fish Fillets was a drag, whereas this isn’t at all: it’s smooth and responsive and has a generous undo and save system. Furthermore the puzzle mechanics in this one have been revised to be much more intuitive: yes of course the fish should be able to carry items downward as well as upward!
It gave me that childlike eager feeling I sometimes get, where not only am I enjoying myself but I become convinced against all reason that everyone I know would enjoy this too. It’s never true, of course — in fact often the things that inspire that kind of enthusiasm are the ones most idiosyncratic to me — but it’s a special expansive kind of enthusiasm, where even the non-ego parts of my psyche get folded in. This is a game not only for “I” but for “the Other”! Too bad Fish Fillets 2 isn’t available for Mac or else I’d give YOU a copy, gentle reader, whether you wanted it or not. (If you have a PC, please note that this is just $5 on Steam, and goes on sale for $0.99 regularly. Please note!)
The brilliance, as with DROD, is that the puzzle construction is always in interlocking conceptual layers: the big-picture plan (“I think the idea is to move the first piece across the screen and then use it to lift the second piece?”) is constrained by the move-by-move sliding-puzzle logistics (“Dammit, in what order do I have to make the moves so that I can squeeze both the fish past that jut in the wall? Is it even possible?”), and vice versa. The process of solving is always an intricate dance between attending to short- and long-term goals.
The puzzles are hard (HARD!) enough that all the X-Files fish nonsense feels perfectly welcome (though I’ll grant that the way the dialogue repeats after an undo is a bit exasperating). All the non-puzzle elements of the production feel like illustrations on paper plates at a 6-year-old’s birthday party, but that’s really fine with me. I generally had a good time at those parties. And yes, after tens of hours of brainwashing, I did actually start to chuckle at some of the supremely supremely nerdy joking. It’s all in good fun, people! Come on!
I’m writing it up even though I didn’t finish, yet, because — did I mention it’s hard? About 40 hours into this thing the difficulty started to be, as they say, prohibitive, and progress became very very slow indeed. But I’m not a quitter. Just a slower. I’ve slowed so significantly that I’m logging it. But I assure you: the work will continue.
Hey! I just now put it together that Fish Fillets is designed by Vlaada Chvátil, the same game designer as instant-classic tabletop game Codenames, as seen at your local Barnes & Noble! NOW do you believe me? This is the real thing! Woo-hoo, Fish Fillets 2!
Meanwhile I do want to keep chipping away at the backlog. Still working through the Humble WB Games Bundle from 11/5/13.
• Scribblenauts Unlimited (2012): 5th Cell (Bellevue, WA) [played for 2 hours]
Curiosity about this game’s celebrated “type absolutely anything and it will appear onscreen!” mechanic was the main reason I bought this bundle in the first place. The system is simultaneously impressive and not that impressive. Everything’s rendered in the same simplistic, blocky, hinged-puppet style, and modifiers are implemented in the simplest and most obvious way. Wanna see “big fat angry teal koala”? Sure, it can do that. Just don’t expect it to be as funny to look at as it was to come up with. Despite all the adjectives it still just looks basically like “koala” which, come to think of it, looks basically like “bear.”
That said, there are certainly several minutes of genuine entertainment to be had in ordering it to generate a bunch of stupid surreal things and then watching them interact. “Stinky mean cantaloupe” vs. “hairy baby mapmaker”! Go! (In case you were curious: the cantaloupe attacked the baby mapmaker, who then defeated it almost immediately by throwing a map at it.)
As for the game, it’s more or less Richard Scarry’s Busytown, with plenty of glockenspiel cheer to go around. Contrary to the silly casting in the trailer above, this is designed for actual kids much more than for kids-at-heart (= weird uncles)… but I do have to wonder if even actual kids would find this rewarding for very long. Once you get past the pure sandbox amusement, the gameplay basically consists of a series of characters making requests like “I need something to help me put these dinosaur bones together!” and you type “glue” and then drag the glue to the woman who asked for it, and then the pile of bones puff-of-smoke into a complete skeleton, and the screen fills up with “hooray you did it” graphics. I guess maybe if I had typed “giant sticky boogers” it might also have worked, but it’s not like it awards creativity points. Glue will do fine.
Fun is where you find it, I guess. Sounds good. I made a hairy baby mapmaker and had the corresponding amount of fun. I heartily approve of the spirit of this game and have no need to actually play it.
• Batman: Arkham City (2011 / “Game of the Year Edition” 2012): Rocksteady Studios (London, UK) [25+ hrs]
Batman’s post-Burton franchise affectations — of being “brooding” and “dramatic” and, quote, “dark,” end quote — are pretty hard for me to take, if only because I actually do like things that are brooding and dramatic and dark, and Batman, as far as I can tell, is actually just a ballet about a bunch of different Mardi Gras costumes getting into fights. All the weeping choruses singing double-talk Dies Iraes, the obsessive Pietà posing — get a grip, guys! Open your eyes and look at what’s really going on here: the little guys are bopping each other!
The storyline is just a catalogue of 15 different villains, strung together into a fetch-quest daisy chain, and the gameplay mostly consists of being trained to do tricks on cue, and then being fed the cues. (Whenever you see a concrete wall: use your explosive to explode it. Got that? Hey look, it’s a concrete wall! Hey look there’s another one!) The characters are all kinda gross and/or porny, and as I’ve already said I can’t really get into the vibe. So why did I thoroughly enjoy this game for 25 hours? Sheer production polish. This product is luxurious in every respect: it looks and sounds and responds like a million bucks. That’s what “triple A” games are supposed to offer: confident, seamless immersion in a sensory thrill. Taste, and indeed substance, is really beside the point. Games are the new Hollywood; this is a mountain of sparkly tinsel. I’m totally a sucker for tinsel. Isn’t everybody?
I think snobbery usually arises from people trying to fight off their own seduction by nonsense. I on the other hand enjoy allowing myself to be thoroughly seduced by all sorts of nonsense. If it can figure out how. This figured out how. Yes, I know, having no standards is risky — but listen: life is risky.
The rest of the Humble WB Games Bundle is going to be skipped!
• Mortal Kombat Kollection is no longer supported by Steam and anyway it’s just old arcade games, which I can play other ways.
• Guardians of Middle-Earth is fundamentally a multiplayer game, in a genre I don’t care at all about, and Steam reviews pretty much all say it’s terrible. Three strikes.
The bundle also came with some kind of starter kit for Lord of the Rings Online but that’s not actually a game that I now own, it’s just a promotional enticement to enter an already free-to-play “massively multiplayer” game. Not happening.
So that finally brings me to the end of my purchases of… let’s see… November 2013!
December 12, 2013: GOG, knowing that at the end of the year they’ll be losing their license to sell the original Fallout games, offers them for free to kick off their winter sale (and possibly to piss off the rights-holders?) I can’t resist clicking on buttons that say Free, so now I have them.
These are famous and beloved games, but they’re now essentially antiques and are furthermore not what I would usually consider to be my kind of game. So let’s see how much patience I have for them.
• Fallout (1997): Interplay Productions (Los Angeles, CA) [played for 2.5 hrs]
Results are in: Not enough patience. I can tell this is a nice, thoughtful RPG. But I have some kind of inborn RPG block, and this isn’t gonna be the game that breaks it.
I spent most of my time punching rats, then waiting for them to ploddingly “take their turn,” so that I could punch them again. A guy said he’d help me for money, but I had no money, and couldn’t find any way to get some. I died several times by stupidly wandering into situations I wasn’t prepared for. There were too many menus and stats, and everything required two more mouse-clicks than I instinctively wanted it to. I just couldn’t get in the zone. I never can with RPGs. That’s all there is.
Very very gradually earning new slivers of the statistical pie in the face of a random number generator is not fun to me. It never will be. Seems to me that RPGs are ALL ABOUT that.
This means I’m gonna skip
• Fallout 2 (1998): Black Isle Studios (Irvine, CA)
• Fallout Tactics (2001): Micro Forté (Canberra, Australia)
Okay.
12/18/03 I purchase “Humble Bundle: PC and Android 8.” This ends up being 8 games (for $5). One of them (Little Inferno) I already own and have addressed somewhere above. The other 7 are next up on the backlog.
• Gemini Rue (2011): Joshua Nuernberger (Los Angeles, CA) / Wadjet Eye Games (Brooklyn, NY) [6 hrs]
All graphic adventure games are born fighting an uphill battle against terminal awkwardness. I can’t help but root for them… for the first half hour. The other five-and-a-half hours of Gemini Rue I spent making editorial corrections, mentally. The title gives a clue to the sort of writing on offer: Gemini is the name of a sci-fi location in the game, and then, yes, that’s just the plain old word “rue,” as in “rue the day.” As in “He doesn’t need to live a life of rue anymore,” which (spoiler!) is the final line of dialogue. Or as in the designer’s own words: ‘…since the game was pretty melancholy, I looked up a sad thesaurus and came up with the word, “Rue.” ‘
The protagonist’s name is “Azriel Odin.”
Sound and graphics are… okay, and some of the Philip K. Dick-ripoff story ideas had promise. The genre is a promising one for this form (and overall I found this more successful than Beneath a Steel Sky; the necessary actions may have been uninspired but at least they made sense). So, sure, the game has its points — I don’t need to look up a sad thesaurus to review it — but it is inescapably student work, living somewhere above “fan” but below “professional.” Of course, a lot of well-staffed graphic adventures also tend to find themselves stuck in that zone, which is why they all need so much rooting for. Root root root! If they don’t win it’s a shame. Hey Wadjet Eye, if you ever want someone to rewrite absolutely every single line of your dialogue, just let me know. Sample work: final line above should have been “Whoever he is… he’s free.” Get in touch if you want the other thousand.
Unless the voice acting is supremely good — which it never is — these constrained pixelly games feel far better without it. Much more enveloping, much more ominous. That hush is a threat and an enticement, just like the faces that are too lo-res to be seen. And yet I never have the guts to just outright mute the voices when they’re provided — it would feel uncouth, like refusing a birthday cake that someone has taken the time to bake for me. On which they’ve written “Happy birth! Day.” because they only got one take and don’t have any clue what the context is. Thanks guys, it’s! Delicious.