developed by Final Form Games (Philadelphia, PA)
first published June 8, 2011, for Windows, $9.99
[trailer]
[website]
~200MB
Played to completion (plus a bunch of the bonus levels) in 5.5 hours, 3/18/15–3/23/15.
[video of a 30-minute complete playthrough]
Third of the seven games in “Humble Indie Bundle 4” purchased on Tuesday, December 13, 2011.
The only note I took while playing this is the word “exuberant,” which is a pretty good word, but I probably ought to say a little more than that.
This is a vertical shooter, which was once a dominant genre and is now fairly niche — although in our present videogame boom times, even niches can be pretty well-populated. But I’ve just flipped through my list of games to come, and of the nearly 200 games I still have in my sack, there’s only one more vertical shooter. And it’s an old 90s game.
Yet once upon a time, the foil-wrapped look of vertical-scrolling explosion-fests was the quintessential arcade machine sight. If I think back to the 90s and imagine I’m in a college dorm rec room, or a pizza parlor, or a bus station, and there’s an arcade machine, my imagination supplies the screen with the image of a vertical shooter. (You know, like this. That’s chosen at random — anything else on that playlist would do equally well.) Seeing stuff like that I feel like I can smell bus fumes and bad pizza.
I think they’re great; I love the space they inhabit. But only in a sort of abstracted way, where I know I’ll never actually pay direct attention to them, never become an aficionado. In fact I almost don’t need to play them to get my fill; the “attract mode” is plenty. It’s the way I’ve always felt about jazz: I really like it when it’s on and of course I like it better when it’s good, but I don’t think I’ll ever want to obsess over it, the way I do over other things.
Maybe what vertical shooters have in common with jazz is that I experience both of them as a kind of pure texture. When it’s pointed out to me that a piece of jazz has form, or that what’s being done is musically sophisticated, I always feel a kind of irritation. I want to say no, it’s not; it’s just this feeling it’s giving me, and no more. Yes, even when it’s the other half of my own brain doing the pointing out; I still wish it would shut up, because it doesn’t add anything.
And these vertical scrolling games feel the same way. They unfurl like a great dream carpet into infinity. Yeah, everything might be all choreographed and predictable, but I don’t choose to predict it. I wouldn’t really want to be attentive enough to get good at one of these games. I like that it’s just a world sliding downward forever and throwing up new artifacts of the imagination as it plows onward. Spaceships spewing gemlike bullets, or whatever, that make their theatrical entrances, are induced to go kablooey, and then make way for whatever’s next. It’s a parade, and when the parade is going by you just take it to be a way things can be, not a specific and finite phenomenon.
Or it’s like a David Lynch dream vaudeville without end. “And the next act is; and the next act is; and the next act is…”
The emphasis in these games is always on sensual values: does each explosion feel like the perfect first bite into a cookie? Do the things that blow up look like little toys, and do they do fancy tricks before crumpling impeccably? In a word, is it all tasty?
That tastiness sometimes goes hand in hand with a cosmic anxiety. If the enemy spaceships are even a little bit creepy, the whole endless cavalcade becomes extremely ominous. Not to mention the vertigo of traveling into infinity while watching nebulae and blasted planetoid surfaces and pure void drift by, ad infinitum. Sometimes I feel it philosophically in the pit of my stomach when a game starts with a little anime dude putting on a helmet and getting in a spaceship “for great justice” or whatever, then followed by hours of a tiny spaceship icon on a completely dehumanized cosmic explosion parade in deep space. How overwhelmingly lonely and grim! What must the dude be thinking while all this is happening? Is he still thinking? What happened to his soul, when the game started?
Sort of like when 2001 goes off the rails and before we know what’s happening, we find we’ve lost contact with Dave as a mortal with mortal concerns. Kubrick knew that would unsettle and it does. Well, it happens in pretty much every video game.
That’s an apt reference, because that forward-hurtling stargate sequence is the direct aesthetic precursor to so much of what goes on in video games. Everything I’ve said here about what I like (and fear) in vertical shooters applies to that sequence, too.
Jamestown has been attentively designed so as to be 100% tasty. It’s actually quite a short game, but each inch of it has been polished ’til it shines like the top of a chunky pixelated Chrysler building. Nothing on screen feels obligatory; it’s all there out of love. It’s got an exuberance to it, there’s the word.
Yes, the 90s pixel style is clearly a slavish imitation of yesteryear — they’ve even gone so far as to put in slightly wonky, unsteady scrolling in the opening animation, faithful to a fault. But the imitation is so fervent and utter that it doesn’t really feel like an affectation. It’s too slavish for that. They don’t seem to be trying to get credit in the present day for their “retro”-ness or their sentimental memories; they just seem to be devoting themselves to an old ideal that they’ve managed to carry with them, intact.
Interestingly, they advertise the game as “a neo-classical top-down shooter,” which is the only place I’ve ever seen the term “neo-classical” applied to modern videogames. It feels good to me, much better-intentioned than “retro.” I called Jasper’s Journeys “anachronistic” because it genuinely felt divorced from concerns about the present day. Jamestown isn’t quite so serene as to be anachronistic — it knows very well that it’s doing something the hipsters will eat up — but it still feels pretty firmly grounded in its 20-year-old milieu. In any case, it never made me feel queasy about fashion and history and all that; it just felt cohesive, I played it as it stood, and I enjoyed myself. I take that as significant.
Jamestown falls into a vertical-shooter subgenre known as “bullet hell,” where the screen can sometimes fill up with literally hundreds of deadly projectiles at a time, spinning outward from enemies in mandala formations that seem impossible to avoid, but in fact can be snaked through if you’re precise. When these attacks burst on the screen, they can give a truly alarming sensation, like being in the ocean and seeing a wave coming that is much much too big for safety. But that can be a thrilling sensation if one does in fact survive.
I’d never played one of these “bullet hell” games before — I’d only seen images that made them look completely masochistic and unappealing — but having played this one I now understand what makes the genre work: unlike most video games, your hitbox (i.e. the area that the program checks to determine whether you’ve been hit) is not the size and shape of the ship as seen on screen, but is in fact much smaller. Only the very center of the player character is actually vulnerable. This means that you are actually much safer than you feel; when a mess of bullets is coming at you, you actually stand a moderate chance of surviving just by luck. But it doesn’t look like it!
This dynamic — where the game feels more dangerous and difficult than it is — seems to me a wonderful thing. It means that the feeling of exhilarating, significant success can be yours at a much lower cost in real-world time and tension than in other games.
The other thing I hadn’t fully taken in about the “bullet hell” games is that when a good deal of the game consists of threading your way through geometric radial blooms of bullets, the dream-parade quality I’m talking about gets supplemented by some downright psychedelic investment in awed abstraction. When you get to the boss at the end of each level, what you’re looking at is not infrequently exactly like a “go to sleeeeeep” hypnosis spiral. (I am reminded of the notorious Super Hexagon.)
I guess this is becoming a recurring theme here: video games are one of the most overtly hypnotic of cultural forms, and I like that about them.
The premise of the game is: colonial America on Mars. This is deliberately gonzo tongue-in-cheek (I think!), but it sort of revealed the underlying sense of steampunk to me, something I’ve been hunting for a long time. To me, “the Jamestown colony” is the quintessential public school “Social Studies” subject. I’m pretty sure my first “research paper,” in 4th grade, was on Jamestown. (Bibliography: “Jamestown,” Encyclopedia Americana, 1967.) And I think this is the key to steampunk: it is the exhilarating juxtaposition of the authoritarian world of Social Studies with the private world of comic books and video games. That is to say, the essential thing is not that it combines 19th (or 18th, or 17th)-century realities with fantasy technology; it’s that it combines stuff that grown-ups insist on with stuff that you like, thus ostensibly reclaiming Social Studies for the impish forces of vitality and happiness, but actually premised on a subconscious belief in the absolute impossibility of such a thing ever really happening.
My theory is, effectively, that Steampunk is a symptom of the alienation of American anti-intellectualism. It is a flaunting of supposed affection for “old-timey” stuff that reveals an underlying disinterest in its essential content. The only real affection is for its status as “old-timey,” which is to say as dry and inaccessible, official, imposed by the hollow public school authority of which one’s classmates are so suspicious, but for which one is seeking gold-star credit for one’s relative intellectualism. As long as the stuff satisfies this profile, it fits the bill, and all “old-timey” stuff becomes effectively alike.
There’s something revealingly tin-eared about steampunk’s supposedly loving evocation of 19th-century ideals. It’s as though someone said they OMG looooooved French language and literature, Mallarmé! Flaubert!, and then demonstrated it by doing a gobbledygook doubletalk impression of French (“Ah je je les vous? Ah vous sais vous le mais jeux?”).
The laboriously antiquated multipartite titles of the levels in this game (“Chapter II: JOURNEY THROUGH THE DARK SECTOR in which RALEIGH IS PURSUED by The VIGILANT SPANISH BORDER GUARD and The AWFUL TRUTH stands REVEALED”) are typical. They know there’s definitely a thing you’re supposed to do that has to do with unpredictable capitalization and the phrase “in which.” Beyond that, who cares? That’s certainly attentive enough to put them into “good student” “nerd” territory, and that’s the only real goal. The point is that from there, the leap into the videogame stuff they actually care about becomes literate, witty, fringe, creditable, rather than junky, self-indulgent, mainstream. Kid-tested and mom-approved.
This is something I harp on because it’s become a much broader and more insidious issue (consider the prevalence of “Well played, sir”), but also because I feel like phony sympathy for 200-year-old ideals obscures the potential for real sympathy for 200-year-old ideals, and that saddens me. “Creative misreading” is all well and good but when it begins to be so habitual that it gets in the way of “reading,” that seems wrong.
But that’s all very much a digression. This is a shooter videogame with giant monsters. If they want it to be about Sir Walter Raleigh on Mars, obviously that’s fine.
The music is sort of the musical equivalent of steampunk: an “epic” “classical orchestra” “cinematic” soundtrack. But again, this is a vertical shooter, an extremely spaced-out thing, so I have no real problem with that. In fact, I thought the score was very well done, for one of those, with a real sense of craft. Here’s the final boss battle music, which seems to me to be a lot classier than most final boss music.
A nice thing about this genre of game is that progression through each level is pretty much on a fixed timer, so the music can be made to sync up with the game events and actually accompany them. This score takes advantage of that on several occasions, to very good effect, like in level 2, when it starts to rain and then the lost colony of Roanoke is revealed.
Yes, it’s ridiculous.
Jamestown is noted for having very satisfying co-operative play, for up to four people. But I don’t do that so I can’t comment.
Final word: this is a very attractive and polished piece of work. I enjoyed that it was short enough that I got to see it all, hard enough that I had to work at it, easy enough that 5 hours did the trick. Of course, there are more bonus challenges and higher difficulty levels if I want to go back some day and keep upping the ante on myself. Sure, maybe! But maybe not! I appreciate the way it’s all been packaged so that, having seen the ending and the credits, I don’t feel I’m leaving it incomplete, even though there’s plenty more to do if I want there to be. There is, for example, no big “57% completion” display in the main menu, to make sure you feel that you have more to do until you’ve OCDed it to death. I don’t have more to do. I had fun, I’m moving on, and Jamestown is comfortable with that. Like a true friend!
I feel that I here have something worth well more then $0.71. Since I got nothing out of the previous game, I’ll say that I spent $1.42 all on this. Still a good deal!
Before we go: I’ve just been checking out various infamous “bullet hell” sequences on Youtube. Get a load of this one. Good god! Doesn’t the very existence of this make you feel like the entire nation of Japan could use some therapy? Some quiet time? The patterns are beautiful, but the construct is tiny vulnerable you vs. overwhelming cruel cosmic beauty, a flea crushed by a galaxy of awe.
Yeah yeah, I know, there’s a sexual reading to be had too, but they’re actually one and the same.
Basically, submissives and dominants are exactly the same people: the people who carry around a sub/dom dichotomy in their minds. Which side they choose to embody and which one they choose to project is immaterial. The people who make these games — effectively, the people who are spewing out the bullets — are the same people who identify with the player who has to dodge them. Too much deferent investment in the vital importance of authority structures can make you go crazy. That’s a video of what it feels like!
Jamestown was made by three guys in Philadelphia, with help. The main credits as they appear in the game:
Timothy Ambrogi: design, engine, chieftain
Michael Ambrogi: design, art, soldier
Halsted Larsson: design, gameplay, shaman
Francesco ‘Foco’ Cerda: music