The Last Candle

One of the new radios in the Portal update. Broadcasts may contain SSTV data or LOLs.

In the summer of 2004, an ARG called I Love Bees (or ILB), a series of promotional stunts for the upcoming release of the game Halo 2, invigorated a time that was otherwise a working summer spent in my college city of Mount Pleasant, Michigan. Heck, I wasn’t even a big Halo fan at the time, but the ILB game, which combined a digital world with our sensory one, captured my attention completely for several days. I wrote an essay about my excitement for the surreal events, events where hidden messages were found buried in distorted JPEG images and pay phones across the nation in both urban and rural locations rang out as the game’s awakening AI stretched “axons” across the continent. Naturally I concluded that fond recognition by saying I very much looked forward to the next ARG that captured my imagination.

That ARG arrived two days ago, and this time the events surround the puzzle-adventure game Portal. My interest began when I was browsing through the feeds in my RSS reader and found that an update was released for Portal. Hardly unusual, even for a two-plus-year-old game, but the patch notes for this update piqued my curiosity.

Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations

Needless to say, this kind of “compliance” is not your typical bug fix or extra feature, notwithstanding the beautiful freedom allowed to the PC platform (compared to the locked-down purgatory occupied by the popular consoles[^1]). I went to my usual Internet gaming haunts and found that various fan communities had already accomplished most of the gruntwork with the new update, revealing the update as actually the advent of a new ARG, one to rival 2004’s I Love Bees.

A Steam post on the official Steam forums summarizes the week’s excitement very well, but own my excitement continues below.

Portal players who began a new game booted up the game after the update was applied, they (including me) discovered that a series of radios, exactly 26 in all, had been added to the many “test chambers” — puzzles, divided among many rooms — and that they would broadcast morse code or what was seemingly static. And the radios now make terrible noises when tossed through a “fizzler,” signaling a newfound significance in the setting.

All information for the new ARG thus far has come from those radios. The morse code contained genuine messages, although the quality of the new information ranged from mysterious (“Interior transmission active”) to comedic (“Beep beep beep beep lol”). But the real meat has come from the static, which turned out to not be static at all but data. Intrepid gamer investigators extracted the data, and someone had the knowledge to guess the audio recordings were “broadcast” using slow-scan television, a picture transmission method utilized by ham radio operators. Someone ran the audio through a decoder of sorts, and images like the below came out the other end of the black box.

One of the pictures decoded from Portal's new radio transmissions. Crazy!

Twenty-two of these images were decoded, and further numbers and letters were extracted from the new information. And here’s where the game bled out into the real world: Some of the numbers and letters, after being further decoded, ended up being a regular, single telephone number, location in Seattle, WA.

Voice calls resulted in no success, but eventually someone called using a different, bygone technology: a dial-up modem. A BBS picked up on the other end, which of course requested login credentials. After discovering the credentials (the method how they were discovered escapes me), modern Portal fans, using video cards holding 1000 times the primary memory of a entire desktop computer back when BBS’s were common, logged into the system and retrieved another set of vital clues, presented this time in a very appropriate format: ASCII art.

Like ILB preceded a sequel to Halo, Portal’s ARG is seemingly approaching a sequel to itself. I find it incredibly cool that the developer Valve used Portal, which has basically been unmodified for over two years, as a vector to continue its universe. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen: that’s what press releases, magazine advertisements (okay, maybe not so much these days) and previews are used for. But here we have not only the game influencing real-life events, but a game seemingly modifying itself (within the fiction, of course), which goes hand-in-hand with the main antagonist of the Portal universe, a saucy artificial intelligence who declared itself at the end of the original game (after a fair bit of combat) to be “still alive.” And so it seems.

Of course this gives me an excellent excuse to play through Portal again, collecting radios and enjoying once again, for the fourth or fifth time, what is arguably one of the best games of the past decade and definitely one of my all-time favorites.

Oh, and hey — looks like Portal was updated again today, this time adding a “valuable asset retrieval.” Seems like this fiction is picking up momentum, and I am all too happy about it.

[^1]: Neither the PS3 or Xbox 360 versions of Portal will receive the update, due to the pressures and gauntlet of Sony and Microsoft’s certification processes for updates. Microsoft also likes to require Valve to charge for all updates, even if the updates are free on the PC. Quel domage.

In the later half of the 90’s I took part in this burgeoning so-called World Wide Web by creating and managing a fan site for the vehicular combat video game series Twisted Metal. The site was stored at Geocities, the inarguable hosting giant of the time, and stayed put on a stretch of land in the TimesSquare/Arcade district for over ten years.

But last Monday, parent company Yahoo! swept an arm across the ‘Cities property and cleared a thousand crude communities from the face of the Internet, including my site, that first easily-forgotten foray of mine into web development. But for reasons of nostalgia and a touch of masochism, I grabbed a copy of my ol’ site from Yahoo!’s clutches before the couple rusty Geocities servers were isolated from the niche market of web surfers who still pined for the days of when the web was simple, static, and almost completely ugly.

For my part during dawn on the Web, visitors to my simple, static and ugly Twisted Metal-focused portal were greeted by the following splash page entrance:

Welcome to Twisted Metal. You will enjoy this.

Splash pages as an entrance to a web site are frowned upon these days, although artist portfolios and upscale furniture stores usually can get by without anyone complaining. But back in the late 90’s, the splash page was a throw-down introduction and on the cutting edge of site presentation. Match a splash page with a few blink and marquee tags — also on the cutting edge of web development at the time — and your site counter was almost guaranteed to click through at least twenty hits a day. That’s juice.

The site provided screenshots, news, clever commentary, and, of course, cheat codes, as well as insider tips announcing that foreign fascists had infiltrated our domestic game studios:

'Have a drink. Enjoy. Be refreshed.'

When the site was abandoned in early 1999, shortly before before I struck out in the world to make a mint on the stock market or develop a new type of biodegradable shopping bag or something similarly important, the site focused on the recent release of Twisted Metal 3. But ever the careful webmaster, I didn’t let the previous games in the series fall out of the public view and continued to praise their contribution to the now-popular exploding cars and vehicular manslaughter genre. Even when compared to site documents that focused on more recent titles, the Twisted Metal 2-focused pages delivered the same forceful, intense aesthetic design and high quality content expected of the site:

Too Twisted, too Metal Two.

That title graphic is rad: blood-weeping bullet holes, a lens flare blaring out from a skull’s barren eye socket (yes, that is a big stupid skull in the image’s background), and a prominent application of the blue-and-gold “chrome” paint gradient. I actually was pretty proud of the work at the time, but looking at it again, the chrome is a touch gratuitous. Maybe.

I’d like to think my Twisted Metal site accrued a hundred-thousand hits and served the audience of the fine vehicular combat series for many happy years. Of course, I’ll never know about those hits since my free counter died years ago — overflow because of exceptionally high numbers perhaps? — but the site is now part of my archives, to be enjoyed whenever I please. Maybe I’ll even pop one of the old games in my original PlayStation and relive those simpler times.

On second thought, looking back at those screenshots, I’ll keep those memories and the games at arm’s length.

Nonetheless, over ten years later, I am here.

Noby Noby Boy is better seen and not explained, so I’ll just say that the following recording is entirely my doing. Enjoy. No prizes to anyone who watches the entire show.

Hmm. Maybe Noby Noby Boy is best just played and not even recorded.

Over the weekend I concluded a play-through of Cyan Worlds’s realMyst, the 3D remake of the once-hugely popular and confidently two-dimensional Myst, and concluded that not only was the 3D unnecessary, the modernized viewpoint was poorly utilized and reduced the overall experience compared to the original 2D version.

The reasons why the 3D iteration is the lesser brother are pretty clear and might be composed into a separate post in the future, but for now, I’m going to share a stupid comparison and a bit of snark that bubbled to the surface of my memory over the weekend.

To start, allow me to establish the players in this tragi-comedy: realMyst, of course, but also Unreal Tournament, a hot-dogging sci-fi first-person shooter.

For those who haven’t played one or both of these games, Myst is a classic point-and-click adventure-puzzle game with a terrific setting and a satisfyingly unspoken story, featuring a lone adventurer, The Stranger, trying to uncover the reason and secrets behind a surreal island. Unreal Tournament (or UT) is like Myst but with multiple adventurers, wielding crazy goo-blasting firearms, exploding each other into bloody pieces or regenerating from a bloody husk to rise and wreak havoc once again.

Here’s what realMyst looked like back in 2000, which is exactly how it looks today:

realMyst in the mist.

If released today, IGN.Com would give that game a 4.5 out of 10. Back in 2000, though, it was the hot stuff. realMyst easily looked better than anything else out on the market at the time, and it basically came out unannounced.

Don’t want to take my word for it? I don’t blame you, but you might accept the opinion of one Cliff Bleszinski, lead designer of the modern and hyper-popular Unreal Tournament and Gears of War franchises, in a Shacknews comment (then known as the Shugashack) on October 13th, 2000:

That demo [of realMyst] has some impressive engine mojo.

/me goes to whip the programmers

Cliff

Mr. Bleszinski and the rest of his team at Epic Games, the then-PC-only (and now-console) developer, released the first game in the Unreal Tournament series in 1999. Here’s an example of UT ‘99, the in-house product Epic designers had to go home to after gaping at realMyst:

Unreal Tournament '99: Still pretty sweet.

For my money realMyst certainly bests Unreal in the looks department, although at the time it was far outclassed on the dance floor by Unreal on both a critical and technical level[^1].

The stage is set — back to the present day. Today marks roughly nine years since the commendable release of realMyst and ten years since UT’s meteoric impact on the first-person gaming scene. Nine years is a dozen generations of PC hardware, each new generation allowing for significant increases in all of a game’s aspects. How have the respective franchises progressed after nearly a decade of PC progress?

Here’s a screenshot I captured of Unreal Tournament 3, which was released just last year:

WELCOME TO THE FUTURE.

Now that’s an adventure game. Well, maybe more action-adventure. Without the adventure part.

But if Epic Games can come that far in ten years, what about Cyan Worlds? What wondrous worlds and graphics engines has the legendary adventure game studio spawned since the famous release of realMyst?

Here’s Cyan Worlds’s latest release, nine years after realMyst’s debut and CliffyB’s laudations, and after about twenty new generations of CPUs and pixel-pushing video card chipsets:

iMyst, a edition of the original 2D game for the iPhone.

Zing.

To conclude, I should cover myself by saying I really enjoy both the Myst and Unreal Tournament series’ — probably the former more than the latter, honestly. Comparing these two instances is, I admit, much of a stretch, particularly since Cyan World has released fully-3D games after 2000 that had much better visuals than realMyst, like the 2003-released Uru:

The Age of Kadish Tolesa in Uru.

But comparing screenshots from iMyst and Unreal Tournament 3 does make one wayward point: first-person shooters have gone completely nuts, and adventure games have a long way to go back towards innovation.

[^1]: UT ‘99 ran at good framerates on a variety of hardware configurations; realMyst ran poorly on cutting-edge machines. This comparison is even more damning when considering the significantly fewer systems realMyst computed (graphics, audio, input) compared to Unreal’s workload (all of Myst’s, with significant advances in each, and with the addition of artificial intelligence and networking).

In my years, there have been few objects, people or concepts that I’ve singularly devoted extra time or attention towards, fixations of sorts, minor or major. Examples are few: Akira Kurosawa (which blossomed into enjoying Eastern films in general), Stevie Ray Vaughan (whose music introduced me to the blues at large), the Battle of Hastings (of October 14, 1066), and the Ace Attorney series.

But the most recent infatuation is Braid.

Braid trailer by David Hellman.

In typical infatuation fanboy-speak, I’m going to spend a lot of time here talking about the game’s mechanics and makings, most of which is unnecessary to anyone’s who has played the game or read the official web site. Even the official Braid “walkthrough” provides some meaning insightful about the game, although not the kind usually offered by a walkthrough.

Braid is the masterwork of Jonathan Blow, Braid’s designer, programmer, and writer — everything besides the art, which was created by David Hellman (and who also created the trailer above), and the music, which was licensed from a few Magnatune artists.

The gameplay’s core is a puzzle-platformer, with an emphasis on puzzles; the platforming aspect is merely a conduit to solving puzzles. The game is divided simply into chapters and “Worlds,” much like the original Super Mario Bros., although the similarities to Braid stop after the basic platforming and several earnest homages in Braid.

The most basic use of the dominant mechanic of time flow is the player’s ability to reverse it. Everything in the world of Braid works on a timeline, and the simple push of a button can reverse the flow of time. When time reverses, everything moves backwards along the chapter’s history: sound effects, the music, enemy locations, the movement of waving grass, projectiles, clouds in the sky, and, of course, the player character’s movements, all rewound (with some exceptions — more on that below).

Braid does not require the player to follow a health bar or hit points, and it does not use 1-ups or time limits. If the player makes a mistake, all that’s (usually) necessary for the player to rebound is a couple seconds of reversing time, going back in the chapter’s history to before the fatal error was made, allowing a second, third, or twentieth chance at a puzzle (and I’ve definitely kept at some puzzles after more than twenty time-reversals).

But this is a puzzle game after all, and the player is constantly confronted with new twists on familiar methods. What happens when some objects or characters in the game are not affected by reversing time, creating two completely time contexts? Or when all objects in a chapter move as a function of the player character’s horizontal position (as seen in the trailer, where one of the Goomba-like monsters hovers above the lead character’s head in an inevitable death-drop)? Or if time could be dilated within a certain radius, with the dilation dropping off with distance? Interesting puzzles abound in Braid.

If time is the basis of gameplay, the actual root of progression is collecting puzzle pieces, each piece contributing to a final mural that represents a history in the lead character’s life. The difficulty is determining out how to collect those pieces, and the real meat of Braid is how those pieces are retrieved: manipulating and moving through time.

The most controversial subject about Braid, proving that even puzzle games can be controversial, is the game’s subtle marriage of gameplay and story — or plot and story, as it could be better called in this case. In fact, the game’s narrative is so subtle and divisive that discussion of the story’s intention continues to this day (and will no doubt be reignited as a new platform’s market enters the arena) among game analysts, developers, fans and critics, armchair and professional. For examples of critical analysis of Braid, see Corvus Elrod’s or Michael Abbot’s commentaries from last year. More commentaries are sure to come.

I have my own theories about what the game is trying to say through its sparse writing and rare exposition (and thankfully complete lack of cut scenes), but I’ll leave those for another post.

Braid was originally released on the Xbox 360 in August 2008, but beginning two days ago, Friday the 10th, it is available on the PC. The fact that I’m considering purchasing a PC copy, just to play it all over again on a different platform, in addition of nearly fully completing the Xbox 360 version would be the final puzzle piece in a mural that depicts a happy infatuation.