The Last Candle

Where did my December go? Unless the authorities can find a trail or I get a letter in the mail, my last 31 days of 2008 are bound for the back of a milk carton. On the same topic, if anyone saw my late half of last November, drop me a line. Reward in exchange for hot tips.

Actually, while this place has been gathering dust (smart dust?), where I spent December is pretty easy to pin down: work, mostly. Busy season runs annually from October through the middle of January, and this year’s was lopsided towards the end of December, when inexplicable and sudden, perplexing, unusual bugs coupled with the black-magic combination of imminent deadlines and came home to roost in my god-forsaken cube. There is no holiday vacation at Thomson Tax & Accounting — more like the Twenty-One Days of Christmas Overtime. Peace and joy, but not at my desk.

But try as the fates might, I can’t be kept at work forever! Arriving home after 8 PM puts a damper on the usual activites that take a few hours (writing, for example), but a quick hour or two of video gamin’ dulls the edge of a strenuous 12-hour day. So while I’d rather bury the memories of the many long December work weeks deep in the cold ground, I’m happy to talk about video games.

The final month of 2008 began with the adventure game Shadow of Destiny, a time-traveling third-person yarn starring Eike Kusch, a man with no worries, parents who hate him and a fate worse than death: multiple deaths.

Poor Eike is plagued by an annoying malady: someone, or something, keeps murdering him. Fortunately for Eike, a time traveling device and the powers of an androgynous entity who calls himself Homunculus allow Eike to return to the minutes before his timely demise and attempt to change his destiny. It’s a pure-breed adventure game, too, so no mixed-in crappy action sequences. Pretty great, really.

So what kind of measures does Eike take in his efforts to relieve himself of fate beyond the grave? Take this scenario from the game’s third chapter, where Eike has to forestall a literal backstabbing. Was the murderer hiding behind a tree, leaping out behind cover to attack when Eike was busy chatting up a girl?

Yes. Solution: Go back in time four hundred years and convince the gardener-at-large to plant a flower bed instead of a tree sprout. No tree in the past leads to no tree in the future, which leads to no cover for the killer. The unseen murderer is averted, and Eike survives another hour. But as destiny has it, in the very next chapter a giant pot falls on Eike’s head while he’s walking outside of a museum, and so Eike has to go back in time to kill all the pottery makers. Something like that.

The time traveling bit is muddy and avoids a lot of the “how” details, as any story about time traveling or any magic-as-science has to do in order to avoid stumbling over itself. Shadow of Destiny skips any possible science by giving the protagonist (and the player) a “DigiPad,” which only requires chewy little energy gems to give the user power to skip around space-time. Despite the time traveling cliche, the plot device was used in a compelling way, the plot was interesting throughout the game (including the multiple critical paths and endings), and raising temporal hell through four eras of the same fictional German-style town brought many hours of interest and unintentionally humorous voice acting.

Later in December I slipped into my schedule several hours of Braid, another game that promotes time as a major element, but as a gameplay mechanic instead of a plot mechanic. It’s also a puzzle game and fairly beautiful, and a real winner overall.

Next came Silent Hill: Homecoming, a game so muddy and damp that the miasma seeped out of the game and into the console.

The Red Ring of Death might be a misnomer, but there’s no more definite signal of impending console death. This is the second Xbox 360 console that’s given up the ghost on me. Warranty expired: December 10th, 2008. Xbox day of death: December 27th. Owen’s figurative wallet: $100 lighter.

Of course, with the stupid broken console out of the way, I had a chance to play a PC game I’ve put off for years: BioShock.

It’s pretty rad, but the game’s combination of gene therapy, Ayn Randian objectivism and free market theory, 1940’s- and 50’s-inspired architecture and ambience, a touch of horror and suspense, and whole lot of run-and-gun-and-fire-hands action still isn’t meshing well together in my head. The game itself is good gunnin’ and definitely not another System Shock 2, BioShock’s far-related ancestor, for the better.

So that’s December gaming (and, in the case of BioShock, January gaming, too). As for the future, I’m trying to dig up a copy of this survival horror, Suda51-designed beauty:

The title insinuates an adventure in the actual town of Hell, Michigan, a favorite nudge-wink among locals, but it’s actually just Michigan, the survival horror game, as in Lake Michigan. Funny that the game’s setting is actually Chicago, Illinois, which is close enough.

Michigan: Report from Hell, dubbed plainly Michigan for its original Japanese release with the subtitle tacked on for its non-heralded European release, has never been courted by a published in the United States. My guess is that no domestic publishing company was up to the task of trying to sell a game called Michigan. A close second guess would be that no one wanted to publish it because the game largely looks and plays like a bomb. See how many seconds you can last through this exciting sequence that takes place in a nursing home:

The player character is a news cameraman, hence the on-screen display. Trapped in video-game land, the poor guy spends nearly the entire duration of the game’s events staring through a viewfinder, forced to shoot hours of corpses, monsters chowing down on the the still-struggling bodies of Chicago citizens, and a other few run-of-the-mill horrors. The PC’s accomplice, one out of a variety of reporters who appear depending on who’s around and who hasn’t yet been eaten by a monster, does pretty much all of the work as long as she’s first told what to do — aiming the camera at items, doors or objects of interest provokes the reporter to go have a look and continue the story. Novel idea, but the possibilities for frustration are cringe-worthy.

• “Open the door. The goddamned door, the one right in front of me. Yes. No, don’t talk to me about it.”
• “Pick up the key. That one, right there. The one I’m pointing the camera at. I can see it. Just pick it up. No, I can’t pick up the key myself, because I have to film it so you can pick it up. I know, it doesn’t make sense to me either.”
• Point the camera and focus on a monster, and the reporter supposedly draws a gun and opens fire. “Shoot it! Shoot the bloody thing– yes! Shoot! No, come back here! Stop! Help!”
• “Where are you going?” Or, alternatively, “Will get you get over here?”

So why would I even consider this probable POS for my gaming library? First, it’s a survival horror game, which is enough of a draw for me. In this video, after the least heartfelt sign-off ever recorded and a quick stroll through a corpse-littered church, serious business occurs:

Looks good to me! Not exactly triple-A material, but we survival horror fans have to take what we can get, which is usually the among the dregs of any genre. At least the hilariously bad voice acting even trumps the original Resident Evil’s for unintentional greatness.

Unfortunately, getting ahold of a copy of Michigan isn’t looking too good: if I can find a copy at all, the asking price is always over $100, undoubtably due to rarity rather than being some sterling collector’s item (although it is that, in a way). Even if I did get ahold of a European copy, I’d have to deal with fixing a NTSC Playstation 2 to work with a game that’s designed to work with a PAL format.

Michigan might be a non-starter, but December was pretty good overall. While the past year offered little to appease a horror game fan like myself, maybe one of the remaining 11 months of gaming in 2009 will bring better fortune.

I had another idea planned for an entry tonight — nothing politics-related, I assure you — but all of my blogging time was instead squandered by a good couple hours of making portals.

Okay, that screenshot doesn’t actually show any portal-making in progress, but it does show the aftermath of knocking over a few cute sentries, those little gits. And yes, that’s my blood on the wall, thanks to the aforementioned gits.

But it’s true that I sure dig that swank portal technology.

After the recent completion of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, the fourth and most recent lawyering-concept adventure game series, my initial and succint review: “Satisfying and a fair successor, but the game lacked Justice.”

Ha! Pun intended, although I lose points on the originality factor: the game itself used many variations on that same pun, most of them spoken by the titular lead character himself. Joke aside, the non-pun side of my reaction stands easily on its own: while the game’s plots, good humor and bombastic courtroom drama was what I’ve come to expect and enjoy from the Ace Attorney series, the designers largely neglected to give the lead character much time on the stand.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is an adventure game, and modern adventure games depend largely on only a few integral components, one of those components being good characters. Even in a restricted-view game like Riven, where the viewpoint is entirely first-person and all other characters address the player directly without using a specific name, a lot of satisfaction comes from the player’s connection to the game’s character solving puzzles in whatever digital world they’ve engaged.

Not that all adventure games have characters, but when they do, the experience moves beyond a puzzle game and into something that’s a heck of a lot more involving, immersive and fun. Characters matter a lot in adventure games, much more than in, say, real-time strategy games or first-person shooters.

Tim Schafer, writer and designer for three of the best-known adventure games — Secret of Monkey Island 1 and 2, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle — and, more recently, the very well-rated 3D-platformer Psychonauts, gave a lecture at the Game Developers Conference on character design; as part of the lecture Mr. Schafer related a simple gauge to use when determining the quality of a lead character. The gauge’s setup: the finished game, a first-rate and well-known actor, and casting call for a film adaptation of the game. (For the following hypothetical example, viewers of actual video-game movies will have to suspend belief and imagine that a good video-game film might be released someday. Give it a try.)

Imagine, Mr. Schafer related in his lecture, that the first-rate actor or actress caught wind of the film adaptation and, utilizing a keen nose for high potential, requests and acquires a copy of the script. After reading the draft script his interest is completely piqued by the lead character: the role is interesting, deep (or devestatingly clever), offers the ability to flex a well-toned acting muscle (or a challenge in new territory), and, above all, fun.

Well-known thespian, exercising the experiences of years of acting and sound judgment, smells a really good role in this film’s lead characters. He decides that he must have this part. He reaches for his phone to call his agent; once the other end picks up the line, the actor’s enthusiasm and near-desperation is obvious: “Get me that part! I need that part!”

In his lecture Schafer asserts that the lead character in a video game should be like the lead character in the hypothetical script — any good actor would be honored to represent that role in the cinema. The actor would want to be that character. Similarly, and more to Schafer’s point, a video-gamer, who controls a role much like a actor, wants to play the great role. Therefore, when writing a game, give the player the ability to control that great role.

Phoenix Wright, protagonist of the first three Act Attorney games, delivered the goods as the lead character. Wright’s appearance was tame compared to almost other characters who appeared during the series, but after evidence was collected, the wacky courtroom proceedings ensued and the trial was over (defendant: innocent!), Wright, via his tenacity for freeing his client and his unearthly ability

Who played the role of Wright? Me, damn it. The player, of course, and that kind of excellent protagonist is one of the big reasons why the Ace Attorney games are so darn good. After I finished the Wright games, including the mediocre second game, I couldn’t help but feel completely satisfied about outing lying witnesses, beating down the prosecution’s stance and thoroughly vindicating my client. (Now if only a studio would start producing the film or TV mini-series production of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.)

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney has the same great oddities, humor and intrigue that the Phoenix Wright games presented so easily, but Apollo Justice is not the great character that Phoenix Wright was.

For one, Apollo begins first trial — a murder trial, no less — as an unsure, stammering rookie attorney and roughly holds onto that persona throughout almost the entire game. Sure, Apollo (that is, me) would nail a witness on a false testimony one in a while (or often, actually), but the lead character never moves far beyond stammering rookie.

Stammering Rookie might be a fun role in particular contexts — fun in a Marx Brothers movie, maybe — but that persona suffers in the surprisingly anxious Apollo Justice scenarios where logic, courage and confidence in the truth, even if it’s a wacky truth, prevails. (By the way, the world definitely needs more wacky courtroom drama.)

So playing as Apollo was a little disappointing. To make the player feel even more like a dope, the prosecution is a international rock star who, through one of the best animations in the entire series, cranks out a killer guitar riff at a the drop of a high-hat and crows of all his success via hip music metaphors.

Heck, even Apollo’s friend-sidekick, a young magician, who is topped off in a bright blue top hat, a cape tipped with images of playing-card suits, and a great ventriloquist act involving one “Mr. Hat” (the same top hat) that beats out Prosecutor Rock-Star’s riff any day of the week, is a more interesting character than our poor lead defense attorney. Just those two characters, the magician and the rock star, both lively, clever and fun to watch, make Apollo appear, well, a little dull by comparison. Phoenix Wright was the same way — a somewhat banal character in the face of a motley and ridiculous cast — but the cases won by Phoenix felt like a worthy struggle and overall development.

One last major gripe (and this one includes spoilers): in Apollo Justice’s fourth trial, Apollo isn’t even the main character for half of the episode: Phoenix Wright is! Throughout the game Wright is a loose mentor of Apollo, and the final trial looks into Wright’s history between the final Phoenix Wright game and Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney.

That matchup is fine in itself (obviously, Phoenix Wright is a welcome return), but a good portion of the evidence-searching segments is spent playing as Phoenix Wright, even if Apollo handles the final courtoom encounter. But when that final encounter arrives, Apollo doesn’t even feel like the lead character — Phoenix does — and the finale feels indebted to the success of a secondary character rather than the actions brought about by the game’s protagonist. Boo!

Okay, mild frustration over. I really did like Apollo Justice, but the misaligned characterizations was a little off-putting, especially after three great Phoenix Wright games.

Gamer rant over.

After four unsuccessful attempts over the past two years at starting up a character in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the most detailed and ambient single-player computer RPG in recent years (since Morrowind, Oblivion’s predecessor), I thought fortune was smiling on me: I thought I had escaped the grasp of this game and its immersive, engaging, and (above all) time-consuming reputation. In both Morrowind and Daggerfall, the latter being Oblivion’s great-grandfather, a couple hundred hours were spent within the game-realm of Tamriel, the world of The Elder Scrolls.

A couple hundred hours?! Yeesh! These days, I don’t have time for games that span tens of hours, let alone the hundred that could easily be adventured out of Oblivion. I mean, I play guitar. I code. I take a lot of photos. I plot out crappy vector drawings. I catch up on the past four months of Scientific American. I bake bread and make yogurt. I keep the city kids off the streets. I sleep a couple hours. I walk a few miles. I have stuff to do.

Oh, but not after this weekend — the weekend that Oblivion finally caught me. Drat!

I suspect that the previous character of formula of the bristled, Nordic warrior-barbarian was the only thing that kept this latest squeeze at bay. The barbarian was my default choice for the previous games and my character for the first several attempts at Oblivion because, hey, the way of a warrior was an easy choice.

Warrior-types kill a lot of creatures and people, loot the bodies, and make a lot of cash selling the booty of the dead. Warriors can dash into vampire covens and dank grottos and all kinds of havens of the unsavory, confident of success due to an arsenal of bulging thews, vitality that could outlast Methusalah twice over, and a double-bladed axe that could slice through a sequoia trunk like it was made of salmon mousse. Life for warriors is straight-forward, bloody, and profitable.

And warriors have it boring too, I decided. There have been many warrior characters among the multiple play-throughs of Daggerfall (where the class and character distinctions were hardly noticeable), Morrowind, and early Oblivion games, and I’m guessing that the constant single-character narrative had run too thin. Smashy-smashy is good fun and all, but even the most sociopathic barbarian comes home after a long day of vigorous, wanton slaughter and serves himself a raspberry popover.

This weekend, having completed Far Cry and needing another PC game, I decided to give Oblivion one last go, but not as a brutish man-killer from the North. Far from it: this time, I’m playing a female High-Elf thief. How’s that for a career change?

Previous run-throughs of the opening (and typical) sewers dungeon have always ended up the same way: a long trail of dead bodies, and my character gaining enough experience and sellable loot to raise a couple levels and afford himself a full set of lovely fur armor.

As a thief, the sewers progressed very differently: instead of a trail of dead bodies, I was chased out of the ducts and muck-filled cisterns by a trail of very much alive bodies. My character, a master at sweet-talk and sneakery but coming up a little short on the blade and bow side of things, could hardly take up the offensive to a sick rat, let alone square off against goblin mage or the rare crusading skooma-struck madman. Instead of the previous barbarian tactic of hack-slash-repeat, my character dashed won first place in the Imperial Sewers 500 (reward: her bloody life).

(On one occasion, after I was out of the sewers, a female warrior killed my character with a single blow. This immediate death occurred after I’d plunged approximately a dozen arrows into the offender’s body. The bandits in the hills of Oblivion-country are mighty, mighty tough.)

But playing as a thief has turned out to be a completely different experience compared to the kill-and-loot strategy of the warrior’s life, not surprisingly. The free-form, choose-your-own-adventure design of these games has been ignored by me until this current play-though, and now that I’ve exchange axes for arrows, slaughter for speech-craft, and lock-picking instead of looting, my own little plot has been almost entirely different.

For one, my character spends a lot of time running backwards, firing arrows and fireballs at pursuing warriors. After the magic stores run dry and the opponent is bristling with every arrow I once owned, my character, fleeing for her pointy-eared life, dashes off into the scenic hills.

These frequent trips into the wooded areas of Cyrodill are partially fueled by an intrinsic appreciation for the beautiful trees, flowers, and the occasional Nirnroot of the countryside; the other, dominant part of my frenzied wanderlust is fueled by a desire to avoid being cut in half length-wise by a psychotic, blood-thirsty Imperial cave-dweller who’s hungry to add the head of a hot young Elf to his skull collection. Sometimes during these flora-heavy chase sequences I feel like Thoreau, at peace and introspective, but instead of speculating about ants I’m sitting on top of a motorbike, hauling ass and screaming my way through Walden.

It is a lot of fun. And I also hate warriors now.

Over the weekend, I decided to spend a Saturday doing nothing. Nothing! Woo hoooooo—

Of course, when I say “nothing” I don’t mean those hours were spent on the floor motionless, in the midst of brain-death, pulmonary and cardiac arrest, and it definitely means that I didn’t go out and buy carpet. Saturday was the colliquial day off (and by “day off” I don’t mean…well, forget it).

Instead of singing the choir eternal for a few hours, that one Saturday afternoon was spent playing video games. (Death versus video games? The classic Cake or Death routine by the great Izzard-man comes to mind.) As much as I blather on about the state of digital gaming on this blog and with friends, my actual time spent per week in front of a monitor enjoying a game is less than or equal to five hours.

Fortunately, I think the five-hour mark of time spent gaming qualifies me to keep my self-ordained “Underground” status on Xbox Live. If I had chosen the “Pro” status and missed the weekly quota, whatever it is, I’d probably have underage thugs hired by Microsoft leaving obscene and derogatory insults in my Live messagebox. Anyone who has played Halo 2 or Halo 3 and uses the public voicechat knows what kind of insults Live’s pre-pubescent community frequently wields, and for those that haven’t ventured into that Live mire, your ears and general hope for sustaining good taste and humanity at large is magnitudes more rosy.

Half of Saturday’s game time behind the mouse was spent with Far Cry, which is perhaps the most story-bald and intensely-paced game I’ve ever played. As the pacing and actual gameplay goes, roughly 90% of Far Cry is spent sneaking through lush jungle and archipelago brush and bouncing across pristine lagoons and coral reefs in small inflatable boats. Another 8% goes towards wanton death, murder and killing, and that last two percent is banked against watching completely inept, unnecessary story and plot developments.

I like Far Cry’s action. The gameplay is almost continuously maddeningly intense: a common scenario is spent carefully at the keys, creeping through ferns and under the canopy of palm trees, knowing that the last save point is 45 minutes back and that a couple of bullets from the last two alive mercenaries, who are just a few meters ahead, would be a quick death. Such sequences can take up to a half-hour, which is usually a small part of any individual level. That’s good fun.

What’s not good fun is Far Cry’s complete lack of an engaging narrative. The developer’s complete distain for even attempting to finish penning the first sentence of a half-decent story worth the player’s time is evident right from the opening CG intro, a production that’s equal parts MTV music video, art-school senior project, personification of Attention-Deficit Disorder, and cocaine dream.

Subsequent in-game or intermediary cutscenes forgo even the art-school and cocaine ingredients and are just plain bonkers (for better, or for worse). For instance, I’m probably 30 hours into this game, on the fourth-to-last level, and my femme-fatale cohort just told me that the enemy camp in front of us needs to be cleaned of all bipedal life because it’s there. That’s it, more or less (read: less). I’m hours from the end of the game, and the story is still all, Go kill those guys. Happy to oblige.

The good news was that my gung-ho friend suggested that we use a nuclear weapon to blow up the enemy camp. Evidently the mercenaries we are about to wantonly murder have the nuke around as a table centerpiece, conversation starter, or maybe a Plan S if the previous plan involving the pike-wielding, spiked helmet-wearing, methamphetamine-metabolizing silverbacks don’t take care of any opposition.

“Don’t worry,” says my charismatic companion-in-arms, after I told her she was bark-raving nuts for wanting to detonate a nuke in our vicinity. (She is, evidently, afflicted by an especially virulent strain of malaria.) “The yield isn’t big enough to take out more than the camp.” Oh. Right. Perfect strategy, then.

And that, in a rifleshell, is why I like Far Cry. It speaks in the language of gun reports, and sometimes, at the end of a long day, a bit of the ultra-violence isn’t a bad thing.

The other time used up within Saturday’s game land was spend inside of The Museum of Broken Memories.

I’m still not quite sure how I feel about it, other than thinking it is somehow important. I guess more than a few players will want my head on a platter. But then, art isn’t about pleasing your audience, it’s about looking for the truth, no matter where the quest takes you.

That’s what creator Jonas Kyratzes has to say (in part) about his game, The Museum of Broken Memories, an independent point-and-click adventure game about…well, it’s about war, and people broken up about war, and a lot of other small things. Completing the game from start to finish — no collectibles, no additional endings, nothing — took me about 45 minutes.

Not that I’m not hoping you’ll enjoy this – quite the opposite. As I said, it is a unique game; it goes to some pretty crazy places. The only thing I ask of you is that you keep an open mind, and follow me inside…

Overall I enjoyed The Museum of Broken Memories, but my specific feelings are polarized. The narrative is too loose for my taste: Kyratzes obviously has something to say about the consequences of war, but the player within The Museum is privy only to the bad consequences. (Unrelated to my opinion the game, Kyraztes and I have very different worldviews, to put it mildly.) That in itself is not a detriment, but the actual telling is so loose that its like the game is trying to relate a story using a series of vague gestures instead of words — the player can see a general idea, and maybe a disjointed harmony among the different rooms in the museum, but an overall idea is largely lost within the fog.

Kyratzes has noted in the game’s documentation and elsewhere that this abstract, tenuous design was intentional in the name of art, but I personally would have liked to see a stronger statement, one even stronger than the individual statements given by the rooms of the Museum. This is a case where the parts are worth more than the whole.

Simultaneously, the design of The Museum of Broken Memories is brilliant and well-toned. The experience of traveling within The Museum felt very much like reading a story, and nothing like playing an adventure game, or any kind of game. Room to room, the plot, as stretched as it was, was laid out carefully and steadily like the pages in a book, except that in this book was being simultaneously written and read by me.

While I said previously that The Museum of Broken Memories thrusts the player into a post-war atmosphere, the actual individual stories being told are so much deeper and detailed, much closer to the people who lived the war. This design of having a simple-plot, but deep, compelling and intricate characters or actors is my favorite form of narrative, one I fell in love with largely thanks to the frequent employ of such a design by Kurosawa in many of his films. Museum is a bottom-up kind of story: something connects all of these characters together, but the thing is not the interesting part. The really good stuff is the characters themselves — who they are, what they do, how they are affected, how they react.

The bare interface and straight-forward gameplay progression contributes much to the intimacy of The Museum of Broken Memories — the game has no heads-up display, keeps no inventory, and does not force the player to keep track of dozens of numerical codes and passwords. (If you like collecting codes and items, try The Infinite Ocean, another good adventure game by Kyratzes with another discomforting plot and environment.) The Museum is strictly point-and-click, and does not necessitate pixel-hunting rooms for items or buttons or switches. Transitioning rooms and dialogue is obvious and easy, and consequently the pacing is brisk and unrelenting.

But there’s one scenario in the Museum where the “obvious and easy” navigation is intentionally thrown out the window, and the player character is literally stumbling around in complete darkness. When the lights go out in, say, Super Mario Bros. (or Fatal Frame 2, where a ghost really did take away the player character’s sight), it’s extremely annoying, but the usage and presentation in The Museum of Broken Memories is both appropriate and entirely effective.

That’s what I like about the design of The Museum of Broken Memories: its intent and rule-set is clear, even if its plot isn’t (intentionally, again), and the game works wonderfully within its self-picked constraints. Many things could’ve lessened the impact of The Museum of Broken Memories: having to keep track of codes and passwords, for one, or keeping an inventory, or, Thor forbid, an action sequence. There’s even a bit of spoken dialogue that’s slightly comical, but again Kryatzes, firmly holding onto the reigns, exhibits discretion about what works in his game. And it does work, very well.

I need more of these 45-minute games. Beating a couple of these short-story games every week would beat out 30 hours of Far Cry any time. Maybe it’s time for me to start tapping into the indie text-adventure circuit for future entertainment.

Or, heck, maybe I should try making one of those 45-minute games, and finally see if I can put all of my griping into a worthy product. Some day, some day.