I am not a JRPG boy. I like my role playing games in a Western flavour which means exploration, customisation, story branching and a unique player experience are all par for the course. My trip through Baldur’s Gate might be very different from that of my neighbour, and my journey through Morrowind certainly would be, but that’s what’s so great about Western RPGs. Even the most rigid titles adapt to your own personal gameplay style. Want to play Mass Effect through as a psychic peacenik space hippy and not a gun-toting soldier out for blood? Knock yourself out, kid.
This is not the way of the JRPG, where character customisation is often limited to renaming the lead character from ‘Crono’ to ‘Boobies’. Which isn’t to say that this individualism is replaced with a deeper story or more sympathetic characters, resulting in a richer and more absorbing experience. In fact I’ve never played a JRPG that has a more engrossing narrative or more memorable characters than those in than any of Bioware’s games. Which leaves me wondering just what people find so appealing about JRPGs.
And they do. The ongoing success of the Mass Effect series has gone some way to redress the balance between the two hemispheres but it’s the Final Fantasies and the Dragon Quests that dominate RPG culture. Convention-goers are much more likely to dress up in towering spiky wigs and wield gunblades than they are to cosplay as a Krogan warrior or an Asari consort. You hear strange tales coming from Japan about the economy suffering as a result of so many people taking a particular day off work just to play the latest Dragon Quest title. As a Westerner it’s bizarre to think of these games in terms of the popularity associated with the Call of Duty franchise. One’s a dumb-as-a-rock first person shooter and the other, well, the other’s an RPG. It’s weird.
So when the opportunity to revisit the old PS2 back catalogue presented itself I thought I’d pick up a copy of the highly-acclaimed Final Fantasy X to see what all the bother was about. It’s not like I’ve never touched a JRPG before you understand, but this game constantly appears on lists of the systems best titles. If anything could sell me on the JRPG it would be Final Fantasy X, right?
One hundred minutes is, of course, nowhere near long enough to explore such a title. JRPGs are made for longevity; the fans demand it, and seem to harbour a certain sneery attitude toward shorter games. After a hundred minutes I still hadn’t played my first game of Blitzball, a sport that’s introduced at the very start of the game, and I’ve heard some FFX fans mention they’d spent hours upon that particular minigame alone. But one hundred minutes of any game should be enough to show the player a sparkling core of gameplay and give them an inkling as to whether or not they’ll like the rest game.
After one hundred minutes my first impressions weren’t negative, but I’m afraid they’re not entirely positive either.
I’ve always hated that JRPGs speak in stilted riddles. When reading or listening to dialogue I’m always aware that this is a game made for a faraway audience, that’s been translated from a faraway language. Final Fantasy X does not buck this trend. Nothing in it feels natural, and in a title that’s otherwise highly polished this awkwardness stands out as a terrible flaw. The characters undergo titanic mood shifts far too often, leaving them seem brittle at best, unhinged at worst. They voice their thoughts often and when they do it it’s out loud, in a comic book style, but their thoughts are usually half-formed. “But that means-!” is a phrase that typifies this kind of dialogue. It’s there to indicate the character has come to a certain conclusion, but the dialogue surrounding it doesn’t expand upon that conclusion, leaving the gamer to hazard guesses as to the conclusion - or even the mood - of the character itself. Maybe if the voice acting was a little better we’d be able to fathom the emotions of the characters; sadly it’s merely competent, and errs toward that of a cheap import cartoon voiceover. If the Pokémon voice track has you reaching for a shotgun in order to end the pain, you might want to turn FFX’s sound down.
In spite of the acting and dialogue there is something deeper to these characters, something to latch upon. Take Tidus, the main player character. He has the spiky hair and the massive sword, and he’s cocky almost to the point of obnoxiousness, but he’s also a sports megastar whose father abandoned him as a child and left him angry, bitter and confused. Further subtleties of his character are screwed by the broad mood changes and poor translation, but there’s enough emotional content there to grab onto.
It’s the same with Yuna, the squeaky-voiced summoner who’s trying to follow in her father’s priestly footsteps, or Wakka, the burly, big-hearted idiot who pines for his dead father and hides his grief between Blitzball and improbable hairstyles. This disparate band of misfits might be irritating and something of a cliché, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t endearing. It seemed terribly unlikely that I’d ever come to care for them when I first met them but one hundred minutes into the game I was starting to smile at magician Lulu’s callous put-downs, and Wakka’s oxen stupidity.
But the real pull for me - the factor that keeps me playing in spite of my better judgement - is the story. Which is strange because I’m not sure I actually like it, and I definitely don’t like how it ties into the gameplay itself. You begin the game as the aforementioned Tidus, sweeping into town in a limousine, signing autographs for swooning fangirls and pegging it towards a gargantuan Blitzball stadium across silvered walkways, beneath neon lights and vid screens showing endlessly repeated footage of your missing father. And there’s something there, something different to all those other spiky-haired heroes with daddy issues who have something to prove to themselves. Tidus has already proved himself worthy to take up his father’s mantle - he’s a star, he’s beloved. When you reach the stadium (and in a master stroke the fans cheers and well-wishes you encounter along the way intermingle with your own, internal narrative, blending the here and now with future reminisces) the crowd goes mental, and every tuck, toss and turn of the Bltizball game is met with fresh applause and adulation. All the while, mysterious figures watch as the nearby ocean erupts to engulf the city, destroying skyscrapers and walkways, sending flurries of demonic ‘Sin-spawn’ down to terrorize the citizens and finally sweeping you into the heart of the aquatic attacking demon, a water-monster called Sin.
When you wake up a thousand years have passed and with it, the grandeur of your home city. In its place are a series of fishing villages, temples containing tedious puzzles revolving around juggling spheres, and the rest of the game.
It’s a big letdown. It feels like you’ve been promised Blade Runner only to be given Doc Hollywood. But again, there’s enough to grab onto and hope for the best.
That’s the feeling I emerged from the first one hundred minutes of Final Fantasy X with - a sort of hopeful disappointment. While the game is often beautiful in a primitive sort of way, it revels in its own narrowness. There is only the one path through the game, and every battle, puzzle and plot-point you encounter is just another obstacle to surmount. Battles - still simplistic this early into the game - are defeated with a set sequence of button presses. In fact if you deviate from the battle plan the game actively scolds you, telling you to leave certain enemies to the group member who deals with them the best. There’s no room for improvisation - there is only the plan. There is no room for exploration - there is only the path.
While I can’t say I dislike FFX, I can’t say I find much joy in it either. JRPGs have often come under fire for being more akin to interactive novels and movies than anything else, and I think it’s fair to say that thus far, that’s exactly what FFX is. It’s something to sit and watch rather than something to experience, and for a game that’s something of a sin. When a cut scene ends it’s simply a case of moving from point A to point B and climbing the obstacles you encounter until you reach the next cut scene and progress the story. It’s almost like the game is happening to someone else and you, the player, are just a voyeur.
I feel sad that I went into this game hoping it would change my mind on JRPGs; if anything it’s reinforced my opinion of them. Pretty cut scenes, obtuse battle systems, dodgy translations and plenty of pointless, non-interactive scenery - all these are evident in FFX, as they are in pretty much any JRPG you could mention. And again, I wonder why this genre has such fervent and dedicated fans when compared to the open worlds of WRPGs they are little more than narrow, well-decorated corridors.
Still, I’ve only played one hundred minutes of a fifty hour game. Maybe it’ll change my mind after all.
Saturday, 8 January 2011
Friday, 7 January 2011
100 Minutes With . . . Culdcept
Culdcept was released on the DS in Japan. Think about that for a moment.
If you know the game, chances are your eyes are boggling, your jaw is dropped and your tongue is lolling. Your hair stands on end and you’re looking like Large Marge, the phantom truck driver from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, because the sheer impact of this dangerous knowledge is too powerful to contain within your physical body - you need something in claymation to convey your feelings, and you’ll probably need a translator on hand too because those aren’t words you’re speaking but gibbers and hoots, and howling discord.
It’s insane. It can’t be. It’s simply too dangerous to put a game like this on a card the size of your thumbnail and let anyone play it anywhere, and at any time.
How has Japan not fallen? Why haven’t its planes crashed from the sky, its cars smashed in the streets, its buildings crumpled and its sewers overflowed with filth? Why hasn’t this mighty country been brought to its knees by a sudden slothful plague of inaction caused by the release of Culdcept DS? Why haven’t pilots, drivers, janitors and plumbers alike stopped in their tracks, mesmerised by this ingenious, devilish little title?
I’ll tell you something: It beats the hell out of me. But considering the game never had a global release it seems clear that someone did realise the potential this game had to being about Ragnarok, and what a narrow squeak the Japanese release of it was.
Talk about your gaming crack . . .
I’ve been playing the PS2 release of Culdcept. It was one of only a couple of completely unfamiliar titles that appeared on a list of game developers’ favourite PS2 games. In amongst mostly-safe selections like SSX3 and Shadow of the Colossus, Ken Levine of Bioshock fame mentioned Dark Chronicle - my all-time favourite JRPG - Mercenaries, and Culdcept. This was an unconventional selection and one that caught my eye. When I read his reason for adding Culcept, even though it hadn’t had a European release on any format, by hook or by crook I knew I had to play this game.
Ken’s reason for adding it - and my reason for getting it - was this: It’s like Monopoly meets Magic: The Gathering.
Now anyone who caught my appearance on Michael Fox’s Little Metal Dog Show podcast knows I’m not a fan of Monopoly. Neither am I much of a fan of Magic; I tried it once as a teenager, and was soundly beaten by a twenty-something who was trying and failing to grow a beard.
But the two of them mushed together? How would that even work? I had to play it.
I tracked down a cheap copy on Amazon. played it on my wife’s NTSC PS2, and when I slotted it into the drive something magical happened. The disc drive that had been stuttering so badly it would only recognise a game disc if the entire console was turned upside down and laid on its lid worked. It worked quietly, it worked flawlessly. Where Suikoden III, Valkyrie Profile 2, Final Fantasy X and numerous PS1 games had failed, Culdcept had worked.
The game hadn’t even begun and I was already impressed.
But the most impressive thing about Culdcept is that Ken Levine was right, as was the Wikipedia page about it, as was anyone who’s ever played the game and came away from it describing it thusly: Culdcept is Monopoly meets Magic: The Gathering. And it bloody works.
It’s strange charm begins with the opening movies. There’s the usual JRPG gumph about goddesses and magic, and then there’s some kind of space ship heading toward the camera, only it has an old man’s face on the bow and isn’t a space ship at all but a sentient walking stick sent by God to find people who are really good at playing cards. Even by JRPG standards it’s a bt wonky.
Thankfully when the old man walking stick is rendered in-engine it’s much less frightening, hopping about like Zebedee from the Magic Roundabout, spinning in place when it’s flustered and addressing me by name when it asks me to join it’s card-accruing quest.
Then a demon shows up and challenges me to a duel. It’s that kind of game.
Here’s where the magic starts. Here’s where Culdcept presses its needle-jaws into the soft flesh of your brain. This is where your addiction begins.
Level one is a simple loop of five by five squares. The graphics are isometric 3D with 2D sprites, and the level looks like a diamond. You and your opponent must follow dice rolls and race around the board. When you land on a square you have the chance to play a monster card from your hand, which will hold that square for you and accumulate magic points as you move on. The squares are different colours, indicating different land types. If you match your monster type to the land type - by playing a merfolk card on a water square, for example - you accumulate more magic and your monster gets stronger. You can also spend magic to level up your land, which raises the toll for that square.
This is where the Monopoly element comes in. By placing a monster on a square you effectively buy that square. Any player that lands upon it must pay the toll, unless they summon a monster of their own and defeat your monster in combat. Which is where the Magic: The Gathering element comes in.
Though the game informs you if the challenging monster is likely to beat the defending monster, both players can augment their monster’s abilities using weapons, armour and spells they might have in their hands. There are other spell cards that can be played at other points in the game, enabling players to fudge dice rolls, destroy their opponents’ cards, and weaken or attack monsters already in play.
It’s all oh-so baffling at first. There’s a rough tutorial in place that fills you in on what’s happening, and an online help system that can be accessed at any time, but any hints you might get as to how to play the game are sandwiched between character banter and it’s difficult to make head or tail of the proceedings. Why did I just lose that fight? What did that spell do? What difference does levelling-up land make? Why did the music just change?
Why did I just lose?
As opaque as the game is, there’s enough charm there for it to seem like fun, even if you have no idea what’s going on. It makes all the right sounds, the limited monster animations add a lot of character to them, and by the end of the first game I was growing rather attached to certain monsters - even if they tended to be the ones who kept winning battles.
And then, right after I lost my first game, something clicked inside my head. Almost as if the game could read my mind it seemed to say “Aw, that’s too bad. Here, have these new cards and try again.”
This is one path to addictiveness Panorama should have covered. Rewarding failure in the attempt to get you right back in the saddle.
It worked. The bouts last so long and can’t be saved mid-match, but as soon as you finish one and see your fresh set of cards you’ll be itching to try them out. Even though I couldn’t play Culdcept again for days I kept thinking about the difference these new cards would make. The Fire Drake! That looked powerful. With a card like that in my hand I bet I could take that pesky demon down a notch or two.
Winning cards is only a part of the whole collectible card game addiction. Once you have them you can remove your older, weaker cards and replace them, in time reconstructing your entire deck. There are ten slots in which to save custom decks, so if you want one geared towards playing on a certain kind of land as well as one that revolves predominantly around magical attacks, hey, knock yourself out.
Back in the saddle I raced around the game board. Suddenly my rolls were more favourable, my hands luckier. My new cards came in handy as I positioned a hornet over a desert, swapped a few land squares around to bolster its attack and the attacks of the monsters around it, and played some pustulant larva thibg that, though it required that I sacrifice a card from my hand every time I used it, managed to worm its way through the enemy’s defences and cause him grevious toll shock every time he landed on its square.
I ran through the game to a glorious, almost embarrassing victory, and with the demon sent packing I got to gloat over my newly-won cards and fantasise about all the tactical advantages they would offer me.
And then it was back to the game board for another practise round against my moustachioed walking stick friend.
And another.
And though I can’t claim to have gotten very far in the game or to have plumbed the depths of strategy it offers, I’ve looked at the mammoth grid where all your cards are catalogued, seen the multitudinous empty spaces within, and I know that this is a game I could play for a very, very long time. It’s the kind of game that would so effortlessly lend itself to handheld play that the only reason Culdcept DS was never released outside of Japan must be because its so insanely addictive it would have been dangerous to do so.
I could recommend Culdcept unreservedly, but to be honest you’re not going to get a recommendation any better than the one Ken Levine game put on his list of PS2 favourites. It’s Monopoly meets Magic: The Gathering. If you don’t like the sound of that then by all means steer clear, but if you do and you can track down a copy and have the means to play it then man, I hope you don’t have an addictive personality, because this game will destroy you. It’ll take your eyes, your thumbs, your smile and your brain, and it’ll melt them all down into a cheery gaming gloop that exists for no reason other than to appease the goddess Culdcept. And you’ll love every gelatinous minute of it.
If you know the game, chances are your eyes are boggling, your jaw is dropped and your tongue is lolling. Your hair stands on end and you’re looking like Large Marge, the phantom truck driver from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, because the sheer impact of this dangerous knowledge is too powerful to contain within your physical body - you need something in claymation to convey your feelings, and you’ll probably need a translator on hand too because those aren’t words you’re speaking but gibbers and hoots, and howling discord.
It’s insane. It can’t be. It’s simply too dangerous to put a game like this on a card the size of your thumbnail and let anyone play it anywhere, and at any time.
How has Japan not fallen? Why haven’t its planes crashed from the sky, its cars smashed in the streets, its buildings crumpled and its sewers overflowed with filth? Why hasn’t this mighty country been brought to its knees by a sudden slothful plague of inaction caused by the release of Culdcept DS? Why haven’t pilots, drivers, janitors and plumbers alike stopped in their tracks, mesmerised by this ingenious, devilish little title?
I’ll tell you something: It beats the hell out of me. But considering the game never had a global release it seems clear that someone did realise the potential this game had to being about Ragnarok, and what a narrow squeak the Japanese release of it was.
Talk about your gaming crack . . .
I’ve been playing the PS2 release of Culdcept. It was one of only a couple of completely unfamiliar titles that appeared on a list of game developers’ favourite PS2 games. In amongst mostly-safe selections like SSX3 and Shadow of the Colossus, Ken Levine of Bioshock fame mentioned Dark Chronicle - my all-time favourite JRPG - Mercenaries, and Culdcept. This was an unconventional selection and one that caught my eye. When I read his reason for adding Culcept, even though it hadn’t had a European release on any format, by hook or by crook I knew I had to play this game.
Ken’s reason for adding it - and my reason for getting it - was this: It’s like Monopoly meets Magic: The Gathering.
Now anyone who caught my appearance on Michael Fox’s Little Metal Dog Show podcast knows I’m not a fan of Monopoly. Neither am I much of a fan of Magic; I tried it once as a teenager, and was soundly beaten by a twenty-something who was trying and failing to grow a beard.
But the two of them mushed together? How would that even work? I had to play it.
I tracked down a cheap copy on Amazon. played it on my wife’s NTSC PS2, and when I slotted it into the drive something magical happened. The disc drive that had been stuttering so badly it would only recognise a game disc if the entire console was turned upside down and laid on its lid worked. It worked quietly, it worked flawlessly. Where Suikoden III, Valkyrie Profile 2, Final Fantasy X and numerous PS1 games had failed, Culdcept had worked.
The game hadn’t even begun and I was already impressed.
But the most impressive thing about Culdcept is that Ken Levine was right, as was the Wikipedia page about it, as was anyone who’s ever played the game and came away from it describing it thusly: Culdcept is Monopoly meets Magic: The Gathering. And it bloody works.
It’s strange charm begins with the opening movies. There’s the usual JRPG gumph about goddesses and magic, and then there’s some kind of space ship heading toward the camera, only it has an old man’s face on the bow and isn’t a space ship at all but a sentient walking stick sent by God to find people who are really good at playing cards. Even by JRPG standards it’s a bt wonky.
Thankfully when the old man walking stick is rendered in-engine it’s much less frightening, hopping about like Zebedee from the Magic Roundabout, spinning in place when it’s flustered and addressing me by name when it asks me to join it’s card-accruing quest.
Then a demon shows up and challenges me to a duel. It’s that kind of game.
Here’s where the magic starts. Here’s where Culdcept presses its needle-jaws into the soft flesh of your brain. This is where your addiction begins.
Level one is a simple loop of five by five squares. The graphics are isometric 3D with 2D sprites, and the level looks like a diamond. You and your opponent must follow dice rolls and race around the board. When you land on a square you have the chance to play a monster card from your hand, which will hold that square for you and accumulate magic points as you move on. The squares are different colours, indicating different land types. If you match your monster type to the land type - by playing a merfolk card on a water square, for example - you accumulate more magic and your monster gets stronger. You can also spend magic to level up your land, which raises the toll for that square.
This is where the Monopoly element comes in. By placing a monster on a square you effectively buy that square. Any player that lands upon it must pay the toll, unless they summon a monster of their own and defeat your monster in combat. Which is where the Magic: The Gathering element comes in.
Though the game informs you if the challenging monster is likely to beat the defending monster, both players can augment their monster’s abilities using weapons, armour and spells they might have in their hands. There are other spell cards that can be played at other points in the game, enabling players to fudge dice rolls, destroy their opponents’ cards, and weaken or attack monsters already in play.
It’s all oh-so baffling at first. There’s a rough tutorial in place that fills you in on what’s happening, and an online help system that can be accessed at any time, but any hints you might get as to how to play the game are sandwiched between character banter and it’s difficult to make head or tail of the proceedings. Why did I just lose that fight? What did that spell do? What difference does levelling-up land make? Why did the music just change?
Why did I just lose?
As opaque as the game is, there’s enough charm there for it to seem like fun, even if you have no idea what’s going on. It makes all the right sounds, the limited monster animations add a lot of character to them, and by the end of the first game I was growing rather attached to certain monsters - even if they tended to be the ones who kept winning battles.
And then, right after I lost my first game, something clicked inside my head. Almost as if the game could read my mind it seemed to say “Aw, that’s too bad. Here, have these new cards and try again.”
This is one path to addictiveness Panorama should have covered. Rewarding failure in the attempt to get you right back in the saddle.
It worked. The bouts last so long and can’t be saved mid-match, but as soon as you finish one and see your fresh set of cards you’ll be itching to try them out. Even though I couldn’t play Culdcept again for days I kept thinking about the difference these new cards would make. The Fire Drake! That looked powerful. With a card like that in my hand I bet I could take that pesky demon down a notch or two.
Winning cards is only a part of the whole collectible card game addiction. Once you have them you can remove your older, weaker cards and replace them, in time reconstructing your entire deck. There are ten slots in which to save custom decks, so if you want one geared towards playing on a certain kind of land as well as one that revolves predominantly around magical attacks, hey, knock yourself out.
Back in the saddle I raced around the game board. Suddenly my rolls were more favourable, my hands luckier. My new cards came in handy as I positioned a hornet over a desert, swapped a few land squares around to bolster its attack and the attacks of the monsters around it, and played some pustulant larva thibg that, though it required that I sacrifice a card from my hand every time I used it, managed to worm its way through the enemy’s defences and cause him grevious toll shock every time he landed on its square.
I ran through the game to a glorious, almost embarrassing victory, and with the demon sent packing I got to gloat over my newly-won cards and fantasise about all the tactical advantages they would offer me.
And then it was back to the game board for another practise round against my moustachioed walking stick friend.
And another.
And though I can’t claim to have gotten very far in the game or to have plumbed the depths of strategy it offers, I’ve looked at the mammoth grid where all your cards are catalogued, seen the multitudinous empty spaces within, and I know that this is a game I could play for a very, very long time. It’s the kind of game that would so effortlessly lend itself to handheld play that the only reason Culdcept DS was never released outside of Japan must be because its so insanely addictive it would have been dangerous to do so.
I could recommend Culdcept unreservedly, but to be honest you’re not going to get a recommendation any better than the one Ken Levine game put on his list of PS2 favourites. It’s Monopoly meets Magic: The Gathering. If you don’t like the sound of that then by all means steer clear, but if you do and you can track down a copy and have the means to play it then man, I hope you don’t have an addictive personality, because this game will destroy you. It’ll take your eyes, your thumbs, your smile and your brain, and it’ll melt them all down into a cheery gaming gloop that exists for no reason other than to appease the goddess Culdcept. And you’ll love every gelatinous minute of it.
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
Help the Aged
So I suppose I should say a little bit about video game addiction. About how vile they are, how they isolate kids from their loved ones and cocoon them in a phantasma of sound and flashing lights? Or I should take arms with my brethren and fight against this unjust crusade, smug in the knowledge that games can’t possible be addictive - you know, even though we all frequently describe this or that game using exactly that word.
Are video games addictive? Well, no - not if you take ‘addictive’ as a word for actual physical dependency. Nobody gets cold sweats after having their DS taken away. Sure, they might get a little twitchy if they can’t play games, but that’s only to be expected, right?
Actually that’s not true at all. They’ll want to play games the same way a reader deprived of his or her book collection might pine for a novel or two to tide them over, or a gardener in a big city might turn to a window box or houseplant in order to get his or her fix. Does this make them addicts? Or does it simply mean their current circumstances make them miss taking part in a hobby they enjoy?
Nobody ever complains that books are addictive, much less decries them as ‘evil’ in the same way video games are often vilified - and how many times have you heard the same TV show hosts that claim to hate games describe a summer read as ‘unputdownable’? Are you saying you actually couldn’t put down the book? You had to keep reading it or what, you’d shiver, suffer convulsions, go cold turkey and suffer the associated withdrawal symptoms? No? So why do you think going without video games would have the same effect?
Of course you wouldn’t. You’re just repeating this mantra to get your OAP audiences all riled up in indignation, the kind of indignation that keeps them watching your show. You’re saying what they want to hear and rewarding their viewing with a deep-down sense of self-righteousness and Alan fucking Titchmarsh’s moronic seal of approval. Stay tuned, because coming up we have Julie Peasgood talking shit about something she knows nothing about. Yeah, applaud that, studio audience. If your wrinkled, nicotine-stained, arthritis-twisted claws can still applaud anything then clap, you senile grandmotherfuckers.
Which is pretty much the same thing that makes video games so addictive - or compelling, to put it more appropriately.
While gamers mightn’t be dazzled by an impromptu live performance from special guest Daniel O’Donnell, we’re uniformly impressed with strobing lights and graphical fireworks. Our satisfaction comes from completing this level, overcoming that obstacle and gaining a high score. We’re rewarded with achievements, points, new areas and new levels, new challenges to face - and what about all those graphical flourishes and carefully engineered sound effects? The tinkling sound of Sonic collecting rings, or his invincibility theme when he collects a certain power up, or how a little fluffy animal scampers out when we release it from robotic captivity. All of which were designed to compel us to keep playing, of course. All of which help to addict us, if that’s how you wish to see it.
And when we complete a game, oh man! We sit back and smile at a job well done. We watch the end credits roll and think about the game. If it’s a particularly intelligent game - a Longest Journey perhaps, or a Planescape: Torment - we might think about the plot, the themes and characters. Maybe we think about all the cool shit we’ve done, or all the places we’ve been. Or maybe, just maybe we think “That was amazing. I want to do it all over again” and we hit start to do so.
Which is something that nobody’s ever going to do once they’ve seen a daytime television tirade on video game nasties. So I guess in that sense they are more compelling than your average TV show.
Not that TV shows don’t do their best to hook viewers with the promise of guests and features still to come, because they do, although when they come along it’s very rare they offer the same satisfaction as, say, filling an experience meter in your favourite RPG.
But then that’s the big difference between the function of video games and the function of daytime television. Video games have to entertain the player, otherwise they’re going to get up and do something else. Daytime TV watchers, well, sad as it is, they’re much more likely to sit and watch whatever shit’s on TV because most of them are old, most of them are lonely, and most of them really don’t have anything better to do. Daytime television doesn’t have to entertain. Daytime television’s there to pass time until the viewer dies.
Here’s the thing. My grandmother is old. She’s in her eighties, and she recently suffered from a series of stumbling falls. Over the past few years she’s become increasingly confused by the world around her; something inside her head was slowly wearing down, and after her recent illness it had worn through completely and dropped her into a world of frightened disorientation. A couple weeks ago her next-door neighbour telephoned me to say he’d found her clinging to a counter top in her kitchen, standing and shaking, not really sure of where she was or what was going on. He’d called for an ambulance and a paramedic was at her house to examine her and make sure she was okay.
Which she wasn’t.
I travelled there by taxi and spent the day with her, although she didn’t seem particularly aware of my presence. I made her a cup of tea and tried talking to her - there wasn’t really anything I could do but wait for another doctor to arrive and another series of tests to be run, but I had to do something. That night she fell again, just as the doctor was about to leave. He said she should go to hospital, and despite her stubbornly wanting to stay at home, eventually she did.
There’s more story there, more to be said about how long it took for the ambulance to arrive and what the hospital did and didn’t do, but at the time that was still ahead of my family, and still ahead of me. At the time I just sat and watched her watching daytime dross on TV, watched her searching for the TV Choice magazine she referred to in time-honoured tradition as the TV Times, watched her wrinkle her nose in distaste as she mistook an advert for A Bug’s Life on Channel 5 for the actual film, and watched her settle down in her lost and lonely world with the only upper she had in her life, the only fix available to people like her: Her television.
The television feeds her poison. It tells her the world outside is a terrible place filled with violence and anger. It takes cuddly public figures and turns them into deceitful cobras spitting nonsense, fear and propaganda. Buy this book. Buy this record. And for God’s sake, think of the children whose minds are rotting from too much Space Invaders, whose minds are rotting as surely as yours is right now as you get your daily dose of daytime drugs.
I wish my grandmother liked video games. I wish she wasn’t so scared of modern technology, so she could play them and discover that even though she can’t leave her house there are entire worlds out there she can explore, puzzles and activities that can help keep her mind active and alert, and people - so many people! - the world over she can play with, and talk with, and befriend. Those social clubs for the elderly just aren’t good enough. They’re chicken farms we throw our pensioners into so we can pretend they’re still having fun while their minds are dying, where bitterness and resentfulness and isolationism form and harden, and God, no wonder we think these old people are set in their ways if this is all you’re going to offer them, you television execs, you poison peddling scum. How about not cutting old folk off from the world in this, a glorious age of global communication? How about having your shows teach them that technology isn’t something to be scared of but something to be embraced, and something that could enhance their lives? Or is there a reason why you’d prefer to have your presenters reminiscing about the good old days, talking about what’s wrong with the world today, talking gardening tips and giving middle-aged mothers makeovers, and here’s some fucking Donnie Osmond to get your juices going if they haven’t already dried up. Do you give them all that terrible fucking shit because that’s what old people want? Or do they just want it because that’s all you ever give them?
I wish it wasn’t like that. I wish instead of my gran burrowing into her armchair to watch an afternoon of antiques auctions, home makeovers and Doctors; instead of struggling to her club to find out who’s in hospital or who’s in a home or who’s dropped down dead she was in a World of Warcraft guild with other people her age from half-way across the globe, where they could share their lives and cultures and get the same kind of fun from video games as gamers do. and maybe that’s not ideal - maybe that’s just replacing one addiction with another - but wouldn’t it be better? Something to actually and actively enjoy; something to be interact with and be passionate about, rather than some slowly seeping off-beige poison cloud to marinate her bones in, to keep her settled and silent and barely aware of anything except Ainsley Harriot and David Dickenson. At the very least she wouldn’t be so damned scared.
It’s not going to happen. She is too scared and too stubborn, and daytime television programming has made her like that with shows not fit to mention video games, let alone hold laughable discussions on their nature.
But you, reader. Let me talk to you, now. Because fifty years from now we’ll be gaming, you and I. I can’t say we won’t become set in our ways, and I can’t promise we won’t sometimes reminisce about what we - falsely - consider to be the good old days. Hell, I full expect us to be terrified of modern technology. Imagine our cyberpunk future. Age reversal! Cranial implants! Nano-woven skin fashions!
But whatever happens, as scared and as senile as we might become, we’ll be gaming. We’ll still be commanding armies and conquering worlds; we’ll still be fighting bosses and jumping on toadstools; we’ll still be playing, we’ll be playing together, we’ll be active for God’s sake, and we’ll be having fun.
When Alan Titchmarsh and all those like him are dead and buried; when they’re dead and their smug, poisonous hate-mongering is dead alongside them, gaming will still be alive. And if that means so-called video game addiction will still be alive then I’ll proud to be an addict. The alternative is so much worse.
Are video games addictive? Well, no - not if you take ‘addictive’ as a word for actual physical dependency. Nobody gets cold sweats after having their DS taken away. Sure, they might get a little twitchy if they can’t play games, but that’s only to be expected, right?
Actually that’s not true at all. They’ll want to play games the same way a reader deprived of his or her book collection might pine for a novel or two to tide them over, or a gardener in a big city might turn to a window box or houseplant in order to get his or her fix. Does this make them addicts? Or does it simply mean their current circumstances make them miss taking part in a hobby they enjoy?
Nobody ever complains that books are addictive, much less decries them as ‘evil’ in the same way video games are often vilified - and how many times have you heard the same TV show hosts that claim to hate games describe a summer read as ‘unputdownable’? Are you saying you actually couldn’t put down the book? You had to keep reading it or what, you’d shiver, suffer convulsions, go cold turkey and suffer the associated withdrawal symptoms? No? So why do you think going without video games would have the same effect?
Of course you wouldn’t. You’re just repeating this mantra to get your OAP audiences all riled up in indignation, the kind of indignation that keeps them watching your show. You’re saying what they want to hear and rewarding their viewing with a deep-down sense of self-righteousness and Alan fucking Titchmarsh’s moronic seal of approval. Stay tuned, because coming up we have Julie Peasgood talking shit about something she knows nothing about. Yeah, applaud that, studio audience. If your wrinkled, nicotine-stained, arthritis-twisted claws can still applaud anything then clap, you senile grandmotherfuckers.
Which is pretty much the same thing that makes video games so addictive - or compelling, to put it more appropriately.
While gamers mightn’t be dazzled by an impromptu live performance from special guest Daniel O’Donnell, we’re uniformly impressed with strobing lights and graphical fireworks. Our satisfaction comes from completing this level, overcoming that obstacle and gaining a high score. We’re rewarded with achievements, points, new areas and new levels, new challenges to face - and what about all those graphical flourishes and carefully engineered sound effects? The tinkling sound of Sonic collecting rings, or his invincibility theme when he collects a certain power up, or how a little fluffy animal scampers out when we release it from robotic captivity. All of which were designed to compel us to keep playing, of course. All of which help to addict us, if that’s how you wish to see it.
And when we complete a game, oh man! We sit back and smile at a job well done. We watch the end credits roll and think about the game. If it’s a particularly intelligent game - a Longest Journey perhaps, or a Planescape: Torment - we might think about the plot, the themes and characters. Maybe we think about all the cool shit we’ve done, or all the places we’ve been. Or maybe, just maybe we think “That was amazing. I want to do it all over again” and we hit start to do so.
Which is something that nobody’s ever going to do once they’ve seen a daytime television tirade on video game nasties. So I guess in that sense they are more compelling than your average TV show.
Not that TV shows don’t do their best to hook viewers with the promise of guests and features still to come, because they do, although when they come along it’s very rare they offer the same satisfaction as, say, filling an experience meter in your favourite RPG.
But then that’s the big difference between the function of video games and the function of daytime television. Video games have to entertain the player, otherwise they’re going to get up and do something else. Daytime TV watchers, well, sad as it is, they’re much more likely to sit and watch whatever shit’s on TV because most of them are old, most of them are lonely, and most of them really don’t have anything better to do. Daytime television doesn’t have to entertain. Daytime television’s there to pass time until the viewer dies.
Here’s the thing. My grandmother is old. She’s in her eighties, and she recently suffered from a series of stumbling falls. Over the past few years she’s become increasingly confused by the world around her; something inside her head was slowly wearing down, and after her recent illness it had worn through completely and dropped her into a world of frightened disorientation. A couple weeks ago her next-door neighbour telephoned me to say he’d found her clinging to a counter top in her kitchen, standing and shaking, not really sure of where she was or what was going on. He’d called for an ambulance and a paramedic was at her house to examine her and make sure she was okay.
Which she wasn’t.
I travelled there by taxi and spent the day with her, although she didn’t seem particularly aware of my presence. I made her a cup of tea and tried talking to her - there wasn’t really anything I could do but wait for another doctor to arrive and another series of tests to be run, but I had to do something. That night she fell again, just as the doctor was about to leave. He said she should go to hospital, and despite her stubbornly wanting to stay at home, eventually she did.
There’s more story there, more to be said about how long it took for the ambulance to arrive and what the hospital did and didn’t do, but at the time that was still ahead of my family, and still ahead of me. At the time I just sat and watched her watching daytime dross on TV, watched her searching for the TV Choice magazine she referred to in time-honoured tradition as the TV Times, watched her wrinkle her nose in distaste as she mistook an advert for A Bug’s Life on Channel 5 for the actual film, and watched her settle down in her lost and lonely world with the only upper she had in her life, the only fix available to people like her: Her television.
The television feeds her poison. It tells her the world outside is a terrible place filled with violence and anger. It takes cuddly public figures and turns them into deceitful cobras spitting nonsense, fear and propaganda. Buy this book. Buy this record. And for God’s sake, think of the children whose minds are rotting from too much Space Invaders, whose minds are rotting as surely as yours is right now as you get your daily dose of daytime drugs.
I wish my grandmother liked video games. I wish she wasn’t so scared of modern technology, so she could play them and discover that even though she can’t leave her house there are entire worlds out there she can explore, puzzles and activities that can help keep her mind active and alert, and people - so many people! - the world over she can play with, and talk with, and befriend. Those social clubs for the elderly just aren’t good enough. They’re chicken farms we throw our pensioners into so we can pretend they’re still having fun while their minds are dying, where bitterness and resentfulness and isolationism form and harden, and God, no wonder we think these old people are set in their ways if this is all you’re going to offer them, you television execs, you poison peddling scum. How about not cutting old folk off from the world in this, a glorious age of global communication? How about having your shows teach them that technology isn’t something to be scared of but something to be embraced, and something that could enhance their lives? Or is there a reason why you’d prefer to have your presenters reminiscing about the good old days, talking about what’s wrong with the world today, talking gardening tips and giving middle-aged mothers makeovers, and here’s some fucking Donnie Osmond to get your juices going if they haven’t already dried up. Do you give them all that terrible fucking shit because that’s what old people want? Or do they just want it because that’s all you ever give them?
I wish it wasn’t like that. I wish instead of my gran burrowing into her armchair to watch an afternoon of antiques auctions, home makeovers and Doctors; instead of struggling to her club to find out who’s in hospital or who’s in a home or who’s dropped down dead she was in a World of Warcraft guild with other people her age from half-way across the globe, where they could share their lives and cultures and get the same kind of fun from video games as gamers do. and maybe that’s not ideal - maybe that’s just replacing one addiction with another - but wouldn’t it be better? Something to actually and actively enjoy; something to be interact with and be passionate about, rather than some slowly seeping off-beige poison cloud to marinate her bones in, to keep her settled and silent and barely aware of anything except Ainsley Harriot and David Dickenson. At the very least she wouldn’t be so damned scared.
It’s not going to happen. She is too scared and too stubborn, and daytime television programming has made her like that with shows not fit to mention video games, let alone hold laughable discussions on their nature.
But you, reader. Let me talk to you, now. Because fifty years from now we’ll be gaming, you and I. I can’t say we won’t become set in our ways, and I can’t promise we won’t sometimes reminisce about what we - falsely - consider to be the good old days. Hell, I full expect us to be terrified of modern technology. Imagine our cyberpunk future. Age reversal! Cranial implants! Nano-woven skin fashions!
But whatever happens, as scared and as senile as we might become, we’ll be gaming. We’ll still be commanding armies and conquering worlds; we’ll still be fighting bosses and jumping on toadstools; we’ll still be playing, we’ll be playing together, we’ll be active for God’s sake, and we’ll be having fun.
When Alan Titchmarsh and all those like him are dead and buried; when they’re dead and their smug, poisonous hate-mongering is dead alongside them, gaming will still be alive. And if that means so-called video game addiction will still be alive then I’ll proud to be an addict. The alternative is so much worse.
Monday, 6 December 2010
100 Minutes With . . . Darksiders
Darksiders is the kind of game that gives games a bad name. It’s infantile and crass, and appeals to the part of a gamer’s mind that’s stuck in adolescence - in heavy metal fantasies, cartoons and comic books. It’s not the kind of game you could present to Roger Ebert as evidence that yes, games are art. It’s not the kind of game you could show your mother, or your non-gaming better half. It’s the kind of game you sit with in a darkened room, and feel slightly guilty about booting up when there are worthier, more intelligent titles lining your shelves.
It’s the kind of game that, after five minutes of play, makes you forget everything I’ve just said because you’re having so much damned fun with it.
Yeah, you know the kind of game it is. It’s God of War, it’s Dead Space. It’s part of a new generation of games that takes an old genre - the Zelda-styled action adventure in this case - and reinvents it by slinging bucket loads of blood and angst and over-the-top violence in your face so you’re spitting it out, letting it dribble down your chin, and having the time of your life. It should be laughable but every so often it tips you a wink to let you know it’s in on the joke, too. It’s Commando. It’s Deep Blue Sea. It’s ridiculous.
The game starts with the end of the world. Crowds gather in the centre of Metropolitan City USA to watch news broadcasts of meteors falling to Earth, smashing the continents, killing thousands - then one of them strikes the massive LCD billboard everyone’s watching and all Hell breaks loose.
I’m hooked before the opening cinematic ends. There’s something primal about storytelling that presents you with a load of arcane back story about gods and demons and then jettisons you into modern day society. The word ‘epic’ gets bandied about a lot these days, but this is a great way of setting up an epic story. It’s the same thing James Cameron did with The Terminator - we get the back story, we see the future war, and then we’re in familiarly modern surroundings and it’s here the shit’s going down, it’s this moment that’s pivotal.
With Darksiders you’re not given much opportunity to make sense of what’s going on. You are War, one of the four horseman of the apocalypse, called upon to fight in the climactic battle between, well, everyone. So you tiptoe through a city that’s disintegrating by the second. Windowpanes shatter, buildings topple, the sky falls and you beat up angels and demons alike, using cars as clubs, turning into some shadowy smoke monster, smacking puny humans around as collateral damage. The occasional cut scene or scripted moment shows the war raging all around you - you see a winged monstrosity snatching a helicopter out of the air and flinging it to the street below, and you see this through a hole torn through the upper floor of a tall building. As far as the apocalypse goes, it’s crazy apocalyptic. And somewhere along the line - shortly before your first boss tears the damned road up from beneath your feet - you realise that something’s not quite right here.
Then you get squished between the boss creature’s monolithic fingers and wake up in Hell.
Darksiders wears its influences on its sleeve. There’s a pervading air of familiarity about it - it doesn’t quite feel like a rip off, but there’s just enough deja-vu for it to feel comfortable yet disquieting at the same time. The action mechanics fall somewhere between God of War’s manic elastic band chain-swinging and Devil May Cry’s dashing about. I’m no connoisseur of these kinds of action mechanics but it all feels solid enough, with mid-air dashes and reflexive counters, and with a few carefully-timed button presses even I felt like an unstoppable killing machine. Enemies can be pummelled for a set number of hits before a finishing move is made available to you, and as you’d expect from such a game these moves are kind of things that make you want to yell “Did you SEE that?” A particular favourite was one where you pin a villain to the floor by driving your sword through his hand, and then you punch him about a bit while he struggles to get free - although I must admit even that pales in comparison to the move where you slice a monster’s arm off and use it to beat him into submission, all the while yelling “Stop hitting yourself!” at the flickering screen. If that doesn’t say ‘God of War’ to you, nothing will.
There are plenty of other familiar elements scattered throughout the first one hundred minutes. At times the game feels very similar to the Legacy of Kain, with its pompous post-apocalyptic setting, but there’s just as much of its era-mates Shadow Man and Spawn at play. Your sidekick - a shadowy being who lives inside your gauntlet - quips on your events and surroundings, and frequently goads you about your circumstances. At one point you’re whisked away to a shadow dimension in which you partake in a number of challenges - kill 50 monsters within the time limit, defeat 30 monsters only using mid-air combos, which recalls the arena challenges from the Ratchet & Clank games. . Even the Council - a trio of immense talking, blazing stone skulls - bring the Quintessons from Transformers: The Movie to mind. It’s all maddeningly familiar.
And it’s all ludicrously over the top. Characters speak in portentous riddles, the actors wringing every last drop of drama from their voices, reading from a script that’s a hodgepodge of names and clichés drawn from the book of Revelation. Hell, even the locks gout blood when you stick keys in them.
But Darksiders’ main influence isn’t one you’ll necessarily feel for much of the game’s opening. For all its God of War moodiness Darksiders is a Zelda clone, and it’s not until you reach the first dungeon 90 minutes into the game that you’ll realise this. The gore-splattered action is tempered by puzzle solving straight from Ocarina of Time, with bomb-chu and boomerang analogues, block-pushing, treasure chests and hidden exits. Zelda-clones are such rare beasts that it’s something of a surprise when you realise that all the gore is disguising a more-than-competent take on this beloved, underrepresented genre. It’s even more of a surprise when this Zelda dungeon comes after an elongated tribute to Sega’s Panzer Dragoon series. Somewhere in the middle of that level, riding my demonic steed through waves of angels, blasting them all with my mouth lasers I realised that this was the kind of game I’d have made as a teenager - and I don’t in any way mean that as a slur. The developers have taken all the things that would have thrilled me and my mates as teens and whirled them into a title that’s more than the sum of its parts. It would have been all too easy to lean heavily on the more parodic aspects, or to abandon the levity altogether, or to make the minigames ragged and unsatisfactory.
It’s the kind of game that, after five minutes of play, makes you forget everything I’ve just said because you’re having so much damned fun with it.
Yeah, you know the kind of game it is. It’s God of War, it’s Dead Space. It’s part of a new generation of games that takes an old genre - the Zelda-styled action adventure in this case - and reinvents it by slinging bucket loads of blood and angst and over-the-top violence in your face so you’re spitting it out, letting it dribble down your chin, and having the time of your life. It should be laughable but every so often it tips you a wink to let you know it’s in on the joke, too. It’s Commando. It’s Deep Blue Sea. It’s ridiculous.
The game starts with the end of the world. Crowds gather in the centre of Metropolitan City USA to watch news broadcasts of meteors falling to Earth, smashing the continents, killing thousands - then one of them strikes the massive LCD billboard everyone’s watching and all Hell breaks loose.
I’m hooked before the opening cinematic ends. There’s something primal about storytelling that presents you with a load of arcane back story about gods and demons and then jettisons you into modern day society. The word ‘epic’ gets bandied about a lot these days, but this is a great way of setting up an epic story. It’s the same thing James Cameron did with The Terminator - we get the back story, we see the future war, and then we’re in familiarly modern surroundings and it’s here the shit’s going down, it’s this moment that’s pivotal.
With Darksiders you’re not given much opportunity to make sense of what’s going on. You are War, one of the four horseman of the apocalypse, called upon to fight in the climactic battle between, well, everyone. So you tiptoe through a city that’s disintegrating by the second. Windowpanes shatter, buildings topple, the sky falls and you beat up angels and demons alike, using cars as clubs, turning into some shadowy smoke monster, smacking puny humans around as collateral damage. The occasional cut scene or scripted moment shows the war raging all around you - you see a winged monstrosity snatching a helicopter out of the air and flinging it to the street below, and you see this through a hole torn through the upper floor of a tall building. As far as the apocalypse goes, it’s crazy apocalyptic. And somewhere along the line - shortly before your first boss tears the damned road up from beneath your feet - you realise that something’s not quite right here.
Then you get squished between the boss creature’s monolithic fingers and wake up in Hell.
Darksiders wears its influences on its sleeve. There’s a pervading air of familiarity about it - it doesn’t quite feel like a rip off, but there’s just enough deja-vu for it to feel comfortable yet disquieting at the same time. The action mechanics fall somewhere between God of War’s manic elastic band chain-swinging and Devil May Cry’s dashing about. I’m no connoisseur of these kinds of action mechanics but it all feels solid enough, with mid-air dashes and reflexive counters, and with a few carefully-timed button presses even I felt like an unstoppable killing machine. Enemies can be pummelled for a set number of hits before a finishing move is made available to you, and as you’d expect from such a game these moves are kind of things that make you want to yell “Did you SEE that?” A particular favourite was one where you pin a villain to the floor by driving your sword through his hand, and then you punch him about a bit while he struggles to get free - although I must admit even that pales in comparison to the move where you slice a monster’s arm off and use it to beat him into submission, all the while yelling “Stop hitting yourself!” at the flickering screen. If that doesn’t say ‘God of War’ to you, nothing will.
There are plenty of other familiar elements scattered throughout the first one hundred minutes. At times the game feels very similar to the Legacy of Kain, with its pompous post-apocalyptic setting, but there’s just as much of its era-mates Shadow Man and Spawn at play. Your sidekick - a shadowy being who lives inside your gauntlet - quips on your events and surroundings, and frequently goads you about your circumstances. At one point you’re whisked away to a shadow dimension in which you partake in a number of challenges - kill 50 monsters within the time limit, defeat 30 monsters only using mid-air combos, which recalls the arena challenges from the Ratchet & Clank games. . Even the Council - a trio of immense talking, blazing stone skulls - bring the Quintessons from Transformers: The Movie to mind. It’s all maddeningly familiar.
And it’s all ludicrously over the top. Characters speak in portentous riddles, the actors wringing every last drop of drama from their voices, reading from a script that’s a hodgepodge of names and clichés drawn from the book of Revelation. Hell, even the locks gout blood when you stick keys in them.
But Darksiders’ main influence isn’t one you’ll necessarily feel for much of the game’s opening. For all its God of War moodiness Darksiders is a Zelda clone, and it’s not until you reach the first dungeon 90 minutes into the game that you’ll realise this. The gore-splattered action is tempered by puzzle solving straight from Ocarina of Time, with bomb-chu and boomerang analogues, block-pushing, treasure chests and hidden exits. Zelda-clones are such rare beasts that it’s something of a surprise when you realise that all the gore is disguising a more-than-competent take on this beloved, underrepresented genre. It’s even more of a surprise when this Zelda dungeon comes after an elongated tribute to Sega’s Panzer Dragoon series. Somewhere in the middle of that level, riding my demonic steed through waves of angels, blasting them all with my mouth lasers I realised that this was the kind of game I’d have made as a teenager - and I don’t in any way mean that as a slur. The developers have taken all the things that would have thrilled me and my mates as teens and whirled them into a title that’s more than the sum of its parts. It would have been all too easy to lean heavily on the more parodic aspects, or to abandon the levity altogether, or to make the minigames ragged and unsatisfactory.
It’s easy to judge Darksiders based on its ludicrous finishing moves and preponderance for gore, but it’s the love that’s gone into this thing that makes it shine. You get a real sense that the people who made it are people like you and I - people who love video games and pop culture, and wanted to mash them together in a whole that makes you smile instead of wince. Maybe Darksiders is the kind of game that gives the hobby a bad name, but it’s also the kind of game that spawns a loyal following who’ll shake their heads and tell you you just don’t get it. If you don’t get it it, it’s an adolescent mess. But if you’re one of those guys who can browse through Games Workshop catalogues and Iron Maiden album covers, or who still laughs when the bad guy in a zombie movie gets his entrails torn out then trust me, man-child, this game was made for you.
Saturday, 16 October 2010
Hallowe'en on October Street
The gallows are primed at the foot of October Street. The Jack-o’-lanterns are lit, and leaves flow from trees like red and gold tears, scurried by an errant autumn breeze that haunts the dusk. The moon, gibbous, ablaze, rises, and raises a swarm of shadows that chase the last threads of sunlight from the road. It’s clear to anyone and everyone that Hallowe’en is here.
There are bats that flap and rats that snap, and spiders that spin webs from threads as thick as your finger. And from every eave and bog and storm gutter swamp, from crypts laced with dust that stirs as coffin tops lift, from mad laboratories and crematories and great gothic castles, from every abode on October’s road comes the same cry:
“They’re coming!” said Igor, as he swept bone ash from the lightning rod on the top of his master’s tower.
“They’re coming!” echoed the hunchback from his belfry on the other side of the street.
“They’re coming!” cackled witches three as they stirred a cauldron of bubbling slime that smelled of rotten meat and rotting vegetables and worse.
Every eye and tooth and furry snout turned as one to the tiny troop of flicker-flames as they snaked towards the street, and as Hallowe’en touched every town, village and city with its long, elegant claws, so more flames appeared, more candles, more pumpkin faces grinning and snarling in the dark. Children, coaxed by the promise of candied delights donned costumes, wore disguises, became monsters tall and monsters small and joined the parade, and soon the candle light was a river, an ocean flooding into October Street, its ebb and flow too powerful for the street’s inhabitants to draw in their doormats and batten down their hatches. Now they could only watch and wait for the first visitors of the night.
First came Johnny and Christopher, and Christopher’s little sister Sally, trailing behind in a tutu that would soon be frayed, wielding a tinfoil wand that would soon be bent. Of course every child’s costume would be a little worn by the evening’s end, a little too stained with mud and chocolate and masticated candy corn to be worn the next year. But now, if only for a moment Sally was a fairy princess, clad in pink from top to tiptoe, and she took extra care not to scuff her ballet slippers while climbing the steps to the first house of the night.
“It’s a big house,” murmured Johnny, looking up at the eaves that hung above them like great stone bat wings.
“A big, expensive house,” said Christopher. “That means better candy, and more of it.”
“I don’t know. Mom always says rich people scrimp and save - that’s why they have more money,”
“Just press the doorbell, doofus.”
Johnny pressed the doorbell.
It rang somewhere deep inside the mansion, tolling in funereal tones that sent night birds squawking and flapping and wheeling away from the rooftop. A million eyes peeked from the bushes at either side of the porch, a million glistening, watching flames, and when Johnny rang the doorbell again they scattered like bonfire embers in the wind, the last of the Indian summer’s fireflies fleeing into the sky.
They waited for a time, and were just about to leave when they heard heavy footsteps and the click of a thrown latch. As one they stood back, lips trembling, jaws agape as the front door swung slowly open.
“Trick or . . .” Christopher began, and then he stopped to swallow a cry, for the man who’d opened the door was not a man at all but a walking slab of granite, an ashen-skinned creature eight-foot tall. His head bulged at odd angles, his eyes were those of a bloodhound, rheumy and ringed with red, and at either side of a neck the width of a redwood pine was a single metal bolt like a coffin nail hammered into his pallid flesh.
“Whoah,” breathed Johnny. “Nice costume, mister. Trick or treat.”
The eight-foot thing’s mouth grimaced in what Johnny assumed was a grin, and a great gnarled fist rose between them.
Three times the fist rose, and three times the curled fingers opened to let a giant handful of chocolate and jelly beans rain into the children’s sacks, and once they were done they left the porch, their hearts hammering, their hands trembling, feeling like they’d come close to death yet were still very much alive. As they darted down the street to the next doorway little Sally, feeling brave in her pink fairy frock, turned to wave back at the behemoth, but he’d already returned to the house, closing the door behind him.
The children streamed from house to house, their eyes widening and sacks bulging more with every visitation. At every house there was a new horror to behold, a monster, or demon, or spectre, or spook. A hanged man with skin bruised black, a lizard with a forked tongue, ghostly twin girls whose faces and party dresses were stained with something dark, and a woman whose eyes hung damply upon her cheeks, whose bloated and pustulant skin hung from her arms in grizzly grey sheets. At every door was a new nightmare that would accompany them to their beds, that would be locked in their heads in return for a night collecting sweet jujubes and sour sherbets.
I watch them go now, Johnny and Christopher and sweet little Sally, travelling the route from October Street with not a spring in their steps but a slouch. Their arms are weighed down by pillowcases fit to burst, and their bellies are just starting to squirm with too much sugar, the result of small snacks snaffled between doorsteps, little treats eaten between stoops.
They grow tired at this late hour, as they should, as they always have done, and when they fall asleep it won’t be sugarplum visions that dance in their heads, but us. The monsters, the zombies, sea creatures and crones, and I at the head of us, I at the front, leading us onward and into their world. After All Hallows' Eve, when children visit us and take their fill of sugary treats comes our night, the Day of the Dead. We follow their candle flames back to their land, and spread out in the darkness, visiting every bedroom and every child sleeping within. Every monster, every vampire, every mummy and ghoul; we’ll haunt their dreams and we’ll feed on their imaginations until they wake.
The humans never notice it’s missing. They think it’s a part of growing up. They never stop to think that monsters might have holidays too, or that once a year we might visit them with our own carved heads, to mass on their doorsteps and beg for sweet things.
But we do, and tonight as I lead the parade I know exactly where we’ll stop first. Oh, we’ll still visit Johnny’s house and Christopher’s room, but right now the monsters and I hunger for something more satisfying, something sweet.
We stand on the landing outside little Sally’s room; we giggle and shuffle and our costumes are perfect as costumes that can’t be removed always are, and finally, when the excitement grows too much, when we can’t contain ourselves any longer, I knock on the door and we wait for Sally to answer.
Trick or treat, little girl. Trick or treat.
There are bats that flap and rats that snap, and spiders that spin webs from threads as thick as your finger. And from every eave and bog and storm gutter swamp, from crypts laced with dust that stirs as coffin tops lift, from mad laboratories and crematories and great gothic castles, from every abode on October’s road comes the same cry:
“They’re coming!” said Igor, as he swept bone ash from the lightning rod on the top of his master’s tower.
“They’re coming!” echoed the hunchback from his belfry on the other side of the street.
“They’re coming!” cackled witches three as they stirred a cauldron of bubbling slime that smelled of rotten meat and rotting vegetables and worse.
Every eye and tooth and furry snout turned as one to the tiny troop of flicker-flames as they snaked towards the street, and as Hallowe’en touched every town, village and city with its long, elegant claws, so more flames appeared, more candles, more pumpkin faces grinning and snarling in the dark. Children, coaxed by the promise of candied delights donned costumes, wore disguises, became monsters tall and monsters small and joined the parade, and soon the candle light was a river, an ocean flooding into October Street, its ebb and flow too powerful for the street’s inhabitants to draw in their doormats and batten down their hatches. Now they could only watch and wait for the first visitors of the night.
First came Johnny and Christopher, and Christopher’s little sister Sally, trailing behind in a tutu that would soon be frayed, wielding a tinfoil wand that would soon be bent. Of course every child’s costume would be a little worn by the evening’s end, a little too stained with mud and chocolate and masticated candy corn to be worn the next year. But now, if only for a moment Sally was a fairy princess, clad in pink from top to tiptoe, and she took extra care not to scuff her ballet slippers while climbing the steps to the first house of the night.
“It’s a big house,” murmured Johnny, looking up at the eaves that hung above them like great stone bat wings.
“A big, expensive house,” said Christopher. “That means better candy, and more of it.”
“I don’t know. Mom always says rich people scrimp and save - that’s why they have more money,”
“Just press the doorbell, doofus.”
Johnny pressed the doorbell.
It rang somewhere deep inside the mansion, tolling in funereal tones that sent night birds squawking and flapping and wheeling away from the rooftop. A million eyes peeked from the bushes at either side of the porch, a million glistening, watching flames, and when Johnny rang the doorbell again they scattered like bonfire embers in the wind, the last of the Indian summer’s fireflies fleeing into the sky.
They waited for a time, and were just about to leave when they heard heavy footsteps and the click of a thrown latch. As one they stood back, lips trembling, jaws agape as the front door swung slowly open.
“Trick or . . .” Christopher began, and then he stopped to swallow a cry, for the man who’d opened the door was not a man at all but a walking slab of granite, an ashen-skinned creature eight-foot tall. His head bulged at odd angles, his eyes were those of a bloodhound, rheumy and ringed with red, and at either side of a neck the width of a redwood pine was a single metal bolt like a coffin nail hammered into his pallid flesh.
“Whoah,” breathed Johnny. “Nice costume, mister. Trick or treat.”
The eight-foot thing’s mouth grimaced in what Johnny assumed was a grin, and a great gnarled fist rose between them.
Three times the fist rose, and three times the curled fingers opened to let a giant handful of chocolate and jelly beans rain into the children’s sacks, and once they were done they left the porch, their hearts hammering, their hands trembling, feeling like they’d come close to death yet were still very much alive. As they darted down the street to the next doorway little Sally, feeling brave in her pink fairy frock, turned to wave back at the behemoth, but he’d already returned to the house, closing the door behind him.
The children streamed from house to house, their eyes widening and sacks bulging more with every visitation. At every house there was a new horror to behold, a monster, or demon, or spectre, or spook. A hanged man with skin bruised black, a lizard with a forked tongue, ghostly twin girls whose faces and party dresses were stained with something dark, and a woman whose eyes hung damply upon her cheeks, whose bloated and pustulant skin hung from her arms in grizzly grey sheets. At every door was a new nightmare that would accompany them to their beds, that would be locked in their heads in return for a night collecting sweet jujubes and sour sherbets.
I watch them go now, Johnny and Christopher and sweet little Sally, travelling the route from October Street with not a spring in their steps but a slouch. Their arms are weighed down by pillowcases fit to burst, and their bellies are just starting to squirm with too much sugar, the result of small snacks snaffled between doorsteps, little treats eaten between stoops.
They grow tired at this late hour, as they should, as they always have done, and when they fall asleep it won’t be sugarplum visions that dance in their heads, but us. The monsters, the zombies, sea creatures and crones, and I at the head of us, I at the front, leading us onward and into their world. After All Hallows' Eve, when children visit us and take their fill of sugary treats comes our night, the Day of the Dead. We follow their candle flames back to their land, and spread out in the darkness, visiting every bedroom and every child sleeping within. Every monster, every vampire, every mummy and ghoul; we’ll haunt their dreams and we’ll feed on their imaginations until they wake.
The humans never notice it’s missing. They think it’s a part of growing up. They never stop to think that monsters might have holidays too, or that once a year we might visit them with our own carved heads, to mass on their doorsteps and beg for sweet things.
But we do, and tonight as I lead the parade I know exactly where we’ll stop first. Oh, we’ll still visit Johnny’s house and Christopher’s room, but right now the monsters and I hunger for something more satisfying, something sweet.
We stand on the landing outside little Sally’s room; we giggle and shuffle and our costumes are perfect as costumes that can’t be removed always are, and finally, when the excitement grows too much, when we can’t contain ourselves any longer, I knock on the door and we wait for Sally to answer.
Trick or treat, little girl. Trick or treat.
Monday, 4 October 2010
Intellectia Eternum
On the road ahead of you is a dead body. It’s yours.
This might be the first hook in the Neverwinter Nights module Elegia Eternum, but it’s what follows the plot twist that makes the game so special. Most writers would be happy enough ending the story then and there, in a cliché so ubiquitous I expected it to be the be-all and end-all of the mod. Oh my God, I was dead all along! It’s dull, it’s overdone, and I was ready to yawn and roll my eyes that a writer capable of ending his mod on such a well-worn note could be seen as one of the stars of the Neverwinter Nights scene.
But that was a few weeks ago. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and I’ve discovered that not only are there a good number of decent NWN mods out there, but that there are some REALLY good mods. As in, mods that make full-price RPGs look humdrum, unimaginative, and poor in comparison.
Eligia Eternum is a good mod, but not a great one. It takes you away from your standard quest for a magical staff and into a world of conflicting emotions, domestic pain, rack, ruin and heartache. The game would have made a splash on the modding scene anyway thanks to its full voice acting - a rarity in any game mod - but there’s a decent story, a set of interesting characters and some solid puzzle-solving gameplay behind it. The voice acting is almost the least interesting facet of the mod.
You see a dead body on a quest to find a staff. You stop in at a nearby inn and tell the owner about it; she doesn’t believe you - in fact nobody at the inn believes you. There’s something off about the place that you can’t quite put your finger on, but you shake your head and go on your way to the cave where the staff is said to reside. Inside you find a couple of bandits who can’t hear or see you because they killed you some hours ago. They talk about your death and the death of one of their companions in a light-hearted manner, and the phantom of their dead companion sits nearby, bemoaning that he’ll never get to tell his bandit lady-friend how he felt about her.
When you return to the inn the story really begins. The inn is blackened, burnt out, and has been for some time. Everyone you met earlier has been stuck there ever since the place burned down, killing them all in the process. They are imprisoned within the inn’s shadow, both by their own tormented hang-ups and by the staff you were trying to find; the staff, it turns out, is sentient, evil, and doesn’t much like people. You being the hero, it’s your job to stop it, put an end to the torment of those it has trapped, and generally Do Good.
While there are a number of interesting plot points along the way - not least is the introduction of an angel who’d previously tried and failed to save the good residents of the Elgia Inn - what resonated with me was the central story concerning the family that ran the inn. Over the course of the game, through veiled references, diary entries, memories and eventually full-blown maps you learn the history of the Eligia family and how they came to be possessed and trapped by the staff. The staff prays upon their weaknesses and miseries, causing not only their deaths in the process but forging cages from their own tears - sometimes literally - in order to feed upon their pain. The antagonist that indirectly gave the staff this power is an absent husband and father who screwed up his kids, screwed up his wife, and left the lot of them in the lurch. While he thinks of himself as a happy-go-lucky chap he bullies and demeans, and leaves his family in pieces in search of adventure upon the high seas. The staff seizes upon the Eligia family’s sadness and twists it to its own purpose, turning a little girl’s fleeting hatefulness into the blazing murder weapon that razes the inn ot the ground, trapping their souls in its ashes. It’s an extremely powerful motif, and not one that’s often used in video games.
For all the wickedness the staff wreaks during Eligia Eternum, the true villain of the piece is the absent father. The impact of his ignorant hatefulness is driven home by him not appearing in corporeal form in the mod at all. On numerous occasions while playing I’d hear one of his black pearls of wisdom, or watch a childhood memory and see just how bad a father and husband he’d been, and I’d mutter to myself that if I ever managed to track this son of a bitch down I’d make him pay. I never did, because he isn’t in the game. He’d departed long before I’d arrived, and left me to clean up the mess he’d left behind.
But.
He is in the sequel.
Excrucio Eternum is a far more confident mod than its predecessor. It doesn’t rely on the cheap flashiness of voice acting and it doesn’t try to subvert time worn clichés. It has a world all of its own, a world certainly influenced by the likes of Planescape: Torment, Bioshock and Psychonauts, but a world strong enough to stand next to these towering influences and not look out of place.
After saving the Eligia family and letting their souls ascend to heaven I, as dwarvern fighter Manus Dotin, ran into a stranger in the woods, who promptly knocked me out and stole the now neutered staff. I awoke in an asylum manned by gnolls and agents - slaves who’d had their souls carved from them - and discovered that while I’d been unconscious I, too, had become an agent. Once I’d regained my will I set out to find an exit from this place, and to take revenge on whoever had done this to me.
Excrucio Eternum is a true sequel to the first game, and many of the characters from the first title show up in the second in one form or another. It takes the themes from Eligia and greatly expands upon them, twisting them back, looping them over each other, and providing complex motivations for its characters. There’s a part in an early level of Psychonauts where you discover that your optimistic summer camp counsellor has a very dark secret hidden within her psyche. That her psyche is represented by a psychedelic roller-disco makes this discovery darker and more unpleasant. While the Eternum asylum is far from being a roller-disco, the sheer depths to which writer Stefan Gagne plunges needles into his protagonists makes the game often unpleasant, and always achingly sad. He never pushes things too far, and the situations never become gratuitous, but they corkscrew and buck like roller coasters, always threatening to throw the player off yet always driving him onward.
This is best illustrated by the character of Songbird, an elven girl I discovered trapped in a gilded cage. The cage was surrounded by slogans written to suppress her will, her personality - everything that made her who she should have been, and over the years she’d spent within the cage’s confines they’d woven their magic upon her, trapping her mind as surely as the gilt bars trapped her body. I was still only a little way into the game at this point and hadn’t yet seen the depravities this new villain had inflicted upon his victims, but seeing someone reduced to her name and nothing else - a songbird - churned my stomach.
I mean that. Maybe playing the good guy in games for so long has made me soft, but there’s a reason why games prefer to go for the jugular with gratuitous violence, gore and gibs. These are things most gamers have become desensitised to over the years. We can cheer when Marcus Phoenix chainsaws a grub in two with his lancer - hell, that’s what that particular animation is there for. You know there’s not going to be a scene in Gears of War 3 where Marcus talks about how his childhood priest molested him, not simply because it’s distasteful given the atmosphere the Gears games try to cultivate but because it’s not what gamers want in their games. For all the talk of psychological horror in games it’s the gore and monsters people identify with. Look at Silent Hill. Whatever Pyramid Head might have done early on in the series, he’s now a poster child for video game monsters. He’s a monster with a big sword, not some insidiously creeping Freudian nightmare.
The suppression of Songbird’s being was a major part of Excrucio Eternum for me. The game makes it clear that while she was not programmed for use as a sex object there were indignities inflicted upon her besides those involved in wiping her personality. The game even gave me the chance to hear about them, or to take advantage of her myself; I don’t know what might have happened if I’d selected those particular conversation options, because I didn’t. Even in the context of the game I’d become too attached to this fragile creature to act out of character and tread a darker path.
Songbird’s story came to light later in the game, when I was charged with entering the psyches of various characters I’d previously met. While they all had their own tragedies Songbird’s was, predictably, the worst and most affecting, not least because it involved me, Manus Dotin, the friendly dwarf who’d helped a family escape from a well of torment and then been corrupted and turned into a murderer. As the story went, upon my master’s command I’d slaughtered Songbird’s mother when Songbird herself had been a little girl, and taken her back to the asylum where he’d stripped her personality away little by little ‘til all that was left was an obedient bird in a cage. She followed orders - to be an object, to sing, to speak only when spoken to, to always be beautiful, to always be a slave - that hadn’t just been written on signs around her cage, but etched inside her mind. I found the fragments of her distraught personality and seeing them spread out, giving me clear identification as to her mental makeup, somehow made her situation even worse.
Because who wants to think of a person like that? Who wants to break his or herself down into take-or-leave parts? The thought that such a thing might be possible gives cause for panic because it implies that there are events in your life that can set who you are, that can change you for the better or worse. Most people can point to an event in their life and say that it changed their life but the more you think about these things, the more you examine your mental make-up and the circumstances that helped to construct it, the more frightening the world becomes. In its most innocuous form it’s how advertising works, how jingles get lodged in your consciousness so you whistle them in the car and end up buying branded products you don’t really need. If you stop to think about it you realise you’re being manipulated in ways you’d never dreamed of . . . and you don’t want to dream of them. You don’t want to know this because you’ll get wound up in the concept of free will, and you’ll realise that maybe there’s no such thing, and therefore, no point in life but to coast along on other people’s desires. Only without free will, they don’t have any desires either! And life’s one big feedback loop, one self-operating machine.
And God, I don’t want to think of life like that. Do you? It’s given me a headache just writing about it. But this is the kind of thing this game, this free module wants to make you think about. Pretty little Songbird, torn into shards of personality I had to ‘fix’ in order to put things right. Where she was a slave in the real world, inside her head was a version of herself bound by chains. In the real world she had no voice; in her mind she had a locked keyhole sunk into her throat. Where she needed to always be beautiful her skin had turned to gold, and where she was objectified, her skin had turned to stone, making her a statue to be admired and nothing else. And, in one corner of her mind, trapped inside a rotted tree stump she stood in a shaft of burning red light, her skin blistered, her limbs quaking. A man had taken a little girl and done this to her. A man had taken me, scooped out my will and made me bring her to him so he could do this.
It was a powerful moment in a game full of them. Every so often as I devoured the game’s dialogue I’d find my hand holding cupping my jaw as it dropped in disbelief. On one such occasion I’d found the absent father from the first game, sunning himself on a beach surrounded by beer and babes, hiding his red-hot cowardice in the cliff wall overlooking the scene and his guilt at leaving his wife submerged beneath the sand. Though I’d always wanted to make him pay for what he’d done I decided not to kill him, and instead forced him to confront his emotions and crimes. Last I saw of him he was debating whether or not to return to the burned-out inn to pay last respects to his family. Maybe he’ll do it. I hope he does.
The story and motivations behind the villain who built the asylum and imprisoned us all within it are so twisted and brilliant it’d be remiss for me to delve into them here. While they don’t come into play until the end of the mod they are in fact the focal point for it, if not for both games in the series. It’s a trope common to Japanese RPGs to deliver some kind of half-assed sympathy for the villain at the end of the game, as if learning his mother had died when he’d been a child, or that he’d been bullied throughout his schooldays would his excuse his murderous rampage across the land. While Excrucio Eternum doesn’t quite do this - and certainly doesn’t do it in such an opaque way - it does provide ample opportunity for you to stop and reconsider your own motivations for killing him. Maybe it’ll make you change your mind. It takes a skilled game writer to turn such a situation on its head in this way, but Gagne does it, and does it in such a way that you’re questioning yourself as much as you’re questioning the game. In a startling moment of foreshadowing you enter your own head for one sequence earlier in the game. Once inside your own head - in my case, the balding head of Manus Dotin - you lose control of your character and have a one-sided conversation with yourself. This is where the Bioshock factor kicked in, as Manus discussed my own motivations as a player, what had led me through all my adventures thus far, and again addressed the subject of free will. He tried to coerce me into killing him as an escape from this greater control, telling me that killing one’s self is the only free choice a person could ever have. The deeper psychological implication - and the one suggested by the game - is that Manus’s doubts regarding the greater tasks ahead of him were causing him to want escape from what he regarded as his duty towards the greater good. Writ large and sculpted in torment: Death was the only way out.
Today, Bioshock is still lauded for its novel approach to free will but in my opinon this free mod, this throwaway title from a darkened corner of the Internet, this game that has and will only ever be played by a few thousand people did a much better job covering such subject matter than a blockbuster beloved of critics everywhere.
There was going to be a third Eternum game; sadly Stefan Gagne appears to have left the NWN community and the ongoing story of Manus Dotin will never be finished. Such is the way of ambitious mod projects, I suppose. But Excrucio Eternum will always stand, not only as a fine module, not only as a fine game but as a fine story with fine characters, and I feel privileged that I get to be one of the few thousand people who’ve played it.
This might be the first hook in the Neverwinter Nights module Elegia Eternum, but it’s what follows the plot twist that makes the game so special. Most writers would be happy enough ending the story then and there, in a cliché so ubiquitous I expected it to be the be-all and end-all of the mod. Oh my God, I was dead all along! It’s dull, it’s overdone, and I was ready to yawn and roll my eyes that a writer capable of ending his mod on such a well-worn note could be seen as one of the stars of the Neverwinter Nights scene.
But that was a few weeks ago. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and I’ve discovered that not only are there a good number of decent NWN mods out there, but that there are some REALLY good mods. As in, mods that make full-price RPGs look humdrum, unimaginative, and poor in comparison.
Eligia Eternum is a good mod, but not a great one. It takes you away from your standard quest for a magical staff and into a world of conflicting emotions, domestic pain, rack, ruin and heartache. The game would have made a splash on the modding scene anyway thanks to its full voice acting - a rarity in any game mod - but there’s a decent story, a set of interesting characters and some solid puzzle-solving gameplay behind it. The voice acting is almost the least interesting facet of the mod.
You see a dead body on a quest to find a staff. You stop in at a nearby inn and tell the owner about it; she doesn’t believe you - in fact nobody at the inn believes you. There’s something off about the place that you can’t quite put your finger on, but you shake your head and go on your way to the cave where the staff is said to reside. Inside you find a couple of bandits who can’t hear or see you because they killed you some hours ago. They talk about your death and the death of one of their companions in a light-hearted manner, and the phantom of their dead companion sits nearby, bemoaning that he’ll never get to tell his bandit lady-friend how he felt about her.
When you return to the inn the story really begins. The inn is blackened, burnt out, and has been for some time. Everyone you met earlier has been stuck there ever since the place burned down, killing them all in the process. They are imprisoned within the inn’s shadow, both by their own tormented hang-ups and by the staff you were trying to find; the staff, it turns out, is sentient, evil, and doesn’t much like people. You being the hero, it’s your job to stop it, put an end to the torment of those it has trapped, and generally Do Good.
While there are a number of interesting plot points along the way - not least is the introduction of an angel who’d previously tried and failed to save the good residents of the Elgia Inn - what resonated with me was the central story concerning the family that ran the inn. Over the course of the game, through veiled references, diary entries, memories and eventually full-blown maps you learn the history of the Eligia family and how they came to be possessed and trapped by the staff. The staff prays upon their weaknesses and miseries, causing not only their deaths in the process but forging cages from their own tears - sometimes literally - in order to feed upon their pain. The antagonist that indirectly gave the staff this power is an absent husband and father who screwed up his kids, screwed up his wife, and left the lot of them in the lurch. While he thinks of himself as a happy-go-lucky chap he bullies and demeans, and leaves his family in pieces in search of adventure upon the high seas. The staff seizes upon the Eligia family’s sadness and twists it to its own purpose, turning a little girl’s fleeting hatefulness into the blazing murder weapon that razes the inn ot the ground, trapping their souls in its ashes. It’s an extremely powerful motif, and not one that’s often used in video games.
For all the wickedness the staff wreaks during Eligia Eternum, the true villain of the piece is the absent father. The impact of his ignorant hatefulness is driven home by him not appearing in corporeal form in the mod at all. On numerous occasions while playing I’d hear one of his black pearls of wisdom, or watch a childhood memory and see just how bad a father and husband he’d been, and I’d mutter to myself that if I ever managed to track this son of a bitch down I’d make him pay. I never did, because he isn’t in the game. He’d departed long before I’d arrived, and left me to clean up the mess he’d left behind.
But.
He is in the sequel.
Excrucio Eternum is a far more confident mod than its predecessor. It doesn’t rely on the cheap flashiness of voice acting and it doesn’t try to subvert time worn clichés. It has a world all of its own, a world certainly influenced by the likes of Planescape: Torment, Bioshock and Psychonauts, but a world strong enough to stand next to these towering influences and not look out of place.
After saving the Eligia family and letting their souls ascend to heaven I, as dwarvern fighter Manus Dotin, ran into a stranger in the woods, who promptly knocked me out and stole the now neutered staff. I awoke in an asylum manned by gnolls and agents - slaves who’d had their souls carved from them - and discovered that while I’d been unconscious I, too, had become an agent. Once I’d regained my will I set out to find an exit from this place, and to take revenge on whoever had done this to me.
Excrucio Eternum is a true sequel to the first game, and many of the characters from the first title show up in the second in one form or another. It takes the themes from Eligia and greatly expands upon them, twisting them back, looping them over each other, and providing complex motivations for its characters. There’s a part in an early level of Psychonauts where you discover that your optimistic summer camp counsellor has a very dark secret hidden within her psyche. That her psyche is represented by a psychedelic roller-disco makes this discovery darker and more unpleasant. While the Eternum asylum is far from being a roller-disco, the sheer depths to which writer Stefan Gagne plunges needles into his protagonists makes the game often unpleasant, and always achingly sad. He never pushes things too far, and the situations never become gratuitous, but they corkscrew and buck like roller coasters, always threatening to throw the player off yet always driving him onward.
This is best illustrated by the character of Songbird, an elven girl I discovered trapped in a gilded cage. The cage was surrounded by slogans written to suppress her will, her personality - everything that made her who she should have been, and over the years she’d spent within the cage’s confines they’d woven their magic upon her, trapping her mind as surely as the gilt bars trapped her body. I was still only a little way into the game at this point and hadn’t yet seen the depravities this new villain had inflicted upon his victims, but seeing someone reduced to her name and nothing else - a songbird - churned my stomach.
I mean that. Maybe playing the good guy in games for so long has made me soft, but there’s a reason why games prefer to go for the jugular with gratuitous violence, gore and gibs. These are things most gamers have become desensitised to over the years. We can cheer when Marcus Phoenix chainsaws a grub in two with his lancer - hell, that’s what that particular animation is there for. You know there’s not going to be a scene in Gears of War 3 where Marcus talks about how his childhood priest molested him, not simply because it’s distasteful given the atmosphere the Gears games try to cultivate but because it’s not what gamers want in their games. For all the talk of psychological horror in games it’s the gore and monsters people identify with. Look at Silent Hill. Whatever Pyramid Head might have done early on in the series, he’s now a poster child for video game monsters. He’s a monster with a big sword, not some insidiously creeping Freudian nightmare.
The suppression of Songbird’s being was a major part of Excrucio Eternum for me. The game makes it clear that while she was not programmed for use as a sex object there were indignities inflicted upon her besides those involved in wiping her personality. The game even gave me the chance to hear about them, or to take advantage of her myself; I don’t know what might have happened if I’d selected those particular conversation options, because I didn’t. Even in the context of the game I’d become too attached to this fragile creature to act out of character and tread a darker path.
Songbird’s story came to light later in the game, when I was charged with entering the psyches of various characters I’d previously met. While they all had their own tragedies Songbird’s was, predictably, the worst and most affecting, not least because it involved me, Manus Dotin, the friendly dwarf who’d helped a family escape from a well of torment and then been corrupted and turned into a murderer. As the story went, upon my master’s command I’d slaughtered Songbird’s mother when Songbird herself had been a little girl, and taken her back to the asylum where he’d stripped her personality away little by little ‘til all that was left was an obedient bird in a cage. She followed orders - to be an object, to sing, to speak only when spoken to, to always be beautiful, to always be a slave - that hadn’t just been written on signs around her cage, but etched inside her mind. I found the fragments of her distraught personality and seeing them spread out, giving me clear identification as to her mental makeup, somehow made her situation even worse.
Because who wants to think of a person like that? Who wants to break his or herself down into take-or-leave parts? The thought that such a thing might be possible gives cause for panic because it implies that there are events in your life that can set who you are, that can change you for the better or worse. Most people can point to an event in their life and say that it changed their life but the more you think about these things, the more you examine your mental make-up and the circumstances that helped to construct it, the more frightening the world becomes. In its most innocuous form it’s how advertising works, how jingles get lodged in your consciousness so you whistle them in the car and end up buying branded products you don’t really need. If you stop to think about it you realise you’re being manipulated in ways you’d never dreamed of . . . and you don’t want to dream of them. You don’t want to know this because you’ll get wound up in the concept of free will, and you’ll realise that maybe there’s no such thing, and therefore, no point in life but to coast along on other people’s desires. Only without free will, they don’t have any desires either! And life’s one big feedback loop, one self-operating machine.
And God, I don’t want to think of life like that. Do you? It’s given me a headache just writing about it. But this is the kind of thing this game, this free module wants to make you think about. Pretty little Songbird, torn into shards of personality I had to ‘fix’ in order to put things right. Where she was a slave in the real world, inside her head was a version of herself bound by chains. In the real world she had no voice; in her mind she had a locked keyhole sunk into her throat. Where she needed to always be beautiful her skin had turned to gold, and where she was objectified, her skin had turned to stone, making her a statue to be admired and nothing else. And, in one corner of her mind, trapped inside a rotted tree stump she stood in a shaft of burning red light, her skin blistered, her limbs quaking. A man had taken a little girl and done this to her. A man had taken me, scooped out my will and made me bring her to him so he could do this.
It was a powerful moment in a game full of them. Every so often as I devoured the game’s dialogue I’d find my hand holding cupping my jaw as it dropped in disbelief. On one such occasion I’d found the absent father from the first game, sunning himself on a beach surrounded by beer and babes, hiding his red-hot cowardice in the cliff wall overlooking the scene and his guilt at leaving his wife submerged beneath the sand. Though I’d always wanted to make him pay for what he’d done I decided not to kill him, and instead forced him to confront his emotions and crimes. Last I saw of him he was debating whether or not to return to the burned-out inn to pay last respects to his family. Maybe he’ll do it. I hope he does.
The story and motivations behind the villain who built the asylum and imprisoned us all within it are so twisted and brilliant it’d be remiss for me to delve into them here. While they don’t come into play until the end of the mod they are in fact the focal point for it, if not for both games in the series. It’s a trope common to Japanese RPGs to deliver some kind of half-assed sympathy for the villain at the end of the game, as if learning his mother had died when he’d been a child, or that he’d been bullied throughout his schooldays would his excuse his murderous rampage across the land. While Excrucio Eternum doesn’t quite do this - and certainly doesn’t do it in such an opaque way - it does provide ample opportunity for you to stop and reconsider your own motivations for killing him. Maybe it’ll make you change your mind. It takes a skilled game writer to turn such a situation on its head in this way, but Gagne does it, and does it in such a way that you’re questioning yourself as much as you’re questioning the game. In a startling moment of foreshadowing you enter your own head for one sequence earlier in the game. Once inside your own head - in my case, the balding head of Manus Dotin - you lose control of your character and have a one-sided conversation with yourself. This is where the Bioshock factor kicked in, as Manus discussed my own motivations as a player, what had led me through all my adventures thus far, and again addressed the subject of free will. He tried to coerce me into killing him as an escape from this greater control, telling me that killing one’s self is the only free choice a person could ever have. The deeper psychological implication - and the one suggested by the game - is that Manus’s doubts regarding the greater tasks ahead of him were causing him to want escape from what he regarded as his duty towards the greater good. Writ large and sculpted in torment: Death was the only way out.
Today, Bioshock is still lauded for its novel approach to free will but in my opinon this free mod, this throwaway title from a darkened corner of the Internet, this game that has and will only ever be played by a few thousand people did a much better job covering such subject matter than a blockbuster beloved of critics everywhere.
There was going to be a third Eternum game; sadly Stefan Gagne appears to have left the NWN community and the ongoing story of Manus Dotin will never be finished. Such is the way of ambitious mod projects, I suppose. But Excrucio Eternum will always stand, not only as a fine module, not only as a fine game but as a fine story with fine characters, and I feel privileged that I get to be one of the few thousand people who’ve played it.
Tuesday, 21 September 2010
NWN: The Art of Adventure
Out of all the games I've played this year, Neverwinter Nights (yes, I'm still playing, and my adoration of it is showing no signs of abating) is the only title that's managed to convey to me the sheer thrill of adventure; that urge to get up and go, to right wrongs, to explore every corner of the world in search of money, power or sense of a job well done. It's the only game I've played where I'll be presented with a hill or a cave and and it'll let me find out what's over it or what's inside for myself. Which is extraordinary because unlike the other games I've played that have let me scratch that explorer's urge, Neverwinter Nights is in many ways extremely limited.
Let me explain.
At the start of Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri - the forgotten Looking Glass classic about space pirates and class-based, team-based mech-to-mech combat - my squad and I were dropped on moorland a mile or so from a lake and told to sever communications to a rebel pirate base. Once we'd reconoitered the area with a spy drone and found the base in question we could have quelled any pirate resistance we encountered, wired demolition charges to the radio mast, blown it up and waited for our drop ship to come and pick us up. And we did, in time.
But first we went to the beach.
What Terra Nova did that no other game I'd played had was give me the option not to attack the base, but to engage jump jets and bunny-hop down to that faraway lake to frolic in the waves. This fresh sense of freedom was, to put it bluntly, insane. Once I'd become more acquainted with the game I leanred to use it to my tactical advantage. Send my scout-class squadmate out to one side of the base to draw the pirates' attention and have him retreat to the hills, while the heavies attacked with explosives from the rear and I covered from the flank, taking flying pirates out with my tri-laser, frying their skulls inside their power armour helmets and razing their outposts to the ground. But the first time I ran to the beach I hadn't considered any of that. All I was thinking was "There'll be an invisible wall, or something. I'll never get there; the game will never let me". I thought this right up until I took my first tentative steps off-shore, right until I was splashing in the water and power-jumping over the wavelets that welled there.
Liberation: A video game freeing the player from the confines of video games conventions. Remember Morrowind? Remember that agoraphobic urge to stow yourself back down in the ship's hull because there at least you knew you were a prisoner, you knew your purpose in life. Out in the wilds of Vvardenfell you were terrifyingly free to wander a land of dust storms and jelly-fish monsters and towering stiltwalkers. The same was true of Oblivion, and Fallout 3, where Bethesda masterfully turned the scenario on it's head with its post-apocalyptic twist. You leave the vault and you're you're left to fend for yourself in a dead world inhabited by ghouls and mutants. It's do or die - do you curl into a ball, hammer on the vault door and beg your former comrades to let you back in? Or are you an adventurer?
Neverwinter Nights does none of this. Its maps are small and square, and its horizons are ghastly low-res skyboxes that are at their best when mostly obscured by trees and buildings. A lot of the time you can't see anything worth attempting to reach in the distance because there is no distance - there are only skyboxes and cloying fog. Maps flick when you reach the boundaries of an area like in an old Spectrum game.
Yet somehow - in spite of this - it does adventure really, really well.
This is down to the fans who've created the custom content the game is best known for. For the most part they aren't game designers; therefore they're not hampered by concepts of what you can and can't do in a game. They've stretched the engine in new and interesting ways, and, being fantasy fans, one of those ways has been to create epic fantasy experiences the breed of which the game didn't ship with. Longtime fans of the game recommend new players to not touch the original campaign, the one that comes on the game's disc. "If you want a good Neverwinter Nights campaign," they'll say, "play The Aielund Saga."
That's what I'm playing right now. And although it's far from the only NWN mod I've played that has a sense of incredible possibilities and adventure, it's a great series to illustrate exactly what I'm talking about.
Part one of the Aielund Saga beings with the player character arriving in town on - of all things - a dark and stormy night. Rain's been pouring down for so long the town has become waterlogged, and all trade routes and communications with neighbouring towns and villages have been disrupted. To make matters worse there are barbarians holing up somewhere to the east, wolf packs are patrolling the southern roads, and there are strange noises coming from inside the town mausoleum. Obviously there's ample scope for an adventurer to make some coin slaying wolves and barbarians, and running messages along roads no one else will take. But as much as those things might be considered adventuring in a fantasy RPG, that's not where the real adventure comes in.
Exploring the mausoleum under orders from the town priestess I found a trap door which led to a series of recently excavated - and poorly excavated, judging from the close rumblings of falling soil - tunnels. The tunnels were infested with goblins - again, an old, familiar genre trope. But some way into hacking my way through them, the remaining goblins turned tail and fled. I pursued and later found them caught in a cave-in. On one of their bodies I found a note . . .
This jaunt beneath the town of Bracksford had begun like any other quest in the game, but it was actually the start of an epic plotline that took my companions and I to
- a gentlemen's club
- a wyvern nest buried at the bottom of a desert mine
- windswept snowy peaks where we fought ogres
-barbarian forts in tundra so cold we needed fur cloaks just to preserve our body heat
. . . and many other adventure-filled places.
The module ended with us rescuing a kidnapped princess and walking back to town to find it besieged by mercenaries. Finally, I led a band of knights on a downhill charge against mercenary soldiers, trebuchets, and a horse-riding commander who slew three men with one sword blow before he turned his attention upon me and mine.
That was module one. Module two began with me escorting the princess on a sea voyage back to her homeland. Along the way we were attacked by pirates, and had to fend them off with deck-mounted ballista and by swinging across to their ship to light powder kegs buried deep within the hull, escaping by the skin of our teeth as the ship burst to kindling behind us. While we finally made it safely to dock in the princess's home city, we were attacked by assassins while diverted on the way back to her castle. As of my last save I'm on one mission to explore the sewers in search of the thieves' guild (where I'll hopefully find someone who can put me in contact with the assassins' guild and find out who put a contract on the princess's life), and another mission to discover which of the student wizards set up the diversion and if he did it deliberately. Because massive smoking craters in the city's main street - that's not the kind of thing that happens every day.
And all because I was told to investigate some strange sounds.
By rights a single game shouldn't let me do such things. Ship-to-ship combat, swashbuckling, rope-swinging, lighting powderkegs and standing well back - that's a pirate game. Playing gumshoe while trying to unravel the knots of a political assassination? Leading armies into battle? Maybe there are games out there that combine all three into one glorious whole - I haven't played Baldur's Gate 2 yet, so it's possible that does it - but there can't be many of them. I started the year with Mass Effect 2 and for all its gung-ho air-punching action RPG brilliance it didn't have this kind of scale, nor the sense of adventure The Aielund Saga has. With Aielund I genuinely don't know what's going to happen next. For all its bravado Mass Effect 2 was a fairly safe game. Opening with the destruction of the Normandy was a brave move. Presenting the chance for your entire crew to be killed in the finale was interesting. and putting the player in the shoes of Joker, your helpless pilot as he limps his way through corridors filled with rampaging aliens was the highlight of the game for me. I liked Joker's section for a number of reasons, but a big one was because I didn't know it was coming. In a game that might have been hamstrung by its predictable structure - if the content of said structure hadn't been so damned good - stripping away not only your powers but your very identity, and forcing you to hobble through alien terrors as a man who can barely walk was a powerful piece of video game design.
With a game as graphically limited as Neverwinter Nights the module creators have had to push the engine in ways it was never meant to bend in order to make vivid worlds and storylines that engross the player. They engage the player's imagination and show him things other games cannot. I'm a short way into the second part of a story which unfolds over four acts and six modules - I haven't a clue as to where The Aielund Saga will take me next. The only thing I'm sure of is that I want keep playing, and it's in this way that Neverwinter Nights has shown me a hill, shown me a cave, or shown me a glinting lake in the faraway distance, crooked a finger in my direction and said "Come and explore, Campfire. Come and find adventure."
With a request like that, how could I possibly refuse?
Let me explain.
At the start of Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri - the forgotten Looking Glass classic about space pirates and class-based, team-based mech-to-mech combat - my squad and I were dropped on moorland a mile or so from a lake and told to sever communications to a rebel pirate base. Once we'd reconoitered the area with a spy drone and found the base in question we could have quelled any pirate resistance we encountered, wired demolition charges to the radio mast, blown it up and waited for our drop ship to come and pick us up. And we did, in time.
But first we went to the beach.
What Terra Nova did that no other game I'd played had was give me the option not to attack the base, but to engage jump jets and bunny-hop down to that faraway lake to frolic in the waves. This fresh sense of freedom was, to put it bluntly, insane. Once I'd become more acquainted with the game I leanred to use it to my tactical advantage. Send my scout-class squadmate out to one side of the base to draw the pirates' attention and have him retreat to the hills, while the heavies attacked with explosives from the rear and I covered from the flank, taking flying pirates out with my tri-laser, frying their skulls inside their power armour helmets and razing their outposts to the ground. But the first time I ran to the beach I hadn't considered any of that. All I was thinking was "There'll be an invisible wall, or something. I'll never get there; the game will never let me". I thought this right up until I took my first tentative steps off-shore, right until I was splashing in the water and power-jumping over the wavelets that welled there.
Liberation: A video game freeing the player from the confines of video games conventions. Remember Morrowind? Remember that agoraphobic urge to stow yourself back down in the ship's hull because there at least you knew you were a prisoner, you knew your purpose in life. Out in the wilds of Vvardenfell you were terrifyingly free to wander a land of dust storms and jelly-fish monsters and towering stiltwalkers. The same was true of Oblivion, and Fallout 3, where Bethesda masterfully turned the scenario on it's head with its post-apocalyptic twist. You leave the vault and you're you're left to fend for yourself in a dead world inhabited by ghouls and mutants. It's do or die - do you curl into a ball, hammer on the vault door and beg your former comrades to let you back in? Or are you an adventurer?
Neverwinter Nights does none of this. Its maps are small and square, and its horizons are ghastly low-res skyboxes that are at their best when mostly obscured by trees and buildings. A lot of the time you can't see anything worth attempting to reach in the distance because there is no distance - there are only skyboxes and cloying fog. Maps flick when you reach the boundaries of an area like in an old Spectrum game.
Yet somehow - in spite of this - it does adventure really, really well.
This is down to the fans who've created the custom content the game is best known for. For the most part they aren't game designers; therefore they're not hampered by concepts of what you can and can't do in a game. They've stretched the engine in new and interesting ways, and, being fantasy fans, one of those ways has been to create epic fantasy experiences the breed of which the game didn't ship with. Longtime fans of the game recommend new players to not touch the original campaign, the one that comes on the game's disc. "If you want a good Neverwinter Nights campaign," they'll say, "play The Aielund Saga."
That's what I'm playing right now. And although it's far from the only NWN mod I've played that has a sense of incredible possibilities and adventure, it's a great series to illustrate exactly what I'm talking about.
Part one of the Aielund Saga beings with the player character arriving in town on - of all things - a dark and stormy night. Rain's been pouring down for so long the town has become waterlogged, and all trade routes and communications with neighbouring towns and villages have been disrupted. To make matters worse there are barbarians holing up somewhere to the east, wolf packs are patrolling the southern roads, and there are strange noises coming from inside the town mausoleum. Obviously there's ample scope for an adventurer to make some coin slaying wolves and barbarians, and running messages along roads no one else will take. But as much as those things might be considered adventuring in a fantasy RPG, that's not where the real adventure comes in.
Exploring the mausoleum under orders from the town priestess I found a trap door which led to a series of recently excavated - and poorly excavated, judging from the close rumblings of falling soil - tunnels. The tunnels were infested with goblins - again, an old, familiar genre trope. But some way into hacking my way through them, the remaining goblins turned tail and fled. I pursued and later found them caught in a cave-in. On one of their bodies I found a note . . .
This jaunt beneath the town of Bracksford had begun like any other quest in the game, but it was actually the start of an epic plotline that took my companions and I to
- a gentlemen's club
- a wyvern nest buried at the bottom of a desert mine
- windswept snowy peaks where we fought ogres
-barbarian forts in tundra so cold we needed fur cloaks just to preserve our body heat
. . . and many other adventure-filled places.
The module ended with us rescuing a kidnapped princess and walking back to town to find it besieged by mercenaries. Finally, I led a band of knights on a downhill charge against mercenary soldiers, trebuchets, and a horse-riding commander who slew three men with one sword blow before he turned his attention upon me and mine.
That was module one. Module two began with me escorting the princess on a sea voyage back to her homeland. Along the way we were attacked by pirates, and had to fend them off with deck-mounted ballista and by swinging across to their ship to light powder kegs buried deep within the hull, escaping by the skin of our teeth as the ship burst to kindling behind us. While we finally made it safely to dock in the princess's home city, we were attacked by assassins while diverted on the way back to her castle. As of my last save I'm on one mission to explore the sewers in search of the thieves' guild (where I'll hopefully find someone who can put me in contact with the assassins' guild and find out who put a contract on the princess's life), and another mission to discover which of the student wizards set up the diversion and if he did it deliberately. Because massive smoking craters in the city's main street - that's not the kind of thing that happens every day.
And all because I was told to investigate some strange sounds.
By rights a single game shouldn't let me do such things. Ship-to-ship combat, swashbuckling, rope-swinging, lighting powderkegs and standing well back - that's a pirate game. Playing gumshoe while trying to unravel the knots of a political assassination? Leading armies into battle? Maybe there are games out there that combine all three into one glorious whole - I haven't played Baldur's Gate 2 yet, so it's possible that does it - but there can't be many of them. I started the year with Mass Effect 2 and for all its gung-ho air-punching action RPG brilliance it didn't have this kind of scale, nor the sense of adventure The Aielund Saga has. With Aielund I genuinely don't know what's going to happen next. For all its bravado Mass Effect 2 was a fairly safe game. Opening with the destruction of the Normandy was a brave move. Presenting the chance for your entire crew to be killed in the finale was interesting. and putting the player in the shoes of Joker, your helpless pilot as he limps his way through corridors filled with rampaging aliens was the highlight of the game for me. I liked Joker's section for a number of reasons, but a big one was because I didn't know it was coming. In a game that might have been hamstrung by its predictable structure - if the content of said structure hadn't been so damned good - stripping away not only your powers but your very identity, and forcing you to hobble through alien terrors as a man who can barely walk was a powerful piece of video game design.
With a game as graphically limited as Neverwinter Nights the module creators have had to push the engine in ways it was never meant to bend in order to make vivid worlds and storylines that engross the player. They engage the player's imagination and show him things other games cannot. I'm a short way into the second part of a story which unfolds over four acts and six modules - I haven't a clue as to where The Aielund Saga will take me next. The only thing I'm sure of is that I want keep playing, and it's in this way that Neverwinter Nights has shown me a hill, shown me a cave, or shown me a glinting lake in the faraway distance, crooked a finger in my direction and said "Come and explore, Campfire. Come and find adventure."
With a request like that, how could I possibly refuse?
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