*Hyun-ae wants to know what I think of The Pale Bride. Do I think her fate was tragic, or that she was just being overly dramatic?
Both, I think. The Pale Bride is a selfish, melodramatic brat. But at the same time, she's been unfairly thrust into a world she doesn't understand, and where nobody understands her. It's a world she can never connect with, yet she's expected to act the way people think she should. She doesn't know how she's supposed to behave, but the people around her don't comprehend that she doesn't know. The behaviour expected of her is something she finds morally reprehensible. The behaviour which is the norm to her, meanwhile, is reprehensible to the people among whom she now finds herself.
Both, I find myself still thinking, even after dwelling on it. I don't think I like The Pale Bride. I don't think she and I would get along that well, if we knew each other. But there's no way she deserves the fate which has befallen her. She's a confused and slightly stupid kid, given to making everything a Big Deal, but this really IS a Bigger Deal than most of us could ever imagine facing.
Both, I want to tell *Hyun-ae, but I can't. I have to choose one answer or the other. In most games, this would frustrate me. In Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story, it's one of the most beautiful pieces of design I've ever encountered. The AI *Hyun-ae's language parsing systems have failed, and she can only receive communication from me as binary inputs. She asks me a question, and I get to answer between the choices she gives me: this or that, yes or no... is The Pale Bride a tragic figure, or a melodramatic one?
Both, but I can't say that. *Hyun-ae doesn't seem to understand that I might think both, and I don't know if she ever will.
After much deliberation, I say that it's tragic.
*Hyun-ae agrees with me. She's glad someone finally sees it the same way she does. She grants me access to another datafile.
This worries me. Is *Hyun-ae going to keep things from me? She already sort of did, deleting a message from someone named *Mute while I was halfway through. I got the impression there was something in there she didn't want me to read. Do I need to tell *Hyun-ae what she wants to hear, if I'm going to complete my mission? After all, that's why I'm here: to retrieve data. I've been tasked to recover as much as I can from the colony spaceship Mugunghwa, an ancient Marie Celeste of deep space, and try to shed some light on why it vanished all those centuries ago. I knew I'd have to negotiate the AI to do it, but not like this.
Can I even trust *Hyun-ae? I don't know. She's been alone for over six hundred years, and she seems to have gotten a little eccentric. Has she got ulterior motives... did the fate of the Mugunghwa have something to do with her? Is she trying to play me? Maybe her language parsers aren't even really broken...
But it's part of my job to be paranoid and right now, either way, I feel sorry for her. Perhaps even more than I do for The Pale Bride, or Sang-jung the lonely drunk or Jae-hwa the discarded consort or Hana the secret poet, or any of the other people whose struggles and lives are now reduced to a handful of diary entries. People who wrote down their feelings as they felt them - not to keep records, just to vent. From these fragments of personalities, and their opinions of each other, I need to piece together what happened.
I don't know if can trust *Hyun-ae, but I do know that I need her help, and that means I need to stay on her good side. Yet... that's not why I talk to her after every new piece of data revealed. I want to know what she thinks, and more than that, I want her to know that after centuries of solitude, somebody cares about her opinion. *Hyun-ae admits that she doesn't know anything about me, or my motivations, or what I think of her. Having someone to talk to just means that much to her, even with our limited ability to interact.
It's good that she wants to talk, because we have work to do. I need to look into the power struggle between the Smith and Kim families, the ship's two dominant noble houses. At some point during the voyage, something happened - exactly what is never stated, but something big - and in the following centuries, society regressed. It regressed technologically, as people forgot how to use the instruments around them, and it regressed socially, into a feudal serfdom of rigid heirarchy, particularly reminiscent of medieval Korea - a civilisation where deviation from what's expected of one's rank, age and gender is considered horrifying. On some level I find myself infuriated by what the long-dead Smiths, Kims and associates have to say. I want to tell the neglected wife to stand up for herself, to tell the emotionally distant father to pay attention to his daughter, to tell the ambitious but dullardly civil servant to stop measuring his life by how others perceive him. Mainly I feel sorry for them, and wish I could do something. But it's centuries too late for that, and anyway, they wouldn't have understood. Only one person in that society, The Pale Bride, had a different perspective - and she had probably the most miserable time of them all. I read on, uncovering more of their anguish and triumph, at once absorbed, repulsed, pitying, heartbroken.
Later, *Hyun-ae suggests that I could change her avatar's clothing. Right now she's in what she describes as a "schoolgirl-librarian" look, but she thinks it's a bit tacky. I feel awkward about this... it's voyeuristic to have this AI play dress-up for me, especially in light of the culture recorded in the datafiles, a culture where women are little more than political property to be traded and used up. But... it's not really for me, this option to change her outfit - it's what she wants. The reasons why she wants it might make me uncomfortable, but it'll make her happy nonetheless. I don't think about keeping her happy anymore, not in the sense I described earlier; I genuinely want her to be happy. She's not just an archival tool, a cartoon paperclip with big eyes. She's a real person who happens to be made of bits instead of blood, and she's been left in solitude for several times longer than my own lifespan. She's got her flaws, sure, but she deserves to have someone be nice to her, even for a little while.
I cycle through the options and decide upon the detective look, complete with flat cap and pipe. It seems to be her favourite, too. She asks me what I think, and one of the choices she gives me is to say that I think she makes a great sidekick. Only the way she says it is... well... is this her trying to be subtle? Perhaps. Probably. I think she's latching on to me a bit too closely... understandable, right? If a person is alone for the larger part of a millenium, and then someone comes along who acts nice towards them, what would you expect? I want her to be happy, but I don't want to give her the wrong impression. Maybe I should choose the other option, telling her that the outfit looks stupid.
But there's no way I can do that.
I say she makes a great sidekick.
And then I wonder how different I really am, deep down, from the people recorded in these datafiles.
A few hours and some revelations later, I leave Mugunghwa with the data I was hired to get, but that's not all. I've brought a new friend with me. I don't agree with everything she's said to me, and when we get her speech parsing systems back online, I expect there to be arguments. But she needs... something. After what she's been through, surely a bad friend is better than no friend at all.
And I think I need her, too, both for companionship and for any kind of positive closure. I did something terrible to get to this point. I made a hard choice. I still don't know if it was the right choice, but it was my choice, and that's enough right now. Anything at all is at least something; I'm leaving the ship with knowledge far more valuable to me, on a personal level, than the credits I'll get in payment or the solving of a mystery.
I've never been moved by a Bioware game. I've never been moved by a Square-Enix game. I've only rarely been moved by a Bethesda game.
I've never not been moved by a Christine Love game.
Analogue is her tightest and most elegant work to date. At about £11 including tax, it's perhaps a little steeply priced for the amount of content you get, but that's the wrong way to look at it. While you're buying Analogue, be sure to also pick up her excellent previous games Digital: A Love Story and don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story; £11 for all three is an absolute steal. The flaws of those earlier games are wrinkled out of Analogue - the twists and turns of the plot all make sense, and the plot, the mechanics and the anime style all fit together much more coherently than before. Her plots always flow well, but the ways in which you advance them used to seem a bit contrived sometimes. That's not the case here. In the first act, I expected to have a criticism - that the game was overstating the psychological differences between men and women. But as the game goes on, it becomes clear that it's more about the perceptions people have of gender differences. I don't know whether Christine Love shares my outlook that the sexes are much closer, psychologically, than is typically portrayed, but I do know that Analogue can be read that way. I'm pretty sure it can be read other ways too, and that's one of most obvious hallmarks of depth within a piece of art.
And Analogue is art, of that I have no doubt. The sci-fi setting, ambient music and clinical visuals mask a story about human existence which is one of the most effective and affecting in the medium of gaming. In fact, my biggest criticism of Analogue might be that it's too perfect. All of the themes from the previous games are present - privacy, gender and sexuality politics, the relationship between self-expression and emotional growth, the effect of technology on human communication, the dichotomy between historical perspective and immediate context - and they're all built on intelligently and logically from what went before. What's more, they join together almost seamlessly into something at once absolutely singular and impossibly vast. At times it feels less like the next step in her development, and more like a conclusion to it. I can't wait for Christine's next game, whatever it might be [I'm not sure whether current project The Mysterious Aphroditus is going to be commercially released], not just for the quality of her existing titles but to see how and where she can build her themes further - or explore new ground altogether. We may be at the point where any further pure distillation of a "Christine Love game," without some shift in theme or style, would start to feel a little like self-parody.
But it's unfair to judge Analogue on the merits of some hypothetical future release. On the merits of itself, Analogue is one of the best games I've played in years, and I can't recommend it enough.
Friday, 8 June 2012
Friday, 18 May 2012
Obligatory Diablo III nonsense
I wasn't going to get Diablo III anyway, but if I was, Blizzard would have lost a sale.
Courtesy of Penny Arcade, I was under the impression, initially, that the program was already sitting on people's computers awaiting activation on release day. To be honest, I was shocked that companies still do that, despite the huge fan outcry that's occurred whenever it's been tried. I mean, it's understandable why a development company might do things that way; it's more understandable why the fans would be pissed off about it, and the customer is always right, even if said customer is a loud, obnoxious jerk who smells slightly of boiled cabbage and turpentine.
Evis T informs me that actually, it's the rendering engine and such that people have on their PCs, and the content is streamed from Blizzard's servers during play.
Wut?
I live in a neighbourhood with a poor net connection. Evis T lives in a residential complex abutting his workplace, with a poor net connection. Our pals Arron and Andy seem to just have flat out bad net no matter what they do. Playing online games can already be a chore for us, as people drop out randomly or freeze up with lag. Now we can't even play single-player games without worrying about that? Or that things might go tits-up Blizzard-side? Amazing. And this is supposed to be an anti-piracy measure... seriously? If anything this sort of draconian countermeasure, a cure worse than the disease if you will, would make me turn to piracy.
I haven't looked, but I would put money on cracked copes of Diablo III being pretty easily available already.
I don't care about Diablo III - the original Diablo underwhelmed me enough that I never bothered with Diablo II, and to be honest, I'm just not a fan of Blizzard's games in general. But Blizzard are a 'big deal' company, with the power to set precedent for other companies. If BioShock Infinite, or Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, or my beloved Carmageddon: Reincarnation were to use the same system, I would not be impressed. There's already been some backlash against Stainless in some fan quarters for the fact that Carmageddon: Reincarnation will likely require Steam upon its initial release, even though Steam is pretty unobtrusive if you want it to be, and you can play Steam games offline.
Although it might not be how I'd do things, I can - if pressed - reason in favour of Steam-only gaming (especially as Stainless have said that, pending the success of that release, they'd love to be able to port the game to other platforms). Similarly, I'm sure somebody out there can reason in favour of Blizzard's Diablo III model. I'd love to see it justified. But most of my pro-Steam arguments boil down to the fact that all the potentially annoying things about Steam don't get in the way of letting you play your game. Even games which really, really want you to be online, like The Sims 3, still grudgingly allow you to play offline. Blizzard's latest trick, however, effectively restricts access to something people have already paid for a licence to use.
I'm waiting for the day when a company uses the same system as Diablo III, then five months in announces that the game will no longer be playable without a DLC pack. Although maybe that would be a good thing, ultimately, if the resulting backlash would kill off the idea once and for all.
The face of gaming is changing. More and more gamers are putting their money where their mouth is, or more accurately, not putting their money down for practices they dislike. The fan reception to the endings of Fallout 3, and more recently Mass Effect 3, prompted the developers to rectify things in an expansion pack and patch respectively. GFWL is apparently losing steam quicker than a sumo wrestler in a long-distance limbo race. And so a business model which restricts access to single-player, ostensibly 'offline' content is surely doomed to fail.
At least I hope so.
Courtesy of Penny Arcade, I was under the impression, initially, that the program was already sitting on people's computers awaiting activation on release day. To be honest, I was shocked that companies still do that, despite the huge fan outcry that's occurred whenever it's been tried. I mean, it's understandable why a development company might do things that way; it's more understandable why the fans would be pissed off about it, and the customer is always right, even if said customer is a loud, obnoxious jerk who smells slightly of boiled cabbage and turpentine.
Evis T informs me that actually, it's the rendering engine and such that people have on their PCs, and the content is streamed from Blizzard's servers during play.
Wut?
I live in a neighbourhood with a poor net connection. Evis T lives in a residential complex abutting his workplace, with a poor net connection. Our pals Arron and Andy seem to just have flat out bad net no matter what they do. Playing online games can already be a chore for us, as people drop out randomly or freeze up with lag. Now we can't even play single-player games without worrying about that? Or that things might go tits-up Blizzard-side? Amazing. And this is supposed to be an anti-piracy measure... seriously? If anything this sort of draconian countermeasure, a cure worse than the disease if you will, would make me turn to piracy.
I haven't looked, but I would put money on cracked copes of Diablo III being pretty easily available already.
I don't care about Diablo III - the original Diablo underwhelmed me enough that I never bothered with Diablo II, and to be honest, I'm just not a fan of Blizzard's games in general. But Blizzard are a 'big deal' company, with the power to set precedent for other companies. If BioShock Infinite, or Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, or my beloved Carmageddon: Reincarnation were to use the same system, I would not be impressed. There's already been some backlash against Stainless in some fan quarters for the fact that Carmageddon: Reincarnation will likely require Steam upon its initial release, even though Steam is pretty unobtrusive if you want it to be, and you can play Steam games offline.
Although it might not be how I'd do things, I can - if pressed - reason in favour of Steam-only gaming (especially as Stainless have said that, pending the success of that release, they'd love to be able to port the game to other platforms). Similarly, I'm sure somebody out there can reason in favour of Blizzard's Diablo III model. I'd love to see it justified. But most of my pro-Steam arguments boil down to the fact that all the potentially annoying things about Steam don't get in the way of letting you play your game. Even games which really, really want you to be online, like The Sims 3, still grudgingly allow you to play offline. Blizzard's latest trick, however, effectively restricts access to something people have already paid for a licence to use.
I'm waiting for the day when a company uses the same system as Diablo III, then five months in announces that the game will no longer be playable without a DLC pack. Although maybe that would be a good thing, ultimately, if the resulting backlash would kill off the idea once and for all.
The face of gaming is changing. More and more gamers are putting their money where their mouth is, or more accurately, not putting their money down for practices they dislike. The fan reception to the endings of Fallout 3, and more recently Mass Effect 3, prompted the developers to rectify things in an expansion pack and patch respectively. GFWL is apparently losing steam quicker than a sumo wrestler in a long-distance limbo race. And so a business model which restricts access to single-player, ostensibly 'offline' content is surely doomed to fail.
At least I hope so.
Thursday, 17 May 2012
Tekkit City Chronicles, Vol. 3: A very strange reaction
Since last time, a significant part of our Tekkit city project has been spent in different maps from our home, playing around in creative mode with the various doodads and geegaws the mod pack adds, both to get an understanding of how they all work and so Hugh could teach the rest of us how things link up.
One of the most useful things added is the quarry: a machine which squares off a patch of land (within the orange frame you can see above) and then digs down until it hits bedrock or lava, stripping out everything within that area. Everything from stone and sand to diamond and uranium gets sucked up a pipe and deposited in a connected chest. Quarries are expensive to build and they need a lot of power, but they're reusable and a very good way of getting a lot of resources, very quickly. Plus they're largely fire-and-forget, meaning that you can mine and build at the same time, which is handy when you're still aroundabout 3,950 houses short of your target of 4,000 houses.
Another bonus is that the quarry reveals cave networks and ore seams along the walls of the dug area, giving some focus to future caving expeditions. The above screenshot is a rarity, actually - a quarry which didn't turn up a cave network. Normally it gets riddled with them.
As you can imagine, you don't want to fall down there.
A quirk of quarries, which might be good or bad depending on your perspective, is that it doesn't stop when the hole gets flooded. We've idly theorised that if it floods and then digs into lava, it would make a simple source of obsidian, but we've yet to see that happen. Water in Minecraft, you see, doesn't flow like real water. If you have two water sources flowing into the same space, it creates another new water source in that space. You can remove that water source... and the two flowing sources will create a new water source there again. Repeat as needed. This is a pretty common exploit, known to the Minecraft community as 'infinite water.' If that water flows into a lava lake, then bam - obsidian, and the quarry ought to suck that obsidian right up.
Seen in the (above-)above screenshot is an engine cooling system using this trick. A pump sucks out the new water source every time it's created, which is piped to the engine to cool it. Since the pumping cycle and water source creation both repeat without human intervention, you can set that up and then basically forget about it, which means it's a very useful way of regulating low-maintenance, high-power machinery like quarries.
This is our vertical rail lift, inspired by the fastest elevator rivalries and ably tested in this picture by a sheep. Hugh reasoned that with Tekkit, this would likely be the simplest way of building a fast vertical transport system. Plus it would let us use railways, which we have a soft spot for even though they're not actually that useful; anything you can do with rails can be done quicker and easier using something else, such as teleport pipes (which I'll cover in the next update). The only thing rails do best is fast transport of people, and our city just isn't that big yet. Although I am looking forward to building train yards and subway stations, when the time comes!
We also had the bright idea of making... a rollercoaster! Okay, that's probably been done a lot already, but I can't be bothered looking it up on YouTube. We just decided to give it a try and see what happened. It happened pretty good, despite a couple of minor engineering headaches. So, yeah, we're probably going to add a funfair to the city at some point.
Although you can have diagonal rails (as per base Minecraft) and vertical rails (added in Railcraft), you can't have upside-down rails. So no loop-de-loop for us, sadly. This is as close as we could get. This thing still went hellaciously fast though, and managed to throw riders off even without launch rails until we toned it down a bit.
The sheep seemed to enjoy it, and gave no indication of wanting to get off.
We were playing around with reactors, too, fuelled by the cooling system described previously in this post. We ended up with something both stable and powerful, so it was an obvious decision to decommission our existing reactor in the city map, as pictured above.
Decommissioning, in this case, meant going in and ripping out the cores and then smashing up the shielding with pickaxes. I choose to believe that's how it works in real life, too. Somebody is just about visible inside the reactor there, either removing a core or scooping up water.
The overseer's hut, and the status display. Green light means the reactor is running safely. Red light means there's a problem. Inside the hut was a safety override shutdown type lever. All of this is now much, much more complicated in our new reactor.
There's Hugh in the process of building the new one - or at least installing the water pumping systems. Adrian, meanwhile, was constructing the shell of the building. I supplied the water (not by weeing in the pool, I hasten to add) and then very helpfully flew around taking pictures instead of working. Just like a real job!
More work on the reactor. Since I took this, it's been finished; I'll have a pic in the next update. Using the infinite water cooling trick this reactor is much more powerful, enough to keep four batteries charged at once, while running safely enough not to need any shielding.
See? Realism! And we haven't even added the second reactor in the other pool yet.
By the way, the building housing this monstrosity backs onto the warehouse and the hydroponic gardens, and is just round the corner from the water supply. Let's pray nothing goes wrong.
Here's an overhead view of our central industrial complex. The tall building on the left with the bronze cog design on the wall is the warehouse, which currently houses all of our resources with another two and a half storeys still unoccupied. We're currently adding an auto-sorter, and Hugh's talking about installing a computer network which monitors inventory levels.
Behind and to the left of the warehouse is the water processing plant, as seen in the first Tekkit City Chronicle, back when it was going to be our power station. What actually became the power station, where the decommissioning took place, is just visible as a thin sliver of roof beyond the warehouse. The big building on the right with the smokestacks is the current power station. The wooden deck at the south, meanwhile, leads to a hillside warren of buildings - basically a kasbah, minus the walls.
In the foreground you can see out newest toy, the Bessemer converter (the big orange thing). Ores go in, and metal ingots come out. There's a macerator in there which increases the amount of metal we get per load of ore. As a bonus, the same machine can also be used to turn cobblestone into sand (via the macerator) and thence into glass (in the furnace).
Here's a view looking up at the workings. It's not very clear, but it's enough to see that there's a lot going on in there. A real-world Bessemer converter doesn't work like that at all - in reality, and in very simplistic terms, it's basically a giant bucket which mixes pig iron with air to oxidise away the impurities. Hugh just had the idea that it would be a cool-looking thing to house our smelting works in, and he was right. We have cosmetic lava in the top, to make it look like molten iron, although as a bonus it does keep mobs from spawning up there.
Ours doesn't tip over to pour out the molten iron. Given that it backs onto our warehouse, that's probably for the best.
Other things we've discovered, not shown: you can't nuke the Ender Dragon, but you can nuke away his entire dimension. And launching minecarts full of TNT at a mountainside isn't a terribly effective way to mine, but it's definitely a lot of fun.
The next update will contain more sensible stuff. Also, a giant sky penis. Until then, take care, and don't build unshielded reactors next to your farm. We're allowed to because we're trained professionals.
Monday, 7 May 2012
You said no strings could secure you, at the space station [Review: the white chamber]
Studio Trophis' the white chamber was released in 2005, around the time the point-n-click adventure was becoming the genre du jour of the indie scene. Critical reception was positive, but more high profile titles like Yahtzee's Chzo Mythos series and an adaptation of the Bone comic books by new company Telltale Games overshadowed it. I played the white chamber way back when and earlier this year, during my internetless period, I fired it up again. How has it fared in the years since?
A more classic videogame opening there isn't: the protagonist wakes up in a coffin in a sealed room, with no memories - not even of her own name. One simple introductory puzzle and a creepy conversation with a computer panel later, you find yourself alone aboard an abandoned space station. It's dark, it's rusty, and there's a distressing amount of blood encrusted everywhere. It's a claustrophic opening, and it only gets worse as you get the power back on and open up the rest of the complex. Surreal elements, most of them steeped in hellish imagery or twisted body horror, pile up fast. A humanoid knot of pulsating flesh, growing out of the navigation computer, attacks the heroine. A giant eyeball nailed to the wall spins frantically under the glare of a red traffic light seeping congealed gore. Chasms open in the floor, smeared trails of blood appear from nowhere, and dead bodies - or bits of bodies - start showing up at an alarming rate.
The main character finds her mind slipping through this nightmare - although to what extent is debatable. By the midpoint of the game, it's impossible to tell how much of the horror is real and how much is not. For a while, the only answers come from datadisks left behind by a crew member. Eventually, our hero finds her way down into the titular white chamber, and the truth is revealed. The first time I played through this game, a suspicion of the truth behind the nightmare slowly built up in my mind so that I realised it right before the game revealed all, which is the presumable intent; second time around, it all seems pretty obvious from much earlier on, but maybe that's just the benefit of foreknowledge talking.
Either way, the denouement is satisfying, if depressing. That which has gone before is filtered through a new lens - a lens of greed, rage, obsession, betrayal and regret. The previously visceral horror takes on a darker aspect and incidental actions gain sinister alternate significance. For all the dead bodies and loneliness, the white chamber is a game about being alive and being with other people - and the painful ways it can go wrong.
All of the death and decay is presented upfront with few punches pulled. Writhing cadavers, severed limbs, gallons and gallons of blood - it's all there in a grimy, hyperdetailed, hand-drawn art style which heightens the atmosphere using awkward perspectives and off-angle textures. It might seem like it's just badly drawn at first, but as the surreal nature of the game plays out, the bizarre artwork clicks into place, and it works. Lighting takes the form of glowing coloured blocks, adding at once both a classic sci-fi trope and another surreal aspect to the station's twisted design.
The characters are drawn in an 80s-ish manga style, which feels a little out of place - but not mood-shatteringly so, and to be fair, anime is relatively easy to draw and animate for a small, amateur team. The lead character is expressive, and while her voice acting never really evokes the true depths of revulsion and fear she professes to feel, it's good enough not to detract.
What of the game itself? It's short, so within a single day it's easy to attain every possible ending - including the various gruesome deaths awaiting the protagonist. Some actions which seem pointless affect which ending you receive, although the main thrust of the game is not multi-path. Puzzles often follow the same dreamscape logic as the rest of the game; if you struggle with adventure game thinking then the white chamber is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, there seems nothing unusual to you about reassembling a hacked up corpse in the body-shaped grooves on a bed, then you'll do fine.
The puzzling side of the white chamber is pretty unremarkable, in all honesty, neither good nor bad. The way the puzzles tie into the narrative isn't always as tight as it might be, but it's got an interesting take on the old idea of items suddenly becoming interactive when they weren't before. And as I noted in an earlier post, it nails a great balance of usable items being clear without being blatantly obvious.
But the adventuring isn't, in itself, the main reason I would recommend this game. The narrative and twisted imagery, and the atmosphere created, wouldn't work as well in another medium. As with many of my favourites, making the lead's choices induces empathy and that makes the emotional impact all the greater when it comes. Like Assassin's Creed, Braid and Planescape: Torment, and the excellent The Company Of Myself, the white chamber plays with the standard storytelling devices we know and accept in a videogame. It's done more subtly than any of the previously mentioned titles, but it's all the more viscerally affecting for it. To anyone with an interest in games as narrative, and who likes (or can tolerate) adventure games, the white chamber is a fascinating experience.
A more classic videogame opening there isn't: the protagonist wakes up in a coffin in a sealed room, with no memories - not even of her own name. One simple introductory puzzle and a creepy conversation with a computer panel later, you find yourself alone aboard an abandoned space station. It's dark, it's rusty, and there's a distressing amount of blood encrusted everywhere. It's a claustrophic opening, and it only gets worse as you get the power back on and open up the rest of the complex. Surreal elements, most of them steeped in hellish imagery or twisted body horror, pile up fast. A humanoid knot of pulsating flesh, growing out of the navigation computer, attacks the heroine. A giant eyeball nailed to the wall spins frantically under the glare of a red traffic light seeping congealed gore. Chasms open in the floor, smeared trails of blood appear from nowhere, and dead bodies - or bits of bodies - start showing up at an alarming rate.
The main character finds her mind slipping through this nightmare - although to what extent is debatable. By the midpoint of the game, it's impossible to tell how much of the horror is real and how much is not. For a while, the only answers come from datadisks left behind by a crew member. Eventually, our hero finds her way down into the titular white chamber, and the truth is revealed. The first time I played through this game, a suspicion of the truth behind the nightmare slowly built up in my mind so that I realised it right before the game revealed all, which is the presumable intent; second time around, it all seems pretty obvious from much earlier on, but maybe that's just the benefit of foreknowledge talking.
Either way, the denouement is satisfying, if depressing. That which has gone before is filtered through a new lens - a lens of greed, rage, obsession, betrayal and regret. The previously visceral horror takes on a darker aspect and incidental actions gain sinister alternate significance. For all the dead bodies and loneliness, the white chamber is a game about being alive and being with other people - and the painful ways it can go wrong.
All of the death and decay is presented upfront with few punches pulled. Writhing cadavers, severed limbs, gallons and gallons of blood - it's all there in a grimy, hyperdetailed, hand-drawn art style which heightens the atmosphere using awkward perspectives and off-angle textures. It might seem like it's just badly drawn at first, but as the surreal nature of the game plays out, the bizarre artwork clicks into place, and it works. Lighting takes the form of glowing coloured blocks, adding at once both a classic sci-fi trope and another surreal aspect to the station's twisted design.
The characters are drawn in an 80s-ish manga style, which feels a little out of place - but not mood-shatteringly so, and to be fair, anime is relatively easy to draw and animate for a small, amateur team. The lead character is expressive, and while her voice acting never really evokes the true depths of revulsion and fear she professes to feel, it's good enough not to detract.
What of the game itself? It's short, so within a single day it's easy to attain every possible ending - including the various gruesome deaths awaiting the protagonist. Some actions which seem pointless affect which ending you receive, although the main thrust of the game is not multi-path. Puzzles often follow the same dreamscape logic as the rest of the game; if you struggle with adventure game thinking then the white chamber is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, there seems nothing unusual to you about reassembling a hacked up corpse in the body-shaped grooves on a bed, then you'll do fine.
The puzzling side of the white chamber is pretty unremarkable, in all honesty, neither good nor bad. The way the puzzles tie into the narrative isn't always as tight as it might be, but it's got an interesting take on the old idea of items suddenly becoming interactive when they weren't before. And as I noted in an earlier post, it nails a great balance of usable items being clear without being blatantly obvious.
But the adventuring isn't, in itself, the main reason I would recommend this game. The narrative and twisted imagery, and the atmosphere created, wouldn't work as well in another medium. As with many of my favourites, making the lead's choices induces empathy and that makes the emotional impact all the greater when it comes. Like Assassin's Creed, Braid and Planescape: Torment, and the excellent The Company Of Myself, the white chamber plays with the standard storytelling devices we know and accept in a videogame. It's done more subtly than any of the previously mentioned titles, but it's all the more viscerally affecting for it. To anyone with an interest in games as narrative, and who likes (or can tolerate) adventure games, the white chamber is a fascinating experience.
Sunday, 29 April 2012
Tekkit City Chronicles, Vol. 2
A day is a long time in politics, but it's even longer in Minecraft. Two days after I introduced you to our Tekkit server, things had already changed beyond recognition in some places. I'm posting this the day after again, and no doubt when I log back on this evening even more will have changed!
No, really. A lot of arrows.
And a typical interior, showing the bed, running water and electric light. Still to add: food delivery tube, although there was talk of doing that via local shops instead. This room also has a rather stylish sofa, built by Hugh.
It's the Disneyland castle... I mean, Chris' university. The surrounding area will, I suppose, become a campus with student dorms. This is the central building though.
And then laugh at my co-constructors as their hard-built structures get blown up by creepers.
Thursday, 26 April 2012
Tekkit City Chronicles, Vol. 1
Tekkit is a Minecraft client which collates a number of mods, centred around automation and industrialisation. It allows an even greater number of production lines, resource harvesters and redstone circuit powered marvels than base Minecraft, and something my Minecraft group has always mooted is building a fully working industrial city, from the ground up with no creative mode shenanigans.
Now, with Tekkit smoothing over some of the logistical nightmares, we are. This is a large, ongoing project, which has been running about four or five days so far. The basic plan is to provide a city for at least four thousand people, each of whom lives in a private, modestly sized space with at minimum a bed, a running water supply and a food delivery tube. That means we need the infrastucture of farms, warehouses, mines and whathaveyou to supply all of this, and we also want a train network to get us around quickly. Beyond that, we're also adding in "non-functional" buildings and districts like temples and harbours, and depending on how it goes we might include pubs, shops, offices, schools, libraries, museums, council buildings, military holdings, craft and smithy districts...
Obviously, our Rome will not be built in a day.
Our Rome doesn't even have a name yet, although since the initiator of the project is named Hugh, I've taken to calling the city "Hughtopia." For now, most things are named after what they do, or at the whim of the creator. Streets are mostly named after where they lead to, so we have "Temple Road" and the like. I like this - it feels like how a real city develops. "Organically" has been our watchword.
This is where we're at so far.
Welcome to the main area of the city! I know it's not much to look at yet, but one day we'll stand here and talk about how once upon a time all of this was grass and sand dunes.
In the foreground is our power station. Behind it is the front face of the Pantheon, with the bulk of the building apparently lying past the draw distance cutoff. The agricultural area to the left of the power station is probably going to get bulldozed, even though lots of people worked hard on it.
Well, Chris and Abby worked hard on it, anyway. Adrian just bred freakish multicoloured sheep.
The sugarcane plantation on the right will probably be bulldozed too, as already happened to the cactus farm which was once found in this area. The blackish blob on the horizon is our nether portal.
The Pantheon, built by Chris, is the centrepiece of our world. Well, it's actually right at the far edge of the space we're currently using, but still. You can see it from just about anywhere in the city at present.
There's a long approach to the Pantheon from the harbour, along the riverbank and past the nether portal on the right and the sugarcane plantation on the left. The sun rises through the middle arch of the Pantheon, which looks incredible from down this street I'm standing on in the picture.
The interior of the Pantheon - or at least, the main chamber. There's also the antechamber, plus a loft space and a cellar network. The spiral staircase to both the loft and the cellars is cunningly hidden within one of the pillars in this picture.
Inside the power station is this baby: the water pump. It's very arcane and I don't understand any of it, although I did contribute those stylish little steps over the pipes.
Fortunately, Hugh knows how to run it all. There he is now, checking something or fixing something. With a pickaxe.
The empty half of the power station; I started filling in space with this rooftop access stairwell and overseer gantry. The sliver of marble visible on the right is the edge of Adrian's smokestack. Even so, we're left with a ton of free space in here, into which we're thinking of installing the nuclear reactor. Having unstable radionuclides in the same building as the water supply? I don't see how that could possibly go wrong!
A view of the natural harbour which I've claimed as my territory. It was originally intended to be a dockland area, but after discovering that it's in fact not the sea but rather a lake beyond that channel on the left, I'm saving myself a lot of digging by keeping it limited to small boats. Now we're looking at a fishing village, perhaps with a marina. Fortunately, the lake does connect up with the sea somewhere downriver, which is where we'll put the industrial port.
Past the harbour and round the coast, one comes to this lighthouse. The top is currently just lit with a lot of torches; in time, we'll most likely replace that with glowstone-powered electric lights.
As seen from the top of the lighthouse, this little island - the one with the gulley dug through it - needs to be bulldozed to allow access to the harbour. I'm not yet sure what'll happen to the cows who make their home there.
As seen in these screenshots, Tekkit adds coordinates and a minimap, which is I think my favourite thing about it. It's very, very useful not just for general navigation, but for those huge party-dungeoneering trips out, be it for strip mining cobblestone, scouting cavern networks or snatching glowstone formations from the nether - the kind of trip which invariably sees us get lost and/or separated.
Of course, sometimes a minimap isn't enough, and that's where the good people of Minecraft World Map come in handy; as the name suggests, their fancy tech allows you to map your entire world, and in fetching isometric fashion no less. You can follow the progress of our world at this link!
Until next time, happy mining, and may you not dig into a lava floe when you're laden down with precious ores.
Now, with Tekkit smoothing over some of the logistical nightmares, we are. This is a large, ongoing project, which has been running about four or five days so far. The basic plan is to provide a city for at least four thousand people, each of whom lives in a private, modestly sized space with at minimum a bed, a running water supply and a food delivery tube. That means we need the infrastucture of farms, warehouses, mines and whathaveyou to supply all of this, and we also want a train network to get us around quickly. Beyond that, we're also adding in "non-functional" buildings and districts like temples and harbours, and depending on how it goes we might include pubs, shops, offices, schools, libraries, museums, council buildings, military holdings, craft and smithy districts...
Obviously, our Rome will not be built in a day.
Our Rome doesn't even have a name yet, although since the initiator of the project is named Hugh, I've taken to calling the city "Hughtopia." For now, most things are named after what they do, or at the whim of the creator. Streets are mostly named after where they lead to, so we have "Temple Road" and the like. I like this - it feels like how a real city develops. "Organically" has been our watchword.
This is where we're at so far.
Welcome to the main area of the city! I know it's not much to look at yet, but one day we'll stand here and talk about how once upon a time all of this was grass and sand dunes.
In the foreground is our power station. Behind it is the front face of the Pantheon, with the bulk of the building apparently lying past the draw distance cutoff. The agricultural area to the left of the power station is probably going to get bulldozed, even though lots of people worked hard on it.
Well, Chris and Abby worked hard on it, anyway. Adrian just bred freakish multicoloured sheep.
The sugarcane plantation on the right will probably be bulldozed too, as already happened to the cactus farm which was once found in this area. The blackish blob on the horizon is our nether portal.
The Pantheon, built by Chris, is the centrepiece of our world. Well, it's actually right at the far edge of the space we're currently using, but still. You can see it from just about anywhere in the city at present.
There's a long approach to the Pantheon from the harbour, along the riverbank and past the nether portal on the right and the sugarcane plantation on the left. The sun rises through the middle arch of the Pantheon, which looks incredible from down this street I'm standing on in the picture.
The interior of the Pantheon - or at least, the main chamber. There's also the antechamber, plus a loft space and a cellar network. The spiral staircase to both the loft and the cellars is cunningly hidden within one of the pillars in this picture.
Inside the power station is this baby: the water pump. It's very arcane and I don't understand any of it, although I did contribute those stylish little steps over the pipes.
Fortunately, Hugh knows how to run it all. There he is now, checking something or fixing something. With a pickaxe.
The empty half of the power station; I started filling in space with this rooftop access stairwell and overseer gantry. The sliver of marble visible on the right is the edge of Adrian's smokestack. Even so, we're left with a ton of free space in here, into which we're thinking of installing the nuclear reactor. Having unstable radionuclides in the same building as the water supply? I don't see how that could possibly go wrong!
A view of the natural harbour which I've claimed as my territory. It was originally intended to be a dockland area, but after discovering that it's in fact not the sea but rather a lake beyond that channel on the left, I'm saving myself a lot of digging by keeping it limited to small boats. Now we're looking at a fishing village, perhaps with a marina. Fortunately, the lake does connect up with the sea somewhere downriver, which is where we'll put the industrial port.
Past the harbour and round the coast, one comes to this lighthouse. The top is currently just lit with a lot of torches; in time, we'll most likely replace that with glowstone-powered electric lights.
As seen from the top of the lighthouse, this little island - the one with the gulley dug through it - needs to be bulldozed to allow access to the harbour. I'm not yet sure what'll happen to the cows who make their home there.
As seen in these screenshots, Tekkit adds coordinates and a minimap, which is I think my favourite thing about it. It's very, very useful not just for general navigation, but for those huge party-dungeoneering trips out, be it for strip mining cobblestone, scouting cavern networks or snatching glowstone formations from the nether - the kind of trip which invariably sees us get lost and/or separated.
Of course, sometimes a minimap isn't enough, and that's where the good people of Minecraft World Map come in handy; as the name suggests, their fancy tech allows you to map your entire world, and in fetching isometric fashion no less. You can follow the progress of our world at this link!
Until next time, happy mining, and may you not dig into a lava floe when you're laden down with precious ores.
Tuesday, 24 April 2012
More on graphics: mere technicalities
Several months with no internet meant I looked to the retro world even more than usual for my gaming. Or at least, as far as the PC goes, to the older games which would actually run on my new computer - which unfortunately did not include Grim Fandango. Booo! Retuning older games for modern systems is a bandwagon more devs should hop onto. God bless GOG.com and the various console home arcades. But it does mean that, without the web, I've been kinda limited in options.
On the subject of retro: I know I've said this before and I'm sure I'll say it again, but damn is that word irritating. Gamers of the world, I implore you to stop describing old games as retro! Around Christmas time I rewatched It's a Wonderful Life and it's not a 'retro' film. It's just a film. A film which, despite technical limitations in its production compared to modern releases, and the subsequent years' advancement of cinematic techniques and a shifting of the preconceptions of good storytelling, is still every bit as enjoyable as anything you'll see at the pictures this year.
Similarly, despite their technical ineptitude by modern standards, I've been thoroughly enjoying the Micro Machines, Donkey Kong Country and Sonic the Hedgehog series, and the original Grand Theft Auto has lost barely anything despite the advances of its successors. Even ancient Disney tie-in Aladdin was as playable today as it was in 1993. The original Donkey Kong Country is the most revealing game from a technological standpoint - can you believe it was once considered the cutting edge of photorealism? I wonder if the kids of today could even see the difference in quality between its graphics and those of Sonic 3, a difference which seemed so vast to us at the time. Nonetheless, the visuals do everything they need to do to make the game playable, while still looking charmingly pretty in a - sigh - 'retro' sort of way. Maybe the ice cave levels don't make me feel physically cold anymore, but the big Rareware eyes on all the enemies are still lovely.
Moving ahead a few years, the GameCube remake of Resident Evil is still stunningly beautiful, and not just in consideration of when it was released. It's both confirmed and countered my arguments against the pursuit of graphic fidelity - rendered stills are obviously a lot easier to make realistic than moving images are, and the near-realism of the backgrounds is a big part of the atmosphere. But at the same time, so much attention has been paid to the architecture, the furnishings, and even the drapery that the enhanced visuals are clearly not just a sales point - it's Shinji Mikami finally getting to make this world look the way it always did in his head. The Spencer Mansion and Arklay Laboratory feel like real places, places I know as well as any house I've actually, personally lived in.
Of course improvements could be made - physics-based elements like water, particle effects and shadows are unimpressive by today's standards, ditto the resolution. But aside from such processing updates, and the plastic look to character faces which current games still suffer from anyway, it's hard to see where the graphics could be improved. It's a harmonious case of technological wizardry being applied by talented visual designers who maximise the artistic opportunities said wizardry affords, and the result means that a decade on it remains one of the best-looking games in existence. The most advanced thing I got to play during my fallow months was the PC demo of Arkham Asylum - no longer cutting edge, admittedly, but I will state without hyperbole that GameCube Resident Evil is the better looking game for all the jagged, pixelly edges and blocky shadows. That said, some areas of Arkham Asylum are moderately impressive in aesthetic design terms too, and it'll be interesting to see how it holds up in years to come. By the by, I was pleasantly surprised by how fluidly Arkham Asylum plays on PC - control-wise, it's just as smooth as the 360 version, perhaps even moreso. Having subsequently completed the game on PC, there were only a handful of places where I'd have preferred a pad.
Sadly, onetime kingpin Far Cry's graphics simply don't excite me anymore. The aesthetic design was interesting enough, but leaned heavily on technical splendour for its lighting effects, draw distances and lush vegetation. These days, such things have all been bettered many times, and now it's hard not to notice how often plant models are repeated, or how the sunlight lancing through cracked walls just doesn't seem as bright as it once did (I've gained a new appreciation for High Dynamic Range since replaying Far Cry, that's for sure). Far Cry is certainly not ugly - but the bits which interest me most now are the bombed-out husks and concrete bunkers, which for a game so heavily based around creeping through dense jungles, and hopping between paradise islands, seems like something of a failure. I happily acknowledge that we have Far Cry to thank for the quality of modern graphics, but ultimately it remains tied to its era much more than any other game I've discussed so far.
I now know I'm not alone in my stance that the rabid pursuit of better graphics is as much a curse as a boon; I signed up to the official Carmageddon: Reincarnation fan forum before losing my net, and when the developers asked what we wanted to see in the game, the majority view was that physics and content - rather than cutting edge visuals - need to be the primary foci during development. I'll refine that here. Graphics are important, as the most immediate and visceral connection we get with a game, and as a sales-driving element, but more than overall fidelity what graphics need is to suit the game. For example, Carmageddon doesn't need to be too concerned with peds having perfect musculature and swaying fabric, but it would benefit greatly from per-pixel lighting, neon signs reflecting realistically off grime, oil and twisted metal - a moody atmosphere is key to Carmageddon. Fabric and musculature are of great importance to The Sims on the other hand, but lighting isn't so important there. And in FIFA, I don't care about every line on Coloccini's face being perfectly modelled half as much as I care about his passes and strikes being as fluidly realistic as possible. Every blade of grass on the pitch being individually rendered is excellent if it means the ball bounces more believably, but if it's purely for show, I don't think it's a productive use of development time.
Of course, on top of all that, graphics need to be creatively engaging; the problem with Far Cry is that its aesthetic interest was too dependent on technical advancements alone. If Carmageddon: Reincarnation is evocatively dirty and worn, nails that near-present dystopia without becoming Blade Runner cyberpunk, and features at least a few cars that look like real machines which have been customised rather than pure fantasy creations, then I'm happy. Graphical genius is a bonus, not a requirement. And judging by the Carmageddon concept art released so far, I'm going to be very happy indeed.
Some games were plain ugly first time round, of couse. A couple of titles I've come back to recently are Heroes of Might & Magic III and Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magic Obscura. Each of those, on release, was widely decried for looking like a big pile of pixellated puke. Arcanum's spartan environments couldn't compete with Baldur's Gate 2, its closest contemporary - and yet today, I find something charming in Arcanum's stiff appearance. Its muddy grey scrubland, gleaming brass and starched petticoats may lack warmth, but that's in keeping with the cruel, repressed world in which it's set, and the faceless, rigidly mannequin-like character models are almost as appropriate as the old-fashioned maps and wood panel HUD. Heroes III takes the opposite tack, and tries to pack every screen with as many bright colours, outlandish creatures and incidental details as possible. It's a game bursting with life and humanity despite poor visuals - if anything, it's too cluttered, but then that was always the case, really. It remains a weird contrast to see stiff, jerky movements in sprites with such colourful, fantastical design, and these days they look rather like puppets or automatons. But even in development, 3DO must have known the game would not be breaking any technical barriers, and the upshot is that they designed a game which is functional enough to be as playable today as it was in 1999, and while not conventionally pretty, is at least interesting looking - call it the Agyness Deyn of strategy games.
Syndicate, by contrast, has been a struggle to play nowadays. The graphics weren't terribly clear or engaging at the time, and now, it's difficult to know what's going on, and to distinguish your own squad from both the enemy and from civilians. It's still a good game, but requires a lot more perseverance than any other title I've mentioned. Not being able to see inside buildings when you enter them was a minor frustration back then; today, it's painfully out of step with how we expect to play games, and that's just one example of many issues it has. Syndicate's graphics are still fairly crisp, I'll give it that, and it was obviously made with a strong aesthetic in mind, but not enough thought was given to the necessities of gameplay. It stands a reminder that the balance between the technical and artistic is not the only one which must be struck.
The one vaguely recent PC game I got a chance to play in the winter months was the indie physics platformer NightSky, which is suprisingly entertaining. Much like Braid, NightSky hits a great equilibrium of visual elements. Technical proficiency means it runs smoothly while handling the physics puzzles, the aesthetic design is strikingly beautiful, and it's always clear and readable from a gameplay perspective. Compare that to Super Meat Boy which suffered from occasional lag or camera overshoot, to Alien Hominid and Viewtiful Joe, in which the gameplay elements weren't always distinguishable from the background, or to Limbo in which the main character was intentionally designed to look like part of the background.
Courtesy of Evis T and his portable gadgetry, I also had fun with the wonderful Android games Cut The Rope and Dragon, Fly!, which similarly match the visuals to the game effectively - both are a lot crisper than, say, Fruit Ninja or Burn The City, but Fruit Ninja's bright colours suit it more than cartoonish line drawings would, while Burn The City doesn't need to be especially clear because it's a bit more sedentary. It's not a new trend, of course; I've revistited a couple of indie games from a few years back like Ocular Ink, which is quite ugly but appropriately uncluttered for a fast paced game of drawing, and The White Chamber, which I'll talk about in more detail soon - for now, one thing I love about it is how subtly different the useable elements of the game world look from the non-useable. There's no need for tedious pixel sweeping. but at the same time, they don't stick out like a sore thumb, so you still have to pay attention, and for a point and click adventure that's one of the magic elements which can make a good game into a great game.
A cautionary tale to close this post, regarding picking up old games: I came back to Chrono Trigger after almost a year and had no idea how far through I was or what I was supposed to be doing. I left off my Secret of Mana playthrough even longer ago than that, and I expect I'll probably just need to start again.
On the subject of retro: I know I've said this before and I'm sure I'll say it again, but damn is that word irritating. Gamers of the world, I implore you to stop describing old games as retro! Around Christmas time I rewatched It's a Wonderful Life and it's not a 'retro' film. It's just a film. A film which, despite technical limitations in its production compared to modern releases, and the subsequent years' advancement of cinematic techniques and a shifting of the preconceptions of good storytelling, is still every bit as enjoyable as anything you'll see at the pictures this year.
Similarly, despite their technical ineptitude by modern standards, I've been thoroughly enjoying the Micro Machines, Donkey Kong Country and Sonic the Hedgehog series, and the original Grand Theft Auto has lost barely anything despite the advances of its successors. Even ancient Disney tie-in Aladdin was as playable today as it was in 1993. The original Donkey Kong Country is the most revealing game from a technological standpoint - can you believe it was once considered the cutting edge of photorealism? I wonder if the kids of today could even see the difference in quality between its graphics and those of Sonic 3, a difference which seemed so vast to us at the time. Nonetheless, the visuals do everything they need to do to make the game playable, while still looking charmingly pretty in a - sigh - 'retro' sort of way. Maybe the ice cave levels don't make me feel physically cold anymore, but the big Rareware eyes on all the enemies are still lovely.
Moving ahead a few years, the GameCube remake of Resident Evil is still stunningly beautiful, and not just in consideration of when it was released. It's both confirmed and countered my arguments against the pursuit of graphic fidelity - rendered stills are obviously a lot easier to make realistic than moving images are, and the near-realism of the backgrounds is a big part of the atmosphere. But at the same time, so much attention has been paid to the architecture, the furnishings, and even the drapery that the enhanced visuals are clearly not just a sales point - it's Shinji Mikami finally getting to make this world look the way it always did in his head. The Spencer Mansion and Arklay Laboratory feel like real places, places I know as well as any house I've actually, personally lived in.
Of course improvements could be made - physics-based elements like water, particle effects and shadows are unimpressive by today's standards, ditto the resolution. But aside from such processing updates, and the plastic look to character faces which current games still suffer from anyway, it's hard to see where the graphics could be improved. It's a harmonious case of technological wizardry being applied by talented visual designers who maximise the artistic opportunities said wizardry affords, and the result means that a decade on it remains one of the best-looking games in existence. The most advanced thing I got to play during my fallow months was the PC demo of Arkham Asylum - no longer cutting edge, admittedly, but I will state without hyperbole that GameCube Resident Evil is the better looking game for all the jagged, pixelly edges and blocky shadows. That said, some areas of Arkham Asylum are moderately impressive in aesthetic design terms too, and it'll be interesting to see how it holds up in years to come. By the by, I was pleasantly surprised by how fluidly Arkham Asylum plays on PC - control-wise, it's just as smooth as the 360 version, perhaps even moreso. Having subsequently completed the game on PC, there were only a handful of places where I'd have preferred a pad.
Sadly, onetime kingpin Far Cry's graphics simply don't excite me anymore. The aesthetic design was interesting enough, but leaned heavily on technical splendour for its lighting effects, draw distances and lush vegetation. These days, such things have all been bettered many times, and now it's hard not to notice how often plant models are repeated, or how the sunlight lancing through cracked walls just doesn't seem as bright as it once did (I've gained a new appreciation for High Dynamic Range since replaying Far Cry, that's for sure). Far Cry is certainly not ugly - but the bits which interest me most now are the bombed-out husks and concrete bunkers, which for a game so heavily based around creeping through dense jungles, and hopping between paradise islands, seems like something of a failure. I happily acknowledge that we have Far Cry to thank for the quality of modern graphics, but ultimately it remains tied to its era much more than any other game I've discussed so far.
I now know I'm not alone in my stance that the rabid pursuit of better graphics is as much a curse as a boon; I signed up to the official Carmageddon: Reincarnation fan forum before losing my net, and when the developers asked what we wanted to see in the game, the majority view was that physics and content - rather than cutting edge visuals - need to be the primary foci during development. I'll refine that here. Graphics are important, as the most immediate and visceral connection we get with a game, and as a sales-driving element, but more than overall fidelity what graphics need is to suit the game. For example, Carmageddon doesn't need to be too concerned with peds having perfect musculature and swaying fabric, but it would benefit greatly from per-pixel lighting, neon signs reflecting realistically off grime, oil and twisted metal - a moody atmosphere is key to Carmageddon. Fabric and musculature are of great importance to The Sims on the other hand, but lighting isn't so important there. And in FIFA, I don't care about every line on Coloccini's face being perfectly modelled half as much as I care about his passes and strikes being as fluidly realistic as possible. Every blade of grass on the pitch being individually rendered is excellent if it means the ball bounces more believably, but if it's purely for show, I don't think it's a productive use of development time.
Of course, on top of all that, graphics need to be creatively engaging; the problem with Far Cry is that its aesthetic interest was too dependent on technical advancements alone. If Carmageddon: Reincarnation is evocatively dirty and worn, nails that near-present dystopia without becoming Blade Runner cyberpunk, and features at least a few cars that look like real machines which have been customised rather than pure fantasy creations, then I'm happy. Graphical genius is a bonus, not a requirement. And judging by the Carmageddon concept art released so far, I'm going to be very happy indeed.
Some games were plain ugly first time round, of couse. A couple of titles I've come back to recently are Heroes of Might & Magic III and Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magic Obscura. Each of those, on release, was widely decried for looking like a big pile of pixellated puke. Arcanum's spartan environments couldn't compete with Baldur's Gate 2, its closest contemporary - and yet today, I find something charming in Arcanum's stiff appearance. Its muddy grey scrubland, gleaming brass and starched petticoats may lack warmth, but that's in keeping with the cruel, repressed world in which it's set, and the faceless, rigidly mannequin-like character models are almost as appropriate as the old-fashioned maps and wood panel HUD. Heroes III takes the opposite tack, and tries to pack every screen with as many bright colours, outlandish creatures and incidental details as possible. It's a game bursting with life and humanity despite poor visuals - if anything, it's too cluttered, but then that was always the case, really. It remains a weird contrast to see stiff, jerky movements in sprites with such colourful, fantastical design, and these days they look rather like puppets or automatons. But even in development, 3DO must have known the game would not be breaking any technical barriers, and the upshot is that they designed a game which is functional enough to be as playable today as it was in 1999, and while not conventionally pretty, is at least interesting looking - call it the Agyness Deyn of strategy games.
Syndicate, by contrast, has been a struggle to play nowadays. The graphics weren't terribly clear or engaging at the time, and now, it's difficult to know what's going on, and to distinguish your own squad from both the enemy and from civilians. It's still a good game, but requires a lot more perseverance than any other title I've mentioned. Not being able to see inside buildings when you enter them was a minor frustration back then; today, it's painfully out of step with how we expect to play games, and that's just one example of many issues it has. Syndicate's graphics are still fairly crisp, I'll give it that, and it was obviously made with a strong aesthetic in mind, but not enough thought was given to the necessities of gameplay. It stands a reminder that the balance between the technical and artistic is not the only one which must be struck.
The one vaguely recent PC game I got a chance to play in the winter months was the indie physics platformer NightSky, which is suprisingly entertaining. Much like Braid, NightSky hits a great equilibrium of visual elements. Technical proficiency means it runs smoothly while handling the physics puzzles, the aesthetic design is strikingly beautiful, and it's always clear and readable from a gameplay perspective. Compare that to Super Meat Boy which suffered from occasional lag or camera overshoot, to Alien Hominid and Viewtiful Joe, in which the gameplay elements weren't always distinguishable from the background, or to Limbo in which the main character was intentionally designed to look like part of the background.
Courtesy of Evis T and his portable gadgetry, I also had fun with the wonderful Android games Cut The Rope and Dragon, Fly!, which similarly match the visuals to the game effectively - both are a lot crisper than, say, Fruit Ninja or Burn The City, but Fruit Ninja's bright colours suit it more than cartoonish line drawings would, while Burn The City doesn't need to be especially clear because it's a bit more sedentary. It's not a new trend, of course; I've revistited a couple of indie games from a few years back like Ocular Ink, which is quite ugly but appropriately uncluttered for a fast paced game of drawing, and The White Chamber, which I'll talk about in more detail soon - for now, one thing I love about it is how subtly different the useable elements of the game world look from the non-useable. There's no need for tedious pixel sweeping. but at the same time, they don't stick out like a sore thumb, so you still have to pay attention, and for a point and click adventure that's one of the magic elements which can make a good game into a great game.
A cautionary tale to close this post, regarding picking up old games: I came back to Chrono Trigger after almost a year and had no idea how far through I was or what I was supposed to be doing. I left off my Secret of Mana playthrough even longer ago than that, and I expect I'll probably just need to start again.
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