Director/Designer Koichi Ishii
Producer/Designer/Writer Hiromichi Tanaka
Programmer Nasir Gebelli
Art Designer Hiroo Isono
Music Composed by Hiroki Kikuta
Developer/Publisher Squaresoft
Review by William D. Tucker
Long ago, humanity exploited the magic power of Mana to erect a terrifying flying fortress of unimaginable destructive capability. The Earth, enraged at the exploitation of its lifeblood Mana, sent forth the Mana Beast, an apocalypse monster capable of destroying the Mana Fortress, and therefore humble the ambitions of humankind. This epic battle happened long ago, and has passed largely into legend, myth, and fable. Human beings have settled back down into simple existences mostly using medieval-agrarian levels of technology, save for a few centers of high technology including an evil empire and some pirates with an impressive earth burrowing land cruiser. The Mana Fortress is long gone, destined to live on in rumors of submerged mystery continents and dark schemes in the Emperor's heart . . .
A young boy wanders outside of his village, led along by a ghostly presence. He finds a sword in a stone, which he promptly removes, and becomes the target of an aggressive, outsized bug monster dwelling in the subterranean caverns below his village. The boy defeats the monster, but he is immediately exiled from his village by the community elders for the sword he wields is a repository of great mystical power. The dark forces of this world will attack the boy in order to kill him and take the potent weapon for themselves. Anyone near the kid may also be killed, and so the young boy must leave the village in order to confront the source of evil in this world and free himself from the curse of wielding a heroic sword of legend.
The Earth is filled with animals, plants, and giant insects with unusually high levels of aggression. The implication is that the natural world has become much harsher to keep humanity in check since the war against the Mana Fortress, lest humankind decide to create a new supreme weapon of annihilation.
You, whoever you are, are the player. You control the boy and his two eventual allies, piloting them through a maze-like top-down world of forests, towns, cursed temples, towers filled with Game of Death-style floors filled with opponents of escalating difficulty-all with the goal of gathering a complete set of the mystically empowered heroic weapons of old (which include a whip, a battle-axe, a spear, a set of steel knuckles, and a mighty bow) to keep them out of the hands of the dark forces. You must also collect a set of magic seeds which are tied to different elemental powers. All standard fantasy role playing game stuff, but with a few tweaks.
For one, you cannot actually purchase any of the weapons. They must be earned by overcoming evil forces, and then you must charge them up by killing scores of enemies in battle. Yes, these heroic weapons of yore are charged up by the blood of your foes! The game doesn't quite present it like this. But the reality is that you must kill many, many forest animals and monsters in order to make your weapons more powerful. There's also an experience point system which increases your hit points, your magic points, your various defensive and offensive statistics, but the combat really leans into the notion of these mystically charged, ever transforming weapons. Power, how it should be used, and how it may corrupt those who wield it, is the theme of Secret of Mana.
You eventually take control of three young heroes-a human boy, a human girl, and a sprite of indeterminate gender identity-stand between the world and the world's annihilation. The boy wields a sacred sword of legend. The girl uses healing magics. The sprite casts offensive spells: fireballs, lightning bolts, makes enemy go boom. The fighter, the healer, and the death-ray shooter-a classic trio.
The gameplay consists of nonstop combat with no real puzzles like in a Zelda game, which is somewhat unfortunate. Some puzzles would've livened things up a bit. The combat is surprisingly addictive despite it not always feeling completely under your control. Every time you take a swing with your weapon, you have a recharge period before you can attack at full strength again. As you gain higher levels of weapon proficiency, you can charge your weapon up to deliver a mystically empowered killing strike. The trade-off is that the higher level charge strikes take longer and longer to build up to criticality thus leaving you open to attack. Fortunately, you have your two companions to carry on the fight while you charge up, so you rarely end up feeling overwhelmed as long as you take the time to grind up to a level equal to or above that of your enemies.
An amusingly strident instruction manual exhorts the player to go forth, conquer evil monsters, and to restore balance to the world. It also provides some interesting explanations for why you can throw away most all of the items in your inventory except for your weapons. Your weapons are mystically empowered and capable of transformation into deadlier forms; therefore, they cannot be permitted to fall into the hands of enemies or innocent civilians lest they wreak havoc in the hands of the malicious or untrained. There is also the implied prospect of powerful-perhaps semi-living-weapons corrupting whoever wields them, and this is a bit of lore not obvious within the game itself. It's a nice little bonus that's only in the manual. It got me thinking, "Is this game an elaborate allegory for principled use of weapons in time of necessary armed resistance against overwhelming evil?" Hmmm . . .
Secret of Mana's story isn't quite all that it could have been. The game was originally developed for a cancelled CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo that would've allowed for a much more expansive gaming experience. Once the CD-ROM was scrapped, the developers had to cut large portions of the planned design to fit into the constraints of the regular SNES cartridge. As you get further along in the game, it becomes more and more obvious that a much more elaborate scenario has been hacked down to the minimum: boss enemies are reused; dungeon crawls become simplified and repetitious; the story goes in directions which are not fully elaborated; characterizations are slashed to the minimum-however, it mostly works if you consider that the heroes are children. The game takes place from their perspective, and so not all of the complexities of the world are immediately obvious to them. What is obvious is that the world is in chaos, full of monsters, and endangered by the ambitions of evil would-be rulers. And since the adults have long ago abdicated moral leadership, the children must step up to make things right.
In fact, I rather enjoy the semi-coherent magical realism storytelling of Secret of Mana, which seems culled from various myths and religions. It gives the game the vibe of some half-forgotten, half-remembered myth-cycle only partially set down in writing upon ancient tablets or scrolls or 5D metaphysical holo-cubes or whatever the ancients liked to doodle upon in their idle hours. It reminds me of the endless battle sagas I would compose with my action figures as a kid.
That's not to say Secret of Mana doesn't pack a dramatic punch in a few key scenes. It does, but the game was clearly much more ambitious in its original unconstrained design than what they were actually able to ship back in '93. Many of the themes here explored would achieve greater expression in Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, and in games from other developers such as Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma. Secret of Mana has a very strong reputation for those of us nostalgic for the SNES, but it doesn't quite live up to such fond memories. Today, it plays like a much more casual kind of game, closer in play-style to Final Fantasy Mystic Quest-which is not an insult coming from me. Mystic Quest is massively enjoyable for me to play through-the low-stress alternative to more demanding JRPGs.
Secret of Mana and Mystic Quest have something else in common: both games are blessed with excellent soundtracks. I revisit these titles as much to hear the music as to experience the gameplay. Secret of Mana's soundtrack ranges from soothing meditative arctic melodies to the manic, coked-out loop that plays when you are hanging out in the underground blacksmith works of the dwarfs. The boss battle themes are killer: the mainline boss fight theme begins with a hectic evocation of overwhelming danger that transforms into a soaring theme of heroism thereby providing a sonic map of the ideal flow of battle: danger met, danger conquered, bask in the glory! The Dark Lich Battle Theme is, I believe, an act of psychological warfare upon the player. My personal favorite might be the quietly unsettling theme that plays late in the game signalling the dawn of an ominous new era-but you'll just have to play the game yourself to get the story on that one.
Visually, Secret of Mana pops. Bright colors, credible designs of houses, temples, stores, subterranean lairs, with the one shortcoming being the noticeable number of empty rooms that serve no purpose other than to be dead ends. This is obviously a sign of the cuts made to the game design once the CD-ROM device was cancelled.
All of the enemy and character designs are charming and distinct from the cutesy chibi mini-figure designs of other JRPGs at the time. The characters are stylized, but somewhat close to human proportions. Chrono Trigger would carry on the character design ethos and some aspects of the enemy design approach to new heights, but it's all basically laid out in this game. The boss monsters are satisfyingly large and intimidating thereby giving you the satisfaction of victory once vanquished. One of the more unusual boss creatures is a mega-slime that grows to nearly screen-filling size as you inflict damage upon it. As mentioned above, the game repeats a number of boss fights with slight variations which is another sign of the game's reduced design ambitions.
In terms of gameplay, my favorite stretches involved the longer crawls wherein you really could get the feeling of controlling three swashbuckling heroes dueling wave after wave of formidable foes. The final dungeon before the end boss fight was satisfyingly demanding, although due to my obsessively grindy play style I blew through it pretty quick. I loved fighting the ninja enemies, and would've thoroughly enjoyed fighting an entire castle filled with those guys. The combat has moments where it really cooks, and I wish there would've been some longer, more challenging battles. The final boss fight did keep me on edge in a way I did not expect.
Secret of Mana is an unfinished game which shouldn't work as well as it does. It's not quite a masterpiece all on its own, but it lays the groundwork for superior games to come from Squaresoft and most likely had an influence on other developers of JRPGs in its day.
So take the sword from the stone, and fight alongside three punk kids to save the world from the ambitions of asshole adults!
Showing posts with label Video Game Review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Video Game Review. Show all posts
Monday, February 26, 2018
Monday, July 8, 2013
VIDEO GAME REVIEW: THE CAT LADY (2012)
A Game by Harvester Games
Written and programmed by Remigiusz Michalski
Music composed by MICAMIC (Michal Michalski)
Additional music composed by Richard Henley and Pal Hjornevik
Interface programmed by James Spanos
Voice casting by Mark Lovegrove
Starring:
Lynsey Frost as Susan Ashworth
Brittany Williams as Mitzi
Margaret Cowen as the Queen of Maggots
Review by William D. Tucker.
Susan Ashworth lives in a grim apartment. She's all alone in this world. The apartment isn't huge, but it's more than enough for just one person.
Except it wasn't meant to be a home for just one person. There was supposed to be a husband and a child there, too, but that's all gone now. It's just Susan and a bunch of cats. Her little feline army comes whenever she plays the piano. Susan loves these graceful beasts, but the neighbors hate them. The neighbors hate the cats, hate Susan, and hate her stupid, depressing noodling on the piano keys. Susan isn't too concerned about all that, though, because she's leaving the planet sooner rather than later.
Susan wants to die. But she can't. She swallows a bunch of pills and ends up in an afterlife she never asked for. It's a bizarre otherworld filled with gruesome mutilated animal symbolism, beautiful fields of wheat blowing in the wind, and bombed out traffic tunnels filled with wrecked vehicles. This afterlife is ruled over by a sinister old woman known as the Queen of Maggots, who may be Death itself, some sort of dark god ruling over another dimension, or maybe the Queen is one of the fates of ancient mythology. Or she could be God Herself in a classic mode of bloody, hell-fire and brimstone vengeance.
Susan wanders this afterlife with its nonsensical, ever-shifting geography until she encounters the Queen and is then charged with a mission: eliminate the Five Parasites. These Parasites are predatory human beings who the Queen predicts will soon be coming after Susan in mundane reality. Susan must fight them to the death if she is to survive. The Queen of Maggots also endows Susan with immortality. She can no longer die, so what's there to be afraid of? Of course, this "immortality" could just be Dumbo's magic feather.
How about that? A wanna-be suicide is told by some supernatural crone that now she has to fight to stay alive, but she's immortal, so no big deal. And here she was all this time struggling to end it all. When it rains it pours.
And who is this Queen of the Maggots? Just another Grim Reaper? Is this a mission from God? From Satan? Or maybe this is just a hallucination. It feels real enough . . .
Susan awakes in a hospital bed. She failed to suicide properly, now she's been charged with a mission of murder. Ain't that some shit?
The Cat Lady is a dark tale of murder, rebirth, depression, and, possibly, hope that could have been made as a movie, written as a novel, or even composed in the form of a comic book, but its creators chose to realize it as a point-and-click adventure game. You know the drill. Move through various rooms. Click on items, furniture, the environment, and engage in conversations with the other people you encounter. Find the damn clues. Figure out how to get the story to advance. Wonder if you've made all the right choices. Maybe this is one of those games with multiple endings where every choice is significant and results in a different ending sequence. What's the best ending? What's the worst? Which one do I really want to see? The point and click adventure game approach is used here primarily as a vehicle for the delivery of narrative. So if you're looking for a first person twitch shooter, a 100 hundred hour JRPG quest, or an open world sandbox style RPG this isn't the game you're looking for.
Visually, The Cat Lady offers some variation on its style of play. Most point and click adventure games have relatively small character sprites in larger environmental settings, but here we have a larger than usual view on the action. Many "shots," if you will, depict the characters in wide shots in context of the various locations, mostly indoors, that they inhabit. These wide shots are interspersed with occasional long shots, cuts to close-ups, and the whole frame is displaced at times by bizarre montages and collages of significant imagery. I got a strong sense of the embodiment of the people in this game. They're rather tall for point and click characters, and more realistically proportioned than the sorts of people you expect to find in video games. Susan Ashworth is designed to look like a plausibly proportioned woman in her 40s, not a sexualized BDSM queen with an AK-47 in one hand and a katana in the other.
No, I'm not saying this out of prudery. It's simply what this game is going for: plausible human characters presented in ways meant to evoke empathy and identification-rather than masturbatory fantasy-in the context of a story of supernatural intrigue. I stress the strength of these elements not out of some mindless puritanical morality or a fundamentalist disapproval of sex appeal in video games, but rather to point out the proper tone of seriousness-leavened with witty dialogue and pitch black humor-that the game creators have chosen to deploy in telling their tale. The effect is that one takes the story and the people in it quite seriously. Despite the limited interface I became engrossed in Susan Ashworth's journey. Her emotions, her struggles, her failings, and her strengths became my own as I played, much as I would enter into the heart and mind of the protagonist of an involving novel or movie, I was enraptured by this game.
And the interface is quite limited: arrow keys to move, click enter when you walk into hotspots, navigate options to manipulate objects, and choose dialogue paths. No asinine pixel-hunting, no added value arcade shooter sections, just you, the player, and Susan Ashworth navigating a compellingly gruesome narrative teetering between the worlds of the living and the dead. The Cat Lady is explicitly using a stripped down point-and-click adventure game interface to deliver narrative. It's a smart choice.
A movie, with all the proper special effects and set design, would've been prohibitively expensive, even if the filmmakers cast cheap, but effective, unknowns in all the lead and supporting roles. The interactivity of a game like this brings the player a little bit closer to the action, and the very conventions of the point-and-click adventure game create a structure which encourages dramatic confrontations, inner monologues, self-doubt-it's not all that different from going to see theatre. Just think of your computer screen (or mobile device screen) as analogous to the proscenium arch which frames a live play.
You can also think of The Cat Lady as being in the genre of point-and-click video adventures that function very much like interactive graphic novels like Snatcher, Policenauts, and Rise of the Dragon. A comic book would probably be the only other economically viable form to do justice to The Cat Lady. It's much too provocative for horror cinema as it is currently practiced by Hollywood and other major film industries. What we are dealing with here is not a slasher story, a cheekily self-aware grindhouse parody, or Saw-style torture porn, but a series of confrontations where Susan must grapple with her own rage, anguish, and moral confusion.
Susan's main confrontations are with each of the Five Parasites. Each one is truly a sick fuck of one kind or another, all heartless predators who definitely deserve to die. But who is to do the killing? That's where moral conflict comes into play. Susan is no jaded executioner. She isn't a vicious psychopath. Nor has she been conditioned by military training, political indoctrination, and/or religious brainwashing to mindlessly follow orders, dehumanize the enemy within her own mind, and practice increased aggression up to and including murder of her chosen target. Her only asset when confronting each of the Five Parasites is her immortality-which isn't quite what it seems to be . . . How does a depressed forty-something with no specialized training/indoctrination become a killer?
Or maybe it's not as difficult as I make it out to be to go around the bend. Maybe we all have a murderer inside us. I have only to reflect on the anger I've felt anytime I've almost been run down in a walk lane by some mindless motherfucker violating my right-of-way while safely enclosed within an SUV, jacked-up pick-up truck, or a Prius to know something of Tetsuo levels of perfectly rational rage.
In any case, Susan's grotesque transformation into a dark avenger is fascinating and disturbing. Although the game doesn't come right out and say so, I think The Cat Lady is, to some degree, a bit of a riff on comic book vigilantes. The title itself, as well as Susan's bond with her army of cats, evokes Selina Kyle from DC Comics and specifically the version of Kyle depicted in the wonderfully demented 1992 movie Batman Returns. But Susan's supernatural qualities put her more in line with another DC Comics vigilante: The Spectre.
Remember the Spectre? He used to be Jim Corrigan, an iron-testacled New York City cop brutally murdered by cowardly gangsters whose raw will to avenge himself brought him howling out of the grave. Look him up, he's an intriguing character.
Susan Ashworth lives in a grim apartment. She's all alone in this world. The apartment isn't huge, but it's more than enough for just one person.
Except it wasn't meant to be a home for just one person. There was supposed to be a husband and a child there, too, but that's all gone now. It's just Susan and a bunch of cats. Her little feline army comes whenever she plays the piano. Susan loves these graceful beasts, but the neighbors hate them. The neighbors hate the cats, hate Susan, and hate her stupid, depressing noodling on the piano keys. Susan isn't too concerned about all that, though, because she's leaving the planet sooner rather than later.
Susan wants to die. But she can't. She swallows a bunch of pills and ends up in an afterlife she never asked for. It's a bizarre otherworld filled with gruesome mutilated animal symbolism, beautiful fields of wheat blowing in the wind, and bombed out traffic tunnels filled with wrecked vehicles. This afterlife is ruled over by a sinister old woman known as the Queen of Maggots, who may be Death itself, some sort of dark god ruling over another dimension, or maybe the Queen is one of the fates of ancient mythology. Or she could be God Herself in a classic mode of bloody, hell-fire and brimstone vengeance.
Susan wanders this afterlife with its nonsensical, ever-shifting geography until she encounters the Queen and is then charged with a mission: eliminate the Five Parasites. These Parasites are predatory human beings who the Queen predicts will soon be coming after Susan in mundane reality. Susan must fight them to the death if she is to survive. The Queen of Maggots also endows Susan with immortality. She can no longer die, so what's there to be afraid of? Of course, this "immortality" could just be Dumbo's magic feather.
How about that? A wanna-be suicide is told by some supernatural crone that now she has to fight to stay alive, but she's immortal, so no big deal. And here she was all this time struggling to end it all. When it rains it pours.
And who is this Queen of the Maggots? Just another Grim Reaper? Is this a mission from God? From Satan? Or maybe this is just a hallucination. It feels real enough . . .
Susan awakes in a hospital bed. She failed to suicide properly, now she's been charged with a mission of murder. Ain't that some shit?
The Cat Lady is a dark tale of murder, rebirth, depression, and, possibly, hope that could have been made as a movie, written as a novel, or even composed in the form of a comic book, but its creators chose to realize it as a point-and-click adventure game. You know the drill. Move through various rooms. Click on items, furniture, the environment, and engage in conversations with the other people you encounter. Find the damn clues. Figure out how to get the story to advance. Wonder if you've made all the right choices. Maybe this is one of those games with multiple endings where every choice is significant and results in a different ending sequence. What's the best ending? What's the worst? Which one do I really want to see? The point and click adventure game approach is used here primarily as a vehicle for the delivery of narrative. So if you're looking for a first person twitch shooter, a 100 hundred hour JRPG quest, or an open world sandbox style RPG this isn't the game you're looking for.
Visually, The Cat Lady offers some variation on its style of play. Most point and click adventure games have relatively small character sprites in larger environmental settings, but here we have a larger than usual view on the action. Many "shots," if you will, depict the characters in wide shots in context of the various locations, mostly indoors, that they inhabit. These wide shots are interspersed with occasional long shots, cuts to close-ups, and the whole frame is displaced at times by bizarre montages and collages of significant imagery. I got a strong sense of the embodiment of the people in this game. They're rather tall for point and click characters, and more realistically proportioned than the sorts of people you expect to find in video games. Susan Ashworth is designed to look like a plausibly proportioned woman in her 40s, not a sexualized BDSM queen with an AK-47 in one hand and a katana in the other.
No, I'm not saying this out of prudery. It's simply what this game is going for: plausible human characters presented in ways meant to evoke empathy and identification-rather than masturbatory fantasy-in the context of a story of supernatural intrigue. I stress the strength of these elements not out of some mindless puritanical morality or a fundamentalist disapproval of sex appeal in video games, but rather to point out the proper tone of seriousness-leavened with witty dialogue and pitch black humor-that the game creators have chosen to deploy in telling their tale. The effect is that one takes the story and the people in it quite seriously. Despite the limited interface I became engrossed in Susan Ashworth's journey. Her emotions, her struggles, her failings, and her strengths became my own as I played, much as I would enter into the heart and mind of the protagonist of an involving novel or movie, I was enraptured by this game.
And the interface is quite limited: arrow keys to move, click enter when you walk into hotspots, navigate options to manipulate objects, and choose dialogue paths. No asinine pixel-hunting, no added value arcade shooter sections, just you, the player, and Susan Ashworth navigating a compellingly gruesome narrative teetering between the worlds of the living and the dead. The Cat Lady is explicitly using a stripped down point-and-click adventure game interface to deliver narrative. It's a smart choice.
A movie, with all the proper special effects and set design, would've been prohibitively expensive, even if the filmmakers cast cheap, but effective, unknowns in all the lead and supporting roles. The interactivity of a game like this brings the player a little bit closer to the action, and the very conventions of the point-and-click adventure game create a structure which encourages dramatic confrontations, inner monologues, self-doubt-it's not all that different from going to see theatre. Just think of your computer screen (or mobile device screen) as analogous to the proscenium arch which frames a live play.
You can also think of The Cat Lady as being in the genre of point-and-click video adventures that function very much like interactive graphic novels like Snatcher, Policenauts, and Rise of the Dragon. A comic book would probably be the only other economically viable form to do justice to The Cat Lady. It's much too provocative for horror cinema as it is currently practiced by Hollywood and other major film industries. What we are dealing with here is not a slasher story, a cheekily self-aware grindhouse parody, or Saw-style torture porn, but a series of confrontations where Susan must grapple with her own rage, anguish, and moral confusion.
Susan's main confrontations are with each of the Five Parasites. Each one is truly a sick fuck of one kind or another, all heartless predators who definitely deserve to die. But who is to do the killing? That's where moral conflict comes into play. Susan is no jaded executioner. She isn't a vicious psychopath. Nor has she been conditioned by military training, political indoctrination, and/or religious brainwashing to mindlessly follow orders, dehumanize the enemy within her own mind, and practice increased aggression up to and including murder of her chosen target. Her only asset when confronting each of the Five Parasites is her immortality-which isn't quite what it seems to be . . . How does a depressed forty-something with no specialized training/indoctrination become a killer?
Or maybe it's not as difficult as I make it out to be to go around the bend. Maybe we all have a murderer inside us. I have only to reflect on the anger I've felt anytime I've almost been run down in a walk lane by some mindless motherfucker violating my right-of-way while safely enclosed within an SUV, jacked-up pick-up truck, or a Prius to know something of Tetsuo levels of perfectly rational rage.
In any case, Susan's grotesque transformation into a dark avenger is fascinating and disturbing. Although the game doesn't come right out and say so, I think The Cat Lady is, to some degree, a bit of a riff on comic book vigilantes. The title itself, as well as Susan's bond with her army of cats, evokes Selina Kyle from DC Comics and specifically the version of Kyle depicted in the wonderfully demented 1992 movie Batman Returns. But Susan's supernatural qualities put her more in line with another DC Comics vigilante: The Spectre.
Remember the Spectre? He used to be Jim Corrigan, an iron-testacled New York City cop brutally murdered by cowardly gangsters whose raw will to avenge himself brought him howling out of the grave. Look him up, he's an intriguing character.
The Cat Lady's Susan Ashworth is definitely more of a supernatural avenger like The Spectre, more so than the costumed martial arts masters like Catwoman, Batman, Rorschach, or The Question. Susan isn't a traumatized wealthy person obsessed with justice, like Bruce Wayne, and she isn't a psychopathic thief looking out for her own end, like Selina Kyle. Nor is she a philosophical striver like the Question, or a violent lunatic with a rigid view of the world like Watchmen's Rorschach. And unlike Jim Corrigan she doesn't have any godlike powers to warp the very fabric of reality. Susan is basically a nobody, average in every way. Except that if you kill her she doesn't stay dead . . .
Susan's average feelings and desires come to assume cosmic proportions as she re-examines her mundane past in light of her newly gained immortality. Her mind seems to expand into that other realm where she is given a chance to confront terrifying memories that have ballooned into macabre pocket dimensions reflecting the most traumatized aspects of her soul. Unlike the DC Comics characters-which she resembles somewhat-her battles with the Parasites have a profound impact on her newly immortalized soul. She questions her motivations and the morality of killing. She also wants to figure out the true nature of the Queen of Maggots, and whether or not she's just the pawn of some dark god of death. Whenever she is killed, she seems to go back to that sinister, jumbled-up dimension of death. Susan's "real" world and the world of the dead begin to overlap in terrifying, brain-bursting fashion. What's real? What's a delusion? How is she to make sense of her existence as a human now that she has to straddle conflicting realities? And are there any other immortals like herself out there? If so, are they friend or foe?
Susan also has to confront the guilt of becoming a killer. She may be immortal, but what about her conscience? What's it like to live forever with death and vengeance on your mind? Hopefully, the cliche that time heals all wounds is true for immortals, also. Assuming it was ever true for mortal people, of course.
Actually, I think you would have to be immortal to have time heal your wounds. In real life, time wears us down to nothing. Time erodes our memories of pain and suffering. We don't heal so much as forget. We lose our capacity for memory. In severe cases, we become senile, and are afflicted with degenerative conditions that destroy our capacity to remember. At the end, we can barely understand our lives in the here and now, as the faces of people who've been with us over the years become strangers. But maybe a true immortal could heal with the passing of years. They would have to, since suicide would no longer be an option. I find it amusing to toy with the logic of immortality.
At the end of this game, I wondered what Susan Ashworth would do next. Game designer R. Michalski has crafted a deeply satisfying saga of supernatural trauma, vengeance, and moral doubt centered in an intriguing, formidable protagonist. I think it would be interesting to see The Cat Lady take up some new challenge with her powers. Perhaps to explore or create other realities. Of course, it's not for me to decide, but I cannot help but idly fantasize some new era in the immortal life of Susan Ashworth.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
VIDEO GAME REVIEW: RETRO CITY RAMPAGE (2012)
Developed and published by Vblank Entertainment
Designed by Brian Provinciano
Music composed by Leonard J. Paul, Jake Kaufman, and Matthew Creamer
...
"Just like in real life, food and drinks heal bullet wounds."
-from the Retro City Rampage instruction manual
"Law is sublimated violence."
-Alvin Toffler, Power Shift
Designed by Brian Provinciano
Music composed by Leonard J. Paul, Jake Kaufman, and Matthew Creamer
...
"Just like in real life, food and drinks heal bullet wounds."
-from the Retro City Rampage instruction manual
"Law is sublimated violence."
-Alvin Toffler, Power Shift
...
Review by William D. Tucker.
A man with a lot of guns stalks the city. He steals cars. He takes life at will. He is burning to transform himself into a Hi-Score Street Warrior. Time travel is on the table. Stuffed suits in corporate boardrooms think they're masters of the universe, but our hero knows that violence, not globally scaled economic flim-flammery, is the true engine of power. He'll blast his way through the fabric of space and time, if necessary, rising through the criminal ranks, zooming up the underworld leader board-
Oh, but now he's had a setback. Our man had a hot streak of paradigm-shattering novelty slaughters racking up bodies civilian, police, military, ninja, cyborg, but he got cocky. He got killed. He had to start back at the heart of the city, with less cash in his pocket, and a reduced armory. Ain't that a bitch? Now he's got to do that fetch quest all over again. Time for a break. Time to hop over into the free-roaming dimension to work out some aggression, come back to that onerous fetch quest later. Or maybe he'll just hijack a bus, drive on the sidewalks, see how many kills he can chain together to unlock another achievement, maybe a new hairstyle, or a butterfly tattoo for his left pectoral, or a Yugo with mounted machine guns, or a mullet hair-do that doubles as a sapient AI street warfare consultant . . .
What new horror is this? A sub-par attempt at dystopian sci-fi perhaps hoping to pass itself off as a lost story by J.G. Ballard?
Is it the new Grand Theft Auto game? Close. It's a description of the game that has finally made good on the premise and the promise of GTA . . . Retro City Rampage.
(Well, it's mostly a description of Retro City Rampage. I couldn't help but throw some of my cracked-out fan fiction daydreams, fantasies, and idle musings into the mix . . .)
Here's a video game with ambition. It wants to function as both a kind of imaginary artifact of a time that never quite existed, and, at the same time and in equal measure, it wants to out-GTA GTA.
Retro City Rampage is a work of alternate history speculative fiction in the guise of a Grand Theft Auto-style open world shoot-em-up action game. It takes the distinctive elements of GTA-ultraviolence; narco-business; driving way above the posted speed limit; mass murder of cops, bystanders, and criminal competitors; and, yes, stealing automobiles-and poses this science fictional scenario: what if someone had made GTA for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System?
Think about it. The elements were all there. The NES had violent shoot-em-up games like Contra, Super C, Ikari Warriors, The Punisher, and NARC. The NES had open world RPGs with battery backup game saving function like The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. And the NES had oddball games like Dick Tracy and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? both of which mixed driving and exploration with shoot-em-up missions and fetch quests.
Ultraviolence perpetrated with high-end full auto assault weapons . . . open worlds with complex quests(and in the case of Ultima IV statistically tracked moral complexities) . . . exploration . . . fetch quests . . . driving around looking for stuff . . . God's eye top-down perspective action much like the very first Grand Theft Auto and also like in Ikari Warriors, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Dick Tracy, many others . . . NARC and The Punisher were specifically concerned with organized criminal narco-business gangs, and both were surprisingly violent games to make it past then-puritanical Nintendo of America's censorship standards . . . you can't have any sex or politics in video games, but you can have authoritarian men with guns shoot street dealers in the face with high-explosive ammunition-nothing political about that . . . the basics, more or less, of a GTA-style game were all there, but spread out among disparate titles created by various companies.
If only someone with a synergistic vision, and an anti-authoritarian philosophy, had strode over the horizon--the advent of the Era of Open World Socially Irresponsible Action Console Gaming would've come much sooner. If this had been the case, what would be the vogue now, in 2013? The mind-it does boggle.
Retro City Rampage is the game that might have been made for the NES if that person of vision had manifested within the depths of the bygone 8-bit era of console gaming. I'm not so much talking about the actual story content you experience as you play the game. The game itself is presented as though it were such a creation from such an era. The graphics-character sprites, dialogue portraits, world/level design, vehicles-are studiously 8-bit. The music is glorious 8-bit chiptune, as are the sound effects. The dialogue and text within cut-scenes are intentionally written in a clunky, grammatically erroneous style suggesting a rushed, in-house localization into English from a Japanese language original. Difficulty level is moderate spiked with a few truly frustrating missions, but you're given infinite lives and a "battery backup" to save your game. The controls work, but they are often a source of frustration when the action gets fast and frantic. You will die many times. You will come back, again and again, like some mythic hero across many lives. But will you win? Are you a bad enough dude to defeat Dr. Buttnick and rescue the flux combobulator from the Evil Good Guys?
That's what the overall impression of this video game is when viewed as a kind of imaginary artifact from an alternate dimension of reality. And, no, the good ol' NES probably wouldn't have had the power to actually handle Retro City Rampage. Remember, I'm talking about a piece of speculative-alternate-history-fiction-embodied-as-video-gaming-artifact here. RCR fudges the actual hardware capabilities in favor of a working gaming experience, but the 8-bit atmosphere-the set design, music, overall tone if you will-are spot-on. It's an enticing illusion of an 8-bit game that never was, never could've been, but we all wish could have been.
The actual gameplay and story content are more nakedly absurd. Retro City Rampage's story is a mish-mash of spoofs of Sonic the Hedgehog, Ghostbusters, The Dark Knight, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Back to the Future, Robocop, Bionic Commando, Double Dragon, Metal Gear, Mega Man II, Smash TV, and many others. It's a Wendy's salad bar of goofs on video games, fast food, music, and movies from numerous eras woven into a frantic orgy of action that would work just as well as an Adult Swim cartoon (get those guys who made the Superjail cartoon to do it!) There are also satirical jabs at corporate malfeasance, death by fast food, pathological consumerism, the hypocrisy of moral guardians who want to blame video games for societal decay and violent crime, and good old fashioned All American worship of power and force. It all moves at a whipcrack pace, stringing together different parodies and homages and conflicting pop culture realities into a jittery, propulsive, sometimes frustrating, but often engrossing action gaming experience.
Game play is top-down, God's eye view POV action and larceny after the manner of the very first Grand Theft Auto game. You have to complete quests which are often timed and revolve around specific victory conditions. In-between quests you are more or less free to explore at your leisure. Legion achievements, many of them humorously useless, are unlockable in the course of finishing missions and achieving exotic styles of mass slaughter and destruction. It is this unapologetic emphasis on monstrous behavior which makes RCR more fun than the more serious minded GTA.
Did I mention that Retro City Rampage out-GTAs GTA? It does. Here's how: the free roaming mode. Basically, you can just run wild with unlimited money and ammunition and see how many tanks you can get chasing you once you've trounced the conventional police forces. Playing in this arena is totally at the player's discretion. It gives you a true feeling of out of control lawlessness and maniacal mayhem with zero pretensions to relevance, social commentary, or attempts at superficial insights into crime and criminals. Retro City Rampage unmasks the secret fantasy at the heart of those Grand Theft Auto games: to play an ultraviolent video game where you can use unlimited force, backed by unlimited resources, all to no good end. Even in the regular game where you have to complete missions and manage money and ammo the plot and story are totally amoral to such a cartoonish and satirical degree that I began to think back to that one time I tried to actually play through GTAIV seriously and found myself laughing at the faux-grittiness and inauthentic "hard-boiled" dialogue. I even had an acquaintance of mine try to convince me that the GTA games were "basically, like, The Wire of video games." Uh-huh. Retro City Rampage is as much a jab at lazily written, over-hyped games striving for relevance as much as it is a chance to go totally berserk.
Even the story mode, which is, as already noted, an Adult Swim-ready mish-mash of lunacies, engaged me more than any of the story I've sampled from occasional and, frankly, half-hearted engagements with any of the GTA titles. Bottom line: GTA bored and frustrated me with high difficulty, cliched characters and plots, whereas RCR addicted me from the title screen and made me laugh out loud.
RCR also has some intriguing surprises up its sleeve. I don't want to give anything away, but I'll share this wad of thoughts I had as I played through one of the final missions: This is kind of pissing me off. It's also kind of great. All along, I thought I was free to do what I wanted. But I was just on a track. Like every other game, really. Even the most sophisticated sandbox-style games . . . you're still ensnared in the logic of the game. You're still bound to choose from the range of options the game designers have built into the game. I mean, I can't just go up to a shopkeeper in Fallout 3 and ask to buy his right eyeball. Or walk up to Liquid Snake and say, "Hey, bro, I forgive you. There's no need for us to punch each other out on top of this flying battleship or whatever the hell this thing is. Why don't we just hang it up for today, scoot on over to the nearest Starbucks, get a couple of mocha frappes, and I'll show you some rad footage of rottweilers mating in the noonday sun on my codec." Freedom in video games is just an illusion. Well, fuck me.
By the way, I would love to see the Retro City Rampage movie if, if it were directed by Paul Verhoeven.
Just throwing that out there into the ether. Not unlike a prayer, really.
A man with a lot of guns stalks the city. He steals cars. He takes life at will. He is burning to transform himself into a Hi-Score Street Warrior. Time travel is on the table. Stuffed suits in corporate boardrooms think they're masters of the universe, but our hero knows that violence, not globally scaled economic flim-flammery, is the true engine of power. He'll blast his way through the fabric of space and time, if necessary, rising through the criminal ranks, zooming up the underworld leader board-
Oh, but now he's had a setback. Our man had a hot streak of paradigm-shattering novelty slaughters racking up bodies civilian, police, military, ninja, cyborg, but he got cocky. He got killed. He had to start back at the heart of the city, with less cash in his pocket, and a reduced armory. Ain't that a bitch? Now he's got to do that fetch quest all over again. Time for a break. Time to hop over into the free-roaming dimension to work out some aggression, come back to that onerous fetch quest later. Or maybe he'll just hijack a bus, drive on the sidewalks, see how many kills he can chain together to unlock another achievement, maybe a new hairstyle, or a butterfly tattoo for his left pectoral, or a Yugo with mounted machine guns, or a mullet hair-do that doubles as a sapient AI street warfare consultant . . .
What new horror is this? A sub-par attempt at dystopian sci-fi perhaps hoping to pass itself off as a lost story by J.G. Ballard?
Is it the new Grand Theft Auto game? Close. It's a description of the game that has finally made good on the premise and the promise of GTA . . . Retro City Rampage.
(Well, it's mostly a description of Retro City Rampage. I couldn't help but throw some of my cracked-out fan fiction daydreams, fantasies, and idle musings into the mix . . .)
Here's a video game with ambition. It wants to function as both a kind of imaginary artifact of a time that never quite existed, and, at the same time and in equal measure, it wants to out-GTA GTA.
Retro City Rampage is a work of alternate history speculative fiction in the guise of a Grand Theft Auto-style open world shoot-em-up action game. It takes the distinctive elements of GTA-ultraviolence; narco-business; driving way above the posted speed limit; mass murder of cops, bystanders, and criminal competitors; and, yes, stealing automobiles-and poses this science fictional scenario: what if someone had made GTA for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System?
Think about it. The elements were all there. The NES had violent shoot-em-up games like Contra, Super C, Ikari Warriors, The Punisher, and NARC. The NES had open world RPGs with battery backup game saving function like The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. And the NES had oddball games like Dick Tracy and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? both of which mixed driving and exploration with shoot-em-up missions and fetch quests.
Ultraviolence perpetrated with high-end full auto assault weapons . . . open worlds with complex quests(and in the case of Ultima IV statistically tracked moral complexities) . . . exploration . . . fetch quests . . . driving around looking for stuff . . . God's eye top-down perspective action much like the very first Grand Theft Auto and also like in Ikari Warriors, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Dick Tracy, many others . . . NARC and The Punisher were specifically concerned with organized criminal narco-business gangs, and both were surprisingly violent games to make it past then-puritanical Nintendo of America's censorship standards . . . you can't have any sex or politics in video games, but you can have authoritarian men with guns shoot street dealers in the face with high-explosive ammunition-nothing political about that . . . the basics, more or less, of a GTA-style game were all there, but spread out among disparate titles created by various companies.
If only someone with a synergistic vision, and an anti-authoritarian philosophy, had strode over the horizon--the advent of the Era of Open World Socially Irresponsible Action Console Gaming would've come much sooner. If this had been the case, what would be the vogue now, in 2013? The mind-it does boggle.
Retro City Rampage is the game that might have been made for the NES if that person of vision had manifested within the depths of the bygone 8-bit era of console gaming. I'm not so much talking about the actual story content you experience as you play the game. The game itself is presented as though it were such a creation from such an era. The graphics-character sprites, dialogue portraits, world/level design, vehicles-are studiously 8-bit. The music is glorious 8-bit chiptune, as are the sound effects. The dialogue and text within cut-scenes are intentionally written in a clunky, grammatically erroneous style suggesting a rushed, in-house localization into English from a Japanese language original. Difficulty level is moderate spiked with a few truly frustrating missions, but you're given infinite lives and a "battery backup" to save your game. The controls work, but they are often a source of frustration when the action gets fast and frantic. You will die many times. You will come back, again and again, like some mythic hero across many lives. But will you win? Are you a bad enough dude to defeat Dr. Buttnick and rescue the flux combobulator from the Evil Good Guys?
That's what the overall impression of this video game is when viewed as a kind of imaginary artifact from an alternate dimension of reality. And, no, the good ol' NES probably wouldn't have had the power to actually handle Retro City Rampage. Remember, I'm talking about a piece of speculative-alternate-history-fiction-embodied-as-video-gaming-artifact here. RCR fudges the actual hardware capabilities in favor of a working gaming experience, but the 8-bit atmosphere-the set design, music, overall tone if you will-are spot-on. It's an enticing illusion of an 8-bit game that never was, never could've been, but we all wish could have been.
The actual gameplay and story content are more nakedly absurd. Retro City Rampage's story is a mish-mash of spoofs of Sonic the Hedgehog, Ghostbusters, The Dark Knight, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Back to the Future, Robocop, Bionic Commando, Double Dragon, Metal Gear, Mega Man II, Smash TV, and many others. It's a Wendy's salad bar of goofs on video games, fast food, music, and movies from numerous eras woven into a frantic orgy of action that would work just as well as an Adult Swim cartoon (get those guys who made the Superjail cartoon to do it!) There are also satirical jabs at corporate malfeasance, death by fast food, pathological consumerism, the hypocrisy of moral guardians who want to blame video games for societal decay and violent crime, and good old fashioned All American worship of power and force. It all moves at a whipcrack pace, stringing together different parodies and homages and conflicting pop culture realities into a jittery, propulsive, sometimes frustrating, but often engrossing action gaming experience.
Game play is top-down, God's eye view POV action and larceny after the manner of the very first Grand Theft Auto game. You have to complete quests which are often timed and revolve around specific victory conditions. In-between quests you are more or less free to explore at your leisure. Legion achievements, many of them humorously useless, are unlockable in the course of finishing missions and achieving exotic styles of mass slaughter and destruction. It is this unapologetic emphasis on monstrous behavior which makes RCR more fun than the more serious minded GTA.
Did I mention that Retro City Rampage out-GTAs GTA? It does. Here's how: the free roaming mode. Basically, you can just run wild with unlimited money and ammunition and see how many tanks you can get chasing you once you've trounced the conventional police forces. Playing in this arena is totally at the player's discretion. It gives you a true feeling of out of control lawlessness and maniacal mayhem with zero pretensions to relevance, social commentary, or attempts at superficial insights into crime and criminals. Retro City Rampage unmasks the secret fantasy at the heart of those Grand Theft Auto games: to play an ultraviolent video game where you can use unlimited force, backed by unlimited resources, all to no good end. Even in the regular game where you have to complete missions and manage money and ammo the plot and story are totally amoral to such a cartoonish and satirical degree that I began to think back to that one time I tried to actually play through GTAIV seriously and found myself laughing at the faux-grittiness and inauthentic "hard-boiled" dialogue. I even had an acquaintance of mine try to convince me that the GTA games were "basically, like, The Wire of video games." Uh-huh. Retro City Rampage is as much a jab at lazily written, over-hyped games striving for relevance as much as it is a chance to go totally berserk.
Even the story mode, which is, as already noted, an Adult Swim-ready mish-mash of lunacies, engaged me more than any of the story I've sampled from occasional and, frankly, half-hearted engagements with any of the GTA titles. Bottom line: GTA bored and frustrated me with high difficulty, cliched characters and plots, whereas RCR addicted me from the title screen and made me laugh out loud.
RCR also has some intriguing surprises up its sleeve. I don't want to give anything away, but I'll share this wad of thoughts I had as I played through one of the final missions: This is kind of pissing me off. It's also kind of great. All along, I thought I was free to do what I wanted. But I was just on a track. Like every other game, really. Even the most sophisticated sandbox-style games . . . you're still ensnared in the logic of the game. You're still bound to choose from the range of options the game designers have built into the game. I mean, I can't just go up to a shopkeeper in Fallout 3 and ask to buy his right eyeball. Or walk up to Liquid Snake and say, "Hey, bro, I forgive you. There's no need for us to punch each other out on top of this flying battleship or whatever the hell this thing is. Why don't we just hang it up for today, scoot on over to the nearest Starbucks, get a couple of mocha frappes, and I'll show you some rad footage of rottweilers mating in the noonday sun on my codec." Freedom in video games is just an illusion. Well, fuck me.
By the way, I would love to see the Retro City Rampage movie if, if it were directed by Paul Verhoeven.
Just throwing that out there into the ether. Not unlike a prayer, really.
Monday, March 18, 2013
GAME REVIEW: DEPRESSION QUEST (2013)
an interactive (non)fiction about living with depression
by Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, and Isaac Schankler
Music by Isaac Schankler
by Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, and Isaac Schankler
Music by Isaac Schankler
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Text on the screen, disquieting music, minimalist visuals consisting of abstract Polaroid-style photos of computer keyboard keys, room texture, and other mundane things.
Read the text: it's a second-person narrative (like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure Novels) of a twenty-first century city dweller coping with a mindless cubicle job, a mother that judges him for his lack of ambition in life, a careerist older brother named Malcolm, a sweet-natured girlfriend named Alex, and a hard drive full of half-realized creative projects. Depression suffuses this narrative like a narcotic heat haze that drains one's energy, and fills the mind crowding out pleasure, joy, and hope. Depression is an oppressor which squats in the mind, issuing a kind of defeatist internal monologue which deflates one's ambitions while also mocking the afflicted person's inability to heal themselves.
That's the insidious thing about this mental illness: it's not something you can just shake off, but the condition also makes it seem futile to even try to ask for help.
Just below the descriptive text are a series of choices which you can click on which will take you to another block of text. You can have anywhere from three to five choices, usually, but the top one or two are almost always crossed off, even though you can still read them. This seems to be the game's way of simulating the despair and self-recrimination which comes with depression: "I know I should make this choice, but I can't bring myself to do it. I'll never be well or even normal." Usually, these choices entail something highly idealized, like "Buckle down, shake off the bad feelings, and get to work!" or something like that. In the depths of depression, you know something's wrong, but you cannot help but compare yourself to unrealistic examples of confidence and success. It is the proverbial vicious cycle.
Below the choices are three status lines: one describes in a few sentences your overall level of depression and functionality; another tracks whether or not you're seeing a therapist and how that is affecting you; and a third tracks whether or not you're taking any anti-depressant medication. These three factors change as you click through the various chunks of text, perhaps eventually deciding to seek therapy, or choosing to do a course of anti-depressant medication. Or not.
Depression Quest is very much a Choose Your Own Adventure text game for adults. Instead of adventuring through a Cave of Time, exploring the vast insides of UFO 54-40, or trying to thwart an invasion by Space Vampires, here you must navigate a life afflicted by depression. There is no challenge in the usual sense of the term. There are no fighting combos, military strategies, or puzzles to master or solve. The decision tree is quite basic, but I found the text, which is highly generalized in its descriptions giving the story the overall sense that it could be taking place in any number of American cities, unexpectedly moving. The way the game gives you a range of choices, but crosses through some of them I thought was a rather brilliant way of suggesting the inner suffering of a person afflicted with depression, yet struggling to make good choices in life. It has been said that we can only choose from a range of choices which we actually know about, but how painful is it to see other, appealing possibilities yet be unable to explore those choices? It isn't exactly great literature, but it does give a reasonably realistic sense of what it's like to suffer from depression.
Which is what the creators of the game expressly intended. According to the Depression Quest website, this game was created to give people suffering from depression a sense that they are not alone and that healing is possible (if not easy), and to give a general audience a sense of what it's like to live with this mental illness, and what the daily struggles are for a person in such a situation. The noble goal of this game, which is available to play online for no charge (donations optional), is to create a sense of empathy, hope, and understanding within the mind of the player.
And once you play through it once, play through it again, making different choices, and experiencing other consequences and outcomes. It is quite fascinating to explore.
Depression Quest is rather crude compared to the latest next generation console games like Bioshock Infinite, Borderlands 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim, and others, but consider this: what if a game like Depression Quest got an entire company behind it, with an army of programmers, artists, musicians, voice actors, motion capture performers, writers, psychiatric consultants, and all the research and development assets that a major gaming corporation could muster? Right now, most games, even deep, highly detailed open world games with rich RPG fantasy environments have little to do with trying to creatively portray reality and reality's struggles. They are primarily escapist power fantasy entertainments.
And that's all well and good. Nothing wrong with gaming just for fun. I myself love fantasy, science fiction, and ultraviolent shoot-em-ups with exploding heads, guts coiling about my blade, and oceans of blood everywhere.
But . . . that stuff does get old, doesn't it? I get kind of tired of seeing video games create scenarios which can only exist within a post-modern, anti-realist, self-referential computer fantasy world entirely without any relevance to what actual homo sapiens deal with on planet Earth right here, right now.
Wouldn't it be intriguing if one of the large gaming companies hired the people who created Depression Quest, and put vast resources at their disposal. Just for one game. Gave it the full production treatment with no compromises in realism and empathetic vision. Even if this new, next-gen version of Depression Quest didn't make any money it would be a truly worthwhile experiment. It would perhaps be the first time a major console game actually went beyond the usual fantasy escapism art (and it is an art) of most video games and into a realm of realist video game art-which would be a new artistic breakthrough for the medium.
It'd be a helluva thing. Here's hoping.
Text on the screen, disquieting music, minimalist visuals consisting of abstract Polaroid-style photos of computer keyboard keys, room texture, and other mundane things.
Read the text: it's a second-person narrative (like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure Novels) of a twenty-first century city dweller coping with a mindless cubicle job, a mother that judges him for his lack of ambition in life, a careerist older brother named Malcolm, a sweet-natured girlfriend named Alex, and a hard drive full of half-realized creative projects. Depression suffuses this narrative like a narcotic heat haze that drains one's energy, and fills the mind crowding out pleasure, joy, and hope. Depression is an oppressor which squats in the mind, issuing a kind of defeatist internal monologue which deflates one's ambitions while also mocking the afflicted person's inability to heal themselves.
That's the insidious thing about this mental illness: it's not something you can just shake off, but the condition also makes it seem futile to even try to ask for help.
Just below the descriptive text are a series of choices which you can click on which will take you to another block of text. You can have anywhere from three to five choices, usually, but the top one or two are almost always crossed off, even though you can still read them. This seems to be the game's way of simulating the despair and self-recrimination which comes with depression: "I know I should make this choice, but I can't bring myself to do it. I'll never be well or even normal." Usually, these choices entail something highly idealized, like "Buckle down, shake off the bad feelings, and get to work!" or something like that. In the depths of depression, you know something's wrong, but you cannot help but compare yourself to unrealistic examples of confidence and success. It is the proverbial vicious cycle.
Below the choices are three status lines: one describes in a few sentences your overall level of depression and functionality; another tracks whether or not you're seeing a therapist and how that is affecting you; and a third tracks whether or not you're taking any anti-depressant medication. These three factors change as you click through the various chunks of text, perhaps eventually deciding to seek therapy, or choosing to do a course of anti-depressant medication. Or not.
Depression Quest is very much a Choose Your Own Adventure text game for adults. Instead of adventuring through a Cave of Time, exploring the vast insides of UFO 54-40, or trying to thwart an invasion by Space Vampires, here you must navigate a life afflicted by depression. There is no challenge in the usual sense of the term. There are no fighting combos, military strategies, or puzzles to master or solve. The decision tree is quite basic, but I found the text, which is highly generalized in its descriptions giving the story the overall sense that it could be taking place in any number of American cities, unexpectedly moving. The way the game gives you a range of choices, but crosses through some of them I thought was a rather brilliant way of suggesting the inner suffering of a person afflicted with depression, yet struggling to make good choices in life. It has been said that we can only choose from a range of choices which we actually know about, but how painful is it to see other, appealing possibilities yet be unable to explore those choices? It isn't exactly great literature, but it does give a reasonably realistic sense of what it's like to suffer from depression.
Which is what the creators of the game expressly intended. According to the Depression Quest website, this game was created to give people suffering from depression a sense that they are not alone and that healing is possible (if not easy), and to give a general audience a sense of what it's like to live with this mental illness, and what the daily struggles are for a person in such a situation. The noble goal of this game, which is available to play online for no charge (donations optional), is to create a sense of empathy, hope, and understanding within the mind of the player.
And once you play through it once, play through it again, making different choices, and experiencing other consequences and outcomes. It is quite fascinating to explore.
Depression Quest is rather crude compared to the latest next generation console games like Bioshock Infinite, Borderlands 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim, and others, but consider this: what if a game like Depression Quest got an entire company behind it, with an army of programmers, artists, musicians, voice actors, motion capture performers, writers, psychiatric consultants, and all the research and development assets that a major gaming corporation could muster? Right now, most games, even deep, highly detailed open world games with rich RPG fantasy environments have little to do with trying to creatively portray reality and reality's struggles. They are primarily escapist power fantasy entertainments.
And that's all well and good. Nothing wrong with gaming just for fun. I myself love fantasy, science fiction, and ultraviolent shoot-em-ups with exploding heads, guts coiling about my blade, and oceans of blood everywhere.
But . . . that stuff does get old, doesn't it? I get kind of tired of seeing video games create scenarios which can only exist within a post-modern, anti-realist, self-referential computer fantasy world entirely without any relevance to what actual homo sapiens deal with on planet Earth right here, right now.
Wouldn't it be intriguing if one of the large gaming companies hired the people who created Depression Quest, and put vast resources at their disposal. Just for one game. Gave it the full production treatment with no compromises in realism and empathetic vision. Even if this new, next-gen version of Depression Quest didn't make any money it would be a truly worthwhile experiment. It would perhaps be the first time a major console game actually went beyond the usual fantasy escapism art (and it is an art) of most video games and into a realm of realist video game art-which would be a new artistic breakthrough for the medium.
It'd be a helluva thing. Here's hoping.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
VIDEO GAME REVIEW: RICHARD AND ALICE (2013)
Developed and Published by Denby Raze
Review by William D. Tucker.
Two people, Richard and Alice, are incarcerated within a rather cushy prison. They have flatscreen TVs showing vintage nature documentaries and old school anime; clean water for the shower and the toilet; computer with prison intranet email; and each of their cells are single occupancy. No overcrowding, no gangs, no violence, and the guards deliver the meals on time. No abuse from the prison authorities, either. Richard and Alice's prison cell doors face each other across the hall, so they have company, if not potential physical contact.
They get to talking. Richard's a former soldier locked up on charges of desertion. Alice is a homemaker accused of murder. They both miss their children who are still on the outside. They would prefer to have their children with them. Inside the prison.
The outside world is a dangerous, depraved place. Anthropogenic global warming has polarized world climate patterns into extremes of hot and cold. In England, Richard and Alice's part of the world, every day is snowy, at the least, and some days it's a full on blizzard. Civil society has broken down due to shortages of fuel, food, electricity, medicine, and potable water. Violent bandits who call themselves the Polar Bears roam the snowy wastes, raping, murdering, and pillaging at will. The only place where there still seems to be law and order is within the prison, and even that may be starting to break down.
Richard and Alice is a point-and-click adventure/mystery game that functions primarily as a vehicle for narrative, similar in this respect to 2011's To the Moon. None of the puzzles are particularly difficult. Fetch quests for items are confined to relatively small locales. Everything is eminently logical (with a couple of exceptions, perhaps . . .), with none of the near-mystical puzzle design of a game like Myst, nor any of the harsh techno-logic of the hardest puzzles of 2012's Resonance. Hardcore gamers looking for extreme challenge and difficulty will not find it here. Richard and Alice is not an action or role-playing game. I would liken the experience of playing it to reading a short story, or maybe watching a movie. It reminded me of the 2008 movie version of Jose Saramago's novel Blindness.
So if you want to experience a dark science fiction story told via the medium of retro 16-bit (maybe even 14-bit) overhead perspective graphics, effectively atmospheric music, and sharply composed dialogue, Richard and Alice delivers the goods for the most part. The story does stumble in a couple of places, and I wasn't crazy about the visuals. There is almost no character animation in terms of facial expressions or emotions, and this works against some moments and scenes. The dialogue and music mostly pick up the dramatic slack, but I think more expressive character portraits would've helped. But the game doesn't compromise in the areas of tone, mood, and theme.
Oh, and there's no voice acting. It's all text, and you have to read it. This didn't bother me, since the dialogue is quite good (and authentically British I might add), and I like to read. If you don't like to read, well, that's your problem.
Richard and Alice is the first commercial offering from indie developers Denby Raze. It has narrative juice and thematic integrity, good music, not-so-spectacular graphics, sharp dialogue, and it's short. Some may feel they are not getting their money's worth paying to play such a brief game. I would rather play a short game that says all it needs to say then exits the stage, rather than dragging things out, and I do think Denby Raze has every right to make money from their creative efforts. But some may feel they've been shortchanged. Caveat emptor, all that.
I have done my level best to say as little about the actual story content of Richard and Alice as possible. It would be pointless to give anything away, as this game hinges on its turns of narrative more than anything. But if you do play through this game, ask yourself this: is the ending of Richard and Alice the absolute ending, all she wrote, the rest is silence, that's all folks? Or is it just the first act?
Personally, I'm kinda hoping it's just the first act. We only really get to know one of these two characters. I'd kinda like to learn about the other one, too. I'd come back for another installment even if the graphics were the same. These Denby Raze guys got a strong line on dialogue, theme, and story, so here's hoping we see more from them down the line.
Two people, Richard and Alice, are incarcerated within a rather cushy prison. They have flatscreen TVs showing vintage nature documentaries and old school anime; clean water for the shower and the toilet; computer with prison intranet email; and each of their cells are single occupancy. No overcrowding, no gangs, no violence, and the guards deliver the meals on time. No abuse from the prison authorities, either. Richard and Alice's prison cell doors face each other across the hall, so they have company, if not potential physical contact.
They get to talking. Richard's a former soldier locked up on charges of desertion. Alice is a homemaker accused of murder. They both miss their children who are still on the outside. They would prefer to have their children with them. Inside the prison.
The outside world is a dangerous, depraved place. Anthropogenic global warming has polarized world climate patterns into extremes of hot and cold. In England, Richard and Alice's part of the world, every day is snowy, at the least, and some days it's a full on blizzard. Civil society has broken down due to shortages of fuel, food, electricity, medicine, and potable water. Violent bandits who call themselves the Polar Bears roam the snowy wastes, raping, murdering, and pillaging at will. The only place where there still seems to be law and order is within the prison, and even that may be starting to break down.
Richard and Alice is a point-and-click adventure/mystery game that functions primarily as a vehicle for narrative, similar in this respect to 2011's To the Moon. None of the puzzles are particularly difficult. Fetch quests for items are confined to relatively small locales. Everything is eminently logical (with a couple of exceptions, perhaps . . .), with none of the near-mystical puzzle design of a game like Myst, nor any of the harsh techno-logic of the hardest puzzles of 2012's Resonance. Hardcore gamers looking for extreme challenge and difficulty will not find it here. Richard and Alice is not an action or role-playing game. I would liken the experience of playing it to reading a short story, or maybe watching a movie. It reminded me of the 2008 movie version of Jose Saramago's novel Blindness.
So if you want to experience a dark science fiction story told via the medium of retro 16-bit (maybe even 14-bit) overhead perspective graphics, effectively atmospheric music, and sharply composed dialogue, Richard and Alice delivers the goods for the most part. The story does stumble in a couple of places, and I wasn't crazy about the visuals. There is almost no character animation in terms of facial expressions or emotions, and this works against some moments and scenes. The dialogue and music mostly pick up the dramatic slack, but I think more expressive character portraits would've helped. But the game doesn't compromise in the areas of tone, mood, and theme.
Oh, and there's no voice acting. It's all text, and you have to read it. This didn't bother me, since the dialogue is quite good (and authentically British I might add), and I like to read. If you don't like to read, well, that's your problem.
Richard and Alice is the first commercial offering from indie developers Denby Raze. It has narrative juice and thematic integrity, good music, not-so-spectacular graphics, sharp dialogue, and it's short. Some may feel they are not getting their money's worth paying to play such a brief game. I would rather play a short game that says all it needs to say then exits the stage, rather than dragging things out, and I do think Denby Raze has every right to make money from their creative efforts. But some may feel they've been shortchanged. Caveat emptor, all that.
I have done my level best to say as little about the actual story content of Richard and Alice as possible. It would be pointless to give anything away, as this game hinges on its turns of narrative more than anything. But if you do play through this game, ask yourself this: is the ending of Richard and Alice the absolute ending, all she wrote, the rest is silence, that's all folks? Or is it just the first act?
Personally, I'm kinda hoping it's just the first act. We only really get to know one of these two characters. I'd kinda like to learn about the other one, too. I'd come back for another installment even if the graphics were the same. These Denby Raze guys got a strong line on dialogue, theme, and story, so here's hoping we see more from them down the line.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
VIDEO GAME REVIEW: THE SHIVAH (2006)
Designer/Developer/Script and Dialogue by Dave Gilbert
Original Music Composed by Peter Gresser
Backgrounds by Tom Scary
Character Animations by Shane Stevens
Featuring the voice talents of:
Abe Goldfarb as Rabbi Stone
Ruth Weber as Rajshree Lauder
Joe Rodriguez as Amos Zelig
with
John Swist
Francisco Gonzalez
Kim Lee
Dave Gilbert
Published by Wadjet Eye Games, 2006
Review by William D. Tucker.
The Shivah is a PC game after the style of the point-and-click mystery adventure games of the 1980s and 1990s. It tells the story of Rabbi Russell Stone who leads a synagogue on New York's Lower East Side. His temple has fallen on hard times. No one shows up to hear his services, save for a sleepy old lady. His email inbox is filled with angry and disappointed messages from former members of his congregation who have been alienated by his harsh, cynical sermons. The bills are piling up, and he expects to be evicted from the property any day now. That's when the homicide detective shows up to tell him that his old friend Jack Lauder has been murdered. The Rabbi is a suspect because Lauder has left Stone a sizable fortune. Of course, the detective has no hard evidence, and so Rabbi Stone, piloted by the player, must solve the mystery and clear his name.
The Shivah orchestrates an intriguing dramatic situation around the murder investigation. Like any good murder mystery there is much more to the case than meets the eye. There are also issues tied to Rabbi Stone's sense of his own identity as a religious leader. He has sacrificed much of his own personal happiness to his profound sense of what it means to be a rabbi. The game doesn't come right out and reveal every last detail of this sacrifice, but it starts out with the broad picture, a depressed and embittered rabbi in a fading synagogue, and gradually zooms in on the specifics of Stone's past and, by implication, the nature of his personality that has led him to the particular dilemma he faces in attempting to clear his own name. The mystery isn't just, "Who murdered Jack Lauder?" It is also, "Who is Rabbi Stone?" It is this second mystery that the game as a game allows players a certain degree of freedom to solve. The choices you make determine the game's ultimate outcome. There are several endings, each one dependent on key moral and ethical choices the player makes as they pilot the Rabbi through the game.
Another fascinating element about Rabbi Stone is the fact that he is a flawed character. Many video game protagonists are screwed-up people. First person shooters and RPGs are filled with violent, heavily armed sociopaths, mutilation and power obsessed barbarians, and brain-washed militarists. Rabbi Stone's flaw is also his strength: his unwavering commitment to his sense of identity, and the kernel of remorse that he seems to feel over a harsh decision he made a long time ago. A decision that affected the life of his old friend Jack Lauder. Rabbi Stone is a dramatic character in the way of great literary characters: Oedipus, Sam Spade, Hamlet, Othello, The Continental Op, and Antigone. He isn't just another ultraviolent cipher to pilot around a dungeon or field of battle. He actually comes off as someone who could conceivably exist in real life.
The dialogue is excellent, sharp, and is worthy of a stage play or film. There are some rather impressive one-liners, and some pitch-black humor as well. One of the key elements of Rabbi Stone's character is his questioning nature. It seems, depending on which dialogue options you follow, that he is always seeking to respond to whatever trials that reality or God or whatever sends his way with the right question. Rabbi Stone's identity is tied to this view of life as a constant inquiry. This outlook is also a great fit with a mystery-adventure gaming dynamic.
A strong cast of voice actors, led by Abe Goldfarb as Rabbi Stone, lends a massive amount of credibility to the characters and the story. I would like to say more about individual performances, but I don't want to give away too much of the story. Suffice it to say, that all of the voice actors do top-notch work, including designer Dave Gilbert in a cameo role.
The visuals are consciously retro--way retro. Like, King's Quest retro, but very carefully done. All of the locations by Tom Scary are rendered with pixelated precision. The game presents synagogues, bars, apartments, stores, and subway platforms that look like they've actually been inspired by genuine New York settings. It's hard to describe, but it's rather impressive that such locations and atmosphere are so effectively rendered with such limited graphics.
The character animations by Shane Stevens are also effective, and include some surprising events. Whenever there is dialogue, the characters' faces are rendered in boxes and display a pleasing array of emotions and nuances which are complimented by the strong voice acting. The effectiveness of the dialogue animations reminded me of Scott McCloud's breakdown of emotions and expressions in Understanding Comics. McCloud puts forward the notion that sometimes visual storytelling can achieve surprising depths and abiding effects by paring real life actions and emotions to their bare essence and then sequencing those essences correctly. It's just another example of how a retro-game can offer worthwhile, involving experiences in a world of ultra-tech gaming.
A state of the art 3-D gaming engine could, of course, deliver photo realism, physics, and a persistent world to get lost in--but would it offer such a concentrated dramatic experience? The Shivah is like an intriguing Off-Off-Broadway play in a black box performance space. Or maybe a memorable crime novella you might find in an old paperback collection of murder mysteries. The retro-charm runs deep.
The musical score by Peter Gresser is mournful, jazzy, and achieves some epic highs as the drama escalates. The mournful, contemplative opening theme is particularly effective, establishing a mood unlike what you would find in most video games. It isn't at all intrusive, and, in fact, it helps with the investigation. I found it to be the perfect underscore for a murder case. Although Gresser's score is more accomplished, it put me in mind of the underscores for the Kemco/Seika NES adaptations of the classic graphic adventures Deja Vu, Shadowgate, and Uninvited. The music in those games, for me, was also mood enhancing and conducive to ratiocination.
The gaming element which is most distinctive is the Clue Inventory. In adventure games, it is not uncommon to have inventory puzzles, wherein you must combine items in your possession in just the right way and use them on some key element of the environment. The Shivah uses a similar dynamic with clues-words and phrases that Rabbi Stone picks up on while questioning people and investigating the various locations. You can then click on a clue and drag it over other clues, click, and see if the ideas work together to offer new insights. The clues also figure into the dialogue options. Clues beget clues, and so the investigation proceeds. The game is much too brief to fully realize this intriguing gaming mechanic, however it does reinforce the cerebral and questioning nature of Rabbi Stone.
Another interesting feature is the Kibbitz Mode, which is a DVD-style commentary that you can choose to switch on while you play the game. In Kibbitz Mode, as you play through, Dave Gilbert, the game's creator, pops up as a charmingly animated talking head and talks you through how he made the game, and offers interesting insights into how, why, and when certain decisions were made. Gilbert is an enjoyable commentator who offers a generous amount of insight into how and why he made the game the way he did. It is strongly advised that you do not switch on the Kibbitz Mode until you've played through the game a few times, as it gives away most of the puzzles and plot twists.
The Shivah is not a very long game, nor is it difficult. But it offers a compelling and concise dramatic narrative with clever dialogue, effective music, and a strong thematic focus.The Shivah is offered through Wadjet Eye Games's website for near-instant download. I say near-instant because it took about an hour for the company to process the order. For $4.99, The Shivah is cheaper than a movie ticket, and much better scripted and acted than what you are likely to find at the summer multiplex.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)