Here’s a little tidbit for you young’uns who might be tuning into this little blog o’ mine.
Did you know that there were online games before the Internet existed?
When I was a lad (old man joke, oh crumbs there goes the hip, we’re walking, we’re walking) there were these little dial-up places called Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSs. This was long before anything resembling DSL existed, to say nothing of cable or fiber optics running into people’s homes. So one would dial into the BBS’ on-site modem (and if you only had one phone line, someone would need the phone ten seconds after you try dialing) and look at postings of news, jobs and whatnot. BBS setups also had something called ‘doors’.
A ‘door’ was less a physical portal and more the launching point for an on-line game. Of the many that got started back in the late 80s, one in particular not only stands out in my mind but is also played to this day: Trade Wars.
Last year PC World called it one of the greatest PC games ever. I’m hard-pressed to disagree. With simple text displays and ASCII art, Trade Wars would unashamedly eat up hours of my time, with commodities trading, space combat and interaction with other players. You know, the sort of thing that happens in EVE Online but without having to mine asteroids (at least not that I remember). The fact that this sort of game structure has survived into the graphical MMOG era not just as EVE but also as online and hosted versions of the old Trade Wars engine itself is a testament to the longevity and appeal of its simplicity. It doesn’t get much simpler than “Buy stuff for cheap, shoot anybody trying to shoot you, sell stuff for profit, 40 goto 10”.
I might look into finding a way for Blue Ink Alchemy to play host for a Trade Wars game of its own.
If people would be interested in playing, that is.
I was going to write about Maschine Zeit some more, since I spent some time yesterday working on a little promotional material and trying to drum up some interest. It really made me miss a gaming store in Conshohoken called “The Roundtable” that had a great staff, fantastic atmosphere and fun events. I’d be willing to try and help promote that place, too, if they hadn’t closed their doors. I’d even try to reopen them if I had the credit to support a business loan.
Anyway, the reason I’m not is because of a debate that began over yonder regarding Zynga. Basically the argument was that people who play Farmville (among other things) aren’t “hardcore” gamers and thus they’re not legitimate. That’s bullshit, obviously. Video games are video games, from the tiny little indy projects programmed in BASIC to the massive summer releases that rake in millions of dollars from youth just itching to blow an alien’s head off rather than taking it out on their math teacher.
So in that I’m in agreement. But placing Zynga on the same level as other game developers is, to me, comparing apples and oranges. My ire might be increased due to Zynga’s performance in The Escapist’s March Mayhem, where the social network gaming company has defeated NCSoft (creators of Aion), Infinity Ward (Call of Duty), Rockstar North (Grand Theft Auto), Square Enix (Final Fantasy), and are facing off against a favorite of mine, Valve (Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead…)
This irritates me, and I’ll tell you why.
Zynga doesn’t develop games the way those others developers do, or at least they go for a different kind of game. Zynga’s games are technically video games, just like So You Think You Can Dance, Jersey Shore and Millionaire Matchmaker are technically television shoes. They’re aimed at a very specific demographic. I don’t mean to generalize, but a lot of the people who play Zynga’s games know very little about video games in general. They don’t realize how far things have come. They don’t understand why someone like me can sit back in awe of a Mass Effect 2 or Super Mario Galaxy or No More Heroes when things like Asteroids and Galaxian were the height of gameplay innovation.
To put it another way, here’s a post made over on the Escapist by one Catherine Lyons:
It’s about the culture America (and even the world) is taking that the cheap and tawdry is more important than the innovative and artistic.
“Twilight” gets throngs of fans, who understand nothing of the true genre (one fan even wrote about how Universal’s “Wolfman” was a rip off (despite the fact Universal was remaking a movie they produced back in 30s(? don’t know the exact year), and flamed them because “how could a silver bullet kill a werewolf?” and “the transformation sucked. Look at Jacob for how a real werewolf is supposed to look and morph like.”) It’s mediocre writings set a low standard for it’s fans, and they can’t recognize good material if it doesn’t have a romance between moody teenagers.
Other movies are giving into the “zomg3D” craze where movies that have nothing to really gain from a 3D environment slap together a 3D version just because they can.
TV is getting bogged down with melodramatic crap. The Hills, Secret Life of the American Teenager, Tyra.
WoW is watering down WoW (and by extension, the entire MMO community) with hand-holding and catering too much to their non-gamer base.
Even the news is more celeb gossip and political flaming than actual journalism.
We idolize people like Paris Hilton and the Kardashians, and teach our children from a young age “Be a slut. It’s the cool thing to do. Aspiring to be the concubine of a man in his 80s is a worthy goal.”
Every day, the general populace moves further and further away from anything that makes them think, exert effort, or engage in more than a non-superficial way, and more towards the inane and uninspired.
Gaming seemed to be the last bastion of hope for artistic medium. Despite problems with WoW and Zynga bringing in people that know nothing of gaming into the gaming world and making them think that they know what they’re talking about, it seemed that our games were just getting better and better. More attention to detail, better plot lines, better gameplay.
Now, to see Zynga, who, for reasons I won’t re-enumerate here, doesn’t even deserve to be in this competition (and my assumption is that they were only thrown in there to fill a spot, and expected to quickly get kicked out) win against game houses who have reshaped the industry (Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty is one of the most popular war-based FPS’s out there, Rockstar has consistently pushed the envelope in terms of content and has redefined the idea of a video game again and again, and Square Enix has put out some very popular series that hold a special place in the hearts of many gamers) is like a film fanatic watching Twilight go up for Best Picture. Or a music fanatic watching Kidz Bop go up for a Grammy.
It’s watching our art from get pushed down with the rest of the world in this new world-order of “Thinking is, like, hard and stuff.” and watching as our passion falls to the tawdry mediocrity that is drowning our entire culture.
Anyway, that’s my two rather pretentious cents on the whole Zynga thing, and if they win March Mayhem I won’t be terribly surprised. Just disappointed.
This week’s Escapist, “Bump In The Night,” is all about survival horror. Here is the article I pitched them for the issue, all about one of the best games of the genre I never played until I got married.
I think there are certain elements of true horror in games that, like in the film industry, have been left aside for torture porn and jump-out scares. Few games that carry the horror moniker truly get inside the head of the player and compel them to struggle to survive, let alone prevail, and instead toss handfuls of gore and jarring images at the screen. A game that understood the meaning of horror and holds up despite the passing of one console generation to another is a humble title for the GameCube – Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.
Instead of cribbing notes from more modern sources of horror such as Eli Roth or James Wan, Eternal Darkness reaches back to some of the more foundational writings of the genre, particularly H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe. The game, in fact, quotes Poe in the beginning, as we are introduced to Alexandra Roivas, a young woman whose grandfather Edward was murdered in his Rhode Island home. As the investigators have few answers, Alex begins looking around the mansion herself, and stumbles across a secret room containing, among other things, the “Tome of Eternal Darkness.” Upon opening this ghastly book, Alex is transported into the life of centurion Pious Augustus, who in 26 B.C. discovers one of three artifacts representing the essence of a powerful and old god-like being called an Ancient. As the player, you choose which Ancient corrupts Pious, setting up a conflict between the creature using the now-undying centurion as a proxy, and several characters throughout time including Alex who must stop the Ancient from ushering in a terrible age of eternal darkness.
Several generations of the Roivas family
Eternal Darkness has a minimal UI, keeping the screen from being too cluttered as you explore the game’s four locations at various points throughout history. Your life, “magick” and sanity meters only appeared when they were being affected. The player quickly begins to associate the different colors of the meters – red, blue and green, respectively – with the three Ancients and their minions, and must quickly learn how each affects the other. Ulyaoth, whose purview is over the soul, powers his minions through magick but is vulnerable to physical confrontation. Chattur’gha rules the body, making his pawns potent in a direct scrape but susceptible to mental assault. Xel’lotath reigns supreme in the realm of the mind and pushes the boundaries of one’s perceptions of reality through her servants, but must succumb to magickal assaults. Each has a color, a distinct personality and a unique appearance, but all three of them hate the neutral yet powerful fourth Ancient, Mantorok, whom the player’s characters come to represent whether they want to or not.
The spell-casting system of “magick” is one of the unique features of the game. Instead of giving the players direct instructions on how to use the runes discovered in various places and times, the player must experiment with the runes in what amounts to sentence construction. Basic spells involve three runes: the name of an Ancient which sets the spell’s “alignment”, a “verb” that describes what the player wants to do – summon, absorb, etc – and a “noun” that instructs the spell as to its target. Enhancement or “power” runes can expand a spell to five or seven runes, but the important part of the spell is its alignment. Trying to attack a minion of Xel’lotath with a physical spell isn’t going to work as well as the opposite. However, a spell aligned with Ulyaoth will do the trick nicely. Remembering this sort of thing on the fly as undead minions lumber towards you can make for a harrowing experience in and of itself. There’s also an option to discover the right rune to represent Mantorok.
On a story level, the common threads woven between the disparate lives of the dozen or so characters in Eternal Darkness drew them and the player into the dire and seemingly hopeless web of machinations of the Ancients. Well-written stories for each character coupled with excellent voice acting showed us mortal beings who found themselves struggling to maintain their sanity in the face of horrors from beyond the stars. And the insanity was not limited to the game’s side of the screen, because every so often, the game would quite directly remind the player that they are not entirely in control of what is happening to them with the use of the game’s infamous Insanity Effects. This innovation was so singular that Nintendo patented it.
Gamers often maintain a distance between themselves and the content of the game with the knowledge that they, ultimately, are in control of the events unfolding on the screen. Eternal Darkness broke through that barrier directly into the fear center of players’ brains. In addition to horrifying visions the characters see, witnessing a character’s head explode upon attempting to cast a healing spell or finding them walking across the ceiling when previously they were on the floor, the game occasionally poked holes through the fourth wall, by turning down the volume complete with a generic TV volume meter (a move guaranteed to blast out your eardrums if you were unprepared and tried turning up your TV in response), turning off the screen entirely or giving a false GameCube error screen. It’s not entirely uncommon for the player to echo the character’s panicked cry of “THIS ISN’T HAPPENING!”
Ellia, one of the game’s dozen characters.
Since Eternal Darkness, there have been few games that really got into the head of a player. Silent Hill 2 is often touted for the same sort of atmosphere and storytelling as Eternal Darkness, but when it comes to this sort of immersive survival horror gameplay, the list is pretty short. Survival is, after all, more than just fighting off wave after wave of zombies. Who are we when we emerge on the other side of such an experience? How do those events change us? Good survival horror should address those questions as well as “how many zombies can you kill in three minutes?” or “how many different ways can you kill zombies?” Killing zombies will always be fun in games, but few games balance that fun with sheer terror, let alone madness.
Horror is about more than just gore. Games, as a storytelling medium, should ideally be about more than complicated physics engines and shameless sex appeal. Horror games, then, should aspire to rise above the slavering hordes of the undead chasing down a trashy blonde with big tits. Alex Roivas may be an attractive blonde, but she’s also smart, not a marathon runner, and pretty reasonable and stable, at least when she first arrives at Edward’s mansion. Like James Sunderland of Silent Hill 2, she is pretty much alone in a haunted place slowly losing her grip on her sanity as she delves deeper and deeper into the mad secrets of the Tome of Eternal Darkness. We’re taken right along with her on this downward spiral, rather than observing from a distance. We want to maintain her stability because it’s the stability of our experience as well, and we want her to survive because we want to see how it ends. If that isn’t immersive storytelling, I don’t know what is.
Eternal Darkness doesn’t just set us up against slavering hordes of the undead with a selection of blunt, sharp and loud objects to fend them off. It sets up a situation that pulls is in, drives us forward and leaves us wondering how we made it through to the other side. The game becomes more than a mere simulation and serves as a medium for the invocation of primal fear. So few games since have tapped into that sort of emotional and psychological response because marketing trends seem to indicate that this sort of experience, singular and powerful as it may be, isn’t what the majority of gamers are looking for. The wide-spread critical acclaim of Eternal Darkness and its die-hard fans can’t compare to the masses clamoring for the next Halo game, at least in terms of spending power. Shooting or bludgeoning zombies over and over in various arenas is simpler than setting up a situation where facing a single creature can be a pants-wetting experience, and while it might be unfair to call the fans of the former sort of game “simple”, the evidence seems to speak for itself. As much as I will admit to enjoying blasting legions of shambling corpses, there are times when my brain cries out for something more, some immersive storytelling, an experience that means something. Eternal Darkness fits that bill perfectly, and when my brain starts making those noises I’m likely to play it again. The uninitiated player would hopefully find it to be a unique and unforgettable experience … if they survive.
Yahtzee put it best. Released in 2007, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed is a decent game with an interesting concept and good story let down by a few things that I’m going to dive into right now. This isn’t really a review, though I’m filing it as such. It’s more of a ‘first impressions’ overview because I got about three hours into the game, realized how much tedium I’d have to repeat and decided I’d finished wasting my time with it and went back to wasting my time with World of Warcraft.
One of the things that I really enjoyed about the Prince of Persia games on the PS2 was the free running you could do, basically holding down two buttons in such a way that the rather charming and very human prince of thieves jumps, swings, runs and leaps across ancient palaces full of nasty traps and nastier enemies made of sand. However, you were always going from point A to B, so any sense of freedom engendered by this mode of transportation seemed to deflate once you arrived. Then again, it was also buoyed up by knowing exactly where you were going.
In Assassin’s Creed, you’re free to run, jump, swing and fall on your face anywhere in the 11th century Holy Land you damn well please. That is if the guards aren’t trying to turn you into chunky salsa. But let me back up and talk about the story.
From the promotional art and trailers it seemed that the game was an action-adventure-platformer set in the aforementioned Holy Land where you play an assassin dispatching some of those dirty amoral Christians everybody loves hating so much. But Ubisoft lied to us. Assassin’s Creed is really about this guy named Desmond, strapped to a table in a lab located twenty minutes into the future where an evil scientist who really isn’t Dr. Breen from Half-Life 2 wants to mine the genetic memories of his 11th century ancestor, Altaiir. Now, I have to give Ubisoft props for making an action protagonist who’s of Middle Eastern descent and not characterizing him as a crazed fundamental Jihadist. Then again, Altaiir was just a touch more bland and emotionless than Desmond himself, but at least he wasn’t pursuing his targets the way Glenn Beck pursues anybody with a functioning frontal lobe or decent sense of morality.
Ah, shit, I promised I’d keep politics & religion out of this blog, didn’t I. Dammit.
Anyway, the game. Altaiir is tasked with taking down a series of extremely nasty Crusaders who are making life miserable for pretty much everybody and begins to uncover an ancient battle between his people, the Assassins, and a rather well-organized secret order of amoral knights called Templars. The Templars tend to get the short end of the stick in historical fiction, big examples being Kingdom of Heaven and anything Dan Brown writes, while at other times they’re actually shown to be somewhat virtuous, i.e. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Knowing some of the members of their spiritual descendants, the Freemasons, I find it hard to believe that the Templars are as dirty and horrible as some like to characterize them. However, that’s the route Assassin’s Creed goes, and Altaiir has quite a few pseudo-pious throats to puncture.
However, there’s a lot standing between you and your targets. Every time you jump into a new memory, you begin at your home base, which is at the top of a mountain far from any sort of Western civilization. While I can appreciate this from a historical perspective, as Alamut was indeed used by the Hashshashins as a refuge and fortress, walking down from the peak all the way down to the stables every single time was pretty much the definition of tedium. When you do get to the stables, you have to resist the urge to gallop off to your next target, since the Crusaders who patrol the roads of the Holy Land don’t want you to hurt yourself by riding too fast, and why don’t you have any papers for that horse? You need to get your horse inspected and registered every 12 months, or they’ll slap you with a fine. And by ‘fine’ I mean ‘longsword up the ass.’
Anyway, so you’ve hiked all the way down Alamut and gotten to Jerusalem or whereever at a slightly faster pace than your own brisk walk by having your horse do a brisk walk. Time to get your stabbing on, right? Wrong! You need to ‘gather intelligence’. And by ‘gather intelligence’ I mean ‘run around doing chores at the behest of NPCs before someone will tell you where the damn target is.’ You deliver messages, beat up bad guys (but without killing them, that’d summon the legions of Crusaders waiting around the corner to slay you for Jesus), sweep chimneys, walk dogs, babysit, run to the store, help little old ladies across the street and generally do everything for everybody in sight like this is an 11th-century MMOG and you’re trying to grind your way up to a more impressive hood.
When you finally find out where your target is, Assassin’s Creed adds something to the ‘good’ column under ‘breathtaking environments’, ‘intuitive free-running’ and ‘original story-framing idea’. You plan your route to where the target’s hanging out to make sure you avoid being seen by his cronies, make your way there stealthily either by moving through the crowd or via a tricky Parkour sequence that belies the peacefulness of the scene, leap onto the bad guy and slam your retractable blade into their larynx. Awesome!
But wait – the target has something to say. In fact, these guys have a lot to say. Even after you’ve sprung your sharp implement of holy death and driven it home, they’ll clearly tell you something about the ongoing conspiracy or their apple-cheeked children or something, with nary a gurgle or spattering of blood. Are they telepathic or something? How can you soliloquize when you’ve got a gaping hole in your voice box?
Following a successful assassination you are rubber-banded back into Desmond, who has a near-future room to hang out in between the near-future experiments on his near-future brain. And once you’re strapped back into the Animus, whammo, you’re back on top of Alamut again. It was around the third time that this happened that my patience for the game ran out.
“It’s like you’re enjoying a nice (if somewhat bland) grilled cheese sandwich livened up by intermittent lumps of Branston pickle, when someone snatches it from your mouth and replaces it with a spoonful of watery ejaculate between two peices of wood.” – Yahtzee
I do consider that a bit of a shame, because Assassin’s Creed had a lot going for it. The story seemed interesting and the free-running and sealth-assassining was fun, but the tedium of going from one place to another, all of the crap I had to take care of before I could stab with impunity got on my nerves and the lepers and beggars who ran up to me begging for cash really tempted me to break the first rule of the Creed, which is ‘Never harm an innocent’. I harmed quite a few, only to get desynchronized (read: killed) when the Crusaders nearby jumped on me for giving the beggar a discouraging poke. With my hidden blade. In the face.
This turned into a bit more of a rant than I expected, but I wanted to revisit my thoughts on Assassin’s Creed because I’m playing the sequel when I’m not sinking more time into the Mass Effect universe. So how does Assassin’s Creed II stack up? I’ll let you know when I finish playing it. Yes, I’m going to finish it, which says something for it right there. And here’s something else.
You know how Yahtzee described Assassin’s Creed as, at first, a nice little grilled cheese & Branston sandwich? Assassin’s Creed II is, so far, the same sandwich with a nice thin layer of prosciutto added for extra deliciousness. And nobody’s come to snatch it yet, which is a good thing because I love prosciutto to pieces.
Fair warning: this is a post that deals with my opinions, reflections and influences from growing up in the 80s. You may consider these the ramblings of a crazy old man if you like.
It’s also going to be picture-heavy, since I’m a bit strapped for time.
I grew up in the 80s. I was in my formative years during the Regean administration, the height of NASA’s Space Shuttle program, the tail end of the arcade’s heyday and the final years of the Cold War. I think it’s safe to say that, even from a young age, my tastes in entertainment verged towards escapism, especially speculative fiction in the form of movies. I watched a lot of movies.
Some of the movies I grew up loving and watching repeatedly to catch nuances and relive key moments have not, as they say, aged well. Some still hold up as entire moviegoing experiences while others look or feel a bit dated. I think there’s fertile ground for discussion in these films, especially if younger generations fail to understand why I consider them so influential. I don’t expect everybody to fall in love with these films the way I did. In fact, if I were to watch a couple of these films again I’m not sure my feelings about them would be as strong now as they were then. However, I think it’s safe to say that, for most of them, they can be considered classics in one regard or another.
I’d like to go in-depth on a few of these “nerd classics” another time, but for now, here’s some of the films that helped shape me as a movie geek and storyteller which some of you young whipper-snappers don’t respect, appreciate or even know about.
Spoiler
Feel free to discuss a bit here and now, and expect more from me on these in the future.
