Friday Quistis Blogging

There is something about Quistis Trepe. I am not sure what it is.

Further Degeneration

Just in case you thought I'd taken a break from being a Resident Evil fanboy, let me point out that the upcoming CG animated movie Resident Evil: Degeneration now has an offical US website. There's nothing much there at the moment except for the teaser trailer and a promise that more is to come in a week's time...

Reviews +2

I've added another couple of reviews to the Interactive Fiction Database, this time of Vespers and Downtown Tokyo, Present Day (pictured above).

I've been in a reviewing kind of mood lately, so I finally made use of my account at the Interactive Fiction Database to post reviews of a couple of games: Kathleen M. Fischer's Masquerade and an adaptation of Metroid.

"Take that! Ha!"

It perhaps indicates that I've reached that dreaded point in any gamer's life when you realise that it's taking you months to complete lengthy games, but I've devoted a lot of my Wii time to Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles this past month precisely because I know that it's easy to pick up and put down. This is a game divided into discrete, bite-size, but inter-related chapters - each of which, while often nicely challenging, can typically be completed in twenty or thirty minutes. Compared to the main line of Resident Evil games – exploration-based with an emphasis on the conservation of ammunition, full of tough boss fights and with save points moderately spaced – this all-guns blazing rail shooter is definitely Resident Evil: The Casual Game. Not that this is a bad thing.

As the title suggests, Umbrella Chronicles spans the events before Resident Evil 4, detailing the rise and fall of the Umbrella corporation from the first grisly events in the Raccoon City forests to its last desperate gambit. Along the way we retread, in rail shooter format, the events of Resident Evil 0, Resident Evil and Resident Evil 3, before unveiling the previously unrevealed swansong of Umbrella, deep in the frozen wastes of Siberia. Completing these chapters also unlocks a number of side-misions, filling in the stories of secondary characters, with an especial focus on unflappable, black-clad Albert Wesker.

Gameplay in Umbrella Chronicles is, on the face of it, very simple. The wii remote acts as a pointer for a set of crosshairs and pulling the trigger-like B button fires your character's gun. The screen takes a first person view, creeping carefully through claustrophobic corridors and devastated streets. Perhaps because this movement is largely out of your control, Umbrella Chronicles does a better job of creating a sense of POV than most first person shooters. At times the characters do seem to be a bit dense in terms of when they choose to look at obvious threats, but typically there's a nice pace to things, as the view sweeps around fearfully, with little clue as to when danger will strike.

An additional layer of complexity is added in the form of special weapons with limited ammunition, and difficult-to-perform critical hits that can allow you to defeat dangerous or plentiful foes with your infinite ammo handgun. There's also a fair bit of button bashing and wii-mote waving to avoid attacks during boss fights and cut scenes; while quickly shaking the wii-mote after a zombie latches onto you will cause your character to pull off a stylish counter-attack. Some of the characters seem to just perform the same boring punch, but Rebecca uses a grenade, Jill tasers and kicks (while shouting "Take that! Ha!" a line I must have heard about a hundred times already), while Wesker and Hunk perform their trademark 'thrust punch' (think The Matrix) and 'neck snap' (a move as balletic as it is brutal) respectively. It's an interesting mechanic in that it shows how a player who is doing badly can both be leant a hand by a game (when it's been a bad day for aiming, I've counter-attacked my way through whole hoards of zombies) and even be given a conciliatory reward in the form of a neat little cut scene (and catchy exclamation - "Take that! Ha!").

As a digest of the story so far (RE4 and RE: Code Veronica notwithstanding), Umbrella Chronicles naturally seems like a good stepping-on point for those unfamiliar with the series, while by fleshing out some of the events taking place in the shadows, there's also plenty here for die-hard fans as well. Similarly, the system of ranks and rewards means that playing for fun, or playing to obsessively hone your skills, are both equally valid approaches to the game. Above all, though, owning Umbrella Chronicles means I can always spend twenty minutes killing zombies with some of my favourite video game characters. Simple, undemanding, engaging, and above all: fun.

Friday Franchise Blogging

The Resident Evil franchise.

(I am missing a few.)

"Gotta find the exit... Gotta find that exit, to Paradise!"

Travis Touchdown, a detached, unemployed loser, proud owner of a light sabre beam katana purchased in an internet auction, suddenly finds himself the 11th ranked assassin in America. Naturally, he's now bent on getting to number one, in the hopes of amassing fame, fortune and girls - and the only way to do that is to defeat the ten assassins ranked above him. So begins No More Heroes, a unique action-hybrid game about slicing people up with a light sabre beam katana and working in dead-end jobs.

There is some controversy over whether great fountains of blood were inserted into the American version of No More Heroes, or removed from the European and Japanese version - but personally, I can't think of anything more suited to my copy of this game than the way defeated enemies disintegrate into a cloud of black pixels, spurting coins from their severed necks. One of the bravest things that No More Heroes does is unashamedly embrace its gamey-ness.

When every other action game is trying to be the same pseudo-cinematic, over-serious Halo clone, it's nice to see something that's full of beeps and boops, pixellated icons and slacker humour. The characters talk in cartoonish quips, the tone varies on a whim, and those silly little things like 'plot' and 'theme' - while they may be lurking in the background - are happily ridiculed and often sacrificed on the altar of good old-fashioned gameplay. When a useful shopkeeper character dies in the middle of the game, he's still to be found in his old spot, as a ghost, just as able to take your money and provide his services - with hardly a word mentioned about it. No More Heroes is a game that puts more thought into any single instance of slapstick humour than into providing an over-arching sense of emotional progression or resolution. And, hey, why the hell not?

The number one complaint that everyone has with No More Heroes is the attempt to integrate a free-roaming aspect to it. Much of your time in the game takes place in the city of Santa Destroy, driving around its streets on your ridiculously over-sized motorcycle and scouring its alleyways for treasure. And this quickly gets pretty boring. It didn't have to be this way, of course - I've happily spent hours just wandering around Liberty City in GTA3 - but the trouble is that there really are only two things to do in Santa Destroy - drive between established locations and search for treasure. On top of that, the city is completely uninteresting - there are no distinctive building or street designs, no real ambience, hardly any sounds except those of passing cars. If Santa Destroy had any kind of character at all, this free-roaming aspect might actually be pleasant. As it is, it's merely bearable.

Where No More Heroes really excels is in its humorous minigames (trying to work a pump at a petrol station, for example, without setting yourself on fire) and its combat. Great use is made of the wii remote for all these things. In particular, I like the combination of button-bashing to pull off basic attacks and wii-remote waving to perform finishing moves. Still, the battles against hordes of badguys are pretty repetitive, and although they're usually over quite quickly, they do get tiresome after a while.

So, actually, where No More Heroes really really excels is in its boss fights. The ten assassins you have to defeat are all extremely unusual, well-defined characters. The conversations they have with Travis are entertaining enough, but the battles, in which they get up to all sorts of neat tricks, are extremely fun, challenging and more-ish. In particular, I think it's great how the assassins' over-the-top personalities are perfectly integrated into the unique style and ambience of each of these fights. There's the girl who prances around in a pink dress in between trying to brutally beat your brains out with a baseball bat, for example, or the guy who changes into a superhero costume and swoops around a television studio suspended from wires.

So, yes, it's flawed. But that's probably chiefly because this is a game with a strong creative streak, unafraid to take risks. Perhaps the best way to describe No More Heroes is as "Quentin Tarantino meets Super Mario". You'll know if that appeals to you.

Unsuitable Content

Well, I completed the main story of Resident Evil 4, still leaving a fistful of side stories and mini-games to master - and of course I want to play the whole thing a second time with my upgraded weapons. My completion time was 16 hours and 40 minutes (which probably corresponds pretty closely to the amount of free time I've had over the past week or so). I was expecting to get a poor rating, but, hey: no ratings! Which, personally, I think is great. It would be a shame to have such an intricate, expansive world and then encourage players to rush through it.

The, uh, 'not zombies' are fantastic. A heady mixture of 28 Days Later, The Thing and Deliverance - but also very original in their realisation. An intelligent enemy, driven by hatred and manipulated by religion, evoking the unwashed masses of unfamiliar lands, fond of chainsaws and pitchforks, eerily degenerated, prone to obscene transformation... Wish I'd come up with something like that myself.

I particularly love the way RE4 continues the Ada/Leon relationship from Resident Evil 2 (a game I've raved about before). And I liked all the 'good guys', even Princess Useless (or Ashley as she's also known) - although the bad guys were a bit too cookie-cutter for my liking - especially compared to previous Resi outings. Special mention to the two minor male characters: Luis Sera the 'mysterious Spaniard' and Mike the semi-anonymous helicopter pilot.

Like Half Life 2, RE4 also demonstrates once again that there is no excuse for games that repeat themselves (Halo, anyone?). One moment you're barricaded in a besieged house with Luis, the next you're riding a runaway mine cart, or trying to convince a huge monster to stand over the trap door to a molten-iron furnace. You get the impression that if Capcom excluded anything from their brainstorming sessions, they must have been the really out-of-this-world ideas.

The aesthetic is gorgeous - or horrible, rather, but in a good way. Muted palettes, leafless trees, ruin and piled garbage abound. Brilliant use, in places, of dark scenes lit primarily by lightning. The laboratory right at the end (there's always a laboratory at the end in Resident Evil) was nicely grimy, rusted and littered, like a former torture chamber that has since gone downhill.

The game's themes are interesting to boot, like you get the impression the Japanese developers were trying to recreate the neo-con versus Islamic fundamentalist conflict, without realising that neo-cons are mostly fundamentalist Christians themselves. Leon's quip that, "Faith and money will lead you nowhere!" is brilliant, but utterly unlike anything you'd expect to be coming from a clean-cut US agent (although Leon is arguably not so clean cut after his stay in Raccoon City).

Right at the end, though, the sequence after the credits... A game containing, as this does, decapitations, impalements, exploding heads, grotesque mutation and so on - that's all well and good. But right at the end, when Leon re-establishes contact with Hunnigan and tells her she looks cute without her glasses... Absolutely unconscionable. But the game's certainly good enough to overlook it.

In Which I Join Contemporary Mainstream Gaming

I am now the proud owner of a bouncing baby Wii. Until now, as far as contemporary games go, I've been stuck playing PC games from before the advent of hardware transform and lighting - ie. the most recent games you can play with a typical home PC. I've played Half Life 2, of course, and Sam and Max (though that's edging back onto the indie scene), but it's nice just to have a piece of hardware that can run relatively modern (albeit not as nuclear-powered as those for the XBox 360 or PS3) commercial games without any fuss.

If I'm quiet over the next few days, it's because I'm busy gunning down feral villagers in Resident Evil 4...

"I am a misunderstood robot"

Image credit: mmechtley
Some rights reserved

Cynicism is the lingua franca of the modern videogame industry and it is also a heavy albatross weighing down on everyone trying to push the industry forward. [Independent game developer Jonathan] Mak’s demonstration at [the Games Developers Conference] today is, in my mind, the most audacious thing anyone has done at a platform that large, and, if there is any justice in the universe, it will be a historic event. We’ve become obsessed with technology and hyper-classification as the games industry settles fatly into a console-centric medium. In two minutes Mak reinforced everything that is powerful and beautiful about games, in a way that was more immediate and meaningful than a million cutscenes or a thousand parallel processors crunching a trillion polygons each.

Just what did Jonathan Mak do that was so amazing? Find out here.

Hat tip: TIGSource

What R-Type of Manly-Man are You?

In ripping off H.R Giger's art style, does R-Type end up depicting a Freudian nightmare of homophobia and misogyny? Game Cabaret argue that yes, yes it does.

Resident Evil De-Degeneration

(Warning: zombie violencing)

While the trailer above isn't all that slick, it at least gives us the gist. Yes, I bet Capcom were front of the queue when Advent Children (I reviewed it here) opened in cinemas. "You mean we can take our expertise in computer animation and make our own movies extending the storyline of our games instead of just letting Hollywood make trashy cash-in 'adaptations', pissing on our work like a less polite form of zombie dog?!"

Granted, the Final Fantasy games are a quantum leap ahead of Resident Evil in the visual storytelling stakes, but Paul W.S. Anderson has already set the bar pretty low. To be honest, I think many fans will just be happy with a faithful Resi movie, regardless of how rubbish it is.

And this trailer definitely has "For the fans!" written all over it. Resi aficionados will be quivering with excitement at the prospect of the further adventures of Leon and Claire, while I suspect those who only know the movies (or are completely innocent of the whole franchise) will be left singularly bemused.

Text the Halls - Review-Me-Do

As promised, here are my thoughts on the other Text the Halls entrants. If I were to compare them to this year's bevy of IFComp games, I'd say that the Text the Halls entrants were less technically proficient, but a lot more lighthearted, fun, varied and - dare I say it - interesting.

The TIGSource forums are down (pining for holidaying TIG head-honcho Derek, I suspect), so I'm linking to each (non-online) game's page at the IFWiki instead. Alternatively, download the whole lot (except for Breathe) courtesy of Terry by clicking here.

When it gets down to it, I don't think there's any way you could order these games and not find something undeservedly at the bottom, so I've gone for alphabetical order, cowardly allowing Sesame Street to take the heat.

---

Breathe - Daniel Benmergui

Who'd think getting your head stuck in a sweater would be so dangerous and difficult a situation? Still haven't beaten this game, though it's very addictive.

Capture Santa! - James Higgins

It's not an especially good sign when you find yourself solving puzzles without understanding how you did it. It's worse when the game is constantly giving you heavy hints about what to do and you still struggle to make it respond to sensible commands. Capture Santa! is full of neat ideas that the author clearly wasn't entirely sure how to implement. Some tough testing might help to kick this game into shape. As it stands, I found it difficult to enjoy. Sorry. T_T

The Christmas Party - OldGrover

Definitely wins the award for best implementation, and it was even written in ALAN, which doesn't have the best reputation for that sort of thing. The Christmas Party relies on the fact that people like sticking things together, and gives you a straightforward but expansive goal from the outset. It's simple enough, and full of enough things to do that it holds your interest and makes the nicely festive atmosphere work well.
(Disclosure: I was one of the beta testers for this game.)

Midwinter Rites – Colossus Entertainment

An unashamed homage to the text adventures of old, complete with retro music and fantasy clichés. Great, simple fun.

My Magic Tire Hoax – nd

God, I hate this game. In particular, I hate the fact that I didn't write it. Because it's great. Sure, it needs a beta tester to poke and prod and add to the implementation and change some of the default responses and deal with some strange (occasionally game-breaking) bugs, but the setting is so imaginative and atmospheric and the characters are so believably strange and compelling, and the whole thing's like Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet had a love child and Philip K. Dick was the midwife and when it grew up, it was this game. I love it, it's brilliant - I hate it, I'm so jealous...

Panorama - Ereth

Don't judge this game by your first impressions. The first thing you encounter is a poetic text dump musing about winter and its oh-so quirky foibles – no thanks. The next thing that happens is you discover that only directional commands have been implemented – I'm sorry, what? But if you stick with this for more than half a minute, you'll realise that Panorama has a huge depth of implementation in its own way. As a snowflake floating on the wind, you have a large and varied environment to explore, and a lot of places to fall. It's a game that teeters a little on the line between evocative emotion and mushy sentiment, but if you play around for long enough you're bound to find at least one ending that will warm the cockles of your heart.

The Snowman – Caio Miranda

The Snowman is a game with a lot of implementation issues – endless disambiguation, a confusing map, misleading instructions, puzzles that provide no indication when you're getting close to the solution...

And yet, The Snowman is also huge fun. A light-hearted, surreal, slightly sociopathic game, utterly insane, joyfully irreverent. I think this is what Text the Halls was supposed to be about: not a masterpiece, but a great piece of very unusual entertainment.
(Note: There's an improved version of this game that I've yet to play.)

TIGSaga -Terry, Kinten, Akhel, Xander, Haowan, Shinygerbil, and #tigIRC

A Wiki-made choose-your-own-adventure created at the last minute, full of TIGS in-jokes. Well-written, imaginative and unique, but there aren't actually that many branches, and they don't go all that far. Its heart is definitely in the right place, though - somewhere between its monocle and its top hat. No, really. o_O

Xmaton – Simeon Maxein

Aha! A gadget game. Push buttons in the right order to win, trial and error with amusing misfires. It's kind of annoying that it only seems to reward you for achieving absolute perfection, but it's simple enough that I was compelled to keep trying. Your reward for winning, by the way, is just to be told that you won, but getting everything to fit together properly is satisfying in its own way.

---

That's it. I think there was another game in the competition, but I don't remember what. Probably nothing important.

Running Out of Year

The year is almost over. It is a time to reflect, a time when we are more likely to notice that this day is one that was preceded by another one 365 days earlier, and then to obsess about what we did in the intervening period, and about what we hope to do in the next such period.

It is a bandwagon I would like to jump on, please. Here is some cool stuff I found in 2007. Much of it actually coming from other years (but not years in the future, as I am not a time traveller - or AM I?!) because I am always behind on everything and they have been making cool stuff for billions of years, so give me a break, okay?

---Of the movies I saw:

A Scanner Darkly
Funny, moving, strange and deeply human psychedelia.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society
Politically aware cyberpunk, demonstrates that Kenji Kamiyama can spin a decent yarn if you let him do it in a more cinematic format. Needs more colons.

The Host
Character-driven monster movie provides laughs, scares and tears.

---Of the books I read:

His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Breathtaking imagination and heart.

A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick
Because my record got stuck.

Pushing Ice - Alistair Reynolds
All this is fleeting, the most solid buildings just motes of dust.

---Comics and manga:

Lost at Sea - Bryan Lee O'Malley
So adolescent angst can be evocative and touching. Now I shall have to eat my hat. Pass the pepper.

Death Note - Tsugumi Ohba, Takeshi Obata
Teenager becomes vengeful angel. World-class detective pursues! But I only read the first volume. Why? Because I got distracted. Thus forms my first new year's resolution.

One Piece - Eiichiro Oda
Why did I read so much of this stuff? And there are like a million volumes of it! My name is Pacian, and I am addicted to dumb stories about pirates.

---TV Shows

Battlerstar Galactica
Intelligent science fiction on television? Someone should have done this before!

Primeval
It is better than Doctor Who. It is better than Doctor Who. It is better than- you get the idea.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: 2nd Gig
Didn't live up to its potential, but full of cool ideas, beautiful visuals and visceral action.

---Games

Nelly Cootalot
So... cute... can't breathe...

Art of Theft
Actually, I could probably have spent all those hours doing something much more productive.

Sam and Max
They're back! And some of it is excellent! And some of it is not so excellent, but we will ignore that because these two seemed to chime more with my personality than Lost Pig or Aquaria or other - arguably better - games. Tomorrow I am probably going to think of a really stonking game I played in 2007 and kick myself.

---People

You, and you, and especially you. On which note, I wish you all a happy and creative New Year!

Friday Interactive Fiction Blogging

Masquerade by Kathleen M. Fischer.

From the dark depths of the Space Year 2000 comes this nice demonstration of one way to create compelling, (mostly) puzzle-less IF: by placing the emphasis on making difficult decisions rather than on unlocking doors or navigating dialogue trees.

Abe Lincoln Must Die

Episode 4 of the first season of Sam and Max is now available for free. Go download it if you don't already know why a dog in a hat is the greatest thing ever to happen to the world. Or just mess about with Sybil's matchmaking questionnaire. "An elbow that can connect to the internet!"

And now I feel really guilty for not having finished episodes 5 and 6 yet. Something else I'm supposed to be doing.

Via: this piece of garden furniture.

Classic Game: Tetris

In a recent issue of Retro Gamer, Stuart Campbell wrote with great nostalgia of the era when games magazines would simply take photographs of television and handheld screens, producing ethereal optical effects. So, the image above isn't a bug, it's a feature. In other news, I now have a headache and a few dozen really blurry photos of my old Gameboy.

I never really notice Halloween, so I didn't think to swap this entry with Resident Evil 2 earlier, but even if I had, is there any terror quite like that of Level 9, High 5?

Classic Game: Resident Evil 2

"What's going on in this town? "
"I don't have a clue, darlin'. By the time I noticed something was wrong, the entire city was infested with zombies!"

Well, it's a classic to me.

Classic Game: The Chaos Engine

Sometime in the last century
an experimenter with
time, space and early computers
created a bizarre machine...

I was never any good at this game, but the strong aesthetic had a big effect on me. There'll always be a part of my imagination labelled: 'inspired by The Chaos Engine'.

Classic Game: Wing Commander

A scan from the famous 'Claw Marks' manual. My copy now smells strange, probably because the staples are rusty.

I'm wondering whether Maniac was my least favourite wingman. He was at least my second least favourite, always biting more off than he could chew and often ending up dead, but at least he didn't turn tail and run at the first scratch on his armour like the mind-bogglingly inappropriately nicknamed Knight.