I am going to tell you a story about an island. This island will soon cease to exist, and this will be no great loss, because no life resides on it. This island is, in fact, unimportant in every way possible. Yet since first visiting it ten years ago, it has regularly appeared in my mind, unbidden, like a recurring dream. I feel a sense of nostalgia for my time there, and I’ve never been able to explain why; I’ve never even told another soul of its existence
The island has no name. It is located off the eastern coast of a larger landmass that, itself, has no proper title; it is referred to only as the New Conglomerate Sanctuary, as it is the home base of a militaristic faction of the same name. From this base, the New Conglomerate battles the Terran Republic and the Vanu Sovereignty for control of ten continents on the planet of Auraxis. This conflict forms the backdrop of the game Planetside, which I first started playing in beta form in 2002.
Planetside was the first Massively Multiplayer Online First-Person Shooter, or MMOFPS, and I feel it has never been properly recognized for the landmark achievement it was. This was the first game to give online shootfests a real meaning. By introducing a persistent world, RPG-like character progression, and factions with opposing ideologies that were often publically adopted and espoused by their players, the battles took on a weight greater than the abstracted warfare of its peers. The game was released ahead of its time; the currently available computing and network technology was not ready for its design, and so the actual combat that formed the core of the game was mediocre at best. Planetside initially achieved brisk sales when it was released in May 2003, but by 2005 server populations had plummeted, and it has limped along in a more limited state ever since. When it’s remembered, it’s remembered for the sheer complexity and depth of its massive battles; Quinton Smith’s “Planetside: The 1%”is possibly the best of these. And while the battles were glorious, in all honesty I don’t have much of a memory of them. I remember the down time; training with new weapons, flying above quiet swaths of mountainous terrain, choosing what skills I would learn next. But none of these memories are as strong as those of my time on the island.
I don’t know when I first visited it, but I can guess. I have always loved the experience of virtual flight, but even more than that I relished the experience of take-off and landing. I can’t explain why, only that I find it calming, a sort of meditative exercise. And so I must have been flying around the sanctuary in a Mosquito, a tiny one-man fighter craft, when I spotted the island and thought it would make a good landing spot.
Maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe I was depressed, and wanted to “get away” from both the world and the big battles. Maybe I was trying to create an artificial moment of meaning, to evoke something from this mechanical landscape. I’ll never be sure. All I can know is that I landed my craft, stepped out, and wandered the short length of the island. I do not remember its exact shape or size, and am only guessing that it is even the one pictured in this post. But it does not matter; all the islands were the same, equally barren, equally useless. My island, like the others, was merely a lump in the ocean, a slight mountainous cress with some simple grass textures and nothing else.
But I do remember staying there. I stood by my aircraft and looked out to sea, even though I knew there was nothing there; the only way outside the sanctuary was through warp gates that instantly sent the traveler to other continents or to a regularly scheduled shuttle that allow a passenger to drop to a combat site in an orbital pod. The ocean merely spread into a void. There was nothing to see. But I gazed out nonetheless.
I think that’s what I found so comforting about the island, and why I kept returning to it throughout my time at Planetside. In battle I was mediocre at best, and there were always limits to my understanding that put my virtual life—and actual ego—in danger. But on the island, I knew everything there was to know and could see everything there was to see. I was also absolutely safe; enemies could not attack the sanctuary unless they controlled every other continent, a Herculean task that was never accomplished during my time playing the game. Even if an invasion did commence, the island was so far from anything of tactical value that it would be ignored. I could rule this island, and no one would care.
There was no equivalent to this virtual space in the physical world. I had a safe and mostly comfortable home growing up, but the real world has a certain messiness to even the tidiest of rooms. There is always an improvement that can be made, always something to draw my attention and keep me from being at total peace. The island was a perfect haven during my adolescent struggle for control over my life and my mind.
It’s still there; a single instance of Planetside is still running on some group of servers, though it will probably be shut down shortly after this year’s release of Planetside 2, a full-on remake of the original. I could return to the island any time I wished. But I feel no need to; the memory is enough to sustain my nostalgia, and I suspect that, were I to go back, I would be unable to recapture whatever it was I had found down during my initial visits. But the image of this place of serenity remained with me long after I stopped playing or thinking of Planetside, and I suspect it will continue to be a peculiar source of strength for many years to come.
When it comes to pop culture, there seems to be a consistent nostalgia for whatever was happening 20 years prior. In high school my peers seemed convinced that the ’80s were an unparallelled period of great film and music. It goes without saying that none of these bozos were actually old enough to remember anything substantial about the decade, and they had the luxury of ignoring the synthesizer-driven hair bands and focusing on how cool the Brat Pack was (or seemed to be, if you were 15.)
As the capstone of a malaise-filled weekend I chose to watch 1994′s Clerks, a Historically Important Independent Film that I’ve somehow managed to never see. It held up much better than I expected, and I kept marveling at how distinct and, well, fresh it seemed for an 18-year-old movie that was influential enough that its tone and style have surely been copied many times over (not least by Kevin Smith himself—it probably helps that I haven’t seen any of his other films). I thought most of the jokes were funny, the performances were charming, and if ever there was a story that could be told well on a $28,000 budget, it was this. But none of these factors were really enough to explain how much I was drawn in to the film. I finally put it together about halfway through, as the bullshit academic in me went “My word! This is the very essence of the early-to-mid ’90s!” and I was overcome with a wave of nostaglia.
Dan Pinchbeck, the British game designer/academic behind The Chinese Room and Dear Esther, was gracious enough to answer a few questions that popped into my head when playing the recently-released remake of Dear Esther. Most of these questions have to do with chages between the remake and the 2008 original (which I wrote a chapter of my thesis on), and so contain spoilers for both of them. The questions, and Pinchbeck’s always thoughtful answers, are below. Read the rest of this entry »
Way, way back in 2010, game journalists N’Gai Croal and Stephen Totilo came up with a new twist on the tired old “Greatest Games of All Time” list, which they called “Canon Fodder.” They started with GameRanking’s (incomplete) list of the best-reviewed games of all time, which neither of them particularly liked. They then came up with a sort of populist-debate-meets-game-show process for refining the list, as explained by Totilo:
“N’Gai and I then invited game developers to each make one of two moves. They could 1) swap the positions of any two games on the list or 2) remove any game and replace it with a new game in that removed game’s spot.”
The game was held over two rounds, in front of a live gamer audience at PAX East and West, respectively. A developer would go out, replace or swap a game, and leave the audience to cheer or boo until the next dev took the stage. You can read the write-ups at the link above. I think some of the decisions are pretty interesting. But after six months and 25 moves, they went from a list that most people disagreed with to a list that slightly fewer people disagreed with. And even that was only an accomplishment if quality was decided by majority vote.
Hyperspace Delivery Boy! never got the audience that it deserved.
Mind you, this is how nine out of ten retrospectives begin, but this is an extreme example. Back when digital gaming libraries were starting to get established, I cataloged my collection over at Gamespot. It had a feature that let you see how many other people owned a game, and Hyperspace Delivery Boy! was by far the most obscure game in my collection, owned by a total of…four people. Only a fraction of the internet gaming population actually used Gamespot’s system, but it was still minute in purely relative terms; I couldn’t find a single other title in the database that had single-digit ownership numbers. In short: no one played this game.
Which is too bad, because there’s nothing else like it. In a game-spanning parody of countless FedEx quests, Hyperspace Delivery Boy! casts you as Guy Carrington, a—you guessed it—delivery boy who flies around a the galaxy delivering all sorts of ridiculous packages. Along the way, he encounters an array of offbeat characters, all sporting Tom Hall’s trademark dialog (characterized by a sort of understated whimsy, like someone quietly reading a Monty Python script at an open mic).
While HDB! sports elements of both the RPG and the graphic adventure, it’s ultimately best described as a puzzle game. The various monsters Guy encounters are the least of his worries, easily dispatched in some lightweight combat in one game mode and altogether absent in another. No, his foe is a most ancient evil that has plagued game protagonists since time immemorial: the crate.
Sure, sometimes crates seem innocuous enough. They’re mostly used as easy (and sometimes lazy) ways to define level boundaries. Sometimes they contain goodies. But by the early ’90s crates had become an object of scorn, mostly for use in the dreaded Crate Puzzle. Lara Croft would be doing her archealogical thing, delving into ancient ruins and shooting innocent wolves, when she’d come across a door that could only be unlocked by shifting crates (or stones, or barrels) around in a specific order. Millions of gamers screamed out in terror, and were suddenly silenced when their mom told them to shut the hell up. So you may be dismayed to learn that Hyperspace Delivery Boy! has crate puzzles. Lots of crate puzzles. Four entire planets full of crate puzzles. Crate puzzles are the meat of the game. Really.
To recap what we’ve learned so far: Hyperspace Delivery Boy! is a low-fi game released before the indie revolution had normalized homebrewed visuals, and was built on FedEx quests and crate puzzles, two of the most hated structures in all of gaming. One begins to see why it didn’t find an audience.
All of this makes explaining why it’s such a joy to play rather difficult. But I’ll give it my best shot.
The first charming element is the aforementioned writing. While acknowledging that most games have scripts that seem to have been assembled by the proverbial million monkeys, there are still enough releases with genuinely engaging narratives that it’s not that surprising when another one comes along. But even the best games tend to stay well within their genre, and you often have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen next (this is nowhere more true than celebrated game storytellers Bioware, whose narrative construction is just a wee bit predictable). Yet with Hyperspace Delivery Boy!, I never had the slightest idea what was going to happen next: just that it would be somewhere between amusing and laugh-out-loud funny, and that there’d eventually be a Dopefish cameo.
While this was the reward that drove me through a few frustrating puzzles, by and large they were actually fun in and of themselves. Which seems strange, but makes perfect sense if you think about it. I mean, there’s nothing inherently wrong with crate puzzles; like any puzzle format, they have rules, strategies, and varying degrees of difficulty; with a bit of creativity, you can easily make enough different crate puzzles to fill a game. The problem is they tend to appear where they’re least wanted. No one really wants to stop in the middle of Tomb Raider or Heretic to shove around some blocks. It grinds the rest of the game to a halt, and sticks out like a sore thumb. But when they’re the main attraction, when there is nothing standing between you and a screen full of crates…well, you start to work with it. Like all good puzzles, they oscillate between a sort of zen satisfaction and hair-pulling rage when you slide things into an unsolvable position (thankfully easily reset by exiting and re-entering the screen), but always deliver genuine satisfaction upon completion. And like that most elegant of puzzle games, Portal, there’s a real sense of learning throughout. When I started HDB!, I couldn’t shove two barrels together; now, I feel confident I could solve any crate puzzle thrown at me, even nine years after playing it.
The story behind Hyperspace Delivery Boy! is almost as unusual as the game itself. After the collapse of Ion Storm, co-founders John Romero and Tom Hall decided to take a back-to-basics approach to game development, and took things farther than most. Rather then heading up the traditional “small” 30-person dev team, they formed Monkeystone Games, containing all of 4 employees: Hall, Romero, Stevie Case (a level designer at Ion Storm and then-prominent Girl Gamer), and producer Brian Moon. They used little to no external help, going so far as to do the voice acting for HDB’s kooky cast themselves, which resulted in voices that made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in professionalism. With such famous talent behind it, you’d think the game would have at least some sort of cult following, like Hall’s previous effort Anachronox. But nope. I can honestly say that this post is the first thing I’ve read about the game since Gamespot’s 2002 review.
In an ideal universe, this entry would do its part to lift this little gem from its undeserved obscurity. Sadly, you couldn’t play it now if you wanted to. Hyperspace Delivery Boy! was digitally distributed before the likes of Steam, and with the Monkeystone web site long gone, there’s no where to buy it. And even if you wanted to pirate it, well, good luck; I suspect the game’s obscurity is such that the PC version is entirely absent from the internet. I don’t even have a copy anymore, having lost it during some computer upgrade.
There is hope, though! While nothing is confirmed, I’ve heard rumors that a remake is in the works. I can only hope so. Hyperspace Delivery Boy! represented a sincere, heartfelt approach to puzzle gaming that I haven’t seen the likes of since. Spacechem may be brilliant, but it doesn’t have a single exploding chicken. It doesn’t even have a crate.
Pet peeve of mine: back when I read Gamespot, I noticed that every year – bar none – they claimed that it had been one of the best years for gaming since X (usually 1998). They had no sense of relativity. It was embarrassing.
That said: 2011 was, in my opinion, the best year for gaming since, I dunno, 2000? And probably better. Purely for my subjective tastes, mind you; I’m not sure the industry as a whole made a great leap forward, though I do think the greater variety among AAA titles was a step in right direction.
Most years I struggle to make a list of ten of games I really loved. This year I have a list of games that I whole-heartedly endorse, and even more that I haven’t had a chance to play. There are, in fact, so many presumably-great games I haven’t touched that it would be insincere of me to make any sort of “Best of 2011” list. Instead, I’ll just list five games I really, really liked, with more to come.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Like pretty much any devote Deus Ex fan, I had some issues with this. Third person popped up more than I’d like. My decisions never really carried the weight I felt they should. The plot was too sparse. And, of course, the enormously stupid boss fights. But it also did so much right, so much more than I expected. Both the art design and the soundtrack would be in any Top Ten I’d make in those respective categories. The combat was excellent, which was a particular surprise given its progeny. And the stealth worked. It worked so well that I won’t be surprised if Thief 4 ends up being the better game. At the end of the year, I may have had more fun with Skyrim; but Human Revolution was, I believe, the greater accomplishment. Eidos Montreal was fighting an uphill battle in trying to make a game that was both a worthy successor to the original and something that could appeal to a mass audience. Somehow, they pulled it off.
Bastion
There’s no fair way to compare this Xbox Live Indie Game That Could to sprawling, big-budget releases like Skyrim or Human Revolution, which is why doing any sort of hard ranking is pretty stupid (even if they are great for discussion). Bastion reminds me of Portal in that it is a game that I can’t find any fault with. Every element of it is fantastic on its own, and it is short enough that it leaves you wanting more. It may not be perfect, but it is without overt flaws.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
I’m still in the midst of this one, and have probably seen no more than a third of its content; yet I’ve logged enough hours that I feel I have a good enough grasp of it to put it on this list. This is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Bastion: there is a gaping chasm between Skyrim and perfection, and I could easily make a list of 100 things wrong with the game. Yet at least some of this is forgivable because of its scope in ambition: so much is wrong simply because there is so much, and the vast majority of the muchness is wonderful. Human Revolution gets a higher spot because there is a real sense that Bethesda was, at times, coasting, particularly on aspects relating to the PC release (modders designed a better UI in a matter of days) and role-playing (it doesn’t really want you to do it, which is a bummer for a theoretically non-linear RPG). But set against just how enjoyable the province of Skyrim is to inhabit, these are quibbles. It will only become better once the Construction Set comes out; I won’t be surprised if this is the greatest modding platform since the Source engine was first released. A multiplayer mod is already in the works, and may actually be feasible.
Atom Zombie Smasher
The above three titles have all earned many an accolade, and will inevitably be featured on various big award lists. Of Atom Zombie Smasher, I’ve heard nary a peep. It’s such a fantastic creation that I can only guess that:
Not many people played it, and
It is suffering from being released early in the year.
But hey, that’s why I’m writing this. Atom Zombie Smasher is exactly what a one-man creation should be: tightly focused on being as awesome as it can be within the small space it’s carved out. At first glance, one might dismiss it choosing that space in the first place, since AZS is yet another game about zombies overrunning cities. But whereas every previous game has used zombies in a typical horror-movie-monster sense, AZS is outright clinical. You’re trying to evacuate as many citizens as you can before the zombies (“Zed”) overrun the city and you must flee. It’s a game about saving a civilization that almost certainly can’t be saved. Winning the game on the default settings isn’t impossible, but it’s pretty close.
Which is kind of the point. AZS tells its story almost entirely through its gameplay mechanics, something that is normally restricted to “persuasive games” like McDonald’s Video Game and Harpooned!. It shouldn’t be. Combine this with the hip, tongue-in-cheek style that Brendon Chung brings to every one of his creations, and you’ve got a real winner.
Frozen Synapse
Frozen Synapse is, on the surface, an extremely simple strategy game. You have a small, randomly generated arena, and the fighting takes place on a two-dimensional plane. There are only five unit types, and you never have all of them at once. Your characters are basic humanoids whose only abilities are moving, spotting enemies, and shooting them.
Yet the designers realized that while they were making a “simultaneous turn based” mode (in which each player inputs orders, which combine and activate in real time) they could allow each player to input orders for the opponent’s units and “simulate” what would happen if the opponent actually carried it out. And then give their orders to counter appropriately. But, of course, this is only useful if you’ve read your opponent well, AND if they haven’t anticipated your actions.
Frozen Synapse is thus the closest thing to poker I’ve ever seen in video games: simple mechanics made enormously complex by adding a psychological element. Playing with a good player, there will be so many feints and misdirections as each tries to simultaneously read his opponent’s plans while obfuscating his own.
Every time I play a match, I feel like I’m barely scratching the game’s surface. I suspect that people will be playing Frozen Synapse long after like the likes of Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 2 have been replaced by newer and slicker shooters. It’s hard to achieve any sort of longevity in such a technology-driven medium, but I’ll be damned if Frozen Synapse doesn’t have the design to pull it off.
I’ve always wanted to start a band, despite having little interest in making music. I just want to NAME the band. Narrowing down the near-infinite possibilities to a single combinations of words (or just sounds) just has to be character building.
Which is pretty much how I feel about The Elder Scrolls VI. I don’t want to make it. If Bethesda wants to really push the open-world RPG forward, rather than just coasting off of the success of Skyrim, then they have a lot of difficult work ahead of them. I don’t envy them that challenge. Yet even if – as I suspect – they do just tweak and further simplify the same formula they’ve been using since Morrowind, they’ll still have one decision that requires a lot of creative thought, and I’d love to be a fly on the wall when they’re trying to hammer out this singular detail. I speak, of course, of the setting.
To say that the setting is important to an Elder Scrolls game would be both understated and blindly obvious: it’s the sole titular identifier for each game. While the title of Arena reflected the series’ origins as a gladiatorial combat game (before design changes that made it much more like Wizardry, the series that was the team’s chief inspiration), Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Skyrim are named after the Imperial province l in which they take place, and while Oblivion is in Cyrodiil, it is the titular plane that is most central to its plot. Setting makes or breaks these games; I’d argue that Oblivion‘s focus on plot over developing an interesting central setting is one of the key reasons it had a considerably weaker narrative than its predecessor. Bethesda seemed to realize this, and made the geography and culture of Skyrim the central focus of the latest series incarnation.
So when Bethesda starts thinking about Elder Scrolls VI – as they already surely are – one of the first, and most important, decisions that needs to be made is where it will take place. I’ve put some thought into this, and have found that one potential location stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Okay, so that’s me being overambitious. Two entries wasn’t really counting on me taking work home with me and it being a huge pain in the ass.
Plus, it’s early game yet in Skyrim – I realized that I needed to play the game a bit more before I could fully justify the rant I was planning on writing.
Instead, we’ll get one entry out tomorrow (promise!) and after that, well, I promise no more promises. So I don’t have to write apologetic meta posts like this.
Augmented Vision is coming back, a little different.
Shortly after gaining gainful employment in mid-November, I was forced to ditch the Nightmare Mode gig for time reasons. Along with pretty much everything else, including gaming. But things have settled down now, and Augmented Vision is ready to return to form. I have various long-term plans (including getting some decent graphic design on this thing) but the immediate changes will be as follows:
1. It’s not just about video games any more. This will probably be the main focus, but I don’t want to constrain myself by medium here: I’m interested in storytelling literature in whatever form it takes. This will be, for all intents and purposes, a Screen Culture blog, but the occasional book/audio commentary may creep in.
2. Regular updating. Not like clockwork, because my day job is writing stuff and sometimes I can’t take it any more upon getting home, but I’m at a point in my life where I’m a lot more disciplined about getting writing done. Expect at least one entry a week. To facilitate this, these won’t necessary be articles or pseudo-professional pieces; I’m not trying to snag a job with this thing anymore. It’s for fun, for enlightenment, for taking gaming a shaking it up and down to see what falls out.*
Expect a pair of Skyrim-related articles this weekend, followed by more expansive stuff thereafter.
Consider this a stealth launch. Once I build up enough stuff, I’m actually going to advertise this thing and get some helpful friends to assist with graphic design. Ultimate goal: readership of 100 people.
Which is actually pretty ambitious, all things considered.
*Do not actually do this with any gaming device. The only thing falling will be your tears.
Sorry for neglecting this blog – the Nightmare Mode stuff has been taking more time than I expected, and given that they welcome blog posts and I’ve really hooked my start to them it’s made this space somewhat superfluous. I’m still trying to figure out a way to make it viable and continue, but it may be a dead space for a while, or even be shut down and come back later when I’m doing more independent writing. We’ll see.
For now, here’s a link to all the stuff I’ve written at Nightmare Mode: one retrospective, two features, one review, and some news stories. I’ve got a Battlefield 3 multiplayer review written, but it will take a while to get out of editing due to the power failures in New England where a lot of the staff is based.
