Dead Island...

While polarization of 'inter-game' opinions isn't rare among the gaming press, 'intra-game' polarization tends to be. Maybe it's the hype bandwagon, but among major gaming sites it often feels like games appears to be 'great' (> 9 out of 10) or 'crap' (< 8 out of 10). Therefore, I tend to find the rare title with polarized opinions interesting.

One such title from last year was Dead Island (2011): a first-person, open-world survival horror game developed by Polish studio, Techland. While the title got a lot of buzz after releasing a very artsy trailer before the its debut, it was clear upon release that DI was firmly 'Eastern European' (see below). While most sites complained about its myriad issues, a few outfits, such as Giantbomb and GameCritics, praised the title, the latter awarding it their 'Game of the Year'. I think they're on crack - but to each their own :-)1.

Dead Island has some good ideas wrapped in a game that's so buggy and utterly derivative that its commercial release at $60 is completely unacceptable. From the very beginning of the PC version, I regularly saw weird, glitchy artifacts in the background and strange texture pop-in. Options chosen in the game's menus would either fail to work, or would be completely counter-intuitive: Turning vertical sync 'on' caused screen tearing, while turning it 'off' enables v-sync. You explain it to me.

 What in the hell is this thing? I'm about 15 mins into the game and I'm already seeing weird engine artifacts? Bad sign.

The game's setting itself (at least for the first third) is gorgeous: A zombie outbreak on a Pacific island resort? Sounds great! The beaches, palm trees, and all aspects of the background are entertaining to explore... until you have to interact with actual humans. Zombies are fine and probably more gruesome than is required to convey the grimness of the situation, but live humans are stiff, plastic faced monstrosities.

In fact, the character animations, facial modelling, and lip-syncing are so terrible that I'm not sure why the game bothers to have so many non-interactive cutscenes. Also, who CARES about the 'story' to Dead Island? Yet another biological experiment gone wrong. The devs should've learned from Valve's Left 4 Dead series and left the player as confused about the cause of the outbreak as the characters are.

What about the text on the bottom of this screen shot justifies the look on this woman's face? Plastic golem eyes are always surprised, I guess. Note that 'Press B to skip the cutscene' flashes in the upper right corner as a friendly and helpful suggestion...

This is one of those situations where the 'story' is an impediment to my enjoyment of the game. If I don't watch the cutscenes, I miss out on information about new enemy types and situations, whereas if I force myself to watch them, I'm left utterly confused - they make no sense. See, Dead Island's biggest strength may be that you can take on hordes of zombies with up to 3 friends online; each of you  plays one of the game's 4 characters. However, if you play alone, the other characters are not with you... until you hit a cutscene, during which they may decide to pop up... or not. It's jarring to be walking alone on a beach when suddenly three people appear around me during a non-interactive sequence. And yet, in other such sequences, I seem to be alone. These cutscenes are all in-engine, couldn't they have simply accounted for how many players were actually in the party???

Look at the crazy artifacting that's going on in this cutscene! So to summarize: the cutscenes are horribly animated, boring, awfully acted, jarring, and glitchy. Way. to. go.

So in what crazy world would anyone praise this game? Well, as I said in the beginning of this post, Dead Island does have some good ideas. The mission structure is much more logical (within the fiction of its world) than most open-world games. In fact, once you get over the initial jarring uglyness of the controls and graphics, the early sections are quite enjoyable. It also helps that the game has some of the best driving mechanics I've seen in this style of game as well - riding down zombies is pretty fun. Also, I guess you could praise the inclusion of an RPG system in which you can gain experience and customize your character; however, like many light RPG mechanics, you're making skill choices and upgrades 'blindly', with no idea of how useful (or not) many of the upgrades will be.

In the end though, what really kills DI is that its fairly weak initial promise is over all too quickly, and after ~5 hours of gameplay, you transition from the beautiful island setting, to a burned out city. Very soon after that, a large portion of the game takes place in buildings and/or the sewers. I have to ask myself whether the developers forgot that they'd made an open world game; the engine is certainly not suited to tight corridor shooting. 

At about 7 hours of play, I realized that the sewers weren't any fun and that, like all open world games, the missions do eventually get incredibly repetitive and predictable (there will always be a be hulking brute or two next ot the mission objective) so I gave up. If the entire game was simply an 8-10 hour version of the first 5, I could've understood the (albeit limited) praise, but as it stands, Dead Island is a game that got far more attention than it deserved, unfortunately.

1I put the little smiley face there because, for some reason, on the internet, it denotes respectable disagreement. I like both GameCritics and Giant Bomb a lot, and yet I disagree with the opinions of their writers fairly frequently. Like any sane person, I use their opinions to inform my own, not determine it.

The Sega Dreamcast...

As a younger man - oddly with far more disposable income - I fancied myself a collector of rare and precious artifacts. Well, rare and precious to me, anyways. It began with books and movies, but eventually came to encompass video games. I suppose that my experiences growing up in a family that took a rather dim view of some of my youthful nerdy pursuits was partially to blame. I wasn't allowed to buy as many geeky things as some of my friends were, and I was encouraged to sell them (or trade them in) when I was done. I dropped out of video gaming during college, and when I decided to pick the hobby up again, I realized that the few dollars I'd made trading in my old systems wasn't worth my inability to re-explore the titles of my youth.

While I played few games at all in college, I had been a PC gamer until that point. My lapse from console gaming was far longer, and actually spanned the sale of my Super NES in ~'96 'till my purchase of a GameCube in 2002. I missed out on the '32-bit era' entirely (Nintendo's N64, Sega's Saturn, and Sony's PlayStation), and acquiring and experiencing titles from the latter system made up a huge part of my 'collecting' efforts1.

There's another system that I missed entirely during my hiatus - a console that's become somewhat of a legend among enthusiasts: The 'ill-fated' Sega Dreamcast (1999 - 2001). I've never been much of a Sega fan. I think it has to do with my general preference for PC gaming: even in my youth it struck me that Sega's big claim-to-fame was its arcade presence, and it's consoles (Master System, Genesis, Saturn) all really emphasized high-quality arcade ports and sports games. Arcade games are designed to be brutally difficult so as to steal your quarters, and I've always been disappointed that this difficulty seems to run like a curse through many of their titles. However, all of this being said, I've heard among friends and on numerous podcasts that the Dreamcast was awesome. What gives?

Every time I walk into a pawn shop, I check to see if there's a Dreamcast for a reasonable price. I came within a hair's breath of buying a bare system for $40 a few years back. Last weekend I picked one up at a Goodwill in San Francisco with 2 controllers, 3 games, a Visual Memory Unit, and all the cables for $22.99. Considering that the system's in great condition, and despite having precious little time to game, I couldn't pass it up.

I have to agree with one oft-repeated comment about the Dreamcast: It's arguably the coolest-looking system of its generation. Compared to the toy-like GameCube or the bulky PS2 or Xbox, it's small, sleek, and unassuming. Notice that the controller is really unique: it's flawed in only having a single thumbstick (even the PS1 incorporated two, as did the three competitors listed above), but despite its bulky appearance, it's quite comfortable and responsive. 

One of the reasons for the controller's bulk was that it acted as the connection port for the console's peripherals, including it's unique 'Visual Memory Unit'. The VMU acted both as a repository for saving games, but also allowed for some unique gameplay elements. For example, in the NFL 2K series of sports games, you could call plays from the VMU's screen, preventing your opponents from seeing your intentions. The device was also self-powered (I had to replace the batteries) and a host of titles transferred simple minigames to the unit that could be played on the go, with progress transfered back to the main game. Pretty innovative in the grand scheme of things.

Reams of text have been written about the circumstances surrounding the system's untimely demise, and if I understand correctly, it's part of the reason behind its legendary adoration. The system didn't fail because of poor design and lack of good titles, rather it died because of the many, many mistakes made by Sega as a corporation during the 90s. After a string of hastily released consoles and expensive peripherals that sold poorly (the 32X, Sega CD, and Saturn), Sega had thoroughly soured the market for its wares, and up-and-coming giants such as Sony and Microsoft were creating an environment in which it couldn't compete. 

I've heard so many great things about the Dreamcast's quirky and unique game catalogue that I'm excited to slowly dig into it. Conveniently, another aspect contributing to the DC's failure also makes its games surprisingly cheap on eBay (even for new and unopened copies): Because most of its games were on standard CD-ROMs and used no copy protection, it's easy to simply download copies online and burn them to CD-Rs. I'm sure that there is a collector's market for DC games, but it seems to be suppressed simply because most people just download them anyways... Oh well.

More to come... 

1As with any very popular system, the PlayStation had an amazing library of titles. Its popularity also meant that many great games were still fairly common on the used market and sold relatively cheaply (I got many a game in pawnshops and on eBay for $15-20). Some of the titles that I scored cheap now go online for upwards of $100. I'm also fortunate enough to have received as a gift a great-condition copy of one the system's rarest and most sought-after titles, Suikoden II, which I've seen sell used for ~$250 (at the time of this writing, brand new copies list on eBay starting at an insane $750 USD). 

Jamestown: Bullet Hell!

Some time ago I picked up one of the awesome indie game soundtrack bundles1 (see http://www.gamemusicbundle.com/ for more info), which came with the soundtrack to a shooter called Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony by Chilean composer Francisco Cerda. I was so impressed by the quality of the soundtrack that I wanted to try out the game - a very rare occurence for me. (Incidentally, I was playing Jamestown while my girlfriend was getting ready to go out and the first thing she said coming out of the restroom was "What were you playing? The music was really good!"). As is typical of my buying habits, I picked up the game when it was on sale on Steam and gave it a go.

Jamestown, by Final Form Games, is a 'bullet-hell' shooter set in a fictional 'history' where an English, Martian colonist battles a Spanish conquistador hellbent on using ancient alien technology to become all-powerful... or something. The plot is unimportant, but its utter weirdness - Mars, 1666 - adds a lot of personality to an already wild title.

'Bullet Hell shooters' are games where you fly a craft along an auto-scrolling screen, typically moving vertically, using your avatar to shoot and destroy enemies that appear along the way. What makes them 'bullet hell' is that enemies shoot back massive numbers of shots, such that they fill the entire screen. You need lightning fast reflexes to either dodge the projectiles or throw up your limited shields in the nick of time. Practice makes perfect.

I'm not a connoisseur of shooters in general - they're really a very Japanese genre with niche appeal in the West - and I've had mixed feelings about the few that I've played. Some classics, Gradius, R-Type, Lifeforce, etc. were great for when you had a few minutes to kill here or there. However, some of the modern beloved shooters, like Ikaruga, are so insanely difficult that they make me want to throw my controller/keyboard out of the window.

Jamestown is reasonably challenging and relatively simple in design as compared to many titles of the genre. There are no power ups; your ship gets only the abilites that you chose to begin with, which include basic and special firing modes and a short burst shield that both protects you and increases your score multiplier. The shield must be charged by destroying enemies, and the main mechanics revolve around staying alive long enough to power the shield such that you can use it to avoid death during a massive bullet volley.

 The 16-bit style graphics are really charming and make it easy to see what's going on. The controls are also excellent.

Like all such titles, the 'main' quest of Jamestown is quite short: ~2 hours. But that's not really the point. There are multiple challenge modes and bonus levels that can be played for 10 minutes here and there when you want to brush up on your reflexes or go for a high score.

Yet again, I've found another awesome indie title, and this time in a genre that I generally avoid. When I think about the amount of satisfaction that I typically get from a $60 game, I find that my bang-per-buck from these 5$-$10 indie titles is often significantly greater (I paid $3.33 for Jamestown). It's utterly clear to me that something has to come along and shake up the industry's pricing model - at least making it much more flexible. These bite-sized titles are starting to kill. 

1A couple of years ago, I realized that instrumental soundtracks are perfect background music for doing writing and computer work, so I've started picking up movie and game scores when I can find them for a reasonable price. 

Dear Esther...

As my posts have perhaps indicated, I've been pretty pleased with the crop of indie games that I've sampled recently. For a long time, I associated 'indie' games not so much with small budget versions of the types of games that I like to play, but rather with small 'experimental' games that I often found unsatisfying. I fully support people making whatever games they like, but I've got precious little time to indulge people's wildest imaginations. It doesn't help that many such titles hinge on a single mechanic and fail to develop a full actual game around it (again, at least in my experience).

I feel as though I've now circled back to playing just such an experiment in Dear Esther by UK indie studio The Chinese Room. I'd heard some controversial scuttlebutt about the title in the Twitterverse, and when it went on sale on Steam last week I decided to take a look for myself.

Dear Esther is a gorgeous experience - I just wish it incorporated more player agency.

Dear Esther is a Source Engine 'mod' - the engine that powers Valve's titles such as Half-Life 2, Team Fortress, and Portal - in which you take the role of a man marooned on a deserted island. As you 'explore' the island, the protagonist narrates a series of letters written to the titular character of Esther, describing some tragedy that took place in the past.

I put explore in single quotation marks above because using this word is somewhat insulting. Dear Esther essentially consists of a 90 minute 'corridor' with zero interaction. You simply walk forward looking at the environment, occasionally crossing points where the protagonist's narration kicks in. That's it. Thankfully, the game is absolutely gorgeous, the voice acting is top-notch, and the foley-work is great. And yet I don't feel like I got very much out of the experience. I don't want to be closed-minded about what constitutes a proper game, and if people get enjoyment out of what Dear Esther provides then more power to them. Rather I'm going to try to lay out my reasoning for why the title failed for me.

I often rant about narrative in games, both about how it's typically very poor (most game stories are at about the same level as the pulpiest pulp fantasy/sci-fi novels), and how it's often misapplied. I think that each medium offers different benefits and challenges to storytelling. Books are the most personal - everything is constructed in the reader's imagination, while film is the most shared - every viewer has the same point of reference for what everything looks and sounds like. Good authors/directors play to these strengths, taking advantage of their mediums to connect with their audience.

I mean it when I say that some of the areas are mind blowing in terms of scenery and atmosphere. Most games running on my tricked out gaming PC don't look as good as Dear Esther does on my MacBook. 

In my mind, the biggest asset that a game could possibly deliver is to have a shared experience that also molds to reflect player agency. We all got to experience Baldur's Gate and Skyrim, but each of us got to experience them in such a way that reflected our decisions and actions. We got the multimedia experience - the ability of musical cues to influence mood and voice acting to imbue personality into characters, and we got to control the outcome, if only within pre-defined bounds of course.

Dear Esther does a worse job than most games on this count: whereas typical titles feature boring, linear narratives, at least they give you something to do in between the cutscenes. 

I'm certainly impressed by the developer's ability to create atmosphere and mood with the environment, and I'm sure that the limited interactivity (I can stop and look around!) hides some deeper meaning that I can't quite grasp. But I can't help but feel that there's really no reason why this couldn't be a film... except that it would be an extremely boring one. I guess that being able to gawk at the brilliant scenery disguises the fact that nothing is actually happening.

Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that this 'game' released at a whopping $10 price tag, which is frankly insane. Post-modernist lit ideas aside, I feel like I got as much value, if not more, out of some free tech-demos and mods (like Valve's Lost Coast). I don't feel like I wasted my time with Esther, and I'm glad that I experienced it to be part of the conversation. Regardless, I'd be lying if I didn't say that I would've been pretty ticked off had I paid full price for 90 mins of walking.

Lest I seem unduly harsh, when I found out that the developers of Dear Esther were working on the sequel to Amnesia: The Dark Descent - an excellent PC horror adventure game - I immediately made a mental note to make it a day-one purchase. Amnesia's all about atmosphere, and The Chinese Room are clearly more than competent. I guess I'm just excited to see what they'll do when they add in an actual game. 

Eschalon: Book 2...

I was so impressed by Basilisk Games' Eschalon: Book 1 that upon completion, I immediately went to Steam and picked up Book 2. I've already blogged a bit about some of the specific mechanical changes made to E:B2, so here I'll focus more on the game in general.

It's clear that the developers wanted to build upon the core foundation that made Book 1 a success: the combat and exploration mechanics remain essentially the same but almost all of the details have been expanded. The world is larger and more complex (areas are no longer simply big open fields), there are many more types of items and gradations of equipment, and they've added quite a few new skills.

Another facet that's been improved is the narrative. I didn't even bother talking about the story of E:B1 because it was so generic - goblins have stolen the magic crystal that kept the kingdom safe and you have to find and return it. In EB:2, you find out that your efforts were for naught as the goblins were actually under the control of a much more sinister force whose machinations you've been tasked with foiling. your character is a bit more developed as is the history of the world. The entire plot is an mystery that gets unravelled bit-by-bit, so any detailed description would be a spoiler. I only wanted to note that character interactions and dialog have been improved and the overall plot beats driving the game were interesting enough to keep me entertained beyond my basic enjoyment of character progression and combat.

The overall game world of Eschalon: Book 2 has been expanded in many great ways. There are now large cities to explore with all kinds of things going on within and more interesting characters with which to interact.

Not all expansion is improvement however, and Book 2 suffers from its attempt to add complexity while keeping the gameplay balanced. For instance, some of the new skills seem ridiculously useful when compared to others (the same 'cost' applies to increasing all skills). Pumping a few points into the 'repair' skill - which makes your character repair equipment automatically while resting - early on will have a massive effect on your ability to afford new items and on your cash flow in general. On the other hand, it takes large investments in the 'mercantile' skill in order to have any meaningful effect on your ability to haggle over prices in shops. I tried out most of the skills over the course of the game and more than I would have liked I was shocked and a little upset when I realized that had I distributed points a bit differently, I would've had a much more smooth experience.

The devs also upped the game's default difficulty, which is a good thing overall. I mentioned in my post about Book 1 that you could basically play any character you wanted and make your way through. By increasing the challenge in the sequel, Basilisk made all of the skill and item choices more meaningful. While this does lead to the problems mentioned above, it also has makes combat and adventuring more strategic. You're not going to be playing the Eschalon series for the graphics, so this method of beefing up the strategy was a good choice overall.

All of our ideas are completely original! The combat is tougher than in Book 1, but you're also given a lot of options and abilities to help you deal with trickier foes.

Unfortunately, the one big downside to beefing up the challenge is that there's a massive difficulty spike right before the end of the game. I played a very similar character to what I'd chosen in Book 1: a jack-of-all-trades who got to experience a bit of each of the skills the game has to offer. The enemy types I met in the last act of the game required me to cast every buff I had, fight a battle of attrition, and camp out after every individual fight. This turned the final couple of hours into a boring slog and I came very close to simply giving up. It's a tough challenge to try to balance a large open game for every class, but I've noticed that many games of this style tend to edge toward balancing the final dungeon for the most combat-focused classes. As a former games writer once poignantly asked, why do so many developers insist on making your final experience with their titles one of screaming frustration?

If Eschalon: Book 2 hadn't of added so many new aspects to the formula - weapon degradation, hunger and thirst, more complex combat, expanded weapon subtypes, new spells, etc. - I'm sure that people would've complained that it was just 'more of the same'. In fact, most of the additions are ultimately good and set up the trilogy for a stellar finale. Lest the post seem overly negative, with the exception of the frustrating end, I quite enjoyed the ~20 or so hours that I pumped into the title and am looking forward to concluding the adventure in the sequel. I have to admit though that because I'm such a sucker for tight, balanced mechanics, I think that I enjoyed the original more. I guess all things must change and we can only hope that Basilisk learns from the good and the bad of Book 2 in their design of Book 3.