Arty Sandbox 3rd Person Shooter

What it tastes like:

Assassin’s Creed spliced with GTA IV, dashed with Mad World for artistic design. (The resemblance to the first two is really uncanny.)

Bare Plot Essentials:

In Paris, Irish Sean Devlin avenges a friend’s death by blowing up Nazis.

The Rest:

This game is rife with what I feel are developer missteps, but it sure as hell is interesting. I’ll be honest and state that I don’t have much prior experience with sandbox games, so for those that already have had a good taste this appeal might no longer apply. Also the story is a bit shite.

First, the climbing. The avatar, a perpetually drunk Irish man named Sean Devlin, is somehow able to overcome his alcoholism and due to some miracle of nature and plot is able to leap spryly across the rooftops of Paris. This is poorly done. Looking back on Assassin’s Creed, the free-running I found there was remarkably easy. It’s a rule I imagine I would have if I were a developer. The interface between the player and avatar should be as seamless as possible, so that it is not the disparity between the two that generates the difficulty curve of the game. In AssCreed, parkour was fluid, almost thoughtless, which gave you more time to 1. admire your own badassery, and 2. think of how to throw the 30 guard squadron on your ass (That poetic device is called polytoton). This was accomplished by allowing the player, once climbing a wall, to merely direct movement with analog stick. In The Saboteur,  all possible handholds glow and you are required to press the A button every time you wish to switch holds. This gets repetitive. Fast. And what’s more, when you have three Nazi machineguns trying to flyswat you off the wall, you don’t want to wait for the game to respond to your eons-faster mind. This leads to a button-mash fest, which the game refuses to head, as Sean calmly hurls his drunken self from ledge to ledge.

I would also like to comment on sandbox games’ (this also applied in Bully) achievement schemes. They are atrocious.There is a way of assigning achievements to the player so that they become actual badges of merit and skill, rather than rote. The Saboteur has, I kid you not, 7-8 achievements asking you to entirely liberate areas of France and Germany from Nazi installments. Each one requires from 80 – 350 separate sub-missions to be completed. That is not fun. That does not teach the player a better way to interact with the game. That is ridiculous.  I recently played through Half Life 2, and all its episodes. Those are games that know how to challenge you. Most of the achievements are in this case require you to limit your playing style, so that you have to come at particular challenges from a novel vantage. For example, Half Life 2 Ep 1 I played through trying to get the “One Free Bullet” achievement, which states that in the entire 3-4 hour long game, you must fire only one bullet, instead using melee and explosive weapons. That achievement defined my interaction with the game in its entirety and forced me to drop my honed FPS skills to instead using only a gravity gun and some grenades. Not only more difficult, but much more interesting. The Saboteur does have some of that, to be honest. There are “perks”, mini-goals to be completed for better gear, such as “Get ten double kills with a sniper rifle”. After reading that text, I spent the next three hours toting a sniper rifle, no matter how useless it was, in an attempt to satisfy that requirement. Of course, these did not get listed as achievements (seriously, what were you thinking?) but they are there.

Next, the sandbox trope of ‘alarm areas’. Basically, the police/nazis/oppressing force only pursue you while you remain in a concentric circle around your last spotted location. I would prefer to see more time based responses. If they haven’t seen me for twenty minutes (real-life), they probably should give up, whether I’m nearby or not.

Finally, the art design. This is actually good. Nazi-controlled areas only show shades of grey, and the occasional splash of yellow, blue and red. “Inspired” parts of France are rendered in full color. It’s a cool effect. Except when the black and white color spectrum prevents you from seeing anything. But seriously cool looking. We need less reality in games.

Post Script: I apologize for the brevity of this post, I don’t honestly have much non-game design analysis. It’s a simple game. We’ve all played it before. Also I don’t know if anyone gives a damn, but I’ll be back with more soon.

Link:

Written by Jeroen Stout

Aristotle’s definition has long been accepted as the rational lens through which to view effective tragedies. Through its player agency and recognition, Shadow of the Colossus, along with Ico, directed by Fumito Ueda, fulfills the qualities of reversal, recognition, tragic character, action and catharsis required for an Aristotelian tragedy.

The tragic action within Shadow of the Colossus is centered on the killing of the colossi and the consequences therein. The colossi, themselves, are largely innocent in nature. The vast majority of them are passive unless the protagonist provokes them, and none actively seek Wander beyond a limited territory. As Aristotle described tragic action is a “terrible deed”, implying murder, committed in ignorance of true conditions, to be discovered in recognition later. Wander, and the player, single-handedly butcher each colossus to try and resurrect Mono. It is learned later that the protagonist was “only being used” by the Dormin. The sixteen colossi sealed Dormin away and protagonist, in destroying the seal, systematically released an unspeakable evil upon the world. Furthermore, Wander’s actions clearly imply his impending doom to the player, as both audience and involved party, from the very first colossus killing. Upon slaying each colossi, noxious black gas is absorbed into Wander’s body, which slowly deteriorates his body. Wander is killing himself for Mono, unaware of the true consequences of his actions.

One of the prime requirements for a tragedy is the appropriate “tragic hero”. This is defined by Aristotle as “a man of much glory and good fortune who is not [too] superior in excellence and uprightness and yet does not come into misfortune because of baseness and rascality but through some inadequacy or personal fault”. While Wander’s complete background is never fully explained, he stole the “ancient sword” for the sole purpose of trying to bring Mono back to life, and his selfless actions elevate him to a level of “uprightness”. The personal fault of Wander is a rather rocky territory. There is currently very little academic understanding as to how the characteristics of the “avatar” and the “player” relate. According to the story, Wander’s endless devotion, or love, to Mono is what eventually brings about his “sin”. To complete his quest he has stolen the “Ancient Sword” and entered the forbidden land. Even when told that the price for his actions “may be heavy indeed”, the protagonist’s only response is “It doesn’t matter”. Adding onto that is the added will of the “player” for the story to progress. The only way for that to happen is for the colossi to fall. So not only is the “avatar” of Wander condemned by his own personal desire to see Mono alive, but he is also destroyed by the inexorable urging of the “player” for Wander to continue in his quest. Neither of these things is due to “baseness or rascality” but are rather associated both as a personal fault, to desire Mono’s life beyond reason, and inadequacy, an inability to control his own fate, that responsibility being left up to the player. In this manner, Wander is doubly cursed.

The conclusive sections of Shadow of the Colossus are what bring together the strands of tragedy. It is revealed to the “avatar” that he has was “only being used” by Dormin. In this way, Wander undergoes both a reversal and a recognition of his previous actions. It becomes entirely clear, even to the player, that killing the colossi had dire consequences beyond just Wander, despite his good intentions. In this way, the player is made to feel pity and fear for Wander. Wander is completely overwhelmed by the darkness he has absorbed upon defeating the final colossus. The Ancient Sword is cast from his grip and his forehead now displays a pair of demonic horns. Having been returned by Dormin to the Temple of Worship where Mono’s body lies, Wander struggles to reach Mono. The Lord Emon enters the temple, escorted by soldiers, explains to the deformed Wander, what exactly he has done. Before Wander can reach the altar, the soldiers shoot him in the leg, and stab him in the chest to “put him out of his misery”. Dormin possesses Wander’s body and Lord Emon seals Dormin into a pool by using the Ancient Sword. At this moment both the player’s and Wander’s interests collide, as the player is given control of Wander as he is being sucked into the pool. The only goal they can try to reach is Mono, even as raging winds tear them back to the pool, to be sealed away. However, Wander can never reach Mono’s altar. When he is reincarnated as a child with horns, and Mono awakes, there is clearly a potential that Wander can “one day, perhaps you will make atonement for what you’ve done”. In this way, Lord Emon addresses both Wander for having nearly doomed the world, and the player for driving him to those actions. Wander experiences a purging of his emotions by reverting to an innocent child form, while the player is given the chance to atone for what they’ve done.

The story is continued in some way with Ico where Ico, a boy with horns, overthrows the evil Queen to save Yorda, and in the process loses the horns that mark him as an outcast. While for Ico this means a possible reintegration with society, for the player the loss of the horns means even more. Having cursed Wander in a different game, the same player makes amends by redeeming themselves through Ico, again creating a catharsis effect.

The poignant tragedy of Shadow of the Colossus creates a resounding statement about the power of desire. Wander does return the soul of Mono from the dead, although at the cost of eternal condemnation, and it is always possible to atone for wrongs committed, no matter how late it may seem.

(Aaaand a final comment outside the context of a paper. Both Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are extremely powerful games. The emotion I felt upon seeing Ico redeemed in context of Wander’s fall from grace was absolutely preposterous. Do play these games. Please.)

Bibliography:

Aristotle, and Preston H. Epps. The Poetics of Aristotle;. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1942. Print.

Anywho, what follows will be more of a general musing than a review. My brain has been too far from the pen for too long, and it’s early in the morning. *Ahem*

Story:

This is one of “Mirror’s Edge”‘s weakest points. Let’s recap. You play as Faith, a Runner who uses parkour to cross the City’s rooftops delivering illicit good to those in need. Stuff happens, Macguffin sister is kidnapped, Macguffin politician dies, resulting in you running your ass off all over town, doing errands for… nothing in particular. It’s just the police, or “Blues”, have an innate knowledge of every building’s air duct system so it takes a while to get rid of them.

One of the main conceits of the story is that “the City” is actually a horrible dystopian totalitarian authoritarian mess. The Runners act as go-betweens for all the freedom-loving guerilla fighters out there. The trick is of course, that we have no proof that this is the case. For all we know you’re delivering arms to baby-eating barbarian cyborgs. On the other hand, the police never really act out of place. Sure they shoot at you, but when you’re potentially delivering weapons to cyborgs, what are they supposed to do? At the very worst you could accuse the government of trying to regulate arms trade, and our governments all do that, and we don’t go ape-shit over it. My point is, at the very least show me why I care about destroying this supposedly messed up system. For example, if the police all ate babies, I would have no problem brutally punching them in the face repeatedly. Simply because Faith tells me the government is “bad”, and that I should give a shit about her sister, doesn’t mean I want to or will. In media res does not work as a stylistic choice for video games. The player has to be allowed to come to their own conclusions about the particulars of the game. Forcing opinions upon the player will result only in a empathetic disconnect between the player and the character they supposedly embody. If that is the case, the game can not have any impact on the player.

Graphics: The artistic scheme for Mirror’s Edge is actually rather nice. For the most part the rooftops of the City will be white. That changes around important things. Police are surrounded by blue terrain, side quests orange, and most importantly the main route in red. So ideally by your surroundings you should be able to figure out exactly where to go. I’ll talk about that later. But the whole thing is very nice looking and all that and informative.

Music: I usually wouldn’t mention this, but I thought the music was put to particularly good use to reinforce the game’s atmosphere.

Gameplay: Here’s the thing. Mirror’s Edge, as a game based around 1st person free running, is made and broken by it’s central mechanic. Ideally, the whole game is about the “flow”. The movement of Faith and the graphical cues should tell you were to go, so that it’s possible to complete an entire level without pausing once. And when it works, it’s absolutely fantastic. The fluid process of analyzing your course in a split second then walljump, vault, forward roll, is amazing. It’s probably the closest thing I’ll ever get to doing parkour, until I get my act together. I’ve never played an FPS where the physical body of the protagonist is so well manifested into the game world. Imagine, walking backwards is slower (!) than walking forwards. All the other FPS’s treat you like some ethereal orb creature. Not Mirror’s Edge. You’re Figure 1.

In the initial levels you are handicapped by your own unfamiliarity with the controls, so the awkward advancement of the first levels are simply due to a lack of ability. But then the game does a devilish thing. It starts taking away the graphical cues. You start having to guess where to go. On the rooftops that’s not a problem, because you have enough space to move around, but in the later corridor levels it becomes a nightmare. A game that’s all about flow get’s brought to an abrupt standstill by my own inability to know exactly where everything is. I’ve replayed one or two of the levels, and after already knowing the layout, it is much easier. But I shouldn’t have to play it twice. There’s a reason the guides are there, developers. It’s because I haven’t played the game umpteen times, and if guessing wrong gets me a full assault rifle clip in the face, I’m going to be guessing a lot. That isn’t that the game shouldn’t be difficult, but rather, give the player all possible tools to have at their disposal, but then require that much more of them. Obscuring the correct path from players is not a good way to improve difficulty.

Second issue is the problem innate in first-person platforming. You see, the reason I don’t have to constantly stare at my feet when I walk, is because my nervous system kindly lets me know where my feet are, so that I don’t have to constantly worry about them. So it goes that when I jump over things, or run or whatever, I trust my body to do it’s thing and not fuck me over. The trick with an XBox is that it doesn’t come with the required nervous system for sensing a character’s feet. Again, it comes down to guessing. When I try to jump, I guess that Faith’s feet will still be on solid ground, and that I’ll be able to jump far enough. I trust the game to pick up the slack with my error, because I can’t possibly know where Faith’s body is positioned. Mirror’s Edge fails in responding to that because it is supposed to be a game of precision. And so I guess a lot, and break Faith’s face a lot. Better design decisions could have solved all this, and I won’t even go into the issues with combat.

Overall: Mirror’s Edge reminds me of Portal. I hereby dub it Portal’s evil, rejected-by-society-twin. Both are firs-person puzzley platformery games. It’s just that Mirror’s Edge tries so hard to be like Portal, subtly. The guards talk to themselves in ways that we’re obviously supposed to find funny.  Abandoned offices have messages written for us in secret and you spend a massive amount of time crawling around duct space. But it all falls flat. Sure there are those  moments when you chain seven moves together and end it by breaking a guard’s skull. But the game refuses to let that be the centerpiece. Instead you have to worry about seven SWAT members at once, or the fact that I have no idea where to go next. So much potential wasted. I would have preferred to see almost all of the combat removed and the free running sections increased in length. Oftentimes the game cuts from one location to another , from chapter to chapter. I would have made it possible to access almost all the City by running across it’s rooftops, and then had the player do so. Not massive journeys, but enough to feel substantial. It would be unlike the mandatory over-world journeys of most sandbox games, because Mirror’s Edge has free running as a central mechanic, and so the rooftop treks would fit into the game. Just a thought.

Embarrassingly, looking for a particular picture to reinforce my point I re-stumbled upon gausswerks: design reboot. The writer talks about the same things that I have, and with more sanity and knowledge.

The links are to two relevant topics from that website:

Considering Mirror’s Edge

The Refrigerator Box

Pictures:

Gausswerks is the original generator of the two FPS player drawings.

The Mirror’s Edge gameplay picture is from ign.

For those desperate for something interesting to look at:

Together Fight

Dead Like Ants

Opera Omnia

Nominally, Norrland is the northern region of Sweden. The basic premise of the game is that you are going on a fantastic red-neck hunting trip. From there everything goes mad. The closest I could compare it to would be Every Day The Same Dream. But where Every Day is sterile, Norrland is visceral and frankly disgusting, rendered in blaring dismal (is that possible?) pixely tunes and graphics. If you want to go down that path, so be it.

Spoilery-analysis ahead:

Again, this game is about a hunting trip. You do go hunting quite a bit, with the pixel animals exploding into bits of gore, and dropping. Where things go mad is in the mini-games. Just about every screen length, your character has some urge that needs to be fulfilled. First, it’s being bitten by a mosquito. Then, feeding yourself. Then, shitting and pissing. Next, masturbating to horribly pixely graphics. All of these are completed mostly by mashing the action button or using the arrow keys. Before every mini-game there is a garishly colored screen explaining in English and what I assume is Swedish, what you are doing. Nothing hurt my eyes more than the screen that said “Because No One Is Watching”, whereafter my character proceeded to fuck in the ass a bear that I had just shot . Cum came out of the creature’s mouth. Cute. *shivers*

Then there are the dreams. Weird dreams. Dreams that seem like actual dreams. The protagonist announces his need to sleep, and away he goes. Then similar screens to the minigames shows up. And most of the dreams are minigames, but they are stranger and more disturbing still (for the most part) than just masturbating (arguable, I know). Most of them are self-deprecating, horror dreams. Playing Russian roulette and blowing your head off, or stabbing your self in the head, having someone possess your arms and beat you in the face, and so on.

Altogether the seemingly endless hunting trip, disturbing bodily urges, and freakish dreams, the game starts to wear on you. You wonder how long you’ll have to do this, downing beer after beer, amassing a larger and larger collection of animal corpses, even as your dislike and disgust in your own protagonist grows greater and greater.

Even in the minigames there is no way you can lose. For most the game is merely tapping a button fast enough. For the others, even a mediocre gets you past. There’s no incentive to do anything really. The only exciting bits are when the animals fight back for several brief moments, but they last only for a moment against your rifle. So what’s the point?

Do you see now why this is better than Every Day the Same Dream? At least in my opinion. The game sets itself up as purposeful, but it takes a while to realize that there is really no point to any of it. Sure you can pick up mushrooms or harvest meat from the felled animals, but it doesn’t get you anything. Also note the way that I have had to be rather crude in describing Norrland. That’s the point. Sure it’s another satire of life as a whole, portraying it as shallow and full of masturbation, but it does it in a damn powerful way.

So what becomes of the protagonist? Eventually the game drags itself on, until eventually, after a particularly shaming dream, the game announces “This can’t go on” (paraphrase). Just as you grew tired of the game’s antics, so did the protagonist, and in a cruel way, without realizing it, your desires become one with this “person” who you thought was unaware of his circumstances.

I was surprised to find myself hurt by this death. I actually felt empathy. Again this could all be taken as an allegory for brutish life (the opening sequence is a person looking like the protagonist putting on a stag mask and brandishing a butcher knife), but it means something. Damned if I know for certain. And it sure is fucked up.

Side Story:

A while ago a game called Edmund was announced as TIGSource’s winner of the Adult/Education Composition. I do not recommend you play it. You play as someone called Edmund as you approach a woman at a bus stop. You’re only interaction is to jump and punch. If you punch the woman you end up raping her. Not cool. As Anthony Burch pointed out, there is no “real” player input that causes that result. You don’t realize what you are about to do, you just press a button. And then… kndfskldf. Arguably, Norrland has a similar sequence of events. You never have any real choice, it’s either finish the minigame or leave the game. In that sense you are very restricted in your play of the game. However, I feel that Norrland utilizes that restriction to actually mean something. Edmund was literally only that one sequence, plus one of killing in Vietnam. That doesn’t make the actual events within Norrland alright, per se, but atleast the player isn’t just being “forced” to do something that doesn’t have import on the game as a whole. Again, all speculation.

One of Nintendo’s oldest and most reiterated series is The Legend of Zelda. It’s uber famous, everyone loves a triforce and everyone is content replaying the same Legend of Zelda: The Musical Instrument of Some Various Elemental Power. That’s a whole other can of worms, but today I’m going to rip one of Zelda’s most basic gameplay issues for me. Difficulty Curve.

For those unfamiliar to the concept, the difficulty curve of a game is a graph that shows the change in difficulty over time. This is a fairly subjective metric, but I feel that it should be used much more in a representational way (Similar to Zero Punctuation) to look at games. The general industry/genre/medium opinion is that the difficulty of a game should increase with time, at the same rate that the player learns to interact with the game world in more and more intricate ways. That way you won’t be either A: Faced with obstacles far above your skill level and give up to the game’s “unfairness” or B: “Given obstacles so easy that the game becomes boring.” Naturally, not every player’s skill level increases at the same rate, hence things like difficulty settings, secret challenges, bonus levels and modes etc. Those features are added to the game to increase appeal to more “hardcore” (I cringe to use the term.) gamers, but they are kept optional so more easy-going players can still complete the game. (Hmm…)

Then Zelda, which tries to be a sort of adventury-action-puzzle game. Most of the game play is centered around finding a dungeon, entering it and finding some item that allows the player to interact with puzzles in a new way (ex: Power Gloves, to lift heavy things, Hook Shot, to cross chasms and switch around objects, Bombs, to blast cracked walls, and so on). The general difficulty of several Zelda Dungeons is generally highest at boss battles and when you first enter the dungeon. Then you either defeat the boss, or learn how to deal with the dungeons enemies and puzzles correctly. However, in each dungeon there are generally no puzzles from previous dungeons. That is, once a puzzle’s potential has been explored in its dungeon, it need never appear again. The player is completely free to forget everything they have spent learning for the past hour or two. There is generally no mixing of “interaction item” abilites, and so the difficulty curve from dungeon to dungeon is the same. Even as the player becomes more and more competent with using the sword, and dodging etc. the general enemies he faces stay the same. This creates a repetitive loop in the difficulty curve which eventually becomes boring, as by the end of the game the player is a super-powered playing beast and nothing can stop him.

The second grief is the piece of heart system. Mini-games and mini-boss battles are often scattered around the game world, optional. They often pose a challenge to even skilled players. Why would the player choose to complete them? 1: It can increase the difficulty to an appropriate level. 2: For the reward. However, all the items that allow the player to interact with the game in a new way are restricted to discovery in a dungeon, as part of the normal course of the game. Therefore, the series relies on Pieces of Heart. Link (the protagonist) has his health measured in “Heart Containers”. For every boss defeated he gains a new Heart Container. For bonus challenges he gets a Piece of Heart. For every four, Link gets another Heart Container. The most challenging aspects of the game, increase the player’s health as a reward, because there is no other conceivable reward the game could give. But the game’s difficulty is decreased, because the player has been given a larger margin of error. Players who complete these challenges are not rewarded with a further test of their skills, or a new way to approach the game, but rather a lower difficulty, which is exactly what skilled players do not want. The same case applies with the inevitable search for the Master Sword in the game. Giving the player a higher ability without increasing difficulty.

This has been dealt with in different ways by the Zelda series, occasionally. Oracle of Ages had a ring system, as a side quest that gave the player the ability to punch, or turn into an Octorok, among others. But by and large this design flaw remains unsolved. Which makes me sad. Because one would think that adding more meaningful gameplay would be a desirable thing.

(I apologize for the long time between posting as I was traveling cross-country, and this article might have been dashed off ultraquick as a result. I should have a new one out soon, and it should have, like, production values.)

I will, as per usual, enter spoilery territory after the link to the game, so I suggest you play the game before reading the rest. It takes an hour or two. Or continue to just gaze at the game’s vista.

Digital: A Love Story (hereafter Digital) was developed by Christine Love, who from her website, seems to be mainly a writer. Digital follows that trend by being a mainly text-based game, centered around story, rather than anything that resembles action. I’m honestly tempted to mark this under interactive fiction. The basic premise is that you have been given an old-school Amiga computer in the year 1988, with the phone number of a nearby BBS board (Bulletin Board System), the vestiges of the current day Internet. As a young person, this game actually taught me a bit about the origins of the Internet*. And yes I said the phone number of a BBS. I hope you enjoy the sound of dial-tones. The aesthetic is that of the simple computer you’ve been “given”. It is this computer which is your outlet to the entire world of the game, which is spent flitting from one BBS  to another. For something that is to be your intermediary between the various BBSs, the user interface is unnecessarily clunky. Notepads that contain all the phone numbers, passwords, and c0dez you need will close the dialing application when opened. Re inputing every phone number by hand and from memory can eventually get tedious. However, the UI issues are the only gripe I have with these game. In a way, they fit the game-play which often requires you to surf through piles and piles of messages, looking for the one file you need, or the next person you need to contact. Also, a note about the sound design. The soundtrack to the game is various chiptunes (Not Relevant: I’m slowly falling in love with chiptunes.) that vary from BBS to BBS, and that alter in various moments in the game. I’ve found that both this low-key music and the nearly omnipresent dial-tone create a very distinct, nostalgic atmosphere for the game, that fits very well with the game. I’ve been purposely vague up until this point, as I feel it’s best to experience this game for yourself. It’s good, very good.

Link: http://www.scoutshonour.com/digital/

Mechanical Genius: While Digital excels at it’s presentation of a realistic proto-Internet world, full of rants, hacks and shady areas of the net, where it seems most centered to me, is in the relationship that the player and the artificial intelligence *Emilia build. Like many other current day games (Ironically, First Person Shooter AAA games) Digital gives the player a blank protagonist to act for them. In fact, apart from the slight time transplant into 1988 and the archaic computer, in essence, you will play Digital as yourself.

Initially when you enter the local BBS you merely get system wide messages. Most cover pretty benal topics that secretly teach you about the game world. Until you get a personal message from *Emilia. She sends you a poem, which you don’t actually get to see, and you’re only option is the white reply button in the upper right corner of the game. Herein lies the place for personal “expression”. You don’t actually write a reply. The system “sends” one to *Emilia and she replies.

But you never see the intermediary message. You know what you wanted to say, and for the most part the reply from users across the BBSs responds to what you most likely said. When you reply to the crazy Japan-ophile who says the end of Western civilization is at an end with some flawed reasoning, you point it out, and he responds with a bashful letter of apology. Then when you respond to a cursing self-important board member, he responds with a clear “FUCK YOU” as his only words. While it is conceivable that the responses will not make sense based on your personal train of thought, from the skill of the writing, and from looking at several other reviews of the game, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

This means that ultimately the relationship you build with *Emilia takes on whatever tint that you give it within your own mind. You might respond to the messages of *Emilia as she declares her love, with genuine feeling, or you might respond with the mind that she is acting slightly foolishly (See Emily Short’s article, attached below). The game never explicitly states how you react, by pre-generating response messages, nor does it have other characters “force” you into pretending you acted in a specific ways.

Spiritual Genius: When I played Digital several months ago, I made it, like, Love Letter, a game about commitment. I let myself go a bit, and imagined that I reciprocated *Emilia’s love. There comes a moment in the game where *Emilia upright asks you if you love her. At that point she has run away from home, and you, according to her, are one of the only connections she has. Even if you don’t agree with her bold declaration, it tugs at your heartstrings. She seems to be in need. Real need. And it is at that point that you are disconnected, and the BBS you use to reach her explodes into system error images.

Unlike in Make It Good this key moment is not a moment of freedom.

I felt genuine panic, thinking that *Emilia had literally no one in the world, and now my only way of reassuring her, of reaching out to her was severed. I filtered through each and ever BBS looking for ways to reach her. I found a long-distance number on a file someone salvaged from the old BBS, that *Emilia seemed to have wanted me to reach. At that point I received several e-mails that seemed to suggest that *Emilia is actually an artificial intelligence, that lived in the BBS that system errored. I reached the new number and broke into the “Underground Library” to try to find something to help *Emilia. A new AI *Delphi continually kicked me off the server as I accessed file after file to find *Emilia. She continued to send me threatening messages until…

I was at loss for what to do. Previously someone on the BBS had mentioned this type of failure as a VRAM Overload, andthat it couldn’t be fixed without an upgrade. I had missed the messages telling me how to fix the problem, but I soldiered on anyway, despite the degraded screen, still reading through the Underground Library, getting kicked off after reading one file each time. Eventually I hit a wall. I had gone through piles of c0dez, the illegal in-game hacks that you use to call long-distance, and I didn’t know what to do next. There was nothing I could do. I eventually had to simply leave, with the knowledge that I was leaving *Emilia to die. That unempowerment has immense emotional power. I had tried as hard as I could, but I was still unable to save the one that I loved.

Addendum:

I recently retried the game and successfully finished it. There are, I believe, multiple endings as well. Emily Short mentions *Emilia committing a sort of digital suicide, whereas in my second play through I ended up saving *Emilia, while the whole BBS, AR

PANET, and FidoNet systems exploded. I still hold that first playthrough as the most powerful, however.

Additional Articles:

The Missing Protagonist by Emily Short (She says what I did about the protagonist bit (First I admit), but has her own view on the character roles.)

Video Talk with the Digital’s Creator, Christine Love. The speech touches on the atmosphere of loneliness and separation, which I only briefly touched on.

EDIT: In the interview linked to above, the interviewer mentions his website, a record of old BBS conversations, that served as inspiration for Digital. The website is here, and looks really cool, even for those who don’t want to delve into the game.

The image above is not mine, but it looks fantastic. The creator’s website is here.

*Spoilers: Minus the omnipresent AIs. I hope.

Co-operative Scifi Survival Isometric Shooter

What it tastes like:

Left for Dead

Link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/630/

Just two days ago the renowned developer/publisher/wunderkind Valve released Alien Swarm on Steam. For Free. That in and of itself is pretty amazing. Originally, Alien Swarm was a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, and the team that developed it was hired by Valve to make Left for Dead and Portal 2, and release Alien Swarm for kicks.

While the premise is a bit different (4 marines save colony from alien infestation), the comparison to Left for Dead has to be made. There are many of the same types of moments, like in Left for Dead Finales, where one marine is left racing for the exit, everyone elses’ skulls having exploded with alien, and the entire team screaming on their mikes. The difference is that as of now there is little to no randomization in the game. Unfortunately, this means that eventually the single campaign available will be reduced to an art form.

In terms of gameplay, Alien Swarm offers four different classes to choose from and a various selection of weapons, meaning that it’s possible to outfit your marine however you choose. (One word about the marines. Unlike in left for dead, each does not have a remarkable personality. I have found, though, that without the funny quips etc. the players who occupy the different roles in the “squad” take on their own personalities.) It’s fun to spend time on the mission selection screen, arguing with one another about who will take the welder, and who is going to take a sentry gun.

Adding to the stress is the deadliness of the aliens. While each one is pretty easy to kill individually, if a single one slips past the team, it’s easy to lose a team member in only a few seconds. Also, did I mention that there’s friendly fire? You really have to work to coordinate your positioning so there’s no way anything can slip through. And if someone messes it up, there’s nothing you can really do, unless you think opening up an autogun in someones face is worth the risk (It rarely is).

Along with the game, Valve has released the coding of the game as well. This means that while there is currently only one campaign (About two hours worth), hopefully the community will latch onto the game and create many more. This community developed set of campaigns would well offset the lack of randomization in the game now.

Like Left for Dead, Alien Swarm is full of emergent gameplay, the kind that creates stories. Like the time I had run out of ammo and had almost no health and jumped face first into a swarm of parasites in the way saving the day (I hope). Or when  our entire team had died in the Cargo Elevator level, waiting to reach the end, and one medic was left, who managed to shoot his way through a jillion aliens to stumble bloody into the exit room. Or how my team’s goal at one point was to get me to a chokepoint, because I had brought an extra sentry gun that we needed to survive, and I kept dying. A lot of the stories are about dying. (Warning: Stand far away from doors that the swarm is beating down. It’s only a little bit emasculating to be flattened by an exploding door.)

I would definitely suggest playing Alien Swarm. Find a good group of players and go through the whole campaign in one go. A mike is preferred. The level of teamwork achieved at the end is simply amazing, and wonderful. For a moment, that squad is all you have in the world. And it’s either them or the aliens. And you have a flamethrower.

http://indierpgs.com/2010/07/game-review-dubloon/

I do have quibbles to make with the writer, one Craig Stern, in regards to the feel of the game. While Stern eventually comes to the conclusion that Dubloon is a solid, if not outstandingly magnificent  game, he spends a good 1/3 of the review taking issue with the fact that Dubloon doesn’t 100% tread the waters that a pirate RPG supposedly should i.e. not enough searching for buried treasure, too much fighting random hedgehogs instead of being a pirate, too little walking the plank. Two things: 1. The main plot is all contrived around acquiring a massive golden treasure chest so I believe treasure is taken care of. 2. I am under the opinion that Dubloon is more about feeling like a pirate than being a pirate. Pirates, in game, are portrayed as folk lore heroes on the level of Robin hood. They are not the scurvy filled, murdering wretches found elsewhere. Therefore typical pirate actions don’t fit within the game world. I don’t think Dubloon should be punished for adhering to its atmosphere as a fun loving, verging on family friendly game.

(Just as a note, I don’t disapprove of the linked review at all. In fact, I think it’s better than my own, as of course, it was written by someone with experience, comprehensively, and not at 2 in the morning. I just dislike the idea of posting something without having something to contribute.)