Yume Nikki is a game about a young girl, named Madotsuki, and her escape from reality. It’s a game that has the potential to be long, or very short, depending on if you play it with a strategy guide or not. I played it initially without a guide, and then later on using a guide to get the ending. I recommend not using a guide during your first attempt at finishing, as using a strategy guide ruins some elements of the game, particularly the excitement of any exploration. The game is a great deal of fun if you enjoy cryptic exploration games with very artsy presentation (it’s similar to the game “LSD” on Playstation). I’m going to try to give very little info on the actual content of the dream worlds and effects in this review/analysis, simply because it would totally shatter the discovery and explorative element of the game, especially with regard to the hidden dream worlds. This will limit my analysis to non-specifics about the game, rather than what specifically X effect could mean, or Y dream world, or Z character. I highly recommend, in addition to playing without a strategy guide, playing in the dark, with no one around, after having been in your room/home alone for at least an entire day. Try to be a social recluse to play this game.

All that aside, the main “plot” of the game is that you play a girl named Madotsuki, a social recluse who lives in her apartment/home, and you must sleep in your bed, travel to a dreamland, and collect “effects”. The dream worlds are each distinct little areas of various themes and abstract styles, and contain different effects scattered about their landscapes. The effects in Yume Nikki are toggle-able effects on the character, for example, having longer hair, or a bicycle, or a little winter hat. The effects all have a specific use or interaction with the different dream worlds, usually in a dream world other than the one the effect was discovered in. Madotsuki can leave her dream worlds at any time by simply waking up, where she reappears in the real-world. The only other way to  be removed from the dream worlds is to run into the bird people. The bird people are strange female-looking bird humans that chase Madotsuki around in her dreams, and upon contact, return her to the waking world. I took them to be representative of the adults and social figures of the waking world that push Madotsuki to “get a life”.

The waking world.

The flow of the game starts very strong, with the very open-ended, looping dream worlds that are initially presented to the player to explore. It’s easy to find a few effects in the beginning, though the player is likely to be overwhelmed with the size and complete lack of linearity of Yume Nikki. The flow drops a significant amount when the player has explored all the initial dream worlds, if the player has not found any hidden ones. This is where I would suggest using a guide, as it doesn’t ruin the game, but the player should explore a lot to get the most out of each area. Most of the thrill of Yume Nikki is experimenting the effects, finding hidden dream worlds, and the discovery element of the uniqueness of each dream world. There’s very little challenge in this game, aside from dodging the bird people, and requires more patience than skill from a player. There is certainly a sort of skill in puzzle-solving, as the effects are mechanically puzzle-solving, and puzzle-introducing, devices.

The effects are symbolic of various things of importance or meaning to Madotsuki, buried away in her consciousness. I do not think they are necessarily things she likes, as there are effects that are somewhat morbid, like the knife. The effects are things that structured who she is as a person, and their interaction with the dream worlds reflect their importance. If the dream worlds can be seen as her unconscious, hidden mind, then the effects are forgotten, buried, hidden interactions that have structured her, and the dream worlds themselves. What is the first toy you ever received from a parent? Can you remember what it was, or would you have to dig around in your mind a bit to find it? They are often esoteric and strange to the player. How could we hope to fully understand something so utterly personal?

My favorite area.

The dream worlds are headspaces that can be accessed in Madotsuki’s mind, through dreams, and some of which can only be accessed through various effects that were collected in the initial dream worlds. So, there are a group of dream worlds which are given to the player as immediately enterable, and some which are hidden. The given dream worlds are conscious, they are the headspaces that Madotsuki is used to entering in her dreams, and possibly the most prevalent ones in her mind. The hidden dream worlds are unconscious headspaces, the places that Madotsuki’s psychology has buried or tucked away because of their traumatic or symbolic meaning being too much to enter immediately upon dreaming. They are the place of nightmares and deepest fantasy. Thus, the dream worlds, and to a good extend the effects themselves, provide indirect characterization of Madotsuki, who can be described as a social recluse, and someone who spends a lot of time trying to escape from the social situation.

That is likely the main theme this game has to offer: the theme of solipsistic escapism. Yume Nikki is a very personal, very introverted game, and it wants us to feel both Madotsuki’s isolationism, and her escapism from the world entirely. Her dream worlds are more interesting than the waking world, but are unfortunately melancholy and toned with sadness at the reality that they are based on the waking world. The ending (warning: the only spoiler in the review is following) signifies this solipsistic escapism in the most absolute way possible. Madotsuki, upon gathering all of the effects of her dream worlds, has essentially gathered all that of importance to her, found all in her mind that was buried away, all that composes her (current) state as a  person. “People don’t matter, the outside world doesn’t matter, it’s all a hostile game that humans play with each other, and no one understands me”. This is the kind of thing Madotsuki would say, if she talked at all, but the game has no need for her to speak. Her suicide signifies the full-cycle of this solipsism, and the final act of escapism, the escapism from both life and the game (they are the same in this context) entirely. The escape of one state (life) and another state (the game, that is the same, again) into death, the end of cycles and states. She has no more dream worlds or effects in them, discovery being mortification. This is the kind of person that society doesn’t destroy by hostility or by any sort of direct attack, but more subtly, by simply leaving behind. Of course, maybe she left herself behind, it’s unclear in that regard, but it certainly saddened her.

Horror is, as Alan Wake points out, a kind of darkness. A mental, reality darkness, something that confounds us with its illogicality.

But before we get into all that, let’s get into philosophy a little. In continental (not analytic) philosophy, a term, and series of terms, have been in circulation regarding the nature of reality, or realities, and how we perceive it/them. I’ll rip an explanation/definition straight from wikipedia (why not?):

“The Real is a term used by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in his theory of psychic structures. There is also the Symbolic order and the Imaginary order. This order is not only opposed to the imaginary but is also located beyond the symbolic. Unlike the symbolic, which is constituted in terms of oppositions such as “presence” and “absence”, there is no absence in the real. The symbolic opposition between “presence” and “absence” implies the possibility that something may be missing from the symbolic, the real is “always in its place: it carries it glued to its heel, ignorant of what might exile it from there.” If the symbolic is a set of differentiated signifiers, the real is in itself undifferentiated: “it is without fissure.” The symbolic introduces “a cut in the real,” in the process of signification: “it is the world of words that creates the world of things.” Thus the real emerges as that which is outside language: “it is that which resists symbolization absolutely.” The real is impossible because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic order. This character of impossibility and resistance to symbolization lends the real its traumatic quality.”

To translate to terms that most people use, the Real is a superstructure of all of reality, which is broken down into three different categories of reality: the Real Real (sorry, in philosophy we sometimes make very silly terms), the Symbolic Real, and the Imaginary Real. The Real Real is, as the description says, the universe without fissure. This is the most difficult to explain of the three. It means the infinite, the everything and the nothing that are the same. It means, in Discordianism’s terms, the underlying Chaos of the universe. A formless, empty (or completely, utterly full) void, devoid of any meaning or “thing”. In Crowley’s Thelema, it is the Abyss under Chronozon. In Buddhism, one could say it is Nirvana (though that is arguable depending on the variant of Buddhism in question). Regardless, it is the universe without fissure, without symbol, without “thing” at all. When Lovecraft speaks of his monsterous horrors from other dimensions and the Other Side coming to do whatever they do, he is attempting the impossible: to describe something from the Real Real. Which makes no sense because nothing can be “of” the Real Real, but it is that very problem, that something can come from some Other Side, that makes Lovecraft’s horrors both indescribable and terrible. The Real Real, then, is also a limit on human intelligence and possible context of thought, for the Real is unimaginable, we are not capable of imagining something without fissure, simply the act of imagining anything makes it a “thing”, immediately cutting-into and compartmentalizing the idea of the Real Real, which removes the idea’s point entirely. But lets continue to seeing how this idea very clearly applies to Alan Wake.

Fortunately, there are no actual examples of the Real Real, we cannot interact with it, it is simply the negative space of our reality, imperceptible and untouchable by us, the reality we live in without symbol or Baudillard’s Simulacra. But what we can do is just slightly lick it, we can de-symbolize our reality enough that we can at least taste the very tip of what humans can know of the Real Real. A common example I have come across is the “mirror spook”. One simply stares into their own eyes, in silence, in a mirror, trying to convince themselves that the person in the mirror is not them. Try it out! It’s totally terrifying for some people. It momentarily removes your physical sense of Self, there is now some mysterious, formless impostor in front of you, and you lack all coordinates for understanding it. Another one is to get a group of friends, sit in a room, and start a conversation, then ruthlessly analyze what is going on, but vocalize every word of that analysis. The entire situation will come apart, as the social structures and symbols that compose it are deconstructed. For some people, this either does not work or does not scare them.

Another example, given by people like Slavoj Zizek, is that we can touch the basic idea of the Real Real in a horror film (Zizek is more into Film than Games). What is it exactly that makes Michael from Halloween so scary? It is because he is nearly a Lovecraftian horror.

Now the chain of thought continues: What is a Lovecraftian horror? Lovecraft’s horrors are things. They are things that we cannot fully integrate into our symbolic order, things which defy our perception of reality so utterly and completely that Lovecraft could barely describe any of them, he had to describe the space around them, he had to describe how amorphous and without solidity they appeared to be. Michael, from Halloween, is like this, but visually represented, rather than written. Visuals are still a language, however, and that is the root of horror: being an aberration, or refusing to be integrated within our language, where our language is the limits of our world. Michael is scary because there is a nothingness to him. He enters without motive, kills without motive, cannot be stopped by any means known to mankind. He is a force. He enters the babysitter’s reality, kills, and the viewer cannot discern why he would do this. No reason at all. There is no dark past, no abusive mother (ignore the terrible remake), no school bully origin story, nothing. He is so without motive and purpose that he wears a totally featureless, blank, emotionless white mask for the duration of the entire movie. No information can be gained from him, other than he is a “thing” (perhaps not even human), and kills. We see no pleasure in the killing, no hate either, simply nothing. Then, he leaves, a wake of death and meaninglessness behind him. We cannot symbolize him, we cannot talk to each other of Michael, we can simply describe what happened around him. This is precisely what horror is, in its most basic, primordial form. Horror then is something only symbolical enough that we can observe and be affected by it, but cannot make any sense of it, we cannot put words to it (the very act that makes us humans), and thus logic as well cannot apply (logic is simply language in itself) It is that which is the most inhuman of all things, something that cannot possibly be known to us, talked of by us. Yet, it can touch us, talk of us. So then, the Symbolic Real, simply put, is where we as humans live, the world of words, the world of things, and the Real Real is the fissure-less Other Side, consisting of the infinite formlessness.

It is this topic, this theme, that Alan Wake explores. Alan Wake is a horror game, there are horrors in it, but it is more about horror itself than composed of horror (and it does pay homage to its writers consistently, and without irony). Alan Wake is a writer who has been having writer’s block for some time, which has caused him to become an alcoholic. He lives with his wife, Alice, who has a crippling phobia of the dark. Alan decides to take a trip, with his wife, to a mountain town in Washington, to have a vacation, relax, and drink himself into comfort.

I won’t spoil the game’s plot, because it is really fantastic, bearing little of the bad writing so common to both horror games and videogames in general. I will simply say it is a game, artistically speaking, about the Symbolic Real we live in, represented by the Light, and words themselves, conflicting with the Real Real, represented by darkness and illogicality (IE the things the Taken say as attacking you). This much is clear to anyone who plays. Further from that, it is a game that shows that writing itself is tied to this reality-bending conflict embedded in humanity till the end of our time, and that writers and artists have a special eye into it, into words and their nature, stories and their purpose. I doubt the artists behind this game thought in these specific philosophical terms, but the concept is identical, as it is in many beliefs.

Alan Wake has great flow. Stupendous, even. There are a total of maybe 8 kinds of enemy in this game, and yet there is a decent amount of combat. Never did it feel like a horror game based on combat, though I can recall doing it a lot. Alan Wake reuses those 8 or so enemies in so many ways, with so many environmental situations, that there is not a single point in the entire game that I felt the combat was getting repetitive, or the feeling of “I’ve done this before”. Certainly I’d killed these Taken many times in many ways, but all in different scenarios. One time, they tried to jump me. Another time, they cut logs that rolled down, threatening to crush me. Another fight was on a long bridge. Another, a Taken (or the Darkness itself) took control of a construction vehicle and tried to run me over. They don’t have complex AI by any means, though they do surround you, but the varied situations make each fight different, and in no way impede on the flow of the game.

The levels, no, environments are incredible. Everywhere feels perfectly like the place it is in the game. We don’t really realize, as gamers, people used to the logic and visual symbolism of videogames themselves, that usually we are playing in levels not environments. Such is not the case in Alan Wake. Every place you go is a set piece, every place and thing you do in this game is important. There is no padding, no wasted player time, nothing of the sort. Every environment is accurate, perfectly, immaculately lit, and unique. Unique is a big deal. Most games have very modular level assets, and simply mix and match, with a set piece here and there. Alan Wake? Every area is a set piece, every detail present. In your home, there is a room for you and your wife, a living room, a walk-in room and hallway, bathroom, two offices, etc. Everything is there. There is absolutely NO corner cutting. There are shoes by the door. The bathroom is beautiful! Perfect lighting, amazing models, nice texture work, reflections, etc. And most of these rooms are there simply to drive the idea in that this is your home, you live here, they have absolutely no function to the game’s mechanics. This is not simply a level, says Alan Wake, it is a place people live in. Why is it this game didn’t need gimmicky full-time actions for NPCs, like say Oblivion, to make me feel that way? It is, again, the attention to detail. A forest feels like a forest, not some easily-mentally-mapped thing that symbolically represents a forest, it is a god damn forest. If you find a little house in the middle of running around, a little shed, whose sole game purpose is to walk inside, look around for but a few seconds, take some ammo or a flare, and walk out, I can promise you it won’t be like the other sheds you run into. It will look different, be placed differently, and have a different interior. If it’s a shed at a lumber camp, it’ll have lumber worker stuff in it, and not in an over-done manner that says “hey player, I don’t think you understand implications, lets fill this shed with tons of lumberjack shit”. Alan Wake understands that appearances themselves are balanced. Too much lumberjack equipment in this shed, and it looks unnatural, it looks like a game would present it, as an idealized lumberjack shed. Returning to the uniqueness, other sheds will reflect the area they are in. And honestly, this game’s sheds are not an element of the game, you simply find them here and there! And yet, even such a small, forgettable thing as a shed where I find some ammo or resources to keep trucking are given so much detail. Lets also not forget the scenic distance in every environment of the mountains and forest, as they are absolutely beautiful in themselves. And even then, they look like mountains, atmospheric perspective and all. This is a videogame that shows how important it is, to immersion and the game itself, that there is attention to detail. It feels like a game Stanley Kubrick would have made, if it were a bit less wordy.

I watch people play this game, and I see them zip through the game ignoring the detail, the items everywhere, the perfectly placed environmental objects, the TV sets that play a live-action spinoff of The Twilight Zone called Night Springs, the little radio sets that do nothing but play the local radio station. Nothing Doom 3-esque, no one dies in the middle of radio transmission as expected, there’s just some country-bumpkin talk to pull you more into the game. Take a load off, listen to these dudes chat on the radio. People rush because we are used to games that are not like this, games where there is so much corner-cutting and idealization of what the environment looks and feels like, that we run through the environment, it is simply a little box for us to be led from point A to point B. This cycle continues itself in game design, as game designers now believe that levels should be overall interesting, but that the detail is not as important, since a player will only be looking at any single thing for at most a second or two. Not in Alan Wake, where things are done intelligently and correctly. Note: Don’t look for examples of this online, at least on Google Images, I could not find anything remotely similar to how most of the game looks, or any of the nice interiors.

I cannot think of much more to write. Amazing visuals, terrible cutscenes (I suspect outsourcing from Remedy), great writing, interesting and memorable characters, great voices, everything the player does is important, and possibly the best horror game ever made, if such a title can correctly exist.

P.S. My game is almost done. A friend of mine, Lord Tetrarch, of the black ambient Forgotten Land, is making me some custom tunes. Otherwise, there’s polishing and some stuff to finish, and it will be released.

Screenies:

*Perhaps existentialism.

It is no mystery to myself or immediate friends that I am a fan of Gregory Weir’s works. He’s a nice guy, his art is great, he has cool ideas for games and game design. Babies Dream of Dead Worlds is his latest, and the idea is very interesting: If babies have no perception of reality before being born, what do they dream about? It’s an interesting question, and equally interesting that he chose to make a game out of a question like that. However, I didn’t think this game was very well made. It has some really interesting stuff in it, but I didn’t find the bulk of the game interesting or engaging.

The game revolves around some…creatures? Aliens I will assume, with wings, that exist in a strange reality where logic and physics can turn on its head . For example, the player can swing up and down as gravity reverses, making for a very unique style of platforming that made me think in different ways about how to spatially maneuver myself. It’s a platformer, a racing game, and a collection game. The player starts in one baby and moves to other babies as he progresses the individual alien storylines.

Babies Dream of Dead Worlds is a game I found very frustrating to play for a number of reasons. The collecting is very obnoxious, and doesn’t really flow at all with the rest of the game. The game makes a point of explaining that the journey is more or less what counts, but I found this heavy-handed. Wouldn’t it perhaps be better to make me feel and think that naturally then just telling me that collecting is symbolic for a journey? The collecting itself is tedious because there are a whole lot of coins, though this is not a huge issue since the player does not need to collect a specific amount (that I noticed) to progress. I think the main issue is that the game is trying to use coins as a symbol for the purpose of making a journey, but provides nothing on that journey. The areas are very dull, full of pretty lifeless colors, and there is very little reason to want to explore any area. The actual platforming was sometimes enjoyable and sometimes very annoying, due mainly to very poor collision on the edges of the tiles. I would get easily stopped by the tiniest little corner of a tile, which is all kinds of obnoxious, having rounded tiles might have been a better idea for a game where the player is sling-shotting around.

I really do not feel like I got enough into the game to understand most of the artistic subtext. It’s clearly a game about family and journeys and so on, but what else? It was hard to discern, my attention was being split by what exactly I was being led to understand. The game was not pushing me anywhere interesting to go, and thus forming a message, but allowing me to have a space to explore. The problem as I said is that the space is not interesting, there’s little there for the player to bask in or explore in a meaningful manner.

The music is really atonal, and instead of being tracks (from what I noticed), it is just snippets of music that fade in and out*. Interesting in a way, but grinding on the ears, and as a guy who listens to Sunn O))) on a regular basis, there’s a way to do atonal without it being a bad thing. But perhaps to others it sounded good, I dunno, there’s no specific reason it sounds bad to me, but it does. The visuals are also not very good. It’s not really a matter of being advanced for visuals to be good, they should be fitting and aesthetically pleasing typically, but the colors here are not. Lots of very dull earthy colors in places that don’t really seem to  have any purpose in making any sort of composition. Is this to show how odd and chaotic a place like this would be? Maybe, but it sure looks yucky. Animation is not very smooth, and the centerpiece of the game’s visuals, the player, is not very interesting to look at. I was unaware it even had wing and not just red spaghetti for a bit until the game told me.

My last complaint is the title. It’s such a badass and interesting idea, but this game seems to have no relation. Sure this is an unconventional world, but these aliens talk and act mostly like humans, they have faces, they are representing human things. That’s all fine but it seems like there should be some sort of divide. Majesty of Colors had an alien doing a very human thing, but it still felt somewhat alien, it alienated humanity to your agency, and vice versa. This game not so much, I felt pretty much just like a human being who could use gravity differently. The title is also just confusing in relation to the game. How is this what babies dream of? How is this really what evokes a “dead world”? It would have been much more engaging if the setting and characters were a bit more alien. Not so alien we cannot relate of course, but more than this would perhaps be nice. A bit of a Sorites’ Paradox, but whatever, so is everything to some level.

I’m hesistant to call this a bad game, it’s not, but either I am at a great misunderstanding as to its nature and function by my own analysis, or it is not up to par with Mr. Weir’s previous artistic works. It’s just very strange to even review. Why are the graphics such low quality and such dull colors? Is it a metaphor to a child’s lack of understanding of what a color is while in the womb? Why the snippets of music instead of a track*? Why a racing game? Why coin collecting if the thing that it is typically used for, provoking the player to explore the game, is not very interesting to explore? I’m not sure.

*EDIT: I was a bit hasty on the audio, there are some full tracks, atonal as they are, they are not too shabby. I didn’t notice them my first time fully completing the game.

X-Com’s atmosphere runs on a lot of pretty important components. The most readily identifiable is the music, it is eerie and god damn creepy. Go here and listen to it right now. Minimalistic and atonal little droning beeps and crescendos of stark briefness. The music fits the gameplay perfectly. You are never 100% sure where all the aliens are, in the game’s over-world Geoscape view, or in the combat-oriented Battlescape view. It’s kind of like the X-Files music. Come to think of it, the game itself is kind of Mulder’s nightmare, but I’ll get into that later. It reminds me of the more tense moments in Deus Ex, as it has that information-age, high tech bleepy-ness to it. It sounds a fair bit like some Drone music out there, and perhaps with some Doom elements, though it’s very unlikely either genres of music were inspirations. This entire game feels like an accident, a really good accident.

Another component of the atmosphere is certainly the juxtaposition of the familiar and the alien. Another fine example of this idea to contrast with is Half Life, but I think X-Com does it even better. Half Life does it by showing this somewhat ordinary looking facility with crazy dimensional aliens spewing from it, and the contrast of highly organic, orange and green and purple aliens against stark white corporate office is enough to make them seem even more alien. X-Com does it better though because we don’t live in stark white corporate offices, at least most of us. We live in cities. We live in suburbs with our parents and old people and their perfect houses and dogs named Sport. X-Com brings out pop-cultural, and perhaps somewhat real, fear of gray aliens and ufos and even the government itself into complete reality, and not by putting us in a cyberpunk setting or a stark white corporate office, by putting us, as the government agent himself, in control of a gang of Majestic-12 agents, right in the front yard of every person in the world, right in the desert of Egypt, right in a city we know and love like New York. It’s a masterful juxtaposition, the small and creepy aliens, and even the larger monsterous ones, tromping through the green grass yards of American suburbs, eating everyone’s Sport and destroying three story houses, stomping on cars and the like.

While the actual terrain in X-Com is random and completely and utterly destructible, both things that I believe more games need to have because they add a vast amount to replayability and dynamic narrative, the best non-atmospheric thing about the environments is the variety. X-Com takes place all over the god damn planet, and everywhere you land to stop aliens or recover them or whatever, that place is visually represented during the battle. Land in Egypt? Yeah, there are pyramids and lots of sand. South America? You might land in a jungle, which are a bitch because you cannot see much at all. Antarctica? Sure, it’s a frozen wasteland. New York? Yep, streets, cars, buildings, people everywhere you might have to kill to prevent their transformation into an alien, at the hands of an alien. The environments are pop-cultural, because X-Com is pop-cultural. None of these places really look like this in reality, but they do in our heads, and that’s why (to go back a bit) the juxtaposition is so powerful. It runs on our idea of what suburban America or the sands of Egypt look like, not the reality, because reality is not as real to us as the symbols, to get into some Baudrillard. It’s all symbolic and pop-cultural. These are pop-cultural aliens invading a pop-cultural earth to be “defended”, I use that term loosely, by a pop-cultural government conspiracy. And it feels real. With those beautiful isometric graphics and that haunting music, it feels real.

While we’re on the environments, the fact that they can be destroyed is amazingly awesome. Everything blows up in this game as it would in out action-movie reality. Sometimes it is a tactical decision to simply blow the wall of a house in with a grenade or rocket launcher or explosive charge (an item made basically just for doing that), rather than walking in the front door like a human being. The gas stations blow up in a chain reaction that can be very useful. The environment in itself is a very powerful weapon, and is the only thing preventing your agents from being slaughtered, as most of the game, your men and women will die from a single landed shot from an alien. The tactics that can be employed here, in variety, are stunning. The maps are random, and the terrain is all over the world and diverse, so being strategic actually counts, running in is sure suicide, usually. One of my favorite maneuvers is to send a few people into the biggest house in the area, if it is an area with housing, and have them shoot off of the balconies with auto cannons. This stopped working later in the game when aliens began having mind control abilities, but I adapted.

This is the only criticism I have of X-Com, the single and only one: Mind Control. That shit was completely stupid, and whoever put it in should really consider that, because it is the only bad thing in this entire game from a design standpoint. Some X-Com veterans may disagree with me, finding the mind control challenging and interesting. I found it interesting, because it’s also pop-cultural, alien mind control. And the fact that you can eventually research it adds to that pop-cultural fear of unknown powers with mind control secretly making us do what we do for their benefit. However, mechanically, it sucks. Hard. Mind control is very difficult to thwart, and causes complete loss of control of a character, or characters, for a round of combat, in which time they will almost assuredly shoot someone else in your group, as X-Com agents start the battle toe to toe with each other, and usually remain that way the entire battle, for purposes of safety. So the game tells me “the minute you land your ship here, I will begin controlling some of your agents, keep them away from each other”. This is bad. Do not ever remove player agency and control in a game unless there is a very good effect from it for the purpose of the game being fun or more interesting (say, Left 4 Dead). Since mind control is barely counter-able (it requires very high-end research and technology development and takes a boatload of time to get), you will almost assuredly get hit by it over and over near the end, and especially on the last level. An agent will get controlled, shoot another one, lower the moral of all the agents around him and himself, which will make them panic and do nothing or berserk and shoot each other, and in a mere second your entire strategy can go from tactical to a bunch of morons shooting the shit out of each other. And again, there is hardly any counter to this. It’s like playing Counter Strike, being very tactical and skillful, and all of a sudden, for no apparent reason what so ever, your gun turns into an angry wombat and kills you. It ruins any strategy gaming that would have been going on because it’s an almost totally random elements that removes your control of what you are doing. And that is my only criticism of this game.

This idea that you should usually not remove player control unless there is a fucking fantastic reason to do so is only embellished by the fact that X-Com is so good at letting the player do what he wants while still being an amazing game. Shigesato Itoi said games are like prostitutes, which I can understand but I’d rather they be teachers, and X-Com is excellent at being a prostitute and a teacher. You pick your first base, it is the first thing that happens in X-Com, the game opens, you might watch the intro cinematic, you start the new game, and BAM pick a base, anywhere on the entire planet of earth. You name that base, whatever you want. And then you do whatever you want. You can rotate the world, you can add to your base, research new technologies, buy things, sell things, name ALL of your X-Com operatives whatever you feel like, look at charts showing UFO activity, micro-manage your bases manufacturing facilities, and so on. The game is very structured, but has almost Dwarf Fortress levels of dynamic narrative to be had simply by the sheer amount of things you can do with it. But like a good prostitute, you don’t have to do anything specifically. Like a good teacher, X-Com will let you do pretty much whatever you want, so long as it’s by its rules, and it will teach you what was a good idea and bad idea very quickly, with implied pushes in various directions, and with more direct teaching like scores for each battle or UFO recovery, and a monthly assessment of your usefulness as an organization by the entire world. Everyone in the world is counting on your, the player, to make those decisions.

There’s a lot of stuff in X-Com that has tactical advantage but isn’t really necessary. The game never tells you what is necessary, other than stopping the aliens at all costs. For example, it’s completely up to the player to determine that it’s probably a good idea to use X kind of weapon against Y enemy. A lot of the time, I picked my equipment out of sheer dynamic fun. I just wanted my squad to be a certain way. Each member to have a little flare on their left leg, a pistol on their belt for back up, and a laser rifle in their hands, with a grenade on the belt. Some members would have a piece of advanced logistics equipment, or a heavy weapon like an auto cannon or plasma cannon, and some might be demolitions experts and have high explosives for blowing entrances into people’s perfect American homes. I named everyone! I loved that. Every time a member got to a high rank I’d give him a name, and maybe a suit of power armor or a jetpack, just as my human to computer reward for that virtual guy being so efficient at killing aliens. X-Com just loves and wants the player to try whatever it wants, and there’s no wrong choices so much as much harder ones and easier ones. And this makes for amazing and fun dynamic narrative. The game actually rewarded and reacted to my behavior in these choices. It didn’t prop up buildings just for me having explosives, but there were enough buildings that it was useful. Every avenue in the game, for the most part, is useful and fun, even if it may be harder, and because of all these options and random possibilities, there is no way to determine a most-efficient route that is objectively correct, just what you would like to do from an efficiency and thematic standpoint. The game is simply more fun and engaging when you make the decisions you want to make, not just whatever looks the most logical. I think that kind of thinking in a game is fantastic and should be explored much more.

While most of the game runs on pure dynamic narrative, and does so absolutely amazingly (no it is not a Shakespearean sonnet but it is engaging in the way only a game can be), there is an actual author-side static narrative. You, whoever the fuck You are in this game, control an organization called X-Com, and you must stop aliens from invading and enslaving earth, find their home planet, and annihilate them for global security. Your ability will be judged by the entire world in a secretive joint meeting every month, and you receive your funding from every country in the world that is willing to pay for your services. In this way it becomes apparent that while X-Com is the biggest government conspiracy ever made (it spans the entire god damn world), it is also a mafia. The other countries are upset when you blow up their buildings and pyramids and landmarks, and especially when you slaughter their civilians in the crossfire of killing aliens, but they will tolerate it as one tolerates the local mafia, because if you do not pay them for their service, a bigger group of assholes will kill you. It is never quite established, at least when I played, why there is a conflict. It’s like both the earth’s leaders and the aliens assumed the other was hostile and immediately set about destroying them. There was an immediate realization that the other could be a threat and they just went at it, absolutely no dialogue is exchanged in X-Com between the two species, not a single time I am aware of. In this sense, X-Com is a very political game. It is the absolute nightmare of any human being, that an alien race exists, and our world, out of the common man’s control, is going to immediately attack it, and it attack us. It’s worse than nuclear war with Russia or anything like that, it’s inter-solar-system war. And, it’s almost completely being kept from the public. Christ.

I think I’ve gone over everything really important about X-Com as a game and art, though I’m sure there is more just because it is such a vast and complex game. The last thing I’d like to go over is the second game, X-Com: Terror From the Deep. The game is basically the exact same game as X-Com: UFO Defense, but with a different look, much harder difficulty, a few new aliens and weapons, and the ability to fight aliens underwater and above ground. The story has advanced from the first game, and is moderately different, but nothing too crazy. TFTD was made in a rush attempt by Microprose, I believe, to make another X-Com game quickly, and it is about all they could do in that time, as the original X-Com took a long time to make, as most good games do. It’s a pretty interesting little mod or expansion of a game, I like the underwater atmosphere and the Lovecraftian aliens, but in that sense I also dislike it because that juxtaposition between familiar and alien is lost, since most of us don’t live at the bottom of the ocean.

Someday I can only hope I construct a game as amazing and atmospheric as X-Com, and certainly I will be making games that borrow from what it has presented as possible in a game. Till that day, then.

]]> http://www.cosmicmaher.com/?feed=rss2&p=194 2 http://www.cosmicmaher.com/?p=169 http://www.cosmicmaher.com/?p=169#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:25:59 +0000 msagrillo http://www.cosmicmaher.com/?p=169 It has been a long time since I updated this website. Lots of things have happened in life, good and a few bad, but predominately good. I’ll be updating this site more with info on my first Flash game, and various other things like sketches and possibly music and movie review. I’ve played a good amount of games in the time that I have not updated, and will make an effort to review them all rapidly enough to continue with other reviews, but not fast enough to lose any quality I may have.

Shattered Horizon is a game that I bought completely off the concept being presented: An FPS with 3D movement and camera set in space, featuring astronauts and DirectX10 support. The game is now a good watermark of PC performance, being one of the few PC games in existence to only run on Vista or Windows 7 due to the need for DX10. The game was made by FutureMark, the same people who made the 3D Mark software to test  your video performance. Pretty strange for a studio/company’s first game, but one gets the feeling that their lack of experience in making the usual FPS actually contributed to the design of this game.

Zero gravity is a big deal in this game, and the first thing that attracted me to it. There are 360 degree shooters out there that have multiplayer capabilities, but not any that I know of where the player is an astronaut. It’s a completely new dynamic on how one plays in an FPS. I was used to games like Natural Selection, Counter Strike, Halo, and so on where my spacial relation to the enemy is judged in relation to a plane, the ground, and another plane, the ceiling or sky. As long as I see movement within these two pretty constricting boundaries, it’s a safe bet I’ve located my enemy. Stealth in a conventional FPS (barring an actual Stealth FPS like Thief) is done by crouching or otherwise just hiding behind something, and as a tactic more often then not isn’t terribly useful beyond the surprise element, unless the game is built around the idea. With zero gravity and 360 degree movement and view, stealth is incredibly useful, even vital, and can be used to sneak up very easily on someone. It’s substantially harder to predict where someone is coming from or hiding when you can look through a complete sphere of possible locations. The zero gravity is very well done, and feels very natural (if that is even possible for a human to feel), as the player can move around normally, use a recharging jetpack, and magnetically attach himself to a surface to walk around. With a lot of 360 degree shooters, it feels like you’re playing an unnecessarily-dimensional shooter, because they mostly have the mechanical design of a standard ground-based FPS. This is not the case with Shattered Horizon.

The mechanic that immediately jumps out as complementing the dimensional design is the game’s Silent Running Mode. The players are all astronauts, and the game’s logic is that it “simulates” the sounds the player hears (gunfire, walking, radio messages, etc) using their spacesuit. In addition, the space suit controls the HUD and the player’s jetpack. The problem in-game with the suit is that it emits very bright lights from the front of your body to enable your sight, which in turn makes most players pretty obvious targets for enemy fire when contrasted against the blackness of space. Silent Running Mode is a toggled mode that disables the suit entirely! The player loses their HUD and ability to differentiate friend from foe through anything but suit color, their jetpack propulsion decreases dramatically, there is no reticule to aim your rifle, and you lose most sound abilities, including the sound of your surroundings that your suit was simulating, and the voice communications from team members. On the plus side, Silent Running Mode makes the player amazingly sneaky. Your suit has no lights, and you do not show up on enemy HUDs, making both hiding and sneaking up on enemies very easy. Players begin to rely on seeing the opponent through their suit’s HUD, and don’t think to look even “up” on most levels, and when you do, it’s not uncommon to see a player floating through space towards the enemy territory with Silent Running Mode on. It’s a pretty brilliant mechanic and synergizes really well with the rest of the game.

Players can attack from any direction.

The levels are both worth a little criticism and praise. On the plus side, they are built very well for the 360 degree view. Most of the levels can be approached from many angles, and are basically designed so that there are 2-4 actual levels taking place on one map, and simply re-orienting oneself will show an entirely new level (for example, an asteroid level has buildings on the top and bottom of the asteroid). The internal levels are amazing and I honestly wish there were more levels that take place completely indoors. I realize that makes little sense with the 360 degree view, but the sheer atmosphere (which I’ll get into later) of being inside is amazing and needs to be its own level, or even game. The main criticism I have is that the levels can be so open in areas as to remove any real sense of strategy. I see most players just treat those areas as dead zones, which is fine, but it seems wasteful from a design aspect. The reason games like Counter Strike are so strategic is because of the predictability of enemy movement and location. Remove that element, and Shattered Horizon has a hard time being tactical. Not a huge deal though, as this is very rare in the games I have played. While we’re on the small criticisms I have, the spawning and team-killing could be improved. Team-killing is enabled because of Silent Running Mode. One of the drawbacks to using that mode is that you are prone to accidentally shooting teammates without the HUD, which is a pretty cool idea as a drawback. It’s annoying though as some players, being the amazing douches they are, will just kill team mates with no “voteban” or “votekick” system in place to remove them, they have to just be shot back at till they decide to leave, or you leave. The spawning is cool in that the player launches from space into the map, which is neat, but uncool in that you can be launched right into a group of enemies. The game seems to make an attempt to prevent this, but, there’s nothing in place between the enemies and your spawn point, so they can just spawn camp until defeated, which is bad design I think.

The rifle in Shattered Horizon is pretty awesome. I was initially a little upset that there was only one weapon, but quickly realized it made the game a little more consolidated in its mechanics. The rifle shoots very well, and can do bursts or spray very easily, it is one of the most kinesthetically satisfying guns I’ve ever  used. When a player presses the middle mouse button, the rifle enters a sniping mode, making it a totally different gun. The rate of fire is different, and it begins firing in 10 shot bursts, which is more than enough to easily kill an enemy astronaut. The fun part about the sniper rifle is that it is nearly impossible to shoot unless the player is magnetically attached to a surface, making it more of a choke-point gun, and removing the dislike that a lot of sniper rifles in other FPSes draw, as it never really feels “cheap” if you are sniped. The other game weapons include the grenades, which are very cool. There are three grenades: the MPR, the EMP, and the ICE, and none of them do any damage. This is good, because they become purely for utility instead of a Call of Duty-esque grenade spam in space. The MPR fires a bright red grenade that explodes and launches every movable object away from the point of impact. It’s awesome, and really demands for the player to use it in a variety of situations, which makes it even more skill-based. The MPR can be used to rocket enemies away from you and save yourself, or with some smart physics and bouncing, be used to rocket yourself towards the enemy, and dramatically increase your velocity. Those are only a few possible uses too. The EMP is a grenade that explodes into a radius of electromagnetic bullshittery and “turns off” everyone in the radius, but is hampered by being incredibly close range. Players who are EMP’d can still turn and shoot, but their sensitivity is much lower to turn, and they have no HUD. The ICE is my favorite grenade, and it is basically space’s version of the smoke grenade. It fires pretty far, and explodes into a cloud of ice particles that act to obscure vision dramatically, making it an ideal grenade for closing in on a sniper or blocking a choke point from enemy sight, giving you the upper hand on who shoots first. That’s what I love about the grenades, they can all be used in more than one way effectively.

Disorienting as all fuck.

To conclude this review/analysis, my favorite aspect of Shattered Horizon is the atmosphere. It’s very contrasting, as space can be, and things go from dark to light very easily. It is the first game I’ve ever played where I actually felt like I was in space. Floating around, magnetizing to things and shooting at enemy astronauts, watching their faceplate burst and glisten in the space around them is very visceral. The long sections of space and silence in 2001: A Space Odyssey feel similar to floating around in this game. The atmosphere is so thick that it is easy to get disoriented if one just spins around a bit, becoming totally confused as to which way one was going. I’d like to see more FPSes with this level of atmosphere and isolation, but I’ve never played Metroid Prime, which I hear is the pinnacle of the “isolating space game” genre. Shattered Horizon is a really fun and good game idea because it does something humans fundamentally were not meant/set-up to do.

]]> http://www.cosmicmaher.com/?feed=rss2&p=169 0 http://www.cosmicmaher.com/?p=165 http://www.cosmicmaher.com/?p=165#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:44:30 +0000 msagrillo http://www.cosmicmaher.com/?p=165

Gregory Weir recently put out two new flash games on his website, www.ludusnovus.net. The first, Paladin 0, is a shmup where the player assumes the role of a star ship. Paladin 0 is a short game, so this will be a short review. This star ship is instructed to destroy all evil, purging it from the entire game. The game’s title then is a link to this idea, the player is a paladin of sorts.

Paladin 0 is a short but sweet game, with a good and clever idea. It’s a game that is only fully actualized when you have beaten it. Upon defeating what is assuredly the ultimate evil, the game says “Nothing is wrong, everything is beautiful” and asks if the player would like to play again. Upon trying to play again, you are greeted with the beginning of the game, which then fades to black, and you’re back at the same “Nothing is wrong, everything is beautiful”/Play Again menu. The point the game makes is that in defeating all of the evil in the game, the game itself is gone. What is a world without the contrast of imperfection to perfection, “good” and “evil”, and other such dichotomies? It’s not a game, it’s merely a stagnant state of immobility, and it is that state to which Paladin 0 leads the player. I enjoyed this game quite a bit, and though the concept it presents and the point it makes is simple, it’s clever and something that only a game could really accomplish.

The latest installment of the Professor Layton series, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box (in the US), is more of the same, with some very new and interesting things that I didn’t expect. The controls are the same as the previous game, and the general flow of the story is about the same. The excellent animation and voices have returned, and every witty exchange between Luke and Layton is here. I felt the game was more serious than the previous game, however. Professor Layton and the Curious Village, as well as PLDB, maintain an ironic distance between very childish and very serious, with the previous game having many reality-bending and nostalgic themes that the player can really feel emotionally effected by, rather than just being a nice puzzle-pusher. The game is also a good deal longer than the previous one, and I think it made the story a bit more dramatic.

The quality of puzzles in PLDB has increased, but unfortunately their integration with the story flips between really amazingly brilliant, and totally irrelevant. A lot of the puzzles that are required for the story to progress are excellent, and really demand the player to think creatively, often employing various clues discovered from the story. A lot of the puzzles, I’d guesstimate about 30%, seem to have nothing to do at all with the narrative that is unfolding. Unlike PLCV, where the puzzles seemed irrelevant until the secret of the St. Mystere unfolded to the player and all made sense, these puzzles are literally things like “Oh hey I saw you walking around town. Here’s a puzzle.” It was disappointing, but the sheer awesomeness of the narrative and the puzzles that actually did intertwine effectively with it makes up for this issue, particularly the amazing and simple final puzzle. Some of the puzzles are also very shitty, and have either really horrible instructions or do not accurately lay out the available rules to the player. Fortunately, those puzzles are few, and not important to the unfolding of the story.

Three new, and somewhat interesting, additions to the game are the Hamster, Camera, and Tea Set. The hamster is a fat hamster given to Layton and Luke, on the Molentary Express, by the train’s cook, and is essentially the clockwork dog from the previous game, but the puzzle to attain the hamster is different. Your objective is to use a variety of little hamster toys and items to “work out” the hamster, and cause him to lose weight. The hamster items are acquired by completing various puzzles. The player places the puzzles on a grid board, and the hamster runs around collecting the items. The more steps the hamster walks, the less fat he becomes, and if you reach the goal for that level of fatness, the closer you are to him being lean enough for the cook’s liking. This is pretty cool, as it is essentially a puzzle that spans the entire game’s story, and I felt pretty great when I managed to lower his fat-rating each time. There is criticism to be had here though, as the way the items are progressively given to the player is both pointless and silly.

To my knowledge, there is no way to arrange these items to move any farther than 3 spaces between each item.

Some of the hamster items have abilities, such as the apple, which automatically attracts the hamster to it if it is within 3 spaces, ignoring all surrounding non-apple items. However, these items are all given to you in such an order that the game implies you can, with some clever placement, make the hamster walk very far. The truth however, is that the hamster can only walk a specific length at each section of the game until you reach much later in the game and receive the light bulb hamster item. Until then, it is literally a process of just placing each item 3 spaces away from each other. There’s no puzzle there, it’s simply a process of getting more items. By the ending, however, when the player has access to all the hamster items, it becomes much more interesting as the items’ placement will lead the hamster around the grid in many different ways, and clever placement does increase his steps taken. Once the hamster is complete, he will tell you in his hilarious voice where hint coins are located as you travel around. The hamster is a cool idea but could have used better initial delivery.

The second game-wide puzzle is the Camera. Like the Tea Set and the Hamster, the player collects parts of the camera, and like the clockwork dog from PLCV, the player must put the camera together. As he/she does, the player can arrange the parts inside of the camera, rotating and moving them around how they think it should fit. It’s not a very difficult puzzle. Once the camera is completed, the player can take snapshots of 9 different areas in the game, and then play a “find the difference” game with that area’s screen and the screen with minor differences. The reward is access to secret areas in the game, which are all pretty cool and rewarding. There’s nothing mind-blowing to the camera but it’s a fun little inclusion to the game, for an extra bit of puzzling content, a side-quest, and I don’t have any criticisms about it.

The tea set is my favorite of the three added game-wide puzzles. The player collects various tea ingredients by solving puzzles, and progressively adds them to a tea set. Teas take 3 ingredients, which can be of any combination of either multiple tea ingredients or just 3 of a kind. The player mixes and matches to produce different teas that each have their own set of flavor attributes. My favorite part of the tea was listening to Layton and Luke’s hilarious commentaries on the horrible teas I would brew. The use of the teas is extroverted. The townsfolk of Folsense will be visually distraught, with little action lines above their heads, and by engaging them in conversation and providing them with a tea of their description (IE “I want a spicy, refreshing tea with a hint of berry”) will both alleviate their narrative pains, and provide Layton and Luke with a little background on the city, and even occasionally a puzzle (why? I don’t know).

Nothing is ever what it seems.

The game’s theme has stayed predominately untouched. The central idea remains a questioning of the reality of a village and the subtle inconsistencies that lead to eventually discovering its long-buried secret. This is an idea I Love, with a capital L, in art, and is done very well in the Layton games. This one is even more dramatic about the entire process, adding themes of lost innocence and misunderstood rage into the mix. Vampires, gothic castles, a town lost in the haze of the past, it’s almost Lovecraftian in a way. There’s lots of nostalgia to be had in this game, as with the last game, and it’s very effective. I highly recommend this game to anyone who loves puzzles and dark, mysterious pasts, filled with secrets and shames. It is actually somewhat depressing. I’m excited for the third and fourth games in the Layton series to be translated to English, and curious as to whether this theme spans the entire series.