SR388: A Spelunker’s Nightmare

  • Reading time:8 mins read

[ The following post is assembled from fragments of discussion from July 2014, October 2014, July 2016, and August 2017. ]

Long before that AM2R thing, which is exactly what a cynical observer would predict from a fan remake, I’ve often rambled about ways to do a sensitive update of Metroid II, that (unlike AM2R) honors the original game’s tone and thematic material and develops it even further, makes the game even more awkward and upsetting to play:

I still think the best way to tackle a remake is to consider the affect of the original, and try to recreate it. The original is claustrophobic, in part due to feeling lost — sameness, lack of a map — in part to the screen.

So, make light a scarce quantity. The world would be desaturated and have a big focus on environmental light sources — lava, certain bioluminescent plants or animals, Chozo technology. At times it’s hard to see anything. Sort of a Silent Hill aspect.

Samus’s suit may project a slight glow around her, reflecting on things. Generally the glow would extend about as far as the boundaries of the GB screen. Occasionally more or less. The glow from Samus’ suit would give things a sort of monotone hue. Maybe greenish, from her visor.

If you wanted to expand on the game, you could give her various kinds of light beam. Or make her suit glitch out. Maybe special heat and X-ray visors would be needed to navigate certain areas. Glitchily. It would be all grainy and prone to error. Make it go totally dark, for a scripted segment here or there, in the spirit of those segments where you have to blindly fumble around in ball form. Maybe you have to navigate by noise and touch. Maybe a sort of a sonar, so you can hear when the Metroids are getting close.

There might be an attempt at a map, but it doesn’t work right. Glitchy. Staticky. Suggests non-Euclidean space. Some key parts of the interior may not make any sort of euclidean geometric sense. They kind of don’t, already.

This would also play up some of the Zelda-style risk-and-reward progress limitation. You CAN go down there, but… should you?

Also see: Dragon Warrior, Phantasy Star II, Lost in Blue.

But, that’s if I were pressed to reinterpret the game. Insofar as its native form on the Game Boy, Metroid II is basically perfect. The worst I can say is that the control can get a little mushy at times. Speed up Samus’ movement by 125%, maybe tighten collision and response time. Little stuff like that.

Something I really dig about Metroid II is that as designed, it wouldn’t really make as much sense on another console. If you play through as an adult, with a modicum of design literacy in hand, it soon becomes clear to what extent the game actively uses its technical and conceptual limitations to say its own thing.

Unlike Super Metroid the world that it draws doesn’t feel like a playground set up for your benefit. It’s just there. If it’s confusing, then it would be, wouldn’t it. You’re invading this space that was never meant for a thing like you.

The game’s affect is just so subjective.The way the Spider Ball is used nails down how unfriendly the space is. This is a space where we really shouldn’t be, and it’s just by the skin of this overpowered miraculous thing that it works.

When you get to the cramped corridor forcing you to draw a visual parallel between Samus in ball form and the unhatched Metroid egg, there’s not a lot of space left (as it were) to question how expressive the design is meant to be.

It’s supposed to be claustrophobic. It’s meant to be disorienting and upsetting. You’re supposed to lose your way and freak out, the way you probably would in reality if you were dropped into an unmapped hole in the ground on an alien world. Or even ours. Even if mapped. It’s meant to be distressing, in no small part because you shouldn’t be there. The mission is wrong. You are playing the bad guy.

That’s not reading into it. In its closing moments the game tells you how you messed up, and Fusion‘s plot is based on this revelation. (Another irritating thing about Super Metroid is how it not only glosses over this failing; it compounds it. But Fusion gets the story back.) Fusion also gets the claustrophobia and tension back, in a shifted form, where Super throws them out in favor of Whee Shiny Perfect Action.

As far as how Metroid II uses the resources it has, the only thing I would treat differently is the lava. To quote one of many earlier discussions on the topic,

That goddamned lava. What is that? Of all the ways to limit progress. I mean… I can make up some silly theories that kind of work. But how arbitrary is that? At least it’s an apparent phenomenon of the gameworld, even if it’s triggered by discrete player-dependent flags.

Instead of progress clearly resulting from the player’s action it’s just, “What the hell was that rumble? Oh… there’s… a route here. Was it here before? I don’t think so.” Granted, it doesn’t affect me when I’m playing. It’s just in retrospect that it’s so incredibly clumsy and weird.

Of course the game is pretty linear, and it can’t let you miss a Metroid. If there were some narrative rationalization, maybe that would be enough. But then you’re in danger of needless exposition.

On reflection, I would add a horrible piercing screech after the extermination of each set of Metroids and before the earthquake and lava drain. Each time, as Samus strayed deeper into the caverns, the screech would get louder and longer, while the screen would shake with ramping violence. Toward the end, it basically would peak all of the sound output and leave the game a nauseating shaky-cam mess for minutes at a time.

This would serve many purposes.

  • It would make the game more disorienting and upsetting to play.
  • It would introduce the Queen early as Samus’s opponent.
  • It would establish the Queen’s growing pain and anger.
  • It would help to underline that maybe Samus isn’t quite doing the right thing here.
  • And it would resolve the structural weirdness around the lava, which as it stands is a VERY CONVENIENT and unexplained progress limiter.

All of this would be totally doable on the Game Boy. Pretty easy, even, in this engine. Everything’s already set up, pretty much. Just add a screech that gets louder and longer each time, and make the screen rumble longer and more violent each time. That’s all! But, it would make such a big difference to the game’s narrative flow, logical consistency, and thematic unity.

Would this change be on-the-nose, in terms of the game’s themes? Maybe. But done well, it wouldn’t be clear what was happening at first. It’d just add a layer of “huh?”, growing to “oh hell.”

Right now there’s little feedback to completing each wave, and the mild rumble has little impact, the lava drain nothing like an explanation. This would add at least a sense of intentionality to the design, which as designed leaves room for interpretation, yes, but also feels sloppy.

Significantly, all of the scream’s and the rumble’ thematic resonance becomes clear only in retrospect. You get ramping uncomfortable chaos as you burrow in, but aside from feeling increasingly intimidated, it’s only clear what’s happening when you finally meet the Queen, which snaps it all into focus.

Currently there is no clear moment of epiphany, and the Queen’s role consists of sitting there, unseen, until you burst in and kill her. The epiphany comes with the egg, which is great. Really great, actually. But its significance would be enhanced, coming out of the catharsis of that encounter with the thing that had been expressing pain the whole time. “Oh hell,” you’d think, “so that’s what has been happening all along. What… does all of this mean? What have I done?” And then, a baby Metroid imprints on you.

You’re still free to interpret however you like, but this gives a touch of emotional feedback and clarity to undermine any sense of bravado. And all it is is a screech and a more violent screen shake. That’s all it takes to snap it all into focus.

The Playlist / Those Tenuous Twos

  • Reading time:23 mins read

by [name redacted]

You may have read the first part of this column in the December 2009 Play Magazine. It was intended as a single article, and the start of a whole series of such lists. In the event, I was asked (due to my incorrigible verbosity) to break the article into three pieces; only the first found its way to print. Here is the column in full.

Used to be, when a game was successful enough to demand a sequel, the design team would do its best to avoid repeating itself. Though I’m sure they mostly wanted to keep their job interesting, the practical effect was that if the games were different, they would both remain relevant. In an arcade, Donkey Kong Jr. could stand handsomely by its father, each shilling for its own share of the coin. You might call them companion pieces, rather than updates or replacements.

When home consoles hit, design teams were even more modest, and were generally left to do their own thing. So starting on the NES, you will see a certain trend: successful game spawns weird, only tenuously related sequel; fans of the original scratch their heads; a greatly expanded dev team releases a third game, which is basically just the first again, on steroids; fans think it’s the best thing ever, because it’s exactly the same, except better! And to hell with that weird second chapter.

Thing is… usually the second game is the most interesting you’ll ever see.

Cultivating Fear

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, under the title “How to Make Fear“.

With Halloween at hand, surely there must be some way to warp the festive energy to our own analytical ends. Just see what happens when you invite us to a party! Don’t fret, though – though full of long words, our museum of terror takes the well-oiled form of a top ten list. We know how you like your information, and it’s in bite-sized individually wrapped treats. Please… be our guest.

The Nose Before Your Face

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part eight of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “The Value of Simplicity”.

So lately we’ve been swinging back toward thinking about games as a medium of expression. It’s not a new concept; way back in the early ’80s, companies like Activision and EA put all their energy behind publicizing game designers like rock stars – or better yet, like book authors – and their games as unique works by your favorite authors. This all happened just after figures like Ed Logg and Toshihiro Nishikado started to extrapolate Pong and SpaceWar!, incorporating more overt narrative frameworks and exploring more elaborate ways of interacting with the gameworld. From this initial explosion of creativity came Steve Wozniak and the Apple II, providing an easy platform for all of the early Richard Garriotts and Roberta Williamses and Dan Buntens to come.

Then stuff happened, particularly though not specifically the crash; the industry changed in focus. On the one hand we had ultra-secretive Japanese companies that – like Atari before them – usually didn’t credit their staff for fear of sniping and for the benefit of greater brand identity; on the other, what US companies remained tended to inflate beyond the point where small, expressive, intimate games were economically feasible. And then there’s just the issue that, as technology grew more complex, design teams grew larger and larger, making it harder for any one voice to stand out, leading to more of a committee-driven approach.

NextGen’s Top Ten Years In Gaming History

  • Reading time:30 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published in some form by Next Generation. I was asked not to include 1999 or 2000, because the Dreamcast was perceived as a low mark in the industry rather than a high one. I was also asked to include the previous year, to suggest that we were in the middle of an upswing. So… that explains some of the selections.

In videogames, as in life, we tend to get things right about a third of the time. There’s one decent Sonic game for every two disasters; one out of every three consoles can be considered an unqualified success; the Game Boy remake of Mother 1 + 2 was released in one out of three major territories. With the same level of scientific accuracy, one can easily say that, out of the thirty years that videogames have acted as a consumer product, there are maybe ten really excellent milestones, spaced out by your 1984s and your 1994s – years maybe we were all better off doing something out-of-doors.

It kind of makes sense, intuitively: you’ve got the new-hardware years and the innovative-software years, spaced out by years of futzing around with the new hardware introduced a few months back, or copying that amazing new game that was released last summer. We grow enthusiastic, we get bored. Just as we’re about to write off videogames forever, we get slapped in the face with a Wii, or a Sega Genesis – and then the magic starts up all over again, allowing us to coast until the next checkpoint.

Worlds

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Occurs to me that the thing The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly has definitely in common with Fellowship of the Ring (more than the other two Rings movies), and indeed with things like Lang’s Metropolis and The Third Man and Nosferatu — basically every movie I find magical and involving — is that the movie’s world is in a sense the main character. There are other characers in the movie, with their own agendas that we follow. The main conflict or relationship, though, is between those characters and the world they’re in — which in most cases is their own world; they just don’t see all of the aspects of it that we do, because they live there. The characters exist to bounce off the scenery, to ignore it, to walk us through it, to give us contrast with it..

This also describes The Legend of Zelda. And Silent Hill. And Phantasy Star II. And Dragon Warrior. And just about every videogame I find magical and involving. Hell, Riven is nothing but environment.

In a certain meta way, it also decribes more postmodern fare like Charlie Kaufman and Treasure. In MGS3, Kojima does both at the same time! Resident Evil 4 tries to as well, though it’s a little more clunky in execution.

A thread here.

Psychology

  • Reading time:11 mins read

So. Videogames tend to be built like videogames. People tend to play videogames like videogames — even if playing them that way hurts the experience. People go to great lengths to do stupid things in videogames just because they must collect every item, do everything that can be done, before they finish. And videogames know this.

Why is that treasure chest placed in that out-of-the-way room that no one has reason to go to? To reward someone who goes down there. Why do most people go down there, even if it’s clearly not the right direction? Not out of curiosity, but because they expect a reward. It’s become a task, almost. (Again, look at how RPGs tend to be made.) Some second-guessing is fun, if it’s clever and unobvious. Much of it is just tiresome. Everyone’s nodding, saying, “Yeah, we get it. We’ve been here before.” And yet there’s this unwritten code, that everyone’s afraid to break. It leads to leaps of logic like the player being expected to wander around and level up for two hours to beat a boss. That’s just plain fucking bizarre. Grotesque. Picture it, for a moment. What FUCKING reason do you have to do that?

Same for the perfectionist impulse, where you must collect everything — just because it’s there to collect. And the games now take way too much advantage of this, as a result of people reacting in that dysfunctional way to start with. It’s a natural compulsion, so the games treat it as if people actually gain joy from it. When it’s really more of a feeling of obligation. A quirk of mental chemistry, because the game presents it as a viable option. And now we’ve come to expect it so much that we become pissed off when we can’t finish a game with a perfect save file. Same with speed runs and sequence breaking for the sake of sequence breaking and all of this inanity that comes out of that stew of boredom, idle greed, and the natural human response to a lack of consequence.

Doukutsu Monogatari makes me wonder. It’s weak here, but. Perhaps a way to discourage, say, hoarding in a game is to make it so you can’t get a good ending unless you play it in a sane, non-videogamey way.

Silent Hill 2 also comes into this a little, as does the discussion about hardware — although you don’t really need advanced hardware for this. Not in a basic sense. I mean. Some version of this goes as far back as Ultima. Further, probably.

I don’t mean imposing arbitrary (or strict story-based) limits, of the kind we’re all so used to and annoyed with. Damn, I can’t get through this door because I have the Zippomat instead of the Gizmodrome. Or I haven’t given this item to this other character, triggering this plot event. So I can’t progress until I do it. What I mean is, sure — let the player do whatever he wants within the boundaries of the game world. Yet if the player is obviously behaving in a manner inappropriate to the situation, just because he CAN, or because he’s used to second-guessing what videogames are asking of him, it will result in — well. Not punishment, so much as consequences.

Someone else can come up with specific examples, I’m sure. As well as too many examples of when a game’s charm comes from exactly that freedom to put your trinkets in a row. Or from subverting the system (though that’s not what I’m talking about here, exactly; I’m all about subversion within the established rules — which is why I can appreciate Nippon Ichi’s SRPGs even as I am unwilling to play them). I’m just working in vague generalities. And I don’t know where they’re going.

What are the possible ramifications here? Is a lack of consequene for the player’s acting like a yo-yo, or like (simply) a gamer, part of why videogames are still so fucking adolescent? Clearly, a good portion of their existing audience — probably the most vocal and obvious segment — would do as well to grow up as the games they’re playing. How much are the two sides encouraging the current situation? What are the dynamics?

It basically is a question of motivation. In Shenmue, there’s such potential to get absorbed in the gamey nonsense — and some people do, and become lost and annoyed. For the most part, though, I just feel compelled to drink in the situation. Play it as if I’m living a life, rather than play it as a game. It’s actually rather boring if you try to second-guess it and to treat it as a typical videogame. I think maybe its fault is that there is little aside from boredom to dissuade the player from going all OCD and missing the point. If you linger too long, I hear that Long Di eventually comes and kills Ryo. That’s a long way out, though. I’ve never had to worry about it, even at my slowest poke of a pace. It’s likely boredom will drive anyone on by then; the only reason to remain, in fact, is to find out what happens if you don’t do what you’re expected to.

What might be an organic solution? I don’t know. You probably don’t want to wall the player in. As much as we like to make fun of it, the “But thou must!” mechanism is pretty omnipresent. It seems to me that it’s best to allow the player to make those bad decisions (sorry, Nintendo!), and to naturally wind up in an undesirable circumstance as a result. That’s the way we learn, y’know? On the one hand, don’t encourage acting like you have a mental problem — so if the player goes there, it’s his own doing. On the other, make him feel like a genuine idiot for behaving so erratically.

I think the latter would be most effective as an end effect, rather than a snap response to walking outside certain boundaries: the game cuts short, or the player gets a bad ending that shoves in his face all of the junk he’s done, or what-have-you. This would allow some leeway for the player to stray. No one’s perfect, after all.

Would a more immediate response help as an additional deterrent? I don’t know. Something in me says that this might just encourage a person, out of curiosity to see what else the game has to say about him. Any attention is a reward of some sort. And a lust for trivial reward is the main motivation for behavior lke this.

Perhaps the issue of motivation isn’t something that can be explained in a rational, mechanical way — since it relies so much on the ephemerals of emotion and tone. And because we all interpret our signals in different ways. The Zelda discussion seems to show that. What motivates me to explore Hyrule is much what would motivate me, were I put in Link’s position. What motivates some others is less experiential; more… baubly. It has to do with the gameplay mechanisms for their own sake, rather than to the end they were implemented to start with. With, in effect, how the game plays as a game. And that mentality has determined where the series has evolved as it has been refined, as it has with RPGs and so many other games.

I want to say that something’s lost here. It’s hard to define to people who aren’t tuned to it to start with, though. Or to explain why it’s so important. Hell, it’s a big part of the reason why I play videogames. And so, I expect, it is with many others before they become distracted or mis-trained because of the mental level that videogames so like to tap into. The feeder-bar level of gratification.

It’s seriously unhealthy, I think, where videogames are now. I think, in a manner, they promote and hone OCD and ADD-oriented levels of behavior and thinking. And although it might sound a stretch, I think that might be one factor in why so many gamers are such… insufferable fucks, to be blunt. And the sad thing is, this is gaming’s audience, so there’s a feedback loop. Games are developed for people who already exhibit these signs, and those games just promote them all the more.

Yet. Videogames can operate on a more human level. How much needs to come from the player, seems to depend on the game. For its time, Zelda promoted a much richer mindset. Myst and Riven piss off the core gamer demographic, which tries to approach them like puzzle games, even as they reward people who come at them looking for something more involving. And even Treasure’s games — say, Ikaruga and Gradius V — have a transcendent emotional quality to them, born out of their self-conscious design. They depend on the player’s familiarity with videogames, to make a grander set of statements about the medium itself, and the way we interact with it.

I guess the situation can be summed as follows:

Q: How do we get players to behave like human beings?
A: We motivate them on a human level.
Q: How do we do that?
A: That’s the key, isn’t it.

I was about to go on, and say something about discouraging unhealthy lines of thought — then it struck me how vague that is. More like discourage OCD and ADD-oriented thought strains. I would love videogames to mature enough to allow, or even encourage, the player to explore unhealthy modes of thought. Silent Hill 2 has a passive reaction to the player’s way of thinking; if the player behaves in a suicidal way, for example, the game decides that the main character went to Silent Hill to kill himself. A more tangible set of reactions might be interesting. Not sure how that might be achieved, though.

A while ago, I explored the idea of an emotional change in the player’s avatar, depending on the player’s actions. For instance, in an RPG, you, the player have the option to wander around and kill things, to grow stronger and more experienced and whatnot — yet you lose a bit of yourself every time you kill. A little bit of civility. Of humanity. And that will affect the way the avatar will interpret and interact with the game world. The more you kill, the more unpleasant the game becomes. The more hardened the character becomes, until he becomes something of a psychotic monster. The type who would just wander around and kill anything he came across, for no good reason. He will be treated as such, in-game. Most important, this can’t be seen from a clinical distance. It has to be done in a way that the player will grow uncomfortable with the way things are progressing.

I think Fable experimented with a bit of this line of reasoning, though it couldn’t take it far — so in the end it became something of a cartoon illustration of ideas someone else might want to reinterpret and implement more seriously in another five years or so.

That quality of discomfort seems the most important one, for barrier-building. As long as we’re dealing in emotions, anyway. Whether that discomfort be moral, ethical, fear-based, or just plain boredom and disappointment must, I guess, depend on circumstance.

Again, I would love to get to the point where it would be possible to make an effective Clockwork Orange of sorts; a truly transgressive experience. I’m afraid that’s not really feasible until we’ve established some barriers, though. Made them standardized. The most transgressive a game you can get at present is something like a Kojima game, which rebels against the assumed contract between game and player on a mechanical, on a conceptual level. That’s all nice. I don’t know if we’re really there until it will actually mean something to do that on an emotional level. And until gamers are accustomed to behaving like human beings, that’s not going to happen.

EDIT: Discussion continued here.

On the Outside: An Informal Look into Silent Hill 4

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [name redacted]

Today’s post is brought to you by Andrew Toups and the letter Æ.

People complain about Henry’s personality. I don’t get it. I mean, I do. There seems to be this idea that The Room is substantially more character-based than the earlier games, and that the tendency toward supreme understatement in all parties somehow undermines what emotional potential there might be. I don’t know how true that is, though. Taking the game for what it is, I get the idea that the characters are distant because they’re distant. Because that’s the nature of our interaction, as the player and as Henry Townsend.

See, Henry is a strangely normal guy; in a way, more typical than either Harry or James. He doesn’t have a dead wife and a lost daughter. He doesn’t have a dead wife and a crushing sense of guilt. He just has a bottle of white wine and a carton of chocolate milk in his fridge. He has no particular problems, outside his current predicament. Although compassionate for his part, he maintains his distance. As far as others are concerned, Henry’s role is of the bemused observer.

Although he’s not just a foil, Henry is a parallel for the player. You might call him a bit of a Raiden. Think of his circumstances in terms of Myst — with the Malkovich-holes in place of linking books. Notice how much of the game involves peeping — Henry, taking in his world indirectly, which we in turn take in indirectly through Henry. That is, except for the portions in room 302. Those, the most overtly Myst-like, we experience in the first-person. It is only when we leap through the holes, back into the game world, that Henry returns as a buffer.

In his relationship with others, Henry continues this role. He’s nice enough a person; it’s just, this isn’t his world. He’s busy living the life of the mind. Even when he’s standing next to Eileen, he’s still peeping. He’s not really there. He’s just watching.

It is this distance, and the safety it provides, which the game later tries to dissolve — for Henry and the player alike. When the game notices Henry is when it notices the player. When the darkness intrudes into room 302, it is intruding into the player’s own perceived safe space, where there is no Henry to fall back on.

For my part, I would find Henry’s conversations jarring if they were any less zoned-out. I would be distracted if the human relationships were any more satisfying. That would be too perfect. Perfection ruins any illusion. Henry would cease to be so very normal. He would become someone special. And he’s not. He’s no hero. He’s barely a protagonist. He’s just a twentysomething guy with white wine in his fridge. And at the end, Henry has resolved no personal problems. He remains the guy he always was. He just needs a new apartment.

The Focal Point

  • Reading time:4 mins read

It seems to me that the distinction here between the “big” and the “small” is one of focus. And I think that’s what made me think of B-games.

Silent Hill 2, Ico, and Shenmue are all very small games in the sense that they each consist of really one key theme, or concept — with maybe a related secondary theme, that helps to flesh out and color the primary one.

Further, each game is mechanically, substantially, practically designed so as to illustrate the theme at hand as well as possible. The games don’t always succeed; there are often silly elements present for no good reason. Some of the mechanics aren’t thought-through or implemented as well as they might be. The intent is there, though.

Ico is about Yorda, and the intent to create affection, a protective impulse for her. The game is designed in order to do that, without any distraction. There is no life meter because it’s not about life and death. You can die if you do something retarded, like jump from ten stories up, but that’s just there to keep the player from doing something retarded and to make the world feel more believable. What genius there is in the game is in what it chooses to omit, in order to make its point.

Silent Hill 2 is about James’s emotional state; the entire game is a dive into his subconscious, into his guilt and sorrow and his inability to let go. Everything — well, nearly everything — exists as an ingredient for exploring this: the monsters, the level construction, the imagery. Even the way the game determines the ending is tied into what the player focuses on; how he or she has, intentionally or not, chosen to narrate the game and thereby illustrate the details of James’s condition, through his or her behaviour. There are a bunch of issues with the practical implementation (particularly in the actual moment-to-moment details of gameplay), that threaten to get in the way. Ultimately they don’t occlude the underlying design, though.

Shenmue exists to illustrate the mundane beauty of Being. That life is in the moments, not in the goals. Some people complain that the game is boring; those same people probably wouldn’t think of staying up all night just to watch a sunrise. It’s almost Hitchcockian in the way that, right from the start, implicit in the gameplay, the game lets the player in on something that the main character can’t even see, to try to make its point.  In a way, Ryo himself is kind of a caricature of the average singleminded teenager who would likely play Shenmue, and thereby a perfect tool for the game’s purposes. Everything in the game exists either in attempt to illustrate the simple beauties of life, or to support the plot and characters which wind through this mission — in time, perhaps, to get to the point of seeing what the game has been trying to show the player from the outset, and thereby clearly state its case.

The games feel small in the same sense that a good movie will always be too short, and a bad movie will always be too long.

Same deal with B-games. Often as not, they exist to illustrate one concept. That concept might be philosophical or emotional; mostly it has to do with a unique idea for a play mechanic, or some other gimmick. Anyway, these games don’t mess around; for well or ill, the entire game exists to try to get that central idea across. See Gyromite or Pikmin — which I do consider a B-game. Heck, see Katamari Damacy. It is effective because in the end, its entire being is focused on getting one thing across.

In contrast, games which try to please everyone (like, say, Final Fantasy) try to include something to please everyone. So they come off as unfocused. Expansive. Big. Games which exist solely to reflect some outside idea (like, say, the games based on the Lord of the Rings movies) by nature don’t really have a focal point of their own. So regardless of their craft, they tend to feel empty.

Chilled Pain

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Where did Henry’s bottle of white wine go?

It vanished around the time I picked up the rusty axe.

I… never even got a chance to use it. I was saving it for a special occasion.

I notice that, contrary to expectation, I actually don’t mind the “item box” mechanism in this game. It makes sense, within the game’s format. Every hole you encounter is akin to a save point; it’s just that when you warp back to your room to save, you have other tasks to attend to; things to check on, things to put into and take out of the chest, things to reference. It’s a bit of a vacation, both for Henry and for the player. Much as how in Morrowind I dump all of the tools I know I won’t need for my upcoming task into some corner of my stolen house, if I know I don’t need three golf clubs and several clips of ammo, and I figure I won’t need all of these puzzle panels anytime soon, I can just dump them in the room and cut down on the clutter; free them from my mind.

This stands in contrast to the previous games, where the player is forced to continually carry a huge inventory of random objects, wondering when the game will demand they be put to use. It somehow feels more organic this way. Especially since, hell, you’ve got the room there to hold your crap. It’s like your own pocket dimension. Why not use it to your advantage, instead of lugging everything with you?

I also enjoy the logic of the game’s puzzles, so far. They’re kind of contrived, yes. Yet they rely entirely on the logic of what has already been established. And again, they help to tie the Room into the game as a more advanced concept than as just a save point.

I. Was going to say something else. I can’t remember. (EDIT: It was that the game is structured such that the player doesn’t really need to juggle items, to keep everything in inventory that he wants or needs. There’s no inventory management. The mechanic is more a convenience than anything.)

The game has been referencing Rear Window continually. However, Henry just now began to notice the parallel himself. This strikes me as terrific.

Roomination

  • Reading time:4 mins read

My reluctance to throw things away — my propensity to collect: it has to do with evidence. Evidence to whom; to myself? Evidence of the links between the world within me and that without. Evidence that the things I know of did, at least once, exist. Once those physical tokens are gone, there is no more certainty. I can’t be sure of anything anymore.

I have played the first hour of Silent Hill 4: The Room. Yes, it arrived today (alongside Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda); I am not allowed to play much further until all accountable women have returned to roost.

Nevertheless. The game is supposed to have been principally inspired by Being John Malkovich. That is quickly obvious, now that I have the chance to inspect it more well than before. This knowledge also offers some possible, if incomplete, clues regarding just what’s happening in the game.

Before the opening credits disseminate (another addition to the series, and not an unwelcome one), the game provides a short introduction in the first-person perspective that will later be common to scenes transpiring in The Room in question. In this sequence, however, the room is different: bloodied, rusted over, dirty, abandoned-looking; it resembles the “dark world” from the earlier Silent Hill games. Henry, the main character, is understandably surprised — or, should I say, alarmed. He does not seem to recognize anything. He also, I noticed, fails to cast a reflection in the picture frames scattered around his apartment — frames which reflect everything else around him. I pinpointed this as intentional, especially given that only minutes later, once the credits play and Henry wakes up again in a “normal” version of his bedroom, he no longer seems at all confused by the room’s (clean, yet otherwise mostly-identical) furnishings.

Henry still does not have a reflection, however. In cutscenes, he does; just not in the game proper.

So. Never mind that.

The people on the street outside the window walk like robots. Most of them wear the exact same clothes, and walk in synchronization. A polygonal edge to the hole behind the cabinet flickers into and out of existence as the camera rotates past it. The effect is hard to ignore, given the size of the area in question, its prominent location, and how important this hole is supposed to be.

The soundtrack comes on a separate disc, in a little paper sleeve. Luckily, it does slide easily into the game case. Still, considering that the previous game in the series made space for its soundtrack by default, this all could have been a little prettier.

Although I yet again am not allowed to remap the controls at will, at least the default scheme works for me. For some reason, as minor as the changes were from the previous games, I had real problems playing Silent Hill 3 with any of its predesigned setups. Everything felt like it was in the wrong place; it made me feel a little ill, even. Strange, the psychological effect of control design. I wonder if it could be put to real use, rather than ignored or made as invisible (or as “realistic”) as possible, as are the current strategies.

There’s… something here. Maybe.

Tonally, the game reminds me more of Silent Hill 2 than of the other two. This is not a bad thing. Perhaps it is an intentional thing, even. It also feels tangibly different — more like a mystery than a horror story — and is so far intriguing in that.

EDIT: Naoto Ohshima is involved again, as a camera programmer. I noticed his name flash by in the credits to the first Silent Hill, I believe as some kind of graphics programmer; did he do anything in the middle two games?

Artoon is owned by Konami now, yes? Or involved with them somehow?

EDIT 2: And I like the way the camera works. Mostly. I don’t think I’ve seen quite this technique before.

Vocal Hill

  • Reading time:3 mins read

This is all interesting, particular in the breakdowns of the plot and the character and monster origins for the first two games. Something that strikes me, however, is the marked difference in approach to the third game. Whereas in Silent Hill 1 and 2, the monsters were all consciously designed as manifestations of this or that, and the names for all of the characters and places were carefully (if perhaps overly-so) selected based upon relevent literary references and themes — like Harry and Cheryl’s names originally coming from Kubrick/Nabokov’s Lolita (before some alteration), and James and his wife’s names coming from elements of the Jack the Ripper case — very little of this consideration seems to have gone into Silent Hill 3. Monsters don’t seem to be particularly explained, either in their presence or in their design. They are there because the game needs creepy monsters. Names are increasingly arbitrary. Heather was named after her voice actress. Douglas was named after Douglas Fairbanks, for no particular reason. All of the attention in the creation of the third game seems to have gone into dissection of the plot to the first game, and into attempts to tie up everything prior to some comprehensible framework.

Although impressive in a certain right, I am unsure how truly constructive this approach is — as it kind of overlooks exactly the strengths of the first two games: namely, their ambiguity, and their strong inner motivation to illustrate one or another principle, or theme. Their subjectivity, really. In Silent Hill 3, the role taken by strong central themes in the first two games is usurped, in a manner, by convoluted and overt plotting as a new motivation. An attempt at aimless reason where highly-focued irrationality had previously been the whole reason for being.

This method just strikes me as rather clumsy, in comparison.

I guess that might be part of why Silent Hill 3 reminds me so much more of Biohazard than do the previous games.

EDIT: Notice also how many locations in Silent Hill 3 (once the player actually reaches Silent Hill) are lifted straight from the second game. Same geometry. Same fences still crumpled in the exact same way. Didn’t bother to change a thing, for the purposes of the game at hand. This seems to work into the above, somehow. One monster model is even taken straight from Silent Hill 2, although that should not be, given the explanation for the monsters in the first two games. The director of the third game didn’t seem to much care for these subtleties, though.

E3 Errata

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

I really wanted Nanobreaker to be a step toward something excellent — or at least something compelling and odd. Or for it to show that Igarashi knows what he’s doing with 3D games. I don’t think it accomplishes any of this, in the state in which I saw it. I mean. It’s… sort of interesting in the sense that it’s just so damned bloody. Or. I guess Igarashi insists that this isn’t really blood, but oil or something. Whatever it is, it’s red and it’s goopy and it’s everywhere.

( Continue reading at Insert Credit )

Sunder Land, where all is asunder

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I just beat both scenarios of Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams in one day. In one sitting, really. I first had to play to where I left off in the PS2 version, although that took an atom of the time it did the first time. (I notice that James no longer comments, of a map of the United States, “It’s a picture of something. I’m not sure what.”) Perhaps I was in a better mood or perhaps I was just prepared; the goofy world-logic did not distract me as much, today. Instead, I was distracted by the atmosphere and narrative. This really is a sophisticated game, artistically; one of the most-so I have encountered. Although it falls short on the actual game mechanics, that’s okay. Its mind is elsewhere.

I think I actually respect this even more than the first game, although they are rather different in their approaches and intentions. Where Silent Hill 1has its crushing sense of fear, that makes a person think twice to play it in the dark — or even to play it at all, at times — this does something more subtle. It is about all-encompassing, numbing sorrow and guilt — with all of the haziness and tempermental bursts and aimlessness and self-effacement and strange obsession that come with it. It is a portrait of a man willfully falling apart. A trip through his head, as he fights to either self-destruct entirely or to confront his demons and accept what he has been unwilling to accept. Whatever brings an end to the murmur. The entire game is focused around illustrating that picture.

A common enough theme in literature. In videogames, not so much. It’s too adult a depiction of pain. The scope of the game, by which it does illustrate this theme, is far more ambitious than I am used to. The original Silent Hill deserved enough praise just for being bright enough to understand how fear works better than any of its contemporaries. That seemed like a stroke of genius. This… is something else entirely.

Then Silent Hill 3 seems like an attempt to go mainstream with the series. It plays (and, in general, feels) much more like Biohazard than either of the first two games do. It tries to directly follow the plot of the first game, and to provide some more stable answers about just what this “Silent Hill” place is — something that really did not need to be done. It has a sassy, sarcastic lead. The music is more oriented toward pop, over the metal machine of the first game and the drones of the second. It’s just so… polished, and pretty, and palatable. Then The Room is supposed to follow after the second game, in some respects. I… well.

I guess I should reserve comment until I have seen them through. Something just feels a little unnecessary here.

Anyway. I am making progress.

A while ago, Justin Freeman made reference to a list of the top five (or was it “only five”?) significant games in this hardware generation: Metroid Prime, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, ICO, Rez, and Grand Theft Auto III. He said “Maybe Silent Hill 2” — although that would make an unusual five. I’ll throw it in. I will also throw in Ikaruga, Wind Waker, and Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution. These nine games seem, to me, to be the sum of all of note that we have learned this generation. I have yet to find a tenth candidate.

Some will be surprised that I include Wind Waker, given my attitude toward the game. Some who know me better will know that it is precisely that attitude which puts the game on the list. Evolution finally comes through and admits what a meta-fighter Virtua Fighter has always been, as a series. It says some things about fighters, and about videogames, and the way we interact with them in a broader sense, that should do some permanent damage if you think about it too hard. And Ikaruga is, frankly, one of the most perfect and elegant game designs around — one which helps to illustrate on a base level, along with Rez, what videogames are, at their spine — and one which demonstrates the “pure” videogame (that is, videogame-as-design) at its most ideal. There is a level of truth here that, although related to the games of the early ’80s, could not exist in any previous hardware generation.

I might talk about this all in more detail, later.

Or. Maybe not.