Of Anti-Puzzles and Campy-Acting – Zork: Grand Inquisitor

>_look at the game

You see Zork: Grand Inquisitor. The last in the long and varied line of Zork games. They started out as text adventures in the olden times of ancient technology, then grown, spun-off and transformed into a first-person movie-like puzzle games. Unfortunately, the good times lasted only until 1999 – the year of the series’ demise. I can’t comment on any of the previous games because I haven’t played them yet, but I can say that this Zork quite clearly indicates that the series didn’t end because of lack of quality.

>_play a bit

I got eaten by a Grue around the fourth minute of my stroll around the gameworld. No one knows what a Grue looks like, everyone knows that it eats people in the darkness. I didn’t know. I was too infatuated with my adventuring and problem-solving skills. I’ve found a rope, I used a rope on a well, I was glorious and wise, I climbed down a well and in the darkness of the underground I got munched by a Grue.

>_don’t kill me, you old game

Death isn’t an inescapable fate in Zork GI, though, at least to me, it seems to be a feature. It’s a prize for doing dumb things, like attacking invisible monsters expertly wielding six swords in their six arms. It’s also a slap on the hands for doing things that you’re warned against. That woman will call guards if you don’t stop touching her fish, and guards will have their way with you, you know? The rules are well-communicated, they are for you to see and comprehend the possibility of your character’s death.

>_follow the rules

But Zork: GI doesn’t like the rules. It’s a rebel of a game. The main villain is a half-witted dictator who wants to ban magic because he’s bad at it. He does that by taking over the world, setting up a totalitarian government and caring for propaganda. Zork isn’t above breaking the fourth wall either, the new Boss likes to shout that we should shun magic, floss vigorously and save often. Good advice.

>_i like advice

Zork: GI is a medium-difficulty game, therefore it’s not above helping the player and leading him onto the right path. It’s full of hints – most of the puzzles are mentioned in various books, signs and other written notes around the world. You just put the two and two together which requires a certain level of patience, but is also rather satisfying. Besides, there is murder, and there is brutality in Zork, too, you will meet a number of helpful but dead adventurers, and thoroughly unhelpful monsters. Still, this is an adventure game and paced like one.

>_solve the puzzle

Then again, this is not a straightforward game, it’s a comedy, sometimes dark, sometimes campy but always quite intelligent. So it treats all the puzzles in a different way. On occasion you are required to think outside the box, to use brute force instead of your wits. A Zork player is a wise player. He/She/It (or as game prefers to call us AFGENCAAP) knows that sometimes the puzzle is just a spoon. Don’t use it! Instead bend it and throw it at a wall. Be a Kirk. After all, this kind of puzzle-solving can be extremely satisfying too.

>_talk to the actor man

Grand Inquisitor is an archaic game. Today, we hear the actor’s voices, maybe see their computerized faces, but in the good old 90′s from which this Zork hails, we’ve seen them. We’ve seen them in silly costumes, pouncing around a green screen and overacting to their heart’s content. Here, it doesn’t really hinder the game, it actually elevates it to even more enjoyable levels. The voice acting of the creatures/monsters/talking lamps is top-notch, and the actors are delightful. There’s Dirk ‘Faceman’ Benedict being all old-school and charming, and Erick Avari villainously monologuing like there’s no tomorrow! It’s fun and often funny too.

>_gaze into the face of the pixel

However the graphics are slightly outdated. To me they are acceptable, because they don’t make my eyes bleed out in disgust, and clearly represent what they represent despite being old, but the same cannot be said of the movies and animations. The quality of the recordings is beyond lacking. It’s like a 240p video on Youtube. So compressed, the large pixels want to jump out and cover the screens whole.

>_i’m here for the story anyway

I haven’t written much about the story, because there’s just not much to it. As mentioned earlier, the world has been taken over by a despot who hates magic, so you travel to find three artifacts which will revive it. You don’t have any personality or character arc, because you’re Ageless Faceless Gender-Neutral Culturally-Ambiguous Adventure Person. The real strength of the game lies in the humor. Surprisingly, it isn’t even all campy or dumb for the sake of dumbness, but there is a lot of clever stuff. The writers knew what they were doing – the totalitarian reality and it’s propaganda is never overplayed, because the setting changes often and quickly. The delicious dark humor is often mixed with the proper amount of camp and crazy which make the results fun to watch and listen to.

>_win

I expected the game will be interesting, after all, I wouldn’t get it otherwise, but I didn’t expect it to be this cool. Zork: Grand Inquisitor isn’t stale in its gameplay, it’s not fresh but there’s still life in it’s creaky bones. I framed this review around pseudo text-adventuring, but the only moment you see a text parser in GI is in death. Being eaten, totemized, suffocated or slain. In this way it is making a tribute to the old Zork games. It’s a tribute in blood. You know, the one that tastes like ketchup and jam.
But with a longer expiration date.

[I got the game off GOG, because they care to make them oldies playable on modern PCs, and indeed it worked like a charm.]

Cover Taken, Robots Shot, Potential Wasted – Binary Domain

Blast the screws off the robots and relocate their metallic heads into the walls – that’s the bread and butter of Binary Domain. In the world of this third-person cover shooter, you are a gun-wielding executioner gloriously plowing through robotic parts, and I’m definitely not going to argue here the God-given right of every sane human being to thrash electronic appliances with bullets. That’s just what you’ve got to do sometimes. Also, I have never learned to say no to dystopian metropolises – throw all your sci-fi artworks at me, shower me in terminatoresque monsters, and I’ll happily squeal in a pleasurable manner.

Unfortunately, Binary Domain couldn’t accept to be mediocre and/or normal. The creators clearly wanted more – to cross the rivers of OK into the sprawling lands of greatness. In the process, as often is the case, they crashed and burned, failing immensely at creating a round, complete, thought-out experience. There was not enough skill, not enough planning, and too much posturing mixed with marketing thought.

Like many of its flawed gaming brethren, Binary Domain has an incredibly weak opening segment. The whole first chapter is a tutorial trip through a long drab corridor interrupted by a cut-scene every few steps. It wouldn’t even be that bad because there are waves of robots to keep you company but there’s also Big Bo – the first brother in arms, archetypal hero with a sense of humor borrowed from the most archaic and dead Youtube comments’ sections. I mean, “bro” this, “aight” that, “yo’ momma” something, “yo.” I was five minutes into the game and I already wanted to see my main characters burn.

However, the offensively bad banter isn’t completely the fault of the clichéd writing, because it’s in equal part an issue of design. You see, the game uses a voice-recognition system – with the help of a microphone you can shout commands and take active real part in conversations. So, there’s progress and innovation, but in reality it’s just a broken gimmick. After testing the feature in options and getting one in five of my “OK!” recognized, I just turned it off. I’m pretty sure that’s an advice repeated in every review of Binary Domain – voice recognition is a faulty technology that will only get in the way of fun, turn it off.

But you can’t turn off the fact that the game was designed around that functionality. Without the microphone, every conversation provides the player with around three-four written dialog options: “Yeah,” “Damn,” “No,” and “Roger.” It’s the level of simplification ripped straight from my worst roleplaying nightmares. More so, because just pressing X in every instance of conversation makes characters happy and more trustful towards you. Unfortunately, the trust system is nothing to write home about either – it affects the ending only marginally so this is another waste of time and resources.

The true heart of Binary Domain is in shooting of robots. This is the well-oiled electronic spine of the game that makes it quite hard to just call it bad. I can’t stay mad at a game that lets me avoid cover, or to rephrase it – the awful waist-high walls you find everywhere these days aren’t always a necessity. To the contrary, the game promotes bravado and adds more points for being a quick headshot-happy maniac. There’s a special kind of glee created by picking robots apart with gunfire too.

That point system is also something keeping the mechanics a little bit different from the usual cover shooters. The accumulated virtual currency gathered from effectively exploding robots can be used to buy medpacks, weapons and upgrades. Managing that stuff is useful as a breather and helps create the illusion of gamey progression. You do become stronger, faster, healthier, better, because you see the numbers.

Moreover, the game isn’t shy on boss encounters. There’s a ton of different metallic beasts who want to pound you into the ground. The fights are usually based around destroying a certain, typically glowing, part of the robo, but there’s plenty variety in doing so. I mean, fighting a gigantic mechanical spider (the fiercest killer in the insect kingdom), a mad gorilla and a transformer require different approaches and take place in different settings.

Call me superficial but that’s the reason why I’ve played the game in the first place – the setpieces. Futuristic cityscapes powered by a large robotic population are a ripe concept for imagination. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t play up the scale and instead concentrates around more confined spaces – underground tunnels, tight passages, and when you finally get into the city, there are two car chases and a train ride. Game! Why do you do this to me!? Fortunately, despite the limitations, there is a number of nice vistas and cool-looking places. For every boring sewer, there’s a fantastic ruin with a sprawling city towering above it.

Going back to the story, the character work was rather bland but the plots weren’t half bad. Actually, they were quite interesting. The game starts slow and is really based around two large points of exposition. The one in the beginning sets up the world and creates the main objective for our heroes, and the second one offers a twist and material for the final exciting chapter. So to say the pacing is off would be an understatement. You are a member of a squad of anti-robotic marines, you have to arrest a scientist who created extremely advanced androids which think they are human. That’s most of the game in a sentence – onwards to die!

And that’s the wasted potential part. The last one and a half chapter push the story to a frantic speed with interesting developments and ideas, but there’s just not enough space to create something truly special. The themes don’t get enough attention even though the narrative arc gets a proper conclusion. Binary Domain finishes the tale of its underwhelming characters and only touches upon issues of racism, humanity and evolution that lie at the foundation of this fictional world. There is actually one poignant scene somewhere in the middle of the game where a robotized human is tortured by some folks and then shot by the protagonist. That was emotionally involving and, I believe, could be grown into something greatly compelling. But in here it’s just padding – a little tear in a rain of bullets.

Eh, as a third person shooter the game is quite enjoyable, there’s enough fun scrapheads to blast in order to keep a shooter-liking player interested for this twelve-hour ride into the future. The graphics are up to the standard and the music is a fitting mixture of electronics and instrumentals. Some of the technical and gameplay aspects aren’t as polished as one would expect but it isn’t much of a problem. The problem is Binary Domain could be more, it wanted to be more, and there won’t be no more because it performed badly in sales. It’s a pity because I could see them learning from this one, and taking the universe created here in a new interesting direction signalized by the ending. Just add more story between the shooting. Oh, my disillusioned gamer mantra – add more story, please.

I’ve Been Playing Peggle and I’m Only Slightly Ashamed of Myself.

It’s a casual game with colors, rainbows and quirky animals. In this way, it’s obviously an object of despise for any self-respecting PC player. So, I pouted, I gritted my teeth and wiggled in discomfort during the hours I spend playing the game. I also enjoyed it quite a bit, but that’s completely unrelated to the fact that Peggle isn’t bloodthirsty enough for the daily needs of a hardcore gamer.

Luckily, despite the lack of violence, the game is not completely devoid of shooting. It’s actually the only thing that is expected of a Peggle player. You shoot balls out of your magnificent cannon placed atop of the gaming screen. There’s not much ammunition – you’ve got only ten balls – but personally, I find it to be an unrealistically spectacular amount of balls. Anyway, the goal of the game’s main mode is to destroy all orange peggles. Each of seventy five levels of Peggle is filled with peggles, but only the orange ones are the enemy. The others are either an obstacle in the way of a glorious success, or a helpful aid if one is skilled enough to plan the shots with a grand strategy in mind.

There are also magical green peggles and they represent the other important aspect of the whole puzzle. When hit, they produce powerful effects depending on the Master who is overseeing your game. These Masters are various strange-looking talking creatures with large eyes. They are presented in a cute, appropriate for children manner. As a grossly cynical and randomly random player, I believe the Masters to be drugged out of their earlobes (if present) and tripping balls (present). Again, I have no evidence of such misbehavior but that is my general impression based on speech patterns, pupil dilation and facial expression of the Masters.

Also, I believe it affects the player in some ways. You see, this is not a game about losing or gritty wallowing in self-pity. This is a game about winning, and anyone who has played a level of Peggle can surely attest to that. When you win a level, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy begins to gloriously roar, and a large “Extreme Fever” sign lights up in the middle of a screen. Then the ball falls to one of the baskets filled with thousands of points at the bottom, fireworks shoot right in your face and a rainbow blasts through the screen. It’s an orgasmic experience and clearly designed as such.

Other than that, I don’t remember much of the music of Peggle, though the game surely has some. I don’t think much can be written or said about its graphics either, though they are 2D and colorful in all the exploding ways. They are just instruments that serve to enhance and prolong the player’s contact with this silly gaming construct.

Honestly, I’m not sure if I am capable of recommending Peggle. It is what it is. A game about balls and peggles that is as enjoyable as one would expect from a game about balls and peggles. In other words, shamelessly enjoyable. The adventure mode that starts the game is merely an intro to the mechanics and finishing it opens up challenges which increase difficulty and extend the gameplay considerably. There’s even a hotseat multiplayer which is something every game no matter the genre should have.

In the main menu of Peggle, there is a unicorn. He stands there smiling and welcoming you to the game but if you decide to leave, he will cry. So if you don’t want to make extinct imaginary animals cry, you should play Peggle. It’s for your own good.

[A digital copy of Peggle Deluxe was given away for free for a limited time a couple weeks ago, and that's where I got it. I do believe that the game is available on almost anything that can play games - consoles, computers, handhelds, phones and pads - so it shouldn't be hard to get a hold of. Though the normal price of the PC version seems to be $20 which is too much in my opinion. Also, it's supposedly sold fifty million copies worldwide, so everyone and their mother (or mostly the mother) have already played this and maybe the price was right for them. Eh, it's $1 on iPad so they might have bought it there as well.]

Change or Live: Final Fantasy X as Catholic Dystopia

I have written something lengthier and hopefully brainier about Final Fantasy X.
Come one, come all to Ontological Geek.

“Dystopia, in the simplest of terms, is a subversion of the ideal. It’s an argument against utopian thinking – it’s a voice calling for discussion and reasonable thought. Dystopian narratives often imagine a horrific scenario and run it even further to the ground, as well as present global ramifications of grand ideas taken too far. However, they concentrate around a personal nightmare of an individual trapped in this disastrous future built upon the foundation of seemingly beautiful words spoken by its leaders.”

Here’s a link for more.

Cooking with The Dark Messiah

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic is a 2004 first person fantasy game about crawling through dungeons, hacking and slashing, plus occasionally finding secrets. There’s some role playing in there too since the protagonist gets skill points in predefined moments of the game and can spend them on select skills – magic, stealth, bow-shooting, sword-swinging and similar methods of monster-hurting.

The game has a story too. I even liked it at the beginning – it’s a reverse of the usual “avatar of good raises to defeat the evil.” Here you are a dark messiah, preparing to bring death upon the world. The anti-hero also has two sidekicks – Leanna and Xana – who play the role of an angel and a devil. They whisper into your ear advice and promises. It’s all an incredibly fun setup that unfortunately leads to an utterly lackluster ending. One of the reasons for that is the thin plot – not much happens throughout the game – and the other reason is the protagonist. He doesn’t have much of a personality, his brain activity is barely existent and he maybe too naive.

However, unlike many first-person heroes he has a body. When you look down, you see his hands, his torso and even his legs. The guy interacts with everything and everyone without being a disembodied sword-holding hand floating in front of the screen. And all that because the developers treated the combat of the game with utmost care. Melee is visceral and meaty, weapons have a visible impact. Your body language is important because it creates a dance of destruction at the center of this gaming experience.

That’s the best part of Dark Messiah. That’s the part that makes it such a gleeful romp. I was merrily stabbing monsters in their ugly backs and cutting them apart, running circles around terrifying giant jumping spiders, kicking orcs off the cliffs and throwing goblins into the fire. And I had much too much fun while doing all this. I’ve read reviews that suggested it gets stale and repetitive but that wasn’t my impression. There were always new and exciting ways to dance the danse macabre with my warrior rogue.

The responsibility for that bear in part the creatures of the game. They may be a visually-generic bunch – the orcs are clearly heavily inspired by The Lord of the Rings in their apparition and equipment while dragons, goblins, cyclopes, zombies, knights and necromancers look merely typical – yet despite all that they all have quite a lot of character. Just lurking in the shadows and listening to the complicated discussions on the merits of goblin cuisine was a pleasure, and all the quips during combat where equally nice on the ears (the goblins wanted to eat them and argued who should have dibs on my eyes).

The hunt for long lost artifacts and monsters takes place in the underground lairs and tombs which are fantastically designed. There are both vertical and horizontal travel, many well-hidden secrets and cool but deadly traps. I’m not much of a dungeon fun because it’s usually dark and samey in those but Dark Messiah managed to make it interesting. The graphics are certainly helpful too. They may be a decade old but some of the shadow and light play is still spectacular.

I played the PC version of the game. There is an X-Box 360 edition too and it’s supposedly worse because the game doesn’t control with a gamepad as well as it does with a mouse and keyboard combo. But the PC version has it’s own faults too. All the movies are recorded and shown in 4:3 aspect ratio which means large black bars on both sides of the screen on modern monitors. Luckily, there aren’t many of these cinematics and their quality is dubious but that doesn’t change the fact it’s annoying. I’ve read that the game had a fun multiplayer too. Unfortunately, the servers for that have been turned off by now. Ah, the modern times. Also, there are bugs. The game crushed a couple of times on loading screens and it always exited with an unexpected error when I wanted to quit. The former was rare and autosaves plus quicksaves helped in dealing with the problem, and the former wasn’t really detrimental in any way. It was actually amusing – the game couldn’t believe that I was leaving! The error symbolized the disappointment in the player leaving the fantasy battlefields for the real world.
How dared I!

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is a flawed gem. It’s a missing link between Arx Fatalis and Dishonored. Arkane Studios really perfected first-person close-quarters combat between the three games. They haven’t yet managed to create an engrossing story, and I sort of doubt they ever will but that’s secondary because the gameplay is their main objective and the result is incredibly well-cooked. The game is linear but allows for exploration – if you want to look, there are secrets abound. It’s relatively easy to get through the story using one weapon or one spell too, but equipping every single things you can get your hands on is infinitely more amusing. After all, the controls are in the hands of the player, you shape the fights, and only you have the power to steer them to the bloodied underground tunnels of fun! Yes, it’s that sort of a game.

[The game is old, so probably cheap to get in a physical form. I got it digital off GMG during a promo some time ago. The game activates on Steam anyway.]

News of the Day

After PAX East and GDC there have been a ton of news flying around through the Internet, electrifying the blogosphere and twitting on Twitter. As a nice person with good intentions, I have accumulated all of the information in one place. It’s a condensed info-blast straight from the horse’s mouth into yours!

• The new Batman game will really take place in Silver Age and will have the same gameplay as previous Rockstar ones. The world of computer gaming is not ready for this but you will take it. And you will like it.

• Half Life 3 won’t end on a cliffhanger. That’s a promise.

• Assassin’s Creed V won’t have a dual narrative. No more jumping into the future for exposition talks. A large number of players present at PAX were very angry about this news and threatened to pre-order the game only three months before its premiere.

• The new Mass Effect will be taking place before all the races of the universe mixed their DNA with humans. Moreover, there will be no xenomorphs, no zombies and no Cthulhu. This time the ending will fit the rest of the narrative.

• Activision hired professional level designers for single player campaign of Call of Duty.

• Warcraft IV won’t have a corruption of an individual at the center of its themes and narrative. A first for Blizzard.

• The indie developers have created SPLIT (Strategic Platformers Limitations Indie Talks) – a treaty to limit the number of platformers released every year. The current convention proposes the maximum to be an annual batch of 142 games.

• GTA V will revolutionize open-world gaming again. Because branding.

• Final Fantasy XV won’t have all the graphics, will have a great story.

• During the meeting between the presidents of Capcom and EA, a historical agreement has been made. They both agreed that transforming cool horror games into expensive action shooters is dumb. And they won’t do it again.

• Nintendo promised to release the next big Mario game on every next-gen platform including PC. Fans are outraged because they are worried about the financial results of such a bold move.

I think this is all for the grand news. I strongly doubt anyone got better ones anyway.

The Unauthorized Biography of Super Hexagon

Super Hexagon is a very simple game for iThings, Androids and PCs. Super Hexagon is about a triangle that mustn’t collide with shapes or it’s game over. Super Hexagon doesn’t have a narrative. Learning to control Super Hexagon takes two seconds, finishing Super Hexagon is possible in two minutes. But you won’t do that in two minutes. It’s an addictive, slickly designed game with a beat. This is what Super Hexagon is on the surface. Here’s what I’ve seen in my mind while playing the game:

It was during a cold winter of 1984 in USSR when Alexey Pajitnov was discussing geometry with tovarish Cavaghnov. They roughly harassed their mighty beards and drunk like mad. And they hadn’t had a civilized exchange of ideas either.  Alexey was opposed to the concept of existence of an object with more than four sides to it in their programming projects. He thought more would be too expensive, too lush, too complex, maybe even blasphemous. “Tetra’ is good enough,” he was repeating in angry voice, “it’s my key to immortality!” But Cavaghnov didn’t listen. He was already scheming pentagons and dreaming of hexagons. Five and six dancing at high speeds in an explosion of colors and beats. What beautiful ideas were born in Cavaghnov’s head!

But he was careless. In a drunken stupor, he let Alexey surprise him and throw him into their prototype time machine that stood just by the window and behind the table. No one knows what it was doing there, but it’s easy to understand why it was there. It was fate, a perfect design of fate. It was waiting for Cavaghnov to fall into it and transport him into the future. Far away from origins of computer gaming and their inherent simplicity and elegance. He quickly become lost in the digital land of high budget explosions and violent violence. Yes, the time machine has taken him to the 21st century.

And yet it wasn’t hate that struck his heart at the time, no, no, that came later. At first, our tovarish decided to acclimate – he changed his name to Terry Cavanagh, he acquired an impeccable command of English and journeyed into the lands of Internet to update his programming skills. There, he learned some Flash and some C#, and created his first digital child – VVVVVV - which he promptly released it upon an unsuspecting world and all was good.

6Vs is fantastic. Graphically it is a relic of the long forgotten past, but in terms of platforming gameplay and satisfaction that it can bring, it was something different. One might go so far as to say ‘better.’ Cavanagh was content for some time, but he knew this wasn’t it. He used a power of six but it wasn’t the six that he was destined to create. The advent of hexa this was not.

Thus, the process of designing begun anew. The memories of time travel – rapidly changing shapes and explosion of colors – have haunted him throughout. And a certain harshness of the whole process returned and invaded his mind. There was no fear or anger in Terry’s head. Instead, there was a godlike understanding. He finally understood what needs to be done. And then, then when he finished the thing, he saw it for what it it was – a computerized monster he brought in his brain from the void on the verge of time.

Though, I guess, a more appropriate term would be ‘a virus’. When other people see you play it, they will easily get interested and maybe even catch it too. But it’s dangerous – the visual transmission of Super Hexagon may lead to drastic results! Photosensitive seizure warning has never been more essential to a game’s spirit. If you are prone to dizziness, it will eat your eyes and liquidize your spine.

In this way, I believe Super Hexagon could easily be used in training of cosmonauts. As a matter of fact the game uses a lot of subliminal advertising of Pentagon. The word is often repeated during playthoughs, and one can imagine that Cavanagh struck this ad deal with the US Department of Defense after they failed to weaponize SH.

They failed because, despite what some individuals may think, Super Hexagon isn’t a crazed, difficult weapon of gaming hatred. I mean, in the beginning it is – when you lose a session after 2-3 seconds, it’s impossible to feel differently. But give it a couple more hours and you shall start to see things and understand things. Super Hexagon is like a palate cleanser of the mind. The further you get, the more you fly away, the less frustrated you feel. And your muscle memory does the rest. It’s strange and different even if in reality it’s such a simple simple thing.

[Here's the trailer for the game, because you need to see it move and sing. Here's the online demo, because you need to experience it. And here's a link to the official site. The game seems to be on a $1 sale on various platforms.]