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Dying in Space

I failed to restore oxygen to the moonbase.

It was devastating, at first. I knew that I was going to fail long before the moment actually came—by the time I had about 8 minutes left, I was pretty sure that the end wasn’t going to be pretty. I put it down to my inability to grasp the minigame soon enough: I wasted about five minutes dicking around with the welder before I realized what part of the circuit board I was supposed to be playing with. There was also the issue of my poor robot-driving skills. To top it all off, I also actually got lost a few times—a tough task, admittedly, since there were only about three locations on the entire map. With eight minutes left, the seconds were counting down and there was no one to blame but myself and my incompetence. My incompetence, yeah, and certain fanciful misconceptions I had developed about the game while playing it. See, I kind of psyched myself out, when it comes right down to it. Yeah. Weird. I pretty much worked myself up into a terror. But I would have been perfectly satisfied with this self-inflicted terror, however, if it hadn’t led me to make a rather disappointing discovery about what happens when you fail the game’s scenario.

Bottom line: NASA ruined their own game for me with their squeamish space-positivism.

Moonbase Alpha is supposed to be played in multiplayer mode, pretty much. But when you tackle it alone, it’s got a certain atmospheric element that I think I might have missed if I’d played with another human—a strange combination of cheery optimism and desolate harshness that strikes me as particularly odd. In recent weeks, Neptune’s Pride and Gregory Weir’s Looming have given me the pleasure, if it can be called that, of some real quality intentional hopelessness. On the other hand, Moonbase Alpha is one of those games where you can’t tell if the desolation is intentional or not. I’m not sure if it’s just in my head—a conundrum I’m intimately familiar with after years of reading ‘hard’ science fiction. Space madness! It’s like I’m part of some crazy space-horror novel, I guess, but super low-key, and without the blood running down the inside of the visor dome and all that.

Moonbase Alpha is not necessarily for the kind of small children who tend to be obsessed with astronauts. It was, apparently, inspired by America’s Army, and that says a lot about the direction it takes, I think. It’s actually quite tough on the first playthrough, and though it’s got some cute minigame mechanics, there’s an awful lot of silent trudging, drab regolith, suffocating dust, and fiddly difficulty. Playing it alone, I really did feel like a bewildered, trapped spaceman. There isn’t any music. There aren’t any people to see. It’s in the Unreal engine, but everything feels rather more dusty and much less shiny-shiny-slick-and-fancy than other Unreal games tend to look. The disembodied voices of your fellow spacemen, stuck indoors with a dwindling oxygen supply, are more anxiety-producing than they are comforting.

Meanwhile, however, we’ve got the contrast of pretty LCD panels on the outsides of all our important moon-buildings, a bright glowy UI, oddly adorable maintenance robots, and the whole euphoric people-living-on-the-moon situation to deal with. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to think about the situation. If I’d succeeded in fixing the oxygen system, I doubtless would feel quite different about the game now. I’d probably be focusing more on the cute than the lonely.

See, I really did psych myself out: I was convinced, throughout the whole playthrough, that the astronauts would die, that they would suffocate to death if I didn’t save them. Dead astronauts are the creepiest things modernity has offered us in the past fifty years. Americans these days generally only pay attention to astronauts when they’re dead, or in peril of dying, and everyone loves putting them in movies and scaring the fuck out of us with them. (If you’ve seen Sunshine, you’ll know exactly what I mean.) I myself have a particularly strong fear of dead astronauts. As a child I desperately wanted to be a live one—specifically, a Payload Specialist. I even got to go to Space Camp in Florida for my tenth birthday, a gift that, to this day, remains the best present I have ever recieved. Space occupied a pretty significant portion of my daily thought-load—I would lie in bed for nearly an hour before falling asleep every day and try to imagine what it would be like to do a spacewalk and repair a shuttle. I almost always had nightmares after doing that, but they were particularly awesome nightmares, so I put up with it. Only a few weeks after Space Camp, though, I was diagnosed with diabetes. I immediately convinced myself to give up the whole plan. Didn’t stop my scary dying-in-space nightmares, though.

So when the game began, I immediately convinced myself that these astronauts would die if I didn’t save them. I don’t know if the game tells you otherwise right at the beginning and I missed it, but I was sure that I was the last hope they had, and that they were all slumped in their living quarters, slowly turning ice-blue, while I hopped desperately through the rising dust like an idiot. Imagine my surprise when, the moment I fail, the trapped astronauts suddenly speak up and announce that I can go back and try again, and that my failure’s only resulted in a lost day of productivity!

Listen, NASA. We gamers believe certain things about space. We believe that space is vast, and detailed, and largely friendly; we also believe that it’s as crowded with alien life-forms and awesome laser-gun fights as Canaveral and JPL are with PhDs. Your cute little robots are a step in the right direction when it comes to that kind of propaganda. But as Americans, as science-fiction nerds, we believe other things: we believe that spacemen die, horrifically, on television, with fire in the sky and immense mechanical screeches and explosions and bits of Our Heroes The Spacemen plastered all over the continent. Children of my generation know the ISS, but we also know Disaster in Space. We’ve read the books. We’ve watched the movies. We’re fascinated with space because it’s recently become a place for robots, not for people, and we know why.

I know why you made your design decision, NASA, but for God’s sake, let your spacemen die. It’s the only way we’ll ever be excited about your digital moon.

20 Comments
by lauramichet on July 7, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in AAA Games, Indie Games, PC, Review
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Posted by lauramichet on July 7, 2010

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/07/07/dying-in-space/

Torchlight is like a job you don’t get paid for

Attention universe! I have completed the primary Torchlight campaign! Why did it take me three months of halfhearted, intermittent play? I will tell you. It is because there is no point to Torchlight.

See, unless clicking on colorful enemies is what you enjoy most in life, there’s almost no reason to ‘finish’ playing the game. Because Torchlight has an Endless Dungeon mode, finishing the primary plot only enables more and more of the same-old same-old: you get to go further down, and you get to click on baddies and receive loot. Nothing new there. There’s also no emotional or narrative reward to finishing the plot itself. Quite a lot has been said about the skeletal nature of the game’s plot, about how tepid, uncommitted, and unclear it is.  Not only does it provide no resolution—the dungeon continues—but it makes no sense. The final boss-fight is a tedious and largely-unfair low-framerate ass-raping in which the game’s evil mastermind—a badly-explained, overpowered something called ‘Ordrak’—spams mobs at you for twenty minutes. When you’re done you get a shit-ton of worthless loot.

So why did I keep at it? Frankly, I’m a sucker for numbers that go up. Preferably, numbers that go up very high, and very quickly. It’s why I bothered finishing Infectionator: World Dominator, even though I broke the game, balance-wise, while still in Africa. In Torchlight, the numbers never stop going up. It is impossible to play for an hour without leveling up twice. You are presented with improved gear so frequently that it is hard to keep track of how fast those numbers are rising. There’s not too much need for strategic assessment: each weapon has a tooltip detailing its DPS and bonuses and providing a side-by-side comparison with your current loadout. You simply look at the numbers and choose whatever has the bigger ones. At times, this kind of constant reward feels very sinister, as if the game is trying to keep you sated with numerals while it simultaneously performs a subliminal and evil reconstruction of your brain. You stagger away from the computer, a lizardlike numbness reigning in your mind, and all night long digits scroll before your eyes while the clink of gold rattles in your ears. This is Torchlight. It’s addictive like a Facebook game, but with all the garish stupidity of that genre replaced by Diablo nostalgia. It is a powerful and scientific designer drug.

But the habit is relatively easy to break. Like I said, it quickly becomes clear that there’s no higher reward to playing the game. No dramatic conclusion, no ultimate weapon, no satisfying plot twist. Just more and more of the same. This was apparently the aim of the design team, and by gum, they seem to have accomplished it. If ‘the same’ isn’t enough for you, I can’t see why you’d bother finishing the game, unless it’s for street-cred-related reasons. Instead of dragging me onward, it only left me exhausted.

This raises questions for me, though: do I play games because I want a continuing experience, or because I want a story or a progression that eventually comes to an end, the way a book or a movie does? For me, I’ve discovered that it’s the latter. I don’t want to play the same thing for ever and ever; it’s only human that our tales come to ends. If a game doesn’t want to tell me a serious story, fine, but it’s at least got to resolve itself somehow, because that, too, is human. Currently, my conception of a ‘good game’—and I understand that, with social games, casual games, DLC and so on, this isn’t the way the industry is heading—is something with a beginning, a middle, and a proper, conclusive end. A death. A max level. A final challenge that unlocks extras, maybe. Anything but an infinite perpetuation of identical play experiences. I don’t need to be able to win it—I just need to be able to feel a sense of closure, or to have a chance to find my own kind of closure. Me, personally. Any thoughts on this, guys?

—

Here’s a secret about me and Torchlight: I almost didn’t quit. Apparently, there’s a secret level filled with horses for characters in the 40s level range, based on the cow level in Diablo II. I consider this idea incredibly attractive. But you have to grind the incredibly dull fishing minigame to get there, so I’ve decided that I won’t be bothering.

6 Comments
by lauramichet on March 27, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in PC, Review
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Posted by lauramichet on March 27, 2010

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/03/27/torchlight-is-like-a-job-you-dont-get-paid-for/

The Heavy Rain won’t wash your hands for you

“ETHAN! WASH YOUR GODDAMN HANDS!” Dan and I yell at the T.V. screen while Ethan helplessly stands in front of the sink, staring blankly into space. “Look, dude, you took a leak. Now you wash your hands.” But no, Ethan is not interested in washing his hands.

Maybe half way through the game, Ethan takes another leak and then he walks to the sink. We are excited to discover a helpful interactive arrow! “It’s about time you washed your hands you stupid idiot,” I mutter, pressing forward with my right thumb. Ethan turns the faucet, cups his hands, fills them with water, and then splashes it all over his face. I can almost taste the blood, urine and fluoride.

You know how when you watch a thriller movie you sometimes want to yell at the characters for being so stupid? With all of the times they split up and wander into abandoned buildings, you’d think that they’d never watched a movie in their whole pointless, empty lives. Heavy Rain seeks to remedy the problem of viewer disconnect by letting you make the decisions. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Ethan won’t call the cops like I would, and he won’t wash his hands after he goes to the bathroom.

There are a few times, though, when the decisions are chilling and excellent. I played through the entirety of Heavy Rain with my buddy Dan. Dan doesn’t play games at all, but he sat there watching me participate in ‘interactive drama’ for 10 hours. The controller pulses in my hands as I hover over a table littered with sharp objects, preparing to sever the last digit of my pinky. Dan helpfully suggests, “Whatever you do, just don’t use the saw.”

It’s been said about a million times, but the game is incredibly cinematic. I think that this is why Dan was willing to sit there watching me play it for so long. It sometimes feels like it’s made for viewers as much as it is for players. The interactive elements of the game that are there, however, certainly increased my immersion in the game—navigating an electric maze was intense, and the countless quick time fights always had me gripping a sweaty controller.

It’s probably because Heavy Rain tries so hard to be like a movie that I find myself judging it on so harsh a scale. I found the romance subplot entirely unconvincing, for instance—and not only because of the awkward and unnecessary sex scene. I just didn’t believe that those characters could or would fall in love with so little and trite interaction. There were a few plot holes that bugged me, and one or two lines of dialogue felt pretty stale. By gaming standards, though, the plot, script and characters were great. It might be to the game’s credit that after playing the demo I was ready for an interactive version of The Big Sleep.

David Cage said in a recent interview that he has been writing thrillers because working within such a well established genre was convenient. With Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain, he was trying to establish a new language, and in order to do that he needed something that was “easy to write.” Whatever problems that it had, Heavy Rain did establish a new way to tell stories. This is its greatest achievement.

And Cage seems prepared to move on. “I think I’m done with thrillers,” he says, and I for one am intrigued to see what other stories he has to tell. I hope that we will look back in ten years at the new masterpieces that Quantic Dreams and other developers have created and say to ourselves, these could not have existed without Heavy Rain.

This isn’t to say that the formula that Heavy Rain has established won’t change. I expect that motion controllers will make things better. I also expect that quick time events will become one way of doing action sequences, not the only way. There have been very mixed reactions to this game, which has prompted interesting conversations. It’s exciting. Here is where I stand: Heavy Rain has many faults, but it is still a fun and important experience. I would recommend it to anyone. But you might want to bring some hand sanitizer.

3 Comments
by Kent Sutherland on March 16, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in AAA Games, PS3, Review
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Posted by Kent Sutherland on March 16, 2010

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/03/16/the-heavy-rain-won%e2%80%99t-wash-your-hands-for-you/

Galcon Fusion is good times, some of the time

The gulf between multiplayer and singleplayer Galcon is like the gulf between an adorable puppy and a dead puppy that is already rotting.

Actually, that’s very unfair. But there is a huge divide. In my opinion, this iPhone-game-turned-PC-clickyfest is practically only worth playing on multiplayer. Multiplayer, particularly the team multiplayer, is a strategy-rich experience; the singleplayer is a dull, brief, staccato process that seems particularly ill-suited to the PC. I’ve heard good things about it on the iPhone, but when you’re playing thirty-second strategy games in your hand, while, as one reviewer put it, brushing your teeth, that’s a very different experience from hunching in front of your computer while the whole screen fills with robot strategy triangles. It’s simply not interesting enough to deserve all that space in front of your face.

Somebody got owned. By triangles.

Because that’s what this game is all about: circles and triangles. Lean, lean visuals. Admirable depth evolving out of a very slight, pared-down set of mechanics. And the developers tried to give this PC version some more totally unneeded complexity by including a seething mess of ill-explained singleplayer game modes that seem to have no reason for existing. And then there’s the AI. It comes in ten levels, some or most of which I could not actually tell apart from one another while playing. So, make of that what you will. This is a game which deserved more than to be weighted down with a million irrelevancies.

This is mainly because the multiplayer is so fantastic. I played multiplayer once last week—during finals week at my college—for over three hours straight. And it did not feel like a waste of time.

See, Galcon multiplayer is is more explicitly a kind of communication than it is in any other strategy game I’ve tried, simply because it’s so stripped down. The units are triangles; they point where they’re going. More triangles means more troops. No triangles means a player’s turtling. Everything that happens is right there on the table, ready for players to draw their own conclusions from. The pull and play of triangles is like a conversation between opponents.

The result is an incredible range of strategy—incredible, really, for a game with only one kind of troop, one kind of command, and automated unit production. By manipulating your troop output, you can trick enemies into thinking you have more or less troops than you actually do; by changing your troops’ direction mid-flight,y ou can pull off some impressive feints. And because your enemies here are people, not AI, the kind of strategy and trickery you can pull off is so much broader, so much more satisfying. There are such a diversity of viable strategies that by the time you’ve grasped the basic mechanics you’ve probably developed a distinctly personal play-style. And these styles stick out. The game is so slight in visuals that player behavior takes the absolute center stage. Other players in your game will know you by your favorite tricks. And you’ll know them by theirs. And team multiplayer is even more glorious—those games are all about wordless cooperation, about games turning on a dime, about perpetrating a fantastic kind of human chaos. It’s something that simply isn’t possible in the singleplayer.

So, the game has terrible music, unimpressive graphics, and a singleplayer mode that struck me as a waste of time. But it has a multiplayer that, out of a few bare-bones elements, inspires a pretty-much endless strategy experience. This is some really tight design. I am incredibly impressed with it. What I’m not impressed with, though, is the fact that the multiplayer servers go absolutely cold during much of the day, which makes it impossible for me to enjoy the one aspect of the game that I actually adore.

Actually, this is what the game looks like most of the time. A bit more placid, I'd say.

I got the game for two bucks as part of an indie bundle; knowing what I know now about the singleplayer and the multiplayer server situation, I’m not sure I would have bought the full ten dollar game just by itself. At any rate, there’s a free demo on Steam. I’d certainly recommend that, but since I bought the game already I don’t even know if that demo has multiplayer in it. I hope it does—this game certainly wants to show potential customers the best it has to offer, not the worst.

—

Wondered where we were all last week? We were doing finals. It was kind of a bitch. But we’re back now, and you’ll be seeing some interesting stuff soon!

Also, we are going to PAX East. More about that later.

ALSO ALSO, Galcon, regular iPhone Galcon, won the Innovation in Mobile Game Design award at the IGF last year. Here’s the dev’s– Phil Hassey’s–website.

6 Comments
by lauramichet on March 16, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Indie Games, PC, Review
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Posted by lauramichet on March 16, 2010

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/03/16/galcon-fusion-is-good-times-some-of-the-time/

Hammerfight is like Omar Sharif

ATTENTION. I AM MANLY OMAR.

Or the game Omar Sharif would play. Let’s talk about it.

Like Sharif, Hammerfight is outrageously manly. Derek Yu wrote about the game’s manliness, and it was his assessment of the game—“like Charleton Heston in the Ten Commandments,” he said—that convinced me I had to own it. But I’ve come to disagree with his choice of actors. Yeah, Charleton Heston is plenty manly, but the game’s unusual style points me toward a different super-manly actor with a different cultural background and filmography.

See, Hammerfight is a game about dueling steampunk helicopter gladiators. Its setting draws equally from Dune, Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, and the blisteringly insane imagination of its developers, who are a pack of clever Russians. Like Omar Sharif, a man of Franco-Libyan heritage who could play both Doctor Zhivago and Sherif Ali, the game seems to straddle an East-West stylistic divide. Out of this tension it creates a kind of weird, syncretic perfection never before seen on the face of planet Earth. Look at the man. Look at the game.

I AM ALSO MANLY. BUT A GAME.

Honestly, this game is such a hodgepodge of cultural signs that it actually escapes them and becomes own thing entirely. We’ve got the middle-eastern soundtrack. We’ve got sabers and geometric patterns and other Arabic visual cues. We’ve got the quasi-Arabic character names. We’ve got the Dune references. But on the other hand, we’ve got player advancement linked up to  ultra-western World-War-One-esque army medals and some rather Teutonic player title awards, as well as flying sandworms, steampunk, Greek architecture and Roman coins, and the absurd inclusion of retro pixel-fonts on every screen in the game. Also animated smileys: If you fly in a taunting waggle while fighting, your helicopter will flash the other helicopters an animated yellow smiley face. What.

Basically, what I’m saying is that this universe that Kranx Productions invented for its helicopter brawler is fantastic. This game is the square-jawed mythic hero-figure justice lovechild of Gamal Nasser and the Queen of England. So, Omar Sharif.

CHAIN CAGE MATCH

But what about the crazy mouse-swirling combat? Well, it’s basically genius. There is not a thing like it elsewhere in the universe. But there is a drawback: playing this game too much will give you severe tendonitis in your wrist. If you can suffer that well enough, though, you’re golden.

Like World Of Goo, this game stands upon the strength of its appealing physics engine, and play consists of teasing this engine out, elaborating upon its possibilities and feeling out its limits. Moving your mouse in circles, you struggle with centrifugal force for the control of the giant hammer hanging beneath your helicopter. You then smash things with this hammer. Or you can hang a sword there, and slice your enemies instead! Or an axe! Or you can put a wooden mallet there and play a ball sport! Fighting an enemy in the slave pits? Cool. Fighting an enemy in the slave pits while the two of you are linked by a giant chain that responds realistically to momentum? COOLER. Sick of hammers? How about swinging around some guns, learning to adjust to their solid, punchy recoil? Every possible variation on the engine’s original scenario is here. World of Goo and Hammerfight share that kind of genius.

Much of your time outside these fights is spent tricking around with different loadouts, searching for the best combination of weapons. These weapons feel meaty and significant in combat, and learning each type’s playstyle is one of the central focuses of the game. Unfortunately, there is no Hammerfight wiki, but if there were, it would probably consist mainly of pages about different kinds of weapons. Someone had better get on that.

'Glory' is a statistic in this game. Awesome.

In all likelihood, though, no one will ever get on that. Very few people play this game, probably because it is outrageously difficult. The learning curve for mouse-enabled hammer-battle is quite steep, and although there is ostensibly a tutorial progression, the initial levels are pretty frustrating. In fact, the fifth level features you standing up alone to an army of giant flying-sandworm-zeppelins and a neverending stream of hovering buzzsaw robots who attack you in pairs and triples while the zeppelins fire heatseeking missiles at you. You will probably die eight or ten times, and, restarting, you will sit through the slow pre-level plotty bit eight or ten times, too. If you think you can handle it, stay on board. The real game has barely begun, and things get easier with practice.

If I ever get a time machine, I am going to do a few things with it. One of the first things I will do will be to go back to the sixties with a laptop and give Omar Sharif, then in his multicultural movieacting prime and with all his youthful hand-eye coordination still intact, the chance to play Hammerfight. Then I will come back to the present and give you all an update on what he thought about it.

If he doesn’t get tendonitis, I bet he loves it.

—-

By the way, here is a hilariously-grammared trailer from the developers, reminding you what this game is all about (‘HIGH ART OF FIGHT‘).

8 Comments
by lauramichet on February 28, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Indie Games, PC, Review
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Posted by lauramichet on February 28, 2010

https://secondpersonshooter.com/2010/02/28/hammerfight-is-like-omar-sharif/