boymeetsgame

Heady from the excitement generated from Syberias 1 (2002) & 2 (2003), developer Microïds has moved on to the similarly astonishing Still Life. Continuing their extraordinary talent for innovation and genre-blurring, Microïds have mixed together both ‘point’ AND ‘click’ in a stunning combination, sure to revolutionise the usually conservative genre of Adventure gaming.

Now we all know that Adventure fans are generally backwards-looking; considering gaming to have reached its apex in the early to mid-90’s Lucasarts games of lore. 2D graphic adventures are ‘where it’s at’, in case you didn’t know, and anyone who tries to revitalise the dead genre (and by ‘revitalise the dead genre’ I mean tweaking it to sell to people other than the core fanbase who’ve been playing them since the 90’s anyway) by, I don’t know, doing something new (”Eew! He said a dirty word!”) is to be spat upon as the corporate sell-out he truly is.

It’s because of people like that we end up with games like Microïds insists on making. Games like Syberia and Still Life, that appear to adhere slavishly to the genre, introducing nothing new but instead going backwards. What annoys me most about such slavishness is that the genre of Adventure games is so damned stunted because it is supposed to sacrifice everything in the interests of a good story. Microïds’ games, however, bizarrely lauded on account of “character development” (surely impossible without first the employment of “character”), are some of the worst writing seen in years. Syberia was perhaps an interesting idea that was unfortunately told in a most uninteresting fashion: over two long games. When I first began playing I was frustrated by the length of time everything took to accomplish. Moving from one screen to another was carried out by Kate Walker’s snail-pace meander or, alternatively, her snail-pace trot. Unlike games such as The Longest Journey, there was no option to hold down the Esc button to speed up the process and, as puzzles often required you to retrace quite a bit of the ground covered, this was extremely annoying. But I must come back to the actual writing itself and ask the question: why tell the story over two games? It’s not like a lot of the intervening filler was anything more than just that – filler. We could have been saved the time (and money), and gotten through it in one game, if Sokal had ever heard of a little thing called ‘editing’ or, better yet, ‘re-writing’. But no, his game was perfect from the first.

Similarly, Still Life is some of the worst writing I have ever seen. Starring new character Victoria McPherson and her grandfather PI Gustav McPherson (star of Microïds’ Post-Mortem, which I have not yet played), we revisit boring and offensive stereotypes we thought had died long ago. Supposedly spunky Vic Mac begins the game by bringing all the men at the crime scene a cup of coffee, and later she slides into fluffy slippers and makes her dad a batch of grandma’s cookies (a particularly annoying puzzle) which he proceeds to debour single-handedly. The first officer she meets at the scene is Afro-American and speaks like a white minstrel, not to mention swears more gratuitously than any other character in the game.

Speaking of swearing, in my online adventures in adventure game forum-posting I have discovered an unusual quirk: adventure gamers have an intolerance of colourful language. Now this may be explained away simply as ingrained American Puritanism (founded on dissident religious extremism as the country was), but undoubtedly in this game it would be accepted as in keeping with the painfully gritty ‘atmosphere’. It’s a paradox I don’t think I’ll ever understand.

So the writing is terrible, which doesn’t even begin to go into the derivativeness of it all. The atmosphere is Se7en, the story is a mix of Jack the Ripper and Gabriel Knight (right down to going through Granddad’s trunk in the attic – but not before solving an unnecessarily puzzling lock), and to commit a crime of spoiling: there isn’t an ending! We have to bloody wait until the next game which – not because they’re good games, but because it will be one of the only 2D Graphic Adventure games released that year – the core fanbase will buy.

What I don’t understand about the Adventure genre is that there has been a growing underground movement for some time that produces games in the style fans know and love, a kind of online security blanket, that they can download for free. But they still bemoan the lack of games they can buy in their favourite (only) genre. I know this adventure fan, because I… *shudder* I used to be one.

And no doubt I’ll buy Still Life 2: Animated Life. *sigh*

I picked up KOTOR for $19.95 the other day at EB and, I have to say, the graphics aren’t quite as good as I remember them. In contrast KOTOR2, while maintaining the look of the KOTOR universe, is a vast improvement.

Things I forgot to mention about KOTOR2. 1) Some of the menu layout is much better than KOTOR. For instance: inventory management in KOTOR was organised according to a bizarre taxonomy, i.e. you could organise according to ‘recently acquired’ items, etc. 2) KOTOR had a feeling (perhaps somewhat illogical) that most things you were encountering in the game were as new to the characters as they were to you: alien races, planets, technology, and so on. This proved immensely satisfying for Star Wars nerds such as myself (’Ohmigod, Tattooine has only just been colonised?!’). This wide-eyed innocence is lost in the second game: everything is old hat and nothing is explained. It makes a hell of a lot more narrative sense, but I miss that naïvete. 3) There is a y-axis, when you hold down the right mouse button. 4) The writing really is excellent.

Obsidian’s follow-up to Bioware’s respectably subtitled Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003), SW:KOTOR2:TSL is more of the same, although this is not in itself a bad thing. I hadn’t bought a copy of KOTOR myself, so I was unphased when I read reviews of KOTOR2 which said it was no different from the first one. This way I could play the second one and (basically) own the first, at the same time. Diabolical!

And you know, at first my theory worked and I didn’t mind. Then, as time – and the game – wore on, I began to get bored with the RPG-ness of it all. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of the whole: “do this for me, hack!/slash!, thanks, now do that for her” way of life, and wish my real job simply consisted of doing a whole bunch of stupid little things for other people I barely know (… hey, wait a minute!). But the Art of RPG’s is to fool people into NOT getting bored with their banal tasks. And it is here that KOTOR2 fails miserably. By the end you don’t care that you had seen the ‘twist’ coming since the beginning of the game (because it was pointed out to you then); or that the villain on the cover looks quite menacing despite seeming to have quite a large bosom (it’s supposed to be a man) and his vocoder voice makes him sound like a reject from a Daft Punk song; or that the main villain’s name belongs in Chronicles of Riddick (although Crematoria at least had those evil-looking tendrils of sunlight going for it).

There are some good things going for it. The dialogue seems to read better, or at least more sophisticated. Kreia’s grey-area philosophy is interesting (I’m yet to try and play it that way) and, unlike KOTOR which I also played immediately after Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (SWJKJA: Raven, 2003), I wasn’t particularly perturbed by the fact that it had no y-axis (you can’t look up or down). But Obsidian really needed to make the thing play, feel, hell – even look different to Bioware’s one to make this franchise worth continuing. And with the latter developer’s release of Jade Empire this year which, from what I’ve heard, is more or less the same as KOTOR anyway, there’s some stiff competition for KOTOR2.