Richard's Online Journal
[20/11/08] Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties
Sorry for the lack of posts of late. Too busy. Too much to do. Too many games to play. Games… completely unlike Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties. Any PC Gamer reader will know this one by reputation - a truly foul piece of gaming from back in the days when little movies in computer games seemed like The Future. It was a running joke in the magazine for over a decade… in fact, I’m sure it was referenced only a couple of months back, quite possibly by me. But why mention it now? Why invoke its dark name in 2008?
Because someone’s made a fully functional YouTube version. The pain begins… now!
Don’t be fooled by the angry, somewhat bipolar FMV lady in her bra - so-called adult game or not, PDWT is as objectively erotic as an Ayn Rand striptease. The bit above is the only bit of movie in the whole game, and even in the uncensored version, all you got later on was a shot of a guy’s bottom and half a nipple. The rest is simply a photostory with truly scary narration created by… I don’t know. I really don’t. Just remember, whoever they were, whatever pit in Hades they crawled out of, they actually wanted to sell this game to actual humans. For human currency. They’d have been better off gift-wrapping their own faeces and calling it Chocolate Surprise.
Brr. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties. Quite possibly the worst game in the history of all time. And yes, that includes ET. And Big Rigs. And Max Payne.
[25/08/08] Trial By Fire
I don’t normally do generic ‘look what’s been released’ posts. Anyone who cares will see them on the gaming news sites. I’ll make an exception this time though, because it’s a game I’ve been looking forward to playing for a long time. Quest for Glory II: Trial By Fire. The long awaited VGA remake of one of the most (deservedly) loved Sierra adventure games of all time. Perfect for a quiet bank holiday Monday…
Before and After
But what is Quest for Glory? Well, that calls for some nostalgia…
Almost everyone who grew up playing adventures has used the same metaphor at some point. Lucasarts created movies, which showed up every few years with a level of polish and care that nobody else could match. Sierra created TV shows. Where Lucasarts put its weight behind one game at a time, it took a more scattershot approach. Its games were rougher round the edges, but much more varied - more able to experiment with new technologies and new concepts, without every release having to be a mass-market hit. If one didn’t do it for you, no problem. There’d be a new Police Quest along soon enough, or Space Quest, or Freddy Pharkas, or Conquests of the Longbow, or whatever else had caught the company’s interest at the time. That caused problems when their interests span into incredibly expensive FMV and failed attempts at 3D, but it worked for over a decade, and we got plenty of classic games out of it.
Quest for Glory was one of the most ambitious undertakings in terms of pure game design. Like all the best Sierra adventures, it took the basic point and click template and made it its own with a fresh spin, an interesting setting, and a reason to exist beyond simply letting people solve puzzles and read dialogue. This was the era when people expected that kind of thing, instead of being happy to swallow the torrent of horseshit currently being shovelled into their gaping maws by the likes of Frogwares.
But that’s another rant.
The QFG games were adventure/RPG hybrids - not the only ones, but some of the very, veryfew that did it well. Compared to the likes of Bureau 13 and Bloodnet, they were borderline masterpieces - the RPG elements boosting the adventure, instead of overwhelming it or filling it with needless cruft. You started out by picking a character class - Fighter (which could be upgraded to Paladin), Thief, or Magic User/Wizard - and many of your abilities were based on stats that could be levelled up in the course of playing the game. You could import your old character at the start of each new game, watching them get tougher and tougher over the course of the decade the series ran.
So far, so good. Can’t climb a cliff? Try levitating up it. Or boosting your climbing skill. That’s about as complex as the core stats bit ever got. Luckily, that was only part of the story. Where the QFG games really scored was in providing different experiences, all in keeping with standard adventure controls and thinking, for each character class. As a Fighter, you might get a particular item by showing off your combat skills, whereas a thief would be given the mission to steal it. Thieves would get several burglary missions - proto stealth sequences geared around avoiding squeaky floorboards or being mugged by an old lady’s cat - to raise cash, while a mage might find himself (there wasn’t a gender choice, unfortunately) playing some magic focused strategy minigame.
The main story stayed the same, but the beats could be very different, to the point that you could play the games at least three times over and still have a very different adventure each time. That’s before hitting up the side-quests, finding alternate solutions to problems, or just plain poking round the world in search of jokes, Easter Eggs, and the other goodies that made Sierra games so much fun to explore.
Ah, the great RPG dilemma. Magic User, Not Magic User, or Other One That Is Not A Magic User? Decisions, decisions…
Each game took the hero to a new location, loosely linked around compass directions and seasons. The first was set in the European town of Spielburg - yes, really - where you had the pretty easy objective of freeing the town from the not particularly tough bandits in a nearby camp. The second, Trial By Fire, moved to an Arabian setting, of djinns and tonics. Wages of War was a fairly half-hearted outing, with an African setting and not much in the way of story or interest. The fifth, Dragon Fire, finished off the series by bringing back damn near every character in it for one last adventure in a Grecian themed world that aimed to end things on a high, but fell afoul of a confused design that started off as a multiplayer thing and ended up a bit of a mess. There was still plenty of good stuff in it, but more in the side-quests like the romances than the often combat heavy main quest and its forced trial-based objectives.
The fourth game, I mention last because even though it’s one of the buggiest adventures in the history of the genre, it’s easily one of my Top 10 of all time. Shadows of Darkness was the horror-themed one, and an absolute masterpiece of game design. Puzzles, setting, humour, everything. It didn’t just go for the obvious targets, like vampires and Elder Gods, but took the time to imbue the setting with proper Slavic folklore - the Rusalka, the Domovoi - and little details like a Russian themed tarot sequence. There was more obvious comedy on the top, like Dr.Cranium (a very, very thinly veiled parody of Sierra’s own Dr. Brain) but for the most part the wordplay based humour bounced perfectly off the dark background to give a very unique atmosphere.
It also took the time to add genuine sentiment to its characters, from the little vampire girl Tanya and the cursed Rusalka (who could be befriended by any character, and only kill you if you gave her no choice, but only saved by the Paladin class), all the way to the ‘villain’, Katrina. Evil, yet very sympathetic, she’s up there with Gabriel Knight’s von Glower as one of Sierra’s best villains. It’s notable that while she dies in the course of the game, the Coles brought her back in the next game as a potential romance partner. It’s not quite as squicky as it sounds, but…
QFG5 was a weird, weird game. 3D wraparound backgrounds, polygon characters, plasticky faces, really bad combat. A sadly disappointing finale.
Designers Lori and Corey Cole did a terrific job on the series. The QFG games are adventures where there’s almost always something new to find, from a particularly terrible pun (and when it comes to puns, they put the Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon guys to shame), to a brilliant new way of committing suicide. Simple messages like “That Didn’t Work” were rare - almost everything had a snappy custom response. Try to take out the local ‘ermit with a fireball? Pick your nose with a lockpick? Forget to put out your campfire? The Coles were the masters of Sierra Sudden Death Syndrome, but in a good way. They made dying almost as much fun as winning.
Restore, Restart, Quit?
One of the main reasons I’ve been looking forward to this remake is that QFG2 is the only one of the series I never finished. I always meant to, but the original was just too much of a pain in the neck in a few ways that shouldn’t have been a problem, but were. The copy protection map screen, the basic setting, a lot of early wandering, and the fact that it was the third of the series I played (after the VGA remake of the first game, Wages of War, and the wonderful Shadows of Darkness) all put me off. With this remake, those excuses no longer exist. It’s got shiny new graphics, a wonderful combo interface to pick between dialog and parser puzzles, and all the other cool stuff. I can’t wait, and if you’re an adventure fan who’s never played QFG, you shouldn’t either.
Once again, that link: Quest for Glory II: Trial By Fire. Hurrah!
[12/08/08] Strong Bad’s Yadda Yadda
I like Telltale Games a lot, but goodness, they know how to pick nightmare licenses. With Bone, it was retelling a story that could largely be self-spoiled via Wikipedia. Sam and Max - a series I always look forward to new episodes of - wasn’t just going up against the original Lucasarts game, but at least three pairs of rose-tinted glasses on the noses of everyone who ever played it. What next? Lego The Bible? Bacon: The Game? Oooh! That long-awaited episodic Planescape / Day of the Tentacle / System Shock crossover? As far as I know, they’ve not ruled it out.
That means there is Hope.
I wonder if there’s an alternate universe where Homestar Runner remained the star of his own cartoon? Hope not.
With Strong Bad’s Awesome Game For Cool People, they’ve done it again. For all the simple graphics and effortless humour of the website, this is a pretty challenging license. As such, what really interested me while playing through my review copy wasn’t how well it played - and it plays great - but how it handled some of the pretty unique challenges in converting the free online shorts into a standalone commercial gig.
With the assumption that you find the H*R crowd entertaining in the first place firmly in mind - you’re obviously not going to get much out of this one if you don’t, and to get my bias out of the way now, I’ve got the Strong Bad E-Mails DVD on my shelf - let’s take a closer look. Or not. Your call, really.
[30/07/08] Whydescreen
After a couple of evenings playing Alone in the Dark, I can safely say that nobody, anywhere, needs to spend a couple of evenings playing Alone in the Dark. It’s a terrible, terrible game, and the only reason I blink in surprise to hear people call it ‘controversial’ is that I don’t know a single person who doesn’t think it completely sucks. Deservedly. Capsule review: The stuff it does well is the worst, since in a good game, it could have been cool. In this, it’s insult meeting injury, with a side order of crap controls, terrible plotting, and insane design decisions.
Given how much stuff there is to complain about, it may seem odd that the one that really annoyed the hell out of me was the widescreen viewport. I don’t own a widescreen monitor, which meant staring at the whole crappy game through a letterbox, rather than enjoying it in letterbox format. I don’t get why this had to be the case. Were they worried a boom mike would dip into shot or something? Would filling the whole screen have sapped the cinematic ambience of people swearing and waiting for the inevitable tentacle monsters to show up?
Grr. Still, at least no bright spark has come up with the idea of using those of us shamefully not equipped with the same gear as their QA department for an exercise in stealth marketing. What kind of world would it be when almost half the screen is taken up with nothing more than high-resolution bugger all?
Not the world of advertising, that’s for sure. Wait. Aaah. I’m… I’m having a vision…
Brrr. I just hope I haven’t put ideas into anyone’s head…
[14/06/08] Limbo of the Lost
UPDATE: I’ve added a few videos that other people uploaded to YouTube. They’re the best way of seeing the quality of this game without having to actually play it.
If you haven’t been following the story, Limbo of the Lost is… controversial. It’s an adventure that’s been around for a few months over here, which just got a release in the US. It would have gone without notice, if not for GamePlasma noticing that some of its scenes looked… somewhat familiar. Like it was borrowing a little more than inspiration from Oblivion. And Unreal Tournament. And Thief. And Diablo. And World of Warcraft. And Painkiller. And Spawn: The Movie. And Rune.
Ouch. I actually feel sorry for them, because nobody-but-nobody could be silly enough to do this while understanding the consequences. I can’t work out how the hell they thought they could get away with it - the closest I can get is the deeply naive ‘If I took the screenshot, it’s okay’, which isn’t even close to a justification. I don’t envy them, their publishers, or anyone in a five mile radius when this hots up.
But all that’s been done to death. I wanted to know something else - what the actual game was like. It’s available on BitTorrent, but while I don’t think there’s much of an ethical problem with downloading an Arrh-Jimlad! copy in this very special instance (especially since every dollar that goes into the publisher’s pocket is another bullet for the lawyers’ guns, and they’re already wielding Gatlings), I wanted to make absolutely sure I was playing it for real. So here it is. In the soon-to-be-torn flesh…
Consider it taking one for the team…