Richard's Online Journal

[05/11/08] Quantum of Solace

[02/11/08] Fallout 3

After Ending Report: Except for one of the most staggeringly poorly thought out endings in the history of all things - I’d explain more, but I need to go finish that short story about a fish who was frightened of drowning - it’s good. The main plot is depressingly predictable, especially if you’ve wandered through these wastelands before, and many of the areas badly needed a smack with the design stick, but there’s so much cool stuff to experience, I doubt you’ll care. What’s missing is sadly what I expected - the breakdown of the different towns demonstrating I was doing more than standard RPG quest-bitch duties, and that any of my decisions mattered outside of their individual tasks. Right. Back to the past...

War. War never changes. Unless you count it changing from an isometric tactical RPG to a big AAA FPS hybrid from a different development team with a totally different design style. Then it does. Quite a lot, actually…

I haven’t finished Fallout 3 yet, so this is more a loose collection of thoughts than a review. In a nutshell: I like it. I like it a lot. It’s far from perfect, but it’s an excellent game. If you need a number to explain that, it’s high eighties/low nineties. If you’d rather have a vegetable: tomato. If you just shouted at the screen ‘Tomatoes are a fruit!’, please submit your name to this year’s edition of “Who’s Whom?” - the world’s leading directory of pedants and pendants (patent pending). That score could flicker either way during the rest of the game, so don’t take it as gospel.

Headshots are your friend. They never stop loving you. They never leave you. Not like those cheap melee tarts.

[12/10/08] Stephen Fry In America

I just switched off the first part of this, after almost an hour of staring in bemusement at the screen. What happened? I’m a big fan of Fry’s work in pretty much every form. QI is one of my favourite shows, I enjoy his books, can’t wait for the podgrams, devour the blog posts, loved the recent documentaries, and I’ll tune in for a few minutes of next week’s episode to see if there’s some drastic improvement, but right now, I’ve got to call this offering one of the most superficial, vapid, poorly paced programs I’ve seen in a long, long time. And I’ve seen the whole second series of Hex.

They watch TV in America! DJs emcee in America! Samples are free in America! I’ve had a pee in America!

First of all, if you’re going to do a travelogue, you really need to spend more than a few minutes per state. In almost an hour, we barely got more than ‘Ben and Jerry is in Vermont, Maine has lobsters, New York is also a state’. Fry pokes his nose into each, a suitably media-friendly employee delivers a few lines, and then it’s off off and away to the next state with all the ceremony of making a mark on a list.

The storyline connecting these vignettes, at least in this opening episode, is more or less non-existent - Fry’s question of what he’d have been like as an American barely lasting past the intro, never mind being the focus. There’s no rhyme or reason behind what the cameras are aimed at in each state, whether it’s a submarine or a rich family’s summer lodge, save what caught either the editor or researchers’ attention. That leads to some… oddness, notably the scene where Fry specifically asks a deer hunter not to shoot at deer while he’s around, claiming that he doesn’t want to see one being killed. Ignoring the sheer pointlessness of hooking up with a hunter in the first place, fair enough, I’d feel the same in that situation.

Except that barely ten minutes earlier in TV-Time, he was personally throwing live lobsters into a boiling pot. Medic! Check the editor’s pulse!

Individual segments don’t fare any better. Take the Ben and Jerry’s bit, where Fry gets to make his own ice-cream. The fact that ice-cream is cold hardly seems like a titbit worthy of the next series of QI, does it? Where are the questions about… oh, I don’t know… the history of the company? The role of ice-cream in American culture, as mentioned in the segment’s introduction? The loss or not of its individuality after Unilever sank its fangs in there? Why are we watching an interview with some random oik instead of having Fry chew the fat with Ben and Jerry themselves? The Fairtrade associations of their banana ice-cream? The response to Free Cone Day? The origins of those bizarre flavours that made their name and the ones that didn’t make it?

Forget it. All we learn from this segment is that Stephen Fry likes walnuts.

EDIT: And toffee.

The worst bits are the historical snippets. There’s one that works really well, as he interviews a pastor who delivers some very funny bits on the Pilgrims and dips a little into the American mindset, but it’s too damn short, and stands alone. Later, we’re stuck with a version of the Salem Witch Trials that number-drops the 150 accused and nineteen hangings, but steers clear of the fascinating history of it all in favour of nipping into a shop for a chat with a self-proclaimed witch in truly horrifying eyewear, and then off to a Halloween (Samhain) party that Fry skips out on in favour of bed.

And that’s all we really get on Salem, and indeed, Massachusetts itself. No facts, no opinion, nothing to make the segment even remotely stand out of the crowd. Just for starters, I can’t remember a recent documentary that talked about witchcake, or the judges in the case being specifically advised that it was better for ten witches to escape ‘justice’ than for one innocent person to be condemned.

Isn’t that more interesting than some silly people arsing about in fancy dress?

“Madame, your glasses fill me with scorn and pity and a mild quivering of the bowels. I do apologise. Please, continue your mad ramblings.”

The Boston Tea Party fares no better, dropping ‘no taxation without representation’, but nothing about the actual political situation (Britain trying to weasel its way into getting the colonists to accept that it had a right to tax them, along with details of what the money was being used for, or the lack of representation in the UK at that time), fun trivia like at least one of the Founding Fathers - Benjamin Franklin, I believe - saying the lost money should be repaid, or anything else you won’t already know.

Instead, he goes to a tea party.

Christ.

There’s not only no attempt to dig deeper into things or ask questions that might actually shed light on something other than the media-friendly facade the interview subjects are trying to push, it’s actively avoided. Mitt Romney fielding softball questions is hardly indicative of the political process, especially when Fry comes across as deeply smitten by his ability to push a charming facade and oblivious to being utterly blanked the split-second Romney realises that he’s irrelevant to his campaign stop. A trip to a clubhouse full of gangsters is wasted on namedropping Robert de Niro and explaining a con so phenomenally old, you could probably cut its head off and steal its power via the Quickening. Every stone is left unturned in the search for information, with Fry’s questions so spectacularly softball and facile, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that his interviewees got to write them themselves in exchange for allowing the film crew into their world. Jon Stewart does harsher interviews than this.

Okay, there’s one possible exception involving the Kennedy family. But it doesn’t get much in the way of an answer, so no harm done, eh?

“If I offended you, take solace that one of my legs will soon be snapping like a dry twig. Quite badly. Bones and everything.”

I expect more than this, not just from Stephen Fry himself, one of Britain’s great wits and founts of information, but from the people editing this stuff together, pacing it out, and serving it up. Nothing about this series, at least in its first episode, comes close to justifying itself. There isn’t the scope of Palin’s adventures, or the rather less open-minded journeys of someone like Paul Merton (in India/China), the whimsy of Dave Gorman (Unchained America) the wackiness of Louis Theroux, or the off-beat stuff done by Penn and Teller (Magical Mystery Tour).

Instead, it’s generic, patronisingly simple, and Fry is utterly superfluous in his role as host. It may as well be anyone offering these observations and asking these questions. Hell, it’d probably be better, because then there wouldn’t be so much frustration due to them never bloody being the right ones!

Whether it’s just that they weren’t asked, or ended up on the cutting room floor, I don’t know. I’d like to think it’s the latter, because it’s rare that I see a Stephen Fry anything I don’t enjoy. I’d be interested to see the tie-in book, if only to see if it moves away from this viewers-are-morons stuff in favour of something with Fry’s usual wit and sense of investigative interest… something more akin to Bill Bryson’s amiable ramblings than a program so driven by the research team, they may as well just get in front of the camera and present the damn thing themselves.

Definite thumbs down. Down what, I leave to the imagination.

[12/09/08] Spore

Capsule Review: A fantastic civilisation design tool that gets your creative juices flowing in a game that bores me senseless.

[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!