Richard's Online Journal
Emerald City Confidential
Dave Gilbert’s >Blackwell games were a couple of my favourite adventures over the last couple of years, so I’ve been looking forward to Emerald City Confidential for a while. Hell, the basic concept did it for me. Raymond Chandler… in Oz. Download. Play.
“...exporting American McGee to China before he could make his Oz movie.”
It’s an interesting release, and arguably the first old-school adventure to really be built as casual game. That’s not just down to the difficulty, although it is probably the easiest I’ve played in recent memory. I was halfway through it by the end of the trial period, and the second half didn’t take a whole lot longer. Even if you do get stuck, there’s a hint book built into it which gives you chapter and verse on every puzzle you encounter. Compared to the hours and hours you get out of other casual games, or a couple of Telltale Games’ episodes, $19.99 is a bit expensive. Not insanely — I’m looking at you, Not Even Half A Vampyre Story — but more than I’d have liked.
The key casual features come in three forms, two of which are reasonably unique. The first is the most standard — it automatically saves your progress in the background. A small thing, yes, but I’ve retrudged enough adventures to welcome it when I see it.
Second, there’s a collection element to the game, with each screen hiding a coloured button that occasionally glints at you. I wish these could have been traded in for something other than concept art pictures, giving a real reason to bother. Still, it makes for a good way of encouraging people to pay attention to exactly what’s on each new screen, and possibly spot things they might otherwise have missed. In addition, you get Achievements (not called that, but I don’t care), although these seem very slapped onto the game, being awarded for things like taking a certain number of taxi rides rather than actually ‘achieving’ anything. They’re more Completionist points than anything else.
Finally, a string of gems at the bottom of the screen shows you precisely how much of the game you’ve finished, with each gem representing a new quest. I hate the word ‘quest’ in this context, but only because I hate it in just about every context. It’s a surprisingly effective system. Unlike most adventures, where you can easily be stuck on something or get flustered, you’re constantly making visible progress. The gems are colour-coded for the game’s main sections, offering a real ‘one more sparklie’ feel. A side bonus of this system is that while there are no discrete chapters in ECC, a new gem colour makes for an excellent break-point in the action.
Throw in the lack of death, arcade sequences and time limits, not to mention little touches like only relevant areas being shown on the world map and very few superfluous hotspots, and you’ve got an excellent starter adventure for people who haven’t tried the genre before. For more experienced adventurers, it’s not ‘dumbed down’ so much as streamlined, with the only real catch being that yes, you can be done and dusted in an evening without ever having had to strain your leetle grey cells. The puzzles may be extremely easy, but they’re also pretty clever. More than a couple made me think back to Zork: Grand Inquisitor, and that’s a good thing.
All this said, ECC is clearly an adventure made for the casual market, not a casual game borrowing from adventures. I’m not convinced that the standard object-dialogue-model is the ideal one, given the lack of length and replay value. Fun as the adventure is, it’s not one you’re likely to come back to very often, and the extra achievements and so on aren’t well enough integrated to make doing so a rewarding process.
It’ll be interesting to see what the reaction is like from both camps, but I suspect future adventures will benefit from some fairly hardcore re-engineering of core principles to create stories that benefit from multiple cycles through the plot, and more of a focus on smaller, tighter designs with less intensive production needs.
Meddle not in the affairs of wizards, for they are both subtle and swift to anger. Don’t even ask about evil sorceresses…
Back to ECC itself though. Plot-wise, I’ve read a couple of the Oz books, but not all of them. That’s enough to know that just about everyone aside from the main character, Petra, is straight from at least one of them. That said, it doesn’t actually matter, especially since you almost certainly have a grip on the basics through cultural osmosis, regardless of whether you’ve ever read/seen anything set in the world. Petra re-introduces everyone as and when they appear, along with any necessary history lessons. If you recognise Jack Pumpkinhead, great. If not, a couple of well-written lines tell you everything you need about his smuggling ways.
(If you really, really must have an infodump, there’s a machine that’ll serve up the who and what of just about everyone, but with no offence meant, no thanks. That’s what Wikipedia is for. Luckily, you only need the machine for part of a more general, non-research related puzzle. Twice, for some bizarre reason. More often, we get the same clever Gilbert atmosphere that makes everyone who plays a Blackwell game walk off convinced they know Joey’s backstory, no matter that he’s yet to share it.)
Where the classic characters show up, it’s as part of their own little stories, temporarily intersecting with Petra’s for a bit and both moving on. They typically work on two levels — primarily as a character archetype, with their original roots secondary. Only a couple, like the sorceress Mombi and the Wizard himself, sorely needed a bit more oomph.
The most disappointing part of all this is that while the noir aspect of the story never fully goes away, it’s only the focus of the first half. After a particular plot point lets you leave the Emerald City itself, the game morphs into your fairly standard magical fantasy quest to save the kingdom, slamming on the accelerator and not looking back. This didn’t bother me too much, mostly because it continued to be fun, but it still felt like a shame. I’d have loved to have seen Gilbert really go to town on the underbelly of his reimagined world, much like Discworld Noir did to my favourite fantasy books.
Still, it quickly becomes clear that it’s not so much the noir element per se that makes the story tick as having a fresh pair of eyes to see the world through. Despite all the familiar and not-so-familiar bits and pieces, it’s Petra’s motivations that really make the story work — arguably better than it should, given the speed at which it whips past your eyes. There are lots of bits you can pick holes in if you want, like having two consecutive sections end with exactly the same basic sequence, but the pace of the story means that most of the problems are over and done very, very quickly.
The Lion, now a ruthless lawyer, isn’t actually a major player in the story, but is one of many parts of the game that give the world its texture.
For my money, I’d have preferred something a bit more challenging, and something that had played a bit more with the film-noir model than the more general magic adventure ECC ultimately becomes, but I’m not exactly Playfirst’s target audience. I had a fun evening in the Emerald City, and my wallet doesn’t feel too sore as a result. I just hope it’s not too much longer before the next Blackwell game. I miss those characters.
Dumb Dumb Britain
From that bastion of culture UKTV Gold, a ‘fascinating’ set of statistics. The full release is here, but what could the channel geared towards Only Fools And Horses and other such re-runs have to say for itself?
Shame-faced Brits are increasingly confusing fact and fiction when it comes to historical knowledge ? that’s the verdict of a compelling new study which found that most people believe that fictional figures such as King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby really existed.
Uh-huh, okay. That list in full…
Top ten fictional characters that the British public thinks are real
1) King Arthur ? 65%
2) Sherlock Holmes ? 58%
3) Robin Hood ? 51%
4) Eleanor Rigby ? 47%
5) Mona Lisa –35%
6) Dick Turpin ? 34%
7) Biggles ? 33%
The Three Musketeers ? 17%
9) Lady Godiva ? 12%
10) Robinson Crusoe ? 5%
Oh, goodie. Here we go again…
I’m so tired of reading things like this. There should be a rule that every news story about a poll/survey has to come with a copy of the actual questions and methodology used, because while I can certainly imagine many people not knowing a lot of this stuff — Baker Street gets enough tourist historians — I find it even more obnoxious when newspapers invite us all to snort at the thickies from our ivory towers of intellectual grace, despite the true silliness being to take this kind of study at face value.
Even the information actually provided leaves everything to be desired. Take this extract from the Telegraph’s report.
Despite his celebrated military reputation, 47 per cent of respondents dismissed the 12th-century crusading English king Richard the Lionheart as fictional.
Well, okay, but he effectively is as far as most people who’ve heard of him are concerned. Richard the Lionheart — as in the Good King from the Robin Hood myth — is a fictional construct, roughly as close to the historical figure as a mouse is to the top of the food chain. I wouldn’t quibble, if I hadn’t seen Dick Turpin bizarrely added to the fiction list. He existed too, but in real life, as a deeply unpleasant thug rather than a dashing highwayman — his mythical status awarded later, for no discernable reason.
What about the others? Well, last I checked, the Mona Lisa is widely agreed to be based on someone specific — a woman called Lisa Gherardini, if I remember correctly, but even if not, someone modelled for the thing — so the inclusion of that one is a bit weird, unless the question was specifically “Was she called Mona?”. And Lady Godiva was real enough, although the bit about her riding naked through Coventry was a later, fictional, addition from a guy who really needed to get out more.
So already, my suspicion is that UKTV Gold needs a slap.
As for the others, sure, they’re fiction — but that still leaves the same problem as before — not having the questions, there’s no way of judging the answers. If you ask ‘Did Sherlock Holmes live at 221B Baker Street?’, you can take the answer as a pleasing affirmation of literary knowledge, or the drooling, empty-eyed mutterings of a fool, whichever will better sell the final survey’s intended results. You don’t get much attention with the poll “People Moderately Informed After All”, after all.
I’m not saying they did ask that question, or anything similar. I don’t know. And that’s the problem. Maybe it was a totally legitimate survey, which started with “Are the following people historical figures or fictional characters?” and then just ran down a list. It just bugs me that there’s no way of knowing, and people are going to drink up the results and regurgitate them without ever taking the next step and asking “Okay, but you’re presenting this as science. Where’s the evidence?”
At the very least, it’d be nice if Dumb Britain and Dumb America, and Dumb Wherever were occasionally treated to some of the self-respect that these stories are designed to play on. Or at the very least, if the purveyors of this stuff had to prove their own general knowledge genius prior to staking a claim to trivia’s moral high ground. UKTV shows QI, right? I’m sure they could get channel head Paul Moreton next to Stephen Fry in a future series, demonstrating his in-depth knowledge of everything. At least that would be fair.
I’d also like to see Anne Robinson fall down a hole. That’s not related to the press release, just a general comment. I think it would be nice.
Kindling
Here’s something I don’t get. Every time there’s a new e-reader tool announced, future-gazer types start talking about the Gutenberg Press. And that sounds fair. Moving to an all-digital system, with computers serving up any book in the history of mankind would be an incredible leap for society — bigger even than the wheel, or Bacon Salt.
Except there’s a catch, and it goes something like this.
Gutenberg Press: Took a locked down, incredibly expensive medium and made it affordable and accessible to all, heralding a world of democratic information and incredible social enlightenment.
E-Readers: Um… Not so much…
The latest one, Amazon Kindle, costs four hundred dollars. The books are DRM restricted, with best-sellers kicking off at around $10 a pop. It’s portable, like a book, except that you’ll be terrified of leaving it on the train or taking it onto the beach. It’s open, in the sense that there’ll be another one along next year, and there’s no chance you’ll still be using it in five years. And it ties you into one company for all your literary purchases and news, since content providers are about as good at co-operating as a sack of angry cats.
Basically, Kindle and its ilk are the books the Church would have made.
I’ve got quite a few misgivings about the whole e-book concept in general, not necessarily in the long-term, but certainly right now. The e-book market is tiny (to say nothing of seeing its biggest success in erotica, followed by geek-friendly subjects for the early adopters), and I’m not sure how much it’s going to grow if the only readers available cost as much or more than some laptops. Without fail, the systems available are horrifically over-engineered, critically restricted, and aimed firmly at the wrong market.
These systems should be just as affordable to someone who wants to read pulp as students, and at a price where you could drop one in the toilet and it would probably be okay. The market needs to be combined, so that buying a book on Amazon automatically drops the full thing onto your Kindle, or whatever other device, for no extra charge — with special deals on download only prices to gradually ween people away from standard novels. If they take off, if they’re popular, start pushing e-books as a thing in their own right. People didn’t want to do without CDs until they saw the benefits of digital files. Even if e-books are worth switching to, the resistance will be every bit as strong.
More, when you factor in cultural issues, and the average age of active readers.
As for the devices themselves, they need to be disposable. You should get one by signing up to a book-club — take out a 12 month subscription, get yourself an e-reader. They should be priced so that you can drop them in the toilet by accident and it’ll still be okay. Whatever the price, they need to be something other than a new toy for the small sliver of the population that just wants the latest gadget, especially since it’s likely to be the same crowd more likely to spend the evening with YouTube than Yates.
But that’s not the only thing. Books are an unusual form of entertainment due to the amount of attentiton they demand from the reader, and while you can certainly argue that the actual paper doesn’t matter (I disagree, but it’s a personal call…), it’s one where the torture of choice is particularly noticeable. The more media you have available, the harder it is to knuckle down and finish it.
This is good for the likes of Amazon, who’ll no doubt get plenty of cash from people switching on to continue reading, oh, the new Charlie Stross, before noticing that there’s a new Harry Potter spin-off, but bad when it comes to finishing books, for enjoying the storyline instead of racing to plug into something different, and especially for heavier going books not intended to be read in fits and starts. Everyone’s taken a book like Lord of the Rings on holiday, only to get back with half a page or so actually finished. Attention spans can be tricky enough, without oh look! A squirrel!
I do think that e-readers are a good idea in other contexts — in schools, for research, and to take on the plane or train instead of carting a big sack of books. But for general reading? Not really. Not for a long while yet. Right now, the industry’s firmly built on what the content providers and booksellers want to see, not how regular people actually read. Not to mention, with the declining reading figures in recent years, what’s really needed are ways of pulling people into reading, not defining the future of publishing as some exclusive club for those who can afford it.
For us bibliomaniacs, $400 may or may not be a lot of money. But it does buy a hell of a lot of books. And unless the e-balance e-tips considerably more in our favour than this, I don’t think I’ll be getting rid of my trusty shoulder bag any time soon.
Casino Royale (With Cheese)
"No, Mistah Bond. I expect you to buy!"
We proudly present an exclusive extract from Casino Royale: The Book of the Movie of the Advert of the Movie. Available now at all good booksellers.
The hotel room was an oasis of calm after the chaotic, adrenaline-scented casino floor. James Bond carefully rested his tuxedo on the back of his chair and freed himself of his bow-tie. After ten hours of being surrounded by the beautiful, barely-clad, and professionally unapproachable sirens draped around his poker opponents’ shoulders like the finest of jewellery, there was a primal urge he was no longer able to postpone. He sat back on the bed, professional equipment to hand, and sighed with relief as he checked his e-mail on the sexy Sony VAIO he’d been given by Q.
It bleeped seductively. Bond smiled. Even battered and tortured from so many mortal battles, he could appreciate the inherent quality of its fine moulded plastic and shiny, curvaceous extremities. His heart always raced when firing it up to connect with the world, pounding with the kind of excitement most mortals only ever found during a hard-won kill, or when opening a Playstation 3 for the very first time. It was his friend, his partner, and it would never explode on his goolies like some other well known brands were known to do. You know the ones we mean.
E-mail came first, and ten new messages met his eyes. They were just status update requests from M, and easily deleted. The only other thing of interest was an offer to increase his penis size, and Bond was temporarily excited, until he realised that it wasn’t from Q Branch and deleted it unread. He’d learned his lesson with that obscene photo he’d sent his Treasury liaison, one Vesper Lynd, as an ice-breaker. It had taken three Sony Ericsson mobile phones stacked together before she’d realised what she was looking at, giving her three times the ammunition when realisation dawned and she was looking for something heavy to throw.
Still, it had been worth it. At least now he had spares in case his main phone had to give its life to save him from an errant bullet. Such things were an important consideration in purchasing a phone slash PDA slash music player, and this one had his name written all over it. Right there it was. 007. In matte black. For a premium price. Any one of these things would have been the stuff dreams were made of, but together? Better even than impromptu sex with a sexy married woman the day after getting the all-clear from the Chlamydia doctor.
Almost as good as his VAIO humming away on his lap. Almost.
Bond reluctantly closed the lid and lit a post-computing cigarette, satiated but strangely unfulfilled. There was time to kill before the next game, but first he decided to have a drink. No doubt LeChiffre was still washing away his sorrows down in the casino bar, dribbling those same tears of blood into his unbranded vodka as the world dissolved around him. Bond almost felt pity for the poor wretch, so cruelly reduced to supermarket plonk, even as he himself reached for the endless lake of finest Smirnoff that awaited his own thirsty lips.
Aaah. As far as Bond was concerned, the best martini of the day was the one in his head before he took his first sip, but the best vodka was right here.
He took it into the shower with him, not realising his mistake until the soap came back up. But his mood was too good to care. Showered and refreshed, Bond dressed and strapped his Omega watch around his wrist. He’d bought one for Vesper too, as an apology for the photo business, back on that Virgin Atlantic flight that had brought them so safely and efficiently here, to Montenegro. The only thing more efficient was the movement of the watch’s hands, carving time itself into three hundred and sixty perfect degrees. Was time ever so perfectly divided? He shivered with shame at that dark shadow within his blackened soul that might one day be willing to forsake such craftsmanship in favour of the shallow bidet of a laser attachment, a built-in electromagnet, or God forbid, a Rolex.
There was a knock on the door. Bond perked up, and put a towel over it. It was Vesper, no doubt about it. He could smell the unrestrained culture in her Chanel perfume even this far from the door, but not in such a way that it would be overly pungent or unwelcome. He made to call out, to greet her, to invite her in to play multiplayer Golf via their phones’ Bluetooth connections or possibly just have sex, but there was no point. She would no doubt be lost, listening to the latest tunes on her Sony Walkman; unless…
Bond sniffed the air. His practiced sneer sneered. That was no Chanel, no, merely a cheap knock-off, initially convincing, but badger urine to the true connoisseur. He drew his gun and fired twice at the door, smelling an ambush alongside the foul counterfeit aroma. The scream was as satisfying as an empty country road when driving an Aston Martin. He flung open the door and stared down in raw, unconcealed scorn at the mortally wounded one-eyed Russian assassin in the corridor, a Pizza Hut logo emblazoned on her eyepatch.
“Bloody shameless product placement these days,” said Bond, finishing the job with one clean bullet. And whistling, he went downstairs.