Archive for January, 2007

City of Secrets

City of Secrets is a text adventure by Emily Short, written on commission for a band that wanted it as an extra on their CDs (although this plan fell through for various reasons). It’s one of the few games on the stack that I did not, technically, buy.  It was never for sale; it’s freely downloadable from the Interactive Fiction Archive.  However, I did purchase the feelies, and that gives me the same sense of commitment-to-play as if I had paid for the game itself.

Feelies are tangible objects from the gameworld, a tradition dating back to Infocom and still indulged in from time to time. I purchased the CoS feelies back in 2003 because I enjoyed Emily Short’s previous works and wanted to do my part to support their production. Then I played the game for about fifteen minutes, got intimidated by how much information it was throwing at me, and didn’t get back to it until now.

I shouldn’t have been intimidated. Although the game possesses a great deal of depth of detal, it does a good job of keeping the player from getting lost in it. Plot-crucial information is often available from multiple sources, so it’s seldom if ever necessary to ransack a particular NPC’s entire dialogue tree or read every book on a shelf. This is contrary to adventuring habits, but once you’re used to it, it’s quite liberating.

As to the content: it’s set in a fantasy world with both magic and high technology, trains and robots and illusions.  The player character is a visitor to a big city who gets ensnared in a conflict between the city’s possibly fascist ruler and a mysterious rebel, both of whom are magicians. There are plots and counterplots. One of the first things that I learned was that I had been drugged, although the drug turned out to be an antidote for another drug.

I’ll say more when I’ve completed the game.  Despite the author’s estimation that it takes about three hours to play, I’m about five hours in now, probably because I spend so much time poking at inconsequential details, an activity which the game rewards.

Skullmonkeys: Finished

A second attempt at the last level with 94 lives yielded victory. It turned out that the last part I faced on the previous attempt (an exceedingly tightly-timed section involving two sets of moving platforms that appear when you step on a switch and disappear shortly afterward) was the very last challenge in the game.

For all its goofy amiability on the surface, Skullmonkeys is a brutally punishing game, one that cracks the whip and demands more.  Call it masochism, but there’s a great deal of satisfaction in beating a game like that.  There’s a sense of accomplishment, and also a sense of freedom in realizing that you don’t have to play it any more.

Next up: a change of pace while my left thumb heals.

Skullmonkeys: 1970

It’s easy to die in Skullmonkeys. There’s no notion of “health” in this game: being hurt in any way costs a life and sends you back to the last checkpoint. Extra lives are fairly easy to come by, so success in the game hinges on whether or not you’re picking up new lives faster than you’re losing them.

Fortunately, every level has a bonus room where you can pick up more lives with little or no risk, while listening to the bonus room song, “Invisible Musical Friend”. (Hearing this for the first time is the high point of the game.) But that’ll only take you so far. The last couple of levels eat up lives like they’re candy. And that’s why there’s the 1970s.

The 1970s is a special bonus area accessible from the bonus room on level 11, but only if you’ve found three “1970” icons hidden on different levels. Why “1970s”? Mainly because it gives them an excuse to put the screen through distracting psychedelic kaleidoscope effects. It’s a very slippery level, consisting mostly of bottomless abyss with small platforms, many of which act like conveyor belts so you can’t stand still on them. Because it’s a bonus area, you don’t get to try again if you fall off. You just get thrown into level 12 with no possibility of going back. To understand how inconvenient this is, you have to understand one thing about the game’s save system: it doesn’t have one. It’s old-school enough to simulate saving by giving you a status code whenever you finish a level. You don’t get a code at the beginning of the 1970s. If you fall off, the only way to get back in is to play all the way through level 11.

But if you do make it all the way through the 1970s without falling off, you wind up in a roomful of extra lives. I reached this today, and wound up with a full load of 99 lives to squander.

When I reached the final level, I still had 94 lives. I still have not competed the game. The final level consumed them all.

Skullmonkeys

As I start this blog, I am finishing up Skullmonkeys, an old-fashioned 2D platformer for the Playstation. In fact, it was already old-fashioned when it was new: it was released in 1997, just after Mario 64 and Tomb Raider on their respective consoles ushered in the age of the 3D platformer.

Even though it was a critical failure and a commercial bomb that killed the company that made it, this was one of the first games I sought out when I finally bought a PS2 in 2004. I wanted it because it was the sequel to a game I liked a great deal, The Neverhood, which is a puzzle-based third-person adventure game for the PC. Apparently the creators of The Neverhood thought that the best way to correct the disappointing sales figures of the first game was to switch to a more popular genre and platform, thereby alienating half of the fans of the original and making it impossible for the rest to play it. It’s a bit jarring that Klaymen (the hero) is suddenly able to shoot energy blasts that make his enemies explode. He never did that before.

The grand concept behind The Neverhood was that it’s all made of clay: the characters, the environment, even machines and buildings. It was a striking and original look, and the designers emphasized it by leaving the clay rough and wobbly, just so you never forgot that they had molded it all by hand (unlike the smoothed-out models used by Aardman, for example). Skullmonkeys is similar, but in lower resolution and with parallax scrolling. Oddly, parallax scrolling messes up the claymation look more than the lower resolution does, making the scenery look more like a collage than a three-dimensional space.

Graphics aren’t everything, of course. Except they are in this game. It’s all about style, not gameplay.

I have managed to reach the last of the game’s seventeen levels, but without enough lives to actually get anywhere near the end. I am currently trying to get more lives from the 1970s.

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