The Stack

I think I’ve been missing things that the designers of Psychonauts wanted me to see.

Early on in the game, Raz is given access to his own mental landscape, his dreamworld. There, he sees a mad doctor in a tower menacing Dogen, one of the other kids at the camp, and threatening to extract his brain. Raz is convinced that this is more than just a dream, that he’s witnessing something real. His default dialogue with other characters changes: he asks them if they know anything about people’s brains being stolen and things like that.

But after a while, Raz started saying things that suggested that he had observed changes in Dogen’s behavior that the stolen-brain hypothesis would explain. Thing is, I hadn’t observed these changes. I hadn’t seen Dogen in some time and had no idea where he was. I think I know where he was now: when I finally reached the brain-removal room in Raz’s dreamworld, the one thing that brainless Dogen said was “TV”. There’s a TV room in the main cabin, but I hadn’t visited it lately because there wasn’t much to do there. When I finally got back there (after a long diversion involving a monster lungfish), it was empty, and Raz said something along the lines of “Finally, no one is here! I can watch whatever I want!” Now, I had never seen anyone else in the TV room, and no one had ever objected to my changing the channel. So it really seems like I was supposed to have gone back there and seen Dogen, and possibly other debrained children, watching TV and drooling or something.

If I’m right about all this, and I’ve been breaking the sense of the story by not doing things in the right order, it’s kind of surprising: Tim Schafer comes from adventure games, and keeping the plot sensible regardless of player choices is a big part of adventure game design. But here I am, circumventing important plot points without trying. In fact, I’ve been at some pains to cooperate with the designers and do what they want me to do.

That may in fact be my problem, because the game sends mixed messages. On the one hand, Raz seems to regard the rescue of Dogen in the dream tower to be his top priority, and urgent to boot. It’s a false urgency, because the the game has no real time limits, but it seemed like a sign that this was what I was supposed to focus on next in order to keep the game going the way the designers intended. On the other hand, each step in the plot also changes all the incedental stuff: the kids are all in new places doing new things and have new dialogue, the bulletin boards have new notices, etc. (I didn’t even notice that the boards were readable at first, so I missed a couple of chapters worth of notices.) Most of this is just humor not related to the main story — there’s a fairly complicated pre-teen soap opera going on if you feel like paying attention to it — but some of it’s important to Raz’s investigations, and you’ll miss most of it if you actually go directly where Raz tells you to go instead of wandering around and visiting every location again every time you exit a dreamworld. I suppose I thought I’d always have the opportunity to stumble across relevant scenes involving the other kids on the campground, but at the point I’ve reached in the game, all the other kids are gone.

I may replay from the start at some point just to get a more thorough look at everything, maybe after I’ve finished the game and can understand all the foreshadowing. It’s an enjoyable game to play, and this would also allow me to see the earlier scenes at their intended framerate.

Psychonauts is one of those games that I’d heard people raving about. And yet somehow it seemed to hit the bargain bins pretty quickly, and is already on Gametap. I don’t know why. It might have something to do with the character designs, which are caricatured to the point of grotesqueness. As always, this is something you get used to over the course of play — by now, I’m actually able to see the protagonist, Raz, as handsome and well-formed ¹ Raz actually kind of reminds me of a young Michael J. Fox, but I think that’s more a matter of his earnest manner than his physical appearance. , because he’s really one of the least distorted characters in the game. But seen for the first time, he’s a spindly hypercephalic freak, and I can see that turning off some potential buyers.

The premise provides some reason for making the characters freakish: it emphasizes the fact that they’re not normal. The whole thing is set at a summer camp which is really a secret training ground for tomorrow’s elite psychic warriors. It’s kind of like Harry Potter: kids behaving like kids while at the same time displaying abnormal powers, adults who have mastered those powers giving classes, some kind of secret plot unfolding in the background that only the child hero can unravel.

Structurally, it’s a lot like the Harry Potter videogames, too: you’ve got a largish school/campground hub area containing secrets and collectibles, and various challenge areas accessible from it. The challenge areas in this case are the abstract worlds inside people’s minds. The first such world, in the mind of a drill-sergeant-wannabe coach, is war-themed, by which I mean that the Ditkoesque floating platforms are covered in barbed wire and concrete bunkers and fragmentary bomber fuselages. Interestingly, this level doesn’t contain any actual fighting: war is presented, not as a situation in which you have the opportunity to triumph over an enemy, but merely as a situation of constant danger.

Later scenes do contain combat, but the game is basically a platformer — a fact that must have come as some surprise to fans of Tim Schafer, the creative lead, who’s best known for his work on graphic adventures. (Psychonauts has some adventure-game elements, but what doesn’t these days?) The sense of humor, though, definitely hearkens back to Monkey Island. I’ll note in particular one bit where an unpopular kid with an incongruously deep voice tells a humorously long and boring story: “…Then we went up a hill. Then we walked four miles. Then we walked two miles. Then we walked three miles. Then we walked half a mile. Then we made a U-turn. Then we stood still for a while…” Past a certain point, it’s constructed from randomly-selected phrases, but they’re still delivered with perfect comic timing. That means some coder took the trouble to tweak the delay in a loop for maximum comic effect.

Alas, I’m probably missing similar timing elsewhere. Much of the dialogue in the game occurs in the hub areas, where you can talk to the other kids or show them inventory items or try to set them on fire with your mind or whatever, and in those areas I’m suffering from framerate problems. Presumably this is because the campground is harder to render than the mental worlds, being more open and more detailed. It’s not so bad as to make me stop playing, but characters’ mouths often become noticeably out-of-sync with what they’re saying, and the audio playback pauses to let the video catch up. I wish I knew where the bottleneck is here — whether it’s the CPU or the video card or what. All I know is that altering the settings in the in-game video options panel doesn’t seem to help.

One thing puzzled me about Super Mario Land a bit at first: its length. The Gameboy was designed as ideally a platform for casual play, something to occupy your attention while you waited for the school bus. Its killer app was, after all, Tetris. But at half an hour or more per play session, SML doesn’t really fit that model. On the other hand, with a half hour or so of play in the entire game (and no save feature!), it doesn’t fit the model of a “core” game either. What sort of experience were they aiming for, anyway?

When it came to me, the answer was obvious. A half-hour of maximum total gameplay in a single session fits comfortably within the expected parameters of a coin-op arcade game. In 1989, coin-op was still the dominant form, and it would have been taken for granted that console titles are imitations of coin-op games, even when they weren’t direct adaptations. This also makes sense of the “Continue” mechanic, which simulates inserting another quarter.

Today’s designers of games on the level and scale of Super Mario Land are writing them in Flash and releasing them for free on the web. I suspect that today’s core games are influencing these works in ways that will eventually seem as odd as the coin-op influence in early console games, but only time will give us the perspective to know how.

Rescuing Princess Daisy required just one more solid thumbwrecking play session. I managed to get most of the way through World 4 in the same game that I encountered it for the first time, but needed two continues to pass the two-stage end boss. “Continues” in this game are earned with points, and, when used, restart you at the beginning of your current level with three lives. Since I couldn’t beat the final boss with more than ten lives left on the initial sally, I was rather surprised at pulling through in the continues. But ideally each death teaches you a little more about what to avoid.

World 4 has one of the best bonus rooms ever. It’s a screen that fits the usual parameters of the Super Mario Brothers-style bonus room, but is otherwise completely filled with coins. This isn’t really all that impressive as a reward — it takes 100 coins to earn an extra life, and if you could collect all those coins, they’d be worth two lives and some change. You can get more than that from the bonus game between levels. But the bonus game isn’t nearly as delightful as suddenly finding yourself completely surrounded by coins.

It strikes me that part of the genius behind the early platform games was using motion to create an impression of a continuous, fluid world in spite of the system’s graphical limitations, compensating for low spatial resolution by taking advantage of the high resolution in time. A still image of Mario looks blocky and pixellated, but his trajectory looks like a smooth, graceful parabolic arc. Sonic the Hedgehog would later employ the same principle in a different way, emphasizing both speed and speed differences.

So, what do you play when you’re on the road? Handheld games, of course. The Nintendo Gameboy, and the Gameboy Advance that I later bought to replace it, are the only handheld consoles I’ve ever owned, as well as the only Nintendo consoles. I bought my Gameboy mainly to play The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, considered by some not just to be the best game for that platform, but one of the finest games written for any platform at the time. But if you’re going to buy a Nintendo console, you’re almost required to get at least one Mario title for it. In fact, I think Super Mario Land may have been bundled with the Gameboy I bought.

The fact that I didn’t finish it when I first played it back in the 90’s is mainly due to its complete lack of any way to save your progress. Not even level codes are provided. It compensates for this somewhat by being short. The game consists of four “worlds”, each consisting of three levels with a boss fight at the end of the third (although, interestingly, the bosses allow the player the option of slipping past them instead of fighting them). After a little practice, I find it takes me about 8 minutes to get through the first world, so a skilled player can probably play through the entire game in under half an hour. To someone struggling to get though world 3 for the first time, the first two worlds form a sort of warm-up, where the challenge isn’t to survive but rather to pick up as many extra lives as you can in preparation for the hard part. A lot of games these days have a sort of “survive, then perfect” pattern, where you can go back to earlier levels and try to improve your performance in order to earn special rewards, such as unlockables. Viewed from this perspective, the main difference here is that it’s not a choice. You have to go back to world 1 every so often, when you run out of lives.

The gameplay is based closely on that of Super Mario Brothers for the NES, but with various innovations, such as new monsters, a really distinct boss at the end of each world, and at least one level that’s a scrolling shoot-’em-up rather than a platformer. Still, despite this, it mostly feels like a smaller, simpler version of SMB. Indeed, in some ways it seems like a SMB knockoff, with all of the names changed but the premise kept intact. Princess Daisy, SML‘s damsel in distress, is functionally equivalent to Princess Toadstool/Peach. Only by reading the manual do I know that SML‘s chibibos are not goombas. I wasn’t familiar enough with the Mario mythos to notice this back in the day — possibly it wasn’t as entrenched back then.

I’m under the impression that a lot of early Gameboy titles were reduced versions of NES titles, which is strange, since, as far as I can tell, the Gameboy was actually a more powerful machine than the NES in every respect other than graphics (and possibly sound). But the reduction in graphics is very significant: lower resolution, four-shade greyscale instead of color, and, worst of all, the slow response time of LCD technology circa 1989. It was a rare Gameboy game that actually looked better than the NES game on which it was based — Link’s Awakening being one example. SML has the handicap of continually scrolling, which shows that LCD display at its worst. It’s somewhat better on a GBA than it was on the original Gameboy, but I still find myself occasionally missing crucial jumps because I can’t see what I’m doing well enough.

I reinstalled The Neverhood and played through a bit of it to see if my earlier comments were at all accurate. If anything, I understated things. I called the look “handmade”, but I didn’t specify that the scenery had finger gouges all over the place.

I also mentioned the impression of three-dimensionality. This goes way beyond the look of the graphics. The Neverhood goes to great pains to give an impression that the gameworld is a single continuous physical object, using the tricks employed by graphical adventures from Myst onward. You get maps, glimpses through windows of distant locations that you’ll visit later, puzzles based on adjacency of locations you can’t walk between directly, and physical manipulation of large landscape features to alter what locations are accessible. Presumably many of the backdrops were assembled and photographed individually, but some of the exterior scenes had to have been done by moving a camera around inside a large clay model. Skullmonkeys, by contrast, is clearly a disjointed series of levels assembled out of sprites. How disjointed? Travelling from level to level involves jumping into a “warp gate”. Even though some of the level graphics in Skullmonkeys are quite attractive (particularly the “Castle de los Muertos” level, which involves running across battlements in silhouette against a red sky), I have to call The Neverhood’s overall approach more impressive.

The one area where Skullmonkeys really beats Neverhood is in its framerate. The Neverhood‘s animation looks unbelievably clunky after playing Skullmonkeys for a while. It doesn’t take long to get used to it, though.

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.

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.

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.