The Stack

The 4th of July seemed like an auspicious date to begin the American leg of the journey. The only stop on the entire continent is San Francisco, which happens to be the city I’m in as I play the game. I can report that the simulacrum is a reasonably satisfying representation of the reality. Even though it’s supposed to be set in a different (if indefinite) era, the slope of what I assume to be Powell Street (because it’s right in front of your entry point and it has cable cars running on it) feels just right, and the facades of the houses could be any residential street today. Those streets, by the way, are quite wide and, as in the real city, mostly arranged in a grid, which means this is the best place in the entire game to drive around in a fast car. It even provides a new and faster-looking variety of fanciful car for you to try out. You’re in America now.

There are two spots in this chapter where I failed, in two different ways. The first was a rather Myst-like puzzle involving routing power through a set of electrical boxes with color-coded cables and no clear instructions about what the color-coding indicates, with lots of note-taking and running around to try switches located in different places. Now, I like this sort of puzzle, and I’m not bad at them, but I wasn’t able to solve it within the time allowed — partly because I broke off in the middle to drive back to Oliver’s hotel before he dropped from exhaustion. Now, what happens when you fail to solve a puzzle in this game varies with context. Sometimes your progress is simply blocked indefinitely; sometimes it’s game over; sometimes the punishment is simply the time you spent trying, and the game lets you continue without solving it after enough time has passed. This puzzle was one of the latter sort, and I decided to just keep on playing after I failed, being close to the end and having a considerable lead on Fogg’s time. But it turns out that the approach I was trying at the very end was in fact the thing that would have worked if I had been allowed to keep going, so I feel a little cheated there. Time limits are just bad for puzzles with a strong “Aha!” factor, and possibly for all puzzles of any sort.

The second place I got stuck was in trying to sneak into Fix’s local office to retrieve the last of Uncle Mathew’s patent documents, which Fix had stolen just to slow me down. I have to say that the Fix in the book is a much more sympathetic character. There, he’s sincerely trying to do the right thing, but under a misapprehension about Fogg. The game’s Fix, on the other hand, is just plain mean, a paranoid bully who stoops even to crime, which you’d think would shame his policeman forbear more than Oliver’s travels could. But at least he’s specifically stated to be a different character.

Anyway, I had to break into his office, which was guarded by a bunch of cowboys, and was told that I needed to disguise myself as a member of the cleaning staff. But I couldn’t find a cleaning staff outfit anywhere. After banging my head against that for a while, and taking multiple breaks, I finally resorted to a walkthrough. It turned out to be behind one of the other doors in the building — one undistinguished office door out of many, most of which I had tried, just not the right one.

This gets into one of the big problems with putting an adventure game into an environment like this one. It’s a big environment — not nearly as big as the real city, but big enough that you need some guidance about which of the thousands of environmental objects are interactive and which are backdrops. For most objects, it’s easy to tell: if you’re close to an interactive object and aiming the camera at it, it gets a bright green border around it. There are just three exceptions: people, vehicles, and doors. In the case of people and vehicles, no indicator is necessary, because you can interact with them all — just not necessarily in any useful way. Most NPCs respond with a randomly-chosen line of dialog that essentially boils down to “I’m just here to make the area look populated”. Doors, though, are generally assumed to be permanently locked and effectively just painted onto the wall unless there’s something setting them apart. It could just be that the door is better-lit than the ones around it, or that there’s a quest marker displayed right on the other side of it on the minimap, but there was always something, until the point when there wasn’t.

At any rate, I did ultimately get through the chapter and into the home stretch, the trip back to England, which I’ll talk about in my next post. The musical number at the end of San Francisco is a moment like the ending of Ultima 6, where you hear the Rule Britannia and the Gargoyle theme played together for the first time and realize that they harmonize perfectly (that is, that the reason that Gargoyle music sounds so weird is that it’s Earth music with the melody removed). There’s a particular bit of muzak-y disco that the game has been using as background music basically since the beginning, but only when I heard people singing over it was it clear that it was the instrumental track to “YMCA” by the Village People — and that the game content has already introduced character models for a cowboy, a policeman, and an Indian chief. There’s even a construction site — that’s where the electrical-box puzzle took place — which I speculate was originally planned to provide an excuse for including a construction worker model as well.

Over the weekend, I got all the way through the Yokohama chapter and the boat ride that followed it. I probably could have finished the game then, but I turned away because I was finding the dialogue tiresome. It often runs unnecessarily long with attempts to create humor by pointing out the same character quirks over and over again: one man’s obsession with kilts, another’s seasickness, etc. It grows especially bothersome when the quirks it’s making fun of are ethnic.

Nonetheless, I felt Yokohama was an improvement over the previous two chapters, mainly because of the environment modeling. Cairo was all just flat and sand-colored, including the buildings. Bombay, apart from a bit of temple statuary, was more or less the same, only browner. In Japan, the architecture in general becomes more colorful and ornamental, the land hilly and criss-crossed by rivers. And I think it’s also just bigger, with the result that this was the first chapter where I found it practical to make use of vehicles.

There have been vehicles available for hire since the beginning, all fanciful. I mentioned the monowheel already. Camels were available in Cairo, and everyplace seems to have three-wheeled cars that remind me of my goblin turbo-trike, as well as flying carpets, which Oliver rides standing up, like it’s a surfboard. Yes, even Yokohama has flying carpets, patterned after the Japanese flag. I expect America will have flying Mohawk carpets or something.

I suppose that the designers imagined that the players would use vehicles a lot more than I’ve been doing. Going fast is a central idea to the story, and GTA sequels were still topping the charts when the game came out. But GTA let you just take whatever car you fancied, while 80 Days expects you to pay for them with your limited in-game money, and that makes a big difference. (Part of the reason I gave them another chance in Yokohama is that, for the first time in the game, someone lends you the use of a carpet and a car for free.) Mind you, money isn’t all that limited, and I’ll probably end the game with a very large surplus (unlike Fogg), but I had no idea how that would turn out when I was just starting the game and making my first judgments about whether vehicles are worth it. And my initial conclusions were that they hardly even saved you time. On an unobstructed straightaway, they’d handily outdistance a pedestrian, but once I had to take a turn, or swerve to avoid a wandering cow, I’d overturn or underturn and get stuck on the side of a building until I edged back and forth enough to get free. Also, the animations of getting on and off the things take enough time to make it unsuitable for short hops.

One vehicle in particular deserves special mention: Kiouni the elephant. Kiouni is an unusual case in that he actually travels slower than you can go on foot. (This was definitely not the case in the novel — maybe he’s getting old?) But you need an elephant’s strength in a couple of puzzles, so it’s necessary to get Kiouni to the appropriate places. I had some problems with this, similar to when I got stuck rescuing the zeron on the airship: on a brief trip into the world’s smallest jungle, I needed to get Kiouni up a gentle slope that I could take on foot without problem, but which he seemed to slide down as fast as he could climb it. The alt-tab trick didn’t work here, but I found I could overcome the problem by staying on the very edge of the road and walking at a 45-degree angle to it.

Apart from the vehicles you can ride around within the cities, there are the larger vehicles joining them: the airship, the train, and the ocean liner, each modeled as an environment you walk around in, each extremely large for its type, and each suffering problems that slow it down unless you can solve them. You have to take each of these once, but you get a choice of which of these vehicles to ride at the end of each chapter, within certain limits of reason — that is, you can’t take a train from Yokohama to San Francisco, and consequently if (like me) you didn’t take the train on the first leg of the journey, you have to take it on the second. Notably, because you can vary when the vehicle sub-chapters occur, nothing in them can make any reference to where you’re coming from or going to.

Regarding that airship: Now that I’ve read the book, I find it a little strange how persistently adaptations of it put parts of the voyage in the air. The original has Fogg traveling by train, boat, elephant, and even, in the most fanciful moment, a wind-driven sled, but never by air. Which makes perfect historical sense: the only air transport available in 1873 would have been balloons, which are hardly what you’d use when you’re in a hurry. Not that this stopped the most famous film adaptation from famously using a balloon, of course. There just seems to be a strong appeal to the idea, as if someone circumnavigating the globe at great speed belongs in the air. Verne himself frequently uses imagery of flight, describing fast-moving vehicles as leaving the ground and comparing Fogg to a body in orbit.

Like many games based on existing stories, 80 Days assumes that you’re familiar with the original. That is, you never need to know the original story to figure out what to do next (unlike some games), but it keeps on dropping in references with the expectation that you’ll know their significance. A descendant of Inspector Fix, the detective who pursued Fogg around the world in the mistaken belief that he was a bank robber fleeing justice, repeatedly interferes with your journey in a strange and obsessive attempt to clear his family name by wiping that whole affair from public awareness. The Bombay chapter contains a woman named Aouda and an elephant named Kiouni, just like the book, but here it gets a little strange, because Kiouni is supposed to be the very same elephant as accompanied Fogg (and is now a minor tourist attraction for that reason), while Aouda is definitely a different person: the original was a European-educated Parsee noblewoman, while the game’s version is a minor Bollywood actress, providing the basis for the Bombay chapter’s predicted musical number. (Bollywood? Exactly when is this game supposed to take place, anyway? The answer is that it’s firmly indefinite, and full of gratuitous anachronism. People walk about in Victorian fashions but make modern pop-cultural references. The technology isn’t quite right for any era. It’s all something of a cartoon.) The original Aouda wouldn’t be in India anyway, as she fled with Fogg, fearing death at the hands of fanatics. Is it just a coincidence that you meet someone with the same name? Perhaps not: she’s engaged to Kiouni’s current owner, and I speculate that she chose her screen name after hearing him tell the story of Aouda’s rescue (which he seems to do at the drop of a hat).

Now, when I started the game, I myself wasn’t really familiar with the book. I had never read it, nor seen any of its numerous film adaptations, and had no idea who Inspector Fix and Aouda were. But the game’s name-dropping convinced me to read it, if only to appreciate the game better. It turns out to be a reasonably short book, and I’m currently about halfway through it. So the details are quite fresh in my mind as I play through the equivalent sections of the game. They are of course quite different, in both details and tone. The game is considerably wackier, and this comes as no surprise. (For crying out loud, the last chapter I completed, on the train out of Bombay, had a vampire in it.) But Verne is something of a literary caricaturist, and he portrays Fogg’s meticulous habits, unvarying down-to-the-minute daily schedule, and implacable faith in his ability to account for any unforseen obstacles with something that I’d also call cartoonish exaggeration. (In fact, he reminds me a bit of the DCAU version of the Clock King.) The one aspect of Fogg’s character that I find the most interesting, from a narrative point of view, is his utter lack of curiosity about the world he’s racing around. He’s shown as never leaving the boat or train he’s on unless absolutely forced to. He’s not on this mission to sightsee, he’s on it to win a bet. And that’s interesting because it’s at odds with what the reader, or player, wants. We’re here to sightsee. So it’s little wonder that Passepartout, Fogg’s servant, winds up being the viewpoint character for much of the novel. The game gets around the problem by giving us a completely different character, with completely different motivations, ones that force him to engage the environment. For Fogg, Bombay is just a stop between Suez and Calcutta, a place where he gets off a boat and onto a train. For Oliver, it’s a destination, a place with hidden treasure in the form of one of Uncle Mathew’s patent papers.

Now, I called 80 Days “puzzle-light”. And I stand by that: this is not a game about figuring things out or coming to realizations that transform your understanding of your situation, unless it’s a realization about how to reach point B from point A. When there’s an epiphany to be had, some NPC will have it for you. Nonetheless, it is possible to get stuck and have no idea what to do next. I’ve gotten temporarily stuck twice so far. Just not in ways that the designers intended.

My first sticking-point was the one that ended my efforts with the game back in 2006. It turned out to be entirely due to the game being finnicky about mantling (pulling yourself up onto a chest-high block or wall with your arms). You do it by pressing the space bar, which is the jump button, but you have to be just the right distance from the thing you’re mantling onto, and perfectly square with it, or you just jump in place. The game is just as fussy when it comes to climbing ladders, but at least a ladder is obviously climbable, which encourages one to keep trying, whereas it’s not obvious at first that mantling is possible at all. So when I encountered the first place where it was necessary — in a ruined Egyptian tomb, which is kind of appropriate, considering what a Tomb Raider-ish move it is — I gave up trying too soon. This time around, I was more determined to get through the game.

The second was on the dirigible I took from Cairo to Bombay, which turned out to be a lengthy chapter in its own right, and in some ways more satisfying than the Cairo chapter: the smaller space to explore makes for a tighter design and a better sense of place, and the glimpses of the ground below, hazy with distance, are handled very well. At one point, a rare bird called a “zeron”, exotic but ungainly, gets stuck in the rigging, and Oliver has to climb out onto the superstructure to free it. Now, the main vessel’s gondola has long struts extending from either side, on which mini-blimps are docked like dinghies. One of these mini-blimps was in my way, and I could not for the life of me figure out how to get past it. After spending far too much time stuck there, I finally looked online for hints, only to find that no one else seemed to even regard it as a problem. Even then, I thought there must be some trick I was missing until I found a video playthrough in which the player just crouched and crawled under the thing, just like I had been trying but failing to do. Fortunately, the mere act of alt-tabbing out of the game to google for help seemed to somehow jar something loose, and I was able to continue from that point. (I’ve gone back and retried this, and it doesn’t work consistently. But it works a great deal better than not doing it.)

After getting through a part where you spent a lot of time stuck, the natural next step is to reload the last checkpoint and go through it again, but do it quickly this time. After all, the game has a time limit, and a day/night cycle and on-screen clock to constantly remind you of it. At least, it does if you choose to play it that way; you get a choice of three levels of difficulty at the beginning, and the time limit is waived in the easiest one. The manual suggests playing in this mode “if you want to peacefully explore the world”, which is normally how I like to play adventure games, but it just seems wrong here. This is a game that’s named after its time limit. There’s a whole major mechanic involving an energy meter that you can replenish by resting (which costs time) or eating food (which costs money), and easy mode bypasses that entirely. This is clearly not how this game is supposed to be played.

But then again, look at how I’m playing it instead: reverting to saves in order to do things more optimally, hoarding time the way I’d hoard ammo in a different game. This can’t be the way the game is supposed to be played either. The time limit is there to be raced against, not brute-forced away. One of the more colorful user interface features is a track that lets you compare your progress to Phileas Fogg’s, showing both your progress and his on the current day of the voyage. It’s a little weird if interpreted literally, because Fogg’s progress was different from yours. How do you compare your progress at rescuing the zeron to Fogg’s progress doing nothing of the kind? But the real meaning of the track is clear: Fogg made it in 80 days, so as long as your token isn’t lagging behind his, you’re progressing fast enough. I should probably take that to heart.

What kind of game is 80 Days? I’ll tell you what kind of game it is. It is the kind of game that contains song-and-dance routines.

Most of the game’s Cairo chapter is spent on a quest chain to locate Uncle Mathew’s lost patent papers. I imagine the other chapters will be similar; the patent-hunt gives the game the excuse it needs to make you stick around in each city for a while rather than immediately dashing off to the next spot on the itinerary in an effort to meet the 80-day deadline. The first patent turns out to be encased, for some reason, in a bauble of smash-proof glass. The only way to break in to retrieve it is through the resonating screeches of a cantankerous local diva, stage-named Scheherezade. Once you have the document, you have no more reason to stick around Cairo, but just before you leave, Scheherezade puts on a production number, singing a summary of what’s happened so far to a pop tune used previously in the background music, with a chorus line of random NPCs doing a campy walk-like-an-Egyptian dance in CGI unison.

At this point, I suspect that each chapter — there seem to be four — will end in a similar musical number. And I’m warming to the notion as I write this, but it was honestly a little painful to sit through the first time. I’m reminded a little of the banal doggerel scattered through The Bard’s Tale (2004) and a little of the bizarre little French music video that turns up without warning at the end of MDK. The former is cheese, the latter is camp, and 80 Days lies somewhere between them.

80 Days (Frogwares, 2005) is of course based on the novel Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. As with the Verne adaptations Return to Mysterious Island and The Mystery of the Nautilus, it’s a sequel rather than a retelling, with a new protagonist, which gives the designers the freedom to make whatever additions they like. In the case of 80 Days, that mostly means silliness. The player character, Oliver Lavisheart, isn’t just retracing Phileas Fogg’s famous voyage, he’s hunting for documents lost by his uncle, an eccentric inventor, which provides the designers an excuse to fill the game with wacky steampunk contraptions. For example, you can go about your daily business riding in a monowheel if you like, although I can’t honestly recommend it.

In form, the game is more or less a puzzle-light adventure game in a GTA-ish free-roaming third-person 3D engine, complete with quest arrows on the minimap. What I’ve seen of the gameplay isn’t very open-world, though. Rather, it’s a linear series of missions that remind me a lot of the non-combat quests in World of Warcraft. “Find four men wearing kilts”, you’re told, or “Sneak to your hotel, avoiding customs officials”. In other words, it’s the kind of stuff that gets put into games to keep the shooting or platforming or whatever from becoming too monotonous and one-dimensional, except that here, it’s all there is.

And that’s probably a big part of why the overall feel of the game is so clunky. The translation job also contributes to this, especially when it’s trying to be funny. (Yes, of course the game was originally in French. Who else but the French makes games of Verne?) And this clunkiness is ultimately why I stopped playing back in 2006 without having even got through Cairo, the first chapter. I’ve gotten a little bit past that point already, and will go into more detail in my next post.

For now, I have just a couple of quick installation notes. I was alarmed to find on first launching the game that the opening logo movies got stuck on single frames of animation, and no amount of tweaking of settings seemed to fix this. This is not the sort of problem I expect from a game released in the mid-2000’s! Fortunately, it turns out to only affect the opening logos; all cutscenes within the game are handled in-engine, not as FMV. Other than that, I had some slight problems with lines of dialog getting truncated (at the beginning, oddly enough), but the standard solution of turning off hardware acceleration in dxdiag fixed that.

It’s been over two full months since my last post. I could describe the immediate causes for the delay, but to be honest, I’ve been through worse before and still posted. So I have to admit that the real reason is simply my abandonment of the Oath. I can’t write without a pretense of obligation. (And it really does have to be a pretense. Nothing kills motivation faster than real obligation.) But I am still unwilling to simply resume the Oath in its current form.

You know when I was posting the most frequently? 2010. The year of the Chronological Rundown, when I added an additional stricture on top of the Oath. I’d like to try something like that again, but without the Oath underneath it. I’ve made mutterings about doing the alphabet — one game starting with each letter — under something similar to 2010’s rules: at an allotted two weeks per letter, it would take a full year to get through all 26. I had been thinking of this as something I’d start with a new year, but why wait? It’s going to wind up irregular anyway, especially if I take October off for the IF Comp. Plus, on reflection, there needs to be a slot for 0-9, and possibly punctuation, depending on how one wishes to handle the .hack series. So what the heck, this begins now, almost but not quite halfway through the year.

The new rules: I’ll start playing and posting about a game every two weeks, give or take. I may play other games without posting them, even if they’re on the Stack. In choosing the game to post about for each letter, I intend to give preference to ones on physical media. Bundles have exploded the Stack of late, but if I narrow my sights and only consider things I own on disc or cartridge to matter, the Stack can be seen to be shrinking after all. Exhausting my supply of such games is something I could actually accomplish, given a few more years, and when I do, I can pretend that it means something.

Tomorrow is 80 Days.

Draw Something has been popular enough lately that you probably know someone who plays it. I certainly do. Two of my coworkers have been playing it quite a lot lately, both with each other and with other friends outside the office. As resistant as I normally am to social games, particularly ones that can be played on Facebook, this one looked fun enough to draw me in. I mean, let’s face it: who doesn’t like to draw? It’s a skill that we all have, something every child knows the appeal of, but unless you’re an artist by vocation, you probably don’t do it very often. Draw Something gives you an excuse to exercise your long-neglected drawing urges, and adds just enough constraints to provide cover for your lack of talent.

That said, I’ve already grown tired of it. It’s gotten repetitive, partly due to actual repeated words — the other players in the office complain about this, saying “How hard would it be to hire an intern to vet a few thousand more words?”, but I suspect that there’s a bit of a birthday paradox going on. But even without exact repetition, I’m finding subsequent rounds with the same partners too similar to stay interesting. And without the ties of a social network platform to keep me playing beyond the point of enjoyment, that’s that. It might sustain my interest more if there were some permanent record of the pictures you’ve drawn and seen, so that I could feel like my creative efforts were building something, and so I could show them off to other players after the fact. I suppose I could take screenshots manually, but that would only work if I could consistently remember to do it.

Let me describe the basics of the game before going any farther. Draw Something is a game played asynchronously by two people. First, one of them has to draw a picture from a randomly-chosen word. You get a choice of three words per round, designated “easy”, “medium”, and “hard”, although it’s easy to disagree with the categorization sometimes. Once your picture is complete, you hit a button and it’s sent to the other player, who watches the picture get drawn stroke by stroke, just as you drew it (except sped up a little), and has to guess the word, building it out of a scrabble-hand-like bin of letters, some of which are unneeded. Once they either guess right or give up, they draw a picture for you to guess, and the whole thing iterates indefinitely.

Now, there have been a lot of games very similar to this, both online and off. I remember one web-based variant in particular that had a number of people in a chat room, all watching the drawing as it was taking place and competing to be the first to guess correctly. That seems like the more typical version, but its dynamics are completely different from those of Draw Something. For one thing, it was synchronous. That’s the traditional model for parlor games: a bunch of people sit down together for a game session. Putting such a game on the web just means that the players don’t all have to be in the same room (or even the same continent). Draw Something, by contrast, is designed to be played in spare moments throughout the day. Not only does it not demand simultaneous participation by both players, it actually forbids it. For another thing, Draw Something isn’t competitive — or at least, not within a match. There may be competitiveness among players in different matches to see who can maintain the longest unbroken chain of correct guesses (as the game keeps track of this figure and displays it prominently on the main menu), but within a match, your goal and the other fellow’s are the same. Whenever a picture is guessed correctly, both the drawer and the guesser get the same increase in their streak number, and the same number of “coins”.

Coins. That’s the game’s business model. If you have enough coins, you can use them to buy “bombs”, which have two uses. In the drawing phase, if you don’t like any of the words available to you, you can set off a bomb for a new selection. In the guessing phase, you can set off a bomb to eliminate some of the unused letters. Also — and this verges on parody — you can use coins to buy packages of additional colors to draw with. I don’t know of any other drawing game that treats colors as upgrades, but here, your initial color set is pretty meager, and doesn’t even contain a brown or a green, so there’s a strong motivation to buy at least one more color set. The thing is, every purchase costs hundreds of coins, and you only get at most three coins per round of play. (One for easy, two for medium, three for hard.) It’s all set up to make you impatient with earning coins so that you’ll pay money for them instead.

Now, the one thing I remember the most about that older synchronous drawing game I described above was that there were players who started their turns by ignoring the word and instead drawing things like penises, and presumably giggled at the resulting chat room full of people scrambling to be the first to type “penis”. I haven’t seen this happen in Draw Something, and I assume it’s because the asynchronous play spoils the fun of that sort of trollery. The anonymity also plays a role, of course — most games of Draw Something are between two people who know each other. But not all. When I first started playing, and was eager to draw more things, I started up a number of matches with random strangers while waiting for the people I knew to respond, and I didn’t see a single rude picture. I did, however, see inappropriate pictures of another sort: ones where the person didn’t really draw a picture at all, but simply used the drawing interface to write the word. In fact, it seemed like the majority of random players did this, and I’m not at all sure why. Maybe they were just griefing. Maybe they were doing it to get free coins faster. Maybe they just hold the game in contempt, and don’t consider unenforced rules to be worth following (which raises the question of why they’re playing at all). Maybe they just didn’t understand that what they were doing was objectionable — there didn’t seem to be any explicit rule against it.

When I received a written word instead of a picture, my first reaction was to end the match right there. Unfortunately, in the iOS version, you can only cancel matches from the main menu, and it takes a while to get there. You can’t get out of guessing mode until you either guess correctly or pass, and once you’ve done that, it immediately throws you into choosing a word and drawing it. Since I knew I wasn’t going to be playing any more with that person, I would immediately hit the “done” button without drawing anything in order to get back to the main menu and cancel the match. Which leaves me wondering: were my blank pictures sent? Perhaps the word-writers think I’m the griefer, and are wondering at my motivations for sending them an unguessable picture.

Twenty years ago this year, a band called They Might Be Giants released one of their better-regarded albums, Apollo 18. In celebration of this anniversary, Kevin Jackson-Mead organized a “tribute album” of short text adventures, one for each song, by various authors, including myself: I did “My Evil Twin”. The full package was released two weeks ago, and got mentioned on various major websites like rockpapershotgun and metafilter. This is about as good as publicity for IF gets these days, but, as one of the participants, I found the coverage unsatisfying, lacking commentary and analysis. Now that I’ve played all the games, mostly to successful conclusions, it’s time to redress that.

Now, if you’re familiar with the album, you might be wondering about Fingertips. Fingertips is the musical equivalent of WarioWare: a sequence of songs about ten seconds long each, with clashing styles and humorously enigmatic lyrics. Rather than simply presenting this as a medley that you listen to as a unit, the CD had each of the songs on a separate track, and encouraged the listener to play the entire album on shuffle — and I can report from personal experience that it’s even more effective to shuffle them into a larger and more varied music collection, so that, say, a Philip Glass composition or one of Satie’s piano pieces might be followed by John Flansburgh belting out “What’s That Blue Thing Doing Here?” and then falling silent.

Yes, each Fingertips song gets its own game. But to imitate the form of the songs, there was a rule that they had to end after only one move. This is a formal restriction that actually has some precedent in IF. Sam Barlow’s Aisle (1999) was the trailblazer, demonstrating the narrative possibilities of a single move, and Rematch, written by Andrew Pontious the following year, surprised everyone by showing that the same structure could make for an elaborate and deeply-implemented puzzle game. But that’s about as far as the experimentation went; in the decade-plus since Rematch, the only other one-move games I’ve seen have been a few joke items, mostly parodies of Aisle. That means that the 21 Fingertips games now form the majority of this sub-genre.

Mind you, some of them really strain the one-move descriptor. There are a couple that let you examine objects freely, only counting it as a move when you take an action that affects things. A lot of them rely on iteration — for example, the adaptation of the initial “Fingertips” (a song that consists of the word “Fingertips” repeated four times over a banjo accompaniement) uses a time-loop premise to excuse the fact that the player has to spend several turns examining objects, taking inventory, and so forth in order to figure out the one command that averts the destruction of the space station you’re on. Although each move is followed by a paragraph describing the station blowing up, it feels more like a single multi-turn playthrough. Mind you, Aisle and Rematch were also heavily based on iteration, but it somehow seems less right to expect the player to keep on entering commands for ten minutes when you’re adapting a ten-second song. And while some of the Fingertips games really are over after a single command, some of them took me longer to bring to a satisfactory conclusion than some of the non-Fingertips games in the collection.

Mind you, the one Fingertip that kept me occupied the longest, Who’s Knocking On the Wall, not only didn’t rely on iteration, it actively discouraged iteration: the whole thing is an elaborate randomly-generated logic puzzle, which gets re-randomized on each attempt, making all your reasoning worthless the moment you make a wrong guess. This is one of the more technically impressive works in the collection, despite its constraints and despite the narrow range of input it accepts.

As for the rest of the songs on the album, the game authors took a variety of approaches. Some attempted to base their story on the song, others took greater liberties, and one or two just launch into a puzzle environment with a vague connection to the song’s title. That last category definitely contains Turn Around, but I say “one or two” because Space Suit is a special case: based on an instrumental, it has no lyrics to adapt. But at least it presents a strange enough environment that you can easily imagine the song playing in the background, which is actually a fairly rare thing in these games — I know I personally didn’t make much effort to make my game fit the tune as well as the words. The Guitar (The Lion Sleeps Tonight) is of particular note in that it not only tells a story that unites the song’s nonsensical lyrics, it also imitates the song’s structure: just as the song alternates between two sections with different styles and different vocalists, the game shunts you back and forth between two player characters in different, but linked, situations. I Palindrome I, by noted palindromist Nick Montfort, links to its song solely through its form, ignoring its vague suggestion of a story about filial antagonism and menacing intergenerational patterns in favor of just palindroming it up.

The thing is, the vagueness of TMBG’s lyrics makes it difficult to say for sure in some cases what’s a result of disregarding the song and what’s a sincere difference of interpretation. Discussions with friends back in the day revealed disagreement about whether “Spider” was about a guy named Spider or a literal spider. The game takes the latter view, but also makes spiders the villains rather than the hero, which is something that hadn’t even occurred to me: the line “Spider!” followed by “He is our hero” seemed pretty clear, but the whole song is a collage of samples, so I can see how someone else would consider the two lines completely disconnected. Narrow Your Eyes strikes me as pretty far from the spirit of the song, which is about a disintegrating relationship, much like such other TMBG songs as “They’ll Need a Crane” and “I’ve Got a Match”. The game instead has the PC racing to a wedding rehearsal, the only obstacle being a supervillain who gets in his way. The thing is, despite this drastic shift of tone, the game does take care to imitate superficial details from the lyrics (where it provides details to imitate), which raises the possibility that the author simply didn’t see the song the same way I did (although lines like “Our love’s never coming back” make me doubt that). It’s certainly in the spirit of other TMBG songs.

In one case, I have to admit that my own view of the song is probably the weird and atypical one: I’ve never really seen the experience described in “The Statue Got Me High” as a bad one. Sure, it talks about being killed and set on fire, but it also talks about being dissatisfied with human company afterward, which makes the whole dying-and-burning thing seem metaphorical. And this is the sort of metaphor used in describing mystical or religious experiences. This is the same album that contains “See the Constellation”, which describes looking at the stars and having a vision of being the stars looking at yourself on the ground below (an idea disappointingly ignored by its more prosaic game adaptation); a song about experiencing a personal transformation on looking at a work of art would not be out of place here. Mind you, the final stanza about the fire engine and the charred and smoking chair kind of goes against this interpretation. At any rate, the game adaptation takes the death and the burning literally. But I can’t complain about the result, which is to my mind the most brilliant use of the medium in the entire collection. Essentially, the game gives you a situation with no apparent connection to the title, with a clear goal, a puzzle and clues to focus your mind on. And then, just when you have enough information to start making progress, the statue renders it all irrelevant. This is very much in the spirit of the song even in my weird interpretation: whatever it is you think is really going on in those lyrics, the narrator’s encounter with the statue changes everything for him.

I suppose one of the biggest challenges for the authors was coming up with goals and motivations. Even when TMBG’s songs aren’t outright nonsensical, they’re usually more descriptive than narrative. “Dinner Bell” and “Mammal” consist largely of lists of things, and so both were adapted into treasure-hunts; the strange part is that in both cases the authors motivate it by adding on a premise involving oppression by animals, something that wasn’t a factor in the songs at all. “She’s Actual Size” is basically just words of idiosyncratic praise for an unnamed woman, and I’m still not entirely sure what’s supposed to be going on in the game.

I speak of the vagueness, the nonsense, and the lack of obvious goals in the lyrics as challenges for the authors, and this may have given you the impression that some other album, from a different band, would have made a better basis for such a project. But from a player’s point of view, these attributes are strengths. They make for a greater variability than adaptations from a more narrative source would, and that leaves the player guessing wondering what on earth the game version of, for example, “Which Describes How You’re Feeling All The Time” will be like. (It turns out to be a fast-paced word game.) It also has me inevitably thinking about how I would have adapted the same songs. I think the only game that’s more or less the same as my imagined version is Fingertips: I Don’t Understand You, because the joke there is kind of inevitable in an IF context. I already had specific plans for If I Wasn’t Shy and Fingertips: I Walk Along Darkened Corridors from before they were claimed by other participants, but it was only after playing Fingertips: What’s That Blue Thing Doing Here? and seeing how far it was from my expectations that I realized I had expectations for it, and consequently clarified those expectations in my mind to something like a design. I almost feel like I want the whole project to be run again so I can get some of my ideas into more concrete form.

Ah, but that would take away from the time to work on genuinely new projects. Better to tackle a different album. Anyone up for Flood?

So, I’ve got a little catching up to do now, and multiple things to post about. The week before last, I intended to play through Bugdom (or as much of it as I could get through, anyway) and post about that, and obviously that didn’t happen. What happened instead is that GOG made a retro metroidvania-style platformer called Treasure Adventure Game available for free, and I found it so compelling that I wound up spending most of my gaming time for the week on that instead.

Like VVVVVV, TAG is something of a love letter to a particular era of gaming — in this case, the SNES era. Beyond the pixel art and chiptunes, it’s got such Nintendoisms as the kid hero whose mother-figure sees him off on his journey, dialog where you don’t hear the player character’s side, sudden discrete shifts in terrain type (including a small desert with quicksand pits), and an inventory screen with silhouettes of the items you haven’t collected yet. I suppose it’s de rigeur these days for indie platformers to reference the games that their developers played as children, but that isn’t really what’s going on here; only in the final boss fight does it reference anything directly, using sprites ripped straight from Mario and Castlevania and a couple of others. When this happens, it comes as a bit of a shock, because up to that point the game has been carefully building its own world — one that works by familiar rules, but has its own history and even its own implied continuity with other, nonexistent games: the overarching goal for most of the game is to collect twelve treasures used by a previous legendary hero in his quest, which we’re told were gathered together again by an archeologist and then lost again a few years before the adventure begins.

You can’t use these treasures yourself, as their magic faded long ago, but they’re described as exactly the sort of thing you’d find in a videogame. For example, there’s a “Chaos Whistle” that “would confuse enemies, causing them to attack their allies”, and an “Echo Mirror”, “used as a shield to reflect spells cast at him back at the attacker”. Rather pointedly, the player character collects twelve tools of his own over the course of the game, albeit for the most part humbler and more prosaic ones, such as a shovel and a flashlight. Things that a young boy who goes exploring might find useful.

Because that’s the one of the main themes here: not just exploring, but a Nintendoized version of the kind of exploring found in stories for boys. There’s buried treasure to dig up, dirt tunnels to crawl through, a secret laboratory in the forbidden tunnels underneath an office building. There are also talking bugs and a variety of silly hats to wear, some of which actually have effects on gameplay. It’s very much a childhood fantasy of a game, by which I mean not just that the content is like a child’s fantasy (of having freedom and power, of having meaningful things to do in the world — in short, a fantasy of adulthood), but that it’s the sort of game that we wanted games to be when we were children, but which the actual games of the time fell short of. But the nostalgia factor means that it’s not really pitched at children, so it’s more like a memory of a fantasy, or a fantasy of being young to have a fantasy like this one.

Mind you, there are things here that no official Nintendo game would include. I refer specifically to the drug references. OK, yes, Mario does magic mushrooms. Ha ha. Well, that which you could read into Mario is downright explicit here. There’s a cave realm inhabited by mushroom people who talk like stoners, who are described as “junkies” by your parrot sidekick, and some of whom are hallucinogenic: touch them, and the screen warps alarmingly, while platforms that you couldn’t see or stand on before appear, allowing you to, well, get higher. I don’t want to make it sound like this a game about drugs overall, though. This is just one section in a large game, and elsewhere, the only things hinting at drugs are occasional bongs in the background in the pawn shops and junk stores found in most of the game’s towns.

Now, I call it a “large game”, but I managed to finish it in less than a week. It may not be large in an objective sense. But it does a very good job of seeming large. Partly I think this is due to the due to the amount and variety of background detail, like the aforementioned bongs. True, it’s all coarsely pixelated, but this in fact helps: the backgrounds are made of the same sorts of sprites as the foreground, which means that anything could be interactive until you try and fail to interact with it. Even when you can’t interact with stuff, very often the NPCs do. This gives it a sort of Little Computer People vibe, as if there really is a simple, pixelated world going on unrelated to your platforming heroics. And the sense of world is reinforced by the fact that it’s contiguous: everything outdoors exists in a single space. Interiors break this consistency — buildings tend to be larger on the inside — but the world as a whole is one big platforming space, not even divided up into screens, composed of multiple islands that you sail between in real time, without exiting to a world map or anything of the sort. (There is a shortcut to travel, but you can’t access it until you’ve been most of the way around the world the hard way.) Late in the game, you acquire a diving helmet that lets you explore the depths between the islands, where there’s sunken treasure to be found. The interesting spots underwater are sparse, but the underwater is still a consistent, contiguous world, with as much ocean floor as there is ocean surface, and that helps the sense of scale.

Now, about that boat. Boats are seldom a good idea in games, in my opinion. I particularly dislike them in strategy games like Civilization and Empire; they’re probably part of the reason I haven’t finished the Plane of Water level in Heroes Chronicles: Masters of the Elements yet. In such games, you usually have to build the boat, using up resources in the process, then gather your units and go through a special boarding step, and then very often your units can’t use their normal actions, and the whole thing is vulnerable to sinking. Even in a platformer, a boat typically means learning a distinct and less-capable control system. The point is that, although boats in games are in theory a convenience, letting you cross otherwise-uncrossable bodies of water, they’re typically experienced as an inconvenience. Well, the boat in TAG is about as convenient as a boat can be. Supposedly, it uses advanced technology to shrink down and fit in your pocket when not in use. The effect in the game is that when you jump into the water, be it the ocean or a pool in a cave, the boat appears automatically, and when you jump back onto land, it goes back in your pocket. It does prevent you from attacking normally, but once you’ve upgraded it with a cannon, it more than makes up for it. There are even places where you deliberately jump into the water just so you can use the cannon.

I do have a couple of complaints. The default key bindings are weird; fortunately, it’s a simple matter to rebind them. (The game seems to want to be played from a gamepad with four face buttons. I played with arrow keys and WASD instead.) There’s a strange business with (non-hallucinogenic) mushrooms throughout the world: there are bouncy mushrooms you can trampoline on, but in some places they start off too small to be used this way, and only grow to maturity after you’ve reached the place they allow access to by some other route. In other words, they become a shortcut for return visits. The problem is that the immature form looks too much like the mature form. It’s quite frustrating, early in the game, to learn that pink speckled mushrooms can be jumped on, then unexpectedly not have it work. This is more like what I described with boats in other games: a convenience that’s experienced as an inconvenience.

Overall, though, this is a really good game, and I suggest you try it if you haven’t already — it is free, after all. It’s particularly good at reusing locations, making the meaning of a particular island or dungeon room change as you gain new tools and can approach it in different ways. And that’s metroidvania in a nutshell, really.