Electron Dance Highlights
Counterweight Companion: Suzy and Freedom
Here are my companion notes to this week's Counterweight podcast on Suzy and freedom (Nicolau Chaud, 2013). Big spoilers here.
Counterweight 9: Suzy and freedom
In this episode of Counterweight, Eric Brasure and Joel "HM" Goodwin tackle the disturbing Suzy and freedom (Nicolau Chaud, 2013). Companion notes are available in a separate post.
Story spoilers start 23 minutes in.
Contents
05:20 "Then you get the first platform puzzle and I wanted to throw my computer out the window."
15:50 "But there's also other parts [where] the mechanic is closely tied to the meaning of the game and those are the bits that work."
20:30 "It relies on information and ... intuition in a way that I find very interesting."
22:40 "It grinds the game to a halt not because it's a challenging part of the game but because it's not done well."
27:00 "...because it is such a strange story and it is such a strange out of left field experience for the player to be having..."
32:10 "But also she is playing a game with him. She doesn't care about him, she doesn't care about her parents."
36:40 "I love how stupid they are, though. I love the fact that they are all so stupid."
40:30 "...there's that great line where Suzy says, 'Oh, when I can sell the house?'"
45:00 "This very stark moment and the art he's choosing to use in that moment is pretty terrifying."
Download the podcast MP3 or play it right here in your browser:
References
- Electron Dance on Marvel Brothel
- Electron Dance on Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer
- Nicolau Chaud interview
- Nicolau Chaud wins second place at Game Music Brasil 2011
- Electron Dance on Polymorphous Perversity
- "What I think is happening is that people don't have much patience for minigames and challenging gameplay in story-based games."
- Apparat featuring Soap & Skin "Goodbye"
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Warm Up / 301113
Electron Dance will feature something about each of these seven games in the near future.
The Island
“Much of it came from our camping adventures we took as kids. Every summer growing up, we’d travel to northern Minnesota with my Dad, uncle, brothers and cousins and spend a week in the wilderness. We’d spend the entire day hiking and portaging from camp site to camp site. It was really tough stuff, at least for us suburban kids. We injected a lot of the emotion and feeling of solitude from those trips into Miasmata.”
-- Miasmata developer Bob Johnson, interviewed at True PC Gaming
You’ve just got to play Toki Tori 2+. Go do that Dark Souls, it’s divine.
Click, click: how can I get excited about a this new release over here when there are so many other new releases?
Play 1000 Amps already. Whoa, Bionic Dues, dude.
Click, click: isn’t this exhausting for you as well?
At last, Deadly Premonition is out on PC and now you have no excuse! This is the best Twine I played this month, give it some minutes of your time. Your time. Give it--
Clunk, clunk: is this burnout? Is it boredom? I’m anaesthetised to the constant flow of new new things because I haven’t finished appraising the new things or even the old things. Don’t blink, you’ll miss this. Why would you stop to look? Why would you spend the hours? Nothing gets through the numbness...
...except when it does.
Kairo (Locked Door Puzzle, 2012) excited me. I saw a trailer and I knew, just knew. I bought into the alpha the same day. My gut was right; Kairo was special.
And then I read an unassuming piece on Tap-Repeatedly, last December:
If you like your first person games to be balls-out shooters, Miasmata isn’t for you. If meticulous exploration, flora-gathering, and looking for fresh water doesn’t appeal, Miasmata isn’t for you. It’s a slow, thoughtful game, one that reveals very little in terms of direction, and brings the realities of survival to the fore in a way rarely seen in the medium. Ultimately, Miasmata will resonate with a certain kind of player. I hope that there’s a large enough number of such players out there that IonFX reaps some rewards for risking such an off the beaten path design, because Miasmata is stunningly beautiful and an absolute feast of challenge.
I bought the game immediately. I knew, just knew. But it took me months to find the time to play it. Why would you spend the hours? Why would you? Maybe I was wrong. That’s not what I wanted to discover. When I played, I discovered that it was broken, damaged in transit. I discovered the fault lines in the code, its abrasive, rough edges.
I also discovered the island. Literally, inch by inch.
This is why Miasmata (IonFX, 2012) became the game that meant the most to me this year.
Open Mike 9
Our Open Mike threads are getting shorter, so the world must be getting less interesting. Eventually we shall reach negative comment space when --- ah, why spoil the surprise.
Comments, please. Apparently a new console was launched this week. I promised once again to make a newsletter but did no such thing. And I'm coughing so hard I think I swallowed a rib.
Polis
I guess I fell out of love with the first-person shooter.
I remember I lost myself in City 17, playing a man turned myth becoming legend. I remember I found joy in dismembering necromorphs aboard the USG Ishimura and tried not to think too much about the plot. I remember I crossed the Volga River with hundreds of other Russian soldiers and headed into the crucible of death that is known as the Battle of Stalingrad. I remember I fought the Covenant on an artificial ring world and tore through the Flood.
But in the last few years, I’ve found it hard to find similar enthusiasm to play a modern first-person killer. I found Dishonored (Arkane Studios, 2012) compelling because it was an echo of Thief (Looking Glass Studios, 1998) not because it let me kill just the way I like it. Somehow, the gun-toting cleaner got old.
Was I missing out? Did bullets now fly about in better ways than they did ten years ago? Time for an experiment. The post-apocalyptic Metro 2033 (4A Games, 2010) had been on my radar for some time, a game that seemed to bottle the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (GSC Game World, 2007) aesthetic genie in a linear FPS. Reviews were mixed although Michael Abbott wrote "the things that make Metro 2033 unique and worth playing are the very things routinely overlooked in most critical accounts of the game."
A few months ago I had a gap in my game schedule and inserted Metro 2033 into it. The experiment was on.
The Beautiful Dead
Environmental narrative, which Richard Rouse III defined as "the little stories told through the world itself" [PPT], has been around for decades.
Even in a game as focused on play as DOOM (id Software, 1991) world-building through environment was important. The second episode "The Shores of Hell" takes place on missing Martian moon Deimos where the sky is blood-red and the UAC research base is meshed with "Satanic structures", suggestive of the moon having been dragged into the Hell dimension. In the third episode "Inferno", the player descends into Hell itself and fights through structures constructed from flesh with mutilated bodies treated as decoration. Although this graphical re-skinning has no functional impact, they help reinforce DOOM’s holy wafer-thin plot.
We’ve since experienced Valve’s highly-regarded environmental work on Half-Life (Valve, 1998) and Portal (Valve, 2007), and recent indie games such as Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) and Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013) which foreground what most games consider background.
We're living in the era of environmental storytelling but, despite this, there's often confusion about what it is... and whether it's actually important.
Pause: Moments
Illness robbed me of time to write last week so just enjoy this image instead.
Much thanks to David T Marchand who notified me that the Boson X leaderboards had been reset. It took me an hour to get on the boards with an all-time high on Gravitron. If you don't know why this is important, you haven't read Blood on the Boards.
Counterweight Companion: Gone Home
Before recording a Counterweight, I write up a cornucopia of notes to prepare. However, if I have my notes in front of me during the podcast, my brain decides I have to "write an article in audio" and I stop listening to what Eric is saying. Now, I realise no one else listens to Eric either, but it's bad form for a podcast so I hide my notes when we record.
As a result, not all of my points made it into the podcast so here are all my Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013) notes for completeness. Spoilers, of course.
Counterweight 8: Gone Home
In this specially extended episode of Counterweight, Eric Brasure and Joel "HM" Goodwin tackle Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013). In a first, Joel tells Eric to check his privilege. Spoilers within.
Contents
02:00 "It wasn't what I thought it was going to be - I'll be honest."
12:00 "And then you get the first audio journal and it suddenly morphs into a completely different game."
16:20 "I like it when games misdirect the player."
20:20 "Let's be clear about this, Gone Home still uses ... gamey conventions to work, right?"
23:10 "...would that have done well, say, ten years ago? That we're talking about the audiences moving on, not simply just the designers."
34:20 "I have never been in Casablanca in 1943 but Casablanca the movie works for me."
38:50 "I tended to feel this was a very good TV movie."
43:00 "There's a lot of gay cinema and gay literature out there which makes it seem like coming out is like the worst thing ever..."
47:50 "...you don't have to use your brain a lot in Gone Home?"
49:20 "That moment doesn't exist if you don't get that journal fragment..."
52:30 "It came across as being positive but I couldn't really swallow that."
56:10 "I really do look forward to playing the next game from The Fullbright Company."
Download the podcast MP3 or play it right here in your browser:
References
- Gone Home: Exorcisms and Buried Strata (Michael Peterson)"...the game’s discoveries come through environmental storytelling, only for the narration to belie that."
- Perpetual Adolescence (Ian Bogost): "But it’s also not unreasonable to ask how these players could have been so easily satisfied."
- The Transgression - You Can Do Better (Austin Walker): "I didn’t want to write about something this actually terrifying, I wanted to write about the one clever jump scare."
- On Gone Home (Amanda Lange): "A few blogs have gone up already saying things like 'I wanted to identify with this game, but I can't, for X reason.'"
- What a Difference a Year Makes (Matt Sakey): "It also made me walk around my house for a while and pretend I was a stranger."
- Robert Yang interviews Steve Gaynor: "So you’re saying that space feels game-y to you, when it’s technically the most realistic?"
There are also Companion Notes for this podcast!
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Keep In Touch
Commentary
"Full Bore is on hold at the moment but I look forward to getting back to it soon. Just before I signed off last time,..." – Warm Up / 301113
"100% now! Clearing up the last few mysteries turned out not to take as long as I expected (though that is partly because the mysteries..." – Warm Up / 301113
"Looking back, I can tell that the minigames/puzzles were a bit of hit-and-miss. To a degree, I blame time. It was made for an RPGMaker.net’s..." – Counterweight 9: Suzy and freedom
"This is very exciting because I know very little about all of these games. I hunger for words." – Warm Up / 301113
""I’d probably argue that it’s not that simplistic, because what’s happened is the destruction of price tiers – price is no longer a signal, it’s..." – Open Mike 9
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