Last night, I started playing Journey, and I also "completed" Journey (as far as I know). It was wonderful and different and interesting, and stirred in me emotions that very few games have done. I didn't cry though, and I cry really easily - I didn't even make it to the opening titles of that John Bishop Sport Relief documentary before I was blubbing away. Anyway, find out which emotion Journey stirred, after the break.
Warning: Contains Spoilers and a brief inconsequential spoiler for Batman: Arkham City, wierdly!
For a game without dialogue, Journey certainly tells a heck of a story, it also elicits genuine joy and wonder through most of the scant hour or so of play time. Journey's stroke of genius (amongst a stunningly created game full of artistic and design brilliance) is its introduction of other real-life players throughout the experience. I kind of knew this was coming, but I had no idea how and when; I didn't know if I was guaranteed to meet other travellers, and when I did, I didn't know if they were real-people playing alongside me or well-programmed AI. When I lost them, was that a function of the game design, or the equivalent of that moment in the supermarket when you turn around and you've lost sight of your mum?
The bonds created are immediate and incredible, with no way to communicate other than the simplest of actions and sounds, you learn by doing. With another player, we moved between pillars, staying close because it seemed like the best thing to do, because it made us both feel safer, made us both feel warmer.
The point that has stuck with me was a moment near the end of the game. The moment where the fellow Journeyer - the same one I had been huddling together for warmth with against the buffeting wind, the same one who had run back to find me after my scarf had been dramatically taken from me - suddenly dropped behind, and there was no way for me to get back to them.
And I still don't know if I could have waited. I don't know if the game locks out the second player for that next lonely, slow walk. And my nagging doubt is that it doesn't... that I could have stayed with them, that I should have stayed with them. And then they would have company, and so would I.
For the first time playing a game, I feel guilt - guilt over what happened to another character in the game world, because I believe that things could have been different. There is a moment in Batman: Arkham City(another brilliant game for very different reasons) where you have a choice, as Catwoman, to leave Batman to his fate and escape with the loot, or give up the loot and help your erstwhile on/off enemy. Which is no choice at all. By taking the money, you hear of the death of Batman and you get an early credits sequence. You don’t feel elation at the result, and you certainly don’t feel any guilt at Batman (and Gotham’s) loss – and naturally you go back and play out the other option because it’s more interesting, because you get to play more of the game, not because you wish it could have been different.
In Journey I do wish it could have been different, I will always wonder where I could have strode to the top of the mountain with a friend and colleague, stronger together. But I never will find out, because for the first time I don't want to go back and check. I am happier not knowing and having genuinely experienced something, than I will be if I go back in, play again, and analyse what could and would happen if I played differently. And if that’s not grown-up, I don’t know what is.
Optional titles for this blog post included: "Shafer vs. James-er" or "A Tale of Two Witties" neither of which are very good, but both of which I'll never have the chance to use again.
About ten weeks ago I "launched" my comedy adventure game Byte The Hand. At the same time I started a crowd-funding effort to cover some of the costs of the development. About two weeks ago, Tim Schafer, legendary games designer behind viritually every comedy adventure game from the last twenty years had roughly the same idea.
Here is an infographic showing the relative success of the two projects:
There's little point in detailled analysis, and no matter how much I like making graphs - a graph of earnings against time looks foolish at best when the earnings are zero throughout! But believe it or not, I learned a handful of genuine lessons from the process:
You can go hard, or you can go home - being British and reserved, I didn't really go all out asking people for money, I should have done. I should have hit every avenue I could, as often as I could, and I didn't.
IndieGoGo is not Kickstarter - there's a bunch of crowdfunding sites available, and Kickstarter is far and away the big boy. Unfortunately you can't use it if you don't have a US bank account, so it was out and I had to chose between the rest. I picked IndieGoGo fairly arbitrarily, because it's got a good name, but it doesn't get people chancing upon it, and most importantly, the search is awful. Entering "Byte the Hand" spelled correctly, still didn't return the correct result, searching for "James Parker" similarly.
Shills mean kills - There's a profound psychological barrier to people funding a project on $0, Social Proof (as experts as would have it) is very important and if people see other people funding a thing they will join in. I imagine if I'd put $50 dollars in myself to get the ball rolling, it may have enouraged a couple of others to contribute themselves.
I am not Tim Schafer - It's self-evident, and plenty of words have been written about it, but Tim Schafer's Kickstarter success is not simply due to the product being brill, and the world crying out for a new point-and-click - those may be true, but it's also that here is a man with a history and a fan-base that cares about him. At present I don't have that, and in the future, I probably won't have that - so I may need a new approach.
Ultimately, I'm not saying that Tim Schafer stole all the Byte The Hand thunder... I'm just saying that if a certain amount of compensation (say $8,008) were to be offered for the poor timing of DoubleFine's annoucement at the critical point in the Byte the Hand project cycle, it wouldn't necessarily be turned down.
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I'd been playing Twin Caliber. Now, admittedly it was late at night, and I'd been drinking, but it was - at least in theory - quite good fun.
Developed by the late Rage Software, Twin Caliber was (and still is) a unique shooter game, where rather than control the player's movement, you make use of the dual analogue sticks of your PS2 to aim two guns independently. So far, so John Woo.
At best the game makes you feel like a bad-ass gunplay superhero (and when all is said and done, that's all I ever really want from a game), firing pistols left and right, spinning around and taking out more zombies as they amble towards you from all directions. For literally seconds at a time you feel like you're playing the game the developers wanted you to play... the reason why this hasn't been done before - or since - becomes apparent at every other point in the game.
Reading between the lines, the writing was very much on the wall for Rage when Twin Caliber was in development - and if it wasn't a rushed release, it certainly gives off that impression: The controls actually work, but someone decided that it was appropriate to give the guns hideous multi-coloured dotted lines to show where each character was pointing (rather than, for instance, a nice, subtle laser pointer effect).
Cameras are fixed, but switch dramatically throwing everything from aiming to working out which character is which. Video game camerawork has never been given the attention that it actually deserves (What? There are actually people whose job this is? Who knew!), but Twin Caliber presents a devastating low in this area.
The script is particularly bad, not in a B-Movie way, but in written-in-an-afternoon-by-a-producer way. Voice direction for the player characters seems to have been limited to: "Be more like an angry black man!" and "Be more like an angry white man!". The graphics are not strong.
But despite all this, I enjoyed myself. With a lot - a hell of a lot - more polish, the gameplay could have shined, and maybe instead of being an oddity in gameplay history we could have been seeing triple-A Twin Caliber clones popping up from all the major publishers. When I'm rich enough to be making vanity projects, it's going to be high on my list.
Yesterday was the several-th annual Statham-fest around my house - the invite-only event that celebrates the work and the spirit of not only Jason Statham - the actor - but also Jason Statham - the genre of film. At the event we watch three Jason Statham films and play games about shooting things, driving about recklessly, and beating people up. This year I learned a number of things...
- I really, REALLY want another Crank film to come out soon
- Blitz has a lot of atmosphere and a pretty-good story, but a clunky, horrible script
- It's harder and harder to find good offline co-op shooter games
- I really, really, REALLY want to see a HD remake of Def Jam: Night for New York (PS2)
- Twin Caliber (PS2) is a work of forgotten genius. It's a great example of a genuinely interesting gameplay mechanic executed and packaged so badly that it's impossible to take it seriously
- My retro-game console collection is sufficienly well organised that I managed to set up the console, find both games and the correct memory cards within ten minutes!
- The Mechanic is a big disappointment, especially if you think Ben Foster's face is too small (which it is)
- Killer Elite is quite good, despite Dominic Purcell and Clive Owen's wrong'un moustaches - My #SF2012 film of the day!
- Rage's (PS3) co-op mode takes all the best parts of the game and compresses them into well defined, and well designed chunks of perfectly honed action gameplay. It's a shame that the Single Player doesn't adopt the same mentality, as it could have been a spiritual successor to Quake 2, rather than the lackluster semi-open world title that it ended up being
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