61 Frames Per Second : strong bad

Whatcha Playing: The Thirst For Adventure, Pointing At Things, and Not Knowing What to Say

John Constantine — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:49:00 GMT

Amidst the cavalcade of blockbusters, handheld eccentricities, and Rock Band I’ve been indulging in over the summer, a grand season now a mere two weeks from being officially dead, I’ve been getting a crash course in one of gaming’s most respected and forbidding forms: the adventure game. Though I started playing games during the genre’s heyday, I’ve always been somewhat less than literate when it comes to the many point-and-click and text-commanded classics crafted by Sierra and Lucasarts. My only real experiences came from visiting my aunt Donna. At the ripe age of seven years-old, she introduced me to the wonders of Kings Quest and, er, Leisure Suit Larry. Yeah. It’s not that I didn’t have fun with these eye-openers – they certainly expanded my vocabulary – I was just more interested in walking from left to right, jumping, and shooting when it came to videogames. I always knew that I was missing out on something, listening to friends chortle over playing Space Quest and even later, as a teenager, looking at lush screens of Grim Fandango. I’ve only gotten around to them recently thanks to three conditions working in concert. One is that there are new, easy to access (read: on Wii) point-and-clickers being released with regularity by folks like Telltale Games. Two and three regard vintage software: Nerve is equipped with numerous PCs capable of running things machines in my home twenty years ago could not, but also (and most importantly) I have a guide.

It’s easy to approach Telltale’s Strong Bad games because they move at a brisk pace and they work on a very simplified version of classic point-and-click language: see something, point at it to interact with it. Got an item? Point at it, click, then point the item at what you want to use it on. Repeat playings of King’s Quest V left me acclimated to both the process and the occasionally obtuse logic at work in these sorts of games, so it’s been a painless process and a reminder of the genre’s charms. Playing through the first two episodes of Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People (more on Episode 2 when I’m allowed to talk about it) has, however, made it abundantly clear that adventure games are not inherently relaxing in comparison to more action oriented fare. Nothing on earth is more frustrating than wandering around not knowing what the hell you’re supposed to do. In a platformer, if you keep losing, you know it’s because the challenge is a difficult one, tasking your reflexes and timing. If you keep dying in a shooter, it’s because you aren’t shooting the things shooting you fast enough. When you get lost in an adventure game, you’re just plain missing something and, unlike when you lose your keys or you forget what you’re doing when you walk into a room, the answer isn’t always right in front of you. You are at the whim of a designer’s train of thought, your agency stripped away. The problem is even worse in older adventures where you literally have to talk to the game.

This is why I’ve needed a guide. Pointing and clicking are fine for me, but when it comes to text interfaces, my illiteracy becomes a barrier too high to overcome. Pete Smith urged along my education in adventure, insisting I start with Conquests of Camelot and Quest for Glory. I played Quest for Glory for about twenty minutes before quitting. I spent the majority of this time swearing at everything I could interact with (hey, it worked in Leisure Suit Larry.) But even when I tried to get going, I couldn’t figure out what words the game wanted me to use to accomplish anything. I watched the Quest for Glory and Conquests of Camelot played instead of playing them myself and, now, I feel that I could comfortably tackle an adventure game with a text interface again. But if I hadn’t had someone playing the whole thing in front of me, explaining how to actually play the game at every step, I just wouldn’t have taken the time.

That inability to progress has got me thinking about what happens when you try to go back and play vintage games. Gaming has aged to the point where a modern player isn’t equipped with the language and experience to even play a lot of older software. I see my experience with Quest for Glory mirrored in the online testimonials of people playing Bionic Commando Rearmed, staggered by its difficulty and the demands that type of game makes of players. While games are finally entering an era of preservation through services like Gametap and the Wii’s Virtual Console, how do players get around this sort of cognitive dissonance? Let me know your theories in the comments.

(Yeah, I know. FAQs. But who wants to use a FAQ?)

Related links:

WiiWare: Nintendo, Babe, It Just Isn’t Working Out
Quickies: Homestar Ruiner
Unsolved Crimes and the New Setting
Lucasarts Classics on Nintendo DS?

WiiWare: Nintendo, Babe, It Just Isn’t Working Out

John Constantine — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Nintendo has been on my mind over the past few days. Not as a corporation in the business of making video games. More like a singular anthropomorphic entity. This is how Nintendo exists in my head these days, so when I see them making business decisions, my psychosis interprets those decisions as being made by an individual. You know, as an affront against me personally. For example, I look at the abject madness that is Skip’s Captain Rainbow and then I remember that it will never come out in the US. Sure, WarioWare comes out, but do we get Mother 3? Tingle’s Rosy Rupee Land, a game that’s actually available in English? Nintendo doesn’t bring their weird games here, so Captain Rainbow, with its legion of obscure, z-list Nintendo characters, will flounder away on an island nation half the world away. Nintendo does things like this to spite me. Like my first experiences with WiiWare this past weekend.

On Saturday morning, I decided that, given my overwhelmingly positive experiences with original content on PSN and Xbox Live Arcade in recent weeks, it was time to give WiiWare’s offerings a shot. I loaded twenty dollars worth of Wii points onto my account and went to download Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People and David Braben’s Lost Winds. I was then promptly informed that there was not enough space on my Wii to download either title. My Wii does not get frequent use, so this was the first time I had to “clean out my fridge”. At first, I figured I would back up my Virtual Console titles to the SD Card I purchased two years back, but after fifteen minutes and only backing up five VC classics, it hit me that backing up everything was going to take up most of the day. I had to delete most everything to make space for just two WiiWare titles. It took over half an hour before I could even play them. Strong Bad and Lost Winds turned out to be okay, fun but fairly insubstantial after spending five hours total to complete both. The whole experience was, for lack of a better word, annoying.

When things like this happen between Nintendo I start to feel like the Big N is an ex-girlfriend with whom I had a messy break up but am now trying to be friends with. We're polite to one another and able to be at social functions at the same time but there's a smoldering bubble of bitterness under the pleasant small talk. Sometimes that bitterness boils to the surface.

“Well, if you would broaden your horizons we'd still be together! Try Wii Play or try not downloading so many things!”

"Well, maybe if you didn't start making such subpar software, maybe if you actually released your more interesting games in a language I can understand, and actually kept your word sometimes, I wouldn't have had to leave! Why don’t you support USB hard drives!"

“I don’t even know why I bother talking to you!”

“Go make another crappy Zelda or some Brain Training crap!”

*Door slams*

Okay, well, maybe that got a little weird. WiiWare is a chore to use and needs better games. Probably could have just said that.

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Where is Wii's Disaster: Day of Crisis?
Trailer Review: Captain Rainbow
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Whatcha Playing: Lost Winds

Quickies: Homestar Ruiner

Derrick Sanskrit — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

While we were all ridiculously pumped for Bionic Commando: Rearmed last week, there was another highly-anticipated downloadable game to tide us over for the first half of the week: Telltale Games' point-and-click WiiWare adventure Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People Episode One: Homestar Ruiner. Odds are good that if you're on the internet you're already somewhat familiar with the world of Homstar Runner and its brash luchador masked star Strong Bad, and, if you're anything like me, you were with them from fhqwhgads and quit right around Cheat Commandos. A quick glance through the Toons section of the site shows that, like The Simpsons and Family Guy, I'm probably better off for having missed the past few years of redundancy. How does this bode for the first official H*R video game?

The good news is the game is really funny. Much like their past efforts with Sam & Max and Bone, the team at Telltale Games has really paid close attention to their source material and delivered easily the funniest and most thoughtful Homestar Runner cartoon in years. The bad news is that this is a game, not a cartoon, and all the parts where you're not just kicking back watching the characters be incredibly rude to each other are... well... less than fun. In traditional point-and-click tradition, you, as Strong Bad, must collect all sorts of objects around town which you will use elsewhere to solve puzzles and progress the story or otherwise goof off. The entire game (episode 1 of 5) takes about two hours to play through, and much of that is wandering about trying collected items on different objects in the chance that it will cause something to happen. That's not to say there aren't a few fun sections of actual gameplay. I was particularly smitten with the goofy "stealth" section, and "The Race To The End Of The Race" was a pleasant blend of problem solving and action minigame, still, there is not much to justify Homstar Ruiner's existance as a game rather than a really well-produced cartoon.

Perhaps what is most troubling is the cost of the game. PC users, Telltale's primary demographic, can pick up each episode for $8US or subscribe to the full season of five for only $35 while Wii owners pay $10 for each episode, though I didn't notice much Wiimote integration. Buying all five will cost the same as a brand-new copy of Mario Kart Wii, Super Smash Bros Brawl or most any other AAA Wii title except without any of the fancy packaging to show it off. Additionally, SBCG4APE1HR takes up more space in the Wii's internal memory than any other WiiWare game to date. Add to this the fact that several players have reported a game-freezing glitch and that I myself noticed numerous graphical glitches and this does not feel worth the price. A $10 downloadable console game these days is Bionic Commando: Rearmed, PixelJunk Eden or Paper Mario. In the past, Telltale has been nice enough to produce a disc version of their Sam & Max seasons for customers who purchased all of the individual episodes and I would feel more inclined to continue supporting this series if I knew SBCG4AP would get a similar treatment for Wii since I'm paying full price already. It's certainly more fun so far than Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law, which itself was little more than an animated movie with occassional breaks for pointing and clicking. It's a shame that none of these new point-and-click Wii adventures are nearly as engaging as Zack & Wiki...

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