Another World

aka 'Out of This World"

This was one of the first games I played on my 386DX (I somehow missed the original Amiga version) and it was one of the most memorable experiences from my childhood. The coolest intro ever. The crisp graphics. The splendid music (it sounded great even on my PC Speaker). The well-balanced gameplay. The simple yet perfect controls. The unforgettable atmosphere. What else could you possibly need in a video game? (did I mention no loading-times between the levels?) All of this conceived and made by pretty much a single man, Eric Chahi (with a little help from his friends).

The story is very simple. An experiment goes wrong and an unfortunate scientist named Lester Knight Chaykin gets teleported into... well... another world where death lurks literally everywhere.

...
(Of course, today we could only wonder, why in heaven's name was he all alone down there? Why did the entrance to the facility look similar to the cheapest savepoint in GTA: Vice City? And how could a simple lightning interfere with a particle accelerator? Wasn't this thing supposed to be underground? Didn't they have a surge protector? Nah, to hell with it! It was a great intro anyway!)
...

I remember the original manual saying "at the very beginning press UP to swim to the surface - failing to do so will cause your premature demise". Fun, huh? I took me about one week to finally figure out how to escape that damn black predator and made it to the second level, where it only got harder. It's true that the original version required fast fingers and in some cases, perfect timing, but then again most of the old games did. You watched all those death sequences of Lester being eaten, poisoned, shot, burned (by steam), impaled, crushed, beaten to death, blown to tiny bits, not to mention drowning, falling down countless pits, etc. and yet you wanted to try again. The story made me do that. The story of a man trapped in an extremely hostile environment the rules and laws of which he can't understand, having no hope of returning home. Lester does not utter a single word throughout the entire game, but to this day, he's one of my favorite characters, mostly because I felt sorry for him and yet watched him pressing on and never giving up. Very simple, yet very emotional. I was going to fill you up with the level layout, monsters, other characters and all the gory details, but you know what? I won't. I'll let you see these things for yourself, if you haven't already done so.

Just for the record...
A sequel named "Heart of the Alien" was released as a SegaCD exclusive and I couldn't play it for quite some time, until emulation was possible. It's not good. The story makes sense, the graphics look a little better, but the gameplay is about three times harder, mostly because of incredibly stiff and sluggish controls. There are many more death opportunities as well, which all by itself is not that bad, but the layout of monsters and traps seems very artificial - as if the developers (Eric Chahi had nothing to do with it) wanted really badly to throw things in just for the hell of it. Whatsmore, most of the time you just don't know where you are, what you are doing, and why. You take some items, use them, something happens and you just go on. There are cutscenes (3 of them - intro and outro included, and about two dozens of death sequences) but they seem somehow disconnected from the plot. Overall, the game was pretty bad and Another-World-Sequel hype died down rather quickly.

Today a brand new remake is available for purchase. The vector graphics have been smoothened, the backgrounds have been redrawn into high resolution and the game itself has been made much easier thanks to more checkpoints and a little less enemies. The CD contains numerous extras such as the original sketches, the developer diary and the making-of documentary. You can learn all about it here.

Eric Chahi is supposedly planning to return to the game industry. A wise decision if you ask me.

Bruce Lee

Welcome to „Press Play on Tape”. Each Tuesday evening you will have a chance to read about some old and really damn old games that are still worth (in our opinion at least) playing or at least remembering.
The time range will be fairly vast and go all the way from Commodore 64 and Amiga 500 days to more “recent” PSOne and Nintendo 64.
As you probably already noticed the name and logo of the series (hopefully series ;) ) came form the C64 game Bruce Lee since it will be the first game reviewed.
So without further ado let’s look at one of the best games on Commodore 64 –Bruce Lee.

Bruce Lee is probably the first game that combined a platformer with beat’em up. The plot as well as game mechanics are incredibly simple, but then again that is what you could expect from an 8-bit computer game. You take control of the martial arts master Bruce Lee on a quest for eternal life and a shitload of gold. You ultimate goal is hidden deep inside an evil wizard’s tower and guarded but two fighters – a black ninja that will whack you over the head with a bokken stick and Yamo – a green sumo wrestler/demon/alien (take your pick) that will follow you all the way to hell and back – provided of course that hell is on the particular screen currently displayed.
The graphics were not impressive even for C64 standards, but the animation was surprisingly fluid and the characters had quirky moves.
There are twenty chambers to get though and you need to collect “laterns” in each to open hidden passages in order to reach “cash and fame”. To make things a bit harder apart from fighting Ninja and Yamo you need to watch out for flaming traps, flying daggers, spikes, electric floors and moving walls that populate the chambers. To add another merry annoyance both enemies will respawn a few seconds after they are killed so you never get bored. The good thing is that both Yamo and Ninja are not immune to traps and leading Ninja to a fiery death always seems to brighten my day for some reason.
The controls are basic, but efficient. You can run, duck (which makes you immune to enemy attacks), jump and attack in two ways – punch when you’re standing still, or do a flying kick when you’re running.
The game is very short – you can finish it below fifteen minutes and you will need to spend two or three days of training to know how to avoid all the dangers that await you.

“Bruce Lee” features two multiplayer modes. One, where players take turns to control their own Bruce Lee and a second, where one player controls Yamo and tries to beat the crap out of the unfortunate player controlling Lee.

You might be wondering right now why I bother to write about this game as it seems to be nothing special, but the game is highly addictive in its simplicity. You will have a strong urge to find the treasure chamber and before you know it you will either be trying to beat the game as fast as possible or fight legions of Yamos and Ninjas to get as many points as possible. After you beat the game you will be instantly put at the beginning of the first chamber on higher difficulty level and you can continue the adventure.

The game was ported to several systems including: ZX Spectrum (which unfortunately had even worse graphics than its C64 counterpart), Amstrad CPC, MSX and MS-DOS.

Also, I would like to thank my sweetheart for showing me a PC remake of the game that can be played on modern PC. The remake was made by Mark Rosten and can be downloaded for free from here.

One bad turn deserves another

Same topic, different approach.
Unlike Exramp I will not even try to be polite, because people making Silent Hill 5 don’t deserve it.
First thing that seems wrong right away when I think about the whole concept behind Silent Hill 5 is the main character, who so conveniently is a war veteran, a soldier. As we all know soldiers are good with guns – big guns and military equipment. Now, if you see a seventeen-year-old with a machine gun (hello silent hill 3) it may be strange, but a guy who was trained to use this kind of tools will not look suspicious with an M-16.
They already said they want to streamline combat and make it more interesting. Combat, combat, combat. Make puzzles! Get my point?

Second thing is the fact that they claimed they want to go back to the roots – make the game more focused on the plot than the action. What can we read in the article? That the guy likes Silent Hill 3 most, and for the story from all things?! You need to be a hamburger-eating twat who barely can comprehend the news to say the blunt and even at times cliché story of Silent Hill 3 is the best in the series.

That guy's approach pisses me off even more when he boldly states that they’ll make the scariest iteration of Silent Hill series. I’m sure he’s thinks the “Saw” movies are scary and we gonna get some of that gruesome, mindless violence type of “horror”. You need to be a complete moron to appreciate this kind of… stuff (couldn’t find a better word to describe it).

Note to Konami:
YOU DON’T LET AMERICANS MAKE JAPANESE GAMES!

Note to Yamaoka:
Quality control! Bah, screw it. Stick to the music!

Note to Mr. P.J.D:
Ruin this game and I will buy ten copies of it and shove them up your ass so hard that you will bleed out Sato, and you will have an opportunity to apologize to the man.

Tears of...

I've read a certain interview with a certain person who happens to be working on part 5 of a certain game series I love. It petrified me.

You can read it here and here. I'll try to be as gentle and polite as I can discussing the person's statements one by one but inside I'm terrified as well as aggravated. Everything that particular person was kind enough to say may not necessarily make Silent Hill 5 just a next worthless horror-shooter, but... AH FUCK WHO AM I TRYING TO FOOL?!?

sigh...

The person's favorite part is Silent Hill 3. It's not a crime, anyone is entitled to like whatever they want to like. This means however, that the person does not care much about the game events changing the protagonist emotionally by exposing him to some personal hell (and thus changing the gamer's point of view - if you don't know what I'm talking about play Silent Hill 2) - he cares for a "good" story. We come, we see a problem, we solve it, we win the game. We don't commit suicide.

The game designers are supposed to provide an even heavier atmosphere than in the previous ones by creating weird locations and monsters. Which is just what those previous ones did. That is the basis necessary for a Silent Hill game. Will those weird locations and monsters suffice to make it the most disturbing part of all?

The protagonist is a soldier who is supposed to be making perfectly rational decisions seeing the world suddenly decaying around him and being attacked by malformed creatures - well, not very likely a behavior, but not entirely impossible either. Let's just hope these will more than obligatory "what am I supposed to do now? I know, I'll shoot some monsters" approach. Moreover, the protagonist is supposed to have some knowledge about what is really going on in Silent Hill. I'm dying to see (not really) how the designers will explain that.

The story is supposed to reveal how the Silent Hill events influenced more people that the players think - maybe we will meet the whole society living within the nightmare world, which would be an obvious movie rip-off. Maybe not.

The best for the last:
The person claims that some of the reasons for which he was hired by Konami are him being a huge Silent Hill fan, being very knowledgeable about the series and wishing the series a continued success. I sincerely hope there were other reasons. MUCH more of them. I'm a huge Silent Hill fan too. FallingStickman is a huge Silent Hill fan too. There is a chance of you being a huge Silent Hill fan too. If we are huge Silent Hill fans that we probably are very knowledgeable about the series and wish it a continued success as well.
He also claims to have bought and played the game the very week it came out. I hope he didn't mean it as some sort of achievement.

Apparenty Silent Hill 5 will not concentrate on some personal hell like some of it's predecessors - instead begin based on solving things and answering questions, which in my opinion is a promise of flat 2D characters no one could care less about. It will probably involve a lot of shooting, not a lot of puzzle solving (I can't imagine the protagonist, supposedly being a man of action, figuring out how to insert 3 coins into 5 slots the right way) - so that's one gaming hope going to hell in a hand-basket. It will probably tell a story about the infamous Order - a gathering of deranged people trying to summon some kind of demon. I know that's a crucial element of the Silent Hill universe but that brings SH5 to a typical action-game scheme one good guy versus some bad guys. The lack of such painfully chiched rules was the most important reason why Silent Hill games were so special in the first place.

I have a wish.
I wish that I'm wrong.
I wish that everything I've written above will turn out bullshit.

Hopes

I think most of us gamers have some hopes or wishes about what we want to play on our beloved equipment. Here are ours:

I. Games wishlist
- Shen Mue 3
- more Call of Cthulhu games (there is one coming, hopefully they'll make one about King in Yellow, too)
- Alien vs Predator 3 being a continuation of AvP2 (there's even a petition, let's just hope the upcoming Alien game will be decent)
- resurresction of Syndicate (I miss the Eurocorp universe; I was hoping Duality would bring back some memories, but it got cancelled)
- another Vampire the Masquerade game, pleeeease? (yeah, I know - now there's Requiem and Masquerade is dead; whatever)

II. Remakes wishlist
- Resident Evil 2 (not going to happen, but still if they decided to remake RE2 like they did RE1, I would stand up and run to the game store right now at this moment - probably having multiple orgasms along the way)
- Parasite Eve
- Broken Sword 1 and 2 with HD graphics (but in 2D for God's sake)
- Walker (Remember that little Amiga title? Wouldn't it be great to see all that mayhem in glorious HD?)

III. Silent Hill 5 the way we want it - returning to the roots - a perfect mix of puzzles and combat (unlike number 3 and 4).
Yes, it's THAT important.

IV. A new handheld by Nintendo with a reasonable computing power and access to Wii's Virtual Console titles.

V. Full software emulation of Playstation 2 titles on Playstation 3.

Low budget brain.

What does hurt gamers most? Well, lately I think it’s other gamers. To be more specific hardcore and real casual gamers are getting more or less screwed by the advent of, what I like to call, Sunday gamers. Let me explain all the gamer statuses to be clearer. This is all just something I made up, so feel free to correct me.

A hardcore gamer is someone that loves games, games that are his passion and he’s willing to sell some less important organs to buy them. A hardcore gamer knows what’s going on in the business and is interested in the nuances of gaming (technical terminology, gaming soundtracks, and knows why Chris Kramer is a minuscule twit). A Hardcore gamer usually wants to “bleed” his games from the content – get the unlockables, see the UFO ending in Silent Hill, enjoy the multiplayer and doesn’t stop changing his surround speakers position until he can hear the bird chirp in Oblivion from the 72 degree angle. A hardcore gamer doesn’t give a shit when someone makes fun of him for what he is, and even if he does, he will defend his passion with reasonable arguments (or bash the bastard over the head with a shovel).
These gamers are OK.

A casual gamer is a gaming enthusiast. He finishes most of his games, but rarely does more. Games are not his most important hobby, but he does, if only occasionally, read gaming news and reviews. He doesn’t care what parallax mapping is as long as it looks good.
He doesn’t try to get a new RGB cable for his Gamecube just because his friend told him the color definition on the one he’s using is slightly off. A casual gamer might feel embarrassed if cornered by an orthodox, catholic nun who claims games are the digital droppings of Satan.
He may not be l33t, but he doesn’t care (since he thinks he probably just been offended – which he was if you ask me).
These gamers are OK.

A Sunday gamer is someone who plays games on rare occasions. He doesn’t know what’s going on in the gaming world and doesn’t question Fox newscasters when they say Mass Effect is a porn game. It’s a kind of gamer that bought Wii for Christmas and only plays Wii Sports on it and believes the graphics are amazing. It’s the kind of gamer that plays simple flash games in between his favorite soap operas and when kicked in the head claims that it didn’t hurt and is telling the truth.
There gamers are so not OK.

On to the point. Gamers are getting stupid! I don’t mean personally, but as a community. The inflow of rookies and a more apparent presence of Sunday gamers hamper game development and harm the overall genre diversity. How, you ask?
Consider this. Video game business is a multi-billion dollar industry. Game costs are high and development long. How do you minimize all the risks involved? You make your game accessible to as many people as possible. And when making something for a large group you need to make is as dumb as the dumbest member of that group, and let’s be honest, people are generally not very bright. If you were wondering why half of the games made right now are first person shooters here’s your answer. No offense intended to any of the games I’m about to mention, but you don’t really need a lot of logical thinking in Gears of War, Halo or Resistance – even a goat could finish them. I don’t mind FPSes, but for God’s sake, why am I forced to play them exclusively. What’s more, the number of adventure games released drops every year and the action-adventure genre becomes pretty much action-is-all-you-get-bitch. Take Silent Hill 4 and Resident Evil 4 (now, I know that EXramp disagrees with me on that) – there are no real puzzles in those games anymore (no, finding two pieces of and emblem and inserting them into a recess in a wall is not a puzzle, it’s a gameplay extender). Both of those games are good, yes, but their previous iterations were much more complex. The classical adventure games are just zombies now and I’m pretty sure that in the upcoming years we won’t see titles that could reanimate the genre. Grim Fandango, Broken Sword, The Longest Journey – will we see games like that? Doubtful. We probably gonna get another Turok sooner (why God, why!).
Same thing happens to strategy games. They are more focused on fast reaction than tactical thinking. Same with RPGs – they need to have real-time combat otherwise they just don’t sell (cought, Fallout 3, cough). That’s why I think Lost Odyssey won’t sell well – the traditional turn-based combat will not appeal to “action-oriented” 360 owners, which is very unfortunate (not to mention large quantities of text that this game has).
Gamers are so spoiled by this tendency to make everything one-button-push-one-kill. I dread to read some forums these days because some posts make me want to eat a game-pad choking myself to death in the process. Examples?
Someone claims that Final Fantasy VII is a bad game because of the combat system, and if Square would ever to make a remake they should make that combat real-time. (Tell that to your therapist kid, I’m sure he’ll love it)
Someone else thinks that GTA4 would work better with a first person view. (Really?)
What’s more, the level of intelligence is seems to be rapidly dropping, especially when it comes to teenagers. Before you start to flame I should warn you, I know… I teach some of those bastards at school (part of my profession practices). You can’t take seriously a person who claims that eight lines is a “wall of text” and he can’t be bothered to read through it. He obviously didn’t hear about books.
All those people seem to be playing games now and developers, if they want it or not (they want it) have to make games that those half-witted morons can comprehend.
Some even get lost in miansreaming games making either a game that nobody can play (Viva Piñata – for the love of God, Rare, do you really think children can handle that game?) or a game that nobody should play, but every one apparently does (NFS Pro Street, the weakest of all NFS games with “family” control scheme where you don’t have to break, since the AI does it for you – make the drivers wear track suits, gold chains and compose the soundtrack entirely of rap music next time and choke on the money you make on it.).

You know how in the 90’s gamers were considered to be dimwits with no lives and ability to masturbate with a soldering gun? Well, then that opinion was unjustified. Now when gamers are considered relatively normal when they are not murdering anyone or Jack Thomson is on vacation our rank will actually get filled with dimwits who are not really gamers and we get the same thing that happened to music and movies. When watching Saw or listening to Britney Spears kids loose their brain cells so rapidly that you could be filling their skulls with pudding from a syringe and they wouldn’t know anything changed.

Wait, it gets worse. Imagine a developer releases a shooter that becomes fairly popular. Other developers think – “Let’s just drop all the ambitious projects we have and make a shooter, it’s easy money”. Now gamers have a choice to either buy that next shooter or stop playing altogether because nothing else comes out. Well, maybe Guitar Hero does. The developers say – “Since shooters are so popular let’s make more of them” and Carmack says – “I’ll make an engine that everyone will use and I’ll buy myself a new Ferrari, or six”. The circle is complete. Yes, it your fault Bungie!

I doubt that anything can be done with that, short of boycotting mind-degrading games, but that won’t happen.

Remember, an unused organ will atrophy – that goes for your brain as well.


By the way, IGN has a pretty good article about the state of adventure games that you can read here.

Back to the past...

Konami confirmed that they will release a Metal Gear Solid: Essential Collection for PS2 - a compilation of the playstation platform MGS games (the original MGS for PSOne, MGS2: Substance and MGS3: Subsistance).

Konami did not say when or where the package will be released, but some american stores claim that it will be out sometime in March. Wheter or not MGS: ES will be released in Europe is unknown.

Even though the reasons to release this package are obvious (Money!) I, for one, would gladly sell my kidney to buy it.

Fears

This is my 10 gaming fears for the future. Let's hope they don't come true.

Here goes:

1. EA buying out too many developers and “mainstreaming” all their games (just like they do now) what could result in lower game diversity.
2. Fallout 3 becoming more of a shooter than an actual RPG.
3. Uwe Boll making a movie adaptation of Zelda or Final Fantasy and the world ending.
4. Sony having a huge success with Playstation 3 (well, in the long run ;) ) and screwing up Playstaion 4 in the process (bad start, system too expensive).
5. Developers making games that require less and less thinking (already happening… thank you casual* gamers) – adventures, logic, tactic and puzzle games becoming niche products.
6. Silent Hill 5 being a total letdown killing the series in the process.
7. Someone making a game based on the Saw movies (DAMN! It happened).
8. Games becoming too dependant on internet connection.
9. Console games being released not finished properly and requiring patching for comfortable “usage” (like many PC games now) [ehm…Mistwalker…ehm].
10. “Sequelization” – developers too afraid to make original games because of costs of production.

I encourage you to post your own fears.

* - casual, meaning players who buy a game every 3 months, don't know what normal-mapping is and their biggest succes was getting to level 10 in Puzzle Quest (cool game by the way)