Another Quiet Saturday

In which most of it was actually spent playing Rise Of Legends, a Real Time Strategy game where you control a culture called the Vincis that are an interesting hypothesis of what might have happened had Leonardo DaVinci been in charge of an entire society.

Dinner was had at a restaurant called the Kallang Oasis, which sits on the water and has a decent view of downtown. Their speciality is porridge. This is a food I hadn’t actually ever touched until I met the Wife, and I was extremely dubious of it, since it was mostly just rice in water, but then they give you all kinds of neat little finger foods that you break up into pieces and mix into it, like salted fish, bits of pork, chicken, salted egg, all manner of vegetable… basically you make your own kind of soupy-porridge-y thingy and the results are surprisingly good. It had been a while since we’d gone to the restaurant and it kind of flipped me out when I made the observation that the last time we’d been here, we weren’t married.

That kind of stopped me for a second as I realized that I now had to divide my life between before marriage and after marriage, ’cause honestly it STILL doesn’t feel like we’re married. We still do the same things, have the same talks, and nothing’s actually changed except that it’s now morally, legally and even religiously okay for us to live together.

And now I will get back to writing a little bit more on an article about the end of the world, and maybe sneak off to the 24 hour convenience store for a bag of chips when the late night gaming continues.

One Of These Days…

I will post something a little more substantial, once the novely of having a PC that is game worthy wears off. As it is, I have about 3 RTS games, one fantasy TBS game, two 1st person RPGs, one simulation and one adventure game all sitting on the hard drive with a couple of FPS games to join the collection imminently.

The scary thing is, you’d think I’d be sick of all this gaming, but it keeps not happening. You’d also think the Wife would probably take issue with this, but since work is getting done, the job at GameAxis is about playing games anyhow, and she’s similarly sucked into Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, I don’t even get nagged about this habit. I guess it also doesn’t hurt that there’s always the standby argument of, “I’m staying at home, not getting into trouble, not hanging out with the guys, not getting drunk, doing drugs, or hitting on other women. How is this bad for you?”

Still Boring

Yup, you guessed it. Writing and gaming.

I Am Boring

All I did today was write an article, play Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and then go home and play more Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

I’m So Picky

To think one would spend that much time just going over various eyes to pick just the right ones. For The Sims 2, I mean…

Video Game Housekeeping

All I did today was play Titan Quest, write my review and then do some general maintenance in Oblivion, completing quests and doing some online shopping for The Sims 2; y’know, getting decent eyes, finding nice clothes, some better hair styles, skin tones… Your basic Replicant enhancement procedure…

More Fun With Ruining Lives

Since it took getting a new PC for my birthday to finally bring me into the 21st century as far as games my PC was actually capable of playing, I have now put all that extra processing power to use with the refugee from the GameAxis offices, the venerable The Sims 2.

To the right are very basic likenesses of myself and The Wife, although I’m pretty sure that the accuracy will change once I go through the sordid process of trolling through various Sims 2 websites to find user created content like more accurate glasses, clothing, etcetera. Of course the torturous part comes from building a house that we will, in all likelihood never, ever be able to afford, let alone live in, but oh well…

So to start off what will most likely be an occasional entry on how I am destroying lives (Including my own, to be fair) in the world of the Sims 2, here’s a first shot in a house that will likely be torn down and replaced with a new one.

Here, the Wife is yelling at me for my inexplicable decision to buy a house with no roof or furniture.

In The News Today

I have finally finished Kingdom Hearts II. Level 99, 100% completion, every entry in Jiminy Cricket’s journal, including that insane colosseum fight with 50 rounds in it. I am never going to play it again.

And then there’s that whole bringing back Kathy Kane as a lesbian thing. Or, to the less familiar with DC comics continuity, taking the obscure Batwoman, last seen dead in 1979 after getting killed by the League Of Assassins, and retconning her by outting her and bringing her back to life.

I have to admit, I’m surprised, and I haven’t been following this. The last I’d heard, in the last major DC comic book shake up, Crisis On Infinite Earths, Kathy Kane had been mentioned, was already dead, and in that revision of DC history, she was never Batwoman. So I’m kind of wondering how they’re going to bring her back and whether she’s going to be Kathy Kane again or what… Oh well, at the very least, DC has done it again. They consistently end up being in the news for events related to their comics themselves, rather than movie properties. I don’t remember there being anything in the mainstream news when Spiderman got married, but I do remember the mainstream news covering the death of Robin, the death of Superman, and now this. Whoever is in charge of marketing and PR over at DC should definitely get a raise…

The Best Argument For Games As Art Yet

So I’ve finished Dreamfall: The Longest Journey and I am sad. And that’s the good kind of sad, because it’s the same sad you get when you finish reading an amazing book or a stunning movie and you don’t want to say goodbye to that world, those characters, and you wish you could walk with them a little bit more.

In a sense though, this is a little bit more than either of those and that is because, on at least one level, Ragnar Tornquist, the writer and director of Dreamfall, understands the innate power of a game, and what it can offer that a book and a movie both can, but not at the same time. But first, let me talk a little bit about The Longest Journey as a series before I get into the specifics of this game.

Ragnar Tornquist and the company Funcom, are from Norway, and that being locked into heated rooms 6 months out of the year might account for the sheer, overwhelming amount of imagination that went into the creation of this series, which clearly shows signs of the kind of daydreaming that occurs when you can’t go out to play. In 1999, the first game, The Longest Journey was released, and it is hailed–quite rightly–as arguably the greatest adventure game ever made. Adventure game in this case, means a genre of games, usually for computers, that involves a point n’ click interface, has more emphasis on story, and consists largely of solving puzzles in order to advance the plot. Typical examples of the genre include the Infocom text classics like Zork, Planetfall and of course, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and graphical games like Sierra Online’s King’s Quest, Space Quest or Leisure Suit Larry games and LucasArt’s Full Throttle, Grim Fandango and Secret of Monkey Island series.

The Longest Journey beat them all by having the most advanced visuals at the time, combined with an unheard of–and for the longest time unrepeated–depth of plot, theme and characterization. The story centered around our world, 200 years into the future, and was about April Ryan, a promising art student was starting to lose her focus and feel a little lost, until she stumbled onto a conspiracy that threatened the safety of not just our world, but our twin, which we had forgotten.

I won’t say more, because I highly reccommend people go out and play the game for themselves. If they can get past the pre-millenial, pre-rendered backgrounds and somewhat archaic game mechanics, they will find a story that is as an engaging and provocative as anything on a bookshelf today, with a heroine that is just as complex and likeable as any character in a quality work of literary or cinematic fiction. April Ryan is someone you immediately like, someone you want to be friends with, and over the course of this epic game, you don’t just read the events unfold, you drive them forward, and by the end of it, you feel as if you have been with April every step of the way, and it’s a sad thing when you have to walk down separate roads.

Dreamfall continues that. But in a way, it’s the Empire Strikes Back of adventure games, in that it surpasses The Longest Journey terms of complexity, depth and characterization, but, like that sacred sequel, while it provides some closure, it also leaves things so completely open ended that its a foregone conclusion that there MUST be a conclusion.

I love this game to death. It has one of the most compelling stories I’ve ever seen.

And I think that is because of, not despite, the fact that it is a game.

The novel provides something a movie cannot, and that is time. Depth. Because a novel can go for hundreds of pages, it can involve the reader in a more lengthy attachment in a way that a 2 two or even three hour movie can’t. That’s why we remember those characters in novels, because we don’t just journey with them for a few hours, we do it for days, for weeks. However, we are creatures of sensuality, and that is the one area where novels fails, demanding imagination on the part of the audience, whereas cinema can assault with movement, color, speech and music. What so few gamer developers have fully exploited is the fact that games marry BOTH of these elements, allowing for a long, epic adventure full sight and sound, but at the same time, this is an adventure that audience PARTICIPATES in. Ragnar Tornquist understands this. If we feel an attachment to April Ryan in The Longest Journey, or to Zoe Callisto in Dreamfall it is because we have gone on this adventure with them, we have helped them, we have steered them to safety and witnessed their private, intimate moments. In a way, we didn’t simply watch or hear about it, we were there, and that is why the attachment is so strong. When a character like April or Zoe is written with such depth, such honest, human failing and insecurity, you can’t help but empathize. And as you spend more time with them, you grow to like them, and in time, you care.

That is the triumph of Dreamfall, especially if you’ve play
ed the first game. Ragnar, I’m sure, believes in these people, and KNOWS they are real. Dreamfall takes place 10 years after the events of The Longest Journey and for veteran of the first game, it feels like a highschool reunion. You will meet a lot of characters you met in the first and they’ve changed, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, and sometimes… it’s just change, no better, no worse. The themes the game addresses, from religious zealotry to the ethics of occupying a foreign nation under the auspices of “liberating it” and then trying to institute your own form of government and culture upon it will ring a little too close to home for the thoughtful, and of course, there is Zoe, there are her friends, there is the finest quality of voice acting I’ve ever heard in a game, and a score so cinematic it defies belief. The game is also fully 3D this time around and it’s a breathtaking change. Though the characters are a little sub-par by the exceedingly high standards of today’s First Person Shooter powerhouses, the environments themselves show a level of imagination and detail difficult to comprehend. Storywise, presentation wise, this game has NO equal. The only actual failing is the game itself.

As an adventure game, it’s actually weak. The puzzles have been dumbed down somewhat–not such a big problem–and some unnecessary stealth and fighting components have been grafted on, and so, as pure gaming experience, it actually falls short of its predecessor. But what it lacks in game design it makes up for by making you laugh, care for, fear for and ultimately mourn for the characters and story when it’s all over, because as I said, you won’t want it to be over, you won’t want to say goodbye. In the end, Dreamfall may not be a great adventure, but it is a great tale, that will make you care, make you think and, in the end, make you wish it didn’ t have to end.

Brilliant. Bloody, bloody brilliant game.

Still Playing

Uh… sucked into the vortex of gaming. But DAMN, Dreamfall is good…