Saturday, January 17, 2009

Die Höhlenwelt Saga

Ah yes, an OLD-school adventure. And part one of a series. Guess what was never made!

Höhlenwelt Saga is one of those games that gives you a limited resource of something (money, in this case) and makes you figure out ways of acquiring more, or optimize your path such that you never run out. I never found out what happens if you do run out, but since you need to park your flying dragon for 3 credits every single time you land it somewhere, and go through the same inane "here's my dragon"/"can I have my dragon back" dialogue every single time, I would suspect you're screwed if you don't read about more ways to make money in the walkthrough find out what to sell to whom in order to make more money BEFORE you run out.

The plot? You're this space traveller who met his true love, but then she ran off with this other guy, so you're trying to track her down. And then the other guy, Cal, turns out to be a robotic savior of some kind, and directs you to the titular Cave World, which is a world that's part fantasy, part sf (you have alien invaders with advanced technology, but also dragons and magic). The author of the game was an acclaimed German fantasy writer, and used to write text adventures, so the world works pretty well for the most part, although there are some baffling things the protagonist can get away with, like: throwing pies in alien soldiers' faces; throwing exploding stink mushrooms at alien soldiers; and other insolence.

The way dialog trees are implemented is also somewhat bizarre: you can keep looping around until you happen upon the correct line of reasoning to get information (or someone to do something for you). This despite the game claiming that your dialog choices can have longer-lasting effects on the game (they don't). Furthermore, apparently "How is business, kind Sir?" will get you a tongue-lashing from a businessman, while "Heidau, dude, whassup yo?" will not. Ooo-kay.

Also interesting but slightly creepy is your "true love"'s reaction to seeing you -- she mostly remains coldly indifferent, sometimes even hostile, throughout, until the very end where you can coax her into a kiss with the right choice of dialog. And the main character will happily flirt with any other moderately attractive woman in the game, so there must be something I'm not getting here. Or the author.

So you travel around the place collecting stuff. Sometimes, you go back to the same place only to find new stuff there, and the protagonist even comments on this. Note to game authors: this is lame.

And, of course, while you manage to achieve the goal of this game, it ends on a cliffhanger that was never resolved. Apparently, so do the novels, since the author died mid-series, and wasn't famous enough to get Brandon Sanderson to complete it.

Overall, however: not a bad game. Too bad it's German-only and most of my audience won't get to play it.

Friday, January 9, 2009

Schizm, a repost from 2002

Note: this isn't as much a review of Schizm as a rant about what I didn't like. And it's been quite a long time since I've been so annoyed by an adventure game as I was by Schizm (the last time must have been "Rent-A-Hero", which is probably the single worst adventure game I've ever played in my life), so read ahead at your own peril.

How to make the ultimate annoying adventure game:

Make every movement in the game a cutscene. Cut up longer movements into small pieces so the player has to click more often.

Do NOT make these cutscenes skippable. Play them every single time. In the DVD version, add additional movement scenes that hold the player up EVEN LONGER, like jumping fish or buzzing bees.

Make sure, for total playing time, that the player has to run across half the world and back for every single puzzle. In fact, since there are two player characters the player controls, make sure he has to RUN EACH OF THEM ACROSS HALF THE WORLD AND BACK SEPERATELY FOR EVERY SINGLE PUZZLE, PREFERABLY SEVERAL TIMES. Ensure getting from point A to point B takes at least 15 minutes of real time.

Since there's more space on the DVD, make sure to add a few bonus puzzles which involve EVEN MORE POINTLESS RUNNING AROUND, not to mention additional uninterruptable cutscenes which require you to flip the DVD over twice.

While speaking of flipping the DVD over, make sure the installer pops up when you switch to side A, killing the game in progress. In fact, make sure that Alt-Tab or incoming ICQ messages or any other disturbance kill the game in progress.

Add completely gratuitous play-against-the-computer puzzles. Require the player solve several of them in a row without being allowed to save inbetween. Then repeat the same puzzle later, only make it even MORE ANNOYING. Make the hints for puzzles extremely obscure, not to mention hiding them on the other side of the game world.

Add puzzles relying on sound. Make the sound as unintelligible as possible, just in case. Add lots of red herrings as well, so the player has to try everything at least five times.

Grr.

A Vampyre Story

This game has, first and foremost, the same problem as "Al Emmo," which I don't own and never plan to: the protagonist's voice is incredibly grating. A faux French accent, which drops out randomly, delivered in a high pitch. Yargh.

A Vampyre Story is the first new game by Autumn Moon Games, a company founded by ex-LucasArtsies, with Bill Tiller at the Helm. And I mean "first" -- the story ends halfway through and indicates I should wait for AVS2. Given the track record of games with cliffhangers that are never resolved, I don't hold high hopes, but I'm willing to be surprised.

It'll have to be a more positive surprise than AVS1, however, which was pretty mediocre for the most part. It starts out with a few good puzzles, then bogs down in the mid-game with a gigantic try-and-retry potion mixing puzzle (at which point I started using a walkthrough), then descends, as the second halves of adventures so often do, into nonsensical puzzles.

You play as Mona, a French opera singer who's been turned into a vampire by Baron Von Shroudy, whose love for her she rejects. So he locks her into his castle until she changes her mind, with only a smartass bat for company. Mona, however, refuses to acknowledge that she is, in fact, a vampire, finding ever more bizarre explanations for her behavior, or (like any good politician) simply ignoring reality. Naturally, Froderick, her bat companion, comments on these fugues as much as on anything else in the game; fortunately, the voice actor is vastly superior to Mona's, or the game would become entirely unplayable.

The hallmark of LucasArts games was humor, and while Telltale nailed Sam & Max, AVS never really gets off the ground. The jokes are either juvenile (probably to appeal to a younger audience), dark (and often, but not often enough, funny, but not for kids), or most often simply fall flat spectacularlylamely.

The major new mechanic in AVS is having "ideas" in your inventory -- Mona's not going to drag this shovel around all game, but she knows where it is, and if you want to use it, she'll automatically go grab it, bring it back to the current location, and use it. Unfortunately, this is done via multiple cutscenes, which are randomly either skippable or not, and even when they're skippable one has to hit the space bar an excruciating 5 or 6 times. Every time. At one point, you have to click an object to get its idea first, then click the idea on something in the same room, which you can't even leave at that point, which generates another idea, which you can then use on yet another object in the same room. That is, maybe, a bit too much.

On the positive side, the locations are beautifully drawn and have useful shortcuts, mostly avoiding that other staple of second halves of adventure games: running across the entire game world multiple times to do boring fetch quests. Even better: the right mouse button skips directly to a new location if you click it on an arrow. Less good: the right mouse button also brings up your inventory, so you have to make sure you're NOT on an arrow if you want that.

As it is, I can't really recommend AVS if you want side-splitting comedy and an actual ending. I'm hoping, though, that this first excursion by Autumn Moon will teach the company the dos and don'ts of adventure gaming (though, shouldn't they already know?) and that the second part will be more interesting.

If it ever turns up.