The Closeout Warrior

Most of the games in the Bomberman series are about one thing: getting lots of people in an enclosed area, giving them bombs, and having them try and blow each other up. It’s not as gruesome as it sounds. It’s all very cartoony, very intense, and lots of fun… assuming you can find people to play with.

Atomic Bomberman supports up to eight people in a tiny area, each laying bombs and trying to do each other in, all accompanied by some of the most abrasive voice acting I’ve ever heard. The voice work in this game was done principally by Charles Adler, who is very distinctive and whose range leaves a bit to be desired, and Billy West, who is also very distinctive, but significantly less annoying. Even the limited pool of actors and voice samples wouldn’t be so bad, except that the voices play absolutely all the time. My ears were bleeding within minutes.

Like I said, this game is only really fun if you have multiple players. You can have the computer stand in for any players you have missing, but it’s just not the same. I’m not that good at the game, but the computer is way better than me. I don’t think I ever managed to win. It’s also a bit difficult to trash-talk a computer. Another problem is that, although you can play this game over the Internet, by the time I got hold of it, there were zero games being played. Or, I assume that’s the case, there’s no way to browse for games (and the company that made the game is defunct now). The third big problem is that if you get the maximum of eight players in the match, there are far too many competitors. There are so many players laying so many bombs in so many places that it’s nigh impossible to keep track of them all, and you’ll invariably either die because you got blown up by a bomb that you didn’t even see or you’ll end up with a draw because everyone died because they got blown up by a bomb that they didn’t see.

The best thing about this game has to be that I didn’t spend more than a dollar for it.

A few years ago, due to some epic shortsightedness, I managed to move into a new house that had all the amenities: power and water. What was missing was cable, phone service, and Internet access. This was before I had a cell phone and before unsecured wireless networks were in every home, so I was essentially cut off from the world. The earliest I could get hooked up was over 10 days away, and as I was pondering what I could do to pass the time a friend helpfully suggested that I could read a book. I ended up not taking his suggestion and instead used the time in isolation to play through one of the more peculiar games that I’ve ever played.

American McGee’s Alice is a game set some time after the Alice in Wonderland books. Somehow Alice’s house burns to the ground and her family dies within, leaving her the sole survivor. She ends up at an insane asylum, clearly off her nut. As it seems, Wonderland exists within Alice’s head and since she’s so traumatized the world is warped, twisted, and barely resembles the Carroll tales.

So you have to guide Alice through the landscape and attempt to restore the order of things by brute force… brute force and a kitchen knife (named the ‘Vorpal Blade’). It’s a bit intense.

The game manages to be equal parts creepy, intriguing, and oddly compelling. I’m really glad that I took the time to plow through this game in a couple of days, because I just didn’t want to stop. The only problem? The ending! The intro to the game was well done, the backstory was fleshed out very well, and the game took me a good amount of time to complete. The ending? A 30-second clip where everything’s OK again. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it was more than what I got. It was a huge letdown for such a well crafted experience to completely fall apart at the end.

I would still recommend this game to those interested in the subject matter, just don’t let the ending taint your experience.

Adult Swim, the late night ‘mature’ programming block on the Cartoon Network is putting out some… interesting games on their site of late. One such game is the Candy Mountain Massacre.

I’m not going to pretend to understand the story in this game, mostly because I didn’t bother reading it. But the gist of it seems to be that there are some cupcakes that live on Candy Mountain that are being held hostage by the native fauna, and you have to rescue them. At your disposal is a small but effective arsenal of weaponry including a machine gun and a rocket launcher.

The game is a whole lot like Quake, it’s fully 3D and essentially is just you running around and shooting anything that moves, collecting powerups, and trying to dodge incoming fire.

Despite what this game looks like, it contains some (fairly mild) profanity, and makes gratuitous use of blood and gore and is absolutely not, in any way, shape, or form, for the kiddies. If you’d like to get a taste of what the game’s like, there’s a video you can see here, but you’ve been warned.

I’m pretty blown away that this game can be run in your web browser, and if your computer is sufficiently powerful it doesn’t work half-bad. The game is really short, weighing in at a whopping 3 levels, though there is the promise of more levels coming at some point in the future. I found the normal difficulty to be a little more than I could handle, but was able to blow through easy mode without much of a problem. I’m not sure if the difficulty needs some adjustment or if my shooting game skill have deteriorated in the last few years. But I did get about a half-hour of fun out of it before I finished what game is there, which is a lot more than I typically get out of those silly little browser games.

On the surface, Diablo looks to be your typical hack-’n'-slash dungeon crawl. You take your character into a dungeon to kill the evil things within and come back out with loot. However the apparent simplicity is belied by the increasingly complicated story, which you slowly unravel as you plumb the depths of the dungeon.

I’m not going to pretend to fully understand the story of this game, but here are some highlights, which I’ll probably get completely wrong: Demon gets trapped in crystal → Demon wants out and manages to telepathically control priest → Priest kidnaps king’s son → king goes mad with grief → Possessed priest says that demons did it → Grief-addled king sends troops to find kidnapped son → Troops get slaughtered → One of the handful that survives realized that the king is off his nut, and kills him → king turns undead and enslaves the souls of the troops → king’s son becomes new vessel for spirit of lead deamon → then the game starts.

Now I’ll grant you that the bulk of the story happens before the game starts, but you don’t really know about it until you play through it, talk to the townsfolk, and read the books that are scattered about. You start out with the goal of exterminating the evil from the church.

You essentially just walk around the dungeons and look for stuff to kill. Along the way the things you bludgeon to death will drop money, armor, weapons, and miscellaneous items that you collect to use or to take back to town to sell. It’s all pretty straightforward. The only problem you’ll come across is this: about halfway through the game you’ll encounter some enemies that will hit you with a ranged attack (think bow and arrow). You walk toward them to put them in a world of pain, and they walk away from you to get away. Since you can’t speed up to come up with them, and if you’ve picked a melee class (no ranged attacks) like I did my first time through, you end up with a series of incredibly tedious low-speed chases.

Beyond that significant annoyance this game is pretty solid, and the almost completely nonsensical ending sets the stage for the sequel, which we’ll get into another day.

Yet another game in the After Dark Games collection was Hula Girl, a ridiculously simple game that wasn’t really much of anything. You, as the titular Hula Girl, must travel down a series of platforms that scroll up from the bottom of the screen. If you go off the screen in any direction, you lose a hoop. If you run into your nemesis, you lose a hoop. If you fill up your ‘yukometer’ by running into gross things you lose a hoop (you can run into nice things to empty your meter). Run out of hoops, and it’s game over.

Like most of the games in this collection, this one’s pretty forgettable, and dead easy. You get bonus hoops and nice items to empty your meter so often that even with the worst of reflexes you’ll be playing this one for a while without a whole lot of effort. There are better games in the package to waste time on.

So you had a bit of fun shoving a ragdoll down some stairs, but you’re hankering for some more action. A way, perhaps, of needlessly inflicting a large deal of punishment on our featureless protagonist. If that’s the case, then Rekkaturvat may be the game you’re looking for.

Rekkaturvat is essentially the same as the previous game in the series, but you have a lot more ways to customize the mayhem. You have two ramps to place (forward, back, and side to side), an immovable wall, and a truck that you can customize (windshield or no windshield and speed) that will slam into the wall. On top of all of this, you can place your little man pretty much wherever you want. Your goal is, just like the previous game, to inflict as much pain as possible.

Just be warned that if you do play this game, you’ll play for far longer than you intend to. There’s something about the little guy getting maimed that’s tragically hilarious, and very therapeutic.

Jezzball is probably my favorite game from the venerable Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows 3.x. It’s kind of like Qix in that there is a playfield and you must claim a certain percentage of the field before you can move on to the next level. On each stage there is an ever-increasing number of atoms which bounce around ominously. You are armed with the ability to create two barriers that will originate at your cursor and slowly move toward the walls, one in each direction either left and right or up and down. If they hit a wall, they will create a barrier. If they hit an atom, they will disappear and cost you a life. You claim a section by completely walling it off from the atoms. You have to claim at least 75% of the board to win and advance to the next level where you’ll gain another life and another atom. The tricky part is that though the number of atoms increases every level, the field size does not, so you must build progressively smaller ‘rooms’ to house them, and with ever-increasing numbers of atoms this becomes maddeningly difficult.

I know that if you’ve read through all of that, you’re scratching your head and wondering what the heck I’m talking about. Go here.

Indigo Prophecy is a very peculiar game, possibly because it came from France. I had never actually heard of it or knew anything about it until recently when I saw a review on the former Video Game Channel. What I saw made me want to check it out. The only problem was that it was for the PS2 and XBox, consoles that I didn’t (and still don’t) own. So I promptly put it into the back of my mind and went about my business. Some months later I found a lone copy of the PC version I didn’t know existed sitting on the shelf at my local EB Games.

Indigo Prophecy initially places you in control of the main protagonist, Lucas. Although, initially, ‘control’ may not be the right word. You begin the game by helplessly watching as your avatar commits a pretty grisly murder that you’re powerless to stop. When you come to your senses you have to hide the body, evade the police, and figure out what’s going on. In short order, you get introduced to the two other main characters, Carla and Tyler, who are the police officers trying to solve the murder.

It all sounds a little weird on paper, and there are some interesting moments in the game, like when the main characters interact with each other, but overall it comes together surprisingly well.

There are four things that stand out about this game: the animation, the camera angles, the controls, and the story.

Most of the animation in this game has been motion-captured. This make every movement look eerily realistic, and you can look past the rather lackluster character models. Interestingly, I understand that the animators used puppetry techniques to animate the faces of the characters, making them more expressive than I’m used to seeing in a game. I’m so used to expressionless zombies wiggling their lips when they talk, that I was pleasantly surprised. It helped complete the suspension of disbelief, and certainly made the game more engaging.

The camera angles in this game are unique to any game that I’ve ever played. Very often, you will get several different camera angles of the same bit of action all at the same time. I’ve never watched the series, but I understand that it’s very similar to the techniques used on the show 24. The camera angles are used to draw attention to something important in your immediate vicinity, like a phone ringing or someone you’re needing to stealth your way past. They also might show the same thing from several different angles to paint a more complete picture of the action.

The game’s controls make use of the analog sticks in a unique way to perform many of the motions in the game. The actions you have to perform on the sticks roughly equate to the actions you’re wanting your character to do. For example, you want climb up a structure, you move the right stick a quarter-circle right-to-up then the left stick a quarter-circle left-to-up, repeat until ascended. There are other mini-games that take place that require you to keep your balance by tapping the shoulder buttons, or following along with a bizarre Simon-like interface that pops up during action sequences.

Many points in the story have you making moral choices, each of which will cause the story to play out in a slightly different way. None of the choices will impede you from making progress, but they will affect what the characters say and do, kind of like an interactive ‘Choose your own adventure’ kind of way. In a rather lengthy discussion, the developer indicates that his original vision was for the game to be told over several smaller installments, or episodes, but that didn’t come to pass. I didn’t really notice this until about the last quarter of the game where the pacing of the story gets completely out of whack, completely skipping over large chunks of time/exposition, which left me a little confused, and then the game just ended rather abruptly.

The game itself felt kind of short, which is probably due to a combination of being very engaging, and that the game was scaled down from its original epic scope to fit into one ‘episode’.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this game to anyone, except to maybe preschoolers.