Tag Archives: Video Games

Amnesia Your Pants Off

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Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) is a game unlike any other. It’s so different that the game even starts with a disclaimer, warning the gamer that it is an atypical game and is about immersion, not about ‘winning’. Therefore, this is a game that is entirely and utterly focused on the gamer’s experience. It for this reason that I’ve chosen to review this game in a ‘new journalism’ style – since failure to do so would fail to adequately express the single biggest success of the game, the suspension of reality. As Gillen (2004) says “What a gamer feels and thinks as this alien construct takes over all their sensory inputs is what’s interesting here, not just the mechanics of how it got there”. This is completely true of Amnesia: The Dark Descent since it sacrifices traditional game mechanics and instead relies almost exclusively on the gamer’s suspension of disbelief in order to invoke emotion and provide heavily scripted sensory experiences for the gamer. You simply cannot adequately describe this game to others without describing your personal experiences of this fantastical reality.

I love the horror genre. So it’s probably no surprise that I took to the indie developer Frictional Games’ latest survival horror video game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) with eager anticipation. Two of my personal all-time favorite gaming moments is playing through ‘The Cradle’ in Ion Storm’s Thief 3: Deadly Shadows (2004) and playing through ‘The Mansion’ in Troika Games’ Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (2004). However, while these scary moments in gaming history were very immersive and frightening, they were only individual levels of a larger game. While I was hopeful, I was initially skeptical that a developer would be able to sustain that kind of intensity, fear and suspense over the duration of an entire video game. I was wrong.

So very wrong!

The eight hours or so I spent playing this game, were probably the most frightening eight hours of my life. I say ‘eight or so’ very loosely because the reality was that I was usually only able to emotionally support playing this game in 1 or 2 hour blocks, before I was required to abandon the game for a time and change my pants. And the new panties probably had little flowers on them, because never before has a piece of fiction made me felt so much like a frightened little girl.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent puts the gamer inside the head of ‘Daniel’ a rather mysterious protagonist who unsurprisingly has suffered some kind of memory loss. After rather foolishly following a trail of blood (I generally make it a rule to avoid following trails of blood) you discover a note written by yourself telling you who you are, and that you apparently hate some guy called ‘Alexander’ and you must kill him. I was a little irritated that the note doesn’t explain why, but it was all the motivation I needed to hunt this guy down and take him out. What I soon discovered was that not only was something very dark going on in this mansion, but that I was involved in it (somehow) and that I wasn’t alone. It was clear that evil was afoot because opening drawers and cupboards often yielded loads of creepy stuff such as human remains and bondage and torture gear. Scattered around he place was remains of a journal that slowly reveals how you got tangled up in this mess in the first place. Eventually you discover that your role in this wasn’t entirely passive either. Oh, Awesome.

Just when I was starting to get used to discovering Alexander’s disturbing keepsakes, I heard an eerie sound behind me. I’d like to describe it for you but the truth is I only saw a kind of rapidly disappearing cloud of smoke. A few journal pages later describes a ‘shadow’ that’s apparently stalking me. Oh, Awesome.

Fortunately, the game was very kind to (on occasion) give me helpful hints along the way.

The problem is that it usually handed out these ‘captain hindsight’ hints after something had just mauled me to death.

As I solved the basic puzzles (which seemed to be more of a way to slow you down rather than try to make you think) it proceeded to get darker and darker, making Daniel go slowly insane. Sanity becomes important because the game is already creepy enough without the screen becoming blurry, the ground tilting beneath you, and imaginary bugs crawling over the screen. Fortunately you can increase the light levels by igniting candles and torches with tinderboxes you discover scattered about carelessly or by collecting oil (equally strewn about) for your lantern. However, I quickly realized that simply turning on all the lights is a mixed blessing. Sure you can get out of the darkness (which improves Daniel’s sanity) but it makes it far easier for the ‘others’ in the mansion to track you down. This is undesirable because a) they want to wear your head like a hat, and b) there is absolutely NO WAY for you to defend yourself. You end up trying to find a dark corner or a cupboard to hide in, which might keep you safe, but slowly sends you insane. Arhhh! So this is why I found myself spending long minutes huddled in a dark corner looking at the wall because I was simply too afraid to venture out.

But the game doesn’t rely on overt scare tactics. It’s far smarter than that. In actuality, upon reflection I realized that the actual monster encounters are very few and far between, but this didn’t really occur to me while I was playing. It’s actually the ever changing atmosphere that keeps you on edge, making you fearful of EVERY little detail, even rooms you’ve already explored are scary, because the game changes little details here and there and I needed to keep asking myself: “Did that look like that before?” The constantly changing mansion isn’t just for show either. Occasionally the stone walls of the mansion start growing some kind of organic material, which will hurt you (like everything else) if you get too close to it or stand on it.’

For someone trying to maintain some resemblance of sanity, finding dead bodies around the place doesn’t help.

While playing the game, things get progressively worse. Since the developers had already established the key ‘rules’ of this reality, they slowly increase the severity of the pre-established atmosphere. More strange sounds, more darkness, more traps, and more monsters (usually whenever you least expect them). This builds to the games pièce de résistance – the final pages of Daniel’s journal, flashbacks (via screen or audio cues, or simply text on the screen) and the discovery of the torture chambers.

I cannot think of a game that makes a better and more sophisticated use of audio and visual cues than Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I really felt as though I was living in some kind of lucid nightmare. I soon forgot about the protagonists name (Daniel) because I really began to think it was me! While the ending was mildly disappointing, this game isn’t about the end-goal, it’s about the immersion and its string psychological thrills. I suspect the developers didn’t bother with the ending too much because they were trying to make a game that was so scary that few people would actually make it that far! I cannot count the number of times I literally covered my eyes with my hands, peeking though a split in my fingers, my stomach in knots as my mind tried to make sense of why I would choose to endure such a unrelenting nightmare.

My only criticisms would be that the puzzles do feel a little ‘in the way’, instead of being a part of the overall story, and that the game lacks the ‘big reveal’ that is alluded to throughout the game. The finale with Alexander, felt hurried and underwhelming as it felt disjointed from the rest of the game and the game just kind of ends, quite abruptly. For a game that’s almost entirely about timing, the ending felt like a missed opportunity. However, given that the game isn’t an exercise in how quickly you can get to the finale, this is easily forgiven.

It might sound like a cliché but this game really will scare the pants off you.

My Score: 9/10

This post is a slightly modified version of a piece I wrote for a University assignment for the RMIT  University Subject: Computer Games, reviewing a game of my choice in either a traditional or new-journalism style.

See more from this unit.

Playing Day of the Tentacle…Again (with ScummVM)

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UPDATE: There is literally no reason anyone should or would do this anymore, since Double Fine already HD remastered this classic! Go buy it – NOW – http://store.steampowered.com/app/388210/


One of my favourite teenage memories is that of playing Day of the Tentacle on my old 386 PC. I still remember how much the art and animation (quite excellent for it’s day) impacted on me; and even at today’s standards I feel warm affection whenever I see old screen-shots of the LucasArts classic point-and-click adventure game.  Others prefer others, such as Monkey Island or the Original Sam & Max, but for me, the pinnacle of adventure game goodness was the time traveling story of how the 3 protagonists (Bernard, Hoagie, and Laverne) stop (evil) Purple Tentacle from taking over the world and enslaving humanity.

I’ve been wanting to replay this game for over a decade, but as operating systems advanced, it seemed like short of a re-make my wishes were likely to remain a fantasy.  Until I discovered ScummVM.  From the ScummVM website:

ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!

ScummVM supports many adventure games, including LucasArts SCUMM games (such as Monkey Island 1-3, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, …), many of Sierra’s AGI and SCI games (such as King’s Quest 1-6, Space Quest 1-5, …), Discworld 1 and 2, Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2, Beneath A Steel Sky, Lure of the Temptress, Broken Sword 1 and 2, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Gobliiins 1-3, The Legend of Kyrandia 1-3, many of Humongous Entertainment’s children’s SCUMM games (including Freddi Fish and Putt Putt games) and many more.

You can find a full list with details on which games are supported and how well on the compatibility page. ScummVM is continually improving, so check back often. Among the systems on which you can play those games are Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Dreamcast, PocketPC, PalmOS, AmigaOS, BeOS, OS/2, PSP, PS2, SymbianOS and many more…

But hands down the BEST news about this is that the ScummVM has binaries available to run on virtually every OS you can imagine (except iOS obviously, or at least, not to my knowledge) and the original DOS versions of all these original adventure games seems to run on any platform.  I’ve only tested this with Day of the Tentacle, but sure enough an ISO of the original DOS game, was simply copied to a folder on my Mac, and the ‘DOTT’ directory in that folder selected as the game folder for ScummVM which detected the game and added it to a list.  Form there, I just selected Day of the Tentacle from the list and hit ‘play’ – which launched right into the game, with sound and everything.

I did the same thing on my kids Windows 7 PC’s and it worked well, although I found that I needed to turn the subtitles and voices on, because the speech audio sample-rate is very low and occasionally difficult to understand.  But then the game is 18 years old and under 300Mb. The menu can be accessed in-game by pressing the F5 key, and the game paused with the space bar.

Other than that, its still as good as the day it was released and hopefully ScummVM will get me through my itch for this classic long enough until a possible remake comes along.  Let’s hope the rumors of a Telltale remake are true!

 

Games: At Work, No One Knows I am a Wizard

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A treant from World of Warcraft

There is still a strong social stigma attached to people who confess to regularly playing computer games in western culture. The lingering stereotype of gamers being solitary male teenagers with poor social skills persists, despite studies showing that the average gamer is 30 years old, and has over 30% chance of being female. The fledgling industry is now breaking into the mainstream, and the rise of casual and social gaming has turned the games industry into a $39 billion per year powerhouse of entertainment. In the next 12 months, this figure is expected to balloon into $55 billion per annum, which is a figure that will rival the international film industry and predicted that it will soon be the preferred and dominant form of entertainment.

The popularity and rise of recent casual and social gaming owes much thanks to the phenomenal success of the Nintendo Wii games console, who’s success is largely the result of it’s ability to not only break through the traditional image of the games industry but to transcend it entirely. The Wii made gaming accessible; making games a social experience anyone could enjoy (particularly families and the elderly) – opening up games to a new and untapped demographic . While not the sole reason, it was one instrumental in the rise of casual and social gaming, which in the past 12-24 months has become a seeming tidal wave of success.

There is a deep psychology to gaming that’s yet to be fully understood. Researchers have found that games provide “sense of freedom and connection to other” and this lets us explore ourselves, our friends, our families, but also complete strangers in way we could never do during a face-to-face interaction. Playing games, particularly online, gives us remarkable insight into other people free from typical social constraints, for example PlayStation’s Smash Up Derby allows users to drive classic motor cars, like the T-Bird; but also drive them at breakneck speeds into other users.

This combination of reality and fiction is deeply stimulating. It also allows us to validate and test our moral systems, since people can be exposed to morally questionable situations that would never arise organically in the real world. Studies also suggest that games make us smarter. Educational games such as Immune Attack (presented by the Federation of American Scientists) provide mental and social benefits to players. Unfortunately, there is also a cost. Games are highly validating, in that they provide a source of fun, thrill, competitiveness and this makes them very addictive; although there is a lack of formal diagnosis in current medical or psychological literature. Unfortunately, the number and frequency of deaths and illnesses resulting from online game addiction continue to grow.

While social and casual gaming can clearly enrich our lives and relationships, we must be mindful of the possible problems when taken in excess.


This post is a slightly modified version of a piece I wrote for a University assignment for the Curtin University Subject Internet Studies 102/502: The Internet and Everyday Life, answering the question: What are the implications of the rise of casual and social games on the internet for online gaming and everyday life?

See more from this unit.

Video games are clearly an entry drug

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I love the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC). They protect me and my family from developing expensive heroin and ice addictions; because everyone knows that video games are clearly a gateway to a life of violence and heavy drug use.

In the interest of protecting Australia from the ruthless thread of animated pixels, Fallout 3, is the most recent game to suffer the mighty wrath of the OFLC; being denied a rating, and thus effectively banning it in Australia. GameSpot AU, broke the news only a few days ago:

Rumours were swirling late last week that Australia’s strict games classification regime had struck its highest-profile victim for 2008, with Fallout 3 apparently being refused a rating. It seems the rumours were true, with confirmation coming tonight that Bethesda’s upcoming postapocalyptic action RPG has indeed been banned for sale in Australia.

So don’t worry folks. The temptation to inject yourself in the arm with someone else’s needle because you’re unable to tell the difference between a post-apocalyptic digital fantasy land and reality is now gone.

Initially the news was just an industry rumor, as it’s not the first time a video game has come under fire in Australia because our leaders lack the intelligence to add an R18+ rating for video games, despite the fact that other media has it. GameSpot AU later updated their post, confirming our fears:

Upcoming Bethesda game refused classification Down Under by ratings body; OFLC report confirms banning is due to showing positive effects of in-game drug use.

I think Jeremy from the An Onymous Lefty blog, sums it up perfectly:

Still, thank God the Board has been forced to apply the Government’s stupidly inconsistent legislation in such a ridiculous way to this major game – maybe this will finally prompt enough outrage from the industry that they will push harder for change. Perhaps this will be the final straw, and idiot SA Attorney General Michael Atkinson will no longer be able to prevent the other AGs from the common sense approach of treating games like any other media that adults enjoy, by implementing an R18 rating.

you can read the whole post here; I highly recommend reading it because its hilarious much like Michael Atkinson’s response to a constituent, arguing “That if you have an R18 classification system, children will get access to that material anyway.”
Perhaps someone should explain the interwebs to him?