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Jan 19th, 2007 at 02:02:28 - Katamari Damacy (PS2) |
First session.
Well, that was an entertaining opening. The kitsch-factor, however, feels a little disingenuous. The marketing and translation of the English version even may even be an attempt to cash in on America's fetishization of Japanese culture as a source of cheerful and weird media.
The premise is simple and novel: by guiding an orb that picks up objects, the player produces a snowball-effect that leads to quite large wad of junk. This wad must reach a certain size. Crashing into objects that are too large to pick up results in some junk falling off the wad. That's it!
The design is very innovative in several areas. The control-setup almost reinvents the PS2 controller by forcing players to use the dual analog sticks in a way that is unfamiliar to them. In order to roll your ball in a given direction, both control sticks must be aligned in that direction. Unfortunately, this leaves you with no stick to control the camera, which, quite frankly, can be a pain in the ass. By clicking both sticks you can change the angle by 180 degrees, but that's hardly the camera control you need to avoid frustrating situations.
The game has a dynamic sense of scope. A ball that consists of a few paper clips and walnut shells can grow big enough to pick up skyscrapers. When you are working on a small scale, the detail in the objects is fine enough to make out the labeling on a package. As you grow too large to appreciate such details, the game re-renders your environment to depict it on a different scale. This creates the illusion of a single mind-bogglingly intricate world when in fact it is a series of environments that blend seamlessly together. It also uses an extensive catalog of seemingly everyday objects to create the aesthetic of a virtual parallel (albeit surreal) world. The graphics wisely sacrifice complex shapes in order to support more polygonal clutter on screen.
The game's physics display a good amount of thought. A lopsided ball will have a bumpy trajectory. However, the exaggerated traction used to climb walls feels sloppy, as it seems completely random whether it will let you roll up some incline or smash your ball to bits as it repeatedly runs into some invisible gravity-barrier. Not so fun.
The levels have gradually been getting bigger and bigger in scale. In the first level I could scarcely pick up anything larger than a thumbtack. Things begin to get more exciting in later levels once I am able to pick up larger things. In fact, I just picked up my first human being! Funny how this game transcends such a blatant act of violence with its cheerful aesthetics.
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Jan 17th, 2007 at 01:53:02 - Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC) |
So, having played through the second portion of SCMRPG is just as amusing as I remember. And just as tedious as well. I spent over an hour fighting the same enemies over and over. As with the first part, this grind causes me to forget that I'm playing a Columbine game. The fact that I'm in Hell fighting the demons from "Doom" doesn't help much either.
There are multiple levels of irony to this part of the game. First of all, "Doom" the very game used as a scapegoat for the Columbine incident by reactionaries and censors, as it was the killers' favorite game. Secondly, as living out their favorite game, Eric and Dylan deem Hell a paradise.
The sequence begins with the player controlling Dylan after he awakes in Hell, which is a huge winding dungeon filled with hundreds and hundreds of dangerous enemies, and very little opportunity to restore HP. Eric is gone, as well as all of your handy items (with the exception of an extremely weak pistol and Nietzsche’s "Ecce Homo"). To make matters worse, the player must now face zombies and demons, which are naturally capable of dealing dozens of times the damage of the high school victims you face before. The only security the player has is the ability to save anywhere, anytime. In terms of level design, things have gone to unbearably easy to unbearably difficult. Morally speaking, perhaps it's a great deal easier, since the player isn't asked to kill human beings -- if you can think of 2d sprite characters with the proportions of smurfs as human.
However, after locating Eric, and several powerful weapons (not to mention leveling up a great deal) Hell became as tedious and unchallenging as the high school shooting, which I had long forgotten about.
When reaching the end of the Hell dungeon, the game is essentially over, and disintegrates into comic relief. Much like another pair of boys who visited Hell during a certain "Bogus Journey", Eric and Dylan take on the role of two irreverent, wisecracking children of the 90's, and any remaining pain and suffering awakened by the game's subject matter instantly begins to fade beneath the comic relief as Eric and Dylan converse with Nietzsche, who trades you devil's food cake -- later used by the boys to get on Satan's good side -- in exchange for his book.
Finally, Nietzsche directs the boys to Satan, who appears here as he does in South Park. The player must fight him, but he is fairly easy at this point, especially with the "BFG" weapon gained by this point. After defeating Satan, the final battle in the game, he sends you on a rather boring quest to find his Wiccan bible. At this point you are given a flying dragon to ride on, thus exempting you from random battles as you search Hell for the pages of the bible.
While searching for the book, I came across a hidden area of Hell called "The island of lost souls". This is a small area where you can interact with Hell's various celebrities, including Ronald Reagan, Bart Simpson, Mega Man, Mario, Pikachu, Darth Vader, and others. At this point, any scrap of seriousness clinging to this game goes out the window. Some game scholars consider this aspect of SCMRPG to detract from its integrity, but I consider it a powerful triumph over tragedy.
When you retrieve Satan's bible, he adopts the boys as his apprentices for eternity and the game ends with a cut scene that recreates the press-conference held outside the school after the shooting, with various people using the tragedy to advance their own agendas. One student gives a few unassuming words as a plea for sanity. And so the game ends, leaving the player to reflect upon the what really motivated the incident, hopefully having given the player a defamiliarizing experience to inspire deeper thinking on the subject.
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Jan 10th, 2007 at 22:41:04 - Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC) |
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jan 30th, 2007 at 02:41:43.
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Jan 10th, 2007 at 22:40:32 - Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC) |
Super Columbine Massacre RPG is a controversial recreation of the events of Columbine made by one man with the RPG Maker game-making suite. The game can be played for free at http://www.columbinegame.com/. I played the game last Spring and decided that it would be a good place to start for this assignment, since my favorite aspect of games is the cultural experience they provide. This game has gotten a pretty strong cultural reaction: the author has received countless death threats, baseless legal threats, and claims that he is the devil himself. This negative reaction has mostly come from people who haven't played the game, and probably think of all games as hyper-realistic simulated killing.
But this is neither realistic nor a first person shooter; this is a cartoony, old-school SNES style RPG (hence the "super" in the tile). With the exception of Eric and Dylan, people are represented by stock character sprites provided by RPG Maker that more look like characters from “Final Fantasy VI” than high school students. A character hit by a gunshot merely flashes and loses HP. The one thing you cannot say about the game is that it's realistic. Rather, it embraces the limitations and incongruities of its medium to create a Brechtian alienation effect that demands reflection from the player.
. The game opens with a historically accurate depiction of Eric and Dylan's preparations and then launches the player into their first challenge, in which they must set up explosives while avoiding detection. This "Metal Gear" inspired moment is tedious and requires dozens of attempts, resulting in a great deal of delay before any violence occurs. By forcing the player to endure this trial, the game succeeds in building suspense and resisting the label of a caterer of mindless bloodshed. SCMRPG occurs in two parts: the recreation of the massacre and a metaphysical second act in which Eric and Dylan have gone to hell must battle the demons from "Doom" (the game often blamed for influencing Eric and Dylan’s violent behavior), meet Nietzsche, and befriend Satan. Because this was my second time playing through, I knew that in order to survive the second act I had to level up as much as possible by killing every single teacher and student in Columbine before heading to the library and committing suicide. Leveling up is long and boring process, as the unarmed students provide little to no challenge.
The battle system consists of Eric and Dylan -- who are represented by a first person perspective, as with all battles in an RPG Maker game – gunning down a variety of enemies including jocks, preppy cheerleaders, nerds, and math-teachers, all of which fight with their bare hands in a futile effort. The battle system here replaces “magic” and “mp” with “weapons” and “ammo”, perhaps alluding to the quasi-spiritual obsession with guns in American culture. Unlike most RPGs in which battles occur randomly, the player initiates all the battles, making them the aggressor and properly representing the massacre for what it is.
Although leveling up is boring, it forces you to explore every room in the high school, triggering some interesting cutscenes and flashbacks which explore the psychology of Eric and Dylan and serves provides them with pathos in a refreshing change from the our society’s cowardly efforts to dehumanize the boys in order to escape responsibility.
Exploration is also necessary to find a copy of Nietzsche’s “Ecce Homo”, which will prove to be an essential item when you meet the author himself in hell.
Finally, after killing every victim in the school, the numbing monotony of turn-based combat had caused me to forget what this game was about in the first place. I headed to the library where I was presented with the option to commit suicide or keep killing. I opted for suicide, at which point I was provided with a pixelized slideshow of real photographs of grieving survivors and the bloody bodies of Eric and Dylan.
But just when you think the game is over, Eric and Dylan awake in the fiery pits of hell with a brand new challenge ahead of them! For the next entry I will guide Eric and Dylan through the underworld, where they will battle the demons of “Doom” and experience eternal bliss as they live out their favorite videogame, one of the many incongruously placed lighthearted twists of irony found in the second half.
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