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| Adventure Games Are Dead (unf) by Bill Dungsroman 07/21/2003, 4:16pm PDT | ||||
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| Adventure Games Are Dead. But What Killed Them?
Once upon a time, the adventure game genre flourished. Those of us old enough certainly remember. Time was, there were only two types of computer games available: arcade-type action games and text-based adventure games (or ones with horrific graphics). Time was, the Zork anthology reigned supreme as the quintessential adventure game (in a way, they still do, really). The genre progressed like any other gaming genre, and although it suffered its own ebb and flow as well, just within the past few years the death knell for adventure gaming as a genre began. Zork games typified the adventure gaming genre precisely: alone in a mysterious world, mostly devoid of life, with obvious objectives and devious puzzles. Quite certainly, nearly every adventure game made has followed that basic synopsis more or less: explore the game world, follow the storyline, and solve puzzles. How well a game presents those three aspects generally determines how good of an adventure game it is. Look at Zork I: even though it was a text-based game, the Great Underground Empire was still quite fully-realized, the puzzles were as organic to the story as you’ll ever see in an adventure game, and the story had its own charm in that exploration itself initially was the plot which culminated in outwitted a tricky thief in a pretty amusing way. To use a contemporary example, Grim Fandango (GF) easily nailed all three categories (with the minor glitch being that fucking timed elevator puzzle). But GF was a solitary blip on the adventure game radar, one that was mostly empty by that point. (STATS) Now, why is the genre all-but completely nonexistent at this point? What went wrong? Can it or will it ever be resurrected to even near its former glory? Story Story is pretty important for adventure games, probably more than it is for any other genre. A good story helps make any game better, but adventure games really rely on a good plot to set up the whole thing. “This Door Is Locked.†Exploring the game world is supposed to be one of the best parts of many genres of games, but none more so than adventure games. It’s easily as important as puzzle construction and story on my Axis of Gay (see diagram). There’s a reason you can still go play those old text-based adventure games even today, if you’re so inclined, and you’ll still probably enjoy them. It’s just like reading a good book; in fact, it isn’t much different. A good chunk of descriptive text is all the player needs to imagine the world. Clunky graphics aren’t required, or even desired. There are plenty of reasons to hate the King’s Quest games (and their creator, Roberta Williams), but I personally didn’t like them when they came out because the graphics were shitty. And not shitty in that “Wow, look at that pixellated crap compared to Grim Fandango,†but shitty like “Ugh, these graphics suck. My mom gave me my allowance, let’s go to 7-11 and play Tapper.†That is, the graphics sucked to me back then when I first saw them. I’d rather play – and re-play – Zork and Suspended and everything else in Infocom’s repertoire than suffer through those simple, blocky, abstract shapes meandering across the screen. Who cares? Listen, revile Myst as you will for its slide-show pedantry, but at least those slides were nice to look at (Myst sucked for other reasons). As a side note, Myst certainly made the slide-show format unbearably popular, but it didn’t invent it. I recall playing a boring game on the C64 called The Pawn, which had the same style and proudly boasted it’s super-duper realistic slidesgraphics. The actual graphical presentation of the game world is only the beginning. There is also how the game world is arranged, and how the game has been designed to allow you to interact with it. As with virtually every game genre, interface is absolutely key. How many games have been severely marred or outright ruined by a shitty interface? Too many. Let’s look at two recent adventure games, Rama and Azrael’s Tear (AT), for examples of how a shitty interface can ruin an adventure game as easily as any other type. Let’s look at Rama first. Now, I had every intention of liking this game when it came out a few years ago. Based on Arthur C. “After 2001, I Pretty Much Ran Out Of Ideas†Clark’s Rama series (with an assist by Gentry Lee), a middling hard sci-fi series that started good but only got shittier with each iteration (the fact that Rama the game was made by Sierra only slightly detracted from that glee). I just had to play the game, as ripe for adaptation as they were (at least in terms of their theme). For those unfamiliar with the story, in the near future an alien spacecraft, quite large but apparently unmanned, wanders into our solar system on a trajectory curiously (and uncomfortably) close to Earth. A team of scientists paired with some high-ranking military officers is sent out to investigate, both to explore and attempt to make contact with the alien race and determine their intentions. Your mission is to simply explore and investigate Rama, and attempt to make contact with any aliens aboard, if possible. As I said, a pretty good story, but story was not where Rama went wrong. We’ll start with the interface, since the problems with it are evident the moment you start the game. Rama plays in a non-sizable dinky little window, about 7 by 9 inches. Put that on your 21†viewable flat-screen monitor, Chumley. You can’t play this game on anything larger than a first-generation Mac without a large black border around the game window. Add to that the actual viewing area is only about half that size owing to the obtrusive interface, and you’re at the game world through a viewable window the size of a large index card surrounded by a bunch of oversize tabs and buttons. It’s like you’re playing the game inside a fucking deep-sea explorer, and it really ruins the immersion factor. What’s worse, even with an imposing interface the inventory screen is still far too small, a cardinal sin for an adventure game. It doesn’t pop up (like any inventory screen that doesn’t suck does), so you can only see six objects in your inventory at a time. There is no way to drop them unless they get used, and a lot of items never get used. As such, you end up stuck lugging around a bunch of useless shit before you’re even halfway through the game, since several puzzles in the beginning require the use of stupid puzzle pieces that act as a key if put together properly in the right place. Again, hate Myst as you will, but those slide shows were practically free of all distraction, which I maintain is and always will be the optimum interface for an adventure game. AT had its own interface problems. AT is a first-person action/adventure game that is short on adventure and nearly in absentia with action, but that action component is a big reason why its interface is FUBAR (as a side note, I love how gaming convention demands that an adventure game with “action†elements be dubbed so; I guess only small children, retarded people and computer gamers can have adventures without any action). The title evidently is a metaphor for something, but it beats me what the hell it is, since the objective of the game is to go back in time (from the future, even) and steal the Holy Grail, which I’ve never heard called Azrael’s Tear. Because Azrael is the Angel of Death and the Grail preserves life? I know jack shit about Christian theology so it’s lost on me, but I can’t imagine it’s very clever if some idiot game developer thought of it. In the game you play a thief – excuse me, Raptor – from the future that uses some bullshit technology to travel back into the past and steal the Grail. All that you get out of your futuristic equipment is a throwaway rationale for time travel and a shitty bulky game interface they cleverly call your “HUD.†You can look at shit and your built-in tricorder or whatever analyzes it and gives you a sentence or two of pointless exposition about it. Usually, its telling you a door is locked when you’re standing in front of a door that won’t open and makes a clicky sound when you try to open it. A blithering idiot would figure the door was locked at that point, but thanks for the hint anyway. Because of the terrible controls, simply walking and performing any other action is apparently unbelievably difficult. How does holding down the right mouse button just to look around sound? How about having to hold down the right mouse button and hold down the left mouse button just to move? I hope you have a big mouse pad, because you’ll be zinging your mouse off the edge of your desk trying to move around in AT. I’d love to see this interface modded for Unreal Tournament or something, and just sit there and watch dozens of players careen wildly about in drunken circles, plowing into walls and hitting nothing except by accident, and getting killed because they have to stop and stand completely still to shoot their weapons (or is that how UT plays anyway?). Oh yeah, and you need to hit the Shift key to run, and the Space Bar to toggle between normal and combat modes (like you really fucking needed two different modes, but hey, this game is an action/adventure game). I kept mixing the keys up, so I’d try to run and accidentally enter combat mode or vice-versa. Not that it mattered much, since this game is boring and moves at a crippled snail’s pace most of the time. The game world construction itself sucks in both games as well. In Rama, the combination of a small game window and large interface ruins any chance the gamer has of feeling like he’s exploring the interior of a gigantic spaceship. The game is presented in a Myst-alike slideshow, but the immersion you got from Myst and its unobtrusively-interfaced clones are far and away better than in Rama. The coolest thing about the books was imagining the sweeping grandeur of Rama’s interior, curving up and away majestically until you can look up and see, a mile or so above you, the floor extended all the way around. In the game, it just feels like your nowhere special; sometimes outside, sometimes inside even when you’re supposed to still be outside. Rama should have been released by Infocom several years ago as a text-based game. The majestic interior of Rama works a hell of a lot better inside your own head than on a dinky little game window. Ooh, breathtaking. Another awful part of the game design is analogous to AT’s lame HUD analyzer doohickey. One of the crewmembers, Richard Wakefield – one of the main characters from the novels – is a Shakespeare fanatic. How utterly fucking generic is it for a character in one of a novel to be a Shakespeare fan? Come on. Anyway, Wakefield built all these hard-to-believe little robots based on Shakespearian characters, and you get one of them – Falstaff – as like a hint wizard. Since this game boils down to bits where you’re either staring at the screen trying to figure out what the fuck you should do or mindlessly running around, Hamlet would have been a better choice. Either way, Falstaff has the worst voice acting of the bunch, and his comments make you want to throw him to the ground and stomp his little plastic guts out. The robots were stupid in the novels, and they’re worse in the game. When you play the game, you don’t buy for one second they’re little robots; they’re obviously (painfully so) just actors in reject renaissance fair costumes shrunk down. Land of the Lost meets outer space adventure game, great. Worse yet, Falstaff quotes Shakespeare wrong, just like every other idiot does. It isn’t “Discretion is the better part of valor,†you fucking illiterate jerkoff game developer, it’s “The better part of valour is discretion.†Make sure you pronounce the “u†in valour, too. I’m no Shakespeare nut, but I did pay attention during my English Lit class, another place where mildly exciting works of literature were rendered mind-numblingly tedious all to the tune of some droning clod telling me what to do. In AT, the game is sort of divided up into subsections so that you’ll find yourself backtracking endlessly over the same boring-ass hallways and rooms, the proverbial lead weight of most adventure, role-playing, and action games. For added fun, it’s a virtual guarantee that every fucking door you’ll come across will be locked and will stay locked for awhile. Most of the doors you see in the beginning of the game won’t be unlocked until about halfway through. You’ll eventually open them from the other side, and your excitement at entering a new area will drain away as you realize you’re back in that stupid room with the narrow wooden floorboards again. All of your futuristic equipment CAN’T GET YOU THROUGH A LOCKED FUCKING WOODEN DOOR, but your HUD can helpfully tell you it’s made of wood. And that it’s locked. What’s worse, some areas of the game are nothing but retarded filler places that serve no purpose. Imagine an important-looking gigantic hive-like foresty thing that is utterly and completely pointless from a gameplay perspective, as it turns out. I wasted who knows how long in there, looking for whatever the hell it was I thought I was supposed to find or do. (SS: AT004. Caption: “Here’s a room in Azreal’s Tear that you will walk through about a billion times. If you fall off the narrow boards you will immediately drown. That door? Locked.â€) In terms of the actual game world of AT, I find it very fucking hard to believe those Templar Knights built that place, a jumbled mishmash of Middle-Age architecture, some pretty contemporary looking stuff (like the electronic mining equipment) and some highly improbable shit like giant moving rock platforms. One of these guys is so dumb he blew his own head off mixing gunpowder, are you trying to tell me they put this joint together? What, did Jesus help? I heard he was a pretty good carpenter. (SS: AT005. Caption: “One of the many weird puzzles in AT. Below is some kind of Crusades-era prayer room. Bottom left are mechanical controls. Who the hell built this place?â€) |
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