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| Rama Review (fin) by Bill Dungsroman 07/21/2003, 4:30pm PDT | ||||
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| Rama Review – Interview With Arthur C. Clarke
Teaser: Bill takes venerable science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke to task for his awful whoremongering adventure game based on one of his worst books. I’m such a fruit. I nearly peed myself in sci-fi dork glee when they made a game 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. That and it was based on the second book, Rama II, not Rendezvous With Rama, which was the first and most interesting book of the series. The wonder and excitement of exploring an alien spacecraft diminished significantly in the second book, but not nearly as much as the bullshit third and fourth books, which automatically discourage the rereading of the entire series due to their inexcusable banality. I still liked the first two books and 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. In the first book, the arrival of Rama was a big surprise and the team chosen to explore it was from a ship that happened to be closest. In the second book, another (or the same?) Rama comes by and the planned scientist-military contingent is sent. The characters from Rama II appear in the game as well, along with your typical-for-adventure-games utterly nondescript mute main character. Your mission is to simply explore and investigate Rama, and attempt to make contact with any aliens aboard, if possible. (SS:Ra001. Caption: “Stick to writing, whore.â€) To get to the point, this game sucks. Bad. It’s a fucking mess, and Sierra manages to screw up every convention of an adventure game in making it. Clarke himself appears in the game, which looks like tacit approval at best to me. Someone needs to be held accountable for this shameless desecration of a subpar sci-fi series of which only the first book is any good, goddammit! Figuring that Clarke putting his digitized mug on the game is a seal of approval, I demanded an explanation for such bald-faced prostitution of his written works from the man himself. Our conversation follows. Be advised, Clarke’s rebuttals were collected over a period of several years, and often apply to something entirely different. But one thing’s clear – he’s embarrassed and contrite. BD: Arthur, why did you lend your license, name and face – entire crippled body, actually – to such a fucking sorry, perplexing, artificially long, jumbled mishmash of a game? What’s your fucking deal? ACC: “For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.†BD: Oh, are you referring to those quixotically cocksucking decent reviews Rama got at whoresites like Gamespot? Those people are morons; nobody liked this game. It’s impossible. ACC: “The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.†BD: Fuck, that’s the spirit! You have some spunk left in your withered husk of a mortal coil, it seems. Now, let’s address in what specific ways this game should have installed with a default directory to the Recycle Bin, shall we? ACC: “It is better to know the truth than dabble in illusions.†BD: That’s my boy. First, what possessed you – by you I mean you and the retards at Sierra; I’m using the royal you, or whatfuckingever – to make the game in a nonsizable dinky little window? 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 really playing the game 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. Even with an imposing interface the inventory screen is still far too small, a cardinal sin for an adventure game. You can only see six objects in your inventory at a time, and there is no real way to drop them. As such, you end up stuck lugging around a bunch of useless shit before you’re even halfway through the game, since several puzzles require the use of stupid puzzle pieces that act as a key if put together properly in the right place. We’ll get to how kidney-hemorrhagingly difficult and criminally unfun the puzzles are in a moment, Arthur, but what do you say to this awful interface and non-sizeable game screen? ACC: “Like most human errors, this one had been caused not by evil intentions, but by errors of judgment, misunderstandings…†BD: I get the picture. You don’t have to tell me game developers are fucking idiots, especially at Sierra. Overlooking or ignoring the fact that gamers might want to be able to size the game window larger than the default 6†x 8†is no surprise to anyone who’s played computer games for any length of time. Still, that interface is too big, no matter what size the game window is. You had to have seen at least a mock-up of this, so how do you justify such an annoying design decision? ACC: “Some electronic components are now so small that more time is spent looking for them than using them.†BD: Stop right there. Fuck you, Arthur. Jesus, a sci-fi writer with curmudgeonly opinions about modern technology? Did Ray Bradbury bequeath his title to you when he died? Regardless, the combination of 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 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. How do you feel about that? ACC: “The mind has an extraordinary ability to ‘see’ things that are hoped for.†BD: Tell that to John Romero. No one cares what your intentions were if they failed to become realized in the actual game, Arthur. Never mind, I’d like to talk for a moment what I personally found to be the single most annoying aspect of this game. One of the crewmembers, Richard Wakefield – one of the main characters from your novels – is a Shakespeare fanatic. How utterly fucking generic is it for a character in one of your novels to be a Shakespeare fan? Come on, Arthur. 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. ACC: “Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference. We should all be treated with appropriate respect.†BD: Yeah, that’s fine, except that when you play the game you don’t buy for one second they’re little robots. Christ Arthur, they’re 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, 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. Didn’t you, Mr. Big Time Writer Guy? Hmm? BD: “Few great men remain great when one gets up close to them.†ACC: Backsliding fuck, you’re already crumbling. Rick Flier was a tougher nut, and he helped make Trespasser. Fuck it, it’s time to go for the kill. Let’s talk about the puzzles. The puzzles in this game suck hot shit through a rusty mechanical heart valve. Nearly all of them are frustratingly difficult and/or abhorrently non-intuitive. They usually require some random object hidden away somewhere in the game world. Every time you visit a new screen in the game, you have to scour it meticulously, looking for anything that you might be able to pick up. I was stuck for I don’t know how long because I needed to work some alien machine that cleans the aforementioned puzzle pieces – nothing screams originality in an adventure game like puzzle pieces, Arthur – and I couldn’t find the last object I needed to activate it. It turned out that the last thing I needed was apparently some sort of alien fucking pickle, which beyond being entirely non-intuitive was barely discernible in one of the game’s boring-ass areas, stuck there for no reason. Were you deliberately trying to piss me off? ACC: “All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it.†BD: I’m trying to figure out which hand I want to slap you with. Rationalize this then: for most game areas, all the puzzles are really just one big fucking puzzle, and everything has to be done in a certain sequence, as one puzzle sets up the other. What you end up doing is half-solving several puzzles, wandering around frustrated because you can’t seem to solve any of them, and not being able to tell which ones you can solve or have to solve first. Not to mention a stupid fucking puzzle at the beginning of the game, where you fix some alien laser that happens to blow open a gate somewhere else, like you’d ever guess that’s what would happen. In the middle of the game, you have to wander between three nearly-identical plazas connected by a maze. A fucking maze, Arthur. What’s with these horrible non-intuitive sequential puzzles? ACC: “There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a long-desired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped towards new ends.†BD: What? Are you implying that you made the game a series of baffling puzzles that needlessly rely on solving them in order in order to limit the sense of accomplishment that comes from solving puzzles? On purpose, because you think it’s sad? Well, maybe I do too, but computer gaming as a whole is pretty pathetic. You needn’t remind us of it when we’re paying to play your game. What about the constant trudging around back and forth over the same confusing areas? ACC: “Space is what stops everything from happening in the same place.†BD: Oh, that’s deep. I read something that profound somewhere, too. It was scrawled under a public shithouse toilet paper dispenser: In case of nuclear attack, duck under this toilet – it hasn’t been hit yet. Still, that doesn’t explain why you made the puzzles so fucking hard. There are still several puzzles that you simply won’t be able to figure out, because they don’t make much fucking sense. There are two that require you to imitate sounds, which used to be my most hated puzzle type. Your game found one worse, which we’ll address in a moment. The game really fucking blows it at the end when you have to defuse a nuclear bomb on the ship. That bit pissed me off in the book due to its being horribly cliché and beneath you to include. In the game, it’s worse. I blew up more than Oprah trying to finish that part of the game. ACC: “The lives of men, and all their hopes and fears, were so little against the inconceivable immensities that they dared challenge.†BD: Look, real life makes me feel sufficiently inadequate; that’s why I play games, asshole. I don’t need a game to make me feel small. A porn film can do that. Look, I don’t give a shit anymore. You want to make a hard game to challenge my intellect, my sense of purpose and self-worth? Fine. But there’s one part of this game that’s simply inexcusable. That would be the parts of the game where you have to figure out ALIEN MATH to solve several puzzles. Yeah, nothing generates excitement, tension and intrigue like math, Arthur. While the notion of alien races having a base 6 or base 8 numbering system is somewhat interesting, it needs to stay in your fucking books, not as an integral part to the game and as a basis for many of its puzzles. ACC: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.†BD: Fuck you and your magic, Houdini; I just scribbled down the puzzles and then used the HEX or OCT functions in Windows Calculator to get the answers for them. That’s inexcusably fucking lame, and it makes me hate you when I didn’t use to, and it makes me hate Sierra more, but that’s actually okay. I can see you’re not budging on your opinion that esoteric arithmetic is fun and exciting and makes for gripping gameplay. You’re 100 years old, so maybe for you it is, I don’t know. In the early 1900’s, I suppose solving math problems was what kids did for fun since computers hadn’t been invented yet. Personally, I think you did it just to make the game seem longer. That’s not the only trick you used, either. You can whip through this game a second time with all the answers to the puzzles in a couple of hours, you know. The game has to take longer than that to justify its price though, so besides the aforementioned overly-difficult puzzles, you add in lots of running around in a confusing game world and saddle the player with a hideous inventory interface. However, one gimmick is reprehensible above all others. You can die in several places in this game, which is fine; I like adventure games that kill you. But when you die, you must sit through a long, boring lecture on not being a clumsy idiot by none other than a digitized FMV of you, Arthur C. Clarke, of all things. You hobble out on your cane and mumble for a few minutes, and then the game reloads. There is no way to skip this scene. Dying is like a commercial break: barely serviceable the first time you see it, utterly useless and annoying after that beyond an excuse to take a leak or get another Mountain Dew from the fridge. Did you really need to whore yourself that badly for this game, Arthur? Are you having money problems? Is it drugs? ACC: “Science fiction is the only genuine consciousness expanding drug.†BD: You’re avoiding the question, Arthur, in the gayest possible manner. Alright, you look a little flustered, so I’ll beg off that line of questioning. Actually, I think we ought to end this interview right here. Since we’ve established this game a pointless, stupid, boring, inaccessible waste of time, is there anything you would like to say in closing? Why, Arthur, did this game turn out so fucking horrible, when the books were pretty good, at least in the beginning? ACC: “The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seem to be.†BD: Amen to that, Arthur. Written any good books lately? |
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