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| Re: Rama Review, first version (fin) by Bill Dungsroman 07/22/2003, 2:42pm PDT | ||||
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| This Should Have Been A Text-Based Game Released About Fifteen Years Ago
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 and 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 rereading the series due to their inexcusable banality. Oh well, 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). And just like reading the entire series, expectations and enjoyment diminished over time rapidly. 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 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 character. Your mission is to simply explore and investigate Rama, and attempt to make contact with any aliens aboard, if possible. Was This Fucking Game Originally Made For The First-Gen Mac? Rama is played from a first-person perspective, through the Myst-y “slide show†style of barely-connected images that constitute the game world. That is tolerable enough, since first person adventure games are somewhat easier to get involved in, usually. What really sucks is that the game window is not resizable, so it’s always around 9 inches viewable, which is far too small. Add to that the actual viewing window is only about half that size owing to the obtrusive interface, so 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. And 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 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 these 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. However, there is one fucking “feature†in this game that makes me want to drag a straight razor across my eyeballs to purge my memory of it. One of the crewmembers, Richard Wakefield (one of the main characters in the novels), is a Shakespeare fanatic (how utterly fucking generic is it for a character in your novel to be a Shakespeare fan? Come on, Arthur), and built all these hard-to-believe little robots based on Shakespearian characters. So you get one of them as like a hint wizard, Falstaff. 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. What’s even cheesier is that when you first get Falstaff, as well as talk to the little Bottom robot, 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 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 while you faggot developers-to-be were arguing over who was better at Ms. Pac Man. (SS: R002. Caption: “To be, or…whatever. Who reads that boring shit? Sierra doesn’t.â€) Speaking Of Clowns In Stupid Costumes You get to interact with most of your crew via audio emails or in person. I will give this to the developers, they actually went and got actors who look a lot like Clark described them in his books. The acting isn’t all that bad actually; a far cry from A Fork In The Tale, for instance. They’ll pop out of nowhere occasionally, FMV actors in stupid jumpsuits awkwardly added into the game world, babbling at you about whatever while you naturally say nothing. They’re all over the place at the beginning of the game, then almost all but gone about halfway through, when you’re more or less on your own. Just you and that little fucker Falstaff, adding his shrill Renfag comments every so often. (SS: R003. Caption: “Mildly hot chicks with mediocre acting skills in dopey outfits. Game designers will never learn. At least she isn’t Kari Wuhrer.â€) Rama: The Littlest Big Ship In The Universe The game world in Rama is pathetically small. Any subsection of the game has maybe a dozen or so places to visit. This is really fucking annoying since the ship is supposed to be a large hollow cylinder, about a mile or so in diameter and several miles long. It rotates about its central axis, creating artificial gravity on its interior surface. That’s a neat idea, especially given how you’re supposed to see the ground curve up and away from you from where you’re standing. That grandeur is easier to appreciate in the books than it is through the fucking postage stamp you get to look through in the game. There is absolutely no sense of scale conveyed in Rama; you may as well be in a small outdoor area on some alien planet. Emphasis on small. Oh, there are plenty of places where it seems like you could go but you aren’t allowed to, so part of the game is trying to figure out where the stupid game is going to (seemingly) arbitrarily let you go. Many areas that you can go aren’t readily apparent, either. I found some vitally important areas nearly by accident, clicking on the screen and suddenly moving to a heretofore undiscovered “special†subsection of the area. It’s very disorienting and poorly done, and it also works against any feelings you might be trying to muster to become immersed in the game world. The first island in Myst wasn’t much smaller. (SS: R004. Caption: “You’re in a very large spaceship, with the ground curving up majestically away from you and over your head. Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?â€) This Game Sponsored By Texas Instruments 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), and I couldn’t find the last object I needed to activate it. It turns out that the last thing I needed was apparently some sort of alien pickle, which beyond being entirely non-intuitive was barely discernible in one of the game’s boring-ass areas, stuck there for no reason. That’s the second worst thing about the puzzles in this game: 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. So what you end up doing is half-solving several puzzles, wandering around frustrated because you can’t seem to solve any of them, and you can’t 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. And in the middle of the game, you have to wander between three nearly-identical plazas connected by a HAHAHA maze. As mentioned, the codependent nature of the puzzles is only the second worst aspect of them. The worst is later in the game, when you get to 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. While the notion of alien races having a base 6 or base 8 numbering system is somewhat interesting, it needs to stay in Clark’s books, not as an integral part to the game and as a basis for many of its puzzles. Fortunately, you can scribble down the puzzles and then just use the HEX or OCT functions in Windows Calculator to get the answers for them. But that’s still inexcusably fucking lame. (SS: R005. Caption: “That nondescript yellow thing is a puzzle piece. You get to try to solve that puzzle after you solve another puzzle with its own pieces, and do some math. This game is just head-explodingly fun!â€) Beyond the math, 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 a couple that require you to imitate sounds, which was my most hated puzzle type until this game threw fucking esoteric math at me. 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 Clark to include. In the game, it’s worse. I blew up more than Oprah trying to finish that part of the game. It’s An Okay Game, But How Can We Make It Longer? Certainly not by adding more story or game play, I can tell you that. You can whip through this game a second time with all the answers to the puzzles in a couple of hours. So, the usual artificial devices are used to lengthen playing time, such as the aforementioned overly-difficult puzzles, lots of running around in a highly-confusing game world, and a hideous inventory interface. But one gimmick is reprehensible above all others. You can die in several places in this game, which is fine. 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 Old Man Clark himself. He hobbles out on his cane and mumbles for a few minutes, and then you get to reload. There is no way to skip this scene. Dying is like a commercial break in the game: 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 Clark really need to whore himself that badly for this game? Actually I Lied, This Game Fucking Sucks. Forget this stupid game. You really really need to be a fan of Clark and the Rama series to even consider wasting your time with it. And having read the books doesn’t help much; the puzzles come out of nowhere. Beyond the pretty good music, it’s tragically boring, and there’s too much time spent wandering around the game world wondering if you have all the random items necessary to solve any of the puzzles. That’s probably the thing that ultimately kills this game: there’s no sense of where you should be or what you should be doing in it, there are just puzzles scattered about. You have no idea which one should be solved first, which one can be solved first for that matter. It took a lot of balls to try to make an adventure game based on a hard science fiction novel, yet it could have worked if they had done a few things different. Sierra decided to cop the fuck out and throw in every stupid adventure game convention in our post-Myst era, plus a couple of “original,†(and even worse) additions to the ever-growing canon of Shit We Don’t Want In An Adventure Game. Like MATH. |
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