It’s been a while indeed, as normally happens when life comes at you fast. Things have changed a lot here, and my time for games has been massively reduced – though this has had the side effect of making me slightly more interested in mobile games. When you have little time, you want to play in small sessions.
Candies ‘n’ Curses: this took a very long time. My proudest moment.
Among other things, I have very slow internet in this house, which kinda puts a dampen on my addiction to benchmarks. It takes around two hours to download a 25GB game, and my browsing is very slow in the meanwhile, so of course I gravitate more towards mobile games while bigger ones are downloading.
Subway Surfers: this also took a very long time. Not necessarily my proudest moment.
Still, the downloads eventually finish. And one of them was the Immortals of Aveum demo. Aside from having the most facepalm-worthy name of the century, it’s notable for two things: it supports FSR3 (which by the way is somewhat underwhelming – it does increase the maximum framerate, but the minimum doesn’t seem to change much, and the extra lag is quite noticeable to me… I guess it only works well with 60+ FPS games in the first place). And it has a peculiar method of quantifying your GPU’s power budget: with a single number.
Left number is the required GPU power, right one is the available power, specs be damned. That’s my RX 6600 XT by the way.
In fairness, maybe it’s not so peculiar. After all, our very basic method of quantifying a GPU’s power in Teraflops is effectively the same thing. And I suppose it’s still a little more interesting than games where all you get is the required VRAM. Then again, this game won’t tell you that, so… win some, lose some.
And that’s my GTX 1650 laptop, which is apparently six times slower. I wonder how that number is calculated.
I don’t think it’s very useful regardless, because it doesn’t change depending on the chosen resolution. I guess the game thinks my power budget is the same, no matter if I chose 4K or 320×240? And in the end, my GTX 1650 was still running the game decently… somehow… ok, that’s a very generous take on the results. But they weren’t nearly as bad as the above numbers would imply (ah, the power of 720p and FSR Performance).
I guess after all, the best way to make sure a game runs well is to simply run it yourself… and hope for the best.
720p with FSR Performance means a base resolution of 640×360, meaning I was running old Windows 95 games at higher resolutions. It still doesn’t make Requiem: Avenging Angel any good… but at least it looks sharp.
Lightfall is upon us, inevitable server issues notwithstanding, and while waiting for Destiny 2 to occupy my days once more, I’ve used the last week to replay an unsung gem of the late 90s: Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. Unfairly maligned in its day for not being an adventure like Fate of Atlantis, it is nonetheless a great game that showed that developers at Lucasarts weren’t content with any old licensed drivel. And to be honest, I could spend days just gushing over the environments.
Sophia using her divination skills to read 75 years into the future.
The old Tomb Raider, celebrated as it may have been, I’ve always found drab and lifeless. Okay, maybe lifeless is right, you were raiding tombs after all. But surely Lara Croft herself would get tired of the same old brown and grey eventually. The sequels would introduce a bit more color and variation, but ultimately the palette always strived for a sort of realism, well, as realistic as you could get with people transformed into dragons by old daggers anyway. Venice (despite completing TR1, that was as far as I could get in TR2 before giving up) wasn’t a carnival of 256 colors, it was about what you’d expect from old stone and bricks.
Someone once said that, if you are going to stare at someone’s back for 60 hours, it might as well be a nice-looking girl (let’s not get too specific). The origins of this phrase are lost to time, though some say it dates back to a PVP Online strip from 2004. Personally, I’m more surprised that someone would need 60 hours to complete a Tomb Raider game.
However, Indiana Jones famously doesn’t believe in the supernatural, hence he’s not bound by such wild concepts as realism. And it shows in the colors of the places he visits throughout his adventure. Lava is a searing reddish hue, and the vapors are as ambient temperature as you’d expect from a Hollywood-inspired videogame. Sand is not vaguely beige, but a most brilliant mix of yellow and orange. Water is not just transparent like in real life, but a torrent of azure. With colors like these, who needs realism?
Irregular shapes come together to inform the level design. I love it.
The Infernal Machine was mockingly called a Tomb Raider clone back then. Perhaps it is so, though I’d argue that Lara Croft was directly inspired by Indy, so it’s merely a full circle. You gotta wonder where the circle goes now, since the new Tomb Raider has been inspired by Uncharted instead… what will the upcoming Indiana Jones game do this time? Clone Uncharted as well? It might, and perhaps it won’t be so bad.
Cue scene of Indy driving in the desert for three days. Well, as long as he had water.
Clones have always had a bad reputation in games. Remember the “Doom clones” of its era? Following a leader denotes a lack of originality on your own part, or so goes the idea. But some of the best games around have been directly inspired by other, perhaps more famous titles. I’ve already said that I think Infernal Machine is better than the Tomb Raider games it so obviously copied, but there are so many other cases where a clone can stand perfectly well on its own. Resident Evil is sci-fi Alone in the Dark with zombies. Serious Sam is Doom with more enemies and an adventure setting.
Rhem 1 is basically a harder Myst, and it succeeds because of that. Maybe the sequel copied Riven instead, because it sure was a whole lot harder.
The idea, I guess, is that a clone will need to have at least some element of differentiation, and so will usually introduce a gimmick. When we are lucky, this one different element is what wins the day. Unfortunately the rise of mobile gaming seems to have given birth to an entirely different idea of clone, one where games are exactly always the same. There is only so much you can do with the match-3 formula, I guess.
After finishing the game, I’ve now started Jedi Fallen Order. Because cloning Uncharted is not enough, you gotta clone Dark Souls too.
Even if the new Indiana Jones game ends up being another riff on Uncharted, I have faith that it could stand well on its own. Sometimes, as Henry Jones said, you must believe.
Oh man, almost a year since my previous post. In my defense, things have been quite hectic in the past eleven months. Lots of stuff happened, and I’m now looking at a complete change of life within the next three months. That’s quite something, and more than I could have hoped for even just a year ago. I consider myself lucky overall. Of course, luck only comes to those who made the effort to call for it. Best not forget that. People too often tend to minimize their own achievements.
Maybe not quite as severe a change of life as being resurrected as a wraith to enact vengeance on your old master and executioner. But… almost there.
I guess I don’t have much to say this time, I just wanted to update the blog. But now I’m here, might as well find something to say. So, for example, due to having to move around, I’ve become the owner of an Acer Swift X with Ryzen 5500U and GTX 1650. It… isn’t a great combo. The Ryzen is a little too slow to get to a stable 60fps in modern games, and the GTX is a mere 35W model, so yeah. The 8GB of soldered RAM don’t help any. Kids, remember to buy a laptop with upgradeable memory, or at least one that comes with 16GB in the first place. Still, I’m the one who wanted a thin-and-light that could play games fairly well for a low price. Shoot for the moon, as they say.
Nobody will complain even if there are some jaggies, and even performance isn’t all that. What matters is that I’m ready for Lightfall when it comes out.
Can’t complain too much though. As a whole, this notebook has served me well enough. Destiny 2 runs well as long as you can suffer some framerate uncertainty in heavy scenes, as well as truly unstable performance in PvP. Not that I care, the Crucible has been stuck in a rut for ages anyway. Other than that, the CPU and GPU are generally enough to run Xbox One games at 60fps… at the same settings and resolution, if the original was a stable 30fps and the port is good. So I’m afraid for Elden Ring and some other games I had to keep to 30fps instead. Doing that, however, usually lets you set 1080p and high details. Having all that extra power is very nice indeed.
Ok game, look at me for a moment. I may be below minimum specs, but I can run the benchmark at 1080p medium, at 96fps with lows of 84fps. Got anything to add?
Aside from the RAM struggle, VRAM also tends to be somewhat of a problem nowadays. Frankly, 4GB isn’t quite enough in recent titles. And keep in mind Windows 11 really wants some memory for itself, so it’s more like 3.3GB available. Deathloop takes a minimum of 4.6GB and it shows with stutter at random times, even when playing at 720p and low details. Darktide is more or less out of my league. I was surprised to find that even the new Lego Star Wars can’t keep a stable 60fps no matter what. You’d think the CPU would be able to do better there.
Not terribly excited about that red text. It’s usually not a good color to see. Did you know that in DX12 you can only have 90% of 90% of your card’s total memory? Sucks, yeah.
It’s a 35W card, which would technically be a Max-Q, but since Nvidia doesn’t make those anymore, they just call it a GTX 1650. Apparently it just keeps its clocks as low as needed to stay within the power budget. The overlay shows a maximum of 1740mhz, which sure is too high to be real. The actual performance is lower than the average GTX 1650 by a good 15%. More realistically, GPU-Z says it runs at 990mhz and can boost up to 1155mhz. That sounds more like it, if you ask me. Now, 3DMark 06 actually does a decent job here, since it gives me fillrates of 38GT/s in single texturing and 58GT/s in multi texturing, quite close to what you’d expect from 32 ROPs running, I want to say, in boost clock… and 56 TMUs running in base clock maybe? Performance is respectable still. Much better than the integrated Vega 7 for sure.
The main attraction. The device ID corresponds to a Max-Q. Make of that what you will.
The side show. Pretty bad, yet we have come a long way since my old Radeon Xpress 200.
Borderlands 3 gives us a vague idea of how things stand between the GTX and the Vega. Obviously, the 1650 is bottlenecked hard at low resolution and details, but you get a feeling of their respective powers, and it ain’t a pretty comparison.
Of course, such tests are kinda pointless. We are talking about a sixteen years old benchmark, whereas modern 3DMark says my GPU clock is closer to 1450mhz. A bit harder to believe though. Anyway, I would like to try 3DMark 06 on the old netbook, to find out if it really does have 12 TMUs. And given that I’ll be free until my upcoming change of life, I should have time for that. For now at least, I can enjoy life, free of worries for a few weeks. After eleven difficult months, there’s so much I need to catch up to. Books, games, you name it. Just not Elden Ring though, I already took care of that.
In other words, I can’t afford to be too lazy. Even if being lazy sure feels nice sometimes.
At the time of writing, the world is going crazy for Elden Ring. I’m sure that, at some point, I’ll be picking it up too eventally (I have my reason for not buying it yet, some of which may or may not be related to the fact that I’m a cheapskate). Until then, I decided to try my hands at From Software’s older and lesser known output, specifically Eternal Ring and Shadow Tower. I’ll spare you my opinion on those games at the moment, they may yet end up in another blog post. Instead, I wanted to rant a bit about what I see as a point of difference between Japan and the West in the 90’s: the technology, especially for adventure games.
Games from the nineties tend to be vastly different depending on which side of the ocean you are looking at. America and Europe were quite big on PC games, and both Sierra (before) and Lucasarts (after) influenced many a developers. But perhaps neither were as big as Myst, which went on to become a massive success story, and spawned an entire subtype of Myst clones – a genre that still goes on today, though usually not with static screens anymore. I’m guessing a 3D game is actually easier nowadays than one with 360 degrees panorama points. Not that those don’t exist anymore, look for example at Darkling Room’s Ghost Vigil.
The average Myst clone, much like the average Souls clone, always made a few mistakes that the original did not. Lighthouse really screws up in highlighting hotspots.
Japan was probably bigger on consoles, and not so big on PC games. As a result, when the PS1 and Saturn came out, it was a race to utilize their amazing new 3D capabilities. Since we are still in the topic of From Software, who can forget King’s Field? That was more of an RPG… eventually, however, adventures started appearing too. My usual favorites: Echo Night, Iblard, Enemy Zero. All of them presented in true 3D.
I really just wanted to reuse this gif.
The distinction between both types of graphical approach here is quite obvious. Games like The 7th Guest and Myst looked impressive, but they were clearly static. Press the mouse, move to the next hotspot. Echo Night, on the other hand, is in 3D and gives you total freedom, but it sure looks very rough in comparison. This distinction doesn’t just stop at adventure games, either.
Okay, so maybe The Dark Eye could have been done in 3D too. I doubt it would have looked as interesting though. At least, not with the available texture memory of the PS1.
I’m thinking that the reason for this is due to both different influences and different hardware. As I said before, the Western market was fairly big on PCs. And until the arrival of graphics accelerators, PCs weren’t all that good at 3D stuff. Mind, they weren’t all that good at fast-paced 2D stuff either (rough deal, uh?). This might have been part of the reason for the massive number of Eye of the Beholder clones out there, even when Japanese developers were starting to deal with true 3D dungeons. Mind, you could argue that Ultima Underworld did it even earlier – but that game was a system hog, and later Wolfenstein 3D and especially Doom found far bigger success on computers. It’s possible, then, that developers started seeing faux-3D styles to be more useful for fast-paced shooters and their ilk, though Might and Magic and Elder Scrolls at least eventually did the same for RPGs. Rare examples of 3D adventures from the era (Normality?) have remained mere curiosities. Plus, it wasn’t even real 3D. For that, the earliest game that comes to my mind is realMyst, released in 2000. Quite a long time to wait.
Betrayal at Krondor tried to be more 3D-ish. Looked a bit weird, actually.
I mentioned Myst. Of course, a bunch of static images must have been a lot easier to handle than anything in real 3D – and they looked a lot better too. If you consider the level of true 3D graphics throughout the years, it would take a very, very long time before anyone made anything as good-looking as Riven. And when you also consider the massive success of Myst, it’s no surprise that everyone and their grandmas adopted the same style.
Myst clones were common in edutainment too, such as Opera Fatal here.
Lucasarts and Sierra games were a big deal in the 80’s, and partly through the early 90’s too. Again, another reason to avoid 3D backgrounds. I suspect the success of Alone in the Dark may also be responsible – as developers noticed that fusing 2D backgrounds with 3D models allowed for more details in the formers, and… well, more details in the latters too, since the CPU didn’t have to share its polygons budget with anything else. A character is more dynamic than a background, of course, so the method was viable. And Lucasarts eventually proved that it could be used in pure graphical adventures too. In Japan, Capcom and Square took the same approach for Resident Evil and Final Fantasy, and we all know how successful they were. However, even with the occasional Clock Tower, you were still more likely to find a 3D adventure there.
I’m just going to assume it’s not okay.
Unfortunately, I’m not as familiar with what was popular in Japan in those years. It would be interesting to find out more. Visual novels were probably fairly big, while I don’t think Myst clones ever made a huge splash there, though they did have some games like that, with System Sacom adopting the style widely in their portfolio. Mansion of Hidden Souls and Lunacy were effectively the same, though their interface was adapted for consoles. But that type of adventure works better when you aren’t talking to many NPCs… basically the opposite of visual novels.
I kinda wish Mansion of Hidden Souls had been made on PC, if only so the color palette wouldn’t be murder on the eyes.
I also don’t think interactive fiction was ever big in the Japanese market, possibly due to the complexity of the grammar, which would have made the parser a nightmare. Zork 1 did manage to make it work, just barely. It’s a bit of a slog to play though. This might have been a reason why adventures with menus and multiple choices were more popular.
Maybe they were lucky to be spared the terror that was Beyond Zork.
I can’t even tell for sure when the two sides started to converge. In a way, they were never that separated. But at some point, the differences started to disappear. Maybe around the time when full 3D became more convenient than 2D for just about everything, so… the early 360 era? Incidentally, the western adventure market “died” and remained dormat for a while. By the time it reappeared, graphics had already become a lot better.
And at this point, it should be well possible to get a realRiven that looks better than the original. Anyone thinking about it?
I’ve never made a game (ok, I did dabble in Adventure Game Studio for a bit, but I’ll spare you the horror). If I ever made one, I think one of my questions would be… how do I tell people what can be interacted with?
This seems like a silly question, but knowing how to comunicate with the players can’t have always been easy. In the earliest days it was perhaps entirely unnecessary: here’s a line of aliens, shoot them all. But as new genres were introduced, especially adventure games, things got complicated. Sure it would have been nice if you could have used everything to do anything. But I’m afraid it wasn’t a time for Scribblenauts yet. So you had to somehow tell people what they could grab and what was nailed in place!
Ah, my favorite characters from The Hobbit: Gandalf, Thorin, and The Wooden Chest.
The earliest text adventures might have found their solution, but it was kinda conspicuous to tell people: “you are in a room. There’s all sorts of stuff in here. By the way, look at that piece of garlic on the table”. It makes sense, but why would your character’s eyes fall on the piece of garlic in particular? Maybe he’s hungry. As descriptions in adventure games got a little more flowerish, especially from Infocom, they also got a little better at hiding this practice. But in the end, you do what you gotta do. Things just had to wait until graphics arrived.
Excuse me if this super important key is the same color as the ground, we are working with 16 colors here. Besides, you might as well give up with all those enemies. Cauldron didn’t pull any punches.
Even so, for a while, I don’t think it was all that important to tell players what was interactive. After all, if you could see it, there were probably two results: either it was bad and you’d die upon touching it, or it was good and you needed to walk over it and get it. Whichever it was, people could (usually) tell by themselves. And if not, well, trial and error always worked.
Adventure games were once again out of luck, as the amount of details in the picture increased. Surely that flower pot is interactive? Nope. And that statue? Neither. But at least in Scumm games there was one concession: interactive items had a small description appear in the interface. At least you were able to finally work out somehow that the hamster could go in the microwave oven. That is probably one of the earliest forms of highlighting. It also resulted in a lot of pixel hunting. Wish they had thought about that.
A shovel from a sign. Right out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, that.
This wasn’t always possible, especially after The 7th Guest and Myst showed the world what you could do without, erm, much of an inventory or even HUD. Aside from underground mazes, I mean. Once again the problem was telling players what could be clicked safely. Why, that was easy: since it needs to be clicked, your cursor has to go upon it. So just change the shape of the cursor! Not you, Lighthouse. For some reason you didn’t wanna do this and I hate you.
When you are passing above an interactive object in Zork Nemesis, the cursor goes from yellow to… a different shade of yellow. Hope you are good with colors.
All of this is well and dandy with 2D. But what about 3D? No mouse means you have to find other ways. Well, the earliest 3D games perhaps didn’t need to: for example, in Alone in the Dark, you can be pretty sure that if something is in 3D, it can be interacted with. So that’s one way to do it. Just use common sense there. Although this wasn’t always so. I wonder how many people noticed the books hidden in the library background.
Yes, you can interact with the toy horse too. It’s spooky.
JRPGs have their own way of dealing with things. They still do today, for the most part. Vivi is puzzled, but at least we are not.
But one day, 3D just had to become ubiquitous. Now eveything was 3D. How do you deal with that? If everything is a model, what should the players check? And, as the amount of details increased, the issue just became bigger. This is the problem we face today: in a world full of details, what are the important details?
There have been a number of solutions so far. Here are some of the most common.
The techniques adopted by early 3D games are still valid today. Echo Night really wants you to know that you could look at highlighted stuff, and I mean literally highlighted. Too bad it did that with just about everything. Oh well.
When you are out of ideas, just have a button prompt appear on the screen. Can’t go wrong with that. Although in some cases it feels a bit patronizing. I could have probably told the big lone signpost stone was important by myself.
Let’s see now… that revolving item with sparkles coming out of it looks useful. And it is indeed, although a measly 1 armor doesn’t do much. But everything helps in Serious Sam.
A red outline for a health item. Did you know that in many shooters, red is both the color of health items but also of explosive barrels? Life and death in a single color. How peculiar, that.
Nowadays, the most common methods used are the highlight, the outline, and the button prompt (the revolving item style has mostly fallen in disuse as games strive for slightly more realism). I can’t quite tell which is the most elegant solution. Highlighted items can be kind of jarring in a dark, moody, survival horror game. And might be unnoticeable in a well lit game. Button prompts don’t help until you are very close to the item in question, besides nobody likes seeing half the screen covered. Flashing outlines, maybe? They are probably my favorite, although this might be just my Serious Sam bias speaking. But even I find them distracting sometimes.
Maybe there’s a better solution out there. After all, games have tried everything, not just the methods I’ve mentioned here. Manny in Grim Fandango tilted his head to any object that could be used or observed (but nobody liked this system). In Lunacy, you just press forward everywhere, and if it does something, good for you. The detective in 2Dark automatically uses any object in range. Not sure that’s very comfortable. Anyway, I know there must be other games out there that did their own thing. If you know of any other examples, drop me a line in the comments.
Who knows, maybe it won’t even be important anymore in the future. Maybe games will be streamlined to the point where the characters will just do whatever they need to do in cutscenes. And if that happens, maybe they won’t just put hamsters in microwave ovens anymore.
The summer heat takes us all hostage, and even with the current health situation, there are probably going to be quite a few people taking some time off for a vacation somewhere. And what’s better than your trusty Switch console to spend time during those long sunbathing sessions? You could play Crysis or something, maybe even continue Divinity 2 from your Steam save. But as we know, it wasn’t always like this.
A handheld port of a modern remake of a 3D remake of a 2D adventure.
The Switch may have changed things now, but for many years, the question was always the same: what compromises have to be accepted once you go from a power cord to batteries? (let’s ignore super bulky gaming laptops, they don’t look like the kind of thing you could easily enjoy on the beach)
Wait, I don’t remember what happened on the sides.
Far lower power and less buttons at your disposal meant that developers were generally unable to simply port console games on a handheld. This was perhaps unfortunate at times. While your mates at home were enjoying Super Mario Bros 3, your Gameboy Color had to do with Super Mario Bros Deluxe and its reduced screen view. And this problem continued long into the next century. Got a DS? Fine, have a Super Mario 64 upgraded port with worse controls.
Wait, I don’t remember this boss.
Even when we got slightly more powerful handhelds (the PSP made a valiant attempt for sure), devs knew that you could only do so much with six buttons and one stick. When you think about it, the PSP tried to sell itself not as offering console games on the go, but “console-like” games. There’s quite a bit of difference. Generally, “console-like” games were seen as simply not good enough. So we get handheld games instead, and those were the true bread and butter of portable consoles.
Sometimes, the handheld game was so successful, consoles started getting handheld-like games.
There was a third side to this story though. Sometimes, when they were going to launch their next big thing, publishers wanted to cover the games market as much as possible. This meant including handheld consoles. But how would they do that, when handhelds could never run the same game? Sometimes it was just a port of an older game (Ubisoft knew this all too well, see for example Rayman 3D or Splinter Cell Chaos Theory on the 3DS), but other times it was a spinoff game. And those were usually way better.
Wait, I don’t remember those mission instructions. Can you tell that Ubisoft wanted to market Conviction too?
For an example, did I say that Ubisoft knew this all too well? They also knew about the other possibility, as shown by Prince of Persia 2008 and its DS spinoff, The Fallen King. While they are in the same continuity, more or less, the two games couldn’t be more different. One is on rails, the other is a proper platformer. One doesn’t let you die, the other is all too happy to kill you for a failed jump. One has a snarky girl as your sidekick, the other has a moody and serious dude. The DS spinoff even resembles the original series more due to the prince’s white outfit and a few returning setpieces (timed door switches, potions, etc).
Stylus battles don’t quite have the same appeal of the old sword duels, but we’ll take what we can.
Since portable spinoffs were given a lower budget, they almost never looked as impressive as their console cousins. Often times they weren’t as good either, since the publisher would get a less experienced team to work on this side offering. The Fallen King has many faults, though ultimately I enjoyed it more than the console version. In the end, outside of the AAA realm, devs were probably given more freedom to experiment.
Something weird about the Fallen King story: they say it takes place after the console game and its Epilogue DLC, but it was released together with the console version, while the DLC only came out a few months later. So people were effectively given the first and third chapters of a trilogy, with the second chapter arriving at the end?
The Switch may have changed things now. Let’s that Doom Eternal will look obviously downgraded from the console versions: it will be the same game. That is the reality of today, and it’s clearly better: no surprise the Switch is selling so much. But let’s not forget the time when handhelds couldn’t keep up with consoles, and instead of giving up, they sidestepped their limitations to give us something completely different.
And sometimes, it gave us games we’d rather forget about. I guess it’s fitting that Turok Evolution, being terrible on console, was terrible on the GBA too.
Have you ever considered what makes a game look good? Maybe it’s the backgrounds, some will say it’s the lighting, others yet the texture work. Well, we could make a case that it’s about all of that together. But perhaps the most important thing is the quality of the animations.
Think back to the 80’s. The Atari 2600 was on its way out, and the IBM PC was about to conquer the collective minds of humanity with its… uhm… 16 colors and no hardware scrolling. Okay. So at the time, animations weren’t really a concern. If your game had graphics at all, you were probably in a good place. King’s Quest let you move your little dude Graham! Amazing stuff. Even a powerhouse such as the NES wasn’t really concerned with animations. Difficult to hold several frames when your cartridge was filled up by a few lines of code. But 1989 eventually arrived and it was time for something more. It was time for… Prince of Persia.
That looks like a white leotard, actually?
A standard walking animation must be easy to make. Like, you make a standing sprite, then a sprite with the left leg forward, and then another one with the right leg forward. Mix them up a bit and you get a walking animation! (disclaimer: I have no idea how sprites creation works, I imagine it’s pretty hard actually). So when people saw the life-like running and jumping of the prince, they were amazed. He didn’t just look so realistic – it was also impressive that he would flow from running to jumping in a natural manner. What was that? Did they just waste their entire development budget on animations? Surely this was the future.
Sword duels in 2D!
You could argue that such a big focus on making sure that the animations would flow smoothly, meant that there was no way you could make a responsive game. If you need to make your characters jump in a realistic manner, then instantaneous jumps such as those seen in Mario and Sonic are impossible, right? Well, the future would eventually disagree, but we’ll go over that later. For now, let’s gape in amazement at those sword duels. In 1989, there was little better.
If you want to combine videogames with the gold era of cartoons, your animations better be up to par. Cuphead delivered.
Of course, animation being important is not news, and not just for games. People often think of Disney’s renaissance era movies and marvel at just how good the animation quality was back then. And if you remember Robot Carnival, one of the short stories had such detailed animations for its characters that it actually crossed the uncanny valley. A great-looking cartoon will be praised… but nobody will ever say that Arnie in The Running Man had such great running quality. That would be ridiculous. Because you see, a cartoon is 2D, and real life is 3D. Nobody expects anything other than life-like movements in real life. And said real life was coming fast in the videogames world.
Of course, there was the opposite approach too. Myst was barely animated. And it was glorious.
It wasn’t as sudden as I’m making it sound. Another World was a 2D game, but it used actual polygons to great effect. Just like Prince of Persia, that game prized itself on its animations that looked way better than what you could achieve with sprite-based work (but notice how it was equally unwieldy). And of course games like Alone in the Dark on one hand, or System Shock on the other, did a great job of mixing 2D and 3D. But we were reaching a conundrum fast. The movements in AITD were great for its time, but barely acceptable after a while. And nobody cared that the aliens in Duke Nukem 3D had maybe ten frames of animation total. But true 3D was a different matter.
That looks like a cool backflip, although also totally useless during actual tomb raiding.
When your entire world is 3D, you have to keep up appearances. And Tomb Raider showed the world what smooth animations meant in the 3D space. Lara Croft might have been defined by her pointy chest for many, but for many others she jumped and ran and grabbed ledges and somersaulted. Yes, the last bit was too much, but it all helped. It was also important to see that, just like Another World, the animations weren’t just good by themselves, these actions all flowed into each other quite naturally, of course given the limits of the era. And now that was the new standard. You can get away with iffy animation in 2D games. Maybe some early 3D stuff such as Quake would also get away with relatively few frames for its models, and people were too busy shooting fiends to notice. But an adventure game in 3D? You better had good animations, or you were going to get laughed out of the classroom.
Sword duels, finally in 3D!
So what about the originator, Prince of Persia? When it made the jump to 3D, it knew it had to deliver on that regard. And Prince of Persia 3D is… interesting. I’m still going through it, there’d be much to say about this ambitious yet broken mess of a game, but here and now I’ll just point out that it even one-upped Tomb Raider in how the titular prince moved. All actions follow each other in a natural manner. Sword fighting is quite a sight, a flurry of dramatic poses and blows exchanged, with light trails and tense music for good measure. Yet the game inherits the same problems as its predecessor and even amplifies them. There’s so much lag in your actions, a running jump requires a great deal of momentum, and to be fair even the sword duels don’t really work outside of the supposed spectacle. Prince of Persia 3D wanted to do too much, but Tomb Raider was already skirting the limits of what was deemed acceptably slow controls. And thus, our prince failed.
Sure, lifting yourself up like this might be realistic, but it is slow. Even slower than Lara, and she was already slower than my grandma.
Modern technology eventually gave us motion capture (although it was pioneered super early by Virtua Fighter 2, it didn’t become popular until the PS2 generation). Suddenly life-like animation became the norm, and devs also started seeing the value of snappy controls. Compare Shadowman to Tomb Raider: less precise maybe, but much more playable. In fact, there’s actually something to be said against the search for the most realistic animations (it is one of the reasons why Red Dead Redemption 2’s controls feel so heavy: you gotta wait for your characters to actually complete his actions).
Sword duels, in 3D… but also 2D… it’s come full circle.
But what about 2D? It may have become old news after polygons rocked our collective socks, but many devs didn’t stop using it. And then, eventually, Abe’s Oddysee showed that it was possible to make a game similar to Prince of Persia actually responsive. Abe runs and jumps like how you wanted the prince to run and jump. And then, possibly inspired by that game, the Prince of Persia Classic remake comes out in 2007. It’s almost a different game: even though the levels layout and basic gameplay loop is the same, the Oddworld feel permeates the whole thing. Now it’s the prince who runs and jumps like Abe did. Admittedly, it makes for a more playable experience (also because you get some quality of life enhancements for a much easier time), even if the graphics were old-looking and the animations at that point didn’t wow anyone anymore.
And he shall be the smoothest prince at that.
I’m in a Prince of Persia mood right now. I still have to get through POP3D. I want to try and finish it, despite its issues. And then I’ll have the 2008 game and the DS spinoff… quite the haul. Who knows if those modern games will have had the same effort put into animating the prince’s movements. However, given the predecessors, I’m hopeful. If nothing else, that my player character will move in a manner that befits the Prince of Persia.
Ah, Pathologic. Where to begin? One of the most glaring examples of “games as art”, although it worked fairly well as a game too. I’m sure everybody knows about the original shoddy translation, so let’s leave it at that. One question I often hear is “can you play the sequel if you have never played the first game?”. The answer to that question is undoubtedly, yes. But the next question: “should I play the first game or the second one?”. That’s not as clear cut.
Maybe I could say “play the easier game”. After all, you are here for the story, right? And as you probably know, Pathologic was about as easy as . And neither is the sequel, although the difficulty sliders that were added later can probably make the experience somewhat less difficult. I’m not sure, because I haven’t tried meddling with them. Anyway, assuming default settings, if you want to know which is the hardest game of the two? The answer, as usual, is that it depends. Yeah, I know nobody likes this kind of answer. But if you want the truth in details, let’s analyse the two games and see where their systems differ. Bear in mind that I’ve only played the Bachelor’s route so far, and P2 only contains the Haruspex’s route for now.
Some very slight spoilers will follow, at least in terms of mechanics required to play and get to the end.
The Changeling has been slacking off, it seems.
Maybe the biggest difference is in how the plague works. In P1, it was more mechanical than you’d expect: while in both games districts become infected at random and then possibly become abandoned the next day, the infection method itself changed. In the first game, your important NPCs could only ever be infected if you failed story quests, while your rivals’ aligned NPCs would be infected at random occurrences and without warning. In any case, infected characters wouldn’t die until the end of the game (except for specific plot points). If you needed to talk to an infected NPC, you could give them an antibiotic and they’d become available until the end of that day (showing no sign of sickness, to boot). Of course, it was also possible to completely heal them with special items, but they were better kept – because in the final day, if you want to get a character’s specific ending, all of their Adherents had to be completely cured. Antibiotics wouldn’t help you there. It was also possible to get a story-important NPC sick, which required you to waste money on antibiotics just to get their quest for the day. Anyway, aside from them, infected generic people on the streets were utterly screwed and you could only give them painkillers to ease their passing, for a reputation boost. I never did that, though. I kept my painkillers to recover from exhaustion more quickly.
I’m sorry, lady in horrible agony, but I need my beauty sleep.
In P2, things get a bit harder. Infected and abandoned districts work in a similar way, but important NPCs in infected districts will go into “danger” status. At midnight, the plague rolls a dice to see if this character will be infected or not. You can influence the outcome by giving them immunity boosters. If the character isn’t infected, they are safe – at least until the district is hit by the plague again. But if they are not lucky, they will show on your list as “infected”. Now, infected NPCs are kind of a pain. They can be talked to, but they are covered in rags and usually just rambling, doubt they’ll be much help for any quests. You can’t give them antibiotics as a temporary remedy either, they’ll live with the disease until they are either cured completely with a shmowder, or die of the plague.
So how do people die? At midnight, after the infection roll, the plague rolls another dice – this time to see who among the infected is going to kick the bucket (people who have just been infected won’t be counted until the next night). Again, you can influence this roll by giving those characters antibiotics. Either you waste a lot of medicines to find out the proper antibiotics, which will result in a sizeable health boost, or you just give them whatever pills you have – even if they aren’t the right antibiotics, at least a bit of extra health is guaranteed, and that can’t hurt. After the dice has been rolled, if the character dies, that’s it. Game over for them. You can’t bring them back at all. This isn’t Dragon Ball, folks. But if they do survive… they’ll be put on trial again the next night, this time with a shorter health bar. You can help them again, but antibiotics are going to be less and less effective every time. The only way out is a proper cure. And even if you do cure someone, districts can and will become infected again eventually, so the process is repeated.
Time to mug a few children.
So that’s a handful. On the other hand, possibly because of this complicated plague system, I think Pathologic 2 won’t put you into an unwinnable status by making NPCs crucial to the story. The story can go on regardless of everyone else, although you’ll miss on sidequests and other good stuff. With that in mind, despite the plague being much more deadly, P2 is a more welcoming game (I use the term in a relative manner) because you aren’t “required” to do things. You can take the story at a more leisurely pace. Pathologic 1 was often a race against time, where you’d try to complete the daily quest first and foremost, and then think about everything else (unless some sidequest just happened to be on the way to a main quest NPC). In P2, daily quests are only completed for rewards, and they are generally shorter, although not necessarily easier. Mind, you’ll need those rewards to not starve, so you’d be better of completing the daily quests as soon as you can anyway.
Women seem to be unappreciated on this side of the Gorkhon.
There are many other differences of course. The economy in P1 is harder to start with, but eventually becomes easier to abuse. Abandoned houses will be your main source of loot. Stay awake at night, kill bandits and looters, loot houses, trade those crowbars and razors to the guards in exchange for meat, sell the loot for money, buy more meat. By day seven, I was already swimming in food. Pathologic 2 is somewhat similar, but never so easy to abuse. You can loot houses, but without quicksave and with stats penalties upon death, you are better off getting away as soon as a looter spots you (luckily, they have far worse eyesight and spacial awareness than their P1 counterparts). Trading for food is not as simple, because children don’t have as much stuff as the guards did, and you don’t have an established source of pins and needles. Better check out as many trash bins as you can. Oh, and you have a thirst meter too, which reduces your stamina as it fills up.
Yes, maybe unappreciated is an understatement.
Really, quicksave makes your life easier in P1 in many ways. Since infected districts won’t sap your immunity just for being there, you can get through them simply by saving before entering, and quickloading if you are ever caught by a plague cloud. Shop prices change at midnight, meaning you can enter a shop at 23:57, save the game, and wait to see if prices are higher or lower the next day. If they are lower, reload the save and sell what you don’t need, and you’ll get more money that way. Essentially, since Pathologic abuses the player, it’s only fair that we abuse it too. Pathologic 2 gives you less chances to do the same. However, you don’t need it as much, because you have the chance to drop the story content for a while to focus on scavenging and survival, and you won’t be overly punished for it.
You can also abuse the looters’ inability to aim upward. Maybe the plague rots their brain too.
So we return to the question: which is harder? Again, it depends. But if you ask me, I think the second game is harder overall. The irst game is only harder until you are given a chance to milk its systems for all they are worth. And since that starts at around day 3, you’ll be spending most of the game doing exactly that. So I guess the answer is… if you want a story-focused game, play Pathologic 1, because you’ll have no choice but to follow the story, and you’ll have to do some game-breaking to live through it. But if you’d rather have a survival game with more tension, then Pathologic 2 is the way to go, because just managing to keep yourself and your Adherents alive will be troubling enough.
Or you can be like me, and play both. After all, you want to see both perspectives, right?
Sorry, Clara. I’ll get to your route too at some point.
As far as my habits go, there is one I particularly like: every summer, as my free time suddenly shoots up, I look for some quirky japanese game that few people this side of the world have played. This method served me well so far, since it allowed me to discover Machi and Moon RPG Adventure Remix, two great unsung games. Last year I had to make do with Otogirisou, which is perhaps a bit more famous due to its status as first real visual novel. But this year, I have found my gold again.
Ibarado, or Iblard, depending on your taste
Iblard: Raputa no Kaeru Machi is an old PS1 videogame based around the works of Naohisa Inoue, a contemporary artist. You might perhaps know him because he helped Studio Ghibli with Whispers of the Heart. His drawings apparently depict the fictional world of Iblard, an idyllic place where gardens and colorful flowers dominate the eyes. But I will admit to only being interested, at first, because it was developed by System Sacom, aka the makers of Mansion of Hidden Souls.
Mansion of Hidden Souls (SCD)
Iblard (PS1). There’s something about System Sacom’s visual design that makes it feel homely, even if in this case, the design is based on a specific artist.
So what we have here is an adventure game, almost Myst-like (that fabled genre was still very popular at this point), but a lot easier and more focused on taking in the enviroments and following the story. Oh, and of course, entirely in 3D. With my limited japanese, I didn’t understand everything, but still most of it, I think. You are trapped in Iblard, and need to help its inhabitants fix the world by finding several crystals, which will also return you to Earth. Very simple, but the plot is mostly just an excuse to see Naohisa Inoue’s world rendered in 3D.
Technological limitations hamper the developer’s attempts to carefully reproduce Iblard in 3D: is this a flower shop? Probably, but it’s not easy to tell.
It may take cues from Myst (you are even transported to Iblard due to a book!), but the puzzles are all very simple, and even without any knowledge of japanese, one could easily finish the game. The adventure is also divided in stages, with only one or two puzzles in each stage, so you never feel overwhelmed like in some more recent adventures that try to offer the player more freedom.
Every level gives you a map very early on, and it always marks the important bits, so you can never get lost.
As a matter of fact, the game is probably too easy. Like in Mansion of Hidden Souls, difficulty and lengthy were not taken into account when designing the game, it is more of a relaxing experience. It does have two endings, but you get clued quite heavily on how to get the best ending. Given the good-natured feeling of the game, I didn’t have the heart to try and obtain the bad ending too. I’m sure others will be more eager than me.
While early 3D would have never allowed the same level of details of Mansion of Hidden Souls, even this very simple design manages to feel striking to me somehow.
There are some strange action elements: you can use a boomerang weapon to hit enemies, and even have to deal with an health bar. I don’t know what happens if you die. The game is easy enough as is, and there is lots of health lying around. Still, it feels very out of place with the rest of the game.
This level contains the only difficult action sequence in the entire game, and admittedly it’s only made difficult by the relative slowness of moving and aiming the weapon. Nice scenery though.
The 3D is primitive, probably primitive enough to thwart the developers’ attempt at mimicking the artist’s visual style, but it’s still functional enough, and makes every level seem unique. As I said before, it feels homely in a way that only early 3D or static 2D could. And the music, while not memorable, fits the experience well.
The cutscenes look even more low-budget than the rest of the game. Mind, it’s not like you will remember these characters for a long time.
It’s an average game. That’s probably the best way to categorize it. But then again, if we have to look at it objectively, so was Mansion of Hidden Souls, and I’m still fond of it. Not every game needs to be a masterpiece, perhaps the developers are content if the player is entertained merely for as long as they are playing.
Easier than it seems.
As you might have guessed, Iblard was never localized. A game made by a small developer on a small budget, published by a TV station, based around the works of an artist unknown outside of Japan? It never stood a chance. The world might not remember about Iblard today. But now that I have played it, one more person at least knows about it. I have taken some of the green of Iblard with me, and while it may not last, my summer was a little better for it.
Well, there is the last story. High stakes this time.
Immortal
“Today as well, according to the squad’s reports, there is no reason for anxiety for all of you citizens living in the standard area…”
The government broadcast continued, now showing a CGI model of some meta-being extermination squad members.
“Amazing, it’s like one of those old monster movies”
Ruby was glued to the TV.
“That’s just because of the uniforms they are wearing”
Their bodysuits were fully red, with rifles dangling down their backs. If they wanted to make people believe that meta-beings were no problem for their squad, they did a pretty good job, I thought.
But Baroques wouldn’t be deceived by that. It had been six days since the government had officially revealed the existence of meta-beings, and in that time, thirteen customers had come to visit me.
“At least three of them must have died by now. If this keeps up, it won’t be good for you”
“Stop jinxing it”
To most of them, I had given the Baroque of being immortal androids, so that it didn’t matter to them whether they died or were killed by a meta-being.
“Is it really okay, to give the same Baroque to so many people?”
“I’m busy with too many customers now, I can’t help it. Besides, not one of them has complained yet”
Right then, I heard a knock on the door.
Ruby hid under the desk.
“May I buy my Baroque in this shop?”
The girl who just entered the office was wearing a black funeral dress. Her golden hair was hidden by a black veil, and in her hand she was holding a white handkerchief.
“I’m very sorry, but we don’t sell here”
“Not even an immortality Baroque?”
“Sorry…”
I tried to ascertain whether she was truly a a customer. From the slight trembling of her fingers, a Baroque seemed possible, but I couldn’t see her eyes because they were hidden behind the veil.
“But though we don’t sell, we do make trades. The customer’s Baroque, for a Baroque that matches them”
“… fine. This is my Baroque”
She produced a black envelope and put it on the desk.
“There is an address written inside, so you may contact me if you can find a matching Baroque”
Without ever showing her face or even giving her name, the girl left.
“That girl looked like she was coming back from a funeral”
Ruby popped her head out from under the desk.
I opened the black envelope.
“I’m the heir of a house of immortals. Our symbol is our very name. When a ship of a thousand passengers is swallowed by the waves, when a town is submerged by the firey inferno of an erupting volcano, and when demons hunt down and kill people, the survivors always carry our name. He who is blessed with the power of our name becomes immortal, but the mouth that utters our name will forever be sealed…”
“Mmh, not bad”
“What do you mean?”
“In order to obtain the power of the immortal name, there must be some kind of requirement. In order to find this Baroque, you must also find that requirement. You can’t do the former without doing the latter first. But if you don’t find the right answer”
I turned the envelope upside down. The mummified body of a spider fell down without a sound.
“The wrong name becomes the cursed word, and the one who said it will be silenced”
“So if you can’t say the name, you will die?”
“Maybe that girl was dressed that way because she was coming back from the funerals of the Baroquemongers who have failed thus far”
“No way! Kitsune, this is not how you want to die!”
“And why would you know how I want to die?”
“Hey, you must absolutely find the immortal name!”
“If I can”
But I couldn’t make any progress. I examined the patterns of all the Baroques I had seen since, and various legends about the conditions to immortality, but didn’t make any breakthrough. Ruby kept desperately asking for updates, but I never thought I was going to die from the riddle brought by a Baroque. And if by some chance it really became a curse, then it would be a fitting end for a Baroquemonger.
Seven days without any progress passed, and at the dawn of the eighth day, the girl in black appeared again.
It was a strange day, it had been thundering all morning.
“I have heard my Baroque has been found”
“Uh… no”
I never contacted her. But then, Ruby appeared from behind the girl.
“I called her. Hey, your immortal name is the vampire Miralka. Your power comes from blood and the rose that blooms at night”
“Idiot, why did you-”
It couldn’t have been such a simple answer, even Ruby had to know that. But the girl simply bit her lips bitterly.
“Why…”
The girl waved the white handkerchief she was carrying. A black spider landed on Ruby’s bare legs. Immediately, Ruby collapsed. It was a poisonous spider. Ruby’s body and limbs started shivering, and her lifeless eyes grew wider.
“What’s the meaning of this?”
“You ask even though you already know”
The situation suddenly gave me a spark. I walked to my machine, and finished the Baroque I was working on.
“What about this?”
“I’m the angels’ trumpet, announcing the time of rebirth. My music cleanses corruption, guides people to the eternal kingdom. Resurrection is unavoidable. Knowing fate, crossing over the bodies of the perished, the trumpet makes everyone dance. Makes them dance all the way to the eternal kingdom…”
“The requirement for obtaining the power of immortality is sacrifice. Sinking the boat with a thousand people, or slaying one’s own brothers, makes their name immortal. Because the name of the victim is taken, and succeeds one’s own. So, you who have killed Ruby, from now on your name is Ruby”
“…”
“Is this Baroque fine?”
The girl lifted her veil. Her eyes were hidden well, but they didn’t show any of the signs of a Baroque.
She put some money in my hand, then turned around and left. Behind her golden hair, you could vaguely see a pair of small fake wings.
“Ruby”
I called out to the lifeless Ruby. Did she choose to sacrifice herself to protect me?
But then.
“Whew! That went smoothly”
Ruby stood up quickly, and grinned at me.
“How did you survive the bite of a poisonous spider?”
“The venom of a spider… of the Tarantella, won’t kill me”
“Tarantella?”
That name awoke memories in me. Tarantella. Dancing all the way to the eternal kingdom. Dancing sickness. The angels’ trumpet. The small wings on the funeral girl’s back. The girl had approached me under the pretense of a Baroque. Did an angel try to kill me as some kind of trial?
Trial. An abducted friend, a boy with light brown eyes, Neuro Tower, a man forsaking his wings.
“Impossible”
I shook my head to chase away the thoughts.
I was a simple Baroquemonger, and Ruby merely a loiterer who spent her time in my office. Even as the whole world was being swallowed by delusions, my days were going on with nary anything out of the ordinary.
If any weird and unique adventure had ever happened, I had no memory of it.
Still, I asked with worry.
“Ruby. Could it be that you are my own delusion?”
Her silhouette getting gradually fuzzier, Ruby grinned.
“Yep. Me, Kitsune, everyone, we all only exist inside a Baroque”
“I see…”
My heart, which had almost burst open, was once again calm inside the delusion.
“Immortality is nice”
“Yeah”
The Ruby of the delusion couldn’t die from the venom of a spider that gave people their Baroques.
“I’ve found a pretty interesting Baroque”
Like always, I went to my machine and created a new file.
Were you expecting that ending? I suppose it doesn’t make a lot of sense, given the plot of Syndrome, and cements Interludium’s status as a side project.
Kitsune’s memories in the last part are most likely referring to the Prologue novel. I will need to make my way through that someday. Maybe scan it and try my luck with some OCR program for the more difficult kanji. It could be a good idea to waste my summer days. Maybe also go back to these stories and fix the translations a bit, since they are pretty rough at the moment.
But there will be time for that. For now, hold onto your Baroques, and good night.
A Few Steps 