The Stack

I still haven’t got the right joystick to work correctly with GTA3, and I’m on the verge of giving up. There’s a part of the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MediaProperties\PrivateProperties\Joystick\ that clearly corresponds to my gamepad. Indeed, I can disable rumble effects by deleting certain keys under it, so it’s not like I’ve been completely unable to affect the way the joystick operates. According to various websites, including Microsoft’s joystick driver specs, I should be able to remap the axes by altering the “Attributes” value of the various sub-keys under “Axes”. Nothing I have done affects the axes at all in any way other than miscalibrating them. Like I say, I’ve almost given up, but I’d really like to get this working right, not just for GTA3, but for all the other games in the stack that don’t have in-game axis reconfiguration.

Anyway, in the process of testing my alterations in GTA3, I’ve noodled around in cars a bit. I’m beginning to see why this game was so popular. This is a very different game from the first two. The switch from top-down fixed camera angle to a more street-level view has a greater effect on the experience than I thought it would, mainly that it gives a better sense of motion, that you’re careening along the street and onto the crowded sidewalk and so forth. It also has a different feel from its imitators, such as Jak 2, which tend to be set in more fantastical environments. Liberty City is based on New York City. I live in New York City. The sites in this game — the decaying tenements, the tiny fenced-in parks, the storefronts jammed into grey concrete — are familiar to me, and modelled well enough to really evoke the real thing. I can’t explain why it’s enjoyable to play with an imitation of someting that I could see just by walking around outside, but it is.

Surely, Grand Theft Auto 3 is one of the games that any game-literate person must know, one of the defining games of this decade. Not only has it been tremendously influential to the industry, it’s controversial enough to have become one of the few games that even non-gamers have heard of. It’s even been satirized in a soda commercial. Strange to think that it’s taken me this long to get around to playing it.

My reasons for not playing it yet are not good ones. They stem from my completist leanings: I don’t like to play series out of order if I can help it. Thus, I didn’t want to start GTA3 until I had finished GTA2, even though there’s no continuity of story or anything like that. And it took me a while to get around to playing through GTA2 simply because it wasn’t all that good. Its faction system was an interesting experiment, but it encouraged somewhat tedious gameplay. The easiest way to complete many of the missions was to pacify the gang whose turf you’d be invading in advance, which you could do by killing your unresisting allies in the target gang’s rival gang. Still, I finished GTA2 a few months ago, and then took a months-long break from the series.

Even now, I haven’t really made a serious go of it. I’m having some difficulty getting it to work properly with my joystick, a PS2 Dualshock controller connected to my PC via a PSX-to-USB adaptor from Radio Shack. The problems I’m having are problems I’ve had before: the right analog stick seems to have its axes swapped, so that pressing forward and back rotates the camera and pressing left and right zooms in and out. Various websites suggest registry hacks to fix this, but nothing has worked yet. I suppose I could just go to keyboard/mouse controls, but that just seems wrong for something that’s primarily a PS2 game.

I reinstalled The Neverhood and played through a bit of it to see if my earlier comments were at all accurate. If anything, I understated things. I called the look “handmade”, but I didn’t specify that the scenery had finger gouges all over the place.

I also mentioned the impression of three-dimensionality. This goes way beyond the look of the graphics. The Neverhood goes to great pains to give an impression that the gameworld is a single continuous physical object, using the tricks employed by graphical adventures from Myst onward. You get maps, glimpses through windows of distant locations that you’ll visit later, puzzles based on adjacency of locations you can’t walk between directly, and physical manipulation of large landscape features to alter what locations are accessible. Presumably many of the backdrops were assembled and photographed individually, but some of the exterior scenes had to have been done by moving a camera around inside a large clay model. Skullmonkeys, by contrast, is clearly a disjointed series of levels assembled out of sprites. How disjointed? Travelling from level to level involves jumping into a “warp gate”. Even though some of the level graphics in Skullmonkeys are quite attractive (particularly the “Castle de los Muertos” level, which involves running across battlements in silhouette against a red sky), I have to call The Neverhood’s overall approach more impressive.

The one area where Skullmonkeys really beats Neverhood is in its framerate. The Neverhood‘s animation looks unbelievably clunky after playing Skullmonkeys for a while. It doesn’t take long to get used to it, though.

So, let’s talk story. You’ve got this nameless city, ruled with an iron fist by one Thomas Malik, who keeps the city in an illusion of perpetual daylight. To sustain his magics, he secretly abducts travellers and extracts their souls, rendering them insane. He earnestly believes that everything he does is for the best. Opposing him is a Gnostic sect led by one Evaine, who might possibly be heir to the dynasty of Queens who ruled the city long ago, although I never found any definitive confirmation of this, and strongly suspect that there is none to be found. Malik’s enforcers are hunting for Evaine on the grounds that she’s a rebel and a terrorist, but in the end you learn that the two of them have some personal history together, which makes it seem like the whole city is in the grip of some kind of twisted lover’s spat or something. In a way, it reminds me of Aeon Flux.

As with most heavily plot-based adventures, reaching the end is not difficult: if you just keep plowing ahead wherever the plot guides you, important events will keep occurring until you reach the last important event, which is the ending. But it’s striking that you don’t have to do it this way. Usually, “plot-based” means highly linear and skimpy on simulation, both of which stem from an author’s decision to give priority to their one preimagined storyline over player choices, but that is emphatically not the case here. For example, there’s a point in the story when Malik asks for the player’s help in finding Evaine. In my first play-through, I took him up on it. I suspected that Malik was the bad guy by then, but accepting missions is what you do in these games.  The option to refuse a mission is, in nearly all games, a fake choice; if you choose it, the game will either find an excuse to force the issue or just end. Playing from the beginning a second time, I tried putting up a sterner resistance to Malik in order to see what would happen, and was surprised that he let me go. If I didn’t want to help him, I could just walk away and try to cope with the mysteries of the city on my own. It did not break the plot, although the decision would certainly have consequences.

The only part where player agency really goes away is at the very end, which is a little ironic, because the solution to the final puzzle is precisely to assert your agency, to refuse to be railroaded into doing what the game tells you to do.

City of Secrets is a text adventure by Emily Short, written on commission for a band that wanted it as an extra on their CDs (although this plan fell through for various reasons). It’s one of the few games on the stack that I did not, technically, buy.  It was never for sale; it’s freely downloadable from the Interactive Fiction Archive.  However, I did purchase the feelies, and that gives me the same sense of commitment-to-play as if I had paid for the game itself.

Feelies are tangible objects from the gameworld, a tradition dating back to Infocom and still indulged in from time to time. I purchased the CoS feelies back in 2003 because I enjoyed Emily Short’s previous works and wanted to do my part to support their production. Then I played the game for about fifteen minutes, got intimidated by how much information it was throwing at me, and didn’t get back to it until now.

I shouldn’t have been intimidated. Although the game possesses a great deal of depth of detal, it does a good job of keeping the player from getting lost in it. Plot-crucial information is often available from multiple sources, so it’s seldom if ever necessary to ransack a particular NPC’s entire dialogue tree or read every book on a shelf. This is contrary to adventuring habits, but once you’re used to it, it’s quite liberating.

As to the content: it’s set in a fantasy world with both magic and high technology, trains and robots and illusions.  The player character is a visitor to a big city who gets ensnared in a conflict between the city’s possibly fascist ruler and a mysterious rebel, both of whom are magicians. There are plots and counterplots. One of the first things that I learned was that I had been drugged, although the drug turned out to be an antidote for another drug.

I’ll say more when I’ve completed the game.  Despite the author’s estimation that it takes about three hours to play, I’m about five hours in now, probably because I spend so much time poking at inconsequential details, an activity which the game rewards.

A second attempt at the last level with 94 lives yielded victory. It turned out that the last part I faced on the previous attempt (an exceedingly tightly-timed section involving two sets of moving platforms that appear when you step on a switch and disappear shortly afterward) was the very last challenge in the game.

For all its goofy amiability on the surface, Skullmonkeys is a brutally punishing game, one that cracks the whip and demands more.  Call it masochism, but there’s a great deal of satisfaction in beating a game like that.  There’s a sense of accomplishment, and also a sense of freedom in realizing that you don’t have to play it any more.

Next up: a change of pace while my left thumb heals.

It’s easy to die in Skullmonkeys. There’s no notion of “health” in this game: being hurt in any way costs a life and sends you back to the last checkpoint. Extra lives are fairly easy to come by, so success in the game hinges on whether or not you’re picking up new lives faster than you’re losing them.

Fortunately, every level has a bonus room where you can pick up more lives with little or no risk, while listening to the bonus room song, “Invisible Musical Friend”. (Hearing this for the first time is the high point of the game.) But that’ll only take you so far. The last couple of levels eat up lives like they’re candy. And that’s why there’s the 1970s.

The 1970s is a special bonus area accessible from the bonus room on level 11, but only if you’ve found three “1970” icons hidden on different levels. Why “1970s”? Mainly because it gives them an excuse to put the screen through distracting psychedelic kaleidoscope effects. It’s a very slippery level, consisting mostly of bottomless abyss with small platforms, many of which act like conveyor belts so you can’t stand still on them. Because it’s a bonus area, you don’t get to try again if you fall off. You just get thrown into level 12 with no possibility of going back. To understand how inconvenient this is, you have to understand one thing about the game’s save system: it doesn’t have one. It’s old-school enough to simulate saving by giving you a status code whenever you finish a level. You don’t get a code at the beginning of the 1970s. If you fall off, the only way to get back in is to play all the way through level 11.

But if you do make it all the way through the 1970s without falling off, you wind up in a roomful of extra lives. I reached this today, and wound up with a full load of 99 lives to squander.

When I reached the final level, I still had 94 lives. I still have not competed the game. The final level consumed them all.

As I start this blog, I am finishing up Skullmonkeys, an old-fashioned 2D platformer for the Playstation. In fact, it was already old-fashioned when it was new: it was released in 1997, just after Mario 64 and Tomb Raider on their respective consoles ushered in the age of the 3D platformer.

Even though it was a critical failure and a commercial bomb that killed the company that made it, this was one of the first games I sought out when I finally bought a PS2 in 2004. I wanted it because it was the sequel to a game I liked a great deal, The Neverhood, which is a puzzle-based third-person adventure game for the PC. Apparently the creators of The Neverhood thought that the best way to correct the disappointing sales figures of the first game was to switch to a more popular genre and platform, thereby alienating half of the fans of the original and making it impossible for the rest to play it. It’s a bit jarring that Klaymen (the hero) is suddenly able to shoot energy blasts that make his enemies explode. He never did that before.

The grand concept behind The Neverhood was that it’s all made of clay: the characters, the environment, even machines and buildings. It was a striking and original look, and the designers emphasized it by leaving the clay rough and wobbly, just so you never forgot that they had molded it all by hand (unlike the smoothed-out models used by Aardman, for example). Skullmonkeys is similar, but in lower resolution and with parallax scrolling. Oddly, parallax scrolling messes up the claymation look more than the lower resolution does, making the scenery look more like a collage than a three-dimensional space.

Graphics aren’t everything, of course. Except they are in this game. It’s all about style, not gameplay.

I have managed to reach the last of the game’s seventeen levels, but without enough lives to actually get anywhere near the end. I am currently trying to get more lives from the 1970s.