The Stack

Like I said before, I really knew very little about this game going in. One thing that I only just recently learned is that its original platform was the Playstation 3. Which means that it was designed for a PS3 controller, with its dual analog sticks. Which isn’t really all that surprising, given the gameplay…

Suddenly it struck me. I’ve been using the wrong controls. I had been using the keyboard, which limits me to eight directions of movement and fire, when I should have used my PS2 controller and USB adapter to get the intended 360-degree rotation.

I suppose I failed to think of this sooner because of the obvious Robotron influence. After all, Robotron used a pair of 8-direction digital joysticks. And for many years, in the days before dual-stick gamepads became standard, the best way to play Robotron adaptations or imitations at home was with a keyboard. ¹This didn’t stop people from coming up with single-joystick solutions, but the results never had the feel of the original. The few existing console ports of Crazy Climber have the same problem. But Robotron is far from the only game to influence Everyday Shooter, or be referenced by it. Level 4, for example, draws heavily from Time Pilot, a game whose feel is more or less defined by the smooth rotation of an analog stick.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get my PS2 controller working under it. I don’t know why. The game makes provision for a gamepad under Windows, as evidenced by its options menu, but it just doesn’t recognize mine, no matter what I do. And this gamepad works without problems in other apps, so it’s not a hardware problem. Perhaps the game’s PS3 origins mean that it won’t accept anything so antiquated as a PS2 controller, even though it seems equivalent for this game’s purposes. At any rate, it looks like I’m stuck with keyboard for the time being, which makes certain parts harder than they should be. Fortunately, extra starting lives will compensate.

Another random pick today. Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal has an easy three-word description: Pokémon with fairies. You play the part of Amy, an ordinary British teenager in unreasonably tight trousers (yes, this game is definitely post-Tomb Raider), whisked away to fulfill a prophecy in a magical land of elves and goblins who use their smaller winged brethren in the fantasy equivalent of cockfighting. I’ll describe the game content more fully in my next post. At the moment, I want to talk about my adventures in installing the thing.

My first problem was that the install disk was damaged and unusable, with visible abrasions on its surface. I assume this happened when I moved. Possibly it could be resurfaced: I’ve occasionally resurfaced disks in the past, with spotty success. But I didn’t do that. Instead, I turned to piracy. Now, I normally don’t pirate games. I’m aware of the arguments against copyright law in its current form, and generally agree with them, but the way I see it, that just makes it more important that I avoid behaving like a freeloader and undermining those arguments. But this situation here, copying something that I purchased legally but can no longer access, is one of those arguments. Once I had my freshly-burned CD, it was a little reassuring that the installer prompted me to type in a code from the original CD case, allowing me to assert my legal right to play it. But presumably these codes can be found on the internet as well.

Once I managed to install it, there was one more obstacle to playing it: the key configuration. Zanzarah uses the mouse/keyboard movement scheme familiar to PC gamers — mouse to turn, keyboard to move in the four cardinal directions relative to your facing. But by default, the movement keys are the arrow keys. Now, I could play it like that — certainly I played a number of games like that, before I discovered the superiority of WASD, along with the entire PC game industry — but if I could rebind the keys, it seemed worth it. And the game does in fact offer a key-rebinding menu. But on my machine, it doesn’t work. For mysterious reasons, whenever I tried to rebind something, it wound up bound to “Mouse Z Axis” instead of what I wanted to bind it to. So I had a merry time figuring out how to edit the configuration file directly, which involved blind guesswork with a hex editor. A word of advice to anyone writing a game system: Make your configuration files text-based. Someday, someone’s life will be easier if you do.

Before my last session, I would have said that The Final Cut is a game that has to be played twice: once to find out by trial and error what you’re supposed to do, and a second time to use your knowledge of the solutions to spot the clues that you were supposed to have noticed the first time round. But now, I have doubts that even this would be enough.

In the beginning of chapter 2, the detective finally meets his client, Robert Martin-Jordan, in person for the first time. Naturally he has a lot of questions. Some of these questions are about things that just plain haven’t happened. For example, one of the questions is about the things said on an audio tape that I had found, but had not yet found a means to listen to. (Perhaps he has the psychic power to divine the contents of audio tapes? I know there exists a man who can read the grooves on LPs…) Another of the dialog options is to tell him about how you were attacked up on the scaffolding. I had been up on that scaffolding, but there was no attack. All that happened there was a puzzlingly pointless first-person cinematic in which I pressed a button, after which the game returned me to the bottom of the now-unclickable ladder. Oh, and that somehow triggered the end of the chapter. I think I was doing things in the wrong order there.

The whole scaffolding scene had seemed incomprehensible at the time. (In retrospect, the button was probably the one mentioned elsewhere that turns the fire alarm on and off, but it didn’t seem to do anything. Unless perhaps the sound glitches prevented me from hearing the alarm. But if so, did I turn it on or did I turn it off? And either way, why?) But if I was attacked in that scene and didn’t notice, something was very wrong. So I found a walkthrough online to try to find out what was supposed to have happened there.

That walkthrough diverged from my experience of the game before it was even done with the intro movie.

After she leaves for bed, you observe a green car and have a momentary psychic flashback to the time your parents were killed in a car crash.

No I don’t! I saw the car, but there was no psychic flash, and this business about the detective’s parents is news to me. So at this point it looks like it’s just skipping over some of the cutscenes. But only some of them, which is odd. Maybe they’re using multiple codecs? Searching the web for reviews, I don’t see anyone else who had my problems. I see a lot of complaints about the story and the puzzles, but I guess my situation is like the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in reverse: the more fundamental problems blind me to the surface flaws.

At least the walkthrough showed me something that I had genuinely missed on my own: I had failed to find the camera angle that lets you access the document giving all the characters’ names. This is something to be careful about, guys. If you’re going to make basic information missable, some people are going to miss it. Given that the rest of the game assumes that you have this information, it would have been a good idea to make leaving the prologue and proceeding to chapter 1 contingent on finding this document. Instead, the game makes it contingent on watching Mr. Martin-Jordan’s welcome video, which contains no information that’s useful once you’re out of the prologue.

It looks like this one is going back onto the shelf for a while, alongside Tender Loving Care. I seem to be having poor luck with technical problems in adventure games lately. You might think that adventures would be less prone to failure than big-name titles, being less technically demanding, but this also means that they’re typically developed on low budgets by small teams with tight deadlines. Also, their low replayability means that they often don’t get a lot of fan attention after release, ScummVM notwithstanding.

Well, the Vintage Game Club is proceeding on to its next game ¹As I write this, they’ve narrowed it down to four candidates, all of which I’ve already played. , so I think it’s about time to admit to myself that I’m not finishing up the JRPGs just yet and proceed on to something else. Something nice and quick to finish, like an adventure game. I still have a passel of obscure European graphic adventures that I was formerly unable to play due to the GeForce bug.

So, last night, I reinstalled a couple of games, feeling kind of strange about it — it’s been quite a few months since I ran an installer from physical media. First, I tried out Ring 2, the second part of Arxel Tribe’s sci-fi adaptation of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Sound issues drove me away from this; if there’s one place you don’t want the music to be skipping and stuttering, it’s in a game based on opera. My second attempt was another Arxel Tribe title, The Final Cut. This had similar sound problems, but I was able to mitigate them with some fiddling. I still get some ugliness in incidental background noises, but at least the dialogue seems to be playing without problems.

The grand concept behind The Final Cut is that it’s based on, or at least inspired by, the works of Alfred Hitchcock. An oddball premise, but adventure games can get away with such things more easily than other genres. I haven’t got far in the game yet (I’m basically at the point where I abandoned it the first time), but so far, it doesn’t strike me as a very good match to the source material. I mean, if I were going to make a Hitchcock pastiche, I’d start off with the stereotypical Hitchcock protagonist: an ordinary man who, through no fault of his own, gets caught up in events beyond his control, like in North by Northwest and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Not all of his films have such a protagonist; sometimes it’s a spy or a master thief or something, but those sorts of roles aren’t specifically Hitchcockian; anyone can make a film about spies or master thieves. Well, the player character here is apparently some kind of psychic detective, which seems a bit outlandish. That’s the kind of premise you’d start with if you had heard of Hitchcock but had never seen his films. Or, more charitably, if you thought players wouldn’t be attracted to playing the Jimmy Stewart role.

The game is driven by the same sort of interface seen in Grim Fandango, which is to say, it’s the Alone in the Dark interface with the addition that the player character turns his head to look at important objects (something that worked a lot better in GF, due to the PC’s freakishly elongated cranium). In this UI, you drive your avatar around with keyboard or joystick, ²The controls here are relative to the direction the character is facing, not the camera, which makes for awkward stumbling and running into walls. Grim Fandango at least let you toggle between character-relative and camera-relative movement modes. and the camera switches between fixed positions depending on your position. And this is the game’s second stumbling block as a Hitchcock imitation — that the camera is controlled exclusively by the player’s position. Hitchcock’s directorial style heavily depends on his control of the camera: I think of the way it emphasizes the separation between inside and outside in Rear Window, or creates tension by lingering on the impromptu casket in Rope, or how in Frenzy it follows a woman to the killer’s door, watches her go through, and then slowly backs off the way it came, as if abandoning her to her fate (and thus forcing the audience to abandon her as well). But here, even in noninteractive bits — which is to say, the dramatic parts — the camera just sits there. I suppose that even with an engine like this, you could give the director control of the camera in FMV sequences, but so far the only FMV bit I’ve seen is the intro.

So, if we don’t have Hitchcock-style premise or direction, what, apart from the blurb on the box, lets us know it’s a Hitchcock game? Well, there are scattered references to specific films — in particular, one of the early puzzles involves piecing together film titles from fragments. And I think the sets are probably from his films. (Note that when I say “sets”, I mean sets: the premise involves a wealthy eccentric who’s making a film on his estate.) I’m not sure of this because, frankly, most of Hitchcock’s sets aren’t all that distinctive. Maybe a real devotee would look at the hotel set and say “Aha! It’s the hotel from scene 17 of Topaz!” But people like me, who have seen a bunch of Hitchcock films and enjoyed them but didn’t rush out to buy the action figures ³On the other hand, I did buy the game, so maybe I’m just in the smallest part of the Venn diagram here., can probably recognize the Psycho house and maybe the schoolyard from The Birds, and that’s it.

In short, so far this is Alfred Hitchcock: The Game in the same sense as Batman: The Ride. Still, there’s one bit that I’ve come across that seems like it fits the spirit of the films pretty well. Standing in for a missing actor, the player character gets in front of a bluescreen and mimes shooting at a dummy. As I go through that sequence, I know full well that it’s going to come back to haunt me later — I’m basically giving the filmmakers the raw materials to fabricate evidence that I’ve shot someone. And I can only assume that I was supposed to realize this, even as the PC blithely goes through with it, because that’s how suspense works: as in the famous example of the ticking bomb, it’s enhanced if the audience knows something that the characters don’t. But in a game, it can be taken a step farther: the audience doesn’t just watch the hapless protagonist do the wrong thing, but actively participates. Step by step, you’re given directions — “Stand on the X”, “Draw the gun now and point it at the dummy”, and so forth — and you execute them, because however strong your sympathy with the protagonist, your desire to advance the plot is stronger.

Hitchcock was no stranger to audience complicity, of course: he knew full well that people would pay good money to see him take sympathetic characters and put them through the worst day of their lives. He sometimes even made his audience feel like accomplices in his virtual crimes, as in the aforementioned scene in Frenzy, or the cleaning-up scene in Psycho, where the tension depends on the audience’s desire, at that moment, for the killer to get away with it. But it’s so much more direct in a game.

After my post about my difficulties getting TLC working, I got a couple of comments with suggestions. Unfortunately, neither has been enough to get things working.

The first suggestion, from Jason Dyer, was to get the official patch from archive.org. Unfortunately, the copy there seems to be corrupt: it’s a self-extracting executable, and it failed to unzip itself. However, finding a patch there inspired me to look for patches elsewhere, and I found a working zip file (not a self-extractor) at patches-scrolls.de. This had a tangible effect: after installing it, I no longer got the error messages about inability to adjust the DVD volume. However, it still skipped over all the video content.

The second suggestion, from malkav11, was to use a video player, such as VLC. A surprising suggestion, perhaps, but apparently Groovie isn’t so much a programming language or development system as a video playback system with a certain amount of scripting capability. Which explains a lot about the design of The 7th Guest. True, it’s a bit more powerful than ordinary DVD scripting — consider T7G‘s infamous microscope puzzle. But even an ordinary DVD player has to be capable of doing more than just playing a sequence of data tracks on a playlist. DVD data includes menus, and that means responding to user input in a scriptable way. Viewed thus, there’s no reason a DVD player couldn’t handle TLC if it could load its scripting engine.

That said, after an evening of fiddling with VLC, I still haven’t convinced it to do anything more than play the individual noninteractive video and audio tracks. Much of the video content is in the form of VOBs, the familiar elements of ordinary video DVDs, but since they’re not in a directory called VIDEO_TS, DVD players won’t recognize the disc as something playable. So, obviously I’m hoping that malkav11 will respond with more details about how he got this to work (although I’m not hopeful, because he barely remembered as much as he said).

Browsing forum posts, I find it suggested that my problems might stem from the lack of an MPEG2 decoder card. Now, I hope that isn’t the case, because that would be silly. No one who has a machine capable of playing Half-Life 2 needs dedicated hardware for DVD decoding. But I don’t know a lot about how Windows DVD drivers work; I’ve basically assumed that programs that need to do MPEG2 playback just make some system call that can be handled through either software or hardware, but what if I’m wrong?

[ADDENDUM] I’m seeing some evidence that there are in fact two different DVD versions: a Groovie-based DVD-ROM one (which is what I have), and a standard DVD version that can be played in an ordinary DVD player. It seems like the simple-DVD version would lose any advanced Groovie scripting, but I don’t know how much TLC takes advantage of that anyway. It’s kind of like the whole problem with “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” interfaces: the interface tells you very little about the underlying model. You just can’t tell how deep or shallow it is from a single playthrough. It might be all on the surface, a simple series of forking paths, or it might be keeping hidden variables, using all your past actions rather than just your present choice to determine what happens next. At any rate, I’m giving up on the play-it-in-a-media-player route for now.

Tender Loving Care is one of an all-but-dead breed, the Interactive Movie. A lot of people seem to have been convinced at one point that this was the future of digital media. The whole phenomenon was inextricably bound up with the introduction of the CD-ROM, with its impressively large storage capacity compared to floppy disks, making it suddenly practical to include heaps of choppy low-res video content in games. The irony is that, by the time DVD-ROM technology was in wide use and we could really do interactive movies properly, the fad was pretty much over. Producers had figured out that people didn’t want interactive movies, they wanted games.

That being the case, TLC is easily seen as trailing the wave: it was made in both CD-ROM and DVD-ROM versions. Even the DVD version doesn’t have DVD video, though. It features video data for the “Groovie” engine, the system used by The 7th Guest and very little else. ¹To be precise, the complete set of Groovie games consists of T7G, The 11th Hour (the sequel to T7G), Clandestiny, Uncle Henry’s Playhouse (a collection of minigames from the three previously-listed titles), and this. I’ve already played T7G, T11H, and Clandestiny. Once I get through TLC, I can reasonably claim to have exhausted a data format. How’s that for completism? I suppose they had to use more or less the same format as the CD version, except of course at higher quality.

I purchased the DVD version when it was new, mainly because I had a DVD-ROM drive and very little to use it with. ²Game publishers were a lot slower than users to embrace the DVD, and for good reason: even if 90% of your potential audience has the newer technology, you don’t want to lose 10% of your sales if you can avoid it. I got a few hours into the story, but then my drive decided to stop recognizing the disk and crash the program. Since the system only saves your progress when you quit, and I hadn’t quit, I’d have had to start over from the beginning, and I didn’t feel like sitting through the same videos — or, worse, through different ones, because I doubt I’d be able to duplicate my choices from the first time, but didn’t want to confuse myself with two different stories just yet. So I set it aside and resolved to wait until I had forgotten it all and could approach it afresh. And here we are, ten years later.

And in those ten years, my window of compatibility seems to have closed. Whenever the game is supposed to play video content, it instead pops up an error box stating “Unable to adjust volume on this DVD platform”. Compatibility mode doesn’t help — indeed, it makes it crash immediately on execution most of the time. The game’s official site is still up, and mentions a “DVD-ROM update”, but the link it provides is broken. Web-searching hasn’t turned up any help yet — it has the handicap of being a rather obscure work with a title that’s a common phrase. So until I find a retrogaming site that knows about it, back on the stack it goes. Maybe if I wait a few more years ScummVM will support it.

Spoilers follow the break.
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A game by Anssi Räisänen written in the Alan adventure language. Spoilers follow the break.
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Denied the opportunity to continue with Half-Life 2 Episode 1, I found myself still craving some FPS action. This seemed like as good a time as any to bring out the oldest FPS on the Stack. Released in 1996, Strife was one of the earlier attempts at making a FPS that was more than just a FPS, like Deus Ex four years early. It’s the only game I know that uses the Doom engine for something resembling a RPG: it’s got non-combatant characters with conversation trees, stores where you can buy equipment, even a couple of upgradable character stats (maximum health and shot accuracy). (All of which Ultima Underworld had in 1992, but that didn’t use the Doom engine.) It has a stealth component, with alarms that you can try to avoid setting off. And it’s got a story. Not just a premise that gives you an excuse to shoot stuff, but a story that you interact with and which, to some extent, you influence with your decisions.

That story is, however, pretty comic-bookish. It’s the story of a medieval-looking city taken over by evil cultists with anachronistic technology. The Order (as they call themselves) have achieved their dominance by obeying the voices they started hearing in their heads after a nearby meteorite strike. This sounds like a job for the Meteor Police from Maniac Mansion, but since they’re not around, expelling the Order is left to an underground rebel group that the player joins shortly after the start of the game.

This game is old enough that I had some difficulty getting it working. Setting the executable to use Windows 95 Compatibility Mode got it to stop hanging up my machine, but there was no sound, and sound is actually pretty important in this game — sometimes you get audio-only messages from your contact in the rebel alliance. Even when I set it up with the right IRQ for soundblaster compatibility, the sounds were distorted by micro-pauses. Running it under VDMSound seemed to undo the effect of Compatibility Mode. DOSBox got the sound and music working, but trashed the framerate, unless I turned up the emulation speed a lot, at which point it started becoming unresponsive to the keyboard. Eventually I discovered ZDoom, a very nice modern re-implementation of the Doom engine that’s completely compatible with Windows XP and supports Strife‘s data files. Playing under ZDoom isn’t a perfect replication of the original Strife experience: you lose the ability to examine inventory items, the sound clips on exiting the game don’t play, and a few other minor details assume their Doom defaults rather than their Strife customizations. But it’s a lot closer to the intended experience than I was getting by any other means.

After playing episodic adventure games, it seems only fair that I follow up with the noble failure of the episodic FPS. The confusingly-titled Half-Life 2, Episode 1 has of course been on the Stack since I purchased the Orange Box, and for stack purposes I’m counting it as a separate title.

The episode begins with an intro sequence that essentially says “never mind” to Half-Life 2‘s epilogue and puts you right back into the situation you were in at the end of the final boss battle. Alyx Vance, sidekick and presumed love interest, seems to be a more or less constant companion this time around, and the designers put some effort into coming up with gameplay that takes advantage of her. In one segment, you’re attacked by alien bugs, which can be killed most efficiently by flipping them over on their backs with the gravity gun and letting Alyx shoot them while they’re helpless. Before that are a few scenes in darkness with lots of zombies. You have a flashlight built into your hazard suit, but limited ammo. Alyx has a different gun than you and loads of ammo for it, but no flashlight. So you spend most of that part just shining your light on things for Alyx to shoot. (In restrospect, it would have been simpler to trade guns, but I can’t blame Alyx and Gordon for not thinking of that, seeing how I didn’t.)

These things remind me of using the pheropod to send antlions after enemies in Half-Life 2. Although this is a shooter, you’re not always doing the shooting yourself. Sometimes you’re just directing it.

Another thing that reminds me of the pheropods: If you catch a rollermine with the gravity gun, Alyx can hack it to attack the enemy. This is the sort of thing she’s been doing all along, really — there were scenes in Half-Life 2 where she pulls similar tricks on automated gun turrets — but rollermines are mobile, and seek out things to attack, which makes them seem more like monsters than weapons. So this seems like an extension of a theme I noted before, the enemies switching sides ¹One example of this I failed to note in my previous post: Dr. Kleiner has a defanged headcrab that he keeps as a pet., except this time applied to something purely mechanical.

At any rate, it looks like I’ve gotten as far as I can get in this episode for the moment. From near the beginning, it has sometimes crashed to the desktop when it loads a new area, and now I’ve reached a point where this happens consistently. The worst part is that it crashes slowly. It’ll spend a minute or so with the word “Loading” on the screen, and I won’t know whether it’s actually loading or crashed. Then the screen will go black for a minute, and then, even when the desktop comes up, it’ll be another minute before it actually displays a dialog box with an error message in it. Upgrading my display drivers has not helped, so it’s time to hit the support forums. The slowness is the sort of thing I associate with running out of memory, so maybe slapping another gigabyte into the machine would fix it, but I’d like some confirmation of this before I pony up the dough.