Choose your own Super Amazing Wagon Adventure

We'd just made it beyond the Great Plains when, as a token and confession of his love, Flynn gave Poopface a flower. Soon after that Flynn got syphilis. Then, in his weakened state, Flynn died. I think he was devoured by a wolf. Anna died too, although—honestly—I don't at all remember what caused her demise. I'd been through so many different versions of this adventure already, it could have been any number of things. But our story didn't end there. Somehow, against the odds, Poopface survived a river raid of sorts and made it to the coast. And I finally completed the Super Amazing Wagon Adventure.

To say this game is a parody on The Oregon Trail would be both obvious and insufficient. Yes, the game has you shooting buffalo (lots of buffalo … sometimes flaming buffalo) and fording rivers (or, if you prefer, jumping them). It's utterly zany, completely hilarious. But Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is also just a really good, well thought-out game.

The game splits between two primary modes of action. There are the wagon driving portions that involve side-scrolling shooting and dodging. And then there are the segments during which one of your party members sets off on foot and the game becomes a dual-stick shooter. Your journey across the wagon trail is broken up into a bunch of semi-random episodes that last no more than about 30 seconds each.

I say semi-random, because the game actually has a really nice structure that gives the adventure some overall grounding and consistency. Each play through—depending on how long your party survives—will involve a trek through the Great Plains, a mountain pass, a couple of rivers, and more. The precise obstacles you encounter along each stage of the journey, however, will vary. A side quest for exploring a cave might trigger a battle with giant bats during one adventure and giant spiders during the next. Or you might not encounter a cave at all.

Devote a little bit of practice to the game and you might start to develop some strategies. Each animal carcass, if picked up, can potentially be traded for extra health and munitions at certain points in the game. But because some weapons, such as the ray gun, decimate a carcass completely, there might be times when you choose to avoid that particular power-up.

I first got a chance to see this game in action during the Seattle Indies Expo on July 29. And I had a brief chat with the game's developer, who goes by the name sparsevector. Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is actually his first game, and the expo was his first chance to observe the experience of first-time players.There were a lot of interesting games on display, many of which were much shinier than this one, but I think Super Amazing Wagon Adventure was my my personal favorite from the show. It had a kind of instant, mass appeal, mostly attributable to its sense of humor.

It was only upon purchasing the game from the Xbox Live indie games channel that I got to appreciate the actual playing experience. I kept dying and retrying, intent on getting through the entire adventure at least once. Pretty soon it was like something out of The Twilight Zone. Here were these three hapless digital versions of myself, my wife, and some stranger named Poopface, caught in an endless procession of inevitable death and destruction. Each journey, while different, was uncannily familiar. I watched and played as all of these facsimile versions of my party met their gruesome end, unable to stop myself until the wagon adventure gods smiled upon that one Poopface who had given Flynn an STD.

I could have been bitter. I could have turned away in disdain. But it was a beautiful moment. Life had found a way. The sperm had fertilized the egg. Also, I got to unlock the game's “shuffle” mode.

Here's my final recommendation. Buy this game if you:

• Like an old-school video game challenge.
• Still enjoy doing Mad Libs.
• Are looking for a new kind of party game to show off to your snarky friends.

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is currently available on Xbox and will soon be out on PC.

Rapture is us

Rapture is leaking, and nobody seems to mind. Anyone who might have thought to point this out—and maybe do something about it—has already died by the time I arrive on the scene. And let me tell you, I'm seeing a lot of dead people.

Rapture was probably what you might call a boomtown. Talk about commercial enterprise, this place found a way to profiteer just about everything, even criminal justice! Did you accidentally get caught trespassing someplace you didn't belong? Just pay a quick one-time fee to shut down those frenzied flying death bots.

It seems on the one hand brilliant, and yet I can see just as easily how this automated economy will soon meet its end. Monetary transactions no longer flow between the hands of human beings, only into the dead-end deposit slots of these untended vending machines. After a while, as I venture further into new areas of the city, I find that even the money isn't sufficient to buy the supplies needed for survival. I'm literally scrounging through corpses and garbage cans looking for the raw components that will let me invent my own items. Random supplies could be anywhere, sitting on some high up ledge, hiding under a fallen slab of concrete. I feel like a skittish street rat.

I've discovered there's also a new economy, the economy of Adam. It's a cartel really. It ate up the old economy, the old way of living. In fact, it completely killed living and replaced it with something different, a kind of … sub-living.

This is my mental travelogue as I re-play my way through the first few hours of BioShock, and I must say, I'm really feeling it. Here is a shooter that doesn't feel like a regular shooter. It feels more like the old Resident Evil games (sort of mechanically clunky, but on purpose) only more immediate and immersive. As I travel, I have to make decisions about how best to approach my enemies—not only how to win an encounter when I come upon a splicer by surprise, but how to become more deliberate in how I move about, deliberate in how I kill. Before long, I find myself to be more hunter than prey. I'm becoming more dangerous than the crazies around me.

This is good stuff, right? Like, I wonder how this game experience might relate psychologically to a recovered (or not) drug addict. I really do! How do those first hours of playing BioShock feel to someone who might actually have experienced what it's like to go from upstanding citizen to a desperate and broken mess of a person, someone who pawned off all their crap when they descended beyond the means of legitimately obtaining cash and eventually had to resort to other less-than-savory methods of getting by. Burglary? Violence? Scavenging copper wire from abandoned buildings, perhaps? Go back and watch that animation of your player character popping a syringe needle into his vein. Feel that desperation!

But then, something strange happens. The game keeps on going … and going. I wouldn't say it becomes boring or unplayable, but that once foreign and engrossing experience becomes less engrossing and a lot more familiar. My simple, understandable motivation for getting the hell out of Rapture becomes a bit more convoluted. I notice how my once compelling need to scavenge for supplies becomes more of a compulsion. It's a mindless chore, wherein I search every available box and corpse, not to find things that I desperately need, but rather any item that I haven't arbitrarily maxed out.

A friend of mine told me he started playing the first couple of hours of BioShock and then soon lost interest. While I definitely don't have the same playing habits (I will compulsively finish almost any game I start), I can understand how that would happen. I told him he probably got the best of the BioShock experience in those first couple hours.

It's maybe the day after I start playing through the game when news of the violent massacre at a movie theater in Colorado sends shockwaves through the nation. It's terrifying. What's happening to our country, we ask? Then the national discussion immediately becomes another political debate on the issue of gun control. People argue about the need for more regulation. They say guns are deadly instruments that are too numerous and too easy to obtain. Other people argue that an infringement on the right to bear arms is an infringement on an individual's safety and personal liberty, the right to defend oneself from the violence of others.

All the while, America is leaking. Infrastructure is deteriorating. The purchasing power of the dollar is plummeting while the people become more and more accustomed to an increasingly impersonal economy. The streetlights of bankrupt cities are being systematically shut down. The surveillance system is expanding. So many unsettling things are happening around us and yet we're more likely to hear people talking about the personal scandals and exploits of Hollywood celebrities (is it that much different from the meaningless jabber of those wandering splicers, some insane woman complaining about a tenderloin steak or a psychopathic religious nut babbling about “Jesus loves me” before he tosses you a live grenade?). Before long we'll hear about another episode of shocking violence somewhere else, and it's kind of like being reminded that we built our city at the bottom of the sea. Ours is a fragile and exposed society, an at-once impossible, constantly bleeding utopia. And I'd like to think that if we knew how to fix it, we would.

Images were borrowed from bioshock.wikia.com.

The Trials HD bunny hop and expressive movement

I made a breakthrough last week in one of my favorite recent video games . . . and I guess I'd like to tell you about it.

One small hop for a bike, one giant leap for precision gaming

The game is Trials HD, a downloadable title on the Xbox LIVE Arcade in which the player moves a dude on a dirt bike through an obstacle course as fast as possible while trying not to spill. The breakthrough involved the mastery (of sorts) of a certain in-game maneuver.

In my head I've been calling it the bunny hop. But when I think about it now, it seems more accurate to describe it as the forward hop. Or maybe the forward pop. It's kind of a snappy motion—a jerky left-to-right gesture of the left analog thumbstick that results in a sort of quick pop forward for the biker on the screen. The biker guy moves his body down and back, then springs his weight upward and forward. That sudden shift, combined with a careful acceleration of the gas (determined by the level of pressure my right index finger applies to the right trigger button), helps give me some much needed forward momentum to make it over protruding surfaces that would otherwise send me straight up in the air—or maybe right into a wall. It's … really hard to describe what I'm talking about. But believe me, it's something the Trials HD player will need to learn if she or he wants to finish the game's extreme difficulty tracks—a feat I now have accomplished, thank you very much.

You're gonna want to use the bunny hop here. Trust me.

Playing Trials HD, as a physical experience, reminded me of playing the guitar. I remember in middle school, back when I was still a fairly early learner. By this time I had gotten used to the basic chords. I could switch between a D chord and an A chord and an E chord handily enough. It was the F chord that really tripped me up. Playing an F chord—properly, at least—required me to stretch my left index finger all the way across the first fret. Not only that, I had to press down across that fret with enough pressure to ensure that each of the six strings would still ring clear and vibrant when picked or strummed. At first this was a real challenge. I could see clear as day what I had to do, and yet my hand and finger muscles weren't ready to cooperate. Stretching that finger felt awkward and strenuous. And when I strummed the notes came out all muted and smothered. This was the case for a long time until one day, lo and behold, I got it. I could do it! It sounded clear as a bell—well, almost, anyway. But it also felt comfortable! Not only that, I could now strum bar chords all the way up the fret board. It introduced a whole new mode of playing. 

I first learned about the Trials HD bunny hop while watching a YouTube video showing how to get through one of the the extreme tracks. The video tutorial got to the place in the track that had me stumped. Just do a little bunny hop, the narrator told me; push back and forth on the thumbstick and jump. This was easier said than done. I probably tried over a hundred times to get over that uphill bump, but my clunky back-and-forth motions did nothing to help the situation. I gave up on that track for a while.

I don't know what else to say, other than the guy in the video was right. My fingers may not have understood the instructions at first, but at some point—several weeks and thousands of spills later—it started to click. I can't describe what I was doing differently, only that somehow I was pulling off one successful bunny hop after another. I guess my fingers had finally learned the magic language. That was the first breakthrough. The second breakthrough was the realization that this bunny hop maneuver, or some variation of it, formed the basis for overcoming just about every near-impossible obstacle in the game. It was the secret ingredient.

The truth is I'm in awe of Trials HD, specifically its simulated physics. Trials HD is a game about precision—muscle precision to be … precise. And what amazes me when playing Trials HD is the seeming seamlessness with which my controller movements correspond to the visual animations displayed on the TV screen. Large, wild gestures (I'm speaking relatively here; these are thumbstick movements) translate to wild gestures on screen, and often result in crashes. Minute, articulated gestures result in equally small and articulated movements—which also can lead to crashes.

But there's such a spectrum of available movement, broken up by such minuscule degrees of difference. So often it's the slightest, most sensitive variation in controller movement that makes all the difference between overcoming a track obstacle or losing balance and crashing. And while the most extreme tracks demand the execution of more precise gestures, there nevertheless are infinite ways with which an individual player can move through the virtual environment—be it gracefully or otherwise. Every run through a Trials HD track is like a snowflake in that it can't be replicated. I suppose that's similarly true even for more technologically primitive games, except that other games don't necessarily feel as genuinely physical or gestural. The input/feedback of attempting a virtual jump in Trials HD could be compared to the input/feedback of any real-life physical activity that demands skill and precise muscle control. Ever tried bouncing quarters into a shot glass? Sometimes you'll overshoot; sometimes you'll undershoot. Eventually you'll get it in. And after a while, with more practice, you might start landing it in the glass more often than not.

Arcade-style video games have always involved hand-eye coordination. As with anything skill-based, there inevitably are video game players who for certain games ascend to the realm of true mastery. I would not describe the original Donkey Kong as having a very robust physics system, let alone graceful controller mechanics. And yet there are a select number of individuals who have mastered the movements of that game on a level most of us never will. That's almost to be expected, really.

What I mean to say is that my captivation with Trials HD has less to do with the fact that there are people who can play as good as this (although, if you have played the game, you will be insanely jealous). You can find people who are really good at just about anything. It has more to do with my own experience with the game and how—looking back—I have a newfound appreciation for how video game physics engines and corresponding controller input mechanics have evolved. Here's a fun exercise. Go play five minutes of Pitfall on the Atari 2600. Then play Trials HD (or skip ahead to its recently released sequel, Trials Evolution. I haven't played it, but I imagine it's just as good). 

In terms of hardware progression alone—and through the console gaming industry's gradual movement from joystick to directional pad to analog stick to dual analog sticks and pressure-sensitive buttons—game playing can be more physically elegant, dynamic and expressive than ever. This perhaps is even more apparent when playing games that—like Trials HD—have scaled things back to a set of simple but refined core mechanics. Super Meat Boy is another good example of this. In a sense, both games involve little more than simulated running and jumping on a two-dimensional plane. But by honing and perfecting the underlying engines that drive that relationship of physical input and visual feedback, developers are rewarding players with gaming experiences that feel as revolutionary and exciting as ever.

Screenshot images of Trials HD were borrowed from ign.com.

5-10-15-25-30

So tomorrow is like my 30^th birthday. To commemorate the occasion—and to get something published on my blog for the month of June—I decided to put together a brief retrospective. Here is a snapshot of the games I remember playing at each of the five-year intervals of my life. (I've seen something similar over at Pitchfork.)

Age 5:

I don't really know what I was playing at around age 5, other than the games I started playing shortly thereafter on our family's Macintosh computer. But since I've already written a little about that here, I'm going to relate a different memory from my early childhood.

As a Generation Y'er, I mostly missed out on the golden age of the arcades. But I do remember them, particularly the arcade at the nearby mall my family frequented for the Learning World store and the Orange Julius stand. That arcade always intrigued me. The darkness. The sounds. The machines!

I vaguely remember one time when my dad took me into the arcade to … actually play some games. I don't know why. Maybe we were killing time while my mom shopped for Christmas presents or something. At any rate, after asking me what I wanted to play and not knowing how to respond, we ended up at the Pac-Man cabinet. My dad dropped some quarters and pushed me up to the screen. Now, I was not at this time an experienced gamer by any stretch, but I was smart enough to know I should avoid those little moving ghost sprites at all costs. I was terrified. Where should I go? How do I get away from those things? I couldn't get away from those things! Left, no, right, no, down! I died immediately and made my dad finish the game. It wasn't just that the prospect of failure was inevitable. It wasn't just my that failure was on display, as I imagined, for every set of eyes in the room. I was also acutely aware that my dad was spending actual money to facilitate this embarrassment.

Needless to say, I didn't spend a lot of time in the arcade growing up. And I owe it in part to Pac-Mac.

Memorable game — Pac-Man (arcade)

Age 10:

This was a watermark year for me and video games. Prior to age 10, my sole source for digital entertainment was either the black-and-white computer or my small collection of Tiger electronic games. Yeah.

What a monumental occasion when—in the fourth grade—my parents decided to buy me a Nintendo Game Boy. Here's the interesting thing. I was probably the only kid in America who had a Game Boy but didn't have the Tetris cartridge. That was a deliberate choice on my part to go with the non-bundled version. I'd already played a version of Tetris on our Mac computer. Been there, done that. Tetris was cool and all, but it was also kind of lame, not exactly the flashiest game with which to showcase this amazing new hardware. Let's not forget—before I got my Game Boy I was playing this! I distinctly remember pacing up and down the aisle of games at Toys R Us, trying to decide what would become the first real video game I would own. In the end I went with Mega Man.

I don't think I can properly convey how satisfying it felt to click on that Game Boy device for the first time and listen to that 4-bit musical score on the title screen. I savored it for about a minute. And then I hit start. Even at the time I knew it was the beginning of something special.

Memorable game — Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge (Game Boy)

Age 15:

Well, age 15 would have been an interesting year in my video game life. I was now five years into owning the Game Boy, four years into the Sega Genesis, and still a year away from getting the Nintendo 64 as a joint birthday present with my sister.

But in 1997 I was probably picking up whatever I could still find on the Genesis, such as Paperboy 2 and Mortal Kombat 3, the latter of which I acquired used from the video rental store that went out of business. That was an interesting one. It was like watching your first R-rated movie, or buying your first CD with a parental advisory sticker. I wasn't sure if my mom had gotten the memo on Mortal Kombat back when it had debuted. Did she realize that by letting me play this game I was going to develop antisocial or—who knows?—sociopathic tendencies? As far as I recall, I don't think she batted an eye. And so back to home we went, where I promptly started up the game and attempted to pull off my first of what would become many gruesome fatalities. Toasty!

Memorable game — Mortal Kombat 3 (Genesis)

Age 20:

My sophomore year of college. For me, a recently declared English major, 2002 marked the beginning of the most intensive reading period of my life. For my dorm mates, it was the year of Halo. I'd picked up one of those massive Xbox machines between my freshman and sophomore year. I remember playing that quite a bit at the beginning of the school year. My friends and I had some intense matches, but I was pretty good. I could definitely hold my own in a Hang 'Em High deathmatch. Pretty soon, however, those reading and writing assignments started really piling up. Whereas I had pretty strong willpower to abstain from the "one-more-game" addiction, it seems the other people around me did not. Actually, they probably just didn't care about their GPA as much as I cared about mine. All I know is those guys got good—like really good.

It was impressive to watch—demoralizing to play. And it just got worse throughout the year. Two-on-two team deathmatch? Forget it. Oh well. There was always the single player.

Memorable game — Halo: Combat Evolved (Xbox)

Age 25:

Ah, bachelorhood. Age 25 marked the beginning of my relocation to a small town in rural Eastern Oregon, where I lived alone and worked for about 15 months as a newspaperman. I didn't have much time for games. When I did, it was for abnegation—a chance to unwind. I remember playing a bit of Dead or Alive Ultimate for precisely this reason. It was also the year I picked up a free hand-me-down Playstation 2 with a borrowed copy of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3, a.k.a. the longest game I have ever played. I'd like to talk about that game some more in a future episode of “On The List,” so for now I'll just move along.

Memorable game — Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 (Playstation 2)

Age 30:

Well, here I am, 30 years old and still playing games. I'm a married man. I just moved again to start a new job (which I should probably tell you about sometime). I'm writing this in an unfurnished apartment ... in a very uncomfortable chair. I need to wrap this up.

It's hard to say what will be the most memorable game of 30, so for now I'm going with Trials HD, another game I will be posting about very soon. Hopefully. 

Memorable game — Trials HD (Xbox 360)

Wonderputt - thinking around the box

When I was a first-semester freshman in high school I took a drawing class. It was the only art class I took during my entire four years. This was back when I still had tentative career ambitions to become a graphic designer.

There was one assignment I remember in which we had to draw an abstract isometric picture—a kind of jumbling together of boxes and rectangular prisms. The idea was to create something figurative from these bland three-dimensional renderings. It felt similar to a Rorschach test—interesting from a psychological perspective to see what different students saw in a mass of boxes.

A friend who was also taking the class drew his initial piece and immediately envisioned a gun. He rendered his final drawing as a complex weapon resembling an Uzi. It was interesting. Very utilitarian.

I had a more difficult time with the assignment. I looked at my initial sketch and didn't see anything practical at all. Quite the opposite. The best I could envision was a futuristic, utopian cityscape, or rather just a small block of a fantastical (completely impractical) urban environment. I made little shops and buildings out of the blocky shapes. I drew in people walking through the alleys, one guy pulling money out of an ATM.

I was reminded of that 15-year old drawing exercise while playing Wonderputt, a web-browser game developed by Reece Millidge of Damp Gnat Ltd. As much a piece of interactive art as an actual game, Wonderputt presents a surreal isometric landscape as the backdrop for a five-minute point-and-click putt putt adventure. Its 18 holes are linked together by a series of quirky animation bits; the little yellow golf ball travels by balloon, submarine and all manner of imaginative transport. It's a delightful sight to behold as the static backdrop unfolds, reveals new layers and otherwise comes to life with each successive hole.

The game itself plays handily and functions more like a virtual billiards game than golf, in that it's all cursor-based. Position the cursor in a certain radius around the ball and a trajectory arrow will appear. The thickness of the arrow, which changes with the cursor's moment-to-moment distance from the ball, indicates speed.

Wonderputt really is the perfect name for the game. There are no clubs, and while the course itself takes inspiration from miniature golf with its banked surfaces and puzzle-like setup, these holes abandon the notion of traditional putting greens altogether. But it's still a type of golf game at heart, a golf game with a generous standard for par (I was already 16 strokes under after my second time through). Getting a bogey triggers a playful chicken cluck. A birdie activates a pleasant chirping sound. And putting for an “albatross”—one better than an eagle in the land of Wonderputt—awards the player with a victorious squawk.

A cursory peak into the background of the developer reveals some interesting information. Prior to making Wonderputt, creator Reece Millidge had developed a very similar experiment of a game called Adverputt. Just as the name implies, this browser game mixes commercial branding with putt putt golf, with each hole individually sponsored by a different advertiser. While a decidedly colder experience than Wonderputt—not necessarily for the hyper-advertising but more for its comparative lack of visual and auditory character—it's mechanically the same game and an intriguing idea. He even made a micro version of the game that individual companies can use on their own websites, plastering the small game world with their own name and logo. He strikes me as a pretty innovative guy. You can read a quick interview with the developer at Gamasutra.

Needless to say, that whole visual art career path didn't quite happen for me. If it did, or if I had the technical talent to develop small games myself, I'd like to think I would be creating things like Wonderputt. Ever since I was a kid I've been drawn to elaborate, visual-physical contraptions. I loved miniature golf. I swooned over marble mazes and labyrinth games, even the digital ones (a lá Marble Madness). There's also something aesthetically satisfying to me in the conceptualization of basic isometric design as an interactive space. So it's easy to see why Wonderputt and I really click.

But enough about me, you should really check out the game (such as here). It's free. It's fun. You might be as surprised as I was to see how advanced and polished a modern web browser game can be.

On the List — Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell

I'm starting a news series on Knee Deep in the Game called “On the List.” The idea is that for each entry I'll write a little bit about one of my favorite video games, one that could potentially end up somewhere on my Top 100 Games list if such a thing existed. That or someone else's list … or maybe not all. I don't know. Let's face it, there are no hard rules here. This is fifth-freedom territory!


Sam Fisher: He's a real nowhere man
I’ve never read a Tom Clancy novel. I guess I’ve always assumed the world of shadow governments and international espionage is frighteningly real enough. Why fictionalize it?

I am a fan, however, of the Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell video game franchise, which began as an original Xbox title back in 2002, developed by Ubisoft. In the game the player assumes the role of Sam Fisher, a Navy SEAL covert ops veteran whom we can probably assume has been through some serious shit in his day. Fisher has been called back into the field, recruited as the titular one-man “splinter cell” for the new ultra secret Third Echelon initiative within the National Security Agency. The idea behind the initiative is to gather info and intelligence from the most sensitive of around-the-world locations by means of physical infiltration and a compartmentalized support network of hackers, handlers and so forth.

The NSA basically needs Fisher to sneak into a former Soviet-bloc country to investigate some strange political shenanigans and the ominous disappearance of two CIA field agents. The information he uncovers has immediate, global consequences. Fisher then hops from country to country to track down new targets and throw water on all kinds of political living room fires that spring up from the fallout.

What the player experiences is a finely tuned stealth action video game, most of which is spent crouching among the shadows, trying to get from one place to the next without being noticed or shot at. Obviously, this is not always easy, causing the player to rely on a repertoire of cool takedown maneuvers and a limited inventory of techno gadgets and weaponry—including sticky cameras, some grenades and a silenced combat rifle. Needless to say, more than a few unlucky or deserving bastards will end up knocked out or rubbed out for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Taking a cue from the likes of Deus Ex and I'm sure other predecessors, Splinter Cell succeeded as a game that encouraged a certain level of player choice and technique. A scrupulous player was free to put in the extra effort to minimize fatalities and/or confrontations. The more speed-minded player could perhaps afford to run through an area with less caution, soaking up the bullets and simply healing with medical kits later on. Stealthy progress depended, in part, on the speed and sound of Fisher's movement, which the player controlled by applying degrees of pressure to the controller's analog stick.

Something the first Splinter Cell did better than any other game that came before was to render dynamic and realistic lighting effects. Various intensities of virtual light could be projected in all directions of a three-dimensional environment. The game's levels and their scripted obstacles were designed largely around the staggering of light and dark areas, all determined by the deliberate placement of things like street lamps and other artificial light sources. Perhaps the neatest trick up the player’s sleeve was the ability to shoot out light bulbs and rely on night vision goggles as a means of evading detection.

Similar to games in the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series—wherein an otherwise standard urban environment will be designed around the fantastical concept of grind-worthy edges and smooth, concave ramps built into virtually every utilitarian structure—the Splinter Cell games present a type of exaggerated environment suited to the mechanics of the game's genre. Most of the settings employ a contradictory combination of high-level security (patrolling goons everywhere) and incredibly poor lighting. The very halls of the CIA headquarters, for example, contain more predatory blackout spots than a mall parking garage.

Playing Splinter Cell invariably causes me to imagine a scenario in which Sam Fisher has to pass through my apartment at night while I'm at home performing some random task, like cutting an onion in the kitchen or folding my underwear in the bedroom. What path would he follow in order to pass through undetected? Or would he more-than-likely just grab me in a choke hold and pull me off into some dim corner of the room? Creepy!

These aren't my only questions. Sometimes, after finishing a level, I have to wonder ... what happens later? What happens in the hours after Sam Fisher has blown the proverbial taco stand and is back at home, drinking his morning protein shake, nagging his daughter to get out of bed for school? What happens when all of those guys who got knocked unconscious and dumped in storage rooms halfway across the globe start to wake up? Surely some of those dudes sustained physical injuries, if not brain damage! Are they going to be okay? What kind of a conversation do these baffled individuals have as they stumble groggily around trying to find one another, or when they start to sort out the living from the dead? What happens to the living guys who wake up underneath the dead guys because there wasn't any other convenient place for Fisher to quickly stash the bodies? Double creepy!

One narrative element I find interesting is the between-mission cutscenes, shown as quick snippets of TV news reports that sometimes present a revisionist spin on the events related to all of Fisher’s recent sneaking around. There's a moment at the end of the game when Fisher, watching a televised speech with his daughter, allows himself an amused chuckle or two as the president of the United States credits the spirit of “American tenacity” for what Fisher has almost singlehandedly accomplished behind the scenes.

What I find even more chuckle-worthy is the aspect of player complicity. People talk a lot about morality in video games, but that discussion typically is reserved for the games that bop you over the head with it, the ones that give you good experience points for helping the old lady across the street or evil experience points for pushing her under a bus. The interesting thing is that most players will go through Splinter Cell without a moment’s thought to the bigger picture of it all. Such as, is any of this Third Echelon business even legal?

At one point during the second level, Fisher’s remote handler Irving Lambert warns Sam about a military colonel approaching his specific location inside a foreign embassy building. “That’s detailed intelligence,” Fisher replies. No kidding! Sam Fisher is no idiot. He’s used to taking orders on little to no information, a so-called “need-to-know basis” if ever there was one. But, for God’s sake, what else are the folks in Washington seeing that we're not? And who's calling the shots? At multiple times in the game Lambert gives the call on whether Fisher is authorized to use lethal force, depending on the political stickiness of the situation. Lambert is sometimes explicit in telling Fisher his mission has not been officially approved by the Joint Chiefs. I'm sorry, did you just tell me we're working outside the approval of the Joint Chiefs? Suddenly, the idea of staying hidden all the time, of turning out the lights on everyone around you, becomes a much larger symbol. By the end of the game we may be wondering if the president himself has been privy to what's really gone on. Such is the way of things, I suppose, in the Tom Clancy universe. Just good fiction, right?

Images were borrowed from splintercell.wikia.com.

If necessary, use words

If you've read part three of my video game “memoir” series, you might remember that some of my earliest digital gaming experiences had to do with text-based adventures. I talked a little bit about King's Quest in particular.

King's Quest was an interesting type of game that was both a graphics- and text-based adventure. In it the player moved the character avatar around a set of static location screens using either keyboard directional buttons or by clicking with a mouse cursor. This, however, was purely for navigational purposes. The primary system of player input was handled via written commands that the player literally would have to type into existence.


If a player walked up to the castle doors, they would have to type “open door” to actually open the door and proceed. If the player wanted to speak to the king, they would have to type “speak to king.” Later on in the game these text-based commands became a little more puzzling. The player might wander into an exterior environment and have to type something like “look at room,” a basic command that usually would provide a rudimentary description of the environment immediately depicted on-screen. This visual description might even hone in on a particular object of player interest—perhaps a particular rock that required pushing or a tree to climb.

This system of text-driven input had its roots in earlier games such as the Zork series—the first of which were text-only adventures—and carried over into other adventure games for several years until pretty much the entire adventure game genre switched over to a point-and-click interface model. Instead of typing commands the player would select from various cursor icon types, each representing a specific type of action—an eye cursor for looking, a hand cursor for touching or taking objects, and a dialog cursor for speaking to people, things, etc. Other games employed similar systems, and they worked rather well for several more years. Then the adventure genre mostly disappeared.

This past January I downloaded Boxer, an awesome DOS-emulator program, onto my Macintosh computer so that I could theoretically go and play, among other things, a bunch of those classic Sierra On-Line adventure games from back in the day. The first (and so far only) game I went through was a game called Quest for Glory: So You Want to be a Hero, which I'd played to completion several times as a kid on our Macintosh Centris 610 computer.

I think the entire Quest for Glory series (there were five original games in the series released between 1989 and 1998, as well as one remake) deserves a writeup all its own, but I'll just mention a couple noteworthy points. The Quest for Glory series was an early and rare example of an adventure and role-playing game hybrid—arguably heavier on the former type of game. Long before BioWare's Mass Effect series did the same, the Quest for Glory games allowed the player to import their saved character file from one installment to the next, with all of that character's built-up statistics transported intact. Alternatively, one could create a new character file for each game, selecting from three optional character classes: fighter, magic user, and thief.


The version I played through this past January, same as the version I played through as a kid, was actually a 1991 remake of the original 1989 game (which also, incidentally, bore the original series title Hero's Quest, changed to avoid copyright infringement with the HeroQuest board games). Whereas the original game was a 16-color adventure with a text-parser input system, the remake was redone with completely redrawn 256-color graphics and a point-and-click user interface.

One aspect of the (remake) game that I had always enjoyed was its system of dialogue with non-playable characters. In all of the other Sierra adventure games I'd played, there really was no dialogue system at all. Speaking to other characters—whether initiated via text- or cursor-based command, depending on the particular game—was functionally no different from looking at something or performing any other type of action. In this Quest for Glory remake, however, clicking the dialog cursor on a character brought up a menu of dialogue topics, sort of an early dialogue tree. Selecting one topic might cause that character to provide background information on related subjects, sometimes bringing up a new sub-menu with some of these new topics. It was an excellent vehicle, I thought, for communicating story and information.


After going through the game again, I was hoping to finally transport my character over to the sequel, Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire. This was something I never got to do as a kid, because that game—as far as I'm aware—was never released for the Macintosh.

My original plan was to play through the sequel using a 2008 fan-made remake version from a group called AGD Interactive. Like the original Quest for Glory (or, rather, Hero's Quest), Quest for Glory II had incorporated 16-color graphics and a text-input system. The fan remake was a redeveloped game with improved graphics and a point-and-click interface. Unfortunately, I was unable to get the game to run on my OSX computer. I also couldn't run it on my dinosaur PC laptop. At that point my only recourse was to try and run a pirated download version of the original Quest for Glory II game, which didn't end up working on the Mac but luckily ran using DOSBox on the PC laptop. Whew!

(I normally wouldn't condone using pirated software, but in this case there currently is no digital distribution service, such as Good Old Games, for purchasing the Quest for Glory titles. And there's absolutely no guarantee I would have been able to run the game through any kind of legitimate used e-Bay copy.)

I'm actually glad I played the original Quest for Glory II in all of its original clunkiness. Again, I wish I could do better justice to this game with a more in-depth writeup. Maybe in the future. It would be very hard to recommend playing this game to anyone I know. It's primitive. It had some very strange design choices. Modern game players, with or without the background experience in old adventure games, would need the patience of Job to get through it. Even so, it's a fascinating kind of game. I quite enjoyed it myself.


If anything, playing the original Quest for Glory II made me a newfound believer in the potential of text-based player input.

Recall what I was just saying about the cool dialogue menus in the remade Quest for Glory I? At first I was baffled about how one was supposed to initiate dialogue in Quest for Glory II. If I were to type simply “speak to [character],” nothing would happen. Then I looked at the program menus and noticed a keyboard shortcut for the text prompt beginning “ask about.”

Instead of just typing “speak to [character]” and being spoon fed a dialogue tree with pre-selected conversation topics, the player has to be specific regarding what they want the character to discuss. Functionally, gleaning information from a character might play out very similarly to the dialogue tree. Perhaps in asking about a particular city the character will mention the name of a person. Ask about that person and the character will divulge more specific information. But it's up to the player to make those connections and associations to new topics. Better yet, as the player progresses through the game and learns about new potential conversation topics from other sources, the player can go back to earlier characters and see if they have anything to say about that new topic. Sometimes they do.

I'm sure if Quest for Glory II were converted to a modern game console there would be some kind of collectible achievement for activating every available dialogue window. In essence, there's nothing necessarily tangible gained from trying to “ask about” every single topic. But the typing system creates a playing experience that really is unlike almost any other. Accessing programmed content with the power of one's intuition is enjoyable. There's something to be said about being able try virtually anything, or of using one's brain power to find the necessary words, for initiating the type of action one might attempt for overcoming puzzles and obstacles. Quest for Glory II and its contemporaries may have been primitive games by today's standards, but I find it somewhat sad how the use of text-based input in games was abandoned.

On the one hand, I suppose this kind of itch for unlimited player input could be partially satisfied through different kinds of table-top role-playing or other community-driven games. I can't speak from personal experience. But I think there's something almost mythical about the connection of the minds between a player and a programmer that has nothing to do with real-time interaction or ad-lib dialogue. This has to do with a game inventor who has put in place a specific framework for responding to the predicted input of an actual user. (On a total side note, I'm reminded of the Foundation novel series by Isaac Asimov, dealing with “psychohistory” and the prediction of mass human behavior.)

When I was in middle school I went through a brief period where I tried programming and designing my own graphic adventure games using a Macintosh authoring system called World Builder, released first in 1986 by Silicon Beach Software (the same company that made the game Dark Castle) and later in 1995 as freeware. The program allowed users to create original adventure games using static black-and-white graphic screens and text.


This was an amazing piece of software, and there were a lot of interesting, albeit obscure, games created because of it. What was really neat was being able to create my own vector graphics in Adobe PageMaker and then copy and paste them into the World Builder graphic design engine. Even better, using the World Builder tool introduced me to a mode of simple computer programming, using a custom language similar to BASIC. For each static location I would have to create lines of codes that would correspond to player text prompts. For example, “IF a player types 'a', THEN 'b' happens.” I even figured out a way to use this programming to implement basic animations, such as a bird's-eye view of bungee jumping from off a bridge toward a river below (man, that segment was fun to make).

It was fun to try and think about the different things a player might type while playing and program specific feedback to that potential behavior. I also learned it's just as much fun to create special triggered events for even the more obscure types of actions that a player might attempt—a sort of reward for intrepid and like-minded individuals. Unfortunately, I never did manage to create a finished product, nor did I have any actual players test my bedroom project. What I did manage to get underway is likely still stored on our family's antique black-and-white Macintosh somewhere in my parents' attic.

I myself am not yearning for a resurrection of traditional adventure games (although, oddly enough, there may actually be somewhat of a demand for it … see here and here). But I do think there is potential in the idea of modern text-based game mechanics, particularly in the android/iOS market where a nifty keyboard is already right there.

On a basic level, it's actually just plain fun to see one's words brought to life in a game. Examples? I've heard people get to name their own weapons in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. That's awesome! There's also a neat and completely throwaway feature in Team Ninja's Dead or Alive 4 fighting game. The game copies the text from the user's Xbox 360 profile motto and displays it on various electronic billboard banners in some of the fighting environments. It's pretty funny when beginning a virtual fight in a large packed-housed stadium and seeing my limited-character motto (“4 me 2 P@@P on”) displayed in gigantic moving text all around the enormous room.

On a larger scale, I wonder what might have happened if the idea of text-based commands had not been so completely abandoned. What if that type of system had survived, adapted to and evolved with modern games? What if we had a type of game today—like the Mass Effect series—that incorporated the individual choices of the player on an even more sophisticated level? What if these games involved complex and dynamic consequences resulting not just from the choices directly presented to the player but from the ones the player came up with independently?