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Nov 12th, 2018 at 12:31:42 - That Dragon, Cancer (PC) |
I have a feeling I will never forget this game. It is a raw, emotional journey through a family's life as they grapple with their youngest son, Joel, dying from cancer. I had a lot of thoughts and feelings while playing, and will do my best to summarize them here.
1. Authenticity. That Dragon, Cancer is such a personal piece of work. You feel what the parents were going through--the shock, the grief, the hope, the love. You even feel the confusion that their other children experienced, and one of my favorite aspects of the game was how it showed the parents guiding their other children through Joel's illness. Many of the recorded conversations sound like a mic was on in routine family interactions. The mother's letters/diary entries are at times brutally sad, at times pensive, and usually hopeful and religiously inspired.
2. Religion. I know the game has been knocked for heavy Christian overtones. This is not a preachy game. If it were preachy, I would have hated it. Instead, it demonstrates how faith helped the family through the ordeal, helped them understand and rationalize the loss of their son. A major function of religion is to explain the inexplicable, and although we can scientifically explain cancer, it is hard to understand WHY it is happening to YOUR child. Why would God allow that? Many of the religious reflections aren't particularly deep, but use them as a springboard to go deeper yourself.
3. Art. The game is beautiful in its own way. Not in the "wow, that's impressive art" or "wow, the technical ability of the artist is high!," but in its simplicity and in the emotions that the scenes evoke. The opening vignette sees you controlling a duck, eating bread that Joel happily tosses into the water, as the father talks to his other two sons about how Joel is different. Then, you take control of Joel and toss the bread. It sets the mood--a serene lake, a family outing, sunshine, hope, happiness--that becomes distorted at times later. One of the most memorable vignettes with a seriously dark tone sees you controlling Joel, floating in the sky with a bunch of inflated medical gloves (as balloons). There are ugly, black, pulsating representations of mutated cells that you need to avoid. But it's impossible to avoid them, and one by one, the balloons pop, until Joel falls from the sky and the vignette ends.
4. Gameplay. The game design is strong because of the art, the vignettes, the empathy the whole package elicits. The game design is weak in terms of controls and how much you can interact with the world. Sometimes these effect each other positively, and sometimes negatively. I'm sure the level of interactivity is purposeful, but I think it clearly shows that this game is in no way a polished product from a team of highly skilled designers that we generally expect to encounter. Instead, there's not a lot to DO except use a walk command and some sort of "interact" command. There are a couple others that I could not figure out what the icon meant. There is a swimming sequence where you have to (I think--actually I'm not sure what the "win condition" was for that area) get the dad to swim to the surface of some water, perhaps toward a rowboat, but he's so hard to control. Another was a little cart racing vignette that was so rudimentary. The cart goes, and you steer it in a circle. Again, these generally worked emotionally, but they were not easy or interesting to play through, and the emotional impact would have been greater if my focus wasn't on "Swim UP man!" or "Wow, this cart control sucks." One cool vignette was a story that the parents were telling their other two sons about Joel. Joel is a knight fighting cancer, which is a dragon. The game shifts to a delightful 2-d platformer. You control Joel, and as his parents tell the story, their words appear on screen where some narration manifests. So for example, "And Joel had armor to protect him [text appears with armor that you pick up]. And he needed this armor because on his journey he faced many fearsome enemies [text appears over new enemies]." It's like the story causes the sidescrolling, and was a super cool way to demonstrate progression in the narrative and in this vignette. But sometimes the text would seem out of place or it would go too fast and appear off screen. It took a little bit of oomph away from the vignette, but that was still one of my favorite ones.
There's plenty more to say about this, but I'm going to revisit the game. Next semester, I'm teaching a course on death, grief, and dying, and I am absolutely going to work this in. It's short enough and simple enough to use in class, touches on numerous topics I've got outlined for the course, and students will find it extremely interesting. And I wasn't even thinking about that before I played!
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Nov 6th, 2018 at 23:50:57 - Kerbal Space Program (PC) |
I was interested in and purchased this long ago, and have since become less interested in it. A few hours after messing around in its career mode, it's off my computer again. Kerbal Space Program (KSP) is a really impressive space program simulator. You tinker with building spacecraft and try to successfully launch them to fulfill whatever objective you have. In sandbox mode, you have access to all the ship parts, which snap together like Legos. This was intuitive; however, keeping the spacecraft from exploding is less so. I gather that the game takes a significant amount of time to understand the basics, and the physics are so realistic that it would probably help to understand the math.
In career mode, you can take contracts from corporations to test their rockets, collect science data, leave the atmosphere, and so on. I enjoyed the given goals, but admit to becoming frustrated for not being able to achieve one that seemed easy: deploy a parachute within a set altitude range and a set speed range. I could get the altitude, but I was always going too fast while within the altitude range. I used the worst rocket, and still I propelled myself too far, and came down too fast to deploy at the correct time. I tried to spin my craft wildly around to slow its ascent, but that didn't work either. I tried to arc my ascent, which also didn't work. Perhaps I need to be able to jettison the rocket engine, and there were coupling parts, which I assume allow you to detach parts in flight. I'm sure I'd figure it out with more tinkering, but three hours in and I couldn't get a parachute to open right. It's a little demoralizing!
Whenever you don't deploy the parachute, your spacecraft crashes, killing the Kerbal pilot. It's cute; anything the Kerbals do is cute. I tried to make my astronaut puke from spinning the spacecraft like an insane teacup, but he just smiled and enjoyed the ride. The NASA management sim is on point, but not so much the Kerbals' response to flight.
There's a whole host of things to manage aside from building and piloting spacecraft. You gain science points to spend on research (buying new parts), prestige (not sure what that does; public relations?), and money. You can recruit new Kerbals and they can level up after going on successful flights (purpose unknown). You can talk to your science intern, publicist, operations manager, and more to get funding or improve public opinion. It might sound like a lot, but everything seemed straightforward except for the actual know-how to build and fly the spacecraft. That seems to be where the depth is, and where one would get hundreds of hours from this game. It didn't grab me, and I've got other stuff I'd rather spend time playing than getting into a NASA sim. I had been planning to use this for a class to talk about games and education, and I'm glad I never followed through with that; I would have had to abandon ship.
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Nov 4th, 2018 at 22:31:46 - Final Fantasy VI (PS) |
Tried to come back to this after two-and-a-half months, spent 30 minutes trying to get the PS2 to work, 30 minutes re-learning the systems, another 30 minutes advancing the story, 30 minutes wandering around lost. I've lost interest in what so many people say is the best Final Fantasy game! Ah well, at least I got to suplex the phantom train.
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Aug 30th, 2018 at 23:41:10 - Duskers (PC) |
Crammed in a couple hours of Duskers before my EA month is up and before Dragoncon. A friend of mine who likes hacking/command prompt games that model old OSes has talked a lot about it. After dabbling, I can say it has a unique feel, though it's not as suspenseful as I was led to believe. Alien this is not. Granted, I haven't played much, but everyone's favorite get-killed-in-space game FTL has it beat for intensity...and everything but hacking, for that matter.
Duskers places you in control of drones that explore derelict ships. Your own ship is stuck out in the middle of space with low supply reserves, and you've got to scavenge scrap and fuel to, presumably, make it somewhere safe. You control drones by inputting commands into a DOS-ish program. Select drones with 1-4, move them with the arrow keys, and type things like "d2" to open door 2, "tow" to tow damaged drones back to the airlock, "generator" to connect a drone with a generator mod to a generator and power rooms, or "motion" to detect motion (enemies) in nearby rooms. You can control drones directly as described, or you can zoom out for a top-down strategic view of the ship and move them in DOS (e.g., navigate 1 3 moves drone 1 to drone 3; navigate all r4 moves all your drones to room 4; etc.).
The game reminded me a bit of Endless Dungeon, a roguelike with some similar mechanics, such as using generators to power sections of a floor. If you've got a drone powering a generator (or later, you find a ship mod so you can power a generator remotely), then you can open nearby doors. No drone on the generator, and you can't explore further. I never quite figured out what connecting to computer interfaces did, though I suspect it has something to do with controlling ship defense systems, one of which attacked me when I didn't have a drone connected to the interface. Also like Endless Dungeon, there are enemies on the ship, and you need to route them from room to room so that you can navigate your way safely through the ship. So far, it was easy to see how to solve these puzzle-like problems, but I'm sure it becomes extremely complex.
I quit playing when I lost two drones and had to exit a mission severely beaten up. Somehow I tripped an alarm and caused a radiation leak or something, and I ran my affected drones to safety. The radiation seeped to another room, so I shut all the doors. Would it dissipate? Would it still spread? No, it was contained. But then I wondered if I could open more doors and diffuse it. Nope. It spread quickly and my two favorite drones were trapped. So I don't know how to get rid of radiation! Maybe route it to an airlock and open that, but everything on the way would need to be powered.
Duskers, then, is like a puzzle-hacking-roguelike game. Look at it in strategic view and you'll see what I mean. It's got a neat premise, and the commands (so far) are intuitive. I was confidently exploring ships after 30 minutes. If I didn't have to cancel my EA subscription, I'd probably spend a few more hours with Duskers, but as it is, I'm happy with the couple I did spend.
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