Artsygamer

If there is one thing that i’ve found over the years guarantees I’ll play a game even if it should have flawed mechanics that is not it’s graphics but it’s story and to what degree i can relate to it… so i’m interested in this category in particular.

I’ll take this opportunity to recomend AVP 2. It’s a PC game from around 2000 I believe, which i won’t recomend like many others for the great shooter it is or the "most frightening to play (as a marine)" like a friend insisted (i still root for "Blood" on that one), but for the unique 3 point of view story. It’s one of my top 3 contenders of any medium in telling a intertwined overlapping story. The other two are: … wait for it… guesses? well, Starcraft and … forgot name… turn based game like Heroes… has 2 great expansions two… okay, it’ll come back to me and i’ll add it then… if not, remind me?

Edit: yep, it’s Disciples 2! Thank you Diana for reminding me!
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No wonder I liked 2…  the moral ambiguity, the choices… I must say I originally discarded the game because of all the fighting, but though that’s not something I like I was very happy to accept it as a means of action once I realized it’s just a tool in a much bigger expression of action and choices.

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Games come in all shapes and colors, and while you might think that we’re now in 2008 and text mode games have died in the ’80s that is not quite true: there are still those of us who love a good story and are even willing to read text for it… especially when, unlike books, movies, and unfortunatelly most games, it’s a story that at least seems to respond/branch according to your input. In comes the interactive fiction competition, the 2008 edition being it’s 14th annual incarnation.
And all this was just the intro for my favorite interactive ficiton: All Roads: this game totally took me by surprise… i don’t want to spoil too much of the story for you, but a game which starts with you being the person being hanged, involves morally strange situations and time travel paradoxes… all through a personal emotional veil… well… let’s just say I never thought a political conspiration in medieval Venice could be so immersive (the image of entering the room of conspirators is still so powerful in my mind).
Winner for best story, best game, best writing & best setting awards for 2001.

PS: forgot to mention: to read the story you need an interpreter, but ther are tons of them, for all OSs, devices and environments imaginable. To go through the story you just communicate simple action words like "look" "stand up" "open" "wake up" "go north" …

PS2: amazing the variety of the stories and settings, from horror to emotional, from action to abstract (btw, I once played a mindblowing abstract one… i couldn’t believe the imagery)
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Like I was saying in the past about games, and movies too, oftentimes I have to dig through tens of discardable works and some worth enjoying but not spectacular until I find something that, to me, is a true revelation! I’m happy to say that after recently having abandoning a bit gaming after a period of less fruition and digging into books again, after a couple of books discarded, including a few quite nice ones (Outbound flight if you’re at all into the star wars/Thrawn or Timothy Zahn’s works) I am so very happy to have discovered a true earth mover for me. I’m also so very happy to have discovered it available directly online for our enjoyment:

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I must admit I had pretty much written The Witcher off. Not only did it seem like a lower budget product (engine, animation in particular, possibly not so great audio…) but besides forcing me to play through the point&click interface of PC RPGing when I have grown to like so much playing with a gamepad it committed what to me is one of the worst sins ever: yet another "been there done that" medieval world with the promisses of lots of hack and slashing. Why can’t people make a non-standard medieval world? I mean, town, inn, swords, outlands of the city infested with monsters… it’s been soooooo done. And then some. I don’t expect all the games to be as original as placing the setting in the Planescape universe, or constructing something as intricate as the Legacy of Kain mythology, but even other cliches would be better. Or a White Wolf setting? Vampire The Masquerade anybody… Or even better… something new, something creative. Or at a least something with a different aestethic feel. Morrowind for example managed to make a medieval setting feel somewhat fresh with interesting architecture types. The Witcher in the meanwhile besides putting me off with the promise of a combat oriented game showed me standard out of the box medieval houses. And inns!!!
So why I am writing about it? I certanly don’t like bashing things or being all critical like… The reason I’m writing this is because there’s new hope: this video… well, i had seen other videos that hinted the game might have a bit of that grey morality that would be so fresh given all the "be super good"/"be cruel evil" choice games… but this video promissed a lot more… it promissed options. Branches. They don’t even try to kid us with "there’ll be a kazillion gameplay modes"… but they do say 3 completelly different ones, and they do say something that I’ve dreamed of for so long: choices that matter. Choices who’s consequences show up hours after the decision sounds VEEERYYY goood. Then again my heart has been broken before by games which promissed choices and moral depth only to discouver that they were only for marketing or amazingly shallow… but if this is true, well, then all other faults of the game I may be able to forgive, I might even play it on the PC (should i one day get one that will play it well and be able to configure my gamepad to fake a mouse)… That makes 3 games I can dare hope will create choice rich experiences: Fallout 3, Mass Effect & Witcher. Now chances are (from past heart breaks and realizing what an incredible expense and unreasonable thing it is to create a choice oriented game) that 2 out of 3 will barely touch meaningful choices… but that still leaves 1 game i may hope will encourage self-expressing immersive gameplay in the next 2 years. Yeayyy!!!!
PS: I know the chances are slim, but wouldn’t it be cool if Final Fantasy XIII decided to so embrace western approaches that it offered choices or GTA 4 ended up having so much content that it pretty much turned into a self-expressing rpg type experience?
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   Can’t say Doom is a title that pops to mind when I think of an artistic game: it feels more like a gameplay game. A game about shooting, survival… And yet it feels like it’s made an emotional mark. It may be just repetition/familiarity/my time spent on figuring out Carmack’s programming through playing with code in DosDoom (Plutonia and TNT wads most of the time) or more likely the fact that I was so freakin excited about all the amazing maps people made for it and spent countless hours trying them (one with a very emotional atmosphere given by NiN midi music pops to mind). My point being: to me it still feels like it has a certain feeling. It’s technical limitations of 2d bsps resulted in a very specific style of artwork, a certain kind of design by symetry/asymetry. Anyway, just found myself on this whole memory-emotional rolercoster reading a gamedaily retrospective of the Doom series. I’m talking about Doom 2 & associated wads mostly. Doom 3 had a very promissing start that made me feel like a writer was behind it, and indeed the audio journals were a great touch, however it too soon turned into maze walking (even backtracking i think) through all too similar environments and though i finished it from that point it lost artistic value to me and all the great graphics, shadows and bumpmapping in the world couldn’t save it for me. Unfortunatelly in my opinion ID software have always been more of a technology company… and though they shaped and led 3d graphics through time my heart still remains with those who use technology for artwork. Take Raven Software: they took the doom engine and made the amazingly art-oriented Heretic. Sure, it ran horrible even ages after, and it didn’t cast any blazing trails… but the artwork in it… yum yum yum. Inspiring.
   Note: I make a HUGE distinction between graphics in the sense of technology and in the sense of artwork. IMHO you can have a top notch engine running on high end hardware producing things that feel ordinary, even if they do it in super high detail, or you can have a world with low res textures, running on a weak engine and ancient hardware that still hints at great artistic elements or even manages to make you forget the technology and enjoy the artwork. For example for me the Heretic game is so full of story, one told just by it’s artwork: i completelly forgot it’s game story, but it’s artwork has told my mind a fascinating story, of a magical world, and yet not fantasy, but somehow dark/scifi.. of ancient civilizations and ritual temples.
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