Notes: Videogames

Natalia O'Shea has sung a Jaina's song in a Russian version of a trailer for a future update of World of Warcraft. As for me, she's extraordinary good in it — I mean, she knows how to make a proper mood and season a speech with steel.

By the way, speaking about her and “Melnitsa” as a whole thing — all of their most powerful songs are about something particular. We were at a concert dedicated to the “Luciferase” release and it's hard to compare, seriously. Perhaps, I didn't know something essential to understanding a context, but sometimes it was even barely possible to figure out a story which I was hearing.

Just watch a video I posted under. You don't need to know something special about the World of Warcraft universe, do you? For example, I haven't played WoW and not planning to do it, but the end of the song literally creeps me out :-)

There’s plenty here that did its best to keep me interested: there are places to explore, things to read, things to think about, and sights to see. If you value that in games, you might like it. Almost nothing interrupts the walking and thinking: it’s pretty hard to get yourself killed. So is getting lost: the protagonist has a map and a car, and later you can get a snowmobile too.

But the story really disappointed me. It starts with an intriguing mystery, but before that can go anywhere, it all dissolves into supernatural stuff. Fine, except the mystery goes out the window with it. Why look for clues, form theories, or worry about anything? Unexplained visions from nowhere will tell and show you everything that happened. Before long, you catch yourself sharing the hero’s weary shrug at all the weirdness around him.

Meanwhile, the mystical side of the plot has gaping holes of its own. The tragedy becomes more or less clear toward the end, yes, but even the final, most complete vision raises a whole host of questions that nobody bothers to answer. The plot is a lot like the game’s map: it looks complete, but in practice you can access at most half of it, with the rest brushed aside under a plainly visible “well, because magic, that’s how magic works, you see?”

No, damn it, I don’t.

A great adaptation of Papers, Please, despite being only ten minutes long. Savochkin is excellent, and everyone else delivers too, including the screenwriter. Fitting both drama and a plot twist into that running time takes skill.

Considering that video game adaptations rarely set the world on fire, this one’s a real gem.

This horror game may be niche, but it really is rather good. The atmosphere of a school at night, filled with dark secrets, works brilliantly. Tension rarely lets up, and the game keeps surprising you where you least expect it. I’m an old hand at the genre and still jumped more than once.

The plot changes depending on the player’s actions, so reaching the end of the story takes more than one playthrough. I think it’s worth it. The antagonist alone is a good reason: you don’t often get one who’s more interesting, appealing, and tragic than the heroes and everyone else put together.

I have translated Stardew Valley fan manga on a wave of enthusiasm at the end of July (SV is an enormously addictive farmer simulator which went out a couple of years ago).

It was an amusing experience. Firstly, an author of the manga is Chinese and her work was already translated from Chinese to English. I'm not sure what was the bigger problem — cultural differences or language skills, but several frames were a bit difficult to understand what's going on. Secondly, I've figured out that it's a real challenge to pick proper Russian words and not to get something like a quote from an official government's letter in the end.

So, a part of sense had lost during the process, I guess, although I tried to keep everything I could and even had a word with the author in order to solve the most problematic cases. It was quite funny — I don't know Chinese, she doesn't know Russian, so our a bit poor English was the only way to understand each other.

Something could have been translated better, I suppose, and several pictures definitely could have been changed more accurately. But you know what? Hell it out, perfection is a cruel mistress and I like the result yet. Yeah, there is no big deal or something like it — a drawing style is quite common, a plot has no significant differences with the game, but… I don't know. Perhaps, visual novels made a too sentimental son of a bitch out of me :-)

Thanks to Alice for helping me with image processing, Lem for helping me with the translation and Marika for the inspiration. And, sure, thanks to Quantus for the manga.

An incredibly addictive farming simulator made with enormous attention to detail. People who know what they’re talking about will tell you about the soundtrack, the lovely pixel art, and all that. I’m no good at that stuff. I just bloody loved it, that’s all :-)

Actually, I will say something about the soundtrack. During winter, the game sometimes plays Ancient, one of the simplest yet most atmospheric melodies I’ve ever heard in a video game.

A mixed bag. On one hand, it does a vivid, colorful job of showing madness from the inside. The plot is generally decent, though at some point the ending becomes predictable.

On the other, it’s fantastically linear, with almost no challenge or logic to events. The story is told by a madman, inside his mind, and that leaves its mark on the gameplay: you can’t predict what you’re supposed to do in the next room.

So you wander around looking for triggers, trying to make sense of whatever weird thing comes next. A melting phone? Exploding clocks? Now and then, something really gets to you, like the letters between the hero and his wife. Those moments are rare, and they feel like a breath of fresh air.

Overall, I don’t regret playing it: it’s a sad, heavy story, with a lot of care put into the art and voice acting. But I suspect a lot of meaning drowned in its sea of symbolism.

Not an outright failure, but very, very weak, especially compared with the first game or its DLC. There are barely any moments that scare you, stand out, or make you feel much of anything. And when one does come along, dying yet again soon wipes it out.

On the positive side: great voice acting, decent graphics, and good attention to small details. There are a dozen or so good scenes and half a dozen gorgeous shots that might make it worth playing. They’ve put some work into the world, though it mostly makes you feel sick and disgusted rather than scared, unlike Mount Massive.

Everything else is simply bad. Clumsy stealth in impenetrable darkness; endless scripted chases; bland characters we barely get to know; frequent bugs like floating in midair or enemies walking through objects.

To top it off, the ending is utterly empty. Yes, you can piece it together, and it all seems logical, but… How do I put this? After eight hours of running from psychopaths, you want something to show for it. Instead, you get an enormous, blazing, blinding pile of absolutely fuck-all, in every sense.

An ordinary, very human story, with something missing in a very human way. A spark, maybe? An idea? A point? The closer you get to the ending, the stronger the feeling that someone forgot to put soup in the pot.

I don’t mean it isn’t worth playing. The dialogue is very natural and beautifully written, and it does about three quarters of the work of drawing you in. The game also looks good, although I don’t quite understand all the raving reviews: something like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter had more impressive scenery. Overall, it’s a pleasure to play.

But the ending is frankly rushed, and there simply is no climax. Yes, I get what they’re going for: this is life, blah blah blah, more ellipses than full stops, blah blah blah. But come on! A story that asks a bunch of questions and answers none of them isn’t all that great, however much you tell me I need to be older to get it.

Excruciatingly tedious gameplay that boils down to finding scraps of paper. A limp, disjointed plot cobbled together from mystical theories about the Dyatlov group’s death. As horror, it’s a complete zero. There’s little to fear: just blind monsters and occasional jump scares.

The only good bits are the visuals and sound. The people behind those did a fantastic job. Sadly, what you end up with is just a huge map with almost nobody in it, almost nothing in it, almost nothing to do, and, worst of all, almost no reason to do anything.

One of those games so good that talking about it would be unbearably tedious.

Let’s do something else. I don’t know which of these two tracks better captures the new DOOM’s energy, Gavin Dunne’s Hell to Pay or JT Music’s Fight Like Hell, so I’ll link both.

A short but atmospheric and rather punishing platformer.

It reminded me a little of LIMBO, except this isn’t the afterlife but a dark, mysterious forest full of smart, scrappy hedgehogs :-)

This definitely isn’t the best BioShock in terms of gameplay, but it’s so beautiful and detailed that I don’t really feel like criticizing it. Besides, there’s a wonderfully tangled plot! And Elizabeth :-) David Brown has already said it all in his “Limelight”; I have nothing to add.

I’ll definitely play it again, just to look at everything once more. I’m not sure how I’ll approach the DLC, though: to me, the story of Columbia and its children is as complete as a story can possibly be.

A short, vivid adventure game. No challenge, just a family story where the parents got so caught up in their own problems that they missed something really important.

I think the sister’s journals could have been removed entirely: the story comes through perfectly in the objects, letters, notes, and photographs. It would have left more mystery, more room to figure things out for yourself.

Though I have to admit, as it stands, it’s damn touching.

A brilliant horror game that scares the hell out of you without relying on jump scares. The Alien’s animation and the way it hunts are just fantastic: playing cat and mouse with the monster, trying to guess or hear where it is, the motion tracker’s frantic beeping, saliva dripping from vents, someone’s dying screams nearby, the desperate search for a hiding place. All of it keeps you on edge the whole way through.

Even when Ripley gets a way to drive the monster off, it doesn’t help much. It might flee (if you manage to fire in time and hit it), but it’ll be back very soon, twice as angry, poking its nose into every corner.

As for the downsides, there’s the characters’ wooden facial animation and minor stealth issues the Tab and Escape keys, which pause the game and let you soothe your shattered nerves :-)

Like most fat guys, I’m not big on running, and just forcing myself doesn’t work. I get two or three days out of sheer willpower, then I’m back to being lazy and dreading the next run.

So I had to find something that would actually make me want to run. Eventually, I came across the phone game Zombies, Run!. Basically, it’s a music player: load a playlist and go for a walk. But familiar tracks alternate with a simple story about surviving in a typical zombie land. Your helicopter has crashed, and you’re trying to reach other survivors. You search for supplies and medicine… And zombies surround you, so if you want to live, move your ass.

Je-e-esus Christ! It’s fantastic. I don’t know whether the game or my imagination deserves the credit, but hundreds of thousands of kills in Left 4 Dead didn’t help me at all: growling behind your back makes running incredibly easy! The game calmly tells you how far away each undead pursuer is. When one of them suddenly gained forty meters on me, I probably ran the best sprint of my life.

(Toward the end of the second walk, Runner Five also hurt his leg and started limping very convincingly. Really added to the drama and made the whole thing feel real.)

I’ve updated my summer wardrobe a little. Minus the extra kilos I’d got so used to, I felt like an MMORPG character in the fitting room. I’d leveled up, and now I could wear better gear.

The problems are much the same, including the eternal question: “Should I buy this light armor set if I’m going to level up again soon?”

Reading my own code from last year has a distinct flavor of masochism. Ah, here I put an implicit query inside a loop, and here I retrieved a balance table and grouped it for some reason. Well done, buddy!

Still, at least it means I’m getting better. Say what you like about games, but sometimes I really wish real life had a pillar of light from the heavens whenever you leveled up.

We were covering kitchens in English class: utensils, furniture, food, that sort of thing. I read out the cake recipe from Portal as an example of a dish with lots of ingredients. It went down rather well :-)

By the way, this is one of those rare cases where the localization really nails it: in the Russian version, this monologue, along with all of GLaDOS’s other lines, sounds much more expressive.

Looking around inside the ticket offices at Belovo bus terminal took me straight back to that ancient DOS hospital sim, Theme Hospital.

At least, when I played it, I set up my GP offices in exactly the same way: identical square rooms, bin always in one corner, plant always in the other, radiator always under the window, and so on :-)