5 Days a Stranger; 1 Not Very Good an Essay

Returning to the adventure game genre after such a long hiatus in preparation for the "Chzo Mythos" summary I'm kinda writing has sent me into flights of Proustian revery, which is why the next four hundred words are not about anything, really.

I'm writing this on a woefully underpowered iBook G4, a laptop in desperate need of retirement after 4 years of heavy use. Today, it is as effective a computer as Pakistan is a democratic government. Still, I've bought into the Apple mystique to the point where I cannot fathom purchasing a Windows machine under any circumstances. Like a jackass. Why, if I was handed legal documentation by a Notary Public Officer guaranteeing a future with lots of sex with beautiful, intelligent women in exchange for buying a Dell, I'm not sure I'd take the deal. Even if the deal required said entourage of attractive ladies to make delicious pancakes for my consumption whenever I desired breakfast.. On second thought, I would buy that Dell if those conditions were met. But I wouldn't be happy about it.

One does not play games on Apple computers anymore. One does not purchase computer games for any platform very often anymore, what with piracy being what it is. Outside of AGS games, "The Ur-Quan Masters," The Battle for Wesnoth, and the occasional flash browser game, I never use my computer for videogame-related entertainment. But there was a time not long ago when I overclocked the shit out of an AMD Athlon processor. I think that was freshman year of college (soon afterward, the computer blew up while I was in Portland -- I don't think I left it on before leaving, but whatever). I bought computer parts from Cedar Mill Computers, and that place had to have been a front business for the Russian mob. At one point, I seriously entertained building a completely open source, Slashdot wet dream of a computer, although I cannot remember what drugs I was using at the time that gave the illusion that I was capable of doing such a thing. I haven't felt that way in seven years; this laptop has functioned much better than any of the wonky, crash-prone beige embarrassments I started building in high school. There is no denying that I am a complete sucker for OSX. The GUI just feels correct -- the resize, minimize & window closing buttons are in the top left hand corner of your windows, as it should be. The finder functionality is infinitely more sensible than explorer's clunky, haphazard organization.

Also, how could anyone not want their Firefox browsers to suck all your virtual memory in seemingly arbitrary intervals? If there's a credible explanation for this "feature" hiding in the flotsam and jetsam of the internets, I would read it.

However, recent developments in the games market have muted some of my Apple-centricsm. Games I find most intriguing rarely get a PowerPC Mac client, or at least a client that requires absolutely no effort to install and run. There is nothing I want to experience more than Tales of Game's Studios Presents: Bakley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden; most likely, it'll have to wait until I get a new Intel powered Mac some day in the far, far future -- with a Windows partition taking up valuable hard drive space. Space that should be occupied by 5 Days a Stranger/

Oh, yes. That.


from fully ramblomatic

5 Days a Stranger looks like an early 90's game developed by Legend or Revolution or some other long-forgetten member in the fraternity of developers not named LucasArts or Sierra. I mention this only because of the aesthetic. In general, the visuals are appealing, with just enough abstract roughness to trigger fond memories of Kings Quest. Objects look like reasonable facsimiles of their inspirations, critical in all point 'n click adventure games. However, some baffling decisions, paramount among them the color palate, actively hamper your ability to read much of the in-game text. The dialogue appears, in traditional LucasArts font, above whoever's saying what has to be said; everything else is grey text centered on the screen, superimposed over the environment. There are moments in which we are expected to read grey text over grey concrete with grey fences looming in the background. This kind of blunder in a rather text-heavy quest is unconscionable; however, I think limitations in the AGS programming tools are more to blame than Yahtzee himself. It's a testament to the overall quality of writing that I strained my eyes to read some of incidental stuff, not just because I expected to find a hint or whatever, but because I was genuinely interested in the story.

The title is not inaccurate, even if it's a bit nonsensical: the world renowned "gentleman thief," Trilby, breaks into the recently vacated DeFoe manor (using an absolutely badass umbrella grappling hook) and discovers himself trapped in the mansion by supernatural forces for five days. There are also, of course, strangers in the same predicament as Trilby, and a series of really awful things happen to pretty much all of them. While all this is going on, horrific things about the DeFoe family are revealed. Like really, really fucked up stuff. Exacerbating the narrative unpleasantness is the worst example I've ever seen of a pixel-hunting puzzle, the second most terrifying type of game-lengthening mechanic in the adventure game genre. Finding that one useful spot you need to progress further in the game is an established trope in this genre, so I would not be so upset had the game not innovated so radically. The puzzle of which I speak required me to turn my mouse sensitivity down so I could scour the landscape more precisely. This is how bad the pixel-hunt is: after accidentally brushing the mouse 1/16th of a centimeter off the hotspot when attempting to click on it, I had to spend 4 minutes trying to realign the cursor to that location again.


from fully ramblomatic

HOW-EV-R, the rest of the detective work is both within the logical parameters of the accursed mansion and make sound narrative sense. There are no "use the mayonnaise jar on the broom-handle" moments, in other words -- one of the puzzles is sort of an extended parody, requiring at least three ridiculous item combinations and the use of one very sarcastic "guide to white magic," pamphlet to solve.

This game would be a competent, if somewhat easy and predictable, freeware adventure title on the strengths of the brain teasers alone. No one would play it if that's all it was, of course. We like adventure games because they tell stories - stories that are very distinctively "adventure game-y," divorced from the Marcus Phenix-iisms so prevalent in our games today. Had Yahtzee slapped some generic motivations and ill-defined personalities for Trilby and the other trapped inhabitants of DeFoe manor, had he not bothered creating the eerie story of one seriously troubled family, I would not be writing about 5 Days a Stranger.

Awesomely, a group of modders began development on a remake of 5 Days a Stranger, using the Source engine. Less awesomely, the project appears to be dead.

So, yeah. Check it out, if you like adventure games. Get it here.

Sorry for the delay in the "X Days an Article 'bout Yahtzee's adventure games," but as far as I know Jackie is the only person who reads this blog anyway. :

So the incredibly niche article about 4 year old independent adventure games is going to have to wait a little longer because a few days ago THIS happened:


Yes, I've played the demo of motherfucking Bionic Commando ReArmed about 40 times since it's release. Is that right? Bionic Commando ReArmed... I think it's inter-caped. That is usually a major detriment to success, because very few things are cool enough to be inter-caped; Bionic Commando is one of the few.

At some point I''ll need to get some PSN voucher cards for which to pay Capcom, GRiN, and most importantly Ben Judd.

ALSO while foolishly trying to organize the closet underneath my staircase, I came across a large cache of long-missing NES games. There's still quite a few missing from the overall collection (where's DynoWarz, for example? And do I really want it?) but I feel much more whole now.

Next, I have to track down some of my SNES games, because the only ones avalible to me right now are things like "Killer Instinct and the Mortal Kombat games. Where are those Quintet games I bought? What kind of library is complete without Actraiser, Soulblazer & Illusion of Gaia?

Speaking of Actraiser, I played it for about 2 hours last weekend because Jeremy Parish commanded me to; while it hasn't aged as gracefully as other near-launch SNES games like Super Castlevaina and Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, I really enjoyed it. I wish the side-scrolling bits were just the arcade Rastan, though, because they're clearly going for that Rastan feel, only screwing it up.

Off to get coffee with Jon now; hopefully I'll be back later.

The Yahtzee Mythos: 1 Day an Introduction

Ben "Yatzee" Cronshaw is a name that, by now, you are likely familiar with. Every Wednesday he publishes a new installment of Zero Punctuation on the increasingly pretentious and turgid but still excellent Escapist website. What Zero Punctuation does is pretty common internet fare -- video reviews, breathlessly delivered by an Englishman-by-way-of-Australia just seething with contempt at all the dumb and predictable things developers continue to shove in their games, complemented by incredibly crude drawings of horrific violence and phalluses -- but unlike most videogame-related humor things, it's astonishingly funny and has garnered a lot of acclaim from the sort of people who acclaim these sorts of things. The primary audience for Zero Punctuation are message board readers and blog commentary writers, the kind of enthusiast blindly loyal to one gigantic monolithic corporation or another - corporations, it should be noted, that care not one whit about their fanboys, so long as money keeps flowing into their coffers -but the humor isn't so niche as to be unintelligible to the lay-person. The humor must have some broad appeal: although they should hate his guts, partisan fanboy-types still flock to Zero Punctuation to watch Yatzee express his universal disdain for their favorite franchises.

Every major videogame blog has caught onto this. The Kotakus and Joystiqs of the world embed the newest episode of Zero Punctuation in blog entries and post that shiznat the second it goes live; far easier to generate those all important ad-revenue generating clicks by repurposing other people's content than it is to write compelling things themselves, I bet! Heh.

It's possible that the like four people who read my blog haven't seen Zero Punctuation yet, however, so I'm going to take a page from the real bloggers and repurpose Yatzee's content right now. After all, I barely write anything, let alone anything compelling! I gotta find a way to generate those clicks, get that ad revenue up, maybe get some ads, make a living off of this... anyway, here's a review of Army of Two:



Eh? Eh?

Well, I still think it's hilarious.

Before Mr. Cronshaw achieved his current level of notoriety, however, he was famous among an even more niche and dorky group of people than Escapist readers -- amateur/indie adventure game scenesters.

A few years ago, Yahtzee created a few random series of games using the Adventure Game Studio (AGS). His first brush with success came when the "Rob Blanc Trilogy," a series of comedy games I'm never going to play because all the graphics were created in MS Paint. Fuck that. I assume they were funny, or at least not egregiously not funny. That's not what I want to talk about, though. I want to talk about Cronshaw's ambitious series of horror games, formally entitled the Chzo Mythos: 5 Days a Stranger; 7 Days a Skeptic; Trilby's Notes; and 6 Days a Sacrifice, because I've played them, all of them, to completion (mostly)!

I fully expected to hate the games, because they're adventure games, and divorced from the syrupy taint of nostalgia, adventure games are a tough sell. Shakespeare was one of the first to denounce these things, memorably writing "An Al Lowe game is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The vast majority of indie adventure game developers are kids who grew up playing Sierra & LucasArts games, where psychologically profiling Roberta Williams or Ron Gilbert was kinda the only way to solve puzzles. In other words, people almost exactly like me, but delusional.

So one must temper enthusiasm when admiring the hefty shelf of virtual awards the AGS community has awarded the Chzo Mythos. Seriously, the AGS community is pretty excited whenever a game doesn't use any of the five pieces of clip art present in every other AGS game on the market. One of the major selling points of 5 Days a Stranger is that Yahtzee did all the art himself, in Photoshop. All the animations, too. Almost no one who makes these little games even bothers to do that. When a community embraces and loves a game because someone bothered to create their own artwork for it, that tells you something. Not that every AGS game I've played is bad -- quite the opposite! -- but some of the better ones are not free and therefore dead to the AGS diehards. I can't understand how upsetting it must be, discovering a developer with the audacity to charge a couple bucks for their really well-done, incredibly interesting rabbinical adventure of mourning and mystery, but that's just the culture we live in today. As we've just seen with Braid, $5 can seem like a staggering amount of money to the sort of dude that bought Halo 3 with the cat helmet.

Before I even started playing any of Yahtzee's oeuvre, I toyed around with a "Zero Punctuation"-style takedown of these little freeware adventure games, only with ponderously slow narration and images of polar bears and walruses maniacally spinning like Spyrographs instead of comedy drawings on yellow backdrops. That'd show Yahtzee how it feels to have someone's hard work demolished in 2 minutes!

However, I dropped that elaborate and not particularly clever plan: firstly, by coming to terms with my own enormous limitations as a voice actor and animator, and secondly, after enjoying 5 Days a Stranger quite a bit. It is evident that Yahtzee has some understanding of game design, which ads some weight to his critiques, and because of this his acerbic ranting on the failings of other games are more than just disposable fun; they are rough sketches of a wise man's brain that hint at the things Yahtzee might want to put in a "real" game if given the time and resources.

Coming in the near future -- like, later today hopefully -- a look at 5 DAYS A STRANGER & 7 DAYS A SKEPTIC