The Dig

RetroSFX

To Play or Not to Play

PSN recently put up ten free games on their store as part of their "Play at Home" initiative.  Never one to turn down such offers, I downloaded three titles that I had never gotten around to playing previously.  Here's are some of my thoughts:   

Abzû is what you get when you take Flower and Journey, mash them together, and move the location underwater.  Is it a highly derivative experience?  Yes.  Is it a bad game?  No, not at all.  In particular, the visual presentation is excellent.  There is a lot of attention paid to details such as the splashes fish make when they jump out of the water or turbidity caused by swimming close to the ocean floor.  I was especially impressed by the shear number of aquatic animals the game can render onscreen at any given time.  There's also some neat foreshadowing that occurs if the player is willing to explore off the mainline path.  One other touch I really liked was not only the inclusion of all manner of iconic sea life, but also some creatures that have gone extinct.  Fans of ancient history will enjoy the references to Sumerian culture.  The music is also quite good and adheres to the mood of game like a wetsuit.  It's short, but sweet...and yet I couldn't shake the feeling that I've seen all this before.

The Witness was Jonathan Blow's last game before he disappeared down the black hole of developing an entirely new programming language called "Jai."  Set on a beautiful island, this puzzle game has a lot of similarities to Myst.  The big difference being all the puzzles utilize a draw-lines-to-connect-the-dots mechanic.  At first I found it interesting, but a lot of the environmental-based clues felt a bit arbitrary.  At times, I also got the impression that the challenge came more from guessing what the developer was thinking rather than some arbitrary logic.  Normally I wouldn't mind having to guess a bit, but certain locals have a sequence of puzzles that reset the previous one if the next isn't done correctly.  It's really tedious to have to go back and re-solve a puzzle that was already completed.  Additionally, my preference for exploration over puzzle solving left me wanting to wander and sightsee the island more than engage with any of the game's actual mechanics.  

Subnautica is the third, last and most substantial of the three games I played.  At first glance it might seem like an extrasolar take on Abzû.  In fact though it's an eclectic mix of survival, exploration, horror, story-driven adventure, and - of course - crafting.  Some aspects are silly (glowing red underwater lava lakes how?) while others are perhaps a bit too realistic (an infectious diseases ruined my aquarium!?!).  The single most enjoyable aspect of the game for me was cruising around in a huge "cyclops" submersible.  It even had a foghorn built in!  Sadly, I couldn't use it to communicate with "reefback leviathans" (huge whale-like sea creatures).  The PC version might be more stable, but on the PS4 I found the game had a number of issues: save file corruption, clipping, objects popping into existence causing things to get trapped or stuck...still, base building was cool and I had some rather intense encounters with the larger more aggressive underwater fauna that I won't soon forget. 

Overall, I have to commend PSN for their choice of games.  It's a great selection for people looking for escapism while being stuck indoors.  The fact that it was all entirely free also means I don't have much cause for complaint.  I also wouldn't mind giving the sequel to Subnautica a looksee once it's out of early access...anyway...that will be a story for another time.  

Before Phase Paradox...

Due to a falling out with Sony,
Kenji Eno had Enemy Zero's
tradeshow event preview feature
 a PlayStation logo that morphed
 into the Sega Saturn symbol as
 a way of snubbing his former
 business partner  

Enemy Zero (or "E0", as it is sometimes stylized) is probably the scariest game ever made on the Sega Saturn.  Brainchild of the now deceased Kenji Eno, an eccentric and multitalented artist (R.I.P.), it's easy to see where this game draws its inspiration from.  The films "Alien" and "Blade Runner" are the two biggest influences, but there are also bits of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and even "Forbidden Planet" if you look hard enough.  

The story takes place aboard the spaceship "AKI" (which looks like a large mass of metal with four parallel towers sprouting out of it).  The player takes the role of Laura, a character who shares the same name as (although no relation to) female protagonists found in two of Kenji Eno's other games.  Anyway...this pale blond-haired, blue-eyed woman awakens from hypersleep to discover the ship is crawling with hostile lifeforms and still a long way away from its destination - Earth.  Does all this sound familiar?   Just in case it doesn't yet, there are a total of seven crew members on the AKI and the ship's engineer is even named Parker.  Incidentally, let me pay my respects to the incredible actor Yaphet Kotto - may he also rest in peace.  As these things tend to go, the crew start getting bumped off, one by one.  The thing about the hostile organisms in Enemy Zero that differ from everyone's favorite xenomorph though is they are almost always invisible.  Now, I know what some readers might be thinking, "Ha!  That's a good way to save some development resources."  Well...not really, because the creatures do become briefly discernable when they get taken down by one of the several energy guns found throughout the game.  The presence of guns might make one think more of "Aliens" than "Alien" but these weapons aren't exactly pulse rifles.

The first weapon acquired
 looks like a precursor to
 those found in the 
Mass Effect series 

If anything, the pistol-like weapons found while playing Enemy Zero have more in common with flamethrowers than firearms.  More specifically, they have a very short range and limited number of shots before needing a battery recharge at one of several power stations tucked away in different parts of the spaceship.  Additionally, the guns have a significant charge-up time.  This mixed with the possibility of an overload, due to holding a charged shot for too long, means that timing is crucial.  Worse still, if one of the monsters get close enough to Laura it's an automatic game over.  Yeah...this isn't an easy game, but players do have a motion senor of sorts in the form of an earbud the protagonist wears that emits chiming tones indicating an enemy's proximity based on how frequently the sound repeats; a very slow rate means the threat is far away while a fast one means it's nearby.  On top of this, if the beeps have a rising intonation it means that the distance is closing while a descending sound means the gap is widening.  To help out further, one of the four CDs that comes with the game (humorously labeled "CD Zero" while the others are 1, 2 and 3) is basically a training simulator that allows players to hone their audio detection skills.  Only about half of the game takes place in these cat-and-mouse corridor challenges though.

The first puzzle is a bit strange it that
it requires simple trial-and-error to solve

The other half of the experience is made up of interactive FMV sequences featuring 3D modeled characters, rather than real life actors.  These segments of gameplay remind me a lot of Myst or The 7th Guest in that they mostly feature puzzle solving and cutscenes.  The voice acting and character animation is very cheesy and dated by modern standards, but for the time was quite impressive.  Incidentally, one of the animators who worked on "E0" was none other than Fumito Ueda, who would later go on to head the development of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian.  Another contributor of considerable talent was Enemy Zero's music composer, Micheal Nyman.  While I confess I'm not much of an authority on these things, my understanding is this Englishman has considerable renown as an opera writer and pianist.  Kenji Eno, himself had significant music talent as well, composing the scores for several of his own games.  How he got such a widely respected composer to help him out though is a strange story that I will let readers discover on their own.  Needless to say though, the melodious music is an interesting juxtaposition to the harsh machine-like sound effects heard throughout the game.

The dark, cramped environment
 aboard the AKI spaceship helps
 compensate for the limited
 rendering capabilities of the 
Sega Saturn

One last gameplay detail I want to mention is the rather unique save system.  The closest thing I can think of to it is the typewriter ribbons in early Resident Evil titles.  To put it simply, the main character (Laura) has a audio recorder that functions like a mobile save point.  However, it has a limited power reserve that drains every time the player saves or loads.  There's no way to recharge it in-game and once the power is depleted the player has no choice but to make it to the finish or die and start over from the beginning.  How much power the device has (and uses) depends on the difficulty setting selected at the start menu.  That might sound rather harsh, but Enemy Zero realistically only takes a couple of hours to complete if you know where to go and what to do.  

During its initial launch twenty copies of the game were sold in Japan as special collector's editions for roughly 2,000 USD each.  These twenty copies were delivered by Kenji Eno himself and came in a crate containing the kinds of stuff you typically associate with these sorts of boxed sets.  The noteworthy difference being it was for a game that came out in 1996.   Eventually, Enemy Zero got a PC port.  While generally receiving critical acclaim, like Kenji Eno's other titles (namely "D" and "D2"), "E0" failed to reach a wider audience.  So even though it isn't as unheard of as Phase Paradox, this Japanese horror/sci-fi video game definitely qualifies as obscure even for fans of the sub-genre.

The Legacy of Aliens

Aside from the dozens and dozens of officially licensed video games featuring "Aliens" video, and the Darkseed duology, there are an mind boggling number of titles that have been inspired (or significantly influenced) by the 1986 James Cameron film.  An incomplete list of IPs in no particular order is as follows: 

• Halo series
• Half-life series
• DOOM series
• Contra series
• Metroid series
• Resident Evil series
• Dead Space series
• Dino Crisis series
• StarCraft series

The list grows even longer when one considering individual games rather than franchises in their entirety.  While original to varying degrees all the games that follow have elements or scenes which are easy to point to and say "that's Aliens" either visually or thematically.  Again, in no particular order here is what I could find:

• The Astyanax (aka The Lord of King)
• Streets of Rage 2 (the amusement park interior)
• Run Like Hell
• Xenophobe
• R-Type
• Ecco the Dolphin (the final boss)
• Space Gun
• Space Hulk
• Alien Storm
• Alien Breed
• Alien Syndrome
• Die Alien Slime
• Slime World
• Duke Nukem 3D
• X-Multiply
• Darius
• Gradius
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (the sewers boss)
• Mega Turrican
• GTFO
• Splatter House
• XCOM (particularly with regards to the Chryssalids and Tentaculats)
• Space Quest II, V and VI
• Prey
• The Colony
• Mass Effect
• Project Firestart
• Stasis
• Cayne
• System Shock
• Parasite Eve 2

...and a couple of games by Psygnosis Limited.  There are probably a bunch of other survival horror games that I haven't mentioned, but I think the point has been made.  A lot of video game developers liked "Aliens" and borrowed ideas from it wholeheartedly.  There's also one more game I didn't mention above because it really has more to do with "Alien" than "Aliens." I want to go into more detail, but that will have to wait until the blog entry after this one.