Sword of Sodan

 

Eldritch Quest

While not the first ever made, the original Alone in the Dark was the first video game I ever played that had clear ties to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.  Since then, I've played may more, but honestly feel that direct adaptations of his creations don't work nearly as well as games that eschew those details in lieu of key thematic elements (cosmic horror and a fear of the unknown).  Enter The Last Door, a game that feels very Lovecraftian without any shoggoths prowling about or copies of the Necronomicon waiting to be read.  Much like Shadow of the Comet though, it does feel very reminiscent of old Sierra "Quest" games; except more EGA than VGA.

For those who are too young (or too old) to remember Sierra On-line was a California-based developer and publisher that was known for making a number of adventure game IPs with the word "Quest" in the title.  Some of the most famous examples are King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, and somewhat later on down the road, Hero's Quest (eventually renamed Quest for Glory in order to avoid copyright infringement with a board game of the same name).  Two of the most defining aspects of Sierra games were item-based puzzle solving and a fair amount of text to support the on-screen visuals.  Both of these things are fully represented in The Last Door.  Where the game differs though is in the visual presentation.  I'm not talking about the blocky character sprites...those are actually very true to the originals; right down to the minimalistic double digit pixel count.  In truth, that aspect of the the entire design continues to work surprisingly well.  It's kind of amazing how much visual information can be communicated just by adjusting the colors of a pixel or two.  Want a character to look baling?  Just make the pixel at the top of their head the color of skin instead of the color of hair.  To make a character look unshaven all one has to do is use a slightly darker shade of skin tone on the lower two (out of four) facial pixels.  No, that aspect is fine, rather it is the background environments that look noticeably different. 

Back in the days of King's Quest I to III, Space Quest 1 and 2, in addition to the original Police Quest, every visual had to be made using EGA graphics.  This meant developers had to choose a maximum of 16 colors from a total palette of 64 for any given onscreen image.  The result was, unsurprisingly, very sharp images made up of mostly primary colors.  The Last Door isn't limited by this constraint having access to several orders of magnitude more colors to choose from.  Perhaps because of this, the backgrounds have a somewhat murky look (kind of like a low-res scan of an actual photo).  On the plus side though, the wider color pallet allows for some interesting use of light and shadow.  Combining that with parallax scrolling for foreground, middle ground and background objects, actually produces some truly unique visuals.  Despite not being an accurate recreation of EGA graphics, the overall style does tie well into the game's themes of a veil that obscures reality and hides the true nature of the world.  

The time period in which The Last Door is set is another interesting choice.  1890s London might be familiar to table-top gaming enthusiasts in the form of the "Cthulhu by Gaslight" RPG.  Meanwhile avid readers of fiction might be well versed in that time and place through the works of novelists such as H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, or William Hope Hodgson.  Personally, I found the setting very similar to the "Cthulhu Casebook" trilogy by James Lovegrove, but unlike the other examples, he wrote those novels in recent years and just happened to set them in the 1890s.  Regardless, it's an under-utilized setting in video games so I'm glad to see it represented here, albeit in a highly pixelated fashion.  

  

The Nut Behind the Wheel

"Drive" (2011) is a film I wanted to like a lot more than I did.  It has a cool neo-noir style and and impressive cast; Ryan Gosling, Ron Perlman, Oscar Issac and Bryan Cranston (from the TV series "Breaking Bad").  Sadly, the movie had a contrived/convoluted storyline, as well as some glaring continuity errors.  I also feel like the protagonist (referred to simply as "Driver" in both the original novel and motion picture adaptation) needed a bit more to him.  Maybe he would be a more interesting character if he was a crooked cop, or a person who landed somewhere on the autistic spectrum.  Armchair script doctoring aside, what does "Drive" have to do with video games?  Well...not a lot, but more than you might think.

Looking at the official soundtrack cover it's easy to draw a parallel to the GTA series (particularly Vice City).  However, there's actually an older series that got started on the PSX, a game called Driver: You Are the Wheelman.  The title is pretty self-explanatory and it plays a lot like the start of the film "Drive".  The player accepts missions via messages left on his answering machine.  Sometimes the player has a mutually-exclusive choice between two (or three) jobs and sometimes they get to listen to rather hilarious requests made by people who obviously had the wrong phone number.  The missions themselves follow a similar theme of traveling to series of locations, tailing another car, ditching the cops or running someone off the road in one of four major cities: Miami, San Francisco, New York and Los Angles.  That last location is the place in which  "Drive" takes place.  It's also set in around the same basic time period (1980s) and features a number of classic muscle cars.  As far as I can remember, Driver was a very difficult game, with a mandatory tutorial at the beginning that was not easy to complete.  The sequel allowed the player exit the vehicle and enter another, making it a kind of proto-GTA.  Unsurprising, I suppose, when one considers that Driver: You Are the Wheelman and Driver 2 slightly pre-date all but the two-dimensional top-down GTA games.

Interestingly enough, The Driver series was heavily inspired by the old Steve McQueen film "Bullitt" in addition to other car chase films from that era of cinema.  So, what we have here is a case of "Drive" being a film adapted from a novel, based on a video game, which in turn was a tribute to another movie.  I'm almost tempted to say it should have been a game, but I think in order for a crime-themed driving game to work in this day-and-age the gameplay needs to have a certain Je ne sais quoi in order to work.  Otherwise it's just a GTA clone, but with a more limited feature set.

The Second and a Half Dimension

What do Dick Tracy, 1942, Super Mario World, Space Harrier and DOOM have in common?  Not much, but one feature they do all share is a 2.5D design atheistic.  In recent years 2.5D has come to mean a video game that uses three-dimensional polygonal models restricted to two-dimensional environments.  In the past though, it was a designation given to games that would use visual tricks to create the impression of a 3D space.  Let me elaborate on this a bit further by going into some more detailed examples.

In Dick Tracy the players can move left and right, as well as up and down (via climbing, jumping, falling, etc.).  Enemies come from the sides of the screen, some in the foreground and others in the background.  Foreground enemies can be fought using a pistol or fisticuffs, while background enemies can be shot at with a Tommy gun.  World War 2 themed bullet-hell shooter, 1942 allows the player to roll and loop to avoid enemy fire by momentarily climbing to a higher altitude.  Like many top-down shooters, fire from the player's strike craft hits other airborne targets, in addition to ground emplacements and ship turrets (no dive attacks needed).  Super Mario World has a few stages with special fences that feature small rotating patches that allow Mario get on the backside.  Space Harrier, much like Afterburner and Thunder Blade, uses enlarging pixels to create the illusion of of forward momentum.  It's a technique that is also used in a lot of racing games such as Hang On and Out Run.  However, in those games the player can only move left and right via a steering input (rather than the more common two axis of motion).  Perhaps that means they are 1.5D games?

DOOM might sound like a stretch since it has all the trappings of a "3D game" (along the lines of "Wolfenstein 3D" or "Duke Nukem 3D").  Much like other aforementioned titles, it uses cleaver design to mask a simplified system of rendering.  Technically, the game has higher and lower elevations, but there can't be any vertical overlap.  One of the big reasons for this is to take pressure off the CPU by reducing the complexity of the mathematical calculations needed.  In modern games, 2D and 2.5D graphics are done purely for style or gameplay reasons, but back in the days of 16-bit gaming platforms it was a necessity due to hardware limitations.  

Maybe that's why the meaning of the term has gradually changed over time...

Samurai

This might come as a shock, but "Bushido" is a relatively recent invention that didn't enter wide usage until the 20th century.  Before then the most commonly used expression was "Bushi no Michi."  In fact, most texts concerning samurai written before the 17th century basically read like combat instruction manuals.  Topics of interest were typically swordsmanship and archery.  Honor was rarely mentioned because such an ingrained part of society was rarely discussed in an abstract sense.  Samurai did what they were expected to do because that was the way things were.  What exactly that entailed depended on the time and place.  So, what does this little history lesson have to do with video games?  Well...a lot, actually, when it comes to Ghost of Tsushima.

In truth, I wouldn't have a problem with any of the stylistic choices in this game if it weren't for the fact that the developers (Sucker Punch Studios) evoked the name of Akira Kurosawa.  Here's the thing...there's a lot of samurai themed media and quite a bit of it is unrealistic or downright goofy.  There's nothing wrong with that, but Kurosawa was not that kind of filmmaker.  He was very much a stickler for historical accuracy, and would even go so far as to have movie sets torn down a rebuilt because the nails were visible (nails not being part of pre-modern Japanese building construction).  Kurosawa has long since passed away, but you can bet your silk kimono he would have never allowed a Kamakura Era film of his to have katana, haiku, or modern sounding Japanese names.  He also went to great lengths to mystify the time and place in which his samurai films took place in order to create the illusion of plausibility.  Ghost of Tsushima, though, doesn't show this kind of forbearance, and instead chooses a very precise time (November, 1274 A.D.) and place (Tsushima Island).  So, right away the game has problems in that the ruler of the island was a man named Sō Sukekuni and not some dude named Shimura.  

Kurosawa had a preference for making the protagonists of his films peasants and ronin because it made this sort of obvious historical inaccuracy easier to avoid.  He also didn't hold samurai in high regard (despite being descended from that social class).  The two films he made that did feature samurai lords in the leading role ("Throne of Blood" and "Ran") are Shakespearean tragedies that come across as fairly critical.  If anything Ghost of Tsushima feels more like "Last Samurai" than any of Kurosawa's films.  At best Sucker Punch has created something that is ahistorical, but respectful.  At worst though, they've perpetuated the false myths that surround many warrior cultures (vikings, Spartans, knights, etc.).  That said, if you're just looking for some chambara action in an open-world setting then enjoy...just leave Kurosawa's legacy out of it.