Tales of Terror

Since it's the month of October, I decided to do a little three part series on horror in video games.  The first part is about six games that scared the crap out of me even though the weren't, strictly speaking, considered part of the horror genre.  Meanwhile, the second part will feature six titles that failed to scare me despite being classified as horror games.  For the third and final part we'll look to six nightmare inducing games that are in the works.  Ready?  On to the first part...

I've  heard the claim that horror games intrinsically can't be scary to a lot of players simply because they'll mentally brace themselves for the worst the moment gameplay begins.  In this case the only way you can really creep these hardened types out is to catch them off guard.  Ideally this is achieved by not letting them know ahead of time that they're playing a horror title.  Here's six games that pulled this particular kind of fast one on me by using just such a strategy.

Demon's Souls

You'd think that I would have been prepared for some scares with this game, but the fact of the matter is Demon's Souls and its sequel, Dark Souls, are really more dark fantasy than anything else.  It's easy to get used to the grim foreboding without expecting any genuine scares.  However, there are a few places where players will unexpectedly dip into realms of terror.  For some players The Tower of Latria is just such a place, with its dungeons full of deranged madmen, some of whom are trapped in medieval torture devices.  In my case though the Valley of Defilement was where I got freaked out.  In particular there's a deep cesspit where even the diseased inhabitants of the poisonous swamp throw their filth.  Whether the result of infanticide or simply disposal of stillborn babies, I can't say for sure, but in a blood and plague filled pool at the very bottom of this area there are some truly horrific creatures to be encountered.

Homeworld: Cataclysm

What better place to throw in a bit of horror than with an RTS?  Because of the distance between the player and action it's difficult to pull off, but if there's one game that has succeeded it's the stand alone expansion to the original Homeworld.  The truly frightening aspect of this game comes from the nature of "The Beast."  While never precisely explained, it's hinted that this adversary originally resided in the huge emptiness between galaxies.  As far as foes go it's quite deadly since it can subvert organic nervous systems and synthetic circuitry with equal ease.  It doesn't really have a consciousness so much as half echos and warped shadows of its victims which it projects to confuse, terrify or demoralize prey.  At its core The Beast is a virus or bacteria seeking only to increase the number of its "parts."  A startling revelation to make, I can assure you.

X-COM: UFO Defense

Terror missions are bad.  Doing them at night is worse, but the absolutely most fear inducing situation to be in is both of these circumstances combined with a pack of Chryssalids on the loose.  In the much newer X-COM: Enemy Unknown the danger is somewhat reduced by the simple fact that you can't deploy more than six agents at a time.  In the original game though large teams of a dozen or more were quite common.  As you can imagine a few of these bio-weapons getting loose among your rookies would result in a lot of casualties (not to mention a sizable increase in foes).  All the while this music is playing in the background.  As if having to kill zombified civilians and former squad mates wasn't bad enough, the original X-COM was designed such that implanted Chryssalid larva would always hatch either in three turns or immediately after the host was killed...and you thought playing the new game on the classic difficulty was hard.

Thief II: The Metal Age

Much like Dark Souls this is another dark fantasy setting which starts off merely foreboding, but then ramps up the terror with the occasional appearance of ghosts, undead or worst of all the dreaded "Haunts," think Jacob Marley except he's got a hefty sledgehammer and an insatiable desire to use it.  Now, creepy as these guys are, I wouldn't loose my nerve when I happened upon one (or several) in some abandoned cathedral, old crypt or burned out house.  After all what else do you think would be there?  What did get me though was coming face to face (or rather face to skull) with a Haunt in the poorly lit library room of an otherwise ordinary mansion I was casing.  In hindsight I guess I should have guessed that the place might be "Haunted" at night.  Needless to say next morning the household servants had to clean up some bodily fluids on top of accounting for what was stolen.

Minecraft

For players new to this seemingly lighthearted colorful little sandbox game, surviving the first night can be a nightmarish experience.  Giant spiders, skeleton archers and zombies trying to break down the door of your hastily constructed shelter are just a few threats.  Other night time horrors include the iconic exploding "Creeper," which incidentally was the end result of an animation error for pigs during development.  Then there are the "Endermen," who move stuff around in the environment without rhyme or reason and grow angry with you look into their all white eyes.  Lastly, is the "Nether," an underworld filled with lava and ruins, inhabited by even worse things than those previously mentioned.  For a game that has such a friendly looking exterior things get pretty horrible once you break it open and dive in.  Oh, and don't try digging through the bedrock otherwise you might plunge into an endless black void...sweet dreams.

Space Quest V: The Next Mutation
In truth all the Space Quest games have horror segments, sometimes jarringly so given the game's overall comical nature.  Worst of all though is the mutants which appear about halfway through SQ V.  Resulting from humans inadvertently being exposed to an illegally dumped toxic waste called "Primordial Soup," these creatures first appear shortly after a remote colony losses contact with one of their survey teams.  For the next several nights sighting are reported around the perimeter.  A search team is sent out and vanishes too. Then one night the entire compound is overrun.  Only the administrator survives by sealing himself in a secured enclosure.  Despite his best attempts the mutants are able to commandeer the only shuttle leaving the lone survivor to slowly succumb to the toxins.  Oh...yeah, when you figure out about all this after the fact some really eerie music plays just to make it all the more disturbing.  I thought this game was supposed to be funny...

Hiigara

If you've never been to it before, there's a little website called "Collative Learning" run by a British chap named Rob Ager.  He likes to break down films and analyze the pieces to see where they germinated from.  By all means check his stuff out if you haven't already.  Watching some of the videos he uploaded to Youtube inspired me to try something similar, except instead of movies I want to apply some of his methodology to video games.  So for my first (and possibly only) attempt I've chosen Homeworld and its direct sequel Homeworld 2.

On a superficial level Homeworld takes plot points from the TV series Battlestar Galactica, sprinkles in some real history regarding ancient Indian trade routes, and paints it all using visuals inspired by The Terran Trade Authority series of sci-fi picture books.  An even more distilled interpretation might be PERSIANS IN SPAAAAAACE!  However, I think both of the above mentioned summaries do a bit of a disservice.  Homeworld, quite frankly, has a lot more to it.

Kharak, the desert planet from which the game starts its journey, is very similar in concept to Arrakis...also known as Dune, which in turn is the title of (and primary location in) the landmark science fiction novel of the same name by Frank Herbert.  The story of Dune features several feuding houses, each of which has a real world parallel.  House Atreides is Greek, House Harkonnen is Russian, and the Emperor is somewhat akin to a ruler of the Ottoman Empire; of course complete with Sardukar as stand-ins for Turkish Janissaries.  In Homeworld we are able to see a similar style at work.  The Taiidan Empire speaks garbled Russian during cutscenes.  The trade people known as the Bentusi have the "Great Harbor Ship" Bentus with a distinctive keyhole shape very reminiscent of harbor for the ancient city of Carthage.  Then there are the Kushan, whose language features a lot of double vowel words such as "Kiith," "Sajuuk," and "Khadeesh."  This kind of vernacular sometimes appears in romanizations of Arabic dialects.  Music too plays a part with acoustical instruments native to India and sparse lyrics in Sanskrit (for an example click here).

The Bible also has a slight influence in the form of names.  Particularly with regards to places mentioned in The Exodus.  The Garden of Kadesh has a multifaceted location name in that it was both the real world site of a great battle and carries a vague resemblance to the Garden of Eden.  Completing the picture are wrath-of-god defenders employing swarms of insect-like fighter craft, lightening spewing multi-beam frigates, and snake shaped motherships.

The warlord and chief antagonist in Homeworld 2, Makaan, is often though of as a futuristic version of Genghis Khan.  Especially so when you equate the Vaygr with outer space Mongols.  Then again other great conquerors from real history such as Hannibal Barca or Attila the Hun fit the role pretty well too.

Even ship color schemes offer clues as to sources of inspiration.  The shades of orange and blue used to represent Kushan vessels have a strong association with Arabic culture.  The shape of the Kushan mothership is also quite similar to the mainsail of a dhow.  Incidentally, a real life construction project with a similar theme in mind is the Burj Al Arab in Dubai.

So, taking all these bits and pieces into account, it's clear that Homeworld represents a complex amalgamation of different cultures found in and around places like the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and Black Sea.  However, this rich tapestry does have some thread which seems to lack a discernible origin despite my investigations.  I can think of no explanation for the little details such as the intergalactic Progenitors, the Ghost Ship, or the partially complete megalithic constructs near the graveyard of Karos.  Then again perhaps all three of those things are tied together somehow.

Back to my research.

Pyromania Potential

It doesn't matter if you call it a flamethrower, incinerator unit or Greek fire, pyrotechnic streams of burning death have never quite gotten the treatment they deserve in video games.  Thankfully there have recently been some positive strides, but before I get into current developments lets go back to the early days and the early attempts to simulate this deadly form of weaponry.

The 16-bit era is about as far back as I can remember seeing flamethrowers in video games.  Titles like Super Contra, Gouls'n'Ghosts, and Mystic Defender would all treat jets of fire like a wobbly chain made of interconnected sprites that would steadily inflict damage on anything caught in its path.  An admirable first effort, but still a long way from, the real thing.  Gain Ground is another slightly different 16-bit example.  One of the playable units was capable of using a flamethrower which would fart out short range slow moving balls of fire.  Provided you could mash the attack button like crazy, it was possible to get something resembling a steady stream of flame.  Sadly, it never really had a good in-game use.  One final 16-bit game that had yet another take was Alien 3.  While not consistent with the film of the same name, it was possible to get an incinerator unit that would spurt out pre-rendered gouts of fire considerable distances.  While an improvement over anything which had come before, it still lacked the ability to ignite other objects in the environment, nor did the xenomorphs seem at all intimidated by it.

Jumping over to PC (and Mac), Marathon had an instant kill flamethrower, which again isn't  the way the real thing works either, but at least it felt deadly under the right circumstances.  In fact it took over a decade of stagnation before we've finally started to see significant  improvements. The Thing let players catch their enemies on fire and Far Cry 2 stands out for having burnable objects allowing the player to use brush fires and other conflagrations against foes.  But for every game that took a step forward there were two games such as Dead Space and Dark Souls (gasp!) which still had the same old reductive designs you'd hardly consider adequate for lighting up a BBQ or campfire.  What pretty much everyone outside the development team behind Return to Castle Wolfenstein had a hard time figuring out was real flamethrowers are kind of like super powered squirt guns, except instead of water it's burning napalm capable of arching distances over 100 feet!  Getting into an enclosed space for protection from the heat doesn't help as much as you might think either in that the intense flames produced by these weapons will eat up all the surrounding oxygen, so even if you're able to avoid having your flesh roasted you might very well die of asphyxiation.

All in all flamethrowers are something radically more complex than firearms.  Simulating how they work in a digital world is extreme taxing even on top-of-the-line physics engines.  In film making too flamethrowers tend to be nerfed for the safety of cast and crew.  Hence, the impression Hollywood movies give tends to be pretty inaccurate compared to the real deal.  On an interesting side note, the US Military has shyed away from man-portable flamethrowers since WW2, preferring instead to rely on vehicle mounted or ballistic ordinance incendiary devices.  Fire, after all, doesn't take sides and as such is dangerous to wielder and target alike.

Of course in the world of video games safety isn't exactly a high priority.  After playing through The Last of Us, I found myself rather pleased with the way the jerry-rigged flamethrower and Molotov cocktails worked.  Granted the range for the former is a still a bit short, but at least they got the effect right.  Enemies in particular, react with horrific accuracy when burned, and best of all (or worst, depending on your perspective) ballistic armor and cover confer no benefit.  Regrettably, you still can't ignite stuff in the game environment.  I guess that's asking a bit much for current gen consoles though.  Regardless, I hope someone tries to make a realistic firefighting sim someday.  Maybe base it in pre-modern Japan with the player managing an Edo (now Tokyo) based unit of Hikeshi.  That would be cool...er...maybe I should say hot?  Well, you know what I mean.  

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

I recently did a little snooping around the Moby Games database and was surprised to discover that there really aren't any video games that embrace the theme of ancient naval battles.  Oar driven war galleys bent on ramming, boarding or bombarding each other doesn't appear to have been a central mechanic outside of titles like the Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War series.  There are a few board games that have been published over the years, but until Total War: Rome II nobody has bothered to tackle this particular slice of military history for quite awhile.  I find this a bit odd considering it was the primary form of naval warfare for well over a millennium and featured a considerable number of decisive engagements between a variety of different factions.  Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Carthaginians and even peoples beyond the Mediterranean (such as Vikings and Maori) employed war galleys.

The vessels themselves had a significant amount of variation in design.  Uniremes (or if you prefer monoremes), biremes and triremes featured single, double or triple deck arrangements of oars on each side.  Quadremes, Quinqueremes and Hexeremes retained the triple configuration, but added additional rowers at each oar.  Galleys were not at the mercy of the wind and currents.  Crews could maintain speeds of 7~8 knots all day with top speeds of 10 knots in short bursts.  It was possible to operate in as little as three feet deep water and they could turn much faster than any pre-industrial era ship of equivalent size.  Sails could also be unfurled for a top speed of 5~6 knots should the oarsmen need a rest. The combination of light weight and flat keel made it possible to beach a galley relatively quickly should the weather turn foul.  This form of dry land storage had the added advantage of keeping the hull free of worms, rot and seaweed.  Some galleys even had a lead coating below the waterline to prevent barnacles.

Rams were up to seven feet long and tipped with a bronze head with flanged sides meant to rend holes in moving targets.  Even a slow collision at a mere three to four knots was capable of punching through another ship's side at oblique angels.  Getting T-boned by a large vessel at full speed might very well have been a back breaking experience for both the struck ship and her crew.  Even a glancing blow might be deadly in that it could potentially shear the oars off should the crew not bring them in quick enough.  Thus, crippling the galley and leaving it at a severe disadvantage.  Ramming became such a popular tactic that special defensive formations were devised to force an aggressor to open himself up to counter-ramming.

Experienced rowers were valued for their strength and endurance, as well as being able to keep tempo for hours on end.  Generally speaking, war galleys only had about 30 inches of wiggle room between each oar so it was vital to maintain the rhythm of each stroke.  One advantage of having two or even three rowers per oar was the fact that more senior center most oarsmen could keep their less experienced juniors in sync.

Bigger wasn't always better though.  At the Battle of Actium smaller more maneuverable Roman war galleys were able to swarm larger Egyptian ships.  Boarding actions were where Rome excelled.  Grappling hooks, either thrown by hand or via a launcher called the "harpax", were the primary method getting up against, and on board, an enemy ship.  However, the Romans also used a device called a "corvus" (Latin for "crow") to play to their strengths.  Basically it was a spiked boarding ramp held vertical near the prow until it could be brought down on the deck of an opposing vessel.  While effect in several major naval engagements, it had the disadvantage of making Roman war galleys top heavy and easier to capsize.

Rather than getting up close and personal another viable tactic was to bombard from a distance.  Arrows and javelins worked well for this and sometimes were sent not from the ship's deck, but rather from light weight collapsible towers in order to get a height advantage over opposing vessels.  Incendiary weapons were used as well, though they usually took the form of flaming projectiles or pots of oil suspended on long poles.

So, with all this said what eventually brought an end to the era of war galleys.  In a word - economics.  Having large teams of hard working oarsmen meant also having to keep them well nourished and hydrated.  This, of course, greatly limited the maximum range a galley could travel before it need to resupply.  Hence, logistics were an especially big and ever present concern for navel commanders of that era.  Most galleys never left sight of land even when navigation techniques improved to the point that it was no longer necessary to hug the coastline.  The reason for this was the danger of sudden storms, not to mention the need for dry land so the crew could have a place to stretch out and sleep on at night.  In other words the age of war galleys came to an end when the drum beat changed from "catch and drive" to "quick and cheap."    

Some Do's and Don'ts

Bacon gone bad

Before writing this blog entry I did a bit of reading with regards to other lists that people had written with a similar theme.  In all honesty what I read was not good.  I could think of far too many exceptions to the blanket demands that were presented in each article.  Overall it felt like the authors really just wanted to spout pet peeves rather than give advice on how to make games better for everyone.  So, with that in mind I'll try to choose six things (three "do's' and three "don'ts") that I think almost everyone can get behind.  Here we go.

Do have good camera placement in your third person game.  It saddens me to say this but a lot of my favorite games have had bad camera usability; Dark Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, Resident Evil and the list goes on.  It can be tolerable depending on the game (especially less action oriented titles), but for shooters or brawlers it's vital to have a camera that doesn't get bunched up or pointed in a useless direction...doubly so if the games has third person plaftormer.

Do have precise collision detection in your three dimensional environments. Emerson breaking clipping aside, all too often these days I see games trying to cover their sloppy melee combat with bright impact flashes and particle effects.  What I'd really like to see is more games with enemies that implement a dynamic hit reaction system similar to the one used in Red Dead Redemption.  An improved version of the injury texture modeling in Silent Hill: Homecoming would also be very welcome.

Do have responsive controls.  This one sounds like a no-brainer, but the reality is it still remains a persistent problem (especially for a lot of games on the Ouya).  You could blame it on hardware, but the remake of Mickey Mouse's Castle of Illusion and TMNT: Out of the Shadows are other recent examples (and they're for the PC, PS3 and Xbox360).  There's no excuse for this kind of problem which brings me to my "don'ts" list.

Don't release a full priced game that is full of bugs and needs numerous patches to get to a playable state.  If you want to release it as early access on Steam - great!  If you want to do some kind of limited beta test with your fan base - even better.  Just make sure to be honest with us gamers about what we're getting into.  This has been such a major problem the last few years, I almost never buy anything until it's gotten patched a couple times or at least given a relatively clean bill of health on various gaming forums.

Don't do day one paid DLC.  Just don't!  I get that in order to make DLC for games in a timely manner plans have to be made early on in the development process.  However, if that extra content is ready at launch then there's no valid excuse.  There just isn't.

Don't remove features in your sequel that were previously well received by fans.  Why does Total War: Rome II no longer have "guard" or "fire at will" commands?  Why no co-op play in Golden Axe: Beast Rider?  Why doesn't Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs have any inventory, sanity mechanic or oil lamp management anymore? Worst of all is unlockables and cheat codes being turned in to micro-transactions, but that's a topic for another time.

That's my list.  Nothing profound, but given the number of games that fall into these traps, I figured it worth mentioning.  Especially since next gen consoles are just around the corner.