The Area 51 Escape level in particular is burned into my memory. You’re in a room with a fellow agent and the alien the two of you are rescuing. Only two of you can escape in the alien’s spacecraft. The other agent tells you to cover him while he operates a panel to open the hangar doors so that you and the alien can escape in the spacecraft. I don’t recall this being presented as a choice, he just tells you what to do. But if you interrupt the agent while he’s walking to the panel, you’ll tell him to escape with the alien – then you operate said panel and have to fight your own way out. That first time I was playing I happened to interrupt him on a whim because I felt bad that I was abandoning him to die. So having the game react to my actions exhilarated me, it felt real in a powerful way. And you tear your way through the base on a hoverbike during your subsequent escape so it’s topped off with some delicious spectacle ::chef kiss::
The game has been obsoleted by now and I guess contemporaneous PC games were running circles around it in terms of sophistication. But I’ve been chasing the feeling from that sequence ever since. So many games present me with choices from a dialogue or either/or button prompts, so being rewarded for a moment of role-playing via the limited set of verbs available still seems special to me. And somewhat remarkable for being present in what was, yeah, a “mature” N64 game with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink design philosophy and a silly plot.
One of my favorite subtle things about Demon’s souls is that each world has one kind of valuable resource available in abundance (world 1: grass, world 2: stones, world 3: spices, world 4: souls) except of course the valley of defilement which offers nothing
the closest valley of defilement has to a common drop is those poison curing lotuses but surprise, they only drop from those swamp jellyfish that don’t respawn so you still can’t farm them!
i love the VoD it’s my favorite example of “unenjoyable to play, but to a purpose” in a game
Revisiting the game has been very strange. It does very little to help the player figure out what they need to do. It just kind of puts weird stuff into your inventory every mission without warning. Why are there only two agents in the entire institute? Why is the boss modeled to look like Robin Williams but sounds like a bad Sean Connery impersonation? Why did they spend all of their money on textures but not on voice acting or figuring out how to make the framerate not be dogshit on the N64? None of the locations look like they could exist in real life. (Goldeneye gets a pass on this because it’s based on a Bond movie)
The multiplayer was great, the bots in multiplayer were very helpful for a lonely teenager like me. And the Xbox rerelease that I am playing now thankfully has no framerate issues as far as I can tell.
i have no idea if it’s true but my one memory of perfect dark is that it seemed like they were extremely proud of their one destructible glass effect, and so every level and multiplayer map seemed to have enormous glass pane windows or tinted glass cubicle walls or would suddenly detour into a wine cellar of something. and i remain kind of charmed by the idea that everything about that game’s plot and setting was just a motivation for the device of showing off the most elaborate windows on the n64.
Perfect Dark does have a handful of moments like that where you can exit the level in multiple ways but it doesn’t tell you (i guess the Air Base level is another example). that’s neat but because it had to be hardcoded into a game that was already kind of bursting at the seams as it is, it’s only in a few places and i don’t think they did nearly enough with it.
actually my favorite level was the Area 51 secret level where you play as an alien who escapes being experimented on and sends an SOS signal. you’re shorter and have less health and limited weapons so you have to move much more carefully. it’s slower paced overall, like a stealth mission. also you got the “psychosis gun” which turned bad guys into good guys for you, which i always thought was badass. plus a lot of the Area 51 map is presented as one contiguous environment there and not split into a few different maps.
i agree that a lot more games at the time would give you the option to do something without telling you that you could or should do it in ways that maybe were kind of clunky and not fully formed but perhaps unexpected (whereas they’d be annoying telegraphed now). i think that’s when the idea of “meaningful choices” started to become an industry buzz thing and is the beginning of modern open world games. once it became a less half-hearted fun little experiment to do it got codified much more into the mode of heavily tutorializing and being as explicit as possible.
i think the lack of direction in the levels might have to do with the way Rare approached a lot of their games of that era - with the assumption that that’s the one game you’d be buying and you’d be playing it over and over again trying to get the most content possible out of it. online communities were starting to take off at the time too, so maybe they were assuming a lot of players would be trying to help each other out with the missions - or maybe they were doing it to sell the strategy guide! lol. from a Value For Money perspective, Perfect Dark was basically the best you could get from a non-RPG console game. because the N64 notoriously lacked a lot of “prestige” games and games were expensive a lot of the audience was probably leaning way harder on Rare’s games. that’s something i appreciated very much as a child who could rarely ever convince my parents to buy me any new games but was able to get Perfect Dark when it came out.
as far as the other stuff goes, i guess the nonsensical narrative framing was their way of saying “hey we can still tell a real badass story here you guys!!” and buy into the idea that they were advancing what was possible re: story telling in an action game while not having any idea how to do that and filling the game with stuff that made absolutely no sense but satisfied the “here’s more narrative” requirement.
Goldeneye’s levels were very much based off of the sets in the original movie (i think they had access to the original sets when they were working on the game), so there’s a reason why they were laid out like they were.
the large amount of glass is why me and my friend would primarily play the “Grid” level in multiplayer (also because it looked like the Matrix i guess). i still like that level a lot.
What kinds of narrative advances do you think have been made?
The real major push that I can think of is companions – and I’m going to start laying out a framework because it’s helping me think through this. Starting in late PS2 era but really unfolding post-Half-Life 2, a companion that’s capable of following the player through the entire game sequence (and the massive supporting structures of AI and pathfinding and custom movements and animations that entails) has become the standard AAA tool for delivering dialogue (including back-and-forth conversations, the player character is so infrequently mute) and world color and emotive signaling.
Outside of shooters, which have an easier time of it, much of the 360/PS3 generation was spent chasing companions in what could eventually be recognized as the modern interpretation of the cinematic platformer.
The canceled Spielberg/EA LMNO concept:
That half-completed Prince of Persia game:
BioShock: Infinite
[no video because I remember all too clearly learning that in the initial design the player sleeps with Elizabeth before learning that the game was about being a father]
Sony’s past decade of output from its American studios and the ‘dad-sim’ represent the fulfillment of these narrative techniques, which allow an easy template to tell television-style stories with conventional conversations and narrative beats in a way unavailable to a stage-by-stage shooter, even one with lots of cutscenes, like Perfect Dark.
I find this interesting because they added even more challenges/crowns to get in the xbox remaster. 231 different tasks they don’t tell you how to complete but here’s the internet to help you out.
I’ve been playing Super Smash Bros. Melee online cause I’m a dweeb and it’s the only fighting-adjacent game I’ve ever been decent at.
The netcode in the Dolphin emulator used to be delay-based but someone in the Melee community (who had previously worked on a replay and real-time stat tracking system for Melee tournaments) quit his job and starting working on rollback netcode for Melee in Dolphin full time.
7 months later (last week) he finally finished the thing, and it’s pretty incredible. Before, if you didn’t have like 20 ping the game played considerably slower than it did locally, but now you can play at CRT-levels of delay (2 frames) at up to ~110 ping with only minor visual rollbacks. This dude gave a nearly 20 year old game better net code than the most recent Smash has.
The other really neat thing is that he implemented matchmaking directly in the game itself. It’s no longer necessary to use some third party site or tool to find people to play against. You literally just launch dolphin, select “Online” from the menu, select your character, and press start to start matchmaking.
I think this might single-handedly rejuvenate the Melee scene, which was floundering a bit due to social distancing. There are still things that need implemented (like a ranking system, so new players don’t just get destroyed), but I’m kind of in awe how well this is implemented, especially because I didn’t think this was even possible from an engineering perspective.
I think Children of Morta has enough charm to stand on it’s own but when in the buffet setting/time constraints of adult life you feel a real urge to move on to something else.
On Perfect Dark: remembering some of the levels have completely different structures on different difficulties. That is a big giant game of stuff but Rare FPS 64 style play is like trying to play with one of those balloonmen in front of a car wash.
Would love to hear more about that game! Never played it but I think it’s so neat that irem had this weird blip of a few third-person adventure-y games in the midst of all their r-types and gekisha boys
In the menu after startup but before you load the game a voice says “Get ready for…” and then a group of voices in unison say “STEAMBOT CHRONICLES”. Then when you select load the first voice says “I hope you enjoy it! Steambot Chronicles!” and when you quit it says “Thanks for playing…” then the group voice “STEAMBOT CHRONICLES!”
It’s a really good game that I haven’t played in ages but those menu voices will be with me forever.
it’s a very good open world game where you can be an excavator, a professional musician, an underground arena fighter, a bus driver, a material transporter, a terrorist, a dungeon explorer, an orphanage overseer, among many other things, usually all at once. and you do it all inside a mech that you can change and upgrade. you can also change your outfit, and people will give you a nickname based on your ensemble.
