Little Points, round four

Lately I haven’t had anything shcool or work-related to occupy me, and neither have I been playing any exiting new games (I have been playing some new games, but nothing exciting). Instead I have read the Song of Ice and Fire-saga and played Dungeons of Dredmor. Both have been vast, time-consuming excercises with little chance to let my mind wonder. Thus I haven’t had anything interesting to write. Instead I’ll give you some tidbits.

I bought my first mobile game: Dead Space. The game is a tiny copy of its namesake, and thus does not fill any specific purpose. Dead Space was not a good horror game, but it was somewhat atmospheric when monsters were not about. The mobile Dead Space is not even that due to the limitations of the technology. I bought it mostly because I had stumbled upon it when I researched (read: Googled) game control methods. The player could press buttons and interact with objects directly by pressing on them on the screen. The idea was solid, but the execution poor. The character moves by pressing the left side of the screen, which acts as a sort of thumbstick. He aims by pressing the right side (as another thumbstick) and fires by tapping on the right side. Trying to aim is difficult and the touchscreen is quite temperamental on what constitutes a tap. I have missed a monster several times because the screen slid as I tapped it to fire. The object promised object interaction is there, but it is also temperamental. I have wasted several shots of ammunition when I have tried to pick up something. Using Kinesis to toss explosive canisters is pure madness.

What I would have done is to remove the aim thumbstick. Tapping at an object makes the character either shoot it or use it. This will remove the fiddly aiming issue. Sure, it will make the game easier and thus less frightening, but it was quite simple to detach limbs in the original Dead Space. I would have also made the game darker, added fog effects and made a single enemy much more dangerous. But then again, I am not the creative director of Dead Space series, so meh.

I have noticed that I like bad but interesting games more than good but forgettable ones. Race for the Galaxy is a good little card game, but I honestly can’t say anything about it. It has little interaction with other players, the mechanics are functional but quite stale, and in the end it boils down to victory point calculation. The player’s strategy is also defined quite early, and breaking it towards the end serves little. But it is fun to play, to see how you might win this time.

I find myself designing a game for little children… again. It is extremely hard to make something simple enough for them to understand, but interesting enough to feel worth designing. But I relish the challenge to design for someone so wildly different to myself. The enjoyment does not come from the challenge of outwitting opponents or performing good risk assessment, but from pure fun of doing stuff and getting rewards.

And I’ve been thinking about blind gaming. Almost every game has a necessary visual element in it. Cards must be read, screen must be watched, tokens must be differentiated… I heard about a blind gamer who plays Magic the Gathering with braille-coded card sleeves. It is a clever way, provided that no card will force control changes. I thought about the games I owned and thought if any of them could be played without sight. I think I found one: Pieces of Eight. A clever, simple game where the player makes a stack of coins representing his pirate ship. At their turn, the player can use one of the three active coins for some effect, usually to destroy one of his opponent’s. The game components are two-sided and their surfaces are three-dimensional, meaning you (probably) can differentiate them by touch. That got me thinking: How would I go about making a good, tactical game with no visual components? I havent’ found the answer yet, though I would think there are people who would appreciate a game like that.

Undead Space

Image via Wikipedia

I did not write anything last weekend mostly because of my first match with my sparkling new Imperial Guard army and various board games. Despite losing the 40k match horribly, it did not sting as much as with Necrons, since my defeat was because my unit choices were poor, not because the whole army was a pile of incompetence.

Another source to blame would be Steam’s weekend offer: Dead Space for a few euros. It inspired me to do something I rarely do these days: Replay the game. For a third time.

Dead Space is a nice little game. It definitely could use improvement,  but never makes any unforgivable mistakes. The game controls nicely, is fun to play and most of all has an excellent atmosphere. While not nearly as good as Space Rangers, it teached me a lot.

The game is very immersive. The camera is constantly near Isaac, the main character, creating a sense of claustrophobia. The player must move constantly to see everywhere. There is no HUD; Health and Stasis energy are shown in the spine of Isaac’s suit. Each weapon’s ammo is projected to the player via hologram, as is the inventory, map, objectives and recordings. Except for the few info-holograms at the start of the game and every time a player collects a new gameplay mechanic, there is nothing there to remind the player that it is a game.

But enough reviewing. You can find a review of the game with just a few clicks. I’ll talk about the most interesting parts of the game; The look and sound.

In the game, Isaac wears his RIG, a pressurized mechanic suit. The suit looks appropriately mechanicky, with a gray overall and brown, rusted-looking metallic parts. It looks somewhat cubersome and heavy, mostly because how Isaac is animated. He walks with a slight stoop, taking careful steps. He never does anything especially agile. And the suit also sounds very heavy, the footsteps make an audible clatter against the metallic floor. And most impressively, Isaac breathes. He breathes, grunts and yells when in pain or surprised, and every sound he makes sounds like it comes from inside a helmet. This is especially noticeable when in a vacuum; No other sounds are audible except for Isaac’s breath, his footsteps and when he fires his weapon. The parts in vacuum are my favourite parts of the game; The soundscape is drastically different from the ambient creaking and groaning of the Ishimura and the oxygen is running out, making Isaac breathe more laborously. The monsters are more frightening, coming at the player in complete silence.

For me the game is best when there are no monsters in direct contact. There is only Isaac, sweating inside his suit, aiming at shadows and pressing forward while the ship creaks and meteor impacts thud against the hull somewhere far away. It feels utterly lonely, with only the ship’s and suit’s computers soulleslly talking to you.

A few years ago I played a one-shot tabletop roleplaying game. It was inspired by Vague Voices, a soundtrack from Half-life. Dead Space reminded me of that game, and the next time I played it, I had taken a few pointers from it to describe the soundscape better. Next time I’ll analyze that game a bit more.