This year of gaming has certainly been a mixed one, the sum of which is a line-up of games, which in my opinion is possibly one of the weakest we’ve seen for years. To try and gain some sense of closure on 2011 in gaming I take a look back over what was in my most memorable titles of last year – for better or for worse. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the titles of 2011, Gamespot or IGN can fight over those honours, these were titles, which caught my attention for one reason or another. So come, follow me as I take a look back through the highs and lows which have made my 2011 in gaming*.

Duke Nukem Forever –  one of the most anticipated titles around 10 years ago I suspect. When news got out that Duke Nukem Forever finally went gold and was receiving an actual release date, well – things finally started to get interesting. The June emergence was awaited by gamers, not necessarily because people thought that it’d actually be any good, but rather, because it was a piece of gaming history, another chapter to be finished in the annals of this ever-growing medium. That chapter had a truly crappy, but ultimately “right” ending; the development hell and smorgasbord of bad decisions meant it couldn’t really be anything other than a complete pile – if you don’t believe me check out the bargain bins this January.

LA Noire – a problematic game for so many reviewers and critics. It was widely regarded as a potential paradigm changer within games, akin to David Cage’s Magnum Opus**, Heavy Rain. This next open world title by Rockstar, followed Red Dead Redeption’s deviation from the GTA locale, but was instead set in a post-war noire world and sporting a very fancy looking facial animation system.

On paper this was a match made in heaven, sprawling open worlds are Rockstar’s forte, and the new animation system seemed to give a greater feeling of immersion with an interrogation system that gave the linear story missions a dynamic kick up the ass. What was in reality was quite distant from this, the open world largely felt like an afterthought, the investigations were frustratingly clipped and the animation, whilst being very effective felt like a trip down the uncanny valley and back again during Halloween.

Shadows of the Damned – this was to be the odd ball entry of 2011, a game with the twisted minds of Suda 51 and Shinji Mikami under the hood. You take control of Garcia Hotspur, a tattooed hispanic demon slayer set on a quest of “road movie” aspirations, through the depths hell with a talking skull sidekick and more penis references than you could shake your Johnson at. The above description of Shadows of the Damned is near enough what sold it to me, I knew I wanted to play it.

Funnily enough if I was to describe what failed the game I’d refer you back to the above description. The promise of such juvenile humour and “grindhouse” action sounds great, but in reality it is irksome and unsettling – but not in the ways Suda 51 would have wanted. Also going against it was the lack of character development and “buddy” qualities, which you’d expect from a road movie approach. The “humour”, atmosphere and general presentation missed the mark, producing a game which was trying a little too hard to be “edgy” and not trying hard enough to become a compelling adventure.

Battlefield 3 – This was near enough the top of my most wanted list of 2011. Battlefield Bad Company 2’s multiplayer was the most satisfying multiplayer experience and I only expected greater things with Battlefield 3. The myriad of different features promised by Dice would tweak, tuck and refine the gameplay, solving the apparent issues of Bad Company 2 and making good all the ills in the world.

The sum of these tweaks and refinements was actually something which felt rougher round the edges, less balanced, more frustrating and overall a poorer showing. I realise that Battlefield 3 is still “young” and many patches have the potential to address the balancing within the game. More linear feeling maps, movement tweaks, the ability to go prone and new battlefield equipment all change the dynamics slightly and feel like one step forward and two steps back as far as the series is concerned.

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim – Having played every game in the Elder Scrolls Series you could say I was somewhat pumped about the release of Skyrim. Being a fan of Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas I felt that the promised updates to the engine and the potential for a larger, more emersive world were too good to miss. Safe to say that after 10 hours I began to felt like something very significant was missing. There’s a lot of love for Skyrim out there at the moment, it appears that Bethesda have done it again and produced one of the most significant games of 2011. It’s just not for me, not at all.

This realisation came about when I began to see that it was still suffering from many of the issues which had dogged the series nearly 10 years ago – wooden characters, poor execution of set pieces and most of all, glitches, glitches and more glitches. But I could actually look past these issues, I’d successfully done so in the prior titles in the series, but this one seemed to be missing more – interest. The background of the world felt truly uninteresting, the story quests were stark and often unengaging and the dungeons uninspiring copy and paste jobs. In the end I barely dipped my toes into what Skyrim had to offer, but having expected so much and found it left wanting, I abandoned it as my biggest gaming tragedy of 2011.

Resistance 3 – This was a surprising entry to my gaming collection in 2011, and one of my most welcomed. Now I’d never gotten on too well with the Resistance series, I think someone was trying too hard to recreate Half-Life and gotten lost on the way. My picking up of Resistance 3 was done on the Skyrim rebound, I was feeling hurt and vulnerable and wanted something quick and cheap to take my mind off it. As the game opened I found that I actually started to care about the premise, the characterisation, whilst nothing new, was very well done. The opening hours of the game flew by as I got drawn into this surprisingly good shooter.

The creativity in the weapon design and the smoothness of the combat, were the biggest surprises, Resistance 3 is a first person shooter that knows how to be fun. And by fun I don’t mean because it adds dick jokes and toilet humour, I mean it strikes the right balance between taking itself seriously and presenting an exciting arsenal of weapons and situations to use them in. This isn’t to say that Resistance 3 doesn’t have it’s problems, because it certainly does, but none of which detriment the core gameplay experience to any great extent.

Crysis 2 – The original Crysis was known primarily for it’s technical prowess and ability to melt processors at a glance, it Crytek clearly wanted to up the ante with Crysis 2. However, the cynic in me – I believe we’re all acquainted – was (and still is) dubious of games whose main bragging point is graphics alone. Crytek did succeed in creating one of the best looking games this console generation and many’d believe I was slumming it by not experiencing it throuhg a true gaming PC as opposed to a 360 or PS3. But Crysis 2 was able to deliver in more than just its stunning presentation, in fact it managed to produce one of the greatest feelings of power for the player than almost any other title in 2011 if not the entire current console cycle.

Many games struggle to get the feel of “super soldier” right, often lacking in gravitas and challenge opting instead to go for a handful of cheap thrills. Many people complained that the super suit in Crysis 2, wasn’t all that super. All of your abilities ran off the suit’s limited energy supply meaning you couldn’t really use more than one at once, you were by no means invincible because of it. The complaints levelled at this demonstrated that many missed the point entirely; the suit’s limited power supply meant that every fight had to be carefully planned and executed, the payoff being the awesome sense of power which acompanies with each successful completion. Crysis 2 is the best lesson in games design, that to make the player feel powerful you’ve got to make them realise how vulnerable they are first.

Rayman Origins – The latest addition to my year’s gaming is again, another surprising one, to me at least. Having never been the biggest fan of Rayman games, I didn’t really even pay attention to it’s launch. Plus, the prospect of playing another adventure game didn’t exactly fill me with joy – the genre has never had the same draw as it once did since I replayed Banjo and Kazooie and nearly had a stress-related blackout due to the underwater control scheme. Nevertheless I took a punt and was very pleasantly surprised by Rayman’s newest outting.

What I found was a charming adventure game, which harked back to platforming roots without feeling lazy or half-baked. Rayman Origins treads heavily on the toes of New Super Mario Bros Wii, but don’t hold that against it. What makes this an amazingly enjoyable experience is a mixture between the wonderful art style, cheeky sense of humour, cleaver level design and challenging – yet achievable – gameplay. One of my favourites this year without question.

Final thoughts – There are many other titles, which for many might be alarmingly absent from this list, but you’ve got to draw the lines somewhere. This doesn’t mean that by omission other titles which are missing aren’t as deserving, just not as salient to this year for me. I started off with the suggestion that 2011 may have been one of the weakest gaming line-ups we’ve had for some time. Never a year goes by without someone making this claim, and I’m sure I’m not alone in making it now.

My main issue this year was with any real lack of imagination, the prevailing feeling of “safeness” within games production. Whether you want to attribute this to the end of a console cycle and the developers are getting comfortable or the wider implications of worldwide economic troubles, it’s still evident that numerous studio closures and abandoned IPs have paved the way for sequels and re-makes galore. Many are happy with the current status quo, and whilst the technical proficiency of this generation can hardly be ignored, it would be nice to see some more genre-bending and perception challenging titles. All we can do now is wait until 2012 and see if the new hardware might spur everyone on a little more – perhaps we might see some more original IPs – here’s hoping!

Chr15 6r33n (Follow me on Twitter @ chrisgreen87)

*From the home consoles – I’m not ignoring mobile or social, just leaving that can of worms for another time.

**Irony.

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It’s been some time since anything has been posted to Chronoludic (due to all of us being amazingly busy), but here’s a treat for you. Just a MegaByte is based on the Radio 4 show Just a Minute, but with a special twist – it’s all about gaming. Joing me on the pilot is Game Critics‘ Brad Gallaway, from Big Red Potion and the Unified Gamers Network, Sinan Kubba, and joining us at the last moment is Dave Traeger of Moddb/IndieDB/DesuraNET.

For those of you who are more familiar with the Just a Minute format will notice that we’ve been much more forgiving on “ums” and “errs” and small hesitation – this is due to the fact that talking about anything for a minute like that is very hard and we wanted to ease ourselves in. As usual, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions please leave them here, or get in contact with me via twitter.

Chr15 6r33n (Follow me on Twitter at chrisgreen87)

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Do you remember last summer a little indie game on XBLA coming out called Limbo? We quite liked it, but what we didn’t really notice was its soundtrack. That was because it was ambient sounds, and next to no music! It might have been enough for the arty types like myself, but I bet the great many were alienated by the game that said nothing and didn’t even tell you what was going on. Well the clever folks at Play Dead decided to right their wrong last Autumn with a DLC soundtrack to be played over the game as either commentary or integrated into the main game, but it was clearly too late as barely anyone mentioned it! Well here at Sonoludic we decided it was time to dedicate a ‘cast to the groundbreaking procedural soundtrack system to the formerly-silent Limbo.

LIMBO on XBLA marketplace

LIMBO DLC

Playdead Studios

Enjoy!

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It’s that time again, episode 6 of the Chronoludic podcast is here for your listening pleasure. In this episode we’re really (really) lucky to be joined by Brad Gallaway from Gamecritics.com for a discussion about some significant indie titles we’ve come across in the last few years. This list is quite eccletic by all accounts and it doesn’t prefess to being all-encompasing by any means, but they are still well worth checking out.

Dinner Date PC
Ilomilo XBLA
Facade PC
Epic Dunegon XBLIG
Machinarium PC
Shoot1up XBLIG

Enjoy!

Chr15 6r33n (Follow me on Twitter at chrisgreen87 and for Chronoludic updates click here)

In yesturday’s “one a day” blog by Mr Sinan “shoinan” Kubba, he chanellenges himself (and the rest of the game writing community) the task of producing a review for a game which is 143 words or less. Writing anything about a game within that word count is a task indeed, but observing all the conventions and requirements for a review is a real challenge. Sinan notes a Metro review of Two worlds 2, where, in 143 words the reviewer describes the gaming experience without actually telling the audience anything of use about the game. As I said, it’s not a easy task; Sinan isn’t targeting that reviewer or waging a war against him, rather he’s seizing the opportunity to see if the task is possible.

Recently I finished my review on Bulletstorm (going live soon), and decided to see whether I could reduce my reviews, which were considerably higher than the 143 words (approximate ten times that amount) and condense it down to the right size. I know we here at Chronoludic aren’t out to review games exactly, but this challenge is more about writing in a concise fashion and still getting the information across. As you may have noticed that many of the pieces here on Chronoludic are around 2,000 words and some even stretch several posts, the idea of producing something completely the opposite was one which excited me.

And here is what I came up with, my review of Bulletstorm:

Bulletstorm is based on killing in the most creative and skilled way possible. During the game you’re tasked with achieving “skillshots”, kills which elaborate on the usual gun-play we’re used to; from the humble head shot through to a lead colonic, to kicking an enemy into a carnivorous plant. Whilst not perfect, it breathes fresh air into the genre. A space pirate out for revenge is hardly original but Bulletstorm has surprisingly deep characterisation. The polish, good writing and wit bolster an inventive and refreshing take on the FPS. Graphically, Bulletstorm is stunning, the environments are as varied as the are beautiful; you are transported from hellish tunnels to vivid cityscapes and more. Sadly it is a one trick pony, and whilst it’s a neat trick, more variation would be nice for a hearty recommendation.

Now this review is actually 136 words, 7 words under the challenged amount. Now, I’d usually advise that you don’t finish a review this short with words to spare, but I’m happy that my opinions about the game were conveyed, along with detailing what Bulletstorm is actually about. I’m not saying that it’s the best review in the world, with more time I could possibly work it some more, get it flowing slightly better. It was a real challnege to write and cutting well over a thousand words from what I’d originally written was a tough ask. It did make me see how much of my writing was superfluous and could be chopped out with little issue. Oh, and I did have a score attached to this, but I’d be interested in seeing what you thought I scored the game based on those 136 words – then I’ll have a better idea as to how successful the writing was.

So are you going to accept the challenge? Not because it might make you write better reviews (because it will), but because it will teach you something about your writing style and make you ask “do I really need that sentence?” and “can I say that in five words instead of 20?” Head over to Sinan’s blog (linked again here) and see If you can take up the challenge.

Chr15 6r33n (Follow me on Twitter at chrisgreen87 and for Chronoludic updates click here)

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Do not adjust your RSS feed, it is really me and not Mike in this latest Sonoludic. Music is usually Mike’s department (after all Sonoludic is his baby), but after playing through K.O.L.M., a recent browser-based flash game by Armor Games, I was really inspired to make one of my own. I realise that it might seem a little ropey in places, but you’ll have to stick with me, the production of this was quite a journey for me.

I won’t give away much of what’s in the podcast, but I will advise that there are massive spoilers which go into the plot in great detail. This episode is a journey into the world of K.O.L.M. through Tommy “Ockeroid” Robin‘s powerful soundtrack. I won’t go into any more detail, but here are links to all the tracks in the order they appear, I really encourage you to check out Ockeroid’s other work it’s really good stuff.

Track one: Forming Habits 5:41

Track two: Counting Down the Hours 3:09

Track three: A Second Chance 4:45

Track four: Master vs Apprentice [A sample]

Track five: Let’s Get Lost Together 4:18

Track six: Master Vs Apprentice 4:56

Track seven: Strained Voice 3:05

Chr15 6r33n (Follow me on Twitter at chrisgreen87 and for Chronoludic updates click here)

p.s. You can check out my review of K.O.L.M. from GamerDork.net here.

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Look it’s that time again. Episode 5 has come around sooner than expected and the world is a marginally better place for it (quite possibly). We’re joined again by my trusty companions Mike Dunbar and Seb Wuepper and our special guest is Eric Swain from The Game Critique to discuss the value of games today. From piles of shame to the $10 policy to Steam we take a slightly tangential journey through the veritable minefield which is “What’s a game worth?”.

Chr15 6r33n (Follow me on Twitter at chrisgreen87 and for Chronoludic updates click here)

“Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages!”

Being a player of games, I am often examining the works of fiction I enjoy in other mediums and wondering how they would fare in my beloved medium of the videogame. Rarely do I get the chance to see it happen, and when it does it is often disappointing. Adaptation decay, they call it – the spark that made the tv show, film, or book so engrossing or thought provoking is lost when the game designer burdens it with clunky game mechanics that don’t fit. The last such encounter I had was Deadly Premonition, a fairly unsubtle re-imagining of Twin Peaks that destroyed the pacing and atmosphere of its inspiration by throwing the player into drawn out combat-heavy “nightmare” sections whereupon you fought wave after wave of zombies who had probably never set foot in the Double R.

I began to wonder why this happened. The setting of Twin Peaks, I thought, would make an enthralling setting for a game – and Deadly Premonition’s Greenvale certainly lived up to that aspect. The townsfolk were interesting, and I definitely felt drawn into uncovering their numerous secrets and their relation to the case I was investigating.  I realise now that the themes that made Twin Peaks so interesting didn’t communicate well into the videogame medium: The corruption of innocence, the presence of evil in a familiar, nondescript, setting? Removing the combat situations from Deadly Premonition you  find yourself wandering around triggering cutscenes. Those mechanics don’t speak particularly strongly to the themes the game was emulating, but the combat makes it all too blunt also. As entertaining as Deadly Premonition is, it unfortunately pales in comparison to its source material.

Leaving that behind, I was watching The Prisoner the other day when it suddenly dawned on me that The Village would be a fascinating location to set a game. From that rather “fanboy” pondering came a much deeper truth – all games are set in a Village, of sorts. I hypothesise that the central themes of The Prisoner, and their presentation through allegory, make it the ideal work of fiction for a videogame adaptation. Once I explain that, I will go on to explain why I think most games unwittingly are already half way there.

Resigned…

The Prisoner is a 17 part TV series that ran from 1967-1968 here in the UK. It was co-created, written, produced, and sometimes directed by it’s star, Patrick Mcgoohan. It follows the exploits of a spy who, as shown in the opening titles, resigns from his job but who is then kidnapped and held prisoner in a mysterious coastal village where his every waking moment is monitored and manipulated by his captors in the attempt to discover why he resigned from his position.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hFzHggD5P0&feature=related

All of that is of course a set up for the star of the piece, The Village. An allegorical fantasy land where the opposing philosophies of individualism and collectivism fight it out through the cipher of one man, struggling to maintain his identity in a place where everyone else has had theirs stripped away – or at least that’s how it seems, as uncertainty and misdirection are the key weapons The Village possesses. A place that is so overtly over-friendly, and positively Orwellian in its approach to civil liberties, The Village was initially based on a stately home used to house and monitor spies after WW2 who knew too much to be allowed to dissipate back into civilian life. As the setting for a psychodrama about one’s sense of self, and what it means to be individual it is an inspired master stroke in evocative story telling.

The protagonist, issued reluctantly with the title “Number 6” upon arrival, is the one struggling against the tide of uniformity, conformity, and the pressures of his environment. Everybody, Number 6 is the player character in most games ever.

Why The Prisoner needs to be a game..

Before I go on I should mention that in 1981 the company Edu-Ware released a text-based graphical adventure game called “Prisoner” that was based loosely on The Prisoner, but was not officially licensed (Their process was astounding – they wrote to ITC, the copyright holders, enquiring to see if they would object to a theme restaurant being opened that used elements from The Prisoner – when ITC said it wouldn’t be a problem Edu-Ware went on to make the game! Imagine that happening now!). Wikipedia cites that the game was reportedly a training tool for the CIA, and that it features a maze which procedurally generates indefinitely until you hit the “escape” key, which makes it very interesting indeed. I have only just found a version playable online and hope to share my thoughts on it when I am finished.

Forgetting about that for now let me explain how I would make The Prisoner as a game, and why.

Through your eyes…

In the series, the viewer learned precious little about Number 6′s life before he resigned his position. This isn’t an accident, Number 6 is – as he says – a free man. His affairs are his business, and the viewer is in some ways no better than the captors, for we are monitoring his every action too, wanting to learn more. In a game this is a very different dynamic. We have to be the prisoner, and so we cannot be someone else. The player character therefore won’t be Number 6, or at least the Number 6 we know in Patrick McGoohan. To make it work as a game it is our identity that has to be at risk. Here is where I would employ something that the majority of players may find superficial and pointless: I would integrate a character creation system for this game despite the fact that A) it will be in the first-person, B) no-one will ever refer to your character by the name you give them, and C) if you play well you would hopefully not provide any details at all.

The game is against you. The game is The Village. That point cannot be stressed enough.

As you play the game you may be faced with the same situation Number 6 is faced with in “Arrival”, where he is presented with a psychometric test, that is actually a symbolic show of power from The Village (when presented with a round peg and a square hole, the hole changes shape to accomodate, and capture, the round peg). The character creation screen has echoes of this, but I wouldn’t want to force the player to sit through pages and pages of tests until the game has a mark on you. I’d much rather integrate the Village’s monitoring of you into the game itself. Thus, I propose the game presents you with situations not too unlike the psychologist encounters in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Remembering that you are trying to defy your captors I would expect players to answer questions, and perform tasks in a manner contrary to their actual feelings, and take that into account when managing their outcomes down the line. As Number 6 does in that scene in “Arrival”, storming off in a huff will be a valid response. What I want impress upon the player is a sense of a paradoxical “free captivity”. You are a free-range hen. Wander around as long as you like, eventually you will come upon the chicken wire, and the only way is back.

This is where the advantages of being a first-person game come to the fore. Also, where my idea of implementing a real-time system (a la Pathologic) add to the player’s engagement in the situation in a way I think a text-based adventure would miss out on.

It's all a game.

Your village…

In a graphical adventure game you aren’t really interacting with a world, you’re interacting with an interface, and while that’s essentially true to any game, a first-person game with the full range of movement (an FPS without the S) is, to me, a more fulfilling way of exploring a place and getting a feel for it. The foot travel between locations, having to interact with the world hands on, I think makes a huge difference. Another game that had a real-time system but the interface of a point-and-click was The Last Express, and while it was a wonderful concept I often felt like I was just clicking around rooms back and forth waiting to trigger cutscenes.

The reason I want you to be able to explore the world fully, in detail, is because I want to make the environment (grounded in inherent unreality of a videogame map) feel as authentic as I can. It will have manicured lawns, and be unrealistically clean because The Village is unrealistically clean – it’s a place where stubbing a cigarette on the ground could have you imprisoned. I don’t expect anyone to think of the environment as truly authentic, but I want them to think I’m aiming for The Village’s level of authenticity when I pull the rug out from under them.

Plus, look at this map for a location. The possibilites are endless, The Village is full of potential for an interesting game to unfold. The fact that there is a sea but no seaworthy boat, and the place is surrounded by ominous sounding “mountains” makes this place strangely familiar to anyone who has seen an outdoor game map before. Even if you go to the areas inbetween to escape, The Prisoner comes with its own device for such circumstances: “Rover”, the big white suffocating balloon.

As I mentioned earlier, videogame worlds are synthetic from the ground up (which gives a great semiotic justification for the incidental “extras” having the same character models – as they have forsaken their identity and slipped into the background). Literally nothing has to behave the way it does in the real world. The fact that The Village is allegorical and surrealist makes it easier to exploit that. You, the player, will gradually come to understand that you have no real agency in your surroundings. You will have to be especially cunning to affect control of them. To give an example from the series opener No. 6 attempts to commandeer a helicopter, only to find that after a certain distance the helicopter stops responding to his controls, and the joystick is wrested from him – steering the helicopter and landing it back from where it was taken. No.6 wasn’t going to succeed with the tools he is given (a sequence that would be mesmerising in a first person game, but lacklustre in a point-and-click I might add).

This creates an interesting conflict to the designer of an adaptation. It is unfair to pit players in a world that is completely beyond their agency. It is more fair to leave things like physics as close to their natural counterparts as possible. Let the player be certain that simple tools will behave as you would expect, but that they cannot expect a quick-fix solution like the helicopter. Reward creativity, reward their individualism in the mechanics while coercing them to comply in the narrative.

An individual stands before the collective.

“What was that?” you gasp! “Ludonarrative dissonance!?” Why yes, it was. The designer really wants the player to win by overcoming the voice of conformity, the challenges put forth. That doesn’t mean we have to motivate them with a friendly character telling them so. The reason this is, is that a success and failure state is practically impossible to impose when planning a game where the interface itself is the kindly antagonist of The Village. The sooner the player realises that the character they control is the only trustworthy thing in the game, the sooner they will realise that any positive or negative re-enforcement beyond that is meaningless.

A still tongue makes a happy life…

An important consideration to make when making a game with a protagonist is how they interact with the other characters. A game about identity would never work if all of a sudden your character started spouting dialogue like Duke Nukem with no prompt or option. You could argue even giving the players dialogue options is a dangerous tactic – putting words in the player’s mouth, or presenting them with binary opinions. Never mind the fact that the UI is part of the system the player is trying to defeat. You can start adding all sorts of gimmicky things to give the player misdirection – a keyword system for dialogue that indicates the subject of the response but not necessarily the tone that is then coloured in a manner to trick the player (colouring a cooperative response red when the player may think it would be aggressive or contrary). You may even want to flat out trick the player by having them click on any dialogue option only for them all to have the same response – leaving the player with no option but to say nothing. You can see how this would quickly become unpopular. The better way to look at the UI, then, is to see it as though all the things that are meant to be representative of real life things (character creation being like No. 6′s files and questionnaires) can be as malevolent as usual, but then the actual UI should remain reliable, as the UI that controls all of your character’s movement and responses is meant to be your character’s individualism. If the game tricks you into saying the wrong thing, I’d hope it’d be a real trick and not a cheap shot.

Once Upon A Time…

Okay, so we have a first-person, open world game set in real-time. Since the game is about individualism I would also suggest the ability to amass a small inventory, and perhaps some basic character levelling to enforce that your actions make who you are. After that the game essentially plays like an adventure game with action elements with puzzles, and “quest givers” – though these are essentially characters you can interact with, follow, spy on, and try to decipher. Before agreeing to do anything for anyone the player must think about their options, their motivations and the possible outcomes of their actions. As No.6 you will have to monitor the degree to which you are under suspicion of escape/insurrection (and perhaps wonder why you aren’t) and figure out your escape.

My idea would be this: There are several means of escape that are only viable after a number of preparatory tasks have been accomplished. There is a routine in The Village that runs for a week or so, and to succeed you are best served living out a week and monitoring what goes on while trying to keep your head down. All the while your captors will be trying to get you to talk, so you will have to balance the amount of cooperation you give them with the amount of resistance. If you cooperate fully you will end up giving them what they want, if you cooperate still too much you will have no free time (and cannot garner trust) to plan an escape, if you don’t cooperate at all you will be under too severe a watch to accomplish anything. As you play you will be subjected to the kinds of torture No. 6 was, for instance being drugged, having loud music play that you cannot switch off, hearing constant radio announcements, and of course being followed by Rover.

Combat, I imagine, will feature as a last resort – and like in the series, will primarily take the form of fist fighting or meleé combat. Really, though, your mind is the weapon.

And we’re already playing this, you say?

That’s what I say! In a manner of speaking. The Village I would make in an adaptation of The Prisoner is symbolic, maybe satirical, of game design tropes we already know. The most obvious is the open-world game. The world is sort of open in open-world games, but they have invisible walls and not-so-subtle ones at that. Putting that concept into The Prisoner, well it explains itself. Again, in open-world games the characters are, more often than not, two dimensional quest-givers with three lines of dialogue, or walking vegetables who exist only to be hit with a car or accidentally shot. Setting them into The Prisoner’s universe makes them thematically blank, they daren’t be anything else for fear of retribution.

Rebuke from Rover

In other, deeper ways, The Prisoner can bring some things to light. Having control stripped from you (like the helicopter scene) can be a good satirical look at how scripted sequences and cutscenes break up gameplay, and take the fate of your protagonist out of your hands. The same things, as well as the dialogue/silence debate I brought up earlier bring about the notion that all games in which you are expected to care about the fate of your protagonists give you precious little opportunity to exert your individuality in them. Even the better attempts at it, with RPGs that give you character creation sometimes don’t pan out – Dragon Age: Origins left me feeling a bit numb with my character, unable to project enough, despite his unique identity, to feel as though he was really mine. Mass Effect, on the other end of the scale allowed me to voice my Shepard much more, but the character was their own person. I am not suggesting The Prisoner game would be an answer to these problems, but it can at least bring them up in an entertaining fashion.

Be seeing you.

UPDATE: Check out this post by Sinan Kubba entitled “My Life is My Own” in response to my own. It brings up a couple of things I didn’t really mention… like, you know, what happens at the end.

Mike Dunbar (Follow me on Twitter at MikeDunbar and for Chronoludic updates click here)

No sane person could come up with the money necessary to acquire all these AND played of these titles start to finish.

Collecting games is a bit akin to collecting books. They might look good on the shelf, but a lot of time needs to be invested to get anything substantial out of them. A game disc in itself is worthless unless the game itself is played with some attention. Just as a book is useless when sitting on the shelf without being read. Yet a lot of games we gamers collect in a more or less obsessive compulsive manner end up unplayed – or underplayed – in our collections.

One of the problems is of course the release schedule. Just because your gaming shelf is filled with unplayed titles doesn’t mean the industry will pause churning out desirable new ones. Also there’s always – really at every point in time – more games either being newly released or on sale than any one person could possibly play. But it is of course possible to buy those games. For those never occurring, entirely hypothetical hard times somewhere in the future, when there will be neither sales nor new games. Nor anything else like a job, the family or school to keep us from playing.

And that’s just the thing. When my gaming shelve is filled with shrink wrapped titles, I still keep on buying new stuff. A part of the reason for that is that I just like the act of buying. Instant self indulgence. Waiting for the mailman to arrive, open the package and place the game box on the shelve. And for that part to be fulfilled, it’s entirely unimportant if I’m going to actually play the game. It’s a collector’s drive. And that even extends to immaterial games on Steam.

The Pillar of Shame. Note that this is actually not it's recent size, it has grown since last summer.

Another problem, although a minor one, is technical progress. It used to be worse, these days the age of a game doesn’t start to show as quickly as it did some years ago. Still, games being released now do look and feel oftentimes better than those being sold for bargain prices. So it’s easy being spoiled. Just play the latest Uncharted title and then fire up a game made before that and observe yourself cringing at the facial animation. Hell, just fire up any game that’s not up to the production qualities of the Uncharted games right after playing them and see how you feel about that. Getting spoiled is really easy. Advice against that? Go play some really old game. 10 years or older. Play an indi title with 8-bit aesthetics.

It gets worse of course once you delve into those, since that opens yet a whole new can of worms. There’s more so called “indi” titles out there than you could shake a controller at. Those cost even less than regular games do, and some of them eat your life for breakfast. Just ask people about how many hours they poured into that 10$ game of Minecraft. That game alone could keep a working man busy for months. Yet still we buy on.

My game collection has grown to a quite impressive – or rather obsessive? – size over the years. I’m arriving at a point, where I’m buying games that end up shrink wrapped on the shelf for some months before I either bother or find the time for playing them. And still I buy on. These days, there’s not a month without at least one big huge must-have release. I like my gaming shelf. It’s an expression of my love for the hobby. It gets a bit more complicated with digital downloads. The Steam Sales of late saw me buying at least one game a day – for somewhere between 2.50€ and 14€.

Prices for games also drop rapidly, if you know where to look. Paying less than 20€ for a game that’s just over a year old isn’t that spectacular a find nowadays. On console. It gets much, much worse with PC games. 10€ for Dragon Age, a game that could easily last for 20+ hours in one playthrough? Lots of bang for the buck. The latest Fallout title set me back only about 29€ on PC. That’s again 30+ hours on one playthrough alone. Have I played it yet? Of course not.

Huge open world games that come in at less than 30€ are probably the best valued entertainment in all media. GTA IV + expansions on a Steam Sale for 13€? That’s what? A cent per hour of action? This does have a side effect of course. There is a sort of devaluing happening with games like that. Entertainment inflation.

Interestingly it’s the opposite to what’s happening with gaming in general. The trend nowadays goes towards games who’s single player campaigns take 6-8 hours while costing 60€ on release. So the subconscious mind is of course tempted to perceive these games as inherently a lot more valuable and more worthy of one’s time than a game one already owns. Also this game appears more valuable than any 30+ hour game that’s on sale for a fiver.

But will this cheap while deep game get that one playthrough that justifies even the 5€ spent on it? Oftentimes, and that’s speaking from personal experience, new releases are so shiny and tempting, and all the net is abuzz about how shiny and tempting about how great and discussionworthy  they are, that they are just so much more appealing to us than the games we already own. Like Tantalus, we are never satisfied, the game we want to play right now is always the one coming out next week.

Follow me on Twitter at SebWuepper , on my personal blog Tellurian’s Petshop and for Chronoludic updates click here

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Hey, Mike here with another Sonoludic – the podcast that explores the music and sound of video-games. Chris is getting in on the act too, and he will be updating this ‘cast too but this episode is one of mine, and it’s about Deadly Premonition.

Deadly Premonition is a game that many gamers, a little unfairly perhaps, criticize because of its graphics and music appearing to be a bit dated. Now I can’t speak for the graphics, but when you examine the music of Deadly Premonition it is abundantly clear, to me, that like so many other things in the game, it is in fact riffing off Angelo Badalamenti, and Twin Peaks.

This podcast is about how a game can be influenced by a tv show, how it is interpreted for the music of another medium, and how other games took the same source material but unconstrained by the obligation to mimic it, are free to interpret it in other ways.

Update: While I’ve got your attention, you should swing by Planet Redwood – a Deadly Premonition Fansite that I just discovered has a section detailing the numerous references DP makes to Twin Peaks, there is section there comparing the music much the way I have, though some of the selections are different from my own, it is definitely worth checking out. NOTE – there are many spoilers for Deadly Premonition AND Twin Peaks in the references.

Track 1: “York and Zach” by R. Kinugasa, T. Kobayashi, and H. Mizutani from Deadly Premonition.

Track 2: “Greenvale” by R. Kinugasa et al. from Deadly Premonition.

Track 3: “Laura Palmer’s Theme (live, with commentary)” by A. Badalamenti from Twin Peaks.

Track 4: “Underground” by R. Kinugasa et al. from Deadly Premonition.

Track 5: “Night Life in Twin Peaks” by Angelo Badalamenti from Twin Peaks.

Track 6: “Thomas McClaine” by R. Kinugasa et al. from Deadly Premonition.

Track 7: “Dance of the Dream Man” by A. Badalamenti from Twin Peaks.

Track 8: “Different Persons” by A. Yamaoka from Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

Track 9: “Tom the Diver (Orchestral)” by P. Alanko from Alan Wake.

Track 10: “Lucas’ Main Theme” by A. Badalamenti from Fahrenheit.

Outro and bed-music under the first link is “Life is Beautiful” by R. Kinugasa et al. from Deadly Premonition.