I have ammo. Lots of ammo. I am having a great time finding all the little crawl spaces, hacking every safe I can find and robbing every corpse rotting up my path. I already have the three photographs of the Spidey Splicers, have had them for quite some time. Got a really cool action shot of one, on a hunch; just turned a corner and clicked. Yeah, I’m a regular Mama Weegee over here. But despite the urgings of my rather vocal spectator to “follow the damn arrow, that’s what it’s there for”, I decide to go on a treasure hunt and take in the scenery.

I am still dumbfounded by the simultaneous beauty and sheer creepiness of this world. I have to pause to look at the ceiling of the bathroom and stop by the windows every once in a while to gaze through the aquatic distortion at the city scape beyond. I hear a Big Daddy coming and I crouch in a good hiding place. I hear him like he is in the room with me, but I don’t see the door open. I turn around, and almost fall off the couch. It’s outside, like outside the windows outside, meandering along the briny deep like ’twere on it’s way to Sunday school!

He doesn’t seem to see me, and I am reluctant to fire on it and allow the suffocating beauty of Rapture’s backdrop to fill the room. I just watch it go past, my jaw dropping a little lower than usual. I spend a moment wondering why all games can’t be like Bioshock, then I plunder a corpse holed up in safe room, it’s desperation obviously having found no safety from the doom outside. Was this one spared the insanity? What happened here? I love this game.

I have to come clean on something: I haven’t really been using my plasmids. I am so much more familiar with the gun mechanic that it is the weapon, not the super-power, that I keep on hand as I walk the halls, as well as the venue I choose when shit goes to hell. I know my way around a shot gun and grenade launcher better than I do a leaking red ball or pyrotechnical wizardry. I know that this will probably prove troublesome in the future, because plasmids are the game mechanic. The guns seem primarily supportive. I am just hoping that it will be later rather than sooner that I am forced to master these powers for use in a quick-thinking all-out plasmids bonanza.

My boyfriend lets me in on a few other tidbits today. When people sparkle, they have ADAM. You don’t say? I thought that was a bit odd. And Big Daddies run circuitous routes, knocking on those weird holes that I was trying to figure out. They knock on the wall and summon Little Sisters from them. Well, I’ll be damned. Crouch in the shadows and watch. Or better yet, walk right up behind it and open fire with the wrong kind of ammo and run like hell. Yes yes, y’all, and you don’t stop. Bioshock one, and you don’t quit, biatch! I am really starting to look forward to the sequel.

Day Five:

Oh shit. I am fucked. You talked, didn’t you? You sang like a birdie and altered the game play just to mess with me! Don’t give me that innocent blinking-cursor look, you lousy word processor!

…

Remember when I said “I am just hoping that it will be later rather than sooner that I am forced to master these powers for use in a quick-thinking all-out plasmids bonanza”? Well, as I progressed to Fontaine’s Fishery, I was rather nonplussed to find that I was forced to relinquish the arms and ammo that I had spent the past day acquiring, and was to set forth from here on with only my plasmids to keep me covered. Arrrrgh. And what lay beyond the first door, mind you? Only a milita! Yes, only that. Did I say that I wasn’t going to quit? Fuck that. Fuck that right up it’s ass.

Day Six:

Like an ADAM addict I am stalking my apartment and babbling incoherently, so I know it’s time to go back for more. With the trepidation of a field mouse, I edge into the fishery and am not immediately ambushed. Good sign. I remember that my first mistake was walking straight forward, so I strafe the corners amidst the shadows. Still nothing. Was I really so brazen last time? I was being mauled from six angles in seconds upon my first entrance; I know that I had set off an alarm, but I am looking at every possible angle of where I must have set off some trap and I see no evidence of a camera. Princess Peach or whoever finally shows up ready to gun me down, but it’s no contest with my back to the wall and a one to one ratio, and plenty of warning. After a hearty self-patting on the back, I make my rounds melting the ice, and boosh, I suddenly have my full arsenal at my fingertips again. That wasn’t so bad.

I still need to work on my telekinesis. I spotted and mind-lassoed a whole box of armor piercing rounds in the ramp to the sub, but let the button go before I changed angles thereby sending it flying god knows where. I must have spent 20 minutes looking for that damn ammunition. Of course when the same thing happens to candy bars and chips, I can find them no problem. I get some sort of flashback where everything goes grainy and I see ghost figures in black and white talking about fucking Fontaine. Seriously. I think this happened in a earlier part of the game, but I was still pretty unsure of myself and wasn’t sure what was happening. Also a flash of a photograph, a nuclear family that I assume was my own, as I make my way through the tunnels.

Hints of my identity? I get the sense that my character has been here before, and the beginning sequence in the plane (in which I remember being told that I was destined for greatness or some crap) has to do with my origins in this mad experiment of Ryan’s. After all, my plane crashing at just this spot couldn’t be a coincidence. This isn’t Lost… thank goodness.

Day Seven, but more like Fourteen:

Pro tip: it’s key not to step away from a game for about a week right before a big battle.

I knew it was coming, after all. I went on a little bit of a bender, and made it to some sort of garden paradise. I was collecting seven of this, seven of that, and seven of the other thing to make a what’s-it-mabob for some indiscernible reason (I think it had something to do with oxygen). All I am sure about re: plot specifics at this point is that the scene where the scientist chick gets gassed and writes the code on the window made me trill in delight.

This three part task is thrust upon me, only lacking a pop-up screen to tell me that “there will be something big following this, stupid”, and after collecting about 14 of the 21 needed items, I put down my handy pink controller and stumble headlong into the mundane world of what I had put off doing over the week so that I could plow through this legend of a game (plow relative to my abilities, I should say. I wouldn’t doubt that a non-n00b would have no problem beating this in a weekend).

When check marks had been applied to to-do list enough to assuage my stunted sense of guilt, and I felt that I had accomplished enough in a week to warrant a full-time re-immersion into the game, I sought refuge once more in the ashen atmosphere or Rapture. But all of a sudden I couldn’t remember how to load my gun or switch gracefully between plasmids and weapons. I was hitting my health button by mistake and wasting first aid kits, and generally acting like an idiot. My first hacking attempt was thwarted in a sad display of panic; that’s what drove the point home, what made me realize the error in my ways.

What would I have been like in two weeks, or a month? I can see a caricature of myself, grunting as I hunch over my controller and beating it with a stick. That’s what I felt like for about the first ten minutes, and by the time the gang of fools descend on me after the what’s-it-mabob was employed, I was only a little more confident. All that ammo I painstakingly sought out in every corner, trashcan, and corpse pocket was unloaded in a frenzy of poorly aimed and often misjudged shots. Flipping frantically through weapons as the splicers came at me, I was sending heat-seeking missiles into the weakest of opponents, and wasting clips of machine gun ammo at houdinis that would only take about a fifth of the potential damage I was dealing out. By the end, I was ammo-less and a little wiser.

Dear Diary,
I want to become a more knowledgeable video game player. I have expressed this, and have found that I have an excellent source of tutelage in my long-time gamer boyfriend. He has compiled a list of games that he considers the “must-play” list, and today I begin my journey, starting with: Bioshock!!! (Da-da-duuuum!!!) I begin by treading water for longer than I could possibly manage in real life. I spend as much time as possible taking in the flames, and then the desperately black horizon in every direction but one. I like it already. Entering the lonely lit monument, I try to grasp what the hell could possibly be going on and if the entire game is supposed to take place on this island.

Quick prologue: unlike 99.9% of the gaming populace, I have no idea what this game is about except for the word “Big Daddy”. In fact, I was instructed to play this game when I picked it out of my boyfriend’s collection one day and remarked upon the “cute little mining guy” on the cover. You have to pardon me. I was not gaming at the time of its release (had not been until very recently, in fact) so I have no memories of screen shots nor any recollection of articles defaming or praising the game.

The closest thing to knowledge about Bioshock that I have came to me in the form of an article I read online a few days ago about the importance of storytelling in gaming, which included a screen shot of a banner that displayed the “No God. No Kings. Just Man.” proclamation. I immediately recognized this same banner as I walked into the first piece of architecture presented in the game, but that’s it as far as familiarity goes.

Of this game, I have only heard from gaming friends references that seem to invoke the general attitude that they share toward games like Portal, expressed in the widening of eyes, “o” shaping their mouths, and emitting an awe-struck noise not unlike silence. The best I could get was a simple and generally detail-lacking comment on the high quality of said friends’ experience of playing the game. I guess that I am that ultra-rare human who was actually surprised when the bathysphere submerged and unveiled a hidden nautical cityscape, dimly shining on the ocean’s floor. And I am very glad for it.

It doesn’t take me long to realize that I have not just entered a game, I have entered a world. Don’t get me wrong. I am not just saying this for dramatic effect. I have never been so immediately drawn into a fiction world, neither in game nor book nor movie, as I feel I have already been at this point in Bioshock. I am attempting to progress through the beginning of the game as slowly as possible, looking in every corner for clues, such as the one that makes reference to a mysterious great chain under the infamous banner that welcomed me from the plane crash. I know I am already missing things, and that I am probably spending way too much time raiding trash cans and reading the info screen for the vita chamber, but this is a hell of game and I intend to appreciate it.

Day Two:

An epiphany today! That arrow, in the middle of my HUD, that’s pointing the direction I am supposed to go! Who would’ve thought? …Oh man, I am so sharp.

Ok, so this is what I have gathered. There was some sort of New Years Eve party, after which everyone promptly went bat shit insane. Now everyone is roaming the joint looking to moider and maim, and I am down here… why? It has something to do with the chain tattoo on my wrist, I think. I caught glimpse of that sucker as I was cocking a shotgun. Did I do hard time in Sing-sing, or am I part of this great chain of madness? And then there are these weird Little Sisters and their Big Daddies. Good stuff.

I am now in a medical pavilion, and looking for some crazy surgeon dude. You know that expression “When shit hits the fan”? I take it this guy lost his shit right into a fan, because it’s smeared in human blood all over the walls. I am taking the live-and-learn route as of right now, learning about all of the mechanical devices in this world. By that, I mean I am getting turned into swiss cheese between the security cameras, the helicopter security bots thingies, and the turrets-that-piss-me-the-fuck-off-seriously-man-wtf. But it’s a good kind of pissing me off, a feeling that I experience when something is worth my time.

There is a singularly satisfying blend of sick thrill and good humor incorporated in this game- kind of reminds me of Plants vs. Zombies in that manner. I laughed my butt off at my first exchange with a Circus of Values machine when it told me to “Come back when you’ve got some money, buddy”. I can still hear the clown’s words reverberating in my skull, both frightening and delighting. Speaking of fright, there is a real wealth of it to be found in this Rapture. I found myself unwilling to enter the morgue, and quite literally jumped out of my seat when a shadowy figure scurried into the darkness. Wow. This is awesome. Like, jet-pack awesome!

I now feel that I have my bearings in this world. The controller is only theoretically in my hand, because I am now comfortable enough to act in the game without considering which analogous button I need to press. I am no hard core gamer, but I think that anyone that plays in a world such as Rapture knows that the mantra of the Mentat* and the FPS gamer are one in the same: “it is by will alone I set my mind in motion.” Not the stuff about the stained lips, though. Maybe that makes sense if you’ve got a gaming/cheetos thing going on.

Aaaaaanyway, I had to make my way completely through the pavilion before I felt that I had it mapped in my mind. Not in the sense that it is mapped in the pause screen, but in the way one maps a place perceptually, so that one can conceive of where a sound is coming from or where a turret or enemy might be stationed as a bullet goes whizzing past. You really feel like you’re at home in this universe when a flaming woman runs screaming past you. Mom?

*in Lynch’s Dune universe, that is.

Day Three:

I am faced with a choice today, and it is not whether or not I play Bioshsock or do the things on my chore list. That’s, like, not even a choice. I am talking about whether I save a little girl or harvest her for her sweet, sweet ADAM.

It only seems logical to harvest her. The way I see it, if you don’t harvest the girls, then you can find out later in the game that Atlas was accurate about Tenenbaum lying, and that we should have been hunting down the darlings. No harm no foul; one can now continue the game and kill them on sight. However, if you are supposed to be saving instead of harvesting, you’re going to have a pile of ingenues and no road to redemption except in not killing any more, if you can find your way clear of that. So I suppose that the game will reveal that ol’ Tenny is a lying sack of shit and we need to off the pretties.

Except that I can’t do it. I am holding their frail little bodies like sack boys, and I cannot find it in me to be the Bane to their Batman and break them over my knee. I feel like I am holding a lobster over a pot. I know I want its delicious innards, but do I have the gusto to do the deed? Furthermore, I think of my little sister and how much I love her. Goddamnitalltohell!!!! This game is a mind trip and I LOVE IT! I savor it, and I every single one of the girls, every time knowing that I’ll probably have to hunt the little bitch down again later and it won’t be worth the contraband left for me in the sacrificed shell of a teddy. And, in a moment of insight, the genius of the game dawns on me: they didn’t make them little girls just because it worked for the storyline. I think they wrote the story around the idea of soul-sucking parasites being in the form of little girls. Now I am just waiting to walk into a room where Maurice Chevalier is thanking heaven for little girls. It’s just a matter of time.

So here I am making my way through McDonagh’s Tavern. This seems like an oddly inactive part of the game. Is it that there hasn’t been a ton of shooting, or am I just getting good? Yes, let’s say that. I am getting SOOOOOOO good at this game! Woot!

Oh, on a side note, I find that there is a strange calm in hacking. I am hacking objects that I don’t even need, vending machines I don’t intend to use and medical units I am simply passing by, just to partake in those meditative moments of TMNT ooze. Side note to the side note: I must admit, I have a hard time figuring out my usb port. So, when I turn to my 1337 boyfriend (who received a cease and desist note from the FBI right about the time most kids are discovering their bodies) and announced “I am a hacker!”, I was relieved that his response was merely a Picard style face-palming. He was fully within his rights to give me what-for right across the mouth. Seriously.

He watched me play today. Turns out, you need to pay attention to those recordings that you pick up. It’s not that I am deaf. Well, I am. But I have the volume turned all the way up. I just can’t make heads or tails out of what they’re saying half the time between the multitudes of accents and the quality of the recordings (which I am not so dense as to think are really “bad”. It’s for the overall effect. I get it. I still cannot hear a damn thing they are saying). Aha! He points me in the direction of the transcripts. What do you know? A whiny mother loosens her lips and I bust a code on the tavern inn’s ass. All of a sudden I have cream cash money. Ballin’.

I say that because this is a very strict remake, helmed by many of the original team members. They decided to keep the core game intact, including the levels, story, and even the jibberish Phantomilian language. The benefits of modern gaming technology come only in the form of a complete aesthetic overhaul. The music has been redone (though perhaps not rearranged), as have the graphics. Klonoa uses the same visual style as many other good looking Wii games like Mario Galaxy and Zack and Wiki. Big, rounded objects with cartoonish textures are magnified by gorgeous, colorful lighting. With support for Progressive Scan and widescreen display, the game is absolutely beautiful. Most impressive is its depth of field. The game always makes sure to fill the background with something, whether it be far away objects or parts of the level.

This is significant in a 2.5d game like Klonoa. Anyone who has played a 2d platformer has likely asked themselves why characters only move in one direction through an environment, and why they never travel along the Z-axis. The routes that Klonoa takes may limit him to two dimensional movement, but the polygon based visuals allow them to twist and wind through the level, as if he is actually exploring the whole thing, rather than just a small area. Quite often the walkways you see in the background are places you will visit later on. Aside from looking nice, this approach gives you the sense that Phantomile is a fully realized world worthy of exploration.

It may sound like a bad thing that only the aesthetics saw major change, but this is actually for the better. Klonoa’s simple two button design still works wonderfully today, and maps to every possible control scheme on the Wii. Fans will appreciate coming home to the same game they know and love, while newcomers will embrace the old school formula which eschews excessive amounts of collectibles and secrets in favor of straightforward platforming (your only techniques are to grab enemies and use them to double jump). Namco could have easily added more enemies, minigames, and Waggle controls. Instead they left things the same, save for a Waggle-based attack that you can entirely ignore, and a few Wii exclusive stages that you can access after completion.

Still, to do nothing but praise Klonoa would be to do you a disservice. You really need to know what you are getting in order to determine if this is the game for you. For one, Klonoa is both short and easy. It can be finished at about four hours and the number of lives and health it dishes out ensure that anyone over 20 will not see the Game Over screen even once. If you come to play with Klonoa, make sure you do so for the cheery music and breezy levels. Those looking for a challenge will be sorely disappointed.

Then there is the matter of the story. It is pleasantly straightforward, with a surprisingly bittersweet ending. My issue with it is that ends up being more serious than it needs to. Since the game uses Japanese voice actors to do the Phantomilian language track, the characters are filled with drama and anguish in all the right places. Except, I don’t really expect drama and anguish in such a cutesy game. Otaku will chalk this up to Japanese games and anime being more mature and deep than their Western equivalents, but I see it as two ideologies that don’t really fit well together. If the cutscenes weren’t so drawn out due to slow text scrolling, I could live with it, but ultimately the drama is only ever effective in the very last scene. The rest of the time it feels forced and hokey, like an anime that insists on becoming serious in its last third for the sake of it.

These flaws don’t mar the overall experience, but they do help establish what kind of experience it is. Anyone who grew up with this genre will be tickled pink by Klonoa’s honest, traditional approach, and I still see myself going back to Klonoa half a year from now to replay the stages in reverse (an added feature in this Wii remake). I see it as a “happy place” for the hobby’s old timers, one that is worth returning to once a year or so to remind yourself that video games can still be beautiful and joyous, rather than hateful and stress filled chores that evolve into side jobs. Klonoa is one of the finest games I have seen on the Wii.

Still, I’m a fan of theirs, and I do find myself playing Medieval II and trying to rebuild an empire that ended 500 years ago. It made me think about identification in games – sometimes you feel you can really identify with the character (or, you know, last vestige of the Roman Empire) you’re playing as. Does that make a game more involving?

Looking back a bit through gaming history, did people really relate to Mario, a plumber trying to rescue a princess, as he leapt through a series of surreal 2D levels? I’m thinking not much, but he is an undeniably likable guy, latter-day backlash or not. He’s got a cool mustache, no one with a mustache can be a bad person. They managed to fit a surprising amount of character into so few pixels back in those early games. Now sure, there’s only so much connection you can have with a 2D sprite that you’re directing. So maybe you didn’t feel like you were inside his head as you jumped down drain pipes, but you were on his side.

Then another staple of the early 90s; 2D Fighters. You found a character that best fit your personal outlook on violence – be it running around fast and jabbing with cheap attacks, doing nothing but throwing fireballs from a safe distance, crushing people’s spines or to my biggest fan – Johnny Cage. Uh, I lost my thread – wait, okay so you probably found a couple of characters that you were particularly good with and largely stuck with them, and you most likely felt a certain connection with them right? Some of them were outlandish indeed, ninjas that could freeze a man solid, killer robots, super spies, undead warriors and uh… also quite a few boxers and wrestlers. I don’t even know where to start with Dhalsim…what the hell is that guy’s deal? The characters were extreme and often bizarre, but they had a lot of personality and you might spend a lot of time in their company.

Which leads us on nicely to RPGs. It’s not uncommon for people to form a real bond with their RPG characters, I suppose it’s hard not to when they’re fairly lengthy undertakings, but there’s more to it than just time. In Western RPGs you’re traditionally given more of a blank slate and you generally have some degree of control over their behavior and attitudes to the world at large. It often conforms to the good/neutral/evil categories laid out somewhat D&D style: you’re either helping rescue cats from trees, setting those trees alight while the cats are in them, or helping rescue the cat and then demanding a reward and burning the tree down for good measure. So in controlling how your character acts you directly influence how the world reacts, and how they come to be perceived, it’s kind of like street theatre.

It’s not really like street theatre at all. In an interesting schism, most Japanese RPGs give you a lead character (and yes, fair chance they’ll be a very effeminate man) and often give you less control over how they act. These games tend to be rather more dominated by lengthy cutscenes that flesh out the story. It also seems fair to say that they give you less control over how a character develops, leveling up often a more automated process, forgoing the careful consideration of whether to improve trap laying or basket weaving that you might get in a western RPG.

Because a lot of JRPGs feel more like a progression through a set sequence of events and pre-defined improvements, I’ve never enjoyed them as much. But then again, many Western RPGs provide more of an illusion of influence than anything else, with events often turning out much the same regardless, or perhaps alternating between two extreme finales. I do enjoy being a blank slate from the start though, and choosing my character’s direction – deciding whether to be some guy with a bow/laser sniper rifle and sneak skills, or a sword/laser sword wielding melee fighter extraordinaire, that kind of thing.

I suppose first and third person shooters, the most ubiquitous genres these days, are most guilty for propagating the trend of alienatingly terrible characterization. How many times have you played a game with a hulking, gravelly voiced alpha male stereotype or barely dressed femme fatal for a lead character? It’s become a regular complaint, people railing against unimaginative writing and basic archetypes. While graphics have improved a thousand fold in the past 20 years, with super-detailed and lifelike character models, the writing has barely moved forward at all. Mario, in all his pixilated early glory, somehow had a lot more charm than many instantly forgettable game heroes of a more recent vintage.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I like to identify with the character I’m supposed to be embodying. It adds something intangible when you feel some connection, some investment in their fate. Don’t give me nihilistic posers with stupid voices or irritating tough guys with stupid voices, games are often better when you’re kind of glad to see the hero(s) succeed. It’s nice to identify with your characters, whether it’s because they’re interesting and charismatic or that you had so much influence on their development and actions throughout the game. Or even because they have a uniquely difficult starting location and an intriguing mix of horse archers and western style heavy infantry, that works too.

Doing the rounds at breakneck speed, our briefest Lamecast to date makes quick work of your sanity. Don covers the failings of multi-platform gaming, we collectively analyze why the guy behind the counter at Christian’s Gamestop needs to NOT share his feelings, Casey’s confounding lack of history with Dungeon Keeper, and would Alexis kindly step away from the pointless hacking.