This is a bit of a departure from the usual stuff here, but it’s good enough and video-gamey enough that I thought it was worth talking about.

A friend of mine recently posted on his tabletop-gaming blog his ruminations on running a tabletop RPG based on Day Break. I’d never heard of Day Break before (and I suspect most other people haven’t, either), but he gave an intriguing, spoiler-free summary of it in his post, so I decided to pick it up for $7.50 for the entire series and give it a whirl. My wife and I started watching it Friday evening, and finished watching the entire thing Saturday night.

Here’s my version of the gist of the show: Taye Diggs (who also starred alongside She-Hulk from Heroes in one of my favorite horror movies, the 1999 remake of House on Haunted Hill) plays a police detective named Hopper in “a serious Groundhog’s Day“; he’s living the same day over and over again, but he’s trying to solve a murder mystery and unravel a huge conspiracy. I say “a serious Groundhog’s Day” because it’s serious, and also because it’s firmly established early on that Hopper’s injuries carry over from day to day, which quickly curtails any of Groundhog’s Day’s “toaster in the tub”-style antics. Other people can be injured and / or die and will be just fine when the day resets, but if Hopper dies it’s game over, and if he’s grievously injured he has to waste a few days being rushed to the hospital first thing in the morning and recuperating in an ICU. Still, Hopper at least carries over his memory from day to day, and if he spends all day going through some sort of grueling ordeal just to get a name, or an address, or some other important clue, then he still has that clue when the day resets, and can circumvent that ordeal completely. Hopper also gradually discovers that there are certain “side quests” he can complete (see? I’m tying this into video games. It’s not TOTALLY off-topic!) that have lasting effects when the day resets, but there’s no indication of what these “side quests” are and, thankfully, there’s no exploitable “gimmick” to making things carry over like “people remember things he tells them while a magic stopwatch is running” or anything like that, which keeps munchkin gamers in the audience from agonizing over possible ways to game the system.

This show only lasted one season, and only half of its episodes were originally aired. This is sad, but its short nature might actually be a blessing in disguise; it was created by a combination of one of the creators of Lost and one of the creators of The X-Files, two shows notorious for running WAY too long, and piling one mystery on top of another without ever resolving any of them. The creators of Day Break knew well in advance that the show was only going to last one season, and so, miraculously, all the major loose ends are tied up and there’s a great, satisfactory ENDING at the end of the last episode. I should also mention that the show features some stellar performances by everyone involved, especially Adam Baldwin (there, I just sold all the Firefly fanatics on this) and Mitch Pileggi.

You can watch the entire show on Hulu, or you can get it from Netflix (it’s not on Watch Instantly, though, unfortunately), or you can get it from Amazon for $7.50 for the whole thing (in a weird case with the discs themselves in black paper sleeves, but still — $7.50).

After blazing through all 13 episodes in a day and a half, I immediately tracked down and started playing the Gamecube port of Majora’s Mask (which takes place in a repeating 3-day cycle), unaware that I already owned but hadn’t yet played two games that revolve around “time loops”; Grim Grimoire and Flower, Sun, and Rain. So I think I’ll be living the same day over and over again for quite a long time.

UPDATE: ZOMG, I had no idea that I was posting this the day before Groundhog’s Day. Spooky!!!

My homies over at Call of Podcast have put together their lists of the top 5 games of the aughts, which has inspired me to make a “top [arbitrary number of] games of the aughts” list of my own! So, here goes!

Honorable Mention: Earthbound: Although this game came out in 1995, I only finally got around to playing it a few years ago, and holy cow is it profound. Where, oh where, is the Virtual Console version, Nintendo??

20: Ninja Gaiden: Be precise, or be dead.

19: The Suffering: An excellent game built entirely from elements that sound terrible on their own.

18: Game Center CX / Retro Game Challenge: The best NES games that never were.

17: Psychonauts: I suspect that someone mis-typed “beacon” in the design doc, and they just decided to roll with it.

16: Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2: Ollie the bum.

15: Dark Cloud 2: The perfect game for the Diablo-fan / weapon-crafter / robot-builder / photographer / inventor / spell-caster / monster-catcher / coin-collector / fisher / fish-breeder / fish-racer / golfer / city-builder / time-traveller / train-engineer / realtor in your family!

14: Civilization Revolution: Communist America is the most productive country in the world.

13: Ico: Kufo! Kufo!

12: Professor Layton and the Curious Village: Over 100 of the sort of logic and picture puzzles I was obsessed with in elementary school + Miyazaki-style idealized interbellum Europe = deeeeelightful

11: Braid: A visual, auditory, technical, and level-design masterpiece. Just ignore the unrelated text about the developer mooning over his ex-girlfriend.

10: Rhythm Tengoku: NOT the DS one, this is the first game which was only released in Japan-land for the GBA, has all-different levels, and uses the GBA’s buttons rather than the DS game’s weird “flicking” mechanic which I felt was way too imprecise for a rhythm game. It saddens me that, now that Nintendo has completely abandoned the GBA, this will never see a US release. “Yo, wakarimasuka!”

9: The Orange Box: Half Life 2 convinced me that first-person-shooters have narrative potential. TF2 convinced me that multiplayer can be fun. Portal just plain convinced me. Listing The Orange Box lets me cheat and cram HL2, Portal, and TF2 all into one spot.

8: Shadow of the Colossus: Or “Shizzle of the Colizzle” as we call it in the hood.

7: Astro Boy: Omega Factor: Treasure’s best game of the aughts (which is saying a lot) and an excellent tribute to Osamu Tezuka’s HUGE body of work (which is also saying a lot).

6: Disgaea: The new benchmark for tactics games.

5: We ♥ Katamari: Save the pandas!

4: Rez: My drug of choice.

3: Fallout 3: All that “decisions you make have a lasting effect” bullshit that games have been claiming for years, except this one actually delivers.

2: Bioshock: Randian Objectivists are a whole lot scarier than run-of-the-mill zombies. Also, best video game setting and ambiance EVAR.

1: Bully: Proof positive that the GTA model works even better if nobody dies.

There ya go. Note that this list only includes games I’ve played; there are several games released over the last 10 years that I suspect would make it into the list if I’d played them, but I haven’t gotten around to them yet. I’m also sure that there are a few games that I’m totally forgetting about, and when I remember them I’ll say “oh crap! That game totally belongs at number 5!” so, this list is subject to a little bit of fluctuation. For the most part, though, them’s my favorite games of the last 10 years.

I feel dumb for being so nitpicky, but I’m really bothered by the audio in Wii Klonoa. The voices in Klonoa are sort of a big thing to me, and “wahoo!” and “eepow!” are an integral part of my wife’s and my vocabulary. Also, Ghadius’s first line of “HOOOAA… JOKE!!” has always really stuck in my mind.

So, last night I checked out Klonoa Wii. I immediately noticed that the music was a little different; not completely different, but kind of not-so-good renditions of the original music. And then I was SUPER TERRIFIED when I started up the game and discovered that Klonoa was talking IN ENGLISH, and voiced by this Cam Clarke sound-alike. Now, I don’t have anything against Cam Clarke, and this guy sounds like he’d do a great job of voicing ninja turtles and cool teens, but he is NOT a good fit for a character who’s supposed to be saying things like “wapow, eepa polly-o!!” in the voice of an excited 8-year-old. I immediately quit, and found an option to change the in-game language from English to “Phantomile”, which improved things considerably. However, it’s STILL not the original voices, and although Klonoa and Huepow’s voices are close enough, Ghadius and Joka’s voices sound AWFUL and completely different.

So, I played through the first level, and then quit in despair. I feel dumb getting so upset about such a minor thing, especially since the gameplay is spot-on and the new all-realtime-rendered HD graphics are beautiful, but the voices are really like 2/3 of the charm of the original game, and with them redone half-assed I’d rather be playing the graphically-uglier original PS1 version.

Just a quick note that the amazing Dr. Petter has released an alpha version of sculptris, an awesome freeware 3D sculpting tool. I used it to make this nifty old man face in about 5 minutes, just playing around with the default settings and brush, and just using my mouse. Cool stuff!

Dr. Petter is also responsible for the sfxr, a free tool that helps you instantly generate 8-bit-ish sound effects (all of the sound effects in Crosstown and Spelunky were made with the sfxr), and musagi, a robust and very easy-to-learn free sequencer for making chiptune music.

The other night I noticed that one of the things listed on my projects page pointed to a dead link, so I fixed that. In the process, however, I started looking at some of my old, abandoned projects, and that got me thinking about how cool I think it is that Konjak has a whole section of his website for projects he abandoned. So I started digging, and digging, and digging…

40 games later, I have an early Christmas present for you guys. Behold, the StudioHunty graveyard of unfinished games, and despair. Or rejoice. Or maybe a little of both.

Herein lie many — but not all — of the games that I’ve abandoned over the last 10 years, every one with some kind of executable or binary or swf!

Not that I’m comparing dicks or anything, but Cactus only has 39 games listed on his website, and I’ve got 40 games listed here. So, maybe he’s got me beat on finishing games, but I can start making games like nobody’s business!!

(Before anyone gets all indignant and rushes to defend Cactus’s honor: I am joking, and I’m not seriously comparing my number of unfinished games to his number of finished games.)

So… uh… Microsoft is starting the next Dream Build Play competition a little early, and this time it’s sponsored by Old Spice, with a separate, larger grand prize if you make an advergame for Old Spice. Wacky. But it means they can double their prize money and prize categories, so I guess that’s good news for entrants.

Remember that, as usual, registering for the competition gets you a free 12 month XNA Creators Club trial membership, which will let you play freeware XNA games like Kenta Cho’s GearToyGear on your Xbox (but won’t let you playtest or peer review XNA games that are on their way to XBLIG).

Somewhere along the line, I developed a certain weakness for sliding-block puzzles.

I’m not quite sure how it happened, honestly; Apple’s bundled Puzzle desktop accessory always drove me nuts, and I never bothered to finish the World’s Hardest Trick the first time around. Yet somewhere between gnotski during Computational Mathematics lectures and a surprisingly high-quality implementation of Rush Hour during the down moments of my first internship, I learned to stop stressing and love shuffling tiles across a board.

There are a number of games of this type available on the web; a basic puzzle of this sort is pretty easy to implement and have therefore been a staple of newbie flash developers for years. I usually don’t find them particularly notable (although I would like to work in a plug for Wooden Path), but sometimes something really standout comes along.

The Indie Games blog linked last week to a flash project called Continuity. Continuity implements the really clever idea of taking a sliding-block puzzle and combining it with a 2D platformer- the blocks that you’re moving around are pieces of a level, and your ultimate goal is to guide your character through it, collect any keys, and reach a red door. Moving pieces whose edges match next to each other allows you to move between them.

The game starts out fairly simple, but the later puzzles become increasingly mind-bending. It’s a solid implementation of a really clever idea, and I enjoyed it tremendously.

- HC

When The Suffering came out five years ago, it sounded like all kinds of terrible. It starred a bad-ass dude named Torque who fought torture monsters in a grungy death row prison block, and he could hulk out for maximum carnage, and it had like a dozen different guns and gnarly dismemberments and shit and it was all edgy, all of which sounded like it would appeal to low-IQ 12-year-olds but bore me to tears.

A friend of mine worked on it, however, so when I found it used a few months ago for super-cheap, I went ahead and picked it up. It sat on my shelf for a few months until last week, when I decided to try it out for the LULZ and probably get bored with it after an hour and never play it again.

I finished it last night, and I have to say that The Suffering is the best horror video game I’ve ever played.

Everything about this game is top-notch, from the writing to the sound design and voice acting to the level design and gameplay mechanics, and it turns out that if you create a beautiful game you can get away with making it be about “a bad-ass death row inmate named Torque”. The “torture monsters” — which I originally assumed were a goofy throwback to bad 90s character design when everything looked like a cenobite — actually work really well and make sense for the setting since they’re designed to be physical manifestations of various forms of capitol punishment. The game has two stories: the history of the island where the prison is located, and Torque’s attempts to remember whether or not he actually murdered his family. Both stories are told in a compelling way over the course of the game, and they frequently intermingle in unsettling ways. There are numerous, organic, alternate paths and cul-de-sacs, and they’re all worth exploring not for loot (which the game gives you plenty of on Normal mode), but because they usually contain another disturbing revelation about the stories.

In the “making of” video that’s included on the disc (don’t watch it until after you’ve finished the game, because it’s filled with spoilers), the project lead mentions that the game was strongly inspired by two of my favorite horror movies: The Shining, and the 1999 remake of House on Haunted Hill, and both influences definitely show in all the right ways. It also seems like The Suffering was in turn a strong influence on Bioshock, another of my favorite games; both games feature “flashbacks”, ghosts reenacting past events, and an intriguing setting with its own well-developed history that’s unraveled over the course of the game. Both games also feature “moral choices”, but whereas they’re boiled down to a stilted “HARVEST or SAVE” choice in Bioshock, they’re much more fleshed-out and natural in The Suffering. The first moral choice you’re faced with is a prison guard who is constantly verbally abusing you when he’s not threatening to shoot you. If you think of Torque as a cold-blooded killer, then you can drop the asshole and take his gun, but if you think Torque is an innocent man wrongly accused, then you gain a useful (albeit verbally abusive) companion (a feature that I felt was sorely missing from Bioshock) for the next section of the game. Both decisions make sense depending on how you want to play the character, which ultimately forms a stronger bond between the player and the character and makes the game more immersive and compelling. Naturally, the moral choices you make effect the ending; if you play Torque as a cold blooded killer who murdered his family, then it turns out he is a cold-blooded killer who murdered his family, and if you play him as an innocent man wrongly accused, then it turns out he is innocent. Most amazing, however, is the fact that these moral choices even carry over to the sequel, which plays differently depending on the choices you made here in the first game!

While I was playing The Suffering, I received both Fallout 3 and the new Prince of Persia via Goozex (see how I snuck my referral code in there?), and also finally got the right equipment to play The English fanslation of Mother 3 on a real GBA, but I put all of those things on hold so that I could keep playing this “last-gen” game.

If, like me, you wrote off The Suffering as mindless pap for angry 12-year-olds, I strongly suggest that you pick it up cheap with the intention of playing it for an hour for the LULZ. And then a week later you can thank me for recommending it.

So, then! Sega’s bringing the Phantasy Star MMO series to the DS next week, and the result looks quite nice. Of particular note is the brilliant use of the DS’s touch screen as a freeform chatpad, where everything you write or draw on the touchscreen is displayed in a speech bubble over your character’s head. So, you could quickly scratch out “HELP!” without having to take your eyes off the giant dragon kicking your ass to peck out the letters on a keyboard, or you could quickly draw out plans of attack so that your team members know exactly what you’re talking about. Or, ya know, you could just communicate entirely in drawings of penises.

Anyone who’s been gaming long enough can remember That Game- the one that you heard about and latched onto and followed every tiny detail and scrap of information about. The one that you looked forward to and anticipated for months, through delays and new release dates. The one that you lived and breathed. The one that, once you got it, turned out to be a hollow shell of the game that you’d been promised- the one that dashed your hopes and turned out to be a huge disappointment.

Everybody’s got one of those- you know that you do, too- many of which have titles you’d recognize: Halo 2. Black and White. Spore.

Mine was a little-known Super Nintendo game entitled The 7th Saga.

You’ve probably never heard of The 7th Saga, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s a straightforward JRPG, released in 1993 in the US. It follows the grind-heavy and plot-light Dragon Quest model, but has an incredibly punishing difficulty level than any of the Dragon Quest games and, at the same time, also has a less interesting battle system. The setting was a straightforward 16-bit-RPG Fantasy-but-there-are-lasers-and-robots-around-for-no-goddamn-reason affair. About the only interesting concept in the game is the way the “party system” is handled- you’re given a choice of seven characters initially, and then will encounter the others (who you can recruit or fight against) at various points in the game. The visuals- which, for the time, were pretty impressive- were about the game’s only real high point. The music wasn’t bad, either, I suppose. All things considered, it’s a mediocre game at best, whose primary advantage lay in being a JRPG released in the US at a time when there were very few JRPGs to be had, and even fewer worthwhile ones. A more humane level of difficulty would have helped the game, but even without the punishing difficulty I still probably would have been better off playing Lufia or Paladin’s Quest instead.

There was a sequel to The 7th Saga which never made it out of Japan, by the name of Mystic Ark (I’ve just learned that there’s a second, Playstation-based sequel, too, which there seems to be little to no reference to on the English-speaking internet). It wasn’t a game that I was particularly interested in, but I recently checked my RSS feeds and learned that the intrepid folks at AGTP have translated it into English- so I decided to give it a try.

I wish I could say that I was pleasantly surprised- unfortunately, I cannot.

Although the difficulty level is much more reasonable than The Seventh Saga’s, Mystic Ark is still a straightforward, unremarkable SNES RPG at its’ core. It seems to rely a lot more on puzzles and “trigger quests” than many of its’ contempararies- unfortunately, many of the puzzles seem totally arbitrary and don’t make that much sense, are drop-dead easy, or some combination of the two. Many also seem designed simply to make you wander back and forth through monster-infested territory as much as possible, and more often than not advancing the plot seems to be a matter of randomly talking to people until you trigger an event (one of my personal JRPG pet peeves). The game is seperated into seven different “worlds”, which seem to each attempt to follow a different wacky theme, but the graphics are really too drab and uninteresting to capture this- it’s hard to get excited about a world inhabited by cat pirates which it looks suspiciously similar to a world inhabited by people living inside giant fruit, which looks suspiciously similar to a world inhabited only by children.

The game’s overall storyline never seems to really form into anything cohesive and interesting- it gets a little better near the end, but all-in-all it’s pretty mediocre. Beyond that, there’s nothing really remarkable about it- combat is only slightly improved from The Seventh Saga’s straightforward Dragon Quest-alike, and the presentation is fairly middle-of-the-road for the time when the game was released.

Mystic Ark is an okay effort, I suppose, and its certainly better than it’s predecessor- but it’s nothing spectacular, and it’s not a game which I’d really recommend to anyone. It was only my personal history with the series that convinced me to finish the game at all- and even with that, I had to force myself to complete the last few worlds.

- HC