We love the content of our games: the characters, the environments, a great lighting trick or a memorable score. But let's be honest. Gameplay trumps all. Without the Portal gun, you wouldn't have Portal. Left 4 Dead proves that you can get more mileage with less plot. And Tetris, arguably the king of games, comes with no content at all.
You could argue that the content is just frosting - except in a few cases. And one of those cases is the oeuvre of game designer Tim Schafer. Schafer's new title, Brütal Legend, due this fall, has stirred up raves and praise from the gaming press after favorable demos at GDC and E3. With Jack Black as roadie Eddie Riggs helming a saga set in a '70s metal fantasy world, Brütal Legend ticks off many boxes on the list of Things That Rawk. The game features the voices of legends such as Lemmy Kilmister, Ozzy Osbourne and Lita Ford, as well as celeb cameos from the likes of Tim Curry. But the main attraction is Scahfer. If he's behind it, the thinking goes, the game will be massive. It'll be hilarious, yet thoughtful. The characters will be larger than life but true to their hearts. You won't even want to skip the cut-scenes.
But will you actually have fun playing the game?
I've never played Schafer's earliest works. He was a co-writer and co-designer on LucasArts' first two Monkey Island games and Day of the Tentacle, and he made his lead designer debut with 1995's Full Throttle. I first fell for him with 1998's Grim Fandango, a brilliantly executed and head-bashingly tough graphical adventure set in an afterlife that crosses Day of the Dead imagery with Art Deco architecture, Aztec motifs, and classic movies like Casablanca. This pastiche, which served as a background for the adventures of Manuel "Manny" Calavera, a travel agent for the Department of Death in the fictitious land of El Marrow, blended perfectly thanks to Schafer's direction and his sense of humor. Across four acts, clever puzzles stemmed not from abstract logic games, but naturally and believably from the sui generis environments and the masterfully-told story.
I mentioned humor, and his sense of it is Schafer's greatest strength. The humor that he and his team bring to their games is surprisingly broad and all-ages, without crossing the line to "corny." The jokes are witty but heartfelt, and they're free of geek-bait, fan service, or other short-lived references. They reflect a creator who's not in love with his jokes, but with his worlds.
Grim Fandango roosts high on the list of all-time great games. But Schafer's next work, 2005's Psychnoauts, is better known as a great game that nobody played. On its first release it racked up critical praise but dismal sales. And while I liked it enough to finish it, I can see why it didn't "click."
Psychonauts takes place in a summer camp - except this is a summer camp for psychics. The students are Psychonauts-in-training, who jump into people's minds and dreams to battle their nightmares and cure their neuroses. This gave Schafer's team the chance to combine a folksy, familiar setting with a panolpy of surreal dreamscapes, where psychedelic discos and black spy helicopters rub against villas filled with black velvet paintings, and a circus full of fluffy little bunnies, all marching to the slaughter.
That's a broad palette - and unlike Grim Fandango, it doesn't gel. The protagonist is Raz, a stock precocious boy who overshadows a smarter heroine and whose whole quest is basically about himself. He doesn't catch the imagination like Fandango's Manny, and the game's maturity level swings from nostalgically youthful, to flat-out juvenile. On the other hand, the peripheral stuff - the environments, the dialogue, and the secondary characters - shine with love and care. Stroll around the campgrounds and you'll have dozens of opportunities to talk to other kids, and to watch cutscenes just because they're so damn entertaining.
But what really marred Psychonauts is the game. It's a 3-D platformer, which has a niche appeal. The platforming has nothing to do with the game's core themes of psychoanalysis-made-physical however. See, our hero is not only a psychic, he's also a circus performer - which explains why he can monkey his way up all these tightwires and pillars, but has nothing to do with all the cool stuff about breaking into people's imaginations. Many levels end with a feeling, not of triumph, but relief. And when the difficulty spikes in the finale, even the game's biggest boosters admit it starts to curdle.
Which brings us to Brütal Legend. I won't try to judge Brütal before I've even laid my hands on a controller. But I've caught several minutes of gameplay footage, and I've already seen one reason to like it: it's an action-adventure, the burger-and-fries of the gaming world.
Enemies show up, and you mash a button and kill them. You upgrade your weapons and pick up new abilities, and you can mash buttons to use them. Your parents who conceived you to this heavy metal soundtrack will have a blast playing this with you. So far, we've seen no baroque puzzles, and no tricky four-story-high rope courses. You smack the buttons and the little guy on the screen kills people. And when you're done? You go back to a world of album cover skies and disfigured headbangers and leather-clad rock chicks and golden-throated pretty boys, and hours and hours of listening to people yap. It's the best reward of all: more content.
Images - Top: Jack Black in Brütal Legend / Second: Grim Fandango / Third: Psychonauts / Bottom: Ozzy in Brütal Legend.
Rachael Webster (a.ka.a SG member PixelVixen707) is SG's Hit Play games columnist. A game lover and game blogger living in New York City, she also writes at PixelVixen707.com and tweets as PixelVixen707.
I kind of hope Brutal Legend will be a great game and actually manage to go beyond the cult status of Psychonauts, despite that will force more Jack Black appearances in video games (something I would most definitely hate to see).
After all I discovered Schafer after playing The Day Of The Tentacle and what impressed me was the ability to make an impressive and entertaining game in a time where technology wasn't so advanced and, despite the "never die or get stuck" philosophy making it easy, it still has an amazing replay value. But with the "fall" of the adventure genre in the sandbox style action game era, designers like him kind of fell aside and Psychonauts proves it. It was a good game but despite the great graphics it felt conceptually dated compared to most GTA style games of the time and that overshadowed the good storyline and witty humor. So far Brutal Legend seems to attract quite some attention and maybe that will put this great game designer back on the map, where he deserves to be.
Plus I kind of hope this will bring back talks on a sequel to Full Throttle, another similarly themed gem from Schafer's Lucasarts days
There was a sequel to Full Throttle in the making, but LucasArts canned it. I believe Sean Clark (Escape from Monkey Island) was the one who led that project, sad that LucasArts decided to can it, really.
Actually they scrapped two ideas for it and some elements of the first one which had Schafer involved (and was also the reason of his departure) ended up in Psychonauts. It was quite sad that Lucasarts kind of gave up on those just to focus most resources on Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, they did some great stuff with those but in the ende their finest hour was the adventure game era
To Psychonauts credit, only the last level deserved to be called bad. Several were really fantastic and the Milkman one is in the pantheon of all-time greats for vidja games.
The thing about Schafer's brand of content is that he keeps the delivery varied. Sometimes it's NPC's talking while you run by, sometimes it's just something written on the wall, and sometimes he reaches for the dreaded cutscene. It never gets that tedious because it's always something new and like you said, it's always worth watching. Even when his game design is goofy, he doesn't skimp on really interesting levels to move around in.
But yeah, it's still a content job. Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, and Dave Grossman are all going to be releasing games this year. I'm curious to see if they can prove that content, when in capable hands, trumps.
Every gamer owes it to their funny bone to at least play through Monkey Island 3. I mean, if Brutal Legend doesn't have a reference to El Pollo Diablo I'll be sorely disappointed.
d20 said:
Every gamer owes it to their funny bone to at least play through Monkey Island 3. I mean, if Brutal Legend doesn't have a reference to El Pollo Diablo I'll be sorely disappointed.
L.B. - Totally agree about the Milkman level, which is why I wish some of the Asylum levels had been a little more mature/subversive. The opera/critic one was silly, and the Napoleon level had a few jumps that were almost as annoying as the circus finale. It's still a great game, but I wouldn't give it more than a B+, and all the "oh wow, how did we all sleep on this?" fandom seems to overlook its flaws.
But totally agree, a year-end "How did Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman do?" wrapup would be great.
Bev Antain - I'm with you. The LucasArts adventure games were legend, and the licensed properties were hit or miss.
With the Monkey Island reissue, LucasArts seems to be dangling more reissues of their classic adventures out there. A rerelease of Grim Fandango seems like an easy sell, and I wouldn't even want them to change the art.
Adventure games are actually making a comeback, in the "casual" space (see Emerald City Confidential, which is on my to-play list), and with Telltale adapting every property under the sun to an adventure game. They've done Strongbad, Bone, Wallace & Gromit, and I just heard they're doing Dr. Who. I think they should do Mighty Boosh next - those shows are already written like adventure games anyway!
But having tried a few Telltale games, one thing I miss is the sheer difficulty of something like Grim Fandango. I beat the game without cheating - no, really - but it took weeks of coming back to it and solving it a little bit at a time. But it was always worth it. The puzzle in Act Two where you have to figure out a date from looking at a photograph - I won't spoil how it works, but suffice to say when I figured it out I almost jumped out the window and turned into a rainbow. Bobby Fischer never had a braingasm like I had with that game.
As for Telltale games I only tried Sam & Max, since I'm not much of fan of either Wallace & Grommit or Bone, and as far as difficutly goes it was pretty much on the same level of the original game, minus a rather annoying random chance event that was more waste of time than test of brains. Afterall Grim Fandango was quite harder than most Lucasarts games of the time since they where aiming for a more mature audience like they did with The Dig, another lost gem of their adventure years and the only one where death was a possibility. Now I'm really looking forward to those Monkey Island episodes and for the remake. As for a Grim Fandango remake (or even a simple re-release compattible with modern systems), I would definitely love it since it's the only one of those games I can't run properly through emulators and I'd like to play it again after all those years.
I'm pretty pumped for the Telltale Monkey Island episodes, though it isn't Monkey Island 5, and takes place after a hypothetical game of that title. Hopefully, if it and the reissue of SOMI do well enough, we'll get that game. I've played all in the series up until this point.
With Psychonauts, it's been a few years since I've played it, so I'm not sure how qualified I am to comment on these things here. I do remember some levels being a tad tedious or childlike, though the Lungfish level was pretty awesome.
E3 this year makes me think late 2010/2011 could see a resurgence of the adventure genre. I have my finger's crossed. Hopefully someone will go get the Leisure Suit Larry back from the college frat boys that are churning out the recent drivel in that series next.
PixelVixen707
New York, NY
April 2009
JUN 16, 2009 05:35 PM