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• Overworld: Syberia

  There are moments, peppered throughout Syberia, where your character’s cell phone rings and you have to talk to a person from “home” in New York City. It’s an unwelcome chore, and you’ll dislike it when it happens. But that’s exactly how you’re supposed to feel. Syberia doesn’t have much to work with. It’s a seven year-old adventure game (its sequel is a slightly spryer five), so even though it could well be the most recent great adventure game both history and age weigh upon it. Its story, though charming and folksy, is bare: there is a master toymaker of dubious mental faculties, and he needs to be found. It never gets more complicated than that. But Syberia raises itself to genre classic on the believability of its curious world. The toymaker, Hans, has touched every step of your journey with his masterful automatons—a completely believable premise since you are riding a mechanical train of his invention, stopping only at the points he has coursed. Of course, the places that accepted this man’s strange gifts are themselves strange, from the gear-powered town of his birth to the grand Russian experiment that was built around his ideas. Every place in the game basked in Han’s genius and withered when he moved on. Following this same sad path gives the game a complete internal consistency that stretches from its art design to its puzzle logic. It’s a tightly composed game that takes very little and composes from it a fully wrought world of rusty gears and broken men. Read More... Posted Feb 03 2009, 03:00 PM by Joe Keiser with | with no comments Filed under: overworld, adventure games, joe keiser, gametap, syberia

• Overworld: Yakuza

  Overworld examines how one game or series establishes a unique sense of place. I’ve never been to Japan. But having played the Yakuza franchise, I can say that…I still have no semblance of what it’s like to be in Japan. But I do have a strong sense of a picture of an urban Japan, of what the leaders at Amusement Vision feel the cities must be like for a haunted, violent criminal. It’s an affecting place, one the hangs an ever-present melancholy over the game. It’s not so much a visual thing, though the graphics do combine technology-limited photorealism with broad splashes of the anime aesthetic for a look that is recognizably Japanese. It’s also not just about the meaningless street violence, of which there is plenty—that exists more for the sake of story progression, though it naturally colors the experience of the environment as well. But it’s more about the little things, what Yakuza will and will not let you do as you interact with the world, that gives its urban Japan its lonely, oppressive feel. Let’s look at what you can do: you can eat, partially to heal up, but mostly for the experience of eating while facing an empty chair. You can drink, for seemingly no reason, again with experience (and a chatty bartender) being the sole incentive. You can play video games, in an arcade, alone. You can watch videos, some of them dirty, in a small room alone. You can pay a young lady to be your friend. You can be paid to be somebody else’s friend. Now let’s look at what you pointedly can’t do: talk to most of the people on the streets. Of the ones that will talk to you, most will fight you; there’s no avoiding this, other than to avoid these people entirely. Read More... Posted Dec 02 2008, 02:00 PM by Joe Keiser with | with no comments Filed under: overworld, japan, yakuza 2, joe keiser, best of 2008

• Overworld: Friday the 13th

  Overworld examines how one game or series establishes a unique sense of place. Buzz for EA Redwood Shores’ Dead Space has gone from indifference to genuine excitement in the weeks since E3. Now that people have actually played the interactive paean to Cameron-Carpenter-styled horror, they’ve found that its forbidding atmosphere, sound, and HUD-free presentation are hype-worthy and legitimately scary. I haven’t gotten to try it out myself but I’m anxious to get my hands on it. Redwood Shores have taken the essential road to designing quality interactive horror; Dead Space is, at its core, a game about confinement, about being trapped in a hostile environment with limited means of survival. Videogames lend themselves to this method of creating tension and anxiety because their environments are, naturally, closed. System Shock’s dilapidated space station, Resident Evil’s mansion, and even the more expansive town of Silent Hill are perfectly closed spaces, places that simultaneously create dread and a functional goal: how do I get out? It’s far rarer to see a game take the opposite route. After all, it isn’t easy to make a game that makes you feel lost. If a game forces you to lose yourself in its environment, by way of randomly generated environments or trick passages that lead to incongruous locations (as in Zelda’s Lost Woods), it risks frustrating the player – this is especially bad if the game’s intent is horror, since frustration can easily replace anxiety. It’s equally difficult to create a closed environment that is delicately constructed to confuse the player. The original Metroid and its Game Boy sequel are two of the only games that manage to successfully pull this off thanks to its series of identical hallways and dead ends. Another is Friday the 13th. Read More... Posted Aug 14 2008, 03:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, overworld, metroid, nintendo, ea, resident evil, silent hill, nes, dead space, Friday the 13th, ljn

• Overworld: Marble Madness

  Overworld examines how one game or series establishes a unique sense of place. Checking out the trailer for Steven Spielberg's Boom Blox, I've got to admit it looks like a good time. And God knows any decent additions to the Wii's anemic library are a good thing. But one not particularly surprising thing about Blox is the degree of cartooniness in the presentation. There's nothing wrong with that, and granted, action/puzzle games have been cartoony more or less ever since technology started to allow it, but in the distant past, there were other stylistic options. Here's one: When I was a kid, Marble Madness freaked me out. Read More... Posted May 09 2008, 01:00 PM by Peter Smith with | with no comments Filed under: boom blox, overworld, marble madness, crash bandicoot, peter smith, steven spielberg, mark cerny