Double Fine fans are rushing to purchase their games in an effort to keep the studio afloat following their independence from Microsoft and recent financial news. I haven't previously played any Double Fine titles, but the weekend before last, I ended up reaching for a Double Fine-produced game: GNOG. GNOG presents you with a series of puzzle-box tableaux, accessible via both front and back, shaped like robot heads. The challenge is, like in The Room and its successors, finding out what parts of the objects before you can be manipulated and how to manipulate them. (In The Room, though, you're trying to get to the heart of eldritch Lament Configuration-type puzzles you'd be better off leaving alone, whereas here, you're, like, trying to feed a couple dogs their supper or something.)
to transform the items and environment in front of youGNOG's visuals are its biggest success. The game looks like a million goddamn bucks. Every level is a candybox of bright, bold color, consistently evolving in delightful, charming, and visualy-rewarding ways and erupting in impressive storms of psychedelia upon completion. Screenshots will speak more loudly than words:
There are two problems, though, and they're rather glaring. One, the controls during my play were awful. There are lots of dials and other spinny bits in the game, and there is no consistent or, in some cases, even workable method of manipulating them. Sometimes, simple left/right movements will work. Sometimes, it's dragging in a circular motion. A lot of the time, though, the method of control is just unfathomable - the dial will turn via one of those motions part of the way, then just zip-zap-zop all over after a certain point in the motion, with no reliable way to get the dial past that point. There's no way in these cases to get your input to translate to an on-screen output reliably, to control a simple dial, or even to figure out what the devs intended you to do; you just have to try one method and, past a given point, use trial and error and hope for the best. (This is very frustrating in situations where, say, an action has a time limit, or where something resets if it's not completed in one go.) Even with the more functional dials, there are cases where your interaction just won't "grip", so to speak, or even register; as a result, you sometimes get the impression that something you're supposed to fiddle with isn't interactable.
Now: I was playing with a laptop touchpad, not a mouse. I'd normally chalk up my experience to lacking the preferred equipment. However: those with other control schemes - a mouse with a wheel; VR controls - report on the Steam forums the same issues I encountered, particularly with manipulating dials. (I'll also note that I completed all three original The Room games, which require more intricate interactions, with a touchpad with no problem.) So something, or several somethings, took a wrong turn at Albuquerque. It's not the only control problem, either; other times, there's a lack of feedback that you're not doing as intended, or the typical control schemes will inexplicably change for a single level, leaving you up a creek. (In the bird level, you have to hold the mouse button to feed the chicks instead of clicking repeatedly, which is not how anything else works in the game and which got me stuck for a bit.)
The second big problem is that the puzzles often aren't very logical. It often wasn't clear what I was trying to accomplish in a given scenario (how do I get the security guy to notice & catch the thief stealing stuff from the apartment building? Oh, wait...I'm actually helping the thief? Oh. ...Oh), or why a certain action would lead to progress. "Hey, this game with stoner imagery doesn't really cohere logically" may not be a surprise, but, well, maybe this is why stoners shouldn't attempt to design puzzle games. There's some utter 10/10 imagery here - and I want to emphasize that; it comes off as a little lopsided when the big positive of the game can be easily noted but the negatives take some explaining - but I'm amazed there wasn't the QA done here to make the game part basically functional.
GNOG wasn't designed by Double Fine; just published by them. This is Hot Takes August September, though, so I'll bundle in what I imagine is an unpopular opinion, though not one where I want to be proven right: I don't think Double Fine has the business acumen to survive on its own.
It already has a bad track record in staying solvent while independent, and that was in far less murderous times for the industry. We are dealing with an utter glut of quality games, and Double Fine & Tim Schaefer's best-remembered titles are all, save for Psychonauts 2, a decade or more old. Its current campaign, the one on which it's banking its survival, is geared toward those already invested in its mystique (i.e. those who know what an "Amnesia Fortnight" is; those willing to watch dozens of episodes of a navel-gazing documentary). The studio needs to draw in a wider audience to survive, and it's not even trying in that regard. It's a games media darling, yes, and journalists like to joke about how there'll be blood if Double Fine goes under. I don't think, though, the studio has quite the cachet among the wider gaming audience these days that journalists believe it does.
The only titles Double Fine has created in the last four years are Keeper and Kiln. Kiln is a multiplayer competitive pottery game. Now: that's something that appeals to a weirdo like me. However, I am a weirdo, and not someone devoted to games whose receipts will keep the lights on for years at a time or that would fine widespread adoption among the Xbox audience.
In Keeper, you are an ambulatory lighthouse. I don't think there's a big market for lighthouse fantasies. I'm not saying everything has to be glamorous, but this is one of the most obtuse and unmarketable premises ever conceived for a game. It's not the kind of weird that's intriguing, that brings up tantalizing possibilities or suggests experiences you're compelled to undergo yourself. It's just makes you wonder...why, but not care enough to want to know the answer to that question.
Furthermore: both games have very high technical requirements. The kind of hardcore indie game weirdos who might give a pottery-based PVP or a walking lighthouse sim a chance a) are not usually found on the Xbox platform and b) do not typically invest in high-end gaming rigs, particularly in this economy. You're taking two titles with a suicidally-narrow focus and limiting their audiences even further.
Look: extremely-talented people should be able to create what they want to create. But Double Fine seems so adverse to dealing with any commercial or practical aspect of their work, to any thought of salability or functionality, that I don't see how they can be saved. It's faced a brush with death in the Microsoft cuts that it logically shouldn't have survived, and it's reacted to its unlikely second chance at life by...not changing a thing; doing exactly what got it into such trouble before. You can't defib*** a patient like that forever.
Unearthed like a fine Grecian urn, The Battle of Olympus is being remade for modern appreciation and a 2027 release. Hopefully, the color palette will be more pleasing than that of most restored & recolored classic Grecian art, but with the original creators evidently at the helm of the project, I don't think we have to worry. The Battle of Olympus was my favorite NES title as a kid for its devotion to Greek mythology - with deep cuts such as the Graeae and Talos - its colorful, well-wrought graphics that made ample use of outdoor locations and the ancient Greek milieu, and its beautiful soundtrack, with two of my favorite SFX to this day (the Harp of Apollo and the dolphins' ocarina). Yes, the hero looks like Link, but this is a game with its own, strong identity, made with heart. I'm looking forward to reexperiencing it.
Over at Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, the author notes a number of parallels between Lunar: The Silver Star and Lufia and the Fortress of Doom and asks: what's up with that? Well, friends, we've already answered this: it's Ys, as detailed copiously here. Lunar and Ys, as noted by the poster quoted here, shared some personnel, and Lunar took a hell of a lot of Ys's plot points, including the red-haired, sword-swinging hero and the naive blue-haired girl with a yen for him who's really an incarnation of a goddess. As for Lufia, the article asserts that the game began life as a PC-98 title, and it is impossible to overstate in the Japanese PC market around that era how Everything Is Ys or Hydlide (or eroge with curiously-intricate art).
I will note, though, that despite the parallels described by the author of that blog post, I've never found Lunar and Lufia ripoffs of another, really. Part of that is due to some very salient differences in the development of their respective parallel twists, as players familiar with both games will well know. Part of that, though, is What the Stories Are About is very different, and told in markedly different ways. But that...is a story for an upcoming post. (Or a revision of this one? Stay tuned.)
There are two types of fan arguments I assume are highly-personal issues being worked out in public generalities:
- When people get very insistent that well-regarded Western-developed shows (Avatar, Castlevania) should be classified as anime
- When people get very aggressive about what qualifies as "retro," usually accompanied by "YOU ARE NOW OLD" memes (yes? what do you want me to do about it?)
In the first case, I think it's some weirdly-derived inferiority complex involving being from a Western society yet having so much of their formative entertainment produced in Japan. I don't see why this is a problem at all—maybe, in the case of fans from the U.S., they're so used to life in the culturally-dominant society that having some of their entertainment not be produced domestically feels wrong to them, and something that has to be corrected; maybe, like the Western devs driven to take over traditionally-Japanese franchises, they feel they have to (or, at least, their society has to) produce the Exact Same Stuff as, or replacements for, the Japanese stuff they loved in childhood in order to have "made it" as creators and prove they're just as good—a sort of parental complex, with Japanese creators as the parents whose approval must be gained or who must be replaced. In any event: I skew toward reserving "anime" for stuff produced in Japan, but I'm not sure why it matters. If a show's good, it's good, regardless of origin.
The second, I think, is a plain age crisis. The people in question feel uncomfortable about seeing games they played at certain life milestones getting into double digits and what that means for their own age, and they think, like Shiori from the Utena movie, that if they make enough people feel bad about the same thing, that they won't feel bad, or at least will feel distracted from feeling bad by trying to spread hate and misery, or something. I can see both sides of the source argument here: that, obviously, consoles once new will eventually be outdated as time inevitably passes; and that "retro," in some gaming circles, refers to a certain style or styles of games identified with the consoles and arcades of the early '80s and '90s, and that the "anything older than ten years" label is kind of uselessly broad.
Hmmm. Guess that's three sides. Time for a distraction in the form of a timely gif:
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