I recently discovered, through means I have now forgotten, that Traysia had been added to Steam. When I was writing about Final Fantasy II, I was at one point going to call it the worst RPG I'd played, but then I remembered Traysia. The gameplay is an atrocious waste of the game's Christina's World-inspired cover, one of the best and most beautiful covers ever created. I do not know why it was chosen for a Steam release. Psycho Dream, also from Renovation and in no need of being introduced to future generations, has also gotten the Steam treatment. I imagine this is part of a misbegotten Pico Interactive-type initiative to attempt to milk income out of moribund properties that weren't popular even in their day.
Of course, I bought Traysia.
Anyhow: I wanted to see what other oddities the publisher had put on Steam, and I ran across a few original titles the publisher had put out. Of these, one by Pixel Noire Games caught my eye immediately, for reasons I'm sure you'll understand once you view the store page banner:
It was six bucks, and How Long to Beat clocked it at two-and-a-half hours. How could I say no to the entertainment proposition offered by It Could Happen to You?
I report from the other end of the experience - an experience, I will note, curiously devoid of resolution controls, Steam's F12 screencap function, or even saving - and I can tell you there are many threads. Let's unravel them one-by-one. FULL SPOILERS, so proceed only if you can handle THE TRUTH!
PLOT THREAD ONE: Cows are being exsanguinated in your aunt and uncle's Spanish rural village. They mention the problem at a family wedding, for which they are appropriately dressed:
While most of the game's visuals are digitized from stock photos, the expressions seem guided by the artistic approach behind the Ecce Homo restoration.
You investigate to find locals are being kidnapped and experimented on by men in black. Instead of teleporting victims to their spaceship, though, they're stuck with driving them in a used sedan to an abandoned factory. (Budget cuts? OSP mission?) When a couple MiBs shanghai a neighbor couple, you tail their sedan for about what the game specifies is about an hour down a lonely, otherwise-deserted and evidently largely flat rural road in broad daylight. The MiBs never twig. Guess those big black eyes the greys have are great for night vision but not so great on the peripheral.
PLOT THREAD TWO: After rescuing the couple, you learn that the MiBs are ticked and have followed you back to the city to your apartment. You get a call on the phone:
I might point out at this juncture that the translation on this is not where it should be. I might also point out that, based on the color version of this portrait on the store page, it seems Photoshopped from an image of Grandpa Munster:
Grandpa Munster instructs you in escaping the MiBs, then sends a taxi to bring you to another small town with more cattle mutilations, which won't have any further relevance to the narrative. Grandpa has set you up for a long stay at the local hotel and exhorts you to investigate a different set of strange events in the town. You do not hear from Grandpa again.
(I will note that during the MiB escape, you'll receive a phone call from a friend claiming a convenient life-threatening medical emergency. Instead of running to his apartment into a very obvious trap or doing nothing, I opted to call an ambulance for him. The game will execute your intentions by having your character interrupt his desperate, death-defying escape to sit tight in his apartment for an hour to charge his phone before making a.by-then very timely emergency services call. Your phone doesn't take an hour to charge fully—just to recover from a dead battery to the point of functionality. Evidently, Spain uses the USB 0.0000001 standard.)
PLOT THREAD THREE: A teenager who disappeared after a car wreck five years ago has reapparated in the town, not having aged a day. He tells you a winged chupacabra-like creature wrecked his car and that he has no memory of anything that happened since then. At the exhortation of his former girlfriend, now in college, you steal a USB containing his examination results from the local doctor - who, it is noted, is operating out of a makeshift garage -
- to reveal that DUH DUH DUHHHH, according to an autopsy report, the teenager actually died five years ago, and the doctor's exam of whoever is presenting himself as him confirms they aren't human. What is he? Who is he? We don't know. The girlfriend goes to say goodbye, and he, like Grandpa Munster, doesn't appear in the narrative again.
PLOT THREAD FOUR: The chupacabra is back! You join forces with a reporter who's been chasing it since it attacked his sister to the fashionable small-town spot for horror games to culminate:
DOOM 66%
Only during the day, though! The chupacabra attacks at night, but you turn the lighthouse's devastating beam on it to shrivel it up. The monster shorts out the light, but oh, well; you and the reporter leave the lighthouse, satisfied and with absolutely no loose ends left untied.
Oops. Guess someone else needed the lighthouse more. You end up causing a cruise ship crash with over 50 fatalities. The tales of chupacabra sightings before disasters turn out to be causative instead of correlative, and everything in the narrative, from the MiB sedans to Grandpa Munster to a teen dying in a car crash five years ago and being impersonated by who-knows-what to the chupacabras, was in service of getting you to connect faulty wiring in the lighthouse and short out its lamp, thereby causing the ship to crash.
There's a germ of a good idea in the horror being caused not directly by a monster but by a human intentionally frightened into doing something beneficial in the moment but calamitous in the longer run. Frankly, though, 50 deaths seems a low RoI on the investments of interstellar travel, cloning, and teaching Greys how to drive stick. Any given Final Destination movie manages more with just Tony Todd and household appliances. Then again, this did all start with MiBs, and bureaucratic officials were never known for their efficiency.
In conclusion:
- Jeff does not like Super Mario Bros. 3, the general consensus choice for the best NES game. He has saved the title to be the very last game he ranks in the project. He will therefore conclude the series by putting it at #105 or something. He will then, given his ego, retire from NES ranking secure in the belief that no one will ever like Mario 3 again.
- Meanwhile, anyone looking at the list subsequently will open it up, go "Hey! Where's Mario 3?", and then, finding what is likely either one of their favorite NES games or the only NES game they know and enjoy in a ridiculous position, immediately close it, defeating any usefulness the list had as a ranking and system guide.
- Jeff's fans will continue making you can't argue with the list! it's just science! "jokes" that were never funny, choke out any conversation, and completely miss the point of the original bit: that these lists, being opinions, are inherently subjective and the exact opposite of science and objective fact.
I've stopped watching most of Jeff's content because he's frankly too much of a jerk nowadays, but I've mentioned that the NES ranking project has brought me a lot of joy. That said: I personally consider the ranking itself beside the point. The real fun was in watching Jeff encounter and react to the more obscure titles in the NES library (going down this timestamped list for segments I recall particularly enjoying: Zombie Nation; Krazy Kreatures; Arkista's Ring; Magician; Faria; Space Shuttle Project; Hydlide; Jaws; Dirty Harry; Nobunaga's Ambition; Castlequest). No matter how the rankings ultimately shake out, I think that, along with using the videos to find titles to explore on one's own regardless of Jeff's rank, will remain the best way to approach this project.
Note: I discovered recently that the initial installment on my planned series on GAMES Magazine's odd choices for Game of the Year is actually one of the site's most-visited articles. I wanted to revisit the series - and to my pleasant surprise, I found a set of complete scans and a complete analysis of the main article from three years ago in the recesses of my hard drive. They are posted for your enjoyment here unedited.
I'm not sure why I never posted the article, but I can make a few guesses. One, there's a light streak in some of the scans on the side, and a bit of stray paper that appears in a few images. I'm sorry, folks, but I can't redo the scans right now. Those are staying.
Two, I note in the article that this edition had a few extra features I wanted to cover as well, including a short separate article on games for kids and a feature on interactive movies. I hadn't gotten around to scanning those - I vaguely recall I wanted to fix the streak issue. For the time being, this post will be restricted to the main Electronic GAMES 100 article. I'll go back, but it won't be soon.
A true extravaganza awaits us.
Coming out in the U.S. this year: Panzer Dragoon, KoF '95, Street Fighter Alpha, Virtua Fighter 2, Earthbound, Phantasmagoria (it was huge at the time), and a little game called Chrono Trigger. Past GAMES's late-September deadline (discussed in previous installments), we have Donkey Kong Country 2, TIE Fighter, and Gabriel Knight II.
So what won? You're never gonna get it, motherfucker. You're never gonna get it in a million years.
I've been playing games for over four decades at this point.
This is, without exaggeration, the most poorly-designed, poorly-functioning RPG I have ever experienced. It is misery to play.
Even if you haven't played it yourself, I've sure you've heard all the stories about the ill-conceived stat system where you can hit your own party members to increase your HP etc. I would like to emphasize that the lamented stat system represents merely the outer layer of bad decisions. There are, like, nine layers of bad decisions below that. There are numerous points in the game that seemed to indicate the designers had no idea how video games in general work, much less their own. There is a roadblock in the game (the Dist/Deist Cave) where it is honestly astonishing, worthy of intensive study, how every single bad decision in the game comes together to create a complete clusterfuck. It is astonishing. It is a masterpiece of incompetence that seems impossible to achieve without intention.
I will also emphasize that every single aspect of the game, from the battles to the world design to the constant poisoning to the utterly astronomical amount of grinding most spells (some of them mandatory for progress) take to become useful to the goddamn insistence on uselessly putting resurrected players in a position where they can't attack for utterly no player benefit, is designed for a maximal waste of the player's time. It is not content to be merely bad, like a Phantasy Star III. It wants to hurt the player.
Before I begin the discussion in earnest, I'd like to get this out of the way: I did not use exploits. I attempted instead to approach the game on its own terms. Using the game's many exploits seems to be a ubiquitous method for dealing with the game's many issues: even the author of this playthrough, who was going for a more organic, fresh-faced "first-time player" approach to the series, knew about and used the Toad and no-armor exploits, used save states in the final dungeon, etc. I don't want to hear, "Well, why didn't you use exploits?" I was trying to show the game respect, engage with its systems honestly, and play it straight. Claiming my complaints are invalid because I didn't use exploits is a self-defeating argument. If you have to break the game to make it work, the game is already broken.
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