Game Under Podcast Episode 126

If screenshot mode was a common thing when I was reviewing games, my screenshots would have been slightly more inappropriate than they already were. Unfortunately I only figured out how to get the GeForce overlay to work with A Plague Tale after finishing the game (windowed mode, FYI), so this is all I have to offer; the wonderful lens distortion and great imagery (not pictured: worth seeing for yourself if you ever play) really makes taking screenshots in it fun.

In episode 126 of the Game Under Podcast Tom Towers and Phil Fogg show solidarity by purchasing the biggest game bundle in history (what could possibly have motivated itch.io to make such an incredible bundle, I wonder?) and playing A Mortician’s Tale from said bundle, offer their thoughts on the PS5, Streets of Rage 4 and A Plague Tale: Innocence.

The dice also rolls on Sky: Children of Light, and the battle between modern history’s biggest tyrants (Hitler and Hobbes) is settled once and for all!

Listen here!

Game Under Podcast Episode 125

Imagine two of these placed leg to leg with a disc levitating between them. That’s Tom’s concept for the PS5.

After seven years Tom and Phil re-play and give their impressions of That Game Company’s Journey, but not before giving impressions of Minecraft Dungeons (and Diablo III on Switch), Final Fantasy VII Remake, Resident Evil 3 Remake and final impressions of Sky: Children of Light (coming soon to Switch). We also spritz in some Trademark Banter about the SNES and cover some of the latest news in gaming.

Phil also discovers that he can rip ESRB rating descriptions for his review copy.

Thanks for listening.

Art of Rally Demo Impressions

Tom Towers played another demo. This time for Art of Rally, from the people who brought you Absolute Drift. You can check it out yourself here, and you can read what Tom wrote here. Why not do both?

Game Under Podcast Episode 124

In episode 124 of the Game Under Podcast, Phil Fogg take a trip down memory lane to remind the listeners that the show has been obituarising people for seven years! While the times may indeed be unprecedented, these obituaries certainly aren’t.

On listening, Tom was a little disappointed to find that there was no mention of Ryan Davis whose death resulted in one of the more interesting discussions of death on the show. However, he was pleased to note that, in fact, the biggest diss of all the Game Under obituary was that Terry Jones didn’t get one.

Listen here, and let us know who else we missed below!

Ghostrunner Demo Impressions

Remember demos? They’re still a thing, apparently. Tom Towers played one: Ghostrunner (obviously just because he heard it had ray-tracing!) It’s been compared to Superhot and Mirror’s Edge but, ever the contrarian, Tom thinks it’s more like Hotline Miami.

Read about why here.

The Lore of NAMCO's 1993 SNES Vehicle Combat Game: Battle Cars

At the time I bought my first SNES (around 1994), I’d been a PC gamer for a while and disconnected with console gaming. But a friend had a co-worker who was selling their daughter’s SNES with a copy of SimCity and Super Mario World for $36, and since I was curious (and actually just wanted to help out my friend’s co-worker), I bought it and was immediately in love with the console. I was taken back to the time of the console’s launch when I would play endlessly with my fellow teenagers, amazed by games like F-Zero.

So after a couple of months with SimCity, the NAMCO release, Battle Cars, was an easy selection for my first new game purchase. In essence, it is F-Zero with vehicular combat and story scenes that act as interstitials between each race. Speaking of race, these are often laden with racial stereotypes, which believe it or not somehow made it into the 21st century, despite the extreme woke-ness of the population.

Imagine my delight when I read the manual for the first time a few weeks ago and found a deep lore behind the game. Don’t strain your eyes by reading it from the image below, as I have transcribed it for your reading pleasure, but it involves climate change, nuclear weapons and such.

I did not make this up.

“The excess of the industrial revolution was doomed to haunt the earth. As the 20th century faded into the 21st, the planet’s largest economies were focused on the service industry. Over population and few environmental quality regulations created an exodus of traditional industry to less developed nations. Fuelled with cheap labor, factories churned out consumer products with obsolete “dirty” machines purchased from the former industrial giants. Each year billions of metric tons of pollution were dumped into the biosphere. Global warning increased exponentially.

As the 21st century progressed the greenhouse effect began to take its ugly toll. The polar ice caps melted at an ever increasing rate. International tensions rose with the water level at a time when the world had never been better armed. The end of the cold war over a hundred years earlier saw huge arsenals of weapons capable of mass destruction. As coastal cities sank under the oceans, people demanded action. Politically the easiest solution was to point fingers and launch attacks against “environmental terrorists”. Between global warning and global warfare the earth was forever changed.

The start of the 22nd century saw a true new world order. Survivors of the devastation lived in city states. Technologically sophisticated and jaded by years of war the people demanded a new sport for their new age… Battle Cars… technology…aggression…Battle Cars. Afforded the same popularity earlier cultures had given artists or pop musicians, battle Car drivers are heroes. The only rule is to win.”

Beautiful. If you wrote this, please contact us, I’d love to interview you for the Game Under podcast.

Phil Fogg

Game Under Podcast Episode 123

Phil Fogg hastily prepares for Episode 123

Tom Towers Reacts…to the news in our most recent episode and we also review a couple of indie games, The Last Day of June and Death and Taxes. We also have some Trademark Banter and lots more.

Thanks for listening.

In Case You Missed It

Tom Towers and Gagandeep Singh return for Smugcast 3

Though we’ve just published the 122nd episode of the Game Under Podcast, you may have missed last week’s release of Smugcast 3, featuring tom Towers and Gagandeep Singh from endlessbacklog.com.

They discuss the following series Bayonetta, DMC, Resident Evil as well as Ori and many other games. Gagan also gives his thoughts on the various top ten lists we’ve been doing lately.

Thanks for Listening

Game Under Podcast Episode 122

Tom and Phil return to discuss the latest gaming news, some Trademark Banter, and Forza Horizon 4 and What Remains of Edith Finch. We also toss out some book recommendations and also the above happened during the show.

Thanks for Listening.

Tom Towers Top 10 Titles of the Twenty Tens: 1

1. Trauma

Be sure to check out Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky’s mentor.

Before I talk about Trauma, let me talk about Proun; another obscure contender for best game of the decade (also developed by a single auteur) in spite of the fact that it did not displace any games in previous instalments. Proun, like Trauma, is an experiment; but here the experiment is one of aesthetics, not theory. Inspired not by canon but by a minor movement of the canon—El Lissitzky’s PROUN: Project of the Affirmation of the New; in Russian the acronym makes sense—it is essentially an abstract racing game. Instead of driving around a circuit, the player circles around a cylinder; each corner a geometrical shape attached to the cylinder that the player must spin out of the way of. Aesthetically it is a powerful interpretation of Proun19D, and there is no other game that looks anything like it.

But just as impressive as its aesthetic achievement is that it is equally compelling a racing game. In spite of its 3D visuals, Proun plays more like a classic 2D racing game. Reminiscent of the likes of Outruns, the abstract aesthetic allows for an expressive freedom in track design that has no equal, making for one of the most complex and intense time attack experiences this side of iRacing qualification. If only more people had participated in its leaderboards, and built a community around the most original and one of the best racing games of the decade...

A rare insight into Tom Towers’ critical process, here are some notes he found for his review of Trauma!

Trauma is as remarkable as it is obscure. The homework of Krystian Majewski, it was made with flash and a Sony DSC-F17! If anyone had heard of it, it would be an important game in the indie canon: a deliberate experiment of a game, Krystian Majewski studied the adventure game genre and decided to emphasise narrative over puzzle design (although the narrative itself is something of a puzzle, and the puzzles themselves are fun) and use some archaic techniques (such as FMV cutscenes) to create something simultaneously unlike anything preceding it, yet clearly the progeny of the likes of The Last Express and Myst—modernist technique at its finest!

Although the plot’s main draw is its mystery rather than the emotional impact of the super low budget FMVs, the melancholy lyricism of the ethereal puzzles, navigation, photography and narration come together to make something entrancingly beautiful, and the narrative is a surprisingly authentic emotional expression, considering the experimental nature of its conception.

I have returned to Trauma almost as many times as I have returned to Ico, the greatest game ever made; and nearly as beautiful as Trauma. Trauma, like Ico, in spite of drawing on some obvious influences, and without being obscurantist, manages to be an enigmatic experience—one that is endlessly fascinating, in the way that all beauty is.

But, unfortunately for the reader, beauty, like love, is undefinable, indescribable and, most of all, unjustifiable; so anything I write and you read about Trauma is sheer folly. Trauma is beautiful, and I am not so foolish (or brave?) a poet to try and encapsulate it in a metaphor. I was, however, foolish (brave?) enough a critic to review it, giving it a miserly 3.5/5. This score, and review, are perfect illustrations of the pretentious folly that is criticism:

Ever the supreme wit, even in his proofreading notes!

Trauma opens with lovely, ghostly headlights, brake lights and indicators Tronning their way along the road. Naturally it ends in disaster: light collides as the title predicts and you wake up—no, you don’t: you dream in a hospital bed. Four recurring dreams that are far more tranquil than nightmarish. But they are not without their horrors. Each dream repeats endlessly until you can bring it to its natural end(s): an end that is often more stifling and suffocating than the dream itself.

Each dream has four endings: with one main ending that triggers a cutscene:  dialogue between doctor and patient. The alternative endings offer a musing, but go no further than that. There are also photos to collect. The photos act as the game’s manual and hint system showing you the controls and where to find, and how to solve, all the alternate endings.

There’s only so many ways to turn, and you’re already facing backwards.

The hint system has one rather large problem. It’s too helpful. It tells you everything you need to do to trigger the alternative endings except where they are (though you can easily extrapolate its location from the photo) and what dream they are in. You switch back and forth from dream to dream, and there’s no reason to play all the dreams in chronological order: the cutscenes play out the same way no matter what.

At first, when you figure out that some photos are hints, it’s helpful. After that they are tantamount to spoilers and end up making the gameplay an exercise in glorified pixel hunting. Admittedly without the hints this would still be the case due to the ‘alternative ending’ puzzles being solved the same way in every level. But without the hints there would at least be a little more excitement when you find what triggers the alternative ending. Having already seen it in the photo-clue takes away from that somewhat.

A flick of the wrist and the tangible becomes intangible.

I say glorified pixel hunting because it is without the frustration of that ever annoying adventure gaming trope. You are not literally pixel hunting, but moving in first person à la Myst and other adventure games and looking for photos and things to interact with. The movement is smoother than most thanks to Trauma’s main gameplay hook: you can draw symbols on the screen to move, and to interact with the world.

You can still click where you want to go, but being able to draw a semi-circle to spin around on the spot or an arrow to move backwards while still facing forwards and the like saves time and gives the game a real flow and organic feel. There are also the three symbols that you’ll acquire as you continue through the game such as a hook to lift spheres and so forth. These solve the puzzles and unlock the endings.

The problem is that there are only three symbols, and they’re always used in exactly the same manner. All you must do is find where the trigger to end the level is. However there is enjoyment in finding the trigger. The story is told through narration from the protagonist talking about her current day fears and anxieties, and her past experiences from when she was growing up. They’re all tasty morsels of information, and it’s a joy to find photos of her past and try to piece together her psyche.

But there are only 9 photos per level, and most of the photos consist of clues or control instructions. While they don’t form the only parts of the story I couldn’t help but feel a little unsatisfied when the credits rolled. I had been introduced to the character, grown to like her, and then the game ended. There was no greater insight than that. Not to mention that her condition belied her Trauma: eight nights (at the very least. One dream per night? Recurring? 4×2=8!) in a hospital after a car crash and she’s positively waltzing out of the front door by the end of her stay.

As a metaphor it works a little better. Her inner turmoil leaves her numb rather than outwardly in pain, but the ending comes across as relief, yet nothing has really been solved and while she has come to accept some things there is no great feeling of character growth. The second ending that is unlocked when you complete all main and alternate dream endings solves these problems, but does not completely overcome the bitter taste that lingers from the first.

Graffiti juxtaposed with vandalism.

But visually Trauma is beautiful, and at times quite touching. While I find nothing more lovely than dirty, filthy and rusty old docks in a state of decay, the way that the second dream presents said docks as a place of nostalgia, childhood curiosity and naive worship, will surely leave even the staunchest of germaphobes entranced by its beauty.

The crushing, totalitarian way a freeway and tunnel is presented as an endless, looping road with signs that “really want you to know your way” is captured perfectly. The loneliness of the first dream in a place that should be anything but lonely yet of course is—a cafe at night—is once again realised very well. The final dream that consists of an endless road that leads nowhere while on either side of it are both billboards and nature: the nature can be explored (and leads somewhere) unlike the road, but just as easily one can be fatally lost amongst the thistle and the shrubs just begs to be explored.

“ZZZ…” still recovering from the Okabu review I see…

The sound does its part too. The music is subtle, and I barely noticed it. That just means it was perfectly done. It let the visuals take centre stage, and while I don’t agree that a naturalistic style of acting ever works successfully when an actor has only the voice to use (and it doesn’t here; while the cutscenes are live action, they are filmed in a way that the actors must still work almost only with their voices) it does mean that once again the visuals and writing are left to tell the story.

It’s a story that is perhaps disappointingly shallow, but it’s a shallow story with an engaging protagonist, and it’s beautifully told—no, it’s beautifully shown. If only she’d spent a little longer in hospital. Then perhaps I could have come to know her just that little bit better.