February 18, 2004

Sigh-beria

Rose and I started playing an adventure game this week, Syberia. When I saw the lead character was Kate Walker, a young American lawyer, I thought, oh, we're going to get a feisty female lead along the lines of The Longest Journey's April Ryan. That's cool. Instead we got...kind of a priss.

Without ruining any puzzles for someone who might play the game in the future, here are two moments when we really wanted to strangle Kate. A boy asks her to draw him a mammoth. She can't, because she just doesn't know how to draw, waah waah waah. Look...cavemen could draw mammoths...just drawthefreakingmammoth! The kid's not that bright, to put the best spin on it; I don't think he's going to give you a really harsh critique. (The irritation of listening to the kid, who talks about himself in the third person, is a whole other story.)

Later, Kate has occasion to pick up something near a river. But it's all wet and dirty! Ewww! She can't possibly touch it! And she also can't wade through the narrow strip of water that seems to be about 6 inches deep to get to the other side of the river. But she gets through with her precious hands and feet unsullied. She's not quite what I'd call a role model.

It's by no means a bad game (although neither has it entirely grabbed me yet), but I hate seeing so much work put into a game that then ends up irritating me with things that seem so poorly thought out.

Upon reading my friend Charles's review of the game, I see he agrees with me about the game so far, which worries me a little, since he's pretty ho-hum on the rest of the game, too. But we'll see how it goes.

Posted by Francis at 03:22 AM
Comments

C and I are COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY hooked on our Morrowind game. Not as much puzzles per se, but definitely addictive, and I know it's supposed to be much purtier on the PC. You and Rose can even have different characters and not Miss Priss. My character is a Nord barbarian assassin who nobody likes. He can kill just about anybody though, so it's understandable, even though his feelings do get hurt.

Posted by: legion at February 18, 2004 10:29 AM

Well - Rose and Francis having Syberia is my fault. When Rose stayed with us the other weekend she had a discussion with me about "whatever happened to the quest/exploration style game" (i.e. the Heirs of Infocom) and I had to tell her that the genre is in sad shape indeed.

These days you may see games which sneak quest/story elements into otherwise bang-bang-shoot-shoot play (notables: System Shock 2, which is a great game that actually requires you to think, and Half-Life, which scared me so badly with its story that I was actually cold-sweating when I played it). Also Morrowind, yes, and a number of the more RPG-like games (the Baldur's Gate series is truly epic, and Neverwinter Nights doesn't suck, etc). These are where "stealth quest" elements are being snuck into games.

Why? Because the game distributors and channels don't think straight adventure/quest games in the old Sierra/Infocom ilk sell anymore. The last major company carrying the torch was LucasArts, and we won't talk about them, it might make me cry. Nowadays, the games like this must come from very small firms who can afford to make them with low overhead - hence Syberia and The Longest Journey. No one knew who Funcom was when that came out (they're still most strongly associated with Anarchy Online), and in fact I had trouble finding the thing despite numerous awards, good press, etc.

Syberia is NOT as good a game as TLJ by any means, but I think Charles Herold (whom, with apologies to his friends, I have always felt is a rather hostile and jaded reviewer) is being too harsh. I thought Kate's android friend was a very nicely done thing, for example. (I agree that Momo, and in fact a lot of the first act, is annoying.) As for Kate herself, the whole point is that she stops being this whiny creature. Maybe her development was more obvious to me than to others. I don't know. At any rate, the story reached a point for me about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through where I started being interested enough in what happened to Kate that the occasional tedium of some of the puzzles didn't matter to me anymore.

Perhaps this goes with Francis' theory, expressed to me separately, that we're more inclined to give a whiny brat some wiggle room to develop when she's an adolescent (April), as opposed to ostensibly an adult (Kate)? Because, I gotta tell you, I wanted to slap April Ryan around for the first third of TLJ, whereas with Kate I just wanted her to throw her cell phone away and open her eyes.

Posted by: Todd at February 19, 2004 02:35 PM

Damn. All that and I forgot to respond to the comment from Legion that inspired the minirant in the first place. Um. Duh.

Anyway, the reason I didn't give Rose Morrowind or something like that was that she specifically requested pure quest games, where there wasn't going to be a lot of combat/reflex stuff. Morrowind is great but you WILL spend a lot of time swinging that sword (or what-have-you). I gave her Syberia, TLJ, and Grim Fandango, the last great thing from LucasArts before they collapsed. That should keep them busy for a while.

Posted by: Todd at February 19, 2004 02:38 PM