Splatterhouse 1990

Splatterhouse is an early side-scrolling horror game made by Namco. In this game, two “parapsychology” students, Rick and Jennifer, take shelter from a storm in a mansion colloquially referred to as the “Splatter House” do to the local belief that it was once the home to grizzly human experiments. You play as Rick. As you enter the mansion, Jennifer screams, and suddenly you are waking up somewhere else. You are deep inside the dungeon under the mansion. You’ve been attacked by monsters, but something called the “Terror Mask”, a sacrificial Mayan artifact. You discover that the artifact is in fact sentient and has fused itself to you, turning you into a monster with superhuman strength. The mask encourages you to go find your girlfriend, and fuelled by fear and anger (and super strength), you go on a murderous rampage through the mansion. It’s inspired by horror movies like “Friday the 13th” and “Evil Dead”, but thankfully isn’t based directly on any movie, unlike some of the much worse horror games of the era.

The game plays like a classic beat-em-up, you can jump, punch, and kick, both high and low attacks, on a side-scrolling 2D screen, giving you a lot of attack options and combinations. Like a proper beat-em-up game, you can perform a combo that will make you do a drop kick that ends with you sliding along the ground and damaging any enemies you hit. Although you are always side-scrolling left or right (with some auto-scrolling sections), there are often ways to drop down through the floor to take an alternative route through a level, if you can find them. There are many weapons you can find along the way, and at the end of each level, there’s a boss fight. One thing this game does that is pretty interesting (for the time at least) is that boss fights, although always in a usual boss room, have varying objectives and ways to succeed, it isn’t just punch the boss ‘till he’s dead. The boss isn’t always a single character, either. For example, in the first level, the boss is a room with strange growths all over it that shoots out larvae-like monsters at you rapidly.

The arcade version actually uses a checkpoint system, just sending you back a little, when you die, instead of paying more coins to continue, to avoid people spamming coins to overcome the game’s challenges (and subsequently robbing themselves, Namco, of a lot of their potential money). If you lose a life, you go back a little, and if you lose all your lives, you go back a considerable amount, but not to the beginning of the game.

Splatterhouse’s visuals are what make it great, although it’s soundtrack is nothing extraordinary. The game filled with disturbing imagery of tortured people and creatures, twisted beyond recognition. You brutally kill them, and they often explode into gooey piles of puss. Fleshy growth spreads across the walls and hideously deformed people chained to the walls puke acidic bile into the floor on your path, which must be avoided. IGN wrote that if the game could have smell, it would reek of puss and rotting. In later PC versions, the gore and gruelly sound effects (such as wailing and screaming and moaning and all that that goes along with being tortured and turned into a Freddy Krueger-esque monster) were toned down, and the Terror mask was changed from white to red to avoid copyright infringement (the aforementioned Freddy has an all-too similar mask).





Sources:

Splatterhouse Arcade Game Review
http://www.solvalou.com/subpage/arcade_reviews/240/325/splatterhouse_review.html

Splatterhouse Review - IGN
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2007/03/21/splatterhouse-review-3

Hardcore Gaming 101: Splatterhouse
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/splatterhouse/splatterhouse.htm

Games of the Late 1980s

Hard Drivin’

Hard Drivin’ is a cabinet game meant to simulate driving a real sports car, and simulated force feedback in the steering wheel, as well as a clutch and pedal and the possibility to stall the car if you don’t operate it properly. It used some of the first 3D polygon graphics (previously everything was done with scaling 2D sprites), and each cabinet cost $10,000. You play in first person perspective, driving a Ferrari Testarossa. If you score among the top 10 players, you can race against the computer controlled “Phantom Photon”, serving sort of like a boss fight for the game.

It featured an instant replay system that lets you see your crash from a cinematic perspective after you go down, which was pretty new for the time. It also had a very complicated physics system including your car's engine, tire and suspension physics, and transmission control simulation. Besides making a few innovations in the racing genre, the game also had four sequels and many ports, despite initial poor reviews.

SimCity Classic

SimCity, later renamed SimCity Classic, is a city-building strategy/simulation game made by Maxis Studios and designed by Will Wright. Wright made this game based on his interest in level editors in games. He always found that he enjoyed the editors in games more than the games themselves, and so he created SimCity based on this idea. SimCity doesn’t have any traditional goal (other than in their scenarios mode, which I’ll talk about later). Instead, you just build up a city from nothing (literally, you start with a patch of dirt and some trees), building city districts like residential or commercial neighbourhoods, manage your taxes, upgrade with new technologies, and more.

However, not all is well in pixel town! You will have to survive random events like floods, traffic congestion, tornados, earthquakes, immigrants (just kidding about that one), train crashes, and even monster attacks! However, the producers didn’t feel that these events were enough to add structure to the game, and thought they needed some kind of goal to keep players interested, and so scenario mode was born. In this mode, you start with an already built city (usually real cities) and have to solve either real historical problems, or made up events. For example, you can play as a swedish mayor who has to solve your city’s traffic problems, or stop a nuclear generator meltdown in Boston, or even defend the city from an alien invasion in Las Vegas (that escalated quickly).

When Will Wright first proposed SimCity, he was told that it was like “a doll house for computers” and told it wouldn’t sell. Of course, SimCity went on to be one of the most successful game franchises ever, popularizing both simulation games and making games without specific goals acceptable in the industry. It has since been called one of the three most important innovations in gaming history. It was also used for urban planning and political science in the universities of South California and Arizona, and won many awards. It spawned many SimCity games, as well as the “The Sims” series and Spore.

MechWarrior

MechWarrior, the first game in the BattleTech series, was a first-person mech fighting RPG game. In this game, you can make choices in the story arc, choose missions, sell and buy mech parts, hire companions, and explore the world (called the Inner Sphere). In the story, you play as Prince Gideon Braver Vandenburg, whose family is murdered. The chalice that proves you are the rightful heir has been stolen, and you must build up an army of mech warriors and forcefully take back your throne, within five years.

In terms of gameplay, MechWarrior has three main mechanics. Politics are a large part of the game, and maintaining a good reputation with the five main houses is important. If you fall too far out of favor, you will have to fight them in several missions. However, if they like you, they will give you very profitable missions.

The second element is the trade system. You can make good profits by trading in mech parts and mechs themselves, buying from one planet and selling to another. You can also hire recruit MechWarriors, the quality of which is affected by your reputation.

The third element is their combat system. You played first person in the cockpit of a mech, with simple flat-looking 3D shaded graphics, which actually served the game well, and made it easy to quickly identify enemy mechs. You could choose from up to eight different mech designs, each with their own advantages and disadvantages in different situations. You also played alongside the AI recruits you had, and could give them basic orders.

Hard Drivin’

http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8072

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Drivin%27

http://www.zzap64.co.uk/cgi-bin/displaypage.pl?issue=068&page=086&thumbstart=0&magazine=zzap&check=1

SimCity

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/product/simcity-classic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_(1989_video_game)

https://archive.org/details/msdos_SimCity_1989

MechWarrior

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechWarrior_(1989_video_game)

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/MechWarrior_(1989_Video_Game)

http://www.mobygames.com/game/mechwarrior

Video Games of the 80's

Berzerk

Berzerk is a game where you play as a small green man with a lazer gun trying to make your way through a maze while shooting robots, avoiding the electric walls, and running from a murderous smiley face called Evil Otto (quite a mouthful there). There are 1024 randomly generated maps and increasingly difficult enemies of various colours and trigger-happy-ness. Berzerk was produced for Atari 2600 in 1980.

Your arch-nemesis Evil Otto can move through walls, and moves at the same speed as you going sideways, but much faster moving up and down, creating interesting gameplay, as you have to try to avoid going up and down for long stretches. It also has Intentionally dumb enemies that you can trick into killing themselves by walking into walls or shooting each other. The robots colour and difficulty changes as your score increases. One of the gameplay innovations of this game is that it featured an enemy (your nemesis Evil Otto) that cannot be killed, which was unheard of for a shooter game at the time. More significantly, however, is that one of the first games to have voice synthesis, in the form of talking talking robots. It cost $1,000 per word to develop synthesized speech, made more impressive by the sheer volume of dialogue the game had. There were dozens of phrases, all which could be rearranged or played at different speeds and pitches, causing hundreds of combinations which were played based on context (ex: if you didn’t kill all the robots, they say “Chicken, fight like a robot”). It had all the lines in english, french, german and spanish.

Alternate Reality

This role playing series was created for the Atari consoles. The original game concept was quite interesting, the idea being that all the games in the series would act as one game. Each game was a different region of the world (the City, the Dungeons, the Wilderness), and if you went to the entrance to a new area, it would prompt you to insert the corresponding disc. At least, this was the idea. Their producers, Datasoft, forced them to release a few of the games early and split up The City and The Dungeons, which were supposed to be the same game originally, and the seamless game transition was never created.

In the story for Alternate Reality, aliens capture you from earth, and you enter a gate that leads you to an “Alternate Reality”, in which the game world is played.

The game had several revolutionary features that were later attributed to different games. It had a lot in common with the Sims, having stats for time, strength, speed, health and more, but most interestingly, it has many hidden stats that you need to mentally track. Drunkenness and poison can artificially alter your stats, giving you false information, and there were hidden stats such as hunger, thirst, temperature, and even your characters alignment (good, neutral, evil, etc) that you had to figure out based on how characters reacted to you. Many of these features are shared with the Sims.

The first game had no traditional plot due to budget cuts, but the following games did without the players realizing, meaning that people could play for days before realizing that their actions had severe consequences down the road (a feature Grand Theft Auto was called revolutionary for, despite the fact that Alternate Reality actually did it first).

Alternate Reality had quite good 3D graphics and interesting concepts, but its huge amounts of cut features and lack of a cohesive plot ultimately made the game fail, and the final installment was never made.

Prince of Persia

Prince of Persia (1989) is 1989 cinematic platformer developed by Broderbund and released for the Apple II. In the game, the sultan of Persia is off fighting a war and his court wizard takes over the country and forces the sultan’s daughter to marry him. You, the nameless protagonist whom the princess loves, are thrown in the palace dungeons and must escape in order to rescue the princess.

In Prince of Persia, you have 60 minutes to save the princess, before the wizard kills her for refusing marriage to him. You have 3 health ‘triangles’, and there are potions around the map. You will avoid traps, acrobatically jump over pits (often just barely grabbing the edges as you nearly fall to your death), and sword fight with guards.

The animations are exceptional due to them having an acrobat that they referenced when making animations. There have been many remakes of Prince of Persia since, and the game series has been very successful.












Berzerk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berzerk_(video_game)
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7096

Prince of Persia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Persia_(1989_video_game)
http://princeofpersia.ubi.com/the-shadow-and-the-flame/en-GB/home/
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2010/05/18/ign-presents-the-history-of-prince-of-persia

Alternate Reality
http://www.marktaw.com/reviews/AlternateRealityTheVideoG.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Reality_(series)

A Biography of Neil Druckmann

This week’s talk is about Neil Druckmann, a game designer who works for Naughty Dog. He’s one of my personal favourite game designers, which is why I chose to talk about him. Under his belt are titles like Uncharted and Jak and Daxter, as well as my personal favourite, The Last of Us. If you haven’t played through that game yet, or if you aren’t very familiar with games (although I don’t know how you ended up on this blog if that’s the case), you definitely need to play this cinematic story-driven game, given you are okay with suffering emotional trauma at the hands of pixels. Moving on from my fanboy-esque rant, we’re going to talk about how Neil Druckmann got to where he is. Who doesn’t like a classic success story, right? ‘Started from the bottom’, and all that...

http://www.movienewsguide.com/last-us-2-might-come-bit-earlier-expected/142579

So as you may have guessed, Druckmann didn’t spring out of the womb designing games, pen, paper and laptop in hand. He was born in Israel in 1978, and actually started learning english from playing games by Sierra Entertainment and LucasArts (unfortunately I couldn’t find out specifically which games). After moving to the US in 1989 and graduating high school, he studied at Florida State University, originally studying criminology. He then bounced around different educational paths for a while, being a research assistant for their computer science lab, developed a game called ‘Pink-Bullet’ with his friends, realized “people make games”, and then switched to programming and got a bachelor’s degree in computer science and then a masters in entertainment technology.

At the Game Developer Conference (GDC), he met Naughty-Dog co-founder Jason Ruben, who allegedly said he “made the mistake” of giving Druckmann his number. Druckmann then called him incessantly until he agreed to bring him in as a programming intern in 2004. Eventually he was officially hired as a junior programmer on Jak 3. He worked on games for a couple years, but eventually realized what he really wanted is to do design. He asked the co-president Evan Wells to move him to design, but he was very reluctant, saying “we hired you as a programmer”. 

http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2015/11/10/jak-and-daxter-ps4/

He later agreed to review any design work Druckmann did as long as he did it on his own time. He worked as a designer after-hours for over a year, before wells admitted that he really was quite talented at design. He was moved to do design work on ‘Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune’, writing the story for the game with designer Amy Hennig. After proving himself on that game, he worked again as a designer on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves as a lead game designer this time. Several scenes he worked extensively on, as well as the whole game, gained critical acclaim, proving without a doubt that he was a valuable designer for Naughty Dog.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncharted:_Drake%27s_Fortune

After that he actually wrote and directed a couple of comics in 2009, before moving onto his next game, a mystery title originally planned to be the next Jak and Daxter game. For the first time, Naughty Dog split their company into two teams, one working on Uncharted 3 and the other, lead by Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley to make a new Jak and Daxter series. However, early in development the team realized that the game wasn’t inspired and said they felt that if they made this game they would be “doing a disservice to the fans of the franchise”, and so set out into the mysterious unknown of making a new IP, The Last of Us. 

http://gazettereview.com/2016/01/studio-could-start-working-on-the-last-of-us-2-after-april-26/

Before making the game, he took acting classes so that he could better work with their actors (or “speak their language” as he put it), which he realized would be one of the most important parts of this story-driven game. The Last of Us was eventually released in 2013 and quickly was acknowledged as a story-masterpiece, receiving critical acclaim and receiving over 200 Game of the Year awards, a staggering success. He worked on the DLC ‘Left Behind’ for The Last of Us, receiving critical acclaim and a second Writers Guild of America award. One scene in particular, involving a kiss between two female characters is considered a breakthrough moment for games. The game industry doesn’t touch on non-heterosexual relationships very often, and when it does it’s often (just like the movie industry) either humorous or sexualized (the latter always involving two women). The ‘Left Behind’ expansion’s quick kiss scene, on the other hand, is a touching moment between two human beings that makes you forget that our society considers it anything out of the ordinary. The Last of Us has a lot of touching or heart-wrenching moments and will often make you question your own morality, as well as having very simple mechanics that make the game incredibly fun and feel very real, which is why Neil Druckmann is one of my favourite game designers.