Binary Swan

I associate that kind of puzzle/action only with a few games, like the original Alone in the Dark or Dragon’s Lair (or Flashback, but we’re not gonna talk about that).

In my eyes, Another World stands apart from those games in the creativity of its solutions. It has the speed of an action/adventure game, but the puzzling elegance of a static adventure game.

-crmbreault

One of the first yet minor things that I noticed was how the game used these long halls with (I guess it’s called) negative space either above or below the action to signal transition from one stage to the next. For some reason, I really like this design choice. It seems to bookend the action with these moments where atmosphere speaks on behalf of the game. This appeals to my sensibilities as a gamer.

-twentyeigth

Wow, the Arena perfectly mirrors the player and the protagonist’s emotional state and experience. I was just frantically mashing buttons, praying something would happen. That’s exactly what the protagonist was doing.

-nelsormensch

The ending made me rethink who the “protagonist” of the story was really supposed to be.  I had almost no empathy for the human character, other than wanting him to get further along in the story and survive to the end.  The game didn’t really present his actions as selfless; they were mostly a means to an uncertain end.  Even the moments where he “rescued” the alien are framed in a survival context, both intra-textually (“I must do this to have this guy as cover and direction”) and extra-textually (“I must do this because I can’t progress in the game unless I do”).  The alien, on the other hand, had more freedom and knowledge of the alien world, and could have probably escaped on his own, making his sudden appearances especially heroic.

It makes you wonder how necessary or enriching “moral choice,” or at least its current implementation, really is contemporary games.  Simply watching characters unfold through their actions, whether you directly choose them or not, seems poignant enough sometimes.

-Frohike

I think that is related to what I loved about the game on this replay; it gave us everything we needed and which we would plausibly have no more, no less.  We had no information regarding the aliens other than what we saw.  The only dialog was untranslated (because it was untranslatable) alien speech (in the 15th anniversary edition at least).

That fidelity to plausibility — within certain limitations — is what allowed the game to convincingly instill that sense of loneliness that Lester must feel and the utter sense of alienness the world must hold for him.  In turn, in that world, survival and companionship are the best one could realistically hope for.

-sqlasheen

All fragments are taken from the discussions surrounding the Vintage Game Club playthrough of  Another World.

To read more: The Vintage Game Club: Another World forum

To get involved: Another World on Good Old Games

To try a different path: Official site for Another World

Failure is an integral part of this experience. Perhaps too easily triggered, but worth it for the specific cutscene or in-game animations triggered. It reminds me of more standard adventure games in this way. Part of the enjoyment comes from poking at the boundaries that the designer laid out and seeing where you can hit a wall.

- shanehinton

As much as I like the visual presentation, though, it’s tough to stay interested when the game is so exceedingly frustrating. Right from the start it wasn’t clear when I was in control- the game starts you off sinking in a monster filled pool of water right after a pretty long cutscene (long enough to get comfortable with not being in control, anyway), and doesn’t give any indication that you’re actually supposed to step in at this point.

- mkapolka

But the economy of expression, the simplicity of the perfect streamlined stroke, the pictorial punch of a well-composed mise en scene – I mean just look at the opening scene of Another World punctuated by that Ferrari skidding to a stop and turning off its lights. Fabulous. The game is full of such carefully composed, yet utterly simple visual moments.

-brainygamer

Chahi’s style seems to bear the rough edges of a painter’s brush, rather than the perfectly angular, carpentered, product of a renderer. So if it’s minimalistic – it’s the “economy of expression” (I love that phrase by the way) inherent to Chahi’s style that remains thoroughly painterly for me.

-artfulgamer

I think the difficulty, by requiring repeated attempts at each semi-self sufficient setpiece adds to the cinematic quality of the game, but in a somewhat backwards way; it makes me feel like I am making the movie while I am watching it. In a sense the player is an actor playing the role of a successful escapee.  Each failure (and there are plenty) is an imperfect attempt at that role, except instead of yelling cut, the director/game kills you.

-sqlasheen

While Another World, in contrast, has a more spare and lonely feel (I argued against the term ‘minimalist’ in another thread, but I agree with loneliness, in that you’re on a strange world with one companion that you can’t communicate directly with and fork paths quickly on); I was trying to figure out what to do to survive, but there wasn’t the same actively antagonistic feel making me resent the difficulty of the puzzles.

each segment is its own self-contained challenge, and the branching nature means that the separate segments fit together into a sort of puzzle box, adding an extra layer of richness instead of an extra layer of annoyance.

-davidcarlton

All fragments are taken from the discussions surrounding the Vintage Game Club playthrough of  Another World.

To read more: The Vintage Game Club: Another World forum

To get involved: Another World on Good Old Games

To try a different path: Official site for Another World

I’ve recently stalled in my writing here and it is because a very rather large event in my personal life combined with the fact I chose to keep playing games when I might have time to write about them. I do enjoy posting on this blog and hope to return to some kind of regular programming soon. In the meantime just visit the sites in my Blogroll. These blogs never fail in providing great insights into videogames and the culture surrounding them.

Seasons greetings

I’ve been really enjoying ‘Splosion Man which, like The Maw, shows off Twisted Pixel’s ability to distill then refine the core gameplay mechanics that define a now ‘classic’ gaming era. Those who have given it a try on Xbox Live Arcade would certainly have noticed something else: the achievement for killing 15 scientists. I usually give only a passing thought to achievements but I found this particularly interesting because of the title “Get them out of our schools”, an ironic comment regarding the attitudes of some members of society. This clever slice of social commentary, however brief, is one of the first uses of the achievement system that has appealed to me in a thought provoking way.

I have often found the intrusive nature of achievements akin to breaking the fourth wall in a film. They remind the player that they are playing a game as they advertise the other levels of statistics and tracking existing above that of the game itself. But I also think that they have an, as yet untapped, potential to enrich our gaming experience above and beyond Twisted Pixels modest example. Just as NGai Croal spoke of the potential of the achievement system to encourage “Off-Label Gaming”, playing a game contrary to the developers original intent, I would like to see achievements used to elicit other responses from a player. Could achievements make a social or moral comment regarding the action on screen? Take this simple example:

The first pedestrian killed randomly in GTA leads to the achievement “No Return Now”, with the description, “You murdered someone in cold blood”.

The effect of such an ‘achievement’ lies in how the system is viewed by the player. Through its direct form of address it might question what is being achieved in the game and the nature of playing a game . There would also be a sense of permanence as it becomes part of the player’s Xbox Live profile history.

This idea is not without its issues, it could be seen as clumsy game design if handled poorly, an idea that the developer lacked the skill to incorporate into their game. One might question the ability of a single line of text to provide effective commentary about an action. At the heart of it is whether such a system is the best way to address such ideas within our medium due to its uniform presentation across all titles.  But achievements also sit separate from the game text because of that uniform presentation, akin to ad pop ups on a website. They could become a broader commentary system layered above the game, a place for developers to present other thoughts about their subject matter that relate to the game text but are not the focus. To illustrate my point I’ll leave you with another example:

“You are playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and you play through the early scene where you are the political leader that is executed. This section of the game blatantly addresses the ideas of empowerment in the shooter genre and it sets up one element of the narrative for consideration later on, then it ends on a black screen with your death.”

Then an achievement pops up:

The description reads: A Reality Check.