Just Keep On Walkin'

Man, talk about brutal! The ostensible reason I gave myself for waiting to start Season 2 of The Walking Dead was so I could “binge play” it and get through all of the episodes without needing to wait for months in between. Frankly, though, I was probably at least somewhat influenced by a desire to avoid the inevitable anguish for as long as possible. The Walking Dead is a fantastic game, one of my absolute favorites of the last few years, but it’s also one of the bleakest and most heartbreaking.

On a technical level, the second season builds on the successes of the first. The overall art style is the same, although there’s a higher level of polish that makes the characters look more vivid, and the new settings are generally even more impressive than the relatively mundane ones of the first game. I also feel like they’ve really perfected the gameplay. Even over the course of the first season, they gradually de-emphasized the more traditional hunt-and-seek adventure game tropes, and correspondingly put more weight on in-depth conversations and quick-time events. Early in Season One, there were occasional spots where I would briefly feel stuck, and would get very slightly frustrated as I tried doing a bunch of random things to advance. That never happens any more. It isn’t completely on rails - there are optional things to do along the way, and some limited opportunities for exploration - but it’s always very clear how to proceed to the next sequence.

I recently heard someone describe TWD as more of an “interactive story” than a “game”. I initially bristled at that characterization, and then started wondering why I had that reaction. My gut reaction is that an “interactive story” is a cheap and uninteresting thing, while a “game” is high-quality and engaging. Really, though, practically all of my favorite games have compelling stories, and I’m always harping on it when a story disappoints me in some way.

It might be fair to say that TWD lies somewhere between a choose-your-own-adventure comic book / TV show, and a video game. It’s true that you do spend proportionally more time watching and listening to other characters; however, your actions can have profound impacts on the direction of that show. Unlike CYOA, which tends to be purely branching (you pick between mutually exclusive paths), TWD has a broader and richer state. You might have conversations with three different people one night, and then get in an argument with them the next day. Each one of those three will remember what you said the night before, but all of your choices were independent of one another. The result is a very organic-feeling adaptable structure which rarely calls attention to itself.

And, in a way, the diminishing of the “game” portion of this experience aligns nicely with my evolving preferences. Minute-for-minute, I get more enjoyment out of TWD than most games, just because I’m always seeing something completely new, always driving the story forwards. There’s no fighting multiple enemies to level up, no time spent fiddling with items in a giant inventory, no incremental upgrades of slightly-better weapons. Just a story that keeps punching me in the gut over and over again.

MINI SPOILERS (for TWD Season 2, MEGA SPOILERS for Season 1)

I’d remarked last year how odd it felt that we had three popular, successful, critically-acclaimed games that all featured gruff middle-aged men looking after young girls. Although their gameplay was different, The Walking Dead, The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite explored this trope in a lot of different ways, and with generally great results: the female characters felt fully developed and believable, they were helpful and didn’t die easily.

I don’t think I could have predicted that, more than a year on, all three of those games would have add-ons in which you actually played as that young girl. I’ve already written about my experiences with Elizabeth in BioShock: Burial at Sea Part 2; I haven’t yet played as Ellie in Left Behind, but did play as her for a good-sized stretch in The Last of Us. I’m pretty happy with how all of them have turned out. The gameplay is fun and rewarding; it recalls the original experience of playing as the male lead, so it isn’t as if you’re missing out or playing a simplified version; but at the same time, you’re controlling a very different character (most notably physically different), and the game mechanics change to reflect that. Ellie had an entirely separate set of moves from Joel: she couldn’t sneak up behind someone and put them in a chokehold, since she’s too short; but unlike Joel she could leap up onto their back and, uh, stab them in the throat with a knife. In Burial at Sea, particularly if you played in 1998 Mode, Elizabeth’s stealthy, pacifist modes of progress stood in stark contrast to Booker’s shoot-everything-that-moves-until-they-are-all-dead way of operating.

The Walking Dead is very different from those action games, and the in-game controls are the same for Clem in Season 2 as they were for Lee in Season 1. Nonetheless, it feels like the developers did a great job at reflecting the place you hold in this very dangerous world. Lee, a fairly strong man, could use his physical strength to smack back zombies and leap over fences. Clementine uses a pistol, hatchet or knife when she needs to engage with zombies, and is capable of crawling into tight spaces that Lee wouldn’t have been able to enter.

TWD has always been mostly about its conversations, and here too they continue to do a great job. It’s an interesting challenge: as the player character, we naturally expect to have a lot of autonomy in making decisions; however, as a young girl in a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested landscape, we would expect to be dependent upon others. The writing is consistently sharp, coming up with very natural and believable reasons for why Clem is being tasked with doing some particularly dangerous errand; they even lampshade it a few times later on, with characters saying things like, “You’re just a little girl, and you’ve done more for the group than anyone else!”

On a personal level, too, Clementine generally has a better time navigating group politics than Lee did. Most people like her, and few view her as a threat. As Lee, the tension often came from worrying that other people would act directly against you. As Clementine, the tension generally comes from worrying about dissent between other factions within the group: everyone wants you to be on their side, which might feel a little like a child caught between two parents in a divorce.

In keeping with the pattern established in Season One, the story can vary in a lot of different ways: you’ll still move through the same locations from one episode to the next, but different people can die or live at different points, which has ripple effects on the rest of the story. And there’s also everyone’s opinion to worry about; there’s not necessarily and “right” or “wrong” way to play the game, but my goal is usually to stay on good terms with as many people as I can for as long as I can. Of course, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and any taste of victory will swiftly turn to ashes in your mouth… but that’s all part of the lovable charm that is The Walking Dead!

One of the most fascinating features of TWD from its very first episode has been the graph which shows at the end of each episode, describing what you decided for the major choices in the episode and how it compared to the average. Looking at this tends to make me actually feel really optimistic about the human race: while many of the choices are tough, there tend to be really solid majorities behind the choices that clearly demonstrate empathy or pure acts of kindness. It kind of flies in the face of the stereotype of gamers as immoral sociopaths, which is very encouraging. (Of course, I should note that the audience of The Walking Dead is self-selecting and probably not representative of gamers as a whole.)

The choices that tend to interest me the most are the ones where I’m in the minority, or where there’s an overwhelming majority. Neither happens all that often. There was one spot in the game where one person was about to harm another person. (Sorry, being vague here.) You had a choice to remain or to leave. I decided to remain; my thinking was that this way at least I could keep an eye on things, and intervene if the situation got too dire. At the end of the episode, I saw that most players had opted to leave. That made me realize that, of course, most people would probably think that sticking around would indicate complicity with or approval in this act of torture, and would vote to show their protest by removing their selves. To their credit, the developers didn’t enforce any particular interpretation on this: they keep a faithful record of what decision you make, but don’t require you to declare your motivation; therefore, in addition to the different game routes people will take based on their in-game choices, people will also come away with very different ideas of what happened in the game based on their own internal thought processes and ambitions for the character.

For example, late in the game I came to realize that the group I was traveling with was not stable. I began to plan in my mind about how to best manage its inevitable dissolution, so we could continue our lives with a minimum of collateral damage. I had even gone so far as to mentally select leaders, followers, and destinations for each faction. Of course, such well-laid plans are doomed to failure, and the group began splintering of its own accord. But it felt personally tragic because the people abandoning me were the very ones I was hoping would be in my faction. My private narration added a whole other layer of betrayal, on top of the one explicit within the game itself.

MEGA SPOILERS

So, big decision points:

I saved Nick at the end of Episode 1. It looked like Pete had been bitten, and if I’ve learned one thing from zombie movies, comics, TV shows and video games, it’s that there’s no hope for someone after they’re bitten. Of course, after that I started feeling guilty. After all, Pete had said “I’m fine!”, and he’s a solid, level-headed guy. What if he had just scratched himself on the weeds, and it looked like a bite to me? Which would be very ironic, since Pete was the only one who believed me when I said that my own injury was not the result of a zombie bite.

I sort of took Nick under my wing, trying to help him calm down and also stay engaged with life; he’s kind of a tough person to like, but he seemed to get better, and made it until near the end of the game.

As noted above, I generally tried to be as nice as possible to everyone and get them all to like me. Rebecca is one of the few who is strongly against you from the beginning; I stayed respectful, and didn’t blab about her child’s paternity, and she gradually came around. I was really happy to see Bonnie from 400 Days show up, and trusted her; that made it sting when she turned out to be in league with Carver, but she has a strong moral compass, and her guilt eventually transformed her into a helpful (though not eternal) ally.

I was initially delighted to see Kenny again: it was great to see a familiar face after so long, and I quickly restored our friendship. (Incidentally, I seriously loved all of the [Hug] options in dialogues, and took advantage of pretty much all of them.) I was happy to see him doing relatively well after the tragedy of losing Duck and Katja; but he’s still kind of on edge even when you first encounter him this season, and that edge just gets crueler and crueler as the game goes on. I supported him killing (but not torturing) Carver, not out of revenge but from sheer pragmatism: if I’ve learned one thing from The Governor, it’s that you don’t leave a charismatic sociopath in your wake.

When Sarita got bitten at the end of Episode 3, I quickly hacked her arm off with a knife, figuring that way she at least had a fraction of a chance. But no, it was hopeless. Kenny spiraled even deeper after that. The one thing that seems to bring him back to normalcy is the baby Alvin Jr., but I felt like by the end of the story, even that paternal feeling of love has been corrupted into a dark source of hatred: he can justify any cruel action to himself if he thinks it’s for the benefit of the child.

In contrast, I was quickly simpatico with Jane. She reminds me a lot of Michonne, who might be my favorite character from the comic and TV show: she’s practical, no-nonsense, smart, resourceful, and independent. On a practical level, she’s managed to survive for several years both in groups and on her own, and has actually paid attention during that time, figuring out what had worked and what hadn’t. Best of all, she seems to like Clem and genuinely respect her. I decided that I’d hitch my wagon to her; it wasn’t always a smooth ride, but it seems like the best possible outcome in the very dire situation you find yourself.

Anyways… as noted above, I’d realized a while before that our group wasn’t working out. I’d initially fantasized about Kenny, Bonnie and AJ taking one group while myself, Jane and Mike took another, but of course that didn’t happen. I was more confident about staying silent in this season than the one before, and during several stretches I showed my disapproval of Kenny by refusing to engage with him. (Silence also worked wonders with Carver, who has a bizarre conception of who you are and will talk you up by himself if you keep quiet.) I was pretty sure that it would end with either Kenny or Jane going down, and at the very end I was the one who pulled the trigger.

I was slightly disappointed that this automatically segued into a return to Howe’s; getting away from Kenny had been my top priority, but I was actually intrigued by the idea of living in a cold area that slowed down zombies. On the flip side, neither Jane nor Clementine were about to breast-feed AJ, so I’m glad they returned to a place where they knew they could get formula for her.

And, that’s pretty much where it ended! I hesitated pretty heavily at the final choices, but ultimately decided to let the others in. Frankly, I’m not sure if it makes sense to try and remain in Howe’s and build it back up or not; I’m always perplexed in the comic and TV show when the survivors try to repair and shore up a place that has already been decimated by an earlier attack. I think the best-case scenario would be to get a small but sustainable group of folks in there, including someone to look after AJ, and then hit the road again with Jane.

END SPOILERS

All in all, I’d say that TWD Season 2 improves on the first one: the gameplay is more fun, the story is even more focused, and the stakes have gotten incredibly high, building on top of all the emotional investment from the first season. It doesn’t feel quite as revolutionary this time around, but that’s just because I’ve come to expect great things from Telltale.

It probably goes without saying that this video game series is, hands down, the best aspect of the Walking Dead franchise. It has the visceral immediacy of the comics, but refuses to allow you to simply be a spectator for this dark story: you must become complicit in its construction, which makes the experience even more powerful.

At this point, I’m pretty much totally committed to whatever Telltale feels like doing. A third season of TWD has been announced, which I’ll definitely be grabbing. There’s currently no word on a follow-up to The Wolf Among Us, but it seems to have been well-received and I’m optimistic they will continue that story as well. And a Telltale Games entry based on the Game of Thrones HBO show? Sign me up!

Guarding Sheep

The Telltale Games version of The Walking Dead was my personal favorite game of the year, and I was encouraged to hear similarly positive things about The Wolf Among Us this year. Like TWD, TWAU is based on a popular and long-running comic book series, in this case Fables. I read much of Fables a few years ago and had generally positive but somewhat mixed feelings about it; given how much TWD exceeded the quality of its source material, though, I had high hopes that TWAU would similarly rise above the comics.

Fortunately, that proved to be true. For the most part, at least. Fables is a sprawling and epic series; as with many successful epics, it starts off with several arcs that have lower stakes and introduce you to the world and its characters, before blasting off into more universe-shaking storylines. TWAU is a prequel to the comics, and its structure and tone generally follows the mystery-story format of the early Fables books, in contrast to the more adventure-story-esque style of the superior middle sections. And, for what it's worth, I enjoyed the story of TWAU more than the corresponding mysteries in Fables. It's a fantastic full-on piece of noir, with a tight central plot, corruption, many shades of gray, and a fantastically faded, dingy, neon-tinged portrayal of 1980s New York City.

I was also impressed by how well TAWU differentiates itself from TWD, both in content and in gameplay. On the surface level, they appear rather similar. You control a single character, you occasionally move around by tapping on the screen, most of the gameplay consists of dialogues where you much select from four possible prompts before time runs out, you manage a small inventory, and complete action sequences through quick-time events that require tapping or sweeping on the correct parts of the screen. However, the feel of the gameplay turns out to be very different, which is very appropriate to the source material. TWD is ultimately a survival horror game, and you spend much of your time either fleeing from danger, recuperating with other survivors, or trying to shore up your defenses for the inevitable next assault. In contrast, TWAU is a noir mystery: you have a fair amount of power in your own right, and the focus is much more on investigating, convincing witnesses to open up to you, connecting the dots and drawing conclusions.

It also seems to be a bit easier than TWD, or maybe I'm just getting better at these games. In any given episode of TWD, I would often die once or twice during particularly gnarly zombie encounters; in TWAU, I don't think I lost the game a single time. Again, this fits well with the theme of the game: TWD should emphasize your helplessness, while TWAU tries to emphasize the consequences of your decisions.

The quick-time event format, which can be very annoying in some games, is used to great effect here. You only have a handful of fights throughout the whole season, but because each one is an individually-crafted and animated puzzle, the variety of your actions are far greater than what any fighting game could offer. You might grab an opponent's fist, then hit them in the shoulder, roll away while they attack, making them smash a table, then grab the now-loose table leg, beat them about the head with it, get tossed into the air, grab onto a rotating overhead fan, throw some debris in their eyes, and so on. It ends up being really exciting and cinematic, not at all game-y. (This was also true of TWD, but I can enjoy it more now that I'm less terrified of dying.)

As with its predecessor, you have a fantastic range of role-playing choices at your disposal. They extend beyond the expected "good cop" and "bad cop" portrayals, and you also get occasional options to express the motivation behind your actions: if you refrain from killing a mortally wounded man, is it because you wish him to suffer, or because you're unwilling to become a killer? If you lash out at a suspect, is it because they've enraged you, or because you're trying to make them spill some information? Only a few of your choices actually change the flow of the story, but most of them helped shape my personal concept of Bigby and his relationships with other characters.

MEGA SPOILERS (for both TWAU and Fables up through about issue 70)

TWAU includes a mixture of existing characters from the comics and new characters for the game. I liked both groups; the existing characters were very recognizable and felt continuous with their comics portrayal, while still feeling free to breathe and not totally tied to their precise look. (The difference in time probably helps this as well; Fables don't age, but they can change their style over the decades between the game and the comics.) The new characters also made a lot of sense, and in some cases I was a bit surprised that they hadn't already been included in the sprawling cast of the comics (why didn't it already include The Little Mermaid or Grendel or the Woodsman?).

In a few cases, I actually felt like the game might be even better for people who hadn't already read the comics. It fits better chronologically, since it takes place first. The game also includes several surprises and twists that, if you know what happens later; lose their impact. The most obvious example is probably Snow White's head being found on the doorstep at the end of Episode 2; that should be a shocking scene, but it was impossible for me to take seriously since I know that she can't be dead. I also sometimes felt like I had unfair information when conducting my investigation. For example, the portrayal of Bluebeard is excellent, giving the same sense as in the comics that he is up to something but not able to prove exactly what; but I knew that he couldn't be the villain, since that would have prevented him from holding the role he does at the start of the comics.

That said, the game as a whole felt very open: you know that several of the main characters will live, but not much else, including who the ultimate villain is, how the case will be resolved, how much death there will be along the way, etc. As is often the case for me, while I enjoyed the flexibility around combat and intimidation, my favorite parts of the game had more to do with political wrangling and social engineering. It felt fantastic to have a game that culminated in a (very tense!) courtroom drama scene, with careful marshaling of facts and counter-arguments, rather than in fisticuffs. I also really enjoyed your (potentially) more tender interactions with other characters; as with The Walking Dead, there aren't any full-blown BioWare-style romances, but the game does give you several choices in how you relate to other characters that nicely set the stage for affection or frigidity.

END SPOILERS

My timing is pretty great, since the final episode of Season 2 of The Walking Dead just came out, so I'll probably pick that up before too much longer. I've been waiting a long time to see what horrible things happen next in that grim saga, and I'm happy to have enjoyed a marginally more uplifting (and genuinely enjoyable, well-done) adventure before returning to the zombie apocalypse.

Increasing Randomness in a Chaotic World

Another grab-bag of thoughts about half-finished games, finished short books, and half-baked theories about choice in games…

I am furious at The Walking Dead! I'm in Episode 3, and got so mad at the story that I nearly hurled my tablet at the wall. Which I guess is a testament to what they're doing here - it's rare for a game to get me that worked up.

The game fills an interesting niche within the Walking Dead franchise. I've been pretty happy so far to see that it doesn't exhibit the same streak of sadism that can be found in the comics, which largely turned me off from reading them after the first few collections. At the same time, though, it's an unabashedly adult game, complete with the bad language and shocking violence that implies.

MINI SPOILERS for Walking Dead (Game, but also a bit for the show and comics):

The game, particularly the first episode, is set during the very start of the zombie apocalypse, and so you can witness first-hand the chaos and the breakdown in social order that Rick Grimes slept through. You encounter several ancillary characters from the main story, but for the most part you're striking a new path in another part of the same world.

That said, the overall arcs of the game feel quite familiar to those of TWD's Rick Grimes story. A small and close-knit group, including several families, forms. Internal tensions within the group threaten to tear them apart. The group works to overcome their differences, certain members die, and things enter an uneasy status quo. Just when it seems like the walkers might be stoppable, though, other groups of human survivors enter the picture, threatening the safety of the group. The group spills from crisis to crisis, and ultimately betrayal and violence threatens to destroy the group.

There's also a healthy dose of the macabre. The first episode was relatively tame, meaning that it just included the stuff you would typically expect from a zombie movie. (I played this on an airplane, next to a middle-aged woman, and felt a bit self-conscious when a part of the game had me repeatedly tapping the screen to cave in the skull of a ravening zombie with a hammer.) The second episode takes a sickening turn; I kind of suspected where the story was going halfway through, but refused to believe it until it was too far. The third episode… well, let's just say that it was a gut-punch, and at this point I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep playing. Telltale Games already has my money, though.

The impact of that gut-punch really got me thinking, though. After all, I'm decently well acquainted with the tropes of the zombie movie. I expect that good people will die and bad decisions will be made. Being a participant in the story changes things, though, and being able to help shape the story changes them even more: I feel invested in this group of survivors in a way that I never would by simply watching a group of idiots running around on the big screen. I might curse the writer of a movie if a character I liked gets killed; but I kind of expect it, and understand that this loss is part of the contract for a zombie movie. When a character in a game dies, I definitely curse the game creators, but I also kind of blame myself a little as well. I shouldn't - there is no way I can save this person - but there are enough other lives I've been able to save within the game that it FEELS like I could have, should have done something differently to preserve this one.

On a related note: anyone who has ever watched any variation of a zombie instantly becomes an armchair quarterback, dispensing the essential pieces of wisdom to beleaguered characters. Typically, this is one of the following:
1. "He/she has been bitten! You have to shoot them in the head NOW!"
2. "That person can't be trusted / relied upon! Get rid of them now, before they get everyone killed!"
3. "Don't split up!"
Consider #1. As the viewer of a movie, it's an easy call to make. You know the calculus: there is no hope, and once someone has been bitten, that's it. Why prolong the misery and risk them turning at an inopportune time?

Of course, if this were real life, that would be an impossible call to make, especially if the person in question were a relative or a close friend, perhaps someone who has saved your life numerous times in the past. We have deeply ingrained senses of empathy, loyalty, and optimism that would keep us from following through.

The game puts me at a midpoint between those two perspectives. I saw one of my companions get bitten. This is someone who I had traveled with for three episodes, covering many hours of gameplay. I had gone to great lengths in the past to save their life and keep them safe. I'd shared precious, limited food with them. I knew people who cared about them.

And so, what did I do? I knew how it had to end - with a bullet in the head - but I wanted them to experience every remaining human moment they could have. So we journeyed onward, keeping an eye on them, knowing the great risk we were taking, but unwilling to make the tough call and end it immediately. I have become the sort of person who I would yell at in a movie. Becoming a character in a zombie story has helped me understand why they can sometimes do foolish things for perfectly good reasons.

END SPOILERS

A brief gaming note: I have "beaten" Fallen London! Okay, okay… not really, but I have wrapped up the last few pieces of content that I hadn't completed yet, including a really fun Christmas-themed arc that played out last month. I've also acquired the outfit I wanted. At this point I'd just be grinding materials and Echoes, so I'm going to cheerfully set it aside for a while and wait for the next phase of the story to unlock. It'll be interesting to see what comes next - lately, Failbetter has seemed to be focusing on expansions that players at a wide range of levels can enjoy, instead of extending the story towards its conclusion (publishing the next phases of the Ambitions, expanding the level cap, etc.). That's probably a wise decision, since it gives players even more stuff to do; on the other hand, I never felt like I needed to grind until well after I became a Person of Some Importance, so the players at the level cap probably appreciate it even more than those who are at lower level do.

I just finished reading "The Running Man", a short novel by Stephen King. It was a pretty good read… very pulpy, and in many ways uncomfortably prescient, with its anticipation of competitive reality shows the least of its disturbing premonitions. It's also pretty disturbing to read what appears to be a positive portrayal of Stockholm Syndrome.

I've finished my second play-through of Dragon Age: Origins. Rather than lay out yet another impenetrable blob of expository text, I shall lay out an impenetrable blob of expository screen-grabs, EACH WITH ITS OWN IMPENETRABLE EXPOSITION. You're welcome! (For once, I captured images from the entire run of a game, from start to finish. Spoilers in abundance.)

I then continued on in playing the Witch Hunt expansion, following my originally published plan through the new DLC. That was fun, but I realized after beating it that I had misjudged the intended order. There wasn't an option to import my post-Witch Hunt save into Golems, and after doing some research online, I realized that the intended order is actually DA:O -> Awakening -> Golems -> Witch Hunt. So, I'm now starting off on Awakening. I'll save my thoughts on Witch Hunt for when I'm through with all of the DLC.

However, I will share a few thoughts on Awakening (potential spoilers have been replaced with incredibly vague allusions):

• I really like how they've added entirely new abilities and skills. The feeling is very reminiscent of BG expansions, where you could grab some precious new spell tiers that significantly change how you play the game. I was initially a bit annoyed that I had dumped so many skill points into marginally useful skills like Herbalism now that they had added some newer and more useful skills; but it looks like there's an item that should let me re-allocate everything, so I'll eventually need to take the fifteen minutes or whatever it takes to re-build my character.
• I got a very nice note in my inventory at the start of the game, which affirmed a crucial character choice I had made throughout the main game; this was a great gesture, that should really help soften the blow of the corresponding character likely not appearing in the expansion.
• On the flip side, though, the dialog from Mhairi near the start of the game directly contradicts another crucial choice I'd made near the end of the game; she references a person, of a certain gender, holding a certain position. Well, that's not how it happened! A single word could have been changed to make this work. Ah, well. It goes to show how failing to follow-through on player choice can be more annoying than denying them choice in the first place.

After taking a break, I started watching season three of Doctor Who. I THINK I like Donna more than Rose, but I'm just one episode in so far, and will reserve judgment.

New season of Archer is off to a fantastic start! Second half of Parks opened strong! I'm waiting with nervous trepidation for Community's delayed opening (can't wait for that Halloween episode to air on Valentine's Day!). And the 49ers are going to the Super Bowl! That'll keep me occupied for a while.

Sam & Max Rock My World

My first love in gaming was adventure gaming.

I played a handful of other games prior to that. My first memory of a computer game was some space combat thing that I played against another person, losing horribly yet feeling utterly fascinated by it. Whenever our family would visit someone who had a computer, I would try and conduct what I thought were subtle investigations to determine whether (1) they had any games installed, and (2) I could play any of them, please? In this way I encountered a few other genres. These included an action game where you run a moon buggy along an alien surface, leaping over pits and rocks; the classic Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?; and a game based on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a game based on a movie that I still have never seen. And my elementary school was blessed with a computer lab full of Apple II computers that served up educational offerings that would serve in a pinch as games: Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Lemonade Tycoon, and a few others.

But all of those games were transient, undependable things. I was at the complete mercy of others to supply me with opportunities to play. What I craved was something I could mooch off of more regularly. And, eventually, it came, in the form of my dad's work computer. Because I was at church so often - at least every Sunday and Wednesday, and occasionally on other days as well - I was able to grab some time in front of the computer while waiting to go home or if the adults around me were otherwise occupied.

I can still vividly remember the games on that computer. One was hangman, a fairly straightforward implementation with a the classic stick figure man. Far more fascinating to me, though, was a game called CASTLE. This game used graphics, but the graphics were composed entirely out of ASCII characters. The player is trapped inside a giant castle and needs to explore its various rooms, collecting items, uncovering secrets, battling monsters in a quest to escape.

It's hard to overstate how profound an impact this game had on my consciousness. It had the most primitive graphics you can imagine, and yet my eager mind filled them in with great detail. A § marked a snake, and I would feel my heart pound when I saw it slithering towards me. Your character was marked with a white smiley character, and onto him I projected my sense of heroism and bravery. This should not be confused with the black frowny character, also known as the daunting Ogre, one of the most fearsome foes you could face.

The game required a mixture of memory (recalling where the items were), reflexes (you attacked enemies by running into them, but had to be careful of how much damage you took), and problem-solving (determining how to use the various items you had collected). I kept playing this game in the little snatches of time allowed to me, getting further and further in, and yet it took years for me to beat the game. During this time it burrowed deeper and deeper into my consciousness. There would be nights that I would lie awake in bed, thinking through parts of the game and trying to figure them out... how should I escape the dungeon? Was I sure there wasn't anything more hidden in the garden? I have fallen in love with many games since then, but this is one of only a handful that I have actually had dreams about, and it proved immensely influential on me as both a gamer and a programmer.

I still remember the epiphany I had when, years after I started playing the game, I realized that there was an entire dimension to the game that I had not yet encountered: elements that were not visible on the screen. Out of pure boredom one day I began typing into the game, and found that if I typed "look", it would describe the room's contents to me. I could get even more specific and try to look at particular items within the room. In this manner, I finally found a key that was "hidden" in a desk, inside a room that I had visited scores of times previously. With this found, I broke outside of the rut I had been stuck in for so long and tore through the game, finally wrapping up the unsolvable puzzles and realizing the significance of previously baffling items. At long last I gained access to the magical elements necessary to open the castle's great gate, and triumphantly walk out, crowing my victory aloud.

Having beaten this game, I felt what would become a regular emotion for me when it comes to gaming, the mixture of elation and regret. I felt an undeniable surge of accomplishment - this feeling, I am convinced, will never make sense to my parents; why should one feel proud about a virtual achievement in an imaginary world? - that is matched with a sadness that the fun is over, the story finished. In the same way that I always wanted to continue the plot past the end of my favorite books, I wanted to learn what happened next in CASTLE. What do you see outside the castle walls? Are there more monsters out there? Does the castle guard a village, and if so, what kind of people live there? Do you know any of them?

I think that this sense of lingering need is a big part of what set me down the path of becoming a programmer, in the same way that my love of reading sparked a need to write. The game is over, but I can use my imagination to think of what comes next, and use my skills as a coder to, however crudely, make it come true.

As I've previously noted, another influential moment in my gaming/programming history was Great Adventures II, a floppy diskette with some purely text-based adventure games. These had even less in the way of graphics than CASTLE, but they had two advantages. First, I relied even more on my imagination to fill in the game, and so could create evocative worlds in conjunction with the white text on a black screen. Second, they were far easier to imitate, and so they spurred me on my investigations into QBASIC even as CASTLE remained an influential target that I didn't even hope to imitate.

Update: Wheee! I love the Internet! Turns out that Castle Adventure is available online. I haven't downloaded or played it yet, but will probably do so soon.

So those were some good times. I should note here that I was hardly living on the cutting edge of gaming; text adventures have been around since the 1970's, and there were far more powerful computers out there which supported games far more advanced than what I was playing on that wonderful old Epson. That said, while I enjoyed the world I was playing in, I knew that there were more out there.

I'm still a little fuzzy on how exactly I was first introduced to Sierra's graphical adventure games, but am certain that one of my earliest contacts came through a young boy I knew at church with the last name Weeks. I want to say his first name was Troy or Tony, but that has sadly been lost to time. Anyways, while Sierra had supported a variety of franchises that seems staggering in retrospect, I mainly knew them for a few: Hero's Quest (later Quest for Glory), Space Quest, and King's Quest. Of the three, the original Hero's Quest was the biggest for me.

This was a MASSIVE game. Unlike Great Adventures, where nearly a dozen different games fit on the same floppy, Hero's Quest came in a box with ten or twelve disks. If you didn't install it to your hard drive (and you might not; in those days, 3MB was a lot of space to clear up for a game), you would be swapping disks every minute or so.

Beyond the size of the game, it was gorgeous as well. Well, at least to my eyes. To a modern person's perception, it looks blocky and crude, but I saw a swirl of colors, exploding what was possible in an adventure game. Sneak past a darkened alley during night and be drawn in by a mysterious flashing light... wander through the lush green forest... spend a few minutes relaxing in Erana's Peace, not doing anything, merely enjoying the beauty and listening to the superb music by Mark Seibert. Much like CASTLE, this game blended some elements of RPG and adventure games. I didn't really know those terms at that time, though... all of gaming felt new to me, with limitless possibilities, and I just knew that I enjoyed it.

Fast forwarding slightly... Sierra remained the gold standard for me throughout elementary school. The games were expensive and the newest ones were out of reach; new games cost $50 (and remember, this was nearly 20 years ago), and my current computer was never capable of running the latest and greatest. Still, whenever I could beg or borrow one from a friend, it would become an obsession for the weeks it took to beat, and if I could, I'd continue to revisit and replay it. Sierra games were fiendishly difficult and punishing, often providing a ridiculous number of possible deaths. On the flip side, though, their inclusion of a scoring system added to replayability; perhaps you did beat the game, but if you only got 450 out of 500 points, you would be incented to try again and find the other parts you missed. And these things were chock full of hidden easter eggs and little jokes. During the golden years, the graphical images on the screen were matched with a textual interface for input, and the programmers could get very creative about what you could type in that box. In the same way that CASTLE taught me to look at everything and use my words, Sierra games were always rewarding the player who took the time to deeply explore the world and type to it.

Most people of my gaming generation agree that Sierra's gradual decline began when they switched from this text/graphic hybrid to an all-graphic interface. This switch began with King's Quest V, and was matched with Quest for Glory III, Space Quest IV, and so on down the franchise line. Severing the traditional bond with classic text adventure games, Sierra now asked players to interact with the world using only their mouse. Early versions had you choose between a selection of iconic verbs (Open, Talk, Take, etc.; Space Quest added whimsical and useless verbs like Lick and Smell); later games would be even more "dumbed down" and use only a single click to perform any action.

For old-school adventure gamers like me, the implications of this switch were dire. The games had become less challenging. They presented us with a discrete set of obvious actions to choose between rather than requiring us to conceive of possible actions. The opportunity for easter eggs dropped way down. (Although I never tried this, persistent rumors insisted that if you typed swear words into the text box, the game would swear back at you. No such system was possible without the keyboard.) Increasingly, these games became more like interactive Hollywood experiences than "real" games... players could advance through a more or less linear plot, appreciating what the creators had laid out for them, but not really participating in the sense that I had grown familiar with. Your role became that of a consumer, plucking morsels off a proffered plate, not that of an adventurer blazing your own path forward.

Meanwhile, in a seemingly parallel universe, were the Lucasfilm games. I was only tangentially aware of these games, primarily through Maniac Mansion, which I only knew via its NES version and so didn't really consider it as a counterpart to the PC adventure games I'd played. I would gradually come to learn more about this company and the different swing they had on gaming.

Lucasfilm was a little late to the party. It's hard to conceive of someone being much earlier than Sierra, which, as I would learn by reading Part 3 of Hackers, more or less coincided with the rise of the IBM Personal Computer. Lucasfilm's interactive games division sprang up later and quickly blazed their own path, unhampered by the legacy of text adventure games and fully embracing the graphical medium. Their signature series, following the gems of the late 1980's, was the Monkey Island series.

From the beginning, these games embraced the non-typing ethos that Sierra moved to. Even if you didn't play with a mouse, you still played the game by moving a cursor around the screen and selecting what to do. This typically required selecting one of a selection of typed verbs, covering the adventure game classics like "Look At", "Take", "Turn On", etc. You would then click on the item on the screen you wanted to interact with, and possibly repeat the process until your intent had been fully expressed ("Use the chainsaw on Chuck the Plant.")

There were tonal differences with Sierra as well. All of the Lucasfilm games (later LucasArts) were funny. Sierra games always had an element of humor, but the overall tone varied wildly based on the franchise. Space Quest games were outright silly and often laugh-out-loud funny; Police Quest could get quite dark and morbid; King's Quest would have occasional lighthearted moments and sometimes jokes. Virtually every Lucasfilm game, in contrast, was a comedy... oh, they had different genres and styles, but each was clearly designed to entertain you.

And therein lies the crux: what is the goal of playing a game, after all? As I grew older and my circle of experience widened, I increasingly met friends who loved Lucasfilm games and couldn't stand Sierra games. Weirdly enough, their reasons were the same as mine. It was impossibly to die or get stuck in most Lucasfilm games. Lucasfilm games were silly. Sierra games didn't have as many hints about what you needed to do.

So what was going on here? The most obvious explanation, and one that I cannot immediately discount, is that my love of Sierra games was a certain expression of masochism. On some level I enjoyed the frustration of NOT solving puzzles, of getting stuck, of losing and dying. All of these trials were quickly forgiven and even turned into virtues once I had beaten a game, because then they added to my (arguably misplaced) sense of pride. "Sure, you may have beaten Monkey Island, but I beat a game that was way harder! I died over a dozen times!"

Is this a valid attitude to take? I'm honestly not sure. I will say that I now am less confident that "harder" necessarily means "more challenging". When I go back and play those old Sierra games, I am sometimes struck by how nonsensical some of the challenges are. If you need to solve a riddle in Conquests of Camelot, then I feel like I had to stretch my mind and think, and in that sense the trial is its own reward. On the other hand, too many early text adventures rely on the puzzle of "think of the exact word that I, the programmer, am thinking of or I will not accept your command; and no, synonyms are not allowed"; too many later graphical games force you into a maddening game of "find the hidden pixel", where unless you click on the EXACT CORRECT SPOT - a spot that might not look any more significant than anything else on the screen - you cannot solve the puzzle. In my opinion, "puzzles" such as these exist only to artificially increase the game's difficulty and increase the average playthrough time without actually making it more challenging or interesting.

I do have to say that, by this new yardstick, Lucasfilm games age extremely well. Some of the best gaming I've had of the last few years has been from old gems like Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders and the transcendent Grim Fandango. I've had to admit that my earlier biases were, well, not that great. While Sierra was incredibly influential on me as I played them, I find that today I far prefer Lucasarts games.

Which brings us to the topic of this post: Sam & Max.

I never played the original Sam & Max Hit the Road, but as with the best computer games, it has become part of our collective unconscious, and I feel like I know these characters and what makes them tick. The premise seemed simple and lovely: a psychotic rabbit and cheerful dog are private detectives who have zany adventures. What's not to love? Add a monkey and it would be perfect.

I was recently kicking around on Steam looking for something to play. Tangent: Steam is consistently about 90% of what I want it to be, but just far enough off the mark to keep me from actually using it. Most recently, I was prepared to buy one of two games, but could not justify purchasing either since each cost $10 more on Steam than they would on Amazon. (In case you're curious: The Orange Box and Bioshock.) Buying from Amazon would give me real CDs and a manual and not require me to check in with the mothership every time I feel like playing a game. I would sacrifice all these for the convenience of having a game right now, but I won't also pay another ten bucks for the privilege. It's especially annoying since I know that the distribution via Steam costs much less than through conventional channels; there are no factories needed to punch out physical materials, warehouses to hold boxes, clerks to stock shelves, or salesmen to run the register. Sending bytes is cheap, and they don't seem to be passing that on to the consumer.

But not to worry, because there are still gems to be had in Steam, the biggest of which is Sam & Max 104: Abe Lincoln Must Die! Available for free, it has provided me with some of the funniest gameplay I've ever come across in my life, and has good puzzles as well.

Backing up a bit: Sam & Max was resurrected outside the Lucasarts stable by Telltale Games to serve a relatively new and growing business model: episodic content. The idea here is to move users from one-time purchasers into a reliable and recurring revenue stream. In the past it has been used for things like expansion packs that allow a game's fans to extend their experience with the game. In Sam & Max, though, each "episode" is a complete stand-alone game. They're smaller in length than you would expect from a full-priced retail game, but each has a high level of professional polish. This model seems like it may be the best hope for adventure gaming. People don't really want to drop a lot of cash on a big game that they may end up hating; it seems more likely that they'll be willing to do an impulse buy for some entertainment that will last a few days or a week.

As far as I can tell the free episode of Sam & Max is comparable to the paid versions; at least, online reviews place it within the same general ballpark of quality. And after spending several hours going through it, I'm tempted to grab one of the other episodes the next time I feel a similar hankering for good, funny adventuring.

Let's kick off the pseudo-review proper with some

MINI SPOILERS

I feel like this game was custom-designed to appeal to me. It includes:

• Satirical political humor.
• Paranoid ravings.
• A psychotically violent wisecracking sidekick.

The first item may only apply to this particular episode, but the others are so well done that I can feel reasonably confident that I would enjoy other Sam & Max content nearly as well.

Let's start with the controls. The game is fully in the mainstream of current adventure gaming, with a simple mouse-based interface. The cursor easily identifies which items in the world are valid for interaction, and will take a single action when you click on them. Inventory management is very simple: you can select one item from your trenchcoat and then try placing it within the world. When you enter conversations, you can select which statement or question to utter. The interface is complete, well-designed and attractive.

One touch I really like: you start the game with a "big gun" in your inventory. You can whip it out at any time and start shooting things in the world. As I suspected early on, it is totally useless for solving puzzles, but it feels incredibly therapeutic. When you get stuck and frustrated, there's a lot of satisfaction in spraying lead at everything in sight.

Violence is actually a really interesting thing to consider when thinking about this game. Looking back over it, it feels incredibly violent. Pretty much every sentence out of Max's mouth involves some flavor of carnage; Sam cheerfully aids and abets this tendency; and the game ends in a glorious spray of property damage and annihilation. And yet, the game is only rated "T", and there is absolutely no blood to be seen anywhere. When you sit down and review your actions, you realize that (other than playing with the Big Gun), hardly anything you do in the game is violent. So it's really a case of the tone and sensibility being driven by violence without it being an integral part of the plot. Anyways, I just thought that was interesting.

It's practically a hallmark of Lucasarts games that a lot of intriguing items in the game will be purely useless red herrings. That tradition continues here. One of the first sights you see is a rat lounging in an inner tube, being observed by a periscope. Wow! What crazy, weird stuff! I bet that's really important! Nope. From start to finish, no necessary action in the game involves these things. And yet, they do serve a valuable purpose: they're funny, they give you more things to interact with, and broaden the world by populating it with more interesting characters, making your path less immediately obvious.

On the flip side, the inventory in this game is far less extensive than earlier games. Throughout the entire game there are fewer than ten items you can pick up, and I think each one of them (except for the big gun) is useful. This is a place where the game benefits from becoming pared down: item combinations lead to the most complex permutations in gameplay, since any item in your inventory could conceivably have an impact on any item in the environment. The limiting of focus helps diminish a player's tendency to desperately try randomly using inventory items when they don't know what else to do.

MAJOR SPOILERS

This game was just chock full of amazingly fun moments:

• Decapitating the President of the United States.
• Witnessing the gigantic animated Lincoln rampaging through downtown Washington, D. C.
• Every single statement that Max makes during the presidential debates. My favorite is probably the joke he tells about the Pope.
• Having a usable toilet in a game. Hey, I won't claim this is Ulysses, but still.
• I will never forget the all-singing, all-dancing Secret Service calvacade of whimsy and nuclear annihilation.

Things I could have done without:

• The governor characters. It seems like these may be recurring characters, and maybe I'd appreciate them more if I had the background, but as it was, they just came off as annoying.
• .... it seems like there must be more, but I'm drawing a blank.

Insufficiently explored possibilities:

• I love having the Big Gun, but next time, having it actually blow things up would be awesome.
• Bosco's shop is filled with awesome stuff that you can't use. I hope that other games make more use of the stuff in there.
• On a similar note, Sam & Max's office is a lot of fun. Still, part of the charm is the fact that there isn't a point to it. It would be a bit of a shame to learn WHY there is a bound and gagged man hidden inside their closet.
• The war room is totally worth it once you finally get in, but still... there are so many other things I would love to have destroyed!

END ALL SPOILERS
So: Awesome game! I highly recommend it to all. If you loved adventure games in the past but have fallen out in recent years, give it a whirl. If you've never tried one before, this is one of the best: a funny, interesting game that makes you think without frustrating you. I can't claim that everyone will appreciate its warped and deranged sense of humor, but I think readers of this blog are more likely than the average population to enjoy it. Bon apetit!

UPDATE: So I went ahead and downloaded Castle. What a great trip down memory lane! At the same time, it's pretty amazing how much your memory can drift over fifteen years. A few corrections to what I wrote above are in order:

• Your character is represented by the "clubs" (i.e., the card suit) character, not the smiley face.
• The smiley face is used by - wait for it - the ANGRY DEMON monster. Wow, I feel bad for having played this game in a church.

I doubt this game will mean nearly as much to someone who didn't play it in their childhood. If you want to give it a whirl, though, the key is to play it using DOSBox, a really good free program that lets you play classic DOS games on modern machines and operating systems. You can also google for Castle Adventure to find several options to play the game online or download a modernized update, although I haven't tried any of these. Setting up DOSBox takes a little bit of effort, but is well worth it if you think you might want to dive into retro gaming. When you start the game, press CTRL+F11 to decrease the game speed (labeled as "Cpu Cycles" in the current version in the title bar). Going down to about 800 cycles seems to be the optimal point for this game. You can actually make it easier by slowing it down even more since the monsters won't be as quick.