Review: Psychonauts

I've had this game for quite a while now, but after having replayed it recently, I thought I should post a review of it here. No, it's not about people getting high in order to explore their own psyche. The exploration of psyches is definitely at the core of the game, but there are no mind-altering substances involved. Psychonauts, like a number of games I enjoy, falls in the category of “best games you never played;” overlooked games that didn't do well commercially for reasons other than their quality.

You play as Razputin, a youngster who, rather than running away from home to join the circus, runs away from the circus to join a summer camp for psychically-gifted children. The camp also serves as training and recruitment facility for the Psychonauts, a government agency that employs individuals with psionic abilities to perform missions such as rescuing kidnapped dignitaries or spying on bad guys. While at the camp, Raz hones his powers into specific abilities, such as generating energy blasts and force shields, clouding others' minds, telekinesis, levitation, invisibility, clairvoyance and the ever-popular pyrokinesis. While at the camp, he becomes aware of a plot to... well, I wouldn't want to spoil that...

As you might expect from a game that equips you with an arsenal of psychic powers, gameplay is ridiculously fun. As soon as you get a new power, you'll be running around to see what (or who) you can try it out on. The fun is only enhanced by the thorough realization of the game world: almost every object and character with which you can interact responds in an expected (and sometimes hilariously unexpected) way when you use your powers on them. Most of these reactions do nothing to advance the plot, but really help to maintain your suspension of disbelief. Only occasionally do you get a curt “that doesn't work” notification from the game in the form of a raspberry sound effect.

Some of the ways in which characters react to your use of powers are side-achingly funny. For example, there is a child at the camp who believes that she is an extraterrestrial. If you use telekinesis to pick her up off the ground, she reacts with near-euphoria, momentarily believing that her “people” have come to take her home. Another kid has a crush on same girl as Raz; using clairvoyance on him allows you to see Raz the way that boy sees him: as a black-clad villain, carrying the tied-up girl and twirling a long, black mustache.

The real fun, though, is when you begin to explore the psyches of other people. At first, the minds you enter are those of the camp counselors as part of your training, but where it really gets interesting is when you later explore the brains of the inhabitants of a nearby asylum. There's Boyd Cooper, a paranoid delusional whose mind looks like a white-picket fenced neighborhood, except that it twists in all directions, heedless of gravity. It's also full of spy cameras popping out of trees and lawn ornaments, eyes peeking through blinds and mailboxes, and spy helicopters flying overhead. Its streets are populated with “G-men” who are pretending (badly) to be normal citizens.

There's Gloria von Gouton, a former starlet who suffers from bipolar disorder. She usually stands in a beam of moonlight in the courtyard, happily waving to the group of flower pots with faces painted on them that now constitute her audience. If she steps out of the light, her mood quickly turns angry. This mirrors her pining for the days when she stood in the limelight, and her mind is a haphazard stage, where plays about her tormented life are forever lambasted by a venomous critic in the balcony.

Fred Bonaparte is plagued by dissociative identity disorder. In his mind he is constantly playing a military board game against his ancestor, Napoleon Bonaparte, but his self-confidence is shattered and he has given up ever winning the game. Raz has to climb into the board game itself to help him defeat Napoleon and reclaim his own personality. My favorite part of this level is when Raz speaks to one of Napoleon's wooden soldiers. After the game piece mocks him for his assertion that Fred will win the game, Raz tells him, “I can burn wood with my mind.”

You can even visit the mind of a giant mutated lungfish. Yes, you read that right. It makes sense in context. Anyway, just before going in, you are informed that “it's probably more afraid of you than you are of it.” This turns out to be true; in its mind, you take on Godzilla-like proportions. Of course, you would expect to be able to wreak all sorts of mayhem at that size, and the game doesn't disappoint: you can rampage around in the lungfish's mental city, knock down buildings, pick up tanks and throw them, and even climb skyscrapers and knock planes out of the sky.

But the psyche that I found the most fun to explore was that of Edgar Teglee, a black velvet painter. He calls himself “a prisoner of art,” and whenever he tries to paint anything, he always ends up painting bullfights. His mind takes the form of a stylized Spanish town, painted in black velvet style. The colors seem to pop as if illuminated by a blacklight. In the central plaza, Edgar tries to build a tower out of giant playing cards, hoping to reach a Spanish beauty in the sky who cries rose petal tears, but his tower is always destroyed by the bull who charges through the town, known as El Odio (Spanish for “hatred”).

Raz comes to learn that the bull symbolizes the rage that overpowers Edgar's mind. In several alleys, Raz finds dogs painting pictures, each of which shares a little piece of Edgar's story. One tells him that Edgar was once a great painter. One day, Dingo Inflagrante, the famous bullfighter, asked Edgar to paint his picture, but then Dingo ran off with Edgar's wife, Lampita Pasionado, a beautiful flamenco dancer. Ever since, his hatred has consumed him and he has painted nothing but bullfights.

This turns out to be a romanticized version of the truth. Another dog gives Raz the real story: Edgar was captain of the high school wrestling team, and his girlfriend was Lana Panzoni, a cheerleader. All was well in his life, but then Lana broke up with Edgar to be with Dean LaGrant, the captain of the cheerleading squad. Edgar's heart was broken, and his distracted state cost his team the wrestling championship. He hid from his angry teammates in the art teacher's classroom at lunch. He has not moved on with his life since, stuck in his obsession with Lana and Dean. To help Edgar get over his past, Raz has to dodge the bull's constant charging through the streets of his mind and take on four lucha libre wrestlers (representing Edgar's teammates), then defeat El Odio and Dingo.

In each mind you enter, you find clues about their past. Their minds are usually full of objects or symbols about things that have happened to them, and you can find “memory vaults” which allow you to view events from their past. Some of these memories are happy, while others, stashed in vaults that have been carefully hidden away, are traumatic. One camp counselor's psyche takes the form of a brightly-lit dance party, but this turns out to be a façade she has created to help her cope with a secret pain. If he looks carefully, Raz can find a small, dark, bare room, containing a few abandoned toys strewn on the floor, a toy chest, and a memory vault. That vault reveals that she had once run an orphanage, only to come back from the store one day to find it engulfed in flames. She carefully hid the grief and guilt of that experience in that lonely room in her mind. In the toy chest, she locked away her nightmares, the voices of the children who perished in the fire.

Psychonauts was originally designed as a console title, and was subsequently ported to the PC. As tends to happen with ports, there were a couple of interface issues that could have been better handled. The worst was definitely the inventory screen. To select a psi power or an object in your inventory, you press a button to call up the inventory screen, which has up to three pages. Each page can contain a maximum of eight items, arranged in a circle. To select one, you have to move an indicator towards the item you want, then press a button. This makes perfect sense when you are using a gamepad, but on the keyboard it's not so great. For example, in order to select the item in the upper-left corner, you have to press both up and left. If you accidentally release one before the other, it changes which item you're pointing at. The PC port should have instead just given you a single screen with all the items displayed on it, and allowed you to simply click on the item you want with the mouse. This control issue also poses something of a problem during a mini-game, where you need to be able to quickly change which direction you're facing, and sometimes the eight cardinal and intermediate directions aren't quite adequate.

The other quibble is with the psi powers themselves. The game provides three “slots” in which you can equip your psi powers, and a corresponding button activates each one. So even though you can acquire up to eight psi powers, only three of them are available at any one time. If you wish to use one of the ones that you don't currently have equipped, you must “unequip” one to make room for the one you want to use. This makes sense for the console because the number of buttons available is limited, but there should be no need to switch powers in and out of slots when you have a full keyboard available.

The graphics are delightful. The character and world design has often been described as what might result if Tim Burton directed a Pixar movie. The voice acting is spot-on, and the music and sound effects compliment the gameplay perfectly. On top of all that, you can get the game for $10 on Steam. If you'd like to try a single-player game with an intriguing story, innovative gameplay and razor wit, you can't go wrong with Psychonauts.

Review: Portal

If I do many more reviews, you'll probably notice that I am unlikely to be particularly negative about the title being reviewed. This is mainly because I can't really justify spending much money on entertainment, what with a family and a mortgage, and I don't have a whole lot of time to spend on them, anyway. So I tend to be pretty selective in the entertainment titles I do pick up; I want to be pretty sure that I'll like it.

I received several items this Christmas that I'll review here and there. First up is Portal. Portal was initially only available as part of a pack called The Orange Box, which I was not interested in because it involved paying a bunch more money for titles I had no desire to own, namely the first-person shooters Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2. Fortunately, Portal is now available as a very inexpensive standalone title.

An aside about first-person shooters: In general, they don't particularly appeal to me because they are typically full of gore and more interested in tossing in the latest eye candy fad (Let's see, we had specular highlights, then bullet time, light bloom, ragdoll physics, parallax mapping...) instead of focusing effort on, say, the story and gameplay. I also enjoy playing games that involve some actual thinking instead of just twitching one's trigger finger at anything that moves. If a game is going to be played more with the brain stem than the cerebral cortex, I might as well be watching TV.

Granted, Portal sports a fair amount of graphics eye candy (inherited from Valve's Source engine) and can be loosely categorized as a first-person shooter, in that your viewpoint in the game is first-person and you shoot (although you're shooting portals rather than bullets), but the similarity ends there. The fun of Portal is from the clever story and the even cleverer gameplay. Not that the story is particularly original; it's your standard “artificial intelligence becomes sentient and kills everyone” plot. And it's not that the portal concept is particularly new to gaming, either; the previous year saw a game titled Prey that also featured portals (though the player could not create them for themselves). It's the way these things came together into a memorable gameplay experience that is the attraction.

A basic overview of the plot is in order: You wake up in a futuristic cell as a computerized voice informs you that it is time for testing to begin. A portal opens up in the wall, through which you can see yourself from outside the cell through the translucent wall. You quickly discover that the portal is connected to another portal outside the cell, and that passing through it causes you to emerge from the other side, allowing you to escape the cell. The computerized voice guides you through a series of tests in which you must use the portals to navigate various test chambers. Soon, you acquire a portal gun which allows you to place one side of the portal on most flat surfaces; later, it's upgraded to allow you to place both ends at will. As you proceed through the facility, it becomes clear that something isn't right. The test chambers become more dangerous, and you begin to see evidence that the testing is not as controlled as you might have thought.

Perhaps most memorable is the antagonist, GLaDOS, the artificial intelligence who speaks to the player over a P.A. system for almost the entire game. While her voice is coldly electronic and she at first serves as a helpful guide through the facility, there are hints of an actual personality that become more apparent as time goes on, and that personality is decidedly unbalanced. From her casual attitude about the possibility of injury to her test subjects, to her disjointed and sometimes manipulative comments about your progress, to her odd sense of humor and obsession with cake, GLaDOS is a really interesting character. Her complete control over the player's circumstances and her callous disregard for the player's well-being causes your progress to feel less like beating test chambers and more like beating GLaDOS at her own game. Thus, it's very rewarding to hear her dismay when you seize the opportunity near the end of the game to break out of her carefully controlled environment.

The game's effectiveness at “sucking you in” is illustrated well by an event that occurs in the latter part of the game. Throughout the game, the player can pick up futuristic-looking crates (referred to as cubes) and use them to form steps or to hold down large buttons to operate devices. Late in the game, GLaDOS gives you what she calls a “Weighted Companion Cube,” which is identical to the normal cubes except for the cheery pink heart painted on each side. GLaDOS instructs you to “take care of it,” and throughout the test chamber alternates between anthropomorphizing it and emphasizing its inanimate nature. At the end of the chamber, GLaDOS requires you to toss the companion cube into an incinerator in order to proceed, and upon compliance, praises you for “euthanizing” it faster than than any previous test subject on record. Many players, despite the undeniable fact that the companion cube is an inanimate object, felt emotional at being forced to destroy it and even more determined to defeat GLaDOS.

The voice acting is top notch. There are really only two voices in the entire game, that of GLaDOS herself, and that of the automated turrets you encounter late in the game. Yes, talking turrets. Amusingly, the turrets have rather childlike voices that chirp “Hello!” before opening fire, call out “Where are you?” or “Come over here,” if you take cover, and cry “Why?” or “I don't blame you,” if you disable them. Both voices are performed by Ellen McLain, who does a terrific job of balancing GLaDOS's synthetic timbre with hints of emotion and nuance.

The other delightful aspect to the game was the sheer enjoyment of figuring out how to use portals and the devices found in the test chambers to proceed. The levels are very well-designed in order to teach you the concepts you'll need to understand in order to make progress, usually without explicitly being told how it works by GLaDOS. The puzzles are clever, and sufficiently challenging without causing you to tear your hair out. If you prefer hair loss, there are “advanced” versions of some levels which have been made more difficult, and “challenge” levels where you try to minimize the time, number of portals, or number of footsteps used to complete the level. The game also tracks achievements you fulfill in the course of gameplay, to satisfy the completionists.

I only had a couple of minor gripes about the game. One was that you couldn't shoot your portal gun through a portal. This is understandable, as it opens up way too many complications in designing puzzles, but it was a tiny disappointment. The other nitpick was that it was short. This is not a bad thing, really. For one thing, the game is inexpensive. For another, the designers could easily have made it drag on far too long, allowing the novelty and enjoyment to wear off and turning it into a chore rather than fun. (A few games have somehow managed to convince some players that turning a game into a second job is somehow fun. I'm looking at you, RPGs.) So they leave you wanting more, which is a good thing, but on the other hand, well, you're left wanting more.

The big problem I have with the entertainment industry today is that too many in it are afraid to try something different that isn't proven to make money. Portal is an example where they took a chance and it worked. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good single-player puzzler with an intriguing story.

Download Day Off to a Slightly Rocky Start

I downloaded Firefox 3 yesterday. It was slightly rougher than expected, though. Like many people, I assumed that “Download Day” would start at midnight GMT, or even midnight Pacific Time (since they're in California). Turned out it was actually slated to start at 10 a.m. Pacific. Maybe they wanted to have breakfast first.

I'm in the Mountain Time Zone, so it was after 11 o'clock before I attempted the download. The download link was for Firefox 2.0.0.14, not 3.0. Oops! I did some URL hacking and figured out the address to download the 3.0 version. Out of curiosity, a little later I refreshed the page and version 3.0 showed up. Guess someone noticed. Due to the mix-up and a bunch of load-related server problems, Download Day didn't actually officially get started until 11:16 a.m. PDT. I was pretty sure my download started before that, thanks to my hacking the URL instead of waiting for them to fix the home page, so I downloaded it again today to make sure it counted. (They'll cancel any duplicates.)

Installation and setup was another little adventure. With the various tweaks I've made over the course of time to my Firefox 2 install, I wanted to start fresh. So I made copies of my data, dumped a list of my extensions, etc., then wiped Firefox completely off my computer and before I installed the new one. That went fine, but when it came time to reinstall the extensions, I found it difficult since a lot of them are hosted on mozdev.org and it was also having server problems, presumably due to the heavy load. They were able to straighten out the problems after an hour or so, so I've got them now.

Fortunately, since then it's been pretty smooth sailing. Many of the new features will matter only to developers, but there are other changes worth noting. One of the best new features in my book is actually pretty small: Previously, when you submitted a form with a password, Firefox would pop up a window, asking if you wanted it to remember the password for you, and wouldn't actually submit the form until you answer. The problem is, sometimes you're not sure you entered the right password, so you'd rather not make the decision until you see if it actually worked. In Firefox 3, the question appears as a thin banner at the top of the page, and the form submits without waiting for your answer. Yay! Bookmark and plug-in management is better, too, and the new rendering engine seems to work fine.

Review: Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac

Sister read my review of Aquaria and told me that I should do more reviews. She even went so far as to accuse me of having good taste. So I thought I might go ahead and review the book I'm reading, Ken Jennings's Trivia Almanac.

In case you were living under a rock during 2004, Ken Jennings entered the public consiousness with a 74-game winning streak on the syndicated game show Jeopardy!. Of course, when he got done making approximately $34,000 an hour, he was approached to do the obligatory cash-in-your-15-minutes book about his experience. Instead, he wrote Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs, which is only partly about his experience, and partly about the world of trivia fanatics in general. (A great read, by the way. Maybe I'll review it as well at some point.)

In the course of writing Brainiac, Jennings unsurprisingly accumulated even more trivia. He figured he'd write another book, this time a full-fledged trivia book, and get all that stored-up trivia an outlet. (He calls it a “trivia enema.”) The result is the Almanac. Each page is devoted to a day of the year, giving one or more events that occurred on that day, followed by a bunch of trivia questions relating to that event in some way. The blurb on the back cover explains it better than I can:

For example—February 21: In 1912, on this day, Teddy Roosevelt coined the political phrase “hat in the ring,” so Ken Jennings fires off a series of “ring” questions. What two NFL quarterbacks have four Super Bowl rings each? What rings are divided by the Cassini Division? Also on this date, in 1981, the “goth” music scene was born in London, so here's a quiz on black-clad icons like Darth Vader, Johnny Cash, and Zorro. Do you know the secret identities of Ivanhoe's Black Knight or Men in Black's Agent M?

The title of each quiz section is often pretty clever and funny. One of my personal favorites appears at the head of round of trivia on mediocrity: “It's Raining Meh.” Anyway, I'm still slogging through October, but it's one of the most enjoyable slogs through a book that I've ever had, and back in the February section I'd seen enough to heartily recommend it.

Review: Aquaria

If you want the short review, here it is: Stop reading right now and go download the Aquaria demo now! (Windows, Mac)

Aquaria is an independently developed adventure game for Windows, Mac, iPad and Linux. You play as Naija, a young undersea dweller who does not know who she is or whether she is the last of her kind and sets out to find answers. Little bits of the intriguing story are revealed here and there, but most of it comes at the end. Even then, the ending (especially the full ending for those that find all of Naija's lost memories) seems to leave the player with more questions than answers. Perhaps a sequel will elaborate.

Some things set this game apart from others produced today. Probably most notable is the fact that Aquaria is a 2D game. Not in the 8-bit pixellated old-school graphics way, but in the “you move up, down, left and right” sort of way. The gaming world has become so fixed on 3D that it tends to forget the possibilities of 2D entirely these days.

Secondly, Aquaria is freakin' gorgeous. The graphics are beautifully hand-crafted, giving the whole game a painterly feel. Check out the screenshots and videos at their web site to see what I mean. The visuals by themselves make the game world worth exploring.

That brings up another thing: The game world is enormous. You would expect a game that was basically put together by two guys would not be nearly so expansive. Even in the demo, the world is large enough to give you a good two hours worth of exploration and gameplay. (With most demos, you're lucky to get half an hour.) A big part of the game is exploration, discovering new areas and finding new things to see and do. In this sense, it is similar to the Metroid games.

Sometimes you'll get new abilities, which may allow you to reach areas that were not available to you before (swimming against strong currents, opening doors, finding your way through the dark, etc.). Because of this, there will be some backtracking involved. That isn't for everybody, I know, but the great scenery makes it worth it, and the game does provide a mechanism for moving rapidly to other parts of the world.

Another remarkable thing about the game is the great voice acting. Voice acting tends to be hit-and-miss; even major gaming studios put out games with mediocre voice acting. Not so with Aquaria: Naija's voice perfectly complements the game. Naija is voiced by Jenna Sharpe, and she does a great job of lending some real emotion to the character.

A nice thing about the game is that it isn't chock-full of violence like many games today. Yes, there is combat in the game, including boss characters, but it is handled far more tastefully than seems to be typical in mainstream games these days. There are some genuinely creepy parts to the game, so I wouldn't go so far as to let very young kids play it without being there with them, but if it were rated by the ESRB, I would imagine that it would net an E10+ rating.

Probably most compelling for me was the level of craftsmanship that is apparent in the game. For example, you will often encounter areas of the game with creatures, plant life or other elements that serve no purpose in the game plot-wise, and that appear nowhere else in the game. They just serve to make each place unique and to give little rewards to the player for exploring. You just don't find that level of craftsmanship in most games; they just don't “waste” much time on that sort of thing. It's a shame, since little touches like that are a great benefit to games, especially ones which focus a lot on exploration.

I highly recommend Aquaria. Really. Go get it.