Summer Games Challenge 2018 - begin when ready!

[Key-Glyph]

Now it's my turn to double-post. Mahahaha!

I have finally re-begun The Last Express. I say "re-begun" because I picked it up about six years ago but wasn't able to play it all the way through for various technical reasons. Some years later it became available on GOG and Steam (and I highly recommend it to all of you), but I held out in the hopes that I'd use my actual disks one day, because I'm silly like that.

I got this game after hearing Jordan Mechner's (of Karateka, Prince of Persia fame) keynote speech at a PAX East. I'd been fascinated with Karateka since I was Baby Key, and attended that PAX specifically because he was going to be there. He spoke about his approach to his work, which was that he was never really "trying to make a video game." In other words, he didn't sit down and think, "What would make a great game?" That wasn't his starting point. Instead, he'd get fascinated by something -- like the Orient Express -- and eventually think, "Can I find a way to create a game that captures this obsession of mine?"

This really resonated with me. So when I heard him describe this Last Express project of his, and how dedicated he was to recreating the train as historically accurately as possible (he and his team did such things as seek out the two final remaining Orient Express cars in existence to measure them for rendering, scan actual documents from the era such as newspapers to make them readable items, etc.), I knew I had to play it.

This game was a commercial flop, but it shouldn't have been. First of all, check out the gorgeous rendered backgrounds and the fascinating art nouveaux character rotoscoping:





But second of all, the gameplay is custom-built for intrigue and anti-frustration. Example of intrigue: Your character speaks English and can understand French, German, and Russian. If you get close enough to folks conversing in the latter languages, you'll get subtitles. Any other languages are a mystery to you and don't prompt subtitles, making you agonize over what was being said. Below, a chef is yelling at a kitchen employee in his native French; when I'm noticed, the chef abruptly switches to spoken English to apologize and clearly hopes I couldn't understand what he was saying.



Example of anti-frustration: You can game over by dying or getting thrown off the train, but there's an ingenious "rewind" system that takes a lot of guesswork out of things. If you game over, time "rewinds" to the last point in your playthrough where you could have done something that avoided your game over. I don't mean it places you right next to an object seconds before you need to use it, but it will drop you in the general chronological slice where a success was still in your grasp. No scratching you head over "Should I have talked to that person when I first stepped on the train??" or "Did I not pick up an item I needed that I now can't get to??" You're basically given a sandbox for do-overs, which makes exploring much more enjoyable (while still being stressful).

Anyways, I'm not as far into the story as I got six years ago, but I'm well on my way, and am finding it absolutely compelling all over again. Updates to follow!

[Key-Glyph]

Triple post! I'm excited. Forgive me.

I've officially made it further in The Last Express than I did during my previous janky playthrough attempt. I know I said that the game's rewind feature removes a lot of tedium, but it still took me maybe two hours to figure out how to clear this latest chapter.

I should have mentioned this chapter aspect of the game already, actually: the play is divided into discrete pieces, cleverly defined as the travel time between major station stops, and you get a cutscene at the end of each one. If you haven't satisfied the necessary conditions to move on, the cutscene will give you a visual clue (plus a cool in-universe closing narration from a passenger on the train who's been journaling the goings-on) that strongly hints at a particular event you need to prevent in order to succeed.

So, I failed this particular chapter three or four times before I'd fully sussed out each of the separate events I needed to prevent, and I rewound pretty far on the fourth or fifth attempt to make sure I could get them all done within the window of opportunity.

I should also mention that my copy of the game -- which I think was just the official launch package that everybody got back in the day -- came with a strategy guide. I peeked at it during this last section because I was stumped and discovered that I'd completely misunderstood something due to my timing. Basically I needed to kick in a window to be able to steal some stuff, which I did... and then promptly got caught. I spent a while thinking the noise of shattering glass was the issue and that there had to be an alternate way into the compartment, but no! I guess everyone is deaf, because the actual problem was that I was kicking in the window just a little past the allowable time frame. For this I am glad I had the guide, because without it I wouldn't have rewound nearly far enough to get through my vandalism in time and may have stayed confused forever.

Let this be a lesson to us all, though: shattering glass can be drowned out by piano and violin duets one room away.

So finally, I move foward! If I have one complaint about the game so far, it's only that you're the quintessential caught-up-in-machinations-beyond-your-understanding kind of protagonist whose motive for messing up everybody's plans isn't exactly clear. I'm trying not to give away too much here, but basically the protagonist is trying to solve a murder mystery that is the result of some kind of deal gone wrong. He walks into the deal blind, discovers there are many hands in the pie, and his way of "getting to the bottom of things" is just to fake out every individual involved and put off every promised transaction to... buy time, I guess? I'm not sure why he thinks this kind of procrastination is going to get him answers and not simply make everyone want to murder him too, but if you let go of that and embrace the idea that your goal is basically to delay the game long enough for it to unfold its own narrative, it's very compelling.

To be fair, though, there's a significant amount of information about the protagonist that I know is being withheld from me -- so maybe this guy really does know more than he's letting on, and I just have to wait for it to finally surface.

I'm on the last disc now, so when I'm done maybe I'll do a synopsis under spoilers.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Awesome posts, Key. I’ve had this game in my tablet foreve, and you are inspiring me to play it.

[alienjesus]

1. ActRaiser (SNES)
2. Conker's Bad Fur Day (N64)
3. GoldenEye 007 (N64)
4. Fire Emblem: Fuuin No Tsurugi (GBA)
5. Mother 3 (GBA)
6. Ecco: The Tides of Time (MD)
7. Shenmue 2 (DC)
8. Jet Set Radio Future (XBox)
9. Resident Evil HD Remaster (PS3)
10. Mega Man 8 (PS4)
Bonus: Crazy Taxi

It's been a logn time since I updated, but I actually have a lot to post here now. The games in bold above are the ones I've been playing.

So, in order:

Fire Emblem 6: I'm near the end of this one, just a few more maps to play. My team is pretty strong and I'm confident I shouldn't have too much trouble as I think I'm past the worst maps now.

Mother 3: I've only played a little bit of this so far, holding off getting more involved until I finish Fire Emblem. I'm still playing as Flint, gone looking for Claus.

Conker's Bad Fur Day: I finished this up today. I plan to write more about it in the Together Retro thread, but my final judgement is that it's OK. I think it's one of Rare's weakest for the platform all told, but a bad Rare game is still a pretty decent game overall. The ideas it had were super interesting, but the execution left a lot to be desired.

Jet Set Radio Future: This is what I decided to pick up after finishing Conker. Its certainly a lot faster feeling then the original, but I kinda miss having to run from the police rather than fighting them directly. I also kinda liked the commands you had to input to do big graffiti sprays, but whatever. I do think being able to fight the police takes away some of the strategising in taking out the bigger sprays first so it's easier to keep moving, but I'm liking the zippy pacing here too.

Shenmue 2: I hadn't played this in a long time due to being so busy, but I jumped back in today. I found the 4 wude, commandments of a kung-fu code, and moved onto disc 2. Now I'm searching for a book called Wulinshu that a man I'm trying to track down wrote. I do think the bigger city here comes at the expense of knowing the environment as in-depth - I don't know all of the shops here like I did in Shenmue 1. I also don't know the contents of every drawer either - in fact, that mechanic seems to have been removed entirely. I also haven't found the arcade yet.

Anyhow, hopefully I can make some progress on the 4 games I'm still playing, particularly Fire Emblem. I won't finish my list by the end of August, but I fully plan to continue playing into September so I get through all of these.

[alienjesus]

Double post time!

More Shenmue 2 today. I've been moving a lot of books for the temple. I liked the Forklifting from the first game more, at least they paid me.

I did some exploring, found the Wulinshu book, found a secret letter in there and had the meaning of it explained to me. Now I just need to figure out where to show off the signal I've learned.

[pierrot]

I have actually put a few sessions in with Uncharted since my last post. Over three sittings I made it up to chapter 14, out of 22, I believe. So, I'd guess another session or so should finish it off. I hope. It's actually not so bad as I initially feared. When I've actually sit down to play it, I've gotten fairly sucked in, but I don't really prefer the gameplay. I think I liked this game better when it was called Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. For one thing, I don't really like the setting, at all. Jungles tend to do very little for me. High temps, coupled with humidity, are pretty much my kriptonite--off topic, but what percentage of Kripton comprises of kriptonite; for some reason I decided to think about this dumb DC comics thing right now--and doesn't really do anything for me as a game setting. Also, I really don't like how the game feels like a hallway full of staged gunfights that kind of play like ass. It's kind of crazy how some of them play out, too, because I'll be shooting it out with three to six dudes, then after I've killed them, a bunch of other dudes crawl out of the wood works. Why weren't they alerted earlier, though? The one that really got me riled up was outside of the gates in chapter 5, I think it was: There's a huge firefight, involving a gatling gun even, right outside the gate. Then after everything has quieted down, Nate does some of his famous monkey business, and gets on a radio where he ends up alerting a guy sitting right on the other side of the gate! How was he not alerted by all of the gun fire! Once that happens, a bunch more dudes flood out into the same place as the last gunfight. It feels super contrived, and I don't appreciate it.

Overall, it's fun enough, though. I don't love it, but it's decent.

[Mara]

This seems like a really interesting concept, but the summer is already gone in Finland. I will participate in 2019 edition.

[Key-Glyph]

There's a huge firefight, involving a gatling gun even, right outside the gate. Then after everything has quieted down, Nate does some of his famous monkey business, and gets on a radio where he ends up alerting a guy sitting right on the other side of the gate! How was he not alerted by all of the gun fire!

Apparently there is a lot of close-range selective deafness afflicting many video game NPCs. That's also funny about gunfight folks coming out at you one by one. It seems borderline acceptable in ninja skirmishes, but with ranged firearms? Yeah.

I have some bad news and good news about The Last Express. The bad news is that I misunderstood how the rewinding feature works after a game over. It doesn't put you back to the last moment when you were on the right track to succeed at the game as a whole -- it puts you back to the last moment you were on track to pass the specific event you just failed. So, for instance, if you're in a QTE knife fight and get stabbed, the game will place you at the start of that QTE, giving you infinite chances to pass that roadblock. However, last night I got all the way to the end of the game only to discover I needed something in my inventory that I'd left behind ages ago. When I failed that check, the game rewound me into the past by more than an entire day, even though I'd died a lot in some knife fights in between.

So basically, because I thought the game rewound you to the last place you had all your ducks properly in a row, I pushed through to the end without this inventory item thinking it wouldn't matter. Oh nooooo~!!

What's worse, after I rewound my save back more than 50% of the entire game length to fix my blunder, my file got all janked and wouldn't trigger necessary cutscenes. Tonight I resigned myself to starting over from the beginning. This is not heartbreaking, as the game is not long and it's interesting through-and-through. But it was disappointing.

That said, in this new runthrough I've already seen maybe five or six incidental cutscenes and/or conversations I'd never triggered or eavesdropped on before. So that's the good news! It's fascinating to get a chance to learn more about these characters, and so much of it is done by sitting in the dining car and listening, or creeping around outside someone's door, or happening to have an item with you that someone will comment on. For example, there's a scroll you can find of a Russian fairy tale, and although there is more than one native Russian person aboard the train, I only thought you could talk to one of them about it. On this new runthrough, I got the scroll way earlier than usual because why not, I knew where it was -- and all of a sudden I can ask a different Russian passenger about it while they're loitering around in the smoking car! Surprise!

I really can't understate how awesome it is that you learn things about all these characters through inference. No one says, "Hi, I'm X person from X country, I do X for a living, and I hate my government." They look at the scroll and say, "This is a fairy tale," and I say, "Can you translate it?" and they look at me with disdain and say, "Do you know what a fairytale is? It's what the upper classes use to indoctrinate children into waiting for a hero while they suffer in poverty and hunger." And then you get super uncomfortable and back off. I love this kind of stuff! Or you find a sketchbook and infer someone's affection for another person because of how prominently they're featured in the drawings. You can play through the game, miss a ton of these connections, and not even know that you did.

I've seen a few of you mention in various places that you have this game for tablet or phone, and I just wanted to say how interesting that is to me. I'd be really keen on hearing how it works for you all in that format. I have a gut feeling it'll work very well, actually.

When I finally finish this I'll give the summary and provide my VERY STRONG FEELINGS on the main character. Haha.

[Key-Glyph]

This seems like a really interesting concept, but the summer is already gone in Finland. I will participate in 2019 edition.

I hope you join us next time! The Challenge is such a fun time.

The Last Express is done, and I am thrilled. It almost didn't happen. Remember how I had to rewind my game by over a day's worth of time to pick up an item I missed? Well, after doing that and putting in another hour or so of play, I discovered that essential cutscenes weren't triggering. EGAD. Assuming my save file was corrupted from the extensive rewind, I started a new game from scratch, played for another hour... and encountered the same glitches. Noooo! What had I done?

I gave up and went to bed frustrated, but had an inkling that maybe the game was not anticipating my knowing where certain inventory objects were so early on. Maybe my picking them up too soon was screwing with the programming. I awoke resolved to test this by postponing in-game pickups... only to discover that my Win95 virtual machine was throwing a fatal error and would not boot. Was my quest to play through this game completely cursed?!

But in the end, I fixed the virtual machine, acquired inventory items more naturally in a third playthrough attempt, and finally, finally finished.

I've decided I'm not going to divulge too much of the plot here, because if any of you are going to play it, so much of the greatness of the game lies in how it unfolds. I don't want to ruin it. But here's the briefest of summaries which includes only a few things you won't know very early on in the game:

You are Robert Cath, an American invited onto the Orient Express by his friend, Tyler Whitney. It is 1914, and European tensions are high. The two of you are reckless young gentlemen who get caught up in complicated, shady deals in the pursuit of gold, and this adventure is no different. Whitney wrote that he has found something amazing, but after you (literally) jump onto the Orient Express in the dead of night without your own ticket, you find him gashed and dead on the floor of his compartment.

Immediately you assume Whitney's identity in an attempt to divulge what he was doing, why he was murdered for it, and whodunnit -- all with the looming threat that you could be next. Thus begins your long campaign of rummaging through strangers' stuff, eavesdropping on a variety of languages (I cannot tell you what a joy it is to hear all these languages spoken in the game), dashing into off-limits areas, and above all else, faking your face off through conversations in order to keep your assumed identity intact among a cast of characters whose motivations appear more and more dangerous with every passing hour.

Aboard the train you have a German who was in the middle of some kind of goods trade with Whitney and is expecting a lot of gold, a Serbian who believes you murdered Whitney, a Russian count traveling with his granddaughter, a Russian rebel who wishes death to the bourgeois class, an Austrian musician who stays aloof, and a mysterious art collector referred to as "his excellency" who seems to know everything about you and has no time for your bullshit. And it just gets more complicated and dangerous from here.

I will say that this game's controls were clunky at times, and that inventory management was unintuitive. For example, the game has a feature where, if you have something in your inventory that will interact with another character, your cursor will automatically change to that item when you hover over that character. This saves a lot of guesswork. Unfortunately, this design did not carry over into objects interacting with other objects, leading to some confusing moments where I mistakenly believed an item would not interact with something else because my cursor didn't change. If you acquire a key that unlocks doors, for example, you won't just automatically open all locked doors from then on, nor will you be prompted by your cursor suddenly turning into a key. You will have to equip the key -- actually hold it in your hand -- to be able to unlock that door.

These are small potatoes, though (and things I imagine they might have changed for the Steam and GOG releases). I recommend this game highly. It's fascinating, beautiful, and honestly would be worth it for the historical details and reams of incidental dialog even if you can't figure the puzzles out.

And about the protagonist, Robert Cath. I hated him at first and thought he was just one of those garden-variety brooding asshole leading characters who needs to constantly snark and condescend to everybody (even the women he stalks like a wolf) in his utter conviction that he's special and somehow morally superior. I have amended my views on him somewhat in that I can see how, at every turn, he's basically trying to keep the game going so he 1) doesn't end up dead and 2) gets to the bottom of what he senses is a much larger conspiracy. Still, he's pretty unbelievable, and definitely still an asshole. But I'm not immersed in the game for him at all -- it's all about the other characters and the plot unraveling on the train, so I can roll my eyes at Cath sometimes and get on with it just fine.

Play this game! Enjoy this amazing piece of video game history, this absolutely labor of love, that went unappreciated for so long.

• The Last Express (DOS)
  
  StarTropics (NES)
  Maniac Mansion (NES)
  Lemmings (GEN)
  Metroid Fusion (GBA)
  LOOM (ScummVM)
  Tetris (GB)
  Resident Evil: Code Veronica (PS2)
  Ultima III: Exodus (NES)
  Where in America's Past is Carmen Sandiego? (DOS)

[pierrot]

So, another Summer has come and gone (sort of).

Last night I finished off Uncharted. I don't have a whole lot to say about it that I haven't pretty much already said. There's just too much shooty-shoot, and I would generally rather be playing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The zombies in Uncharted are horrendous, also. They feel entirely out of place from a gameplay perspective. Fortunately there aren't that many times they have to be dealt with. The other focus of the game (the story) is also kind of weak. Not that it's bad, per se, but it's just quite thin. I could see people really liking the characters in the game--I don't particularly care one way or the other about them, but I could see other people really liking them--but the story really feels like the means to an end in exploring this island out in some ocean, somewhere (I don't even remember).

It wasn't really a game that was meant for me, but that's okay. Overall it's a decent experience, similar to Tomb Raider (2013) where in a lot of ways it serves as a better action movie experience than a game. Although, unsurprisingly (I hope), I would say Tomb Raider (2013) is a significantly better experience, overall, but it's easy to see that Tomb Raider (2013) relied heavily on "inspiration" from Naughty Dog's Uncharted (which probably owes a lot to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time--). I do think it's possible that Uncharted 2 might strike a bit more of a chord with me. So at some point I will be interested in checking out the sequel.


That's about a rap of my summer challenge this year. I ended up finishing the following:

- Garou: Mark of the Wolves
- Killer 7
- Streets of Rage
- Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
- Dragon Quest VI

Reserve:
- Final Fantasy VI

I didn't greatly enjoy many of these. Streets of Rage was probably the game I had the most fun with, and Garou, Uncharted, and Dragon Quest VI were all fairly good. Wasn't much of a fan of Killer 7, or Final Fantasy VI, at all.


These games I unfortunately didn't even touch this summer, but them's the breaks. (There's always next year, fellas.)

- Sega Rally
- Metroid Prime
- Super Monkey Ball
- Zelda II
- Virtua Racing