By The TAG Team
Here’s a tough game of “what-if”:
We’ve all played games at times and said, “if only they had done this instead of that.” Or maybe just thinking of a new twist on something to breathe more life into it.
For example: What if they remade Police Quest 1, but from the point of view of Jesse Bains? Like, perhaps, an adventure game version of Grand Theft Auto. There’s probably not too many adventure games that make you sell drugs to win, right?
Or, how about the other direction? After all, they already made a card game version of The Oregon Trail, how about a tabletop role-playing game of The Secret of Monkey Island? A roll of the dice determines how many bananas you’ll need to make a monkey wrench...
Yeah, this is a tough one -- but we’re sure you have some ideas.
I will think about my favorite game ever, the one I beat more than 50 times in my life, played every port, debugged its code, met its designers and some of the graphic artists, tried to hack it, started to learn piano just to play some of the music featured in it, etc etc etc.
ReplyDeleteSo, many people think that Fate of Atlantis has the best, or one of the best intros. With Indy being playable in a very clumsy representation of the Indy mythos falling his way down Barnette College, and then the brilliant tutoralization of the New York scene with its 2 screens, multiple solutions, 2 NPC characters (+ ticket seller), and 1 item to solve an easy puzzle.
Game grows, gets interesting, each set piece is 3 or 4 screens long, you can go back and forth between them. You get 3 second act paths, some stuff overlap a bit, but in general you get a lot of mileage. Puzzles are great, setting is amazing, but .. what happened ?
Most adventure games start being great, and they feel like they either run out of budget, or the ending got rushed. Fate of Atlantis is no exception. You reach the aformentioned Atlantis and the game gets regular or even bad. Tons of screens with the same art, same palette, the random rooms in the maze .. the maze being so slow to navigate, all the nazi fights that you can run away from and are just in there to pad the maze or try to make you feel in danger.
The Sophia in the cage puzzle where you could potentially use tons of items to solve it, but you are forced to use a very specific rod and not another palette swaped sprite rod. The lack of direction, hinting. The fact that you can get to the God Machine room at the end of the game and you are still able to return to the Atlantis entrance with the sub, which may be a thing since you can run out of orichalcum and need to make more.
The fact that you can forget the stone discs in any spindle, the rotating wheel either in the robot machine or in the orichalcum machine, the stepladder that you need to use 3 times and you can forget it each time. The sloooow crab boat in the canals, everytime you get back to Sophia to try your random crap item to free her from the cage only to be denied. The random solution to stop the microtaur that you can totally miss and makes the puzzle just a guessing game.
It takes a lot of time to navigate Atlantis, it's minutes and minutes of just walking. The game picks it pace once you reach the lava maze at the end (which is my favorite moment and music in the entire game).
How can you fix Atlantis ? I have no idea, it's impossible to me to make the exercise of thinking about this game in any different way. This is perfection, this is an archetype game that molded my entire gaming life. Even with its flaws, which I recognize, I can't be neutral and try to fix it. That's something that someone else could suggest, would be an interesting read for sure.
Now, about those minigames .. specially the submarine with the obtuse controls (and the plunger), and the hot air balloon where one click means go higher, turn in 45 degrees and move faster (all in one axis or the other) .. yeah, screw them. The weird controls don't feel like something from a LucasArts game at all.
Also, second time this year that my comment is longer than the main post, thanks for reading !
DeleteHow to fix the final act of Atlantis? I think you did a pretty good job of answering that yourself. Lose the maze, get rid of the wandering Nazis, remove the possible dead ends from forgetting/missing items, have traversal be quicker and improve the frustrating puzzles.
DeleteOf course that's easier said than done and at the most drastic end of the scale would require a complete rewrite. But there may be more subtle ways to do it. For example, have Indy find a map of the Atlantis labyrinth earlier in the game with mysterious indications of what is located where that you need to decipher, and the understanding comes in stages by the time you arrive there. Instead of wandering Nazis, have there be guards at specific locations that you need to puzzle your way past. Have the rescue of Sophia be more straightforward and let her accompany (and assist) you more here, grounding the more fantastical section with character and relationship dialogue between them alongside.
Wow, all this hate for the last section of Atlantis... I know I'm in the vocal minority (on this web site) for people who have absolutely no problem with the layout of Atlantis, and don't even consider it a maze. Reason being, you can see EVERYTHING. You don't know what is in the rooms until you explore them, but it's not like a maze where you don't know that going right or left will get you to a dead end or something.
DeleteThat said, I agree with one thing, kind of. Sure, remove the random guards, but only for the TEAM and WITS paths. Random fighting guards fit in perfectly with the FISTS path.
Could Sophia be a better character? Sure. But unlike the movies, she was slightly more substantial here. I don't think anyone expects her to be here for sex appeal, except maybe for the ONE screenshot in the game (and even then, there's no cleavage or suggestive imagery).
Well, after reading Alex's post I was reminded of something.
ReplyDeleteAs a movie buff, I was exposed to some films which were excellent throughout, but then totally flunked the ending, so that the last ten minutes completely baffled me and undermined the rest of the movie. I'm talking jarring genre shifts, characters acting the complete opposite of what they did until that moment, rushed endings without any payoff, things like that. Off the top of my head: "The Lady Vanishes" by Hitchcock, Danny Boyle's "Sunshine" and "Der Amerikanische Freund" by Wenders.
As Alex said, something similar happens sometimes with adventure games, but none is as egregious as those film examples above.
Except for one game.
That is the original "Broken Sword".
(unmarked SPOILERS below - you have been warned)
The game is excellent through and through, a strong contender for best adventure game ever... until Nico and George arrive in Bannockburn.
From then on, instead of the epic showdown with the Templars which we were all expecting, there is just one very disappointing puzzle to open the church, a cutscene which barely makes any sense, and an explosion scene so cliché that would have probably already been antiquated in the 1960s.
How to fix this mess? It is not easy, but a first step would be to make the whole coda of the game entirely playable (like in "Fate of Atlantis"), having the showdown with the baddies have at least some dialogue and a semblance of interactivity (like in "Fate of Atlantis"), and have the decisions of the player actually matter in the ending (like in "Fate of Atlantis").
So, I guess that what I wanted to say, dear Alex, is that actually "Fate of Atlantis" has a pretty decent final part, all things considered.
Continuing spoilers:
Deleteoh that ending in Broken Sword, feels more like a Dragon's Lair kind of interaction than a true adventure game / adventure movie. There's even a plot twist thrown in there with the french police cop being part of the cult.
Fate of Atlantis though, "final boss" is just a dialogue tree with very fixed outcomes, you are given the illusion of free choice for a while, but in reality you are always looping on the same options. You are obliged to loop at least once in order to get the correct dialog option, and then when presented with 4 new options, 2 of them are the win condition, and 2 of them just return to the main loop.
I think they also rushed the ending in Broken Sword 2, but it's not that bad as the original one.
Well, but Broken Sword 2 is pretty bad throughout, so the juxtaposition is not that grating like in the first one, where there is a HUGE drop in quality between all the rest of the game and the last part.
DeleteI absolutely adore The Dig, but one thing that I would change without a second thought is the terrible dialogue (written by Orson Scott Card of all people). It's laughable in how it gets the tone wrong and shapes your view of the characters so negatively. No matter what you say to people, their response is always a sarcastic, negative comment that subtly implies you are a bad person for talking to them.
ReplyDeleteOh that's a good point, everyone hates you in the dig, Boston is hated by his mates since the start with no obvious reason except for the 2 guys that are in the ship, which is a shame since they only appear for the first 5 minutes.
DeleteThere's an amazing rant though, when you are in the power room near the start of the 2nd act, and Boston goes on and on on how he wants people to listen to him, he demands a map with instructions, a sandwich, and begins to yell .. and finally he calms down. One great random moment