Gaming Weekend: Psychobabble Edition
The risk inherent in seeking out the “critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful” product is that sometimes critics, being immersed as they are in whatever they critique, find delight in something that is perhaps otherwise flawed merely because it is different. Movie critics are like this a lot: The artsy foreign snoozers a normal person couldn’t sit through will entrance them because it simply dares to break the mold of the medium in some—possibly flawed—manner.
I want to believe that video game critics have something more to offer than your average dork with a PlayStation and a Live account, something like a sense of history and a genuinely discerning eye. This hasn’t always been my experience, but I continue to give them the benefit of the doubt because if nothing else game reviewers and journalists tend to have a broader perspective on games and their relative scores and sales than most casual market observers. So when something that everyone seems to love sells terribly, it strikes me as interesting.
My first experience with Psychonauts, the late-gen original Xbox game from Creative Director Tim Schaefer, was less than overwhelming. But as I sat down this weekend with a short lull in the holiday gaming deluge, I found myself being slowly won over by a clever, cute and ceaselessly charming little game that all the critics loved (88 metacritic score) but no one bought (one report suggested it sold under 100,000 copies despite the critical acclaim).
Oh, and I did some other stuff this weekend, too.
Endearing. Weird, But Endearing
Video gamers have a problem: We, as a general rule, are resistant to things that we have no rational reason to be resistant to. Cutesy or even just stylized graphics, for example. New intellectual properties that don’t involve either aliens or dragons. That kind of thing. It’s an industry that simultaneously identifies itself at times with a child-like elf who roams the country side in order to save a kidnapped princess yet can’t accept it when that elf looks like a Saturday morning cartoon.
But sometimes we do have reasons for our fickle nature. I can pretty much tell you right now why Psychonauts was never a big hit. For one thing, it starts off slowly. I’d say the first real mission in the game comes about three or four hours in once you’ve explored the camp a bit, run through several tutorial-type missions and buy a couple of vital items from the store. It takes about that long for the game’s quirky sense of humor and style to sink in, but it takes something of an investment. It’s not the kind of game your average gamer—or even some discerning ones—will sit through patiently before it gets “good.”
Which is not to say the early part of the game is flawed or anything, but the subtle genius of the game takes some time to unfold. It’s hard to say if this is some kind of issue the game has, like it needs to hit you harder and faster over the head with its charm (the way Portal did) or if the problem is with me and my expectation that I should either love or hate this game within the first ten minutes.
In any case, make no mistake that this game is genius. As warped and weird as the whole concept sounds, it’s even more warped and far weirder than what you expect. As a platformer in 3D it’s very reminiscent of Mario 64 in a good way. It’s like playing the natural progression of that title where jumping and attacking feel pretty natural and familiar rather than as if the developers decided they needed to reinvent the wheel just to be different. The game you play in Psychonauts is not different, it’s the setting and the characters and the panache that set it apart.
It’s impossible not to recommend this title except for two minor issues related solely to playing the game on the 360 in emulation mode instead of on an original Xbox. One: The black and white buttons from the Xbox controller have been remapped to the LB and RB, which means that some psychic powers (which are always mapped to your choice of RT, LB and RB and no others) don’t work well in certain locations. For example, Levitation use frequently requires the secondary control of the LT so unless you hold your controller differently than I do, LB and LT don’t have “hover fingers” simultaneously and that mapping is worthless.
The other issue is that the image occasionally looks on my screen like there is some sort of burn-in because there are vertical “tears” in the picture from time to time. This is different from in-game tearing caused by graphical problems and I suspect is solely due to the emulation. It’s not a big deal, but it does break the spell from time to time and gets annoying.
Other Games
- The Orange Box – I wrapped up Episode One and played through Episode Two this week. Both were good although Two was definitely superior. The emotional resonance provided by Episode Two’s climax/cliffhanger was pretty impressive but again still tempered by the fact that playing as Gordon Freeman I can’t help feeling detached from this world, as expertly crafted as it has become. In any case, with that morsel’s conclusion I’m left with only Team Fortress 2 on the disc yet untapped and frankly I’m terribly intimidated by it. I do plan to put some time into it this week before I pick up Call of Duty 4.
- Puzzle Quest – I’ve now pushed closer to the summit of the game and have only three achievements left: Reach level 50, win an Xbox Live match and defeat the final boss. I think getting to level 50 will be followed closely by the final boss battle so those should come within a week or so, but the Live thing is one of those where I don’t have any idea what to expect from this game over Live so I’m not sure if I even want to bother or if I desire those last few points enough to push through. Part of me feels like my victories vs the computer are mostly luck anyway and I fear that a simple effort to gain ten or fifteen points could result in a lifetime’s worth of crushing humiliation.
- Call of Duty 3 – I had a request for this game via Goozex so before I shipped it out I put it in the 360 one last time and grabbed a couple of easy achievements off it I had been neglecting. I know CoD3 gets a lot of flak for being beneath the level of quality CoD2 displayed, but I still enjoyed the game quite a bit. I just missed the Military Channel interstitials. Somehow the in-game scenes didn’t mesh as well with the stern voice-overs as they had in the earlier game.
- Catan – I’m not entirely sure what prompted me to pull this one out of the closet but I played a game on a lark and found that while it’s possible to play with an unusual strategy (build only roads and buy development cards), it’s perhaps not possible to win against AI opponents when doing so.
- Planet Puzzle League – I have re-discovered the joy of the Daily Play, which are these bite-sized game modes that are playable only once per day and track your progress via some professional-looking line charts. For quick commode play, nothing is superior.
- Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass – It took me two tries to make it through the first venture into the temple with the titular Hourglass because once I opened the door to the room I sought it felt as if I had achieved my stated goal too readily. With seven minutes or more to go in my ten minute allotment, I felt like I had missed something significant. I realize now that the game was just giving me plenty of leeway as I explored the new time-restricted mechanism but for a while I ran around perplexed, wondering what other sinister trial I would have to endure once it was located at long last.