Baud Attitude

There’s a particular Japanese ghost story that I see repeated quite often, with some variation - that, not knowing the official name, I think of as the “extra person” story.  If you’ve ever seen They Were Eleven, you have the gist of it - a group of people, in some extraordinary circumstance, discover that they have an extra member, but don’t know which of the group is the “extra” who isn’t supposed to be there.  In some variants, we actually find out WHY there is one extra person - in other variants, the “wait, we have one extra!” is the Big Reveal and the story ends there.

Killer 7 draws on this ghost story - there are EIGHT Smiths in a group called the Killer SEVEN, and I was quite happy when it turned out to follow the first of those options and we found out who the extra was and why they were there.  I was expecting it would remain unexplained - because, well, the story DOES have that reputation for being opaque.

Reputation aside, the game actually does an awful lot of explaining after a certain point, and the story becomes a lot easier to follow - though, I have the feeling that, if I were to put disc 1 back in the Gamecube and start over from scratch, it would make even more sense.

That’s a little more effort than I’m willing to put in, though.  I happily did it for Fatal Frame II, which featured cute girls in frilly outfits, but Killer 7 doesn’t have quite the same replay appeal.

That sounds like a bit of a put-down, so I’ll clarify a bit:

Killer 7 is one ugly game, even accounting for “stylistic decisions”, the control scheme seems almost deliberately engineered to make things difficult for the player, the blood is overdone, the characters say “fuck” entirely too much, and there’s a “Boy, you really liked “Se7en”, huh?” cutscene that could have been dropped.

It’s also ridiculously satisfying and at times a sheer joy to play.  I wouldn’t have felt ripped off if I’d actually paid full price for it, so getting it after it’d hit the clearance racks is even sweeter.

Note: I typed the bit above without realizing that a “Se7en” ripoff homage in a game called “Killer 7″ might have been an intentional reference, and now I feel silly but I’m going to leave it in the post so you can all point and laugh.

Just for the record, when I was making fun of adventure games in my earlier post on Killer 7, I did not know that I would, at a point approximately halfway through the game, actually have to look around for doohickies so I could turn on a valve to drain a pool.

I got some of the particulars wrong, mind you.  While you do get an awful lot of rings throughout the course of the game, none of them have been swallowed by fish, not yet anyway.  Instead, they are, perfectly logically, given to you by a disembodied head that likes to go to amusement parks and hang around in garages.

At the moment, having broken up an organlegging ring by fighting a machine-gun-toting Sailor-Moon-wannabe in a plaid skirt followed by a quick-draw contest with her albino adoptive father, I’m hunting down an artist whose Power-Rangers-esque comic book seems to be predicting the future.

This is all, again, perfectly logical.

OK, I’m pretty much lying.  What I should say is that, while I’m really enjoying the game, I’m looking forward to playing through to the end so I can go looking for discussions on what the hell the story was all about. 

As often as I see the topic come up on forums and blogs, I think it’s safe to say that most - if not all - gamers have a list of games that they loved and that they think got the short end of the stick in the marketplace.

Sometimes, these are pretty individual opinions - I haven’t met too many other folks who absolutely loved Alisia Dragoon, for instance - but there are games whose market reception was legendarily apathetic in comparison to the efforts spent on promoting them.  These usually get even more credit if their production costs were so high, and their sales so low, that they heavily contributed to the failure-or-near-failure of a publisher or development house.  See: Majesco, Clover, etc.

The top two games that I see trotted out as “overlooked” are Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil.  Both expensive games, both heavily marketed, both marked down to twenty bucks in their first month of sales.

I can’t say that this is ALL bad.  Yeah, it’s sucked having to wait so long for a BG&E2, but I’m not sure that it would be better if it had sold by the truckload and spawned an endless stream of sequels and spin-offs.

Put another way:  Do you really want to see a BG&E-inspired Kart Racing game?

Anyway, after you get past the “big two” underappreciated games, you tend to see at least a mention of Killer 7.

Killer 7 is a game that’s at the end of the “accessibility” scale that’s furthest away from, oh, Pac-man.  The control scheme is obtuse - you don’t even use the joystick to move, for instance, your character moves forward when you press the A button and turns around if you press B - and it has the worst case of Ugly First Level Syndrome I’ve yet encountered, a bizarre mostly-white building that reminds me of the worst examples of mid-90s 3D and which is so devoid of distinguishing features that I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a hotel, an office building, or maybe an apartment block.

Your in-game advice is delivered by a gibbering nutjob in a bondage outfit, and when you die, you leave a take-out-baggie - seriously - full of your vital bits that you then have to use another character to retrieve and bring back to a save room before you can continue.

Is it any wonder that I was able to pick this up, a few months after release, for $9.98?  Or that the shelf I took it from was full of similarly-clearance-priced copies?

At its core, it’s awfully close to an adventure game.  You have a limited set of locations you can explore, there are puzzles to be solved to open up new locations, and the puzzle solving tends pretty heavily towards the “to open this door, you’re going to need to do two or three fetch quests, seemingly unrelated to the actual door opening, which will result in the key to the door falling out of its hiding place for no apparent reason.”

On the other hand, while you’re roaming around whatever building you’re in looking for the crank handle that will turn on the water pump in the basement and drain the flooded room, leaving the fish in the flooded room gasping on the floor so you can find the fish that swallowed the signet ring that you need to show to the butler so he will loan you a serving tray which you will use to reflect the moonlight on to the portrait of the princess which will open the secret compartment which…

I am, of course, kidding here.

I hope I’m kidding here, anyway.  Let’s start over.

…while you’re roaming around whatever building you’re in doing adventure game stuff, occasionally you will hear an evil laugh and something invisible will run at you and try to get close enough to explode.  That is your cue to switch to shooter mode, hit the “scan the area for invisible running exploding guys” button, target the newly-visible running exploding guy and try to shoot him before he blows up on you.

This bit is sort of cheap.  Often the invisible running exploding guys spawn so close to you that you don’t have a chance to protect yourself, and then you tend to wind up in the aforementioned take-out-baggie.  It’s not like you can pull out your gun and then back up, or anything.  While aiming, you’re rooted in place.

It’s a bit of a hybrid of the genres, and doesn’t necessarily take the best bits from either, is what I’m getting at.

Now, it does come with some payoffs, if you can make it past the first level.  It’s got an art style that looks dreadful in still images but really works in motion, what I’ve seen so far of the story looks pretty interesting, even if I’m having a little trouble following the different players and their motivations, and you switch between characters as diverse as a wheelchair-bound sniper, a curiously soft-spoken wrestler in a Lucha Libre mask and tuxedo, and a waifish psychic who can break barriers by, well, bleeding all over them.

Did I mention I’m a terrible hemophobe?  Between this game and Bullet Witch, It’s been a bad month for my particular neurosis.

Let’s put my squeamishness aside, though, and carry on.

Twenty minutes into playing Killer 7, I was wondering what the heck people saw in it.

An hour into playing Killer 7, I was wondering why I was still playing it instead of, say, minesweeper.

Two hours into playing Killer 7, I started wondering what the heck was going to happen next, and if the next - I don’t like to use terms like “mindfuck”, but it applies here - could possibly top the last.

That’s a pretty good progression, I think.

So, back in 2002, I wasn’t really in the market for a new videogame console. I’d bought an import Dreamcast in 1999 before the US launch, bought a US Dreamcast a few months after that so I could play cheaper domestic games, and I’d realized that I just wasn’t playing console games much with the whole Everquest habit in full swing.

I knew that Sony had released the PS2 and I was vaguely aware of a console from Microsoft that you could play Halo on, but I didn’t know Nintendo had a new console. I kind of thought the Nintendo 64 was still going strong. Like I said, not really tuned in to the market.

Then I was visiting a friend and he wanted to show off his new Gamecube and the two games he’d bought for it: Super Monkey Ball and Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.

And the next day my wife and I went out and bought a Gamecube and a copy of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.

And we played through quite a lot of the game, all the way up to Michael’s story, which is the next-to-last level of the game, and then we stopped for some reason.

And every time we thought about going back to it, it was like, well, if we did that we wouldn’t know where we left off, so we’d need to start from the beginning and, like, ugh.

So it’s been sitting on the shelf mocking us for almost six years.

Until yesterday, when we decided, damnit, we’re going to DO THIS THING and sat down, together, in front of the Wii.

With, I will admit, a copy of the strategy guide, because, damnit, if we were going to play through 90% of the game a second time, we were going to do it as fast as possible.

And after two days of 6+ hour play sessions, we succeeded in our efforts to save the world from the horrific machinations of the Ancients, and all was well again.

It was still worth buying a Gamecube to play this. I believe this very strongly. It’s an excellent game, one of the few instances of Lovecraft Done Right in modern media.

And it’s a hell of a thing to be able to sit down with your wife for a couple of days and spend some Couple Time hacking up zombies together.

It’s good to marry a geek.

Another game off the “to-play” stack, which is a good feeling.

P.N.03 was a game that got some pretty poor reviews, and I can see why at the same time I see good things about it. The main character certainly looks good, and the sterile / antiseptic play environments mixed with occasional futuristic cityscapes are very stylish, and that was enough to make me drop 10 bucks on the game when it went on clearance.

Music - also worth hearing. If you like the music in the new Battlestar Galactica series, the music in the later levels are very similar.

The actual playing part of it? Not so great. You look like a dancer, kind of move like a gymnast, but handle like a tank. There’s no shooting while moving, so you have to move, stop, aim, shoot, move, repeat. It just doesn’t feel right.

Also, it’s very easy to get bogged down in practice missions, that aren’t part of the storyline, in an attempt to buy new armor and upgrade it. The practice missions - very boring. I almost walked away from the game before I realized that the reason it was putting me to sleep is that I got sidetracked after the fourth story mission and I’d been doing nothing but repeat practice missions. Once I got back on track it got better, but I’m still glad it was a $10 game instead of a $50 one. I understand that, if you play through the game twice on the same save file (something like that, anyway) you get a really COOL suit of armor… I don’t think that’s reward enough for me.

I have the other members of the “Capcom 5″ still on the to-play stack. It seems thematically appropriate to try another one next. Killer 7 maybe?

Edit: I have been mislead - to score the best suit in P.N.03, in the Japanese version of the game - beat it twice, done. Enjoy watching your character run around in a thong.

In the US and PAL versions, you have to do crazy stuff like beat the game in hard mode, finish all the side missions, blah blah blah. Why on earth?