999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

 

Chunsoft, or I guess Spike Chunsoft as they are now known, are a developer I really like.  They've been around since the 80s but I was really made aware of them in the mid 2010s when I got my hands on a very cheap copy of Kamaitachi no Yoru for the Super Nintendo.  Kamaitachi isn't really a "game" per se, it's more of a choose your own adventure novel slammed into a SNES cartridge.  There is a game element to it, the process of combing through the story to deduce who did the murder that takes place at the start of the game but gameplay consists entirely of reading through long passages of text with very little actual input from the player.  It sounds boring as fuck when I write it like that but Chunsoft are quite adept at weaving a decent mystery and so the game is carried by strong writing and some clever twists and turns.

Fast forward from the Super Nintendo to 2009 and Chunsoft are still at it with the first entry in what is now known as the Zero Escape series, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.  No longer just a sound novel, 999 has graduated into a full on visual novel with character art and even, if you're playing the PC re-release like I was, voice acting.  The original version didn't have the VA so its a little closer to its roots in that regard, I suppose and the VA in both English and Japanese is sort of crap so maybe the DS is the way to go.

The gameplay is pretty simple with it consisting mainly of reading the story and making choices at various key moments.  Unlike something like Kamaitachi though, 999 splits its talky, novelly sections up with point and click adventure segments where you poke around a room and solve puzzles.  The puzzles are mostly pretty easy and getting stuck usually means that you've missed some clickable aspect of the environments you're in but they are a welcome addition either way.

They story is sort of hard to talk about in a review like this because the story is all there really is to this game.  If I go into any detail with it and spoil it then there's no real reason for you to go play it and I DO want you to go play this game, it's good.  To summarize in a not quite accurate way, the game follows 9 people who have been kidnapped onto a sinking ship and have 9 hours to get out or else die in a watery grave.  Doesn't sound too complicated until you factor in that each victim has a numbered bracelet which, through some simple math, allows them to access the numbered doors in the ship which block their escape routes.  The other problem with those bracelets is that they will send a signal to the bomb in their gut if they fuck up and kill them.  So think of it kind of like anime Saw.  That doesn't quite do it justice because writer Kotaro Uchikoshi was fucking ON something (good connotation) when he wrote this game but it's an easy comparison to make.

My one problem, and I will put a spoiler for one of the endings here so stop reading and fuck off to play 999 if you haven't already, is that mistakes in this game feel undeserved and bullshit.  For example, I stumbled into one of the endings where everyone gets murdered at the end but the choices that you make in 999 don't give any indication as to that being the path that you're on.  In Kamaitachi, when I got one of the many bad endings for that game it felt like my fault.  A bad decision somewhere down the line, a misunderstating of the facts.  But in 999 pretty much all the choices you make are "pick a door".  Imagine some guy comes up to you in the street and says "pick a card", so you choose one at random and then he shoots your dog.  You had no way to know that the card you picked was the dog murder card, you'd be pissed.

Thankfully the game doesn't twist and turn quite as much as other Chunsoft games and you can use a flowchart to jump to any previously viewed point in the story to make the other choice so I guess 999 actually ends up being more book-like than the SNES games despite the point and click editions.

Either way, it's a good game, worth playing and it's got a decent steam version that comes bundled with the sequel that, at time of writing, I have never got around to playing.  I'd probably suggest the DS version over the PC version just because I have fond memories of curling up in bed with my DS, a hot beverage and a good mystery but there's nothing overtly wrong with the port so just get comfy in your gaming chair if need be.

GoG's "Preservation" of Video Games

 

As someone who sees video games as an art form and not just a toy to kill time with, preservation is an important topic for me.  Not just me either, there are plenty of people online who will be happy to shout from the rooftops about how important the preservation of old media is for a laundry list of different.  Due to the fact it's such an important topic, it really pisses me off when people come into that space with a shitty attitude and shitty intentions, just like the people over at Good Old Games.

Good Old Games was a website I used to have a lot of time for.  They would take ancient PC games that were an absolute bitch to get running on modern systems, get it running and then provide a DRM free installer so that instead of having to mess with things like DOSBox you could just double click an icon and be playing Ultima 7, for example, in seconds.  I do think that charging 10 dollars for a game from 1992 is sort of dogshit but whatever, better than nothing I suppose.

One thing that Good Old Games likes to harp on about is the fact that they are preserving video games.  That they are force for good in the gaming space by making old games accessible for all.  Maybe at one point that was true.  I remember a long time ago they had some kind of legal bother over the Fallout games and their response to being told to take the games off their storefront was to make the games completely free for like a week before they were pulled.  Obviously, to continue their efforts they have to fall in line with this bullshit but they did everything they could to make sure their installers for Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics got on as many computers as possible.  I'm not 100% certain that's exactly what happened but that's how I understood it at the time and that's what drew me to the website in the first place.  "It sucks that this happened, but have it for free and keep it forever"

But fast foward to today and it's a different story.  Warcraft 3 recently got an, apparently, shoddy remake from Blizzard and what I'm assuming is a result of this remake being launched, GoG were told to pull their Battle.net edition of the game from their store.  So did they make it free for as many people to download as possible before it's gone?  No, they made multiple social media posts about how the game is being pulled, how "they care" about preservation and that you can buy the game for 15 bucks, maybe a bit less if you use a discount code from their Facebook post comment section.  "Look at this thing we failed to preserve in any meaningful way, give us money before it's gone though!"

It just rings so hollow to me as soon as they start charging money for it.  Unwilling to do anything about it other than advertise its dwindling avaliability hoping that a few 30-40 year olds will open their wallets in light of the news.  An easy way to prey on people's nostalgia or computer illiteracy as a method to make a quick buck.  I was willing to pay for the convienience prior to this because I was under the impression that when push came to shove they would throw down but instead they shook the silver cup in our face and demanded payment for them not doing their fucking job.

If you want to know where the real preservation efforts lie, it's unfortunately in piracy.  The thankless, sometimes dangerous (in a litigation sense) work of making sure that as many games from the artforms history aren't lost to time and aren't lost to shit-head companies pulling crap like this so they can make a few extra sales of poorly put together or uneeded remakes and remasters.  There are plenty of sites doing it that I will refuse to name here because being underground is what helps keep them alive but THOSE are the people you should be rallying around.  The people making emulators, the people dumping ROMs, the people provding these old games for free and providing instructions for the less tech-savvy to get them running.  That's true preservation

Maybe all this is just overly cynical ranting from someone reading way too far into a shitty piece of news about Warcraft 3.  That said though, as far as I'm concerned, GoG don't care about preservation, they care about exploiting your nostalgia to make a line on a graph go up

Evil Dead: A Fist Full of Boomstick

 Confession time.  Despite being a massive fan of horror books, games and movies I have not seen ANYTHING Evil Dead related.  Not a single thing, not the original 1981 movie, not the new Evil Dead Rise from last year and absolutely nothing in between.  I have drunkenly watched some scenes from the various movies on YouTube with friends but never sat down and watched something from this franchise from start to finish.  Not that I have anything against it, it's certainly on my to-do list, but my watchlist is almost as big as my gaming backlog so its really just a case of being lost in the crowd.  

So as someone who knows fuck all about franchise, A Fistful of Boomstick was certainly an interesting experience.  Series main character Ash Williams (portrayed in game by the actual Bruce Campbell, very cool) gets embroiled in what I assume is yet another encounter with demonic monsters called Deadites and it's up to him and his trusty boomstick to make them go away.  This translates into a pretty generic (for the time) yet quite entertaining PS2 action game where you lay waste to demons while solving puzzles to progress a predictable yet decently entertaining enough plot.  The story certainly feels like a bit of an afterthought, a phoned in excuse to facilitate demon murder but judging from the fact that the franchise is about a man with a chainsaw for an arm I think moaning about the predictable twists and sub-par storytelling would be akin to moaning about the lack of story substance in something like Doom.  It's not what we're here for.

So gameplay is king in this one and it's decent enough.  One button for gun, one button for chainsaw arm, kill most things that move until a cutscene happens and then do it again until credits.  Sounds like something that might get repetetive and boring but the game isn't long enough for that to really happen.  I played through the whole thing in one sitting that took around 6 or 7 hours and right as I was maybe starting to get fed up it had the good sense to finish.  Just the right length.  Aside from the boomsticking and the chainsawing Ash also gets access to a spell book which comes with a few offensive options but is mainly used for solving puzzles.  The problem with the spellbook is that it's such a crap offensive option that it's easy to forget that you even have it and then that forgetfullness causes the game to stall horribly as you flounder around with a puzzle that's easily solved with a quick incantation.  For example there was one part where I got a Possess Deadite spell, a spell that you are supposed to use in order to grab a couple of items stashed behind an unkillable horde of the bastards.  A simple puzzle meant to show you how to use the spell but I died there multiple times trying to run in and brute force it (despite the game telling me not to) because I just flat out forgot that I had even picked up the spell.  I was so comfortable in filling everything full of buckshot that the function of my R1 button had completely left my brain.

Despite my own stupidity in that one instance, the other puzzles in this game aren't much better.  There was one puzzle that required the possession of a dog, a spell I DID remember but it then fails to show you that there is a live dog enemy behind an automatically closing door which led me to run around a mostly empty map for about 20 minutes looking for a different dog enemy to possess.  Like trying to solve a jigsaw where someone has just hidden a couple of the pieces around the house and not told you about it.  Aside from that there was a couple of annoying "put the McGuffin in the right sequence in the thing" which would have been fine if the menuing wasn't so slow and one puzzle that involved finding gems with an alarm thing which gave me Sonic Adventure 2 Knuckles flashbacks and I'd rather not thing about those sections of that game.

The bosses are also an incredibly weak aspect of the game pretty much consisting of low-tier Zelda dungeon bosses.  One where you tennis a projectile back, one where you make him run into a wall and the final boss is LITERALLY just stationary King Dodongo.  I would have liked a bit more out of its bigger fights and it's a shame we got this lame, generic, My First Video Game Boss tier shit.

All in all though, these problems aren't enough to ruin what is a pretty decent movie tie in game.  I'd argue that it's worth it just for some of the Bruce Campbell one liners.  It's not going to blow your mind or change your life but Fistful of Boomstick will give you a decently fun action game experience and a sensible chuckle