Emulating Childhood

I missed out on most of the last two decades of console gaming. No, really. This blog is the chronicle of my adventures using cludgy emulators to play games I never got to experience at the time.

[emulatingchildhood]

Nostalgia Plays 2.1 Fallout 3 [Mods, Mercs, and Metros]

A new Nostalgia Plays series! Don’t worry, though, this is intended to run concurrently with the first, my Thief: Deadly Shadows playthrough, so expect more of that soon.

So. Fallout 3. It’s been a good few years since I last played this. In fact, I played this so long ago that I was still using my ancient (now stripped apart and cannibalised) desktop PC, and I was still worried about the Leaving Cert (end of high school exams, for you yanks). Thus, this game definitely qualifies for Nostalgia Plays.

Mods! I have fond memories of original, vanilla Fallout 3, but frankly it looks and feels kind of dated and bland nowadays. Enter, immersion mods! The main two I’m using (both of which can be found on Nexus) are: Project Reality, which takes away the green tint, adds more realistic and varied skies, and puts in lots of enhanced weather patterns like storms, rain, snow, etc.; and the Flora Overhaul, specifically the Total Devastation edition, which makes everything look like The Road, which is aces in my book.

Hell yeah

I should also note that this is the GOTY edition off Steam - I can’t seem to find my original disc, and I’m not sure it’d work anyway. Also it was on sale, so why the hell not. This means that, if I get to any of the DLC, it’ll be my first time with that stuff.

I actually started playing a few days ago, which has perhaps removed some of the immediacy from this first post, but I’ll summarise and describe things so far as best I can. I also caved and used a pre-made save game to skip the opening and get right to the Wasteland - yeah, yeah, cheating, I know, but I can’t count how many times I’ve been through that opening and it gets a little tedious after a while. I wanted to get to the goods, dammit!

My character is Alice Nine, and she is a bad motherfucker. Preferred weapons are shotgun, flamer, ripper, explosives of all kinds. Preferred armour - as scary and gnarly as possible. Currently wearing a be-goggled sack and bloodstained Talon Mercenary combat armor pulled from the body of a dying man. This reminds me - Alice has a vendetta against the Talon Mercenary Company. There’s some bullshit about a bounty on her head or something? Whatever, it’s her mission to end them by any means, preferably involving fire and explosives.

Atmosphere is everything. On the first day, I crossed the Wasteland with a storm at my back, wind wailing overhead, thunder rolling and crashing, and lightning flashing. Today, after going metro-spelunking, I spent an hour or more slowly making my way through a stretch of the DC ruins in the twilight while nuclear snow fell, eyes straining to see the super mutants I knew were waiting for me among the rubble. Later on, I stalked raiders when the dark and the snow came in again. Fallout 3 can often be goofy and over the top, conflict abrupt and anticlimactic, but when things get tense and fraught and moody like this, oh boy does this game sing.

Tonight, after I’d killed the last raider in the camp, I stood on one of the rooftops I’d emerged onto under the falling snow and gazed for a while out at the blasted trees rising from the fog. They looked like tombstones. 

[emulatingchildhood]

Nostalgia Plays #1.2 Thief: Deadly Shadows [City Streets 1 + Saint Edgar's Church]

The Church is the main focus of this post, but first I have to cover something concerning the City.

So as you make your first wanderings around the city, going to fences to sell all that sweet loot, buying every water arrow you can find, stealing EVERYTHING and generally being a thiefy mcthieferson, you come across these little self-contained stories. For instance, you come across a guy hiring a thug who's pretending to be you to steal a dagger and deposit it in the donations box outside the church (a dagger which you can then find and sell, haha!). Another thing you come across is the proprietor of an armoury and gem-cutting workshop being roughed up by some thugs. Usually, they end up killing him. However, something very strange happened.

You see, sometimes the NPCs' pathfinding leaves something to be desired, and the way their basic AI works is rather idiosyncratic. The gem-cutter ran away when they drew their swords - fair enough. However, he ran away so well that they lost him and couldn't find him until he'd done a full circuit of Stonemarket and came RIGHT BACK, at which point they started chasing him. They killed him. Then a guard saw the body. The guard became suspicious. They killed the guard. That's when a wholesale slaughter began, with several armed thugs (some at odds with each other) stalking the streets, cutting down all who crossed their path. It was terrifying. Blood soaked the cobbles. Women screamed. Bodies dropped. I hid in the shadows, watching the bloody opera play out.

Even though I knew it was a bug in the AI's programming, it felt somehow right, in a sort of sick way. It played into the dark, barely-holding-on feeling that pervades the City, the setting of Thief. Sneaking around the city streets, you feel a fragile surface tension among the Hammerites and the guards and the black market and the roving thugs and citizenry. Some switch flicked here, and the thugs broke the surface tension, and all hell broke loose.

Sadly, I had to reload. It made Stonemarket virtually impossible to navigate properly, with every guard on alert at all times and killers ready to strike anything that moved. But that feeling that something very bad, something completely /wrong/ had happened, that stayed.

God, I love this game.

No bugs at Saint Edgar's Church, thank the Builder. Instead, just a really well designed level. It was a like a perfectly balanced meal - top-notch environmental design, buckets of flavour, fantastic storytelling and numerous options for getting where you need to go and getting what you need to do it. 

Case in point - you need the High Priest's holy symbol to get The MacGuffin from its absurdly well-secured vault. The High Priest stays in his chambers, with an armed guard carrying a torch. His holy symbol is right there, on his desk, close at hand. I could have thrown a gas bomb and knocked them out - boring. Instead, I searched the rest of the level. In particular, I listened to the sermon being given in the nave. At the end, you Hammerite giving the sermon says that if anyone requires a blessing here in the nave, he must ring the church bell and the High Priest will come down from his chambers. Bingo. I rang the bell, the High Priest left his chambers, I stole all his shit and saved a gas bomb for later. Aces.

Thief is full of these kinds of things, where you're rewarded for patience and experimentation and paying attention to both your tools and your surroundings. You'll probably see me harping on about this in every other post in this series.

In the story: Keepers want us to steel MacGuffins from the Hammerites (done!) and the Pagans (that's next post), blah blah blah. More interesting - in the city streets, I freed a strange fish-man from a guard lock-up who said he was returning to someplace called "Kurshok," and he gave me an as-yet unread map. In the Church, we got our first glimpse of the undead and encountered the empty office of a Hammerite named Drept, who appears to be fighting a one-man crusade against the Hag/Grey Lady, a figure of superstition and legend. He is scorned by his brothers in the order for this foolhardy errand. An inscription above his desk mentions someone called Lauryl. Hope you're keeping notes there, reader.

Next up, as previously stated: the Pagan Sanctuary!

[emulatingchildhood]

NOSTALGIA PLAYS #1.1 Thief: Deadly Shadows [Blue Heron Inn + Rutherford Manor]

These two levels are ingrained in my memory. Every corner, every guard, every loading zone, every patch of light and darkness. These were the levels I ended up playing the most initially, simply because of the fact that I kept reinstalling and restarting. It was strange going through them now after so many years, returning to familiar territory. It was easier this time around, partly due to prior knowledge, but also due to the fact that I've just become better at stealth games.

Still, there were a few hairy moments, and getting used to using the blackjack was an unexpected obstacle - in more modern stealth games, doing a takedown is as easy as getting into a rough area around the rear of an NPC and hitting a context-sensitive button. In Thief, there's the blackjack, a weapon which has to be carefully aimed while standing directly behind the target - you can't knock someone out by whacking them across the knees after all.

Thief, like any good stealth game, is a game of extreme patience. At the end of a level, you get a stats page where, among other things, your time spent on the level is listed. I spent a full 77 minutes going through Rutherford Manor according to these stats, and that doesn't to my knowledge include saving and reloading (which I do often - classic PC gaming, y'all) - and that's one of the smaller levels. This pace is probably going to be par for the course for sure.

A point on storytelling: these two levels are easily grouped together because they have a largely self-contained plot that goes across the both of them, a plot concerning one Lord Julian and his family's Bloodline Opal. What's brilliant about Thief is that much of this (apart from Garrett's snarky briefing monologues about stealing the Opal itself) is told through overheard conversations, found journal entries and letters, and Lord Julian being very pleased with himself. We'll see this crop up again in every other level in the game, with incredible detail lying just beneath the surface, detail you might likely miss, that you're left to put together yourself. This will come to its pinnacle at the Shalebridge Cradle, where immersion and environmental storytelling such as this is made into an art-form. But that conversation is for a later post.

Next up, we hit the hub world for the first time, steal everything that isn't nailed down, cash out at the fence, and head to church.

[emulatingchildhood]

NOSTALGIA PLAYS #1 - Thief: Deadly Shadows [Intro]

The Castlevania run is on an extended hiatus right now, so instead I decided to introduce a new segment to this so-far woefully unloved blog - Nostalgia Plays. This is where, going against the remit of this blog entirely, I play through games I did actually play when I was a kid and offer commentary on them. The first instalment is Thief: Deadly Shadows, a stellar entry in the classic Thief series, which more or less defined modern stealth games. I'll offer an introduction in this post, some general thoughts on the game, and then each successive post will more less deal with a single level. I'm gonna have a lot of fun, and I hope you find this interesting. I know I will.

I played Thief: Deadly Shadows in my early teens, back when me and my younger brother had our hand-me-down desktop PCs set up as a sort of makeshift command station on a circular table in our shared bedroom. Sitting at my computer, I could look just past the tower and see his reactions to what he was playing, ask him questions, that sort of thing. We played LANs this way. I remember one evening, though, when we were both playing the demo for Thief. I played that demo in an almost constant state of shivering, adrenal, stressful excitement. I remember looking over at my brother and seeing his rapt stare as he nudged Garrett from shadow to shadow. I remember the daylight leaving the room, and not going to turn the lamp on. I remember us going down to dinner afterwards when our mum called up to us. It was like stepping out of a vivid dream. I could barely keep my hands still. The adrenaline still coursed through our systems.

I don't think I ever got all that far in Thief: Deadly Shadows. I think the stressful, fraught, tense atmosphere got to me in the end, but I always found myself getting sucked back in. It was one of the most immersive gaming experiences I had ever had up to that point. Recently, especially after the release of the frankly abominable Thief 2014, I've been evangelising to my friends about the original Thief games, particularly Deadly Shadows, and I realised it had been many, many years since I last played. So I picked it up cheap on Steam yesterday, added the Sneaky Upgrade mod so my resolution was supported, and then dove right in.

We'll see how this all went in the next post, where I'll be talking about the Blue Heron Inn (our tutorial mission), and Rutherford Manor (the first proper mission of the game).

[emulatingchildhood]

STILL PLAYING Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

#2

This game is massive.

I mean it. Massive. I knew this was one of the original funky metroidvania semi-sandbox jobs, but man. This shit is huge. I've been playing for a few hours on and off now, and I've barely explored even a fraction of the map.

It's not just the sheer area, though. That image there is the merchant I came across today. He's the Librarian. He greets you warmly and then unleashes list upon list of items you can buy. It's a little intimidating.

I think I had an expectation that, because of the year this came out, it'd be, if not a tiny game, then at least fairly small compared to a lot of games I've played. Guess I was wrong. This got me thinking, actually, about exploration and sandboxes. It's been a while since I've had virgin territory to conquer, game-wise. I'd forgotten how damn fun it is. Pushing out to the edges until you can't go any further, then going somewhere else to see if you can get another route - it tickles the part of my brain that digs big fantasy novels and hiking through forests and up hills. I'm keeping myself as blind as possible to keep that feeling alive, and I'm having a blast.

It's been a while since I hit a boss. The last one was the Doppleganger, but he wasn't too bad, I'm beginning to get very, very afraid.

[emulatingchildhood]

NOW PLAYING Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

#1

I used to get truly pissed-off when I played games on any difficulty level above "Easy". I used to grit my teeth and shout and curse. Then, a few years ago, some switch flipped in my head. Now difficulty is not something I flinch away from or get angry at - it's something that, at best, I embrace. This is due to the fact that I started playing games more intelligently, as GAMES rather than passive experiences, as things to test skill and grit. I began to savour challenge.

This is also due to the fact that I started playing games that treat me right. Games that give the player something to work against, but also the tools to deal with it. So, we come to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I've always heard of this game, of the Metroidvania style, and I've probably played games in the same vein before. I've always heard about the difficulty, about how bosses crush you mercilessly. I wasn't prepared for how fucking fun it was though.

Let me put it like this: smashing your head against a brick wall until you break through sounds painful. Then you play Castlevania, and experience the joy of learning where the weak point in the wall is, then gleefully hopping over it and KICKING THE SHIT OUT OF SLOGRA AND GAIBON THOSE FIREBALL-CHUCKING FUCKERS

Sorry. I spent a lot of time on those two the other night. Words were had. And by words I mean swords connecting painfully with monstrous kneecaps. And throwing-axes. Oh so many throwing-axes. That boss fight is case in point of the Castlevania mentality - for retry after retry, I died and died. But every time, I learned more of their pattern, and tried different things, and got better. I improved my skill at playing the game. Then I cheesed them out with a hail of throwing-axes. It's brilliant.