gamehugs

all those little game moments that made us have a feeling or do a think

[gamehugs-blog]

A little insight - Gravity Rush

There are moments, sometimes, when a little insight becomes everything. See in Gravity Rush you play as Kat, so named because she is friends with a cat, who breaks with convention by being called Dusty, rather than Human. One of Kat’s friends is Raven, who is friends with a raven, although I don’t know the name of the raven. Perhaps it is called Human, which would explain the Dusty thing.

And Kat, who is a stranger in the world (she fell in from the sky one day, like me), lives quite happily with Dusty in the sewers. And she really is happy – a childish, naive delight at having found a big pipe to call home. The first thing she does is go and grab some furniture, a chair, a bed, a desk, donated by people who are all very suspicious to me but not to lovely Kat. Soon, and with a little flourish, there is a proper little room. Still in a pipe, still in the sewers, but happy and homely nonetheless.

Although Kat goes off on a lot of adventures, flying through the streets and into the sky, walking on the underneath of bridges, you can always go back home. And see when you do, you can look inside, and see Kat there, with her chair and her bed that you helped her collect. A little diorama of happy Kat and her cat Dusty, living in the sewers, beneath the city.

See, that was it - a static screen where you can save, or warp or change outfits. Sometimes she is lying down sleepy on the bed, sometimes standing, milling about. It’s window into Kat’s life away from the gravity switching and kicking and jumping. A reminder that here is a person who lives and survives and exists outside of the times when you’re with her.

Then one day I was laying on my couch, as I am wont to do, when the clouds parted and a shaft of sunlight struck upon my screen. Dash it, I thought, reflection obscuring my window into Kat’s room (I had come home to change her outfit from the default, which is a strange corset thing that offended the old lady who gave me a chair, to a lovely dull sweater and skirt). I shifted, sitting up, still looking at the screen, and a chime played in my head and my eyes opened wide and a smile formed slightly on my face. Because as I moved the vita around, so too did my view of Kat’s room change.

And suddenly there was this connection between this screen and the game and everything else. Move it up and you can see a little up, down and you can see down. Look, a rug! You can look right at that rug! The screen is a window but someone has left it open and you can poke your head through. If there was a pie on the table it feels as if you could almost reach in and ... take it.

It’s not just in Kat’s house, either. Float up above the city and you can swirl around, vita in hand, peeling away the scenes in front to reveal the game dimension behind. And that tunnel at the end of your arms is a hole to fall down that you don’t want to climb out of. That’s not a chair! It’s the clock tower. That’s no picture of a boat in harbour hung on a wall, it’s the seething mass of a gravity storm. You’re being deceived, it’s not a cheese lunch on your plate at all – it’s the gaudy neon of the Pleajeune Ferris Wheel.  A world behind the world – with a little imagination you can see it and familiar things become new again.

I don’t know if you’ve played Gravity Rush. You should, if you can, because it is full of charm and character and joy. Not least among these is the sensation that what you hold in your hands isn't a flat screen full of moving colours, but a place that is as real and alive as any other. And you can peer in, and look around, and step inside and live there for some hours of your day, which is important. It’s important because every new place you go is another part of your life and who you are, and Kat’s room and her sewer world and the city above could be part of your life too, like they’re part of mine.

And maybe when you hold your vita up to a door and see on the other side the bustle of a city from 30 feet up, your imagination will make you smile, which will be nice. 

by ger

[gamehugs-blog]

Rollcage - a flight and a crash

I talk almost all the time about how I like to play around with games - test them from the inside out, to try and get somewhere I’m not supposed to be or break the physics or whatever. I just enjoy prodding about - I like the feeling of being slightly, inoffensively naughty that goes along with it and I like seeing what lies beyond the limits built up during a game’s creation. I don’t know where this compulsion began exactly - probably it’s just a pretty boring expression of pretty typical levels of interest - but I do remember quite clearly a few early instances where it came to light, one of which was with Rollcage. Rollcage is one of the many futuristic racing games that never quite caught on like Wipeout or F-Zero, but they tried their best. They all had their own little twists - in Rollcage the vehicles had four massive wheels and with enough speed they could drive along walls and ceilings, tumbling upside down without a problem. It was fast and slick and fun.  

The track Daytona was my favourite. Or at least, the one I remember the most. A very simple track, just a loop really, green and hilly with an optional detour along the sand beside the sea. I spent a long time playing this track in time trial mode, messing around with the destructible buildings which were a really neat idea at the time if pretty inconsequential during play. If all their support pillars were destroyed they collapsed down into giant boulders that I liked rolling around on the beach. But that’s not the thing. The memory is pretty clear … the track’s last bend is littered with speed pads. Hit all these just right - right, centre, left, centre - and I’m almost flying already, barely in control. The track rises up in the final stretch before the line. It’s a jump, it’s supposed to be dramatic, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be quite like this. I straighten up. 500kph. Gripping the controller tightly, I squeeze down hard on both shoulder buttons at once, firing two turbo boosts simultaneously. The speed counter rockets and so do I. Flying … Airborne, out of control. Out of the track. It doesn’t even look like a track any more, certainly not a place, not the coastal cliffs I was supposed to be racing through. From this height all pretence of a world, a reality, disappears. The surrounding land is filled with great blank holes. All solid walls are revealed as just these odd, folded two-dimensional shapes placed in front of each other. It’s all set dressing with no substance, an illusion that only works from one low angle. The whole track a series of flat inward-facing planes floating in a weird wide space infinitely blue below and orange above. I cross the finish line but the time’s not important. I race back around, launch myself up above everything again. Again, again. The flight is most of the fun, really, it feels like I’m straining at the edge of the game’s limits with the speed and the height of it. A great sensation, as though I might break free entirely with just a little more effort. But that half-second sneak peek behind the scenes is what drives me round again, a base intrigue to see out of bounds. 

*

It was around this point in time I think that games became more important to me than before. Not just distractions and slightly more than a hobby, they were a bigger piece of my life than that. There’s lots of reasons for that which come from me, but I think this was one of the reasons which came from the games themselves. I began to see them differently. No longer as solid, indelible objects, but as things with edges and gaps and weaknesses. Probably a transition most people went through. A slight change in attitude, beginning to analyse things rather than just accept them. Growing up, I guess. That wasn’t the end, though, it didn’t shatter my perfect fantasy worlds or anything like that - it intrigued me, drew me in even more. These things were flawed, with their quirks and accidents of design, and I wanted to see everything behind what was presented to me. Just for the hell of it, or to try and figure out why things were the way they were. I realised that people had made these things, I wanted to see how and why.  Perhaps the time before that transition is why we’re usually quite lenient about the games we played as children. I know when I was younger it never really crossed my mind to question the game itself. Nothing was too hard or badly designed, it just was. I held the controller on its side to play Solstice on the NES because somehow it made more sense to me that way with the game’s isometric viewpoint. And that’s just how I played the game, all there was to it. Well, I changed, and games changed too. With early 3D worlds there needed to be a lot of trickery and a lot of stagecraft involved to sell the environment as a reality. I’m glad these two changes intersected for me, and my desire to see beyond bounds synced up with the existence of games which allowed such revelations due to their technical limitations. I remember Rollcage most strongly in one static image - me hanging too far above the track, able to see the cracks between everything below me and the edges of the space it all floated within. Almost free. I’ve kept pushing and prodding at games all my life. It’ll never be quite that same as that picture in my head, but I still feel a thrill every time the curtain lifts a little and I catch a glimpse of something backstage that I know I wasn’t supposed to see.

by alex

[gamehugs-blog]

Underneath the surface - Far Cry 3 and Ecco the Dolphin

Usually I love to jump off things. Just take a leap through the air and plunge. I fell in love with diving in Zora’s Domain in Ocarina of Time and I’ve never fallen out of love. Borderlands 2 lets you fall any distance without damage and I would leap off anything. The swan dives in Assassins Creed and the chance to launch downwards from Skyward Sword's Skyfall Island.  The sudden sensation of being weightless.  When everything is right, there’s that feeling as if my stomach is rising up into my throat and threatening to burst out as the ground approaches. Have you ever been to the top of a high dive board and stood on the edge? It makes my hands and feet tingle to think about it.  What game was I playing recently where your character would scream, ah ahhh ahhhh! in terror as you fell past the safe distance? I liked that. In Dishonored, Corvo can scale giant buildings and leap off them only to blink to safety at the last second and avoid death.  What a rush.  --  Unlike Borderlands most worlds don’t leave you unpunished for taking abyssal leaps. Often the only way is to find a nice body of water to cushion the fall. As with Zora’s Domain, the dive into water becomes a Thing. A big leap into a puddle, a childish splash.  Far Cry 3 has a lot of falling, if you like. You can paraglide from mountain tops and cliffs and just...let go, whenever you feel like it. The prompt that appears is so hard to resist. But poor Jason Brody hurts himself falling 5 feet so your only safe bet is to land in the water.  And that landing, sheesh.  You go deep, arms flailing, bubbles, disorientating. The sudden shift from light to dark is blinding and for a second you have no control. Vulnerable, weaponless and amidst danger. Terrible, terrible danger. the danger of the deep.  --  For a long time if you asked me what my phobia was, I’d tell you “oh boy, I’m shit scared of the deep ocean”. I might not say “oh boy”. I don’t say that in real life. But there is some terrible fear of the unknown beneath my feet, miles down, miles of unknown, GIANT creatures. Whales and squids and huge fish. Gosh. Imagine just floating and then a huge whale is just there oh my god.  But you see I love whales, I love the sea and I’m no more scared of sharks than any sane person should be. Nor am I actually scared of the deep ocean when confronted with it. I’ve sailed boats and leapt off the side without a second thought as to what is circling beneath. I suppose the reality is significantly less frightening than my own imagination.  So why, when I stand on the edge of a boat in Far Cry 3 and look down into the sea, do I feel such terror?  --  I’ve seen the tip of an old ruin through the waves, my map that I bought from a vending machine tells me there’s a relic inside. I want the relic, because, well, because I like the noise it makes when I pick it up, alright? Leave me alone. There’s a boat in the dock which I can “charter” (I just take it because, like everything on the island, it exists purely for my pleasure, right?), a crappy little fishing boat with a mounted gun. I’m off out into the sea, pirate, captain, bounty hunter. Vrrrrm, full speed ahead to starboard, down the mizzen mast etc. It’s a motor boat so really it’s just a loud engine and the smell of petrol and wet metal, but I can dream.  And it’s all fine until I have to stop and stand and look down into the water. After a few metres everything is invisible. There’s treasure down there but what else? It could be anything waiting for me, ready to attack. A giant manta ray, a horrible shark, ANYTHING.  But the treasure, oh that treasure and the little noise. And it’s only a couple of metres it will be easy to find and once I’m inside the ruin nothing will be able to get me. One more look down, a quick look back to shore and the volcanic mountains in the distance. Ok go.  Ok, go  Ok ok ok this time ok jump.  --  Far Cry has helped me pinpoint the cause of my virtual thalassophobia, you see. When was the last time you took a dive under the sea? Endless Ocean on the Wii? That ocean hunting game? Ecco the Dolphin on Dreamcast? Yeah. Ecco the Dolphin. That was it.  --  Early in Ecco's adventure you find Aquamarine Bay. It is sandy, serene. There are some benevolent turtles and a coral reef and some playful fish to chase. A beautiful three dimensional playground to soar and leap and dive about in. It’s a very calm place and very safe. You can swim about in peace and enjoy the scenes, free.  But the mouth of the bay leads to the ocean, and the ocean is dark and endless and full of sharks and whales and squids probably. You can’t see them, but they are there definitely, definitely.  It looms, this giant wall of water. It is foreboding, awful. The gaping maw of the beast, how can it not unsettle you? You, this tiny creature, vulnerable from all sides beneath the infinite sea. A nothing! A morsel!  Knowing it’s there, how can you continue to be happy? You’ve eaten the apple and it cannot be uneaten. Innocence is lost. Ecco’s playground is a sham, a bubble of placidity in a literal ocean of horror. How can you frolic now, with the sharks and whales and giant icthiosaurs probably roaming, watching, waiting? You become the lobster in the tank, suddenly aware that your tank is in a restaurant and hungry diners are pondering and selecting and soon it will be your end.  And they make you go out there! The monsters, force you into the darkness and the danger! To go out there and kill a shark, to find one, to attack one. Leave your nest, this joyful tank, and plunge into the restaurant.  A shark, and me a mere dolphin?!  This is suicide. Madness. Approaching, the water feels colder, the pressure greater. The sudden vulnerability is immense, almost deafening. They could attack from anywhere, swift, deadly, unseen and unheard, death from the silent watery shadows.  And then it happens, out of the gloom a darting shape jaws opening head tearing blood spouting and Ecco,  poor Ecco is no more.  --  Is it any wonder I don’t want to dive in?  --  No come on come on there’s nothing there.  Go  Go  Ok.  Jason puts his hands together and there’s the bubbles and the darkness and a moment where I can’t do anything or hear anything or see anything. Just floating inside the sea.  Quick frantic looking around in all directions but there’s nothing about, right now. The distance merges together into a solid wall of colour. Is that something over there? Look away look away. I have to get a move on before I suffocate or something gets me. What I don’t like is that I can’t see below or above me. The pressure of the unknown is closing in from every side, except one- which is forward. So go that way and stop thinking about it, idiot!  I circle the ruin seeking an entrance, feeling time tick away very quickly. It’s not just knowing that I’ll run out of air, but the feeling that surely the longer I wait the sooner something will get me.  I really don’t want something to get me. I have a terrible fear of something getting me.  But I can’t find a way in. This is awful I start to panic come on come on I can’t go round again where is it where is it. Do I have to go deeper? Please not deeper.  Ok one quick look on this side of the building, a bit deeper and if it’s not there I’ll go back up to the boat. The safe boat, the lovely boat with its gun and its chair.  Look look no it’s just a wall there’s no entrance there’s nothing go up go up go up oh my god something is definitely chasing me go quicker! Climb why can’t I climb on the boat there was something right behind me oh come on come on I can feel it right behind me pull yourself up stupid man!  I look back down and there’s nothing there, of course. I don’t think there are any sharks in this part of the water.  Oh look there’s an entrance to the ruin up here on the surface. Let’s not go back in the water again. 

by ger

[gamehugs-blog]

Hotel Dusk - living a lenticular life

I can’t use the word dusky even once here. Police me. I need it, oh how I need it.

The allure of a video game is that it lets you be in two places at once. It’s not so much an escape as a sort of quantum state, an entanglement. It isn’t just that your imagination is transported elsewhere, but your entire physical experience is multiplied. You exist in a video game world just as you do in the physical world. Often this dual existence plays out as being stationary and in motion at the same time. Passive while active, loud while quiet. Running across rooftops while sat in a chair, shouting at dragons with a mouth that has been closed for hours, firing a rocket and kissing a robot. It is a remarkable superpower, to exist twice at once. In 2007 when Hotel Dusk came out I had just moved from one of the world’s busiest cities to a house on a crossroads amid green fields. You could see the stars. I’ve grown up in a landscape that changes every day, people scurrying back and forth and a thousand places to go. A city is a living thing and you learn to expect the commotion and the movement. A sudden life of plants is another language. It evolves and moves but I can’t read it. One page looks much like another to me. At that time I felt disconnected and cut off and like I was living in a static world. Days melted together into a long string. Although I lived in this world of sky and leaves, I lived in another world, too. It is a restaurant, it is a dusky (dammit) bar with soft elevator jazz and the smell of whisky and maybe smoke. It’s a brown place filled with grey people and it is slow. Hotel Dusk  is small. There are only a few guests and you get to know them well. Time is divided into discrete segments and you can only do so much before it moves on again.   Of an evening I would go down to the restaurant, sit at the table, eat Rosa’s rib-eye with hash browns. Sit and eat and wait or think. Afterwards I walk around the room, looking at pictures on the walls. There’s only a couple of tables and they’re all empty. If I leave there are things to do but I don’t have to leave. You can walk around that room forever, if you want. Later at night I visit the bar, have a drink with the bartender. I take a sip of bourbon, and maybe I take a sip of bourbon too. The ice rattles in my glass and I can feel the heat and the cold at the same time. Both of these things happen but I can only taste one of them. It’s lonely but I’m not alone. People keep interrupting. To escape I would go outside and look up at the moon and feel like the only person in the world. I would sit at the bar and look at the empty glass and feel the same. The door creaks open and someone comes in to talk but I don’t really want to talk, I just want to sit. There’s an investigation to do but sometimes I just want to ignore it and hide away in the bar. It only strikes me now, looking back, I think the two lives resonating like that amplified my experience. I felt melancholy and it echoed. An empty house, an empty restaurant. My two lives added up. Wandering around small rooms, you can leave but there isn’t really anywhere to go. See when I started writing this I thought to tell you how playing Hotel Dusk was me trying to grab a piece of the old city I’d left behind. An urban place with people, seductive and stylish and created. It was supposed to be me choosing a place that was deliberate over the haphazard arrangement of my new surroundings. A way to get back a little of what I’d lost. But that’s not what was happening, my friends. In the end the hotel bar and my own house, my two lives, were complimentary. I wasn’t loud and quiet or running and standing. I was sitting and drinking and sitting and drinking. Waiting and waiting. Throughout life I think you find places that have a significance, because they are containers for thoughts and action. The architecture of a place gets imprinted on your memory when it matches just so with how you feel. Perhaps Hotel Dusk is where I feel most cut off and alone because of that.

  by ger

[gamehugs-blog]

Shadow of the Colossus - what goes up

Don’t worry, it’s okay. I’m not gonna talk about feeling lonely but content or subtle narratives or falling in love with a horse or anything like that. Though I’ve got some pretty darn romantic special interest equine fiction up on my livejournal if you are interested. His mane across my shoulders as we embrace - a thousand black whispers, a thousand silken fingers on my skin. Monochrome, quivering, both of us straining inside our skin, desperate to-

Sorry. I get distracted easily. Very easily, actually, in games as much as anything. Mostly by jumping, I love to jump up everywhere I can go and anywhere I’m not supposed to go. But there’s a bunch of smaller things I’m sure many other people do too. Maybe shoot the walls and see how many bullet holes will show up before the first ones start disappearing. Same with footprints in the snow. Look at mirrors, smash windows, splash about in puddles. Just having a play, seeing what details the developers decided were worth including and to what extent. One of these little distractions is shooting stuff into the air to see if it falls down again. Maybe it hits an invisible sky ceiling and disappears or it just sails onwards forever, into the darkest reaches of intergalactic space.

The arrows in Shadow of the Colossus are pretty persistent. Sticking around in trees and earth and animals alike. They'll also fall back to earth after a long flight upwards. And, if they are the flash arrows which can be unlocked through the game's time attack mode, they will fall and explode, throwing up dirt and smoke. Things like explosions feel a little out of place in Shadow of the Colossus. It is a game of massive things contrasted with tiny details, all of them quiet or slow. The lumbering colossi, the vast plains. The fruit of a tree, a tortoise in the desert. The first time the peace is distorted is by the colossi themselves, who will eventually start shooting lightning. Crashing, jarring disturbances - danger. The flash arrows let Wander feel a little more even, a little more powerful himself, even if they are more novelty than genuine aid. Somehow with these arrows there exists a theoretical chain of events in my mind. A boy sits upon his horse, draws an arrow and fire it high into the sky. He rears up and breaks into a gallop, across the dusty grass towards the great tower where his love waits. The boy climbs up onto the saddle as he rides, controlling the horse with just the reins. And that arrows comes down upon him, upon them both, with the roar of powder. Throwing them apart. Horse and boy climb back to their feet, boy pats horse gently on the neck. A reassurance, an apology perhaps. End scene. A pattern played out in my mind. All possible, just not easy. The perfect aim upwards, the perfect movement onwards. Direction, timing, fall, fall, recovery, comfort. Maybe you’ve chased such moments yourself before, if not so explicitly. It’s all about freedom and fluidity, grace. Just Cause 2 is full of freedom, to engineer moments of excitement for no reason than the feel of it - two vehicles falling madly through the sky, a switch, a swoop, a close-call recovery. In Super Meat Boy I never wanted to just complete a level, but do it properly, where I didn’t feel like I was battling against obstacles but I became a part of them. A swooping gliding thing, moving smoothly between the other parts, me and the machine together. Outstanding design coupled with a joyful fluidity of movement. Remainder by Tom McCarthy is a novel all about a man chasing moments such as these. He sets up intricate recreations of mundane events to evoke vaguely defined, barely remembered emotion. Each scene played out again and again at his command to the point of obsession, trying to get everything just so, just right, just … perfect. All of it undermined by the chaotic nature of people, existence and even the angle of the sun as it changes through the seasons. Games are easier to control than life, and that's maybe why I love them so. But even then, chasing moments can just as easily become obsessions, especially when the movements involved become really complex or rely on the actions of other players. The enticing thrill of the potential perfect game. This moment of mine in Shadow of the Colossus comes, eventually. After an hour and more it happens just as I imagined it, to the slightest movement. No hesitations, no awkward twitches in character or camera. The flight and the fall, just so. No great excitement in it though, no shouting, no achievement chime. Just a little smile from me. I had a picture in my mind and then I made it happen with my own hands. Choreographer and director and performer all, to an audience of one. A love note not just for games with graceful movements but those with surplus motions. This scene in Shadow of the Colossus wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t stand up on the saddle, if I couldn’t cap it all off by patting Argo on the neck afterwards. Completely unnecessary actions in terms of usefulness during gameplay, but entirely essential for me and my experience. I’m reminded of all the extra flips and spins, dives and somersaults included in the Tomb Raider games. None of them are actually helpful during the game, but they are important to me, in shaping the moments I remember.  Games talk a lot about freedom on a large scale - make big decisions, have a wide variety of mountains to wander up. But it’s these small freedoms I always find more enticing - more, well, freeing. To move as I desire, to craft moments as I wish, to express myself in smooth actions for no reason besides the feel of it. 

by alex 

[gamehugs-blog]

All right guys! Pile on! Ready?

chie