falling back into the old addiction

[egypturnash]

ultraken mentioned getting Psychonauts for his PC this past weekend and having a lot of fun playing it. He got it via Steam for twenty bucks. Rik has Steam and a machine capable of it, and I haven't played anything like this in about a year. I happen to have picked up a USB controller for MAME purposes the day before Ken talked about the game, too.

So I got it. A day later, after it downloaded, I stayed up late playing it, and then spent all today playing it. Literally. I didn't even get up off my ass to go out to the store to get a new bottle of Diet Coke until Rik came home and wanted his machine back. I got out of bed and booted it up, I got up to pee a few times. That's it for today. Good thing I don't have any paying deadlines, though this is getting me no closer to doing Bucket O Blood in time for a Halloween release. (1/4 boarded, ship designs being pondered. Hints of gags evolving from chance things filling in these mostly full-page boards.)

I think I'm about halfway through it; I got stuck for a while on the very creepy world inside the paranoid conspiracy nut's head. It started to get to me before I finally got through it. It's a really well-done game - and it's clearly made by cartoonists. Moreso than pretty much any 3D platformer I can remember playing, it's a world that's clearly designed. Everything is weird and off-kilter and stylized. But pretty.

Some self-destructive part of me has been wanting to get a used PS2 for, well, a fix of pretty much just this kind of game. With the price of the controller I got, I'm only out forty bucks and a few days, instead of however much a used PS2 costs now plus a game and a TV and a much greater chance of impulsing on another week of my life down the drain every few months... instead I'm getting my fix this way.

Story-based platform bouncy games still just eat my fucking head in a way that I'm really not comfortable with.

I wonder if this is what drives some people into making games: the knowledge that they can so easily lose themselves in one, and wanting to short-circuit that by losing themselves in their own world instead of someone else's?

Comments

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It's been twenty bucks well spent. It's a high-quality fix of big-budget narrative video game crack that'll keep me from jonesing for most of a year!

Yeah, the Milkman level was great, though its final boss was a bitch. I dunno, I stopped seeing the agents as comedic a few times, and it really... um... started to feel like being in a paranoid person's mind. I think it was meeting the girlscouts and having them call me creepy didn't help. I think I've met the person who has Waterloo inside 'em...

I had Nick look at the FAQ to get me into the post office. Partially because the alarm didn't fire when I idly poked at the keyboard the first time. That's it, so far.

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that bit was tricky. I used Marksman to inflict damage, picked up the godseye and used Clairvoyance to see from her perspective, and Shield to block the godseyes she throws. Clairvoyance can be a lot of fun otherwise, particularly the amusing images the agents see when you're holding one of the appropriate items. I saw the agents themselves as simply obstacles, as they're only a threat when you aren't holding the right item. Talking to them can be rather amusing when you're "one of them".

Fred Bonaparte is the guy with Waterloo World. I like his character design and acting.

By the way, if you find all the "safes" and open them, some of the characters have fairly tragic stories.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I did that boss fight the way they seem to want you to do it: throwing her cookie-bombs back at her. Which had the problem of being really, really prone to missing.

Now that I got Clairvoyance, I've been checking what every single character sees me as. It's always something silly, often related to people's backstories. Which are, indeed, pretty twisted - this is really a very adult game. Which might be part of why it got so little promotion: platformers are typically sold as HAPPY FUN BUTT-BOUNCE SUNSHINE TIME, which this really is not - those cartoony View-Master reels of memories touch on a lot of kinds of loss and pain.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

So what you're saying is, it goes far beyond SHINE GET !!

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Err, the second half of my comment seems to have been omitted. Oops. What I meant was this:

So what you're saying is, it goes far beyond "SHINE GET !!" to something like "SHINE GET … but at what cost?"

On second thought, that's not nearly as amusing as it was in my head.