But i love Dreamweb to death. Because i infer.

In 1992 i was 10 years old, and despite trying hard, completely incapable of understanding what Dreamweb was all about. It was a Blade Runner-esque dark sci-fi trip into a perpetually rainy city where the protagonist, Ryan, is suffering through a psychotic break.  Ryan, through his dreams, receives messages from a mystical council of hooded monks, who assure him the world is going to end unless 7 powers are stopped. These 7 powers conspire to tear apart the Dreamweb, which i assume is akin to Stephen King’s “beams”; the fabric of reality. These 7 powers are contained by 7 people. Ryan must murder these seemingly completely unrelated 7, or the world will end. As such, the game boils down to 7 murders. The puzzles are essentially murder scenarios to be played out.

In waking life, Ryan is miserable, working as a bartender in a dive bar. His frequent nightmares and messages from the dream world are beginning to distort his perception of reality, drives him into a deep depression, skewing his priorities to the point of open neglect. His girlfriend, Eden, a receptionist at Sartain corporation, is at the point of the game’s start weary of Ryan’s constant nightmares and turn towards the dark. She loves him, but he is drifting away from her, and she’s realizing that at this point she can do nothing but watch.

The game begins as Ryan wakes up from yet another apocalyptic nightmare. He’s been given the name of the first power, and has reached a point where the dreamworld seems more real than reality. He is convinced, and sets out to perform his divine duty. It’s the middle of the night, at Eden’s apartment. Eden sleepily tries to console her boyfriend, but drifts off, as Ryan gets dressed and exits into the perpetually rainy neon-lit metropolis, knowing only his target’s last name.

Granularity

The heart of Dreamweb’s appeal is atmosphere. Almost every element of the game is fanatically detailed. A common criticism of the game was the ability to pick up nearly every item that wasn’t bolted down, which resulted in a whole heap of confusing puzzles. Why, for instance, would you need a screwdriver to bend open a locked cabinet when you were already holding a full set of cutlery? It’s telling that the game’s UI contained a separate zoomed-in per-pixel view of the cursor’s surroundings;

This was a game that knew it was firmly embedded in a hardcore pixel-hunt and gave players a sniper scope to carry out the grim task. It was also not above putting players in situations where, if they failed to pick up a key item, they could leave without it and never be given the chance to get it back. Knowing what a key item was was hard enough to begin with.

Rather awesomely, the game models a sort of 1980s conception of the internet, being console command driven. Ryan can access a terminal to check his mail and the daily news, as well as check the contents of the game world’s common storage unit, the Cartridge. Some cartridges hold information vital to advancement, but the world is literally strewn with red herring cartridges, and the process of digging out the gold could be absolutely maddening.

The murders themselves, the payoff if you will, were loud and graphic. Ryan’s first kill involves breaking into a penthouse hotel room, burying an axe in the chest of an unsuspecting man, taking the head off another with a gun, and coldly executing his target as he begs for his life. The red flows free and often, and morality is never a question. Everyone is rotten, and anyone can die.

All this is framed in a wonderfully moody synth-based soundtrack by Matthew Seldon, which elevates the game from oddity to something quite special. If anything is fondly remembered about the game these days, it’s the music.

Dreamweb flounders a bit in terms of storytelling. It paints a broad picture of a man who thinks he’s saving the world, but is wildly out of control, and bombards us with hints that he might not be mad at all. Taken at face value, Dreamweb is a basic story of a Jesus figure who suffers for our sins and saves us all from chaos and oblivion, and for me this was both its largest strength and weakness. It begins with enough hint that Ryan is simply going bananas, but spends the last two thirds of the game reassuring us that he is in fact right. We are never forced to question our motive for murdering these people, and characters close to Ryan vanish as soon as they appear. The game can’t see the forest for the trees, and struggles to draw emotional investment. The mystery dies quickly, and leaves us with atmosphere and gore. A concept this good deserves so much more.

A Unity3D remake

I’ve been scrambling for a Unity3D project to devote my time to, and I’ve always gravitated towards the adventure game. Dreamweb is a wonderful place to visit but a tough place to stay, and every time i boot it up i recognize more things that could be bettered. A dark cyberpunk murder-scenario psychological adventure game? Why not give it a go!

I’ve been working on a Dreamweb re-imagining for the past month. I’m doing basic engine work at the moment, putting the mechanics into place for puzzle mechanics, item use, inventory management and, yes, combat. The game will be a first person adventure game in the vein of Penumbra, with a large emphasis on atmosphere, physical interaction, item-on-item puzzles, social engineering, computer interfacing and short, sharp combat. This is not a first person shooter. Bullets are important and big events, and a single one will do.

Besides this, i am writing a new script. The outline and characters are the same as the original game, but dialogue, puzzles, locations and core elements of Ryan’s character are thoroughly altered. So much so i am considering hiding Ryan and his name, as well as making his gender ambiguous.

I’ll keep posting news here as i go on. For now, as a teaser, here are the first 3 pages of the script for your perusal. Enjoy, and do post feedback! Dreamweb! Yeah!

http://playthisthing.com/randomness-blight-or-bane

Fantastic read, heartily recommended if you’re a game designer

I’ve played through the Metal Gears on the NES, the MSX, the Playstation, even the Metal Gear Acid ones on the PSP, and as i’m going through MGS3 now there are just some choices that i have no idea why they haven’t backed out on. I know they released MGS3 Subsistence now to mend certain things like the draconian camera, but as far as i know the control setup is, was, will always be the wildest bout of controller masturbation any developer ever put a joypad through. Kojima’s credo it seems is If It’s There Make A Jonesey Of It (i just made that expression up. It means to use it a lot).

The PS2 dual shock joypad has the following buttons:
2 Left buttons
2 Right buttons
8 directional joypad
4 analog face buttons
two analog sticks that depress for another 2 buttons
a select button
a start button

That gives the joypad 20 buttons (TWENTY) which may be utilized by developers.

In every single gameplay mode of MGS, every single button is being put to use. Sometimes the uses differ depending on the situation you’re in, how long they’re held down, how HARD they’re pressed, how they’re pressed in combination with others.

With all this in mind, recall that Solid Snake or any other snake progeny moves like a broken matchbox car compared to the more recent Sam Fisher of the Splinter Cell games. Splinter cell has context sensitive buttons. Metal Gear has a button for every context. It’s been a while since i played Falcon 4, but if i’m not completely mistaken, it took less than 20 buttons to fly an F-16 fighter/bomber, and that’s in real life.

What the fuck is up with a world where a game i’ve played for almost a decade still baffles me with its technicalities? This is a game where moving towards an enemy slowly and moving towards an enemy stealthily are two separate actions, and as such is mapped to two entirely separate input methods. It was confusing enough in MGS2, but at least that planted you in a somewhat rigid environment. MGS3 places you in an open, “free” area with myriads of tactical possibilities, and as awesome as that is, the moments where the game just flat out stumbles over its torturous button layout are so plentiful it makes me seriously question mr Kojima’s prowess as a game designer. As a storyteller and systems engineer i have no doubt in my mind he’s a class act through and through, but what makes Miyamoto such a god damn champ is that he can convey this level of perceived complexity through an action that flows through your fingers like a word off your tongue.

Some games revel in complexity. System Shock 2 had an interface that almost felt designed as a moodpiece rather than an actual interface (when else would you want details on what exactly a cup was). Deus Ex thrived on its same level of perceived complexity, where a point and click inventory system would allow users to handle multiple kinds of ammo and other categories of objects. Deus Ex 2 took more flak from die hard players than any other fora, and one of the major reason was a “dumbing down”.

Making Solid Snake control like a game character and not some arcane device uncovered in an alien mineshaft wouldn’t, in this gamer’s eye, be dumbing the game down. If MGS4 controls anything like MGS3, salty tears will fall, because this idiocy is messing up a perfectly good game of storydriven stealth action.

I’m pretty impressed something this simple can have such an impact. Really makes you think about some choices you’ve made in your life.

Nothing screams “we couldn’t even bother” like a final boss fight that determinedly breaks the rules of the game up until then. It is well known that Namco have never even bothered balancing their Tekken franchise, with character matchups that aren’t just broken, but WILFULLY so. Want to put Anna Williams up against Bryan Fury? Good luck with that, you’ve got a far-far harder fight ahead of you than if you played Yoshimitsu.

So in terms of balance, Namco have basically handed the gauntlet to the multiplayer gamers, who have to create some kind of unwritten code of honor as to how to play the game, with characters being delegated into “tiers”. No wonder Itagaki rips on Tekken.

Namco, you ASSHOLES.

Jinpachi? What in gods name were you thinking? You take an otherwise entirely enjoyable story mode (by fighting game standards), and end it with a big fat cheat? If your boss isn’t hard enough, there is a VERY fine line between cheap and challenging, and you take that line and basically LEAP joyfully across it with Jinpachi.

1. Attack that comes out in less than 5 frames, stuns you for 2 seconds and has no buildup? Check.
2. *UNBLOCKABLE RANGED ATTACK* in a game that’s previously been known to disregard Street Fighter’s fireball massive? Check. Does it take 65% health off your bar? Yeap. Is it dodgeable? With great effort, but then another one is coming right after it so why bother.
3. Character mesh so MESSY that identifying the buildup to a move among it’s myriads of useless wavy junk becomes nigh on impossible? Check.
4. HUGE character mesh, making catching the difference between a high and a medium or a medium or a low attack a complete lottery? Check.

Fighting game developers: If you can’t include the last boss of the game as a playable character because you KNOW it’s cheap, your design flat out sucks. Last time i saw something this retarded was in Marvel Vs Capcom 2, with a screenfilling multiphase thing that would be better off in Gunstar heroes. Complete bullshit.

Rubbing salt into my wounds, Tekken 5 has a model for unlockables that requires you to play the game for a very, very long time indeed, with the fastest way to moneys being the story mode. Playing through the story mode and having to vomit my way through Jinpachi THIRTY TIMES is about as unpleasant a thought as i can come up with right now.

And Jeff Gerstman, you list “tough final boss fight” as a PRO? Jinpachi isn’t challenging, he’s a pain in the ass! It’s like saying putting needles under your feet makes running a marathon more challenging!