Clod of Cthulhu: Lamprey and Hutch
Three cheers for another special fun-sized finals week post!
So far, Jack’s master plan of breaking a shop clerk out of jail in the hopes that maybe he’d have a clue has backfired on him, to the shock of everyone involved. In this case, “everyone” extends to Jack and Jack alone. Burnham isn’t doing jack shiz, and I refuse to associate myself with anything he does.
Really, that’s the game’s biggest issue. All of these quibbles about how logical his actions are aren’t academic, they’re genuine roadblocks in my attempt to empathize with the character and immerse myself in the game. First-person videogames must work to establish a bond between the protagonist and the player. When the player’s screen goes red, they need to think, Crap! I’ve been shot! If they’re not immersed, they think…well, okay, syntactically, they think the exact same thing, because it’s awkward to phrase it any other way, but what they’re really thinking is that the mook they’re playing as got shot. Not nearly as much impact in that, is there? It’s the difference between playing paintball and watching an eight-year-old get hit in the face with one on YouTube.
Personally, the best way for a game to ruin my immersion is to have the protagonist do something baffling or say something stupid, and Jack Walters is a nonstop buffet of this kind of behavior. It genuinely impacts the game for me to be piloting a stooge of this caliber.
Anyway, sorry, back to the summary. After dodging the guards some more, I find a grate, and after overcoming the functional fixation of Crowbar=Murder Weapon I figure out that I’m supposed to grab it out of my inventory and pry the grate up. We slip down into a medium-length sewer tunnel of some sort, I see some more evil visions, and we finally surface inside the garage, for some reason. I don’t know why this tunnel connects directly to the garage. Who cares, let’s blow this fishstick stand.
There’s a large automobile in here. It looks fine to me, but my companion gives it one glance and automatically diagnoses that it’s broken and needs fixing. He says he’ll get to work on it immediately…but that he has something for me to do for him. Apparently, this locket for his girlfriend is in a safe back at the police station, and he wants me to be a dear and go get it for him.
Thankfully, Jack has enough sense to object, not wanting to put his life on the line to go get a bit of jewelry for this schmuck’s girlfriend. He does not have the presence of mind to point out that they were just inside the police station, and Burnham didn’t mention it at all. He saved it as a sort of surprise, like, yay, guess what, Jack? You get to go back and wade through some more fishmen in a quest to get jewelry from a room we passed on our way here! Happy Birthday!
The kid absolutely refuses to leave without the jewelry. This, despite the fact that we’re wanted by fish people, we both need to escape, neither of us actually know the safe combination, and I’ve got a gun that I am currently pointing at his stupid head. He just can’t leave without his bauble. Fine, you know what? Whatever. I don’t even care anymore. Maybe we should stop by the grocery store on our way out, you know? Pick up some jerky. You feel like jerky? Me, I’m jonesing jerky. Totally worth risking our lives for, amirte?
I leave, go back to the police station, kill some fishmen on the way, get the combination from a book in one of the cells, and open the safe. Yeah, yeah, creepy vision of a fish-hand either putting it in or taking it out. Real scary. You know, these visions lose their punch when I get one every five minutes. They’re all pretty much the same, too. The effect is less like a window into a world beyond my ken and more like a commercial that pops up every single break, on every single station, until you’re ready to overthrow capitalism entirely if it means the suit responsible for the ad is the first against the wall.
When I get back, Burnham’s finished fixing the car. I guess I should call it a truck: it’s a two-seater automobile with a three-walled flatbed attached, kind of like they backed a wagon up against it and then bolted it on. Burnham suggests a fairly simple division of labor: he drives, I shoot. Works for me. Just promise me you’re not going to swerve and crash the thing halfway through.
“Alright, Jack,” he says. “We have to go. Get in the back.”
The back? You mean the passenger’s seat, right? The one right next to you? Shotgun? That’s where you want me? I mean, there is no back seat on this truck, so I don’t get what else you….wait a minute.
Are you seriously suggesting I ride on the flatbed?
Are you high? There’s nowhere to sit. There’s no seatbelts, nothing to hold on to, nothing to stop me from sliding right off the truck onto the road. I’m completely exposed to gunfire, I’m all alone, and I can’t shoot any targets on the road up ahead, leaving you totally exposed. And if for some ass-backwards reason someone has to ride on the murderbed, shouldn’t it be you, considering I just went through considerable effort to rescue you and secure your jewelry?
I can’t get over this. Why should I ride back here? This is beyond insanity. There’s no good cover back here! I am a complete sitting duck. And even if there weren’t dozens of cultists shooting at us and we were just riding down a civilized street to get a quart of milk, you know what would happen? We’d get arrested five feet down the road for reckless behavior. Alternately, ten feet down the road, you’d hit a bump and I’d go flying headfirst into traffic.
Unbelievable.
It causes me great pain to actually climb into the back of the truck. I felt genuinely angry at the developers as I did so. Why, developers? Why was this a good idea? Did you even think about…
Hey, wait, hold on, Burnham, you left the garage doors shut. And they’re barred, too, remember? We couldn’t get through. Let me get out and…hey, stop revving the engine, we need to open the doors! They’re like two feet away, you’re just going to…wait…WAIT!
He slams down the pedal, tires squealing as he rams directly into the closed, barred double-doors, breaking them both into clouds of inexplicable splinters.
Okay, Jack? Everything bad I’ve ever said about you?
I don’t take any of it back, but I would like to add a qualifier to all of it: as stupid as you are, you are not Burnham.
I hope you’re not waiting for a cookie, because I sure as hell am not offering you one.
You know, reading this I kept forgetting that I wasn’t reading the Saga of Cahmel. Particularly when you mentioned jerky.
This is an inherent problem with story-based games. Yes, it’s worse with dumb games, but it’s inherent in the conflict between telling a story and playing a game. Books and movies are a great medium for telling a story, because they’re linear and passive. Games are not.
The more freedom you give a game-player, the harder it is to follow a particular storyline. And vice versa. If you want to tell a story, you have to make sure the player will follow along. You CAN’T give him too much freedom to make his own decisions.
IMHO, the future of gaming is not in story-based games, but in the kinds of games that let the player create his own stories as he’s playing. (As you do, as much as you can, in your Saga of Cahmel, and here, too.) The game developer still needs to create the setting, the NPCs, the AI, and even the initial conditions for any number of different stories, but the actual “story” of the game will be the player’s, which he creates by his choices, by his character(s) actions during the game.
I think that mainstream developers have taken the wrong path here, seduced by the purely superficial similarities of games with movies. But games aren’t movies, and never will be. A few Indie games are starting to move in the right direction, especially Dwarf Fortress, but also such games as Aurora, Mount&Blade, UnReal World, etc. But this kind of game development is still very primitive. IMHO, we’re only at the very beginning of a revolution.
I agree for the most part WCG, but it there is a difference between telling a story and forcing player(or players, as most fo my experience with this sort of thing comes from pen and paper) to play out specfic set pieces the way that the author has it set up in his head.
For example, you could still tell the same sort of story of people escaping from fish city, with a fetch quest, but you could make it more logical. You could have the quest be to get gas for the vehicle, and have Jack open the garage doors. But the designer clearly wanted the jewlery and to have scene where the player bursts down the garage door.
You can see the same sorts of things going on in GTAIV and Saint’s Row (already analysed extremely well by Shamus Young) where both games tell a story, but GTA makes the player follow stage directions where as Saints Row allows a player to make it up as they go.
Idiotic story decsions are annoying, but I find being forced into setpieces much, much worse.
Nobody likes being railroaded. In a table top game, at least the GM/DM can adapt on the fly to the way their story is being altered by the players. A programmed game can’t, rare is the one that can at least give players a chance to tackle the mission in any other form than the one originally intended.
It kind of reminds me of why adventure gaming dropped off. Trying to solve a puzzle the way that the designers intended instead of a way that would make realworld sense. Locked door? Explosive device and/or good shotgun shell? Not the key that you need.
Easy way to get the explanation for why Jack rides in the back is Burnham climbing in to the cab while Jack putzs around the back of the garage. Burnham starts up and tada, Jack jumps in back or gets left in the dust. We already hate Burnham, so no love lost there.
To be totally honest, I wouldn’t notice those kind of details myself.
I’m much easier going and ready to accept the game’s story as the designers intended.
If they wanted me to backtrack to a room I was just in to get a locket I don’t need for a guy I don’t like who wants it more than leaving a police station he was locked in overnight with threats from everyone around to kill him on sight, well, I wouldn’t bat an eyelash at the logic and just do it.
But throw me into, say, a game of Oblivion, or really any open world RPG, and I’d grow bored of it after a while cause I have to come up with my own story, my own motivations and character, which I don’t care for, really.
If I wanted to come up with my own story, why would I play yours?
Wow Rustkarn, you came across as a tad bit angry. What did someone murder you at L4D2 or was it finals beating you over the head with a rock?
Emlyn: That last one, probably, although this part pisses me off a little more than the others.
To be fair to Rutskarn I had pretty much the same reaction to this part of the game. Almost down to the details in fact. Except for being obsessed with jerky.
The truck thing wouldn’t bug me. Primarily because I regularly see people riding in the open backs of trucks. In fact, having done it myself, I can safely say it’s not hard to keep your balance and you can see in front just fine, if you want to. Shooting will be harder, but in all honesty, shooting from any moving car is basically Hollywood-only. Doing it while riding in the back isn’t any more impossible.
The locket thing, though, is just stupid. If they’d done truck keys, that would have fixed several problems with a minimum of effort, but no, make it a locket, because they don’t have enough cliches already. -_-
Rutskarn. Hey, buddy. Not to trod on your metaphorical pun toes, but…
Starkist and Hutch fits better
@SatansBestBuddy:
Agreed completely. I mean, the better the story, the happier I am. But if I just wanted to write fiction, I’d sit down and write fiction.
I have to second Ramsus’ comment, Rutskarn’s wrath is justified. This is about where the game died for me, while the earlier parts were often nonsensical I could usually invent some reasonable explanation as to why they happened, but not even my considerable suspension-of-disbelief powers were able to save this part. It doesn’t help that riding exposed in the back of the truck is one of the most frustrating segments of the game.
@SatansBestBuddy
@Sydney
And if I wanted to watch a movie, I’d watch a movie. But I chose to play a game – you know, an interactive medium? Playing as a stuntman who’s not allowed to see the script is not good gameplay.