Deadly Premonition: First Impressions

There are times when I latch onto a trivial entry in the vast body of human art and achievement and over-analyze the stuffing out of it. Like when I say that Maniac Mansion is the origin of all that is good or interesting in video games or that the meaning of life can be found in Beetlejuice. These things just speak to me in a way that Wuthering Heights or Battlestar Galactica just don't.

Deadly Premonition is one of those magical things. I intend to give it a "proper" review at some point, but there is a lot I have to say about it and I haven't even begun to scratch the surface. No spoilers in terms of plot, but if you don't want to know about "the pickles" in glistening, agonizing detail then I suggest you go do something else, like reading a fine June 2009 article about Spy Groove or play an exciting game demo.

If you are not aware, Deadly Premonition is the incredibly Twin Peakes-esque story of an FBI agent, Francis York Morgan, investigating the murder of a beloved local girl in a small town. Only he's totally crazy and always talks to his imaginary friend, Zach, and also is menaced by spooky creatures. The first thing that struck me is that the player character is not the main character. You think that you're playing as York, but you're Zach, the guy he's talking to. This is a space that I for one love to see explored, but not enough to play more than a couple hours of Contact for the DS. Think about it really for a minute: this guy has been receiving otherworldly commands from someone with outside information about his situation who wants to accomplish certain goals but with a callous disregard for his safety. Of course York is crazy, but he's making do as best he can. It's like that movie I totally didn't see where that guy hears his own life being narrated. On car trips, in lieu of a radio, you can actually have York go on for quite some time about 80s movies and his fetish for women turning into cats. True story.

It's like a deconstruction of the medium. There are things in normal games that are bizarre since they're abstracted gameplay elements from real life, and since you realize that's what they are you just kind of ignore them, unless you're the author of a crappy comic about video games groping for the day's lame joke. For example, the Pay 'n' Sprays in the Grand Theft Auto series. You drive in, they paint your car in a matter of seconds, fixing any damage and erasing your wanted level, no matter how many military guys see you drive into the garage. This is absolutely absurd but not a problem for anyone. DP has a similar mechanic where you get a car wash, either by the sexy lady attendant or the gross dude, for about $15 that repairs your car. Thing is, absolutely everything that happens in the game is abstract or surreal or just off somehow, which makes "normal" sort of weird game things like this stand out as being wrong. You're actually thinking about how strange it is that the game does something like fixing your flaming squad car with just a damp rag for less than half of what you just paid for a pack of crackers. This is DP's triumph, that it calls into question the way normal games are done.

It's this close to being an actually, legitimately good game. Sure, the production values are super low and the least appropriate music is playing at all times, but it's still totally playable. I don't find the investigation and the shooty bits an obstacle to get through so I can see the next hilarious cutscene. I'm actually into it. The horror elements are genuinely creepy. But, as my boyfriend pointed out, every frame of animation looks weird like those Half-Life comics people make using Garry's Mod.

Oh yeah, "the pickles." They come in a can. Labeled "the pickles." And I know where you can get an infinite supply of them. Also, I picked up a turkey sandwich trading card and thought, aww yeah, I'm going to eat this sandwich only to be bitterly disappointed.

I think you need visuals to understand what I'm talking about here. This is the cutscene that convinced me that this game was something I needed in my life:



And this is the one that made me go down to the store and buy it:

How to chat up girls on the internet if you were tragically born with only a torso.

There are some people on the internet dating sites that only post a picture of their rockin' abs. Here is my encounter with one.

Me: You sure do have some abs there
Me: In lieu of a face
The Human Abs: why thank you
The Human Abs: hehe, well I do have a face
The Human Abs: if you have an e-mail address you may see it
Me: I think I'll just extrapolate from the torso
The Human Abs: hehe that is perfectly okay with me
The Human Abs: well you have a cute face, but you are lacking the torso
Me: I was born without a torso.
Me: It's pretty freaking tragic.
The Human Abs: well you are lucky you have such a cute face then
Me: You gotta work with what you got.

Boys

Choice quotes from messages sent to me on OKCupid, months after I had started seeing my current beau and updated my profile to reflect that.

"You sound awesome except that you don't like puppies. What's up with that?"

"you are yummy"

"i love ur eyes & smile..
i think you are very sexy
tell me more about you."

"And then I see that you're seeing someone. Son of a. Perhaps sometime we will meet on the same stage while doing comedy. Or at a store. Either or.

You still interest me though. There. I said it. It has been said."

First guy, I have a phobia of dogs.

Second and third are the type of generic, low content messages that will never get you an internet girl of any reasonable quality level. It is also hard to believe that anyone finds the picture of me in my loud Wal-Mart children's hoodie holding the most hilariously bad painting known to man "sexy."

I kind of admire last dude for his hopeful transmission into the aether. I feel like if he thought he had a chance he would have sent a proper message, but he knows the score. They have a saying in Norway: those who holler in the woods are answered. I wish him the best.

Eagle Vs. Shark

If you haven't seen Eagle Vs. Shark, I highly recommend it. It's a romantic comedy from New Zealand has that sort of very awkward Napoleon Dynamite-style humor, but the story is a bit more sophisticated and it has actual emotional content. And it's got Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords!

Anyway, my boyfriend was the recipient of some pretty bad news recently on the job hunt front, and while pastries do not fill the same function as gainful employment I thought I would bake him something to cheer him up.

A little about me, I took some cake decorating classes in middle school--made it through Wilton level 3--and while I am super rusty I can still do an icing rose if I absolutely have to. The problem with cake decorating is I'm too lazy to do a proper job of it and cleaning tips afterward is not my idea of a good time. I decided to make the cake Lily makes for Jarrod in Eagle Vs. Shark since it's supposed to look like an unskilled home job. And here is the result of my efforts:


Obviously his name isn't Jarrod, but I think it's a pretty good likeness. For reference, and so I don't end up on Cake Wrecks for reasons other than being awesome, here is the original cake from the film.

MAC ATTACK!

When I was a kid, my dad was able to borrow Macintosh computers from work, so I was used to having a pretty nice (for the time) computer. I was also able to skip the awkward DOS phase of PCs. Unfortunately, being a Mac user invited the scorn of the other children. I never understood this, because the OS was pleasantly Windows 2000y, and the other kids said that there were no games and I was all, what?

Now I chew through games like a bag of Cheetos, always demanding content and progress, but when I was a kid I could spend months if not years on a demo alone. Back in the 90s, there was actually a pretty vibrant shareware community for the Mac. This was before the spread of the web, so you would get these discs (floppy and later compact) full of demos and sometimes full games, which you could then get the full version by mailing some dude a check. Yeah, really. I'm not totally sure where the discs came from.

I will probably write about such gems as Scarab of RA, Taskmaker, and Escape Velocity at a later date, but today I was compelled to post because I remembered this weird one called Weekend Warrior. You were on some kind of surreal game show with a cast of waaaaacky contestants to choose from. Here's the official site, Mac users without compatibility issues can play it for free. I thought of it because there's one level in which you have to grab some plutonium (or was it uranium?) and upon getting it the weird announcer dude says "now you're cooking with plutonium!" which is something that's always stuck with me, for some reason. I find that it has worked its way into my rolodex of catch phrases. It's always the weird quotes that stick with you.

Vintage Season

As a kid I had access to many treasuries of science fiction short stories that were around the house. I enjoyed them on a sort of surface level, enough to revisit some of the stories certainly. It's been interesting to go through them again and apply the sophistication that comes with my fancy-shmancy college learnin'.

"Vintage Season," by Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore, is about a group of time travelers taking a tour of seasons: the most perfect fall, winter, spring, and summer known to history, which leads them to take lodgings at a house belonging to the unsuspecting protagonist. But as it turns out, the people from the future are connoisseurs, who delight in both the beautiful and the grotesque. There's a pretty strong parallel, I think, between the way the future folk enjoy the tragedies of the past without feeling anything for plight of the people in the past and refuse to change it as doing so might jeopardize their own lifestyle and the way we in the first world often turn a blind eye and even profit off of the suffering of the less fortunate.

What's really always stuck with me are the descriptions. Sometimes I find myself remembering the way the folds of their clothes and the strands of their hair are always immaculate, like "an actress on the screen, who can stop time and the film to adjust every disarrayed fold so that she looks perpetually perfect," or Kleph's set of rosy covered cups. Also worth pointing out is the sort of stare-down between Kleph and the protagonist's wife, where the wife is dressed more fashionably with big padded shoulders and Kleph just kind of overpowers her with her unfashionable but feminine silhouette. I think it's interesting to note that we're not talking about some kind of atrocious '80s pantsuit here, but rather the fact that this story was written in the mid-40s. In the Depression and the war years there wasn't a lot of excess in fashion, and this sort of mannish, broad-shouldered look was in, so we haven't really seen women shaped like women for ten or fifteen years and Dior's New Look is still a few years off. I really like the statement that a strong showing of femininity will win out over how we try to contort or conceal it.

It's Bureaucracy Part 2

I've always thought that any given work is successful if it makes you feel something. It doesn't even have to produce the emotional response that it set out to inspire, like a B movie that makes you laugh instead of recoil in terror. And I think that Bureaucracy is doing that. It makes the player stressed out, which--given the subject matter--is entirely appropriate. I am completely tense and nervous as I play. There are many things to accomplish before my flight leaves, many of which I won't realize I had to do until after I've managed to get on it. I find myself dreading interacting with the characters. Fighting the parser to find the exact right combination of words that a character will accept is kind of a problem I have with any text game, though.

Which brings me to the next point. Fear. Most games have a sort of feeling that they produce in the player. It's this sort of "oh no, I'm going to die and have to do that complicated section all over again" or "if I do this, is it going to put me in an unwinnable situation?" You're hesitant to use items or even explore for fear of messing up the game somehow, even though failure is relatively easy to recover from. I'm finding that I need to relax and learn how to accomplish one goal, like getting some cash, without worrying about being able to do it before the time limit, and then once I've figured out how to achieve all the items on my pre-flight checklist work on streamlining the process.

VAMPIRE BOYFRIEND

We at Superlemons are pleased to announce the release of our first game, VAMPIRE BOYFRIEND. The challenge was to write the game in one week, which has been failed spectacularly as we are also pleased to announce the acceptance of a temp job. If all goes as planned, however, it should be coming out this Friday.

What is VAMPIRE BOYFRIEND, you ask? It is the text-based adventures of a teenage girl at a new high school, living with her father, attempting to get a date to the Winter Formal from one of several sexy, sparkly, studly vampire bachelors. It's a great time for the whole family as it is an abstinence adventure.

It's Bureaucracy Part 1

Douglas Adams is my hero, and have endeavored to follow his example in my own life. Unfortunately, I have only gotten as far as working a series of bizarre and terrible jobs. Anyhow, I've decided to experience one of his lesser-known works, the 1987 Infocom game, Bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is a nasty piece of work from a man who thinks that having the player buy a cheese sandwich at the beginning of the game and feed it to a dog with no prompting so that they won't be eaten by that dog while aboard a passing microscopic space fleet near the end of the game is a puzzle. Still, I am determined to play it without any outside help, other than the feelies that were originally packaged with the game.

A brief note on feelies for those not savvy with how text games in the late '80s rolled: games were packaged with additional materials, usually small items found in the game or pamphlets and documents in some way related to it. They added an element of immersion and were often required to solve puzzles in the game as an early sort of copy protection. It was DRM made fun!

Why am I doing this? I remember a time not so long ago when I didn't have to make progress to enjoy a game. I was content to wander the Great Underground Empire in Zork or explore Maniac Mansion for hours without really getting anything done. Losing wasn't a problem, it was a learning experience. Games aren't like that for me anymore and I find that very sad.

So, before firing up the game, I took the time to familiarize myself with the documents and forms included with the game. This is important since, as I recall, you aren't really given any direction in the game itself. Now I know that I got an awesome new job and am being flown to Paris for training/vacation, and I have to cash my $75 money order which has been mailed to the wrong address before the flight leaves. Is this interesting blogging? Who cares! The game is afoot!