Kill Ten Rats

I have become convinced that good camera control must be the hardest part of a 3-D game, because you see great games like Psychonauts where the camera is utterly horrible at critical moments. The camera usually follows Razputin, more or less facing where he is facing in a standard third-person view. Then sometimes, particularly for boss fights, the camera becomes relatively fixed and your movement keys are now relative to the camera’s facing rather than Razputin’s. Mix that up with sometimes having a fixed camera but your movement keys are still relative to the way your character is facing.

Handling around edges is always rough. Do you make a rock transparent, squish the camera between the character and the wall, swing it off somewhere…? Psychonauts mostly makes the camera stop at the wall while you keep moving or sometimes swings it off. There is also the problem of having objects interpose themselves between the camera and your character. The camera can be lost in the trees while you jump blindly. There is a mid-game boss fight in which the camera tends to get caught behind rocks while you are dodging around them, as if there were a physical camera on the edge of the map trying to keep you in view. Come to think of it, that would be a really great mechanic for a level in Psychonauts 2, really having a camera rolling or flying about.

The worst part is when the camera moves on its own. This is presumably to be helpful in difficult situations, but the effect is to make them more difficult. When your movement is relative to the camera, if the camera swings around 180 degrees while you are jumping, your button has just reversed your direction and sent you plummeting to your doom. The hardest parts of the game are mostly so because a change in camera angle made you lose where you were or made your keys send you in a different direction, or perhaps you could not see anything at all at that angle.

Contrarily, there are some really great moments in camera work. On a couple of boss fights, half the time is spent looking out the boss’s eyes. This works much better the second time, when the level design is less complex and therefore the camera itself is not an enemy in the fight.

: Zubon

Yahtzee comments that the first half of the game is easy training and the later levels are ridiculously difficult. Either the PC version differs or the new update made the later bit less insane. My only indication of how hard the game used to be is Googling videos of folks playing. Hmm, that last level included a lot more flying, flaming projectiles than my playthrough did. I can see how that would be really frustrating, when you must replay a section of the level for the 58th time because one hit knocked you off a trapeze or tightrope. If you had been staying away because of horror stories about the endgame, I’m here to tell you that it is difficult but reasonable, with the occasional exception of tomorrow’s topic.

Anyone have a notion or list of what all changed in the recent Psychonauts update?

: Zubon

Something fresh in my mind and dear to my MMO-playing heart is that Psychonauts has the worst escort quest I have ever seen. Besides who you are escorting on the last level, the escort NPC:

• is incarnated as a screaming child
• walks slowly, as escort NPCs do, but teleports away through several phases once you manage to save him, forcing you to catch up
• leaves you to figure out how to get to him after he teleports somewhere above you.

The escort chase also introduces a new, invulnerable enemy that you figure out then use while finding the NPC. It is a four-stage escort, which blessedly refills the escort NPC’s hit points as each stage, but requires you to start over if you fail any; you can save mid-escort, but it will still start you back at the start of the zone. There are also lots of things around to collect if you want your 100% completion, and if there is a way to come back for them after the escort is done, I have not found it yet (go back before following the NPC to the next part of the level). You do not lose lives for failing the escort quest, despite what the characters imply, which is necessary considering the combination of “teleport away, find the path, figure out the mechanics, and the child is already screaming about being under attack.” Oh, and there is some sobbing (literal) emotional baggage along the way to provide a counterpoint to the wailing child. So, yeah, not the most pleasant part of the game, even before the imagery that surrounds it.

: Zubon

Psychonauts does great things with themed levels. We have grown used to thinking of WoW as varied because there is a zone of green forests and then one of red mountains, but Psychonauts exists on an entirely different level. Much of the action takes places in characters’ minds, so you get wildly varying settings that fit together perfectly well. What comes next remains surprising.

Your base setting is a summer camp for psychic children. Your training grounds consist of an obstacle course soaked in war memories; a shooting range themed around strict geometry and floating, dream-like architecture that uses imagery and a small enemy set to suggest the trauma and repression behind the precise facade; and a ’70s dance party crossed with the inside of a pinball machine. You will go on to play Godzilla and fight Napoleon. I will not list all the levels because they are pleasantly surprising, and even when you recognize the point in the game when you will be meeting Napoleon in battle, the structure of the level should remain unexpected.

The levels represent characters’ psyches, and they do it well. You wander around in someone’s head, maybe help him sort out some problems, and you get a notion of how things work in there. If you explore carefully, you will find more, like the little room where someone’s nightmares are locked away or the really meaningful figments that seem out of place but make perfect sense once you have the whole picture. Not to spoil Edgar’s level, but the nature of your unreliable narrator becomes apparent along the way, piece by piece, until it is explicitly spelled out at the end … and then comes back later to explicitly cash out one of the wrap-up jokes.

It’s just a wonderful thing to have this huge variety in levels and have it all fit together coherently. Each level is tied to a character, so it fits that way, and they collectively explore a lot of the space you would imagine for a game in characters’ minds. We have strict, abstract geometry in one level, and another shows a different sort of impossible landscape with a world that is twisted upon itself. We see varieties of trauma incarnated, paranoia and multiple personalities made concrete, and then stack that with scenes played out from the enemy’s point of view.

And then they are made well, wonderful with details and personalities.

: Zubon

Holy crap, it’s been almost two years since I bought Psychonauts, and I finally beat it this weekend. I started it a long while ago, got distracted, and just got back around to it. Conveniently, I’m not going to let a little thing like “published 6.5 years ago” stop me from talking about a game, nor “neither online nor multiplayer.” There are lots of good and bad design bits to discuss here, and rather than cram them all into one of my tldr reviews, I am going to break this up into several days of discussion. If you need the whole thing, here, have the Zero Punctuation review. It is one of Yahtzee’s most positively reviewed games.

To make sure it gets said, since discussion often turns negative, this is a very good game, the sort people will pull out 20 years from now as gaming art or literature when people see Sturgeon’s Revelation in a sea of Farmville and Alganon. It is clever and inventive, with gameplay elements you know but a total experience not to be found elsewhere. It is varied, surprisingly deep, and decorated with little touches that are quite wonderful or sufficiently disturbing. It is worth the money (even without a sale, even 6.5 years later, but there will almost inevitably be a great sale on it coming up) and definitely worth the time. It also had a recent update when the rights reverted to the original publishers, including Steam achievements, so there’s your decorative shinies.

I’m not sure how many days of Psychonauts content I have, but there are lots of design bits to discuss here.

: Zubon

While I’m waiting for the wild pendulum swings of post-release re-balancing to slow down in Dungeon Defenders, a FPS/tower defense game is the free promo of the weekend on Steam: Sanctum. Having gone through a first map, it feels a lot like Defense Grid with a hero unit. That hero unit makes a lot of difference when you are sniping down bosses and tanks. There is also an elegant mobility mechanic, a teleportation/elevator tower, and you can pick any of them just by hitting tab. Where Dungeon Defenders gives you maps with large numbers in a few waves, Sanctum goes for 20 waves on the first map, and it took me about 45 minutes (including placing turrets, figuring out buttons, etc.).

With the weekend sale, the game is $5, or $15 for a 4-pack, or $11 for the game plus all DLC to-date, so it’s more a question of whether it is worth the time than the money to play. The comments are open for building our collective review.

: Zubon

Update: 3 people have commented. That’s probably indicative.