 |
||
|
|||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||
Title: A Vampyre Story A Vampyre Story looks beautiful. When my roommate passed by he thought that I was playing A Nightmare Before Christmas. The style will also remind you of the movie Coraline. I am glad that the main character, Mona, was given a 3D model instead of 2D. Take a look at the prototype on the left and compare it to the screenshot I took of the final product. Her cleavage is so well designed that until the ending cinematic I had not even noticed that her nose is over six inches long!
The opening shows us Mona practicing her opera singing. Afterwards she moans about wanting to escape from a short shrew named Shrowdy. When Shrowdy appears Mona tells him to fetch her some wine because she is hungry. Obviously, Mona is a vampire, but she is in denial and calls blood, wine. Shrowdy, the vampire that turned the captivating Mona, takes a boat to the shore instead of flying in bat form. As the game progresses and it is revealed that Mona can also transform into a bat I kept wondering why she doesn't just fly to the shore. The bad thing about adventure games is that if you don't try everything on everything there can be story bits that you miss. I had no idea why Mona didn't just fly until after I finished the game and read through the game script searching for the phrase, "fly over." I found this: "For some reason I can’t fly over moving water. It must be part of the magic curse Shrowdy placed on me." That would have been so much better as a required dialogue instead of dialogue triggered by clicking on the shore in the distance with a specific command. The bread and butter of an adventure game is the witty dialogue. Like Psychonauts, the dialogue in A Vampyre Story builds likable characters. My first reaction to the Froderick bat companion was that he was the unneeded comic relief, like Rob Schneider in the movie Judge Dredd, but you can actually use Froderick to solve puzzles. He comes in handy so often that I promoted him from comic relief gimmick to sidekick. Unfortunately, the dialogue writers used Froderick to channel most of their contemporary humor through.
Contemporary humor only has a place in stories set in contemporary times. Cultural references that we understand, like the upcoming idiom, wouldn't make a lick of sense to someone from the nineteenth century. This game is so beautiful I really wanted it to stay in character, but things kept popping up to pull me back.
Within A Vampyre Story are also embedded many references that the average gamer will not catch. When Mona looks down into a fiery pit to hell she asks Froderick:
The lead designer, William V. Tiller, was previously of Lucas Arts and worked on The Curse of Monkey Island and Full Throttle. The George mentioned above is George Lucas. The mean looking dude with the pitchfork is satan. Another reference to Tiller's Lucas Arts days are the numerous times when Froderick mentions tentacles. At first, I thought the writers were making a pass at tentacle sex hentai until I remembered the insanely popular Lucas Arts adventure, Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle.
The last reference that I found was in mentioning a poster of a band called CABAL that the Baroness did not like very much. Read this April Fool's post for more information about the FreeSCI, Sarien and ScummVM teams merging to create CABAL. Obviously a joke that got fans hyped then let down. I started background for this review by reading an interview with Bill Tiller. In it he mentions:
There are two points in that quote that interest me. Bill says that there are over 35 locations and that is good for an adventure game. In most adventure games each room or location serves a puzzle or story purpose. I've not seen many locations that are there only to look pretty or for you to run through like God of War (PS2). In adventure games even seemingly empty rooms serve a purpose at sometime. However, more locations equals break of gameflow when, between locations, there is a noticeable loading period. I had loads of patience for the first three hours because I was seeding thirty torrents, running NewsBin Pro, was connected to two mIRC servers, had Folding@Home calculating in the background and 7zip archiving some ~GB files. My patience was gone after I restarted my computer, only ran A Vampyre Story and the loading times were the same. It's only a few seconds between rooms, but it adds up with lots of backtracking. Thankfully, the right-click and spacebar help to skip the agonizingly slow walking pace of the main character by teleporting her to the selected on-screen destination. Skippable dialogue is a gamers' friend, especially when a particular gamer hasn't saved in over an hour and the game crashes... A Vampyre Story was developed over a five year span sometimes with only three designers on staff (and some family members: Amy, Catherine, Zoe, Lily and Logan Tiller) so some parts developed earlier were not updated to reflect the quality of newer areas as the concept was more refined. As I said, dialogue can be skipped, but there are more than a handful of conversations that can not. I press the spacebar to remove the subtitles and skip to the next spoken sentence, but in these events the subtitles and audio track are removed, but the character models continue posing and moving their mouths for the time it would have taken for the audio clip to finish. This is frustrating, a little creepy and inconsistent. The most annoying instance being the long flirt-turned-yelling match between the Woman With Low Moral Fiber and the Band Instructor. The second thing Bill spoke of above that interests me is his estimate of A Vampyre Story being a, "full fifteen to twenty hour game." According to the time on the last save I made right before the ending I finished this journey in 4:47 and some odd seconds. I'm sure that if I had not used The_Will's well-written FAQ to quickly speed through the cooking/spell potion segment the time it took me to beat the game might well have been 14:47 and some odd seconds. Like The_Will mentions in his FAQ, "An unwritten rule of adventure games is that when you are presented with a formula, there's a 99% chance you're going to have to make it at some point." This really gets my goat. Formula/spell/potion/food/machinery mixing or assembling is arbitrary and wholly not needed. This exercise has become a staple of the adventure genre, but it only takes a few brain cells for me to put you in your place.
First, either ignore or fire the enthusiast on staff who tells you that it's not an adventure game unless there is a formula mixing segment. Second, take pride in the puzzles you've designed so far and boost your self esteem by telling yourself that you don't need to arbitrarily extend the gameplay by incorporating a segment where the time to completion/pay-off ratio is too highly skewed on the side of time to completion. You can replace that segment with a short, clever puzzle so as to not so rudely break up the story telling. Third, remember the basic rule of fiction writing: if you can remove it and the story still makes sense then you never needed it in the first place. Read this carefully, future game designer: I do not ever want to have to spend hours finding then collecting ingredients, memorizing arcane symbols so that I can translate a recipe, then trying to figure out what items in my inventory will double for the items on the list and end up randomly mixing things to hit on the solution when I don't think exactly like the puzzle designer and can't grasp the vague references to mixing order. If you ever present me with another formula to something I have to spend more than ten minutes collecting ingredients to then building I will skip it with the use of GameFAQs or put down the game altogether. The whole point of ToeJam & Earl (GEN) or Pikmin (Wii) was to collect parts to build a space ship, I have no problem making collection the ultimate goal of a game because each piece is the end level reward like a Chaos Emerald. It has no real effect on the gameplay and you don't have to mix them together yourself at the end. Make collecting the sole focus and you'll end up with a stinking pile of monkey poo like Donkey Kong 64 (N64). Zack and Wiki (Wii) had a segment of mixing potions to shrink the main character so that he could pass under some wall or other obstruction. It has been a while since I beat that game. Once again, GameFAQs to the rescue. It was worth it to me to tred through the bog so that I might enjoy the future levels, that game had a lot of appeal. The art style and innocent atmosphere of A Vampyre Story also made this game worth tolerating its formula abyss of player hating. On the other claw, I firmly laid to rest my PS2 controller after trying and failing to find interest in Resident Evil 1 or 2 (PS2). A game about shooting zombies should focus more on the shooting parts and less on the shallow puzzles placed here to make the game seem longer parts. If hundreds of the undead are tirelessly hunting me and I come across a door that requires two crests to unlock, but I have explosives... What would be the obvious move? Oh, right, back tracking and item collection, makes perfect sense. Want to know what makes even more sense? Spending half an hour digging up those crests to finally unlock the door then walking through and seeing a character inside the next room that you had just spoken to a few rooms back and there not existing any dialogue or even a questioning look on your character's face as to how the hell anyone made it there before you when the only door to the room was locked.
Bill also said, "...the first game is a whole game, not an episode like the Sam & Max online games." Each Sam & Max episode consists of a beginning, middle and end; the elementary basics of a good story. The over-arching story within a book trilogy also consists of a beginning, middle and end. Within each separate book, though, is also a beginning, middle and end. The difference being that the first and second books in the trilogy wrap up their respective plot foci while leaving a logical cliffhanger. It is the equivalent of this in your head, "The immediate problems that faced my heroes have been overcome. Right now they are safe, but how long will that last?" There is some satisfaction gained from overcoming some trial and a brave determination to face what lies ahead. Each Sam & Max game is a whole game, the story is finished at the end. The only reason each Sam & Max episode is referred to as episodic is because they come in tiny packages. A Vampyre Story is neither a whole game nor episodic. A single episode of Lost builds tension even while characters mound tiny obstacles and ends right when your interest is peaked, that is episodic. In A Vampyre Story There is no plot trial that is overcome, Mona wants to go back to Gay Paris. She collects all this stuff needed to safely make it to a smuggler's ship at port sailing for France, but, literally, at the last minute, "Go to that windmill, see Dr. Rigor Mortis. He can cure your vampirism." END. Nothing is concluded, nothing was overcome. Even escaping from the castle in the first half can not be considered the obstacle overcome since so much happens after that in the second chapter.
The 'cliffhanger' amounts to a mediocre apprehension that our heroes are willfully moving into the clutches of a doctor with a scary name! It was so abrupt an ending that it felt like watching only 2/3 of a show and the electricity shutting off or finishing Halo 2 and my mind trying to fit in "highly intelligent, telekinetic, super-being that can control the mindless swarms" into my established view of the Halo universe while my mouth only repeats over, and over, "Wait, ...what?" Having it revealed that factions exist within the Covenant was a good plot twist because it was within the logical realm. Introducing a main character halfway through that affects everything, but was never hinted to once before is a shameful literary technique used by unimaginative writers to create plot twists or solve plots that they wrote themselves into a corner with. "You want to go back to Paris to resume the normal life of an Opera star? Oh, but I have a better idea, go to that windmill, there's a doctor that can cure your vampirism." END. That is a plot twist out of left field. Sometimes item events do no update. I unlocked the door to the dining hall, went in then came back out to the bridge. The animation showed the door open, but the 'locked door; need key' event was still masking it. In another case I opened Shrowd's coffin and found a pillow and pictures of mona inside. I wanted to move the pillow, but wherever I clicked I was presented with only the option to re-open the coffin. These issues are easily fixed by saving then loading. Since I beat the game in a single sitting I didn't like seeing more than one save game listed, but hey, whatever works. I have typed up quite a long rant about A Vampyre Story, but this game has captured a spot on my list of recommended games. It was a pleasure playing through it and I look forward to purchasing episode two. Of the adventure equation gorgeous backdrops, likable characters, interesting story, moody musical score, logical puzzles and fluid pace were all acceptable to excellent. The jokes that seemed like they were trying too hard to be funny made the dialogue something that I really wish could have been written better. Fans have waited since 2004 for this release and it is quite a gem. I was fortunate enough to have discovered it only a few days ago and would wish that if, you too, have not heard of this game you accept my recommendation and take it for a click. -Matthew |
