Introduction
So, I watch a lot of movies. I mean, not to scary Tarantino / Ebert levels, but still quite a few. So it doesn’t surprise me when sometimes, my nightmares contain film tropes or are just flat out films in themselves. Hell, once or twice things that happen in my dreams quickly became plot points in something I’m writing.
Then there’s the nightmares – once, I dreamt my friends and I were stuck in a Michael Bay film. And not a good-ish one like The Rock, either. Everywhere I went there were either long over-cinematographed wide shots where I’d be doing something out of character set to popular music, work was a series of action montages with too many edit points and too much slow motion, all my friends were behaving in ways that just didn’t fit with their character profile – all in the service of a quickly guessable plot twist or the next action sequence. Also, Joe Pantoliano (a great actor) was mis-cast in almost every supporting role.
What a dream.
So, I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that the act of playing a large number of video games would have a similar effect.
And so, having survived a tumultuous night trying to sleep through being stuck in a video game, I thought I’d work it out of my system by reviewing the game my brain thought was a fitting setting for a nightmare.
My Bad Dream From Last Night
Every era of games have its ripoffs. For a while, in the ’80s, the cash cow for worthless companies with employees who didn’t care about their creative output was making a clone of River Raid. During the early to mid ’90s, it was “Doom Clones”, which eventually became a genre unto itself. Now, Grand Theft Auto clones are turning up. And often, the problem isn’t lack of desire to make a good game, but lack of money. The large, detailed open-world that a game like this requires tends to simply require a huge amount of creative manpower to produce, and not many companies can afford that. The result is that most of the games that occupy this ‘genre’ – Saints Row, Crackdown, True Crime and The Godfather tend to be skin-deep only. Dare to scratch the surface as you explore the city and you’ll find canned pedestrians, cookie-cutter houses and other duplicated buildings simply existing to provide space between the plot locations.
My Bad Dream From Last Night is no exception. But to a truly terrifying degree. The game designers have done a bang-up job of making realistic-looking characters, but I can’t help but find myself in brown-pants due to the Uncanny Valley-like way these identical, cloned pedestrians behave. And really, folks – not every person in the world looks like, Ken, Barbie or Don Rickles.
So, let’s examine where the game design fell down.
Gameplay
Like most GTA clones, the game relies on you, the protagonist, Rohan Harris, a software developer and Indie filmmaker, being forced to endure a rather bland storyline involving a ‘lost’ coat in a hotel cloakroom (a plot point liberally ‘borrowed’ from Get Shorty), an incomprehensible foreign pseudo-mafia boss and – of course – your best buddy betraying you to said boss just at the end of the second act. The story is ‘told’ to you in crappy cut scenes that punctuate ‘missions’. But unlike GTA or even Saints Row, where missions might contain anything from whacking a lawyer to following somebody for a while, or even stealing a helicopter for an overweight businessman with two noses and a strange accent, My Bad Dream has no pretensions about playability, diversity or anything like that.
No, in this game each ‘mission’ simply involves moving inside indoor locations that very obviously don’t even use the same game engine as the free-roaming engine used to show the game’s setting, “Bigg City“, an obvious merger of Chicago, New York and even Los Angeles in places. (Aren’t we tired of those pastiches yet, guys?)
Once inside whatever building the shootup is to occur in, Rohan Harris, wanky pony-tail bouncing along behind him, must be directed in third-person perspective through cookie-cutter corridors to kill more and more henchmen & goons. But not only do these goons all look the same, sound the same (TWO voices actors for the males might have worked for that classic film Manos: The Hands of Fate, but this is a video game, fellas!) but they all have the same crappy weapon – apparently, they’re firing peas out of a .22 or something, because this mild-mannered software developer lost barely a pixel of health on every shot.
But naturally, when he fires his badly-modelled “Blast-o-tron 5,000,000″ (which he obtained due to the before-mentioned coat-losing plot point) at these bad guys, a tomato comes flying out (oh, great, guys – you played Toejam & Earl, steal some more why don’t you!) hits these nameless cronies, and they immediately ‘die’. By which I mean that they curl up using one of three death animations and emit one of maybe five Willhelm screams.
Talk about getting old quickly.
Smaller Things
So what about the between-mission content? It’s become a common thing now for games to offer you either sub-missions, mini-games or at least interesting content between your main scripted missions. But in My Bad Dream this trope has reached a new low. The only mini-game is to play ‘poing’ (a pong clone with WORSE graphics) at the arcade with a small virtual rendition of Gary Coleman as he appears in ‘Avenue Q’, and the only sub-missions are smaller versions of the same shoot-millions-of-nameless-goons scenarios that litter the main plot missions.
And this is where we get to the surreal-as-fuck part. For some reason, in a world of bland, boring animation-aly-challenged NPCs, very obviously positioned outside a small house in a beautifully detailed version of a single street from Venice Beach lies the game’s aberration.
What the Deuce?
Her name is Deuce (explain that to me) and she’s single-handedly one of the most incredible realistic, detailed and fully-fledged independent characters in a game ever created. When you talk to her, she talks back, and through input from your microphone she is able to seamlessly discuss any topic with you, although she does frequently like to bring up American politics, Astronomy and the current state of Apple.
She’d easily pass any turing test, and she’s also modelled with a much higher poly-count than any other character in the game – never mind how nicely the full body animation works. She even invites you in for tea.
Very quickly, I found myself scrabbling to finish more stupid missions so I’d get to spend more time with Extra in her perfect little Venice Beach house. It even backed onto a canal so you could go rowing (although you did have to avoid random speed-boat chases that, seemingly, are very common in Bigg City) or just take a nice dip in the perfectly blue, clean waters.
The Last Part
As the game progresses, more and more of your time is spent with Deuce, simply out of desire to avoid the pathetic mess that is the rest of the city. Soon you’re hosting parties that dozens of same-looking henchmen and pedestrians with bad character animations are turning up to, throwing some out when they fail to detach their weaponry from their character-model and berating others when they ignore your warnings and dive into Deuce’s roof-top pool. You know – the one that overlooks a pixelated beach and that bus route that no buses ever run on.
And naturally, as things continue, you begin to realise the truth – that Deuce has been working for the mob boss of indeterminate European heritage, and that her time spent discussing python programming with you was a trick – a lure used to expose the player to yet another twisty back-stabbing in the later part of the game.
But nothing forgives the bad sound design. That was just terrible. Why loop the same 15 second segment of ’street noise’ all the time? Lame.
In short, I give this game a single star out of five. It was nonsensical, pointless, and rambling. Just like this blog entry.
And just like this blog entry, it was almost entirely made up to try and seed as many tropes and cliches as possible.
I’m hungry damnit… breakfast time…
