Bethesda Blog � Blog Archive � Behind the Scenes: The Many Voices of New Vegas

Bethesda Blog � Blog Archive � Behind the Scenes: The Many Voices of New Vegas

Fallout: New Vegas has an impressive voice cast, a lot won over by the immensity of Fallout 3, which has very little in the way of excellent voice acting (Liam Neesen notwithstanding).

Matthew Perry's story is one of the most fun.

VIDEO: Star Control and Game History

Free and Worth Every Penny - Issue 53: Nostalgia Wave - Colony of Gamers

Take a look at the following great, old games out now as freeware.  I didn't post the original, that would be Ravenlock at Colony of Gamers:

Free and Worth Every Penny - Issue 53: Nostalgia Wave - Colony of Gamers

Let me get this out of the way up front: this is not a post about abandonware. This will not be a thread about abandonware, either. I know that there are umpteen sites where you can go and download DOS and Windows classic games for the low, low price of $0, under circumstances that some folks consider A-okay and others consider more dubious. This is not the place for that argument, or links to those sites. We all have Google and know how to use it, yes? Okay, cool.

That said, though, sometimes publishers give us the gift of a piece of our youth - repackaged, or just as it was - free of charge. Over the last few years we've seen several instances of this: Rockstar with their Classics Collection and Mektek's recent re-release of Mechwarrior 4 come most readily to mind. It was recommended by NotJeff (thank you!) that I do a writeup of the free Star Control 2 remake The Ur-quan Masters, and I decided I'd do one better and just do a round-up of all the totally legal, totally free old games I could think of. So brace yourselves, it's a...

#1. The Ur-Quan Masters

Let's start where NotJeff suggested, with the open-source remake of 1992 classic Star Control 2. Bringing the galactic adventure of Star Control 2 into a slightly more modern era, The Ur-Quan Masters is essentially an enhanced port blessed by the original developers that's been underway since 2002. Version 0.6.2 was released in 2007, and adds online multiplayer to the already considerable content of the original game.

If you aren't familiar, it's a little bit of a 4X game, a little bit adventure game, a little bit top-down combat, and a whole lot wacky. I didn't get to play a lot of Star Control 2 as a kid, but what I remember is the extremely strong characterization of the alien races - you will laugh at some, and tremble at others - the fun of hunting for minerals on planet surfaces, and the great music. All of that has been preserved here, including optional updates to the music if you prefer them.

If you fondly remember Star Control 2, it's all waiting for you just as you remember it. If you've never tried it, now's a great time to give it a whirl.

#2. Sierra Adventure Games

Next up, some games that I do have a much deeper personal connection with - Sierra adventure games. These were quite literally my introduction to gaming, playing King's Quest I through IV on a Tandy 1000 EX in the mid-80's with my parents. A fair bit of noise has been made (and rightly so) about the long-awaited successful release of The Silver Lining, but those guys aren't the only ones who are keeping Sierra's legacy alive.

For starters, AGD Interactive has been lovingly re-creating Sierra's adventures for years now - I first remember coming across their work on the original King's Quest sometime in college. They've now done three full games - the first two in the King's Quest series, and Quest for Glory II - and the scope of their work is difficult to overstate. Entirely new VGA graphics, music, voicework for both of the KQ games... truly, I think of these as the definitive versions of the games I loved as a kid. It's wonderful work, and if you have any love for adventure games, you need to check it out.

Quite apart from them, Infamous Adventures released a similarly complete graphic, music and speech overhaul of King's Quest III back in 2006, and while I confess to not having played it myself yet, it certainlylooks excellent. Between AGD and Infamous Adventures, revisiting memories of Sierra games is easier - and better - than anyone could reasonably expect.

#3. ScummVM Adventure Games

Let's stay on the adventure kick for a moment and point out how great ScummVM is. If you've never used it, it's basically a modern player for all the classic SCUMM adventure games, of which there were a metric ton. Almost every classic LucasArts adventure (Monkey Island 1 and 2, Sam & Max, Loom, two Indiana Jonesgames, The Dig, Full Throttle) can be plugged into ScummVM, which runs on damn near anything, and they'll run like a dream. Many of the classic Sierra games will work as well. Of course, those games you need to legally own before playing them in ScummVM, so that's not the purview of this article, but there are three classic adventures you can download completely free that will work right out of the box.

Remarkably, this image with monkeys in pirate hats is not from a LucasArts game. I was shocked too.

Beneath a Steel Sky, Flight of the Amazon Queen and Lure of the Temptress are all now freeware, and areonly a click away. BaSS is a classic post-apocalyptic tale of a man on the run (and in addition to being a great game has the distinction of being animated by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame). Flight of the Amazon Queen, pictured above, is a much more light-hearted Indiana Jones-style jungle adventure. Lure of the Temptress I'm not familiar with, but is apparently fantasy-themed. But hey, it's free, so if you like adventure games, hop to!

#4. Rockstar Classics Collection

I feel like there isn't a whole lot to say here, because it's GTA, right? I mean, we all know what GTA is about. If you've never played the first two, it's hard to say that they hold up tremendously well in a world where GTA IV and its expansions can both be had for well under $20 in a sale, but they're still pretty good top-down fun and perfect for gaming on a laptop if you're on the go. They also had great multiplayer longbefore the 3D GTA games figured out how to do that.

Wild Metal, I confess, I have not played. It won't cost me anything but time, so maybe I should get on that? If you've played it, leave a comment and let us know if we should.

#5. Mechwarrior 4

This one probably isn't news to you, since it was a big deal a few months back, but MekTek has releasedMechwarrior 4 for free, one assumes at least partly to drum up interest for their new Mechwarrior game, which is coming... someday.

That's the good news - and don't get me wrong, it IS good news. Mech 4 is a pretty great game and not a whole lot of people played it at release (myself included). The bad news is, MekTek kind of stealth-bundled the whole thing with their own Impulse-esque delivery service, MTX, and that didn't go so well. A lot of people weren't able to download the game at all, and those who were able still sometimes had problems with MTX as a launcher.

MekTek promised quickly that they would release a downoad free of MTX, but as far as I can see they have not yet done so. The community has come up with workarounds, which you can feel free to try if you're so inclined, but it's unfortunate that this game comes with a side of either a lousy delivery client or required back-end tinkering.

#6. A Whole Lot More

We're only scratching the surface here, really; for all that we PC gamers complain (and rightly so) about restrictive DRM and fear of not being able to play our games down the road, there are still a lot of publishers happy to create goodwill by giving away older wares. The original Railroad Tycoon is free now, if you feel like building trains across the country. If you want to play through the predecessors to Halo, all three Marathongames are completely free. For strategy buffs, Command & Conquer Gold can be had gratis, and one of my favorite strategy games as a kid, Defender of the Crown, is free now too. M.U.L.E. has been completely overhauled and is available with online multiplayer, and the classic text adventure version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is playable as a webgame provided by the BBC.

And there's probably a lot more I don't know about. If you do, leave a comment and share it with us. And here's hoping that more publishers in the future go through their back catalogs and choose to donate some of their older work to the public good. These games aren't just good for nostalgia, after all; they're part of our history, and helped build the industry we care so much about. It's great to see them kept alive.

Alice and Kev: Homeless Sims

An experiment in Sims 3 in which the player added the homeless neighbors, Alice and Kev

Quest Ideas, by Tom Francis

An interesting Alternative to death as a fail-state.

Quest Ideas, by Tom Francis

Were PC Gamers Too Good For Microsoft's Cross-Platform Gaming Project?

So PC Gamers, with a mouse and a keyboard, are better than X-Box players. Or just more hardcore.

Were PC Gamers Too Good For Microsoft's Cross-Platform Gaming Project?

Horrible Delight: The 7th Guest

Disclaimer: I spoil 7th Guest pretty hard in this article.

Trilobyte's The 7th Guest is a game that routinely makes top ten lists for 'Scariest Games of All Time'. I wonder, though, if they've played through the game recently or just place it on these lists out of a sense of respect and history. Certainly, it is a PC gaming's milestone. It's clear that Trilobyte made 7th Guest with the very goal of being a technology pioneer that would awe its players with a cutting edge multimedia event. That was exceeded beyond their wildest imaginations; it's just too bad that making a great game wasn't as important to them.

7th Guest's place in the annals of computer lore is well-deserved. The leap to integrate full motion video with rendered 3D graphics is an inspired one. Its CD only format pushed computing into the CD-ROM age and gave designers the freedom to make a game that was like a movie, with sweeping camera movements, actors, and a soundtrack. Graeme Devine, one of the founders of Trilobyte and one of 7th Guest’s visionaries, was the first to ever compress digital video and designed the tools to do so from scratch (if you ever find yourself streaming low quality video from Starz Play on Netflix, you know who to thank). Graeme, along with Trilobyte’s co-founder Rob Landeros, developed the story to go along with the dream of a next generation multimedia experience, though their ambitions to become a weaver of tales might have outmatched their talents.



The story revolves around a diabolical toy master named Henry Stauf. Though not spelled out, I gather from the Faust anagram that Stauf sold his soul for wealth and ended up with more than he bargained. Your character, who is nameless in the game but is supposedly called Ego, wakes up at the front door with amnesia (sigh) and the game begins! Throughout the game, you're treated to full motion video flashbacks of a dinner party thrown by Stauf (although he doesn't actually attend) where he asks the six guests to solve the grand puzzle of his mansion. The winner of Stauf's game is granted his or hers greatest desire. As the game progresses by solving puzzles and watching vignettes, you discover that Stauf is manipulating the guests in order to harvest the soul of a young boy who broke in the house on a dare, the 7th guest. You see, Stauf's toys actually steal the souls of children and he needs just one more childsoul to bring his evil mansion to life (or something, it's pretty vague). You spend the whole game discovering this basic back story with no real arcs for various guests or Ego. After you complete the last, best puzzle, there's a painfully obvious twist that you are the child, the 7th guest, that Stauf was hunting in all the cutscenes. Then Stauf explodes in a burst of holy light for absolutely no reason and the game is over.

The story was further developed from the initial concept by a professional writer, something I will credit them. Still, the full motion video segments are hurt by shoddy characters, low production value, and creative talent overmatched by challenges presented using the new technology. At the time, it was forgivable because there was nothing else to compare it to, but looked upon with a critical eye in a modern context, it’s a bit baffling. If you’re going to innovate with video, why not make it the best you possibly can instead of treating like a chore and an afterthought? When they set up Trilobyte in a quiet Oregon town, I’m sure it seemed like a great idea but it was ultimately a selfish one. I have no doubt it was a more pleasant to live in west Oregon than southern California but Oregon just isn’t going to have the resources that would benefit what amounts to an experimental film shoot. Inexperienced actors and silly costumes hamper a promising but hackeneyed story. Now, it’s not like I expect the 7th Guest to be written with the same level of complexity and depth as literature, but the emotional experience of the game leaves me little else to focus on.



Gameplay in 7th Guest, outside of the exploration of the house and story, boils down to puzzles. The puzzles are a mixed bag and, while plentiful and varied, left me wanting. Their lack of innovation is a major felony here, Halloween party versions of the most common brain teasers or word games. I enjoy a good chess challenge but they go overboard here and the knight-switching puzzle is one of the most awful and tedious puzzles that’s ever been forced upon me. A few of the puzzles make absolutely no sense unless you check out the clue book in the den (which will actually solve puzzles for you, I discovered way too late). There were puzzles I enjoyed, especially the insanely difficult game of Ataxx versus Stauf on a microscopic level (which took me longer to beat than the rest of the game combined), and I appreciated the level of polish to the puzzles. A lot about the puzzles can be forgiven with the limitations imposed by the game design. For a reason I don’t understand but accept, they could only have one button to interact with the world and I imagine that posed a challenge when creating unique puzzles. Still, what I can’t get past are the haphazard nature of the puzzles. Why are we solving them? To what end? Why does solving all of them make Henry Stauf explode into purity dust? They try to explain, at the start, that the puzzles are created by Henry Stauf for the six guests to solve as part of his dinner party game but they drop that after the first few rooms and don’t connect it to the story. Since there’s never anything to threaten your life and the puzzles are abstract filler, the only emotional draw is the full motion video segments, which, as I’ve already said, are less than compelling.



Part of me hates to harp on all of this, it is clear Trilobyte spent a ton of time and effort on the game and it’s one of the few PC games that transcend the world of your usual gamers. The house looks fantastic, seventeen years later, and even if the technology has moved on, the artistry has not. The music and sound design are, frankly, outstanding and shoulders most of the responsibility for creating an effective mood. Every guest has their own little theme that is woven into the overall music that adds more to their story than anything that appears on screen—it's clever and I'd put it on iPod if I could only figure out how. Even a cursory glance at the game shows they weren’t myopic programmers interested only in lines of code, there’s a real love there for the game and a real passion to tell its story. The problem lies in a deeper cognitive dissonance.

Graeme Devine stated that he wanted 7th Guest to be a family game, which is strange considering the content. There’s nothing outright offensive but it’s still a horror game with a brutal stabbing, Stauf’s weird demon tongue, lascivious sex moans, a strangling, and the stealing of children’s soul by their own toys--it’s not exactly a Pixar movie. It explains the silly Halloween party nature of most of the horror, though: the cake with cartoon skulls and gravestones, a painting that grows fangs, the relentless and degrading use of puns throughout the experience, it’s all haphazard and seems the product of an ADHD “Wouldn’t it be cool if...” style of game design. There doesn’t seem to be any real love for horror or at least an attempt to understand the genre. It’s like a Scooby Doo episode that lasts hours and hours, except Fred pulls off Stauf’s mask at the beginning to discover a hissing lizard demon and Shaggy spends the whole time hilariously weeping with terror as he tries to spell six different words with no vowels. The demonic presence that holds sway over Stauf isn't even addressed, really. Sure it can give Stauf a really long tongue to impotently lash at people but they don't try to have any perceptible rules to its power or any mystery to its existence—it's just a means to an end. There’s a powerful vision for a game but it’s just not very well thought out. In my opinion, Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros were men of vision. It’s just that the vision seemed to be more about the glory of making a great game than it was about making the great game.



The 7th Guest is a truly innovative and remarkable game that deserves its place in history but, at the end of the day, it’s not good. After 7th Guest was released, the company spent a long time spiraling down into financial oblivion and I think the cracks are already showing in their touchstone product. The truth of Trilobyte seems to be a story of aimless projects costing millions and infighting between a stressed Devine and a disgusted Landeros. It.sounds exactly like the problems in the 7th Guest: unfocused and at war with itself. I think the issue of implementing a game’s vision is one of the most primal struggles when making a game. What is it that makes a game fun? What is it that makes a game inspirational? It isn’t number of units sold or the groundbreaking technology used to make the game. The only game I think think of that tries to ape 7th Guest is Shivers (a game that is superior in every way) but mostly games took the technology and went their own way before full motion video died a quick death. Making a game is difficult and it takes a special talent to make a good one. It requires patience and a willingness to adapt to the problems at hand. There’s just no guarantee that the game will turn out, so the more thought you put into your game before you put the money into it, the better off you’ll be.

7th Guest is a victim of poor planning. Dazzled by the tech and what could be, Graeme and Rob didn’t consider the journey. They relocated to the idyllic Oregon coast where there were few actors, fewer programmers, and certainly no one familiar with new technology of digital video. Graeme and Rob’s vision went unquestioned, by all accounts they seemed men of large egos and the writer they hired to flesh out the story didn’t do a good job at challenging them. The tone and game design are muddled, relying on the wow factor that certainly delivered at the time. Shock and awe is cheap and immediate, though, and it’s a terrible foundation for game design. 7th Guest could have been the Nosferatu of video games, something future generations could look at and appreciate as an important work in the art and history of video games. Instead, it's more of a footnote, the game that opened the door for better games to walk through. A cohesive and compelling game experience is the key lesson of game design that separates a great game from a good game and a good game from a bad game. Themes aren't just for books and movies, kids, they’re for any story, regardless of format. Something like Castle Crashers, one of the most ridiculous games ever made, resonates so deeply because its wild and silly tone is demonstrated in every aspect of the game, most especially the gameplay. I'd argue that themes are harder to implement in a video game than in any other medium because they have to be felt in the gameplay as well in the story and art direction. Left 4 Dead isn't just about shooting zombies, it's about the balance of four people fighting the zombie horde—the co-operative gameplay reinforces and elevates the feelings of isolation and horror exquisitely. 7th Guest just didn't get it, in the end, and that's too bad. How much more could it have inspired if it had? How many more lifelong gamers would it have left behind?



Epilogue

I tried to play 7th Guest’s sequel, the 11th Hour, for a follow up article but the game keeps crashing and I’m tired of troubleshooting it just to play a more polished version of the 7th Guest. Apparently it’s not a new problem; the joke is that the greatest puzzle in 11th Hour is getting the game to run. It’s too bad, because the game looks even better and the video elements have a fun Twin Peaks vibe (by that I mean they’re basically ripping off Twin Peaks but it’s still a good thing for this series) that I wished was present in the original. The puzzles I did play were better designed and, from what I understand, had a lot of AI involved that was cutting edge at the time. The look and feel of the game is more coherent as a whole, spookier and less stupid. It’s just too bad they released an MS DOS game in a world that had switched over to Windows 95. Technical failures are always worse than conceptual ones and, coming from a game company that redefined computing, are unforgivable.

I recommend checking out this article about the history of Trilobyte. It’s a cautionary tale of game design that I hope every developer keeps in mind when they build a game experience. Most importantly, it is a fascinating story and a great read.

The Rise and Fall of Trilobyte