The last bastion for socially unacceptable behavior is when the perpetuator is an animal. They attack us, and destroy our property, and it’s hilarious. If they were capable of speech, perhaps we’d even allow them to make racist jokes and misgender trans people.
It’s not that they lack the intelligence to understand their actions, it’s that their systems of values are fundamentally unrelatable to ours. A human looks upon a carefully laid table and sees effort and organisation; a housecat sees fun shiny objects to bat and knock around. You get the sense that even if you could explain to a housecat what it’s doing, it wouldn’t care. Misbehaving animals are funny, but also disquietening: as though we’re getting a taste of what an alien invasion might be like.
Untitled Goose Game is an indie puzzle/adventure game where you play as a goose, wandering around one of those insufferably whimsical British towns that have names like Toddlefold or Nippleshire. You have a checklist of tasks to complete, which basically reduce to “annoy as many people as possible.”
You steal laundry, destroy gardens, ruin picnics, and honk at people, The game bears some resemblance to Pulse Entertainment’s notorious 1996 adventure game Bad Mojo, where you are a cockroach, and your objectives are to basically…be a cockroach. Here, as there, you are invited to reject your own species, and view them as the Other. Most humans (with the exception of two women who find the goose hilarious) are enemies, to be avoided or navigated around.
It will take you a couple of hours to beat. When the game is on the verge of overstaying its welcome, it ends.
The graphics are cell shaded or flat shaded (or whatever the fuck the trendy term for it is now), . Environments are clean, while retaining enough detail to have verisimilitude. The human models walk with a jerky, odd gait, but I believe this is intentional: from a goose’s perspective, humans are ridiculous. The music is dynamic, changing to reflect the in-game action, and the sound design is nicely detailed (the acoustics of the goose’s honks change when its beak is inside a glass bottle, for instance).
I grew weary of debates about games vs art a long time ago. Most of the games praised as “artistic” are in fact regurgitations of cinematic tropes. They only seem profound because you’re comparing them with Candy Crush. In a 2010 Cracked column, Robert Brockway praised the “artistry” of a scene in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare where you crawl around and die of radiation burns. Is this the groundbreaking artistry of videogaming? Cultural commentary about how war is hell?
Untitled Goose Game is a clearer statement of videogaming as an art form. It has no story, no “point”, and ludonarrative interaction drives the game. Even title seems more suggestive of a painting (where it’s common for work) than something from Hollywood.
Untitled Goose Game is now in the inevitable backlash stage of its hype cycle, but it’s perfectly good at being what it is, even if it’s something that’s confusing and meaningless to a lot of people. It has an unusual premise, and it’s even a little philosophical. When William Wallace was arrested and charged with treason, he retorted. “I could not be a traitor to Edward, for I was never his subject.” Animals are not our subjects. They exist outside our world.
Radio personality Ron Bennington described stand-up comedy as a game of “tell a joke, or become the joke”. Your audience has invested time into you, and they want it repaid. If you bomb and your jokes fall flat, be afraid. Your audience came here to laugh, and they’re going to do it, one way or another.
Id software co-founder John Romero was an extremely hot property in 1996. Heavily promoted as gaming’s bad boy, he’d just left id software and had launched a new company, Ion Storm, under the mantra “design is law”. Ion Storm promoted their debut game Daikatana with an ad campaign suggesting that FPS games had become lame and boring, and now long-haired John Romero was going to crash the party on a skateboard and kick everyone’s ass. Radical, dude!
Daikatana was supposed to be the next big thing. Instead, it became a joke. It missed its 1997 ship date, and then perhaps half a dozen ship dates after that. It finally came out in 2000 in a plague field of negative publicity, having gone through two engine upgrades, a full dev team, and thirty million dollars in funding.
What went wrong? It’s a long and fascinating story (told here by Gamespot’s Geoff Keighley) which, along with Duke Nukem Forever, has become an industry cautionary tale on hubris and perfectionism. Daikatana essentially ended Romero’s career as a Triple-A game dev, and he’s spent twenty years bouncing from company to company, leaving a shallow strew of indie and mobile shovelware.
Assuming you’re immune to the charms of Gunman Taco Truck and Pettington Park, Daikatana will likely remain Romero’s last hurrah as a game dev. Was it any good?
That depends on what you want. If you’re eager to play four badly designed half-a-games at once, with a graphical engine years out of date, it’s quite good.
It’s a first person shooter featuring “RPG” “elements” (LEVEL UP flashes on the screen occasionally, and this apparently does something.) Unlike Doom the game attempts to tell a story and establish a rich universe filled with lore, although it isn’t successful on either count.
We start off with a cutscene: an old man who is dying of polygon deficiency explains the plot to you. It goes on for quite a while. The developers must have realised they were boring the player, because they have ninjas jump out of the shadows, beat the shit out of the old man, and run away…after which he continues explaining the plot to you. A mood is created. I don’t think it’s the mood the developers intended.
The story is confusing, and the game as a whole lacks thematic direction. What’s the vibe here? Berserk? Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Doom? It’s neither funny nor dramatic. It reminds me of a ten year old boy play-acting Spiderman fighting Sonic the Hedgehog while he smashes action figures together. There’s time travel, ancient Greece, a black sidekick called Superfly (note the spelling) and an Asian female sidekick who’s into martial arts, a giant sword…
But that wouldn’t have mattered if the game was fun. Fun has an excellent track record of elevating games above their own conceptual stupidity. Not so here.
The game technically has “depth”, but so does the Marianas Trench. Eleven thousand meters of water and squid-shit isn’t interesting, and nor are Daikatana‘s huge stack of poorly-integrated, half-tested features.
Why shove an RPG-lite stats system into the game when it has no visible impact on gameplay? Why is there an XP system? What does it do, and why do I care? Why design unique enemies for every level when they all feel like variants of either “annoying fast flying enemy” or “annoying slow-moving bullet-sponge”?
None of the weapons obey logic. There’s a double-barrelled shotgun that fires six shots at once (???), a rocket launcher that shoots two twisty rockets that hit everything except the enemy you aimed them at, etc. This is MC Escher with a gun catalog. The titular weapon, the Daikatana, proves to be a gigantic sword that blocks a large portion of your screen when you have it equipped. It murders everything it touches, including your peripheral vision!
But the game’s absolute nadir is the sidekicks.
They have the worst AI I have ever seen. They run in front of your gun. They get stuck on corners. They get crushed by elevators. They ignore weapons on the ground and charge heavily-armed enemies using their fists. When they die you lose, and they exist at all times in a state of permanent about-to-die. They are comprehensively broken.
Daikatana is off-the-box unplayable because of the sidekicks. Un-fucking-playable. I don’t exaggerate. Daikanata literally cannot be played because of the sidekicks and you will frustrate yourself trying. Don’t bother.
Here’s what you should do instead: download the community-made 1.3 patch, which deletes the fucking sidekicks from the game, thus rehabbing it to “barely playable”. You’re welcome.
The graphics are visually interesting at times (how often do you see the colour purple in FPS titles?), but are mostly dull and ugly. There’s no vibrancy. Why did they upgrade from the Quake engine when the colour scheme recreates most of Quake’s excesses?
What else was happening in 2000? What did the market look like? System Shock 2, Perfect Dark, Deus Ex, Half Life, Unreal Tournament, NOLF, and two Quake games. Next to these titles, Daikatana looks like a game from 1997, with inferior playability. It isn’t as bad as people say: it’s worse.
I don’t know if the third Quake is a better game than I and II, but it’s certainly less of a game. They cut away any story mode, focusing it like a laser on its deathmatch experience. You run in circles, trying to kill enemies more times than they kill you. The sarcastic way people described Doom and Quake is now a literal reality.
The result is a first person shooter of incredible purity. Playing Quake III Arena is like breathing pure oxygen – liberating, and destructive to your health. As soon as a stage loads, your mind enters a trance state, and your body falls away. Only three things remain: a left hand on the WASD keys, a right hand clicking the mouse, and an eye orchestrating the violence. The circuit sparks and crackles, the connections fusing together, and when the match ends, it takes a few seconds for the hands-eye unity to remember it has a body.
The game was meant to be played with other people. It has a single player mode, but it’s not a good one and you sense the game is laughing at you for picking it. You play against “bots”, which aren’t smart but are difficult in an abusive fashion. Turning up the difficulty means they gain split-second reflexes and superhuman accuracy – they simply never miss with the railgun, which isn’t fun.
As with past Quake games, there’s a game-inside-the-game, and mastery of competitive online play requires exploiting oddities in the code like rocketjumping (surfing the blast of an exploding rocket), plasma climbing (scaling walls with blowback from the plasma cannon), circle-jumping (pirouetting to add massive velocity to your next jump), and more. The developers would probably spit out their Adderall-laced coffee if they saw what modern players do with Quake III.
A game like this isn’t about content, but about balance. While Doom’s juice came from “yay, cool weapon” and “yay, cool map”, Quake III’s design requires an analytical approach: “are the weapons equally strong, or does one dominate? Are the maps laid out in a way that leads to fair gameplay, or can you just camp a spawn spot and fight off all comers?” Single player is about indulging orgiastic power fantasies, while multiplayer is about fair play and rules. It’s hard to get both right with the same game engine, and maybe it was for the best to ditch a story mode.
The graphics were great, almost to the point of undercutting the game’s minimalist ethos. This game reduced your Riva TNT to sludge. But the lighting, shadows, and all looked very good for the time, with the only competitor being Unreal Tournament.
Thomas Aquinas once said “I fear the man of a single book.” The idea is that you can be unstoppable by doing one thing very well, and Quake III Arena does indeed do one thing very well. “It’s just mindless violence!” – some developers tried to dignify their games away from that, but id Software was apparently taking notes for their next design document.
