No Uudders isn’t dead; it’s merely in a state of torpor. The head chefs (Logan and myself) are going through a busy RL patch at present; with Loge’s currently in the death-rattle stages of pre-release beta for a Dreamworks title, and myself currently readjusting lifestyle to the strange new customs of a foreign land (even though New Zealand is about as foreign to Australia as Canada is to the States).

We hope that you will remain patient with us over the next month or two as we attempt to gradually build it back up to a steady hum once again, and know that our separation doesn’t in any way spell the end times for armature nerd on nerd action, I myself plan to start posting regularly again and once I’ve got my workstation back online I also hope to be remotely adding to our video features.

So stay tuned, come make some spam posts on our website if you like, tell us how gay we are and let us know you’re still out there lurking. In the mean time though, on behalf of Uudders -salute!.

~R

As promised some time back, we will be kicking off the new year firstly with an Indianna Pones extravaganza; presenting our exclusive three part documentary focus on the releases of Blendo Games, including a blow-by-blow interview with Blendo’s founding playa Brendon Chung.

For any of you out there who’re unhealthily obsessed with Mr. Chung, we’ve included the interview transcript for your reading pleasure (below).

In addition to this Blendo games expose, we’ve got even more recently relevant news that’s so hot out of the oven you’ll blister your tongue trying to digest it, ruining the rest of your day and any other consequent meals you might attempt to enjoy… material or er metaphysical… what was I getting at again?

…Oh right, Flotilla (review pending).

Flotilla is the newest of the new from the mind of Brendon Chung, soon to be released through Impulse, GamersGate, XBLA and also direct from Blendo Games. We’ve got our copy of the game, where’s yours?

We’ve also recently been writing lots of promise-checks by way of our stunted efforts to play through the entirety of Resident Evil 5; all three of our die hard Beginners-Guide fans will be happy to know that recently Loge’s and myself finally witnessed the conclusion to Resi 5 in all of its jaundice tinged glory! So now all that’s left for us to do (aside from the mammoth video editing line I’ve got to wade through) is make more promises about soon to be finished and updated entries into our Beginners Guide to Resident Evil #5 series; parts three & four should be up in the next couple of weeks so ya’ll do come back now!

And now our interview with Brendon Chung of Blendo Games…

UUDD: Can you tell us about your history & experience with Videogames; Your gamer roots, the titles that you’ve drawn the most inspiration from, your love of the artistic medium that is ‘Games’, how long you’ve been developing your own games.

BC: I grew up with the old 16-color Sierra and LucasArts adventure games. I think the first game I made was a text adventure game in QBasic – just getting a little text prompt that recognized player input was incredibly exciting (for me, at least!). There’s been a lot of films, books, and games that have had an impact on me. Regarding games, notable ones for me are Thief, X-COM, and Another World. It’s great when a game creates a world that just compels you to discover more and more about it.

UUDD: How many games have you developed that have never seen the light of day & of which is there one or two in particular that you regret having never been able to release?

BC: There’s a pile of game prototypes hanging out in my hard drive. It usually takes several iterations to finally get something on the right track. What’s nice is that when things finally do start shaping up, there’s a nice grab-bag of prototype code, assets, levels, and sounds to pick and choose from!  There’s definitely a few prototypes I’d like to clean up and flesh out some more.

UUDD: The original Barista game (apart from having Coffee drink health power-ups) has no direct indication as to the significance of its title; additionally it has spawned three apparent sequels if going by the name alone. Can you divulge to us the enigma of the Barista series concerning the title ‘Barista’? Or is it a carefully guarded secret? And were they actually intended to follow on from one another?

BC: The back story for the original Barista was “something catastrophic happens in the Mars station where everyone awake disappears.”  The gag was, the player character never drinks coffee.  So, you sleep like a baby and survive the ordeal.  This gag is somewhat referenced by the other Barista games, in that you always begin the game waking up from slumber. Once the project was done, the coffee back-story felt a bit too ridiculous, so I removed most references to it.

UUDD: (In the Case of Barista #1) DooM modding back in the day was arguably the original game customization craze that birthed FPS modding as we know it today, responsible for such success stories as Couterstrike & Team Fortress. Were you a DooM modder back in the day? Why chose DooM source to make an indie game? Was your plan for the originating Barista always to make it so brief or had you initially planned more levels / episodes?

BC: I made a lot of Doom maps back in the day. None were released – I didn’t have an Internet connection at the time!

Barista 1 was made primarily to learn how to use the ZDoom engine port and learn its scripting language.  Whenever I learn how to use a game engine, I like to expand my test maps into a small, focused project, such as Barista 1.  Afterward, once I’m more comfortable with the game engine and know its strengths and weaknesses, I’m in a better position to make a bigger, full-fledged production.

UUDD: (In the Case of Barista #2) players were exposed to intricate abstractions akin to what they would later experience in a consolidated format within Gravity Bone. What was the deal with Barista #2? Who was the girl? What was the equation?

How did you come up with the fantastically non-diegettic concept of forcing the player out of their FPS comfort zone & into a more text-adventure sensitive format with the introduction of the talking skull?

BC: The gag of the story is that the player is always trailing one step behind an expedition team. The player discovers the expedition team slowly unraveling, starting with distrust, to jealousy, and eventually culminating in murder. The player has his own back story, but I’ll leave that part open to interpretation for now!

I can’t claim credit for the idea of the talking skull. The idea was borrowed from Bungie’s great “Pathways into Darkness”, where the player could talk to dead nazi soldiers to learn more about the story and characters.

UUDD: The following Barista installments came in the form of Doom3 & Halflife mods, in addition to this you also have a number of other Blendo-branded mods such as Bugstompers, the Puppy Years & Bootleg Squadrog; while these are slightly less accessible for all casual gamers (needing the original game in order to run) they seem to have been quite popular in the modding community. Can you tell us a little more about them, particularly for the benefit of those interested in your stand-alone indie releases who might not have played the mods.

BC: Bootleg Squadrog was an experiment to see how would it feel to play the role of a squad member, not a squad leader. That is, your AI squad leader gives your team orders, and you and your squad mates carry out these orders. It was challenging to make your squad buddies move in a tight pack and do basic bounding overwatch maneuvers, but it turned out pretty well.

In Bugstompers you play a space-marine on a mission to retrieve a MacGuffin suitcase from an abandoned office complex. It builds off of Bootleg Squadrog in that you have an AI squad mate who gives you covering fire and cooperates with you in solving some puzzles.  Something Bugstompers plays with is the player weapon. I was taking a photography class at the time, and thought it would be fun to model a rifle after the basic camera principles of f-stops and shutter speed.  The final result was a simplified system where the player was able to modify two-weapon parameters on the fly, letting the player “make” any weapon he needed.

The Puppy Years was made mainly because I think the premise of a super-powered infant is hilarious. You climb up sheer walls, hack security keypads with your tiny baby-hands, and eat cookies and milk.  This was a bit more ridiculous than my previous projects, so it was a nice change of pace.

UUDD: Most recently released in your Mod specific repertoire is the Doom3 based title Pathways Redux; intended to be your love letter to the original Apple FPS title Pathways by Bungie. Can you elaborate on your feelings toward the original, how you came to revisit this somewhat obscure nugget of retro gaming & what you were aiming for in your Pathways Redux remake?

BC: After Barista 3, I was interested in following it up with a more elaborate project. Barista 3 played with the Doom 3 GUI system and had a fairly large story component, so I wanted to do something that further explored those aspects. Pathways fit the bill quite well – it had a great story to tell, and there was a lot of room for experimenting with light adventure game mechanics such as inventory items and conversation trees.

It’s always fun to see in what directions a genre can be pushed and prodded. There’s something thrilling to see games like Ultima Underworld of Pathways into Darkness blurring the lines between game genres.

UUDD: In your entire listed catalogue, the point & click adventure Pilot Light is easily the odd one out. This sample sized homage to the LucasArts era of RPG gaming is branded as being the ‘first episode’. Can you talk a bit about this particular project and the likelihood of Pilot Light Episode #2.

BC: I grew up on the old Sierra and LucasArts adventure games. I heard about this free game engine called Adventure Game Studio and saw a nice opportunity to make homage to the point’n'click genre, and give myself a primer on the AGS engine at the same time.  Pilot Light was very refreshing to make – compared to previous projects, it was a nice change of pace to have the game not focus on shooting everything that moves!

There is a half-complete Pilot Light 2 sitting somewhere in my computer. It’s a light RPG where the player can visit planets and take on odd jobs. The scope of the project got a bit out of control, so I stopped working on it.  I’d certainly like to revisit it someday.

UUDD: Your game ‘Grotto King’ seems to be a strange halfway point between some of the more recognized releases (Gravity Bone / Barista) can you tell us a little about the development of this project & your thoughts regarding GK in general.

BC: At the time, I was having the game equivalent to writer’s block on Gravity Bone. I decided to take a break and make a small FPS game to get things moving again – this ended up being Grotto King.

A problem I was having with Gravity Bone was developing its art. Its art then was more realistic-looking, and it took a large amount of time to make a single asset. I happened to borrow Zelda Wind Waker over a weekend and loved its art style – so I used Grotto King as a test bed for trying out a cartoon look.  It turned out better than expected, and as a bonus it was now significantly easier to generate art assets.

One of my goals was to make an FPS game for people who have never played an FPS game. There’s a fair amount of coordination required to move with the keyboard, look with the mouse, and shoot at the same time. So I thought it would be fun for Grotto King to be a “My First FPS” for new gamers.  Testing it on non-gamers was great, if a little soul-crushing – watching someone fall into the same lava pit for the 20th time in a row is an amazing wake-up call that something needs to be adjusted.

UUDD: In your earliest listed works we can find mention of your Citizen Abel character in the form of a collection of what looks like mod maps for HalfLife, can you explain to UUDD & its audience if this is a significant character of your creation or just a simple film geek play-on-words, and if the former then who-exactly IS the illusive ‘Citizen Abel’ and how significant is he/she to your work.

BC: Citizen Abel is the name of a series of Quake 2 mods I made several years ago. The player assumed the role of Citizen Abel, a gun for hire.

Abel is what made me take a deeper interest in game development. After releasing the first Abel and getting some good feedback, I became interested in game development – what makes a game good, what are the nuts & bolts to achieving those things?  I experimented with various ideas in the sequels, some things successfully working and some things failing horribly.  My latest project “Gravity Bone” is the fifth Citizen Abel episode.

UUDD: Which brings us to Gravity Bone; this is a difficult game to discuss as aside from its rampant peculiarity the most noticeable dilemma for Journalists writing about this game seems to be the dichotomy faced trying to explain its content with desired zeal, while ambivalently trying to keep their review free of spoilers. From the perspective of the gamer, Citizen Abel is a secret agent arriving at some sort of plush mountain lodge where an international super villain (or sexual deviant) convention is apparently taking place. From here the player engages in about 30 mins worth of lateral thinking in order to navigate to the game’s conclusion. Please tell us a bit about how the game came about.

BC: Gravity Bone is a sequel to a series of mods made a while ago named Citizen Abel.  The first couple iterations of Gravity Bone were very gun-heavy.  Lots of bullets, lots of explosions.  I wanted to add something to break up the shooting sequences, so I experimented with a few things like grappling hooks and computer consoles.

With each passing iteration, the new “toys” and story bits became more interesting, but the gun shooting started feeling almost unnecessary.  I had always wanted to try to make a FPS game that didn’t have any shooting, so I decided to take the plunge and remove guns from Gravity Bone. It was a fun thing to try, and I’m still pretty surprised that people are responding to the final results.

UUDD: Tell the truth, did you make up most of Gravity Bone as you went or was it meticulously planned out?

BC: Yeah, the project was planned out. But, as often happens, every level went through a lot of iteration and changes. I’ve found that the best ideas are almost always sparked once you see the initial pass of your ideas implemented in the engine.

UUDD: One of the most memorable aspects of Gravity Bone is its unique artistic aesthetic, stylistically half 70’s retro-kitsch and half 80’s Super Deformed Anime. Tell us about the creative inspiration behind this.

BC: I didn’t really have any sort of epiphany about it; the style was borne out of technical constraints – the technical constraint namely being myself.

My 3D modelling skills are fairly basic. People are difficult to make, but I’m fairly capable of making mechanical-looking objects. After failing to make a good-looking person for the nth time, I decided on a whim to make a character with an oversized square head. It instantly clicked – on the design side, it had a great light-hearted look, and on the production side it was dead simple and quick to make new characters and textures.

UUDD: How long was its development from start to finish? Was it a long-term project considering your original Citizen Able relevant work, involving dressed up content that you created back then? Or 100% fresh material?

BC: I’d estimate Gravity Bone took about a year from start to finish.  The game itself is short – most of the development time was spent iterating on various versions and polishing up the final project.

UUDD: What have been some of the more memorable responses and/or feedback to Gravity Bone (friends/family & complete strangers) that you’ve had?

BC: Someone had an interesting comment on the characters.  He felt that very little was expected of the characters – they’re big square people, their animation is limited to a few frames, and you don’t really interact with them in any meaningful way.  But by the time the finale is reached, the characters surprise you a bit and give the impression of having back story, personality.  I didn’t quite intend to pull a switcheroo like that, but I thought it was a very interesting view.

UUDD: Do you think we might see more of Citizen Abel in the future?

BC: I’d certainly like to see more!

UUDD: Finally we arrive at your latest work-in-progress Atom Zombie Smasher, being developed with the open source 360 community XNA utility, you’ve described AZS as a top down strategy game.

BC: Yes, Atom Zombie Smasher is a game I’m making using the XNA framework.  It’s potentially for release on XBLA, though its still in development.

(Uudders would like to personally thank Brendon for taking the time to speak to us about his work, we wish him all the best with Flotilla and Atom Zombie Smasher in 2010)

*Whew* It’s been an interesting few weeks over here and I’ve noticed my posting has dropped away to bare minimum. Hopefully all you faithful uudders out there (all four of you) have been sharp enough to recognise my absence as a sign of intensive labor.

Hence I am pleased to announce in advance, coming soon to uudders we will be issuing the next sterling installation of Indianna Pones with a special focus on Blendo Games.

This mini-documentary will cover the broad spectrum of games by Brendon Chung (headmiester at Blendo) while also including an exclusive interview with Brendon.

We will also be issuing new installments in the ongoing Beginners Guide to Resident Evil 5 series of vids very soon.

Stay tuned uudders!

~R

Recently I watched a pre-release video for the PC port of the expansion set to the Star Wars Force Unleashed re release; Ultimate Sith Addition *mouthful*. This video showcased a mission taking place on Hoth during the events of the Rebs vs. Emps skirmish circa Episode #5, over the course of the video were additionally showcased;

• Multicoloured sabre crystal customisation toggles.
• Adjusted and/or rebalanced attacks.
• An extremely extensive library of alternate player skins.

The skins library could even be altered live during play at any time the player wished to do a quick wardrobe change. Naturally due to this abundance of flexibility the demonstrator playing the game quickly jumped through the customisation menus to emerge with a picture perfect C3PO HD skin flaunting a hot pink light sabre.

The gameplay looked basic; like an add-on traditionally would look, with the gameplay demonstrator perishing some five to six times consecutively on a cheap-ass platform jumping challenge, while fighting off a seemingly endless flow of Wampa beasts (Which looked fluffier and cuddlier than ever, pushing home yet another good reason for the monster’s appearances to remain cameo at best, just as it was in the original cut of Empire). Somewhere a few minutes into the demo I felt overwhelming waves of underwhelm ..er ment.. washing over me, I thought about all the starwars canon videogames both good and bad until eventually my thoughts parked at the praise and awe surrounding the initial release of Unleashed. Then I wept at said praise and awe which will soon trickle away with this; an updated expansion pack version that ballyhoos even further stretching of an already perishing semi-official canon with the added bonus of live player skin customization.

This brings me back to the earlier topic of butch C3PO galloping about with his pink saber, there’s a webcomic that summarizes the general feeling toward this sort of open plan player customization, though to echo the point it makes; Do we really need another Star Wars franchise title that allows for unlimited customization? Back when Roddenberry was still kicking he had the flexibility of Star Trek cannon expansion nailed down by the tip of its penis; budding sci-fi writers had to undergo a rigorous training debacle before they were allowed to write anything officially associated with the fiction and even after that fact the work could be rejected by Rberry.

George Lucas has sincerely sprung his masterwork from its retirement home, smeared some lipstick on and proceeded to pimp its ass repeatedly for more cash. This isn’t news though, we’re all aware of the sad state of affairs concerning Star Wars though the part of all this that I’m having the most trouble with is the part specifically regarding the label of ‘Official Starwars cannon’: when the initial Force Unleashed title was up and coming, several puritanical types were up in arms about its boasted secret sith apprentice, secretly carrying out secret wet work for Vader in, around and during the events of half the original trilogy, but in secrecy. Folks were impressed with its visual, historical and narrative relevant accuracy upon the release of Force Unleashed and many of these initial concerns were put to bed. Concerns stemmed from a fear that Lucas was potentially about to re-realise his retirement home bound masterwork yet again, potentially for the worse yet again again. So then, why don’t we raise the same flags of concern when these expansions come along? This expansion pack allows the player to force jump through the Hoth base as Jedi C3P0 with a giant pink dildo, doing battle with an army of Wampa Saint Bernards. How much do we care about the cannon now? And more importantly, when do I get my Star trek game with speedo suit skin variable and rainbow umbrella melee weapon for Spock?

Feel the adventuring wind in your hair. Feel your adventuring blood, pumping through your veins. Put down that plastic rockband guitar, grab some sort of plastic beard or something and clean out your inventory. You are a professional adventurer. You are a hero. You are me.

Step into the shoes of famous adventurer, me (Duzz), and into the bare feet of my co-adventurer Tim, as we venture across the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, seeking truth, enlightenment, pancakes and an end to the sinister machinations of Dark Fool’s evil twin.

The game based on my latest adventures is here.

Don’t believe me? Watch the trailer

Still don’t believe me? Download it now

Features:
- Sequel to the critically acclaimed “DuzzQuest: An egotistic adventure”.

- Multiple player characters.

- Longer than the original.

- Real time inventory item change.

- Original music by Mr Clean (mostly).

- Wider than the original.

- Super Deformed!

- Breathtaking graphics, built upon latest 1.3 megapixel digital camera technology!

- More outrageous inventory items than ever before. Panpipes! Bam! Blew your mind!

- Higher than the original.

- Me!

- Explore 8 exotic locales, spanning 28 stunning playable areas.

- Skippable cutscenes.

- 20 fully realized and deeply developed characters.

- Join and play simultaneously with other players worldwide. Share your experiences afterward by some sort of pen pal arrangement.

- Based on real events.

- More original than the original.

- Adventure!

]]> http://www.uudders.com/duzz-quest-2-update/feed/ 0 http://www.uudders.com/the-quest-of-a-man-with-a-giant-head/ http://www.uudders.com/the-quest-of-a-man-with-a-giant-head/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:15:51 +0000 Rob http://www.uudders.com/?p=281 A beloved acquaintance of mine has recently taken some time away from his high flying job programming mainline console titles in order to get away from it all (to program some indy PC titles).

-The man is David ‘Duzz’ Lloyd, the game is Duzz Quest #2; highly anticipated, predecessor antiquated, ever-so-slightly belated sequel to the original point & click indie effort Duzz Quest, released during the summer of love 2004. Like its flagship title, Duzz Quest #2 sees the RL protagonist Duzz resplendent with stylish leather jacket and big mad fat head, wandering about the place while solving a series of nebulous and usually comical riddles involving other RL SD renditions of his close friends and family members (although the big mad fat heads are an exclusive new feature to the sequel only).

While Duzz has yet to announce an official release date he has however gotten as far as beta testing the title, which would suggest that we’re soon to see that download link. In the short amount of time we have left before this veritable awesome bomb explodes our collective faces wholesale, Uudders suggests visiting Mr. Lloyd’s base of operations: Wintermute Studios and having a general poke about the place.

After the grand release of Duzz Quest #2, UpUpDownDown might revisit the game with a more in-depth descriptor article, we will also endeavour to get sir Duzz drunk enough to appear on camera for a proper Uudders baptism of fire (video segment). In said baptism we’ll probably take a look at the finished game together, perhaps play some other stuff, be generally crass and/or disgraceful while we’re at it.

Watch this space though folks. Below is the trailer, you should watch that next.

I explained to him that the game in question had been refused classification by the OFLC due to specific content being deemed ‘unratable’.

Who or what is the OFLC he asked.

The Office of Film and Literature classification I said.

Why was it ‘unratable’ he asked.

I explained to him that since we don’t have an officially dedicated ratings system for Interactive Entertainment (due to their entire classification board operating out of an administration that exists primarily for Film and Literature) the games industry classification system only goes up to an MA rating in Oz (due to an archaic notion whereby games are still considered as children’s toys and not as a form of adult oriented entertainment) which means that R18+ titles can’t be released here due to the simple fact that we don’t have a ratings system that permits for restrictions to be set higher than the age of fifteen.

He asked why this was the case, as he hadn’t been aware and felt instantly perplexed by the concept.

I explained the entire Atkinson shit storm to him, including the various titles that have had classification refusal over the last twelve months and the frightening notion that many games had been released in recent years that would have been refused classification if they were screened by today’s OFLC, simply due to the snowballing of OFLC’s approach and understanding of unclassifiable materials.

He summarised what I had imparted; We don’t get games that everyone else gets because our government thinks the adult populous of Australia aren’t mature enough to deserve adult oriented entertainment, nor are they mature enough to discipline their children against exposure to unsuitable material.

I confirmed for him that this was the whole enchilada, yes.

He asked if these games would ever be released here.

I told him that most of them had to be compromised in some way in order to deem them suitable for release here, and that something along these lines would most likely happen with this most recently refused title.

Compromised in what way he asked.

I explained to him that in order for an R18+ title to be released under our highest rating of MA15+, the game would essentially have to be altered so as to remove themes only suitable for eighteen year olds and up, removed until such time as the remaining game can be classified suitable for a fifteen year old.

Thats pretty ridiculous he remarked.

I agreed with him, stating that it was tantamount to reducing the impact/potency of Nicotine, Alcohol or Pornography so that it would be legal to sell Winnie blues, Jim Beam & Hustler to otherwise underage adolescents.

He agreed in muted astonishment.

Sad times to be Australian in the games industry…

As a westerner though I have to ask myself; does the western release of the game really need an English dub? I find myself thinking this more and more these days, if any western based distributors took the time to run a survey targeting gamers between the ages of 20-30 (which encompasses almost all gamers today) they’d find very quickly that your average nerd likes to watch their Anime, J-Horror, Hong Kong action cinema and Korean arthouse SUBBED! As an adolescent we might have been a little turned off at the prospect of having to read subtitles as it might have been too much of a detractor from the entertainment at hand. Although we realized before long that our interest in all things east was to become a fetishistic craving that simply must be an authentic experience.

Why is it taking so long for games to be available to the west in their native language with the option of subtitles? Sure there have been isolated cases out there, though they’re categorically few and far between. If I buy a Japanese videogame I want to hear the Japanese characters (based on Japanese cultural and intellectual concepts, developed by Japanese developers in the Japanese country of Japan) to SPEAK JAPANESE DAMMIT!

Making English language dubs for foreign media almost always results in considerable compromise where the narrative is concerned, characters names are changed, intonation of dialogue altered, and sometimes even the plot needs to be massaged in order for localization changes to make sense. Then there’s the voices… *shudder* …Barely one out of ten Jap Anime’s have decent English voice dubs, and by ‘decent’ I mean acceptable, the rest are usually abysmally overacted with asinine overuse of expletives and exposition thrown in for gap filling and vege-head appeal.

Why, I remember when all the eastern-to-western film adaptation madness started with Gore Verbinski’s interpretation of Hideo Nakata’s staggering masterwork Ringu; every partially illiterate couch potato in the west was about to get a shake & bake education in cutting edge J-Horror without ever having to experience it firsthand. It was a sad time indeed, I spent months leading up to the release of Verbinski’s remake running and screaming through the streets, approaching random people and begging them to go watch Ringu immediately, before it was too late, before they were given the option of seeing it without having to read subtitles. But alas; people are dummies who needed a work of art to be homogenised for them instead, like infants need their stewed apple slop to be cut into bite size pieces before rubbing it all over their face.

Its just not fair when this sort of thing happens to our games. We need more options; we need original dialogue with the option of subtitles instead of stupid-ass westerners putting on whacky embarrassing voices. And THIS MEANS YOU TOO, NO MORE HEROES!!

Incidentally, even Suda’s been dubbed into English for the sake of this interview… but I think he might have intended it or something… he’s artistic like that sometimes or whatever… enjoy…

]]> http://www.uudders.com/youve-got-to-start-asking-why-when/feed/ 0 http://www.uudders.com/seriously/ http://www.uudders.com/seriously/#comments Thu, 27 Aug 2009 06:30:33 +0000 Rob http://www.uudders.com/?p=234 Back in the bohemian days of university survival I worked with a nice young lad (who should really remain anonymous and henceforth shall be referred to as Bullwinkle) on a number of Unreal & Neverwinter mods (all of which turned out to be blisteringly politically incorrect, broken, were ultimately shite) during my quality time spent with young Bullwinkle, surprisingly we would have conversations about games, the one game Bullwinkle sung the praise of heavenly hosts for seemed to always be Serious Sam. Despite our repeat conversations regarding Mr. Sam and his series of tacky oddball videogame titles, it never once occurred to me that I should seek out the game and experience the greatness I was so frequently reassured of (by Bullwinkle).

Bullwinkle was some nineteen years old; he had a handsome collection of Megadeath T-Shirts, metal hair and perhaps a handsomer collection of metal albums back at his hovel. He enjoyed calling people ‘faggot’ at LAN parties and drinking wild turkey. He was a spritely young thing and he always tried to have these complicated conversations with me about the ludicrous difficulty curb he loved oh-so much in the Serious Sam PC game series. He even claimed that on its harder difficulty settings the game was potentially unaccomplishable. While I never took the time to find out for myself, it always tickled my interest gland to think that a developer existed out there somewhere who had the vision capable of recognising their title as somewhat tacky, henceforth attempting to reinvigorate interest through waving dicks in the face of every-hardcore-gamer by fashioning it unconquerable.

My knowledge of Serious Sam remains the same today as it has always been; was released almost ten years ago by Croatian developers who have spent their entire industry history dedicated to the Sam franchise and little else, who have released on every sixth gen console following the initial PC release. The game its self comes from a strange genre of satirical and excessively violent FPS titles originated almost entirely by the Duke Nukem series of PC/Console games, which its self was more recently spoofed in the Matt Hazard ‘series’ of games. Serious Sam is a big ugly bunch of dumb, you have to ask yourself why was it ever popular then? In Japan these games actually belong to a specific genre known affectionately as Kuso-Ge, sometimes titles are developed purposefully belonging to this category and sometimes they are retrospectively lumped in. I think Serious Sam might identify with the latter in that its essentially a big stupid, ridiculous, cheap videogame with a weak grasp on its own direction, narrative and gameplay. But Fuck-Hell its got a solid fanbase, established primarily on the BALLS hard challenge of Serious Sam, which in the end is actually the main appeal of some more well known Japanese Kuso-Ge titles.

I dunno, perhaps like that virtuoso guitar savant mate of yours, who obsesses over inaccessible solo albums by folks like Steve Vai, Stone Gossard and Tom Morello; you might just need to be a programmer to truly appreciate and understand the beauty of Serious Sam. Either way, I think we’re all gonna get our chance at experiencing Sam if after all this time the curiosity is still lingering, the Tim & Eric styling’s of this Serious Sam HD trailer have been enough to put the consumer brainwashing spell over on me.

Next week on the 14th & 15th of August is the Melbourne Freeplay Summit, during which Logan will be appearing on a Panel discussion concerning Games criticism and the danger of the fanboy (or girl), this will take place at the State Library at approx 3:30 in the afternoon, come on down if you’re in Melbourne town, the summit should be a real eye opener.

FREEPLAY