13. There and back again, a story of five games

You are listening to the Ericade Radio Network. Good evening and welcome to another hour of Amiga Retro music. It's Sunday and a new Amiga flashback. DJ Daemon here and today's subject is storytelling in games. How is it done? When is it right? And when does it make the game broken?

Bop flop. I'm not making words up. That's the name. I'm just reading the liner notes. So storytelling. Games tell stories in various ways and I want to sort them out in four different categories and that's not a complete list, but I think those categories are important. The first is text. A game that tells a story by text is often an adventure game and they werekinda a big thing during the Infocom era. You probably remember games like Sork, or maybe the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, based on the book of course, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. They had no graphics whatsoever, and the stories were short but very informative, and you wrote commands like go north, pick up, open door, I whateaten by a grue. So that is a thing and it's kind of limited but it puts a number of very powerful tools in the hands of the developer. You namely force the game player to use his or her imagination to, well, experience the game. This is super powerful but okay it's a bit obsolete and Infocom eventually disappeared due to not being able to handle this.They actually tried to put graphics in the last games, but it was too late in the day for them. The other storytelling system, the thing that builds the story is talking to people. You walk around and you speak to everyone in the village and they tell their stories, they give little hints. The storytelling device is magnificent, but also very dangerous in the way that it makes the game super buggy.If you think about it, it's not the storylines, but if you listen to little tidbits of stories, you can actually assemble the whole story and collect clues and stuff just by yourself. You don't need to go in a straight line. And that opens up a number of options which may make the game super immersive, very good open-ended sandbox, but also buggy. I'm looking at you, Fallout 2.

Then we have audio logs. I've spoken about System Shock, so I won't repeat myself, but both those games and later games in the Doom series and of course Bioshock, which is kind of logic, have those. Everyone is dead. That's a bad thing, but you're alive and everybody are lying, you know, piles of bodies and they all carry those audio logs where they tell you that everything went kind of bad.and you have to pick the story together. Super popular and very capable in a limited space environment, okay? If you're in a burnt out spaceship or maybe in an underground military base, then it works perfect. However, if you depopulate whole West Virginia, yeah, then suddenly the audio log metaphor is utterly broken. 76 reasons to hate you, Fallout.And then we have the immersion. That is the idea that you learn by walking around. You pick up stuff. You look around for clues everywhere. And immersion is not just storytelling. It's how the game is experienced in itself. I would say that this is kind of how I want to sort them up.

Don't ask me to translate it because I cannot.You crawl out of the wreckage of a helicopter. You don't know exactly why you were forced in there and exactly what you're doing in Union City or who you're supposed to meet, but you know that you have to run away. You flee into the sprawling city in a dystopian world where you are somewhere in Australia.Yeah, this is the start of Beneath a Steel Sky, a game that came out in 1994 by Revolution Software. It existed for the Amiga, and there was a Tokyo version with spoken words on a CD-ROM for the PC. That's the one I played, by the way. So, Mr. Robert Foster, the fugitive, without any idea what's going on. Well, you also have Joey, a circuit board.with a robot personality on. Once you find a robot to plug it in, you also have a sidekick. And I love storytelling with sidekicks. That's a thing. You can do it so well. And Joey is a really sarcastic little bot. Fits me fine. And the whole story, when you run around trying to figure out what's wrong with this city, it is very cheerful in a way. Everybody's happy, crazy, wacky.But that is in stark contrast to the world itself. It's dark, people die, and it's horrible in all ways. And it turns out that this has a reason, you see. There were two people that worked with this game that were the leaders, Charles Cecil and comic book artist David Gibbons. One of those guys wanted it to be dark, and the other one wanted it to be very perky in a LucasArts game style.

pretty much meant that they compromised. And this in its way, this could have been a really horrific thing, but it turned out to be perfect. In the way the game is told, you're pretty much exploring the city. You talk to people and you utterly understand that one of the game players in this whole thing is the world itself. Many games has the world building as a canvas. You pretty much get a backstory and that's it.but everything the backstory tells you shows up in the city so it almost plays an active role in it. eventually you're up against your father in some kind of like Luke Skywalker Darth Vader moment and you have to choose between ending the game early by siding with him or fighting him. I think it's a fantastic story in the fact that you see how the world hangsinto one singular story rather than being disjoined. The city is upside down, the world is largely burnt out after a big war and what I mean upside down is that in the higher levels the poor people live and in the bottom of this dilapidated city the rich people are running around and everybody is utterly clueless to what's really going on. Now that is a storytelling game that is magnificent.

Brodie Epic. Epic is a good word because storytelling on a grand scale, that's pretty much what epic means actually. I like two things with good storytelling in any games. That is the first thing I want to feel for the world. I want to feel for the people in it. When they die, when they get happy, when they feel bad.I want to have some of that experience and a good game can tell you exactly in the way that you care for the characters and the failing ones will do no such thing.

kinda bubble bubble something. Anyway, next game is something we've stolen a lot of stuff from. It would be dumb not to admit as much. It's Flashback, the quest for identity. Amiga Flashback got its name from that game and it also got the graphics on the podcast from the game itself.It was released in 1992 by Delphine, French developer company, and distributed by U.S. It takes place in the year 2142. Conrad B. Hart wakes up with no memory on some kind of alien world, and he has to get his bearings and interact with the world, which means he has to run a lot from it. He has to...interoperate with some terminals, he has to shoot stuff and generally make sure he stays alive. Eventually he figures out how to restore the memories and that is not a good experience because now he knows exactly what happened. Seems like he screwed up some kind of scientific experiment and now he's up against some kind of shape shifters called morphs. And in the end you go from part to part toAnd it doesn't really feel like you are in an adventure game mainly because it's more action-based and this makes it more fast-paced and You eventually pick the story together little by little And it ends up that you know that you're up against big brain I would even say it's a stable genius of a brain hidden somewhere in a planet core and you have to blow it upOnce done, you have saved the world from the bad stuff, the bad boys, the bad, you know, the big bad, that is the Morphs. And you end up frozen down in stasis because you don't know how to get home. But now at least time is not a problem. I hope you really get home someday. Conrad B. Hart.

Celestial Vibes, one of the new songs on the station. All songs this hour in this podcast are new on the station. Yeah, you know this. Will all games really benefit from a story at all? I mean, the people that made Arkanoid for the Commodore 64 really believed it did, because it has one.And if you don't know, Arkanoid is basically Breakout. You know, this game where you have some kind of pad or bat or whatever that you move horizontally in the bottom and then you bounce a ball on bricks and they kind of disappear when you hit them. You know, a super simple game. But indeed, it does have a story of someone blowing up your ship, you're going after them, you're playing Breakout for whatever reasons and then you end up with an end boss. Now, I'm not going to complain, it's a great game, butI really don't see how this story helps anything.

Cybers PC Good storytelling cannot guarantee success and bad storytelling doesn't necessarily mean the end of the game but it kinda helps bringing down a promising concept. 2001 a game was released, one of the last really big adventure games. It was in Spanish but it was translated into English and in 2003It came out to a very eagerly awaiting world. The game was called Runaway. And it promised you, on the box, you are going to love this game. Let's read from the box the story, the synopsis if you want to. New York. Without knowing how or why, Brian, a student on the verge of graduating from college, is attacked by mafia gangsters.During his desperate getaway, in the company of a mysterious striptease dancer, he ends up meeting a wide range of unusual characters. But which ones are trying to help him, and which ones are planning to blow his head off? Yeah, I'm not kidding you, that is actually what the box says. Kinda brutal. On the other side of the box,There is a well, cartoony picture, so to speak, of a man that would be Brian Basko. That's your character. And the other one is a gorgeous young woman called Gina Timmons, a lounge singer or as the liner notes here says, striptease dancer. guess that's the same thing for some people. So here you are in a storytelling experience that really does not work.

Like this. You expect them to appear in the game. Otherwise it's this caveat-emptor trope I told you about. But pretty early in the game, Gina Timmings, the gorgeous woman, falls down a shaft and dies. Or that's what you think is happening. And the rest of the game is just Brian. Yeah. So you run around trying to figure out a lot of things and you...Eventually figure out that you will have to not only run away, have to talk to people, people get killed, and in the end, well, Gina Timmons is now a damsel in distress, magically reappearing and you have to rescue her. The problem with the storytelling is it's not particularly interesting. It's not very, you know, it doesn't feel very real. And the worst and most horrible part is you don't care about the characters.so they die, whatever. That's not an experience you want to have with a game like this. And it's not particularly funny. And the only memorable part, I believe, is a bus where you meet some transvestites. And that bunch is quite, you know, that's the only characters that seem to be interesting in any way. The rest of them are just bland and boring.So in the end comes the dumbest moment in gaming this part of the century or maybe millennium. Yeah, you see you find your damsel in distress and she gives you an opportunity. One, you can go back to New York and good luck. You're going to be something cool. You have a career in academia or maybe a high paying job somewhere. That sounds good. I take it or I have a better suggestion.Go away and run away with Gina herself somewhere and I believe it's like California I don't really remember and I don't really care. Okay and do what? Well, you get to be with her. Of course My guess is this is something they put there to make A possible sequel or something and this is not even a choice.

will happen and he automatically, without your input, chooses to run away with her. Well, I kinda get the idea that he is going to spend his time being a pool boy because, well, he has not completed college and she's a striptease dancer. What can a job would you get if you run away with such a person? Really? It's dumb behind belief. Paper thin storytelling.and the best thing would have been what if Gina and you were sidekicks in the same way that Indiana Jones would do in the fate of Atlantis. Now that would have been interesting. So it's just a wasted game, that's what that is. Well, it's called Runaway and that's pretty fitting because, you know, you should.

charming but drunk. And I can promise you, I am neither. So, what about stealing a story? If you make a good story, well, there's one thing. If you kinda take a book and make it into a game, that's another thing altogether. C64 had an adventure text game with a little bit of graphics called The Hobbit.It's not freely based on the story by Tolkien. It's actually more or less exactly the book I had just read the book when I played the game and I can tell you side by side It was pretty close to the whole story which Really helped you to complete a game if you had read that book So that is a surefire way to win and the game actually does deliver. It's funThe graphic is ok and since it's a very good book to begin with, of course the game delivers. What else could you expect from it? But I'm bit weirded out by the fact that that's not very often they do. It's like if you kind of base a game on a movie, it generally becomes very loosely attached and if that's Ocean doing it, it generally sucks. I'm sorry to say it like that, but really.So I would hope that people would actually create books. Sorry, games based pretty much on books.

VeneSense, what do you want? A question to you. Do you think that a story in a computer game you play has to be static? You can play it, you can learn it, you can beat the game, but you cannot change the story. If the answer is no, then I give you Defender of the Crown.A Commodore 64 game also ported to the Amiga, but the C64 version is better. You start out by meeting Robin Hood, a fictitious character, yes, there are no evidence that he ever did exist. And the whole storytelling is based loosely on Great Britain's history before it became what it is today. So we are back in the Middle Ages, I believe.And Robin Hood gives you some resources and simply starts up your quest to unite the split up kingdoms and warlords fighting for control over the whole region. And that is a story you make yourself.You can, well, you can fight in battles, can joust the enemy on horseback, you can row the ladies, and of course you will eventually take over region by region in any means you can, trying to run your burgeoning empire. The whole thing pretty much writes itself. If you know how to do it, it is a surprisingly fast game. If you can beat it, it'salmost not a speedrun, I'm amazed about it. I mean, I struggled with it because yeah, you know, I'm not much of a speedrunner, but it was a very fun story experience because you really felt for the whole thing. I especially loved the jousting because it was kind of tough, but it had immense effect on what happened in the game because everything that you won gave you all kinds of advantages.

and everything you lost humiliated you and made it harder for you to go about trying to bring alliances and stuff to work. Well, in the end, you're the ruler of, well, Great Britain or England, I don't know. It's kind of history. I'm not sure if Great Britain is the right name here, but you know what I mean. The little thing that was Albion or Airstrip One, if you like, It is a good way to make your own storyand also have a lot of fun. The Middle Ages were never that fun.

FB Drunk Monkey. I don't know if it's related to Monkey Island. There are many games that tell stories in their own little way. And I cannot name them all, that's impossible. But you know if you listen to this podcast that I'm really fond of System Shock 1, System Shock 2,Bioshock and to a certain degree Bioshock Infinite, which kinda have a very driven storytelling, all of them, in their own way so to speak, as I said. So, there is something new as well, but it's not new as in yesterday, but it's new enough not to be a retro game. Go to, well, Steam and search for Analog, a Hate Story, or maybe Hate Plus, the sequel to it.The story is that you connect to a generation ship in space that has been lost for centuries in order to figure out what really brought it down. As you go there you are tasked to like piece together all the stories that are given to you in fragments.If you can ignore the rather bad anime-manga thing going on, because that part of the story I really don't like, you actually get treated to a very interesting way of assembling your own novel and trying to figure out what the ship was about. You can also re-enter the whole thing, because you can never in one game run get all the fragments.and pieced together from different eras in the ship's existence. You can also interact with their weird AIs, but that's the less interesting part of the game. I absolutely love this thing, so that's an experience if you want some really cool storytelling. Well, thank you for listening and we will be hearing you every Saturday. The podcast is available on Sunday, so please don't misunderstand me now.

There's only one Amiga flashback per week and it can be heard on Saturday 9pm and on your podcast player the day after.

Fish and Chips. Funny little name for a chip tune. And before it was Fine Anot. Yeah, yeah, you know this. Amiga Flashback is available every week and I have to inform you that I will not be able to keep this backbreaking tempo of giving you three or four Amiga Flashbacks per week. I can only commit to one. Someday I may be a little bit inspired and you get an extra one.That's about what I can do, but I'm happy that you're listening and keep spreading the word. And the podcast, course.