Caltrops - Short Dumbledores





	[quote name="junior allen"][quote name="Bill Dungsroman"]Sanitarium Review Boo. I bought Sanitarium when it came out because someone, either Computer Gaming World or maybe just the game’s box, promised that it was scary. It was, once during a cut scene about halfway through the game. However, I don’t think the praise for the game was “Scary – once!” Actually, there is another aspect of this game that frightens me: playing it again for this review without reading a walkthrough that explains the ridiculously difficult puzzles and points out where all the pixel-sized items are. Fuck that. The game itself, played in a third-person isometric perspective, is not too bad. The controls and interface are intuitive enough, and the graphics are really nice. The voice acting isn’t horrible, either, which really makes or breaks an adventure game. And the story, well…uh…? (SS: S001. Caption: “Spooky!”) Sibling Concerns And Technobabble The game opens with a fairly generic movie about your character and some other dude who doesn’t want you to do something about something, and apparently you’re both scientists. Then your character’s car “mysteriously” crashes, and thus you can immediately figure out who the bad guy is, since only two characters have been introduced by that point. Then you wake up in the game world, in a – you guessed it! – sanitarium. And it’s spoooooky. Oh yeah, and you have amnesia. Need I even tell you that the point of the game is to get your memory (and possibly – moohoohaha! – your sanity) back? Yay, it’s Torment minus all the great dialogue (well, minus mostly everything) and also just like about 500 million other stories in any medium ever. Oh, the story? Some nonsense about your sister and “Molecular Cohesion,” which you really won’t care about except for the few bits when the game tries to force you to. “Yoo hoo, remember the whole deal with the Cohesion of that Which Is Molecular?” it will ask you, not caring that your answer is usually a resounding “Sort of, but I really don’t remember or give a shit.” The bits with your sister are far more interesting, which is as much a compliment to that part of the story as it is an insult to the molecular what-fucking-ever part. (SS: S002. Caption: “Here you are as your sister, in one of the better parts of the game. Ignore the sci-fag horseshit and pay attention to her story.”) Because Deformed Children Are Edgy, That’s Why After waking up in the eponymous sanitarium, you attempt to effect your escape from it to God knows where. The game unfolds in a series of chapters, and in most of them you appear to be in some fruity dream world. After the sanitarium, you escape to a weird ruined little town populated by deformed children. In an unexpected twist (for this game), you change into other characters during the course of the story, including your sister (when she was younger), a comic book character cyclops named Grimwall, and an Aztec warrior named Olmec. I told you this game was weird. Near the end of the game you can become any of these as you choose to utilize their various abilities, which is actually a pretty cool design choice. It beats being the same generic idiot you’re forced to be in most adventure games. Yeah, a wise-cracking white dude never gets old. As with most adventure games, there are items for you to collect and use elsewhere. Honestly, there’s a friggin’ assload of items, over 60. And there are plenty of characters to talk to as well. And with dozens and dozens of puzzles, this game isn’t fucking around, it’s all the adventure game you’ll need for awhile. I’m not sure if that’s such a good thing, however. (SS: S003. Caption: “Here you are in a maze as Olmec, the Aztec Warrior. I was over mazes back in Zork 1.”) Zork Meets Myst Meets a Sharp Rap On The Head With a Ball Peen Hammer Actually, the puzzles in this game are pretty challenging, and most of them are relevant to the story. But that’s qualified with the following: the story is so fruity and bizarre nearly anything can be shoehorned into being made relevant, and some of the puzzles transcend merely challenging to outright complex and monitor-punchingly tedious. At least one (usually two) of the puzzles in each of the nine chapters (plus the last part, which is just one annoying timed puzzle – oh, how I do love timed puzzles) is perplexing to the point that you will spend far too much time on it, and then quit the game to either look for the solution in a FAQ or play something dumber where you can shoot and blow up things for awhile. Some of the puzzles, of the always-entertaining button-in-sequence variety, have over 20 individual steps. Have fun trial-and-erroring your way through those. A 21-step water pressure puzzle? Oh, no. One puzzle that appears about halfway through the game has you attempting to mimic sound notes in sequence. Yes, just like the one that made any of us gullible enough to play Myst did in that stupid ship. The one in this game is even harder than that one. I simply can’t think of a puzzle I have come across in an adventure game where the solution was so obvious yet so unbelievably difficult to achieve. I thought I was fucking tone deaf after bunging up the sequence for the millionth time in a row. Every annoying type of adventure game puzzle is present at least once: timed puzzles, sequence puzzles, mazes (one is a maze with timed parts – oh, the pain), they’re all here. Dials, buttons, knobs, alien fucking fly wings, you name it. Keys, oh yes, there are keys, keys and key analogs, all kinds. Plus, be prepared to pixel hunt; there is little indication that something may be picked up and used, including a SMALL FUCKING ROCK AMONG A BUNCH OF OTHER SMALL NONINTERACTIVE ROCKS. The Magic Rock was in the second chapter, and I almost gave up at that point, flopping on my bed and mumbling “Mommy it hurts” over and over as I cradled my pounding head in my hands. Not that head, you faggot. (SS: S004. Caption: “I know, I know: WTF is that? It’s an alien fly wing puzzle, of course. Good luck figuring it out.”) Is This Game Over Yet? It’s Eleven O’Clock And I Have To Jerk Off Sanitarium will take awhile to get all the way through, especially the first time. Many of the puzzles are quite difficult, and have fairly non-intuitive solutions. The developers made most of them relevant to the story, but like I said, just because you’re supposed to be lost in your own comatose dream world doesn’t excuse the fruity nature of many of the puzzles. There’s a ton of them though, and if you crave adventure games for their puzzles, this one has them in spades. There are probably over a hundred total, in difficulty ranging from not-too-hard to OMFG-where’s-the-FAQ? But hey, even the superlative Grim Fandango had a timed puzzle, what can you do? I really don’t recommend this game unless you really dig adventure games and especially relish puzzle solving. The story is fairly generic unless you make a concerted effort to get into it, as the bits involving the main character’s sister are fairly interesting, but the Secret Formula shit is pretty run-of-the-mill. You really won’t care about it by the end of the game, provided you get to it. [/quote] I actually once landed a job interview with the guys who put out this game -- they were looking for a writer and were interested based on a couple of stories I sent them, one of which was all about a sadist killing the zombie version of his dead wife over and over again for jollies. Ah, youth. They didn't advertise where they were (at the time they were based in Greensburg, PA, a declining mill town best known nowadays for being the hometown of Mario Balzac in K.C. Constatine's series of police novels, which ain't exactly known at all) and it was hard to find the offices. From the outside it looked like they might put together water softeners, or maybe underwrite insurance. The first interview I spent a lot of time talking to a little fat guy who had just come off a brisk shift of Quake 3 , where he had seemingly done very well - I asked him why there wasn't a back catalog, really, for games and we had an interesting discussion about publishing realities in the computer world. (My one job interview tip -- if you can charm them into talking about anything other than "where do you see yourself in the next five years"you've won.) I then moved to the current writer. We had some discussions about the dialog, and I got him to admit that while of course the game was great, I mean, no doubt, some of the lines were just Gay. (Actually, I never finished Sanitarium, losing heart right around the Olmec scenario, which was just stupid beyond words.) I think we talked about Don Dellilo after that, and he wondered if I liked <i>End Zone</i>. I lied and told him I had. They called me back the next day and gave me some kind of test where I had to write rpg dialog trees. They were working at the time on some kind of game which involved werewolves and dimension portals -- it was all very hush-hush of course and I wasn't allowed to see any of it, but it sounded pretty okay to me. No stupider than anything else I've ever played. I remember it was their Big Project -- they even made me sign a confidentiality agreement. I tried to write convincingly Ungay versions of "we can't go there"and "i can't use that" and "you have offended me/i will kill you" I wrote what I thought they wanted to hear, went back home (drove back in a blazing snowstorm, I remember) and waited. A few days later I heard it was neck and neck, but they ended up with the Other Guy. A few months later they called back and asked if I was still interested, since the Other Guy wasn't working out. By that time, though, I was already planning my move to Philly, so I told them were they could stick it. Some time later I read on some site (Fatbabies?) that they were supposed to do Myst 4 but lost the license somehow. Maybe they're all back to flipping burgers and playing Quake 3 in their parent's garage, who knows. junior allen currently playing <i>Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines</i> currently reading: <i>Flashman at the Charge</i>, George Macdonald Fraser[/quote]