Infinite Lives

This summer, my friend Chris and I went, along with our friend A.J., to Video Games New York. I browsed the glass case full of Virtual Boy games, then beelined to the counter to ask, in a breathy stage whisper, “Hey, hi. Do you have that Japanese Virtual Boy game? The first-person shooter that is based on Lovecraft? The one where you shoot fish-people?” No, they did not have that game.

Of this event, my friend Chris writes,

I immediately called bullshit on her, since things that awesome just don’t exist, ever.

Then I googled it.

Turns out she was totally not making it up. It’s called “Insmouse no Yakata” (Innsmouth Mansion) and was a first person shooter.

So now you know: the legend is true. The ill-fated Virtual Boy did, indeed, have exactly one 3D first-person shooter, and it took place in Innsmouth, and in it, you actually shot freaky fish people. Except for the time I insisted Mary Tyler Moore had briefly served in the Senate, I have never lost a bet.

Chris found Insmouse no Yakata’s entry at Planet Virtual Boy, here. In addition to a review, they’ve got plenty of screen captures, and even a couple videos, which are available for download.

I filched one of said downloadables and, since none of us may ever pony up the US$80 Insmouse goes for, I have embedded two whole minutes of spoilers, below:

I really want to buy and play this game. For $10.

• Bohemian Gamer – Who Says There are No Good Lovecraft Games?
• Planet Virtual Boy – Insmouse no Yakata game overview

I get the feeling TGS is probably about to happen, because a disproportionate number of people I know are suddenly in Japan.

I am a total sucker for photoblogs, and Chris Kohler’s Tokyo blog does not disappoint. Below, I’ve pasted the photo that made me laugh like a 10-year old. In it, Chris—ordinarily an upstanding citizen—is poking a giant Game Boy, which itself is clearly labeled “Do Not Touch” and “Do Not Photograph.”

I love the sense of extremely restrained defiance this photo imparts.

• Game Life – Dear Akihabara: You’re Doing It Wrong

...if you live here in the Bay Area, I mean. And I totally understand if you’re busy. But if you are anywhere near the Haight on Saturday night, you could pop on by Giant Robot—the one here in San Francisco, not the hip LA one—and check out art by heavy-hitting art bigwigs (David Horvath) and unsung heroes (Martin Cendreda). I mean, only if you’re up for it.

• GRSF

I mentioned the INN Revival Project in passing to Josh, my e-friend of over ten years, who, like me, had a Sierra Network account in the early- to mid-nineties. “Yeah,” he said of INN Revival, “too bad that never took off.”

Excuse me? This is a common misconception, I told him. “But they never got the INN software to work!” Josh protested. I let him know that the INN Revival is alive and well! And it isn’t a huge overhaul of the INN software—it’s actually the same software (mostly), emulated in DOSBox!

Getting Back to Our Roots

The ImagiNation Network, AKA the Sierra Network, was among the earliest virtual worlds and online multiplayer gathering spots. With the exception of LarryLand, which was densely packed with casinos and lewd talk, the virtual world was targeted at family values and wholesome, clean fun. In MedievaLand, you could hop into Shadow of Yserbius, a proto-MMORPG, or either of Yserbius’ sequels. Yserbius was an early graphical MUD that is, today, extremely clunky by WoW standards, but compared to the earliest text MUDs I telnetted into, was absolutely breathtaking.

In a way, Yserbius was INN’s downfall. AOL, who owned and operated Neverwinter Nights, purchased INN from AT&T, simply so they could shut the Yserbius operation down. Neverwinter Nights is credited on Wikipedia as being the first MMORPG to display graphics—this, I think, is absolutely debatable (not only because of Yserbius’ place in the canon, but also because of Mad Maze, the online Prodigy MMO).

Now that Josh knew INN was being played on PCs and laptops all over the world, he wanted in. But how?

“I assume you’re on a Mac,” I sighed. “It’s trickier than installing DOSbox for PC.”

Of course, the process isn’t that tricky; the real problem is, the steps are mostly undocumented.

What follows is the explanation I gave Josh. It’s tailored for Mac users like me, with OSX as your operating system. If you’re a PC user, these instructions might not do you much good—with a little extra reading, you’ll see that setting up DOSbox and INN for PC is actually easier. You can do it!

Filed under things-I-absolutely-did-not-know-before-this-moment:

Yesterday, writer Bob Mackey dispelled the myth that EarthBound is twee, cutesy, and lovable. Oh, no. It is not. If you wrong the game, it will string you along, waiting for the exact moment to mete out its terrible, cruel justice.

Mackey discovered this in an article at Edge Online, which explains:

Perhaps the most prominent example of cartridge-based DRM was in the SNES classic Earthbound. Those that had Super Nintendo disc copiers would find that their illegal copy of Earthbound seemed to play fine. What they didn’t know was that the game was spawning way more enemies than normal, making the entire game an endless annoyance. And to those intrepid pirates who slogged their way through anyway, Earthbound had a special treat for them—the game would freeze in the middle of the battle with the final boss, taking the time to instead delete whatever saved games it could find.

Because this truly gut-wrenching moment happens in the endgame, the video depicting said horror contains big spoilers I regret having seen, even though everyone said, “Hey! Spoilers!” If you’re still curious, there’s a YouTube video of the final boss battle, complete with the game pausing to systematically delete all of the saved games, here. Skip to 1:33 if you want a spoiler-free experience.

• 61 Frames Per Second – Earthbound’s Secret Evil

• Edge Online – Ten Most Annoying DRM Methods

Do you use Raptr? That’s the social networking tool and community site that, in this era of status updates and passive intimacy, makes it super-easy to keep an eye on what your gamer friends are currently playing. The service is extremely useful for circles of gaming friends—potentially, I mean—and it’s also worth noting that the site and client themselves are streamlined, polished, and intuitive.

Unfortunately, I haven’t fiddled too much with the service since I first registered and, for reasons beyond my ken, the site and client don’t seem to follow my online gaming goings-on.

But that didn’t stop the site from sending me this strange little email cataloguing my full user experience with bullet points:

Ha, ha. I get it, thanks.

• Raptr: What are you playing?

When I was a fiction writing undergrad, our class was visited by the great Lee K. Abbott. I felt at odds with him, I remember. He told my class that it was wrong to write a story with certain facts concealed. He told us that when the facts of the full story are only gradually uncovered, the process is, to the readers, unfair.

Annoyingly, Lee K. Abbott was not wrong. There are stories we tell that are very deliberately ‘unfair’; it is now obvious to me that Abbott is not a fan of horror.

In the horror genre, and especially in Japanese horror, real fear comes from the thrill of discovery. And Japanese horror itself takes a cue from, not just the principles of Asian cinema and plotting, but also the very distinctly Japanese design philosophy. Japanese design is less about agency, and more about uncovering a plot. Lee K. Abbot would be furious with it.

Recently Leigh Alexander published this intriguing feature at Kotaku, about the history of survival horror. Apart from being an excellent overview of the genre, it wisely compares Western and Japanese game design philosophies. Most importantly, Alexander asks this question: does survival horror still exist? She writes,

Don’t Fight, Just Run! Titles like these all have distinct differences, of course, but they all tend to have a few traits in common. First, they largely de-prioritize combat mechanics, favoring challenging the player through elements like on-location puzzles, mazelike game areas, using the environment itself against enemies, and even fleeing and hiding instead of direct combat.

It’s true. Alexander names Siren and Fatal Frame as two of the finest examples of using vulnerability to create horror and panic. In the Fatal Frame canon, you do not use weapons or ‘defeat’ anything, per se—rather, you are a young woman wielding a camera.