The Gamer's Quarter

[Dracko]

I consider my earliest gaming childhood to be pretty well filled and tasteful. There's Mechner's ever-threatening Prince of Persia, the LucasArts greats Last Crusade and Secret of Monkey Island, Brøderbund's Wings of Fury...

But the strangest game, by far, that I experienced on my modest IBM at childhood, the most foreboding, saturated one, was a French title called Targhan. It's hard to truly explain now, with so much distance between those experiences (Guess it's time for a trip to Home of the Underdogs), but as a fantasy title, it seemed to borrow from, and pervert, Tolkien and Howard, while further darkening the two universes tehy created. This was appropriate: The game was hard. Really hard. The developers, Silmarils, are reputed for the difficulty of their games. And its environments reflected its arduous, sometimes even ornery, nature. Bleak, rusted skies and a dying forest served as backdrop, and more often than not, I'd find myself tumbling into pitch dark caverns only to get slaughtered at the hands of something unidentifiable.

What Silmarils had to offer, through this title and many others, was a distinct sense of survival. One were the poorest consequences, demise, would be met with frustration and hatred. This wasn't Every Step if Potentially Fatal, the sort of surreal dread that Prince of Persia laid at your feet every second, that you could surmount with attention, misguided patience and habit, or even that of an The Immortal. This was a a very visceral form of contest and almost Darwinian randomness. No guaranteees are present and all bets are off. This is seen eve, more in Robinson's Requiem, a game unforgiving in every aspect, where every little wound, every one, could turn gangrenous, cancerous, in a word, fatal, even months after the facts, leading only to your death. And it wasn't a poor game either: Cast in the role of a Robinson, test subjects who live on foreign planets for a year to determine human viablity, only to be tossed away on a prison world in case of bearing sympathy or diseases that would work against colonisation, you had to work on surviving daily against bone breaks, illnesses, poisonings, and your peers, in hopes to escape.

Silmarils, even if purely accidentally, had a knack for creating games where uncertain survival was at stake. And in a sense, that was engrossing. More so than any petty slasher flick. So you may as well treat yourselves to the utter Franco-angst you'll get out of these games.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Lackey]

Survival angst is intense, it's a shame I've lost my tolerance for it. If you haven't tried it, Notrium is like a much more mild Robinson's Requiem but a little more adventure gamish. I played an earlier version of the game before the addition of the alien and robot, so I'm not sure how similar the experience is.

Your description of Targhan reminds me of playing Shadow of the Beast. Some games are just extremely player hostile but more, I don't know, indifferent about it.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[OtakupunkX]

One of the earliest PC games I ever played (when I was really, really young) was this MS-DOS psuedo-FMV game called MegaRace. The actual gameplay was like a ghetto Pole Position with weapons and pre-rendered graphics that were really nice for the time, but there were these very long FMV sequences between levels that were meant to set the game up like some kind of reality TV show (and this was back in 92'ish). They featured this creepy game show host guy that was really annoying.

[Lackey]

You know what? Transarctica is awesome. Have you tried it? It's a great example of some really specific theme or concept having an entire game designed around it. It's not like they thought to make a specific genre of game and then came up with a theme to fit it; Transartica could be nothing but a game about piloting a giant armoured train around a post-apocalyptic frozen wasteland.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Dracko]

Transarctica is yet another ambitious and engrossing concept leading to results I can't properly qualify yet. I'm going to have to get used to this game, just like every other title of theirs. It's satisfying in a way, and survival angst as you coined it, seems to be somewhat lost these days, not neccesarily in form, but in essence.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Lackey]

If you're playing transarctica, I highly recommend this manual from abandonia.com. It's in Word format, which is strange, but it's all hyperlinked and pretty handy for getting started.

[dessgeega]

contemporary players are wusses.
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[dhex]

and/or have a life.

though i'll cop to being a wuss too. i simply don't have the patience anymore, with a few exceptions here and there. shit, shadow of the colossus got to be a bit too repetiive for me and i gave up on that too.
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[dessgeega]

well, most current console games are filled with load times and cutscenes, so replaying them is often tedious and time-consuming (hi, rule of rose). if a game takes half an hour to complete, that's different. but most players accustomed to the cutscene breed lose the replay mechanism, i think.

what i'm trying to say is that i have a life.

;_;
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[Lackey]

Have to concede to not playing many games even when I have time. I guess that means I'm more wuss than life-haver.

It's unfortunate the replay mechanism outlived it's function. Like in a cutscene heavy game: why why why would you replay them? Frustrating and not in a challenge/failure way.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Dracko]

I can see why most would settle on poor game design as a reason. That's definitely part of it, but there's surely all manners of ways of weaving something complex and involving in the Test by Fire department by using up-to-date, yet simple, mechanisms.

P.S. I find it funny and revealing that the simplest thing for me to learn at the beginning of Transarctica is how to shoot myself in the head.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Lackey]

I really enjoy the gameover text that appears when you commit suicide. The last line, about the sun shining above the opaque cloud layer, is included in every death message.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Dracko]

That sentence doesn't seem to know whether it's hopeful or hopeless, whether you're just another speck of dust vied to die off in a cold universe or if your people will succeed without you.

This is far more impressive stuff than I originally gave Silmarils credit for.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Lackey]

Just so other people can see what we're talking about:


I also ran into a town with this cryptic message for me:

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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |