Video Games As Travel

Beyond just being a fun diversion, a good video game can be a transportive experience. I would even go so far to say that for many of us whose responsibilities to work and family preclude us from extensive travel, video games offer a way to experience both real and imagined worlds. Some games immerse the player in compelling 3D environments that offer an experience that is not unlike taking a trip to an interesting locale. Below is my personal list of games that have taken me away to exotic and compelling places.

10. Animal Crossing

Yes, it's a game about living in a village of cartoon animals but take a midnight winter's stroll through your village and tell me you are not immersed. Animal Crossing in any of its incarnations is the epitome of a chill experience from its soft and colorful art style to its relaxing soundtrack. The music of Animal Crossing does a lot to set the mood and feels like it could be from some half-remembered kids show from your childhood which helps to put the player in the right mindset for this very charming kid-friendly world. While the environment is a simple one, that's not a bad thing and it offers an enjoyable alternative to our our fast-paced stressful adult lives.

9. Turok The Dinosaur Hunter

In this Nintendo 64 classic you play the titular dino hunter as he traverses a dramatic jungle environment replete with ersatz Mayan and Incan temples. Sure, the game in its original incarnation has not aged particularly well but playing Turok takes you away. In fact, years later when I was backpacking through actual Central and South American ruins, I couldn't help but think of this game and how it planted a seed of exploration in my mind.

8. The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker

From the very beginning the Zelda games emphasized exploration and featured immersive open worlds. This is especially true of the 3D games that started with Ocarina of Time but Windwaker presents the most unique visual experience of all of the Zelda games. Windwaker takes the form of a gorgeously fluid animated movie and has aged surprisingly well for a game that is over a decade old. What's more, it provides the player with a vast oceanic world with a lots of islands big and small to explore. While sailing this world can get a little repetitive (alleviated in some recent versions of the game) traversing this enormous watery world is an undeniably thrilling experience, no small thanks to a stirring soundtrack.

7. Resident Evil: REmake

Not all trips are to fun vacation spots. Resident Evil Remake is the Nintendo Gamecube version of the classic Playstation game and is essentially a remix of the original with new graphics and side stories that really bring the environments to life in way they hadn't been before. The game is set in the creepy Spencer Mansion, a dark, sprawling creature-infested estate built over an equally creepy labyrinth of grungy labs. The original Playstation graphics left a lot to be desired but this remake lovingly recreates a set of truly scary and disturbing environments to the point where the mansion itself is an important character in the game. What's more, there is a lot of fun lore to pick up that helps you piece together the events that led to the outbreak and the long twisted history of the mansion.

6. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

There are technically bigger GTA maps but San Andreas gives you a whole state to play in complete with three distinct cities, multiple small towns, a sprawling desert, and a vast countryside. While there have been newer and better GTA experiences in the over ten years since this game was released, nothing quite offers this much variety and distinction in its environments. Not only do you get analogues of LA and San Francisco but a Las Vegas clone to explore complete with playable casinos. Including a Vegas-inspired city is unique and makes the game worth playing in itself. It turns out San Andreas is a great spot for a virtual vacation.

5. Alien Isolation

Sure the Alien is terrifying but the real star of Alien Isolation is the magnificent Sevestapol station, a wonderfully low-rent and shoddy space outpost. Sevastopol is a brilliant extrapolation of Ridley Scott's dystopian capitalist future and is steeped in lo-fi 1970's retro futuristic realness, complete with CRT monitors, ashtrays, and random magazines lying around. What's more the game features a lot of great space porn with vistas of a gorgeous gas giant hanging out the windows and a blazing star casting long black shadows.

When you are not hiding under desks and in lockers avoiding a deadly xenomorph, you can marvel at what is a towering design achievement. There have been a lot of games inspired by Alien but this is the only one that really captures the spirit of the movies. It's a harrowing game and a bit of a slow burn but worth playing for the design alone.

5. LA Noire

A loving video game recreation of the 1940's film noir aesthetic. Unlike a lot of games which offer approximations of American cities, the designers have thoroughly recreated post-war Los Angeles based on years of research and archival materials to deliver an unforgettable setting for their dark detective story. This is an amazingly ambitious game from the studio who brought you the Grand Theft Auto series and shares some of its open world structure with that series but it is also very much its own thing with an emphasis investigative gameplay and then-cutting edge performance capture. Still, there are few games that are this successful at capturing a particular time and place.

4. Halo

For a series of games that span the known universe, the Halo series is great at creating very terrestrial-feeling environments that usually resemble the Pacific Northwest and juxtaposing them with otherworldly elements. Who can forget strolling along a grassy hill in the first game and looking up to see the horizon giving way to a ribbon of land and water in the distance which arcs over the zeneith? Or turning a corner in a forested stretch of land only to see a massive Forerunner skyscraper in the distance? Or exiting a room only to find yourself in a snowy tundra where marines and alien tanks are engaged in a sprawling battle? Halo is not only a series of excellent console shooters but it never forgets to give players epic environments in which to play.

2. Far Cry 4

The raison d'etre of the Far Cry series has always been open world action games in exotic locales but Far Cry 4 not only brought it into the next generation of consoles but also brings to life a unique and truly compelling environment, the fictional Himalayan country of Kiryat which is an analogue of real life places such as Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan and therefore draws on their culture and visual language. Far Cry 4 is filled with majestic mountain vistas, exotic architecture, jungles, and glaciers all of which can be traversed with ATVs, helicopters, and mountain climbing.  Even the region's mythological heritage is represented in a series of missions that take the player to the legendary realm of Shangri-La, created in shades of red and gold. Far Cry 4 also shows off what is possible with the current generation of consoles in creating environments that are at times almost photo-realistic and gorgeous to behold. It's a game that really takes you away to an unforgettable (though violent) place.

1. Skyrim

For years the Elder Scrolls games have been been creating a sprawling fantasy world steeped in thousands of years of history and lore. Each game has built on a successful formula of single player action RPG gameplay and it's hard to say that anyone of the recent games are "better" than the others but Skyrim gets the edge for being the most recent and polished experience. If you are looking to spend a lot of time in a fully realized expansive fantasy world with shades of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones there is no better game. Not only is the presentation great but the world is so dense. You can literally spend hours in-game reading any of the hundreds of books that can be found all over the game and which enrich the world. It doesn't get much more immersive than that.


Patrick Garone
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Alien Isolation Review

Anyone who reads my inaccurately-named Monster Movie of the Week feature on this blog knows that I am a lifelong fan of the Alien franchise.  So, I had been eyeing SEGA's Alien Isolation  for a while, impressed with its take on the material and its inspiration from Ridley Scott's 1979 horror movie rather than James Cameron's 1986 action film, which video games have been relentlessly ripping off since it was released.  Instead of being a shooter, like most games adapted from the series, Isolation  is an intense survival horror experience and seemingly a spiritual successor to the old Commodore 64 Alien game.  I also liked what I heard from its developers Creative Assembly, who in a series of videos prior to the release described the game's horrors in a hilariously quiet and deadpan manner.

Alien Isolation is a direct sequel to Alien and features Ellen Ripley's daughter, Amanda who was introduced in the extended cut of Aliens.  Amanda has gone to work for the Weyland Yutani company but has an agenda to find out the fate of her mother, missing since the "loss" of the Nostromo many years earlier.  At the start of the game, the Nostromo's flight recorder has been located and taken to Sevastapol, a station managed by the hapless Seegson company, known for making creepy chokebots.  The station is in the process of being decommissioned but has also become home to some aliens, when Amanda arrives to retrieve the Nostormo's black box and get some closure about her mother's disappearance.

Isolation was released in October to some of the most schizophrenic video game reviews I have ever read.  While most independent reviewers praised it-some effusively hailing it a "game changer"-other high-profile reviewers with outlets-such as IGN, Gamespot, and Polygon-were less impressed with it, citing the game's punishing difficulty, manual save system, length, and pacing.  Strangely, many of the positive reviews seemed to hold up the difficulty and "pacing" as strengths of the game.

Having now finished Alien Isolation and contemplating the game's reviews, I wonder if it's time to stop thinking of "video games" as cookie cutter experiences that should all be played and approached the same way.  Isolation is not your typical video game and I have been thinking about how it is best to be played.  It took me about two months to finish Alien Isolation partially because I don't have unlimited time but also because this is an intense and harrowing game and I found myself needing to take frequent breaks from it. I played it mostly in the mornings because I didn't really like playing it at night (They mostly come out at night.  Mostly.).  The truth is, it's a demanding game and I wasn't always in the mood for it.

I don't know how most reviews happen at the big websites but I can't imagine anyone "cramming" this game and playing it in a week or two and having a good experience with it.   I'm wondering if all of the griping about the difficulty and the save points is a function of people trying to blow through Alien Isolation as thought it were your typical shooter.  This is a game that punishes cockiness.  I took my time with Alien Isolation and thoroughly enjoyed it.   I didn't pick it up necessarily expecting to finish a whole mission in one sitting.  Instead, I was happy to play from save point to save point and consider myself lucky for not getting my face chewed off.  As far as the difficulty, I rarely had to play any sections over and over again.  Nor, did I ever lose a significant amount of progress for lack of a save point.

I come down on the side of thinking that the pacing is actually quite good.  The game takes about an hour to really get moving but the setting, graphics, and art direction are so good that I didn't mind. This is also in keeping with the spirit of Ridley Scott's movie, which featured a similar slow-burn. The game also smartly alternates between sections in which the Alien actively hunts you and other stretches during which the beast is out of commission and your main antagonists are groups of human survivors or rogue androids called Working Joes which are a bit easier to deal with.  This gives the player both a nice break from the intense Alien gameplay and also a good opportunity to explore and enjoy the setting,  a compelling retrofuturistic environment.  When the Alien is about, you really don't get a lot of opportunities to enjoy the scenery.  There are a couple of sections that involve space walks and even a flashback to a stroll on LV-426 which also offer a respite from the intense Alien action and some beautiful space porn.

One of the things that I love about Alien Isolation is that it is more experiential than "gamey."    Also, it doesn't feed into the typical video game male power fantasy.  Most often in games you are cast as some over-powered gun-toting badass.  That's certainly been a problem in Alien  games which demote H.R. Giger's fantastic creature to cannon fodder.  One could even make the case that this goes back to Cameron's sequel.  But it is certainly not the case in Alien Isolation.  As Amanda Ripley, the odds are stacked against you and the only real ability you have is to build some devices to fend off or distract your opponents.  The game even teases you with an assortment of guns only to have you learn that you really are better off not using them at all.  Your only real weapons against the Alien are Molotov Cocktails and the flamethrower and both of those will only drive the monster off for a second.  As in Scott's original movie, the Alien is relentless and indestructible in Alien Isolation.

The Alien itself is a terrific adversary in the game and it has been said that it has advanced AI which actively learns from how you play.  I did find this to be the case.  I had gotten too comfortable hiding in the many lockers found in the Sevastapol station and I found that the Alien did get wise to me before long and it would invariably find me in these lockers and violently rip the doors off.

Most of your encounters with the Alien are unscripted and will change depending on your actions. Even late in the game I observed behavior that I hadn't seen in my early encounters, such as when I thought I was safe in one of the many small iris vents on the station and I turned around to discover the monster slowly crawling towards me.  I didn't even think the damn thing could get in those vents and I might have gone the whole game without seeing that bit of behavior.  Who knows what else the Alien is doing when you are not watching it?  Maybe it does the dance number from Spaceballs.

It also is revealed that there is not one but multiple aliens on the station when a nest is encountered well into the game.  I had mixed feelings about this as I was attached to that very Alien experience of surviving a singular creature.  It was also frustrating from a gameplay perspective because I felt like I was being dropped into an Aliens game without Aliens  weapons.  Luckily these nest sections are fairly short.  From a story perspective, I was confused by where these Aliens came from since there was no evidence of a Queen Alien on the station.  Were the people on the station being transformed into eggs as in the famous Alien deleted scene?  I would have been fine if this had been the case.  In fact it would have fit right in with the game's wonderful devotion to Scott's movie-but it is never addressed in the game.  There are just a bunch of eggs and facehuggers running around without explanation.  And strangely, for all of the Aliens that are running around in the cutscenes, I rarely encountered more than one of them in the game at the same time (thankfully.)


The story is decent but a bit skeletal and there are some plot holes that are not really addressed.  The characters are also a bit skimpy and underdeveloped.  While Amanda is given a bit of personality and a compelling personal mission, no one else seems to have been given much development.  The Weyand android who accompanies Amanda was potentially an interesting character but I felt like his nature was kept ambiguous and then awkwardly revealed.  When he ended up being a compassionate ally to Amanda, I was interested to learn more but was confused by his character arc.  I do agree with the game's critics regarding the sudden and anticlimactic ending but I feel this is symptomatic with larger problems with the writing.

The station is probably the most vividly fleshed out character in Alien Isolation and in many ways it is an extrapolation of the design aesthetic of the Nostromo ship from Alien.   It is similarly lived-in and grimy and feels like it has a real history and context.  It expands on the vaguely dystopian capitalist future hinted at in Scott's movie, full of sociopathic corporations and their exploited employees.  You learn a lot about Seegson Corporation and the Sevastapol station by reading terminals throughout the station.  The creepy Working Joe androids also inhabit this junky station.  Unlike the lifelike Weyland Yutani synthetics, the Working Joes are not meant to pass for human but instead feature rubbery skin and raspy electronic voices.  In the larger economy, they are probably meant to be cheap, entry-level androids.

The Sevastapol and its synthetic inhabitants are probably the most original and interesting concepts that Alien Isolation introduces to the Alien universe.  Otherwise, you could make the argument that Alien Isolation is a bit too derivative of Ridley Scott's Alien.  It would have been interesting for the game to have stepped out of the shadow a bit and not been quite so beholden to its source material.  I mean, the ship in which Amanda Ripley arrives to Sevastapol is literally the same model of ship as the Nostromo.  And the station itself is inexplicably identical to the large cargo section to which the Nostromo was attached.

Despite a few story flaws Alien Isolation is a fantastic game and a wonderful Alien experience.  I can't remember another game that made me feel such genuine fear and anxiety.  The gameplay is compelling and when I wasn't playing Alien Isolation, I was thinking about it.  For fans of the Alien  series or old-school survival horror games it is a no-brainer.


MISCELLANEOUS TIPS

Use Active Stealth:  Don't be afraid to sneak around in the Alien's presence.  As long as you stay behind cover, you should be fine.  What you shouldn't do is spend all your time stationary and hiding. There are times when the Alien will be on alert and looking for you and will not just go away if you hide.  As scary as it is, you need to move around.  Use flares and other items to distract enemies.

The Vents Are Not Safe:  It may seem like the iris vents are too small for the Alien to use but guess what, he can get in there!  Unfortunately, some time you have to use them.

Lockers Are A Last Resort:  The ubiquitous lockers on the Sevastapol may seem like good hiding places but they are noisy to get in and out and once you are in there you are kind of stuck.  As I said above, it won't be long before the Alien catches on.  Whenever possible, find yourself a nice table to hide under.  As long as you are not in direct view and are not making noise, they are reliable hiding places.

Your Motion Tracker Tells You Exactly Where to Go:  In addition to, you know, tracking motion, your Motion Tracker has a sliding bar along the screen's perimeter which tells you exactly where you need to go next.

Turn Off Your Mic Xbox One and Playstation 4 both feature a mode in which you can use the consoles' mics to pick up sound from your environment.  So if your cat is meowing in your living room the Alien will hear it and kill you.  And possibly your cat.  Turn it off.


Patrick Garone
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Ex Games: Turok Dinosaur Hunter

When a man meets that special video game, there is a certain magical spark that occurs. There has to be a special kind of chemistry that will let him know, This is the right game for me. After all, how often have you been recommended a video game, read a glowing review in a magazine only to find when you have taken it home-gotten it out of its packaging, fooled around with its tutorial level-this is not a game with which you can spend hours and hours. This is awkward and uncomfortable for all involved.

However, with certain games you know you can commit right away. It's cool. You know this is a game that you will play often and worthy of your collection. But, sadly, nothing lasts forever and there is no real monogamy in video games.

These are my ex games.

In 1996 I bought a Nintendo 64, upon learning about the upcoming Star Wars game, Shadows of the Empire (a long and sad story for another time involving the quest for the perfect Star Wars game). After some nauseating hours playing Super Mario 64, I finally got used to the idea of 3D gaming and soon discovered the joy of the classic first-person shooter Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (in my mind it will always be Turok, The Dinosaur Hunter). I spent hours and hours in my little studio apartment in Rogers Park completely immersed in this (at the time) amazing world of killer dinosaurs, attempting to locate all of the pieces of the Chronoscepter. Turok was loaded with some absolutely insane weapons and featured a uniquely open and expansive world for its time when corridor shooters like Doom were the norm.

Personally, I was knocked out by the design aspects of the game, particularly its locations which had a real world, Pre-Colombian historical aesthetic. Many of the building were based on Mayan or Incan structures which really captured my imagination at the time. In some strange way, this game was a stepping stone towards some of the things in which I would be interested later in life and some of the traveling that I would do. When I finally made it to my first Inca ruin, high in the Andes of Peru, I couldn't help thinking of Turok.

I will always regret that I never finished this game. I'm not sure how it all ended. Shame. Boredom. Negligence. A furtive transaction at Funcoland. You spend weeks and weeks together and this is what happens. It makes it hard to keep playing video games. Maybe one day I will see Turok on the Wii Virtual Console and I will take it out for a spin. Or maybe it will never be the same.

Maybe I should leave well enough alone.