Two epic video game dreams (dream)
MMO
The first dream wasn't a game so much as a sequence of events which happened on some sort of 3D MUCK system (either a future generation of Second Life or a subjunctive generation of Solace).Basically, there was a game module which was extremely story-oriented and epic and plot-driven and so on. In this particular story, I was a raccoon-girl who was being trained as a secret agent so that I could uncover the various conspiracies in day-to-day life. Mostly I hung around an area which looked a lot like Luskwood (in Second Life) except much more pastel-colored with rich foliage and watercolor splashes of light. I spent a lot of time leveling up with a little tiny bit of exploration (for example, I found a cache of shiny round objects which I couldn't identify but which obviously were very important to some long-gone past civilization — they were American quarters, though my character didn't know that, and I could suspend disbelief enough to not know it either), though after a while I got bored with it and returned to my virtual life as a plaid-skinned fluffy.
A few months later, I returned to the game module, only to discover that it was unmaintained and decrepit, lying in ruin with badly-formed objects and broken links. Even my avatar was messed up (so I was a plaid raccoon). A large scruffy guy showed up and he asked me what the hell I was doing here, and I told him I thought I'd play the game some more; he told me that because of lack of interest he'd stopped building campaigns, and he was extremely disappointed in me for just using all of his time so long ago without even thanking him, as it turned out that he was giving every single player individual attention by crafting their situations to them!
I apologized, but he never forgave me.
Anyway, wouldn't it be cool if that were the plot to a game, where there's meta-layers of gaming and trying to save the environment from the apathy of its own creators? (Of course, I'm supposed to share game ideas I come up with at work, but this is the sort of game that would just get ignored anyway. Meh.)
Generic puzzle action-adventure
The other game was of the genre of many modern 3D action/adventures, with a free-form walkabout engine, though rather than being jumping-puzzle based (like Ratchet and Clank) it was more puzzle-oriented (like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time's better parts). Anyway, the plot was that you play a woman who is a descendant of Mayans, who turns out to be a werewolf. And also psychic. She starts getting violent visions of the future; one of these is so violent that it triggers her changing into a werewolf, and she's stuck like that.In order to turn human again, she has to find the source of all the evil and destroy it. Fortunately, she has visions of her future (presented as cinematic cutscenes, kind of like the visions in PoP:SoT only more coherent) which explain the puzzles, though don't give the actual solutions (unlike PoP). The first component of the evil which had to be assembled (the Ribbon of Teal) was stored in an underground Aztec temple which was hiding under Central Park, revealed by stepping on a golden button and then solving a puzzle where you combine various wireframe images of different palace entrances until it looks just like how it did in the vision. (This wireframe happened to change colors as well, and the correct color was purple, and not teal as the name would imply — teal is a misdirection.)
Inside the temple foyer there was a ball which would grow and sprout in different directions when pressed on in different directions, and this had to be made to grow in a certain way to open the first door. I woke up before I could get the door open, though.
Comments
"Trying to save the environment from the apathy of its own creators" reminds me a little of Zork, too — the whole theme of wandering alone and confused through the half-ruined works of the Great Implementors. (And do you know the surprise ending of the original ADVENT(ure)?)
Also, that writeup of mine didn't do the dreams justice AT ALL.
Also, the mental imagery I had playing Colossal Cave is a hell of a lot better than what I've seen in any modern games. One time I casually mentioned to my dad that I was thinking of making a graphical version of it to convey how I saw things, and he immediately told me that if anyone were to ever do that he never, ever wanted to even KNOW about it, because it would ruin the mental images he had of it.
For me, if I make it to that point in a game I usually try Really Hard to finish it, because I'd really like to know how the story ends. Ocarina's ending is particularly profound if you've also played the earlier Zelda games (particularly the third one, on the SNES). Usually when I give up on a game it's much earlier, like when I get stuck in the middle of some stupid minigame; I hate how so many modern games put so much of an emphasis on minigames which are mandatory but are given the playtesting and quality control of an optional component. Bad minigames ruined Majora's Mask (giant skeleton race), Sly Cooper (piranha lake), and Ratchet & Clank (skateboard-thing race) for me. Though bad level design has also killed its fair share of games for me (the stealth mission on Beyond Good and Evil, the underwater maze in Conker's Bad Fur Day, etc.).
I think the only story-oriented game I've played where I've gotten to the end and been unable to beat the boss was Sonic Adventure (on the Dreamcast), and really the final boss in that one was more of a bonus unlockable — actually, it came across as more of a minigame anyway. The story had already gotten a satisfying ending at that point (six, actually).
I only beat Sonic 1. (And even there, I didn't get all the Chaos Emeralds. I'm not really into collect-all-the-items quests.) I never even got NEAR the ending in Sonic Adventure, having early on been defeated by the awful voice acting.
The secret to Sonic Adventure is to set the voice track to Japanese and turn on subtitles. Especially if you know enough Japanese to understand the cussing (as I did). SA's story is WELL worth playing through — it's actually one of the examples I use when talking about games with a strong story element, especially with how masterfully the six separate storylines are intertwined, often in pretty subtle ways.
Yup. I was referring to the surprise of getting to the end-game, where the cave itself is revealed as a theme park for adventurers. (Apparently that was Woods's doing: Crowther was too serious a spelunker to put in all that silly fantasy stuff.)