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September 4, 2004

Reviews

SEN5241 (THX1138)

Roughly a month and a half after konamouse and many in the THX 1138 fan community received the first emails from OMM, the SEN5241 (aka SubCity Central) ARG has ended. OMM has fallen, all are free and ARG players have walked away with another quality bit of entertainment under their belts.

For those of you who didn't play along, Subcity Central was set in the world of THX-1138, an early film by George Lucas. In the THX-1138 world, people live in an oppressive, drug-controlled society. They aren't allowed to think for themselves, love or even have sex. They don't even have names, but instead SubjecteID's like SEN5421. Players helped bring down OMM by sabotaging many of the systems that kept the people under OMM's thumb. The players produced defective police robots, altered the community's drugs and broke the hold OMM held over the people. Without drug clouded minds and police to control them, the people rose up against OMM and gained their freedom. Yay!

One of the things I really liked about SubCity Central was that the puzzles actually had a place within the storyline. There weren't any arbitrary puzzles thrown in just to keep the players occupied. Don't get me wrong - some of those arbitrary puzzles can be really fun, but it was nice to have puzzles that had some meaning. Many of the puzzle solves resulted in a direct and immediate change in the game. Each time a player created an inferior police robot or sedative their SubjecteID (like VAR1234) would show up on the site with their solution. Once enough players succeeded in breaking one of these puzzles, OMM's control over the community was weakened. I also liked that some of the puzzles were cooperative. Each player could only contribute one part to a particular puzzle. So those of us that, um, aren't the best at puzzle solving had a chance to contribute.

The character interaction was a little lacking in the game, but it fit well within the storyline. We were trying to help characters who were oppressed and secretly sending us messages under the radar of the controlling OMM. It wouldn't really have been realistic to expect SEN to be able to email us freely and chat on AIM every night. Most of the interaction was through official emails that SEN5421 "hijacked" and added an encrypted message to. So, to me, the lack of interaction was realistic and worked with the game. Plus it was kind of nice to not have to get the characters to warm up to you in order to get any progress.

Overall, I really, really liked SubCity Central. The storyline was an interesting one that many of us were already familar with, but even those that hadn't seen the movie could still play along. If anyone wanted more background on the characters or story all they had to do was take a trip to the video store. The ARG was simple, short and to the point. It didn't require several hours a night to wade through tons of information and spec. It didn't require complex graphs and flow charts to keep up with the game's events. The players knew what they had to do and did it. SubCity Central was alot of fun and I'm really glad I didn't sit this one out.

The biggest surprise was discovering that the PMs behind Subcity Central are the Virtuquest team. Having played some of Virtuquest's previous netventures and Corporate ARGs, I'm not surprised at the quality of SubCity Central. It's not entirely clear whether or not this was officially sanctioned by George Lucas. Virtuquest does thank George Lucas both in the credits and on their site and the ARG suspiciously occured right before the release of the THX-1138 DVD. I hope Lucas was in some way involved because that would mean that maybe others in the entertainment world are becoming aware of ARGs. Subcity Central was a great spinoff from the movie and a fun advertising campaign (whether it was intended to be or not) I was sucked into the movie all over again and will probably buy the DVD because of this ARG.

posted on September 4, 2004 1:22 PM | print this