Category: Reviews (Page 10 of 13)

Anatomy of an Implosion

June 4, 2009 / Steve Diddle

Editor’s Note: The original byline for this article had to be changed, as have some details in this article. Please see this article for an explanation.

If you’ve been playing indie ARGs for more than a couple days you’ve probably experienced a game that started off with a bang but ended with a whimper and a quiet death rattle. Most of us take a few moments to grieve the loss of the imploded game but quickly get over it and start looking for the start of another game. As someone who is drawn to the idea of creating my own games, I dwell over the loss of a game a little longer and crave a eulogy that helps me understand why the game didn’t reach it’s full potential. One of the biggest challenges in analyzing a failed game is that the creators of failed games rarely come forward afterward to share the behind-the-scenes missteps so that the rest of us can learn from their mistakes. So, with that said, I’d like to share why I stopped playing a recently staged game Tyler Greek (also named PHH Interception) and invite the creators of the game (and anyone else in the community who’s interested) to join the discussion.

Background:
Tyler Greek was the story’s protagonist who led a group of paramilitary soldiers in an alternate timeline where the TR Corporation unleashed an army of â€œsuper soldiersâ€ on the world and destroyed most of the major US cities. Tyler, along with his tech support guy Jacob, were trying to provide humanitarian supplies for survivors and planning a counter-offensive against the TR Corporation minions.

The story was introduced and played out primarily on Twitter, YouTube, and through instant messenger chat clients like Skype and MSN Messenger. There was an attempt to deliver story elements on a TR Corporation website and on Tyler’s MySpace page along with some leaked documents which filled in some of the backstory, but those delivery mechanisms went stale soon after they were discovered.

Player Review: Prototype 161 Mare Vitreum

November 10, 2008 / Letter to the Editor

Editor’s note: The following is a recap of the Prototype 161 event on October 31, 2008 in New York City. Originally brought to our attention via a lovely piece of glass swag, the game took players to the streets of NYC on the spookiest night of the year, and intrepid player Jim Babb covered the event for us. Thanks to Jim for his eye-witness account of what transpired.

This past Halloween night, I was member of a group of elite investigators that brought down an evil cult mastermind and his super genetic computer. Yep, a first for me, but just another night for Prototype 161. The event had an online pre-game that Prototype assured us was not necessary for the game and which I enjoyed. The pre-game even had a clue drops in five cities across the country.

At 7pm the event started in New York City’s Central Park when investigators were each handed a folded piece of paper, sealed with wax (a nice touch in my book). The first part of the night was a foot race around Central Park solving simple clues in order to build a map that would come in handy later when we moved over to Roosevelt Island. For those of you that have never been, Roosevelt island is accessible by means of a Tramway and was also the home of New York’s abandoned mental institutions. The Tramway offers an excellent view of the city and was my favorite part of the night — I am glad that the Puppet Masters included this in the game. Roosevelt island offered an excellent backdrop for the rest of the night, because of its size, roughly 0.3 square miles. However, despite the amazing setting of the game the night quickly hit some snags.

We were met on the island by a “professor” giving a lecture on the occult at the local youth center. The youth center would become our home base for the rest of the evening and into the morning, which was decent enough until the soda machine ran out. Most, if not all, of the teams became stuck on the first puzzle (my own team was out of commission for 2 hours). The puzzles were difficult and fun if not entirely related to the premise of the event. One of the major problems I had with the game was after the first clue was finally solved: it provided an answer with which we didn’t know what to do. We were supposed to be looking for a six-letter word, but there were not hints to this effect.

Finally, my team got back on track as we split up to get the rest of the clues. The island was used to full advantage by the PMs. They had us running up and down the area, from a Chinese restaurant to get puzzle containing fortune cookie, to a garden that was totally creepy and dark at night. I am pretty sure that the drunk guys outside the garden were out-of-game, but nevertheless they provided a nice atmospheric element. Other snags included one of the puzzles being vandalized (pumpkins smashed), restaurants used in-game that closed because it was too late, and the police breaking up the big groups of people.

However, my team was determined not to give up, but we were far too frustrated and tired to put in the needed effort to finish with a bang. We all received text messages informing us to stop what we were doing and see the finale. We had lost, but everyone did get to see the end acted out. The problem here was that the finale only made sense to those that had played the online pre-game, but was interesting enough even if a little anti-climatic.

I was excited to try my hand at an alternate reality game and I thought Prototype 161 would provide a good crash course in the genre, and while it did provide me with a feel of ARGs I wish it had gone a little smoother.

Having Conquered Cincinnati and California, John Turns Gaze To Internet

July 30, 2007 / Jessica Price

With an increasing number of television shows extending their worlds onto the web, it seems worthwhile to start asking for whom the extended experiences are intended. In the case of the online experience for John From Cincinnati, it appears that this is a bonus for people who are already fans of the show. While it seems unlikely to attract any new devotees, there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that, at least from a player point of view: it’s nice to think that maybe the makers of a show are appreciative enough of their fans to want to play with them outside the confines of the TV set.

In brief, John From Cincinnati is “surf noir” series from the maker of Deadwood, about a brittle family of surfing superstars and a strange young man who appears and turns their lives upside down.

Via Game Tip, ARGNet received word that HBO was doing something interesting with a promo site, johnmonad.com. Clicking repeatedly on the “Help” button generates an increasing number of search terms and objects floating around your screen until you’re told, “That’s all the help you’re going to get. There’s more out there. Start Searching.” However, the interface seems pretty intelligent — entering your own search terms nets results that usually seem on-target. There’s definitely something to put together, here, but I’m not conversant enough in the show’s mythology to have any idea what it is.

Subject 137 and The Experiments Of Doom

July 27, 2007 / Jessica Price

I’m dying. I was falling asleep last night, and I knew. All I had to do was just let go, you know? …And that would be it. I’d wake up a f*cking corpse, and you’d be in trouble. So why don’t you just let me go? Why don’t you just let me get out of here before everyone gets in trouble?

The plea is made with weary resignation by Subject 137, a man who appears to be in his twenties and who, the video’s poster tells us, has been the subject of mysterious medical testing.

It’s an eerie and surprisingly affecting response to the assertion, delivered from offscreen in an electronically disguised voice, that Subject 137 is special, but that he’d get lost “out there” in the real world. Is this the idealism of a fanatic scientist? Propaganda from an organization with sinister plans? Or is Subject 137 actually special? It’s impossible to tell from this first video, but Subject 137’s bleak response is delivered in a way that makes him seem grounded and easy to identify with.

The viewer allegiances established by the introductory video (Subject 137 sympathetic! Voice-disguised man scary!) are destabilized, however, by the notes attached to it by Maria Ail:

I beg viewers to be careful when watching this clip since it’s view out of context of everything that comes before it. Think of this clip as a test.

Be Good, Tanya, and You Might Just Discover Something Supernatural

July 25, 2007 / Jessica Price

Pity Tanya Mitchel: she’s just a nice girl with a LiveJournal, a job at a bank, and a wacky sister. The last of these happens to have disappeared, leaving a cipher-strewn trail and mysterious plea for her sister to save her by finding Dean Winchester (who appears to be the same Dean Winchester from CW’s Supernatural), and poor Tanya is utterly distraught about the whole thing. So, like any self-respecting character in an alternate reality game, she has turned to the wisdom of the internet to help her out.

A tip sent to Unfiction owner SpaceBass last Friday, containing a link to Tanya’s blog (Essentially Invisible), set players on the trail of what is beginning to look like a disjointed indulgence in ARG cliches. Between Tanya claiming that she found her own blog by accident and the appearance of ciphers with no plot-based justification for their placement, this looks likely to be the type of game that makes community veterans roll their eyes.

However, the game’s limited scope provides an easy opportunity for overview. During a discussion about the difficulty of finding regular coverage of the ARG world that is geared to people outside the community with game reviewer par excellence Chris Dahlen (one of the few journalists to tackle reviewing an ARG — Perplex City — in the context of mainstream gaming), Chris expressed a desire for regular sports-page-like coverage of running ARGs. He wanted to see an account of a game’s highs and lows that would be accessible to people who are internet literate but don’t regularly play ARGs.

I’m far too lazy to attempt such an ambitious project for a large-scale game, but Essentially Invisible provides an example of limited enough scope that I’m willing to give it a try. Please mentally read the following in your best sportscaster voice.

The Hunt For More Frustration

February 25, 2007 / Geoff May

Editor’s Note: Big thanks to Geoff May for contributing this article about the recently-launched Dr. Pepper marketing campaign. Geoff is a former ARGNet staff writer, and we are thankful for this timely article.

Is there a drink you’d be willing to purchase and drink for a full month to get the chance to win up to $1,000,000? What if it weren’t a matter of chance, but of skill and problem solving?

Recently, Cadbury Schweppes PLC ran a marketing campaign for the Dr.Pepper brand that would take its followers potentially to every corner of North America (and beyond), both physically and virtually. Dr.Pepper’s “The Hunt For More” campaign could be considered a great success, though YMMV. Following the marketing theme of Dr.Pepper’s unique 23 flavored pop, the ‘Hunt’ campaign would get people all over the US and Canada hunting down 23 physical coins for guaranteed $$$ – ultimately ending in a flurry of controversial press.

Over the course of 30 days from Jan 21 to Feb 21, Dr.Pepper bottles were disappearing off shelves faster than usual, making it a hunt in itself to find them before they disappeared, and not every store carrying the brand had the specially labeled bottles. It was a frantic race for players to have a unique code in their possession every day, and it was a lot of pop to drink.

The clue portion of the hunt was very much a game of skill. There was no luck involved or random draw – just be the first to either find your region’s physical coin, or report the location of the virtual one. To balance this game of skill, players were also given the option to use the code not to retrieve a clue, but for a chance to win an instant prize.