Life Finds A Way

A little while back, Telltale Games announced that their next two titles would be licensed from Universal Pictures and that they would be set in the Back to the Future and Jurassic Park universes, respectively. I'm a huge fan of Telltale, so my initial reaction was one of obnoxiously loud excitement. Telltale has made games out Bone (probably one of my favorite comics ever), brought back Sam and Max, and revived the Monkey Island series (certainly my favorite adventure game series ever). I truly believe that Telltale is 90% responsible for the recent resurgence of quality adventure games, and in my mind, they can truly do no wrong. Whose hands would be better to leave two of my favorite movie franchises in?

The more I thought about it, however, the more I started to bite my nails.

Back to the Future is fine. It actually shares a lot with the Monkey Island series in terms of tone. It's funny, it's balances a lighthearted and epic storyline at the same time, and focuses on the characters and their interactions. Therefore, it was no surprise to me that when Telltale finally released this concept art for the new Back to the Future game, it looked genuinely awesome. Jurassic Park, though?

Do me a favor, and take a look at the following image:

Look real hard. These are some of the featured characters from Telltale's biggest franchises. What you have here is a sarcastic Mexican wrestler, two anthropomorphic detectives, a bumbling mighty pirate, a prehistoric animal that feasts on the flesh of living things and strikes fear into the hearts of children across the world, and a goofy inventor who lives with a dog. 

One of theses things is not like the others.

It's not that I think that Jurassic Park can't be translated into a video game. After all, there have been many Jurassic Park games running the full range of good, bad, and ugly. What makes me hesitate is that Telltale games (to date) tend to follow the same shtick: Light, episodic, cartoony adventure games with a sense of humor. It's a great shtick and I'm all for branching out, but it seems like they might be a little bit over their heads with this one. So, Telltale, just in case you're a bit stuck, here are five things that I think a good Jurassic Park game should be.

A Jurassic Park game should be:

1. Dark and terrifying

Remember that part in Jurassic Park where Robert Muldoon (the Australian guy) is sitting in the bushes trying to line up a shot to kill a Velociraptor and another Velociraptor pops up right beside him and he realizes for two brief seconds that he's been ambushed before he is viciously torn apart and devoured? Remember how afterwards you had to change your underwear, couldn't sleep at night, and to this day are scared to death of the jungle?

Jurassic Park is a scary movie based on a scary book based on a scary group of animals that we'd better be glad can't be resurrected in real life because they would eat us. That's part of what makes it good.

A Jurassic Park game should capture that feeling and run with it. The atmosphere should be tense. We should hear the distant roars of different dinosaurs, find the bodies of their victims, see them dart through the trees, and hope that they're full. When we come face to face with a dinosaur, we should feel like I'm sure Robert Muldoon did after that second raptor popped out: scared out of our minds.

2. An adventure game

As far as I know, there has never been a Jurassic Park adventure game, and I think it's a pretty good idea. First, it gives Telltale a comfortable foundation and an opportunity to experiment with something that they're good at. Second, I feel like there's a lot of unexplored opportunities for puzzles within the Jurassic Park universe. Most adventure game puzzles require communication with other (semi)intelligent beings and interaction with relatively static environments, but Jurassic Park is alive and mostly devoid of human life. I would love to see the dinosaurs be incorporated into puzzles in different ways. In addition, adventure games are usually non-combat. Not having combat would lead to all sorts of interesting and terrifying survival situations. I think a non-combat survival adventure game set in Jurassic Park would be awesome.

3. About characters we care about

I don't necessarily want to rehash characters from previous books and movies, but I do want to care about them. This is one area where I'm sure Telltale can knock it out of the park. Before the Dilophosaurus spit hits the fan, we need to have a good read on each character, their personalities, and their flaws. One of the many reasons that the second and third movies were so terrible was that the characters were all stilted stereotypes that no one could find interesting. Every character in the first movie was developed enough that we had at least one reason that we didn't want them to get eaten by a T-Rex.

One thing that I find interesting about the (mostly terrible) new Jurassic Park comic book is that the main characters are adult versions of Lex and Tim, the kids from the first movie, but they're very different. Lex grows up trying to preserve the island and its scaly inhabitants and tries to protect them from the outside world while Tim tries to keep his grandfather's dream alive by opening a new, much more secure, carnivore-free park. They are constantly at odds, working at every chance to sabotage the other's plans, even though they still love each other.

That's the kind of emotional investment that we need out of a game. We need something besides "let's go back to the island because [insert stupid MacGuffin here]" as a plot.

4. Set on Isla Nublar

Okay, this one is really just a personal thing, but think about the Jurassic Park series for a second. There has been exactly one book, one movie, and one game (possibly two) that have had the words "Jurassic Park" in the title and not been terrible. What do they all have in common? Isla Nublar.

See, there's two islands with dinosaurs on them in the Jurassic Park universe: Isla Nublar (Jurassic Park) and Isla Sorna (Lost World, Jurassic Park III). Isla Sorna is the location of "Site B," a facility where the dinosaurs were allowed to mature before being sent to the park. Every story that has ever taken place on Isla Sorna has been awful. We could speculate that this is because we don't get the feeling of lost security on Isla Sorna or that the lack of human element detracts from the experience. But, seriously? I think the place is cursed, and I don't want to go back there again.

5. Awe-inspiring and breath-taking.

Jurassic Park is not just about watching people get torn up by dinosaurs. It's about trying and failing to control something bigger than you, human beings fighting nature, and ultimately, about life finding a way. These are grandiose themes that should be met with grandiose images. The first few minutes on the island in Jurassic Park make up one of my favorite moments in movie history. The beautiful scenery, the tearfully moving music, and the juxtaposition of human beings to such magnanimous creatures are what separate Jurassic Park from every other creature thriller out there.

You should feel tiny in a Jurassic Park game, like you're part of a bigger world that you couldn't control even if you had the desire to. There should be mountains, waterfalls, and rich jungles full of life. The main character of any good Jurassic Park story is nature itself. Whoever you play as in this game should be out of his/her element, and it should be beautiful.


That's not too much to ask, right?

My Big Backyard

Minecraft seems to have really hit its stride recently. Despite the lack of any sort of tutorial and looking like the twisted love child of Doom and a Lego set, the game has reported over a million registered players, made buckets of money, and has been praised by some of the biggest guns in the industry in addition to being blogged about, tweeted about, and Rule 34'd. It really looks like Minecraft is the new champion of the independent games industry and real proof that you don't need to look exactly like this to be successful.

For the uninitiated, Minecraft is a first-person sandbox game that revolves around exploration and creation. There's not much I could say that's not covered by this excellent (if cheesy) fanmade trailer, but the basic idea is this: You are stranded in a huge, open world. You can dig, mine, and chop down trees. Every time you destroy a "block" you obtain it as an item. Destroy a tree, you get a block of wood. Destroy some strone, you get a block of stone, etc. You can use these blocks to craft new tools, build buildings, and shape the world as you see fit. This is fun enough, and you quickly get lulled into a false sense of security. Your only real threat is falling off the huge glass castle you just built and your only companions are the friendly wild animals that roam the huge, (randomly-generated!) world, but as night falls, things get a lot more challenging. When the sun goes down, the friendly animals go away. That's when the monsters come out. Now you have to balance creativity and practicality; wanton playtime and survival. During the day, the world is your oyster. At night, it's theirs.

Personally, I was hesitant to get into Minecraft. I was introduced to the game last summer by a co-worker who was acquainted with the game's creator, Notch. I remember being unimpressed by what he told me, as well as his assurances that it was "gonna be huge." I did, however, give it a shot. I started up a game, chopped down a tree, built a rudimentary wooden box around myself and came up with the following syllogism:

1. To beat a game is to overcome all of its obstacles.
2. The only obstacles in the game are the monsters.
3. I am protected from the monsters due to my being in a wooden box.
4. I have beaten the game!

See, my beef with sandbox games comes down to two problems. The first is my attention span. After becoming hooked on a game, I have about a week to do everything that I want to do with it, because after that I will no longer be interested. Thus, open-ended games that require months of dedication and work never appeal to me. I know that I'll just give up on it eventually. The second problem is that I'm really not that creative a person when it comes to sandbox games. I remember when Garry's Mod was first released and my first thought was, "Awesome! I can do whatever I want! ...But I don't know what I want."

I ended up just spawning a car and driving around wishing I was playing a fun game.

With these two problems, it was pretty clear why I was so intent on not enjoying Minecraft. After declaring myself the victor, I put down the game and decided to never play it again. It's a shame that my arrogance and naivete prevented me from being a participant in one of this biggest events in indie game history. It was maybe two weeks later when Valve publicly declared its love for Minecraft on the Team Fortress 2 blog, and the ensuing rush of Minecraft purchases was jaw-dropping. Suddenly, everyone was talking about it. And there I was, grumbling in the corner about how no one was talking about whatever the hell obscure thing I was playing at the time.

It took months for me to come around. It actually all happened relatively quickly. Kotaku had a post (NSFW: language) about some guy who had recreated a lifesize replica of the Enterprise D from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Impressed, I showed it to my roommate, who was not too familiar with the game. I explained to him what I knew: That there was a huge, open, randomly-generated world that you could fight monsters and build things in. He said that that sounded like fun and went back to his room, leaving me to suddenly realize that he was absolutely correct. It DID sound like fun! So, like a nervous moron who tries to get back together with is ex, despite absolute proof that it won't work out, I decided to give Minecraft another shot.

I'm not entirely sure what happened after that because the next thing I remember was having a gargantuan cathedral/fortress with a minecart roller coaster, killing pigs with my diamond sword, and screaming "I NEED IRON! WHERE IS IT!? IS IT IN HERE!? I NEED IT!" while my girlfriend asked me when the last time I had eaten was.

To say that the game is addictive is like saying that Thin Mints are a pretty good cookie. I was seriously glued to the screen in a way that I really haven't been in a long time. I built towers, shrines, roller coasters, mines, houses, greenhouses, aquariums (sadly empty, as there are no fish in the game yet), and a multitude of waterfalls. My castle was particularly impressive with three stories, a basement, an escape tunnel to my old house, and an underground roller coaster that led to my mine. I was in the process of setting up an electrical system that would allow me to use switches and levers to change the direction of my tracks to other parts of my mine when I started looking at the clock and taking longer and longer breaks. Oddly enough, my week-long attention span record had already been broken, but I knew it wouldn't last much longer. Minecraft held my attention for a full two weeks, and there I was with an unfinished roller coaster, a dozen uncompleted dungeons, and so many questions.

What did this game do to hook me that other games didn't? Why was it an experience that lasted so much longer for me? More importantly: The fact that I get distracted when there are still so many things left unfinished in a sandbox game usually bothers me. Why didn't it get to me this time? It took me a while to figure it out. I didn't have anything else to do yesterday, so I started up a new game of Minecraft just to play around. I wasn't glued to the screen this time and I was just kind of going through the motions. I was exploring this mountain, looking for a good place to set up camp, when suddenly I turned the corner, and there it was: the tallest, most beautiful in-game waterfall I had ever seen. And I found myself thinking, "You know, that would make an awesome water slide."

That's when I got it. That feeling right there is what makes Minecraft special. It taps into that feeling you get when you're a kid and everything you see has limitless potential. I remember when I was very young, playing in the backyard of our house in upstate New York. To me, every tree was a place we could put a tire swing. Every hill was where I would put my slide if it ever snowed. I remember thinking just how easy it would be to build my own underground fort if only Mom would let me borrow Dad's shovel. Every step further from home was an adventure, every fallen branch was the perfect walking stick. Minecraft sends you back to those times and allows you to carry through. Really, the world of Minecraft is just a big backyard for you to explore, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be able to experience that again.

Now, I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me. It's almost nightfall and I have to harvest some more wood.

I have a water slide to finish.