Thirty Flights of Loving (PC, 2012)

WARNING!  THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS FOR THIRTY FLIGHTS OF LOVING!

So who IS Citizen Abel?  We still only know he is a spy, but in Thirty Flights of Loving (2012) we find out more about his personal relationships and background.  This is the direct sequel to Gravity Bone, but does not necessarily take place directly after it.  In fact, I believe that this game's chronology makes a sort of sandwich with Gravity Bone, since it takes place before and after.  Instead of being specific missions for Citizen Abel to complete, Thirty Flights of Loving explores his personal relationships with two people, Anita and Borges.
The game opens in a bar in the city of Nuevos Aires, which is currently under prohibition laws.  The bar is only allowed to sell non-alcoholic "Canadian Maple" drink, which you may gorge yourself on with no side effects.  Right from this opening scene you can tell that the attention to detail is remarkable:  Backstory is given in newspaper headings mounted on the wall.  The bartender has an SMG hidden beneath the bar.  A crooked painting on the wall is actually a switch that leads to the secret hideout of Abel, Anita, and Borges.
Anita.  Demolitions.  Mechanic.  Sharpshooter.  Confectioner.  A clever way that director Brendon Chung keeps the game's non-linear plot manageable is with a detail on her.  If you look closely, you'll notice that she has a prosthetic leg and arm, which indicated scenes happening later.  When she doesn't have them, the scene takes place earlier.  The three of you are smuggling alcohol, and when a by-plane delivery goes wrong, you find yourself at the barrel of Anita's SMG.
Borges.  Forger.  Safe cracker.  Pilot.  Best man.  Anita cannot bring herself to shoot you, and when you turn the corner and leave her, you find him lying injured on a stack of boxes.  Abel picks him up and carries him through the airport terminal, until he finds a luggage cart, which he takes to push Borges in.  I would infer that after the three of them took off in the plane, the police caught up to them and shot them down over the airport.  A desperate Abel and Borges are now trying to escape the busy airport.
A flashback takes us to a rooftop party.  Abel awakes in his hotel room to find Anita sitting by the window, eating oranges (which she is glad to share with him).  The two of them (with Borges) go up to the party, where there are many people drinking together and dancing.  You can see the traitor from Gravity Bone playing the wallflower.  While the crowd dances, Anita and Abel opt to pour down the drinks, and in one of the game's most striking moments, their vision grows blurry and the dancers start to float into the air.  The two of them stagger back to the hotel room, where it is implies that they make love.
A flash forward, back to the airport.  Abel tries to get Borges safely out, but they are assailed by police.  A shootout ensues, and the two spies make it out alive, but a blockade outside cuts them short.  Suddenly, we are in a chase, with Abel driving and Borges shooting.  Does this happen after the blockade, or before?  Abel remembers a time when he was riding a motorcycle with Anita, and when she turns to look at him, she is distracted, and crashes into a car.  Is this why she has prosthetics?  The flashback distracts Abel, he too, crashes.
It is then that a funny thing happens.  Abel is propelled into a museum, where the credits for the game take place.  Museum patrons observe and reflect on displays of the game's developers, sipping champagne glasses.  You pass through a display explaining Bernoulli's principle of lift and air pressure.  There seems to be a motif of flight in the game.  Many scenes have ducks visible.  You ride in an airplane.  You climb up and down flights of stairs.  I love pieces of art that withhold just the right amount of information from you.  It allows for interesting inferences, theories, and discussions, which we will have more to look forward to in the next Citizen Abel game.

Gravity Bone (PC, 2008)

WARNING!  THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS FOR GRAVITY BONE!

Who is Citizen Abel?  All we really know is that he is a spy.  On his latest adventure, he is tasked with planting a bug on man at a bourgeois get-together.  The eyes of security guards scrutinize him as he passes.  He sneaks into the staff's quarters, disguises himself as a waiter, and puts the bug (literally an insect, whose foul aroma allows it to be tracked "across the galaxy") into a drink, which he gives to the target.   A job well done, Abel, now get to the exit and await your pay.
So begins Gravity Bone (2008), the sixth game in the Citizen Abel series.  The game was designed and directed by Brendon Chung, who began the series in 1999 as a modification of the Quake II engine.  Gravity Bone is the first game to not be a modification, but its own separate entity, allowing it to assume a bold and original visual and gameplay style.  These games contain little-to-no dialogue, feature non-linear gameplay (each game is not even in chronological order), and cubey character models.  I won't say cubist, because that is not the same thing.  The low definition is made up for by the wonderful color and striking light choices.  The story alone makes up for it.
Abel continues on to another mission.  Whether or not these two missions happen consecutively is irrelevant. Odds are, they are not.  This time, he has to photograph five mechanical birds (who comically explode every time you do so).  What exactly is the purpose of the birds?  Why would that be important information for Abel?  He has only been hired to do his part of the job, and that's all he should worry about.
The mission takes place across a few buildings in a busy city.  A rainstorm rages outside.  There is a girl in the hall smoking a cigarette.  The player does not know her (at this point, they couldn't) but you find out later that the two of you are friends/partners.  I would infer that her purpose in the mission is to keep an eye out for you.  The birds are hidden in rooms locked with padlocks, but you have a can of liquid nitrogen and a hammer to break them.  After you get the last snapshot, you return to the exit, and are suddenly shot in the back.  Your assailant is the girl who was supposed to be your friend.  She takes the camera and jumps out of the nearest window.
Climbing to his feet, Abel runs after the traitor.  She climbs down into ducts below train tracks, and he follows.  One of these ducts drops you down onto the dining room table where the rich are having a meal.  The two trample all over the nice china and glasses.  She runs out onto a balcony, and when Abel turns the corner, she catches him unawares, and shoots him, causing him to fall backward down to the streets below.  As he falls, Abel experiences flashes of memory that show his relation to her.
The wonderful thing about Gravity Bone is that while it is short (beatable in less than fifteen minutes) it never seems to abrupt.  There is an attention to detail that you don't see in many mainstream games, which would only be improved and enhanced in the next Citizen Abel game, Thirty Flights of Loving (2012).  Perhaps the first five episodes will be remade in this style.  When I sent a message to Brendon Chung, he said that he had "played with that idea".  I'm eager to know what else will happen to Citizen Abel, who he will meet, and who he is.  I get the feeling that I won't be let down.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent (PC, 2010)

Very rarely does a video game so effortlessly transcend the screen and pierce directly into your soul.  Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) is a horror game, and the finest example of the genre I have seen to date.  Other contemporary horror games fail to arouse genuine fear in the player because they do not understand what makes true horror.  A good example of this is Dead Space, where you are well-armed against the admittedly grotesque, but not at all frightening monsters aboard an interstellar vessel.  The game offers sufficient lighting to be able to see the monsters coming from anywhere, and they don't pose much of a threat because you can just vaporize them.
In the beginning of the game, you awake in a strange castle after having drunk a potion that has erased your memory.  You have amnesia (fair enough), the only thing you can remember is that your name is Daniel.  You discover a letter written by yourself, telling you that you must kill Alexander, the master of the castle, a twisted soul who is a renaissance man, machinist, and sadist.  You find later that the unfortunate people who suffered under him have been transformed into hideous monsters.
The pacing is excellent.  You begin in well-lit corridors, with a sense of foreboding permeating the air.  Daniel breathes heavy, his footsteps echoing in the hall.  Muffled, distant sounds make you dread each turn around a corner.  Occasionally, the whole castle rumbles, and Daniel cowers in fear.  A fleshy, pulsating web creeps through every pore in the stone.  As you go on, he will regain his ability and bravery, but you may not.  You pick up new pieces of information about the history of the Castle Brennenburg, increasingly unsettling accounts of workers locked in the wine cellar, tortured prisoners, and possessed guests.  It becomes apparent that Alexander is a genius, as well as a monster.
Amnesia has set a new standard for horror games.  The game is played in first person, and focuses on puzzle solving and survival.  Your means for seeing in the dark are tinderboxes, which can be used to light any candle, torch, or lamp, and your lantern, which requires oil to light.  Run out of either, and you will find yourself going mad in the darkness.  Quite literally, because the longer you stay in the dark, the lower your sanity gets.  Losing sanity will make your vision blurry and distorted, controls slippery, and makes it easier for monsters to spot you.  You can regain sanity by making progress.
Monsters in the game are grotesque, but that alone is not enough for true horror.  The game keeps them frightening by expertly using suspense.  There are no cheap jump-scares in this game.  You carefully look around every dark corner in a dungeon, and are relieved when you come to a room where you can shut the door behind you.  After collecting any supplies you can find, you return to the door, only to hear the heart-stopping roar of a monster, and you see it breaking down the door.  You have no means of fighting back, so what can you do?  You must hide.  Crouch down into the darkness behind some boxes, and make sure not to look directly at the monster.  It will eventually go elsewhere to continue its search for you.  You never see monsters clearly, and if you do get a good look at them, it is because they are separating your head from your neck.
Consider the scene in the cellar.  You enter the room and reluctantly inch forward.  Suddenly the lights black out, and when your vision returns, you are knee-deep in water, and suddenly you hear the splashing of footsteps barreling toward you.  You climb up onto the nearest box, and the splashes pass you by to reveal that you are being pursued by an invisible monster.  Only by staying out of the water will you be safe.  Easier said than done, since there are many places where you cannot simply jump from box to box.  You must be smart to survive.  By tossing objects in the water, you can divert the monster's attention, and you can move boxes in the water.  Once you get through that room, you are in a stagnant hallway, where the beast is constantly in close pursuit, but this time, all you can do is run, hopelessly searching for an exit.
This is the perfect horror game, and I can see already that it is having a powerful influence on coming games in the genre.  Steam has just started a green-light section, where you can vote for the games you want to see released there, and when I look at the independent survival horror games, I can see the influence that Amnesia has on most of them.  One seemed to have obviously taken notes while playing Amnesia, and followed them verbatim.  If it means more horror games that capture true horror, I'm all for it.  The only other horror game I've played that matches the feeling of Amnesia, and that is Silent Hill 2.  Both games have excellent atmosphere and pacing, and both feature a terrifying psychological story.  I'll talk more about that game at another time.

Bonus Content: Psychological Symbolism in Psychonauts

WARNING!  THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS FOR PSYCHONAUTS AND MAJOR NERDERY!

When I wrote my Psychonauts (2005) article, I didn't get to go into much of the symbolism behind the game's design, so for my first issue of Bonus Content, I am going to be revisiting the game to discuss symbolic imagery in each character's mind.

Coach Oleander

Coach Oleander is the main antagonist of Psychonauts, and the head of the camp.  He wants to take over the world by stealing the most powerful brains in the world and combining them to make psychically-fueled weapons.  Since he was an army general in the past, his mind is appropriately enough, a battlefield, with the segments floating in space.  You actually enter his mind twice during Psychonauts, once for Basic Braining, and again at the end, then Raz's and his minds combine.

In Basic Braining, he pulls you into his mind, so he has complete control over where you go.  There is no way to see his nasty secrets until you get the mental cobweb duster, which will allow you to go to areas he has blocked off.  Once you have, you find out that he was booted out of the army for some kind of war crime.  One piece of foreshadowing that I adore in this area is the bunnies scattered about on certain battlefields.  More on them later.

At the end of the game, Oleander and Raz combine brains, which forms a meat circus, a conglomeration of their childhoods.  You must defeat the ghosts of both of their fathers.  Raz's dad is a trapeze artist who supposedly looks down at Raz for his psychic powers (a psychic cursed their whole family to die in water).  Oleander's father was a butcher, and you find out that when Oleander was a boy, he found a bunch of cages full of bunnies, which he tired to free, but his dad caught him and then slaughtered the bunnies to make meat. This traumatic moment led to his evil tendencies.

Milla Vodello

Upon your first playthrough, you may miss an important piece of information about Agent Vodello's past.  The inside of her mind is a dance party, and it is very easy not to notice a dark little room off to the side, which contains only a vault and a toy chest.  If you go in there, Milla's voice will warn you to stay out ("The party is out here, Raz!") The vault will reveal that Milla used to volunteer at an orphanage, and one day she arrived to find the building on fire.  Ever since, she has had nightmares about the children burning alive.  If you go inside of the toy chest, you will enter this nightmare.  You will be barred in while the nightmares, shadowy monsters with many arms and antlers, make screams of anguish at you ("Why didn't you try to save us, Milla?" "It's so hot!  I'm burning!").  Milla assures you that she has her nightmares under control, but the party atmosphere of her mind gives the impression that she is just in denial.

Edgar

In the real world, Edgar is trying desperately to paint a portrait, but always ends up painting a bull.  When you go into his mind, he is trying to assemble a huge pyramid of cards, and a bull named El Odeo is disrupting his task.  So Raz has to go around the city streets and collect cards in wrestling matches.  You learn that Edgar had a girlfriend who was stolen from him by a sinister bullfighter.  Raz tries to convince said bullfighter to confront El Odeo.  Everything is not as it seems, for when you go down into the sewers of the city, they resemble an ordinary high school (flooded with neon water, mind you).  As it turns out, the city and tragic love triangle story is a facade for the truth.  The bullfighter is actually a football player who stole the cheerleader Edgar had a crush on in High School, and El Odeo represents Edgar's rage and jealousy, which has been holding him back ever since.

Gloria

First I need to say that Gloria's Theater is one of the most brilliant uses of not just video game storytelling, but expository storytelling in general.  In Psychonauts, some things are handed out in simple exposition, but in this level, it is all symbolism.  Gloria is a burnt-out actor living at the insane asylum, and the inside of her mind is a stage.  Gloria's persona is unable to perform due to the frequent attacks of "the phantom," and the scathing remarks of the critic.  Instead, an elementary-school level play rehearses indefinitely, and you get to play director.  By changing the mood lighting and stage props, you get to witness the story of Gloria's childhood.  She was abandoned as a child by her mother, who dumped her off at an orphanage to run off with her new boyfriend.  Gloria endured years of cold and painful scrutiny from the headmistresses, until she finally got her escape through stage acting.  Just as she found her early success and critical acclaim, however, she finds out that her mother died.  Now in severe depression, her career quickly deteriorates, as does her psyche.  As it turns out, the critic is the phantom in disguise, and by defeating him, Gloria can finally shine.

Spacewar! (Arcade, 1962)

Back in the early 1960's, an MIT student named Steve Russell and his buddies fiddled about with some old SONAR equipment and primitive computers in their spare time.  What they created was Spacewar! (1962), one of the earliest recorded video games.  This idea was nothing new, talented MIT students had been doing the same sort of thing for almost two decades before, using school equipment to make games, which were typically tennis simulations.  The problem with these games was, well, their limit to MIT students, but Spacewar! was going to change that.
The game can be seen as the first multiplayer deathmatch (in the spirit of Halo or Call of Duty).  Two players control their own spaceships, and try to shoot each other down.  There is a star or black hole in the center which will kill a player that strays too close and gets sucked in.  The gravity effect can be used strategically, however.  With careful maneuvering, you can change your momentum to avoid an enemy rocket.  It used vector graphics, which drew everything in rotatable lines instead of pixels.  The control scheme was complex for the time.  There were four buttons, two for rotating clockwise and counterclockwise respectively, one for forward thrust, and another to fire.  Simple by today's standards, but keep in mind, this was a time when hardly anyone had played, let alone heard, of a video game.
In the early 70's, a brand new computer company called Atari wanted to make their first public video game machine, and they chose Russell's Spacewar!  It was the very first arcade machine, looking like some kind of alien equipment from a science fiction film.  It was a failure, due to the complicated controls which alienated players at the time, although a similar control scheme would be used in the popular Asteroids arcade game.  It was not until Pong that an arcade machine would be largely popular and accessible.
Spacewar! is an oft forgotten game, but its importance in the history of gaming is massive.  Like the early films of Thomas Edison or the Lumiere Bros., it helped define the techniques used in video game programming.  It was ported to many home consoles, mostly 1960's computers that had video monitors, and there was an Atari 2600 port, which suffered to the fact that it had become archaic even to the Atari's standards.  It can be played for free on an online browser today.  Compared to the far more successful Pong, I would say that Spacewar! is superior due to its higher level of complexity and strategy, but then that would be like comparing apples and oranges.

The Nintendo Entertainment System (1985)

What I am about to say may not be a shock to you, but is crucial to the understanding of the Nintendo Entertainment System:  It is the single most important video game console in the history of the medium.  Everything that we take for granted, even things that the average layperson will not realize, we owe to this grey box.  It brought us into the modern video gaming world, and single-handedly resuscitated the video game market in North America after the crash of 1983.
There was a period spanning two years where nobody in the United States would dare produce, market, or sell a video game.  The business models of Atari and their contemporaries had proven that it could not sustain itself, and an over-saturated market has collapsed on itself.   In Japan, however, video gaming was just as strong as it had always been.  A software company called Nintendo had created their first console, known as the Famicom (short for Family Computer) and had been met with success.  It was 8-bit, the most powerful piece of gaming hardware at the time.  They wanted to expand into the North American market, and to do that, they knew they would have to be clever.
After a serious redesign (pictured above), the Nintendo Entertainment System was ready to hit store shelves by Christmas 1985.  But who would sell it for them?  Nobody wanted to carry video games because of the negative stigma it carried.  So in a brilliant move of marketing, Nintendo sold their machine as a toy.  It came packaged with a copy of Super Mario Bros, and since then almost every Nintendo console has come with a Mario game.  It was, of course, a huge success, and Nintendo was able to hold a monopoly of sorts for six years until the Sega Genesis started to become popular in 1991.
Now monopolies are obviously bad for any healthy market, but if anyone was going to have one, the best option would be Nintendo.  The way they managed to keep it for so long was by maintaining the highest quality product available.  Sega had their Master System out there, but the far more popular NES was where third party developers wanted to publish their games.  Nintendo was smarter than Atari too, since they created a lock-out chip for NES games.  The Nintendo would only play games that were licensed by the company and had this chip installed.  Another tactic Nintendo used for quality control was limiting third party releases to five games a year.
What this created on the NES was a golden age of experimentation and high-quality games.  Since every software developer wanted to make games for Nintendo, the competition was between them to make the best games.  Heading the competition were Konami and Capcom.  Konami had their Castlevania games, space shooters like Gradius and Life Force, and a solid line of sports games.  Capcom had Mega Man, Disney games, and Bionic Commando.  Nintendo themselves produced high-quality first-party titles, which set the bar high for third parties.
The NES library, over its near ten-year life span, contains over one thousand games.  Most of them are terrible, but there is still a huge number of A+ titles, some of these spawning franchises that still exist today.  In the terms of good NES games, there are two categories.  There are the classics, like Super Mario Bros. 3, Mega Man 2, and The Legend of Zelda, which are the most fondly remembered.  The other kind of NES games are the ones that die-hard Nintendo fans like to talk about today, the underrated gems.  These include wonderful but overlooked titles such as The Guardian Legend, Crystalis, and Blaster Master.
Experimentation was a big factor of game development back in those days.  The quest seemed to be for programmers and designers to find the ways to make their games look, sound, and play the best that they could.  Some of these experiments, like The Legend of Zelda, with its non-linear story progression, and emphasis on puzzle solving and item collecting, have aged remarkably well.  Others, like Castlevania 2, with its confusing navigation, failed RPG elements, and lackluster design and aesthetic have aged poorly.
Some of the most influential titles were those that shifted from the straightforward arcade approach and went toward the choose-your-own-adventure style.  I pointed out The Legend of Zelda, but there was also Metroid, which fostered exploration and atmosphere, and Final Fantasy, an intuitive and incredibly customization RPG experience.  Games were no longer quick hunks of action which you could beat in a dedicated hour, but were now full adventures, which could take days, weeks, even months to complete.  Games like Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Warrior were some of the earliest to include a battery for back-up saves, which is taken completely as a given today.
The NES still lives on in our pop culture.  Anyone can recognize the famous themes from Super Mario Bros., or the line "Thank you Mario!  But our princess is in another castle!"  The movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is full of NES references, from the main character's band being called "Sex Bob-ombs" to one of the rival bands known as "The Clash at Demonhead".  Many sound effects and songs were taken directly from Nintendo games.  How many people have held something they've found aloft and hummed the Zelda theme? How many people will point out their frustrations at the Duck Hunt dog?  The NES is the reason I love retro games so much.  These games are still fun to play, and more interesting when you look at their historical influence.

Kirby's Adventure (NES, 1993)

Unbeknownst to most people, the first game in the Kirby franchise of games was a massive critical failure.  Kirby's Dream Land on the Game Boy was an attempt by Adventures of Lolo creator HAL Laboratory to make a simple game to introduce kids to video games.  It was the story of the titular pink puffball who must reclaim the land's food from the totalitarian King DeDeDe.  Kirby could jump, fly, and inhale enemies to spit them back out at other enemies.  I can praise it for being simple fun and the graphics are quite nice for a Game Boy game, but it is not worthy on its own to be a Great Video Game.  Kirby's Adventure (1993) on the NES, on the other hand, is a different story.
In making a Kirby game for the NES, HAL must have realized that they were going to need more to play with to create a worthwhile home console experience, and what they came up with is a stroke of genius.  Now when Kirby inhales his foes, he can absorb their abilities.  There are over twenty copy abilities, ranging from fire-breathing to becoming a UFO.  Some of them are fairly common and can be used for a variety of fighting styles (such as sword, electric, or fire) and some of them are extremely rare (like backdrop, UFO and bomb).
There are eight main levels with sub-stages and a boss fight at the end.  Kirby starts on a "map" screen where he can roam freely and enter each stage through a door.  Also on this map screen are mini-games that offer extra lives or copy abilities.  There are some areas that are locked away and you must find a secret switch within one of the stages to unlock it.  Some of these switches are simply in a room that is hidden out of sight, and requires some exploration, but others require you to solve puzzles with copy abilities.  For one puzzle you will have to light a fuse and then quickly get into the cannon at the other end to launch yourself to the switch.  For another you will have to get the hammer ability in a different stage, bring it back to another, and use the hammer to break some underwater blocks to get to the room with the switch.
The story, this time around, goes that King DeDeDe is back, and he has stolen the Star Rod from the Fountain of Dreams, broken it into several pieces, and given it to his buddies.  The Star Rod is important because it allows the denizens of Dream Land to dream while they sleep.  Kirby battles his way to get the pieces back and replace the Star Rod in the Fountain, but as it turns out, DeDeDe was only trying not trying to hide it from Kirby, but another being known only as the Nightmare, who seeks to corrupt everyone's dreams.  Using the Star Rod, Kirby defeats it and restores peace in Dream Land.
This game represents NES action games at their finest.  In terms of visuals and sound, it has some of the brightest, most colorful, and best animated graphics, and some of the most memorable music on the NES.  The control is tight, the play mechanics are fully realized, and the possibilities for ways to play through each stage are virtually endless.  There would be another game on the Game Boy, Kirby's Dream Land 2, which would take the copy abilities from Kirby's Adventure and combine it with friends Kirby could ride.  On the SNES there would be Kirby Super Star and Kirby's Dream Land 3, and on the N64 came Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, which is considered by many (myself included) to be the best Kirby game.  This first game was a big step in the right direction.