Flight of the Amazon Queen

Our father that art in heaven, hallowed be they name, thank you for letting Flight of the Amazon Queen finally be over. I have been playing this game literally since a few minutes after my last post. I took breaks for sleep and work, obviously, but I've just been slogging through this wretched piece of adventure-gaming history in virtually all of my down-time for the past week. I had been looking forward to it, but anticipation quickly turned to dismay, and dismay didn't take long to turn into agony.

At its essence, Flight of the Amazon Queen plays a lot like its demi-sibling, Beneath a Steel Sky. They were released by the same company, I think they use the same engine, and since they're both adventure games, they both conform to the standards and conventions of that genre. Unfortunately, while Beneath a Steel Sky is a pleasure to play, Flight of the Amazon Queen magnifies its flaws and creates a bunch of new ones, while neglecting to have any of the positives of the former.

The story isn't a dark dystopian view of the future, which is fine. I don't demand dystopias in all my diversions, and a change of pace sounded great. But the story for Flight of the Amazon Queen is also retarded, which is less than fine.

You're an airplane-pilot for hire who is supposed to fly a movie-star to the Amazon jungle; unfortunately, you crash-land and to escape, you have to rescue an Amazon princess from the clutches of an insane German scientist named Dr. Frank Ironstein, who is plotting to turn all the women of the Amazon tribe into dinosaur cross-breeds and use them to take over the world. He plots to do this with the aid of a magical crystal skull, and a DNA dino-raygun which he has developed. It sounds laughable but fun; it's implemented in such a way as to be laughable, but also mind-numbingly stupid, without an ounce of fun.

The writing itself sucks, but the voice-acting is painful. I was screaming for mercy from the vilely-fake Jersey accent the protagonists uses within minutes. And it just kept going... and going... and going... like some Energizer bunny of dialog suckiness. Your main rival's accent is supposed to be Dutch, but instead sounds like the worst Sean Connery imitation you've ever heard. The best voice-work in the game comes from the Germans, because even though they're supposed to sound like over-the-top caricatures, they're still the most accurate and least flat portrayals. And they're not any good either, for the record.

For all intents and purposes, you can't skip any of the dialog. And Joe King (more on the bad humor, next paragraph) has something to say about everything. Maybe when this came out, voice-acting was so new that it was cool even when it sucked. I've been listening to bad voice acting in video games for over a decade, and this is the worst voice acting I've heard, except for Blue Stinger on the Dreamcast. Painful things you can't skip are par for the course in this game.

Ridiculously juvenile humor is a constant. Twelve year-old boys would have cringed playing this; it must have been written by seven year-olds. I was involuntarily grimacing every minute or two; groans were so constant my room mate asked me if I was okay, a few hours in.

You spend a lot of time going back and forth in the same environments. By the end of the game, I was going back and forth between reading Kotaku and RockPaperShotgun, and playing the game. I would click on the exit, then alt-tab to my browser to read while I waited for the character to actually get there.

Yes, I could have sped up the game, but I didn't know until the end that there was never anything time-sensitive; in most adventure games, you sometimes have to slow the game down because there are real-time interactions that result in certain death. In this game's favor, as far as I know, it's impossible to die. Every adventure game should adopt that philosophy, and most of the good ones did. Playing at its default speed sucks, regardless.

Even playing at a higher speed, you're re-treading the same screens so often that it's just boring. They tried to do a bit to ameliorate that in the jungle portions of the game, by having a central point from which you could get to the main areas. But they messed it up by designing the locations poorly.

For example, take the crash site. It's where you start the jungle portion, and you'll be returning to it quite a bit. But getting back there always requires you to go through two screens that only have something to do on them the first time you visit them. Every time you have to go back to the crash site, you have to walk through those screens. Why? For no reason whatsoever, except that they didn't think the layout through at all.

The credits listed around 30 QA people - I can't believe they actually played the game all the way through; anyone with a brain would have been annoyed by the needless treking about that could have easily been fixed. They would have been annoyed by the horrible dialog. They would have been annoyed by the stupid humor (unless they were less than ten years of age). They would have hated the game, and made constructive criticisms that could have been used to make the game not suck.

The puzzles are, for the most part, not only painfully obvious but painfully contrived. Normally, adventure-games are so obtuse that they have you banging your head against the wall, so kudos to these guys for not going down that route, but they went way too far in the opposite direction. Example: girl says she needs perfume. Cue cutscene, where a character just happens to throw her perfume in the lake, for no good reason, and stalk off.

That happens constantly. Just once in a while, it's totally forgivable. You have a neat idea for a puzzle, and can't make it flow smoothly, so you make a coincidence. I'm fine with that. But every frickin' time? There are just too many utterly laughable coincidences taking place. Again, the writers must have been pre-teens to think that wouldn't make the experience a lot less immersive.

If you're an adventure-game fan, and you've exhausted all other free options, feel free to take this one for a spin. It works, and it's longer than Beneath a Steel Sky. That it's longer only in an artificial way because it makes you go back and forth between the same old environments, and that it has the most juvenile story-telling I've encountered in an adventure game not coded by Roberta Williams, make it a game I could only recommend for an obsessive-compulsive player of the genre. All others, steer clear. Very clear.

Beneath a Steel Sky

Yay! A game with a story! Beneath a Steel Sky is an adventure game, a blessedly not-so-prevalent genre in todays world whose only contribution to the realm of electronic gaming lies in the fact that they had to focus on story, because their gameplay was painfully unfun. Which is a broad generalization, and not exactly accurate in this case, but mostly true most of the time. Adventure game elements are found in most of the games that see release every year, but the bad parts have mostly vanished from the face of the earth.

This is really two reviews in one: firstly, there's the software. That's SCUMM-VM, a sort of emulator that allows you to run a collection of old-school games (mostly LucasArts games from the early 90s, which featured and engine called SCUMM, but also a few others). Then there's the game itself: a collection of datafiles being interpreted by the SCUMM-VM and thus being something we can interact with on our Linux (or Win32 or Apple or... ad infinitum) machine.

SCUMM-VM is mostly amazing. It works very well on this machine; I'd used it to play other games under Windows in the past, but this is my first experience with it in Linux. It was essentially the same experience; they even hard-coded using alt-enter to switch between windowed and full-screen modes, so that works under Linux. The fact that everything in the Linux world seems to have a different short-cut for toggling full-screen is a constant source of frustration to the person who came up on Windows.

When you install Beneath a Steel Sky it adds shortcuts for both the game, and for SCUMM-VM, to your 'Applications' menu - I recommend starting SCUMM-VM, as that allows you to configure some things, the most important of which is probably the graphics engine. SCUMM-VM supports several different anti-aliasing and multi-sampling graphics modes, that look much nicer than the default un-touched-up visuals you get with most of these games. It's a way to triage some of the pain that comes from playing a game from 15 years ago, if you didn't play them at the time. They weren't ugly - some were quite pretty - but they certainly weren't as slick looking as everything these days is. 640x480 was hi-res.

Configuration aside, the SCUMM-VM machine integrates seamlessly into the game itself. Outside of hitting 'F5' to get to the menu that allows you to save and load and turn sound n' sub-titles off, you're mostly working within Beneath a Steel Sky. The gameplay is simple; left click to look at something, right-click to interact with it, and if you want to use any of the items you've picked up on your travels, hover the mouse at the very top of the screen/window, and your inventory appears.

The story starts out uniquely: a helicopter full of riot-gear toting police lands in the middle of your savage-wastelands-post-apocalyptic-style tribe, and demands that you be handed over, in the middle of the tribe's chief/shaman guy having a vision of your impending doom n' whatnot. You leave with the cops, the cops blow up your tribe from the air, and take you to a city, where your 'copter crashes, allowing you to escape. Meanwhile, you had a flashback in there at some point where you saw another helicopter crash involving you, when you were five years old; said crash killed your mom, and led to you being taken in by that tribe.

Your goal? Escape the city! Return to the wilderness of The Gap (the region you're from, not the store). It turns out that the city is built way up into the air, you're on an upper level, and you need to get to the ground level to get the hell out. The plot has a tendency to thicken nicely in well-managed increments, so there's always something new to deal with and think about. Generally, the pacing is quite good, though the game isn't really that long.

Thank the blessed Mary, the puzzles are mostly sensible. I played a number of adventure games back in the day - back when they were still making them a lot, as opposed to the current slow trickle - and mostly, they blew. They existed to sell hint books. How do you defeat the yeti? A pie in the face, obviously. Etc. (that's actually almost too logical to count as a ludicrous adventure-game puzzle - see Old Man Murray's famous examination of Gabriel Knight III for a better example). Some of them were so obscenely funny and fun due to the writing and general aesthetics that you didn't really give a shit (see Grim Fandango), and some adventure games actually made enough sense that you weren't disgusted by them. This is one of the few, the proud, the latter.

I didn't have to consult GameFAQs until the last third of the game, and then - painfully - it was to discover that I needed to do something I'd already tried, only there was a small section of pixels where it would work, and I'd clicked the wrong section of the object in question. The only thing worse than a stupid puzzle is a puzzle that makes perfect sense, that you solved correctly in your head an hour ago, and then spent an hour wasting your time trying to find some imaginary other solution. But at least it's my fault; I don't blame the game (much).

Oddly, for a game that's beloved by tons and tons of people, I found that the aesthetics were a bit confused. The game's quite funny, and also features a dark vision of the future, but they don't seem to mesh well. You have funny bits, and you have dystopic bits, but never darkly humorous bits. At least, not much. It is genuinely funny, so it's still a pleasure, but it seems a bit confused.

The art-direction seems equally confused. Beneath a Steel Sky seems sort of like it wants to look like a post-apocalyptic Fallout-style future most of the time, but then you step on the wrong corridor, and there's nothing post-apocalyptic about it. It's a megapolis that stretches towards the heavens, featuring millions of people, high technology, futuristic forms of transportation, and so on. More like Bladerunner (technically that was post-apocalyptic too, but a very different vision) or something from one of William Gibson's books. Each scene looks fine, but very often the transitions between them are quite abrupt.

It's worth mentioning that the voice-acting is brilliant. I'm not even going to add 'for a game' - it's just hilariously well-done. People actually have realistic inflection, great comedic timing, and intriguing personalities. It's even better than the real thing!

While I've mentioned mostly flaws, don't let me convince you the game sucks. It doesn't. It's brilliant, it's funny, it's witty, and it's fun. Graphically, while I don't think it necessarily fully reflects a coherent vision, it's very well-done and it's a delight to discover. The story features twists and turns, surprises of all sorts, drama, and all the rest of the jazz you associate with good storytelling (a beginning and an ending! I hate it when they don't have those). The game is considered a classic by many fans of sci-fi and adventure gaming for very good reason, and I was delightfully surprised to get the chance to play it for this blog.

Beneath a Steel Sky is available via the Ubuntu packages because it was released into the wild as freeware by its developers. As such, unlike most of the games that SCUMM-VM works with, it's available for free from the SCUMM-VM website. Whatever platform you're reading this on, you can probably go right there, download the game and the engine, and have it up and running in less than ten minutes. Best of all? Beneath a Steel Sky isn't the only one! There's also Lure of the Temptress (from the same developers) and Flight of the Amazon Queen. I'm assuming I'll end up playing both of those for this blog.