Top 10 Games - #9
26/08/09 17:11 Filed in: Gaming Goodness
First, to recap the list, #10 was Prince Of Persia
When I was in high school I got my game on with my Super Nintendo, a Mac IIsi, and a little 386 PC. I could go on for hours talking about that Mac IIsi or my super nintendo. But I don’t remember much about that PC at all. I don’t remember what software I used on it or where it was located in the house even. The only thing I remember about that little computer...is Bloodnet.
Ok, I’m sure right about now most of you are mouthing “WTF”. And you have every right to. I’m pretty sure no-one else on the planet has Bloodnet on a top ten anything list. And yet here it is on mine.
You have to first understand where I was at as a gamer when I stumbled onto Bloodnet. I had played a lot of great action/adventure games up until that point. Story-based games were then and still are my drug of choice. And yet I was starting to grow a little tired of how inflexible they all were. Any problems or puzzles were usually solved in one way. The way the developer intended. And there was no grey. Hell there was no black either. You always had to be goodiest of goody two-shoes throughout the duration of each game. I talked about how inflexible Mirror’s Edge was to me when I played the demo for that game. Well the frustration I have with scripted games stems from that point in my life. I would play a game and see a puzzle or problem. Think of a solution to said problem and then find out that the developer didn’t think of that solution, and therefore didn’t put it into the game. Leaving me to scrap that solution and try to figure out what direction the developer actually had intended for me.
How Bloodnet came into my possession is a little foggy. I think I remember picking it up at an EBGames(then called Electronics Boutique), seeing a Vampire on the cover(who looked like Q from Star Trek) with text that read “A Cyberpunk Gothic”. I thought “Cool, I dig vampire films, and I loved Blade Runner. Sounds like a match made in heaven to me”. But I’m not entirely sure that actually happened or if I’m just having acid flashbacks. Which would be incredibly intriguing due to the fact that I’ve never actually dropped acid. And come to think of it, that would likely be the most boring acid flashback ever. “Oh man, I saw the light pulsing to the beat of the music, my arms and legs stretched for miles, and I started floating across a great chasm filled with all my hopes and dreams...what did you see? Oh, me...I went game shopping.”
I remember loading it up for the first time and thinking, yeah...could be good. But also could be incredibly lame. But where I got hooked was in the character creation screens. There was a “Quick Generation” option and a “Manual Generation” one. I figured, “Hey, I’m in no hurry” so I clicked on the “Manual Generation” one. And the game started asking me questions. “Ok, this is a little odd” I thought. Then it dawned on me. The responses I gave determined what kind of character I would be. “Cooooooooool” I thought. Here’s one of the questions from the game:
You’ve always said that computer games were more fun when you were a kid. Sure, they were simpler, even crude, but you would often spend your last ten dollars to play your favorite:
That to me was so frickin cool. This told me that I wasn’t going to be the character that the developers told me I was going to be. And that was only the beginning.
The premise for the game is this. You’re Ransom Stark. A man living in a futuristic New York that resembles pretty much every other dystopian world conceived after Blade Runner. Ransom goes to a bar one night only to get picked up by some hot chick. Awesome. She turns out to be a vampire. Not so awesome. She bites and turns you into a mindless vampire, ready to do the bidding for the evil big badass vampire, Van Helsing. Or at least she thought she turned you.
Turns out, Ransom had some problems with his brain few years back. Totally messed up. Think permanent acid flashback hell(what’s with me and acid today?). That was until some nice lady invented a special implant that was designed to help you. It keeps you from going insane in this upside-down crazy world. That implant pretty much stops you from turning into a full on vampire. However it’s a losing battle. Cue the ticking clock. You are for all intents and purposes a vampire. Fangs, need to drink blood, strength, yada yada. But you still have your humanity(soul) and it’s slowly slipping away day by day. You, Ransom Stark, must stop your transformation before your implant is overwhelmed and you become one of Van Helsing’s bitches.
There’s a big catch here though. Being a vampire, you have a “thirst for blood” metre. If that metre gets full, you uncontrollably kill someone in your party and drink their blood. So you have to either wander around killing people you don’t like and drinking from them, or find another way to get your blood. Here’s the catch...with every person you kill to feed off of, you lose a part of your humanity, speeding along your transformation. That blew me away. Consequences stem from your choices. I hadn’t played a game like this before. Games I played before this one had a right way to do something and a wrong way. You did it the wrong way? Do it again till you do it right! In Bloodnet there was no right or wrong way to do anything. Which I absolutely loved.
This was also the first RPG I ever played and it made me an instant convert. I loved the party aesthetic, roaming around the city with your possé(it was still cool to say “possé” back then), laying the smack down on anyone in your way(it was never cool to say “laying the smack down” however). The combat was turn-based strategy. So when you got into a fight, you would place your characters around the screen and decide who their target was, and with what weapon they would attack their quarry with. All this gameplay was nothing really new at the time, but it was new to me. And it left such a lasting impression on me that it made me almost freak out when many years later, I saw the CD-based version of this game sitting on a shelf at a second hand store. The only game that store had in fact. Talk about random.
So what can I learn from Bloodnet all these years later? Well it’s nice to have a few hooks in there gameplay-wise. The mechanic that forces the player to make a choice between satiating their thirst for blood or retaining their humanity is such a simple yet effective gameplay mechanism. That’s something to remember when making a great game. Don’t just give the game players a right way and a wrong way to do things. Give them choices. Make it so they have to really think about their options before making a decision. And make sure that regardless, there is impact on the characters and the game world that they inhabit.
You’ll be hard pressed finding this game anywhere now except for Ebay. And it won’t likely run on anything modern unless through emulation. Like Prince Of Persia, dosbox is probably your best option. Like in the previous review, if you have a mac, click here. If you have windows, click here. And you can find Bloodnet here. Give er a try. You may like what you see.
First 9 minutes of Bloodnet:
When I was in high school I got my game on with my Super Nintendo, a Mac IIsi, and a little 386 PC. I could go on for hours talking about that Mac IIsi or my super nintendo. But I don’t remember much about that PC at all. I don’t remember what software I used on it or where it was located in the house even. The only thing I remember about that little computer...is Bloodnet.
#9 - Bloodnet
Ok, I’m sure right about now most of you are mouthing “WTF”. And you have every right to. I’m pretty sure no-one else on the planet has Bloodnet on a top ten anything list. And yet here it is on mine.
You have to first understand where I was at as a gamer when I stumbled onto Bloodnet. I had played a lot of great action/adventure games up until that point. Story-based games were then and still are my drug of choice. And yet I was starting to grow a little tired of how inflexible they all were. Any problems or puzzles were usually solved in one way. The way the developer intended. And there was no grey. Hell there was no black either. You always had to be goodiest of goody two-shoes throughout the duration of each game. I talked about how inflexible Mirror’s Edge was to me when I played the demo for that game. Well the frustration I have with scripted games stems from that point in my life. I would play a game and see a puzzle or problem. Think of a solution to said problem and then find out that the developer didn’t think of that solution, and therefore didn’t put it into the game. Leaving me to scrap that solution and try to figure out what direction the developer actually had intended for me.
I remember loading it up for the first time and thinking, yeah...could be good. But also could be incredibly lame. But where I got hooked was in the character creation screens. There was a “Quick Generation” option and a “Manual Generation” one. I figured, “Hey, I’m in no hurry” so I clicked on the “Manual Generation” one. And the game started asking me questions. “Ok, this is a little odd” I thought. Then it dawned on me. The responses I gave determined what kind of character I would be. “Cooooooooool” I thought. Here’s one of the questions from the game:
- Virtual Spy, which allowed you to engage in adventures of espionage and national security.
- Matrix Master, which allowed you to explore a simulation of the not-fully-designed cyberspace
- any old game for a few rounds. You would then attempt to bust into the machine and score the tokens stored inside
That to me was so frickin cool. This told me that I wasn’t going to be the character that the developers told me I was going to be. And that was only the beginning.
Turns out, Ransom had some problems with his brain few years back. Totally messed up. Think permanent acid flashback hell(what’s with me and acid today?). That was until some nice lady invented a special implant that was designed to help you. It keeps you from going insane in this upside-down crazy world. That implant pretty much stops you from turning into a full on vampire. However it’s a losing battle. Cue the ticking clock. You are for all intents and purposes a vampire. Fangs, need to drink blood, strength, yada yada. But you still have your humanity(soul) and it’s slowly slipping away day by day. You, Ransom Stark, must stop your transformation before your implant is overwhelmed and you become one of Van Helsing’s bitches.
There’s a big catch here though. Being a vampire, you have a “thirst for blood” metre. If that metre gets full, you uncontrollably kill someone in your party and drink their blood. So you have to either wander around killing people you don’t like and drinking from them, or find another way to get your blood. Here’s the catch...with every person you kill to feed off of, you lose a part of your humanity, speeding along your transformation. That blew me away. Consequences stem from your choices. I hadn’t played a game like this before. Games I played before this one had a right way to do something and a wrong way. You did it the wrong way? Do it again till you do it right! In Bloodnet there was no right or wrong way to do anything. Which I absolutely loved.
So what can I learn from Bloodnet all these years later? Well it’s nice to have a few hooks in there gameplay-wise. The mechanic that forces the player to make a choice between satiating their thirst for blood or retaining their humanity is such a simple yet effective gameplay mechanism. That’s something to remember when making a great game. Don’t just give the game players a right way and a wrong way to do things. Give them choices. Make it so they have to really think about their options before making a decision. And make sure that regardless, there is impact on the characters and the game world that they inhabit.
You’ll be hard pressed finding this game anywhere now except for Ebay. And it won’t likely run on anything modern unless through emulation. Like Prince Of Persia, dosbox is probably your best option. Like in the previous review, if you have a mac, click here. If you have windows, click here. And you can find Bloodnet here. Give er a try. You may like what you see.
First 9 minutes of Bloodnet: