Way back in January, I wrote an Impression piece on Persona 3 FES, a game I later had to abandon because I got myself stuck in an unwinnable situation without sufficient save games to back my way out of it. At the time, I couldn’t bring myself to restart from the beginning.

Instead, I started playing a different game – the next game in the series, Atlus Games’ Shin Megami Tensei Persona 4.

I’m not going to write an Impression of P4; the game sucked me in so completely that I have already finished playing it. Not just finished – I finished with the true, good ending. Anyone who knows my game playing habits will understand what this means – I usually take a very long time to finish games. My average play time for Final Fantasy games is measured in years. Persona 4 took months, but for me, that’s crazy-fast.

Persona 4 takes the franchise concept in an interesting direction. As in Persona 3, you play a nameless (you get to name him) protagonist, newly arrived in town. Your parents are working overseas for a year, so the protagonist is going to stay with his uncle and young cousin for the year.

Shortly after arriving, though, the town is left reeling by a series of gristly inexplicable murders. As you’d expect, of course, this is an open invitation for the protagonist (a Japanese highschool student) and his friends and classmates to get involved in the investigation. It’s a bit of a tricky situation for him from time to time, as his uncle is a detective with the local police department, but all crime-fighting Japanese highschool students have SOME cross to bear, or it just wouldn’t feel right.

The investigation is aided greatly by the protagonist’s discovery that he has the ability to somehow enter the screen of a TV, crossing over into a strange fog-filled world on the other side. There he is able to use the power of “Persona”, another personality inside himself that he can call upon to fight the Shadows that inhabit that strange, misty world.

Without going into too much of the plot, the story unfolds with mechanics that will be largely familiar to players with experience of Persona 3. There are some significant changes that improve the play experience though, chiefly the ability to take control of all of your characters in combat. Persona 3 allowed direct control only of the protagonist; his friends were always under AI control. Having full control allows you to take advantage of character abilities better and to more carefully manage the health and magic points of the party on long dungeon grinding sessions.

Dungeon grinding is another area where Persona 4 improves upon Persona 3 in a dramatic way. In P4, you always have the option to resume exploration of a dungeon you’ve left at the deepest level you’ve reached in it, which prevents the often tedious trek back up to where you left off that P3 players faced on a regular basis.

The most important thing for me in any RPG is the characters and the story, and this is where P4 really shines in my eyes. The story and the world are written in such a way that each character that joins your “investigation team” has a Persona, and has that persona because they were a potential victim of the murder spree. Without giving too much away, each character is forced to face his or her own inner demons – or more specifically, their inner Shadow – and once that Shadow is defeated, that person gains a new level of acceptance of who they are. This becomes manifest by their acquisition of a Persona, a figurative and literal gain in power that enables them to join the fight to discover the truth behind what’s happening in the town.

This is a really brilliant move because it doesn’t just encourage good character development, it requires it. All of the characters you play rise above the stale stereotypes you find too often in games and display a depth and complexity that was beyond refreshing. These are characters who live in the mind and imagination of the player, real people with conflicting desires, self-doubts, multi-faceted personalities and a great deal of growth throughout the course of the game. When the game was over and it was time for me and my protagonist to leave these friends behind, it was with true regret that I had to let them go.

Before you start thinking that Atlus is paying me to write this, I should probably mention that there ARE some things that bothered me about the game. Most serious was the obvious railroading that goes on. Given the time management aspect of the game that P4 shares with P3, it’s completely understandable, but it seemed to stand out even more in P4 than it did in P3. Understandable or not, it did affect my ability to enjoy the game on a regular basis.

All in all, flaws or no flaws, Persona 4 is currently at the top of my list of favorite RPGs. The story and particularly the characters are beautifully executed, and kept me completely enthralled. More importantly, those characters are going to continue to live inside my head for a long time to come, and will likely tempt me back in for another play-through, since getting the ultimate good ending allows you to start a new game with some carry-over data to unlock new stuff.

I can’t recommend this game enough. If you have any interest in JPRGs at all, it’s a must-play. If you have any interest in RPGs in general at all, it’s a must-play. If you don’t have any interest in RPGs at all, give it a try anyway; it may well be enough to change your mind.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Persona 5 For PS3? (ps3.ign.com)
• Atlus Launches Shin Megami Tensei: Persona PSP Website (psp.ign.com)
• Shin Megami Tensei Update (ds.ign.com)
• Atlus’ MegaTen game Strange Journey is a DS title (destructoid.com)

Reviews atlus, jrpg, p4, persona, rpg

Fantastic Contraption is many things. Part physics toy, part puzzle game, part sandbox, all wonderful and frustrating and delightful combined.

The idea is not a new one; you have a set level with an object that must be moved, terrain it must be moved over or through, and a goal space it must reach. To accomplish the moving bit, you have some pre-set components you can use to build various contraptions

Blogs, Reviews flash, game, review, web

The Sims 3 is consuming my life. I thought The Sims 2 was addictive… wow.

Blogs, Reviews Sims 3

It’s been forever and an age since I posted anything significant, and that’s because my gaming world seems to have exploded. I’ve got so much stuff to play I don’t even know where to start writing about it all – and so I’ve decided to post a written thumbnail gallery of what I’m going through right now.

Games I’m Still Playing

Star Ocean: The Last Hope, XBox 360

A Kingdom for Keflings, XBox 360 Live

Games I’m Playing But Haven’t (Yet) Written About

Fantastic Contraption, http://www.fantasticcontraption.com

Amazing little web physics game along the lines of The Incredible Machine. You must get an object from one place to another by building fantastic contraptions out of various types of wheels and rods. Free to play with extra content if you’re willing to pay a little. It’s well worth it.

Little Big Planet, PS3.

I haven’t dug too much into this one yet; I just picked it up a couple of days ago. I’m late to join this party and it’s a shame, it’s a pretty mind-blowing gaming experience. At it’s core, LBP is a fairly typical platform game, but they expose that core in an unprecedented way by giving you all the tools you need to create a rediculous variety of worlds of your own to play in, alone or with friends.

Persona 4, PS2

I caved into temptation and started playing Persona 4, and was hugely impressed. As fantastic as Persona 3 is, Persona 4 takes a small step beyond it in nearly every respect. The steps may be small but the number of them adds up to a great difference; Persona 4 is one of the best RPGs I’ve played, so far. I’ll be writing it up soon.

Valkyria Chronicles, PS3

This game really blew my mind, even more so than Little Big Planet. When I got myself a PS3, I got it for two reasons – it was the cheapest BluRay player available on the market at the time, and because I want to get Final Fantasy XIII for the PS3 when it’s released. If I’d known about it, Valkyria Chronicles would have been more than enough justification. It’s a strategy roleplaying game, not a genre I’ve ever tried before, but now I think I’ve been missing out. I’m not going to rave about this one too much, it’s my #1 priority for an Impression post; I’ll save it for that, coming up soon.

Pain, PS3 Store

This is a pretty small game I was introduced to just last week. The idea is to flick a living crash test dummy of a character around a scene, causing as much destruction as you can. It sounds kind of brainless and silly, which it is, but it’s amazingly addictive and satisfying to play. The base game comes with one scene and a couple of characters to throw around. Two additional scenes and a large number of extra characters are available for purchase on the Sony Online Store.

Games I Am No Longer Playing

Persona 3 FES, PS2.

• I’m still sucked in by the story on this one, but sadly I reached a point where I could not defeat a boss encounter and don’t have enough saved games to go back and level up to try again. I will start a new game in the future, manage the early game days better, and possibly play at Easy level just so I can get through the story more effectively.

Harvest Moon – Tree of Tranquility, Wii.

• A good game, one I enjoy, but I’m too far off the target audience for it to hold my attention against the likes of Star Ocean, Persona 4 and Valkyria Chronicles.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Three new DLC packs revealed for Valkyria Chronicles (destructoid.com)
• Fallout 3 and Little Big Planet big winners at E3 awards (canada.com)
• New Japanese “Final Fantasy XIII” Video is Here (amazon.com)

Blogs gaming, keflings, lbp, persona, ps2, ps3, wii, xbox 360

Rockstar has announced Max Payne 3, followup to two highly original shooters that introduced the gaming world to Matrix-style “Bullet Time” before even the Matrix games were able to do it. Slated to appear on the winter release schedule and featuring versions for the PS3, XBox 360 and PC, players will revisit the troubled life of protagonist Max Payne.

“We’re starting a new chapter of Max’s life with this game,” said Sam Houser, Founder of Rockstar Games. “This is Max as we’ve never seen him before, a few years older, more world-weary and cynical than ever. We experience the downward spiral of his life after the events of Max Payne 2 and witness his last chance for salvation.”

These words from the press release ring pretty true for me. Rockstar has a fantastic history with game releases, and I loved the original two games, but I can’t help but (unfairly, I know) assign a little guilt by association that makes me think the full name should be “Max Payne 3: We’re Sorry About the Movie.”

Won’t stop me from playing it though… and it sure won’t stop me from enjoying it.

Reactions announcement, game, max payne, rockstar

As of this writing, I’m about 30 hours into Star Ocean – The Last Hope (SO-TLH) for the XBox 360 and I’m enjoying it. I had wished, when I started writing this, that I’d be able to say I was thoroughly enjoying it, but there are a few concerns I’ve got that prevent me from saying that.

The Last Hope is a fantastic Square-Enix RPG, no doubt. Anyone who likes Final Fantasy style Japanese RPGs will be into this. The title comes from the core of the story, which is that humanity has been up to it’s old tricks and taken warfare to such an extreme that World War III has occurred and left the Earth unable to sustain life, at least on the surface. Humanity has taken refuge under ground, but they can’t remain there indefinitely. The human race’s titular last hope is the search for a new world to call it’s own, hopefully one they’ll take care of a bit better than they did the Earth.

The characters are decent, if a little generic-seeming at the start. They do begin to come into their own as you get further into the game, which is a bit of a relief. Your primary characters are Edge Maverick and Reimi Saionji, humans from Earth’s underground who are determined to find humanity’s new home. They’re fairly typical anime/RPG character archetypes, the idealized everyman that you can identify with comfortably while a part of you wishes you secretly wishes that you could identify with them a little more closely. This makes it easy to slip into their shoes so to speak, but also makes them feel a little bland at the outset. As the game progresses they start to come into their own a little bit more with story events tugging on their personas and moulding them into something a bit more unique.

The combat is enjoyable, resembling other Square-Enix games in the broad strokes but with some twists that are new to this title. It took me a long time to get into the game’s Blindsiding system because I found it largely unnecessary, but now that I do know how to pull them off, I find I do them a lot more often. Blindsiding is a way your characters have of slipping past an enemy’s defenses to strike from their “blind spot” which always results in a critical hit for much more damage than a typical hit would do.

If I had any complaint about the combat, it’s the same one I have with all Square-Enix games – it’s often necessary to go “grinding”, or fighting endlessly for the sake of fighting to build experience up when you discover that you’re not strong enough to get past a particular encounter. This is not always a bad thing. In this game in particular I’ve found it less irritating than I have in other games, because it has led me to exploring the various planets I can travel to in more depth, and I’ve completed a large number of smaller side quests as a result. These side quests make for an effective alternative to grinding, in fact, because you can earn a fair amount of experience doing them,which levels your characters up just as effectively as the fighting.

Another nice side effect of the side quests is that many of them are crafting quests. People or shops will often ask you to find or make special items for them. The game contains a vast number of resources you can acquire in various ways. You can then take these resources back to your ship’s lab, where you can launch the crafting interface and create a dizzying array of items that range from weapons and armor upgrades to ship upgrades to useless bits of arts and craft that can be sold for more than the cost of the components you made them from. Like blindsides in combat, this was not something I jumped into right away, but once I did start messing around with it, it quickly became a fun passtime in it’s own right – and the more combat oriented items are yet another way you can reduce the need for grinding, as they can make those extra-tough encounters a lot easier to manage.

Visually… well, it’s a breathtaking game that often inspires me to just sit still and pan the camera around the world to take it in. I won’t go on too much about how great the game looks, because honestly, it’s not often you find A-list games these days that don’t look spectacular.

I have had some problems with SO-TLH that have driven me absolutely crazy. The game seems to be unusually crash-prone. I’ve had more problems with crashing games on the XBox 360 than on any other console, but this game in particular crashes more than any other 360 title I’ve played in recent memory. I’m not sure whether this is because the game is buggy, the console lacks stability, or because  my console is one of the earlier 360 releases, but no matter the cause, it’s frustrating to lose progress due to lockups.

It does say something about the compelling quality of the game that I keep going back to it though. I’m anxious to see where the story is leading; what more is going to happen with these characters? What more will they go through, fight through, endure through? It’s good enough to be worth a little frustration to see where things are headed.

Overall impression: I’d rank it a bit below Final Fantasy XII or Persona 3 FES, but still definitely worth a look for fans of this style of gaming.

Related articles by Zemanta

• New Japanese “Final Fantasy XIII” Video is Here (amazon.com)
• Star Ocean: The Last Hope gets earlier release date (joystiq.com)
• Destructoid review: Star Ocean: The Last Hope (destructoid.com)
• Stale News: Star Ocean 4’s Battle System Has A Ridiculous Name [Exaltation] (kotaku.com)

Impressions 360, gaming, rpg, square-enix, star ocean

A Kingdom for Keflings is a very cute game for XBox Live Arcade that caught my attention because it’s one of those new games that makes direct use of the 360 Live Avatars in the same way that so many Wii games make use of Miis. The idea is that you play the game as your Avatar, who exists in the world of the Kelflings as a giant among small people. These small Kelflings want a great kingdom, and for some unspecified reason, you’re helping them achieve this goal.

You start with a few Keflings and a large amount of resource-rich land. As a giant, you’re able to work reasonably quickly to harvest basic resources and get the building process under way. This is essentially a resource management game; you could almost see it as  real-time strategy game, except that there’s no opponent to fight. Much like Warcraft and it’s ilk, you’ll spend time chopping trees, mining stone and crystals, etc. all in the name of constructing buildings to unlock more advanced technologies to improve your kingdom and your Keflings themselves.

Though you are capable of gathering the resources you need yourself, you’re better off putting your Keflings to work for you to handle resource gathering. This frees you up for the task of actually constructing all the buildings the new kingdom is going to need. That’s something the Keflings can’t do, so your time is much better spent focused on that.

In addition to the resource management part of the game, there’s a bit of a collecting game as well. You can explore the land around your growing kingdom to find new tools that will help you gather different types of resources. Generally they’ll be found smack in the center of a resource patch, requiring you to do some work to clear a path to the tool.

There’s also a bit of a quest component. Once you’ve built your kingdom up to the point where you have a town hall, keep or castle, you’ll be able to get quests from the Kefling you’ve put in power. These are largely resource quests, along the lines of “I need 50 magic gems, can you put them in the contractor’s office for me?” So you’ll go off, get the resource requested, put it in the building requested, and be rewarded with love.

That may not sound like much of a reward, but Love is actually another resource in and of itself. You need it whenever you build a new house to increase your Kefling population. Building a house is all well and good, but Keflings won’t want to live in it until it contains love. Build a house, put love in it, and you get new Keflings to do your bidding. Quests are the primary means of getting Love, so you’ll need to undertake them once in a while.

Constructing buildings is a pretty interesting process. It’s not too heavy on the micromanagement, but not simplified to the point of pointlessness either. Among the many buildings you’ll construct for your kingdom are various types of workshops. These workshops will take resources of various kinds and enable you to place orders for building components. The components are assembled and placed outside the workshop. Your giant then goes and picks up the component and you can put it wherever you want in the world. You arrange the components in the proper configuration (which you’ll be able to see on the building’s blueprint,) and when you have all the components in the correct configuration, the building is automatically finished off.

This may sound really simple, but you have a limited population of Keflings harvesting resources for you. You’ll also have Keflings working at transporting resources from location to location, and others processing one type of resource into another. For instance, you may have one Kefling chopping trees into logs, one Kefling working in a saw mill, and a third Kefling transporting cut planks from the sawmill to your contractor’s office. Your contractor’s office is just one type of workshop though, you may have half a dozen others in your kingdom, and all of them need to be fed a variety of resources to create all the building pieces you’ll need. Making sure you have all the resources you need where you need them can be a bit of an optimization dance. It’s not too punishing if you mess up though; you can always have one workshop “build” a resource stockpile for you, which your giant can then move where you need it in a hurry. It’s just tricky enough to be interesting but not so tricky as to be frustrating.

I started playing this game with the demo just last night and quickly found myself compelled to spend the 800 Microsoft Points required to upgrade to the full game.  It didn’t claim ALL of my attention; Star Ocean – The Last Hope took the lion’s share of it. But I did find myself playing it far more than I expected I would, given the fact that I had Star Ocean there waiting for me. That’s a pretty good sign.

Speaking of Star Ocean – The Last Hope, that one is next on my Impressions list. Watch for a new post on it very soon.

Related articles by Zemanta

• A Kingdom for Keflings: Casual City-Building Sim to Soothe a Geekdad’s Mind (wired.com)
• Vote for Your Fav Xbox LIVE Arcade Games Next Week (amazon.com)
• A Kingdom For Keflings Hits XBLA, Avatars Infect UNO [Xbox Live Arcade] (kotaku.com)
• Vote In The 2008 Xbox Live Arcade Awards [Xbox Live Arcade] (kotaku.com)

Impressions 360, Arcade, game, Kingdom for Keflings, XBox Live

Written by Gordon S. McLeod
Wednesday, 26 April 2006

This was a group assignment completed with the assistance of Mark Smith and Frank Messier, classmates of mine at the Academy. In this class we were taught to read, write and analyze scripts as used in film, theatre and television, and with thought in mind on how they can be useful in the game development world. Note we also studied the game design document in detail in this class.

February 4, 2005

FADE IN:

EXT. FOREST VALLEY – NIGHT

A carpet of trees covers the sides of the river valley, broken in places by clearings; some natural, some bearing the look of old battle scars. The sky is a pale green/blue of a shade never seen in any time or place on Earth.

Glints of metal in the starlight hint at recent wreckage not yet overgrown.

Two imposing fortresses stand off at opposite ends of the valley, the river between them. They crouch in night’s shadows, facing one another like cathedrals of diametrically opposed religions, each convinced of its own rightness at the other’s expense.

A full moon observes the eternal confrontation, small in the sky, as though distancing itself from a fight it knows will never end.

INT. BLUE BASE – NIGHT

THREE PEOPLE sit at a triangular desk. There’s an air of tension and a hint of veiled hostility in the room.

BLUE LEADER, aka LITTLE PONY, a hard woman in her mid-twenties, faces RED LEADER, a sombre but sharp man only a few years her senior.

The THIRD FIGURE in the room sits in shadow, watching the two leaders in silence.

BLUE LEADER

I knew this meeting was a waste of time! Who are you, and what do you want with me?

RED LEADER

A good question. I too would like to know why I was called here. My time is valuable.

The THIRD FIGURE almost appears not to notice that the two have spoken to him. The orange glow of a cigarette rises in the shadow, casting the faintest of lights on his features. The eyes are large and almond, traced with fine lines, but there’s a hardness to them that suggests it was acquired, slowly, over a long time.

Standing slowly, as though time held little meaning for him, he turned his head from RED LEADER to BLUE LEADER slowly.

Pausing, he took a drag on his cigarette. The light it casts intensifies, revealing a craggy face worn by long years.

Though her words are strong, BLUE LEADER seems taken aback by his demeanor, and perhaps more taken aback by her own reaction to him. There’s a hint of uncertainty to her voice. She tugs unconsciously at her VIETNAM-ERA MILITARY UNIFORM.

RED LEADER controls himself somewhat better, though he too smooths a wrinkle from his VIETNAM-ERA MILITARY UNIFORM – the same era, and same army, as that worn by BLUE LEADER. An ex-wrestler, RED LEADER’S massive muscles keep the uniform from smoothing well.

THIRD FIGURE’s eyes catch the body language, though he doesn’t betray the perception except with the barest flicker of an eye.

THIRD FIGURE’s mouth almost twitch in a smile around his cigarette at BLUE LEADER’S snide tone, RED LEADER’S down-to-business attitude.

BLUE LEADER has heard this before. Eyes rolling, she immediately relaxes into what she mistakenly believes is familiar ground.

Eyes dangerously close to twinkling, THIRD FIGURE actually breaks the barest of smiles.

RED LEADER glances at BLUE LEADER, and both share a slight frown of confusion at this. Eyes narrowing, RED LEADER takes a half-step towards THIRD FIGURE.

THIRD FIGURE lifts a BRIEFCASE from under the table. Opening it with care, he withdraws a perfectly-aligned stack of documents on INTRAGALACTIC MEDIA NET stationary. With equal care, he withdraws an antique FOUNTAIN PEN.

Eyebrows raising slightly at the stunned disbelief clear in the faces of RED and BLUE LEADERS, BRONTE pushes the stacks of paperwork towards them.

Open-mouthed in surprise, BLUE LEADER shrugs at RED LEADER.

CUT TO:

EXT. FOREST VALLEY – BLUE BASE – DAWN

An unaccustomed feeling of motivation hangs over the blue camp this morning. Though tired, BLUE LEADER moves energetically. The TROOPS are brisk and professional in their preparations.

BLUE LEADER loads ammunition into the GUN mounted on the back of her JEEP. The vehicle is an ancient model widely used in mid-20th century conflicts on old Earth, painted with her personal insignia, the LITTLE PONY. Crudely painted EMPTY COFFEE CUPS in rows count the number of kills she has racked up in years of CAPTURE THE FLAG conflicts.

BRONTE oversees unit directors installing holovision camera emplacements about the base, checking remote links to the crews doing the same about RED BASE. He pauses his activity, looking almost fatherly down upon BLUE LEADER.

FADE TO:

EXT. FOREST VALLEY – MINUTES LATER

As the first missiles arch into the skies to rain down on advancing flag seekers, the IntraGalactic Media Net logo flashes onto screens across the galaxy.

Portfolio, Scripts, Writing Projects capture the flag, ctf, Links, script, writing

By Gordon S. McLeod

This is a story I wrote for my first term Introduction to Storytelling class at IADT. The plot is an adaptation of a part of the overall plot to the comic I worked on some years ago, October’s Fools. (Thus the name of this site, as well.)

Morrisdale, OF seemed like your typical small Canadian town until you got beneath the surface. It was a university town, a home town, a bedroom town, a quiet town, and even a haunted town if you believed the rumours spread by neighbouring communities. But no matter what anyone told you of Morrisdale’s nature, no matter how they described it, the word “weird” would invariably enter into the conversation.

Bob was a typical inhabitant of Morrisdale. He lived with his roommate in an old 6 story apartment building that was much like apartment buildings anywhere and everywhere. Its only distinguishing feature of note was the view; the windows of the south side overlooked the Morrisdale Cemetery. He worked out of the apartment running a small web design company; his success in such a small and remote location was a bit strange, but he was very successful in spite of the global nature of the web. People somehow found him and his work though the noise of the ‘net, despite the overwhelming number of worldwide competitors.

One fine evening in early October marked the end of Morrisdale’s merely being weird and began to bring the town to the brink of the utterly bizarre. Bob walked home after a late afternoon meeting with clients. He loved the outdoors and took off to the mountains to hike and camp whenever he could; when he couldn’t, he would walk out-of-the-way paths through the town’s many small parks to try and remember what nature was like. The familiar sights and sounds of the park bordering the cemetery were a constant source of comfort to him. But this night, something was wrong.

“Is someone there?” he called, though he did it quietly. He was on a long stretch of dense tree-and-bush lined path that curved around the outside of the park’s area. It was still some distance to The Grinder, the coffee shop he frequented with his friends. The path was not well lit in this area of the park, and he could have sworn he’d heard something in the bushes.

“I have no money tonight,” he said, even quieter. While very uncommon, beggars were not unknown in Morrisdale. At least the odds of finding a beggar were better than the odds of finding a mugger.

Straining his ears, he heard nothing. The park was quiet, with only the faint stirring of the breeze brushing against bush and tree disturbing the silence, wafting the scent of pine and leaves turning their colours. Pine, leaves… and just a hint of something more. The hair started to rise on the back of his neck as he tried to decide what that odd scent was.

Burning leaves? Pot? No, not quite, though like muggers and beggars, neither was unheard of. Something rustled in the grass near his foot. Through a cloud of his own visible breath, he saw something slithering in the grass in the dark towards his foot. Jumping backwards, he fell awkwardly with a cry and scrambled back. The snake (it must have been a snake, snakes don’t have leaves, it must have brushed one along with it,) snapped back with lightning speed into the bushes.

Breathing heavily, Bob climbed to his feet, keeping towards the middle of the path. Something large and man-shaped moved in the bushes, rusting and rattling branches as it pushed towards him. Bob tried to make a break for the direction of The Grinder, but … SOMEthing sprang from what should have been the man’s arms, some sort of vine-like growth, and wrapped about him tightly. The cell phone in his pocket tumbled out, away from his hands. “Mrrrmph!” The vine-like thing wrapped about his mouth as he struggled, preventing him from crying out. A low, eerily pitched chuckle sounded from a very large, misshapen head.

It looked man-like at a distance, in the near-black of night, but as it drew closer and edged towards the circle of light the impression of humanity melted away. Thick, rough green vines, complete with leaves, spread out from the top of the dangling head – the large, orange, irregularly-shaped pumpkin of a head. As it stepped closer, golden wedges of light slowly appeared on the face as though they were on a dimmer switch. They looked a little like flames, but were made by no candle Bob had ever seen.

The scuff of a shoe in the distance saved his life in that moment. Attention diverted, the fiery eyes narrowed and the tentacles withdrew soundlessly. Bob’s own mind filled in the ’snap’ that should have accompanied such swift movement. Dazed and half-crazed, he blinked but could see no sign of the apparition, nor where it might have gone to. He certainly was of no mind to notice that a single thin vine had broken off and was still wrapped around his wrist.

The footfalls got closer, but it wasn’t until she was right on top of him that Bob was able to focus on his savior. Becky Heitmeyer, the tall, athletic trainer at the local gym, jogged to a stop beside him and stared down unblinking.

“Geezus Bob. You spend all your time hiking in the woods and mountains and never so much as a sprain a toe, and now the park paths are too much for you?” She nudged his shoulder while helping him up and returning his cell phone to his pocket. “What on Earth happened to you? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost!”

Bob’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Brow furrowing a bit, Becky nodded. “Right. There’s only one cure for this, and it’s on me. One double-double at The Grinder. Jack and Allison are meeting me there, and I was supposed to try and drag you out to join us. I didn’t expect the dragging to be quite this literal, though!”

Wrapping her arm under his shoulder to support him, Becky half-led, half-pulled Bob down the path, around the bend, and on into the better-lit areas that led to the coffee shop. Behind them, the faint tracings of a fiery face stared balefully from the branches of the hedgerow.

* * *

The Grinder was the kind of softly lit, always warm feeling coffee shop that seems to spring up somewhere within a couple of kilometers from any college or university. Warm yellowish light filled the place as though it were bathed in candlelight, complete with a slight flickering. The clink of mugs and gurgle of brewing coffee generally soothed away the cares of a trying day.

Jack, or Jackson, was Bob’s roommate. He attended Morrisdale University, studying philosophy, literature, mythology and religion, and worked as a writer-in-residence. Like any good philosophy student, he drank far more coffee than was good for him, and was swallowing the last drops of his third cup when Becky unceremoniously dumped Bob into the chair opposite him. His eyes flickered in surprise and mild curiosity. “What’s with him?” he asked, as Bob sat unmoving, unaffected by the familiar surroundings.

“I don’t know. I found him collapsed on the path. I thought he had tripped, but now… well, he hasn’t reacted at all since I found him.” Becky bit her lip, eyes worried.

“Bob, trip? That’ll be the day.” Allison, a short, dark-haired girl with round glasses, set four large double-doubles in white ceramic mugs on the table. She stood with hands on hips, lips pursed. Leaning in, she snapped her fingers in front of his eyes and by his ears, frowning at the lack of reaction. “What do you think we should do?”

“Do… what… what am I… doing here?”

“Bob! What on Earth happened to you!?” Becky’s concerned face filled his blurry, orange-tinted vision.

“You… didn’t see? You were there… what were you doing there? It came from the hedges… flame… flame and vine…”

“Whoa, easy big fella. Here, you sound like you desperately need some of this.” Jason, by far the tallest of the group at almost 6′5”, pushed Bob’s coffee towards him. “You’re not making any sense. Flame and vines? What came from the hedges?”

His wrist itched and burned. Scratching it, Bob hesitated a moment before reaching for the coffee. There was a thin white line spiraling around his wrist, outlined with red inflammation. He shifted his arm in its sleeve to conceal it. These people had been his best friends for years now, but how well did he really know any of them?

“What were you doing in the park, Becky?” The heat in his tone took the others aback. “It’s awfully convenient that it left just as you were arriving.”

“Bob, what the hell are you saying?” Becky’s face was hard to read; shock, anger and disbelief warred on her fine features. “I was jogging from work to your place to get you. We were going to meet here, right?”

“Mmm.” His head was pounding; he couldn’t think straight. His arm was on fire.

* * *

As they left The Grinder, Becky looked off across the street into the darkness of the park path. “I don’t like this at all. Are you sure about this? A demon? For real? Those are just old legends, right?” The darkness outside seemed somehow much more oppressive than it had hours before.

“I don’t much like it either, believe me. But I saw that mark on his wrist. So did Allison. You know her and her gardens; she recognized that creeper. It’s too much like the stories to be coincidence.”

“But that’s just too… I don’t know. If I hadn’t seen the effects, I’d say silly. I mean, come on. A talking jack-o-lantern, in October? That’s weird even for this place.”

“That’s where a lot of the Halloween associations came from; old stories.”

“I suppose. I didn’t notice the wrist thing, but the eyes were hard to miss. I’m scared; what if we can’t get it out of him in time?”

A faint rustling from above marked the end of their free time as a vine looped down around Becky’s neck. Jackson tried to catch it, but it snaked out of the way as several more vines dropped, clutching for Becky. A spectral rasp uttered “Wheeeere isss heee?”

The main mass of the creature dropped to the ground before them. It was wrapped up in what looked to be old clothes, making it look like nothing so much as a scarecrow with vines in place of arms and legs. It took a step, or a slide… it was hard to say which. It drew closer to her, hellfire burning into her soul from the jagged eye gashes. Jackson seized its ‘arm’ in a tight grip and dragged it halfway around, wrestling it away from her. She took the opportunity to snap off one of the smaller leafy vines around her neck.

Head whipping back, it sent a rippling wave down its arm mass, flinging Jackson a good 7 meters away to slam into the ground with a crash. “Where… issss… heeee?”

From around the corner, eyes still aglow with their orange nimbus, Bob walked into Becky’s view, something clenched in his hand. She gasped and gathered herself for a surge of action, determined to keep its attention on her for as long as possible. Arm muscles straining, she tore off another, larger vine from its arm mass.

Its response was immediate. Keening an ear-rending wail, it thrashed its remaining vines savagely, throwing Becky clear across the street to strike halfway up a telephone pole. Her shoulder shattered, raining blood and fragments of bone, and she lay very, very still.

Something in the image of his friend’s broken body snapped deeply into Bob’s mind, twisting and fighting the snaky strands of fog that strained to keep his thoughts repressed. He stood, physically shaking with the effort, and looked around him with half-clear eyes.

The … thing… that had invaded his mind was ignoring him for the moment, intent on Becky’s broken form. He could see that she was still moving very slightly, breathing at least. Its tentacles crept quickly towards her good outstretched arm.

Bob’s hand tightened around something; looking down, he found he held a large knife. He didn’t know where he’d gotten it; nor did he care. Moving slowly, limbs feeling like they belonged to someone else, he started towards the creeping nightmare. Images crowded through his mind, doubts about his friends. But the sight of Becky smashing into the pole chased them off.

She saved me. She saved me twice tonight, and look what it’s done to her. Assuming she survived, an injury that bad could cost her her job, her dreams, even her arm itself. No nightmare demon creature from any hell could convince him she meant him harm after that.

The last of the clutching creepers of fog lifted from his brain. Step quickening, he slashed with the knife at the stem of the vines protruding from the back of the pumpkin head.

The twisted, unearthly howl that he heard was something he could never thereafter describe. The creature’s body wavered in the air before him like a heat mirage, head turning back to pierce him with the most frightfully hate-filled gaze he had ever known. For a moment, the tendrils of mental domination slid back into his head, but found no purchase; they faded into nothingness, following in its body’s footsteps.

Numbly, Bob pulled out his cell and dialed 911.

Portfolio, Short Story, Writing Projects Links, october's fools, of, short story, writing

By Gordon S. McLeod

As a longtime fan of the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books and of interactive fiction in general, it was with great pleasure that I learned of the CYOA: The Abominable Snowman DVD about a month or so ago. (Note: This review was written years before being reposted in this blog.)

It’s been years since I read any of the books, but the memories rushed back quickly enough. I used to spend hours going through the various possible twists and turns the stories could take, dreading the early ending that death inevitably resulted in, doing my best to find the longest paths through the books.

When finally I saw the new DVD on a store shelf the other day, I snapped it up, eager to see what they’d done with the franchise. DVD is a video medium perfectly suited to this type of storytelling; indeed, this isn’t the first title that has tried this kind of storytelling in DVD format. A number of old laserdisc-based arcade games like Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace and their sequels have appeared on DVD, fully playable. There’s also the recent release of Final Destination 3, which has an interesting “create your own movie” mode where you select the fates of the various characters as you watch in much the same way that you play this disc.

So on to the meat of the review, shall we? Choose Your Own Adventure: The Abominable Snowman DVD boasts 11 possible stories, which disappointed me at first. Familiar as I was with the books, I expected more – but when I sat down to play this disc, it surprised me.

The experience is much like watching a good quality kid’s cartoon; the story goes on for some time before you’re called on to make a choice. There’s plenty to watch and pay attention to, and when the choice points do come up, they feel fittingly weighty and important.

If there’s one problem with the storytelling, it’s that it borrows a little too heavily from the children’s cartoon legacy that its format takes from. Unlike the books, which had you running the risk of dying at every turn, you don’t seem to be able to die at all in this DVD. This is a shame, as that constant looming specter of death was thrilling as a kid, and I miss it in this release.

The controls are also something of a problem; it took me well over an hour to master the choice controls. As I’m an avid video gamer, I’m used to learning new control systems, so this bothered me. I had a few unfortunate instances where I did not get the choice I wanted. I was not quick enough with the remote and failed to get the choice indicator that should appear while you’re selecting. I doubt they’ll be revising their stance on player death in future releases, but I do hope they’ll take a look at the controls a little more closely and refine them a bit for future discs.

The branches of the stories are distinct and imaginative. It’s been long enough that I can’t compare the endings to the ones in the print version, but experiencing them anew, I was pretty satisfied with the types of ends you could reach. You will find yourself journeying through various geographic areas with differing looks and feels, and you will meet various characters in different ways from story to story. The potential for repeat viewing on this disc is hard to beat.

The vocal cast is excellent, lead by William H. Macy and Frankie Muniz, with notable appearances by Lacey Chabert, Felicity Huffman and Mark Hamill. The animation and vocals are better than you’d expect to find in a cartoon TV show, resembling more what you’d find in many animated movies.

So now we reach the end of the review. You have two choices before you.

If you dismiss the Choose Your Own Adventure DVD from your mind, turn to another random web page.
If you find it fascinating and want to experience more, turn instead to your favorite DVD retailer or rental service.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Choose Your Own Adventure Books (usedbooksblog.com)
• The Outbreak, An Online Choose Your Own Adventure Zombie Movie (laughingsquid.com)

Portfolio, Reviews abominable snowman, choose your own adventure, dvd, movie, review