Some Obscure Games.

I picked up my copy of ObsCure from the few games Big Lots had for less than $8 (their usual price for games). It wasn't cheep because it was a bad game that they've overstocked; the box was just damaged, flattened by some stupid customer who dropped and stepped on it, which drew the rest of the customers away from it. For the record, I got ObsCure for the PC, and ObsCure II for the PS2 (after I had it converted painstakingly from PAL to NTSC).

The game was strange from the moment I opened up the box.

Well, not really. The box art was strange, too.

Inside the box, oddly, was a set of five CDs. Seriously. I've never seen anything packaged in so many discs, short of those full-motion video games which almost universally sucked. Oddly, even the installer for the game admitted it was strange; the title for the dialogue box which asked me for the fifth disc was "obscure message". Obscure indeed.

ObsCure is a survival horror game from Hydravision, a french developer. I can't give you any interesting backstory for the creation of this game, since little to nothing is known about this company. The only backstory I can give you is about the soundtrack.

The ObsCure series (there are two of them. This is supposed to be a review for both of them) has music scored by the noted mod tracker Olivier Derivier, who was lucky enough to work with la Matrise des Hauts de Seine, the childrens' choir of the national opera of Paris, which is, in a word, awesome. He used sampled instruments for the first one, but got the Boston Quartet to play for the second one.

ObsCure has a pretty good storyline, based largely on the story of The Faculty. You play as a group of teenagers attending Leafmore High, an American high school (duh) which is indistinguishable from a European boarding school, complete with dormitories, a live-in principal, and a full-time (read: 24Hrs) groundskeeper. But no football field for some reason. The students, of course are unaware of this. They are, however, aware of the unnaturally high amount of missing students - but they disregard this.

Then, one day, Kenny goes missing after basketball practice. The next day, his sister, girlfriend, and one random dude with a camera lock themselves in the school to investigate. They meet Stan, who was there to change his grades in the school computer system.

Unfortunately, I can't give away many more details, as doing so would ruin the story for when you play it (And you will, for I command it). I can, however tell you that there's lots of gore and death, the nurse is a whore, and the monsters are mutated students.

So they kill the major bad-guy, who is a plant (it's a long story...), and the school is closed, 'due to a problem with the water system which flooded the basements, and some sort of parasitic infestation'. All of the teens you controll survive, unless you really suck at the game. Two years later, in ObsCure II, more shit happens, this time in Fallcreek, a neighboring town.

Our friends from the first game, the siblings Kenny and Shannon, have gone on with their lives, going to college at Fallcreek Collage. Kenny has to take intensive medication because of the infection he got in ObsCure, while Shannon doesn't (because of her 'strong will'). Stan, who went to prison soon after the events of ObsCure and now works as a pizza delivery boy, is somehow sucked into the scenario as a major character. The two other people from ObsCure are not in this game, but there's a secret video you can unlock if you open all the hidden boxes that explains what happened to them.

Added to the cast is Chorey, whom I'm not sure if he's Asian or American, his girlfriend Mei, and her twin sister Jun (ha ha, May and June), as well as this one chick who was dating Kenny, then fell in love with Sven, then got pregnant, despite her being the character who speaks informatively against unprotected sex, and has her baby the same night, when she explodes into a cloud of black spores. I'm not kidding. I'm too lazy to look up her name right now, so I'll just call her April.

Anyways, Kenny, Sven (the Norwegian guy who isn't described because his nationality and cute hair are the only things that separate him from April), Chorey, Mei, and I think Jun all get together to get high. They drink a tea made of this dark purple flower (though they call it black. The more hardcore druggies snort it), have this wild, dark, Gorey shared hallucination, and cure themselves with an energy drink. Then they go to the Delta Theta Lambda frat house for a party. The dark flowers bloom when they sneak in, people turn into monsters, and chaos ensues.



The gameplay of ObsCure is a bit unusual. Just as Capcom mandates, there is plenty of puzzle solving to do, none of them too particularly taxing. The fighting is a bit different, though. You have a store of weapons which you can switch to quickly, and you have to press L to aim and R to shoo- ... Wait. It's just like RE4. But I'm thinking of ObsCure II. The first one has some interesting quirks which make combat more memorable. You have the option to tape a flashlight to guns (in O2, your character just holds on to the flashlight with one hand and the gun in the other, and you can't use the flashlight with two-handed weapons, which includes all melee weapons). These flashlights have a turbo button which give them a really bright beam of light, which you can use to ward off the monsters. With the exception of the Uberlight weapon (and I'm not sure if it works as a weapon; you get it late in the game and there's not many monsters to fight with it), this functionality is removed, and you'll just have to use your guns.

The camera angles are very interesting. ObsCure used mostly fixed-position multi angular cameras, while ObsCure II uses more variety. But the interesting thing is that the camera is mostly always close to your character. I like it; it adds a degree of intimacy, and makes the people seem more real. The characters all have well-designed meshes and textures, based on real people - the textures are taken from photographs of people wearing the clothes. All the characters are attractive, too, except for the women, who look like sluts.

The number 1 noteworthy feature of the series is the teamwork system. You don't travel alone, except for a few select instances. In a single-player game, the AI which will control your second character isn't too particularly smart, but at least they'll move aside when you move in their direction. Sometimes. But in combat, they generally suck. They do the job, but any human could do better. But the greatest part of this feature is how it enables multiplayer. I haven't had anyone interesting enough to do a multiplayer game with yet, but it's theoretically great. The second player takes control of the second character, and can join in at any time. This accounts for much buttkicking. And it gets kudos for being the only game of it's kind to support multiplayer.

And then there's death. Each character has their own unique abilities, but, being human, they can die. This doesn't pose much of a problem in the first game, actually. Everyone can do anything anyone else can, though each person has something they can do better than everyone else. In this case, you can get away with having your partner dying, or having you die and take control of your partner, or even having you both die and you having to take control of a different team. When a character dies, and when you approach the place they died, you have a scene where the character will cry out the deceased's name. After you leave the area, the corpse disappears, but there's black scorch marks on the floor as if they suddenly burst into intense flame while you were gone. In O2, everyone has unique abilities that nobody else has (except Kenny and Sven - but you'll only ever have one or the other), so if they die, you have to go back to the last save point.

Saving in O2 is different than the first one. You can save whenever you find a large flower on the wall. It's a bit strange when you first find one; when you approach it, the context for the X button becomes 'Touch'. If you do touch it, it asks you if you're sure. Why would you need to verify that you want to touch a flower? Anyways, when you touch it, all the characters in the area will feint, which is jarring, to say the least. Then the save menu comes up with calming music, so you're calmed. Be happy to know that they'll wake up when you're done, but the flower will be gone, so you won't be able to save there again.

Graphics are above-average, though they get a lower score from me because of it's vector shader-based flashlights. It's not too big a deal, though, as it only counts when you're pointing at a wall that you're right in front of, and it looks great otherwise. The atmosphere is influenced more than normal by the well-textured and highly detailed environment, and the lighting is just perfect. ObsCure II gets one point taken away, though, as it has some areas where you don't have a flashlight and you're in total darkness. The first game gets +1, however, for it's use of lighting as a game mechanic - in the day, you can smash a window to kill the monsters with sunlight, or you can use your flashlight against them anytime.

The audio experience either ObsCure game gives is just pure sex. Olivier Deriviere wrote, produced, and directed the audio for both games, and he did a masterful job. He later went on to do the music for Alone in the Dark, a market flop but a musical masterpiece, rewarding him with three awards for that production alone. He also got an award for his music on ObsCure II, and he definitely deserved it. The only thing I think wasn't right was the voice acting. There's problems with it in both games, but the first is worst for this. They talk with irregular rhythm, and the mouths of the visual actors don't match the voices of the voice actors. But I'm assuming that this is a problem with the animation, since it doesn't really look like they were even trying to be realistic in the first game. It appears as if the voices were always in English, even though the game is French.

The storytelling techniques give me mixed feelings. The stores themselves were particularly absorbing, as they present themselves as mysteries, and the gameplay is pretty streamlined, so it has a pretty good pace which keeps you interested - so long as you don't get stuck in one of the puzzles, which aren't really too difficult. The first game is pretty easy to follow; the places are all essentially the same, even if they're radically different. The second one has a better storyline overall, but you get shuffled around to different locations for the first half of the game, as most of the gang is separated at the beginning. They're teens, after all - they have their own lives, with their own priorities and goals. Both have good use of Pathos - you feel sorry for the monsters you kill, since they were once human, and you feel really bad when Herbert gives his final words, showing his deeds were all from his devotion to his brother. And in O2, most of your playable characters will die very dramatically. You even kill one of them personally. Three or four times, even.

People who say that storyline always gets in the way of gameplay (in other words, the idiots who call themselves 'hardcore' gamers who have ADD and an IQ of 12) would be pretty happy with the way the story progresses. You're very rarely forced to wait through a story segment, and they're all short besides that.

ObsCure isn't a very long game. The first one is about 1.5 - 2 times longer than the second, though the second is arguably better, and can be played in about a day's time. I should know; I did just that yesterday.

When I finished ObsCure, I didn't know if I liked it or not. It was just a totally different game than I was used to. Before, I generally didn't like horror games (Have you ever played Silent Hill Origins? There's the reason why I don't like those games)(P.S. Enemy Zero + D2 are the best horror games ever. Shut up dissenters.) After a while, I figured that I did like it. It was a pretty good expedience, after all, even though I found myself getting a little lost at first. But I didn't know why I liked it. After I finished ObsCure II, I know why; It's one of those games which are simply fun to play because of the overall experience. It was very serious, and had a bit of easily missed comedy (example from ObsCure: The groundskeeper is named Mr. Garrison, named after the South Park character) (Example from ObsCure II: There are signs all around the dorms with humorous messages, like one from a girl (or at least I assume it's a girl) who found a 'toy' in her bed, and will return it if the owner could explain to her what happened on Wednesday). The story was very good, and the urgency and desperation was very real.

But still, I can't seem to write down a single arbitrary measurement of it's merit. So all I can say is that I highly recommend you play it. Go out and buy it, even; ObsCure has unlockable content, including music videos, and either is more replayable then they look that they should be. And since it didn't get popular here in America (it was published here by a Canadian company, after all), it should be pretty cheep when you find it. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to kill Kenny again.

Begin Post Bonanza Now!

I finished fixing my computer, but there's a catch. My Windows XP install disc kept messing up my partition table, so I had to install Vista instead. This will be rectified once I get my hands on a copy of XP x64.

This has been a public service announcement from your overlord. And now back to the main event.

I've decided to get off my lazy ass and start writing again. I may start working on writing a book.

OK, so I've been playing games. So now I have to tell you about them. Which means long blog posts.

...

... I just posted this so I'd have an excuse to seperate everything. I had a whole elaborate plan for what to write about, too. Forgot it.