Divers (UFO 50, Game #27.)

[droqen]

I have chosen, through a semi random and semi very unrandom process, to play UFO 50's Divers.
I hope to play it intensively today, until there is nothing left to do.
Divers will unfold itself before me, like it or not.
(The liker in this case might be me or it might be the game. Perhaps it's us both.)

Today I play the role of a fool with one videogame.

[droqen]

I think part of why I chose Divers is because I have an interest in breath mechanics; not that it is always 'breath', but often water or underwater games employ a 'depleting meter' that a vast majority of games avoid.

I made a song called still operational whose, uh, cover art let's say, depicts a diver. One of my very early games, Fishbane, my first game to make money (to my memory, anyway), was about a diver.

Finally... I think it's interesting that the cover art of Divers is so dark. It has the darkest cartridge art out of all of the games of UFO 50.

[droqen]

1P, RPG
CONTROL DYLAN,
ORLOK, AND THYME AS
THEY EXPLORE THE
WATERY DEPTHS.

DECEMBER, 1986
THE SECOND OF TWO
UNDERWATER GAMES
RELEASED IN THE SAME
YEAR.

ah, even ufo 50 notes the underwaterness as relevant. which is the other?
"porgy," an adventure/shooter.

[droqen]

I have done a run into the depths and died.
But I now understand the first screen of the game:
the first time, I simply went in without weapons.
That was quite an interesting one, actually.
I understand where some treasures are, the nature of switches, etc.
This is a Damien Crawford-ass game
(but of a scope that I can stomach).

I noticed two implementation things:

1. When squeezing into a narrow passageway the physical reaction of my avatar against the world is gross. It's modern in a way that takes me out of the retro vibe. When I think about it, so does the player movement; it's too smooth; but the movement is mostly fine.

When squeezing into a narrow passageway, the feeling is simply gross.

2. With the CRT effect enabled, the visual pixel shudder is made a lot nicer. The shudder is interpolated, which softens it. I have a stronger appreciation for the craft behind this effect, even as I lose some feeling of craft with the above point.

[droqen]

Reminds me of something. There's a small indie game... I can't remember its name. You fight goblins and spiders in this hyper simple tile based way.

Divers reminds me of that game, but writ large, but for very little reason. I understand that I've fallen into a game loop; Divers offers me a game loop and here I am. Looping. The items do strange things. It reminds me of trying to play Loop Hero, knowing that some secret combinations exist, but mostly needing to do the same thing over and over again, while also experimenting somehow?

On the other hand, I'm thinking about Etrian Odyssey; it's also a game like Divers, wherein I am implored to engage with a system, except the combat system is, I dare say, actually good. I am not convinced that the combat in Divers is even trying to be good. It feels like it is attempting to clone a bad RPG combat system. A generic one, with no attempt to inspire excitement.

[droqen]

Re: Divers:

It's not uncool to just say what's going on.
To try to communicate to the player what is happening and why.
I'm frustrated at Divers' intentional choice to not communicate.
The obviously good strategy is to grind a bit;
a necessary tactic is to throw yourself at enemies and see which weapons work;

There is a nostalgia for games that fail to communicate.
But the problem that I have with recreating this failure is that it is being done for a bad reason, a """dead""" reason.

Divers is not seeking what they sought,
Divers is recreating the old problems.
Aesthetic, but the aesthetic is a killer.
Of time.

[droqen]

Divers has multiple equippable weapons. Stick, Mallet, and Lid. Each weapon can be used to attack or to defend. Stick is the cheapest. Mallet is the most expensive.

It seems that Mallet is a worse attacker than Stick. Lid looks like a shield. Attacking an Urchin hurts the attacker, unless the attacker is attacking with a Lid.

Sticks are stronger attacking weapons than Lids. But Sticks are also stronger attacking weapons than Mallets, it seems.

What are Mallets for? In order to figure this out I need to make a blind guess.

Here's the problem that I have; old games would pull shit like this, and it's all well and good to be nostalgic about that, but doing it intentionally is... god, I need a fucking better word for this than dead, but it is a dead process, not respecting the reasons why beautiful things were the way that they were. It is now very, very possible to communicate things well to the player, especially things that are necessary for playing the videogame, for navigating the structure. You have to actually try your best to communicate something in order for the resulting failure to be living failure. Living failure is beautiful. Dead failure is posing, is pretentious.

I'm not claiming, outright, that Divers -- or UFO 50 -- was developed in a posing/pretentious attitude. But I get the vibe that there were no underlying reasons for Divers' lack of communication, and that it was more of a surface decision based on wanting the player to have the old-game experience of poking around blind.

I can't describe my feelings better than that at the moment.

[droqen]

Divers is an RPG.
It has RPG combat.
It has that indie-game flavour of not telling you the rules.
(I'm annoyed at my very visible participation in this flavour.)
It consumes a lot of time, asking you to come and go.
It achieves things, but I wonder if they were worth achieving. (I won't describe further.)
It is satisfying, relatively satisfying, to play.
It is functional. It functions as an entry in a genre.
It is fine. I played it. I'm not sure how much longer it is, but I might even beat it.
I suspect, however, that I won't. It seems like there is a lot more stuff to buy, which implies there is a lot more game to play, and I only really want to play it more to beat it, and that's a pretty bad reason to keep playing.

I like the small interlude when you go back home, with THYME and the other two (I forget their names... ORZON? DWANE? No, it's DYLAN...) eating and sleeping.
I'm not very interested in what is happening here in this underwater world. The details are just too light and sparse, I get the feeling that the 'narrative', such as it is, was designed by intuition, by nothing but feel. A skull here, a mysterious carving there. I am not expecting much of a payoff. Old videogames, at least in the popular vision of them, in UFO 50's vision, do not have a narrative payoff, are not aspiring to anything. They just tell little unrelated story bits with no intended depth to them.

In this way I also think Divers and UFO 50 misunderstand old games to be meaningless artifacts made of nothing but play. I believe that these old games might be trying to say something and failing.

Divers is not trying to say something. It is trying to say as close to nothing as possible, chasing the illusion of these old games. It misunderstands.

Or, perhaps I misunderstand Divers.

[droqen]

I ran out of patience and watched a video of the ending of Divers and, as expected, there is nothing much there. Gameplay, sure. But all there is is a Bad Creature and a Return To The Surface and a "fin."



What have I finished? What was there to finish? Nothing but the unnecessary process I committed to, a process created to be nothing but a thing to commit to. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

A blank page and a fountain pen and no ink but my own blood.

[droqen]

~ backlinked from my tarot of the day