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I want to talk briefly about Dreamfall. If you haven’t played it yet, beware that this post will contain spoilers and that you might want to avoid it. No spoilers beyond chapter 5, though, mainly because I haven’t gotten beyond chapter 5 yet.

Dreamfall is the sequel, of sorts, to The Longest Journey, one my my absolute favorite games. I loved that game, most of all its story, so I naturally had high expectations and hopes for Dreamfall and the continuation of the story. I’m not disappointed here, it is a wonderful and intriguing story so far, and I’m looking forwards to seeing the rest of it.

The Longest Journey was a pretty traditional adventure game. It had a point-and-click interface, and plenty of devilish puzzles. Ernest Adams cautions us against designing games where you have to “use the lampshade with the bulldozer”. Some of my friends took this as a challenge (should you ever find a game called Cygnus, make sure to collect any lampshades you see), and maybe Funcom did as well, since The Longest Journey requires you to use the rubber duck with the clamp and the clothesline.

Dreamfall, on the other hand, is marketed as an action-adventure. In addition to puzzles, it includes action sequences such as sneaking and combat. It is 3D, controlled by keyboard or x-box controller, not point-and-click. The news of these changes were received with a lot of skepticism on various forums, many felt concerned that this wouldn’t be their kind of game at all. Despite a lot of trust in Game Director Ragnar Tørnquist, we couldn’t help but feel a bit of fear that the action sequences would ruin the game. Well, now I have the game, I’ve played the game, and, speaking for myself, I can say this:

They do. They really, really do.

Not the whole game, mind you. The game as a whole is still wonderful, the story fantastic, and the game world beautiful. It is well worth the money. It’s just those parts where the action plays a big role, they are completely ruined for me.

Take for instance the Victory Hotel. In Adams’s column, linked above, one of the headings are “You Have 30 Seconds to Figure Out This Level Before You Die”. This pretty much sums up how I felt in the Victory Hotel level. There was absolutely no enjoyment. It was a matter of sneaking around, with no clue what to do and no proper opportunity to find out, because if I made a single unsneaky move, or stood still in the same place for too long, or forgot to say the alphabet backwards every two minutes or so, Marcus would come running up to kill me. I had to find a corner where I wouldn’t be detected, stand there thinking, then sneak off to see if my theories were usable, run back when I found they weren’t, except I couldn’t run, I had to sneak, which is very agonizingly slow. Like I said, there was no enjoyment.

I sought out a walkthrough in the end, so I could learn what I needed to do, just so I could move on from that bit. I still nearly got killed by Marcus and the patient on the top floor. Shortly thereafter I had to deal with the cave trolls, where I actually had to fight the buggers, which again afforded no enjoyment, unlike the wheel puzzle that followed.

Right now, I am at a location reminding me very much of the Victory Hotel, the fourth floor of WATIcorp. It’s about sneaking and hiding form the security robots, or being blasted and killed if you can’t. No enjoyment. I expect I shall seek out a walkthrough for this too.

Now, as I sit there, wanting so bad to move on to the good bits (which are very good), I can’t help but wonder if including these action elements did any good. There are, luckily, not very many of them, so I think an action game fan might be disappointed and bored by the game as a whole. Adventure game fans who are after puzzles and story, like me, will be frustrated and annoyed by the action sequences. The only people who win are the ones who love both.

Here is a Venn diagram I just made up. It might not reflect reality:

As you can see, both 1 and 2 are clearly bigger than 3. I can’t help but thinking this is a bit like putting a kiss into an action movie and thinking that women who like romance movies will flock to theaters to see it. Or even more fitting, putting a gunfight into a romantic comedy, and thinking that action movie fans will camp out for tickets.

I want to stress this again; the non-action parts of Dreamfall are fantastic. The story is wonderful. The game is well worth the money. It is a good game. But The Longest Journey was better.

Well, as there is only one day left of school, it looks like we will not get to play the final Red Dwarf adventure that I wrote. I’m declassifying some of my notes, and may soon put up the adventure scenario, even though it is untested. For now, you can have a look at absolutely nothing, everything’s classified again. Caches are cheating.

I really hope I can find some new players when I go to university next year, this game is too fun to just stop now. Maybe I’ll even manage to make some more adventures during summer, so I’ll have some ready ones when the time comes.

Oh, and Davey, I hope you find a new group too.

YES!

Oh, sweet GameTap, yes!

And I only have my useless laptop! I need a new computer, pronto!

Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap!

Classic FM, because of new licence terms with the music industry, has discontinued streaming for people outside the UK.

I’m outside the UK! I can no longer listen to the lovely music, because of stupid new licencing terms. Some of the stuff they advertised for is available here, I could be a potential customer! Why lock me out? Damn you, music industry!

Three things happened today that never happen.

First of all, I remembered what I dreamt tonight. This might not sound all that spectacular, but 99% of the time, I wake up with no memory of dreaming at all, so it’s unusual for me.

I dreamt that I was in an airport, or train station or possibly some strange combination of the two, with my family, waiting to leave on a train. Or plane. Or trane. Anyway, at this station, there was a section separated from the rest of the complex, you had to go through some sort of tube to get there, ’cause it was in a different time from the rest of the building, a shop situated in the past.

I went into this shop, and browsed hurriedly through the shelves. hurriedly, because we had to catch the trane, which when I think about it makes little sense, seeing as how there was time travel involved. Anyway, this shop, being a past-shop, had loads of old things for sale, things you never see in shops these days, and yet, many of the shelves were only half full and pretty much uninteresting. I stocked up on all the ElfQuest Readers Collection books I found hat I didn’t have, but just as I was getting ready to pay, I realized that a shop in the past probably wouldn’t take money from the future. This was way, way back, when coins and bills looked entirely different. There was a vague idea that I had to have a cheque of some sort, but I’m not sure what that was all about.

Anyway, I left my loot, and went back into the present to see if I could get hold of some old money or this cheque thing before the trane left. It gets a bit hazy at this point, the next thing I remember clearly is being back in the shop, feeling bloody stupid. being a shop that catered exclusively to time-travelers, the shop obviously accepted money from whichever time you could think of. This is the last think I really remember form it, but I hope I got to buy those books after that.

The second thing that never happens, yet happened today was the weather. It was beautiful summer weather, where it actually was hotter outside than inside. This may be common elsewhere, but to me, this is simply amazing. I could really get used to this inland climate, despite the winter. Back home, it’s not unheard of to have snow, or at the very least sleet, in May. The locals may nit have batted an eyelid, but I was stunned.

This leads to the third and final thing, that literally never happens. Seriously, I can’t remember when it happened last. I thought that the weather was too nice to not be outside.

Understand, I am not an outside-person. I prefer inside, in a relatively controlled environment. In summer, I often frustrate my mother by staying in by the nearest screen instead of catching some sun. I detest beaches, and I dislike simply sitting still on grass or sand doing nothing. Yet today, there was nothing I wanted more. That never happens. Yet it happened today.

These things may seem insignificant, but even one of them would get my notice, especially that last one. All combined, it made my day pretty remarkable to me. And now that I’ve jotted it down, I’ll probably remember it as well, which is good, ’cause today was a day that I’d like to remember.