Attempt not to Vomit

I’ve talked about my subscription to Delphine before; they were responsible for some of the best games I played as a child. I suppose “best games” probably isn’t the right word; it might be fairer to say that they were responsible for some of the best “game experiences” I had growing up.

They had a strange way of doing things that is, I’m assured, very French. I suppose the context of all this is important. Delphine Software International produced two phenomenal games, in the forms of Another World and Flashback (The Quest for Identity), in 1991 and 1992 respectively. For the sake of contextualisation, this means that Another World was released a year after Super Mario World and in the same year as the first of Sega’s Sonic games.

To get an idea of what the animation looks like, check this out.

The animation for these games, in a time when the Marios and Sonics of the world were still establishing themselves, was somehow more real, more human than anything I’d seen. It was charming in the same sense that the original Prince of Persia (1989) was charming; there was a sense of life to the way things moved, a fluidity that was somehow at odds with the cartoonish sprites I’d seen in other games.

As it happened, I’d go on to find years later that Prince of Persia, Another World and Flashback all shared the same style of rotoscoped animation. To cut a long story short, characters are animated over live-action actors by tracing the figures from film. The result is a character that moves and acts more like a real person, including their having body language, unusual head bobbing and slumped shoulders as they move; all the little things that artists animating for games might otherwise have forgotten.

For anyone with an interest, there’s a list of videogames made using rotoscoping here. There’s a bit of a bias towards French developers (Delphine largely responsible) but it’s interesting reading.

Animation aside, it was hard not to be drawn into the Delphine work because it had one thing firmly established that other games didn’t seem to. There was a feeling of comic-book style there that I could never quite get my head around. Again, years later, I’d read Jean-Claude Mézières’ Valérian and find the styles to be similar, though I’ve never seen any suggestion made that it was an influence.

This morning, I had another bash at Another World. Every time I try, I manage to get a little further in, before curling up frozen in some air duct or being mauled by some alien panther creature. Again, the sense of humanity is what draws me in, but what keeps me playing for hours is that sense, so difficult to communicate, that there is a whole world to be fleshed out in these little gems.

Like Prince of Persia, the game is played in screens, progressing from one still shot to another, like panels in a comic. There’s a feeling that you’re only seeing snapshots of one portion of a particular place, and that there’s a world unfolding outside the snapshots we see in the trimmed-down nineties game narrative.

The only reason I’m writing this is because today something struck me. Some deep chord somewhere at the bottom of my belly said,

You know, today is the day. You have to go back to Another World. Dodge the tentacles of the pit-squid thing, splash the stinging creeper-slugs, dodge the howling panther creature and escape the prison. You have to go back.

Somehow, having played an hour or so, I wasn’t sated. I went and trawled over old Wiki pages, Gamespress places I still had memberships to, every tiny corner and cranny, I searched for more of this, because somehow I knew that this couldn’t be the end. I searched until I found the Delphine International Software, and from there Peter Cuisset (their former lead designer).

I poked around, motivated by this strange urge, until I saw the list of games he’s worked on, noted the petering out from the late nineties to now, and then saw that he has been working on something. He’s been working for a company called VectorCell, a company it turns out he owns. They have been working on a survival horror game called Amy.

As luck would have it, Amy was released in Europe last week. My hopes were high until I read the reviews, a slew of two-out-of-tens and twenty-two percents. It seems Amy is a ruinous collection of bugs and poorly implemented ideas, a failure of everything survival horror games have come to be…

But, as I read the reviews, I note:

“A gruelling death-march through a gauntlet of poor design choices and feckless player punishment.”

“The worst game that i have played in my life; bad gameplay, zero originality, what are the developers doing with this game. It’s like a PS1 game…”

“AMY unearths survival horror that could have been incubating in a time capsule buried in 1995, carrying a strain of gameplay first witnessed in the original Resident Evil.”

I’ve not done enough background reading, but to be honest, it sounds like a winner to me. I will buy it, and I will play it until I hate it or myself. Then, years later, I will incorporate it deep into myself and never forget it.