The Game-Maker Archive — Part 15a: The Easiest Lifting

August 23, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

I’m not saying that everything has to be original. We’ve gone over this before; some of the best ideas in history began by ripping someone else off and then veering off in an original direction. One of the best ways for a budding artist to learn form and space is to trace everything in sight. That’s the way that we think; we take what’s in front of us, and we bend it and shape it until it suits our needs. The best of us just do a very good job of hiding our influences — and then if someone spots them, we call them influences.

These guys… they weren’t so good at hiding it. Over the next three columns I’m going to go into some of the stranger creative blanks in the Game-Maker community. What can be confusing is the amount of genuine talent at work — or, having grabbed and run, the bizarre directions they took their borrowed source material. One of these artists pushed Game-Maker in a way that few others did. Another chose the strangest route of influence, but at least made all his own material. The other guy just didn’t care what people thought. Most of these games I find inexplicable, one way or another.

Felix Leung

Felix Leung had a darned good command of Game-Maker. He knew how the engine worked, he knew its tricks, and he sure as heck knew how it used animation files. Leung’s games have extended — often very extended — animated cutscenes, that often transition seamlessly into each other and tend to provide excellent context for the in-game action.

Given these skills, it’s curious that Leung’s most original ideas seem to include renaming Star Trek‘s Federation the Confederation, and placing Final Fantasy‘s fighter in conflict with Barney the Dinosaur.

Die Blarney!

You may remember the Barney backlash of the early-mid ’90s. There was that Doom add-on that replaced the zombie soldiers with Barney, and caused his singsong voice to echo down the corridors of Phobos. Well, here’s an individual addition to the dogpile.

In its perspective, setting, and unremitting enemy attacks, the game is a little reminiscent of Mark Hadley’s Pro or Congress, though I imagine that’s incidental. As one of Square’s Warriors of Light, you roam the town, enter every possible building, and destroy the chances of… er, Blarney ever transmitting himself to the innocent populace. As you slay herds of Blarney clones, they will catch fire or lose limbs, or otherwise die in random and gory ways.

For what it is, Leung made a clean and well-organized game. And trite as the sentiment may be, I guess I can understand the impulse. Once I designed a game where EGM’s Sushi-X, with help from the rest of the Review Crew, demolished the logos to other game magazines. So okay, fair enough.

Xenoblaster: Attack of the Xorg

But what do we make of this? It’s dozens of minutes of carefully animated cutscenes wrapped around four levels of yet another noble, if failed, attempt at a Game-Maker space shooter. In turn those four stages are wrapped around a single short, strange action-adventure segment with a character borrowed straight out of Sample. And every single bit of it is consciously quoted from Star Trek.

The outfits are Starfleet uniforms. The human character is named D.A.T.A., which clearly is completely different from Data. The info screens are based on the Starfleet touchscreen computer interface. Space is full of Romulan ships. And as for the Confederation’s greatest foe, the Xorg…

None of these borrowed elements would be important on their own, or even collectively, if they were just incidental. What makes this game so weird is that there is so little game, and what game is there is both very simple and very forgettable. That leaves the endless and meticulous cutscenes and scenario to carry the package. Even then it might be another thing entirely if Leung were to have gone for it and just made this a fan game. Instead he very slightly changes every proper name, and alters the player’s ship — despite its “Enterprise” file name — to more closely resemble a traditional space shooter vessel.

Despite this constant winking, the game seems to take itself and its dramatic premise rather seriously. The mind boggles at how to process this information.

High Density Disks

What further confuses me, not just about Leung but about all these artists, is that they’re not doing this for free. They’re not just whipping together a borrowed game and putting it out there as freeware. This stuff, it’s shareware. It’s got order forms and everything. You want to register Die Blarney!, it’s $16 ($20, Canadian). Xenoblaster? $21 or $30, depending on your national boundary. Whether these price differences are accurate for 1995, I can’t say. Since Mr. Leung is from Ontario, perhaps he knew exactly what he was doing.

If you want to play his games, you can download them here. If you feel like registering them, that’s on your own head.

[Read all of our Game-Maker Archive editorials]