EChat and Game Review

Well, I just finished my little chat session. It wasn't one-on-one. There was about 40 potential volunteers, and three organizers. There was voice, but only the organizers spoke with it. Applicants were restrained to text chat. I just listened. There was also a screen that displayed visuals. It was similar to a PowerPoint presentation. Amusingly, their example applicant was "Astro Boy".

Everything they said confirmed what I said yesterday. Living with one other applicant, working inside a group of 18, living with a billet family instead of a project leader... There will be two PLs to cover the group of 18, but their roles will be something more detached... Kind of like Katimavik's project coordinators, except a bit more accessible.

I listed 15 locations. There are 32 groups. Each group is almost double in size to a Katimavik group, so that's 64 groups vs Katimavik's 99. 10% are female-exclusive.

There's going to be an orientation camp. I hated Katimavik's orientation camp. It was pointless, and it hindered group development. CWY's sounds a bit more promising in that, at least they plan on doing something while we're their. They'll partner me and find me a placement based on my personality. That's a little intimidating.

Partway through, my desktop shut down and wouldn't restart. I switched to my laptop but it wouldn't connect to the Internet, and it wouldn't recharge. Nobody else was around, so my only option was to despair. Turns out, I accidentally hit some converter thing. Works fine, now.

But the only bit I missed was after the presentation was over and people were just asking questions, and a lot of people had already left. It wasn't too bad.

But enough of that... Let me recommend some videogames for you.

The first is called Yume Nikki. It was created and presented to the Internet by a guy known only by an alias, of which has no background. It was given no explanation. The game has no text, except for item descriptions. You play as a young woman. You start in her apartment. The only two rooms you can go to are her living room and balcony. If you try to leave she simply shakes her head. You can play a videogame where you catch eggplants that fall from the sky in a basket. The more eggplants you catch, the higher your score goes, but that's the only element. It never increases in difficulty and there's no reward for getting a high score.

She has no cable, and the only other form of entertainment is a book at a desk. The book is titled "Dream Diary" and it's where you save your game.

So, guess what you're going to do?

You go into your bed and you can fall asleep. You get out of bed, but now, you can leave your apartment. Outside is a black void with lots of doors. Go through the doors and discover worlds beyond. One is a monochrome desert, one is a dark room with lots of puddles, one has lots of people with shields for faces etc.

You'll soon start finding items called "effects" which will change your appearance and sometimes grant you powers. Some of them are as mundane and pointless as changing the style of your hair. Others will turn you into a decapitated head, or an icewoman with a blizzard following her wherever she goes, or a midget that can multiply, or give you a hand for a head with an eyeball for a palm which can clench it's fist and teleport you to the entranceway, etc. You can get a knife, in which you have the ability to alternate which hand you're holding it in, and can stab various creatures to death and take their money. You can then exchange the money for soft drinks which grant you health... which does nothing. You can get an effect that gives you the qualities of a cat, which draws people near you.

You can use and combine these effects and find more and more sequences, which leds to more effects.

When I first heard of this game, I thought it was kind of gimmicky. I mean, it's a big world,full of people who want to freak you out, and this game isn't exactly high-tech (it was built on RPG Maker and has technology of about the same capacity as the original Nintendo. It wouldn't put someone that far out to present the world with something like this and then just kick their feet back and see what paranoid people do with this.

And when I started playing, I wasn't impressed. There were a lot of hands and blood and eyeballs where their shouldn't be. Talk about uncreative. You want to give people a cheap scare, just stick hands, blood and eyeballs in a bunch of random places.

But after a while you begin to get the impression that something is... just wrong. Really, really wrong. And you can't put your finger on it. It won't be long before you're borderline panicking, and your heroine isn't even phased.

There was a lot of effort put into decoding the game and finding the creator. An interesting fact that I should point out is that a lot of little details, like the fact that her sprite is capable of changing which hand she's holding her knife in, is actually very difficult to create using that type of technology, and a lot of professional games don't bother. So what's the purpose of that action, which the creator put that much effort to include? Absolutely nothing. Or, your character's ability to wake up by pinching herself is moot when she's using the Severed Head or Invisible Woman effect... because she DOESN'T HAVE HANDS! That's a little detail that would've slipped by technologically unless someone had paid close attention.

So, if someone put this much effort into making sure everything fit, why is it that the character's waking world doesn't contain a bathroom or kitchen? And why does her building look like it's only wide enough to contain one apartment per level?

A lot of people have tried analyzing her dreams. Some people think she was raped, some that she witnessed someone dying in a car accident, that she's in a coma and dreaming even in her waking mode, that she's a latchkey child who's parents get home after she falls asleep and leaves before she wakes up... etc. Nobody can be entirely sure.

Most people in the dreams have no names, but if you break apart the coding, there are a few exceptions. There's a girl who lives in a house in an otherwise symmetrical world who's got a name. If you flick her lights on and off long enough, she'll turn into a giant,decapitated, smiling head, and everything in the room will have faces. If you touch her when she's like this, she'll teleport you to a dimension where you're knee deep in water and some image made entirely of hands scrolls by over and over. And the background music is a dull scream. There's also a girl with a name who you can find if you randomly walk far enough into a black abyss on this one level. If you talk to her, it shows a portrait of her face and she disappears. And another who becomes a deranged mutant with five arms, a dripping eye, and a puncture wound in her stomach, who's body, if you talk to her, will bounce around the screen to rave music if you use the effect which changes your head to a traffic light.

Now, the whole game is like this, so why is it that these people have names? More importantly, why do they have names if they were never revealed in the game itself?

Apart from decoding the game, people put effort into finding the person who made it.

No luck, except, they found an email address hidden on the website he presented the game on.

So they sent him an email. And guess what? HE RESPONDED!

He said that he has every intention of updating the game... It's only 10% complete... But it will take him a long time.

Even though it is only 10% complete, it has an ending. Want to know what it is? My other recommendation will wait for tomorrow, so this will be the last thing I post today.

If you collect all 24 effects, you can leave them in the "hub" of your character's mind, the place with all the doors. If you then proceed to go to your balcony in the waking world... You jump off. And they show a smear of blood on the ground below.

But even that's iffy, because some creatures from your dream world approach the blood smear, and the smear is the exact same shape as the one you found next to every hairstyle effect. Combine these surreal facts with the idea that there was so much effort to keep things exact in the game, yet the "Real world" contains some very surreal qualities, and you... are even more confused.