Brother None counts down his favourite games

Interesting how? Obscure? The fact is obscure games are usually obscure for a reason, so expect quite a few more predictable picks in the rest of my list. I don't feel like bumping up obscure games just for being obscure.

Ratty's not an admin.

No, not really.

And even given that it might be, or is in many people's opinions, that has nothing to do with its impact on the industry. I don't think Wizardry 6 is a bad game, but its introduction of mini-games into the genre is something I'm not particularly fond of.

People need to differentiate between a game's quality and impact.

 

10. Psychonauts - Double Fine Productions (Windows, 2005)

Haha, what's with this mainstream casual horseshit? I mean, yawn-o, how predictable a pick can you get? Friggin' Psychonauts? Puh-lease.

Well, I make no excuses as we finally dive into the Noughties, a decade we'll be staying in for the next few titles. I did not pick up Psychonauts until 2 or 3 years after its release. I was peripherally aware of the buzz surrounding it from the gaming media but - as with most gaming media buzz - didn't really care, instead going on personal recommendations, and I never looked back. I know I won't be making many friends by picking this one out of all the games Tim Schafer wrote for, but screw you (also I still haven't played Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle or Grim Fandango).

First, let's get the predictable negative out of the way: Psychonauts' gameplay isn't very good. It's not terrible either, but in what seems set to become a habit for Double Fine, the gameplay comes across as tepid wrapping for the game's world and writing. It is an ok platformer with some problems, noticeably in controls, and some fun stuff it does well, such as the progression of powers Raz unlocks. The game isn't particularly clever in how and when you use your powers (unlike, say, Psi-Ops), but they're still varied and useful enough. The scavenger hunting part of gameplay just isn't for me, though I realise a lot of people get quite a bit of joy from running around collecting random shit.

And one other thing. I don't really mind the general switch from ink-to-CGI made by animation studios, especially since the CGI era has come close to finding its answer to the Lion King in Finding Nemo. But I'm more than fed up with the predictability of the CGI era, the fact that the animations frameworks are eerily similar in every film. I'm especially tired of the predictable way human-skeleton CGI figures all have the same facial expressions and body language when talking. CGI films desperately needs its Don Bluth or Ralph Bakshi.
Psychonauts falls straight into that death trap, offering absolutely nothing new to the already-tepid CGI animating school. "It doesn't innovate a school of animation" is not really much of criticism of the game, but that doesn't stop it from being an annoyance, albeit a minor one.
Of course, Pixar is what comes to mind when playing this game anyway. It looks and feels like a Pixar film, only a lot more inventive and - at times - slightly darker. Its storytelling and writing is superior to the average Disney-Pixar film, and it's not often that games outpace their film counterparts like that.

So what are we about, for those of you who have yet to play this game? Well, the game's story deals with Raz, a young goggle-wearing (why the goggles? You'll find out) boy who escapes the circus to join a summer camp for prospective psychonauts. After managing to join the camp and start his psychonaut training, Raz soon uncovers a conspiracy hidden under the camp's surface, and will have to fight to save the brains of his campmates and - naturally - the world.

The game is filled with a variety of archetypes, and a noticeable dearth of inventive characters. Sasha Nein is the typical cool, calculating, rational agent, Milla Vodello his typical fun-loving counterpart, Morceau Oleander the stereotypical coach. Even the camp kids, while funny, are predictable as hell, including a tinfoil-wearing paranoid kid, a wiseguy obsessed with girls, two bullies and a Russian looking to wrestle bears. Even the love interest is there in Lili, which is somewhat disturbing since I can't figure out what species all these people are supposed to be and hence don't know if Lili and Raz are of the same species.

Archetypes are always a useful tool for writers, and generally the quality of their usage depends on how the writer uses the fact that the consumer will have certain built-in expectations of said archetype, either by building on them and deepening them out or by going in against them. Psychonauts does the former, and it does it rather well, explaining why it opts to lean so much on archetypes in the first place. A lot of the game takes place in the real world, but probably the bigger part takes place in people's minds, as Raz enters them through his little door-tool.

It's here where the game shines. The "mind worlds" are endlessly inventive, both in how much gameplay differs per world - from the combat-heavy mind of Sasha to the jumping puzzle-focused mind of Milla - and in their concept and design. Games don't often give me those "boy, that's clever"-moments in design. Planescape: Torment did it with the way death is integrated in some minor quests, Vampire - The Masquerade: Bloodlines did it with its Malkavian dialogue, the Secret of Monkey Island did it with insult fighting, and Psychonauts did it with the design of quite a few of its worlds.
Don't get me wrong, a few are flat-out misses, Milla's mind just bored me to tears, and Oleander's mind is nice enough but not the best introduction to the concept. Sasha Nein's mind is already quite good, but it's later on, as the game grows into its own, when it really had me shaking my head at the inventiveness of it all. Napoleon's mind is quite good, but its the Milkman's mind and Lynda's mind (Goggalor) that really cemented this concept and game as instant classics.

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There's no denying there's quite a bit wrong with Psychonauts. In particular, many find its creativeness and humour doesn't hold its pace throughout the later parts of the game, and the difficulty spike at the later Meat Circus level turns a lot of people off. Personally, I feel like the creativity just grows a bit more subtle rather than in-your-face later on, and I quite like the difficulty spike in the final parts in an otherwise overly easy game, even if it can grow slightly frustrating. Psychonauts could no doubt have been a better game, but it would have a hard time being more inventive and charming, which is why it opens up my top 10.