Food, water and medicine as treasure

No game has ever made me this thirsty.

Wandering around the earthquake-shattered ruins of Stiver Island, shouting into the evacuated silence for help that never shouts back, dodging falling rubble knocked loose by aftershocks, one thought lies above and around everything else: water. Dripping taps, stagnant pools on cracked asphalt, bottles forgotten in ransacked convenience stores… any and all nontoxic moisture is a treasure to be seized, hoarded, dripped as sparingly as possible down my parched throat.

Yeah, Disaster Report, the PS2 quake-survivor adventure from out of '02 – another happy recovery in this, the New Golden Age of bargain-bin diving. All the Wiitards and XBoxers and… and PlayStation 3 Owners… have been dumping the last-gen B-listers from their collections for credit towards the latest and greatest, and the used-game stockpiles overflow with quality titles at everything-must-go prices. There’s a lot of forgettable crap – twenty copies of Mace Griffin, anyone? – but lots of gold, too. Thus I rebuild my library of swapped-away favorites. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be Monster Rancher 2, or Suikoden. Or maybe… Bushido Blade? Too much to hope for.

Anyway, Disaster Report. Developer Irem took the survival-adventure genre and removed the zombies, creating a man-against-environment game that presents some ye-olde-fashioned puzzle solving (i.e. MacGyvering) in a disturbing setting in which the eerie silence of the deserted city is punctuated by moments of rumbling terror – collapsing walls, exploding tankers, and lots of terrifying dangles. Sprinkle it with an unfolding conspiracy backstory, and you’ve got some pretty unique gaming.

It took a non-gamer, though, to point out one disturbing aspect of this thirsty crawl through virtual rubble: is Disaster Report a post-catastrophe training simulator? The idea that videogames are, either by conspiracy or through unconscious cultural genius, conditioning gamers for real-world scenarios is as old as games themselves. Remember the schoolyard rumour about Zaxxon and/or Gorf and/or any other game with a flightstick-style controller? That there was a secret direct line to the Air Force coming out of every cabinet, and that high-scoring players would be visited by men in uniforms and recruited to do battle with Commie air aces when the shit came down? That’s some powerful terror/fantasy, right there; ever 80s arcade dweeb dreamed/nightmared The Last Starfighter.

There’s no doubt games can be powerful trainers and conditioning tools; anybody who’s logged enough time on any game knows how in-game reflexes creep into daily psychology. A Tetris juicer friend of mine describes the sensation of seeing all geometric shapes – buildings, cars, people – as pieces of a packing puzzle to be solved; when I was playing Duke Nuke’m heavy there for a while, I couldn’t see a ventilation grille without twitching to kick it in and crawl through. That the US Army uses videogames for recruitment and subsequent training is no big news – multiplayer squad simulators are an essential part of readying modern gunts for combat.

So. If Zaxxon was getting getting us ready to shoot down Russian MiGs and Tu-160s, and first-person shooters are cutting months off basic combat training, what does that say about Disaster Report? With global warming a surefire reality, was a relatively obscure Japanese game publisher prepping us for the war against – or, more accurately, the desperate holding action in the face of – nature itself?

Well, let’s not get carried away. For one thing, though the game’s environment is supposed to be a disaster area, it hardly corresponds to what anyone could expect in a real catastrophe zone. Stiver Island is crumbling, but it’s mostly clean and seems more-or-less unlooted, and it's totally emptied of people – the fact the evacuation was so near-perfect actually makes the fact your dude got left behind rather crazy-improbable. Think of New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina: the chaos, the confusion, mad looting, the near-total unreliability of official authority, the health crisis, the formation of gangs and mobs, the hellhole of the Superdome. In that context, the only thing Disaster Report really simulates is the critical importance of water supplies… and, depending on who you believe, the presence of an amoral conspiracy of greedheads at the top of the blame ladder.

The more of I think of Katrina/New Orleans as a sim scenario, though… Jesus, that would make for some intense play! A massively multiplayer post-catastrophe urban survival game? Survivors gathering into clans for protection or raiding… guns and ammo being coveted as magic weapons… food, water and medicine as treasure… inter- (and intra-) gang politics and warfare… unpredictable cops and militias… fear upon fear... jeez.

Now, there’s a game that could have real-world training value, given enough accuracy in its modelling of civil-defense and survival techniques. Even if it gathered only a few dozens of thousands of players (half-decent numbers for a MMOG that’s not World of Warcraft) that’s a few thousand more citizens with serious VR training in coping with a massive disaster scenario – and we’re going to need every one of them, sooner rather than later.

Coolness Simulator

A burning question: are professional guitarists naturally keen at Guitar Hero II? They should be, right? The controller’s a fake fucking guitar: five colorful fret buttons below the head - a single string of sorts to strum - a Whammy bar for chewing on the long notes. Size of a parlour … uh, axe. Odie-tongue red. Obviously, I already scratched my initials into it. But is there a road and stage advantage for pros?

Only one way to find out = party. My drunken, train-hoppin’, post-BeerFest panelists include Red Ram’s Mark Feduk, the Secretaries’ Tash Fryzuk, singers John Guliak and Corb Lund, Twin Fangs’ Paul Coutts joining on this side of the river. So. What happens first is you invent a band name, usually pornographic. Thus far, the righteously assembled have chosen in an AC/DC font: Emotionz, Shittickets, DNK, Devildyke and Truck, the night’s winner. By now, every available towel is slurping up spilled beer and some kind of leopard-skin liqueur Jenny Jenny from the Sun brought in.

Even this early, the “coolness simulator” has us all laughing and some ooh-ing at the sublime cartoon art of the menus. We pick our weapons, a fine exercise in gender-swapping – Manga-scrawny Judy Nails on the Cherry Blossom Gibson Les Paul, for example. The first four songs show up.

Lund to this day ignores Wolfmother and goes for Shout at the Devil, where everyone else usually picks Cheap Trick’s Surrender. Psychologists would do well to cross-section these choices. After some serious play, the list grows – G’N’R, Spinal Tap … even War Pigs. Solid.
“It’s not really a guitar, it’s a Whac-a-Mole!” Coutts exclaims. He’s right. As notes colour-matching the fret buttons speed down the infinite neck, your job is simple. Hit the fret button at the same time you strum, matching the oncoming target note with precise timing. The easy level (where you don’t make money to buy more songs, outfits and guitars) uses only the top three frets. And no chords. Easy. You basically play a pared-down rhythm guitar initially. Expert level, on the other hand, crushes your hand into a furry albino lobster claw which doesn’t matter much because you’re head’s screwed right off your neck anyway.

The game is a hit. Rock poses are struck. Sitting while playing appropriately mocked. Fryzuk screams and drops the thing laughing while hound-voiced Guliak slags himself, but gets the general hang of it. “I give myself ½ star out of five,” he laughs. With my own band, Hebrella, I quickly notice out loud how effective this game is as a role-playing device. Just like real musicians, you’re deaf to how great you just played, obsessed with and chatty about the notes you missed. Uh, great post-gig conversation, in other words.

Hard-rockin’, grey-wearin’ Coutts, meanwhile, generally refuses to pilot any videogame. But while a dance party forms in the music room, there he is, strumming to Danzig all by himself. A heartwarming crossover.

Side note: Someone clever should mix Guitar Hero with bar karaoke. Add virtual drums and keys. Instead of going out to see music, you’d make it! In the meantime …

Lund, it turns out, starts taking names after the typical pro-to-nerd translation fumble. His pro advantage kicks in. He rises to the top of the musician heap. The metal set list has him especially going. “Someone had good taste there,” he muses. “I could imagine it becoming very involved.

“Then again,” he points out the obvious, “it might be a better investment of time and energy to actually get a real guitar and apply your efforts there. But who wants to do that, right? Not like there’s any money in it.”

Thus: Guitar Hero’s ultimate drawback, this early version, anyway. It’s different enough from the real thing that if you can’t already play a real guitar, you’re totally pissing your time away.
Guliak and Lund happily spending the next hour on Wii Sports golf, well, that’s another story.

BACKBEEP: IBM Machine Language music programming (1985)

How cruel our junior high teachers were, making us program an entire song in machine language! Each note was something like “6348.” To go through and program all of Talking Heads’ Heaven without the ability to read music was the first time I stayed up all night on an assignment. Bah! All for a C+. But, you might say, was not a thing learned? Oh, yes. As stated: my teacher was a dink.