FORMAT
: PC/PLAYSTATION
RELEASE
: 1994
asked to list my W hen favourite games of all
time, it’s a familiar list of modern classics (Left 4 Dead, Fahrenheit) timeless genre DEVELOPER : ADELINE breakers (Deus Ex, Vampire The by: Alan Martin Masquerade: Bloodlines) and retro gems (Super Mario World, Sensible Soccer), but there’s one title in particular that doesn’t comfortably fit into any of these categories: Little Big Adventure. It’s a gem that many of today’s players will never have heard of, and yet it still has a dedicated cult following online, making sure it works on modern systems, designing prequels and reminiscing about it. It’s a unusual title that creates such feelings of nostalgia 15 years after its release, but this real time adventure was a breath of fresh air back then, despite the lukewarm reviews it received at the time. PUBLISHER : EA
The game was the work of Adeline. The team that eventually made Little Big Adventure and its sequel had previously crafted Alone in the Dark for Infogrames, but allegedly left after a disagreement over sequels. It was quite hyped at the time being designed initially for CD ROM in an era when floppy disks were still the preferred format, with full voice acting and a non-midi musical score. Not only this, but the game offered a deep plot for an action adventure – an intriguing tale of an oppressive government trying to suppress insurgents and deny freedom of thought, told through an admittedly cutesy world populated with talking animals. Your protagonist – Twinsen (confusingly a citizen of the Planet Twinson) – starts the game imprisoned for having a dream, and your first act is to escape prison and slip through the town without being recaptured. Nobody – not even old friends – can be trusted, and it’s this that makes the first section so enthralling. You can fight to a degree (in fact you can murder fellow citizens for no reason way before Grand Theft Auto made it fashionable), but there are some genetically engineered enemies who will simply knock you out in a single hit, making it impossible for you to become some kind of cutesy Rambo. A deft combination of sneaking and legging it is therefore required to get past the guards, and from then on it’s a case of sneaking around the world undercover to try and find more about the rumoured resistance. The graphics were pretty nice for their day as well – an isometric adventure with little details like furniture, cupboards, bins and trees appearing for the first time in an era when 3d was more typically associated with the futuristic corridors of Doom. Although it’s not a particularly good comparison (given it’s neither a first person
shooter, nor blessed with particularly good combat), it had one other advantage over Doom and its ilk – the AI was very advanced. While in other games, enemies would shoot on sight, the opposition in LBA behave in a very different way, often shouting for help, cowardly running away, and sometimes heading straight for the alarm as soon as they see you. On top of this the game had a wonderful cheeky sense of humour – I still remember being made an honorary Elf (you’d have to have played it) only to be presented with a membership card embossed with the number #000000003. So why was the game only offered average reviews when it was first released in 1994? Possibly because reviewers were expecting the tense horror of Alone in the Dark, and what they found instead was a cartoony world populated with talking rabbits, elephants and spheres with legs. It had an atmosphere, but a completely different one to that found in the grandfather of survival horror. It also had a number of flaws that make the game frustratingly unplayable today, unless you’re buoyed by the nostalgia of having beaten it over 15 years ago. Let’s start of with the main issue: its difficulty. It’s not actually a hard game, but certain design choices go out of their way to make it appear so. Take the first scene for example – if you’re caught escaping, it’s back to the very start again with no hint as to what you did wrong. It turns out there is a prison guard’s uniform hidden in the lockers that will fool some of the guards, but not others – you won’t know which until you reach them, by which time they’ll often have hit the alarm to call in the “one-shot-kills” guards with their homing-bullets. If this happens, you’ll be back to the start no matter how quickly you react. To its credit, the game usually just sends you to a prison, rather than making you restart or reload, but it’s this kind of trial and error frustration that becomes a staple of the game. Another example: each section of the map is a square of isometric land that loads when you step off screen – but if you’re hit by a bullet while standing near the edge of the screen you’ll be knocked back into the previous square. This wouldn’t be too annoying, except the enemies re-spawn, so when
re-play | November 09
you step back in you’ll find that any enemies you’ve managed to get rid of have simply come back in the few seconds you’ve been away. Then you had the controls to contend with. On top of the standard arrow keys, you had to manually switch Twinsen from standard mode (walking, talking, interacting) to athletic (sprinting, jumping) to aggressive (punching and kicking) to sneaking (an elaborate tip-toe movement). Having to change mood quickly when a brawl kicks off is a mess of accidentally pushing the wrong button, and dealing with Twinsen’s elaborate reaction animation before getting to respond. Often if you missed the first punch, that was it. On top of this, you could drown in anything as shallow as a puddle, and the much-vaunted voice acting was weak, to put it charitably. And yet I still look on it with immense nostalgia – it had a charming and unique atmosphere yet to be replicated, not even by its sequel which completely abandoned the dark storyline of the first and replaced it with a clichéd narrative about alien invasion. Despite dealing with a lot of the problems the first game had (most notably the square game map, which became a fully 3d environment), I can’t bring myself to look on the sequel as fondly. There was rumoured to be a third game in development for the Dreamcast after the studio was bought by Sega, but when the console was abandoned in 2001, so was any hope of a third game. I’m sure its had its influences on modern games – probably in what not to do as much as what should be done. It’s quite telling that the game’s creative director, Frederick Raynal, was one of the first three game personalities to be knighted in his native France, becoming a Knight of Art and Literature alongside Shigeru Miyamoto and Michel Ancel in 2006. Since then Raynal has worked as a consultant on the wonderful DS title Soul Bubbles, so the touch still seems to be there. Will we ever see a Little Big Adventure 3? Only if his current studio can get the rights back off Delphine Software International, according to recent sources. Until then, LBA with one of the fanmade work-arounds for current PCs is as good as we’ve got. 20