According to the stats list on the pause screen, I’ve completed 65% of Brütal Legend, the second video game offering from Double Fine. If you follow video game news (or  this blog) even a little then you have no doubt at least heard about this game. All the reviews and articles on it have been written and read long ago and here I am coming in a month later like the out of shape guy who completes the New York Marathon ten hours after it starts. This isn’t so much a review as it is a love letter to Tim Schafer and the things he’s made and the legacy of the Lucasarts graphic adventure games which he continues in a roundabout way. I apologize if I write like Dr. Steve Brule when he tries to decribe the video game whose title he can’t remember and he kept getting distracted by his thoughts of the game while trying to describe the game, remembering only that there are swords. I am thinking of swords while I write this.

Lucasarts and the Advancement of Storytelling with Videogames
Tim Schafer, the president and primary creative force behind Double Fine, cut his teeth by making my childhood bearable. In the late eighties and early nineties he was working for George Lucas’s videogame company, Lucas Arts, writing videogames with strong characters, stories, environments and senses of humor. The license to produce Star Wars games was held by Galoob or Jaleco or some other company with a name that looks like it should be producing balloons instead of electronic media. So instead of producing game after game about Star Wars the young geniuses at Lucasarts took the graphicless, text based adventure game genre to the next level. Oh! The games they made! The two Maniac Mansion games, The first three Monkey Islands, Sam and Max, Loom, Zak McKracken, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade graphic adventure game, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango all transported me away from the horrors of school and family to places I would rather be. I’d like to give you an overview of just a few of the games that Tim Schafer worked on.

Maniac Mansion was the first of it’s kind, a puzzle adventure about teenagers exploring a mansion in an attempt to rescue their friend. You moved the characters around, completed puzzles and had occasional dialogue with other characters. It allowed you to explore an environment in a way that no game had before. There were multiple ways to win and many hilarious ways to die like microwaving a big dumb guy’s pet and then showing it to him. You watch him slowly realize what you’ve done and then there’s a cut to a shot of your grave in the backyard. It turns out that an evil meteor with a face was controlling the crazy scientist and you can drive a car to the moon. I think this game may have been inspired by the movie Repo Man.

Ron Gilbert was riding the Pirates of the Caribbean and wished he could wander around the ride and explore it. That would then eventually lead him to make  a game where he could do just that, The Secret of Monkey Island. When the game was released it had a stronger emphasis on story, dialogue and humor than anything before it that I’m aware of. You were Guybrush Threepwood as he struggled to “become a mighty pirate.” I would sit with my gawky friend, Michael Barron, and we’d play Monkey Island over and over, laughing at the funny dialogue and in-jokes about Lucasarts and Star Wars. The Lucasarts graphic adventure games were a lot like Disneyland. They were the place I wanted to go to most of all and they immersed the audience in a beautiful fantasy world.

With Full Throttle Shafer got to take the lead and made a game about bikers in a post-apocalyptic future. It was good but is unfortunately overshadowed by Schafer’s next and final game for Lucas Arts. Grim Fandango, is probably the finest graphic adventure game of all time and is also the last good one as far as I’m concerned. Don’t talk to me about the new Sam and Max, Monkey Islands or Strong Bad. Those games are garbage! I’ve played them and they are a huge step backwards.

Grim Fandango is noirish story set in the Mexican Land of the Dead where all the characters are papier-mâché skeletons. The climax of Grim Fandango was so intense for me that I felt chills and cried. Only film and music have affected me this intensely before and since. After Grim Fandango Lucasarts ceased production of these wonderful graphic adventure games and regurgitated one piece of shit Star Wars game after another, taking the occasional break with great games like Battlefront and Lego Star Wars. Other companies have tried to duplicate what Lucasarts did in the nineties and they all failed terribly.

Tim left Lucas Arts teamed up with some talented people including my super talented friend, Scott C, and formed Double Fine. Double Fine has made one of the best videogames of the past decade, Psychonauts. The game combined Tim’s storytelling prowess with the joy and action of a platformer like Mario 64. In Psychonauts you controlled Raz, a child acrobat with psychic abilities who has run away from the circus to attend Whispering Rock, a summer camp for psychic children. The game involves Raz jumping into people’s minds and exploring the strange, beautiful and distinct worlds of their subconscious. All is going well until a conspiracy to convert the campers brains into weapons requires Raz to save the day. He travels to the abandoned mental asylum across the lake, saves the day, achieves romantic success and repairs his relationship with his father. This game took the immersive elements of the graphic adventure gaming and applied them to an action platform game. Just running around the campgrounds, talking to the other characters was more fun than most games are at their peak of action-packedness. Despite Psychonauts being one of the greatest videogames of all time, it didn’t blow up people’s minds like it should have. It’s possible that people are too into things seeming “badass” to want to play a videogame about a child who isn’t holding a gun or a sword. A lot of what has gone into Brutal Legend seems to be in response to that.

Brütal Legend
With his post-Lucasarts games, Tim Shafer seems to be trying to reach a compromise with video gamesters, combining the things that make his games great and the things that make other games sell. in Brütal Legend you drive around in a fire belching hotrod killing demons and assholes with a giant axe and magical guitar solos. Brütal Legend has secondary missions, cursing and violence like GTA. It also has a rhythm guitar game aspect and heavy metal music like the kind you just discovered yesterday in Guitar Hero. There’s also a real time strategy element that I didn’t even know about until I was playing an RTS level in the game wondering what the fuck was happening? I don’t know why it’s there since I don’t know anything about that style of game and always found games with complex rules to be like work. I found this element of the game a little daunting and annoying but have learned to enjoy it once I remembered most of the controls. You can play this against other people on XBox Live, but I haven’t tried that just yet.

As always story is king in a Schafer game. We’re introduced to the main character Eddie Riggs, voiced by Jack Black, during the introduction video. He’s working for a band of pussies who claim to be metal but are dressed like goofballs, have a scratching DJ, rapping and “melodic” singing. They’re a parody of every bad rock band from the past ten years. Eddie’s crushed to death during their concert which causes their stage set, which resembles a giant Motorhead logo monster, to come alive, kill the awful band, and take Eddie to the world of Brütal Legend. It seems that Eddie has died and gone to his idea of Heaven where everything looks like a heavy metal album cover. He helps the inhabitants of the world, who are a combiination of fantasy characters and the kind of folks you’d see at shows, resist oppression by fighting glam metal pussies, goths and possibly some other creeps.

You wander around on foot or in your awesome car in a gigantic landscape where you can complete story missions that move the game forward, repetitive-but-fun secondary missions or look for hidden objects and buy upgrades for your car and weapons. For the first hour of playing this game the story missions were all about fighting and punching and then without much warning the story missions suddenly change to being mostly real time strategy games in which you command armies and protect forts but it’s all in heavy metal concert style. I’ve never played real time strategy games. I like puzzles and stories more than strategy and fighting games.

It should also be mentioned that the ability to jump, one of the core elements to the physics of Psychonauts, is absent from Brütal Legend. Instead there are different weapons and ways to command the army of metalheads that accompany you. Some people find a lack of jumping ability to be restricting. I haven’t minded it in the case of this game.

This game is so pretty that I keep taking little breaks and moving the camera around so I can inspect all the details. I bought a 360 just so I could play this game and it was worth it. Everything in this game is beautiful and interesting. I’m constantly rotating the camera around because I want to see everything. The landscape will at times look like the green hills of Ireland, the forests of Norway, the desert of the American Midwest, a frozen winter forest hell, overgrown jungle ruins, a spoooooky cemetery and probably some other shit. There are large monolithic structures and collapsing ruins of castles. When you find Brian Posehn’s character he’s eating meat in what could be one of the medieval churches that Varg Vikernes burned down. Even staring up at the sky is amazing. You’ll see the light coming though the clouds, or lightning or shooting stars.I haven’t seen the whole world yet but there’s no load times as you travel from section to section which is pretty amazing.

There’s an awesome score by Peter McConnell who has worked on Tim Schafer’s games for a while now. His scores add more to the drama of the game than some people might guess. One time I walked in on my brother Charlie playing Psychonauts with the sound off and Howard Stern on and it seemed like the intensity of the game was all but lost. But I digress… When you hop in your car, the Deuce, you can listen to an amazing selection of songs. Motorhead’s on there but thankfully they didn’t us Ace of Spades. According to Wikipedia they got a hundred and seven metal songs. Some are old, some are new. None of them are bullshit.

Jack Black’s been promoting this game really hard, showing up at award shows dressed as the character and filming a video intro for the game that starts up when you turn the game on. Ozzy, Lemmy (pictured above), Lita Ford, Rob Halford, Brian Posehn, Kyle Gass and David Cross all appear in this game, sometimes looking like themselves. Having Lemmy and Rob Halford fighting on my team gives me giddy pleasure.

In-jokes were a fun element of the old graphic adventures. They don’t serve a purpose but if you got rid of everything in a room that didn’t serve a purpose you’d end up with a bed, a phone and one set of clothes which would be creepily boring. The details help create a specific atmosphere. There are some okay references to past Schafer games. A lot of things look a little like the over the top motorcycles from Full Throttle. You can race against a driving demon who could be a cousin of Glottis, the car obsessed orange monster from Grim Fandango. If you select a skeleton themed paint job for your car Ozzy declares “That’s grim.” If anyone finds other in-jokes let me know in the comments section.

Is this game perfect in all ways? No, but what is? It is however perfect in most ways and I haven’t stopped thinking about it yet. It has…swords…in it…..

I’ll leave you with this video I shot of Skeletonwitch performing a song that appears in the game, “Soul Thrashing Black Sorcery.”

P.S. Nathan “Bagel” Stapley did a drawing of me in one of his comics that’s on the Double Fine site. That is rad. He does good comics about totally made up adventures he has. The Double Fine site has lots of good comics on it.

P.P.S. Read my interview with Double FIne’s Scott C that I did last week on the Bloglin.

- Toilet Cobra