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By: Mitali Chaudhary
Nestled in the loft of an Irish pub just off of the loud bass and strobe lights of Hess Village is a throwback to simpler times: The Arcade Bar. Retro, cozy and stocked with an impressive collection of classic arcade games, it offers a fresh take on Hamilton nightlife.
Arcade’s humble beginnings mirror those of its soft-spoken owner, Justin Kavanagh, who moved to Canada from Ireland ten years ago, and whose passions include restoring classic cars and motorcycles. Inspired by his admiration for the 70s and 80s, Kavanagh interestingly coined the name of the bar first, and then realized that including the arcade games that were such a significant part of his childhood would create a niche in the club and bar scene that Hamilton has yet to experience. Offering a selection of craft beer, cocktails and food cooked by his wife, it delivers a different, but fun way to spend a Friday night.
The concept of an arcade-bar fusion is not Arcade’s only defining quality. As an alternative to clubs, which allow for a grimy floor and scant conversation, the bar creates a more mellow environment where dancing and drinking is still encouraged, but also a place where real connections can still be made with others.
This might be a hint at a shift in the wants of bar-goers and the newer cohort of students that are flooding to McMaster, and Hamilton. As Kavanagh notes, “There seems to be a major move towards smaller, independent, food-based [places] … it seems that the next generation doesn’t want those giant clubs.” Indeed, the incredibly loud, packed nightclubs of the early 2000s might be on their way out, as young adults crave a more intimate space. Arcade’s unique setup, and resulting unique demographic, makes it a strong alternative; an interesting mix of twenty-somethings to sixty-year-old regulars comprise the usual attendees, which according to the owner, makes for very interesting conversations.
The bar’s distinct character is also playing a part in bringing some attention to the smaller businesses on George St., normally passed up by Hess regulars. “Nobody really knows this strip,” remarks Justin. This might be changing soon however, since the entire area has been displaying obvious signs of a transition, as many new pubs and restaurants are opening along the road, and quite a few of the clubs on Hess are rumoured to be in the process of being sold or shut down.
It’s clear that Arcade is one of what is definitely soon to be many that cater to a change in interest in the nightlife scene, though it is currently the only “barcade” in Hamilton. “People want something slightly different to do,” as Kavanagh puts it, and The Arcade Bar offers just that.
Photo Credit: Mitali Chaudhary
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Firewatch is hands-down one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever encountered. I’d checked it out with zero idea what it would be about and what to expect, but the graphics of the start menu alone was all the convincing I needed to continue on.
Firewatch is categorized under “first person adventure,” and it follows a fire lookout named Henry on his first few days on the job. The story is jump-started by the disappearance of two teenage girls in the forest, and it’s up to the player to deal with the puzzle this leaves to be solved. This is the first game from Campo Santo, a developer founded by the two leads from Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead game series. That alone already says its fair share about the game. The dialogue in the game operates almost the same way as Walking Dead — a character says something, and you, as player, get to choose what to do or say next in response. Except Firewatch takes it a step farther, making for an adventure game that’s startlingly immersive in its take on a first-person perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZX3MgsRb0A
The first-person perspective was chosen primarily to save on the costs that come with having to sync voice actors with their character counterparts, but the decision seems to have ultimately worked out in Firewatch’s favour. Playing as Henry, the game operates in a way that makes it look like you’re seeing through his eyes. When you look down, you see Henry’s hands and feet as if they were your own. The player only catches glimpses of what Henry is supposed to look like, and otherwise, for all intents and purposes, you are Henry, and his character is completely yours to experience the game through. As Henry, the player interacts with fellow lookout Delilah only via walkie-talkies, and while this sounds dull, it’s Henry and Delilah’s interactions that really make the game stand out. It’s one thing for it to look great, but with some of the best dialogue I’ve heard in a game and perfectly cast voice actors, Firewatch sounds great, too. It’s simultaneously funny and poignant, and at times even relatable. The absence of a mental image to match Henry and Delilah’s voice behind the witty banter is a huge plus. This, coupled with the realistic graphics and being able to pick between response choices that range from emotional to dryly hilarious, it’s a game that feels very, very real in all aspects. Importantly so, since Firewatch doesn’t hold back on the tragic backstories, either.
The first ten minutes of the game alone loads up on Henry’s own emotional background. And it’s worth noting that while this is quickly established and explored throughout the game, it does so without being overdramatic. Firewatch maintains its realism through and through, handling its story and its few characters without being too much nor being too little. It comfortably juggles the drama, the clever banter, the unraveling mystery and the action behind the main storyline, and in my book, any game that can pull that off while sticking to its own personal charm is worth playing.
That said, Firewatch’s one flaw, as noted by many players and critics, is its ending. The game builds itself up to be something dark and gritty, and while in some ways, it does reach that point, it only scratches the surface before descending back to what is a criminally anti-climactic ending. It’s not terrible, per se, but it’s the kind of ending that really makes you go: Wait, what? Is that it? Really? And that’s quite unfortunate for a game that never prompts those questions anywhere else.
Firewatch makes for a great experience largely thanks to the environment it immerses the player in — the woods look shockingly realistic no matter which route you take, and the dialogue is brilliant and satisfying to the very last syllable. While the ending leaves much to be desired, it’s a quick little game that’s relaxing and escapist in its own charming right, and for that, it deserves a play.
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Hamilton has long been synonymous with the "Steel City" moniker, but a growing market for entrepreneurs is helping to re-shape that perception.
This, along with the growing popularity of online crowd-funding models like Kickstarter have allowed developers like Nathan Dworzak, Parker Martin and Michael Huynh to gather support for their own online action role-playing game they're calling Dragon of Legends.
The three are founders of Thrive Games, which they initially began in 2013 as Thrive! Entertainment. The project, their first game developed from scratch, is described on their Kickstarter page as a "2D online [action] RPG inspired by Celtic and Norse mythology" and resembles the style and art reminiscent of video games in the early 90s.
"If you grew up playing the Super Nintendo, it's kind of tapping into that aesthetic," explained Dworzak.
"But we're also adding more advanced mechanics, like being able to play the game on any device."
At the time of writing, the game had accumulated nearly 500 backers and $18,000 on their Kickstarter with a couple weeks left in their campaign to reach their $60,000 goal.
While the team made the decision to briefly shut down the campaign as they didn't expect to reach their end goal, Dworzak went on to explain that an investment firm had very recently stepped forward to cover 80 percent of their costs.
The campaign is expecting to re-launch on Kickstarter before the end of February with a more modest goal of $12,000 for the project to be fully funded.
The project follows in a style of games that have grown in familiarity in recent years. Cult-hit titles like Shovel Knight, and more recently, Undertale, have demonstrated that independent developers like Dworzak and his team can experience critical success with their games, despite having a minimalist approach to the game's aesthetics.
However, the team at Thrive has certainly spared no expense in attempting to flesh out the world that they're promising on their Kickstarter page, and the wealth of information they've provided on the world and the mechanics of their game indicate just how serious they are.
With a team that Dworzak has estimated to have involved up to 25 people, the input and background of the team has had a variety of influences as well, both within and outside Hamilton. While Dworzak graduated from Wilfred Laurier University with a degree in music composition, Martin graduated from McMaster University with a background in Multimedia/Theatre & Film.
However, the three co-founders have grown up as friends in Hamilton since middle school, and have shared a passion for video games that they've been able to turn into more than just a passion project. They’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with The Forge, a start-up accelerator associated with McMaster, as well as McMaster’s Innovation Park.
“For me, it was just a passion, and I’ve always wanted to make games,” Dworzak explained. “But as a composer, I was limited … I managed to be lucky with the people I knew.”
“We shared the same vision in what we wanted to do; we wanted to create a gaming company that would create heartfelt experiences.”
With their Kickstarter set to re-launch, they’re hoping that others will share in their passion for these experiences.
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As much as I have been obsessed with the artistic potential in video games, there have been very few experiences that felt like they could be recommended to a more general audience in the same way that a great film, novel or album could be. Even the classic contenders for the “Best Games of All Time” are steep time investments that make them a hard sell to a less committed audience.
The most prominent titles this year focused on providing hours and hours of content, or using their multi-million dollar budgets to perpetuate the clumsy additions of “cinematic storytelling.” Yet a small Kickstarter-backed game made by director and composer Toby Fox stands out as not only the clear winner for best game of 2015, it may very well have a shot for one of the greatest, and most important games of the modern era. Regardless of whether or not you have dabbled in the medium before, you have to experience the fantastical and complex world of Undertale.
On the surface, Undertale is a relatively straightforward, five-hour, turn-based role playing game, developed using Game Maker: Studio, a free engine. You assume the control of a nameless child, who has fallen into an underground world of monsters, and must encounter its strange residents, solve puzzles, and explore a variety of different environments in their journey home.
Yet, unlike the traditional role-playing game, Undertale allows the player to complete the entire game without killing a single enemy. Almost every character interaction and plot point is changed heavily depending on whether or not the player has chosen to kill or show mercy: to play as a pacifist, or to kill every single character in the game.
The world within Undertale is whimsical, humorous, and as charming as it is deeply moving. It is reminiscent of some of my own favourite works of fantasy, that blend a humorous cast of characters with just the right amount of dark undertones subtly found throughout the plot. Every monster you encounter, though potentially violent at first, are never purely malicious, and it can be just as addicting to flirt with slime monsters, pet a Great Dog knight, or “unhug” a monster and respect their boundaries. The potential interactions during random encounters and boss battles make the pacifist route much more rewarding than traditional turn-based combat.
Undertale really punishes players in emotional form just as it does in terms of difficulty when one chooses the genocide route, and Fox does so by forcing players to consider the weight of their actions on this fictional world. There is no sense of heroism or justification in the genocide path, the game itself acknowledges that the player is really only doing it because they can. Monsters who would otherwise be the best of friends will desperately try to defend their loved ones against you, and their deaths are gruesome as they are desperate.
While the strong cast of characters, writing, and tight battle-system would make a great title in its own right, Undertale’s commentary on some of the inherent traits of the video game medium is what pushes it to masterpiece status. Undertale acknowledges the absolute power the player has over the game itself, and in the face of that, begs and pleads that he/she shows mercy to its charming characters and world. Yet, while Fox actively encourages the player to follow the path of the pacifist, the world and characters that he created actively acknowledge that the player will eventually choose a genocide run out of some morbid curiosity, some “completionist” impulse or at the very least, watch the violent playthrough on YouTube.
Yes, one of the characters will call out those who choose to watch a genocide run on YouTube. That same character will acknowledge your attempts to reset and undo some of your accidental killings, and many more recognize that certain situations feel “nostalgic” after you decided to reset and play the game again. A genocide run followed by a pacifist playthrough will permanently prevent the player from getting the true, happy ending that typically follows the Pacifist run. The characters themselves will even can even beg the player not to reset the game following its completion, as it would undo the happy ending in their world. There are no true resets, and no true reloads.
A small Kickstarter-backed game made by director and composer Toby Fox stands out as not only the clear winner for best game of 2015, it may very well have a shot for one of the greatest, and most important games of the modern era.
Breaking the fourth wall is not just a novel gimmick in Undertale. It is a critical part of the in-game story, and it is more importantly an open acknowledgement of the absolute power players have over video games themselves. This is a critical part of Undertale’s spirit, and what is arguably the most important aspect of its presentation. The ability to save, load, reset, manipulate files and even share these experiences online is an intrinsic part of the medium, and the game uses these components as a more powerful form of storytelling than any of this year’s cinematic attempts. Undertale is one of a kind, in that the relationship between the player and the game is allowed to go beyond the experiences directly within the game, and its exploration of the relationship that the player can have with the game itself is a radical new world for game developers to explore in future titles.
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Transitioning from Telltale’s episodic The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, I went into Life Is Strange not entirely sure what to expect. The premise was simple: an interactive adventure game played from the perspective of photography student Max Caulfield. However, it throws time travel and the butterfly effect into the mix to make one of the most intriguing games I’ve encountered this year.
The game is set in the fictional town of Arcadia Bay, where protagonist Max is in her last year of high school at Blackwell Academy. The episodes take place over the course of one week in October 2013, and the first episode opens with Max’s discovery of a sudden ability to rewind time. This, I discover later, allows me as a player to redo virtually any action I take in the game. While that sounds like a welcome contrast to games where you have to watch your character fade off behind a “Game Over” screen, Life Is Strange is quick to remind its players that it isn’t as nice and convenient as it seems.
The butterfly effect is heavily incorporated into the gameplay, and I learn early on that each of my choices, no matter which one I pick and how many times I rewind time, may have long-term consequences. In this sense, there’s a blurry line between the right and wrong choice, and instead, I’m left nervously waiting for my own choice to backfire on me. This, I believe, contributes most to the intrigue of the game. Instead of being given the chance to truly start over from scratch, you suffer through the possibility of being wrong. It’s a feature that allows the player to be deeply involved, and to have an emotional attachment that’s not purely to the character you’re playing the game through. There’s a connection to the storyline brought by the knowledge that it is your choices that are shaping the story, and that any of your actions can influence how the game will ultimately play out for you.
We also get a glimpse of potential themes in the game, an element I appreciate in a storyline featuring adolescents. The teenage aspect is strong and constant, and it’s nice to see that playing through Max actually feels like being in the mind of a teenage girl. She’s not perfect, and when you are making choices through her, you get to truly experience the uncertainty and frustration that would come if you were to make those same choices in real life. Some of the conversations throughout the game feel stilted and nuanced, but the emotional undercurrent remains present in the implications that grow stronger as more is revealed of the central characters.
Online reviews criticize the awkward dialogue and the lack of lip-syncing, but these are issues that can be easily overlooked once you get into the storyline. The only problem I found with Life Is Strange is that, for a game heavily relying on choices and consequences, there isn’t always a wide variety of decisions to pick and choose from. If there’s anything to be truly frustrated by in this first episode, it’s that you’re awarded the freedom to choose, and yet trapped by options that are at some points too rigid and black-and-white. There may be game conventions to follow, but there are quite a few scenes — Max’s interactions with other Blackwell students, especially — that could have been designed better.
Nevertheless, I am hopeful for the next few episodes of Life Is Strange. There is a lot of room left for character development, and it’s exciting to anticipate what the rest of the game has in store. It’s early on in the storyline, and the game has done well thus far considering the experimental TV series format. It’s a fantasy world that’s fresh and interesting despite its clichéd flaws, and if anything, it has definitely captured my attention. The first episode has set up an interesting world left to be explored, and has shown signs of subverting video game archetypes. The next few instalments will establish whether the game can follow through on these promises.
After all, who doesn’t want to live vicariously every now and then through a time-traveling high school student?
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After hearing the incredibly positive buzz about the new Fallout 4 game, I made sure I got my hands on it the minute it was released. Since last Tuesday, I have been spending all of my waking time playing this game.
The fifth installment in the main Fallout series takes place in Boston and the Greater Boston Area in the year 2287. The events of this game precede all of the major points in time covered by the other games and their spin-offs. You explore a large chunk of New England accompanied by various companions — using a large-field editor to build settlements. A lot of this game is customizable with most of the map and character’s design is left up to the player.
After a beautifully designed opening to catch you up to speed with the opening events of the game, you can design your character. As a lover of The Sims franchise, I was blown away by the design engine created for Fallout 4. I spent my first hour with this game constructing the faces into a male version of what I’d like to date, and then the female character as myself. The character’s faces are divided up into sections — three of which are solely for the nose. I have seen numerous screenshots of celebrity lookalikes made by new players of the game — all of which are uncanny and hilarious.
In line with the idea of the game’s demographic, it’s worth noting that this isn’t your run-of-the-mill violent shooter game. This is an adventure game, where the choices you make affect the path you’ll be taking through Fallout 4. Instead of resorting to spraying and praying with a fully automatic rifle, you can use dialogue and non-violent solutions to solve major conflicts in the game. I’m not saying that this is a preferred method — I’m just saying that this alternative is an option.
As a dog lover, this game really rubs me the right way. After reaching a certain checkpoint, you meet a German shepherd who becomes your ally immediately. It’s odd, since you wouldn’t think that a dog who had just gone through a nuclear war — presumably not socialized by any humans — would be friendly to a stranger who just happened to sprint into town. But, luckily for me, this happens to be the case. You can use the dog to sniff out goodies and assist you in combat, which is a nice feature. Your dog can get hurt, but I wouldn’t advise wasting a stimpak on it, since, as I’ve noticed, the dog’s health regenerates on its own.
As usual with the Fallout games, you must keep your eyes peeled everywhere you go — leave no room unchecked, leave no table unturned, leave no enemy body clothed. I’ve been spending a lot of my time running through rooms and opening drawers, picking up useless, heavy items such as bags of cement and broken fans, but that’s just because it’s fun and you can drop anything at anytime in the game. Unfortunately, despite my ability to pick up random objects, I lost out on a freebie perception level-up by failing to notice a small Vault Boy bobble head on a table in the first quest. I only noticed it the second time around when my partner advised his friend to pick it up — something he knew about from his own run-through. Frustrating as it is, there are more little perks to be picked up along the way, so be sure to stay alert at all times.
This game isn’t without its bugs, unfortunately. The first glitch I encountered was in the opening scene where you have to take a drink of coffee but there is no animation to accompany the slurping sound.
Everyone I have come into contact with has listened to me rave about this game. I cannot recommend it enough. It is, however, $79.99 at this point. I would suggest waiting for the inevitable Steam Christmas sale, or another means of acquisition. Another reason to wait would be for upcoming patches, which will remedy the current bugs in the game. Despite this, I will say that this game is worth every penny, and I look forward to having more exciting conversations with new players of Fallout 4.
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