Review
Vault Of Horror
by J Nash (October 7th, 2010 at 3:52 pm)
Game: Bank Run. Publisher: Silk Tricky. Authors: 20+ people (movie bit), Calvin Rien (game). Free. Buy the game.
As anyone knows who’s tried to find a game with a casual look, the hideous iTunes Shop is less an exciting electro-boutique of inviting infinite shelves and more an impenetrable labyrinth stocked by clueless buffoons under the direction of some riddling quizmaster where search results are influenced by player comments and/or just made up. There should be a feature where Apple mark the point someone gave up on a search with a small picture of a skeleton so you could track the increasingly despairing routes like so many string-y corpses.
“My name is X and I used to be Y — but then my life turned upside down when Z.”
(This might help explain things like Angry Birds; after a single exhausting plunge through the unending thistly bracken, most people are happy to be spoonfed by the attractively lit and neatly trimmed Top 25s.)
But Podgamer’s dandy wastrels are committed to uncovering games you’d never ordinarily find (apparently — I distinctly remember hearing, “Just write the usual rubbish when you feel like it and if you could mention games now and again that’d be q nice, also here is a purse of gold and a fabulous hat”) and, completely by chance, I’ve just stumbled with parched face and malnourished lumbar FOR YOU over an unmissable distillation of 90s games. Come with us now on tomorrow’s journey of next-generation edutaintment.
“But they made a mistake when they X and Y and now they’re going to pay. It’s Z.”
You won’t remember because we never talk about what happened, NEVER, but it was the 90s and there was time for FMV. Tiny human children were trampled in the rush to iNtERActIVEmOVIeS. Cheques flew out of fists to fund down at heel actors shouting into the camera and stiffly animated stuntblokes weightlessly hitting each other for hours, while the game itself was knocked out overnight by the wee work experience lackey using the mandated template of Christmas cracker puzzles and jerky pixel clones of the Star Wars coin-op’s trench run. It was horrible, like Metal Gear Solid had gone back in time and won.
Fortuitously everyone involved suddenly died in a big chemical fire and INterACtiveMOVIes were never heard of again. (The principles behind them linger, but have been corralled into hidden-object games, aka charlady sims.) But now you can safely relive that entire black era in twelve minutes flat with the neo retro advanced flashback of Bank Run.
An ingenious Previously On intro brilliantly dispenses with 98% of the interACTIVE moVIE you’d expect (stealth escape from besieged office, sliding puzzle to unlock safe, etc etc) leaving the meat of a mini-Robocop bit (identically twice), a mini-Time Crisis bit and videos! Videos! VIDEOS!
Surprisingly, at no point do you clamber out of a trapdoor in the lift ceiling.
Bank Run is of course rubbish; you’ll play it straight through in one go then bin it, but those 12 minutes are pretty entertaining. There’s something endearingly innocent about it: for example, there’s a fantastic bit where Obvious Turncoat arranges to meet Unsuspicious Framed Everybloke to collect the McGuffin and then tries to kill him anyway in order to contrive the second mini-Robocop section. The three mini-games last just long enough to keep you amused and the argle-bargle linking story wafts past far better than, say, an episode of Ruddy Spooks.
(It’s also worth noting that thanks to advances in SCIENCE what’s obviously a larky weekend lash-up by a bunch of chums in their day job office building for the price of a table of curries has considerably higher production values than the cripplingly bankrupting FMV disasters of yore.)
The walk cycles are impeccable. We’ve come a long way.
One area where Bank Run slips up is that it’s free, so for the full effect be sure to tear up £50 as you play. And remember solemnly THIS IS HOW IT USED TO BE, until the public rose up and barricaded the publishers’ offices shut and set those big chemical fires WHICH DIDN’T HAPPEN I DIDN’T SAY THAT.
I consigned my first CD-ROM based PC to the bin only last week, having been reunited with it in a grand clear-out. What happy memories this bought back. Ah. FMV. Once, it was the future.