Psychonauts deserves your ten bucks

Why you should consider it: You should always buy a game this fun for $10!

The Penurious Player

Whenever the hype engine for a new game gets going, people get into a frenzy. High profile games like Oblivion, Doom III, or Half Life 2 cause such a buzz that people whip out their wallets, buy multi-hundred dollar video card upgrades, more RAM, and faster processors just so they can play them. Tack on the $50 – $60 that new games cost, and you’ve got what turns into quite an expensive hobby.

But what happens four years from now, when Oblivion is a faded memory of many happy hours spent gaming? Does the game suddenly become no fun anymore? What if there were someone out there who never played it, or couldn’t afford the equipment to run it on when the game was new? Is the experience trivialized somehow because the game is old?

I say no! It’s the same game, with the same entertainment potential that it always had from day one. The difference is, even cheap computers four years from now will have no problem playing Oblivion, and you’ll probably be able to find it for $10!

This is where I like to play – I like to find those gems: games you may have missed the first time around that should not have been missed, and that will run like a dream on your current system because it uses older technology.

Don’t get me wrong, I have my share of $50 games (some of which are total duds) as well as the expensive hobby gear to run them on, but over time I have found that a good majority of my greatest gaming memories were acheived on games that I found for under $20.

So I decided to write a regular feature that will highlight these treasures – either old games that you may have missed the first time around, or new games that cost under $20 that don’t benefit from the hype machine that high profile games enjoy.

pe·nu·ri·ous
adj.

1. Unwilling to spend money; stingy.

And why shouldn’t you be? If you exercise some patience, and keep yourself a year or two “behind the curve”, you can enjoy the same games at greatly reduced prices!

The first game I’m going to feature is Majesco’s Psychonauts.

Publisher: Majesco
Price: Can be found for $10 (search on amazon) (On Steam)
Genre: Adventure / Platform
Available for PC, Xbox, PS2

I tested the game on a newer system and an older system, and it runs flawlessly on both, with all graphic settings cranked to “high”:

Test system 1:
Sempron 2800+
1gb PC3200 DDR
Geforce 6600

Test system 2:
Athlon 64 X2 5000+
2gb PC6400 DDR2
Radeon X850XT

Psychonauts was originally released in 2005. It is the brainchild (pun absolutely intended) of Tim Schafer, who is partially famous for “Grim Fandango” and “Secret of Monkey Island”.

Psychonauts immediately strikes you as something special the moment you start it up. The detailed art has a unique style that definitely comes across as “lovingly created”. You can tell that the developers and artists are really enjoying themselves. The voice acting is also superb. These things, while ultimately not important for actual gameplay, really serve to immerse you into the game world and can make or break the overall game experience.

You play the role of Razputin (“Raz” for short), the runaway ten year old son of a gypsy circus acrobat. Raz wants nothing more than to become a Psychonaut – the elite corps of professional psychics that can delve into people’s minds to sort out their mental problems, but Raz’ father hates “mentalists” and refuses to let Raz attend Psychonauts training. Raz flees the circus to attend Whispering Rock Summer Camp – a camp for budding Psychonauts.

Yes, that is a milkman with a Molotov Cocktail made of milk.

Raz’ arrival at Whispering Rock is where the game begins. You can explore the campgrounds and interact with the various other kids who live at the camp, or you can “dive in” and start the game right away by attending Coach Oleander’s Basic Braining.

The game is divided into a centralized “exploration” area, which encompasses the campgrounds and a couple of extra side areas. This exploration area serves to tie together the “action” areas, which take place inside of people’s thoughts. You don’t really need to spend a lot of time in the camp area if you don’t want to, but you will miss most of the charm that makes the game so memorable. Each kid has a unique personality and side story that really keeps the game engrossing and fresh. You will find yourself laughing out loud at the characteristics and struggles of some of the kids (like poor little Dogen, the misunderstood kid whose brain is so powerful he must wear a tinfoil cap at all times lest he accidentally makes peoples’ heads explode).

The Hideous Hulking Lungfish of Lake Oblangata. (Her name is Linda)

The exploration phase is basically a big “collection” game. There are all kinds of things to collect in order to gain new psychic powers and upgraded statistics. There is a scavenger hunt for 16 unique items, “psi cards” to look for, and “psychic arrowheads” to dig up. None of these are essential to winning the game, but they serve to add depth (and sometimes frustration) to the overall experience.

The action areas are each completely unique and independent. For example, you enter the brain of a asylum patient who suffers from paranoid delusions and is a big time conspiracy theorist. His mental world is like a twisted 1960’s-era suburbia where secret agents hide out in the bushes with cameras, spies tap phone lines, and girl scouts are really assassin-minded automatons. In contrast, you also have to enter the mind of a love-struck Mexican artist whose mental world consists solely of black velvet paintings of La Lucha wrestlers, matadors, and roses, and where a mad bull runs rampant through the town. The variety of the mental worlds is astounding. Each mental world feels like a completely seperate game in its own right.

Trust me, the game is worth $10 alone just to see the different game worlds.

Words cannot describe the glory and wonder of Black Velvetopia

Gameplay is hit-or-miss. Most of the time the game plays well and the controls are mostly intuitive – but not by default. This is one of the only games where I’ve ever scrapped the whole default control system and replaced the keys with my own preferences. They just didn’t work out for me. Once I got the keys situated, I still encountered some incredibly frustrating moments because there are a lot of “jumping” levels – places where you have to get to the top of something and in order to do so you have to make all kinds of crazy leaps, balance on wires, and swing on poles. Remember, Raz is a circus acrobat as well as a powerful psychic. This is the downside of the game – there is TOO much platforming and crazily frustrating jumping parts.

The Milkman Conspiracy – 1960’s suburbia complete with black helicopters, cars with huge radio antennas that park outside your house, peeping eyes everywhere, squirrels with cameras in their mouths, and secret agents hiding in the bushes.

I actually threw in the towel very early in the game for a good month because I got so frustrated with the difficulty of the platforming. Then I got an Xbox 360 controller and set it up to play with that. That changed everything. This is probably the first PC game I’ve ever played that I would say really REQUIRES an analog controller to get the best experience out of. With the 360 controller, everything changed, the jumping stuff became manageable and my experience got a lot more entertaining. I highly recommend trying this game out with a controller if you have one – but to go out and spend $35 on an xbox controller falls out of the realm of budget gaming.

If you can overlook this negative aspect, you are in for a true gaming treat. Psychonauts is the rare game that you keep playing with zeal and yet are saddened by the fact that it must end at some point. You wish it would keep going and going. The characters are truly memorable and the story is excellent. Also, it is kid friendly. My eight year old son has been enjoying the game immensely.

In the mind of a washed up has-been Broadway star, the show never stops going on.

Put it this way: ANY game that contains a level that casts you as a huge Godzilla-like destroyer of an entire city filled with tiny LUNGFISH, and calls you GOGGOLOR, and lets you tromp their town and smash their orphanages, while showing newscasts of the destruction in the style of Japanese monster movies, simply MUST be played just for the sheer spectacle of it all.

For $10, I say “go out and get this right away”. You will not regret it.

Please feel free to discuss this review in the Short-Media Gaming forum