Jul 28, 2022
Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: ‘The Archives of Evil Dr BA’ and ‘Hope’s Peak’
Welcome to page 47!
The Archives of Evil Dr BA is a trilogy of Java titles created by The Giant (Beach) Ball Studio, the solo indie name for Alain Becam. Since there are three games to cover, each will get their own highlight as we explore different games made from over the decades. Let’s go!
Up first is SeaWars, the largest and most complicated of the three. A tactical battle simulator, players will organize ships to take on fleets of enemies in a death battle to see who can keep their bases alive. Players will spend much of their time in the strategy screen that covers the entire map, directing ships to certain regions and searching for ways to attack the enemy. If found, players can zoom in on specific quadrants of the map and begin naval combat, which is an entirely different beast than organizing units. Here, players will search for the enemy ships using radar and sonar as they try to avoid getting blasted at the same time.
There is a lot of juggling between known and unknown information, but thankfully there is automation of movement and firing to help alleviate some of the stress. This is by far the most extensive title of the three, and even with the tutorial it can take a while just to get the hang of the controls. Once mastered, however, the seas are conquerable.
From SeaWars came the birth of the second game, Draw, a trippy effect simulation. Becam mentions that this game ‘believes’ itself to still be SeaWars, but it has been repurposed to allow for fantastical effects. Once in game, players can use the toggles on the right side to alter the effects of the ‘torpedo shots’, changing the colours and shapes and how they explode from where the player clicks.
It’s a lot of fun to make intricate designs, seeing the physics and logic at work as it creates fireworks across a blank canvas. There is not much else to ‘do’ outside of this, but it is still really exciting to see a repurposed aspect of another game.
Finally we have the oldest of the three titles. Similar was launched back in 2006. The goal is to click on matching square colours to make them disappear, slowly lowering the ‘brick wall’ to reveal the photo behind it. More points are given to players that can find large groupings of colours, as opposed to the measly 1 that is given for removing a pair of blocks. It’s a small and light game, aimed at just being relaxing and simple.
What’s more interesting to me is its complete usage of the Java graphics system, which did have its drawbacks but still was able to package together something like this. If you like matching colours together and lovely background shots, this is the game of the three for you.
All in all, these three titles come together to highlight just how robust Java was back when people actually used it as a game engine. It had many faults, but the ideas and execution were there — plus it was one of the only ways we could play online games if Flash was not to our liking. All of the code here is released under the MIT license, which means that anyone that wants to see how games from the mid 2000s were made and wants to mod can go right ahead and have fun. Good luck!
Hope’s Peak is a… well, narrative game, created by Kalle MacDonald (KalleMacD) of Canada. Players will be transported to a wild, wild west location known only as Hope’s Peak and listen to the tales of a nameless stranger, hopefully to gain some information about the place.
There’s no way around this; Hope’s Peak is actively difficult to explain. Players are given a snippet of worldbuilding in the form of a paragraph, centralized around a specific word that they chose from the previous screen. Once the reading is completed, they can select one of three new prompts, and a new paragraph will appear related to that term. Thus the game moves forward in this fashion, paragraph after paragraph until five have passed and an ‘ending’ has been reached —no more prompts are given, only an end button. This can happen early depending on a few trigger prompts that lead to the player’s early demise, but that’s the strange part; the player is not the one ‘dying’, it is the story that is being told to them.
Each paragraph is told in a way that disconnects it from the others, yet builds on the world that has been drafted; a wild land full of lawlessness and wistfulness, where the tales are simple and to the point. The prompts give only a hint as to what the story could be about, but never lie. Once the player reaches the end, a restart of the game will give three prompts that may be different, altering the order of the story that has been given to change how the player views the mysteries of the landscape. Starting with the same prompt won’t give the same three that it did the last time, so the player will see a new ‘story’ as they go.
This makes Hope’s Peak almost an avant-garde narrative, for there is no concrete ‘story’ that is told. The paragraphs give clues as to the land and its inhabitants, but unless you painstakingly go through every option there is always a chance that something may elude you. The land is open to your mind, yet every word seems to drift on the wind until the paragraph comes to an end, joining the rest of the west out on the plains. Does it make sense? I’m not sure, but it is an experience that is hard to forget. If you like narratives that don’t ‘explain’ themselves and want to experience the mysticism that the Wild West can give without being there physically, give this a shot.
