Game: Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Crystal Dynamics, 1996, PSXBeer: Elliot's Phoned Home, 16 fl. oz., 5.1% abv
# of beers consumed during play: 2
Level Reached: 7th or 8th dungeon
Level of Intoxication: Buzzed
Game
*Note: My apologies for the roughshod screen captures. This review was made with an original copy of the game running on an old PS1 and displayed on a CRT television. If you can't appreciate how old-school that is, you need to go back to your Xbone and wait for a Day 1 patch to finish downloading. Now, on with the review.
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain is made by a little studio called Silicon Knights and published-slash-helped-along by Crystal Dynamics. While Crystal Dynamics is probably best known for their Gex games, Silicon Knights is well known for entirely different reasons. In addition to being the developers behind the excellent Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem for Gamecube, they are also quite well known for a less illustrious reason; becoming the studio responsible for one of the highest profile intellectual property cases in recent memory. Long story short, they tried to pass someone else's code off as their own and got caught. All unsold copies of the game were ordered by the court to be recalled and destroyed, and damages in excess of 4 million dollars were awarded to the copyright holders, Epic Games (makers of the Unreal and Gears of War franchises, not that those are popular or anything). After that, Silicon Knights got sued into oblivion, eventually filing bankruptcy and dissolving into yet another industry epitaph, which goes to show two things: one, that if you steal someone else's hard work, you shouldn't try to sue them for breach of contract (yes, they actually tried to do that, which is what started the whole ordeal), and two, if you steal someone else's hard work, you shouldn't try to sue them for breach of contract.
Gameplay
Barring Silicon Knights' spectacularly poor business practices, they were actually a pretty talented group of people, as evidenced by their work on Blood Omen, which gained enough acclaim to justify several sequels. We'll stop mercifully short of speculating why all the sequels were handled by development teams other than Silicon Knights and just get right to the gameplay of Blood Omen. In the game, you play as the titular Kain, who is slain by unknown assassins and returns to wreak vengeance as a sword-wielding, shape-shifting, spell-casting vampire. The game is presented with an overhead perspective, with each area broken into several screens. Each screen is essentially a large 2D map that will scroll around as the player explores, and moving between screens will load a new area, replete with new challenges, new enemies, and new opportunities. If you're having a tough time visualizing that aesthetic, just think back to the 2D Zelda games, only with infinitely more murder and evisceration. As you battle through new dungeons, towns, and other creepy places you would expect a vampire hellbent on revenge to go, you'll pick up new spells, powerups, weapons, and animal forms. While the weapons and spells will make it much easier to tear adversaries limb from limb, the different critters you can morph into will unlock new areas and grant access to hidden upgrades. In later portions of the game, you'll want to have all the extra magic glyphs and life-enhancing vials you can find, as the enemies late in the game get pretty nasty. The gameworld is pretty huge, and so one of the earliest forms you'll earn is a bat, which allows you to fast travel to previously visited shrines dotting the landscape. Other forms include a mist for seeping through bars and--since human vampires are apparently too good for hopping--a wolf, which is able to cross over hazards, and jump up and down short cliffs.
The platforming is half the fun of this game, especially in later levels, where you'll have to integrate spells, shape-shifting, puzzle-solving and combat in complex combinations to reach new areas. The hack and slash element, while taking a bit of time to get used to, is fun and satisfying, getting progressively more challenging as new and varied enemies appear. Once you acclimate to the warm up time inherent to the animation, you'll find yourself performing fluid, visceral combos on opponents only to stop short to feed on their blood. In what is perhaps the most unintentionally comical moment in an otherwise dark, brooding game; the act of feeding consists of you freezing in place, stretching your arm toward the target, and literally summoning the blood into your waiting maw. This routinely occurs at a fairly significant distance from your target, meaning crayon-red streams will cross your screen at frequent intervals, accompanied by--and listen to it yourself if you think I'm exaggerating--the sound of a fat kid drinking Kool-Aid off the floor with a straw. As disingenuous as this is with the tone of the rest of the game, it does serve a purpose as a streamlining game mechanic, making your murderous trek across the countryside a little more...ahem, fluid. Being a vampire, you will have to endure this sound frequently seeing as how your blood level drops steadily, not just from attacks, but slowly over time as well. The only way to stay healthy is to literally beckon the stuff from victims like the Pied Piper of Nope.
In your travels, you will see a fair number of dungeons, which will hold many interesting treats for you, including but not limited to human snacks chained to the wall, wailing to be saved. Unfortunately, you will likely have to do a bit of stabbing and thinking to get to all the game has to offer. The puzzles mainly manifest in button and obstacle form, often incorporating environmental hazards or exploiting a shape-shift ability. It's doubtful too many of the puzzles will stump anyone but the most drooliest of droolers, but there are a couple head-scratchers in there. As an aside, it truly is amazing how many rocks the average revenge-driven vampire pushes out of the way, I'm willing to bet the forest service hires them during the rainy season. When your vampire buddy isn't shoving boulders out of the way, he's probably pushing buttons and unlocking doors, meaning he'd make a pretty badass hotel bellhop as well. He has a spell that turns the flesh of poor tippers into lumpy cake batter. The point being that Kain the vampire is capable of a wide range of actions, giving the game variety and a freedom of engagement that many similar games lack. Unfortunately, that's not to say the game is perfect, or even near perfect, as there are a number of small to middling issues that when taken as a whole bring Kain and his single-minded quest for respite down a couple pegs.
The first thing you're bound to notice is the camera as you move around in-game. Every time you change direction, the camera frantically plays catch-up, trying desperately to get out in front of you so you can see any coming enemies or obstacles. During actual gameplay, due to the fact that you'll find yourself changing direction frequently to line up with enemies, doorways, treasures, buttons, and other whatnots, this creates an effect akin to going outside for a smoke after drinking heavily, where your visual acuity is reduced to an underwater slide show. That the view jerks with every single movement is only made worse by the fact that despite Kain being a magic-wielding immortal, he's still a slave to eight-way control schemes. The game designers didn't provide any animation frames or art assets for anything but the "big 8" compass directions, so each time you change directions, in addition to playing pinball with your vision, the game makes Kain's sprite look cheap and unrealistic. In a similar vein, combat doesn't click like you would imagine it should. Hit boxes aren't where you would expect them to be, and are at times inconsistent depending on how the attackers are facing each other. Sometimes you'll score a hit while standing well outside the graphical arc of your weapon, and others, you'll have to basically be riding your foe piggyback before your sword will register a strike. The combat is further frustrated by lengthy animation cycles. After pressing the attack button, you'll wait as Kain winds up into a very detailed swing animation, which is not only jarring next to the aforementioned janky movement animation, but slows the timing of combat moves, and requires a fair bit of practice before attacking becomes predictable enough to carry out with any degree of confidence. Also prevalent in this game, and which can be attributed as a hallmark of poor game design for the era is the fact that the game gives you no indication on where you should go. For the size of the game in addition to the freedom to visit previously explored areas, there is no objective marker or progress log to help you find your way in the game. This can be particularly crippling if you have a habit of picking up another game, playing that one for a while and then trying to come back to this one...chances are, you'll stand in a town you don't remember arriving at, looking at a nearby pathway and struggling to remember if you just came from there or if you're supposed to go that way to continue.
Finally, and this will be my last complaint until the next one, I swear...the overall interface of this game reeks of complacency on the part of the designer. In remaining consistent with inconsistency, some elements are overly fancy (such as the pause menu, where you choose weapon, magic, and inventory items), while others are mysteriously sparse and utilitarian (the options menu springs to mind). The pause menu has little pre-rendered spinning objects for swords, spells and the like that light up when selected, and voice-overs for all the selectable items, which can get kind of laughable at times. On the other hand, the pause menu is a poorly laid out series of boxes, containing plain text, and selecting them is followed by a lazily sampled click noise and exasperating wait times while data is loaded from the CD. While all of this sounds like nit-picking on the smallest of details, it is precisely these small details and their inability to follow a cohesive design language that reduce the polish of the game and turn large portions of it into a game version of mad libs. It's sad really, because while playing, you can literally see the hard lines between the areas that were given loving care and plenty of development money, and the ones that were outright neglected or rushed to meet certification. Many times they stand right next to one another which goes a long way toward breaking any suspension of disbelief.
Graphics/Sound
The graphics are practically a case study in the ratio between money invested and quality of work produced. As mentioned above, some assets are lovingly crafted and highly detailed, such as the various fighting animations. Others, such as certain enemies, set pieces, and static screens, were cobbled together by blind lobotomy patients. While it is impressive that such physically and mentally crippled people can even contribute to the design of a game, it doesn't help the overall scope of the finished product. The source-based lighting is primitive, but effective, and all the NPCs are the very definition of cookie-cutter sword fodder. That being said, the game's atmosphere is wonderfully dark, and dungeons especially seemed to get most of the attention in the dev cycle. It's important to remember that at the time this game was released, graphical expectations--particularly 2D graphics in the burgeoning world of polygonal 3D--weren't all that high, and what Blood Omen offered was better than most. Still, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the FMV sequences, which were all rendered in the primitive standards of CGI back then. Of course, back in the day, full motion CG cutscenes were a particular treat, and were expected during the advent of the relatively new CD medium. Many games (including this one) even had a theater mode so you could sit and stare at the godawful computer graphics of the day, so in that regard, it was the stone wash jeans of the video game world. We just didn't know how lame we were at the time.
Oh yes...the sound. It seems as though in many games, the sound is neglected and forgotten like an unwanted child. In Blood Omen, while the treatment of the auditory cues aren't all bad, they do frequently dip into Harry Potter-esque "get back under the stairs before we poison your dog food" levels of abuse. One of the most glaring examples of this is Kain's cry of "VAE VICTIS!!!!" which you are guaranteed to hear each and every time you complete an attack combo. Since swinging a sword factors heavily into the whole game thing, you are going to hear the same voice sample so many times, you may find yourself yearning for an activity with a bit less repetition such as grading standardized test answer cards by hand or possibly counting grains of sand in the Sahara. For those out there who either didn't take Latin in school, or do not have Google, "vae victis" translates as "woe to the vanquished", which is a cool thing to say when you run a sword through someone's face the first twenty times. After that, it would be welcome to have some new catch phrases. I for one would vote for "Take a bath, hippie!" Other than the nauseating repetition, the voice samples in the game are good approaching great. Kain's voice actor, Simon Templeman has been at this quite a long time, appearing in a wide variety of projects ranging from live action television and movies, to voice work on popular cartoons and high-profile game projects. His delivery of the at-times clumsily written dialogue in Blood Omen showcases his talent and love for his job. For the curious, his most recently finished project is the very well received Dragon Age: Inquisition, proving he's found a very comfortable place in the industry. Good for him. But unfortunately, Simon's performance is the high-point of Blood Omen's sound. Most everything else, including the other vocal performances, the music, the sound effects, and anything else that travels from the game to your ears reeks of complacency, from the rank-and-file phoned in performances of the supporting characters, to the single, uninspired dirge that follows the entire game around, through dungeons, towns and boss-fights. The sound effects are all pulled unceremoniously from stock sound libraries, and only serve to pin the design of the game to a single, disappointing dimension. More's the pity, as a bit more time on the graphics and sound could have made this game so much more than what it was.
Story
You play as Kain, an ambitious, entitled young nobleman who is murdered in the street by a bunch of thugs. Upon arriving in something that resembles hell, you are offered the opportunity to exact revenge on your butchers. Blindly accepting the offer, you are then granted everlasting unlife and thrust back into the world to whip some ass. Soon though, you find that you have been made a pawn in a larger game, and that your quest is trifling compared to what is truly at stake. Of course, this doesn't prevent you from annihilating anyone in your path before sucking their blood through the air like a British, sword wielding vacuum. Early on in the game, you find that the 9 pillars that hold the world of Nosgoth together are being corrupted. You are tasked by the specter of the balance guardian (voiced by Anna Gunn...yes...THAT Anna Gunn) to rout the corruption and restore Nosgoth to a happy place. Well, as happy a place as you can have when it's named Nosgoth...
The thing I truly like about Blood Omen's story is that it takes something familiar and adds elements of originality to it. Such a mix entices you into the world the designers have built and encourage you to look around. Not long after beginning the game, your impetus for reaching the next area becomes the desire to discover the motivations of the characters around you. As each corrupted pillar guardian is vanquished, you gain an ever-widening window into the dark underbelly of Nosgoth and the twisted machinations of the players that turn those hidden cogs. Soon, you realize that evil and good are more matters of perspective than hard and fast tenets, and as the final showdown looms, you'll begin to question your role in the greater picture. Few games outside full-blown RPGs are able to craft a compelling story of this caliber, which is another reason the shortcomings in the gameplay and art assets are so disheartening, you are left musing on what could have been.
Beer
Elliot's Phoned Home is somewhat difficult to categorize, it is one of those beers that sits alongside disgusting novelty offerings due to the eclectic artwork and unusual name on the can. It is one of those beers that 99% of the beer drinking populace will not even see as they reach for a sixer of something with infinitely more brand-name recognition such as Budweiser or Miller Lite. The spacy, woodcut-inspired theme that seems to warn of an impending alien abduction is difficult to rationalize with the consumption of beer, particularly when the distribution of the stuff is largely limited to East Texas, a locale not generally known for its avant garde taste in recreational beverages. The Cedar Creek Brewery, bravely located in East Texas, is serious about their offerings though, as a closer look at the can actually reveals not only a few paragraphs speaking to the brew process and resultant taste of this particular brewski, but also displays stats for IBU, Gravity, and Standard Reference metrics. For those unfamiliar, these numbers are hallmarks of beer aficionados, and are typically referenced by guys with outlandish beards who can tell you off the top of their heads the different varieties of hops and how they affect the fermentation process. To put it another way, Elliot's Phoned Home is trying very hard to let you know it isn't just another can of sour piss.Smell
Wow, there's so much citrus in this smell you can probably cure scurvy with it. This smells less like a beer and more like a serving of grapefruit juice, with a generous helping of grass clippings and soap to go with it. This being a pale ale, such an odor is not exactly surprising, but the boldness and almost single-note nature is rather unexpected. I'm not usually a fan of pales, or especially IPAs for that matter as their overly bold, excessively bitter taste and smell routinely put me off, and at first blush, this beer seems no different. I can't say I like the smell of this offering, no matter what the rest of the beer may hold, simply for the fact that the olfactory component so unabashedly reminds me of so many past pales and IPAs that I positively detested. Of course, if you wear argyle sweater vests, horn-rim glasses, and listen to bands no one has ever heard of, you might just fall in love with this beer by virtue of the scent alone, that is, if you can put your can of PBR down long enough to try it. I would heartily encourage it, as the hipster consumption of PBR has moved past irony, past non-irony, past ironic non-irony, and has settled into an uncomfortable and vehemently denied niche of mainstreamdom. Seriously, get a new beverage, and while you're at it, trade in your stupid 1950's vintage bicycle for a car and an attitude that isn't capable of descaling bathroom tile.
Taste
The smell doesn't lie, this beer tastes like some weird combination of heart-healthy breakfast juice and heart-unhealthy forget-your-troubles juice. The citrus mingles uncomfortably with the alcohol, much like an interracial couple at a Nazi family reunion. Fortunately, this discomfort is only pronounced in the first few sips, whereupon as your palate begins to acclimate to the beer, the taste begins to broaden into something tangy yet refreshing. The grassy notes show up in the aftertaste, but keep mostly to themselves and only encourage further sips. There is certainly a bitterness, but not quite as bitter as the smell would suggest, nor as obtrusive as most of the other pale ales I've tried. There is a balance of bitterness and clean finish that few other beers have been able to replicate, and the taste is such that after the first few "scorched earth" sips one takes, I am wholly unafraid of filling my entire mouth with this stuff. Don't misunderstand now, this is certainly no Guinness (and such interpretations will be met with swift and terrible retribution), but this beer is the first pale ale that has successfully budged me from my stout love of stouts. That alone is worthy of an appreciative golf-clap.
Intoxication
This beer isn't super strong--truly, I've had some real tongue-picklers in my day--but it does come with a hard-earned 5.1 percent alcohol content. Thus far, I've seen these offered in 4 packs, and in my experience, 4 pints of any alcohol will be enough to achieve a fair level of intoxication, unless the beer in question is O'Doul's. This beer is interesting however in that as I drink it, I can feel it spread in my frontal lobe just as much as I can feel it spread in my gut, and before long, my limbs take on a rubbery quality that longtime alcoholics will recognize as "that feeling I've been waiting my entire workday for". The whirlies are controlled but prominent, and promise an entertaining loss of coordination before any degradation of inhibition is experienced. In practice, this means that you'll knock over that hot girl's drink long before your pickup lines will become an unintelligible mish-mash of vowels, and your success in getting her number will depend mostly on whether you locked your vintage Roadmaster Luxury Liner outside, or pulled your car into a parking spot like a normal person. In case you're wondering where I got the reference for the Roadmaster bicycle, I typed "hipster bikes" into Google and spent an hour hating the human race. Games 'N Beer: pigeonholing entire sub-cultures for your entertainment.
Feel
While most of my review of this beer has been quite positive, I'm afraid all good things must come to an end. While the simple act of drinking this beer isn't painful or unpleasant, aside from a pronounced fizziness in the mouth, the end result of drinking carries with it a distinct discomfort. Once in the stomach, this drink seems to expand and simultaneously gain mass, making me feel full and heavy. It also delivers a sharpness that I can only imagine stems from the citrusy bitterness. All at once, I begin to feel that any sudden moves may endanger my suddenly fragile constitution, and that any vigorous motion will anger the ticking timebomb in my stomach and create a wholly embarrassing scenario, complete with undesired explosiveness. While this feeling will pass eventually, if it comes on during a night of bar-hopping, it has the potential to either cut a night short, or provide video documentation that your friends will gleefully refer to in future conversations. If at any time, someone suggests a jumping-jack competition and you have just downed a few servings of this, the most prudent move would be to slip out the back door and begin working on a story about being kidnapped by the Mexican drug cartel. It will be infinitely preferable to becoming an impromptu beer geyser in front of a bunch of strangers with cell-phone cameras.
The Matchup
So here we are faced with a game that had a lot going for it despite all of its unfortunate shortcomings, and a beer that despite all of its clear advantages, is likely doomed to be a passing footnote due to its unusual packaging. Both products attempt to make the most of what they have with mixed results, and both products have a surprising appeal, despite initial impressions. The big difference is that one was made with love and care throughout, and the other was made with a mix of love and cold, corporate disregard. Still, each property is fun and worth experiencing in its own right, in spite of any rough edges one may encounter. In concert with one another, those rough edges almost (but not quite) cancel each other out and make for an unexpectedly good time.
Cheers/Game on.