DogDay: My thoughts on a very old game.

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Byzantine, Oct 18, 2014.

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  1. Byzantine

    Byzantine Member

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    As with most people whose childhood revolved around video games, there were inevitably those few vague titles that, for one reason or another, were heavily imprinted on me from a very young age. One such game was DogDay (also known by its Japanese title, Curiosity Kills The Cat?), an ancient point and click adventure game (proudly made in Australia) that crawled out from the primordial ooze of the nineties' independent games industry, before being almost entirely forgotten. With the game's development team, Asylum, having faded into complete obscurity, the memory of DogDay is essentially kept alive nowadays by die hard gamers and online reviews written by people with nothing better to do on a Friday night. This is intended to be one of the latter.

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    The premise is fairly easy to digest; set in a world with anthropomorphic dogs in place of humans, the run down city you find yourself trapped in suffers to no end under the brutal tyranny of a man who calls himself Chegga, an oppressive bully who takes great pains to ensure that the extent of his cruelty is fully understood by his citizens. He readily advocates the neutering of young children (to what end, I have no idea), has absolute control of the city's media, elects only his most trusted and loyal friends (a polite term for henchmen) to “serve” the city, and ensures that anyone who challenges his authority is made a battered and bloodied example of, using his corrupt police force to capture, imprison, and torture any stray dog who breaches the city's curfews. Needless to say, Chegga is not the most pleasant of fellows, and the city is slowly dying under his heel.

    Who you are, as the player, isn’t given that clear an explanation during the beginning of the game; judging by the events that gradually unfold as you play, however, it becomes increasingly apparent that you're a reluctant volunteer for a resistance group known as C.A.T.S. (or, the Coalition Against Totalitarian Society), who have promised you the necessary funds required to escape from the city through its outrageously priced subway service (which is presumably made so by Chegga to ensure that few are able to leave his despotic government), should you successfully obtain evidence of Chegga's corrupt dealings. Although this arrangement smacks of blackmail, your character grudgingly agrees to the revolutionaries' terms.

    In the game’s introduction, you find yourself surviving an attempt on your life at the hands (or paws, rather) of Chegga's goons, who have (only moments ago) tried to throw you off from the edge of the world (literally). Keeping alive by clinging desperately to a protruding steel fibre, you slowly clamber back into the lands of the living, and your quest to see Chegga displaced becomes far more intense, and far more personal, thereafter.

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAfzyl00rIs[/youtube]

    And so, the game begins.

    The atmosphere of the game's gritty urban setting is, for its age, very rich, and is able to convey a great deal in spite of its simplicity; as you navigate throughout the city, the graffiti, soup kitchens, neglected constructions, filthy alleyways, and abandoned buildings all come together, visually, to illustrate the extent of Chegga's abundant disregard for his people. It's not a pretty sight, and gives you more cause to ensure that he is usurped before the day's through. It's a nice touch that most of the houses you see in the game look a lot like kennels, too.

    However, despite my personal enjoyment of the game's environment and storyline, there are plenty of bones to pick with DogDay's main gameplay, if you'll pardon the pun.

    As with so many other point and click based games, the majority of DogDay's gameplay consists of numerous puzzles and obstacles for the player to complete, which range from the fun and challenging (such as beating the high scores of classic arcade games) to the downright ridiculous. It's far from helpful, then, that the game has a complete lack of dialogue (not even subtitles, with exception of the horribly vague “clues” it provides), which makes certain points in the game difficult to overcome, and the means to solve the game's puzzles can become incredibly unclear at times, as a result. Its notorious sewer maze puzzle (through which you are are required to somehow navigate through a labyrinthine network of pipes), in particular, is very near impossible to solve without the assistance of a walkthrough guide to help you with every step of the way. Such points in the game would have profited a great deal from at least a small amount of monologue (let alone some explanation) so as to give the gamer some more clarity as to what they are meant to do in such obstacles. The use of dialogue between the player and the characters they encounter could have also contributed to a far more enriching experience in DogDay, whereby the player could have come across a diverse range of interesting personalities (such as those in the Monkey Island or Broken Sword franchises), all of whom had been impacted in some way by Chegga's rule. The homeless dog in the alleyway could have been a fantastic example of this, as would have been the hungry regulars at the soup kitchen. As it stands, however, most of the characters you'll come across might as well be the same person; they're essentially cardboard cut outs, in that regard, and only appear to exist as the ambience of the game, occasionally giving you random objects that are useful for solving certain puzzles later on. Perhaps the developers lacked the funds (or time, maybe) to hire voice actors for their creation, but nevertheless, it still leaves much to be desired, and you can't but feel that the game is somewhat hollow at times, as a result.

    Although the ending is very uninspiring, in which you finally board the subway train (having gone through all of the motions to get back at Chegga and see to your reward) and ride into the night (after which the game simply comes to an abrupt end), there remain some unanswered questions: will the evidence you procured be enough to see Chegga defeated, and if so, who's to say that C.A.T.S. won't replace the status quo with an equally tyrannical government of its own, or if they have had any previous ties with Chegga prior to some manner of schism? By allowing such queries to be conjured up by the player, DogDay's narrative is a great success, whether or not the developers had intended it to be as deep as some (like myself) have made it out to be.

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgDn5TsolfA[/youtube]

    Despite yielding a mixed critique among many of its players, the setting, narrative, and relative themes of DogDay more than had the capacity to have seen it carried out as a far better game than the subsequent end product, and despite the many issues players of the game will encounter (in terms of both the execution of certain aspects of the plot and the nature of some of its puzzles), it's still an enticing game worth at least one conjugal visit. Given its interesting portrayal of an inherently corrupt and nepotistic government, one which boasts of an iron grip on the media, DogDay is a surprisingly ageless game in that its given content hits fairly close to home, and has a habit of making you ponder certain themes in light of current events in the world today. In short, it's quite an interesting (albeit foggy) gaming experience, with a deeply admonitory shade that's hard not to notice, let alone enjoy.

    That, and the idea of dog people is pretty cool.
     
  2. Jojobobo

    Jojobobo Well-Known Member

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    No, I shall not pardon it!

    Sounds and looks like an interesting game. How do you get ahold of it to give it a go?

    Something I played recently with others is Titanic: Adventure Out of Time - a now DOSBOX game set unsurprisingly on the ship in the lead-up to it sinking. The game starts in WWII Britain with you as an ex-secret service agent who essentially has a "What if I wasn't such a fuck up and succeeded with my mission on the Titanic" moment which magically entitles him to a do-over. When you get there the story is focussed on unravelling the plot of a contingent of the Serbian Black Hand planning to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand and also foiling another group of Germans who have similar nefarious designs. The game is very cloak-and-dagger, with several opportunities for you to die if you're not careful (plus, if you take too long in getting what you need the ship will sink). It all culminates with the possibility of radically altering history - having multiple endings to reflect this (not all of them good).

    In terms of historical accuracy of the ship itself, allegedly the layout is such a faithful recreation that it has been used in Titanic documentaries (well, at least according to the font of knowledge - wikipedia). One of the main MacGuffins you're sent after initially was also on the ship's real manifest, which is also pretty cool.

    It's fully voice acted, using the actor's real faces (in-game vs real) for the characters - which looks startlingly good and still holds up today. The characters are all interesting, making part of the fun just walking around and talking to people. The puzzle solving is decent (with the right level of trickiness vs handholding), and there's often multiple paths to get different bits of information - giving it good replay value on top of the different endings. There's several mini-games dotted throughout (fencing, a fist-fight, poker) which, though unremarkable, help to break up the game by having it not just being monotonously point and click.

    Best of all, it's abandonware (or at least no one is sure who owns the rights and no one has stepped into claim them). The game can be found here to download under "offline" in several different languages (it also has a browser based flash version of the game again in multiple languages - but for me it didn't work) and the corresponding DOSBOX front end can be found here - instructions of how to install are on the former website. That DOSBOX front end works on both mac and windows with the appropriate install (I had some issues initially with making the game fullscreen - doing so would make it CTD, but only because I was being an idiot; all the settings are easily changeable in the front end itself. Saving and loading works just fine, there was one other crash I had but mostly it seems stable). The DOSBOX front end website also offers things like Arena and Daggerfall for free (Bethesda gave it's blessing) and loads of other games too.

    There's let's plays of the game on youtube, I've been told there's one of two british people getting progressively more drunk as they play which is supposed to be funny in a loutish way (though I've not actually watched it so don't blame me if it's shit). There's also a similar game set in the Wild West called Dust made by the same company, but I couldn't get ahold of it when I tried about a month ago.

    Ultimately, if you can't tell what I'm getting at here, you should all play it - or feel very bad about yourselves.
     
  3. Byzantine

    Byzantine Member

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    Jojobobo, after half an hour of scouring the Internet, I'm sorry to say that I can't provide a single link to any working download of DogDay, which is more than a little frustrating on account of the fact that I was able to do so only a year or two ago. As it stands, however, the links have all but expired. That's how obscure the damn game is! It might pop back up later on in the future, but I won't hold my breath for it to happen any time soon. I'm sorry for the inconvenience; the elusive playthroughs on YouTube might have to suffice, in the meantime.

    As for this Titantic adventure you've mentioned, it sounds like a great gaming experience, given your descriptions and praise of it. That, and the majority of the online reviews I've just looked over are equally as positive about it. When time permits, I'll definitely have to play it. Thanks for the prescription, friend. I certainly appreciate a fellow purveyor of vintage games.
     
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