there is something very special and precious to me about certain objects. PlayStation 2 platformers of an excessive jank and sparseness. usually European.
in my collection i’ve now completed three over a series of about 7 years.
they are Evil Twin: Cyprien’s Chronicles, Gift, and now Portal Runner.
Portal Runner is a game about Toys, a la, any popular kid’s fantasy in which playthings come to life, they live in a shop where portals appear in the boxes of playsets. Like the dinosaur set, or the ufo set.
An evil sex woman called Brigitte runs the portal worlds, she is accompanied by a big nasty robot and wants very much to marry and then fuck Sarge (green army man), who the game is a spin off of the series starring.
The game is about Vikki, who is a journalist, friend of Sarge, and lover, who gets waylayed by Brigitte, sent to Dinosaur world by the portals. In the meantime, the lonely Brigitte plans to drug Sarge with a ‘love potion’ and marry him.
Thankfully, Vikki has two weapons, her bow which she collects arrows for around the worlds and her companion lion Leo, whom she meets in the portal cave she is lured into by Robot.
Vikki and Leo kill dinosaurs, knights, aliens and various other sundry beings and collect gems, keystones and a variety of arrows, as they traverse the portal worlds.
If you move the camera away from being centred on Vikki’s back, movement becomes a hazardous messy thing. But keep it precise and oriented and you can traverse the numerous puzzles of navigation well enough. With care and effort, Vikki and Leo’s bodies can be maneuvered through toy worlds. Sometimes you ride Leo, sometimes he has to sit. To stay.
Many times you encounter a puzzle that needs a special type of arrow to make something happen. An explosion, lightning, ice. Equally often you encounter a platform that is just too far away for Vikki’s jump, and half the time it’s ledge-grabbing to save face.
In between, there are impeccably done ps2 cutscenes, well voice acted to match what I will call a tone of “sincerely held belief in a project that holds little to no beauty”
i think in fact beauty is excised. quite perfectly. and that’s what i adore and what makes it beautiful. as in, we’re talking the romantic idea of visual art as loaded with ‘meaning’ through capturing an image that conveys the emotional association with something ‘worth seeing’ for its ability to provoke strong emotional reaction. things i would associate both with landscape painting for instance, as well as the films of Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Bullet Ballet, etc.) Art that is ecstatic about life.
A game like Portal Runner is the antithesis of artistic ecstacy, reflects back at you ‘ugliness’ not in a moral sense, but in a mutual agreement between you both that you aren’t going to take it too seriously. it’s that that opens the space for it to be beautiful. You and the game share in moments that are outside of aesthetic expectation and that therefore become special, unexpected, performative in terms of representing not only how people react to each other and their environments. a room of giant bouncy mushrooms that you must navigate carefully which send you into a druggy nightclub haze as you bounce on them, dance music starts up… until you fall off on the way to collect the fire arrow you need at the top of the cave and have to start again.
many other moments capture i think for me what is good about videogames, and this microgenre specifically, which is joyous absurdity. mismatches and calamity that bring me happiness.
expressed throughout the ongoing series of streams by Socpens: Scorpy’s Beautiful Discs a similar desire, to find beauty in the absurd and overwhelming and unintentional results of designing a videogame. things that often come, it feels, from unique combinations of vision and application. of a film studio wanting to have developed something, like a movie tie-in game, and then the people working on it having to then find a way to make the movie into a game. and so on.
the ps2 is the console i am most familiar with, and so am trained to notice in its library these games. but they exist all over of course.
it’s abject. the end of the end of a product genre where all the desire going into it becomes loose and stringy. this end of capitalism is a place of risk, for investors, for those who work on products and depending on the product those who buy it. with games that risk space, of lost investment, leaves behind playgrounds with strange angles.
all artistic production is emulation, and objects created out of a capitalist push, that seem to lose any other function, but fail at selling their own ideas, then become a kind of abject playground, that is itself beautiful.
GlitchOut 