30 Day Video Game Meme Day 9 - Sob story.
Time to catch these up good and proper. First up the question of "What is your saddest game moment."
I can think of only one time when a game has good and properly made me cry, and now reflecting on it I think it's kind of... well corny. Sadness, like romance, seems to be one of those things that just isn't handled well by games. To explain this one without anyone laughing at me I think I just need to set a picture here.
It's 1998, a fairly golden year for gaming. You're all of ten, still a fairly novice gamer and starting to branch out your tastes from platformers and puzzle games. Your parents aren't quite keen for you to play first person shooters and role playing games are still a bit complicated. So one day dad comes home with a fresh copy of Starcraft, it's a bit like that Warcraft game you liked watching him play with the funny orcs. But this time you want to play.
And it's stupidly hard. At any one time there's so much going on and you don't really know what you're doing. But there's all these cool aliens shooting at each other and space ships and you get to build these little cities and it's fairly squishy and gory and it's AWESOME. There's all these really awesome characters such as Jim Raynor and Zeratul but above all there's SARAH KERRIGAN. Unlike basically every female character in every game, she's this awesome ghost type soldier, your favourite unit, and she's kick-ass and not afraid to give lip to the guys. A strong female role model? How awesome!
So you start reading into her back story, all this dark and violent stuff. Seperated from her family at a young age, she's shuffled around between these cruel and twisted science experiments. New level of respect, she's had all these terrible things happen to her and she came out of it looking awesome. You just fall in absolute love with this character, every level she's in you use her to lead everyone else into battle. It's a struggle, sometimes you let Kerrigan down and lose, but if you keep trying then sometimes you can beat the levels. Fairly late into the Terran Campaign, there's a level called New Gettysburg. Part of it is scouting around with Raynor and Kerrigan, part of it base building, and then it's an endurance game, waiting out a time limit as you struggle to destroy wave after wave of Zerg.
It takes you all week to complete that level. But something is wrong. An endless hoard of Zerg comes out of the ground and wipes the base out when the timer finishes. It's the end of the level, you got your victory. AND THEN THIS FUCKING HAPPENS.
This shows what happens in the first Starcraft. And then a re-imagined cut-scene for Starcraft 2. The latter of which is a real kick in the balls, I'll admit even after all these years this brought tears to my eyes. It's just Kerrigan's desperation, followed by that chilling realisation she's surrounded and abandoned, then that utter hopelessness as she just gives up. Basically Kerrigan is left to die at the hands of the Zerg. Raynor is shattered as he is forced to betray the woman he loves. And then it gets worse.
The Zerg don't kill her. Under orders of the Cerebrate she is captured and mutated inside a chrysalis. There's no telling what excruciating pain she's going through. On hearing the news Raynor mounts rescue attempt after rescue attempt to save her. Each failure making him more and more desperate to save her on time. But then it's too late. Kerrigan has turned into something terrifying.
Has become
Infested Kerrigan is crazed, ruthless, power hungry and basically every kind of puppy kicking evil that goes bump in the night. She takes delight in taunting Raynor while killing his soldiers with total ease and eventually becomes champion of the Zerg, the destructive and powerful "Queen of Blades". And it was devastating, at the time I couldn't think of anything worse, destroyed beyond recognition but still living, going after friends and lovers and destroying them completely. I sort of went through the same emotions as Raynor did in the story. Hoping there was some sliver of the awesome Kerrigan struggling with the monster, which each of her attrocities losing hope. The only reason I struggled on with Starcraft and then the Broodwar expansion afterwards was because I held onto the hope that something could be done to save Kerrigan.
And man that was hard. Not just because I sucked completely at RTS (and still do to this day), but because of zerg missions where instead of fighting against Kerrigan you were the one guiding her. She would laugh at the despair of Raynor and then you, as the player, would click on her and watch her destroy him that much further. It was chilling, nauseating. It took me the better part of a year to get through the whole thing, going through long periods of simply not being able to play this game because it was just so chilling. And then no pay off. The Zerg are defeated, the universe is saved by huge sacrifice and there's nothing to be seen or heard from Kerrigan.
I simply can not think of another game that affected me so emotionally. While today I sort of recognise that it was fairly cliche and hammed up, that was the first time I had experienced that kind of story. And it happened to one of my favourite characters. I was ten.
I've heard that there's a cliffhanger at the end of Starcraft 2, that Raynor is finally able to capture and purify Kerrigan of the Zerg infestation through this ancient Protoss temple. I don't know how I feel about that. In a way it's the victory I always wanted in the series. However I guess I came to grips with this tragic story and it's hollow and bitter conclusion. Almost as though it compromises what made Starcraft such a powerful story to me back then.
This is still easily, and without doubt, the saddest moment in any game for me.
I can think of only one time when a game has good and properly made me cry, and now reflecting on it I think it's kind of... well corny. Sadness, like romance, seems to be one of those things that just isn't handled well by games. To explain this one without anyone laughing at me I think I just need to set a picture here.
It's 1998, a fairly golden year for gaming. You're all of ten, still a fairly novice gamer and starting to branch out your tastes from platformers and puzzle games. Your parents aren't quite keen for you to play first person shooters and role playing games are still a bit complicated. So one day dad comes home with a fresh copy of Starcraft, it's a bit like that Warcraft game you liked watching him play with the funny orcs. But this time you want to play.
And it's stupidly hard. At any one time there's so much going on and you don't really know what you're doing. But there's all these cool aliens shooting at each other and space ships and you get to build these little cities and it's fairly squishy and gory and it's AWESOME. There's all these really awesome characters such as Jim Raynor and Zeratul but above all there's SARAH KERRIGAN. Unlike basically every female character in every game, she's this awesome ghost type soldier, your favourite unit, and she's kick-ass and not afraid to give lip to the guys. A strong female role model? How awesome!
So you start reading into her back story, all this dark and violent stuff. Seperated from her family at a young age, she's shuffled around between these cruel and twisted science experiments. New level of respect, she's had all these terrible things happen to her and she came out of it looking awesome. You just fall in absolute love with this character, every level she's in you use her to lead everyone else into battle. It's a struggle, sometimes you let Kerrigan down and lose, but if you keep trying then sometimes you can beat the levels. Fairly late into the Terran Campaign, there's a level called New Gettysburg. Part of it is scouting around with Raynor and Kerrigan, part of it base building, and then it's an endurance game, waiting out a time limit as you struggle to destroy wave after wave of Zerg.
It takes you all week to complete that level. But something is wrong. An endless hoard of Zerg comes out of the ground and wipes the base out when the timer finishes. It's the end of the level, you got your victory. AND THEN THIS FUCKING HAPPENS.
Click to viewThis shows what happens in the first Starcraft. And then a re-imagined cut-scene for Starcraft 2. The latter of which is a real kick in the balls, I'll admit even after all these years this brought tears to my eyes. It's just Kerrigan's desperation, followed by that chilling realisation she's surrounded and abandoned, then that utter hopelessness as she just gives up. Basically Kerrigan is left to die at the hands of the Zerg. Raynor is shattered as he is forced to betray the woman he loves. And then it gets worse.
The Zerg don't kill her. Under orders of the Cerebrate she is captured and mutated inside a chrysalis. There's no telling what excruciating pain she's going through. On hearing the news Raynor mounts rescue attempt after rescue attempt to save her. Each failure making him more and more desperate to save her on time. But then it's too late. Kerrigan has turned into something terrifying.
Has become
Infested Kerrigan is crazed, ruthless, power hungry and basically every kind of puppy kicking evil that goes bump in the night. She takes delight in taunting Raynor while killing his soldiers with total ease and eventually becomes champion of the Zerg, the destructive and powerful "Queen of Blades". And it was devastating, at the time I couldn't think of anything worse, destroyed beyond recognition but still living, going after friends and lovers and destroying them completely. I sort of went through the same emotions as Raynor did in the story. Hoping there was some sliver of the awesome Kerrigan struggling with the monster, which each of her attrocities losing hope. The only reason I struggled on with Starcraft and then the Broodwar expansion afterwards was because I held onto the hope that something could be done to save Kerrigan.
And man that was hard. Not just because I sucked completely at RTS (and still do to this day), but because of zerg missions where instead of fighting against Kerrigan you were the one guiding her. She would laugh at the despair of Raynor and then you, as the player, would click on her and watch her destroy him that much further. It was chilling, nauseating. It took me the better part of a year to get through the whole thing, going through long periods of simply not being able to play this game because it was just so chilling. And then no pay off. The Zerg are defeated, the universe is saved by huge sacrifice and there's nothing to be seen or heard from Kerrigan.
I simply can not think of another game that affected me so emotionally. While today I sort of recognise that it was fairly cliche and hammed up, that was the first time I had experienced that kind of story. And it happened to one of my favourite characters. I was ten.
I've heard that there's a cliffhanger at the end of Starcraft 2, that Raynor is finally able to capture and purify Kerrigan of the Zerg infestation through this ancient Protoss temple. I don't know how I feel about that. In a way it's the victory I always wanted in the series. However I guess I came to grips with this tragic story and it's hollow and bitter conclusion. Almost as though it compromises what made Starcraft such a powerful story to me back then.
This is still easily, and without doubt, the saddest moment in any game for me.