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I got the GADGET virus.

Hello!

This is Anita☆ speaking.

This is the second blog post on GAMERA. I've been having some stressful weeks, but everything is calmer now so I managed to sit down and write for a bit. Fer is preparing my meal for tomorrow as I type this, which I'm super thankful for. We will then continue our separate playthroughs of Boku no Natsuyasumi 2, which we thought would be more fun than having a shared save, since it's one of those games where sharing your findings with others really elevates the experience, in my opinion. If you're interested in playing it, here's the English patch we're using. If you'd like to play the first game in the series (which I wholly recommend!!!) and can read Spanish, you're also in luck! The Spanish patch's just released. I was a tester of this patch and I'm eternally grateful to everyone in the project for letting me be a part of it.

On the topic of sharing game experiences with others, it's actually always been difficult for me to do, let's say, ~personally~. I've always found it difficult to connect with others in terms of tastes and hobbies and I'm also not one to reach out to others, so I've always been a bit lonely in that regard. I have the gamelog, but I struggle with that too, because what started as notes for myself became something that other people read. I don't know how to address the person reading it, I don't know how much information they already have about what I'm talking about, and it's not like you can personally connect with anyone that way because it's completely one-way communication. But sometimes, when you have the chance to show something you simply find interesting to a loved one you can even reconnect with said thing in a completely unexpected manner. This is currently happening to me with the GADGET multimedia project created by Haruhiko Shono and developed by Synergy, Inc.

I actually first played GADGET: Invention, Travel & Adventure three years ago, and I really enjoyed it, but somehow a better impression of Alice and L-ZONE stuck with me. However, I saw Fer playing it intermittently between naps and something clicked on my brain. After he finished it, I immediately booted up its 1997 remake, Past as Future, and this time he was the one who watched the other play.

I didn't love this remake, however. The character designs worked better in the more rudimentary CGI of its predecessor, and the game as a whole was both ways more 'sanitized' and less cryptic. But even after this negative comparison there is something so special about the game's world and most importantly, its narrative. What seems like the standard walking sim/Myst-style (but linear) CD-ROM fare is so unique in its narrative design that, like with many other games, I bothers me to see it relegated as a 'vibes', 'atmosphere' buzzwords type of game. And it's so crazy to me that this game was SO huge back in the day, it's been named as an inspiration by Guillermo del Toro and even by Half-Life's head writer. It was the game that made David Lynch choose Synergy as the developer for his game, Woodcutters from Fiery Ships! And yet, it seems like it's been lost to time and barely anyone remembers it, and who does takes it as a 'cult' videogame. But something I actually felt super genius about making the connection in my brain was with BioShock, which is still praised to this day for a narrative gimmick that, indeed, was already done by Shono & co some 15 years earlier. Needless to say, I Google'd this query and found an article making this same comparison, so I stopped feeling as smart after realizing I don't have a single original idea in my mind, but at least it was a wonderful read.

The GADGET virus (which Fer caught as well) got us so bad we also watched Gadget Trips/Mindscapes, a full-length 3DCG film based on the game, which actually predates Toy Story by a few months. Trips/Mindscapes felt more like a collage of GADGET imagery than a fully "narrative" movie like Pixar's, so that little fact made me wonder if something like, say, a recorded playthrough or cutscene compilation of a 3D game (which this isn't) could also count as a film, and in if maybe such thing already existed and was The First, and in that maybe The Firsts are actually not important at all. But it's still interesting to think about an alternative timeline where this was lauded as the first full-length 3D animation film and was taught in art school and even more people got inspired by it directly instead of residually. A timeline one can only dream of, sadly :(

We also acquired physical copies of the two games, which were surprisingly cheap in their big box variants. There was actually a Spanish version of Past as Future, which is translated and even fully dubbed and currently on its way to us ( ꈍ◡ꈍ) Super cool that this kind of thing was localized there back then, I can't wait to see how the voice acting is. For me, it is hard to imagine the standard Spanish gamer liking this thing, but adventure game fans are built different I guess.

I will upload pictures of it when it's on my hands (and its respective entry over at the gamecolle...). That is all for now, hopefully this diary entry will make someone interested on this game, and in Shono/Synergy's overall work. Over and remember to game on ★!