TRAPT by Tecmo
You can not contain this much craziness
The unfortunate Queen Allura is framed for her father's murder. To avoid being murdered by her enemies she is forced to abandon her castle and hide in the Black Forest with her maid Rachel. Somehow, for obscure reasons, in the forest the devil transforms Allura into an evil temptress / trap-master [sic]. She returns to the castle with the devil to take brutal revenge on her enemies.
Trapt is one crazy game
The basic gameplay idea seems like a sort of elaboration on single-player Bomberman, where you set traps on a map and then run about making sure they work, or something. Tecmo are curiously unforthcoming with screenshots of the map mode, but show plenty of third person rear-view shots of Allura. Neither her maid Rachel, nor the devil appear in the screenies either - almost as if once the introductory cut-scene is over they play no part in the game whatsoever.
I am the trap master!
I quote directly from Tecmo's own promotional material:
...an evil spell from the devil transforms Allura into a trap master, an evil temptress that uses deadly traps to avenge her enemies...
Yes! Tecmo have gone completely stark-raving-bonkers and I for one can't wait to see the result translated into English. I'm not sure why the heroine, Queen Allura, wants to avenge her enemies, at first I thought the translator had just confused 'be revenged on' with 'avenge', but when I realised how wacky the rest of the game concept is, I have to admit that there's every possiblity that Allura really does want to take revenge on the people that hurt her enemies: namely herself. After all she is under an 'evil spell', from the devil no less! A little self-destructive behaviour is only to be expected. I expect her to at least make small cuts on her arms with a blunt razor blade.
Historical Setting?
Apparently, the game is supposed to be set in 'old Europe', I'm only guessing but they must be thinking of the area that was Europe before the last ice age, because their setting seems to bear no resemblance to any part of recorded European history.
The fact that their 'Europe' looks a lot like a kind of lazy mish-mash of Japan, China and a generic D&D fantasy land fits in perfectly with the crack-smoking insanity and hopeless wishful thinking that pervades the entire game concept.
I don't think I've heard of anything quite so idiotic and yet somehow cool since the announcement of Extreme Beach Volleyball. If this game could actually work in any meaningful way it could change everything we think we know about games.
The detail of the Queen being framed for the murder of her father is equaly as muddled as the setting, or perhaps was intended to confuse and enlighten us like some kind of f**ked-up zen koan on peyote. How can she be queen if her father was still alive? Where is her husband? You're not going to kid me that in medieval Europe they would let a woman run the country by herself, or that a young single princess would not be instantly married off in the absence of a male heir. Perhaps if she was called Princess Allura and her father was still king it would make some kind of sense, but apparently she's already queen before he dies, so instead it makes nonsense.
Basically, what is the point of saying you have set a game in medieval Europe if you have in fact taken not one single faithful shred of that setting and actually used it? Maybe her dead civilization is dreaming her? Maybe the designer forgot to take his prescription the day he wrote the background concept? Maybe the art-team had watched too much bad anime and really thought that women wore mini-skirts and Nikes in medieval Europe? Maybe the devil gave them to her to destroy all morals? Damn those Tecmo guys, they think of everything!
I'm actually hopeful that there will be sunbathing, gift giving, funky recipes and clothes shopping in T(R)APT. Allura's default running shoes are nice, but I'd like something with blue LEDs as an upgrade. However, with the other great features it's offering I think I'll manage without. For example, Allura uses her wicked strategy and skill to set up gruesome medieval traps to lure her enemies in and then destroy them.
Yes, not only are these traps conjured out of thin air by devil magic, they are medieval and they are gruesome too. I'm just curious how the traps will represent this gruesomeness? Will it be in the form of tried-and-trusted chaos-death spikes and lots of spraying gore? I certainly hope so. You can never have too many spikes! Also, nothing says subtle cunning and erudite wickedness like an aerosol spray of your enemy's liquidized giblets arcing from beneath a rack of spikes the size of tennis court.
But I thought Allura was supposed to 'avenge' her enemies. How will killing them with gruesome traps achieve that? As I already suggested, maybe she plans to take revenge on herself afterwards to avenge her victims? Tecmo are not forthcoming with how she intends to achieve this last part. Maybe it would spoil the story? Possibly, her last action will be to feed herself into her most gruesome trap with a cry of "Oh, woe is me, for I have been cursed by the devil to be an evil, alluring temptress - only by my own agonizing, bloody death may I redeem myself." Or possibly not.
Evil and Manipulative are the ways of the marketing department
Allegedly, the game is composed equally of action and strategy. This isn't something we see everyday. It also claims to get gamers thinking in evil and manipulative ways. Again, a ground breaking aspiration: it's commonplace to have a situation where you do evil, Grand Theft Auto for example, but rare indeed to be manipulative. I'm just praying they're not thinking Red Ninja... That turkey also claimed groundbreaking gameplay, but actually delivered broken gameplay: a kind of damaged Tenchu plus skank. You could press a button to act like a slut. I'm glad they're teaching kids this stuff!
Just a tiny hint to game developers: a character that dresses like a pole-dancer and wiggles her T&A at every other NPC that she encounters does not an alluring temptress make. There are many words for women like that, but alluring is not one of them.
Anyway, back to the matter of how T(R)APT will combine action and strategy:
Action and Strategy mixed perfectly, like oil and water
Action + Strategy = the sweet and sour of gaming: what a sauce! Of course, it takes true developer genius to create a mix that doesn't end up tasting either sickly sweet or end up as unpleasant as a large mouthful of gaming vinegar. I'm sure Tecmo's game-developer goblins are up to the challenge; they probably turn leaden dross into gold in their spare time. I sure hope I'm not overestimating their skills.
Usually action and strategy don't combine too well. The thing about strategy is that you want time to think and plan, then you create your strategy and you set things in motion and see how it plays out. On the other hand, action is the opposite, the last thing you want to be doing is stopping to think. The goal of somehow combining the two has been something of a game design holy-grail for years now.
The closest things we currently have to this promised gaming nirvana are action-tactics games, more commonly known as RTS games. In such games you formulate a plan and pursue a sort of strategy, but the core of the game is at the detailed tactical level: getting the most out of your units in combat and picking the exact moment to build, mine or fight. In the end, the strategic elements reduce to a very simple set of rules and the person who can follow them fastest and multi-task combat with building and mining most effectively wins: it ends up a battle to be the fastest mouse-click in the west.
It's fair to say that nobody has made a good job of mixing action and strategy in a way that created something that was more than the sum of it parts. Existing games tend to let the strategic component wither, and are simplistic, offering just a few optimal strategies.
In a true strategy game, the best plan is a situational plan. You must be able to counter enemy actions without having to predict far ahead of time what they are going to do, and you need real choices on how to proceed. This is why Civilization is a real strategy game and Warcraft III is an action click-fest where the most perfectly executed rush wins.
Of course, Warcraft III is a fine example of its genre, it offers choices in the type of rush you can perform, and it offers a choice of race - but once you've made your decision you are very much stuck with it. This doesn't make it less fun, but it doesn't make it a strategy game either: it's firmly in the action camp. If action and strategy are oil and water, then Warcraft III is a tasty mayonaise. Which is to say, there's some water in it, but basically it's oil.
In the end, the type of people who want action in their game don't usually want a lot of strategy and the type that want strategy usually would prefer not to need lightning reflexes; they want to get through the game by thinking. The two genres are somewhat exclusive in their target audiences, and the more you try to mix them the more you have a game that neither group likes.
Sexy, beguiling, sweet, innocent, perhaps schizophrenic
Despite the almost certain disaster this game will be, I can't wait to Play as the sexy and beguiling Queen Alllura who looks so sweet, but is wickedly calculating and cursed by the devil.
As Tecmo describe her...
That's not any devil folks, it's the devil. You better fear that dude because he is as cunning as, um, er, a devil. So, he's probably going to get the best of you in a dirty tricks contest.
Yes, she does look sweet in her mini-skirt, rubber stockings and Nikes. Every part of her exudes medieval queen. Though to be honest there is a hint of some cut-scenery where she's dressed slightly more appropriately (though only slightly). I guess that's part of being cursed by the devil: you have to run around in your underwear and battle armoured knights, armed with whopping big phallic lances, by throwing glowing particle effects at them.
I'm wondering, does Allura sell her soul in exchange for the chance to take revenge? In that case, wasn't she already evil before the devil got anywhere near her? Never mind, I'm sure it will all make sense when we get to read the incoherent gibberish that the Tecmo translators so reliably produce.
The Visuals
In the end it's a real pity that some, initially promising, ambitious and innovative ideas have failed to survive the development process and resulted in something a somewhat less impressive than appears to have been originally conceived. The game graphics are at the forefront of this degenerative process. Despite the pre-rendered promo-shots that show Allura from exciting dynamic angles, the real screenshots clearly show that you spend the entire game looking at her pixellated back. Presumably, the only relief you get from this are the obligatory cut-scenes where she spouts surreal dialogue about avenging or something.
The majority of screenshots don't look very good: there only appears to be about three kinds of enemy and their artistic style doesn't match up with the backgrounds much better than Allura does - and she really does not fit in. Given that this is the best the publisher had to offer it doesn't bode well. This picture of a trap is about the best one I could find, there are many worse ones. It also appears from what we can see that the traps are monolithic devices and you don't have much opportunity to create inventive combinations.
The background architecture seem to range from the obviously Japanese, to the grotesquely overscaled, to stuff that is clearly way out of period. Some of the stuff that looks a bit like regency architecture is quite nice. The rest is just absurd out of scale, generic tiled stone floor rubbish. The majority of the textures look alike, as if the same stone texture was repeated over and over again. Maybe the developers couldn't figure how to swap textures in and out of VRAM during rendering? Or perhaps they made hundreds of beautifully detailed stone textures that all just happen to look identical?
The traps themselves can look very low-polygon and sloppily made, and few of them seem particularly imaginative. Mostly there's spikes. Sometimes the spikes come down, other times they go up, or they can go sideways. It may also be possible to make somebody fall in a hole with death at the bottom. The death is probably spikes.
The shots with movement show a heavy handed use of the PS2 motion blur trick that is usually the mark of an attempt to disguise an atrocious frame-rate. This trick was quite novel about five years ago, but is beginning to look a little tired. Presumably, the fact that it comes almost for free is the only reason people do it. Alas, not everything free is good. For example, I can lick dirt off street signs for free, but I choose not to.
In Closing
We are promised multiple play modes, including not just 'Survival Mode', and 'Story Mode' but 'Bonus Story Mode' too. There's supposedly some other bonus material. I've got nothing against that. As a prize for lasting twenty-three hours in 'Survival Mode' I expect we get an authentic medieval polaroid photo of Allura swimming with dophins, lazing on the deck of her cabin cuiser, or picking out a new pair of sunglasses. Rewards are great if the game itself is worth playing, but meaningless if it is not.
Unfortunately, it seems likely that this will be the biggest disappointment since PN3 totally failed to deliver on its promises. If the game was actually what it claimed to be, it would be a classic that created a new genre, as it stands it's more likely to be the target of further derision. I'm not sure it will even get the promised US release and will almost certainly never appear in a PAL format - not that they're even suggesting it will - apparently, for some reason, Tecmo don't believe that people in Europe will be too impressed by their game. Perhaps it's the 'old Europe' setting?
It would be fantastic if the grand ambitions of the designers had come to fruitition to create a genuinely original and interesting game. Far too often, we have to put up with dull genre fodder, which are nothing more than poor copies of games that already exist. At least T(R)APT set out to be something new. Sadly, these well meaning attempts fail more often than not. Developers on 'strange projects' rarely receive the kind of resources necessary to do a good job, and their publishers rarely recognise the kind of extra time required to innovate: the time required to develop a new idea until it works.
Or perhaps it just needs a story change? What if Allura's mysterious enemies should have done us all a favour and instead of killing her father, done away with her instead. You know it makes sense!
It seems I'm not wrong in suggesting that Tecmo are hopeless at translations. All the garbled nonsense was their own work. However, other sources suggest that Allura is in fact a princess (not a queen), and that her mother is also part of the setting. Her mother, the Queen, is the one who has the king killed.
If you're going for any kind of medieval authenticity, even a passing spot of it, this is still hard to swallow as one of the King's male relatives would probably be next in line for the throne, though I suppose the ex-Queen could be planning to marry such a person.
Overall the actual background is no less silly than the one I facetiously imagined, but it doesn't matter because the only game I know of that is worse than this on the PS2 is Red Ninja, but that's another story...