Pixel
Obscura:
Adventures in Candyland
|
Vol.
2, Issue 1
November 9, 1999
|
This Candylandish
adventure/drama is taken a step further when there actually is
a plot waiting to be unearthed by our furry or round or generally
odd little friends. In the new Sega Dreamcast game Sonic Adventure,
the famous, mercurial blue hedgehog undertakes such a challenge.
The scene
opens on the metropolis at peace, people and traffic milling about
in the rhythms of urbania. Suddenly danger rears its head in the
form of water gone mad: manholes spout lethal torrents, the sewers
overflow and, most troubling of all, the ocean surrounding the
city is rebelling in a rather tidal way. There seems to be something
at work here, some preplanned menace to home and country. We soon
see what it is as a particularly sentient acting tidal wave pierces
a skyscraper and begins to take hideous shape on the other side,
losing its globular mass in favor of a well defined dragon beast
replete with gnashing teeth. Enter our heroes. As the soundtrack
swells along to the giddy heights of a rock-ish anthem, Sonic
and his companions race to the rescue.
Many
fine touches are sprinkled throughout the piece. The first two
instances are sound based, a tool often utterly overlooked by
video game cinematic designers. As the water bursts forth onto
the city, the creators don’t succumb to the dreadful temptation
of garishly over intense sound effects, but rather mirror the
fluidity (forgive the pun) of the crisis with the hushed rippling
of vaguely electronic music like drowned wind chimes.
When the
dragon beast is taking shape, vibrating and shimmering, the only
sound is that of a radio being tuned, the warbling tones and frenzied
static that wraps itself around the ghostly voices you can hear
between stations.
It may
not be deeply profound art, but the fragment distinguishes itself
as a thoughtful approach to something often thrown at the viewer
as so much fodder. The song I mentioned earlier, an arm pumping
rock-pop ditty that would feel at home in the Transformers movie,
has a kind of campy charm as a roguish stab at attitude that would
be terminally jokey had it not been played out with such brightly
colored, furry “actors.” There are a few visual gems
as well.
Intercut
between flashes of the drowning city is a first person shot of
moving forward at great speed, the player sharing Sonic’s
world view as he races to help. By way of strict narrative drama,
the trick helps build a lovely comic book tension and, in keeping
with the idea that the gameplay offers a newly enhanced environmental
perspective, it gives the player a view never before indulged
in the Sonic canon. The city itself is nicely realized, a try
for realism that sweats a beautifully cartoonish ink. The approach
to editing is entirely consistent with the tone, something that
in a tight little pitch like this is crucial. As is fitting with
the candy striped ambiance, the “camera” cuts closer
to characters rather then zooming in and refuses to linger on
any one face for too long. Perhaps the single greatest cliché
in all trailer type presentations is the “characters turning
to face the camera” bit, and in Sonic Adventure it
almost becomes reflexive. When the velutinous members of the Sonic
universe play out this same old cliche, they come across as spoofy
and place the viewer at an ironic distance from the material.
Whether intentional or not, the humor works because it doesn’t
produce a mocking laugh so much as a knowing one.
The novelty
comes in watching good old Sonic having to solve a dilemma that
holds challenges beyond those offered by collecting rings and
dodging giant balls; it’s like putting Buster Crabbe’s
1935 Flash Gordon into Total Recall. The opening
cinematics of the game highlight this by washing out the environmental
colors in a realist stance and yet keeping the original Banana
Splits-esque character designs: the “real” and the
hyper-unreal as one. Sonic Adventure is the perfect hybrid
to symbolize the recent trend in video games of bleeding together
the past and the present. The old is brushed up, given a new coat
of paint and hurtled into a strange new world, Like black darts
thrown onto a white board, each is cast into stark relief by the
another and yet that “conflict” makes the whole a much
more fascinating picture.
-
Joshua Vasquez is the resident film critic here at loonygames.
He also writes for the Internet film site Matinee
Magazine.
