Brütal Legend

I continue my journey through Tim Schafer's games. I finished this a month or two ago, and I've been too lazy to write a blog post about it until now. So if you'll excuse me, I'll be real quick about this.

A screenshot of Brütal Legend, in an RTS battle.

Brütal Legend is a difficult game to describe. First off, it's themed around Metal, as in, the music genre. You play as Eddie Riggs, a roady working backstage at a concert. During an accident, Eddie is teleported away to another world. Since this place is based on Metal, Eddie feels like he's in heaven.

Brütal Legend is kinda like an action adventure game, but also has some weird RTS battles. Most of the time, it kind of feels like an open-world RPG since you're getting and completing missions all around the world, but there's no skills or attributes. The RTS parts are more reminiscent of Darwinia than a full-fat RTS. Your objective is to have a concert, gather fan support (through merch booths), and destroy the opponent's stage (they're also having a concert). The camera is still third person like the rest of the game, and you command troops indirectly. You're able to fly around the battlefield to enhance your view of the battle.

The world is themed after metal album cover art. You fight skirmishes with foot soldiers, race a jerk, and steal speakers from The Wailing Wall. Yes, there's a seaside cliff that's made of speakers, called The Wailing Wall.

A screenshot of Brütal Legend, with Ozzy and Eddie.

You drive around the world a lot, helping "the resistance", a group of rebels who seek to free their land from demons. The story has some pretty cool characters, some are voiced by famous people. Eddie is Jack Black (also appearing in the diegetic intro/menu video), and Ozzy Osbourne is the underground merchant. I didn't analyze them closely, but the characters seem cool and well written enough. Humor is applied in appropriate situations, and I can see the continuation from this into Broken Age.

I'm not sure if Eddie will ever get to go home. Come to think of it, I don't think he wants to. Schafer says that a sequel will "eventually happen", but then said that he needed a lot of money to do it. But since he said so, I'm pretty sure that getting money isn't a problem anymore.

I don't listen to Metal music, but I don't dislike it either, yet I enjoyed Brütal Legend. If anything, it made me watch clips from that Ozzy reality show from about 20 years ago.

Since you've made it this far, you might be interested in reading:

Screenshot of Manny talking to Domino. — Grim Fandango

This would be a Halloween game, but Cinco de Mayo is this week, so here's a game to go along with my hot burgers. Grim Fandango is a key part of the Tim Schafer pantheon. It was the last game he made before leaving LucasArts and establishing Double Fine Productions. Like Tim's earlier games, Grim Fandango is an adventure game that first released in 1998: the closing days of the classic adventure game era.

Screenshot from Broken Age, showing Vella and the lumberjack — Broken Age: Act 1

Broken Age is the game that, for the longest time, was known as the Double Fine Adventure. Unfortunately the man behind all of this, Tim Schafer, cannot get publisher funding for a game to save his life. It was Kickstarted a long time ago, and it did well. So well that it made crowdfunding a viable method of fundraising for... pretty much everything.

Screenshot of the "fake ship" ship factory — Broken Age: Act 2

Some things have been happening in my life. Good things. Deal with it. Listen to my podcast: I drop a lot of goings on there. I'll probably make a "State of the" post at some point.

Screenshot of Psychonauts, from the Milkman Conspiracy — Psychonauts

This one has been a long time coming. Remember way back when I played Broken Age? Since that would be the first Tim Schafer game I've played, I wanted to do some research on how this guy does games. I started to play Psychonauts before the first part of Broken Age came out. The first time, I got a little ways into it. I restarted a few years later only to get distracted again, maybe because of some RPG or another. Two months ago, I started making a concerted effort to finish Psychonauts, so I restarted yet again. This time, I made it!

Screenshot of Papers, Please, showing a multitude of documents and a man with killer sideburns — Papers, Please

Papers, Please is a bureaucrat simulator where you man a border checkpoint in a fictional totalitarian country during the late cold war. Gameplay mostly involves examining people's passports and other entry documents and calling 'gotcha' on them. Otherwise, you let them through if you can't find anything or you're lazy.

Screenshot of World of Goo 2, showing two sprayers fueling an airship. — World of Goo 2

World of Goo 2 is another sequel to a game that I don't think needed one. However, given the amount of time since the original, I'll let this one slide. I haven't played through the original for several years, so any references to it are from my own memory, and may not be accurate.