Gray Pixels

Aviary Attorney is a bit like the Ace Attorney series only that all the characters are both French and animals.

Since I was getting tired of stagnant progress, I decided to play for a little while off camera in order to unlock new items to sell. In this episode, we're going to build a whole new shop. And burn through 34,000 gold in the process.

It was a busy weekend around here with the start of an ongoing horror series called A Massive Coward Plays and my playthrough of the first episode of the Noir thriller Blues and Bullets (you can read my full review here). 

Check out the videos below if you want to get caught up on the most recent Gray Pixels happenings. I'll try to throw one of these together every Monday.

A Massive Coward Plays Until Dawn

 [Full Disclosure: A Crowd of Monsters provided a review code for the first episode of Blues and Bullets on Xbox One.]

Few games cause as much conflict for me as A Crowd of Monsters' episodic Noir mystery Blues and Bullets. I've attempted to start this review multiple times over the course of several days now and find the point I want to make perpetually out of reach. The simple answer is, I like Blues and Bullets. But that gets a lot more complicated when I try to tell you why.

Blues and Bullets follows a fictional portrayal of Eliot Ness, a hard-drinking prohibition agent who lead the charge against Al Capone. The real Eliot Ness lead a frustrating life full of divorces and forgotten legacy. Ness died at 54, broken down and penniless. A Crowd of Monsters' Ness is broken but not quite suffering as he ekes out a simple existence in a 1950s diner. The first hurdle for alternate histories is always overcoming what we know about historical figures. Blues and Bullets weaves Ness and Capone into a Lovecraftian missing persons case, but does so at a time where our Capone had succumbed to untreated syphilis. Al Capone never lived to a ripe old age and was barely functioning above a 12-year-old level when he was released from prison. I have nothing against alternate history and dramatic retellings, but when the characters in play are so iconic and their downfalls so well-documented, suspending disbelief is difficult.

Focusing too much on history changes how I feel about this game so I've tried to shut down the historian in my mind and accept the tale being told. 

"The End of Peace" is the disruption of Ness' attempts to leave his police days behind him. He is haunted by a case involving missing children that forced him to retire and uses his diner as a way to connect with younger officers and stay abreast of local happenings. We see Ness lament the brutality of beat cops and spot a potential robber, but these actions come with a tinge of exhaustion. A bulletin board near the juke box in the diner is plastered with pages and pages of missing children posters, and Ness' office is cluttered with articles about the Untouchables. Despite trying to live a peaceful life, Eliot Ness' peace ended long ago.

Al Capone is not only out of prison but he's seeking Ness' help in finding his missing granddaughter. She was kidnapped from school and is just another in a long list of children to disappear across the not quite L.A. and not quite Chicago city of Santa Esperanza. This is a believable connection however theatrical the concept: Ness is haunted by his failures and Capone knows Ness wiill focus all his energy on a case. In their twilight years, these mortal enemies can feed off their loathing for one another to save a stolen generation. 

I enjoy the story A Crowd of Monsters is telling. It is endearingly stilted, a byproduct of the developers being based in Spain and interpreting 1950s America, and it carries that similar spirited charm of games like Deadly Premonition and Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes series. You can be from anywhere and make a game about anything, and I think being disconnected from the source material (in this case the United States and gangland Chicago) allows for more fantastic plots. Blues and Bullets is quirkily trying to marry history and grim fantasy and it works. But when the story collides with the developers' need to reference games set in a similar time period, the quirkiness muddles with outright confusion. Freshly out of prison, Al Capone sets up shop at the Hindenburg Hotel -- A sky hotel built inside the frame of the Hindenburg airship which did not meet a completely tragic end in this reality. This could stand on its own as a stark disconnect from our world, but the references creep in when you discover the Hindenburg Hotel project was overseen by an A. Ryan who's portrait lines the hotel walls. 

Rather than conveying a shift from our reality where neither Ness or Capone would be in a condition to solve a crime, the Hindenburg Hotel is a heavy-handed reference to BioShock, complete with amoral guests and Venetian masks. Even the harrowing cable car ride to the hotel mimics the baptismal entrance into Rapture. Referencing BioShock isn't a problem and it does suit the bizarre world A Crowd of Monsters is establishing, but it goes too far in wanting to be a slice of Rapture and speaks to my largest complaint with Blues and Bullets. That less is actually more.

Less flare and grime on the lens wouldn't detract from the overall grittiness of this Noir tale. Curtailing repetitive dialog options and vocal prompts wouldn't detract from character development. None of these things ruin Blues and Bullets but they do present a frustrating distraction when all you want to do is focus on the bizarre series of events you're exploring.

The first episode of Blues and Bullets is a chaotic introduction to a morally complex world I find worth exploring. My complaints focus largely on refinement, something that could improve from episode to episode. I enjoy that the choices characters make feel immediately impactful, and that both you and the people you interact with remember that in a less cumbersome way than TellTale's typical choice system. I love A Crowd of Monsters' reckless abandon in regard to shifts in gameplay. Right now, we're playing a shooter. Now, we're playing a mystery game. These swings keep you interested and work together in a way I can't quite figure out.  You can buy the first episode of Blues and Bullets on Steam and Xbox One for $5 and for curiosity's sake I recommend it. Beneath my complaints about set dressing and over-stuffed dialog is a perplexing tale of personal redemption, missing children, and grizzly cultist crime. My feelings toward Blue and Bullets may be complex but I can still appreciate what it does well, and right now that is convincing me to stop thinking of Eliot Ness the historical figure and think of him more as the king of ironic statements while he drunkenly brandishes a gun at Al Capone.

Even though Gray Pixels is re-launching with more motivation than ever, I'm still proud of the early content already up on the channel. So if you're new to the project or just want to revisit past videos, this round-up is for you.

GemFridays

Welcome to the new website for Gray Pixels! I wanted to give you a little overview of what this channel is, who I am, and plans for the future. 

Gray Pixels is my foray into creating the content I've always wanted. In recent years, reflecting on the history of the games industry has increased in popularity. Journalists, enthusiasts, archivists, and developers are all working to preserve the early elements of interactive entertainment and that's wonderful news. But history is vast and multi-faceted and takes legions to properly document. 

What I want to do is capture lesser-known stories in gaming's past and present them in researched and hopefully well-documented ways. The games I want to cover range from willfully controversial to opportunistically underdeveloped, but no matter their quality or origin, their impact on the industry is worth remembering. When I started planing my video series, my initial interest was primarily in unlicensed titles - or games that never went through an official hardware manufacturers approval and vetting process. This concept is less defined now that people have greater access to development software, but it is one worth exploring. 

The scope of Gray Pixels has definitely broadened and changed since I first put this idea in text, but I'm pleased that it has. I want to use this channel and this website as a curated exploration into a sometimes seedy, frequently perplexing, view of what helped make the gaming industry what it is today. Everything in culture moves in waves. Clothes, political views, science. Video games are part of culture and their evolution has followed that same undulating theme.  So, on top of presenting gaming history, I also want to take time to discuss a variety of topics including development trends, lost genres, outlying and potential new trends, and simply things I enjoy playing. My tastes are varied and as anyone who has ever read my late-night diatribes on social media can attest to, seemingly fueled by frustration. I'm not pro-brutality in design, but I will spend hours beating my head against games in effort to understand their appeal and their motivation. The same way people might slog through classic novels and films they're not particularly fond of.

I believe in pushing the boundaries of what we like and want to challenge how people view and interact with games. Will I always be right? Probably not, but that's the power of opinion. Through Gray Pixels I want to present an alternate take on an industry that can frequently be too pre-occupied with the "latest and greatest" without appreciating the movements fueling innovation and design. 

I hope you're interested in what's coming. I know I am and after a few months of intense upheavals in my personal life, I know this is what I want to do.