#paradroid

So my wife mis-spoke, and instead of the blog @warriormale , she said “Wario-male”.

So.  I mean.  I had to.  The body.  Shame Wario is sort of a dbag sometimes.

I have to do it. *OK Computer voice* I may be paradroid… but no… android. And it’s true! The things you control in Paradroid are basically just simplified hamburger logos with numbers in. They’re not so distant from things in the kind of games I’d type in the BASIC for from magazines, where for the end product you had to parse a board made up of }, ¬ and $. Paradroids aren’t androids, because they’re not andro-oid: person-like.

Your paradroid, tasked with cleaning out a spaceship with a hostile robot infestation, is just a droid near to some other droids. ‘Droid’ being a word which in one of those marvels of etymology is a slice out of a compound word that doesn’t mean anything by the rules of its component parts but has taken on its own life. Also ‘droid’ appropriately sounds a bit like ‘drone’, even though that comes from a totally different root! Anyway, not an android.

Except… all is not as it seems. Paradroid is a really simple, trivial 2D shoot-em-up wrapped as a disguise around an exploration game and a cool puzzle-battle game. To make progress you have to not just shoot down all the other droids, as force of habit had me do at first, but take over more powerful ones than your initial droid 001. This happens via a separate screen mini-game where you fight to occupy the most power links to a circuit, which is the best part of Paradroid.

And as an intro to that game you see a different view of the droids. Or indeed if, back in the main view, you go to one of the computer terminals on the ship, you can get some more information on the droid you’re controlling and see a diagram that shows them as, to varying extents, vaguely human shaped.

There are at least two worlds that coexist in Paradroid: The one you control, and the one overlaid on it that you get information on and can choose to see more on. It’s something that’s common to our previous games, in a way. Things represent other things. That BASIC $ was a dragon. The guy you control in-game in Boulder Dash II doesn’t look like the picture of him on the title screen (no blond hair, for a start). The implication is that you can bridge the gap with some supported imagination. Yet while you were playing each game, it acted as a self-contained thing. It didn’t pull this switch within itself like Paradroid.

The practice is not unique to video games, and this version exists somewhere on a media spectrum between the explanatory interruption from the inside – an expository caption in a book; something like the Star Wars text crawl in film – and the external additional info – the appendix; the DVD bonus feature. In some ways it occupies both ends of the spectrum at once, combining the element of choice with it being within the main text itself. In Paradroid it seems clearly motivated to address technical limitations, providing a glimpse of the game Andrew Braybrook wished he could make, and maybe couldn’t let go of. But as technology advances in the games we look at, this kind of insert is something we’re going to see more of, rather than less. Perhaps the smaller the gap gets, the greater the temptation to try to bridge it. 

Top 47,858 Games of All Time

Episode 89: Half-Life, Paradroid

Join the HG101 gang as they crowbar their way toward that Nobel Prize for Physics. Patreon bonus for this episode is The Unholy War. Outro music is from Briganty the Roots of Darkness (PC-98). Donate at patreon.com/hg101 to get this bonus content and much, much more! Follow us on Twitter @GC9X @HG_101 Check out the ongoing list bit.ly/47kgames Check out the earlier HG101 podcast Game Club 199X bit.ly/gc9x_linky