The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Alright, so I finished off Double Visions, the fourth episode of the Back to the Future episodic video game saga of video games. It was most certainly an adventure game that I played!

I would like to first start out that this is the first episode I didn’t complete in one session, so it’s the first time I’ve seen the little cute, subtle thing where when you reload the game, it shows you the date in the time stream you’re currently in. You never really jump around enough in the game for that to matter, but it’s a nice little touch.

Anyway, there were puzzles, but I want to talk about the plot.

I actually love where this went. It was so easy just to let Alternate Reality Doc be normal Doc, and forget about that, but they really put that into the plot. Although on board, in the beginning, how Doc slowly begins to doubt that this meddling is doing the right thing is fucking PERFECT. It adds some depth to all the fucking about you’re doing. It also forces Marty to make some interesting character decisions, when he has to basically tell Doc that what he’s doing is what he’s going to do, regardless of this new version’s wishes. It is just so telling of the subtext of these movies, where they’re all worried about fucking up the time stream except when it benefits them. To see them split on an issue was actually fairly meaningful and an interesting plot hook.

Similarly interesting was Emmett’s realization that Marty basically used Adventure Game Shenanigans (TM) to fuck up his relationship with Edna. So often Adventure Game Shenanigans (TM) basically go unpunished and unnoticed in an adventure game world. It was cool to have Emmett, a smart dude, put two and two together and realize how much Marty has been fucking around with his life. Of course, they end up buddies anyway, but at least there was that moment that Marty has been up to some serious fiddling in people’s lives.

Puzzle-wise, there was nothing too bad in all of this. The game did a kind of annoying thing where it would show you several items that are obviously puzzle items, but not let you get them until a little later. There was also this little light in the Delorian that basically signaled “Hey, you haven’t completed the puzzle you need to do before you send that item forward in time!” which, as someone who thinks about how games are built, was really, really fucking obvious to me. Maybe the target audience wouldn’t have caught on, though.

Anyway, on to the last episode whenever I get to it. Whee!