Seattle Underground - a lesson in bad game design
Seattle Underground - a lesson in bad game design
David Hellman, the talented artist many of you know from his recent work on Braid, was in town recently for the Penny Arcade Expo. Since neither he nor I had ever been on the Seattle Underground Tour, we decided to make a day of it.
While waiting for the tour to begin, we began talking about some game design particulars, specifically with regards to The Legend of Zelda and Shadow of the Colossus. We were both in immediate agreement that the Zelda series had gotten consistently worse with each iteration, and furthermore we agreed on the reason: it continued to become more of a forced sequence of events, and less of an exciting exploration of a magical place (David also recently wrote about this problem in the latest DS incarnation). We continued to discuss the finer points of this until the tour began.
Almost as if it had been scripted, the tour managed to serve as a near perfect example of everything we had just said. The overbearing tour guide, who was fanatic in her refusal to let anyone say anything or ask any questions during the tour (lest it derail her carefully practiced banter), forced us through the series of underground passageways stopping exclusively at "sequence points" along the way, where she gave a rehearsed speech. All around us were interesting items - abandon machinery, passageways that led off into unknown places, old electrical wiring, etc. But none of these things were accessible, and even when David and I asked about one or two of them, the tour guide actively dismissed our questions because apparently they were not part of the tour.
It was incredibly frustrating. Which coincidentally, is exactly how we feel when we try to play modern Zelda games.
So until Zelda games return to their explorational roots, or the Underground Tour gets some guides who actually care about their visitors' curiosity, we will have to make due with the limited experiences that we are given. Included below are a series of shots from David's iPhone, which capture some of the things about which we would have liked to learn, but were never given the opportunity.
Links: http://www.undergroundtour.com
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The final room of the tour feature a fantastic pile of rusting machinery. What did it once do? Why was it left down there? Despite standing in front of it and talking for a good ten minutes, our tour guide never acknowledged its existence, and immediately after she finished talking, we were shooed out of the room so we could not examine it more closely.
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For keeping people out, or for keeping people in? Who knows! And our tour guide certainly didn't want to tell us, nor did we get the opportunity to pry around and figure it out ourselves.
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A very interesting discarded sign - and one whose history we don't know, because the tour guide didn't even point it out, let alone explain it. If David hadn't noticed it and taken the picture, we might have missed it completely.
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This was truly puzzling. Apparently, there was a bank facade here, and this makeshift sign was put up by the tour to denote where the teller would sit. It was encased on three sides by stone, and so it seemed quite strange because there appeared to be no actual access to the interior of the bank from the teller window. So was the teller just sitting outside, essentially, with maybe a little till? We tried to map out where that would be relative to the corner, and where it was relative to the buildings on the street above, but the tour guide was so annoyed by our lingering attempts to piece things together that she actually shut the door on us while we were still looking around.
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The skylights open out onto the present-day sidewalks of Seattle. Our tour guide found it endlessly amusing to yell up at people walking by in the hopes of startling them. What she didn't find endlessly amusing was when David asked her to explain why some of the broken skylights (lying around on the floor, not pictured) had large crystal pieces extending downwards from the circular openings. She dismissed his question by saying that she was going to "get to that later".
But, luckily we figured it out on our own, as the crystals looked like they were positioned to capture the light coming from above and diffuse it out in other directions (other than directly down). Unfortunately we were unable to see any still-installed skylights with the crystals in place, so it was hard to see if this was the correct assessment and, if so, how well it actually worked.
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The tour guide actually stood and spoke in front of this wooden contraption for the better part of five minutes. Yet she managed to never acknowledge it. When it was clear she was moving on without ever saying what it was, I asked. She said "coal chute" under her breath and walked away.
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How can you not love that giant gamesque throw-switch? Of course, I'd love to say more about this electrical box, when it was built, decommissioned, what it powered, etc. But it was never even mentioned by the tour guide, let alone explained, and luckily I spotted it hidden in an alcove so Dave could take a picture, otherwise it would have gone by completely unnoticed.
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When were these pipes constructed? Were they part of the original plumbing, or added later? Perhaps a combination of the two? Who knows! Certainly not our tour guide, and we weren't allowed to actually get closer and inspect.
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An entrance to another room - one that has been newly wired with electricity, no less. What does it contain? Nobody knows! At least, we don't know, because we weren't allowed to go in there, and our tour guide didn't bother to tell us.
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Here we see some collapsed woodwork and rubble. I'd love to be able to give you a more accurate description, but of course, our tour guide didn't bother to tell us what it was.
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Here is a bottom-floor toilet, whose tank was positioned considerably higher than normal due to the fact that any other placement apparently caused back-flow due to the way the sewers were routed.
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