Contact: Interviews - The Armchair Empire

Later this year, Atlus will be bringing the latest quirky creation from Grasshopper to North America with Contact for the DS. Recently we had the chance to pick the brain of Tomm Hulett, Project Lead at Altus for localization of the game for our market. In this interview, he sheds some light on what to expect from the game when it ships this October. Thanks for your time, Tomm!

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Contact will be a game that breaks the fourth wall in how the Professor is well aware that there is a person in control of what is happening in the game. How did the decision come to go this route? Are there any major advantages / disadvantages to so thoroughly breaking through the fourth wall in a game?

Having someone controlling the game’s events is actually necessary for the Professor, since he can’t go out and get the Power Cells himself, and he needs someone to keep an eye on Terry while the teen goes out on the Professor’s behalf. You yourself being a character is really a key element to the plot, so the game couldn’t really function WITHOUT breaking the fourth wall.

There are a lot of sandbox elements in Contact, which is something we’re beginning to see a lot more of in other games as well. How do you go about choosing activities that can be sandboxed which help Contact stand out from other games going this route, while making sure that these activities are still within the context of your game?

I am not certain there are many sandbox elements in Contact. While you can control Terry’s actions and make him nice (help people) or mean (kill NPCs), the “extra content” in the game really takes the form of sidequests like you’d find in any RPG. Track down item X, help person B solve his problem, etc etc. You can of course approach obstacles in different ways (using different costumes/weapons/abilities/etc) but the plot of the game is still linearly driven, with sidequests to distract you along the way—not entirely free-roaming like GTA or the like.

What are some of the things that players will be able to do with the decals in Contact?

The decals have varying functions which we’d like the player to discover for themselves. Think of them like summons in other RPGs—you aren’t going to be using them in every single battle, but they’re going to come in handy in a pinch.

In a previous interview Akira Ueda mentioned that he wanted the gameplay to work for the story in Contact, not dictate it. How does this manifest itself?

Well the general idea of the story is that you, the player, are interacting with this world. I think the gameplay fully reflects that, since Terry fights in an MMORPG style where you select a target and he goes about fighting it according to his current stats. That certainly makes him feel like his “own entity” in a way. Meanwhile, the Professor might be telling you something on the top screen. Controlling things with the stylus (which you can also do with the buttons if you’d rather do that) does lend a certain “finger of God” element to the game. Rather than making all the calls, you’re reaching into the game and kind of guiding it along.

Given the nature of Killer 7 and now Contact, what is your take on the argument that games, or at least some games, should be considered art?

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I have not played Killer 7, myself (though I intend to eventually). However, I think we as an industry need to stop hoping that games will become accepted as art universally. Do I think there have been games that are “art”? Yes, I think games like EarthBound and MGS2 have exhibited mature post-modern themes which should be given a lot more credit than

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they are today. Then there are the sublime game experiences people site like Ico or Shadow of the Colossus. Could games be art? Sure. However, I don’t think we should expect games to be art. I think that is selling them short and focusing on entirely the wrong things. Games are an entertainment medium with more potential for greatness than cinema, television, or music could provide—because they combine all three. Once we master THAT, I think we can start worrying about art. Games don’t need to be high art—they need to be enjoyable, fun games. If you asked me which games I’d played that were art, I’d mention the ones I already mentioned above. If you asked me what I considered the most “artful games” ever made, the Marios, Zeldas, and Metroids of the world would top my list.

It appears that combat is more passive in Contact than in other RPGs since players largely guide Terry into combat, telling him who to fight, and letting him do his business. How is this set up to keep this theme, but also make sure the player feels like they are actually doing something, and not just waiting for Terry?

Like I said above, this is mainly a device used to assert that Terry is his own being. But worry not, you’re hardly passively watching. You still tell Terry when to use special moves, when to break off combat and run, and who to target. You’ll also be in control of decal attacks and other strategies of that sort.

Looking at the aesthetics of the game, the top screen in Contact maintains a more classic, SNES-like motif, while the bottom screen is stylized almost like a painting. Are such contrasting styles representative of anything? What was the reasoning behind using two fairly distinct looks in the game, as opposed to a single, unified visual presentation like one normally finds in a game?

Well, there are a number of different “worlds” at play in Contact. There is the world Terry is walking around in, which is highly artful and detailed. Then you have the Professor and his ship—which come from a far off galaxy—that are very retro in design. Then you have the world you see when you look up from your DS. That’s the 4D, high-def, pseudo-realistic world that you move around in when you’re not playing video games. If both screens looked identical, the theme of the game would be harder to really “get.” You can see it even in the concept art. The people playing Contact look like you or me. The characters on the bottom screen are sprite-representations of anime-styled character art. Then the Professor and Mochi (his space dog) only exist as simplistic sprite characters, even outside of the game.

Can you give us an idea of some of the costumes that Terry will be able to collect throughout the game, and some of the fashions and corresponding augmentations his wardrobe will have?

Like the decals, we want to leave most of the costumes up to the player’s discovery. But, I can tell you that the first outfit Terry is likely to come across is the Firefighter, which will grant him a number of water-based abilities. Later on he can find a Thief outfit which will allow him to pick locks and steal things from people. Of course, which costumes you use and level up is up to you—and the completists will naturally want to find and master every single one.

The WiFi abilities in Contact give the sense that the game is “sorta online” in how players can leave messages, and clones of themselves (for lack of a better word) on an island, that their friends can interact with. Why go this route? Why not just allow players to meet with their friends in real time?

I can’t really answer this question, since I wasn’t in on the development process. However, I imagine that with the dawning of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, the team at Grasshopper wanted to include SOMETHING using Wi-Fi (I mean, the game is called CONTACT for goodness sake) but implementing full on WoW or PSO style player interaction would have delayed the game a great deal (and required a re-design and rebalancing of course). That would have compromised their vision of what Contact was to be, and that could have been frustrating too. Think of the Nintendo WFC features as icing on the Contact cake, and not the main reason someone would purchase the game.

So we know that the gameplay, and visuals are trying to march to the beat of their own drum to a certain extent, but what about the audio? How was music handled to help aurally shore Contact up?

The music, I’m happy to report, is great. It harkens back to the days when video game music was allowed to just be really good VIDEO GAME MUSIC and didn’t have to aspire to the same things music does in cinema or orchestras or what have you. It has a nifty “old-school” vibe to it, and people who enjoy the games Contact homages should get just as much enjoyment out of its music. If you have a retro bone in your body, you’ll dig it.

Thanks again, Tomm! For more information on Contact, be sure to read our preview of the game.

(September 13, 2006)


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