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Why Everyone Hates It: This is another issue where there is no real public animosity towards the game we're looking at this month, just a complete lack of attention ever paid to it. In short, Space Station Silicon Valley stands accused of the crime of being a low profile 3D puzzle-platformer for the N64 by some equally low profile Scottish development team.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: While not quite as bad as the screenshots scattered through this review make it appear, SSSV had graphics which, even at the time, for the platform, were considered rather spartan and simplistic, the music, where present, was really more musak, a couple levels stand out as rather confusingly laid out, and there's a few irksome, sometimes even game-freezing bugs to be found.
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Why I Like It Anyway: The short version is that the blocky graphics, and minimalist music, rather than being glaring flaws, were consciously chosen in order to instill the whole game with a sense of humor reminiscent of Wallace and Gromit, or Terry Gilliam's old Monty Python animated shorts. More importantly, the gameplay revolves around a very clever and well-implemented premise. Before we get into too much detail there, we really must take a quick break and discuss the development team behind Space Station Silicon Valley.
SSSV comes to us by way of Scottish developer DMA Designs. A very small number of people well recognize the name from the brief period when the publishers of their games allowed them the vanity of throwing their little animated DMA-man logo in before a title screen. Their most important games however lack this level of recognition.
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The first big name game from DMA is a little gem released in 1990 called Lemmings. If you haven't played Lemmings, stop reading this and track it down. It's a classic and they ported it to darn near everything. The next major splash was in 2001 when they decided to make a 3D sequel to a modestly popular top-down game series they were developing alongside SSSV here with a similar premise behind it. This being Grand Theft Auto 3. After this point, their name was changed to Rockstar North by GTA3's publisher who had the good sense to buy the company and not let these people get away. So now they enjoy the rare status of being a developer with name recognition, but still don't get properly credited in the minds of most people for things like Lemmings, and the game we're discussing at present.
DMA played around with the core concept that drives their current big-name series in three games released around 1998. The first of these was a game called Body Harvest, which would perhaps be a better subject for this feature, but quite frankly, I have never played it, or really heard much of anything about it apart from it being something like a cross between GTA and the old arcade classic Defender. Body Harvest had a troubled development, during which DMA took a break to knock out the somewhat simpler Grand Theft Auto, and then the two were followed by what in many ways was a more ambitious project, Space Station Silicon Valley.
The basic mechanic of hijacking vehicles to get around is the key premise to SSSV, with two rather important twists. The first is that what the player actually controls is the disembodied CPU (often found crawling around on the ground using connector pins as little ant-like legs) of a mercenary robot destroyed in the game's intro when a fight over radio stations causes a space ship crash. Independent of something to hijack, you're quite helpless, and indeed will die after a few seconds crawling around alone.
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The second twist is that rather than hijacking cars, you're hijacking the bodies of various robotic animals who must first be disabled. All of the various potential animal hosts have radically different abilities, and while still able to move around on their own will react to you quite differently depending what you are at the moment. A dog for instance can herd sheep around, a rat, not so much. Then of course there's that disabling business. It's much easier to bring down a host you need as a slobbering arm flailing bear, or a missile launching turtle than it is as, say a perfectly harmless sheep.
This basic premise forms the heart of the game. Each of several levels has a puzzle of some sort to solve, making use of the various animals scattered throughout to do so. Meanwhile, we're constantly being assaulted with the game's odd humor, from the strange way the various creatures are animated (it's quite common for instance for an animal's 4 legs to just take turns rising up and down like pistons rather than move at all realistically), to the fact that all music in the game is piped in through speakers scattered throughout the levels. Getting closer makes the music louder, and if so inclined, you can destroy them to rid yourself of the elevator music they provide.
Overall, SSSV is quite the charming little game, albeit rather rough around the edges. As was previously discussed, while it has no sequels, the gameplay forms a bridge from Lemmings' ability-changing based puzzle solving, and the 3D free-roaming, hop into anything you see appeal of the Grand Theft Auto series. The appeal of both extremes goes without saying one should think.
