Total Distortion page 2
Total Distortion gleefully charges in the other direction: it thumps its game-proud chest, dubbing itself, in one of its many opening screens, a "Great Big Game Thing!" And it translates every aspect of life into a sequence of gaming challenges.
It's not just a matter of solving puzzles to get doors to open, as in Myst or The Seventh Guest; you must master little games simply for your character to sleep, eat and survive. If, for instance, you don't learn to shoot down the evil grinning nightmares and, literally, "catch Zs," your character will pass out from exhaustion -- and Total Distortion will perform a nose-thumbing dance of victory over your corpse.
Life as a game: Total Distortion takes that slightly crazy concept to deliberately baroque extremes. Its genius lies in the way the game rewards you as you master it -- not only with points but with new raw material for your art. The deeper you travel into the game's rock 'n' roll universe, the more crunched-out music and spiky images you can carry home to use in your videos. If making those videos is enjoyable in itself -- and it was for me -- then Total Distortion has managed to reward not just your game character but you, too.
The game borrows its hyperactive aesthetics from its MTV-of-the-future subject matter. The Distortion Dimension turns out, unsurprisingly, to be a noisy place, a soup of soundbites -- guitar licks, groans of pleasure, cries of "C'mon, baby" and "Not dead yet?" All of Total Distortion's music was written and performed by the Pop Rocketeers themselves, and they're featured in many of its video clips, too -- along with people they found on the street near their Haight-Ashbury digs. Self-referential? Sure, but in an endearing way. In a marketplace full of junk CD-ROMs cranked out by corporate committees, here's one that's lovingly handcrafted -- and covered with its creators' fingerprints.
Strangely enough, the one thing Total Distortion isn't going to feel like is a technological advance. Razzle-dazzle devices and techniques that looked revolutionary two years ago when Sparks previewed them at trade shows are now relatively common. For all its flash and fun, Total Distortion is less a breakthrough leap onto some new multimedia level than a summation of what's gone before. It's more the end of an era than the beginning.
