Disaster Report IV: Summer Memories review – compelling earthquake adventure - MW

At the start of his career, journalist and former Wall Street trader Michael Lewis published a section of the so-called non-speculative fiction, in which he imagined, in horrible detail, the effects of the horrible earthquake. in Tokyo. The fictional elements of the Lewis document, designed to exaggerate the impact of its traditional report, argue that Tokyo was not ready to handle such a visit (the one that Lewis made comment, long overdue). The video game series Disaster, released in 2003, stems from flashy entertainment, not strictly from the press, but putting you on the streets of Tokyo in a massive earthquake and devastating aftershocks of it, the effect is just as scary.

In this long-awaited latest entry in the series (development stopped temporarily after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, whose epicenter is 232 miles northeast of Tokyo), you embody a core. Young office worker out of town. The game opens on a crowded bus, moments before the start of a choir of grasshopper bells from smartphones when the government sends a city-wide text message to warn residents of the impending disaster. following. At this point, you have to choose how to react from a number of options: stand indifferently in the aisle, don't want to be embarrassed in front of strangers, or fall on your hands and kneel and sit down for something the worst.

The earthquake struck, a bus overturned, and you crawled through rubble in a city transformed by the ground it once was. When you choose your route through the city, aftershocks cause buildings to collapse, roads are cracked, fires burn and of course, the death toll increases. Along the way, you meet a set of characters who respond exactly to the way you can expect after such a disaster: Instagrams taking photos for food, convenience store staff walking by the price of bottled water, street vendors, helpers, vagrants, determined people.



The game has an idiosyncratic tone, at times approaching something like a public infomercial (when threatened by an aftershock, the game challenges you to choose whether to seek out open spaces, or resilient-looking structures for shelter), at other points like a daytime soap. As neither a svelte blockbuster nor a tightly focused indie game, Disaster Report IV belongs to an almost vanished class of game: the mid-budget romp. It struggles to match its ambitions from the position of this middle ground. The translation work is distractingly inadequate (as routine an English word as “flooding”, for example, is rendered as “liquification”). The designers ’vision for arresting set pieces - toppling skyscrapers that kick up tsunamis of dust and all the rest - is almost never met by the programmers’ technical capability. The experience is also littered with strange, meaningless design choices: this is, for example, one of the few games in which the protagonist is forced to visit the bathroom for essential toilet breaks.

And yet for all these shortcomings, Disaster Report IV remains an unforgettable journey. As the rumble of an aftershock rolls in, the screams go up, and you frantically look around to see if and where the next wave of damage is likely to occur, the game offers a compelling, frightening glimpse of how it might feel to live through this particular natural disaster. (This is especially true of its virtual reality mode, unlocked midway through the adventure, which further situates the player inside the harrowing drama.)

The coronavirus pandemic has shown that humans find foresight much harder to act upon than hindsight. Lewis-style speculative non-fiction based on scientific modeling, or unheeded warnings from experts offered numerous, persuasive warnings of what we are living through now. It's arguable that video games like Disaster Report have a role in educating the public as to what to expect, and how to survive, and serve a useful function, as well as an entertaining one.

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Tokyo Jungle
(Crispy’s !; Sony Computer Entertainment; PS4)

Five steps away from the present reality, Tokyo Jungle presents a post-apocalyptic view of the Japanese capital, in which humans were completely removed from the picture. Here, Tokyo has been reclaimed by giant flora, fauna and animals vying for dominance between weeds and vines. You choose an animal to play and tour the city in search of prey to eat and mates to mate, while watching out for predators. No life circle has ever been so beautifully presented in such a video game. But Tokyo Jungle also has funny and whimsical moments. In addition to picking up dog food boxes to avoid hunger and medicine bags to combat air toxicity, you'll also find clothing items - baseball caps, bikinis, sunglasses and sneakers - to wear. Pomeranian clothes you choose, deer or tigers. Wild, new game design, if you can stomach it.