Harvester Reviews

Carrigon's

Harvester Reviews

email: juliean130@yahoo.com

https://www.angelfire.com/games4/carrigon/index.htm

Below, you will find a collection of reviews for Harvester, graciously donated by: Anthony Larme Email: larme@ozemail.com.au Websites: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~larme/phantas.html [Review of Phantasmagoria] http://www.ozemail.com.au/~larme/phantas2.html [Phantasmagoria 2 Overview] http://www.netleague.com/wwwboards/phantasboard/ [Phantasmagoria Message Forum]

However, I've always believed one should make up one's own mind about things. By the way, I played Harvester on a 486/66 with 2x CD Rom, and a SB16 soundcard. It ran fine. So you do not need a Pentium to play the game. Don't forget that you can download a playable Harvester demo. It's a big file, about 37mb. Harvester Demo Download If this link doesn't work, try the DigiFX website. Enjoy!

Article 1:

[Happy Puppy Games]

Harvest of Horrors

Preview by Steve Honeywell

Title: Harvester Publisher: Merit Studios Developer: DigiFx Category: Action/Adventure SKU: PC System Requirements: 486DX/33, VESA local bus video card, 8MB RAM, 2xCD-ROM, Microsoft compatible mouse, 30MB hard drive space Age/Ratings: Not Available (presumably Mature)

[Image] [Image] Harvester, the brainchild of Gilbert Austin and the recently renamed DigiFx (formerly Future Vision), is a very difficult game to judge. It's still not quite complete, but it's getting there. Part of it works, part of it doesn't. It's mildly askew in parts, fairly disturbing in others and way past the deep end in still others. And while final judgment has yet to be passed on this game, Harvester seems to have its general direction well in hand. [Image] The plot is sort of difficult to determine. The player, an average guy named Steve (hey! I can relate!) wakes up one day in the town of Harvest, population 51. He has no memory of anything and discovers that his impending wedding is two weeks off. He also discovers that Harvest is like mainstream America in the 50s--twisted so hard it's straight again. Nothing seems quite as it should [Image] be. The town is dominated by a huge temple dedicated to a secret lodge that still manages to be exclusive in so small a town. And it seems that many of the bizarre events are related to, if not caused by, this lodge. [Image] Harvester, for lack of a better term, is a black comedy. Very black, and while often comedic, also just as often repugnant. There are some wonderful bits of odd humor thrown into the mix-the main character's mother is baking cookies on the first day of the game, a Monday. She's baking the cookies for a bake sale to be held on Friday but she's doing it early to get it done and out of the way. Of course, [Image] since the cookies will be stale by Friday, she won't be able to sell them, so she's throwing them away-no one would pay for stale cookies, after all. And she's baking more to replace the one's she's throwing away. Oh, but Steve is able to take as many as he wants from the trash-he's her son after all and she wouldn't charge him for cookies. [Image] Still other events evoke the same sort of feeling with a bizarre undercurrent. The newspaper building burned down months ago, the crime still unsolved, but the paperboy comes by every day. But now he's collecting papers from the houses. Odd, sort of cute. But it's also Steve's job to put the papers out for him, and if he doesn't hand them over, one gets the sense of an odd threat coming from the little paperboy. It's disturbing and, frankly, it's well-played here. [Image] And there's lots and lots of dark humor. There's a nuclear missile base in town with rows of nukes pointing jauntily skyward. The guy who runs the joint is a vicious anti-Communist named Buster Monroe, who had his legs shot off in World War II. He's got the trigger to the nukes, and since this is the 50s (and since this is Harvest) he's got no safeguards. The button is strapped to the underside of his torso-he propels himself along by walking on his hands. Of course, if he ever slips and falls, he'll trigger World War III. In fact, this is a possible result in the game. The supreme black comedy moment comes when a bloodied skull and spinal column are found and the sheriff rules it death by natural causes, commenting "Can't live without a spine. Nothing unnatural about that." Harvest has an odd logic all its own. [Image] But then there is a disturbing undercurrent to the game. Rather than walk the fine edge of the abyss between dark comedy and obscenity, Harvester has jumped into said abyss with both feet and is cavorting in its own [Image] depravity at times. There's a surfeit of horror-it no longer becomes a question of how far the game will go, because the game will go anywhere to gross out the player. But it's not just gore that's the problem-gore in and of itself isn't that difficult to deal with, and there's a grand tradition of over-the-top blood and guts being a part of black comedy (witness Evil Dead 2). Unfortunately, Harvester is often mean-spirited and just hateful. [Image] This also doesn't address a couple of technical problems Harvester has. Character animation is laughable much of the time-our hero walks around like he's just soiled himself, which, considering much of Harvester's content, is entirely possible. When carrying a weapon, Steve (the character, not the reviewer) hunches over like an osteoporosis victim. These are issues that could easily be overlooked, but they draw constant attention to themselves. [Image] If the rough edges get sanded off, Harvester could become a disturbing look at society. Of course, it could just as easily become the PC version of Faces of Death; sort of a sanitized snuff film there to give a thrill to the jaded. Caveat gamer.

[Image]

[Back] [Front] [Pulse] [Vault] [Gottahavit] [Airwaves]

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Your comments are welcome. [Image]

Article 2:

[Image]

Harvester by Merit Studios

Official Harvester Website * Harvester Cheat Codes * Vital Statistics

From the depths of vaporware comes Harvester, designed by DigiFx and published by Merit Studios. Was it worth the wait? Harvester mixes both some nicely rendered graphics that create a truly eerie and unique atmosphere, some crazy characters, and some slightly dated looking full-motion video to create a game that is, well, definitely different. And for the most part it is fun, and that is what counts right?

You Always Were a Kidder, Steve

Steve is having one of those days. He wakes up and suddenly can't remember who he is. You've heard this one before, right? Steve has amnesia and wakes up in a world that is totally bizarre. It's like the 1950s from hell. Does he really belong here? Is this really how the world is, or has Steve woken up in some strange dimension called Harvest? Steve's problems only begin with the amnesia. He learns that is he is to get married in a few weeks, he finds his little brother sitting at the TV depicting a show that is a cross between the Lone Ranger and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and his dad is locked in the bedroom, moaning incessantly. Almost every resident of Harvest, and there are a lot of them, is equally as bizarre.

[Image] You'll also meet the paranoid, torso-less Colonel who maintains watch at the nuclear missle base (with the "button" firmly at his waist), the Wasp Woman who lives in an abandoned house filled with wasp nests, and the neighborhood firemen who have an affinity for the color pink. Much of the town's weirdness seems to be centered around a Lodge in the middle of town. The Lodge is an exclusive club, called the Order of the Harvest Moon. As the adventure progresses, Steve will become intimately knowledgeable about the Lodge and its inhabitants.

This is one of the plusses with Harvester. The characters are down right strange! Yeah, some of them go overboard (some, REALLY overboard), but you never really know what is going to happen next when you interact with a new character. The voice acting is above average, especially in the dialogue sequences. Move to the full motion video however, and you are graced with some of the cheesiest acting around. Which also, isn't terribly bad, because I don't think people will play and experience Harvester for its Academy Award winning thesbians. Think of Harvester as the Best Picture winner for B-movies.

Just Your Ordinary, Eerie Town..

Harvester plays like a typical third-person perspective graphic [Image] adventure, ala the King's Quest games and closely resembles the more recently released Darkseed II in presentation. The characters are digitized and superimposed onto the full screen, 3D rendered SVGA backdrops. The backgrounds are some of the best I have seen in a third-person adventure and maybe all adventures put together. A vibrant use of colors and extensive detail is put into every single background in the game. The use of detail in the backgrounds adds a great deal to the overall atmosphere of the town. The depiction of buildings, skyline, and even the cars, is downright eerie.

Mixed in with the static backdrops are many full motion video sequences and 3D rendered cutscenes. These run the spectrum from nicely done to very pixelated and grainy. Some seem to be relevant to the game and its progression, others seem to be included just to attempt to gross you out (of which it occasionally succeeds).

Another thing that adds to the atmosphere is the music and sound effects, both which are excellent. Entering a location you might hear some soft elevator type music, that sounds like it is being played off of an old style radio. This may not exactly sound too great, but inside the world of Harvester, it fits perfectly. The sound effects are also very good and like the music add to the overall feel of the game. For example, enter Harvest's school and you'll hear the students chanting and singing some song like they are zombies. Most sound effects are in perfect volume and pitch to give you the feel they are either just off in the distance or right near you. The only gripe about the music and sound effects is that the track repeats after a little while, so you'll begin to hear the same things over and over again.

Just Your Ordinary, Eerie Conversations..

The interface is pretty basic, your usual point-and-click. You roam the screen with your mouse searching for labelled hotspots. After locating the various hotspots, you can click you mouse to examine the object (or talk to the person). If you can pick up the object or operate the object, you'll be given that choice after you have examined it. "Operate" is the generic term Harvester uses for just about any action besides look, pick up, or talk. Sometimes it sounds pretty silly, especially when it says "Operate the Exit". Like your usual graphic adventure, there are many objects to pick up and use in different places to solve puzzles.

[Image] To solve the puzzles, you'll have to gather clues and hints. This is done by talking to the many strange inhabitants of Harvest. There is a lot of dialogue in this game, some might say too much. However, even though there is a lot of dialogue, I found it to be so bizarre that it kept my attention the entire time I was listening to each character. When you talk with a character, you select various keywords or subjects to talk about, such as "Harvest" or "Amnesia". By talking about these subjects, more keywords will pop up. In a new twist, there is an "Other" line where you can type in your own subject. I haven't found this to be entirely useful though, because most of the time I am just typing subjects that it presents you with, but have disappeared because you selected other subjects. Usually by typing a new subject, you'll be greeted with the typical "What are you talking about, Steve?".

Harvest Quest Meets Mortal Kombat

The puzzles in Harvest range from the usual obvious to the more difficult. One thing that makes the puzzles better are some alternate solutions to many of the games puzzles. However, it isn't entirely perfect. Once I had already completed a task and when I unknowningly went to try and complete that task again, it reacted like I never had done it before. A little design flaw that had no real bearing on the game or its outcome.

Harvester is seperated into days. Each day you'll have to solve a sort of "mini-quest". You have free reign of the town each day, navigation via a nicely done overhead map, so you can pretty much do whatever you want. Each day new conversations and items might pop up and often you'll get a sneak peek, or hint at a quest on an upcoming day. Because of the free reign of each day, these individual quests will take you awhile as you are exploring every location each day, but the actual number of puzzles is fairly small and I had myself wishing there was a little more to do with all the strange inhabitants.

One item that seperates Harvester from the usual adventure fare is [Image] the inclusion of combat sequences. Particularly in the last third of the game, Steve might find it required or useful to weild a weapon and defend himself against an attacking character. When I say useful, that is because you can attack many of the inhabitants of Harvest, even if they are just standing there. But be careful though, most often you'll get it a whole lot of trouble. As far as the combat sequences go, you arm a weapon from your inventory and have at it. No, this isn't Street Fighter II Turbo Edition or Battle Arena Toshinden. After the initial fun of watching innards and guts explode from bodies, you soon realize that combat is little more than two choppy, animated characters duking it out via frantic mouse clicking on your part.

Unfortunately, this is where the game sort of loses its fun factor. In the last third of the game, which takes place in the mysterious Lodge, the combat sequences are pretty much the name of the game. You'll find some interesting new weapons, but the combat still consists of mouse clicking and little more. There are some puzzles in the Lodge, which are good, but I found myself wishing I was back in the town of Harvest, interacting with the crazy characters and having more adventures with them.

Harvester is definitely one of the strangest games I have ever played, and it kept my interest all the way to the end, despite its somewhat lackluster final third chapter. Although most of the game is played for humor, very dark humor that is, it goes without saying that Harvester is definitely king of adventure game gore, so trust the mature rating on the package.

Well, so after all is said and done, was it worth the wait? Though it will be remembered for its long delay and its promise of over the top guts and gore, it doesn't take away from the fact that Harvester is a fun game that boasts some truly unusual scenes and dialogue mixed with some decent puzzles. My favorite line of the game, which pretty much sums up the entire world of Harvester is said by the town Sheriff. "You can't live without a spinal cord, son. There's nothing unnatural about that. Think I will have some more of that pie!".

Rating : 7/10

Doug Radcliffe (10/4/96)

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Vital Statistics

* 486DX-33 (486-66 or Pentium recommended) * 8 MB RAM (16 MB recommended) * SVGA (640x480x256-VESA) * DOS 5.0 or later (runs in Windows 3.1 or Windows 95) * 30 MB swap file * Sound Blaster 8-bit/16-bit; & AWE32; Pro-Audio Spectrum 16; Microsoft sound system, and more. * 2X CD-ROM drive (Quad speed recommended); MSCDEX drivers v.2.1 or greater; Microsoft compatible mouse (version 8.0 or greater)

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Article 3:

Review of HARVESTER

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From scott@basis.com (Scott Amspoker) Organization Basis International Date Mon, 21 Oct 1996 15:22:08 GMT Newsgroups comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure Message-ID <327090e9.6604740@basis.basis.com>

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GAME REVIEW OF "HARVESTER" Scott Amspoker 10/20/96

HARVESTER Developed by DigiFx Produced by Merit Studios

"You can't stay in Harvest without becoming a Harvester."

The benign blurb from the packaging of a computer game will take on a deeper meaning by the game's end. Just what is this place called Harvest and what is a Harvester?

HARVESTER, a recent entry into the adventure game market, pushes the envelope of adult situations, violence, and gore for this genre. Although some players will be turned off by HARVESTER'S twisted style, those who stay with it to the end might find that they got more than they bargained for.

OVERVIEW --------

You wake up in your bedroom with amnesia. You don't even know your name. You explore your house, meet your "family", and then begin exploring the town of Harvest. Harvest, population 51, has a Norman Rockwell aura and appears to be stuck in the golden age of the 1950's. It is a time of black-and-white TV, Tucker automobiles, and simple God-fearing folk ever vigilant about the threat of communism. However, looks can be deceiving. You quickly discover that the town is populated by bizarre characters (including your own family) and has some dark secrets.

The snotty little paper boy does not deliver newspapers but rather takes them and gets rather nasty if you don't have one handy. The elderly deputy sheriff has a penchant for masturbation. The school principal and school teacher have rather unorthodox ideas about how to handle children. The fire department consists of lisping, effeminate firemen. (At first that bothered me but when I realized that Harvest was a 1950's, cold war, bible-belt community, that perception of gay men fit nicely into the mindset).

At the center of the town stands the lodge for the Order Of The Harvest Moon. Membership in the lodge is rather exclusive and it seems to be the focal point of the town's existence and the possible source of the town's many secrets.

When you attempt to join the lodge, you are told you must perform various tasks to prove your worthiness. These tasks create the progress of the game which is divided into days. Each day you are given another task to perform that day. The tasks get progressively more serious and can have devastating consequences for other members of the town. At what point do you sell your soul? Where is all this headed?

SYSTEM ------

The following system requirements are given in the README file:

IBM(tm) PC or Compatible 486DX/33 MHz Processor or greater VESA local bus video card with 512K video memory or greater 8MB RAM or greater (16MB RAM recommended) Double Speed (2X) CD-ROM drive or greater Sound device with Digital Sound Capability MSCDEX drivers v 2.1 or greater Microsoft(tm) compatible mouse and mouse driver (version 8.0 or greater) 30MB free hard disk drive space

I'm running Win95 on a P133, 32MB RAM, 6x CD-ROM. HARVESTER ran smoothly although I feel the scene changes could have been a little faster.

HARVESTER comes on 3 CD-ROMs. The game progresses logically through the 3 CDs so there won't be any needless swapping.

I had a problem configuring the sound under Win95. My sound card settings are just a tad non-standard. It's not unusual for games to crash trying to perform auto-detect on my system under Win95. I rebooted into DOS and successfully ran HARVESTER's sound card configuration program. After that, it ran find under Win95.

I didn't experience any bugs or crashes while playing HARVESTER.

INTERFACE ---------

HARVESTER's interface resembles the old KING'S QUEST games. It is a 3rd-person perspective with your character moving around a series of scenes. A hot cursor provides clues to places to interact. HARVESTER uses live actors blue-screened against a graphics background. When engaging in conversations, the characters' faces appear in an inset with no animation. This is rather outdated today and it initially disappointed me. After a while it seemed appropriate for this particular game as though it were parodying the early Sierra games (check out one of the tombstones in the cemetery).

There is quite an inventory and you may carry everything. Selecting an inventory item wasn't a quick operation and I found it awkward at times when I needed to try different items on a puzzle.

GRAPHICS --------

HARVESTER uses most of a 640x480 display in SVGA mode. The graphics are crisp and photolike. Because of the setting of the story, there is little opportunity for imaginative, fantastic imagery until late in the game. Don't plan on being blown away by the graphics which intend to depict a boring little town. The "gore" shots work hard to shock the player although they're only slightly more explicit than DOOM or DUKE NUKEM.

There is the occasional FMV in HARVESTER. The FMVs are reasonably integrated into the game and are not overdone (mainly as transitions). The quality of the FMVs is good but not great.

I have to mention that HARVESTER has the slickest, most impressive opening credits sequence I've seen so far.

SOUND -----

As with the graphics, the setting of the story doesn't call for a sweeping, glossy soundtrack. The ambient sounds of a small town are well done and occasionally funny. When you enter a store, a small radio or television might be playing. Of course, great care went into getting just the right sound effects to accompany the gore. The voice acting is cheesy but in an deliberately funny way.

It isn't until the final third of the game that the soundtrack gets musically interesting. Here, the music makes an appropriate impact on the game experience.

THE PUZZLES AND GAME PLAY -------------------------

HARVESTER doesn't break any new ground when it comes to puzzles. Most of the puzzles are either inventory puzzles or character interaction puzzles. The fundamental structure of game play is similar to PANDORA DIRECTIVE or UNDER A KILLING MOON. You must interact with characters to gain information about the town and what to do next. After each stage of progress, it's time to make your rounds again and interact some more. You are given multiple-choice conversations.

There is often more than one way to solve a particular puzzle and some puzzles don't need to be solved to complete the game. This gives HARVESTER the illusion of being more complex than it really is. However, I wouldn't go so far as to consider the extraneous puzzles loose ends. Other players have described scenes I never saw. At one point in the game I ended up in jail where there appeared to be a way to get out. Before I figured out the solution, I restored the game and tried a different path that didn't lead to jail. Perhaps I should go back and try to solve the jail puzzle.

The puzzle difficulty was generally moderate. There was only one puzzle I thought unfair (it involved finding a well-hidden switch that I didn't even know existed in the first place).

As mentioned earlier, each day you are given a new task to perform that day. I really liked this type of structure as it set a good pace for story progress.

The final third of the game takes place inside the lodge. Here the game takes a bit of a turn. You have to perform the occasional combat sequence against creatures and other characters you will encounter in the lodge. These combats are quick and simple to get through and don't really dominate the game. (In many cases, you can also get past a character by means other than combat. You decide how you want to act.)

Inside the lodge, you will still have some puzzles to solve. However, the game begins to slowly lose its purpose as an adventure game. The puzzles get progressively easier to solve and start to appear extraneous. Instead, the game becomes even more daring in its graphics and iconoclastic tone. Interactions with characters take on a much darker philosophical nature. I found myself quite fascinated by the relentless assault on my sensibilities - not unlike the morbid urge to look at a car wreck as you drive past.

The ending is unexpected and thought provoking (be sure to try both endings).

BUT IS IT ART? --------------

HARVESTER will no doubt create heated debate among gamers (and among those who don't play computer games at all). The game starts out employing amusing, twisted, dark humor (I found myself laughing out loud on occasion). Some players will be put off by the general tastelessness that's rather forced at times. Later, the game loses its sense of humor and turns disturbingly serious.

In the end, I learned the truth about Harvest and it left me unable to simply write the game off as a pixelated nightmare. When it was over I found myself staring blankly at the computer screen for a while trying to grasp what had just happened and what it meant.

Is HARVESTER a brilliant cultural commentary or exploitive trash? (I recall the same sort of question being debated about Oliver Stone's NATURAL BORN KILLERS.)

Regardless of how the player answers that question, there's no denying that the game embodies one, or many, messages that one doesn't expect to find in an adventure game. We can even argue over what those messages are and how profound they may be. Adventure games often involve the classic battle between good and evil. HARVESTER has much to say about that.

Scott Amspoker | scott@basis.com | THIS SPACE AVAILABLE http://www.rt66.com/sda |

Article 4:

Reviews

Finally, the most awaited and controversial video game ever is now available everywhere this summer! "Harvester" has been in development for over 2 1/2 years and features the latest in game technology. Harvester will disturb you like no other has before!

Features:

* Three CD SVGA Adventure with over 180 locations to explore! * Full 16 Bit CD quality musical score! Over 100 unique characters with which to interact! * Dynamic dialogue system (DDS) with over 12,000 lines of speech! * Talk with characters or rip their guts out using any one of 20 uniqely filmed combat moves!

What the reviews say!

"'Harvester' is a radical departure for this rather staid genre, and it may prove a watershed release for the industry at large."

"You've never seen anything quite like 'Harvester'."

--- Peter Olafson, PC Games Magazine

"I can't remember the last time I played a 'traditional' adventure game with genuine puzzles and an enrossing plot."

"If you thought Phantasmagoria was stomach-churning in places (and let's face it, it was), you're in for a shock when you see Harvester".

--- Chris Anderson, PC Zone Magazine VIew Page 1 View Page 2

"DigiFX have developed an adult adventure game which is unlike anything you are likely to have ever seen in the field of PC gaming. "

"Harvester is difficult to compare with any other game and as such should be applauded for its boldness."

--- Rob Smith, PC Powerplay

"But then there is a disturbing undercurrent to the game. Rather than walk the fine edge of the abyss between dark comedy and obscenity, Harvester has jumped into said abyss with both feet and is cavorting in its own depravity at times."

--- Steve Honeywell, Happy Puppy Games Online

A Letter found on the Net

October 15, 1996, Dallas, TX HARVESTER RECEIVES CRITICISM ON VIOLENCE. The following letter was retrieved off the internet yesterday criticizing the violence in Harvester. Jack Irons, President of Merit Studios, said "I'm sorry this parent is upset but, we have been telling people all along that this is a game for adults only. Guess it is everything we were telling people it was." HERE'S THE LETTER: "Normally, I am completely against any type of censorship and most types of rating systems. The rating system by the ESRB for computer games is one of those. And of course, it has not force of law behind it. A store can sell an M-rated game to a 12-year-old with impunity. However, I've just seen a computer game that represents an incredibly clear case of the pornography of violence -- the kind that should be prevented from getting into kids' hands. It's called "Harvester." My thirteen-year-old daughter came home with it a few days ago, having purchased it with her baby-sitting money. She heard from friends that it was "pretty cool." After trying it out for five minutes, she was actually physically ill. "Apparently the creators of Harvester (Merit Studios) have taken it upon themselves to confront the entire concept of "family values" with this piece of computer trash. Harvester is so disturbingly violent, that I can't conceive of anyone who would not be completely offended. I suspect even the ACLU would refuse to defend it. "In one scene, a small infant's eyes pop out of its head in such a realistic manner that I'm not convinced it was done with special effects at all. In another a man splits his own skull open. One scene is simply more disgusting than the next. If this is a game, then I guess I don't understand what a game is supposed to be any more. "I haven't used my name here because I don't want to get phone calls or e-mails or anything like that. And I don't want my daughter to be embarrassed either. But it seems to me that an organization like yours might spread the word about this game and let people know. Maybe you could look into it. It's available right there on the shelf in most stores that sell computer games. Sincerely, Really concerned and disgusted parent"

[Electric Library] [Image] [Image] [go to Best Part] [begin your Research]

Article 5:

A bloody game.

A BLOODY GAME

In a squat and ugly office building in North Dallas, an artist at a computer creates drop by drop a pool of blood that seeps from a clown who has been sliced in half. In another cubicle, a technician plays a videotape of a pretty young woman standing in black underwear against a blue background. She puts her foot on a blue box and begins to roll down one stocking. The technician freezes the tape frame by frame and, adjusting controls on a Betacam deck, transfers each frame onto a computer-generated background. The result of the combination is that she, a real person, appears to be undressing in a moody painting of a bedroom.

The artist, the technician, and nine others are working late nights to create Harvester, a computer game that goes where no other game has dared to. It is sickeningly violent and depraved. Although it will not be ready for release until mid-May, Harvester already faces censorship in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In the United States it seems destined to become an important exhibit in the debate over violence in movies, rap music, television, and computer games. I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe in individual choice. Harvester is too gory for me.

But despite the gore, there are glimmers of something original here, of bending technology into an entirely new art. I don't mean using computers to compose music or draw, although computers do both very well, because there were musical scores and paintings for centuries before there were computers. I mean an art that could not exist independent of computers. Computers are tools, but are they only tools, with no more artistic potential than an adding machine or a leaf blower? Or are they also a medium like film or paint? Everyone senses that they are a medium--but for creating what? Right now, computer games are as close as anyone has come to answering that question. Computer games are interactive. The players make choices, the computer whirs, and the player must make more choices. Can a game be created in which the player must make choices that have emotional, aesthetic, and moral meaning? That would be how a computer game could become a new art, and Harvester, in its violent, depraved way, does exactly that. Harvester could be to computer games what The Birth of a Nation was to movies. That 1915 masterpiece was the first great movie epic ever made, the first to understand how a movie camera could create a unique art; and in its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, it too was sickeningly violent and depraved.

Harvester, which is more than a little reminiscent of Twin Peaks, begins with the player in a small town where people look normal enough on the outside but are bizarre beneath the surface. The player must meet the people, solve various mysteries, and explore strange places on the edge of town. It is impossible not to admire the variety of Harvester's 116 characters, the inventiveness of the places the player visits, the moments of humor (grisly though they may be), the intricacy of the puzzles, and the great complexity of the game. There is also a lot of action. The player begins by fighting animated, imaginary creatures such as giant spiders. But as the game goes on, the enemies become more like humans until, finally, they are humans: not animated drawings of humans but real actors, like the young woman undressing, who appear in the game. Nor do the human characters die antiseptic, electronic deaths. It can take numerous blows to extinguish them, and they spout rivers of blood as limbs and torsos get whacked off. An elderly chess master, once defeated, self-destructs by splitting his skull with an ax, revealing gooey brains and a key. The player must make his alter ego on the screen reach inside the mess and retrieve the key. Elsewhere, a skull and spinal column may or may not be the grisly remains of the player-character's fiancee; to find out, he must pick them up and carry them to the doorkeeper of a mysterious lodge in town. There, as the game's promotional brochure says with truly chilling sprightliness, "you must prove your willingness to break the law. And, possibly become a serial killer!"

At the end of the game, the player-character must choose between an act of extreme violence and an act of mercy. Until now the human characters have been either bad or at least flawed enough for the player to feel some justification for spilling gallons of their blood. But here there are no such sops to conscience. The potential victim is admirable and good. The act of mercy has rewards. The only reward for the act of violence is doing evil. You know what you should do, but the game asks, What are you going to do right now? And this is where Harvester crosses into new territory and becomes something more than just a game. The action takes place within the game, but the moral choice you make is yours. It exists outside the game. It's real.

Harvester, with all its actors, filming, artists, and programmers to pay for, had a budget of about $1 million. It will be published by Merit Studios, a small Dallas company with a list of about fifty game titles and more than $4 million in revenues. They expect Harvester to generate $2.5 million in new revenue. The game was developed by Future Vision, an even smaller company in Dallas that has created two other games and is pretty much betting the company on Harvester. It was written and directed by Gilbert Austin, a graduate of the University of Texas film school who has lived in Austin for all of his 31 years.

Gilbert had liked to play arcade games in high school but hadn't given much thought to computers until he got a job near the end of 1989 as a writer at Origin Systems, the then-independent game company in Austin. The company's successful games included the Ultima and Commander series. Origin's founder, Richard Garriott, is famous in Austin for tooling around town in a black Lamborghini as well as for turning his home into an elaborate house of horrors on Halloween and opening it to the public. Despite his lack of experience, Gilbert rose rapidly in the company. Before he quit in 1993, Gilbert had helped create several successful games for Origin, including the predecessors of the current megahit Wing Commander III.

So complex that it comes on four CD-ROMs and requires more than eight megabytes of RAM to run properly, Wing Commander III is a game buried within a slavish imitation of the movie Star Wars. Its plot is revealed through elaborate cinematic sequences that star Malcolm McDowell and Mark Hamill, who looks somewhat longer in the tooth than he did in Star Wars. But, sandwiched between the movie sequences, the game itself turns out to be nothing more advanced than an elaborate shooting gallery. You are the commander of a squadron of spaceships trying to shoot enemy spacecraft out of the sky. It's a pleasant enough time waster, even an exciting one; but, for all the movie razzle-dazzle, the game has no heart. You might as well have been shooting tin cans with a BB gun.

Gilbert had wanted to do a horror game because he thought there were no good ones on the market. There were some that featured werewolves or the like, but that was just the trappings of horror without being truly frightening. Future Vision approached Gilbert about creating a game for them and promised him complete freedom. "So," he told me, "I asked myself what a real horror game would be. Was it really possible to scare someone on a computer the way you can scare someone with a movie?" He decided that was impossible: A movie can scare you only because the director has the absolute control of a dictator. He creates suspense by showing you what he wants you to see, exactly the way he wants you to see it and in exactly the order he wants you to see it. There's the door, it's opening, and behind it is . . .

"But," Gilbert said, "you can't do that in a game because you can' t be a dictator. You just have to set up the world of the game and let the players move around in it on their own. So then I thought, 'Is scaring someone the only kind of horror there is?' Well, no, it's not. If you can't scare someone on a computer, what you can do is disturb them." In thirty minutes he had sketched out the basic idea of the game and the ending. "There are other games I admire," he went on, "but none I admire the way I admire film. But this ending really disturbed me. It allowed you to do evil, not just naughty stuff, but stuff that makes you feel disturbed for doing it. And I thought it was a new kind of game, the first one a player would walk away from feeling shaken or disgusted or thoughtful."

Harvester certainly disturbs and disgusts me. What is most disturbing about Harvester is also closest to whatever art on a computer might be. Art engages both the intellect and the emotions, but the emotions most easily aroused by a computer seem to be the negative ones--anger, frustration, hate. Anyone who has worked at all with a computer has felt all three toward the machine itself. Harvester cleverly exploits the computer's ability to arouse those emotions and forces the player to consider whether he might like them after all. Now what? The computer can arouse the negative emotions because they can happen instantly. The first great artist of the computer will be the person who reveals to the player at the computer keyboard a full range of emotions evolving through time. Until then, artistic computer games will continue to depend on distasteful themes similar to the ones in Harvester. We have songs about love and novels about love and movies about love. We still need the first computer game about love.

"That," Gilbert told me, "would be difficult to achieve at this level of technology. If virtual reality comes, then that is a different story. But it's hard to see that level of interactivity in my lifetime. " He paused for a moment and then shrugged. "God only knows how to create something that interactive."

~~~~~~~~

By Gregory Curtis

Curtis, Gregory, A bloody game.., Vol. 23, Texas Monthly, 03-01-1995, pp 5.

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Article 6:

[VrE Online] Harvester from Merit Studios and DigiFX To live or die in Harvest --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rating: graphics 79, sound 86, interface 84, fun factor 96, overall 86 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Harvester] Welcome to Harvest, your average small town. You'll find all the comforts of your own home town, a loving mother, an annoying little brother, a gorgeous girlfriend, a friendly sheriff, oh yeah, and a homicidal cult. Did I forget to mention that you have no idea who, or where, you are, and no one seems to care? Sounds like your typical teenage life to me.

Harvester has been hyped, waited for, hyped again, and waited for again for 3 years. It looks like the wait was well worth it. The underlying story is fantastic. It's been a long time since an adventure game has been more than a hunt for hot spots or a long movie where the only interaction is an occasional mouse click to take you to the next movie. Gilbert Austin has laid out a story full of intrigue, miss direction, and shocking grotesqueness.

Grotesque really isn't the word for it, how about unbelievably [Harvester] disgusting in parts. I'm not complaining at all, I love seeing a company take a chance with the politically correct wackos and put out exactly what they want. Harvester does have a maturity warning label on it, and it's deserved. If you have a weak stomach, you might want to avoid the scenes of ritual sacrifice, wasp eating babies, and a pie eating sheriffs and play something a little safer, like Mario64 on your Pretendo. Fortunately, the violence isn't done for it's own sake. Much of the blood and guts you see on screen actually contributes to the story.

As for game play, Harvester moves along nicely. The entire game is controlled by your mouse. You can move around, pick things up, and even carry on conversations without touching the keyboard. And, before you text adventure players start groaning, Harvester brings back the much missed, user interaction (gasp). While talking to the various inhabitants of the wonderful town of Harvest, you are given a list of topics to ask them about. You can simply stick to the script and watch the conversation take place, or you can actually enter your own topic to ask people about. Wow, I seem to remember this being called interaction.

[Harvester] Harvester isn't all sunshine and roses though. Having been delayed over and over again has left parts of the game seriously lagging behind the current technology. Most notably is the graphics. The actors were shot using a green screen background and then pasted into computer generated scenes. This was all done well, but the low resolution used almost kills this game. Running at 320x200 all of the scenes look blocky, and the video all looks grainy. This really shows the length of time DigiFX has been working on this project. When compared to then new standards set by games like Zork: Nemisis, Harvester really needs video help.

My only other real complaint is that the characters aren't [Harvester] doing anything when you are talking to them. During conversations a still shot is put up on screen and then they speak their lines. If their attitude changes, the still shot changes. It gets real annoying seeing that same shocked expression on Steve's face over and over again. Some close up animation would have been real nice, or no still shots at all would have been an improvement.

Fortunately, the story in Harvester more than makes up for any technological failings this game has. I highly recommend playing at night, with all the lights off. If you don't mind lower res graphics, or blood and guts, Harvester is definitely a must get game.

--- Steve Gerencser --- krell@psyber.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------- System Requirements: 486dx33, Dos 5.0, 8MB Ram, 30MB Hard Drive, 2x Cd-Rom, SVGA, Mouse Recommended: 486dx66 or better, 16MB Ram, 4x Cd-Rom --------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Front Door]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright VrE Online 1996. No portion of this review may be copied or reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from VrE Online. All product and company names are Copyright & Trademark their respective owners.

Article 7:

[Image] [Have a Life. Get OS/2 Warp Server.]

[GAMECENTER.COM][reviews header] [Harvester][3 stars][box shot] [*] [Image] by Arinn Dembo

[Image] The problem with waiting a long time for a game is that by the time you get it, you usually don't want it anymore. When a game is held up for too long, it's [Image] Game usually dated by the time it hits the shelves. Graphics news or gameplay that might have been thrillsville three Features years ago wind up looking ridiculously primitive after Hardware enough time has passed. This is certainly the case with Consoles Harvester, the latest game from Merit Studios. Reviews Xperts the stench of bated breath Horror fans have been waiting for Harvester at least a [Image] Top year--two years by some counts--and seeing the finished product, it's hard to see why. Although the game does downloads display some of the fancy details that we've seen in Ask GamerX products like Phantasmagoria and Gabriel Knight II, Tips and there is some stunningly old programming. Even after tactics years of struggle to be released, the title feels World of half-finished; it's too bad, considering that the end cheats product might have been a pretty good game.

[Image] The main obstacle to enjoying Harvester is the CNET.COM interface, which looks to be about two years out of NEWS.COM date. It's the usual point-and-click, with a SEARCH.COM third-person view of your character moving against SVGA DOWNLOAD.COM screens. Automatic cursor changes allow you to examine, SHAREWARE.COM [*]pick up, or walk toward objects, as well as talk to various characters. All of this will be pretty familiar.

techno terror What I found surprising is that the conversations are accompanied by little snapshots of the characters rather than modern-day video, with a change to a different facial expression every so often to convey mood. This [quote] was unexpected in a game that came on three CD-ROMs. It was like walking into a movie theater and seeing a puppet show--not entirely unpleasant, but certainly not what I was expecting. There are some other low-budget touches as well: click to "examine" an object, and you get a clip of text rather than a voice. That was standard practice for older adventure games, but not today's.

The payoff for this simplicity is that you get an awful lot of characters to work with. There are no less than 60 actors employed in the cast of Harvester, which is more than the population of the fictional town the game is set in--Harvest is supposed to have a population of 50. Although you don't get to talk to all of these characters, you do get extended interaction with at least 20 characters who are associated with various locations. This is double the character density that you see in a lot of more-sophisticated adventure games nowadays, which usually support interaction with up to a dozen characters at most.

give me more! [Image]

Article 8:

[GAMECENTER.COM][Harvester]

[Image] Mike and Steph's macabre adventure The plot of the game is a real curiosity, [Image] revolving around themes of alienation, conspiracy, blood thirst, and madness. Harvester is the story of Mike and Stephanie, two wholesome teens who [Image] Game wake up one morning in a terrible predicament: news engaged to be married right out of high school and Features stuck in a town so small that the entire Hardware population could leave on one Greyhound bus. Consoles Reviews [screen shot]Now, most of us will agree that this Xperts scenario is more than horrible enough without adding anything more, but to top it [Image] Top all off, both of them have a stiff case of amnesia. Neither one of them remembers anything downloads about this town called Harvest, where they Ask GamerX supposedly grew up, or about the people who claim Tips and to be their parents and siblings--much less the tactics wedding plans that the whole town seems to be World of eagerly laying. The only thing that they find cheats vaguely familiar is each other, and even so they both agree that under the circumstances, getting [Image] married is probably the last thing they ought to CNET.COM do. NEWS.COM SEARCH.COM The player takes on the role of Mike and is DOWNLOAD.COM allowed to wander the streets of the town, while SHAREWARE.COM Stephanie is confined to her room, imprisoned until the wedding day. Of course, she doesn't have to leave her room to realize that there is something seriously wrong with Harvest. All she has to do is look out the window to see the Lodge, a monolithic structure that is twice the size of any other building in town, looming over all of Harvest like some kind of demonic temple. Everyone seems to think that Mike should try to join the Lodge and become a member of something called The Order of the Harvest Moon--but looking at the place, Stephanie thinks that joining up would probably be the worst idea since plutonium.

Mike has his own doubts about Harvest. For one thing, the year is 1953, even though he senses it shouldn't be. A boy who claims to be his little brother is sitting in front of a huge old cabinet TV, watching scenes of horrifying violence in black-and-white. And the bloodshed doesn't end at home.

give me more! [Image]

Article 9:

[GAMECENTER.COM][Harvester]

[Image] hula hoop horror In the elementary school, the teacher is beating [Image] children to death with a baseball bat. Anyone who checks in at the local hotel checks out at the mortuary--the innkeeper and the mortician are the [Image] Game same fellow. There's a pain-maddened, legless old news cripple holding the launch button on a rack of Features ICBMs at a nuclear missile base right in the Hardware town. And everyone seems to be off his or her Consoles rocker in one way or another, trying to pretend Reviews to be normal and failing miserably--like a bunch Xperts of dangerous lunatics trying to put on a production of Our Town. [Image] Top [screen shot]There's some good material here, downloads but you have to do some slogging to Ask GamerX get to it; there are a lot of little puzzles to Tips and solve, and some are pretty frustrating. The game tactics is somewhat dynamic, changing slightly in World of response to your choices as a player. During the cheats course of the game you'll uncover a lot of dirty laundry on various people, but if you try to show [Image] the evidence to anyone else, you'll trigger CNET.COM nothing but hostility. Information travels faster NEWS.COM than the speed of light in this town. SEARCH.COM DOWNLOAD.COM trick or treat? SHAREWARE.COM I guess what it comes down to is a single question: is Harvester worth the wait (not to mention $60)? Sadly, it probably won't be to the majority of gamers. For those with a serious case of nostalgia for the older adventure games, this is actually a fine example of the form, but it just doesn't hold up to modern standards. As a horror enthusiast, I enjoyed seeing the title, and as a gamer who appreciates the thin edge between laughing and screaming, I appreciate the work. But, despite those nods, I just can't recommend it. Gamers who see this one on the shelves are probably best advised to keep driving--and they definitely won't want to spend the night in town.

quick hints -Don't blab--it will do you no good. If you find any dirty laundry on someone in the town, don't bother trying to share the information with anyone else; the only benefit you can get from it is blackmail. -It took me a couple of days to find the shovel in the ruins of the newspaper building, which you need in order to break into Johnson's Garage. If you're not careful, you may also miss the open drawer in Edna's Diner. -On the first level of the Lodge, don't kill the coatroom attendant right away! You need him to launder your clothes first. Instead, you should go into the saloon and have a few drinks. Three should do it.

Arinn Dembo is a professional writer and critic. Her latest story, "Sisterhood of the Skin," appeared in the June issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Send your gaming challenges to GamerX.

[facts] Harvester Merit Software Studios, 800/238-4277 Price: $60.00

[pc] 486DX/33, 8MB RAM, 30MB disk space, SVGA, 2X CD-ROM, MS-DOS 5.0 or Windows 3.1, Microsoft-compatible mouse; Sound Blaster or compatible sound card

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