[mechanori]

Supposedly, LSD (a video game) is a recreation of dreams written down in a staff member's dream journal. The subtitle calls it a "dream emulator," but the game is themed after it's hard drug name.

There is no goal in LSD. You can walk in four directions, you can look behind you with the L1 or R1 buttons, you can strafe with the L2 and R2 buttons, and you can look up with the triangle button. There's no "jump" or "use" button; you're purely an observer in the world of LSD.

The game is composed of large, linked rooms or stages. Some are fairly coherent (a green field, a boat dock, a city of old Japanese architecture). Some are pretty absurd (a park of miniature buildings, a wasteland of bizarre architecture and bright colors). Sometimes they're littered with animals and moving clouds. Other times, they're completely still.

You begin in an arbitrary, but familiar place in one of these stages. You move through the stages by walking into certain objects. A window, a tree, a sculpture. Pretty much any object you can walk into is a portal of sorts to another stage. The screen fades to white, a catchy jingle plays, and suddenly you're somewhere else entirely.


After 10 minutes, your "trip" ends, and this chart appears:



A blinking red box indicates what sort of "trip" you were having, and each white box represents what sorts of trips you've had on other "days." You're then brought back to the main menu, where you can save or play through another "day."

Every so often, instead of walking through stages, you will be shown a video, or be given text to read. The one video I've seen was a fisheye view of a man walking through a Japanese convenience store. At the end, a hand examines a lightbulb. This movie, and the opening movie, are actually very well-produced. Makes you wonder what sort of budget this game had.

It's pretty spectacularly experimental. There's no real hook. The only reason to play more is to experience more, which works because there's so much to experience. Pretty original for a game released in 1998.

Here are some screenshots I took:

[composerzane]

wait what is this? psx? pc?

[mechanori]

Playstation.

[Mr. Mechanical]

Sounds pretty interesting. I like the premise of it, just a bunch of random bits of dreams someone once had, rendered through a videogame? I take it the experience is different every time you play. How many different dream areas are there to explore and warp to?

It'd be neat to see something like this come out on the current generation systems. I'd check it out, definitely.
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[Jeff Garneau]

from a usenet post:

[psiga]

Man, this morning I had a dream where I was gleefully cleaning grout at Sea World.

This game looks interesting.
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[mechanori]

I see it as one of those uniquely video game experiences. We've seen interpretations of dreams in film and in paintings, but rarely are we able to wander through a Playstation interpretation of someone's dream at our own discretion.

It makes me wonder why we don't see more passive games of this ilk. That raises the the whole "Can a game about walking be fun?" question, but yeah. Context, in this case, makes walking around pretty entertaining.

[Laurel Soup]

[mechanori]

Not at all. Now that I think about it, everything's in English, except for the textual dream interludes.

I can't remember our policy on this sort of thing, but maybe I can make this available somehow? It took days of Rapidshare waiting for me to get a hold of the CD image.

[composerzane]

thank you for bringing this game to my attention mechanori

you know, everytime i read a post about some interesting game that's come out, i think, 'maybe games aren't on the wrong track after all'

then i play some more wow and drink bawls and forget such a question ever came to mind

clarification: i do not play wow

[glitch]

i played this a little while ago and loved it.
that area with the miniatures of famous buildings? i was walking/warping in circles one time, and the third time i got to that area, the textures of all the buildings were replaced with seemingly random textures from other areas. in the abandoned city area, at night, walking into that dead body on the street seriously creeped me out...

[psiga]

[composerzane]

[Loki Laufeyson]

this looks interesting. especially if sopme pirate were to make a psp eboot of it

has anyone played the lalaland games? this seems quite similar to those.

[Cycle]

holy wow, this looks cool
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Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

[RecessRapist]

I want this game, like, right fucking now.
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[Assault Suit]

Been looking for this for ages but it never turns up on eBay. I suspect it would be quite expensive, since the only copy I've ever seen of it for sale (on Yahoo Auctions) was around $100 IIRC. Looks really, really interesting anyway.

[wourme]

Is it okay to ask whether anyone knows where to find a rip of this? I'd love to try it. One of my greatest desires is to one day translate some of my own dreams into video games.

Also, I second the recommendation of Matt Aldrige's La La Land games. They are freeware, and you can get some of them here and here and here. The La La Land games were inspired in part by the "Johnny" series by Kim Okkerstrøm. But that's getting into some pretty rough amateur game development territory that not everyone finds very appealing.

[Mr. Toups]

[Jeff Garneau]

blackcats has it

[Capt. Caveman]

Wow. I dig how much more surreal it looks on account of the grainy, jagged old graphics. It makes me wonder if a game deliberately mining that aesthetic would do well if released today.

[Assault Suit]

Probably wouldn't do well but it would certainly be interesting. I find many older 3D games share this surreal quality, even though that most of the time wasn't the goal of the creators. Jumping Flash comes to mind, although I assume the team behind that were sort of striving for that dreamy surreal aesthetic. It all comes down to the textures I think. Even stuff like Tomb Raider looks really surreal today.

EDIT:
La La Land is great BTW.

[wourme]

[Mr. Toups]

oh!

right!

uh.

you didn't hear this here but uh.

click

please don't spread the link around too much, because bandwidth costs would make me very :( at this present juncture.
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[extrabastardformula]

[wourme]

This is a very inspiring game. I don't think it's running exactly as it's supposed to in the emulator, but it's close enough. I like the way that touching anything transitions to another dream. Here are some of the places I've been so far:

[negativedge]

Kudos for making something that looks interesting out of 1995's visuals.
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[img:074899cc9a]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v298/Decinoge/REV_WEEK/negativedge_sig.gif[/img:074899cc9a]

[Mr. Business]

[dessgeega]

there are five. we're planning on making all of the games available for download when the podcast goes up, i think.

i am going to attempt to burn lsd and run it on my playstation tonight.
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[Mr. Business]

Also, Mechanori, how the heck did you even figure out that this game exists, much less get a copy of it?

[wourme]

This is just the type of game that I've always wished existed. And it isn't all scenery--some interesting things happen that I won't mention or post images of so not to spoil them.

[SplashBeats]

This game is utterly beautiful. I really don't know what else to say about it.

I'm going to spend some time with this.
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BOUNCE SHAKE TWERK JERK !!!!

[unhappy days]

Is there any music??

I'd like there to be some music

[les meat]

i had 2 CDRs left and the lack of decent free image burning software on windows wasted both of them :(

I'll have to emulate it until I can justify buying more CDRs which may be never
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[les meat]

just chased a baby through some guts into a room with lots of babies bouncing up and down with their heads spinning, but it faded out before I could screengrab
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[wourme]

At times, this game kind of strikes me as a precursor to Silent Hill. Also, one thing that I came across startled me, but I won't say what it was. (It was unrelated to these images.)

[dessgeega]

my efforts at running the game on a playstation were not very successful, but nevertheless surreal. i ended up playing in an emulator.

the game is both wondrous and totally scary. it reminds me most of cosmology of kyoto.
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[unhappy days]

mechanori i'm assuming you actually own the game??

how on earth did you manage to track down a copy??

[dark steve]

I have never played something that's affected me so strongly. I feel like I'm six years old again, playing The Manhole or Cosmic Osmo on a four-color mac classic, but the comparison doesn't even begin to explain how psychically sophisticated this game is.

I'm completely overwhelmed.

[lofighost]

wourme, I was just going to post about the dark streets area. That section is one of my favorite and one of my most hated parts now.

[sawtooth]

holy shit this game
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