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Casual Friday

There are many reasons to recommend Cadenza - Music, Betrayal and Death. There are also a number of reasons to stay as far away from this game as you can.

The developer of Cadenza is Mad Head Games. I like them quite a lot. But here they undertook a storyline that is out of their sphere of knowledge. The company is headquartered in Serbia, which is neither good nor bad. Unfortunately, it’s probably fair to say that nobody directly involved in designing the game had first-hand knowledge of immediate pre- and post WWII New Orleans. (Other than from movies, television shows and, perhaps, phtographs depicting that era.) And that shows.

The game’s background music is very, very good. But it is reminiscent of the “Big Band Era” of Goodman, Miller and Ellington, and not the jazz that is unique to the New Orleans music style.

The graphics are very nice, but outdoor scenes fail to make use of iconic New Orleans landmarks. That, to me, is almost criminal because it deprives the player of any intimacy. If a player could look at a scene and say, “I know that place,” if only vicariously, involvement in the game is greatly enhanced. As an add-on to this complaint, there is an interactive map, but only two streets, Canal Street and Bienville, represent actual streets in New Orleans. That’s just lazy. Again, it deprives the player of real vs. imagined immersion in the environment.

Voice acting is barely passable. It’s not that there are mumbles, or bad translations or anything like that. It’s that whatever voice actors the developers hired “attempted” to speak an African/American, New Orleans Southern, period-specific dialect without having any clue what they were doing. (I’m sorry if this is first-hand knowledge, but I traveled to NOLA at least three times a year for close to twenty years, and this is not how the residents talk.) Again, this is either lazyness or a perverse sort of pragmatism in that the developers figured nobody would know the dialect, so who cares if it’s wrong.

Now I know that many players really liked this game. For some time it was a fairly-popular nominee on the Casual Community Playthrough thread. I admit that I never voted for it. (Recent events in Chicago, my home town, require me to state this as a form of “transparency.”) That’s so you know that I am not a big fan of this game, which I also stated at the beginning of the post.

The thing that bothers me most, and up front, this is my personal opinion, is that the depicition of black characters, which are a majority of characters in the game, is borderline racist. Whether it’s the bad dialect, or the fact that a white character must intervene on several occasions to save the day for a black protagonist. It just doesn’t give me a warm/fuzzy feeling.

I’m not saying that Mad Head Games is racist. I am saying that they were totally out of their element when designing this game. I know there are several other games in the series, of which this was the first. I’ve not played any of them. Perhaps things have improved on all fronts. I don’t plan on playing them to find out.

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This game has annoyed me for a long time. You will find similar comments on the Casual Games thread. This game has been on the schedule for quite a while, and I kept pushing it back because the use of the word racist has horrible connotations. But stuff that is going on in my home town made this post appropriate.

I am sorry if anyone is offended.

rtrooney - 10 December 2015 11:50 PM

It’s that whatever voice actors the developers hired “attempted” to speak an African/American, New Orleans Southern, period-specific dialect without having any clue what they were doing. (I’m sorry if this is first-hand knowledge, but I traveled to NOLA at least three times a year for close to twenty years, and this is not how the residents talk.) Again, this is either lazyness or a perverse sort of pragmatism in that the developers figured nobody would know the dialect, so who cares if it’s wrong.

So basically, Tim Curry in GK1 all over again?

I am sorry if anyone is offended.

I don’t see how anyone would be.

Accents are difficult to get right for any non-native speaker, and in each region, there are significant smaller pockets of differences that only a person living there would have experienced.  New Jersey is a small state, but there are distinctive differences between the north, the west and the south.  I doubt it’s a matter of laziness for a game developer, but more like what’s available that sounds right to them based on their budget.

I played Cadenza and enjoyed the game, but then I don’t have first hand knowledge of the city.  As Becky said, it would take tons of research to get it right, and that may be beyond the abilities of a small company.  Does that mean that they shouldn’t even attempt setting a game in a different location?  In my opinion, variety is welcome, even if the results aren’t perfect.