Sony USA advertised Trash Panic for its Earth Day 2009 marketing, which is all I needed to know to be interested in it. I’m also, happily enough, obsessed with block-style action puzzle games–Tetris, Panel de Pon, Puyo Puyo, Cleopatra, all welcome. Trash Panic is, in a sentence, one of those Tetris-derived games that implements complex physics simulations and uses irregularly shaped pieces. Namely, trash.
Trash is, sadly, often the operative word these days when talking about digital-only video games. By that, I mean games that are released on digital stores–either on console or on personal computer systems–without any disc release. These games are usually cheaper both on the development and consumer side, released directly to consumers while skipping all the logistical costs of manufacturing and tangible transportation. Stores like the PlayStation Network today have forsaken any kind of quality standards, so you end up seeing a ton of creative refuse choking up the stores and making it difficult to find anything specific, much less anything of high quality.
Back in the late 2000s, however, the idea of a digital-only storefront for smaller games had a real shine to it. Before the deluge of jetsam came washing in, console-based digital stores and platforms like Steam felt less harried and disorganized than the electronics section at the local big-box store or game boutique. Some of the pleasures of this early time were purely tied to novelty, of course. Still, in the days where iTunes still felt a little new, the idea of getting full games legitimately downloaded onto a console with a hard drive hooked up to my family television excited me.
Japan Studio, long more comfortable operating in tandem with collaborators and small teams of independents than with big factory-scale productions, thrived in filling these new digital storefronts with great games. One aspect of Sony Japan’s game operations that I haven’t discussed much to this point is the Game Yarouze! project. Roughly translated to mean “let’s make games,” Game Yarouze! was a creative audition program similar to music industry talent scouting or similar efforts conducted by other Japanese companies like Enix. Started in 1995, Game Yarouze! involved contestants submitting game ideas and proving some development acumen. Sony would then finance the project, paying for cost of living and providing a small support staff to complete the eventual game. This is a rather unorthodox way of doing things in the United States–though Valve’s tendency to co-opt and hire people who create unofficial game modifications bears some resemblance to it–but it has resulted in some profound successes. These included the masterful puzzle game XI (In English, Devil Dice) and the previously covered Doko Demo Issho series. Sony Japan made itself, therefore, a kind of independent game development hub, leveraging the low manufacturing costs of CD-ROM technology and their experience with collaborative development to turn out polished, focused, yet highly creative software.
During the beginning years of the PlayStation 3, however, Sony Japan rebranded Game Yarouze! as PlayStation C.A.M.P! (Creator Audition Mash up Project!).
I’m unsure of how the internal workings of the contest might have changed with this rebrand–if they changed at all–but for our purposes today the most important thing is that Trash Panic resulted from a C.A.M.P! submission by a developer named Taro Matsuda. Matsuda’s idea, which was considered part of PlayStation Japan’s attempt to break up what they called the “common sense” (link in Japanese) of stale console games, was in many ways completely genius. It would use the technology of the PlayStation 3 in ways that were rather unusual back then and even more strange now, all for a game that is fiendishly hard and slyly funny at the same time.
Before we commit too hard to sweeping thematic statements, though, let’s clarify what you do in Trash Panic. I mentioned its similarity to Tetris, and one look at it confirms this.
On the left, we see the playing space. You have a blue trash bin in the centre, a conveyor belt of magnets carrying pieces of trash to the bin on the right, a description of the current piece of trash and its characteristics on the bottom right, a Tetris-style holding space for pieces you want to save on the left, a stoplight measuring player’s remaining chances still further left, and gauges for the temperature, oxygen levels, and score on the bottom left. If you know how Tetris works, most of the game’s workings should be relatively intuitive to guess. Pieces of trash come, one after another with some warning, and you use the controller to rotate and drop the trash into the garbage can in such a way that it doesn’t spill or cause the trash can to overflow. If a piece falls outside the trash bin, you lose one of the green lights on the stoplight on the left, and you can do that twice before you fail and have to restart. Each level involves handling far more trash than the bin can handle, however, so the player can use a button to make pieces fall quickly and shatter, thus making room for more and more garbage to pile on top of it.
As mentioned above, however, the pieces are all modelled on real-life objects with advanced physics simulations. It’s easy to smash small and light lightbulbs, for example, but exercise weights and kitchen knives are not so simple. Everything has relatively realistic material properties, and learning the properties and interactions of each object is the key to victory. Rather than just making rows and clearing abstract blocks, you have to know, for example, that the microwave you threw in the garbage one move ago can act as a sort of anvil. You can drop pencils, teacups, wooden guitars, and mops onto it so they shatter before they ever hit the bottom of the bin. Eventually, though, the microwave will itself break and fall to pieces, leaving you with more space but without a way to shatter less durable objects. This system means that seemingly flat and mundane objects like sponges and futon mattresses, which are floppy and impossible to shatter, become incredibly vexing. They not only take up space without breaking up, they also cushion the bin and make it harder to break incoming objects.
These physics interactions get even more complex, however–and here is where the oxygen and temperature metres come into play. The game features simulations not just of hard and soft objects but also fluids and fire. When your bin is getting overfilled, the game will sometimes drop some rolls of toilet paper and a lit match into your hands. Since each object has its own burning point, you need to use kindling like paper or oil to start up a fire, at which point you can let the entire bin burn and even accelerate it by closing the lid of the bin, which increases the internal temperature. It also, however, eats up the oxygen inside, and when it reaches zero the fire will abruptly burn itself out. This means that managing the lid of the garbage can is also a tactical consideration. Closing it just long enough to get a conflagration going and then opening it so that it consumes the more durable trash slowly rather than burning out prematurely is important to success. Because there is no time pressure in Trash Panic, you can dramatically slow the game down to let a fire take care of your work for you. It can even spark explosives like dynamite or large bombs the game gives you, which blow huge holes in the trash pile clogging up your bin. These are a godsend.
Or rather, they are if you don’t mind producing a lot of harmful pollution.
That’s right! The game’s Earth Day marketing was no coincidence, nor are the game’s themes about waste management entirely superficial. The main goal of the game is to escape each level without dropping three objects out of the trash bin. This means that you have to keep the bin tidy and manageable and, especially in the diabolical later stages, use fire or other means to break down accumulated waste. At the end of each stage, if you win, the game counts your carbon dioxide output and other wasteful acts like dumping fluids out of the bin (which doesn’t count against your chances on the stoplight) or using bombs and fire. At the end, you get labeled ECO or EGO depending on how well you protect the environment while wisely handling your trash bin. Fire is, after all, only one option, and every stage is beatable while keeping its use to a minimum or even zero. That said, the game, far from easy to complete in the first place, becomes almost agonizing when you refrain from using fire and explosives. Without the ability to burn trash, you have to use careful organization and precise planning. The game gives you very little help, though it’s not entirely without mercy.
One final weapon presents itself to the player: the decomposition ball. In later stages, some objects–toilets, and the like–are full of water. You can fill the bin with water, and if you are locked into a fire-based strategy these can be a huge pain because water protects lower levels of the bin from flames. However, if you can pour in enough water, you can immerse the decomposition ball item, which consumes water while growing tendrils of purple material that eat away at any trash that it touches, especially metal. Getting two such balls in the water at the same time creates an even more powerful feedback loop. That said, though these devices are useful and contribute to ECO points rather than EGO points as fire does, they are hard to use because they don’t work except when they have water to drink up and are, infuriatingly, neutralized by petroleum.
With all that said, the game’s themes play out visually, in terms of gameplay, and in the feeling of frustration and heartache you feel as a player trying to both take care of mountains of trash while not creating more pollution. The best trick of all, however, is that the game’s levels move upward in terms of scale, much like fellow Japanese clutter-management game Katamari Damacy. You go from managing an office trash can to vast-scale industrial wastelands. The game thus connects personal habits to social and technological structures, and it avoids directly moralizing about the issues of waste and pollution while allowing players to draw accurate inferences about the role that waste plays in industrial capitalist society from workplace tracing all the way back to production and extraction of resources.
Luckily, you can still play Trash Panic for a low cost if you have a PlayStation 3. It’s a real gem of the late 2000s, one of the worst eras for creative games anyone can remember, dominated as it was by ash-choked military shooters and inane sci-fi trash. What it shows is that, even at this late date and as it was–knowingly or not–staring down at its own incoming demise, Japan Studio could yet produce a wonder or two.
Evvycology 