Prince of Persia (2008): Save me Elika! You're my only hope!

I’m not sure what I can write about this game that hasn’t been covered by reviews.  Part of it is cultural – it’s interesting to see that British reviewers didn’t like Nolan North’s Prince because it felt like an anachronism whereas many American reviewers liked the new character because he’s very much like Han Solo (which is interesting, consider who they cast to play the "real life" Prince of Persia in the new Disney film trilogy).  The other part, of course, comes down to the difficulty.  No matter how you see it, this is a game that is simply TOO easy and for many people this is its most basic flaw.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and I simply don’t have the patience to play a game for 100 hours (Persona 4, I’m looking at you) but I was perfectly happy with the game difficulty and its balance.  While you can’t die, you are penalized when you miss a jump or when you are knocked down by an enemy.  As many people have mentioned, the game implements quick save into the game itself and quite frankly, it makes it a more enjoyable experience.  That said, I do find the actual platforming to be annoying sometimes – it’s so automatic that it runs counter to all of your instincts as a gamer.  I jumped to my death so many times because I instinctually pushed a button that I shouldn’t have and it was extremely frustrating.  Although, to be fair, for someone who has never played a game before and who doesn’t have that game grammar ingrained into them this automatic nature of the platforming would make the game infinitely more accessible.  I’ll also say that if you’re able to hit every jump and grab correctly, it’s very satisfying to go from point A to point B.

With that out of the way, let’s just look at how the story was delivered in the game.  It still relies on cutscenes, but a lot of the exposition and character building moments are found in incidental dialog (primarily through your battles with the Concubine) and through the purely optional dialog cutscenes with Elika.  Essentially, if you want the story, you can stop and listen to it but if you want to breeze through the game and just play, you can do that too.  I admire the choice – rather than force you to sit through cutscenes that you can’t skip (Heavenly Sword), it gives you the choice to experience as much of the story as you want.  You can still get the basic plot points by just going through the game, but if you want to discover the characters’ motivations, you can do that too.  It’s a design that certainly satisfies both types of gamers.  (Incidentally, yes, the Prince of Persia is actually a prince.  The game hints at the fact that he has run away from his title and that in the sequel, he’ll have to face his “destiny” and assume the mantle he has rejected.)

In terms of how the main story is told though, it’s pretty standard.  While the environments are stunning to look at, other than the plates left behind by Ormazd they don’t really tell a story.  There is a feeling of loss because this once vibrant and beautiful land has decayed into disrepair and neglect, but it doesn’t really tell anything more.  The game’s highlights are in its small touches – the Prince’s interactions with Elika are so fluid it feels very much like they are working in tandem.  Once in a while, you’ll find that she’ll slow you down as you wait for her to catch up but for the most part, there’s an almost ballet like quality to how they both interact with each other and the environment.   Even if you skip all the character development exposition, you get a feel for how the characters are bonded to each other.  At the very least, it’s probably the first time I’ve appreciated the storytelling possibilities of dance.

The other storytelling highlight is the ending.  On a drink fuelled podcast, Greg Miller of the IGN Playstation channel said he was angry that the game forced a decision on him (and actually suggested that GTA4 had a more open ended ending!).  I’d argue that all games are linear in terms of their plot – even GTA4 funnels you towards an ending regardless of your choices throughout the game.   I just like that they made you play through the ending yourself.  In most games, this would have been an elaborate bloviated ten minute cutscene that you’d forget about after the credits rolled.  Instead, you are forced to actively participate in the ending – whether you agree with the Prince’s decision or not.  But I’m getting ahead of myself; in the ending, you have saved the world but at the cost of Elika’s life.  Unwilling to let her die, the Prince makes the same pact with the devil that her father did and frees Ahriman in order to revive her.  The game makes you career her dead body to an altar and then directs you to destroy five newly planted trees in the game world meant to symbolize renewal.  Each tree you destroy corrupts the land and when you destroy the final tree, you are given a light seed that you can use to revive Elika.  For me, it’s a haunting sequence that is meant to invoke Shadow of the Colossus (which is a nice touch, since the Prince/Elika relationship is obviously a reference to ICO).  Like that game, here you are choosing to destroy the world in order to save the woman you love.   While games constantly refer to each other through conventional artistic signs, this is a rare example of intertextuality through gameplay itself – where a gameplay sequence is meant to invoke the gameplay in another game.  A nice touch is the use of achievements to tell you that the story will be “To be continued...”.  They even timed it to appear at the right place in the game.

I haven’t played the previous trilogy – I was a PC gamer who avoided console ports – so I don’t know if this game is any better or worse than Sands of Time.  What I do know is that this Prince of Persia should be lauded for trying to tell story and develop its characters through the game itself and not through cutscenes or blocks of text or any other traditional form of storytelling.  I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what they’ll bring to the table for the sequel because they’ve clearly raised the bar for me.

And, on a completely random note – it looks like Nolan North is now the “lead” for two major game franchises.  He really is the Harrison Ford of video games!

Also, if Wikipedia is to believed, this is all based on Persian legend.  At least we're moving away from knights and princesses and elves.  Thank Ormazd!

Steven Spielberg on Games and Cutscenes

http://videogames.yahoo.com/celebrity-byte/steven-spielberg/1271249/2

More a link for my own reference:  

You know the thing that doesn't work for me in these games are the little movies where they attempt to tell a story in between the playable levels. That's where there hasn't been a synergy between storytelling and gaming. They go to a lot of trouble to do these [motion-capture] movies that explain the characters. And then the second the game is returned to you and it's under your control, you forget everything the interstitials are trying to impact you with, and you just go back to shooting things. And that has not found its way into a universal narrative. And I think more has to be done in that arena.

And:

Yeah, I've played Half-Life, of course. But some games will not let you quit out. I think Battlefield: Bad Company, which I played though, doesn't let you escape the interstitials. I do applaud them for trying the storytelling. It's important to try to invest in these characters you don't get to see when you're playing them. You only get to see them during the little movies. But you don't get to see the faces or recognize the foxhole buddies when you're just targeting the enemy. Yet I applaud them for at least attempting to tell a story.

It's just interesting to see that a filmmaker can get frustrated with cutscenes (although, arguably, the latest Indiana Jones movie was one long cutscene.)

Games Roundup November 2008 Blowout Edition

To finish out my three post mega update, here are just some games I played but I really don’t have any long thoughts about:

Call of Duty: World at War

Really, it’s a decent enough game but they really didn’t try to do anything interesting with the story telling.  Almost every moment in the Russian section of the game is taken from a previous Call of Duty and the Japanese section of the game is very underwhelming.  They wanted to show the horrors of war (to the point where they show Japanese and German soldiers trying to execute the player TWICE in the game), but nothing in the game itself gave you that feeling.  Call of Duty 4 had the nuclear bomb moment... this one just has people die around you and at this point, that’s just not enough anymore.  

In fact, there's one point in the game where the game pauses and you're told by your Russian sargeant to execute some German soldiers who have surrendered.  But your choice is meaningless - if you kill them, the game moves on and if you spare their lives, your sargeant kilsl them and the game moves on.  If this was meant to be a chilling moment in the life of a soldier where one has to choose mercy over self preservation, it completely fell flat.  Treyarch just didn't earn that emotional investment from me as a player, despite how hard they tried throughout the entire game.  Unfortunately, Activision seems intent on pumping these games out and because there two different studios working on Call of Duty games, the “learning time” from game it game is increased.  But now that Treyarch has had the opportunity to learn from Infinity Ward, hopefully Call of Duty 7 will have more interesting storytelling.

Also, the damn clown car spawn closets are still here.  I know that’s their way of forcing the player to progress and move forward but it’s just annoying as hell.  I think I swore several times during the horrible storming the Reichstag level.  I will say that the Black Cat mission – this game’s scripted vehicle sequence – was pretty fun.  It’s nothing like the AC-130 Gunship section in Call of Duty 4 – indeed, the tone of the Black Cat mission is hectic and exciting whereas the AC-130 mission is cool and calm – but seeing your character jump from turret to turret to shoot down patrol boats and Zeroes was pretty exciting.  It also gave me an appreciation for WW2 turret gunners.  I have no idea how they could have hit anything with those viewfinders.

One other thing that’s just worth mentioning is that the intro videos for each level are edited like they were made for MTV.  It’s extremely slick and probably a little overly produced.  On the one hand they were striking and made you want to pay attention but on the other hand, they didn’t fit in with the tone of the game at all.  If anything, Infinity Ward should have used intros like this in Call of Duty 4.

Left 4 Dead

There’s not really much to say here other than this is a game that’s more of a ludic experience rather than a narrative experience.  There is no true narrative in the game other than you are survivors of a zombie apocalypse and that you are trying to escape to freedom.  As with all Valve games, the environments do tell a story (mostly through signs and writing on the walls) but otherwise, it’s pure gameplay.  And honestly, this is a game where it’s all about what happens to you and how you solve a problem.  If ever there was a game where the personal stories were “emergent”, it’s this one.  Add the fact that no two gameplays will ever be the same because of the “AI director”/procedurally generated enemy spawns and you have a game that’s all about personal experience.

And co-op makes the experience that much more fun because it’s very much like watching a zombie movie with your friends, except of course that you are all in the movie itself.  Inevitably, you’ll scream for help when you are caught by a zombie, you’ll yell in frustration if someone does something stupid and you’ll all cheer when you escape the final zombie horde in a helicopter.  This really is the best co-op experience ever designed – probably even better than the ultimate co-op game, Rock Band.

Little Big Planet

Again, this is another game that is more about your own personal experience derived from the game rather than the story.  And again, co-op is very much like Left 4 Dead, although there’s less screaming because no one uses headset on a PS3.  The design itself is very charming and clever and it also has some of the greatest community features found in a game.  I haven’t really had time to play with the level making tools (and I’m not sure if I ever will), but some of the levels I’ve played are simply astonishing.  I just can’t imagine the time and effort it must have taken to make something like a Gradius clone or a level that plays the introduction to the song “Sweet Child of Mine” or to program the logic tables to make a calculator or a fully functional Tic Tac Toe game.  The Microsoft hater in me would just like to point out that I don’t have to pay to play online on the Sony network and their games have much more robust online features than any game found on the 360.  

And just for my own reference:

Pure

This is just a fun ATV off road arcade racing game really – probably my surprise of the year.  I almost never finish racing games and unfortunately, I probably won’t finish this one either, but I definitely had a lot of fun with this and I’d love to get back to it some time.

Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero 4

More plastic guitar action!  The music creator in Guitar Hero 4 was a letdown so hopefully the feature will be much improved in the sequel.  Rock Band 2 changed single player for the worse and I’m left playing quick play in order to play through my songs.  

On a random note, I think I've spent more money on Rock Band DLC than I have on music in my entire life.

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix

It’s Street Fighter 2!  I just wish I could find a decent joystick... the Hori is good, but there could be something better.

Chrono Trigger DS

I really have no excuse not to finish what some people consider the greatest game in the history of games.  I've finished the game so many times when I was in high school and I've seen all the endings, but I really just need to experience the game again as an adult and "professional" academic.  Hopefully my new perspective will give me new insight into the game's design and narrative.

Fallout 3: Ethics... Ethics Never Changes

So, this is yet another one of those time cherished PC RPG Franchises that I’ve just never got into. I chalk it up to my misspent youth playing Team Fortress 1, Starcraft and Counter Strike. I didn’t go into this blind – I played about 10 hours of Fallout 2 before the summer ended and I had to get back to work (and newer games) – but I really wasn’t sure what to expect with Fallout 3.

If anything, I now know that the roots of ethical interactivity in RPGs go back way further than BioWare and the Neverwinter Nights/Baldur’s Gate series. But what about Fallout 3? If you listen to the people at No Mutants Allowed, it’s quite literally a digital representation of a piece of garbage. Or, to filter through the rhetoric, it’s perhaps a decent game but not actually a Fallout game. I agree with them in some respects. Avoiding the whole issue of gameplay – the move from isometric to first person, the move from turn based combat to real time combat – the writing just isn’t as sharp as the writing in Fallout 2. Sure, the original Fallouts were perhaps a little too off wall in terms of the number of references to 90s pop-culture, bit the dialog was clever and the plotting was very interesting. Indeed, someone rolled a low Intelligence character and the entire game changes – dialog options and all.

While I understand that Bethesda shouldn’t be burdened with the legacy of Fallout, they did choose to buy the franchise and call their game Fallout 3. But I don’t want to turn this into an X is better than Y discussion – I’ll leave that to the forums. What I really wanted to talk about was their implementation of ethics or “Karma”. Now, I’m really at a point where this is becoming to sound old hat – every single WRPG now uses morality as a way to give the player narrative agency – but there are some interesting things that Bethesda tries out in their game.

Probably the biggest aspect of Bethesda’s morality system is the fact that interacting with the environment itself affects your Karma score. Now, Fable 2 did this by associating an ethics score with various objects you can interact with – eat vegetables and you’re more “pure” or raise rents to 200% and you’re more “corrupt” – but in Fallout 3, your interaction is much more direct. It’s still very simple – if you take an object that’s not yours or “free to the world”, it’s considered stealing and you will lose Karma. The same happens if you hack a computer or pick a lock that someone in the game world owns. Of course, killing a good or bad character in the world will also change your Karma accordingly. Now, it still seems odd that there’s a cosmic Karma counter out in the netherworld watching your every move, but the fact that your actions in the non-narrative or quest part of the game has as much as an impact on your overall morality score is an interesting implementation of a fluid morality system. Essentially, they added a score counter to the stealing and lockpicking mechanic in Oblivion.

Indeed, while I was playing a saintly character that would make Jesus Christ proud, I wasn’t above looting and stealing. The game recognized that my “good” actions in the quests (or narrative section of the game) outweighed my “bad” game play actions in the rest of the world (or the ludic section of the game), but I know that I’ve stolen from a lot of people in my effort to help them. The game doesn't really say anything about your actions either way - I just had to rationalize my actions in the "real world". I think it might have been nice if the game had some dialog along the lines of "I heard that you a good person - why would you steal from me?" or "I thought you were a monster, but you saved my life!", but I suppose that's just something they couldn't account for or implement.

That said, the quest/narrative section of the game is very standard... and perhaps a step backwards from Mass Effect’s more cinematic dialog wheel system. You basically have good, neutral or evil dialog choice options that you choose from a standard dialog tree. And like Mass Effect, for the majority of the official and freeform quests in the game, you can finish the quest in a good, neutral or evil manner. It’s not that the quests weren’t fulfilling or interesting – my playthrough took me 80 hours – it’s just that Bethesda simply didn’t do anything really new with their implementation of ethical interactivity. It’s very clear when you do something morally good in the game, to the point where the game tells you that your Karma has improved.

I think my bigger problem with the game (and with games of this sort) is that there is absolutely no compelling reason to play an evil character other than to see how the story might unfold if you make evil choices. Even the first big choice in the game is rendered moot by the game play – having a home in the game is essential to survive the early stages and the quickest way to get a home is to disarm the bomb in Megaton. If you are trying to make life easier for yourself in the game rather than roleplay a bad character, there’s absolutely no reason to destroy Megaton and take the penthouse suite at Tenpenny Tower. The one location in the game where bad characters thrive – Paradise Falls – is still open to good characters that complete a quest or bribe the guard, so it’s not as if there are sections of the game world blocked off if you choose to play a good character. In fact, I would argue that the game is substantially easier in the early to mid stages of the game if you play a good character simply because the majority of the NPCs in the game won’t hate you the moment they meet you.

I will say that the world itself is almost lovingly constructed. Strolling through the Mall and going through the museums and the Capitol building was a breathtaking experience for someone who has never been to Washington DC. The detail in the rest of the Wasteland is just as astounding and the way that some buildings are constructed tell a story without relying on exposition. You might come across a room with children’s toys scattered across the floor with a couple of skeletons holding each other and even though you don’t know what happened, you can pretty much imagine that it was a mother holding her child as nuclear bombs exploded around them. Of course, the 50s aesthetic is alive and well in the game – to the point where a typical 50s suburb is lovingly recreated in a virtual reality simulation – and it serves the game really well. There’s something amusingly surreal about killing a super mutant while listening to music from the 40s over the radio (although they should have tried to license more music). I’ll agree with the assertion that a lot of the towns/cities feel completely empty – one “town” only has two people in it – and it’s probably my only criticism with a game with otherwise excellent set/art design.

As for the actual narrative part of the game? Well, there’s really not much to say. You are funnelled down a story much like Mass Effect or Fable 2 and while you can make moral choices throughout the main quest, the overall end game remains the same. Also, there’s almost no nuance in the game when it comes to the two main factions that appear – the Brotherhood of Steel is good, the Enclave is evil. You don’t necessarily know why the Enclave is evil... you just have to take the game’s word for it. There also isn’t a “huge” interactive moment in the narrative that stands out – there isn’t a Spire or a Virmire or any other similar set piece – and it makes the story somewhat forgettable. Yes, the first time you encounter a Behemoth and the ending sequence where you have to go to the Jefferson Memorial are very exciting moments in the game, but these are moments where you do more "watching" than "playing". It’s not that I didn’t enjoy those sequences – it’s just that they didn’t challenge my preconceptions of narrative in games the way that Mass Effect or Fable 2 did.

Ultimately, Fallout 3 falls under that cliché of “iteration, not evolution”. It’s a great game that could have been much better if they tried to push the narrative storytelling that much further. That said, there really is nothing else like it in the single player RPG realm other than Bethesda’s previous game, Oblivion. Not surprisingly, Bethesda is expanding the game with three expansion packs due out in early 2009 and like the Oblivion expansions, this DLC will add new locations for the player to explore but will probably not do anything new in terms of storytelling. The Fallout universe is a rich world however, so I just have to hope that they try to do something more interesting with the narrative in the inevitable sequel.

May 29, 2009 edit!

So, I was listening to the May 29, 2009 episode of Listen Up! and one thing came up that I found really interesting - it's possible to completely break the "linear" narrative and skip ahead several steps just by exploring. I think the discussion happens around the 1:05-1:10 mark.

Garnett had a problem with the fact that he could find Doctor Li right from the get go and essentially skip the first 5 missions of the game. And yes, this is true... but as Brad pointed out, the game essentially reflects reality back at the player. In "real life", if you sometime tells you to go to Home Depot to buy a widget but you choose to search a junkyard to find the same widget, haven't you achieved the same objective?

I believe that this only happens at the beginning of the game and that after you find your father, you are essentially stuck in a fairly linear narrative... but it's interesting that you could skip a large part of the early game if you wanted to.

And come to think of it, this happened to me during an early playthrough... but being the achievement completionist that I am (at least in RPGs), I just had to reload and earlier save. But I guess achievement hunting and how that affects agency in games is another discussion.

Gears of War 2: Eat Shit and Die!

There really isn’t that much I want to say about the game especially since everyone with a 360 has probably finished it already.  In broad strokes, I’ll defend all the game play changes they made from the first game in terms of level design and pacing.  A lot of people had a violent reaction to the worm level, but I thought it was just a nice way to slow the game down and give the player a breather.  I also loved the game ending, even though it’s essentially a rail ride on a Brumak where you can’t die.  Maybe it’s just me, but I preferred that to the horrible General RAAM battle at the end of the first game.  In fact, the only problem I had with the game was the Centaur tank level – I still don’t understand why they chose to throw in a vehicle section in a game that’s a shooter.  The Brumak is a throwaway level that’s meant to be the reward for completing the game... the Centaur level?  That felt like something I needed to overcome in order to keep going.

And just as a random point – Horde mode is fun – but the fact that you can only choose your starting level if you start a private game is extremely annoying.  At this point, I don’t know anyone still seriously playing Gears of War 2 online, which means I’m dependent on matchmaking.  Halo 3 had the exact same problem – in order to have play a co-op match, you basically need to have people on your friends list willing to play the game.  I guess it’s more the nature of console gaming and the preponderance of peer-to-peer matchmaking, but they really should re-implement the server browser and let people search for games by specific criteria if they want.

Everything about the narrative is pretty standard for a AAA game – it is gameplay first and story second.  Which is fine, it’s just that there really isn’t much to say about how the story is delivered.  You essentially move from set piece to set piece and while each set piece is very well designed (from the fallen city to the inside of a worm), there really isn’t any story or thematic content delivered through the gameplay itself.  Again, like MGS4 and countless other games, Gears of War 2 relies on the cutscenes for the expositional parts of the game.

The one cutscene I want to talk about is the one that probably everyone who has finished the game remembers – the one that CliffyB claimed would make us cry.  Yep, I’m talking about when Dom is reunited with Maria.   I’ll fully admit that it was a very effective cinematic moment and if I was watching a “real” film, I might have been impressed.  In fact, it’s very similar to the moment in Brothers in Arms that I described in a previous post.  Dom frees Maria from a cage and he rushes over to her and holds her.  The background is full of colour (well, comparatively speaking for Gears of War 2 anyway) and we see a healthy, attractive looking Maria featured in an earlier cutscene.  But we soon find out that this is all an illusion; Marcus interrupts Dom and suddenly the scene changes.  The colour in the scene is quickly removed and the world turns deathly brown.  The camera pans out and we see Maria as she actually is – a victim of enslavement at the hands of the Locust.  Ostensibly, she looks like a victim of a German concentration camp, as she is thin, pale and has lost all her hair.  Unable to rescue her, ultimately the scene ends with Dom shooting Maria in the head – the only merciful act he could do in a horrible situation.

Now, the scene is fantastic but the fact that it’s something I had to watch renders some of its impact rather meaningless.  Ultimately, after the scene is complete, I’ll go back to chainsawing guys in half with my Lancer and will forget that the scene happened.  It’s another example of gameplay/narrative dissonance found in GTA4.  I’m not saying they should have ripped off MGS3 and had you shoot Maria yourself (something that wouldn’t have worked giving the co-op nature of the game), but I feel like they could have tried to have given the scene more impact by tying it to the player’s actions rather than her inaction.

Perhaps the more interesting aspect of the scene was brought up by Shawn Elliot on episode 109 of the Gamers with Jobs podcast  (incidentally, they read my letter on episode 110.  Whoo!).  He pointed out that the nature of the game pretty much spoils the outcome of the cutscene.  Why?  Because we know that Gears of War 2 just isn’t the type of game that will have a handholding escort mission – especially since they removed the limited squad control found in the original Gears of War.  Since it’s highly unlikely that the game would make you babysit Maria as you went off to fight the Horde, you know that they’ll have to somehow get rid of Maria before the game continues and Dom shooting her is the most likely outcome. 

I just think it’s interesting that games have developed enough of a convention that they cultivate reader expectations.  One analog I can think of is how a veteran television watcher can spot a cliffhanger ending to an episode of a television series based on the time.  If it’s 8:55 and the plot hasn’t resolved itself, you know that “To Be Continued...” will flash on the screen in the next minute or so (I believe a comedian did a routine based on this phenomena).  It’s not something new, but it’s the first time I’ve really noticed it as I was playing a game.  I first saw the scene while playing with someone on Live and the first thing I said was that “there’s no way we’re taking her with us” and that’s exactly what happened.

It’s not that I don’t like the game.  While I didn’t really find the storytelling in the game all that interesting, the game itself is solid.  Headshots are still extremely satisfying and the Lancer never gets old.  Horde mode, despite the matchmaking difficulties, is a great co-op mode that is part of a larger trend in gaming this year (Call of Duty 5’s Nazi Zombie mode for one).  It’s clear that they made an effort to tell a deeper story this time around – compared to the first game, the story here is Shakespearean.  I just hope that in Gears of War 3, Epic directs their efforts toward HOW they tell their story and not just WHAT their story should be about.