Scholarly Gamer

Quickie Thoughts

2009-10-28T00:13:00.000-07:00

I don't have time to write my full thoughts on some of the games I managed to finish since September, but here are the quick hits.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade
I haven't technically finished the game (two more endings on each character to go...) but after putting in the 15 hours on each character, I feel like I just need to come back to this some time down the line.
There are really two points I wanted to touch on: First, there's no Christianity in the game. It's pure Japanese mythology and religion... and I'm sure it was a difficult decision for Vanilla Ware to make a game that is so foreign to western audiences because it limited its potential in the West, but for me it was just refreshing to see a game deal with Buddhism in a serious manner. Also, the fact that there were no crosses and resurrection isn't limited to a Christ-like figure (since everyone is reborn after all) just got me more excited to play through the game that I otherwise would have if this was set in medieval Europe or some hybrid Japanese-Western fantasy setting.
Second, the difficulty settings. I'm just not good at action games, but easy mode is extremely trivial while the hard mode is extremely difficult (let's not even talk about the one hit death mode). I'm sure they wanted to appeal to the two extremes - the people who might just want to finish the game and the people who want to experience the agency of being a sword master, but they probably should have had a more balanced mode for people in the middle.

Halo 3 ODST
There's not much to talk about here... the single player is an average campaign with a story that isn't all that great... but the standout again is the collectible videos spread throughout the game. Not only is Sadie's story just more interesting (an African girl trying to find her father in the midst of an alien invasion set in the far future? An outstanding premise on its own), but the way it is incorporated into the game's narrative is clever as well.
Essentially, the Superintendent, an AI that runs the city of New Mombasa, guides you to terminals that contain pieces of the collectible videos by manipulating the environment. Since "he" is able to control all the vehicles, the lights and street signs, when you are near a terminal, the signs will point you in its direction and any sirens or cars around will start blaring. It's a nice way to indicate that a collectible is in the area (unlike other games which just produce a glow around the object or some other conceit).
Collecting them also changes the story very slightly, as a guard in the final level will turn hostile toward you as you try to collect to last video. It's another small touch, but it helps conclude Sadie's story in a satisfactory manner and bring a story that you can only experience through these videos into the game itself.

Uncharted 2
There's not much to say about this one. It's like the first game but greatly improved - the gun mechanics and the platforming are just much easier and the frustrating elements are limited to the ending boss and the train sequence.
That said, while I love the characters and the cutscenes... the game does absolutely nothing in terms of trying to tell story through gameplay. Perhaps the only time it tries is during the short sequence where you have to carry Jeff through a battlefield to safety and even that section is only a few minutes long.
While Kojima was self-indulgent with his cutscenes in MGS4, at least he tried to do some clever things with the game play and level design. Uncharted 2 doesn't do much of that unfortunately.
I still love the game - I "Platinumed" the game and played a lot of the multiplayer. It's just unfortunate that something so good tells a story in such a pedestrian manner.

Borderlands
In terms of story, there's nothing here at all. It's not that kind of game and I really don't have anything to say about it. It fulfills the promise of Hellgate London - a first person Diablo shooter - and that's all it needed to do. It probably helped that the game was 40 bucks (as opposed to Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, which I'll probably never play again any time soon).

All that's left this year is Dragon Age - which I won't finish any time soon - and Call of Duty 6/Modern Warfare 2. I'll be back then!

Oh right, Infamous
I stopped half way through and I'm not sure if I'll get back to it any time soon. The gameplay is fairly interesting, but the morality system is so shallow that it serves only as a conceit for power differentiation - almost like the Jedi/Sith powers in the old Jedi Knight games. Perhaps the only good thing is that the game forces you to make a choice early... it's just too bad the choices themselves are so thinly veiled you don't give it a second thought.

Persona 4: Friends Forever!

2009-07-18T01:06:00.000-07:00

I’ve already done a bit on Persona 4 in a post on Bitmob.com touching on some of the issues of sexuality, so I just wanted to focus on some of the other more “gamey” issues in this post.

I suppose I could start with the irony that in a game which wants you to take away the message that making connections with people is the only way you can succeed is an extremely isolating experience that can take anywhere from 60-100 hours to play, but that’s too easy.

I will say that the game does all it can to impart this lesson through the gameplay. Essentially, the game is a “life simulator” that wants you to balance everything from making money, studying for exams, improving your “characteristics”, spending time with your friends and running into dungeons. Each of these aspects of the game are interconnected, so you can’t ignore any of these aspects of your character’s life if you want to get the most out of the game.

So, making friends isn’t as simply as easy as just spending time with the person. You might need to have a talent for “Understanding” in order to be able to properly listen to one of your friend’s problems. Or, doing well at your exams (and you’ll write exams several times throughout the game) will impress your friends and improve your relationship with them.

You’ll also have to learn to speak to each person’s personality. For most characters, being nice is the best way to improve your relationship with them. But some people only respond to you if you are straightforward or disaffected. It’s a nice way to break up the “nice = good” equation that most games suffer from. For example, one character will tease your character by flirting with him and the fastest way to improve your relationship with her is to resist her advances.

So how does the “dating sim” part of the game line up with the actual gameplay? First and foremost, improving your relationship with your party members enables to provide several in combat bonuses and ultimately upgrade their abilities. Similarly, fusing Personas – the key to unlocking better abilities in the game – is made much easier if you have a close relationship with certain people in the game. Simply put, if you manage to improve your relationship with as many people as possible, the game becomes much easier.

Of course, the game also ties the theme of friendship into its narrative. Perhaps in a moment inspired by Super Metroid, in the final battle of the game and before you are able to strike the winning blow, the boss suddenly gains the ability to instant-kill your character. However, before the boss is able to kill you, each of your party members steps in to take the fatal blow. Of course, when all your friends are dead, there is no one left to save your character and he finally succumbs to the inevitable.

However, rather than get a game over screen, you are tossed into a cutscene. The game reminds you of all the friendships you have forged throughout the game (which seems to be procedurally generated based the actual progress you made) and you are resurrected and given one more chance to defeat the boss... which, like Samus in Super Metroid, you do with no problem.

I admit I’m not really doing the scene any justice and I was at the point in the game where I was expecting this exact ending to happen, but when it happened I did appreciate what the game was trying to do. It was a nice payoff for spending all those hours fostering your friendships with the other characters in the game and, as much as this can be said for ANY game, you really have to experience it yourself in order to appreciate the climax of the moment.

I’m starting to find that this is very much a Japanese trope in game design. There are many RPGs where you are in the middle of a battle in which agency is removed from the player in order to advance story. As I mentioned before in my FF4: TAY write-up, there are battles where you are simply meant to lose. I find it interesting that Western game design tends to go the other way – you’re locked into a certain path, but you always have some sense of control. Even in the “nuke” moment in CoD4 or the “forced” ending of Prince of Persia (2008), you’re still in control of the moment as the player.

It makes me wonder if it’s cultural. Clearly, I don’t have enough sociological knowledge of Japan (or even America, to be honest) to make anything but broad generalizations (otaku like being told what to do! Japanese people are afraid of choice!), so I won’t. It’s just interesting to see this “fork” in design philosophy, as subtle as it seems to be. I only wish I was qualified enough to attempt to draw any kind of real conclusion.

Before I begin to just ramble on too much, I just wanted to point out some examples of game design choices meant to limit the player that I noticed.

First is the SP system and it’s worth noting that this mechanic appeared in FF4: TAY as well. The game gives no real SP recovering items early in the game, forcing you to jump out of dungeons the moment you run out of SP. Of course, this becomes mostly irrelevant in the mid-to-late game as you’ll have various ways to recover SP fairly easily, but it’s still an interesting way to prevent you from endlessly grinding (which is unfortunately the natural action most people take when playing JRPGs).

Second is the fact that even after you max out their S-links and evolve their personas, Teddie and Yukiko are still weak to fire and ice respectively. Every other character develops a null or reflect to their weak element, but not the two healers. My thinking is that the designers made this decision to try to keep the boss battles interesting. The fact that your two healers could be vulnerable to death at any point in the battle forces you not to take them for granted – you could lose your healer at a critical time, which in a worst case scenario might lead to your death and a game over screen.

I’ll just conclude by saying that the biggest hook for me was the fact that it was set in contemporary Japan and not some generic fantasy world with elves and mages. Sure, there were a lot of clichés associated with teen life in Japan – onsen antics, school field trips, the school cultural festival, the o-bon festival – but seeing how a typical teenager would experience a complete school year was a nice refreshing break from the standard RPG setting. I know that I’ll definitely go back and try Persona 3: FES whenever I get bored with generic fantasy or science fiction.

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (WiiWare) - You CAN go back home again...

2009-06-13T01:04:00.000-07:00

(This post will be based on the first two chapters that were available at launch and may be updated as new chapters are released)

I remember hearing about this sometime ago... and I imagine it must have been on 1up when Shane Bettenhausen was still on the show or during an episode of Retronauts.

Originally released as an episodic cellphone game, Square ported the code to WiiWare and gave us shameful Westerners with our antique and quaint "iPhones" a chance to play the game for ourselves.

First of all, what is it? Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (henceforth shortened as TAY in this post) is the second "mainline" Final Fantasy game to receive a true honest to god sequel (I'm looking at you, Compilation of Final Fantasy VII) that brings back most of the original cast for an all new story. And as a sequel, it does not shy away from its original roots. I really don't know much about making a 16bit game, but I wouldn't be surprised if Square went back into the archives and dug up the original artwork from the FF4 for use in TAY. They've also reused most, if not all, the music cues from the original game, meaning that you probably shouldn't be coming into this game thinking that you'll get a completely new experience.

In fact, I would argue that most of the charm of the game comes from the fact that we're playing a brand new sprite-based RPG in 2009. It's a game that exudes nostalgia, in a way that the fourth Act of Metal Gear Solid 4 did with its flashback, taking the player back to the early 90s and reminding them of the fun (or frustration) of playing the original back on the SNES with an oldschool gamepad.

And I think it succeeds completely at that invoking my wistful longings for a simpler time. I found myself enjoying the grind because the battle animations were short (unlike the longwinded animations of modern 3D RPGs) and even though the music is just a series of endless loops, I found myself humming along to them out of habit. In many ways, I think I prefer TAY to the DS remake of FF4 simply because I much prefer the sprite-based art to the Playstation era polygon-based art that the DS version produces.

But is there more to the game than just its art assets? Certainly.

I appreciated the way that it invoked nostalgia with flashback scenes. When you travel to a location that was important in the original game, you will often flashback to the original scene. The game suddenly applies a sepia filter, plays the "sad" version of the main theme (I'm not really good with names of songs from FF games unfortunately), uses the original character sprites from FF4 and replays the original cutscene. In a game whose art design already invokves nostalgia, they managed to find a way to make the game even more nostalgic. And for me, it excused the recycling of old locations, simply because it meant that I could go back to many of these old towns and dungeons and remember the original game.

Story-wise, the game relies on that old trope of aging the original characters and introducing their children. Personally, I've only experienced this a couple of times - The Anne of Green Gables novels and the Allison to Lillia anime - so I don't have a lot to compare this to, but I think it works relatively well. It gives you a chance to relive the consequences of the original game (what happens in the first chapter of the game is almost ripped out of Persona 4 where Kain must fight his true emotions - being on the losing end of the Cecil-Rosa-Kain love triangle - made manifest in a "shadow"/evil Kain that you must battle) while also giving you a chance to explore the world from a completely new perspective (through Cecil and Rosa's child, Ceodore).

Rydia's chapter plays out the same way, as you can play Rydia and Luca - you explore Rydia's issues with her lineage from the first game while seeing the Underworld from Luca's relatively unexplored perspective. I have to imagine that all the chapters will be designed in this manner - an old character to tie the game to the old story and a new character to provide a fresh perspective.

It's a nice way to keep the game from devolving into complete fanservice by having the old characters simply relive their old issues without introducing anything new and I think it works relatively well.

Pacing wise, it appears that the game will take a page from Rashomon and have all the chapters happen concurrently, telling the story from several perspectives. This keeps in line with the fact that the game has to be sold episodically (which was probably how it was originally sold in Japan). By introducing the characters in their own episodes rather than have a single chronologically continuous story that you have to play in sequence, you don't really have the problems of serialized fiction (what happened last week?) and you might even sell the subsequent chapters to people who aren't interested in the entire story but like a particular character. I might have preferred that the game was released in one complete package, but this is a fair compromise.

There really isn't much to say until the final chapter comes out and I finish off the game. As it stands, it's all very familiar in terms of gameplay and storytelling. I still think it's clever that the game manipulates the battle system in order to impart narrative (in the form of battles that you will inevitable lose), but that's so old hat now that it's not as special as it was back in the 90s. But, you're not playing this to be blown away... you're playing this to be taken back to the past (very much like the Angry Video Game Nerd!).

One final note though. I honestly don't think any other game franchise could have pulled this off. Most companies simply remake games (like Bionic Commando: Re-armed) or just re-emulate games (pretty much everything Backbone makes) and even those just sell for 5 or 10 dollars. But TAY will cost nearly 40 dollars when the game is fully released and I don't doubt that the many older fans will be perfectly willing to part with that obscene amount of money just to play through the entire game (myself included). I look at it this way. The Penny Arcade Adventures games are brand new experiences for 20/15 dollars each and I just couldn't bring myself to buy them. With TAY, there was absolutely no hesitation. I guess it just goes to show that for a certain generation of people, the Final Fantasy name is still extremely important to them.

Books I have borrowed

2009-05-29T15:36:00.000-07:00

Books I have borrowed - May 2009. Just for reference!

Hop on pop : the politics and pleasures of popular culture / edited by Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, & Jane Shattuc. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks E169.12 .H666 2002 Book Overdue: Due 05/20/2009

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive games : the expressive power of videogames / Ian Bogost. - WLU Book Shelves GV1469.34.S52 B64 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Taylor, T. L. Play between worlds : exploring online game culture / T.L. Taylor. - WLU Book Shelves GV1469.17.S63 T38 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Ludlow, Peter, 1957- Second Life Herald : the virtual tabloid that witnessed the dawn of the metaverse / Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. GV1469.25.S425 L83 2007 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Law, Kar, 1941- Hong Kong cinema : a cross-cultural view / Law Kar, Frank Bren ; with the collaboration of Sam Ho. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PN1993.5.C4 K37 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Wei, William, 1948- Asian American movement / William Wei. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks E 184.O6 W44 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Remapping Asian American history / edited by Sucheng Chan. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks E184.O6 R46 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Kitano, Harry H. L. Asian Americans : emerging minorities / Harry H.L. Kitano, Roger Daniels. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks E184.O6 K57 2001 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Fong, Timothy P. Contemporary Asian American experience : beyond the model minority / Timothy P. Fong. - WLU Book Shelves E184.O6 F66 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Ancheta, Angelo N., 1960- Race, rights, and the Asian American experience / Angelo N. Ancheta. - WLU Book Shelves KF4757.A75 A53 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Anderson, Craig Alan, 1952- Violent video game effects on children and adolescents : theory, research, and public policy / Craig A. Anderson, Douglas A. Gentile,

Katherine E. Buckley. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks HQ784.V53 A53 2007 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Visible minorities and multiculturalism: Asians in Canada, edited by K. Victor Ujimoto and Gordon Hirabayashi, with the assistance of P.A. Saram. - WLU Book Shelves FC106 .O6V58 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Hwang, David Henry, 1957- FOB and other plays / David Henry Hwang ; with a foreword by Maxine Hong Kingston. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PS 3558.W83 F62 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Hwang, David Henry, 1957- Trying to find Chinatown : the selected plays / David Henry Hwang. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PS3558.W83 A6 2000 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Hall, Kenneth E., 1954- John Woo : the films / by Kenneth E. Hall. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. PN1998.3.W655 H36 1999 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Woo, John, 1948- John Woo : interviews / edited by Robert K. Elder. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. PN1998.3.W655 J65 2005 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Bogost, Ian. Unit operations : an approach to videogame criticism / Ian Bogost. - UW Davis. Book Stacks. Main Floor QA76.76.C672 B65 2006 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Cinema of Hong Kong : history, arts, identity / edited by Poshek Fu, David Desser. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. PN1993.5.H6 C56 2000 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Cheng, Jim. Annotated bibliography for Chinese film studies / Jim Cheng = Zhongguo dian ying yan jiu shu mu ti yao / Cheng Jian. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. PN1993.5.C4 C442x 2004 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Bordwell, David. Planet Hong Kong : popular cinema and the art of entertainment / David Bordwell. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. PN1993.5.H6 B63 2000 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Meaning and culture of Grand theft auto : critical essays / edited by Nate Garrelts. - WLU Book Shelves GV1469.35.G738 M43 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm
Chinese films in focus : 25 new takes / edited by Chris Berry. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. PN1993.5.C4 C463x 2003 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Aureus, Leon, 1973- Banana boys : the play / by Leon Aureus ; adapted from the novel by Terry Woo. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. PS8601.U74 B35 2007 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm
Davis, Rocío G. Transcultural reinventions : Asian American and Asian Canadian short-story cycles / Rocio G. Davis. - WLU Book Shelves PS8191.S5 D39 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Hwang, David Henry, 1957- Flower drum song / music by Richard Rodgers ; lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II ; book by David Hanry Hwang. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. PS3558.W83 F58 2003 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm
Manning, Erin. Ephemeral territories : representing nation, home, and identity in Canada / Erin Manning. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. FC97 .M36 2003 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Casteel, Sarah Phillips, 1974- Second arrivals : landscape and belonging in contemporary writing of the Americas / Sarah Phillips Casteel. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. PR9175 .C37 2007 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Yoon, Jin-me, 1960- Jin-me Yoon : touring home from away / [guest curator, Annette Hurtig]. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. N6549.Y66 A4 2003 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Berry, Chris, 1959- China on screen : cinema and nation / Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PN1993.5.C4 B44 2006 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Heard, Christopher Ten thousand bullets : the cinematic journey of John Woo / Christopher Heard. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PN1998.3.W655 H43 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Zhang, Yingjin. Chinese national cinema / Yingjin Zhang. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PN1993.5.C4 Z49 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

New Chinese cinemas : forms, identities, politics / edited by Nick Browne ... [et al.]. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PN 1993.5.C4 N49 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Lee, Josephine Ding, 1960- Performing Asian America : race and ethnicity on the contemporary stage / Josephine Lee. 1997 - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. PS338.A74L44 1997 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

East Main Street : Asian American popular culture / edited by Shilpa Davé, LeiLani Nishime, and Tasha G. Oren ; foreword by Robert G. Lee. - WLU Book Shelves E184.A75 E17 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Xu, Wenying. Eating identities : reading food in Asian American literature / Wenying Xu. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PS153.A84 X8 2008 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Li, Xiaoping, 1954- Voices rising : Asian Canadian cultural activism / Xiaoping Li. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks F1035.A75 L5 2007 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 1971- Race & resistance : literature & politics in Asian America / Viet Thanh Nguyen. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PS153.A84 N48 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Grice, Helena. Negotiating identities : an introduction to Asian American women's writing / Helena Grice. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PS153.A84 G74 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Khoo, Tseen-Ling, 1970- Banana bending : Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian literatures / Tseen-Ling Khoo. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PR9080.5 K48 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Singh, Simon. Big bang : the origin of the universe / Simon Singh. - Guelph/Humber Collection -- At Humber College QB991.B54 S56 2004 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

First person : new media as story, performance, and game / edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan ; designed by Michael Crumpton. - WLU Book Shelves GV1469.17.S63 F57 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Sun, Wei. Minority invisibility : an Asian American experience / Wei Sun. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. P94.5.M552 U67x 2007 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Ono, Kent A., 1964- Asian Americans and the media / Kent A. Ono and Vincent N. Pham. - WLU Book Shelves P94.5.A762 U6 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Kane, Michael. Game boys : professional videogaming's rise from the basement to the big time / Michael Kane. - WLU Book Shelves GV1469.17.S63 K36 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

McCloud, Scott, 1960- Making comics : storytelling secrets of comics, manga and graphic novels / Scott McCloud. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PN6710 .M3325 2006 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Stokes, Lisa Odham. City on fire : Hong Kong cinema / Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. PN1993.5.H6 S76 1999 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Burton, David M. Elementary number theory / David M. Burton. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks QA241 .B83 2007 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Bogart, Kenneth P. Discrete mathematics for computer science / Kenneth Bogart, Clifford Stein, Robert L. Drysdale - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks QA76.9.M35 B64 2006 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Teo, Stephen. Hong Kong cinema : the extra dimensions / Stephen Teo. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. PN1993.5.H6 T46 1997 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Ghymn, Esther Mikyung, 1949- Images of Asian American women by Asian American women writers / Esther Mikyung Ghymn. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PS 153.A84 G47 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Asian American sexualities : dimensions of the gay and lesbian experience / edited by Russell Leong. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks HQ 76.2.U5 A75 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Ma, Sheng-mei. East-West montage : reflections on Asian bodies in diaspora / Sheng-mei Ma. - WLU Book Shelves DS13 .M3 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Second person : role-playing and story in games and playable media / edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin ; designed by Michael Crumpton. - WLU Book Shelves GV1469.17.S63 S43 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Screening Asian Americans / edited and with an introduction by Peter X Feng. - WLU Book Shelves PN1995.9.A77 S79 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Gee, James Paul. What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy / James Paul Gee. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks GV1469.3 .G44 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Computer games : text, narrative and play / Diane Carr ... [et al.]. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks GV1469.17.S63 C66 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

New media : a critical introduction / Martin Lister ... [et al.]. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks P96.T42 N478 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Flew, Terry. New media : an introduction / Terry Flew. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks P96.T42 F58 2005 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

New media book / edited by Dan Harries. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks P96.T42 N49 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Ty, Eleanor Rose, 1958- Politics of the visible in Asian North American narratives / Eleanor Ty. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PS8089.5 A8 T9 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Gendering the nation : Canadian women's cinema / edited by Kay Armatage ... [et al.]. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PN1998.2 .G46 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Versaci, Rocco. This book contains graphic language : comics as literature / Rocco Versaci. - WLU Book Shelves PN6714 .V47 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm
Wark, McKenzie, 1961- Gamer theory / McKenzie Wark. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks GV1469.17.S63 W37 2007 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Comics & ideology / edited by Matthew P. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell Jr., and Ian Gordon. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PN6714 .C645 2001 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Strips, toons, and bluesies : essays in comics and culture / D.B. Dowd and Todd Hignite, editors. - Guelph McLaughlin Book Stacks PN6710 .R83 2006 Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Fuchs, Wolfgang J 1945- Comics; anatomy of a mass medium [by] Reinhold Reitberger [and] Wolfgang Fuchs [Translated from the German by Nadia Fowler. - UW Porter. Book Stacks. 6th-10th Floors. PN6710.F813 1972b Book Renewed: Due 09/15/2009 11:59pm

Fox 2! Dancing with the Angels: Tom Clancy’s HAWX and Ace Combat 6

2009-05-19T12:53:00.000-07:00

It seemed almost natural to play these games back to back, even if I didn’t intend to do it that way. I’m not quite sure why I dropped AC6 way back in 2007. Other things probably came up and it was just a tad too ridiculous for me to find it engaging. Fast forward to the 2009 release of HAWX, which as a general fan of the Ubisoft Tom Clancy franchise, I felt inclined to play. By the time I finished HAWX, I felt like I should give AC6 another chance.

As for the gameplay, I can really only speak to the level design. I’ve discovered that I hate bombing missions. The one good thing about old Space Sims is that by the very nature of the setting, crashing isn’t even a consideration. You can just focus on dogfighting other fighter craft. HAWX on the other hand emphasizes bombing – and while the bombs themselves are fairly easy fire and forget type weapons, it’s still a pain to try to hit a target while trying to avoid smacking into terrain. There’s even a mission where you’re forced to fly under a certain altitude through hilly terrain for the majority of the mission. High pressure? Sure. It’s just not quite as fun as trying to chase down an F-18.

As for AC6, while the bombing is relatively simplified because of the option to use fire and forget bombs, they’ve replaced the frustration with the classic Star Wars trench run. Fly down a tunnel in a jet while being shot at by turrets and aiming for a target that you only have one chance to hit. Again, the tension is ratcheted up but since the margin of error is fairly low (especially on a higher difficulty), there is a large potential for frustration.

But, as Yahtzee said in his review of HAWX, there’s something satisfying about chasing down another plane and blowing it out of the sky – even if it’s boiled down to pointing and clicking – and there are more than enough missions in both games where you do just that.

In terms of story conveyed through gameplay and level design, both games rely on scripted sequences to try to inspire what I would tentatively call “cinematic moments” or more specifically, the type of climaxes found at the height of action sequences in war films. The turning point in HAWX is when Artemis, the PMC that your character flies for, switches allegiances against the United States because the enemy (a generic separatist terrorist organization) has offered them a better contract. In the game itself, this is represented by an Artemis fleet suddenly appearing on the map after the completion of a mission, demanding the immediate withdrawal of American forces. With patriotic fervour, your wingman declares that he can’t fight against Americans and suddenly you’re tasked with destroying the Artemis flagship in order to save an American carrier group.

For what it tries to accomplish, I suppose it’s perfectly adequate. But for some reason, it just wasn’t all that inspiring. Now, one thing to point out is that most of the Tom Clancy games are now made by Europeans or Canadians (a fact that Tom Clancy himself might find ironic in between dips in his gold plated pool filled with thousand dollar bills), and I suppose this is just a twisted view of nationalism and patriotism that non-Americans seem to believe that Americans are consumed with. It’s a far cry from the type of story found in American war films or even Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4. Alternatively, it might just be horrible writing and presentation – and given that Ubisoft doesn’t publish credits for the games anywhere online, it might not be fair to place the blame on Ubisoft Romania.

Speaking of presentation, one of the lauded features of the game was that it takes place during Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 – and indeed, the first mission in the game has you flying into Juarez in order to support Captain Mitchell. It’s a great concept that I was really looking forward to, simply because the moment referenced in GRAW2 is one of the better uses of the “cinematic moment” in games to this day. Unfortunately, the actual mission in HAWX has nothing in common with the mission in GRAW2. Then there’s the fact that they didn’t even bother to hire the same voice actor to play Mitchell. Sure, gruff American soldier is a generic voice that anyone can do... but if you’re going out of the way to reference a character that you’ve used in other games, at least have the foresight to hire the same voice actor as well.

Ace Combat 6’s “cinematic moment” comes late in the game and it’s surprisingly similar to the one found in GRAW2. You’re tasked to destroy some biological weapons, which is fairly simple it itself, and then you are told to pull out and return to base. As you begin to fly home, wave after wave of enemy fighters begin to engage you and you soon begin to realize that the odds are against you. And it’s for this reason that I found the moment in AC6 to be more engaging and emotionally affecting than the one in HAWX. Speaking for myself, when I saw that I had to somehow take on a dozen or so fighter jets with just a single wingman for support, I thought I was going to “die” (or at least, lose the mission). It’s a classic manipulation of the sense of agency that a player has when playing a game. Barring survival horror games, typically a player has a tremendous sense of power over the game world and by suddenly overwhelming the player, the designers are hoping that – at least for a brief moment – the player will feel overwhelmed and become anxious.

And just as suddenly and unexpectedly as the game removes agency from the player, the game returns it to him in the form of allied forces appearing in the map to provide support. It’s quite literally the game version of the cavalry appearing from the distance to save the protagonist in the nick of time (such as at the end of Saving Private Ryan when American forces arrive to stop the German advance). By returning the power that was temporary removed from the player, the game is able to manipulate the player into feeling a sense of relief as he realizes that he is no longer in any imminent danger. Hearing an ally tell you that he’s here to help you is as cliché as refusing to turn on one’s homeland, but the way it is executed in AC6 allowed me to temporarily forget that I’ve experienced this moment many times before – in games and in other media. Running in my head was the thought that I was glad I wasn’t going to “die” and have to repeat the mission, which is probably as close as a game can come to replicating the danger of real world combat.

Moving on to the actual stories of both games... they’re both fairly obnoxious in terms of how shallow they are, but for very different reasons. I don’t want to go into any real detail because plot summaries of both games are available on Wikipedia, but I will say that if I had to choose which one I liked more, I would have to go with Ace Combat 6. The story in HAWX was just pure bullshit that makes Metal Gear Solid 4 seem like a well considered white paper on the precipitous future humanity faces as private military corporations begin to capitalize on the everlasting demand for soldiers and weapons. Just like the current season of 24 (season 7), for some random reason a PMC wants to destroy the United States... but there’s no real compelling reason why they’d want to take over America or what they’d even do if they actually succeeded. And even then, most of the footage they used for the “cutscenes” (or over-glorified Power Point presentations) in between missions was recycled from other Tom Clancy games. I think they probably shouldn’t have even bothered with a story at all.

Ace Combat 6 on the other hand is disappointing in that the storytelling is so heavy handed. It would almost be an insult to anime to call this story anime-inspired, even though it’s clear that’s where the game is drawing its inspiration. Essentially (and quite like Valkyria Chronicles) a country is invaded by an unprovoked aggressor and you have to fight to save your homeland. But as the story unfolds, it’s clear that this is an anti-war story. I think I’ve touched on my feelings about Japanese anti-war stories in my Valkyria Chronicles post. While it’s strange seeing an anti-war story from the Japanese perspective (for a variety of reasons – the most notable one being that the game received assistance from JASDF), at least they’re trying to do something “more meaningful” with the story than their Western counterparts.

That said, it just seems that Japanese game writing seems to be clunky as hell. While the narrative is split amongst several characters, let’s focus on Melissa Herman. When the game opens, we find out that her husband is a pilot in the air force that you yourself fly in. A typical war movie would just be happy with having the character discover that she is a widow through a messenger or another soldier. Not Ace Combat 6 however. No, Melissa finds out that her husband has died when she walks by the wreckage of her husband’s jet on her way out of the city. And of course, there’s the “Go Dance with the Angels!” line that is used throughout the story. It’s supposed to be an elaborate way to curse someone (dancing with the angels implies that one should be shot down by pilots) but it just becomes a joke by the time the game ends. I have to assume that it was better in Japanese and the translator/localizer did the best they could when trying to come up with an English equivalent. Either way, Japanese game companies should simply hire anime writers/directors to work on the story for their games to avoid problems like these entirely.

Finally, I just wanted to touch on the music. Wikipedia lists Tom Salta as the composer for HAWX... which is slightly disappointing because I think his work on the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter games was excellent. Unfortunately, no tracks really stood out this time. The Ace Combat 6 soundtrack on the other hand works well with the game. The track that they used for the trailer (the “Invasion of Gracemeria” theme) is probably one of my favourite pieces of game music. In fact, I’m not surprised that they went all out and released a 3 CD OST in Japan.

There was some other minor point that I wanted to write about... but it's long since left my head unfortunately. Hopefully it'll come to me again some time in the future.

Valkyria Chronicles: I hate Nazis and You do too!

2009-02-19T04:38:00.002-08:00

A sequel to Sega’s Viking: Battle of the Asgaard? No, not quite. It just seems that non Judeo-Christian mythology is back in vogue again and I for one am perfectly happy to indulge in this new trend. No more crosses, please!

Anyway, let’s go through the game in brief. It’s a half real-time and half turn-based SRPG – which in itself seems like a crazy idea but it injects some life into an old genre. You control each character in real time from a third person perspective, almost like a TPS. There are also quite a few nuances with the combat engine, the best example is that if you move into an enemy’s cone of vision you will expose your characters to a free attack, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

I’m also not going to dwell on the eye-catching art style that they chose to use – everything looks like a watercolour painting or a pencil sketch. I have no idea how the technology works, but it needs to be seen in motion to be truly appreciated. In a world where every other game has is the plastic look of UE3, anything that takes a different approach should be commended.

What I really want to focus on is the story and the story telling. So it’s been a while since I’ve watched a full anime or manga series mostly because I don’t have the time or self-dedication to devote myself to watching something that will take months to get through (the heady days of the 90s, with Initial D and Sailor Moon and GTO, are behind me) but Valkyria Chronicles is the most “anime” text that I’ve experienced in a long time.

Everything that confuses and bewilders me about anime is in this game. For a game set during a brutal war, it feels strange to have 14 year old characters being shot at by soldiers who are essentially SS troopers. I know that the genre often features characters that are extremely young – but imagine if the cast of Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan were all teenagers. It’s just an odd convention that takes a bit of getting used to.

Then there’s the other anime convention that has always confused me – are these characters white or Japanese? It’s set in a fictional Europe that they’ve so creatively dubbed “Europa”, but the characters are drawn exactly the same way that characters in other anime series are drawn. What makes it all doubly strange is that there are “black” or at least “dark skinned” characters, so it’s not as if race doesn’t exist in the convention of anime. I just don’t know enough about Japanese culture or the conventions of manga/anime to know if this is just an art style, some form of deep-seated wish fulfillment or even just the typical privileging of whiteness.

Taking out the mythology of the “Valkyria” and the steam punk nature of the technology, the game is basically a retelling of the Second World War – including the holocaust (the Darcsen being locked up in concentration camps, use as forced labour and then being executed as their overseers abandon their posts? It's not subtle at all). Now, I don’t want to attribute the qualities of one game to an entire nation, but given the role that Japan took during WW2, it seems odd that there is a romanticisation of the European front of the Second World War. Perhaps the only interesting divergence from real world history is that the “Allies” in the game’s fiction are almost as evil as the “Axis” powers in the game’s fiction. I just wonder what the game would have been like if it was set in a fictional Asia, with the “Korean” country trying to resist a fictional China and Japan. Again, this is just one of those odd socio-cultural aspects of being Japanese that I'm not sure I'll ever understand.

As for how story is presented in the game itself, it’s typically Japanese – long cutscenes intermixed with bits of gameplay. I was mostly caught up in the story, as clunky as it could be, so I didn’t mind it so much but I can understand how someone might be totally frustrated with having to sit through hours of videos and text bubbles in order to actually play the game (it's better than Metal Gear Solid 4 thankfully). That said the way they presented the story is probably one of the cleverest ways I’ve seen someone do a menu screen since Psychonauts. The game is set up so that as you play through the game, you are essentially reading a book about the war aptly titled The Valkyria Chronicles, with each chapter of the book being a mission in the game. When most games simply use a text menu to select cutscenes and missions, it was just nice to see someone take the time to integrate the menus into the fiction of the game world.

While I wished that they took some of the thought that went into designing the menus into figuring out ways that they could have told the story during gameplay, I definitely appreciate the game for what it is. Yes, it’s undeniably a Japanese game but it is also innovative enough that it becomes a standout in a genre that is somewhat stuck in old conventions.

(Now if I could only finish Persona 3... or Persona 4!)

Oh, and here's an interesting picture I found on NeoGAF that apparently comes from 4chan that pretty much sums up the weirdness in the game:

Saints Row 2: Even Rower

2009-02-19T04:38:00.001-08:00

Okay, so that’s not the subtitle... but it seems in keeping with the spirit of the game. Yeah, there’s really nothing spectacular about the game’s narrative or story – Volition has gone out of its way to tell you how pretentious and boring Grand Theft Auto 4 was – instead opting to make a game that was simply fun. Your character isn’t a conflicted ex-soldier trying to find a better life – s/he is just a “gangsta” who wants to own the city through any means necessary. Sure, there’s satire, but it feels more genuine and less contrived than Rock Star North’s particular brand of extreme Americanism.

And you know what? In an open world game – that just works for me. There is no narrative dissonance when I run over people or shoot down a police chopper with a wire guided RPG. There isn’t an overwrought cutscene trying to convince me that the main character is more than what s/he is – a psychopath who likes to blow things up. It’s completely unapologetic and it’s much better for it.

With a very thin plot then, what is there to talk about? I just wanted to point out that if there was ever a game about ergodic/ludic/emergent “game telling” experiences, this is it. The game is as fun as you want it to be and Volition went out of their way to make it accessible to as many people as possible. In mission checkpoints, regenerating health, the ability to recruit CPU players to help you on missions and a Gears of War-like revival system in co-op – it’s a game that wants you to finish it. Even the cars handle much easier, relying on a more arcade-like handling model that lets you do hairpin turns on a dime.

For all my talk about narrative in games, I just needed a reminder that games can just be “fun” and that I shouldn’t feel the need to apologize for the fact that I find it amusing to run around suburbia with a septic truck spraying raw sewage on people in order to lower property values. As I make my way through GTA4: The Lost and Damned, all I can think is that I hope Volition is working on Saints Row 3.

Flower or How I Became a Flower Child

2009-02-19T04:29:00.000-08:00

Like Braid, I’m imagine that Flower has been talked to death by the time this goes up, so there really is nothing I need to say about the game that hasn’t been said – including those who think the game is a pretentious, unplayable mess. Of course, I’m in love with the game for the same reasons that everyone else loves it. Following in the footsteps of Rez and Everyday Shooter, Flower is the embodiment of game “synesthesia”, where you add to the music in the game through your own actions. But what will immediately draw people in is just the amazing art design of the first two levels.

That said, I honestly wasn’t impressed with the first three levels. It was charming and pretty and I was quite happy to play the game, but it felt like nothing more than an elaborate tech demo.

Then I played the fourth level and the whole experience changed. It went from just flying around a pretty environment to being a rousing adventure straight out of the typical myth cycle. While I’m sure people will have their own take on the game and ascribing authorial intent to a game that tries its best not to impose a narrative on the player is somewhat problematic, I believe that it is safe to say that the game is a reaction to urbanization from the perspective of a flower.

The jarring move from the gentle turning of windmills on a grassy plain to the black and harsh reality of a world full of power line towers and steel girders is an extremely emotionally jarring moment. The game forces you through a dark trench that imposes a feeling of claustrophobia on you – a feeling that is doubly more oppressive because of the freedom that the game offered you in the first three levels.

In the fifth level, the game completely changes. For the first time the game introduces an element of danger. If you touch a downed, blacked power line – you take damage and lose visibility. The first time that happened, it was so unexpected that I almost felt the shock myself. The payoff for the “boring” unassuming gameplay of the first three levels is that it is able to lull you into a false sense of security. I haven’t seen a better way to invoke the fear that a flower would feel when faced with the cold and harsh reality of a city. I’m sure there are poems and paintings that try to do their best to be moving representations of nature, but actually putting the experience into the hands of the player simply makes the experience that much more personal.

Following the myth cycle, the final level is one of redemption. Having suffered the crushing oppression urbanization, the flower then strikes back. The game gives you a powerful sense of agency and tells you to go forward and destroy the corrupting elements of humanity. It doesn’t condemn humanity or city life. In fact, when you destroy downed power lines and steel girders, new high rises are born out of the ground – just like flowers! – and you see that nature and humanity can coexist. You enliven a city block by restoring colour to the buildings and bringing back life to a small park. You even make flowers bloom as you fly down a highway. This isn’t the hyperbolic YOU’RE KILLING THE EARTH message that you’ll find everywhere else.

And the final moment of the game is the emotional climax that the game builds toward. You explode past a tower of steel and into a scene that reminds you of the window you see at the beginning of the game and the steel tower suddenly transforms itself into a giant tree. It was just an extremely satisfying moment that I haven’t felt since I finished the special “star” ending of Braid.

I really don’t want to make any declarative statements. Games have arrived. Games have evolved. Games are more than just a series of violent actions linked together by cutscenes stolen from film. I’ll let other people try to argue those points about the game, because I'm sure the hyperbole is flowing free without me contributing to it. I’ll just say that I never thought a human made "text", game or otherwise, could ever properly personify a flower – so much so that I felt, as stupid as this sounds, the anxieties and aspirations of a flower. Flow left me a little disappointed, but Jenova Chen is now on my radar and I'm definitely looking forward to "Flowerer" or whatever his next game may be.

What better way to end a post than with a sunset?

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

2008-12-20T03:12:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-20T03:07:00.000-08:00

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

Games Roundup November 2008 Blowout Edition

2008-12-14T04:26:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-14T04:13:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-12-14T04:06:00.000-08:00

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.

Fable 2 as The Book of Job (NeoGAF post)

2008-11-04T00:11:00.000-08:00

This is just a repost of a NeoGAF post I made... just in case I want to refer to it again:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=13488882&postcount=6042

[QUOTE=sennin]Hmm, we are going to have to agree to disagree here. I typed out a post on why I felt the ending was crap. This part addresses choices and morality at the endgame. Finally, the 3 "choices" given at the end aren't really tests of values. From a pragmatic point, everyone wants the dog, for he's the only clue to finding buried treasures without losing your sanity in some of the postgame quests, and more importantly a tool to fully experiencing the game. From a roleplay perspective, this self-serving justification is one an evil character will take, "fuck the world, I need my dog to find buried treasure! Too bad for you weak folks!" An evil character who is smart will not choose money over the dog when he can exploit the proletarians for easy cash by raising rent and prices. A good character will not choose money either, for his noble self will value lives over material gains. If there is a conflict of values, it is merely a shallow one of society vs. family. Fable II's cutscens focuses so much on the Hero's life being a parallel to Lucien's tragedy that it will result in the same path. Did the game go out of its way to make you feel attached to the common folks of Albion? If anything the game tells you that people of Albion who are in bliss care not for your personal tragedies. In fact, to prevent such tragedies from happening it is best to erase all roots of jealousy, hence if the Hero has a happy family he will not turn into another Lucien. So how is the player coerced into thinking that these are "tough choices", when all roads point to one clear path? [/QUOTE]

See, one of the tests of faith that Job suffers is the loss of his wife and children. Job has always been faithful to God and even after suffering the three trials, from the loss of his wealth to his health to his family, he remains pious to God and refuses to lose faith. He knows that he hasn't sinned and doesn't deserve punishment, but accepts it anyway rather than question the will God him/itself. That's my interpretation of The Book of Job given my non-Christian leanings anyway.

Now, it's not that cut and dry in the game I suppose... because the game isn't trying to convince you that shit happens in life and you have to get over it, but I think the same thing applies to the choices in the game. For the final choice, I think the "bad" choice is the fake out. Depending on how much time you spend buying property and investing, you'll be rich by the time you get to the end game anyway. Between the Sacrifice and Love choices, if you are truly roleplaying a "good" character and believe that being good is better than your own self interests, you'll HAVE to choose sacrifice. The problem is, in The Book of Job, Job gets it both ways. He is able to lose everything to prove his piety and then at the end, God rewards him by giving him more money and bringing back his health and his family.

Here, you aren't so lucky - you choose Sacrifice for the sake of being good. There's no happy ending if you choose to be good, you just have to live with the fact that you made the "right" and "moral" and "unselfish choice" and hope that helps you sleep at night. I think most people will choose the Love choice because they feel it's the compromise choice between the two extremes. And it is. Molyneux wanted to make it extremely difficult to be a good character and it progressively gets more difficult to do so. Losing XP? Not a big deal. Permanent scarring? A big deal, but you can dye your hair and whatnot. Losing your family, your dog and a chance to save your sister (remember that you spend a "perfect day" with her after Lucien shoots you!)? That's the tough choice. Even if you don't care about your spouse or your sister, chances are you care about your dog... and you'll make the selfish choice and choose to keep your dog over doing the right thing. It's the ultimate test of faith if you're playing a pious character and chances are, most people will fail. I know I went with the dog, even though I played the rest of the game as "good" as possible.

Maybe I'm reading too much into the game, I'm not sure. But that's what I see anyway.

Fable 2 (or The Book of Job 3D)

2008-11-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

My confession: I got about half way through the first Fable before I just lost interest and gave up. It does a lot that BioWare games of that period tried to do (and Molyneux himself experimented with interactive morality back in Black and White), but it didn’t grab me. I’m not sure if I was just too young to appreciate the British sensibility of the game or if there were other games I ended up playing at the time, but I just never felt the need to go back to it. So, when Fable 2 was announced, I figured that this would give me a chance to atone for the past and finish a Fable game without having to dip back into “last gen”.

With that out of the way, let’s just cut straight to the rhetoric: Fable 2 has some of the most interesting ethical choices in games today and blows everything BioWare has done right out of the water. Mass Effect tried to nuance ethics by forcing you to play a hero regardless of your ethical choices and Fable 2 does exactly the same thing – ultimately, you will kill Lucien whether you are good or evil. But Fable 2 handles the ethical choices by directly integrating them into the game play and the narrative of the game itself.

There are two points in Fable 2 where the game will jump far into the future, following the progression of your character from childhood to adulthood. After each time jump, the choices you’ve made will directly influence how the world evolves. As a child, if you decided to be “naughty” by losing arrest warrants, smashing up a warehouse, giving booze to a drunk, then Bowerstone Old Town will turn into an inner city ghetto run by criminals and flooded with drunks and prostitutes. Alternatively, if you try to be “nice” Old Town will go through a renaissance, looking as cleaned up and as nice as the rest of Bowerstone. You can have the same effect on West Cliff and the two Temples near Oakvale after you enter The Spire.

What’s interesting about having these chronological jumps is that you can actually see the long term consequences of your actions. Whereas the BioWare games hint at what might have happened at the end of the game, here you not only get to see what happens but play through what happens. And there’s the interesting bit of narrative interactivity. Because the entire landscape and demographics of an entire section of the game world is so drastically altered by your actions, you may come to regret your decision. The fact that the chronological jump happens twice in the game gives you the opportunity to at least change your mind the second time around. At the very least it makes the game much more fluid with its system ethics than the typical game where you have to be either good or bad and being able to see the results of your ethical choices makes those choices that much more meaningful.

Like Mass Effect, Fable 2 presents you with ethical set pieces where an entire sequence is based around an ethical choice. Whereas in Mass Effect these set pieces take place almost exclusively within the conversation system, Fable 2 integrates these choices into the game play itself. Drawing from the story of Job, in which Job’s faith to God is tested by God himself through progressively difficult and horrific trials, the player is forced to make harder and harder choices if they wish to roleplay as a “good” character. When you’re at The Spire, you have the choice to be an obedient soldier for Lucien and the Commandant or you can try to defy orders and do the right thing. In Mass Effect, this may have taken place within the conversation wheel and you may end up getting “good” or “evil” points based on the choices you make. Here, every time you choose to be “good” you are punished by having experience points and skills taken from you at a geometric rate. In other words, every time you don’t follow orders, you are given an in game penalty that directly affects your player progression and sets you back maybe several hours.

The choices in The Spire start off very simple and progressively become more difficult – including a reinterpretation of the classic Stanford Prison Experiment. Needless to say, the last sequence is the most interesting – the Commandant orders you to kill Bob, one of the friends you’ve made during your stay at The Spire, for being disobedient. If you refuse to kill Bob, the Commandant drains your experience and gives you another chance to kill Bob. This happens at least several times before the sequence ends. Why does this happen? The game is trying to pressure you into changing your mind by progressively taking away more and more of your experience points. It wants to see if you will panic, if have a breaking point where you will kill Bob because you don’t want to lose anymore of your hard earned experience points. The ultimate tragedy of this sequence is that if you last the gauntlet of experience loss and refuse to kill Bob up until the end, the Commandant gets tired of you and kills Bob himself. Your choice to spare Bob’s life is rendered meaningless and you’ve lost all your experience points. All you get for your trouble is a small number of “good points” that affect your alignment. Here I believe the game is trying to make you feel guilty for regretting your decision to spare Bob’s life. With most narratives, you expect a payoff for making a sacrifice and choosing the good choice – maybe Bob lives and is able to see his wife again. But the game robs you of even that payoff. You choose to be good simply because you want to stand by your conviction to be good – there is no in game reward, either in experience points or in the plot, for making the “right” choice. Because there’s no payoff, there must be a small part of you that wishes you just killed Bob in the first place and kept your experience – it’s a perfectly natural response, especially for a player who is familiar with how games and RPGs work. In fact, I’m sure that’s the response that Molyneux and the designers wanted you to have when you choose to be good throughout the entire Spire sequence. If you want to “feel good” for making the “good” choice, you are forced to come to the realization that sometimes being good means you won’t be rewarded. In fact, you may even be punished for your conviction.

The second major test of your conviction to being “good” comes at the end of the Reaver/Dark Seal quest. You learn that Reaver has spent the last few centuries sacrificing the lives of innocents in order to maintain his own youth and he has sent you as his latest sacrifice. However, this time an innocent woman has accidently ended up at the same sacrificial altar as well and you are forced to choose whether to sacrifice yourself or to sacrifice the woman. There are two aspects of this sequence that makes this choice interesting. First, the effects of the sacrifice are permanent. If you choose to be good and sacrifice yourself, your character is permanently scarred for the remainder of the game (which has the annoying side effect of having all the NPCs in the game – including your spouse and child – run away from you whenever you walk next to them). Second, and more interesting from my perspective, the choice you make isn’t immediate. Unlike other games, you don’t simply make a choice and watch the consequences of your choice play out. Here, if you choose to sacrifice the innocent woman, she pleads and begs for her life and you have the chance to reverse your decision and sacrifice yourself. In fact, the whole sequence is timed so that you will agonize over the decision. What I like about this sequence is that it uses game design to try to make you feel guilty if you make the “evil” choice and sacrifice the woman as you make the choice rather than wait until after you make the choice. The fact that the game gives you a chance to reconsider forces you to live in the moment of the choice, realizing exactly what you are doing when you are choosing to sacrifice the woman. Of course, the fact that making the good choice permanently scars your own character makes the “good” choice difficult as well. Either way, the game makes it difficult to choose one over the other. What’s doubly frustrating is that you aren’t given the chance to reject the premise of the choice – you need Reaver’s co-operation, so you can’t just abandon the quest and bring Reaver to justice for sacrificing so many innocent people throughout the years.

The final test comes at the end of the game after you defeat Lucien. Theresa tells you that The Spire will be able to grant you one wish. You can choose between Sacrifice, where you wish that everyone who was killed by Lucien in order to construct the Spire was brought back to life; Love, where you wish that your sister, spouse, child and (most importantly!) your dog is brought back to life; or Wealth, where you wish for a larger amount of gold. Now, I think it’s fair to say that the Wealth choice is the false choice. Since money is so easy to make in the game, even if you don’t use the Pub Games glitch, the only reason why you might choose this option is to get the achievement and if you are dead set on roleplaying a purely “evil” character. So the real choice is between Sacrifice and Love, and yet again this is an extremely difficult choice. As a “good” character, the expectation is that you will be a martyr and sacrifice the people you love for the greater good of humanity... like another figure in Christianity. But throughout the game, you steadily grow attached to the companionship of your faithful dog (and maybe even your family), so that your instincts are to choose to bring back the people that you love and that personally love you.

If the true moral of the game is that blind devotion to being “good” is a fallacy, that life is more nuanced that the moral binary of good and evil, then Molyneux made it work with this final choice. For me, I agonized over the choice for a moment before choosing Love over Sacrifice. I want to save the world, but I wanted to save my sister and my dog that much more. The path that Job took based purely on his faith in God was extremely difficult and I think Molyneux has shown that most people, despite their good intentions, could never make the same sacrifices. Ultimately, this is what makes the game more interesting than the system of binary choices presented in BioWare games (and, at least at first glance, in Fallout 3). This game questions the nature of morality itself, considering the possibility that being purely good may be as destructive as being purely evil.

While I definitely wanted to focus on how ethics is constructed in the game, there are just a few unrelated points I wanted to touch on. First, the game draws upon the Dungeons & Dragons system of ethics. That is, there are two axes for codifying morality in the game – Good vs Evil and Purity vs Corruption. In D&D terms, it’s the same as the Good/Evil, Chaotic/Lawful system. That means that you could be a perfectly Good character that is also completely Corrupt or an Evil character who is also Pure. By having two axes of morality rather than the basic binary of Good and Evil, the game wants to nuance morality much more than it usually is in games of this kind. Both axes will ultimately affect how NPCs in the world will react to you and whether or not they like you, but both are influenced by very separate actions. Good/Evil is influenced by the big choices you make in the game – for example, whether you save people captured by slavers or whether you enslave people yourself. Purity/Corruption is influenced by the smaller, inconsequential choices you make in the game. If you own a house and increase the rent by 100%, you will be more corrupt. If you discount the rent by 100%, you will be more pure. Similarly, if you eat meat, you will be more corrupt because an animal had to die for your food but if you eat tofu, you will be more pure because you are getting the same health benefits without killing an animal. That’s right! Being a vegan in Fable 2 has a tangible affect on your character! It may not have a great bearing on how the game plays out in the end, but it’s just a more interesting way to think about morality.

Second, the game has taken into account a lot of the choices you can make in the game. If you are a bigamist and get married to more than one person (yes, the game lets you pursue a gay/lesbian relationship if you so choose), at some point in the game you will be blackmailed. If you don’t pay the blackmailer, he’ll tell all your spouses about your infidelity and wreck your relationship with all of them. While the price the blackmailer asks for is relatively low, making paying him off the easy choice, it’s just neat that the designers took bigamy into account and tries to penalize you for keeping more than one family.

Third, I just wanted to talk about the final flashback in the game after Lucien shoots you. There is another pseudo-flashback that you can get if you buy the Brightwood Tower where you have to fight “Chesty the Chest” as a child which is also pretty surreal (and British, honestly), but that’s not the one I want to touch on. Here, you are brought back to the farm you and your sister grew up in before your parents were killed and you were orphaned. The final flashback is just an interesting gameplay sequence because it brings you back to the beginning of the game, reminding you of why you are a hero in the first place – Lucien killed your sister. By making you to spend time with her as a child, you are reminded of the tragedy without actually showing your sister being killed again. It’s made that much more depressing because your sister follows you around in the flashback, encouraging you as you go around having fun. As the flashback ends, the dream becomes nightmare and the farm becomes a twisted, burning landscape as screams punctuate the soundtrack, bringing you back to the reality that your entire family is dead. It’s just a fascinating sequence that brings you back to the beginning of the game without relying on a cinematic. Indeed, it’s a sequence that only makes sense in gameplay, because it depends so much on your interaction with your sister. And most important of all, this takes place right before you have to choose between Sacrifice and Love, making that choice that much more difficult. Even if you forget your spouse and your dog, you’ve just spent time with your sister – the person who helped raise you when your parents were killed and the person who you vowed to avenge when you grew up to become a hero. Given the chance to save her, after spending all the time with her, wouldn’t you? Even if you condemn thousands of others to their deaths? It primes you for the tough choice you’ll have to make at the end of the game.

Fourth, there’s the ending itself. There is no real boss battle in the game. It builds to a confrontation with Lucien, but you never actually fight him. All you do is press a button to activate a magical item that drains him of his power. You don’t even get a chance to hear his motivation for trying to take over the world (brought on in part by the murder of his wife and daughter) because as he begins to explain himself, Reaver gets tired of hearing him talk and shoots him to death. As someone at the 1up Boards brought up, this is a game where the climax isn’t in a boss battle but in the final narrative and ethical choice you have to make. Even Lucien’s death is anti-climatic, even if it is somewhat humorous. It’s just interesting to see that games have come to a point where you don’t need to end a game on a pointless fight against a large boss (Bioshock, I’m looking at YOU!). Instead, games can end on a story note and that's okay!

Fifth, I want to talk about the Orb system. This is perhaps the first Massive Multiplayer Online Singleplayer game and I hope that other designers look at this feature and rip it off. It’s not only nice to see that other people are playing the game at the same time as you, turning a solitary experience into a shared communal experience, but the fact that you can communicate and talk to these people pushes the communal experience to the next level. If you’re stuck at a point in the game and you see an Orb, you might ask them for help... or, you may just want to chat with random strangers about anything else that comes to mind. It’s just a great feature that makes the singleplayer experience more interesting than the typical RPG.

Finally, I’ll end with the dog, the breadcrumb system and the combat. The dog is a great companion character that makes the solitary experience that much more palatable. And because it’s a dog, they didn’t have to worry about trying to design a character that could interact with the player – they just had to model how a real dog would react and have him run around interact with you based simply on a dog’s emotions. If the dog is scared, he’ll whimper. If he’s hurt, he’ll limp at you. If he finds treasure, he’ll run towards it excitedly. It’s a smart way to create a companion character that is more than just a pack mule or a boring NPC.

The breadcrumb system was also a nice touch because it tells you exactly where you need to go. Some people hate being told where to go and what to do, but I don’t want to have to learn Albion in order to enjoy the game and the breadcrumb system is perfect for players like me.

As for the combat, the one button combat is a great way to make the game accessible to casual players and advanced players alike. It’s easy enough for people who just want to play through the game and not worry about killing things but deep enough for the people who want a full combat experience.

In the end, Fable 2 has pushed ethical interactivity to a whole new level, complicating the whole Good vs Evil binary that has defined games up until now. Hopefully the next BioWare and Obsidian Entertainment games will be able to draw on Fable 2 and continue to evolve storytelling in games. At the very least, it's the one of the first games to draw from the Bible (and the Book of Job specifically) in an interesting way. There aren't random crosses or devils and angels, it just draws from one of the most well known stories from the Old Testament and leaves you to connect the dots.

Edit: Just a final note - the fact that you can only have one save forces you to stick with your decisions during your playthrough. Unlike other games, you won't have the chance to go back and change your mind after the game has saved. It's an interesting, if not frustrating, way to make the choices you make more important to you.

Portable Games Roundup

2008-10-19T19:04:00.001-07:00

I just wanted to say a few words about some portable games that I haven’t finished but want to talk about. I’m not sure

Final Fantasy 4 DS

I finished the game back when it was called Final Fantasy 2 and I was playing it on the SNES, but I had absolutely no memories of it when I started up the DS remake. I’m about 3/4s of the way through the plot and I think I’m suitably impressed with the storytelling. Yeah, the gameplay very old fashioned and grindy, but the tightly focused linear gameplay is made up for by a strong story with well developed characters. It even does the Metal Gear Solid thing of using gameplay – specifically the battle engine – in some of its cutscenes.

The World Ends With You

Another fascinating JRPG if only because the combat is an interesting mix of old school JRPG combat and ARPG combat. Of course, the most interesting part of the game is its setting – an afterlife mirror image of Shibuya. In a genre that’s mostly defined by fantasy, science fiction or in a pinch science fantasy, it’s just nice to see a roleplaying game set in a contemporary city with contemporary characters and situations. The Japanese interpretation of death and the afterlife is interesting as well.

Final Fantasy Tactics PSP

The seminal SRPG. Again, it’s been so long since I’ve played the PS1 original that I have no idea what happens in the game, but the classic “war of the roses” type storyline mixed with some elements of Japanese fantasy makes the storyline interesting to follow. Like the early Final Fantasy games, it also uses gameplay to tell the story – in fact, most of the game’s story is told through the game engine. The new voiced and beautifully animated cutscenes also help develop the characters and move the story along. For whatever reason, the linear tightly focused and novel-like development of the characters and the plot just make the stories in these games very interesting even though in other games I find it mostly disappointing.

Anyway, time to gear up for Fable 2, Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2!

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

2008-10-19T18:34:00.001-07:00

“War is hell”, as I’ve been told in many war films and games and Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway does not trend far from the norm. That’s what makes writing about the game so difficult – it’s so remarkable in its average-ness. Now, don’t get me wrong – the game itself is solid and I actually appreciate the slower paced puzzle-like combat (know the four “fs”!) that you can’t find in any other game – but in terms of what the game does narratively, it’s just fairly lacking.

The game tells the story of a group of paratroopers during Operation Market Garden, following the story developed through the two previous Brothers in Arms games. The fact that Market Garden was ultimately a failure, the developers of the game have the opportunity to present the darker side of the Second World War. In fact, the tone of the game is sombre and depressing with the bombing of Eindhoven being the centerpiece of the game. We see Germans execute Dutch civilians and we see a Dutch boy that we’ve rescued in an earlier mission killed by a German bomb.

But why doesn’t this resonate with me? The designers chose to use cutscenes to tell the story but for whatever reason, these cutscenes fall flat. On several podcasts, one common complaint is that the game doesn’t provide any context for the character’s behaviour – it assumes you’ve played the previous games and know these characters intimately, treating the story as if you were watching an episode of Band of Brothers in the middle of the series. And I’ll admit that not knowing who these characters are did affect how I interpreted the story. Baker’s struggle with PTSD and losing men around him should have been as effecting as Compton’s breakdown at Bastogne in Band of Brothers but it just doesn’t work. I don’t know enough about Baker or the rest of the characters to be invested enough in his breakdown or any of the character development.

The designers do really try with their cutscenes though and there are several very impressive editing tricks that you’d only find in film – the reveal of what happened to Leggett and the history of Baker’s gun is perhaps one of the most cinematic cutscenes I’ve seen in gaming. It’s just that the writing doesn’t seem to be up to par with the presentation. The climax of the film features Baker recovering from the guilt he feels over the deaths of Leggett and the other men, triumphantly climbing atop a jeep to give the soldiers who are still alive a rousing and inspiring speech about war. It’s a moment that should pay off, especially since it’s meant to lead into a sequel that is almost certainly going to be set during the Battle of the Bulge, but for me it just falls flat. Even though I played through the entire game as Baker, I didn’t feel any connection with him.

Maybe like so many other games, there’s a disconnect with the gameplay and the narrative. During the game itself, Baker and the rest of the characters are so anonymous that you see them only as pieces to be moved around the game field. When a member of your team is hit and falls down, you don’t react and move on as if nothing happened. Now, I understand that in a combat situation you can stop to nurse the wounded but for a man suffering from PTSD as a result of seeing men die around him, you’d think there would be some indication that these casualties are effecting. Of course, there’s also the problem with the fact that no one really dies during the missions – characters only die in the cutscenes when the story requires them to die. Any desire you have to keep your men alive is quickly evaporated when you realize that they won’t die anyway.

There is one “ludic” or “game-telling” narrative moment that I did find interesting. As with most games of this nature, the first level is inevitably a tutorial that teaches you how to play the game. Here, they get you to learn how to shoot, how to order your men around and the importance of suppression fire and flanking. As you make your way through a hospital in Eindhoven, learning how to play the game, you eventually reach the end of the level where you are knocked down and surrounded by Germans. The game proper then begins three days in the past. As you work your way through the storyline, you eventually find out how you end up in that hospital. What’s interesting here is that you end up replaying the tutorial level all over again so you know exactly what happens. You race through the level heading toward the end where you know you will end up in a showdown with the German soldiers. This is an interesting moment that manipulates your previous gameplay knowledge of the level in order to give you the feeling of agency. It’s the equivalent of a film that builds to a climax that you’re introduced to right from the beginning (The Bourne Identity being one of many examples). While this is the only example of “game-telling” in the game, it’s certainly worth mentioning.

Ultimately, I think the biggest letdown of the game is its inability to get across the “horror” of war either through cutscenes or through gameplay. Sure, there’s the killcam with the slow motion shots of German soldiers being killed, but this almost trivializes gore and violence rather than emphasize any effect it may have on a soldier. Call of Duty 4 showed that there are ways that games can explore war that other media can’t. If Gearbox is given the opportunity to make the sequel that they’ve set up at the end of this game, I hope they look at games like Call of Duty 4 and try to implement some game specific narrative techniques.

Side note – they got Dale Dye to provide the voice of Colonel Sink in the game. Now, I’m not invested enough to find out if this is meant to be the same character found in Band of Brothers, but I’m almost certain that it’s more than just a coincidence. He may have consulted on the game and the designers may have thought it would have been a nice crossover with .

Second side note – Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts tells story of Market Garden from the perspective of the Germans. I haven’t played the game so I don’t know how the story is handled, but it’s probably the only example of a Canadian/American representation of the Second World War that sympathizes with the “enemy”. Admittedly, storytelling in the original Company of Heroes wasn’t all that remarkable either – mostly due to the limitations of the Real Time Strategy genre – but the fact that this is pretty much the Canadian/American version of Das Boot makes it worth considering.

Braid: An Analysis

2008-08-23T12:07:00.000-07:00

Screen grabs are taking from YouTube videos found here and here.
(Who knew doing screenshots and captions would be such a pain?)

Also, the NeoGAF thread is here and the GameFAQs thread is here.

Now that it’s been a couple of weeks since Braid came out and people have moved on to Bionic Commando, I think we have a chance to reflect on it outside of the “bubble”. As a game itself, Braid is a great platformer/puzzle game designed to give you as many attempts as you need to complete a puzzle. Small annoyances that would make you go crazy in traditional platformers – mistiming a jump being the most egregious mistake one can make – are removed by the simple fact that you can reverse time at any point and try again. Of course, the downside is that the ability to easily retry a section also encourages a frustrating grind (I spent an hour trying to grab a star!), but I think that’s a small price to pay for the tremendous accessibility that the game gives you.

As for the “content” in the game, I really didn’t want to do a close reading of any section of the game. By now, the Atom Bomb theory has passed around the Internet and all I really want to say about that is that I’m glad more people have been exposed to the process of close reading. Present evidence, deliver argument, then conclude. For whatever reason, this process seems to be difficult to teach to undergrads... so maybe they just need something obtuse that forces them to think and to come up with something on their own. The only real problem that I have with this close reading is that it doesn’t address the larger context of the game, including the introductory books that begin each world and the events in the game itself (killer rabbits and cute plush dinosaurs?), and there may be contradictions or inconsistencies with this reading if you were to bring these elements into the fold.

What I want to focus on is the use of the time reversal mechanic and how that influences the integration of gameplay and storytelling. For the moment, let’s take the story we are giving at face value. You play as Tim, a person who may have made some kind of mistake with a woman in the past and wants to reconnect with her. Time reversal gives Tim (hey, Time without the “e”. I can’t believe I just noticed that!) the opportunity to correct his mistakes and even change the nature of causality (as one of the books points out, why are people punished for mistakes instead of rewarded for the learning experience mistakes can provide?) , allowing him to overcome several thematic obstacles in order to reach the “princess” who we assume is the girl he has been pining for throughout the game.

Throughout the entire game, you assume a level of agency that you become familiar with. Yes, each world treats time differently, but as the player you can always depend on the X button to reverse time regardless of the situation you find yourself in. Indeed, you come to expect that you will be able to fix any mistake you make in the game by pressing the X button to reverse time for a few seconds. The game wants you to have this agency because it makes the actual ending (World 1-1, not the epilogue) that much more personal. In World 1-1, you finally meet the princess you’ve been looking for. You see what appears to be the boss character, a very large man, carry the princess down to a platform above you. She jumps free of his grasp and he becomes angry, sending a wall of flame toward you from the left. In this final world in the game, you essentially must run through a final obstacle course to escape the wall of flame and, implicitly, reach the princess at the end of this ordeal. Additionally, as you play through the world, you get the distinct impression that the princess is doing everything in her power to try to help you get through the obstacle course. She’ll flip switches that raises platforms or lowers obstacles, allowing you to pass through the obstacles. In fact, perhaps in a moment that references ICO, you have to trust the princess to flip the switches for you – the wall of flame is mere centimetres away from you and the only option you have is to jump into a pit of spikes. Without any option, you make the jump and just as you are about to die, the princess flips a switch and a platform suddenly rises from the ground, saving your life and allowing you to continue through the world.

As you approach the end of the map, you see the princess approach her bedroom and as you get closer to reaching her, she falls asleep in her bed. When you jump to the space just outside her bedroom, time suddenly freezes and you lose all control of the game. You aren’t told to do anything or if anything had actually happened and instinctively, you reach for the X button because you’ve been trained that pressing the X button will fix any problems. When you do press and hold the X button, the game suddenly resumes – but instead of reversing time, time actually progresses normally. If you release the X button, the game stops and will only continue if you hold the X button again. An ability that previously gave the player a tremendous amount of agency suddenly becomes suffocating, uncontrollable and most importantly, unreliable.

A scene in which it seemed as if the princess and the player were working together in order to escape the evil boss character and imminent death now becomes extremely warped and twisted. Rather than be the valiant hero trying to reach the princess, you end up being a creepy guy standing outside of a girl’s bedroom, staring at her as she sleeps. Eventually, she wakes up, notices you and runs away from you. You try to follow her, running the same obstacle course but this time in reverse. Everything is exactly the same, but the entire scene is replayed through a distorted perspective. Rather than try to help you through the obstacle course, the princess is now actively trying to stop you from completing the course by dropping obstacles in your path. Indeed, moments where you thought that the princess was trying to save you from death were actually moments where the princess was actively trying to kill you. When you reach the end (or beginning, depending on your perspective) of the world, you see the boss character shout at the princess. While you first thought that this character was evil and had kidnapped the princess, it actually turns out that this character is a valiant knight, saving the princess from the evil character – YOU. Eventually, the princess jumps into the knight’s arms and they escape off screen. At this point, you are given control again but the only thing you can do is go through a door and head toward the Epilogue world. From this sequence, it’s undeniable – you aren’t the hero trying to reach and rescue the princess, you are the villain that the princess needs rescuing from!

There is one small example in this sequence that I’d like to point out here, because it will help explain how I come to my ultimate conclusion. As you watch the scene unfold by holding the X button, you will get to a scene that will be familiar to you. When you first encountered this segment of the map during normal gameplay, you see that the princess hit a switch that rotated a wall that was blocking your path. When you return to this segment during the “hold X” portion of the game, you see that the princess flipped this switch in order to block you from using a ladder to reach her. This is an example of what I believe is one of the themes of the game – the revisionist nature of memory. Assuming that this sequence is what “really happens” in this game world, all of Tim’s time reversal power is simply Tim re-imagining his life experience in his head. Most of us have experienced a moment in our lives that we replay in our heads, trying to figure out how a situation would have unfolded differently if we had just said something or did something different and this is exactly what Tim has done throughout the entire game. Indeed, this is why World 1-1 is the last level of the game. At this point, you are in the “present” in the game’s temporal continuity and you, as Tim, have simply replayed Tim’s memories in your head, revising and optimizing his memory in the process. Maybe Tim tried to ask a girl out and she told him to fuck off before going home with another guy. In his head, he’s able to “reverse time” and fix this memory so that he’s able to convince the girl to stay with him.

Now, for most players, this is basically the end of the game. And as it stands, this ending alone is a rather noteworthy example of how ludic and narratological experiences can work together to tell an effective story to the player. After you exit the Epilogue world, you are dumped right back at the beginning of the game. Everything appears to be exactly the same, except in the night sky, you see a group of star outlines forming a constellation in the night sky. This is the only clue that you get that tells you that there is much, much more to the game.

So what do I make of the eight secret stars? There’s the metagame aspect that’s worth looking at for a moment. First and foremost there is no achievement for getting the stars. When you complete the game for the first time, the only achievement that is listed as incomplete is the speedrun achievement. Whereas Blow wanted people to try for an optimal run-through of the game (the official speedrun time is 45 minutes for the entire game) as a challenge for the player after the game was complete, he didn’t mind if people ended up missing this second layer of challenge. In fact, going by NeoGAF and GameFAQs, there were many players who did not know about the stars until reading them (myself included).

One poster at NeoGAF suggested that this was a way to poke fun or at least acknowledge obsessive gamers who are completionists or who try to find ways to break a game/find secrets. Indeed, the first star that you can get (in World 2) requires you to sit by the game for two hours as a slow moving cloud platform scrolls to the left side of the screen. It’s almost reminiscent of that cancelled Penn and Teller game where you had to drive a bus across the country in REAL TIME (8 hours one way) and you had to sit and hold the controller or the bus would crash and you would have to start over. Now, Blow isn’t that much of a sadist and as long as you glance up at the screen once in a while, you don’t have to babysit your controller. But it’s almost as if he expected you to find something else to occupy your time as you waited to get this star and I believe that Blow is trying to put you into the headspace of Tim. Just as Tim is determined to use whatever means he has available to him to reach the princess, you are willing to put in the extra effort to reach these stars even if you do not know what the end result will be.

Of course, the real rub is that one of the stars is only obtainable if you haven’t completed the puzzle pieces in World 3. This means that if you’ve played and finished the game, you’ll have to make use of the “restart game” option and start over from the beginning. This may be frustrating if you’ve already completed the game... but much more so if you’ve spent the time to try to obtain the other stars. But I think Blow did this expecting that most players would not see that star and would have to restart the game. This not only implicitly nudges the player toward completing a speedrun, but it is also another attempt to put the player into Tim’s mindset. As you play through the game a second time, you know all the solutions to the puzzles in the game and your sense of agency is tremendously increased. Not only do you have the power to reverse time, but you know exactly what will happen in the future as well. As the player you actually have MORE power than Tim since at this point, you have full control of time. Yes, you can’t fast forward time but since you know exactly what will happen (especially in World 4 when your movements dictate the how time flows), it is an implied prescience that Blow wants you to experience as you replay the game.

This new sense of power leads to the final star in the game which, not coincidentally, is found back in the last level in the game, World 1-1. You play through the exact same scene again, with you trying to get to the princess by navigating the obstacle course, but this time there is an important difference. You’ll notice that two of the switches are immune to the time reversal mechanic (this is the “glowing green” game mechanic introduced in World 3) and that these switches block off some of the obstacles that slow down your progress. This gives you the clue that you should be able to exploit the timing of the level by flipping the switches and using your time reversal powers. If done correctly, you literally break the timing of the level and are able to get to a location in the world well before you should be able to. Again this whole sequence requires you to know exactly what happens in the world beforehand, relying on your ability to “see into the future” in order to figure out that you have to break the timing of the level in the first place. When you do this, you are able to not only reach the princess but get into her bedroom as well, as this is where you’ll find the final star in the game.

The game’s original ending is both a comment on the futility of agency, your power to reverse time ultimately does not help you get to the princess, and hints at the revisionist nature of memory, as I suggested above with an analysis of what happens in the original ending. With this ending however, agency is completely restored to the player and the “optimal” reality is the one that prevails. I’m not sure what Blow is trying to suggest here. Perhaps this is meant to be inspirational – if you try hard enough, you will be able to reach the princess after all. But it may also hint at a darker message, that when the trauma of the “truth” is impossible to accept, you’ll keep trying to undo the truth in your own imagination until you are unable to see reality at all. For me, the message isn’t what’s remarkable about the game – lots of the games have tried to impart a message to the player. No, what’s remarkable is that all of this is done THROUGH gameplay without any dialogue or without relying on a cutscene. Not only is it left up to the player to find her own interpretation of the ending (nuclear bomb allegory or not), the player also CREATES this ending. By integrating both endings so tightly into the gameplay, the player almost becomes Blow’s co-writer and is fully involved in how the ending will unfold.

Ultimately, this is why I think the game is one of the more important texts of this generation of games. Blow pushes Ken Levine’s “story through gameplay” design choice in Bioshock further, not only allowing the player to create the ending but also a chance to interpret the ending as well. If I were to ever teach a course about ludology and narratology, this game would be at the top of my syllabus. Thankfully, a PC version of the game has been promised by Blow, but even if this wasn’t the case, I would make my students purchase an Xbox 360 in order to experience this moment in gaming history themselves. Braid gives me hope as both an enthusiast and an academic that games are close to a breakthrough that will finally show that games have their own mechanical and rhetorical storytelling devices.

Indiana Jones and the Forgotten Post

2008-08-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

Ah! So I completely forgot to post about this in my grab bag post and I'm busy working on actual writing, so I'm just going to repost my own post from NeoGAF. And hey, this is just a stream of consciousness blog for my own purposes anyway, so why not?

Here's my first post:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=331015

I'm going through a mini LucasArts adventure game marathon and I'm on Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis. I really haven't gotten too far into it yet, but I think the opening has got to be one of the best designed game openings that I've ever seen.

There's no menu screen.
There's no introductory cutscene.
There's no tutorial.

The screen just starts on the room and suddenly Indiana Jones crashes through a wall as the Indiana Jones theme plays in glorious midi. Indy tells you that he's looking for a statue and without any other instruction, the cursor pops up and you have control of the game.

You slowly move the cursor around and explore the various objects in the game. You click a statue and you fall through a trap door! As the screen transitions to the next scene, credits are displayed on the screen just like in an Indy movie. This continues through various screens, introducing you to the basic game controls and the plot of the game (those evil Nazis are at it again!), playing out like the beginning of any of the Indiana Jones movies.
What's doubly genius is that these screens are all "safe" screens in that you can't die and you can take as much time as you want, so the only way you might get stuck is if you don't know how to use a mouse or you can't read English.

I don't know if you're supposed to read the manual first or if games back then didn't feel a need to hold your hand, but imagine if a shooter like Halo 3 dropped you right in the middle of a firefight the moment you started the game. You don't even see a menu to start the game or a cutscene to set up the context. It'd be such a great way to put you in the moment right at the start without giving you a moment to breathe.

I wonder, have there been any other games that just started with gameplay and no other introduction? Or is Fate of Atlantis unique in this regard?

Edit for clarification: I'm trying to think of, to borrow N'Gai Croal's term, the "game telling" version of this concept. Where you immediately start with gameplay and it is only later that the game mechanics/controls are introduced to you.

Heavenly Sword and it seems like the X-men 2 game would be other examples.

And this lead to a discussion of what the term actually meant... and, sure, if you're talking about convention "literary" stories, I definitely agree. But at some point, rightwhen the thread died, I came up with this:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=12377731&postcount=118

That's fine, but I guess I'm in the camp that believes gameplay/the ludic experience is itself a narrative mode, that learning a game and how to play a game is as much the narrative experience as the traditional elements such as the names of the characters or the plot.

Maybe I'm up my own ass (probably am), but I think most games, when teaching gameplay and controls, follow some form of Freytag's triangle - from the slow build/introduction (tutorial, first few levels) to the climax (the first time where you have learned enough about the rules of the game to put all the pieces together to defeat a boss or pass a level) to the denoument (where you are familiar with the rules so that you don't need to think about what you are doing).

I dunno. Maybe Braid has been fucking with my brain and making me over think things that I shouldn't think about.

I still believe this and I think it's a pretty interesting way to introduce someone to a game, given that most games begin with a start menu then slowly ramp you up with the gameplay and the controls.

Of course, there are the Castlevania and Metroid games , but that's not quite the same as simply throwing you in and then going back to develop your personal "ludic" narrative. The most important aspect would be the "cold open" that takes you into a game experience without any set up, menu screen or otherwise.

Assassin's Creed was close, but I think it fell into the Metroid camp more than say the Heavenly Sword camp.

Anyway, back to the grind.

A Grab Bag of Thoughts

2008-08-16T05:07:00.000-07:00

I thought I’d jot down some thoughts on the various games I finished recently. I may revisit them eventually. I’m too tired to write up something about Braid at the moment.

Rocketmen: Axis of Evil
Part ARPG, part dual-stick shooter, this game is based on an IP created by WizKids. The only thing that I want to say about it is that the universe is one of the freshest takes on science fiction that I’ve seen in a while. It’s just a riff on 50s SF serials, but it doesn’t try to be either scientifically consistent or take itself too seriously. Flash Gordon, eat your heart out.

The only really noteworthy aspect of the game that I want to write down is the fact that it follows the recent trend of breaking the fourth wall. One of the mechanics in the game is to tap on X repeatedly in order to activate various consoles in the game – and that’s exactly what the characters in the game tell you to do. Then, the character you play will get this funny look on her face and mock the simplicity of this game mechanic.

There’s a moment at the end of the game where your “handler”, Zach, pokes fun at you for being afraid of the overwhelming odds against you. Your character replies, “Well, you’re just a NPC character! It’s not like you’re in any danger!” While not as clever as the first Psychomantis battle in MGS, but it’s a nice way to bring levity into the game and is perfectly consistent with the setting and the universe.

Star Control 2/The Ur-Quan Masters
I’d refer to SquadCast #6 for some real discussion of the game... suffice it to say, if I were to write some kind of “top 10 games list” (yuck), this game would definitely make that list. I can’t believe I missed it when it came out in the 90s (misspent youth indeed) and I’m even more surprised that no one else has tried to make a game that tried to copy the game since (Yes, there was Epic Game’s Solar Winds, and I haven’t played it since it came out... and while it was another space-shooter adventure game, it definitely was not as open or in depth as Star Control 2).

What’s so remarkable about this game is how the many pieces come together. The first game was a deeper take on the original Space War, featuring two ships going head to head in combat. Branching off from that, Star Control 2 takes that combat (calling it Melee) and builds an entire space exploration and management game on top of it. It’s not quite the 4X of Master of Orion, but the ability to influence empires and at the very least explore planets to exploit their resources gives it that 4X feel. On top of the two seemingly disparate game mechanics is what is essentially an adventure game or RPG.

If there was ever a case to be made for the idea that games are both simultaneously ludic and narrative experiences, this game is it. First and foremost, there IS a story. I won’t go into detail, but you basically have to save the galaxy from the evil aliens with the help of all the good aliens. How you do that is based on how well you explore the galaxy and manage your relationships with the alien races throughout the galaxy. How well you do this effects how the game unfolds around you – you can see the galaxy map slowly change as time passes. And of course, this effects how the plot unfolds as well – your successes in the game are directly reflected by how the characters in the game react to you, as are your failures. It’s the perfect fusion of gameplay and story, as your ludic experience influences your narrative experience and vice versa. A small example of this is the fact that when you start the game, you have a limited number of replacement crew because there are only so many human beings that can staff your ship. If you start losing crew members, it slowly becomes more expensive to replace them. However, if you complete a specific quest, you’ll be able to constantly replenish your crew for free (or close enough). There’s a story reason for the economy in the game and the game mechanic effects how the story is played out.

As for the universe and the story itself – in some ways, it shares a lot with Rocketmen in that it’s pulpy science fiction. That said the original dev team managed to create a world with so much personality that if you enjoy science fiction on any level, you’ll love all the characters in this game. The aliens range from the typical sexy blue skinned alien women to the atypical gaseous blobs that somehow managed to evolve on a gas giant. Even if you ignore the gameplay innovation, the story and universe itself is a gem that should be canonized alongside Star Trek and Star Wars.

While no game has tried to use this formula, Mass Effect did come awfully close. Though there is no ship combat, you are thrown into a galaxy that you can explore at your whim. That said there was simply no reason to go around exploring the universe unless you were off collecting items for quests or purposely trying to gain XP. The fact that travelling from system to system required a load screen combined with the dubious Mako planet sequences, I’m not surprised that most people simply ignored the exploration aspect of the game and stuck to the main story. Even then, your exploration didn’t have any effect on the main campaign (although, to be fair, a completely separate side campaign about Cerberus awaits those who choose to go off the beaten path), so the game didn’t encourage you to explore the large galaxy map anyway. And while I do like the Mass Effect universe and it is certainly more expansive than the Star Control universe, it just pales in comparison. Star Control feels alive and compels you to find out more about the different aliens that populate the galaxy. Mass Effect? Not so much (although, those Elephant-looking aliens were pretty cool).

One final point to make is the fact that the game is a product of its time. It’s HARD. Really HARD. Like all old school adventure games, you’ll want to have a pen and paper with you in order to take notes because there is no quest log or even any in game reminders of where you need to go. Also, the game world is constantly in action, almost like a Rogue-like – it’s not quite a full blown simulation, but as time passes scripted events will unfold. You can change what events unfold, but the races will do their own thing as you go about your own adventure, meaning that if you take too long to initiate the end game, the evil aliens will win and you will lose the game.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
Now this one will be really short since most people should know what this game is all about. To be crass, you can call it Tomb Raider with a man... but I would call it Sahara: The Game (Yep, as in the 2005 Matthew McConaughey action film). In short, you play Nathan Drake, descendant of Sir Francis Drake, in search of the older Drake’s missing treasure. And as we’ve learned from Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, every time someone searches for some ancient, missing treasure, bad things happen.

The first thing I want to point out is that the game was directed by Amy Hennig – and as one of the few women in a position of power on the creative side of game production I just think it’s worth pointing out. At the very least, I think it’s a very big reason as to why Elena Fisher comes off as a normal character and not some kind of archetype – she’s neither a damsel in distress nor a scantily clad and heavily armed bad grrrrl.

The second thing I want to point out is that this is a game that I would rather watch than play. That’s not to say that there’s anything bad about the gameplay... it’s just that it’s not interesting in any way. The platforming can get tricky because sometimes that crack in the wall turns out to be a texture that you can’t hold on to, leading to a potentially nasty fall. The shooting can be frustrating as well, but that’s because the game is trying to encourage you to use melee attacks – the brutal combo specifically. No, the gameplay is perfectly serviceable but it’s the cutscenes that shine. Fully mo-capped and featuring great voice acting, these cutscenes play out like scenes from a big budget Hollywood film. Greg Edmonson’s brassy score (including the beautiful main theme) only add to how well produced these cutscenes are.

I’m just not sure if this is a good thing though. On one of the post GDC 2008 1up Yours podcasts, Hennig defended the use of cutscenes to tell a story, pointing to how the player can break how the story is delivered in Half Life 2. To that point, I definitely agree with her and I can see why a game director would want to wrest control from the player at certain points in the game in order to tell the story that holds the game together. But if this is a game where I’m perfectly happy watching through the cutscenes in lieu of actually replaying the game, isn’t that a problem? Uncharted isn’t as incongruous as Grand Theft Auto 4 or Metal Gear Solid 4 when it comes to using cutscenes to tell a story, but I can’t help but wonder if there was a better way to integrate the storytelling into the gameplay itself rather than rely on conventions set by filmmakers.

In keeping with the “movie” presentation, one final observation is that through some kind of technology trick, the game NEVER needs to load after the initial load. That means the game seamlessly moves from one level to another, creating the effect that you are playing one large, epic level rather than a series of smaller levels. The only way you know that you’re in a new “chapter” is when the game overtly tells you. It’s a neat trick that helps you forget that you aren’t playing a game, if only momentarily.

Well, that's all for now. I'm avoiding the Braid post because... well, my brain can't take it!

Metal Gear Solid 4: The Breast Game Ever

2008-07-10T09:43:00.000-07:00

Wow, I thought I’d try a tortured pun and I realized that I probably should never do that again. Anyway, as I mentioned in the first part of my MGS4 review, there was more I wanted to talk about. Unfortunately, I was so self-indulgent when it came to the discussion of cutscenes it just wasn’t going to happen.

So, what more could I possibly have to write about? Well, the only other obvious issue in the game that hasn’t been done to death by other writers in their reviews – the representation of women. In a previous episode of the Player One Podcast, I believe it was Greg Sewart who made the flip comment that Kojima is a pervert. I don’t think he’s that far off base though, based on what I’ve seen in the game.

Now, I don’t want this to come off as some kind of condemnation... but because the game is so heavily invested in cutscenes, it’s almost unavoidable to draw on elements of film analysis to analyse the game’s representation of women. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that Naomi Hunter is needlessly fetishized and sexualized in the game. Let’s forget the fact that she doesn’t wear a bra or button up her shirt, because that’s just too easy. Just pay attention to the way she’s shot in the game. The slow lingering shots of her legs and her chest bordered on creepy voyeurism and are a textbook example of the concept of the “male gaze” if there ever was one. That’s not to say that the male gaze doesn’t exist in other games. Indeed, because games are interactive and many games feature both control of the character and the camera, many times the player is entirely complicit in objectifying the female body: posing Lara Croft being the most famous example.

The difference is that since these are cutscenes, this is what Kojima wants you to see. For whatever reason, he wants Naomi to be sexualized. I honestly don’t know if there’s a deeper reason behind this or if he just wants to fetishize this imaginary woman. An easy explanation is that by eroticizing Naomi’s anatomy, the player will understand Otacon’s attraction for her. What’s interesting is that there’s an easter egg in the game where the player is given the chance to stare at Naomi’s legs. When Snake drops his cigarette during the cutscene when he first meets her in her lab, the player can press L1 to enter first person mode to look at Naomi from Snake’s perspective. Is Kojima saying that Snake is attracted to her as well? Or should this be categorized with the rest of the “male gaze” shots in the game?

And, honestly, it’s not just Naomi. The Beauty and the Beast Corp is similarly sexualized. When you defeat their “beast” form and first see their “beauty” form, they crawl at Snake suggestively and the camera does its best to show as much as possible. Another easter egg here is that if you have the camera and you do not kill the “beauty” in a few minutes, the game will cut to a scene where you can use the camera on the “beauty” and have her pose like a model. Some of the shots of Laughing Beauty posted on line were obtained this way. Whereas Naomi’s objectification may be explained in terms of the story, these scenes are simply fanservice. What’s extremely disturbing is that after you make the “beauty” pose for you and finish her off, Drebin comes on the Codec and proceeds to tell you her terrible backstory. “So, this girl went around killing children because she couldn’t stand their crying? And then I just made her pose for me while I took pictures of her? Good times!”.

Another easter egg that just defies explanation is the fact that during a Codec
conversation with Rosemary, if you shake your Sixaxis, you can move her breasts around. I suppose this is just Kojima’s unexplainable “wackiness”.

What’s odd is that not all the women are sexualized. Yes, EVA was extremely sexual in MGS3 and even in her current incarnation as “Big Mama” she doesn’t mind wearing an extremely low cut shirt that shows off her bosom, there are no awkward shots that linger on her chest or any other part of her anatomy. Meryl is similarly free of the male gaze of Kojima’s camera. Indeed, while it’s almost impossible to ignore Naomi’s objectification by the directing, the scenes featuring Meryl are almost free of any overt examples of the male gaze (And at the very least, by not overtly sexualizing Meryl, her aggressive no-nonsense attitude isn’t compromised, so it’s not quite a joke that she accessorizes her wedding dress with a holster and a gun). Mei Ling makes an appearance in the final act of the game and during the briefing and Akiba is clearly enthralled by her. But his male gaze and his attempt to grope Mei Ling are chastised by Meryl, indicating to the player not only that sexualizing women is problematic, but that Kojima is aware of that very fact himself. Indeed, the representations of these three women in the game seem to run counter to how the BB Corps and Naomi are represented.

I don’t believe this contradiction is ever resolved. I suppose one could suggest that the “weaker” women are sexualized while the “stronger” women are able to avoid the male gaze, but all of the women have a certain sense of agency in the film. Naomi is the one that brings about the destruction of The Patriots, playing both Liquid Snake/Ocelot and Vamp in order to achieve this goal. The fact that the BB Corps characters are bosses in the game elevates them above all of the other soldiers in the game. So, if there is a reason why Kojima wants the player to sexualize Naomi but not Meryl, I’m not sure what it is.
It’s worth pointing out the fact that for some unknown reason, Liquid’s top soldiers are women. Not just the BB Corps, but the FROG soldiers as well. While the BB Corps’ inception is explained by Drebin as an exploitation of their extreme trauma and this explanation might be applied to the FROGs, it does seem odd that men wouldn’t make it into Liquid’s personal army. Is he suggesting that women suffer more from war trauma and thus more exploitable? Or does Liquid simply get off on having a harem of women who are heavily armed? If there’s an answer, it’s not provided in this game.

Again, I’m not trying to condemn the game. In fact, I think Meryl may be one of the strongest and most developed female characters in games today. I admire the fact that the game is deep enough to allow for the opportunity of analysis, which is more than can be said for a lot of narrative based games. The representation of women is just an issue I wanted to address, since it’s an issue that has been largely ignored in other reviews and analysis.

Battlefield: Bad Company

2008-07-07T20:54:00.000-07:00

I’m going to put off further MGS4 ramblings for a while to talk about Battlefield: Bad Company. Bad Company is DICE’s first game with a true single player story-based campaign, relating the events of the player controlled Preston Marlowe and the other members of the eponymous Bad Company. Based on films such as Kelly’s Heroes and Three Kings, the misfits that make up Bad Company decide to take a side trip away from the war in search of gold. There really isn’t much to say about the story as presented in the game itself. It’s a story that’s relatively safe, taking place in fictional locales and featuring completely generic characters. Like the soldiers in Kelly’s Heroes or Three Kings, Bad Company is disenfranchised by the US Army, but any true anti-war or even anti-bureaucracy commentary is limited to glib one-liners. Oddly, character development itself is limited to promotion videos released before the game in the form of video diaries in which the characters explain their motivations. In the game itself, the characters are limited to their archetypes. Sweetwater is the overeducated big city college boy, Haggard is the simpleton from the south and Redford is the gruff veteran Sergeant who is days away from home. Marlowe, standing in for the player, remains as blank and generic as possible – like many other player characters in FPS games – in order to avoid imposing a character onto the player. With fictional settings and standard war film characters, needless to say that plot itself is fairly safe as well. Our heroes eventually disappear from the US Army’s radar and manage to make off with the gold.

That’s not to say that the game doesn’t offer the comedy of those films. Haggard’s obsession with violence and demolitions certainly offers a few laughs, as does the introduction of Serdar, the eccentric dictator of Serdaristan. Indeed, the absurdity of flying a gold plated helicopter was enough to get me to laugh out loud, a response that not many games can illicit from me. But, the comedy is far from biting. As David Ellis said on a segment for the 1up Show, it’s the type of comedy found in Dumb and Dumber. I don’t want to hold that against the game though. The fact that DICE chose to make a war comedy game in itself is worth praising. In a genre where most developers are trying to emphasize how realistically they can depict the worst aspects of war (the upcoming Brothers in Arms and Call of Duty games promise to be extremely “gritty” in their “dark” depiction of war), it is refreshing to see someone try something different. At the very least, it broadens the genre and perhaps opens the door for other developers to try to provide alternative depictions of war. It’s also worth noting that the video game parodies that were released a week before the game came out were amusing and a good indicator of the humour the developers deployed in the game itself.

I guess I should say something about how the story is actually told in the game. Perhaps coming off of the overly verbose cutscenes in MGS4, I didn’t mind that most of the story here is told through cutscenes either. That said, the final boss battle where you have to shoot down a helicopter with a rocket launcher (or, if you’re a bit crazy, with a laser designator) made me pine for a boss battle with an unnaturally attractive mercenary supermodel in a skin tight animal costume. I do appreciate that they managed to incorporate comedy into their level design and gameplay. I did mention the gold plated helicopter, but there is also a level which takes place on a golf course... and of course, on a golf course, there are golf carts. I will say that being chased by a Russian tank while driving a golf cart through a sand trap is a moment that I would have never imagined playing in a game. It was a ludic moment that made me appreciate how level design and open ended gameplay could create an interesting, but strictly optional, narrative.

One bit of miscellany that I’d like to bring up is the fact that the characters are supported by a faceless woman somewhere away from the fighting. I don’t know if there’s something I want to say about this specifically... certainly there are games that feature female soldiers, but I think it’s an interesting trope that’s used in games. What I like in particular is that in the game the characters sexualize and fetishize her voice. Her call sign, “Mike One Juliet”, becomes “Miss July” among the men in Bad Company, referring of course to the depiction of women in a certain adult magazine. I really don’t want to read into this too much, but needless to say, I found it interesting that it was actually addressed in the game. In Gears of War for example, it’s taken for granted that an attractive woman is giving support to the main characters in the game. I’m sure the developers at Epic Games wanted the player to know that she was attractive, since they took the time to include her in one of the opening cutscenes, but to what end? The female support voice was also found in both Rainbow Six: Vegas games, a few of the Splinter Cell games, and probably in several other games that I am forgetting.

I also feel that I should briefly touch on the gameplay. I want to leave most of that stuff to the other reviews you find out there, because having me tell you about a game’s “tight controls” is probably meaningless in a sea of reviews that write about how a game controls. I just want to point out that this game is perhaps as close as DICE will get to putting a game like Battlefield 2 onto a console. I am frustrated sometimes by the lack of buttons (weapon switching and position switching in a vehicle can be aggravating), but it’s just as fun as BF2. The only major limitation is the lack of team communication (according to DICE, this is due to latency issues) and a console player base that approaches online shooters mostly as team deathmatch who worry only about their scores. But if you’re looking for a new BF2 experience, BF:BC is definitely worth playing... at least until BF3 is released. God, I feel like I just stole that from one of an infinite number of reviews out there. At least I didn’t call the Gold Rush mode compelling.

Metal Gear Solid 4 (Part 1)

2008-06-18T13:01:00.000-07:00

As always, spoilers.

I don’t want to address the rhetoric surrounding the game like I did with Grand Theft Auto 4. I don’t think the game “deserves an 11” as IGN puts it and I’ll leave it at that. Personally, I’m more interested in talking about the game itself and some of the issues that it raises.

First of all, I should point out that I am completely un-invested in the series. I had a PS1 and I did play through some of the first game when it first came out. However, because I skipped the last generation of consoles, I never had a chance to play MGS2 or MGS3. I recently picked up the Essentials collection, but of course I got sidetracked by work and other games so I never got the chance to go through the series before I started MGS4. I don’t know if this is good or bad, to be honest. I don’t have the history with the game and I can approach it with a fresh perspective. Yet, I am sure that I am missing some aspects of the game that veterans of the series would find old hat. But, I just wanted to put it out there that I come to the game from the outsider’s perspective.

Of course, I should probably start with the 800 pound gorilla in the room – the number and length of the cutscenes. I have no idea how long the cutscenes are, but the estimates of 6-8 hours probably aren’t far off. I realize that I shouldn’t ignore the cultural context of the game. I don’t claim to be an expert on Japanese games, but many of them rely on cutscenes to introduce plot and for exposition. Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey are recent examples of games that use cutscenes to tell their stories, but there are countless other examples. MGS4 isn’t any exception and it probably shouldn’t be. As a man who is a major voice in the Japanese development community and who has been working for over two decades, Kojima has informed Japanese game design as much as he has been influenced by it.

As a “western” gamer however, the length and number of these cutscenes do standout. Again I’ll point to Ken Levine and his insistence on not forcing story on a player but on using the game world to tell a story. The question is whether or not the cutscenes are a crutch that developers use when they cannot figure out a different way to tell a story in a game. I’m not saying that developers should ignore filmic storytelling techniques developed over the last century, but perhaps there should be an attempt to push the game medium forward as well. I don’t want to discount Kojima’s attempts to try something different with some of his cutscenes. The most prominent example is the number of times the psyche meter makes an appearance during the cutscenes. The psyche bar usually depletes by one segment when Snake is told that he can’t smoke or that he is old. In one case, it severely depletes when the he discovers that he only has six months to live (and then again when he discovers that he has to kill himself in three months or the mutated FOXDIE virus that he carries will infect the entire world) and near the end of the game when the nanomachines in his body fail. The integration of the game HUD into the cutscenes is very clever and helps teach the player the game mechanics while also reinforcing the characterization of Snake.

Intriguingly, I found that much more interesting than the other attempt to introduce a game mechanic into the cutscenes – the use of a mechanic similar to QTEs. During a cutscene, either the L1 button or the X button will appear. The L1 button allows the player to watch a scene from Snake’s perspective while the X button will trigger a quick image from the previous games. While the former lets you see a scene from another perspective and the latter lets you contextualize the current dialog with a previous game, their importance isn’t emphasized enough to make them anything more than curiosities (although you get extra Drebin points for viewing the flashbacks, so there is a small gameplay incentive for viewing them). It’s possible that for someone nostalgic for the previous games the flashbacks would have much more meaning... but unfortunately, I’m not that person. But, at the very least, they do break some of the monotony of the cutscenes. Of course, I should mention that during the mission briefings, you are given the chance to control the Mark II and you can watch the scene unfold from any angle you wish and also find some extras strewn about the plane. But still, this doesn’t change the fact that you’re sitting for 20 minutes waiting for plot to be delivered to you.

I should be fair. The cutscenes aren’t all plot exposition... although there is a fair amount of it. I imagine part of it is to make the story accessible for people who may be playing the game for the first time. So, not only do characters repeat information for you, they also do it as slowly as possible. I think I just turned off my brain when the fourth person explained the role of nanomachines/SOP in the game’s soldiers/PMC recruits. It’s the equivalent of Data trying to explain some made up scientific fact in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. You can tell when exposition is about to begin when there is a cut to an animatic of the Patriots or of the PMCs or the AIs or something else. But, there is also a lot of characterization in these cutscenes... indeed, most if not all of the character development is found in the cutscenes – from Snake’s reaction to the fact that he was designed with a degenerative disease, to Naomi’s personal conflict between her wish to live and her desire to stop the Patriots and the various other characters. Meryl, Johnny, Drebin, Otacon, Sunny, Big Mama, Ocelot/Liquid... all of their growth and development comes from how they are depicted in the cutscenes. As with GTA4, this aspect of the cutscenes certainly helps make the characters sympathetic and explain their motivations. My only criticism would be that, unlike the GTA4 cutscenes, the MGS4 cutscenes could use some editing to make them faster paced.

That said, not everything is overly explained in the cutscenes. A moment that pops up for me is during Act 1, when Snake first meets Meryl. He asks her about the Patriots, but she only hears “La li lu le” (or something similar). When she asks him why he’s speaking nonsense, he just drops it and the exposition moves on. Later on, Snake meets up again with Drebin and they begin to talk about the Patriots. Drebin first says “La li lu le”, Snake looks at him suspiciously. Drebin then says the world “Patriots” and reassures Snake that he’s free of the nanomachines that control the typical soldier. It’s a nice little moment where a small plot element is introduced and is explained later on.

Could they have used alternatives to cutscenes to tell their story? Probably. But I think Kojima wanted to tell his story this way and I certainly respect his choice to do so. I just think the more interesting story elements come from the times when he does not rely on cutscenes.

First and foremost is the “dream sequence” that starts Act 4. I must admit I found it hilarious that when Act 4 starts, you are right back in MGS1, PS1 graphics and all. What better way to put the player into Snake’s head than to have him or her go through the second screen at Shadow Moses? The player feels nostalgic for MGS1 since it invokes his or her memory of the past game, just as Snake is dreaming of the first time he was sent to Shadow Moses.

The end of Act 5, from the moment that Snake tries to get to GW to the point when Snake fights Liquid Ocelot, also stands out. Going through the microwave corridor by tapping the triangle button does, as some posters have suggested, put you in the physical state of Snake. The slowly depleting health and psyche bars also reinforce the player/Snake relationship. The fact that the player needs to pound on the triangle button faster as Snake struggles against death to reach the end of the corridor only adds to this relationship. During Snake’s crawl, the top half of the screen shows a montage of the entire cast of characters as they fight their individual battles. Meryl and Johnny fighting the FROGS, Mei Ling tries to maintain her composure as captain of the Missouri and Raiden is trying to survive a fight without any arms. It’s a nice way to bring the entire storyline to a head and connect it with the player’s interactions with Snake.

The fight between Snake and Liquid turns into a fighting game, complete with health bars for both characters. The controls for this section are very simple – there’s only block and attack – but it’s definitely a moment that stands out, reminding the player that this is the climax of the story. Not only that, but during each round of the fight, music from the past games is played in the background (and there is a “music video” style title that tells you the name of the track and the composer, in case you aren’t sure where the music is from), emphasizing that this is the climax of the entire series. Despite being largely contained and a bit shallow, the different experience makes the scene stand out from the rest of the game and gives it the importance that it deserves.

And of course, there are the many times when the game breaks the fourth wall. The ones that come to mind are when Otacon telling you to switch discs during the Shadow Moses mission in Act 4... before remembering that the game is being played on a PS3 so they don’t have to switch discs and the (Psycho) Mantis fight, which harkens back to the original MGS game where Psycho Mantis could do things like “read your mind” by looking at your memory card and reading your control inputs. I’m sure there are several other examples, but I can’t think of them at the moment.

Personally, I just find these moments far more interesting than the fairly non-interactive cutscenes that make up the majority of the story telling in the game. As a game, the player should be involved for the majority of his or her time with it, but when the designer demands that the player sit for 10 to 15 minutes while being fed plot, it takes the player straight out of the game. The lack of a theatre mode or even a way to fast forward through these cutscenes means that you have to sit through them if you want to follow the entire story. For a game that would take 15-20 hours to complete, nearly half that time is spent watching the cutscenes and I’m not sure if that’s a complete game experience or an HBO miniseries with some interactivity thrown in. For me, when I play a game, I want to play a game. That means that I am looking for an interactive experience. Even Mass Effect, which is essentially a 20 hour long cutscene, felt engaging because I was directing Shepard’s actions even when I wasn’t going through a level blasting bad guys. There’s no such interactivity with Snake here... and when the dialog is clunky and awkward, I can only sit in frustration hoping for the next game sequence to start up.

There’s one last thing I wanted to point out which I thought was clever and wish was done more in this game. One of the “secrets” that you can find is a camera that you can use in game to take screenshots with. Now, you can pick up the camera any time using the Mark II during the first four mission briefings. However, if you wait until the last briefing to pick up the camera, you get a “bonus” picture of Sunny and Naomi. This works as a story telling mechanic because Act 3 is when the characters get close to each other (not just to write the virus that takes down JD and the Patriots) and bond, so it’s almost perfectly natural that the characters would take a picture together. Yes, there’s a bit of a meta-game there where you probably have to have outside assistance to know that there’s a special picture only if you wait until Act 4, but it’s a nice moment that combines gameplay and story progression.

I’ve already went way too long here, so I’m going to save the rest of my thoughts for another post. I do have a couple of other points that I really want to write about, so bear with me as I complete my ramblings.

Grand Theft Auto IV

2008-05-11T02:43:00.000-07:00

As always, this post will contain spoilers.

I've always had a fairly ambivalent relationship to the Grand Theft Auto series. I played the first two top down GTAs back on my old 486 machine, but I never finished them. I never owned a PS2, so I only played GTA3 and Vice City years later when they arrived on PC... and by that time, they were so dated they really weren't worth playing.

I think GTA: San Andreas changed that for me. It was the first GTA game where your character was more than just a cipher for the player. CJ was his own entity and didn't apologize for it. The fact that many people complained that they were "forced" to play a black character only legitimized the Hausers' decision to appropriate West Coast "urbanity" in their game (although, from various reports within the gaming press, the Hausers are offended by accusations of appropriation). San Andreas went beyond the simple parody and satire of American life - although it still did so amusingly - to address issues of race and masculinity. The fact that a simple Google Scholar search will yield several articles on race and San Andreas indicates that the game certainly touched a nerve.

There are a lot of things that I found interesting with San Andreas that I'm sure other people have written about. My favourite scene has to be when CJ and his friends crash through the "R" of the giant SPRUNK sign overlooking the highway. Yeah, it's crude toilet humour, but it also attacks American commercialism by showing how crass it can be. As a parody of the LA Riots, the ending of San Andreas was both breathtaking in that "Ken Levine inspired let the world tell the story" kind of way (entire city blocks were on fire and the previously mindless pedestrians suddenly became a vicious mob) and also heartbreaking. CJ gets his revenge... but he lost so much in the process. The fact that the riots were caused because an African American police officer was acquitted of his crimes raised issues of race that went beyond the simple black vs white dichotomy - something that would come up in real life when African American NYPD officers were acquitted of shooting an unarmed African American civilian.

But this post is about Grand Theft Auto IV. I honestly don't think I need to talk about the gameplay too much, but I'll go counter to the glowing reviews by suggesting that the shooting controls are average at best and the lack of checkpoints during those long arduous missions are still annoying, even with the quick retry button (mainly because you lose your body armor if you die). My biggest gameplay problem with the game is the fact that many of the missions are heavily scripted. Most of the storyline car chases are just that - chases. You can unload all your ammo into the enemy vehicle, but they won't die. Why? Because the chase is leading you to the next cutscene. One of the possible final missions, Out of Commission, is probably the most guilty of all of these missions. When you first catch up to Pegorino, you can't shoot him - he is invincible. When he's on his speedboat, you can't shoot him. When you are chasing him in an attack helicopter, you can't shoot him. It's only when your chopper is shot down and you land that you are able to chase Pegorino down and kill him. Clearly, this was so the player could experience the drama of the scripted chase - from foot, to bike, to helicopter, but for a game in a genre that is defined by its openness, this level was anything but.

But, let's go to the story. We've all read the rhetoric and in fact, N'Gai Croal justifies the use of such rhetoric by explaining why he needed to compare the game's story to The Sopranos. As engaging as I found some of the story to be, I don't think it comes close to the best of television or film. That mantle still goes to Bioshock. Why? Ultimately, the game's story is told through cutscenes and through conversations - this game's version of the "radio logs" found in Bioshock. Some of the environmental storytelling found in San Andreas - such as the SPRUNK sign and the city wide riots in which the entire city descends into chaos - is nowhere to be found in GTA IV. If anything, this game feels slightly regressive.

What is added however are branching story paths. You'll have a couple of opportunities to kill or release characters and at three points in the game, you'll have to choose to kill one of two people - the last choice deciding which ending you receive. While this is certainly an interesting mechanic, forcing players to make tough choices, it feels very much like a shallow version of the system perfected (perhaps too much) by BioWare. In the last few 1up.com podcasts, Shawn Elliot has expressed my concerns with the choices that the game offers. The problem is that throughout the rest of the game, you can essentially act like a sociopath. You might just shoot random people and police officers while driving around the city... not to mention the fact that you constantly commit the game's eponymous crime in order to get a car in the first place.
So, when you finally track down Darko - the man who betrayed Niko's military unit back in Europe - and you are offered the choice of executing him or letting him go, the consequences are fairly shallow. I chose to let Darko go and when I did and got into a car, Niko begins talking about the various emotions he is feeling at the moment. Anger, sadness, regret. But, the fact that I just stole a car a gun point in order to trigger the conversation makes it almost farcical. Niko believes that he might have changed after letting Darko go, but as a player, I just stole a car and killed countless innocent people before hand... not to mention the people I had to kill in order to progress the story in the first place.

This is a case where the choices you make are not only shallow, but the this is where the gameplay - dare I say the ludic experience - interferes or contradicts the narrative. The two simply do not mesh and the story becomes less than what it should be.

It was pointed out by John Davison on the May 9th episode of 1up Yours that this may be the first multi-million selling game that is a tragedy. Indeed, depending on your choices at the end of the game, either Roman or Kate will be killed. I don't know what happens in the ending where Roman dies - I haven't tried that ending yet, but in the ending where Kate dies and you kill Pegorino in revenge, that victory is hollow. After you shoot Pegorino, Roman enters the scene and tells Niko, "We won man, we won." Niko simply walks away as the camera pans to show the Statue of Happiness in all its satirical - and at this moment ironic - glory. Despite my problems with the narrative, I will readily admit that I was excited by the fact that the game truly is a tragedy in that traditional literary sense. Sure, Niko doesn't die, but at this point he might as well be dead. Of course, the fact that you go back on your merry way after the game ends ruins the weight of that tragic ending... but, I can forgive that since being able to play through the game after the story is over is a trademark of open world sandbox games.

Ultimately, I don't believe that Grand Theft Auto IV is the revolution that everyone in the game enthusiast industry and members of the mainstream press want it to be. Yes, the graphics and the representation of New York are fantastic... and the Euphoria physics engine looks like it will be the new "lens flare" and "bump mapping" of video game technologies. But from a storytelling perspective, it doesn't do anything new. If anything, it regressed and is lesser than San Andreas.

It was recently confirmed that Bioshock will be made into a movie and because of Ken Levine's method of storytelling through video games, I don't believe that there really is any interesting way for the film's producers to reproduce the game's story. At best, they'll have to focus on someone other than the player character. With Grand Theft Auto IV however, I believe that you could probably string all the cutscenes together and release that as a film. There's really nothing in the script or the game that can't just be lifted and made into a screenplay... and that's unfortunate.

I do have other issues with the story, but they are perhaps relatively minor when compared to what I've just discussed. For example, I believe the pacing is way off. This is a case of game designers believing that "longer is better" because the "hardcore" gamer wants 80 hours of gameplay. Unfortunately, the length leads to the gameplay being monotonous (it's a series of chases and shooting sequences) and the introduction of characters that ultimately lead nowhere. As amusing as people find Brucie and Bernie/Florian, they are characters that maybe could have been left out of the main story and made secondary.

The "revolutionary" choice system in this game is fairly shallow as well. What is lauded here is criticized in other games, namely the various Star Wars in which you make a choice the effects the outcome of the game. Most famously, Knights of the Old Republic featured a single choice where you could choose the "light side" or "dark side" ending, regardless of your decisions throughout the entire game. GTA IV does exactly the same thing and saving before you make this choice allows you to effectively watch and play through both endings.

There is also a problem with misogyny and perhaps homophobia. The women in the game are fairly shallow characters that stand only in the periphery. Michelle, Elizabeta and Kate are all ultimately background characters that do not matter. Yes, Michelle's betrayal ultimately leads Niko to find Darko and Kate's death leads Niko to seek revenge and feel the pathos of losing everything he has in America just as he has lost everything back in Europe, but they are mere plot devices and nothing more. The shallow dating game and the reference to "Hot Coffee" only show that they really haven't evolved that much from their previous efforts. The lap dance sequence at the strip club (complete with vibrating controller) only adds to the male-centered focus of the game. At least in this game, prostitution is not encouraged. As a gameplay mechanic, it's faster and cheaper to by food than it is to sleep with a prostitute. My only hope is that the Hausers will finally make a game that features a female lead. That will ultimately solve some of the problems with misogyny in the game. If anything, having a female character cruise around for male prostitutes will at least confound the Jack Thompsons of the world.

As for the homophobia, while Brucie may be an astute observation of closeted homosexuality, Bernie/Florian is essentially an effeminate male stereotype. The fact that he runs using the female running animation only compounds the use of that stereotype. Are there closeted men who need to assert their masculinity constantly? Hell, there are gay men who need to assert their masculinity constantly, so that's not an issue. Similarly, I do not deny that there are effeminate gay men either. But relying on these shallow stereotypes simply detracts from the more nuanced discussions of the immigrant experience and the themes of loyalty and identity. Although, I will admit, the fact that the game makes you execute a gay basher (Bernie/Florian's stalker) is clearly a standout mission. Given the many, many people on Xbox Live who casually toss the word "faggot" and "gay" around, I can only hope that mission made them realize their own homophobia.

I don't want to make it seem that I "hate" the game. At the very least the game forces people to think of these issues simply because of its popularity. Indeed, as shallow as the representation of some of the themes in the new Iron Man movie must be, the fact that it's out there and will be seen by millions of people is only a good thing. While I wish that more people would watch Standard Operating Procedure, I think that's simply a pipe dream. Indeed, a straight up game about the immigrant experience in America probably wouldn't sell well. But within the context of Grand Theft Auto? Suddenly millions of people are playing the immigrant experience for themselves and maybe, just maybe, they'll learn something from it.

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas (1 and 2)

2008-05-04T19:24:00.000-07:00

With the recent release of Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, I am reminded of a moment that I consider a highlight of 2006. Yes, a lot of people were busy curb stomping and chainsawing each other in Gears of War, but I believe that Rainbow Six: Vegas featured one of the more visceral moments that year.

On the level “Freemont Street”, you lead your team through a casino and into the eponymous street. When you open the door, the first thing you see is a family taking cover from terrorist fire. You notice that the child is separated from his anguished parents, telling their child to stay where he is as bullets fly past them. If you can clear out the terrorists fast enough, the child runs to his parents and the family is reunited. As you approach the family, the parents thank you for saving their child.

Yes, this is a scripted event. But one thing that people may not have noticed is that you can fail and the child can die. Unlike other sections of the game where a civilian death results in an instant game over screen, the game lets continue on if the child is shot by the terrorists. As you pass by the child’s parents, you see them hold each other in grief as they look at their child’s lifeless body. While you didn’t kill their child, you failed as a member of Rainbow and let the terrorist score a small victory.

In the end, this moment is inconsequential in a rather generic and uneventful story. Yet for me, it stands out as the most memorable moment in the game, if not in recent memory. This is a case where player performance directly affects the outcome of the narrative as opposed to the menu based system seen in many other games (for example, in Bioshock, press one button to harvest a little sister or another to save her) and where failure does not necessarily mean a game over screen. Yes, there have been many other games where mission failure does not necessarily mean game failure (Wing Commander instantly comes to mind), but not on this specific scale. This is yet another case where games, through game play, can provide an experience through interactivity that cannot be provided through the passivity of film or other media.

Unfortunately, this moment is not replicated anywhere else in the game or its sequel. Clearly, the designers were aware of this innovative method of storytelling, so it is disappointing that they did not choose to revisit it. One can only hope that they implement performance based narratives in a future game because it is a device that remains largely untapped.

As for the story itself? Well, there’s really not much to say. Both the game and its sequel are by the book techno-action Tom Clancy-like thrillers, except instead of killing incompetent Chinese people, you are killing incompetent Mexicans and/or Latin Americans. Perhaps the only interesting thing that appears in Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 is the fact that you can choose the gender of your character. As a male character, the story turns out to be a fairly standard Oedipal narrative, with the main antagonist feeling resentment towards you because you coddled and protected him from his failure. As a female character, the conflict suddenly becomes creepy as your character is caught in that grey area between mother figure and sexual object. Does Gabe resent “you” because you were too motherly, or because you rejected his sexual advances, or maybe even because he rejected your sexual advances? I have no doubt that this is completely unintentional and perhaps I am bordering on over-analysis... but play through the last chapter again with a female character and listen to that final piece of dialog between you and Gabe again. If you can tell me you don’t see anything weird in that relationship, you are probably less damaged than I am.

Mass Effect

2008-04-23T18:08:00.000-07:00

Again, this will be spoilerific... perhaps more so than my Call of Duty 4 post.

So, before I begin, I will gladly admit that I am a BioWare fan... and dare I say it? Yes, I dare. I am a BioWare fanboy. While I'm not hardcore enough to have MDK... I have the two Baldur's Gate games, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire and the recently released Mass Effect. In fact, I am probably one of 50 people in the world who would openly admit to being a David Gaider fan and while I hate displays of nationalistic pride when it comes to art or sports (USA! USA!), I am genuinely proud that BioWare is a Canadian company.

With all that preamble out of the way, I'll say that I have forgiven the game for many of its game breaking and technological problems. Some of the classes are just unbalanced for even normal difficulty while some of the classes are essentially invulnerable once you reach level 25. There's the classic loading problems (people ignored Portal's elevators, didn't they?), screen tearing and Unreal Engine 3 related texture pop-up problems. I also think Jennifer Hale is the best voice actress in the industry and I would pay her to read the back of cereal boxes, so having her be the voice of (female) Shepard didn't hurt either.

But, let's ignore all that reviewey stuff. At this point, you've either played the game or you've ignored it to play Halo 3 or Lost Odyssey. Mass Effect is the latest game in BioWare's opus of interactive ethics games. The twist this time is that the binary isn't good vs evil... it's good cop vs bad cop or Paragon vs Renegade. "Jack Bauer in space", as one of the designers put it. In many ways, the system has been greatly simplified from previous BioWare games. Being Paragon unlocks some Charm points and opens up more Charm slots to allocate points to, which in turn unlocks various dialogue options in the game and to make shopping at stores cheaper. But unlike KoTOR or JE, there are no specific gameplay advantages to being a full Paragon. The light side character in KoTOR has a special advantage when using light side powers and is penalized for using dark side powers. In ME, a rifle is a rifle... it doesn't matter if you're good or bad. The end result is that you are maxing out your Paragon slot in order to max out your Charm and to unlock new dialogue options and nothing more.

The huge problem here is that you are forced to choose a path one way or the other. There are no shades of gray here (in KoTOR, there was a specific item that you could only equip as a "gray" Jedi, and Jolee Bindo encouraged you to ride the line and not choose one or the other). If you want to unlock the "Charismatic" achievement where you "Use Charm or Intimidate to resolve an impossible situation", you must have 10-12 points in Charm or Intimidate. (This is when you convince Wrex to stand down on Virmire or convince Saren to commit suicide at the Citadel). The only way to do that in a single playthrough is to stick to a course and rack up as many Paragon or Renegade points as possible. The only advantage to this system is that unlike past BioWare games, there is no one single point where you choose your ending. In both KoTOR and JE, your previous actions had no bearing on the game ending... it came down to one specific choice you made near the end game. Here, your ending is based on your Paragon or Renegade values at the end of the game, even in spite of your decision to save or kill the Council.

Despite the simplified morality system, some of the complex emotions still exist. Just like many other gamers out there, I slowly grew more uncomfortable making Renegade choices. I felt horrible while my Shepard gleefully pushed the button that killed the Rachni queen. And Feros? That planet nearly broke me. Not only did I have to kill every colonist who was being controlled by the Thorian, an event which is horrible enough... but the aftermath of the battle with the Thorian? In case you haven't seen this part, after you kill the Thorian, the Asari is set free. She tells you everything she knows about the Conduit and in the end, you have to decide her fate. The Renegade choice here is to "make her pay for her crimes". But this isn't just a simple case of shooting her. She looks at you, agrees with your choice, turns around and kneels down so that you have a perfect shot at the back of her head. It was perhaps one of the most disturbing moments in the game for me.

The deeper question is why was this disturbing? For me, the answer is player agency. The mere fact that you personally choose to drive your character down this path makes you complicit in a way that you aren't when you read a novel or watch a film. Like the famous ending of Metal Gear Solid 3, you pulled the trigger... not the author of the text. This is something I've wanted to explore for the last three years, but I haven't found the right framework. Psychology? Sociology? Philosophy? Narratology? Or God forbid, Ludology? There are also a lot of questions, of course. Is this system of ethics culturally located? For the few Japanese players who have finished the game, did they have the same experience? Is it "wrong" if you do not feel guilty after making "bad" choices? Many players can, as with novels and film, separate themselves from the text. Even though they are personally making the decisions, to them it's "just a game". While I'm far, far away from contemplating my dissertation, I know that I will be answering these questions and more.

For a game of choices, there is also one moment in the game where player agency is constructed in a, as a Star Trek fan might put it, "Kobyashi Maru" scenario. On Virmire, near the end of the mission your team splits up and at some point, both members of your team are under attack. You have to make a choice to save either Kaidan or Ashley. Now, there is of course the larger meta-game at play here - if you are pursuing a romantic relationship with one of the characters, obviously you would want to save them. Also, if you need a strong Soldier or Sentinel in your party, that might inform your decision as well. But let's ignore that for a moment. Here you are presented with the illusion of choice, since either decision you make you are condemning one of your characters to death by nuclear explosion. This is a scene that replicates the "tough choice" that we see military officers make in various war films, only this time you are the one who is forced to make the choice and deal with the consequences. Indeed, if you choose to save your love interest, the character will wonder if you saved them because of that relationship, questioning your ability to make rational judgements (and perhaps reinforcing the idea that superior officers should not sleep with their subordinates). However you read it, narratologically, it is a moment of player agency that isn't agency at all. You choose who to save, but in an ideal game situation, you would be able to save both characters and still kick Saren's ass.

Peter Molyneux suggested that most game players simply could not accept negative outcomes as a natural property of video games. In Fable 2, when you are knocked out your character is permanently physically scarred. He pointed out that in testing, most players would simply turn of their consoles and restart the game rather than deal with the consequences of their failure. As a result, he was forced to remove that aspect from the game entirely. By building in failure right into the game narrative, Drew Karpyshyn (and his writing team) created a narrative where failure was inescapable and the player was complicit with that failure. While you can react to that failure with compassion or anger after the fact, this is an failure you must face whether you are a Paragon or Renegade player.

In a year where player agency was the new focus of major games - see Bioshock, Portal and The Darkness - this moment was as much a standout as the nuclear weapon going off in Call of Duty 4 and potentially says as much about the text itself and its underlying themes of leadership, command and ethics.

One final point. As someone who saw the anxiety over the series finale of The Sopranos, both in public discourse and within academia, the lack of narrative closure in Mass Effect did bother me. For all their successes, BioWare's writing teams seem to have a problem with denouements. KoTOR just ends, regardless of your choices. JE gives you an ending, but they are a series of text pages that perhaps foreshadow the ungainly reading that Sakaguchi put into Lost Odyssey. Mass Effect is no different. Yes, the game is the first in a trilogy... but does that mean that your characters can't take the time to mourn the death of Kaidan or Ashley? Or that your character can't take the time to help Tali find her way back to her fleet? Or perhaps help Wrex use Saren's research to save his people from extinction? Or have your character simply spend time with your love interest, if you chose one?

Maybe the sequel will address some of these unfinished plot threads... we can only hope.

New Games Journalism

2008-04-22T14:02:00.000-07:00

The phrase "New Games Journalism" is almost like a curse in the gaming press. Jeff Gerstmann, formerly of GameSpot and now of Giant Bomb, has totally resisted the phrase, suggesting that the game press shouldn't aim for the example of Edward R. Murrow or Pauline Kael. This is an opinion shared by many writers in the industry, including those at 1up.com, IGN.com and Future US.

While I certainly value Gerstmann's opinion as a long term veteran of the gaming press, I feel that this is extremely shortsighted. He advocates a "consumer reports" type approach to reviews. The facts and just the facts. What's good, what's bad, and why you should or should not buy the game. Unfortunately, I believe that this style of review is essentially impossible - Gerstmann's own Kane and Lynch review and the subsequent controversy would seem to disprove his position on the issue.

Shawn Elliot of the now defunct Games For Windows Magazine once called the press "professional enthusiasts" and recently referred to his occupation as a "game boner stoker", a not so subtle admission that the current state of games journalism is anything but journalism.
Not surprisingly, GFW Magazine and CGW Magazine was one of the few American game enthusiast magazines to print multi-page articles not tied to a new preview of Halo 5 or Final Fantasy 17 EX Crystalis or whatever the hot new game of the moment might be. Yes, they do the previews, but they've also featured articles examining Christian gaming and Islamic gaming, topics that are anathema in the gaming press. Freelancers such Lara Crigger and Evan Shamoon contributed articles to the magazine on peripheral issues related to gaming or on small games that would never make the cover of the magazine. I should stop before this turns into a full blown eulogy.
(I should note that I share the same opinion of Game Informer magazine. While other gaming press outlets were left wondering why Koreans like Starcraft, Game Informer sent someone to Korea to actually try to answer the question. The writer interviewed Koreans, went to PC Bangs, and did what journalists who want to answer a question usually do - investigate. The result was a 10+ page spread in a magazine usually devoted to console games... not on Starcraft 2 itself, but on the role of Starcraft in Korea.)

While the closure of the magazine would seem to indicate that people who play games do not want these types of articles, I believe in the contrary. N'Gai Croal and the MTV Multiplayer Blog prove that you can have more in depth articles that are not game previews or reviews. Indeed, Patrick Klepek's recent investigative article on the 360 remote would indicate that there is space for game journalists to actually be journalists and not be the mouth piece of large game companies.

Should the gaming press aspire to Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert or Edward R. Murrow? It's only games, right? Games aren't as serious as film or the news. But why not try your best? Why not aim to have your name added to that lexicon of journalists? What are games journalists and game players afraid of? It's time to grow up and I, for one, anticipate reading the work of the next Pauline Kael of games journalism.

Reading Call of Duty 4

2008-04-21T16:34:00.000-07:00

Getting waylaid once again, this time I'm just going to work on short, brief posts.

There has been some question on whether games can be taken serious or should be taken seriously. The backlash against N'Gai Croal after his comments on the MTV Multiplayer Blog here sparked an outcry across the big gaming forums, claiming that Croal had been taking the Resident Evil 5 trailer too seriously.
That topic has been discussed to death and really, after the GFW Radio podcast from 04/18/2008, the PC editorial staff at 1up.com has covered most of the bases.

What I want to do here is show that games can be "read" in the same way that pretentious, out of touch academics "read" works of literature and film. Disclaimer: I am an PhD student in English Literature, so I'm one of "those" people.

So, why Call of Duty 4? It's one of the biggest games of 2007, tops the NPD monthly sales charts and tops the Xbox Live play charts. Launching the map packs a couple of weeks ago brought Live marketplace to a crawl, crippling it for at least a day. It's one of the few games that nearly everyone knows about and when people think games that can be read, people immediate point to Bioshock, not something mainstream like CoD4.

*spoiler alert*

Let's begin by looking at how the game starts. You take the role of Yasir Al-Fulani, president of an unnamed country that is obviously Saudi Arabia if you know how to use an atlas or Google Earth. You have extremely limited control at this point - in fact, you are basically a moving camera, forced to watch as your capital city is taken over by Khaled Al-Asad. Over the PA system, you are called an American collaborator who has grown wealthy working as an American puppet as the people of the country grow poor. See any parallels to the real world here?
Let's look at the fact that you are quite literally a puppet in this moment, being controlled by the game designers who decided that the game should begin this way. Here, you are complicit with Al-Fulani, a mere puppet for some greater power, forcibly complying with this greater power's wishes in order to get more. In Al-Fulani's case, maybe it was military support or money. In the player's case, it's a desire to progress the plot of the game.

Let's not go overboard here. Someone could keep going with this one scene and I think they should, but in the interest of brevity, let's move on.

Much has been said of the AC-130 gunship scene and I really don't need to cover it again here. If you don't see anything deeper in this scene than just blowing away Russians with a howitzer, maybe you need to watch the news or find some AC-130 footage on YouTube.

No, the big scene I really want to talk about is the end of Act 1. In fact, I would argue that this was the biggest moment in gaming and for gaming in 2007. To set the scene, you are in the capital city of this unnamed Middle Eastern country as part of an American invasion force. Through the course of this mission, a Cobra pilot is taken down by a RPG and your Lieutenant orders you to pull her out and save her life. After you do just that, a nuclear bomb detonates and you are knocked out. When you wake up, you see you are right in the middle of the aftermath of a nuclear attack - the huge mushroom cloud is right there in the distance. You can hear over loudspeakers or your radio that American forces are trying to save survivors... but your controller starts to rumble and you can hear a beating coming from your speakers. Seconds later, the screen turns to white and you are listed as KIA.

That's right. This is the first Call of Duty game, if not one of the first FPSes, where you really die. Maybe you can chalk Al-Fulani up as a throwaway character... but this is a US soldier, your true cipher into the game world. This game changing event even impressed Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame, and that's saying something if you're familiar with his reviews.

But what does this mean? It basically renders the entire first Act a "waste". Al-Asad used the coup as a distraction against the true threat in Russia and it worked, since thousands of American soldiers are dead and he's closer to getting to that Russian nuclear facility that appears in Act 2 and 3. Your personal victory of pulling out the injured Cobra pilot and dragging her back to your helicopter is rendered meaningless by her death, the death of your squad, the death of the thousands of other soldiers in the city and your death. It doesn't matter if you're the greatest CoD4 player in the world and you pulled that pilot out on Veteran difficulty while time to spare. That effort was pointless, because in the end, you still died.

If this moment isn't as thoughtful as a similar moment in Platoon or Full Metal Jacket, I don't know what is.

The game ends in the same way, with everyone in your SAS team getting wiped out. It's implied that you don't die, but you can't know that for sure. You save the United States from a nuclear attack, but at the cost of the lives of your friends. The ultimate price for answering the "call of duty".

Is CoD4 a fun game? Yeah, of course it is. Infinity Ward never disappoints... (well, except for spawn closets) But just because it's fun doesn't mean that it can have a deeper message or that it can be "read". I hope I've shown that here today.

Yay for state sanctioned holidays!

2007-12-20T13:46:00.001-08:00

This is more a reminder for myself that this place exists. Now that the holidays are here and I don't have to worry about anything for a week or so, I'll have the time to bang out my own review of Call of Duty 4 and Mass Effect. My focus will be on how these two games manipulate a player's expectations of player agency.

With apologies to the Academic Gamer

2007-11-16T05:17:00.000-08:00

This space is just a place for me to perform close readings of current games outside the context of the various ludological and narratological debates that are raging throughout academia.
Also, the act of writing and publishing forces many academics/scholars to write on games that are essentially years old by the time they publish. When will a paper on Bioshock appear? Probably not for a while.
Finally, the problem with reviews now is the concern with spoilers, which makes for very surface and shallow readings of games. "The story is good" or "Great gameplay" are common phrases thrown around in reviews, but with very little explanation. Hopefully, by writing down my ideas, I can develop my own understanding of how games operate and other people can tell me how full of shit I am.

Onward ho!