Good Vibes
This was originally going to be a very different post. Riled by an increasing number of blogs, forums and professional articles claiming that games were being made ‘too fun’ or ‘dumbed down’, this was going to be a rant about how the minds of the sort of folk who routinely make those claims are clouded by nostalgia for a golden age that never was and that, whilst the degree to which games have been improved might be debatable, only the most heavy duty of light red oracular devices could lead one to thing they were getting worse.
Actually, though, I’ve changed my mind. I think what’s needed is for everyone, on both side of this debate[1], to pipe down and grow up. And I include myself in that.
The problem with these arguments, and the reason that they’re doomed to go round in circles for all time, is that they’re based on the idea that some types of game, or styles of gameplay, are inherently good, and others are inherently bad. They assume that an individuals subjective preference is somehow instead die-cast, objective Truth.
That’s hardly an uncommon attitude on the internet, but gamers seem to have a particular pre-disposition towards it. In part, I think it’s due to the fact that the industry is so heavily technology driven. For most pieces of technology, you can easily assess them against objective criteria. If you’re choosing a tv, or an anti-virus programme, or whatever, you check the available products against your particular criteria, see which best fulfils those criteria, and go with that. Different people with have different criteria, of course, but preference doesn’t really enter into it.
There was a time when games were like that as well, when the technology was making such massive leaps, not necessarily in graphics but in scope and interactivity, that technological superiority often did equal a better game. That’s not so much the case now: the returns on technological improvements are starting to level off. But it’s left us as gamers viewing games as things which are either good or bad, successful or unsuccessful. Instead, we ought to be looking at them in the same way we look at books and films. It’s commonly accepted that while some films are truly bad, others (indeed, the majority) will appeal to particular tastes, which doesn’t make them inherently ‘worse’ than those that appeal to different tastes.
Take point and click adventures. I hate point and click adventures[2]. Dragging my cursor across the screen desperately looking for the interactive bits is like some kind of gaming purgatory. The way you sweep up everything not nailed down because you know, you know, it’s going to be useful later, regardless of the fact that no sane person would ever have picked the damned junk up, kills my suspension of disbelief[3]. Round that off by asking me to bash said objects mindlessly against each other until I hit upon whatever random combination of items a stoned designer decided was the ‘solution’ to the current puzzle, and I’m pretty much at the swearing and monitor smashing stage.
So I really don’t like point and click adventures. But those who do, those who hold them up as the very hight of gaming joy, aren’t wrong[4]. They’ve just got a different preference to me. We don’t have to flame war to the death over who’s right.
I guess what I’m really saying is just chill, y’all[5].
[1]And the related ones, like how ‘casual games’ suck, come on discs burned in the very fires of Hades and will cause the death of all that is good and pure in gaming.
[2]Oh, I’ve enjoyed a couple of them, but almost always in spite of the actual gameplay rather than because of it.
[3]Six inches of frayed rope? Who wouldn’t grab that! Broken golf trophy? It’s just what I need to give my flat that bohemian air! Pile of dog excrement? I can’t believe they’re giving this stuff away!
[4]Although they might have some masochistic tendencies they ought to look at.
[5]Clearly, this enlightened attitude will not stop me from criticising/ranting about games, genres, etc in the future. But I do appreciate that people will disagree with me, and have a right to their opinions. Their wrong-headed, totally misguided opinions.
A Galaxy Far, Far Away
Having seen the most recent chunk of video posted on IGN, I think I finally have a better handle on Bioware’s upcoming MMO The Old Republic. The central concept was one I struggled to understand back when the game was first announced back in 2008[1].
For those not already in the know, Star Wars: The Old Republic (to give it its full title) was announced to great fanfare, with Bioware declaring that they planned to bring their proven skill with plot and character to the MMO space.
I should have been more excited by this declaration. Under normal circumstances I would walk through fire in order to get my paws on a new Bioware title, and I’ve been waiting for an MMO to truly capture my attention for pretty much as long as the genre has been around[2].
It was difficult, however, not to feel that Bioware had missed the point. They were talking about adding ‘career specific’ storylines to the game. While I’d expect those storylines to be crafted with all of Bioware’s customary care and skill, that means that an eighth of the players in the game would have been through to same story as me. What’s the point of becoming Champion of Such-and-Such, Slayer of Darth What’s-His-Face, if every eighth person in the galaxy has already Championed Such-and-Such, kerb-stomped What’s-His-Face and sold on the loot drop because it didn’t help maximise their build?
I agree, whole-heartedly, that more massively multiplayer games need a stronger story component. But just straight out telling your players a story is never going to work. The trick to narrative in an MMO is putting the structures in place to encourage players to create stories with each other. EVE Online gives a good example of what I mean. The players have such a massive influence on the gameworld that wars have started, alliances have been forged, empires and business have risen and fallen, all of it player driven, and each event generating thousands of attendant stories.
If you want to take it a step further, what you really need to do is mechanically reward dramatic behaviour. For example, if the game has a significant combat element, rewarding players for repeated clashes with the same opponent encourages the development of personal foes and nemeses, rather than a faceless mass of opponents.
Whilst I still think they’ve missed a trick, the video on IGN did at least show something that looked enjoyable: not a massively multiplayer RPG in the truest sense of the word, but a co-op RPG where all of the players in the party could be involved in the conversations as well as the combat. That’s an interesting idea, and one I can see myself enjoying, but it doesn’t really take any advantage of the thousands of other players running around outside of your immediate group (surely the largest asset of any MMO), and it still leaves the fact that you can presumably talk, in game, to other people who have undertaken the same stories constantly gnawing away at your suspension of disbelief.
It’s early days, of course, and there’s still time for Bioware to turn around and blow everyone away with some amazing innovation. As things stand, however, it’s hard to shake the feeling that whilst they might be building something interesting, its core gameplay will be undermined rather than strengthened by the MMO format.
Welcome, to the world of Tomorrow!
The first half of an interesting piece on ‘The future of video games’ was posted on players only recently[1]:
It’s an interesting watch. The general consensus seems to be that online distribution will be the future of the industry. Possibly they’re right, but in the same way that hovercars have been a few years away for decades[2], a mass migration towards digital distribution has been being predicted for a while now, and it has yet to grind the retail market beneath its remorseless tread.
See, at the moment, direct download is the main digital distribution option around. This is a great idea for developers, because they see it as a route to market that might allow them to sidestep the publisher altogether, and thus keep a bigger slice of the profits. With a slightly different spin on it, publishers like the idea, because they hope that it might give them a distribution method which is a bit more resistant to piracy than physical media.
It isn’t, however, always such a great deal for the consumer. It can be wonderful when it comes to getting indy games, which typically have a relatively modest download size and which would struggle to see a retail release. When it comes to a big AAA title though, it runs into problems.
Direct download stops looking like the sensible and convenient option if it takes me six hours to download a game: I could have been to the shops and bought it in a fraction of that time. Then there’s the fact that once you’ve finished the game, you either have to leave it squatting in the depths of your hard drive, hungrily gobbling up the gigabytes, or face that whole six hour slog again when you get a sudden urge to boot up that game from six months back you fancy having another bash at.
Yes, I’m well aware of the staggering success of digital music distribution, but big games are rather a different proposition. Aside from the (much) larger download times mentioned above, music download services offer the significant advantage of allowing the consumer to pay a lower price to purchase only to exact songs they want. DD doesn’t offer that: I can’t purchase only those levels or gameplay features that interest me.
Beyond that, the fact that a game is a larger investment in time and money than a couple of tracks off iTunes means I’m more inclined to look to the advantages of physical ownership, like the fact that I can lend the game out, take it to a friends house to play, or (and this is important) keep using it when some change to operating standards would have rendered my digital collection unusable[3].
More exciting is the potential advance of in-browser gaming and ‘cloud computing’. Indeed, over the past few years we’ve already seen sites like Kongregate rocketing to popularity.
The advantages of taking away the download and not running the game locally are manifold. No need to wait for the download, obviously. But also no need to worry about system requirements, and with the added bonus of being able to access the content wherever you have an internet connection. There’s still the potential for changing standards or collapsing businesses to render your collection obsolete, but at least there are some more concrete advantages to balance that out.
Ultimately, I think although downloadable game services will become a bigger part of the way we access content, it’s not going to catch on in the way some believe, if only because by the time the storage capacity and internet connection required to make it truly attractive become ubiquitous, it will already have been overtaken by the cloud computing[4] revolution.
[1] Actually, the second half has been posted as well, but I haven’t been able to watch that yet because it opens with an exec at Acclaim saying that the games industry should be more like U2. It’s already too much like U2: rich, hypocritical, risk-averse and dead inside. My shouting at the monitor precluded further viewing
[2] That’s real science, right?
[3] Case in point: I recently re-installed and started playing my copy of Giants: Citizen Kabouto (released 2000) recently. Would my digital download service still be offering the game after nine years, or honouring my original purchase? Hell, would the company I downloaded it from still be in business after nearly a decade?
[4] Incidentally, we sorely need a cooler name for the concept. Answers on a postcard.
Living on the Edge
With no news for me to self-indulgently editorialise at the moment, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look back at one of the most overlooked games of recent times (both critically and commercially): Mirror’s Edge.
The game’s lack of commercial success isn’t particularly surprising1, but I still find the critical reception baffling, particularly given Mirror’s Edge’s status as my favourite release of Q4-08/Q1-09, a period which put it up against the likes of Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2.
Actually, those two titles probably give some insight into why it was my favourite release. Both Fallout 3 and Gears 2 were wonderful games, but both were sequels and, more importantly, both were using gameplay mechanics which have been refined over many years. With Mirror’s Edge, on the other hand, Dice chose to strike out into the all but unmapped territory of first person platforming, and came back with something which was fast paced, kinetic, and beautiful to look at. It may not have been perfect, but when you’re in the zone, stringing moves together almost unconsciously, it’s a nearly zen-like experience, and completely unlike anything else available.
I hold review scores at least partially accountable for this. The idea that you can score the quality of the game on something as fine grained as a 100-point scale suggests an objective standard against which they’re being measured. ‘The enjoyment gained from playing something different from the norm’ isn’t something that lends itself to being easily rated on a scale.
Too put it in perspective, Call of Duty: World at War2 has a higher score on Metacritic than Mirror’s Edge. The gaming press, collectively, values the polished yet soulless progeny of an apparently endless franchise over the start of something new and interesting.
In particular, several of the reviews seemed to be fooled by the fact that you could pick up a gun into thinking that they should review the game as an FPS. It’s nothing of the sort: the gunplay is clumsy and, frankly, shouldn’t have been included at all. The martial arts, on the other hand, are thrillingly reminiscent of the Bourne films. Even the fisticuffs, though, need to be approached in the right frame of mind. This is still a platform game, and the combat isn’t about moment-to-moment tactical decisions, but rather about finding that perfect series of moves that will allow you to glide around and through the guards with apparently effortless grace3.
Is there a point to this rambling diatribe? Not especially, except that you shouldn’t always trust the reviews. And that you should rush out right now and buy a copy of Mirror’s Edge.
1It’s not a sports game, it isn’t on the Wii, large men with guns are the bad guys rather than the teenage-boy wish fulfilment protagonists: ME doesn’t really manage to hit any of the core game consumer groups…
2That’s Call of Duty 5 to anyone who’s counting
3Obviously, you buy that grace at the cost of much swearing and hurling of controllers about the room, but surely that is the whole joy of platforming games?
Picture Perfect
It’s taken some time, but I finally got round to checking out Microsoft’s new Natal camera as the E3 dust began to settle1. I’d been distracted by more immediately exciting software info, like new Mass Effect 2 footage and the complete redesign of Splinter Cell – Conviction, but I did think that the concept of completely controller-free input sounded pretty cool, and I eventually looked up the stage show demo.
Congratulations then to Microsoft for very nearly succeeding in strangling that spark of interest at birth. The tech might be awesome, but in a week in which I’ve been shown The Exorcist for the first time, the most profoundly unsettling thing I’ve seen is still the soulless, dead-eyed family featured in that video2.
More concerning than the fact that the video was apparently shot on location in Stepford, however, is that it is filled with, well, lets just cut to it and call them lies shall we?
Take exhibit A, the girl trying on a dress using Natal, which she can then go out and buy in the shops3. Really? Which high street chain are you in partnership with then, Microsoft? Besides which, we already have online catalogues. It’s hard to see any genuine benefit provided by Natal, with the added downside that I have to stop gaming for one of my housemates to check out their potential new togs.
Or exhibit B, that business with the skateboard. Aside from the fact that using my own gear is almost exactly the opposite of what I want from a video game4, the process of turning a real world object into a 3D, physics enabled in-game entity is complex, and not something that can be done with just a picture. You can of course apply that picture to a pre-created object, but that isn’t going to get you the perfectly recreated skateboard we saw in the demo.
Loathsome demo aside though, I did see things there to get excited about. Peter Molyneux’s Milo presentation held a truly exciting moment when the presenter looked into the lake and saw her own reflection looking back. The potential there for allowing you to not only interact with games in new ways, but to actually insert yourself directly into the experience, is truly exciting.
It is a nifty piece of kit, then, and could mark a genuine step forward in terms of game controller design. Of course, the real proof of this particular gaming pudding is going to be the software. Can Microsoft get enough developers working on Natal-specific games to make their (probably expensive) camera worthwhile? I don’t know, but I’m certainly hopeful. Just don’t try to use it to sell me clothes.
1The observant will notice that it has also taken me some time to the write a new blog post. Fortunately, one of the advantages of having no readers is that no one cares if I vanish for a year.
2Look at them sitting there, vacant grins plastered over their faces, their expression of forced gaiety unable to mask the fact that they are dead inside. Shudder…
3Leaving aside the fact that her friend apparently does nothing all day but stand forlornly in front of the Natal camera, waiting for someone to call her.
4I buy games to be exposed to experiences I couldn’t have (or wouldn’t want) in the real world. Having to get hold of real world stuff to get the most out of a game seems to rather defeat the point.
Letters from the front
I think, given the content of earlier entries, I’m going to have to make a qualifying statement before beginning this post.
I don’t hate Peter Molyneux.
I don’t even dislike him. I’ve got at least some enjoyment from all of his games1, and a great deal of enjoyment from some of them. His games tend to be technologically innovation, and artistically pleasing. Too often they don’t tie their good ideas and good looks into good gameplay mechanics, but hey, you can’t have everything.
His comments, however, frequently annoy me, because they often seem to reveal either an ignorance of, or disregard for, the ways game design has changed in the past couple of decades, and of the advances that other developers have been making.
Which leads me to my point. Apparently, Peter Molyneux sent out a note with review copies of Fable 2, asking reviewers to “Please, please, please” get a non-gamer to play the game, observe what they did and how their world turns out.
The problem here is that, for a whole host of reasons, and regardless of whether it was designed with the non-gamer in mind or not, Fable 2 is not a game that’s going to appeal to the casual market.
1) It’s on the Xbox 360
Much as Microsoft (and Sony) might wish otherwise, non-gamers don’t own gaming consoles. Who’s going to blow £200+ on top of the line gaming hardware just to use Xbox Live Arcade? Some of them might own a Wii. But if you really want casual gamers, you go for the PC, and make sure it can be played on any machine capable of running Windows XP.
2) It’s a full price release
The other thing non-gamer’s don’t do is blow £50 on a game2. That’s new pair of trainers, or a weeks groceries for a couple, or two nights down the pub. £20-£25 (one night in the pub, a reasonable two course meal) is the upper limit if you want the casuals to come streaming in. £10 is ideal, because that drops you into the realm of the impulse buy3.
3) Movement and camera control in 3D is essential to the game
One of the reasons for the success of the Wii is that Wii Sports removes the need for 3D, dual analouge camera control. For those of us who have spent over a decade getting accustomed to dual analouge control it comes naturally, but most people picking up a game for the first time struggle with it, particularly with syncing character movement with camera direction. If you don’t play games, and you pick up something with this steep learning curve, you’re probably not going to enjoy it, conclude that gaming isn’t for you, and go on your way.
4) It’s a Fantasy RPG
Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings films may have made fantasy at least moderatly cool these days, but RPGs, or anything else with the whiff of dragons, rule books, and dice with a number of sides other than six is still seen as some sort of weird social aberration to be avoided at all costs. A good portion of those who don’t feel this way are also already video gamers, and thus not the people who can truly appreciate Fable 2. Apparently.
5) Violence is central to the game
Although there may be lots of enjoyable4 padding like buying houses and dancing for the townspeople, advancing the story in Fable 2 ultimately involves repeatedly bashing your fellow sentient creatures with sharp metal sticks. As a general rule, if you want the broad audience, you have to avoid using violence as the driving activity of the game.
Given the above, much as Mr Molyneux might like to get the non-gamers perspective, they just aren’t the people that are going to be buying Fable 2, so it seems rather skewed to base reviews on that point of view. Indeed, I’m not really convinced that someone not familiar with gaming would actually enjoy Fable 2 that much even if they didn’t have to pay for it.
Peter Molyneux really should realise this. If he doesn’t, then he also doesn’t understand that much about the casual market, or even the gaming market in general. If he does already appreciate it, then the letter starts to look like an attempt to guard himself against accusations of shallowness in Fable 25.
On an unrelated note, I’ve been made aware that the links to the footnotes only work for the most reccent blog post: otherwise they bring you back to that footnote number in the top post. I’ll try and find some ingenius solution, but until then either view the posts one at or time, or scroll down to see footnotes in older entries.
1Or at least, the games of produced by Bullfrog and Lionhead. Let’s not fall into the trap of assuming that because he happens to be the public face of the company, Peter Molyneux single-handedly puts these games together.
2For the console they don’t own, but we’re moving on from that point.
3As we all know, any purchase of under £10 (no matter how many individual £10 purchases are made), has no impact on your budget.
4Behold my restraint at not putting that word in parenthesis.
5Wrongly, because a good casual game should be simple to learn, but have depth to the gameplay. Again, most of the Wii Sports games provide good examples of this, as does the recently released World of Goo (which if you have a human soul in your body you should be downloading right now, but that’s another post).
A Moral Dilemma
Last Friday, I found myself standing facing a choice of epic proportions. In one hand I held a copy of Spore, in the other The Force Unleashed1. It was a knotty problem. Spore, innovative, different, trying new things even if it didn’t always succeed. Leaving it on the shelf in favour of The Force Unleashed would put me in a category with all those people who consigned Sacrifice, Giants and Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath to a slow, wasting demise in PC World bargain bins. I would be One Of Them. Part Of The Problem.
On the other hand, I really wanted to hurl stormtroopers around with the Force.
In the end, I went with the only available option, and bought them both.
I’m damn glad I didn’t pass over Spore in favour of TFU. TFU on the Wii was ultimately a disappointing experience (and I wasn’t expecting that much from it to begin with). It’s a shame, because when it works, its brilliantly fun. The controls on the Wii give a great sense of physical connection with the game2. Thrusting forwards with the nuncuck to do a Force push just feels badass.
Once the novelty of the controls wears off, however, the cracks quickly start to show. It’s galling, because so many of the mistakes feel like things that ought to be covered in Game Design 101. Like the colour pallet. Why is every enemy that isn’t a stormtrooper exactly the same colour as the background? And why are those colours invariably grey and brown3?
It uses invisible walls in the worst way, with platforms that are low enough to jump to, but you can’t land on because the game designers decided…actually, I don’t know what they decided: I really cant see how it would have caused any gameplay problems whatsoever. If it really was essential that the player not be able to jump to them, then just make the bloody platforms higher.
How about the fact every battle against something large and stompy, be it an AT-ST, Rancor, Basilisk War Droid, whatever, plays out in exactly the same way, with you running in a circle whilst throwing handy crates and barrels at it? Or the way that, despite never actually raising the difficulty in a significant way, enemies become ridiculously, frustratingly lightsaber-and-lightening resistant as the game progresses? I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Spore, on the other hand, has been an absolute joy. I suspect part of the reason I got so much enjoyment out of it was the fact that I hadn’t spent too much time studying previews and interviews before the game released, so although I was expecting it to be good, I hadn’t really formed any opinions on how it was likely to play.
It’s basically a giant, galactic Lego set, and I really like the shared content: there’s a great sense of discovery in knowing that every weird alien you encounter was created by another player. The internet has expressed its displeasure that the end game seems to be largely a clone of Star Control 2, but given that Star Control 2 frequently makes it into the top ten of ‘Greatest Games of All Time’ lists4, and no one seems to have been inclined to rip it off in the intervening 16 years, I say ‘good job’. If people hadn’t started ripping off Doom, we’d never have got Half Life 2. Ripping off good ideas and improving on them is the heart and soul of creative industry.
On that note, you can download the original Star Control 2 here. It’s well worth it, SC 2 is one of the few retro games I can still play without poor graphics and controls causing me to smash the keyboard.
1Indeed, the Wii version of TFU, in all its buggy, ugly, glory, so I couldn’t even kid myself that I’d just be buying it to check of the fancy new physics technology.
2I mean sure, the camera is dodgy, and the lightsaber attacks sometimes feel a little on the loose side, but that’s pretty much the price of admission for a 3D action game on the Wii.
3With the notable exception of the Felucia levels, which are blue and brown.
4Probably. If it doesn’t, it should.
Let Me Tell You A Story…
For me, the first ripple of the new wave in video game storytelling came in 2005, from an extremely unlikely source; Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Unlikely because, much like his so-thick-you-could-beat-a-mugger-to-death-with-them novel’s, Tom Clancy games traditionally have storylines that could generously be described as ‘serviceable’.1 Indeed, Chaos Theory itself was, for the most part, pretty standard fare in the plot department. It did, however, manage to provide one perfect, shining moment of storytelling genius.
It’s the second-to-last level, and you confront Shetland, a man who has sold out his country and betrayed Sam Fisher (the player character in the Splinter Cell series, for those who somehow missed it2) personally. Shetland tries to convince Sam of his viewpoint, that a nuclear strike on the US is really the way to go, so they can “tear it all down and start again”. He steps back, raises his hands, and tells Sam to let him go, saying “you’d never shoot an old friend.”
And then you shoot him.
It doesn’t sound all that spectacular, does it? But what makes that moment great is that it’s not a cutscene, it actually you, the player, who raises that gun and pulls the trigger. It puts you right in Sam Fisher’s shoes. Rather than just showing you the character’s sense of betrayal, his anger at this man who’s calmly discussed killing hundreds of thousands of innocents and then dares to talk about friendship, it makes you experience it, and react as the character would. For that brief handful of moments, you are Sam Fisher, and you’re angry.
It’s a form of storytelling that only games can do. An average book or film will tell you about it’s character’s emotion’s and state of mind. A great book or film will show you. But a great game can make you experience those things for yourself, just as the character does.
It’s a trick that I suspect Chaos Theory pulled partly by accident, and it’s something that games are only now coming to use extensively. Bioshock, for example, cleverly uses the structure of an FPS games, where you’re given an objective and carry it out without thinking, simply because you were told to do it, to mirror the experience of the character, who it emerges is in exactly the same situation.
The Darkness did it nicely as well: there are an outstanding couple of minutes at the end of that game where you storm a Mafia mansion. Jackie, the character, has given it to The Darkness, a demonic symbiont that bonds with him at the start of the game3. He can no longer tell who’s in control of his actions, him or The Darkness. As you fight through the mansion, the game cuts between a number of brief scenes. Sometimes, you’re in control, sometimes the game, whilst still being in first person, is on autopilot. The genius part is, it’s hard to tell which is which. In the autopilot sections, the game is doing exactly what you, as an FPS player, want to do, namely waste the baddies. The same is true for the character: The Darkness is doing exactly what Jackie wants to do. For a short while, the game makes you directly experience a little bit of what Jackie is going through.
Perhaps it’s just me, but I find the potential of these techniques, once developers and scriptwriters really start to get their heads round them, to be truly exciting. They’re hard to pull off, of course. The traditional videogame development model sees the developers put together the actual game, with a lose story in mind, and then a freelance scriptwriter and the cinematic team come in to tie everything together with some snappy (or not so snappy) dialogue. But to create those moments when the game thrusts you not only into the character’s shoes, but into his mind, require a close collaboration between games developers and writers. You can’t just tack them on at the last minute.
Of course, it will probably also help when we start to get some big-budget, well written games about something other than large men wielding guns.
Meanwhile, Elsewhere in the City…
If you’ve made it this far through my ramblings, I salute your fortitude. For anyone who hasn’t had their fill of games storytelling theory, this series of blog posts by Professor Roger Travis of the University of Connecticut is thoroughly worthwhile reading, drawing parallels between recent video games and ancient epics. Give it a whirl; it’s entertaining and educational!
2Shame on you!
3It’s a video game, just go with it.
Lost in Space
I was almost resigned to the fact that there was no exciting news on the horizon, and prepared to give up waiting and write a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual article on the art of video game storytelling1, when this video surfaced:
Almost, almost, I wish that I hadn’t seen this video. For one thing, it means that I would have been spared the vicarious embarrassment of listening to the developer use the word ‘cinamaticion’2, especially given that he then has to pretend that giving us a dramatic angle for finishing moves is something that is in any way buzz-word worthy. Because we’ve never seen that before.
Then the coup-de-grace “This is what we like to call ‘Orchestrating Your Ballet of Death”. Do you? Do you really? Do you actually sit in your office and say “Hey Jim, hows work coming on Orchestrating your Ballet of Death?” or “Dude, you totally Orchestrated that Ballet of Death! You Orchestrated the shit out of it!”? I doubt it, and if you do, Mr Developer, I pity you.
But more than the teeth-grinding PR talk, it’s that fact that it’s introduced that traitorous sliver of hope into my life.
War hammer 40,000 holds a special place in my heart. I spent a good chunk of my youth pushing little lead soldiers around a table3, and the idea that someone could make a genuinely great 40K action game makes me go a little wobbly at the knees. Let’s face it, though, the odds are that this is going to suck. It’s going to be horrifyingly easy, too slow paced, and badly acted4. I know this. At best, it’s going to be Viking: Battle for Asgard5 with power armour and chainswords. I know this. But that was an Alpha build being shown in the video. Who knows how much it could change over the next, what, two years? Three? Two or three years that I’m going to have to spend hoping against hope that 40K Space Marine comes good, that it becomes the games I wish it could be, all leading up to inevitable, crushing disappointment when it is finally pushed out of THQ’s door and onto the game shop shelves.
Damn you THQ. Damn you and your cursed inability to frisk your presentation attendees for cameras.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city….
I came upon Zounds: Youth Rock Ministry video games review section whilst I was stumbling blindly through the internet the other day. Scroll down to the ‘Secular and Un-Christian Games’ section, it’s comedy gold.
I’m genuinely unsure as to whether or not the whole site is an elaborate spoof. That said, I’m erring towards ‘comic genius’ rather than ‘rabid drivel’, based on lines like “The player controls the Master Chef who in a surprise twist turns out to be more than just a military cook… he’s also a super soldier”(speaking about Halo, if you hadn’t guessed). Other classics include: “Snake is actually a symbolic agent of Satan, sent into the world to finish what he started in the Garden” (Metal Gear Solid 4). and “After one of the boys asked me if I wanted to play ‘shirts and skins’, I quickly turned off the Playstation because I didn’t want to see what that was (Pastor Skeet later told me it’s homosexual slang)” (Bully).
In earnest or not, go take a look, have a chuckle: it is easily one of the ten funniest things on the internet.
1Fear not, pretension fans! That article will be coming to you next week.
2Is that how you spell it? Can you spell it? Perhaps the English language, in protest against that horrific abuse, has contorted itself in such a way as to make it impossible to actually put the word down on paper. Maybe spelling it correctly summons Satan.
3Yes, I am a geek. I write a gaming blog in my spare time. You thought I was captain of the football team?
4Oh, and FYI THQ; when the guy doing the demo has to fire his gun so that the muzzle flash gives you enough light to see the environmental detail IT’S TOO BLOODY DARK!
5Actually, I didn’t hate Viking. It was fun, in a shallow, short lived way. But I already own Viking, and it it certainly ‘aint the kind of game you want to own twice, even if the second copy is wearing a shiny new 40K skin.
Biohazard
Bioshock has two confirmed sequels on the way. Normally, this would be the sort of news that I would be thrilled to hear. A squeal to one of the finest games of 2007? Time to ring the bells and break out the good brandy. However, for a number of reasons, I’m somewhat apprehensive about this particular sequel:
1) It’s not Irrational[1] at the helm.
Development duties for the Bioshock sequels have been passed from Irrational to 2K Marin. On the face of it, this isn’t a cause for too much alarm: franchises bounce around among development teams all the time. Bioshock is something of a unique case, though. Frankly, it wasn’t a great shooter. It was a great game, which happened to have some reasonable FPS elements. The things that made Bioshock great would have made it just as great if it had been an adventure game, or a survival horror, or even a platformer.[2]
Bioshock, unlike the vast majority of mainstream games, had actual themes rather than just a plot: it made points and expressed views that could be applied just as well to the real world. Most games draw their influences from existing science fiction and fantasy, which always creates an experience that, no matter how engaging, is ultimately shallow. Really good science fiction and fantasy draws its influences from a wide range of sources, and that is exactly what Irrational did with Bioshock. It’s plot and it’s world were the result of a range of different philosophical, political and aesthetic schools of thought[3]. Even if you didn’t get all the references, its hard to deny the power and vibrancy of the result.
Can a new dev team really capture this spirit? Short of putting them on a crash course of Sartre and Ayn Rand, it’s hard to see how. But without that spirit, Bioshock 2 will be a hollow experience: it might look right, but it won’t feel right.
2) Rapture is now a known quantity.
The city of Rapture itself was very much a character in Bioshock. There were new horrors and wonders around every corner, the constant juxtaposition of the familiar and the fantastic. A big part of the appeal of the game was exploring this underwater world, taking in its strange and terrible sights, and discovering its secrets.
You can’t recapture that in a sequel. It’s not that we can’t be shown parts of Rapture that we’ve never seen before, indeed, I’m sure that’s exactly what we will see. But we know what to expect from them now. That feeling of discovery, and of creeping horror as another laudable aspect of human endeavour is shown taken beyond the point of obsession, will be gone, and it’s hard to see what can be put in its place.
3) The story seems likely to be cheapened by a sequel.
It’s one of the unfortunate habits of games publishers to view any big budget release that doesn’t set up a franchise that can be milked for at least three more titles as a waste of time. It’s like the studio turning to Orson Welles after he’d just finished Citizen Kane and saying “That’s great, Orson, how long ’till Citizen Kane II? Actually, subtitles are big these days. Let’s call it Citizen Kane: Rosebud This! Awesome. Have it on my desk in six months.”
So much of Bioshock seems designed to stand alone. The whole first half of the game, for example, plays on the fact that you, as a player, unthinkingly follow the objectives set for you by the game, just as the character is unable to resist the commands given to him by Atlas. That trick, so central to the experience, can’t be pulled again. Neither of the ‘villains’ can be bought back without cheapening the story. Ryan, in particular, dies proving a point about his conception of free will: he dies victorious, you, his killer, live on as his slave. If he pops up again in a puff of dues ex machina, that scene, perhaps the most powerful I’ve ever witnessed in a game, is rendered utterly hollow.
Even beyond that, both endings to Bioshock pretty much finish Rapture as a setting for future games. There’s always the option for a prequel, of course, but again, a large part of the appeal of the first game is never quite knowing the whole story of what went on before your arrival.
It would be nice if we could get into the habit of celebrating developers, rather than particular franchises: that way we could applaud them for a great game, then look forward to seeing those talents applied to a new and unique project (although the upside of all this, of course, is that Irrational will be doing just that).
In other sequel news, the new Prince of Persia game is causing quite a stir at the moment. An open world sequel to the Prince of Persia franchise? Didn’t Ubisoft already release that last year? Yes, I’m sure they did. It was called Assassin’s Creed[4].
[1] Actually, they’re called 2K Boston now, but Irrational is a vastly better name, so I’ll keep using that.
[2] In fact, if 2k Marin, in a sudden change of direction, announce that their Bioshock sequels are going to be platform games, all is forgiven. A platform game set in a decaying, under water steampunk city where genetic engineering and free market economics have run amok? Now there’s a game I want to play. I’d like to see any fat Italian plumbers jump their way through that.
[3] It did turn to Sci Fi influences occasionally, but we’re talking more A Clockwork Orange and Metropolis than Star Trek and Aliens.
[4] Or Prince of San Andreas’ Splinter Cell, for those not feeling in a charitable mood. Ah, don’t worry Assassin’s Creed. I only mock because I care.
Gaming Wisdom of the Crafty Banana 
