Drew Norton's Very Professional Video Game Blog

The Unfinished Swan

2013-08-16T15:45:00.000-07:00

Video games have been struggling with their identities recently. Much like pubescent teens, video games have been growing in size, intellect, and maturity. Sure they make mistakes and things can get a bit hairy, but overall they have been moving in the right direction. But as this self-awareness grows, questions about what exactly this medium is and how it works are bound to arise. Self-reflexive games, or games that either bluntly or obliquely tackle the subject of games themselves, have started to become a lot more common. The Bioshock series is the most notable of the bunch, ignoring Bioshock 2, but Little Inferno, Far Cry: Blood Dragon, and Thomas was Alone have all in their own style begun to contribute to the conversation of what video games are and should be. The Unfinished Swan, developed by Giant Sparrow for the PS3, continues this trend while also providing an affecting story about family.

The story is told in the form of a children’s book. A boy named Monroe loses his mother and, when taken to an orphanage, is allowed to take only one of her many paintings with him. He chooses the unfinished painting of a swan which was her favorite. One night, the swan escapes through a door he’d never seen before, and Monroe finds himself in a vast and magical land. As Monroe travels through the empty kingdom looking for the swan, he finds snippets of a story about the king who ruled the place. Everything that happens in the story is very whimsical, but not always without weight. The story is full of loss and regret and can at times become very sober, but it is never somber. It is well-balanced with humor and a light touch. Art and the act of creation are also very important in the story, but that comes out more in the gameplay.

This game is no simple platformer. Yes there is jumping and climbing, but from the very beginning you are forced to reveal the world around you. The game begins with a solid white screen. Upon experimentation, you realize that the only things your character can do are jump and throw little black balls of paint. The paint reveals that there is a world around you. The developers cleverly placed white objects in the world, and the only way you can move through it is by finding them. Though the objects and the walls are there no matter what you do, painting them feels like you are bringing them into being. You wander around painting everything until you eventually find shadows. Then there are huge cities and labyrinthine mazes that you can still splatter with black paint, occasionally finding barrels or streetlamps hidden against the white walls. Eventually your paint can make vines grow or lights shine; getting to the point where you can actually paint platforms to get to higher places. It’s impossible not to think parallels to the developers as you do this. The artifice of the game is constantly revealed by the gameplay. I’m not sure why necessarily, but I know it was on purpose. There is a breaking of the fourth wall during the credit sequence I won’t go into that makes it all but certain this was their intention. It may be that the developers were drawing parallels between classic artistic mediums and video games. There may be a personal story, as this feels like a very personal game. I can’t be sure. I implore you to play it and tell me what you think.

As important as art is to this game, it would have been a shame if it was anything but beautiful. Luckily the game employs a starkly beautiful style fitting that fits it perfectly. The buildings in the cities look like something you find in Greece with pure white walls and pale blue roofs. All of the lines are bold because of the pervasive use of white in the early levels and black in the later. The music is also very spare, using a lot of chimes and piano. It’s all very indie.

Of course it isn’t perfect. The Unfinished Swan can feel very boring some times. It doesn’t drag exactly, but it definitely meanders. If most games these days are like a Michael Bay film, this game is more like an episode of “Winnie the Pooh”. If you stick with it, though, you won’t help but be charmed by it. It’s so sweet and sincere it’s hard not to. The action also begins to pick up slightly near the end, if that’s really all you need. In the end, this is an effective little story about art, family, and all of the other things I’ve already said it was about. They pack a lot of feeling into what is about a two to three hour game. The visuals are stunning, the gameplay is fun and surprisingly varied, and it’s just so damn nice. We need more games like this. Hell, we just need more of this in general. A piece of media without a drop of snark or cynicism is practically unheard of today. I don’t know if this trend of thoughtfulness will continue, and I don’t even know if the developers intended to make any kind of a statement with this game. I just know that I become more encouraged almost any time I play something new these days. Hotline Miami notwithstanding.

Also, Terry Gilliam lends his voice to the game. I was surprised as you are.

Hotline Miami

2013-08-10T11:27:00.003-07:00

I will never understand the masochism that allows people to enjoy unbearably difficult games. In the beginning, the beginning here meaning the 8 and 16-bit eras, video games were hard because the challenge was the only thing they had going for them. If a video game was easy, you were done with it and probably never wanted to play it again. If a game was difficult enough, it could become legendary. Most gamers still know the Konami code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start) because of Contra. Cheating was almost necessary to beat that game. Nowadays there is no reason for the difficulty to be that high. Storytelling in games, even small indie games with archaic graphics, has advanced greatly. This has allowed games to not be so hair-tearingly frustrating. Developers can balance the difficulty to give enough challenge that winning feels satisfying, but not so difficult that you want to smash everything you own in anger because you’ve died eighty times in the same room. Hotline Miami spits in the face of this development, then douses it in gasoline and lights it on fire.

The game is about a psychopath who murders a lot of people because he keeps getting phone messages from some unknown source. Every once in a while he also talks to a bunch of guys in animal masks. In between missions he goes to various local establishments like bars and video stores, which all seem to be run by the same clerk. While there, the clerk offers him something for free while saying a bunch of cryptic stuff, and then the psychopath protagonist leaves. It’s not much of a story, but it’s intriguing. You know that there’s something weird going on as you’re playing, and it’s tantalizing enough to make you want to keep play for a while. The ultra-violence is potentially a little off-putting, but it works with the seedy Miami underground they’ve built. What would Scarface be without a lot of blood? The art style is also extremely cool. Everything is 80’s neon. The music is jarring and haunting, but can also be funky at times. Unfortunately, that’s all I can tell you about the story. There’s an 80’s psychopath, it’s violent, and the style is cool. Why is that all I can tell you? I quit at Chapter 11 because I couldn’t take the gameplay anymore.

The actual style of gameplay isn’t the problem. It’s a top-down shooter kind of like the online flash game Endless War or, more appropriately for the style of the game, like the 80’s arcade games Smash TV and Robotron. This vantage point provides more of a tactical view in practical terms, and it allows more distance from the character in terms of narrative. Unfortunately I found the actual controls to be incredibly loose. I was constantly running into walls when I was trying to make it through a doorway, missing people right in front of me with an attack, or opening and closing doors when I really didn’t want to. While these may seem like minor problems, they become vastly more important when every shot is a one hit kill against you. It doesn’t matter what kind of weapon they have; it’s going to kill you. This forces you to think more tactically, which is usually fun and rewarding. In Hotline Miami it’s tedious and frustrating.

For one, the enemies will always see you. They can’t see through walls, although eventually there will be windows they can shoot you through, but if you’re in the room with them then they know you’re there. You can’t sneak up on these guys for some reason. I have walked into bathrooms in that game where a man is urinating and could have no way of knowing I was there, and yet after one step he spun around and shot me in the face. Who is so cautious and fast that they can stop peeing and shoot you in the face in the time it takes to cross a room? But the most egregious, stupid, and frustrating part of the game is the complete unpredictability of the enemy AI. The room that made me quit the game had me start by busting into a room with a guy at the end. I didn’t have a choice; the door just opens. Having a shotgun, I was forced to shoot him rather than take him down quietly.

Every single time I shot that guy, a different configuration of enemies came from different directions. I never knew how many guys I would have to kill, or how many were waiting for me in the different rooms. I could never get a feel for where I should go or what I should do, and I inevitably met a horrible end every single time. It was infuriating. I woke my girlfriend up just from yelling at the stupid screen. Also, it’s not like I could sneak around them to advance. The only way to advance is to kill everyone in the level. So even though I knew it was a bad idea I had to go into a room with three guys on multiple occasions, try to shoot them, miss because the aiming is atrocious, and then get shot and pummeled to death by the Russian mob. I understand that this game is a love letter to the difficult games of the past. The retro style, the blocky graphics, and the frustrating difficulty make this more than obvious. Here’s the thing about those old games though; they were predictable. The reason it was ok that Super Mario Brothers or whatever was hard was that there was a pattern. If you could figure out the pattern, you had the level. I still remember most of the Sonic and Knuckles. There is no pattern in Hotline Miami. Guys will come at you and you have to figure something out because they have every advantage. It sucks.

This is not a game that was made for me. I like stories and worlds I can get lost in, not dying over and over until I happen to get lucky and make it past an area. If a game is going to be difficult, it has to be consistent. It has to be fun. It can’t feel like you’re being unfairly dispatched by imaginary gangsters. I really wanted to like Hotline Miami. It’s weird, and has a really cool soundtrack. Unfortunately, loose controls and the frustrating difficulty really hold this game back. I hated it. Feel free to call me a wuss in the comments.

Sorry this is a day late. I was at my cousin’s wedding reception most of yesterday. Everything will be back to normal next week.

Thomas Was Alone

2013-08-02T17:35:00.001-07:00

Thomas was Alone is not as simple as it looks. This game, developed by Mike Bithell, looks from the screenshots like something a child with a surprisingly robust knowledge of game design could do; all of the characters are quadrilaterals and the environments all exist in weirdly-geometric abstract spaces. Even the gameplay is pretty simple for the most part, with the player jumping from platform to platform while avoiding water and spikes. It sounds like every 90’s platformer from Super Mario Bros. to Aladdin, but without any enemies to fight. The difference, as always, is in the story. Thomas was Alone is a beautifully written game, and the integration between the story and the gameplay is done exceptionally well. No game has ever made you love a rectangle as much as this one will.

The game starts with an AI spontaneously generating a personality. His name is Thomas. His first thought is that he’s alone, and his second thought is how he would like that to change. He proceeds through a few levels, making observations and generally wondering about his existence, when he comes across another AI named Chris. Chris is a surly guy who would rather not hang around Thomas if he can avoid it. Unfortunately for him, they need to work together to progress through the levels and continue moving up and to the right. AIs keep showing up, each with a different personality, jumping ability, and in some cases a special ability. Claire, for instance, can float. The player can switch between these characters with a simple push of a button. The player will need to use the skills, abilities, and varying heights of the group of friends to escape an evil cloud of pixels as well as wherever it is they are.

Though the quadrilaterals never speak themselves in the game, the BAFTA-winning narrative performance of humorist Danny Wallace provides plenty of insight into the mind of an artificial intelligence. Each shape is infused with so much personality that you quickly become attached to them. It is truly remarkable how willing we are to anthropomorphize anything and everything. The narration is sharp and funny, but is often tinged with a bit of pensivity or even melancholy as the game progresses. This is aided by the wonderful score. The mixture of string instruments and mechanical beeps and boops is both atmospheric and evokes the mixture of the mechanical and the natural or spiritual embodied by the AI.

While I really enjoyed this game, it is not perfect. There are some wonky control issues. Because the quadrilaterals don’t have legs, it’s hard to get a sense of where they are on the platform sometimes. This is especially true when you are trying to jump. A few of the jumps need every nanometer of space, but if you are slightly off then your character won’t jump at all. Also while the game isn’t ridiculously difficult, but there were a few times where I needed to restart many times because of poorly spaced checkpoints. There is also some question as to the actual message of the game. It raises interesting questions about the nature of life and friendship, as well as the necessity of sacrifice for the survival of a community. However, the game sort of just ends after a somewhat confusing stretch of plot. After a certain point in the game, and you will know it when you see it, everything feels sort of out of place. It left me more than a little puzzled considering how well-constructed the story had been up to that point. It isn’t horrible, and it isn’t so jarring that it ruins the game. It was just something I noticed could have been better.

This is a truly great game. Even though it has some flaws and can be very simplistic at times, you become so invested in it and it is so charming that it’s hard not to like. The writing is superb, the gameplay is ingenious in its simplicity, and the sound design is spot on. It also raises a lot of big questions about the nature of life and community.

I highly recommend it.

As a side note, I’ve realized lately that I don’t give a lot of bad reviews. The worst I’ve said about a game so far is that it’s just ok. Part of it is that I’ve mostly been reviewing cheap indie games I picked up in the Humble Bundle or for free. It’s hard to hate something when it’s cheap and you have no expectations. I try to point out the flaws in things, and I think I’m getting better at it, but it’s not always easy when you genuinely enjoyed something. I’m still getting the hang of this style of writing, so bear with me. Thanks for reading; I’m sure you are attractive and extremely intelligent.

Far Cry: Blood Dragon

2013-07-26T11:34:00.006-07:00

Video games have a problem with being serious. I’m not sure when it happened, but sometime in the past decade or so developers decided that a video game needed to be super serious to be taken seriously. It needed to tackle big themes, make a statement about humanity, and chide us for enjoying violence as we shooting the weaponry they programmed into their game. This hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing. Great games like The Last of Us and Bioshock: Infinite have been a direct result of this movement. Unfortunately, it also gave us the four player-character deaths in Modern Warfare 2 and the whiniest narrator since Holden Caulfield in Max Payne 3. The quality of the writing separates these games. Modern Warfare 2 is not exactly narrative heavy, while the story in Max Payne 3 serves only to slow-motion jump the player from one set piece to another with little to no regard for character development. A lack of awareness of how absurd they are also holds the games back from narrative greatness. The Last of Us and Bioshock: Infinite take a lot of time building characters and setting the rules for their respective worlds so that nothing feels out of place or too silly. Modern Warfare 2 has you fighting Russians in a fast food restaurant with Keith David. So what does any of this have to do with my game for the month, Far Cry: Blood Dragon? Well, to understand Blood Dragon, you have to understand the current climate surrounding game narratives and you have to understand its parent: Far Cry 3

Far Cry 3 typifies games that take themselves too seriously. It tries to tell an affecting narrative sharing similar themes with Heart of Darkness while it also throws ridiculous drug-fueled hallucination sequences and one-dimensional characters at you. It expects you to care about a bunch of rich white kids with little to no redeeming qualities while the main character, king of the rich white kids, lives out his own personal white native/white savior narrative. Then to make the disconnect even greater the game plops you on an open world island which makes forgetting the gist of the story very easy, and gives you a number of silly missions to take away any of the power the story has left. The narrative is atrocious, especially considering how much time they apparently put into it and how much game journalists apparently loved it (just read their Wikipedia page.) The game is saved by its stellar gameplay, which eschews any pretense of a serious game and lets you blow up sharks with grenades. So after playing this slog of a campaign and joy of an open-world experience, I was more than a little surprised to find out about Far Cry: Blood Dragon. I thought it was a joke at first; Far Cry 3 with 80’s home video trappings? It doesn’t make any sense. And that’s the beauty of it; in Blood Dragon Ubisoft has made a strong statement against their own game. They’ve made a campaign that is both compelling and fun. Unfortunately, they raised a whole new set of problems that prevent Blood Dragon from achieving greatness.

First things first: the setup. You are Sergeant Rex Power Colt; a cyber commando just trying to make his way in this mixed up, post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland. After unearthing a plot to destroy the world, you are forced to destroy the madman who thought it up by any means necessary. The odds are not in your favor; if the Omega soldiers don’t get you, the bevy of mutated animals probably will. But if you have enough skill and enough balls, you just might make it through…

The writing in this game is seriously brilliant. Though the comedy may lean a little too heavily on references sometimes, Colt’s dialogue never fails to make me laugh. It doesn’t hurt that the man speaking that dialogue is none other than Kyle Reese himself, Michael Biehn. His gruff, sarcastic tone screams action hero, and his one-liners never grow old. The story is ridiculous, but it’s supposed to be and it never wears out its welcome. Some things that try to be bad (read: Syfy movies) succeed without being entertaining. They’re made that way simply because they know if they make something sound crazy enough people will watch it. Here, the insanity is genuine. You can see there is real love for the aesthetic and the style of the time. This especially shows in the obscurity of some of the references. The shotgun is called the Galleria 1991, a Terminator 2 reference. The game starts with an assault on a base from a helicopter while Little Richard’s “Long, Tall Sally” plays; a reference to Predator. It’s not subtle, but even if you don’t get the actual reference it enhances the experience. You know that “Long, Tall Sally” is the only song that would fit that sequence even if you’d never seen Predator. You inherently understand the African-American sidekick who needs to slip curse words into every sentence even if you’ve never seen a buddy cop film or The Thing. It’s ingrained in our cultural memory. The narrative isn’t Dickens; it’s Bruckheimer, and it’s perfect.

In the middle of all of this 80’s nostalgia, however, are a lot of references to video games. Of course a lot of the references are to games at the dawn of the medium. For instance, the cut scenes in the game are not fully animated. Instead, they are drawn figures which move stiffly around a background. If you’re having trouble picturing it, imagine a child moving a paper doll around a picture of a house. Basically, it's this with better English. However, there are a lot of modern touches as well. They have a comically extended tutorial that includes a joke about free-to-play games. Also alongside a tracking bar that fits awesomely into the 80’s pastiche, there are hints and tips. This has been a very modern addition to the world of games and is used extensively in Far Cry 3, except that in Blood Dragon none of it is helpfully. It’s all painfully obvious tips like grenades explode or silly such as one that wonders why zip lines aren’t called sky ropes. It’s hard not to joke about the genre you’re working in when making a parody, but these jokes really stick out against the neon background of the game. Blood Dragon constantly jokes about the over-the-top style of these cheesy films, but it never questions why they existed. On the other hand it seems to constantly question the modern conventions it lampoons, especially those prevalent in Far Cry 3. A great example is the collecting missions. The player collects video tapes, watches TVs, and collects notes of one of the head doctors working with the main bad guy. This is similar to the idols and letters you collect in Far Cry 3. Whenever you collect something in Blood Dragon, though, Colt feels the need to say something like, “Six million credits to rebuild me, and I’m doing this?” The player-character actually thinks it’s pointless. This treatment of the different elements actually gives the game something of a message against all odds. Blood Dragon is constantly questioning why we aren’t making ridiculous things like we used to. Why do we have brown military shooters full of burly guys that say “Stay frosty” when we could have beefy dudes in jungles shooting aliens while insulting their mothers? It’s a plea for a badly needed does of invested frivolity; pointlessness with soul, if you will. Blood Dragon tries, even if just for a second, to teleport us to a time when film and the media were like vacuous babies. Everything was new and exciting, with insane outfits and androgynous men lived alongside ripped action heroes and a ridiculously folksy president. We still had the Soviet Union to direct our irrational hatred towards, and everything was right with the world. Blood Dragon wants everything to be simple again.

Unfortunately, just like its vision of 80’s pop culture, this game is deeply flawed. For one the gameplay somehow, in some small but important way, took a hit. The guns just don’t feel right. Gone is the thrill of creeping through a jungle stalking bands of mercs. Most egregiously, the world is way too dark. In an attempt to make the neon of the lasers and the general Tron-inspired glow of the place pop, the environment is almost completely black. It’s incredibly difficult to get a sense of where you are and where you’re going when you’re lost in a great void of a landmass. It was hard to connect to the space on any level. The same can be said for the bases. One of the nice touches in the Far Cry 3 was that every base was different. The differences in Blood Dragon are so minute that they may as well not exist for the most part. This all held the game way back. Setting, level design, or mise-en-scene if you’re a fancy cinema studies major like myself is one of the most important aspects of a game. It is where your player will be spending most of their time. It’s one of the best ways to convey the story without exposition. When you decide to make it black with a kind of red, hazy miasma hanging over it, the player will not connect. Also, as great as the story is, it falls into the anticlimax trap that Far Cry 3 has. I can't say more without ruining the whole game.

We can never go back to the 80’s; at least not until we invent a time machine. The culture of the time period was born of fears surrounding the changing political and social landscapes combined with a swiftly diminishing innocence that can never be replicated. Even for all of its love for the time, Blood Dragon is steeped in reference and irony because it has to be. We live in a time where everyone knows and understands where this is coming from, and to not wink is to not be in on the joke. The 80’s died, strangely, in 1993 with Last Action Hero. I can still appreciate what Blood Dragon is trying to do, though, and certainly champion a restrained version of the gospel I’m sure I’m only reading into it. Games do need more silly, over-the-top games with no agenda other than excitement and entertainment. We need crazy ideas. We need originality, even if we have to steal from other generations to get it. Blood Dragon needs more polish and a gameplay tune-up to be sure, but it was so much fun and seemed like it was so much fun to make that it hardly seems worth it to complain. If this review seems mixed, it is only my feelings are equally so. I want so badly to live in a time where I can see “G.I. Joe” cartoons and think they’re awesome without qualifying how silly they are, but I also understand how far we’ve come as a people since Reagan hand-delivered the first vial of crack to the inner city. It's hard to reconcile, just like its hard to reconcile that I love the style and tone of this game more than anything I've played since Infinite, but the gameplay felt so weird and unpolished.

This is a blog that reviews games, but I also try to work in a little academic thinking and actual reviewing rather than consumer reports as often as I can. Unfortunately, whether its the cold I came down with this week or a battle between the part of me that loves great works of art and the part of me that loves terrible pieces of trash, I honestly can't decide how I feel about this game. I can't say whether this game is good or bad; it defies those labels. I hate having to be that ambiguous in a blog like this, though, so I'm going to put it this way. At one point in the game, Colt gets a hold of a Gatling gun he can carry around and use. It's awesome. What's even better than that, though, is that when he is shooting over an extended period of time he starts to yell like Johnny Utah wishing he didn't love Patrick Swayze so much. There is a distinct possibility that at some point in this game, you will walk into a base full of cyber soldiers and empty a Gatling gun that shoots lasers at them while screaming at the top of your lungs. For me, that makes up for pretty much any failing the game has. If it does the same for you, play the game. You'll love it despite its flaws. If not, there's no point in you even thinking about it.

Tiny and Big

2013-07-19T17:09:00.003-07:00

I am a sucker for game physics, and physics are what has made this generation and hopefully the next generation so exciting. A lot of people focus on the graphical power of a game, which is arguably one of the least important aspects of a game. As long as you can see what is happening and the developer has a good sense of style, things don’t need to be photorealistic. Sonic and Knuckles is still more beautiful than most of the brown military shooters that have come out recently. On the other handSonic and Knuckles. You can’t mess around with weight distribution and other physics based puzzles like you can in Half Life 2 either. That is the kind of evolution that impresses me. This is why Tiny and Big in Grandpa’s Leftovers (or Tiny and Big as it will be known hereafter) is so up my alley. The gameplay is all pulling, pushing, and cutting the sometimes massive setting elements in the game. It can be very impressive. Unfortunately, it is marred by a lack of polish that can make the game excruciating.

, you can’t blow up buildings in

Developed by German development team Black Pants Game Studio, Tiny and Big has a promisingly oddball story. A nerd named Tiny is on a quest to retrieve a pair of magic underpants from a bully named Big. The pants, as he calls them, were given to him by his grandfather. In order to get the underpants back, Tiny must scale a vast and ancient pyramid while avoiding the doom which lurks around every corner. The game is funny in that quirky way so popular in independent media. The hand-drawn look of the game adds to this goofy strangeness. While often charming, the indie sensibility can also get in the game’s way sometimes. Tiny and Big seems to be a sequel, although I didn’t know this until I had already finished the game. I know nothing about the game that came before it, or if it was anything more than a beta version of the game I played. Either way I hope it explained or showed more than Grandpa’s Leftovers, because this game is confusing. While the basic storyline and motivations all make perfect sense, the particulars of the world don’t. I don’t actually know what Tiny and Big’s relationship actually is. At the end of the game they seem like they might be brothers, but you never get that through the rest of the game. Also the dialogue can be maddeningly obtuse. The characters seem to always be saying things strangely or in a way that doesn’t quite make sense. This may be because of the translation, because I have to assume it was originally written in German. The lack of voice acting didn’t help. I don’t like reading my games unless it is subtitled or a JRPG.

The gameplay, unfortunately, is haunted by similar problems. On one level, I really loved it. Tiny and Big is one of the purest platformers to come out in recent memory. Helping Tiny jump, cut, pull, and push his way up the temple can be very fun and rewarding. The laser is especially well done. There is something about cutting rocks into platforms or slicing off the entire side of the temple to reveal a secret area that is amazingly good fun. I would really like to see this style come back in another game. Then, just as you’re having fun, the lack of polish starts to show. For instance, it’s often difficult to tell exactly where a platform ends. There were multiple times where I accidentally fell off a ledge because I got a little too close to the edge, or I wasn’t paying attention and strolled right off a cliff only to find myself standing on thin air like Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade. The giant rocks you cut can smash you, which makes this aspect of the platforming fun and dangerous. However if said rock even thinks about rocking backwards it’ll squish you. The level design can be gorgeous with huge, sweeping vistas of desert or the impressive scale of the massive temple Tiny’s climbing. Then again, the whole place seems to be littered with crevasses you can fall through at any moment. There is little more frustrating in the world of games than falling for seemingly no reason. I almost quit the game a few times over it.

The biggest failing in Tiny and Big is the lack of connection between the story and the gameplay. The story doesn’t really seem to enhance the actions taken by the player. I rarely felt connected to what Tiny was doing because I was kept at a distance by the strangeness of the dialogue as well as the lack of exposition. I didn’t understand what I was doing or why I was doing it most of the time. I didn’t even know WHAT I was supposed to be doing in a lot of cases. The game is not always clear about where you need to go. The most important aspect of any story is motivation. Go to any creative writing workshop and I can almost guarantee that they will talk endlessly about why the characters did whatever they did. We know that Tiny needs to get the underwear back from Big because it came from his grandfather and he cherished it, but that emotion never really comes through. We don’t know anything about his grandfather at all other than that he was an archaeologist that specialized in underwear for some reason. About halfway through the game I started to get really bored because I neither knew nor particularly cared what why anything was happening. I was just cutting down platforms, jumping on them, and all the time moving closer towards…something. It picked up a little near the end, but that middle sagged amazingly low for such a short game.

So Tiny and Big is destined for the worst of all fates: mediocrity. There are really cool things going on in this game. The music is great, although obviously not so great that I remembered to mention it in the main body of my review. I like the gameplay most of the time, and the story has its moments. It all ultimately feels disconnected. The game simply doesn’t try hard enough to make you care about what is going on, and is somewhat shoddily assembled. I look forward to a better product next time, because this series has potential. I just hope that Black Pants Game Studio can get their act together. Also, maybe they could stop being obsessed with underwear. That would be nice.

I'm Scared: A Pixelated Nightmare

2013-07-12T14:18:00.001-07:00

Video games are a fantastic medium for the horror genre. The experience of controlling a character walking down a dark corridor is much more visceral and terrifying that watching someone on a screen or reading about it in a book. I haven't been truly scared by a film since The Ring came out in 2002. I can say, with some bruises to my ego, that I am still a little creeped out because of I’m Scared: A Pixelated Nightmare.

Video games are a fantastic medium for horror. There is something about walking down a dark corridor rather than watching someone or reading about someone doing it that makes the experience much more terrifying. I haven’t been scared by a movie since

I’m Scared, which you can download here, is a first-person horror game developed by Ivan Zanotti. The game starts with a completely silent screen onto which text appears as if it is being typed in real time. It seems to be a basic tutorial at first, but ends with the ominous words, “I’m extremely sorry. I didn’t really want to do that. Forgive me.” The player then awakens in a bare room with a table, a wardrobe, and a table. Once out of the room, the player wanders around, looking for a heart with which to open the door. None of this sounds scary written out, but in the moment it is chilling. Your footsteps sound like thunder when you walk. The low-quality graphics and low draw distance make everything fuzzy. Then, White Face shows up.

I’ve never been more terrified by the prospect of wandering around looking for keys than I was during I’m Scared. The horror is perfectly paced. It doesn’t rely too heavily on jump scares like a lot of recent horror films, but it also doesn’t burn so slowly that it becomes boring like the rest of the recent horror films. I don’t remember a single scare chord in the whole game. All I remember is the hissing and the laughing that foreshadowed White Face’s arrival. The sound design in the game is impeccable. It’s jarring, creepy, and uncanny with its choppy synth qualities. I’m Scared is a game that knows that louder isn’t scarier. A soft electronic hiss and a squishy moan beats a roar any day.

In tandem with the lo-fi, retro sound design is the graphics. I’m Scared has Superman 64- level graphics; just replace green smog with inky blackness. Contrary to popular design theories, higher graphics could have ruined this experience. The poor graphics are a great source of horror. Again, low draw distance makes it so you can only see a foot in front of your face. The blocky, dare I say pixelated environment naturally morphs common objects into unnatural shapes. The solid colors, which look like the result of a game developer overusing the bucket on MS Paint, serve as a perfect canvas for when the blood starts appearing. It all feels like, well, a nightmare; dark, confusing, and dreamy.

Both the poor audio and poor graphics serve to remind us just how creepy early gaming could be. One the most unsettling piece of music to me, to this day, is the song that plays in Lavender Town in the original Pokemon games. There’s something about poorly recorded pieces of media that creep us out more than well-produced pieces of similar narrative quality. Look at Paranormal Activity. That movie is objectively idiotic with unlikable characters played by actors slightly above community theater, but it is still regarded by many as terrifying. There’s a fifth sequel coming out this year. That is not a typo.

There’s not a whole lot to say about this game other than it is spooky as hell. The controls are all simple and fairly standard, and there’s not really a lot to do. The game is all atmosphere; a brooding and somewhat archaic experience similar to what Lovecraft might have made if he knew anything about video games. It’s also free, so I’m having a hard time really finding flaws with it. The low production value works in its favor, much in the same way as its popular predecessor Slender. It’s a prime example of how graphics don’t need to make a game more realistic to be effective. It’s also a lot of fun to play in the dark.

Little Inferno

2013-07-05T12:44:00.001-07:00

It’s been snowing for years and nobody knows why. What do you do? Burn everything you own, of course! Little Inferno, the arson simulator developed by the Tomorrow Corporation, is a darkly comic and vaguely moving tale about a boy who buys things and then lights them on fire. The gameplay consists of lighting various objects on fire in different predetermined combos. For instance if you burn the toy pirate and the bicycle together, you get a combo. Combos give you money with which to buy more stuff to burn and stamps to deliver the stuff to your house faster. After getting enough combos and buying all of the things in your catalogue, you can buy…a new catalogue full of new things to burn and new combos! It all sounds kind of pointless written out here, and it is. That’s the point.

The story doesn’t seem very interesting at first. Again, you’re a boy burning things in his shiny new Little Inferno Playset from the Tomorrow Corporation. Yes, the corporation in the game has the same name as the development team (which consists of three guys, by the way.) Then, a little girl named Sugar Plumps starts sending you letters. She is a little crazy, to say the least. Whenever one of her letters arrived, I always wondered if they had Adderall in this universe and, if so, how she had managed to stay off of it. Her letters, as well as letters sent by the head of the Tomorrow Corporation and a weatherman, all work together to reveal bits and pieces of the world they live in. It’s really cold, namely. Everyone is burning as much as they can to stay warm. Honestly it would have been nice if they’d been a little more specific with their story. Like Dear Esther and a lot of art actually, Little Inferno remains intentionally ambiguous to allow for discussion and the ideas of the audience to influence the narrative. It’s not exactly a blank slate, but more of a Rorschach test. You get a vague impression of what’s going on, but everything’s so abstract and sometimes downright random that it’s hard to pin. I think, for instance, that all of the Little Inferno sets are contributing to the cold snap. The soot is building up in the atmosphere and causing the Earth to cool, which in turn causes more burning. It’s the opposite of a runaway Greenhouse Effect. It never states this though so there’s no way to know. It’s just a theory I have.

Though the narrative lacks substance, its integration into the gameplay is very well done. One thing that is certain about this game is that it is a commentary on the games we play today. Again the actual message is maddeningly up for interpretation, but consider the point of view. For most of the game all the player sees is the Little Inferno. The edges of the fireplace/toy form a graphic match of a television. The game consists of putting objects into this screen and then destroying them, which is essentially how developers make their games and the audience plays them, respectively. If I had to guess, and I do because I’m that type of person, I would say that this is a statement on modern gaming. The simplicity and the potential tedium of the gameplay points out how much we are willing to go through to achieve an end that doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s a satire about how we play games that even goes so far as to question whether or not we should play games anymore. This satire mostly comes from the gameplay itself. While the letters and some late-game developments put it into sharper focus, it’s all there in the fire. The different objects you can order from the catalogue all have different effects when they are burned. Some pop, some change the color of the fire, some freeze things, some just scream horribly. When you are burning a teddy bear that watches you as it burns, it’s hard not to question whether or not we've

gone a little far in the video game violence department. It’s lightened slightly by the dark and referential humor in the game (the video game catalogue is the best) as well as the Burton-esque art style, but the deep disturbing knot in your stomach is still there.

Little Inferno isn't a great game, but it’s got a lot of great ideas. It can be tedious, and the lack of story details can be frustrating. It tries to be artistic, weird, and enigmatic, and it achieves that to some extent but occasionally at the cost of fun. The best way to describe it is quirky. Quirky is an overused term that lost a lot of its meaning once Zooey Deschanel became famous and everyone started trying too hard to be different. That’s how this game feels. It’s trying too hard to have a different and interesting story. It’s trying too hard to connect with the fringe. It’s trying too hard to be weird and artsy. Again to its credit, Little Inferno is often effective and boasts some really interesting ideas and commentary. I thought the beginning of the ending was extremely well done, which will only really make sense if you play the game. I thought the creepy toys and the little touches like the music that plays while perusing the catalogues were also inspired. But then the actual ending comes and it makes you wonder what the point of it all was. I encourage everyone to try the game if they can. The developers deserve to be rewarded if only because they tried to make something deeper than Call of Duty: Dog Simulator. It’s a beautifully flawed work of art. Maybe next time, just don’t try so hard?

The Last of Us

2013-06-28T12:25:00.003-07:00

The Last of Us, developed by Naughty Dog of Uncharted, Jak and Daxter, and Crash Bandicoot fame, has been justly hailed as a masterpiece by critics and gamers alike. It is a game of crushing emotional weight and narrative depth rarely seen before in games, though it’s becoming more common. The gameplay is tight and fun, if occasionally brutally difficult. It is one of the most beautiful and original games in recent memory. Yet, when broken down into its constituent parts, everything about it is as stale as can be. The zombie genre’s been done to death, the kid that needs protecting from the world trope is old hat, and the gameplay is essentially just toned-down Uncharted with crafting (which itself is ridiculously ubiquitous and tiresome.) Why is it that this game is so powerful then? Why are so many hailing it as one of the best cases for video games as art?

Let’s start with the narrative. The game starts with the main protagonist, Joel, and his daughter as they experience an outbreak of a fungal infection slightly more worrisome than athlete’s foot. This fungal infection latches itself on to the brain and drives the infected to become violently insane. While trying to escape the city something happens to his daughter, and then twenty years pass. The world has gone to hell. Joel lives in a quarantine zone in Boston and works as a smuggler. Twenty years of rough living have molded him into a hard-ass with graying hair and a no-nonsense attitude. After a series of unfortunate events, Joel is forced to help a fourteen-year-old girl named Ellie across the country to a medical research center where she may hold the key to curing the infection. So in the simplest terms, it’s a road narrative. Two people are forced to travel a distance and learn a little about each other and Life with a capital L. Again, this has been done countless times. Especially in the United States, our art is filled with images of the road: Kerouac’s On the Road, McCarthy’s The Road, Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”, Weird Al’s “I Love Rocky Road.” It works though, because road narratives never get old and the medium was practically built for them. Road narratives are kinetic by design, as are video games. Most games use the road structure and message (it’s not the destination but the journey) anyway. Look at the newest Fallout games, or any of Bethesda’s open-world games. They are about a hero on the road looking for adventure and loot, who happens to also affect the lives of millions of people because they are the chosen one or something. It’s never about the destination, be it slaying a giant dragon or capturing a dam; it’s about the journey that literally allows them to grow via experience points. The Last of Us eschews experience points for the more metaphysical character development. They use the road narrative structure, as well as many of the zombie apocalypse tableaus such as the “look at how ridiculous our consumer culture is” routine, to grow a legitimate affection for our characters. While we get why Joel’s a mess in the beginning our understanding deepens as he travels down the road, and we start to root for him to come to terms with what has happened. While we get that Ellie’s sassy in the beginning, a trait which could have quickly worn thin, we find out that she’s also resourceful, smart, and genuinely a pleasure to be around. So essentially, and this is a really novel concept, the narrative is good because the writing is good. More specifically, the writers knew what they were writing for. They understood the medium.

Like the story, the gameplay could have been tired. It’s a third-person action/shooter with a heavy emphasis on stealth and resource management. That does not sound fun. The reason it is fun is because of how well the story is integrated into the gameplay. As I’ve been saying for years now, the only way that games will advance as an art form is when game developers realize that they need to integrate the story and the interaction. Otherwise you’re watching a lame movie with some puzzles or shooting in between. A lot of the exposition and actual plot still comes through cinematics, but most of the character development is in the game. For instance, late in the game, there is a moment where Joel and Ellie are in yet another broken down building; this time it’s a train station. Ellie has been through a nasty ordeal, and has been quieter than usual. Joel tries to cheer her up by chatting cheerfully, but it just isn’t working. She keeps spacing out, not listening. Finally Joel figures a way to the next floor of the building: a ladder at the top of a high ledge. After the player presses triangle, he gets into position to boost Ellie up has he and the player have done countless times throughout the game. This time, however, Ellie never comes. Joel sighs and the animation halts. The player must walk over to Ellie and talk to her before they can continue. This may not sound particularly interesting on the page, but I found it to be one of the most powerful moments in all of my days of gaming. It’s subtle and understated. By usurping this repeated action, Naughty Dog lets us know in a way that dialogue never could that Ellie is really hurting. It is such a masterfully executed sequence that could only be in a video game.

That’s where the power in this game lies: execution. The voice acting is impeccable. Both Ellie (Ashley Johnson) and Joel (Troy Baker, who also played Booker in Bioshock: Infinite) are so convincing and likeable. The story and gameplay are intertwined in interesting and innovative ways. Even the zombies, the second most tired horror cliché of the new millennium after creepy ghost girls, are handled in interesting ways. The fungus which causes the symptoms continues to grow over the years to the point that the host can no longer see, so they use their increased hearing capabilities to find their victims. This leads to a clever reversal of the use of stealth in video games, where players need to stick to the shadows to avoid being caught. You can shine a light right in their faces and not be found, but if you walk just a little too loudly they will hunt you down. The lack of ammo along with the seemingly patternless paths the enemies take add so much tension to the stealth that it’s suffocating. A friend of mine pointed out that the bandits and cannibals in the game are referred to as “hunters,” playing on the idea of survival in the post-apocalypse and forcing the player to question their own actions. Aren’t they just trying to survive too? The Last of Us is a game that knows what it wants to do and say and, most importantly, it knows how to do it. That’s what makes it so great.

The game has not been without criticism. Philip Kollar of Polygon, for instance, criticizes the game for its difficult gunplay, some silly AI issues, and use of waves of enemies. Tom Mc Shea of Gamespot felt that the distance of the checkpoints didn’t allow the players to feel that they had enough to lose in dying and that they game, “…refuses to punish failure in a manner befitting the world.” I couldn’t disagree more with both of them, though in fairness to Mc Shea he still gives it a "Great" rating

. The difficult gunplay, even later when you are forced to use it more, only adds to the tension. When an
infected person is rushing at you and you just can’t seem to hit them, it is legitimately terrifying. Also, waves are the way zombies work. Again that’s why they’re scary. It is a brutal game that only becomes slightly less brutal the more you upgrade your weapons and Joel. Mc Shea’s complaint about the checkpoints is even more ridiculous. I thought they were usually sufficiently spaced enough to provide punishment for death. More than that, if this game was any more brutal Kollar would have a better argument. I would have thrown this game away in disgust if I had to totally restart a level, which seems to be the only punishment which would “befit” the world. I almost did anyway in my first real fight with the infected. Clickers have a one-hit kill that is so annoying I yelled at the TV, but I got smarter, started avoiding fights, and always made sure to take out the Clickers first if I could. Any real quibbles about the game are either expected (there are glitches in every game, and I’m pretty sure most gamers can ignore them by now) or a matter of opinion such as Kollar and Mc Shea’s.

To be frank, this is an amazing game. The story is haunting with a nearly perfect ending, the gameplay is unforgiving but rewarding, and the overall experience will stick with you long after the game is over. I think that this is direction single-player games are going and it somewhat ironically gives me a lot of hope for the future. Now if they could make a game this good that isn't morally ambiguous and oppressive, I could die happy.

Oh, and there’s multiplayer. Apparently it’s fun.

Dear Esther/Triumphant return

2013-06-24T10:49:00.000-07:00

Yes, yes I'm back. I'm making another run at this "writing on the Internet" thing, and I think I have a model that will work. Except for this post, you will get a review every Friday. Most of the month, they will be cheap, short indie games. Then, at the end of the month, there will be a more in-depth look at a larger mainstream release. To start, I've decided to look at one of the least reviewable games I've ever played because I like to make things as hard on myself as possible.

Dear Esther is either genius or an utter failure. I can’t decide. Included with the eighth Humble Bundle pack, it can barely be classified as a game because of its lack of goal or real interactivity. You walk. That’s the gameplay. You walk around an island while a disembodied voice reads letters that are never actually seen except as subtitles. The weird thing is, even as you scoff at the game, you keep walking. There is something compelling in the enigmatic way the game composes itself and reveals the shockingly vague narrative. It’s a mystery, in a way, but not in the classic whodunit sense. The mystery is what the hell this game is about. It truly defies any kind of summary judgment, so the best I can do is lay out the pieces for you to pick up.

Dear Esther starts with your character staring at the ocean from a first-person perspective while a letter is read and the sun sets. The graphics are fine with that strangely distinct look that the Source engine will give a game. After a minute or two of idly standing there, you, the player, will realize that all this time you have been able to move and the game decided spitefully not to tell you about it. This will be your relationship with the game from here on out. There are no arrows or objectives. There won’t be a letter explaining why you are wandering around on the island or where you actually are or what is going on in even the most basic terms. So you wander at a brooding pace around the island, sometimes getting stuck trying to figure out where to go only to realize that there was a staircase built into the wall that you had no way of seeing but should have known about if you didn’t want to flail into the sea. It is possible to die in the game, but you have to work at it. There’s no life bar or HUD of any kind, but if you swim out far enough into the ocean, you’ll drown.

I don’t want to give too many of the hints about the story away because those hints are the only reason to play the game; that is unless you like walking but hate exercise. The most I can comfortably say about the story is that it involves people and cars. I also interpreted the game as being about loss and dealing with grief because of some of the content contained within the letter, but I’m sure that’s one of a million interpretations. I myself had at least a hundred of them. Between the cryptic letters and the strange electrical diagrams and notes about Damascus of all things, I occasionally had the sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t about anything. The conspiracy theorist in my mind wondered if designers Dan Pinchbeck and Robert Briscoe were just throwing images on the screen and hoping that they meant something like a bad film student. It’s all very weird.

The thing is, when the game climaxes in one of the weirdest endings I’ve ever encountered, you get the feeling that you do understand; that there is something there. Subconsciously, on some level, you know what this game is about but you just can’t quite put your finger on it. And that’s the genius of the game. It’s so hopelessly pretentious, but there is something there on the tip of your tongue when it’s over. To use a slightly altered cliché, it’s like not knowing why you’re walking into a room, and then feel like you knew why when you were walking in and then forgot. To its credit, it also engages with narrative in a wholly interactive way. While you can only walk and turn your head (even the flashlight is automatic,) you are always driving the story forward. Even though your actions are limited every one of them drives the story forward, even if the story is driving through a swamp of molasses. It’s truly maddening in the same way that Inception is maddening or any of the other great mind-benders. I’m not saying that this game is as well-crafted as a Christopher Nolan film, but it has those aspirations and comes surprisingly close. I urge you to play this game if only to experience it. Is it good? No idea. I don’t really care, honestly. What I do know is that it’s cheap and it will make you question many things, including your own sanity. What more can you ask for from a piece of art?

Bastion: Initial Thoughts

2012-05-06T20:08:00.000-07:00

I'm maybe halfway through Bastion, and so far I'm seeing what everyone loved about the game.

The game is set in a fictional land that has experienced a horrible calamity called...well, The Calamity. I don't know what said calamity is so far, but the game is unfolding at a nice pace and I'm certainly intrigued. The gameplay is mostly beat-em-up with a little bit of RPG and platforming mixed in. The platforming is extremely annoying, as it isn't based on jumping but on trying to stay on these floating platforms. With the angle the camera is at, this gets old fast.

The art style in the game is very intriguing. It's not quite Windwaker-style cell-shading, but it is very cartoony. The characters and environments look like color versions of Alice in Wonderland illustrations, or any old-timey stories I suppose. It's simultaneously fanciful and dangerous; nostalgic and ominous.

The most heavily-lauded and famous part of Bastion has to be the narrator. Everyone was going bonkers over this interactive narrator who comments on everything you do. At first, I really didn't like him. The constant commentary annoyed the hell out of me and I really wished I was just playing a pretty beat-em-up. He's started to grow on me, however. They made him funny and sardonic. He isn't snide exactly, but he does have an edge to his voice that makes it feel like he's told this story a few times and has no patience for shenanigans. I still don't know if his inclusion is as revolutionary as everyone thought, but it is certainly entertaining.

I'll come back with more next week when I have a little more to say. Stay tuned.

Mass Effect 3: Final Thoughts

2012-04-29T14:43:00.001-07:00

First, I would like to apologize for not posting last week. School has been hectic this term to say the least, and the maintenance of this is of a slightly lower priority than graduating from college. Again, sorry. I will try to be more diligent.

Second, I would like to know what you all think of this new format. I think it's a little too long-form, but it will work a little differently when I haven't finished a game before I even start thinking about my reviews. Therefore, I will give it another month before I revise the idea, but I would like to hear what you all have to say.

Ok, so final thoughts on Mass Effect 3. I have to say that I stand by my previous assertions. I think that Bioware has created a fantastic series of games because of their focus on engrossing gameplay and a deep, fascinating universe to explore. They create characters that players can relate to, even if they are a bit two-dimensional. As for Mass Effect 3 itself, all of the above is true. However, they wrote a terrible ending for a game. They tried to make it artistic with an open-ending, and failed miserably. It's a weird, aggravating exercise that they may not be able to fix, but that is for critics like me to complain about and not necessarily for Bioware to fix. There were also issues with DLC that are too complex to really get in to here. I will just say that I don't like DLC and I wish it would go away, but they make too much money off of it for that to happen. Besides those two (kind of big) issues, it's another great entry in a great series of games.

One thing that I forgot to talk about in my review of the story of the game was a little boy. While escaping from Earth, Shepard tries to save a little boy who is hiding in an air-vent. No matter what the player chooses, the boy runs away. Later, he blows the hell up in a ship that is fleeing. Throughout the game, there are dream sequences that show the boy running through the woods. The player then controls Shepard as he/she chases the boy through a grey grove filled with Reaper noises and lazers. Bioware was trying to show Shepard's inner turmoil with this ghost-boy, but its really just a transparent ploy to emotionally involve the player that fails miserably for a couple of reasons. For one, you see the boy for about two seconds before he is blown to smithereens. Call me heartless, but I don't care about a character I see for two seconds no matter how old they are. We have no idea who this kid is other than the fact that he's a kid. Another reason is that he's a damn stupid kid. Everyone knows who Commander Shepard is on Earth, and any child with brains should realize that he/she is going to give you the best chance of survival by far. So now we've got a dumb kid we've barely met haunting Shepard's dreams and giving us no emotional response, so Bioware makes it essentially the same dream every time to make it repetitive and boring as well as ineffective. This is a place where the narrative of Bioware as master storytellers kind of falls apart. Of course, all of this is moot if the Indoctrination Theory is true, but at face value the child is pointless.

All right, I'm finally done with Mass Effect 3. Feel free to tell me what you think in the comments. I'm moving on.

Mass Effect 3: The Ending

2012-04-15T17:38:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a spoiler-laden article here about the various problems with the ending of Mass Effect 3. It was going to be sprawling and deep and it was going to blow all of your goddamn minds. Then, I did a Google search for 'Mass Effect 3 Endings' and realized that this is already old news. I don't care anymore. There's no right answer in this and we have to live with what Bioware gave us. For the sake of furthering the art of gaming, as I am obviously its vanguard, I will say that the ending is way too confusing. If the Indoctrination Theory is true (viewable here, but beware of spoilers and overproduction,) then Bioware should have made it more explicit and expanded. I like open endings, but only when they are done well and have more than three seconds of footage to hint and what's coming next.

I'll post links at the bottom so that you guys can read various takes on the ending, but I'm still going to put my two cents in here really fast. Video games are a very new art form with very new rules. Developers feel they own a game because they made it and gamers feel they own a game because of how invested they are in the story; they feel they are in that story. This is even more true in an RPG, and doubly super infinity true when an RPG is as well-crafted and beloved as Mass Effect. I think gamers went too far especially the one who filed a complaint with the FTC, but at the same time Bioware really dropped the ball. Anyway, I'll just give you the links and let you decide for yourself, although I will give commentary with each link.

I agree that your choices do affect the middle of the game, but this guy underestimates the importance of endings

This guy likes 2001 way too much. Video games do not need overwrought and confusing endings to mature. Still makes some good points, though.

This guy gives the best reasons why the ending is atrocious

Just as a recap:

1) The Mass Effect 3 ending is terrible because it makes no sense, ignores most players decisions and is overall confusing, melodramatic, and awful.

2) However, if video games are art, then we must respect the authors and their vision. We can argue and whine about how bad it is, but changing it would arguably destroy it as a work of art.

3) You're damned if you do and damned if you don't, Bioware. Think next time, and make sure that the new ending you're making works. I'm sick of this and don't really want to talk about it anymore. See you guys next week.

Mass Effect 3: The Story

2012-04-09T15:39:00.001-07:00

This post will almost certainly contain spoilers.

Bioware, above all other game developers, are heralded for their narratives. They have an undeniable knack for telling tales that can capture the imaginations of their fans. Between Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, and the most important series for this week Mass Effect, they've built a reputation as well as become a sort of posterboy for the potential that video games have as vehicles for narratives. Why? What makes them so different from the rest of the competition? Mass Effect 3 is the perfect opportunity to explore what Bioware does well, and what they do poorly in terms of story. It also gives us the chance to ask what it is that makes video games so compelling to the people who play them.

Before I get into the specifics, I suppose I should give a very brief overview of what happens in the game. The Reapers have finally nutted-up and decided to start wiping out organic life in the galaxy. They start with Earth, and Shepard is forced to leave in order to gather an army and defeat the synthetic bastards. That's basically it. You get two new squadmates, although only one is actually a new character. His name is James and he's one of the worst characters I've ever encountered in the Mass Effect universe. He's too cliche and too voiced-by-Freddie-Prince-Jr. for me to like him. Also, I'm pretty sure he takes steroids. It's terrifying. The story is still set up in that fairly open style in which you can play the missions in almost any order that you want, with the exception of one mission that makes it impossible to finish a bunch of others that I didn't know about until I did it and lost about five hours of game time which was just dandy. I spent about forty hours playing it, although I've heard of people somehow putting upwards of ninety hours in. I don't know how that's possible, but there you have it.

The best way to sum up what is great about Bioware's ability to spin a story is an anecdote. I was playing Mass Effect 3 and was very depressed about something big that had just happened (I know that I warned about spoilers, but I just can't say what that thing is.) As the cut-scene played and particles fell from the sky around the characters, the music from the title screen of the first Mass Effect started to play. It's a beautiful score; sort of techno, but the kind of awe-inspiring techno that shares more with the opening harmonics in the "Star Trek" theme song than Deadmau5. As I sat there watching this cut-scene, I started to get a little choked-up. This generally doesn't happen with me in a video game, no matter how good the game. I loved Bioshock, but I didn't feel a lump in the back of my throat during the ending cut-scene. This scene did that. I was amazed and couldn't stop thinking about why I'd had that reaction. I've decided that the reason for this emotional response is Bioware's uncanny ability to make the gamer feel attachment, not only to characters but to entire universes. A few people have joked derisively about the amount of dialogue in Bioware games, but that dialogue forces the gamer to connect to the game in a way that few others do. Even Skyrim, which is one of the conceived games in one of the best conceived universes in gaming history, couldn't come close to the emotional resonance of these games because of the amount of freedom that players have to not chat with NPC's. Everything is too expansive and too spread out to have any kind of emotion at all. I remember beating Skyrim and feeling next to nothing, partially because I still had a bunch more missions and partially because it just kind of happened. Bioware forces to player to talk to the people in their universe, and by way of their dialogue wheel the player is actually talking to those NPC's (albeit through pre-programmed responses.) The NPC's then talk about their views, their lives, and the qualities of their people, expanding the universe and forcing the player to pick a side. That is the strength of Bioware's storytelling; they force you to engage in the conversation and, in the process, find out about this vast universe their engineers have created. It's a mix of interactivity and depth that few have quite gotten right.

I was going to write here about what Bioware does wrong in their storytelling. For instance, their characters can be extremely wooden. The lines they deliver sound unnatural and awkward. Their voice actors aren't always the best and sound like they're reading the ingredients on a cereal box instead of worrying about the end of the universe. This is especially true of the male Shepard, who is excruciatingly hard to listen to sometimes. The structure of their stories is very loose and unconnected sometimes. Then I realized that I really didn't care. I think they need to fix the dialogue and hire better voice actors, sure, but the stories they tell are still intense and interesting. We still connect to these characters even if they are occasionally written with the subtlety of a fat ninja. Again, it has to be that mix of interactivity and deep personal histories that connects us to these characters. Let's look at an example: why do fans love Liara besides her propensity for lesbian sex scenes? Well, of course there is manipulation. Bioware made her smart and adorably awkward like a blue Zoe Deschanel.

The Same Person

She's essentially the girl-next-door type. However, though she is a good person, she also has a mother who almost helps destroy organic life. She becomes the Shadowbroker as well, which adds some danger and depth to her character. There is also all that you learn about her people, and eventually about her father. She becomes interesting because she doesn't necessarily fit into any traditional archetypes. She's not the whore or the mother, and while she is likable and essentially a good person, she is no madonna. She can be a cold-blooded killer, in fact. She is a really good blend of prototypical and atypical. We need that archetypal foundation of the good, approachable girl so that we can relate to her and become invested in all of the exposition/backstory she will have to deliver, but we also need that edge to keep an interest. In the grand scheme of things, it's actually quite skillfully done. However, again, on a line-by-line basis, the quality of the writing suffers. This leads to something interesting I've noticed about narrative in video games; the detailed skill of the writing doesn't matter.

In terms of narrative, video games share just as much with books as they do with film. Yes, they are visually oriented, but they are also long-form and take anywhere from six hours to infinity to finish. Therefore, I would like to do something a little odd and compare Mass Effect 3 to the Harry Potter series. How closely have you read those books? If you've taken any time to actually read them, it becomes apparent that they aren't particularly well-written. JK Rowling's dialogue is often very unwieldy, the structures of the stories can be nearly non-existent and calling some of the characters flat is an understatement. However, they are some of the best-selling and most-beloved books of all-time. I love them. The reasons for this is the same reason that Bioware and other game developers can succeed in telling a great story without necessarily having the best writing. The number one most important thing is building a universe that the characters inhabit. The world Harry and his friends live in is, for lack of a better term, magical. There's fantastic creatures, imaginative inventions, and whimsical/nightmareish adventure around every corner. It's a fully realized realm that people would love to explore. The same is true of Mass Effect, Dragon Age or The Elder Scrolls if we're going to leave Bioware canon. Hell, Star Wars and "Star Trek" could be included in here as well as a bevy of other sci-fi and fantasy titles. Beyond a world, they also have characters that are enjoyable, if not always deep. Who doesn't love Aberforth, even if he probably had sex with a goat? The gruffer, disillusioned Dumbledore is interesting not because he's such an interesting character, but because of how he fits into the mythos and how differently he acts from Albus Dumbledore, the beloved and complex character we miss throughout the seventh book. A good equivalent to Aberforth in Mass Effect 3 would be the Asari barmaid in the Presidium Commons. Asari are wise and generally aloof, but this lady is gruff and harshly-spoken. Again, this is using the player's knowledge of this universe they set up to make characters engaging and entertaining. Then, of course, there's the length. Both Mass Effect and any Harry Potter book are too long to remember the specifics of each conversation. If you say that Ron said something, I can assume it was probably something incredibly stupid and possibly funny. If you say Garrus said something, I can assume it was badass. I couldn't tell you what either of them actually said, though, which allows the player to fill in the blanks themselves. I choose to believe these characters were well-written because I liked them and can't remember specific reasons to believe anything else.

So what am I trying to say in this vast, tangled weave of text? The writers at Bioware aren't William Shakespeare. They aren't even Christopher Nolan. They use a lot of cliches and manipulation, their dialogue is awkward, and a lot of stuff feels disconnected or doesn't really make sense. However, they are pioneers. They are attempting to write deep storylines and build interesting characters in a medium that doesn't always pride itself on its storytelling abilities. Writing in video games is a deep, unmapped lake in the middle of nowhere and Bioware is just dipping a toe. They are laying groundwork for what will eventually be a medium that could rival all others before it in terms of emotional power and narrative complexity. You have to applaud them for that.

Mass Effect 3: General Feelings

2012-04-02T15:08:00.000-07:00

Well, after a very long break I am back. I know you've all missed me terribly, as I am one of the few shining lights in your life. You don't have to say it, I just know. To my Russian readers, dosvedanya or something. I'm sorry, I don't speak your language. Anyway, I've decided to break up my reviews into four week parts so that I can put more thought into them and maybe actually finish games before I review them, just like a big boy. Generally the first week will be first impressions, the second and third will be something interesting I've noticed about the game, and the fourth week will either be a reworking of my original impressions based on the ending or something else I thought was interesting if my first impressions were totally right. If there are five Sundays in a month, then I just get an extra week to play the new game. I think this will allow for a little more analysis and depth. Also, again, the finishing the game thing. That's been bugging me since I started writing this blog. This month will be a little different, however, as I have already finished the game. I was sick almost all of Spring Break so I had nothing better to do. Therefore, I have all of my impressions of the game and will have to be crafty with the rest of my articles. Also, I'm now posting this on a Monday so I've already screwed up the format. Anyway, I hope this works better than that hellish weekly format.

Now that old business is closed, we shall move on to new business: Mass Effect 3. As all of you know, I am a huge fan of the Mass Effect series. Bioware has done a fantastic job of building a deep universe, a compelling story, and a rabid fan-base. Because of the quality of the previous games in the series, hype for Mass Effect 3 has been fevered. Ads were ubiquitous on TV and the Internet in the months leading up to its release. Xbox Live even had a countdown on the dashboard. However, the game has also been mired in controversies surrounding its ending and DLC. I'll talk about the endings and controversy in different, spoiler-laden part of the review. Right now, I want to talk about the more general gameplay aspects of Mass Effect 3. Does the game work as a game?

In terms of actual game-play, everything is very much like Mass Effect 2. The style is more action-RPG than the first one, with fast-paced, roll-and-shoot game play not totally unlike Gears of War. The characters still have powers to upgrade, though now there is a branching tree-esque system in place where the gamer picks between two different modifications to their skills once they upgrade it past level three. There are all kinds of cool weapons that are actually impressively distinct in terms of how they fire and how much damage they can do. The vehicle sections are still gone, the elevators load quickly, and they've added decapitation effects when you shoot enemies in the head. In terms of bare-bones gameplay, nothing has changed. The dialogue is also handled similarly using Bioware's patent-pending talk-o-gram dialogue wheel. The paragon/renegade quick-time actions are also still in place, though now they can have actual influence on the game. Really, what you can take from the game play is that Shepard is still a badass space warrior who will stop at nothing to see an end to the Reapers.

There are two gameplay concepts introduced into Mass Effect 3 that are different and really modify the game feels; the war assets and the multiplayer. War assets are a concept that isn't completely alien to the Mass Effect franchise. The essentially act like the upgrades to the ship from Mass Effect 2 in that you need to take part in missions in order to acquire resources to get the best ending possible for your playthrough. It's a fairly simple concept, but one that is even more effective in this game. Collecting war assets feels so much grander and more important than modifying an engine. It's easier to imagine amassing hordes of Elcor to help in your war effort than imaging the difference between Thanix cannons and whatever second-rate crap Cerberus installed on your ship in the first place. It's epic, for lack of a better word, and makes you want to gather every race in the galaxy to help save Earth. The multiplayer is much less successful. If you don't already know, the multiplayer in Mass Effect 3 is tied to the single-player via a galaxy readiness system. Galactic readiness is a handicap on your war assets that cuts off half of the effective strength of those armies from the beginning. For instance, if your war assets total at five thousand and your galactic readiness is at 50%, then your effective strength is only around two-thousand five-hundred, which will probably give you an ending that results in everyone dying and show naked pictures of old Marlon Brando. In order to raise your galactic readiness, you either need to play the multiplayer or apps you can get on your phone or Ipad. Its extremely annoying, especially since the free app is really only useful as a way to boost your galactic readiness in multiplayer. The multiplayer itself is essentially horde mode, where you kill wave after wave of increasingly difficult enemies. You can unlock different classes, races, and other schwag as you gain levels. There seems to be one map for every system in the game's universe, so that's about six maps. Its not awful, its just really boring and made to feel like a chore you have to complete to complete your single-player campaign. It's horribly unnecessary.

Besides the very existence of multiplayer, the only other problem with the game-play is that the controls can be a bit awkward on occasion, especially while using cover. Shepard has a tendency to roll when he/she should really duck or randomly stand up completely out of cover for no discernible reason. It seems like a little thing, but it can get you killed pretty easily. Other than that, all I can say is that its Mass Effect. They want you to feel powerful without being a god like just about every other game out there, and they execute very well. The gun play is tight, the dialogue system is still the best around, and the quick-time events are actually enjoyable which is the exception when it comes to quick-time events.

Next week, I'll talk narrative in this game and the rest of the Mass Effect series. I don't know if I'll talk about endings yet. I might make an article that's all about controversies. We'll see.

SORRY

2012-03-08T13:55:00.002-08:00

I realize it's been a very long time since I've posted anything on this blog. This likely disturbed my readers immensely, possibly leading to alcoholism or insanity. For that, I apologize. The reason for my absence, besides factors like living my life, is that I've been rethinking the format of this blog. A week is not enough time. As you may have noticed, I rarely finish the games I review. This gives me a good idea of how a game is, but isn't really fair or as thorough as I would like. I also feel I'm rushing like mad the entire time. So I'm debating changing it to a review a month, or possibly writing and article a week, but only on one game a month. I'm doing some soul searching is what I'm saying. So I'm sorry I haven't said anything before this, but I think I'll probably start posting again in April. It's starting to get sunny outside so we'll see how that goes, but I think I should be able to do that.

Ta ta,
Drew

Rock Band 3 and Rhythm Games

2012-02-16T15:43:00.000-08:00

Music and rhythm games have been around for a long time. Dance Dance Revolution, Rez, Space Channel 5, and even the mini-game in Ocarina of Time are all prime examples. However, for a very long time they were a niche genre. Unless they were part of a larger game, music games didn't sell particularly well and most didn't consider them to be a part of the enormous pantheon of classic games. Then there was Harmonix.

Harmonix is a developer that deals almost exclusively in music and rhythm games. In the early 2000's, they released Frequency and Amplitude. In the game, the player took control of a weird, futuristic DJ. Using a track-and-button system not unlike their later Guitar Hero and Rockband games, the player would pound out notes using a regular controller rather than an instrument peripheral. The player also controlled every track of the song, rather than one instrument. The games garnered plenty of critical respect and a loyal cult following. A few years later, in 2005, they released the first Guitar Hero game through Activision for the Playstation 2. Obviously, this game came with the guitar peripheral developed by Red Octane. It was, again, a big success critically, but not hugely popular with gamers at first. However, it started to gain traction and by the time Guitar Hero 2 was released the following year, it was huge. Harmonix then decided that they wanted to expand the instrumentation to drums and vocals, as well as the guitars already in place. Activision laughed in their faces, so they left to make the Rockband series.

For a while, in the late 2000's, the Rockband and Guitar Hero series were the best selling games on the market, though they were popular for slightly different reasons. Guitar Hero was slightly more competitive with it's face-off mode pitting two guitarists against one another, while Rockband was symbiotic with everyone coming together to finish a song as a band. Their business models were very different, with Guitar Hero pumping out full-blown and full-priced games multiple times a year and Rockband focusing on downloadable content. After a few years, the market became saturated to the point that no one could figure out any reason to buy a new game. With a full band of plastic instruments cluttering their apartments, people had had enough. It was in this market with this mindset that Harmonix released Rockband 3.

Rockband 3, to its credit, tried to revolutionize the genre. Rather than release a $60 game that could have been sold as DLC and made much more money, Harmonix decided that they were going to actually teach players to play the instruments they'd been pretending to play for the past few years. Pro mode was going to be their crowning achievement and the the ending to an inevitable progression. And there was no way in hell it was going to work.

The drums made sense. They'd released cymbal expansions a few years ago that a person could put on their kit for little more than aesthetic value, so with a quick update, the player could play the drums when the game said drums and cymbals when a new round symbol came flying down the track. The keyboard (a new peripheral) was also fairly easy since the piece of equipment was new and was cheap enough to include in a bundle with the game without being totally inconceivable to buy. Nothing was needed to make the vocals pro, though they did throw in three-part harmonies that no one ever used. The only thing left was the guitar. There were two guitars; a plastic one and a real one. No one wanted the plastic one, because it was stupid. It was a replica of a Fender Mustang that had a button where each fret should have been. It also had less fret than a guitar, so the whole goal of teaching the gamer how to play the guitar was lost. the only option was the real Squire that Fender had made specially for the game. It was cool, though it was over $300 before you bought the adapter necessary to interface with the game. No one was willing to buy a substandard guitar that they could use to play a video game and the whole experiment flopped.

Nowadays, Rockband still quietly sells tons of DLC to people who still enjoy banging away on those plastic instruments (myself included.) The Guitar Hero franchise, which was taken over by Tony Hawk developers Neversoft for some reason, is apparently dead. There are many reasons for this, most notably over-saturation (There were twelve different games released in five years, not counting mobile and portable games,) and a weird decision to add vague story lines and gimmicks to the games. While rhythm games focused on dancing are still seemingly popular (including Harmonix's Dance Central series,) the heyday of plastic instruments seems to be over. The Rockband developers have wisely moved to building their music library and releasing the tracks through digital distribution rather than releasing new games every few weeks.

It had been a long time since I'd played Rockband when I picked it up this week and, to my surprise, it's still really fun. My fingers don't remember the brightly-colored frets of my old, white Explorer controller as well as I'd hoped, but I fudged my way through my Jimi Hendrix DLC and old enemies like "Green Grass and High Tides." There's nothing really to say about Rockband other than it's a great game to play drunk and rowdy with a group of dorky friends. I once saw a man get through "Almost Easy" while he was on acid and I had to wonder if he was the reincarnation of John Bonham. You don't get that same experience out of Halo or sports games. This is less of a review and more of a message that you should try these games again. You may have forgotten how much fun they can be.

Half Life 2

2012-02-08T18:17:00.000-08:00

Recently there was a push by people on Steam, developer Valve's digital distribution service, to force Gabe Newell and the other folks at Valve to say literally anything about their most anticipated game; Half Life 3. Since releasing the Orange Box set in 2007, no one has said anything about a Half Life: Episode 3 or the more likely, full-length follow-up to the genre-defining series. In an attempt to persuade Valve, some Steam users played Half Life 2 in an attempt to rocket the game up the play-charts and send a message that Gordon Freeman had not been forgotten. The game only got to number eleven on the chart over the weekend and Valve has kept mum on the subject of a sequel. This got me thinking about the game again, however. Half Life 2 was my first favorite game, and it is an extremely important one to many people. The entire series has shown that first-person shooters, a genre notorious for attracting meat heads of the highest caliber, can be art. Just thinking about it makes me feel fuzzy inside.

It's impossible to talk about the merits of Half Life 2 without first discussing the merits of its predecessor, Half Life. Half Life was released in 1998, spewed from the churning cauldron that was the modding community. It was built with a heavily modded version of the Quake engine. The game is notable for many reasons, including AI that was extremely advanced for the time and its position at a weird crossroads between shooter and platformer. However, most would say that its most important contribution to the world of video games was its narrative. The story itself wasn't deep, although a quick Wikipedia search will reveal a deep world outside of the game-space. The player character was a theoretical physicist by the name of Gordon Freeman. He looked a little like Ed Norton with a goatee, glasses and a super advanced Hazard suit that worked as a suit of armor that shielded him from environmental hazards as well as attacks. In the beginning of the game, an experiment Gordon is involved in results in a catastrophic event known as a resonance cascade. The resonance cascade rips open a hole in space-time and sends forth a variety of monsters from another dimension known as Xen. The rest of the game is simply Gordon trying to escape. Much happens, of course, but that is the basic structure.

The dreaded zombie from Half Life

What was remarkable about the game was the lack of cutting. There were no cut-scenes or cinematics in the game. The only reason that the player knew what Gordon Freeman looked like was from the art on the box. This continuous game play was a huge step forward. It made the player feel closer to Gordon. Freeman never speaks throughout the game, either, allowing the player to project their own thoughts onto him. One of the most riveting scenes in the game is one which normally would have been glossed over in cut-scene. In the introduction scene of the game, the player stands in a high-tech tram. This tram lowers into the Black Mesa Research Facility at the start and takes the player on a tour. there are giant machines and bubbling vats of neon-green ooze. There are giant metal blast doors that take a few seconds to open, building the tension and player's curiosity. At one point you see a man in a business suit; the great enigma of the series, the G-Man. Eventually, the player arrives at their destination, and the game begins. That scene illustrates perfectly the pacing and narrative control that Valve used in this game. The concept is very simple (aliens come from another dimension and you have to escape,) but with the build in tension and the multitude of problems Gordon must overcome, the game starts to feel epic and because of the lack of cut-scenes the player is always a part of the action.

After Half Life, fans were rabid for a sequel. While Gearbox developed some competent expansion packs, everyone wanted Gordon back. It didn't happen until 2004 for a variety of reasons including, but not limited to, the development of the Steam distribution service, development of the Source engine, and a German hacker stealing their source code. When the game was finally released in 2004, it was a revelation.

Welcome to City 17

The game looked beautiful, and I think it still does. Gordon finds himself in City 17 after something that happened at the end of the first Half Life that I don't want to ruin for anyone who hasn't played it. City 17 is one of many urban centers controlled by the Combine, an alien race that has enslaved the human race. As with the first game, there is an introductory scene in which there is no real action where the world is revealed to the player. Everything is very 1984, with the smiling face of this universe's big Brother, Dr. Breen, slathering propaganda onto the newly arrived visitors. There are hints of atrocities and oppression all around. Nothing is over-the-top and very little is actually said. It's very obvious through little actions and snippets of dialogue that everything is very wrong. From there, the action picks up considerably, with portals and teleportation, vehicle sequences and intense gun-fighting. The story is even more engrossing than its predecessor, with characters who are actually likable (something that doesn't happen often in video games.) The world feels more realized than in the first game and everything shines.

My favorite part of the game is later on, when you find a car. As you're driving along a coastal road, you are constantly attacked by Combine forces. Sometimes this means you have to stop and snipe them with a crossbow, sometimes it means surviving an assault that feels eerily lifelike. If you aren't paying attention, they can sneak up on you and get you with that shotgun. All the while, the most beautiful scenery every put into a game is on display. It feels like the Pacific Northwest, actually. I felt like the bridge could have been found in Astoria. Large pine trees are everywhere and you can feel the mist on your neck. It's a glorious sequence. There is also the famous Ravenholm sequence featured in the demo of the game. It's essentially Valve's take on a zombie film (at least before Left 4 Dead) and it needs to be seen by everyone.

The physics, appropriately considering Gordon's profession, were also a major step forward. For one of the first, if not the first, time in gaming history, there were actually puzzles based around the physics of the game. I remember the first time I figured out that putting bricks onto one side of fulcrum weighed the contraption down enough that I could run up the side like a ramp and jump onto a ledge. It was exhilarating. Then there was, of course, the Gravity Gun. I like to call it the Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator, but that might be because I'm a giant dork. The idea of a device that can pull or push random objects in game space was genius. It was a revolutionary idea that is still being ripped off today. There is little more terrifying in the world of games than hearing the pitiful moans of a zombie, and little more satisfying than launching a saw blade at the abomination and slicing it at the midsection.

Speaking of sound, there has never been better than the sound in Half Life 2. There is a crispness to it like it was recorded in an autumn morning. Everything is so clear and concise; the crack of the crowbar, the snap of the pistol, the boom of the shotgun. That piercing screech and hoot of the fast zombies would make Bruce Lee soil himself while the headcrabs had an almost adorable chirp until they latched onto your face. The aural qualities of the game were immediate and sharp, only adding to the immediacy and the beauty of the game.

The game deals with issues that all good games deal with; namely, control. Control is an inherently big issue in the world of games because control is the very foundation of games. Without control, without gameplay, a game is just a very awkward animated film. Control is everything. In Half Life 2, you have the G-Man silently observing you, and you get the feeling that he is somehow responsible for all of this. There are the Vortagaunts, aliens who were former slaves with no free will. In the previous game, you were forced to kill in the first game because of their bondage to a massive alien by the name of Nihalenth. Now, they help you and worship you for freeing them from their shackles. They sometimes speak of seeing a million eyes through Gordon's, a possible allusion to the players of the game. Breen is controlled by the Combine, but the Combine appears to be controlled by some unseen force, as Gordon is. Everything that happens comes back to one decision made at the end of the last game, and who controls whom.

I cannot speak highly enough of this game. It is damn near perfect with beautiful visuals, incredible sound design, fun game play and the most enthralling storyline of any game I've ever played. Most great games have some of these qualities. I don't know if I've played another game that has all of them (maybe Portal, but it's still Valve and they're in the same universe so doesn't matter.) If you haven't played these games, play them.

And I would do horrible sex acts to Gabe Newell if he'd release Half Life 3.

NCAA Football 12

2012-02-01T16:30:00.000-08:00

Dear five or so readers,

I was going to write a long piece about genre and how video games are simultaneously three things: games, narratives and simulations. It was interesting, but ultimately had nothing to do with this game. Let's face it, it's a game about playing football. You get a lot of options in terms of player stats, conference realignment and plays. If you like college football, you'll like this game. If you don't care, you will care even less about this. It's fun, but ultimately extremely stupid. Not even my uncanny ability to bullshit could connect this game to anything deeper. I've got some homework to do, and then I'll see about writing something a little deeper in a few days.

Love,

Drew Norton

Writer/World-Class Assassin

Costume Quest

2012-01-25T16:39:00.000-08:00

Just out of curiosity, how many of you know who Tim Schaffer is? If you don't, just know that I don't hate you, but I am terribly disappointed in you. Tim Schaffer is the fantastic creative designer and head of Double Fine Studios. He started at Lucas Arts before founding Double Fine in 2000 and has helped developed some of the best, or at least best written, games in history including The Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, and the flawed but enjoyable Brutal Legend. Recently, Double Fine has begun to create smaller games for release through digital distribution services such as Xbox Live and Steam. The first of these games is Costume Quest, and I could not be happier with the results.

Costume Quest is a simple game, but it is executed so perfectly. In terms of game mechanics, it's a fairly standard turn-based RPG. You choose the attacks you wish your character to perform and then they perform them. The game requires the player to press certain buttons during the attack at certain times or hammer on a button to power up the attack and keep the battles a little more dynamic. This is also required when the enemies attack to minimize the damage taken. I suppose they're technically quick-time events, but they don't result in instant death and are relatively easy so they actually worked well. When not in battle, the player wanders around in three different environments in search of new costumes which somehow change the characters into magical beings, candy which is used as currency, and quests, which are usually of the 'fetch' variety. There are a few mini-games and collectables, too, but overall there is little to the game in terms of actual playing. You look around, you trick-or-treat a little bit and then you fight some monsters. There is a little variety that kept things fresh, but there is little more to the game than that.

So why do I like this game so much? Well, it all comes down to the narrative. Don't get me wrong, this is extremely simple, too. You are either a boy or a girl whose sister or brother is abducted by monsters because they think he/she is candy. The rest of the game is a quest to get them back. That's really it. However, the writing and the environments are so charming that it is impossible to dislike the game. Every line of dialogue in the game is fantastic. I bought the game, in fact, because of a screen shot I saw of a boy in a banana suit making an Arrested Development reference that I won't spoil here. Video game writing doesn't get better than this. It's a little annoying that there's no voice acting, but I don't mind reading every once in a while. Then there's the environments, or really the overall tone of the game which the environments evoked so perfectly. This game brings back the memories of childhood and bygone Halloweens so perfectly that I thought I would asphyxiate on the nostalgia. All of the kids running around, the constant pursuit of candy, and the sheer adventure of being a child is all so beautifully rendered. The three main environments are a suburban neighborhood, a gigantic mall and a little town that looks like it is somewhere in Connecticut or one of those other Northeastern states that are so beautifully and disgustingly quaint. I love it so much.

This is a short review, I know, but it is also a short game. It took me just about seven hours to beat with minimal effort. Be that as it may, I urge you to buy this game. Tim Schaffer is the closest thing to an auteur that video games have right now and he should be supported. At the same time, this is a fantastic game about the joys of being young. The imagination, the writing and the sheer love that went into this game makes it irresistible. I feel that this game is a modern Norman Rockwell painting. It embodies everything we hold dear, including meta humor, pop culture references, fantastic imagination and a deep undercurrent of, for lack of a better term, goodness. I'd say love, but I'm not a hippie. It's one of the few games I've ever seen that has children killing monsters for candy that I think is totally wholesome.

More Thoughts on Dead Island

2012-01-22T15:43:00.000-08:00

The more I play this game, the more I hate it. I've been playing co-op with my girlfriend recently because there's nothing better to do, and I have to say that this is one of the most frustrating, broken experiences I've ever had. The Thugs (AKA really big zombies) are annoying in that they can basically look at you and send you flying around a room like a bouncy ball. However, this annoyance is relatively contained in the beginning of the game because there's rarely more than one Thug in an area. However, once you get into the city level, everything can knock you over in one hit! Isn't that wonderful? I thought at first that this was because of the zombie leveling system, which scales somewhat with the player's level. However, I was continually knocked off of my feet by zombies several levels below me, zombies which just randomly decided to spawn behind me when I was fighting one of the annoying mini-boss super zombie things that they stole from Left 4 Dead. How can you play a game that has enemies that are illogically much stronger than you spawning out of nowhere for ever and ever and ever? There is no end to them. This may have been a premeditated idea for the game as zombies tend to swarm (they're social creatures, of course.) If that's the case, however, then make the combat fun or consistent or even usable for Christ's sake. In the beginning of the game, you can just kick a zombie and it basically explodes in a cloud of dust. Later on, however, you can kick them a million times and they just keep swinging at you while a million other zombies randomly spawn. Then of course there's the stamina meter that forces you to choose your shots or, you know, stop swinging altogether and die a horrible death. Also, your weapons break so that might happen. They pile all of this unnecessary crap onto their game to make it difficult, but its just annoying. In fact, even with all of this extraneous bullshit, the game would be easy if it wasn't so glitchy. I've swung at a zombie that was right in front of me and missed before. That isn't a testament to how bad of a gamer I am, but to how I swung through the zombie like it was a ghost. Maybe that's a power that zombies get when they reach level 20 or something.

Speaking of which, why do the zombies have levels? That is the stupidest concept I've eve heard. What do zombies gain out of levels? How do they gain them in the first place? What experiences are they gaining? Humans gaining levels makes sense because they're learning how to do different things, how to handle different situations and handle their weapons properly. Zombies can't do this because they're fucking zombies. Zombies don't learn from their mistakes. That's stupid. Zombies don't get stronger and grow. They're dead. Next they'll have zombie families and go to their zombie job where they hope to get a promotion to director of brain sales or something. Zombies are brainless and primal creatures that act on instinct. Thecided to completely ruin the intrinsic nature of the zombie to keep with the aesthetics of the RPG.

Finally, and most possibly nit-picky, is the whole central premise of the game. Not the tired survival aspect of the zombie experience, though that is annoying. No, the fact that your character can't be infected. It makes sense, of course. If you could be infected, then you would die very easily. It would be an even more annoying game than it already is. However, the thing that is scary or unnerving or even compelling about zombies is that they can infect you. Zombies can turn you into a monster with simply a bite or transfer of fluids. That's scary. However, what are zombies without their infectious nature? They're dead people that can walk. Creepy, yes, but what the hell is a walking corpse going to do to you? Half of the zombies in this game don't even have weapons, so they are just scratching at this character that is cutting them up with a machete or bashing them in the head with a baseball bat and, at least starting in the city section, they start to become very deadly. That is ridiculous. I know there's really no way around it, because instant infection would make the game unplayable. However while being scratched a lot hurts, it hardly seems deadly, no mater what level the zombie is at THIS IS STUPID!

There were a number of things this game could have used (polish, a writer, ect.) and a lot of things it could have done without (zombie levels, glitches, ect.) As it stands, we have a mediocre zombie game that couldn't possibly have lived up to its expectations and instead delivers an infuriating mix of glitches and poor gameplay. Sorry about this rant. I was playing this game this morning and I just couldn't take leaving these things unsaid. It fails on a narrative level, a gameplay level and just a general fun level.

Dead Island

2012-01-18T17:08:00.000-08:00

Dead Island is a poster boy for a giant problem in the world of video games: pre-rendered trailers. Pre-rendered trailers, or previews for video games that only show cinematics and not actual gameplay footage, tell the consumer absolutely nothing about what a game actually is while still making the game look fantastic. Dead Island's trailer was magnificent and set the Internet buzzing like a bee hive. All that this trailer tells you about the actual game is that there are zombies in it. If you watched that trailer, could you tell me that this game is a survival horror/RPG game in which you play one of four characters immune to a zombie virus? No, you could tell me that its cool how it was all in reverse and such. That's it. This isn't an isolated incident. Could you tell me that Alice: Madness Returns is a platformer from this trailer? Or how about how the battle system works in this one for Final Fantasy XIII-2. Yes, it will probably involve chocobos and moogles at some point, but beyond that it's a mystery. If you see a really great pre-rendered trailer for a game and feel a sudden itching in your pocket, you either have a strange STD or you should wait to see a gameplay trailer before you buy that game...or both I suppose.

Now, beyond this trailer business, Dead Island is a remarkably unremarkable game. It's not terrible, it's just repetitive and boring. As I said before, the game is about whichever character the player chooses doing zombie survival-themed fetch-quests. I chose the black guy because, as I've stated many times, video games don't know how to handle minorities and the subtleties of character yet. I derive endless pleasure from hearing a man say, "Copacetic," when they are handed a mission, especially when the man in question has a voice that sounds like it was picked out of a stereotype line-up. Other than the fact that he is black and some back-story my character read to me during the selection process like it was an interview, I know nothing about my character and learn even less. In fact, I've forgotten everything that was read to me except that he was from New Orleans (also, he conspicuously loses his Nawlens accent the second he stops telling me his life story at the beginning, so that apparently didn't matter anyway.) There is no characterization beyond what weapon each character specializes in. If you're hoping that the lack of characterization in the player character is made up for in an ensemble of kooky NPC's, you're sorely mistaken. I don't remember any of the characters except for Sinamoi, and that's only because I was trying to figure out where the hell that name came from the whole time I played it. I have to assume it's some kind of islander name, but I'm out of luck so far.

However, what the game lacks in story and characters, it also lacks in gameplay. This is an action/RPG, and in that spirit every character has some specializations into which the player can dump the skill points they accrue through a leveling system. I know this idea is Earth-shattering, but please try not to soil yourselves. My character, who's name is Sam B. I just remembered, specializes in blunt weapons and heals over time. Huzzah! To move up the skill tiers, the character must fully invest in at least one of the skills in the tier below it (below it in terms of power at least, as it is technically above the next tier in the menu.) It's all really simple stuff. The combat is just about as simple, with most characters swinging and stabbing their way through hordes of enemies. The enemies level with the players, but I never really had any trouble with them. There are special zombies, such as the infinitely annoying thugs which can knock the player down with a single hit. The player can also throw items at the zombies, use environmental weapons such as propane tanks and upgrade their weapons with a somewhat fun mod system. However, the weapons degrade and must be repaired which, along with charging weapons, is one of my least favorite game mechanics in the video game industry. I know weapons break in real life and its a good way to stop the players from becoming the
Übermensch, but I want to feel powerful when I'm using a flaming baseball bat. Call me crazy, but it's just a dream of mine.

One thing I will give the game is its weird little details. For instance, when you look downwards in the game, you can actually see your character's legs. That's rare, indeed. Also, when starting a car, the character actually turns the key and puts the car into gear. The legs are just a nice aesthetic choice but the car starting, whether or not there is really danger, adds a taste of panic to a moment that would be completely over-looked in any other game. I've never had a zombie break into a car and kill me in that game, but every time I was running away from them towards a vehicle, it was on my mind. However, this glimmer of interest is squashed by other attempts at realism, like a stamina bar that forces the player to stop attacking if it goes down to zero. In fact, there were a few times I was swinging a crow bar Gordan Freeman-style and my famous rapper character decided to just quit swinging. My stamina was fine, but he decided that the zombie might just let him go if he stopped swinging. I don't know if it was a glitch or if this was supposed to simulate a zombie blocking somehow, but it was extremely annoying.

When it comes down to it, this game is nothing more than a great trailer. Playing co-op with a friend or loved one makes the game much more fun (though the lack of polish is even more noticeable), but as a single-player experience it's lacking. The concept of zombies, at least in the classic Romero style, have been looked at from ever angle. There is nothing more to say about them. Furthermore, the gameplay doesn't seem to go beyond simply trying to make the game realistic, as if that would add enough tension to completely ignore story, characters or meaning of any kind. I am very aware that this game takes part on a rich party island and that it is most likely a commentary on the super rich and capitalism in general. Fantastic. I always love to hear about how capitalism is evil from people who sell their product on false advertising.

Saints Row: The Third

2012-01-11T21:35:00.000-08:00

It's hard to really decide how I feel about Saints' Row: The Third. It raises a lot of conflicting emotions. On one hand, it's fun. All of the Saints' Row games are great open-world games because they haven't forgotten that you can do anything you want in them. On the other hand, it's really stupid. It hovers right around Soul Plane on the Drew Norton Scale of Stupidity that I just made up and refuse to calibrate. There's a thin line between fun and stupidity in the world of video games, and Saints' Row: The Third poops all over that line. I think that's why I enjoyed it so much.

The story is non-existent. Everything that happens is just a setup for a raid on a sex dungeon or an excuse to blow a skyscraper sky-high. For the purposes of this review though, I can tell you that the boss of the 3rd Street Saints (a gang from the imaginary town of Stillwater) gets screwed over again and ends up in a new town called Steelport. Underneath all of the baseball bat-sized dildos, this is just a revenge tale. Of course, it's really hard to look underneath dildos of that magnitude.

This game was sold on its zaniness. It seems unlikely that anyone has failed to see one of the commercials for this game parodying Japanese game shows. Yes, there are killer game shows, multiple missions involving free-falling out of airplanes and a street gang that has become a commercial force to be reckoned with. Everything glows in the city of Steelport, from casino fronts to the lighting underneath a custom sports car.There are references to everything from old-school gaming to old-school film actors with fantastic mustaches. It seems like the developers cranked everything to eleven for this game, which I have to give them credit for. This does lead to situations that may turn-off people not entrenched in the culture of gaming. People who have played these types of games for years, blowing up a town full of people with an RPG is par for the course (though this game goes much, much farther than that.) However, I can see how other people might be turned-off by this excessive violence, sex, drugs and sheer volume. Those people also don't know what fun is, but I digress.

An argument could easily be made that this game lacks any kind of narrative depth. In fact, I doubt there would be any argument. There's little to no character development, there really isn't a plot so much as a general theme of destroying gang leaders and anyone with even the slightest tendency to deviate from the path of the main story-line could easily lose the thread altogether in a mash-up of side quests and mini-games. Even when there is something resembling a story, all of the dialogue is silly. Don't get me wrong it can also be awesome, but in more of an Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando way than in a way that connects you to the characters. Really, it's just poorly written. It is.

However, while everything in the story is silly (and that's being kind), two things about this game are done better than almost any game I've played; the customization and the developers' imagination. Volition made an amazing world in Steelport. All of the neighborhoods are fantastically realized with a ton of flair. The gangs are amazingly cool, with a group of luchadores, some Tron junkies and a group of Matrix-esque badasses ruling the various islands. The situations in the game, while sometimes cheesy or forced, are almost always entertaining.

That's what this game is; entertaining. I can see how people could feel disconnected by the sheer stupidity of the game, and I can't disagree with them or say that I don't wish this game was better written. However, I had so much fun shooting tanks, flying high-tech fighter jets and killing hookers with giant rubber penises that I could look past the sub-sophomoric humor and god-awful writing. It's a romp, best played drunk with friends. At least it was more fun than Battlefield 3.

Edit: I realized that I completely forgot to talk about the second thing I thought was amazing; the customization. It was nagging at me all day, so I've finally gotten to it. The character creator in this game is phenomenal, allowing you to tweak your character's features to the smallest degree. The only thing I wanted that wasn't there was a great bushy beard, but alas we can't have everything in life. Instead, I made mine look almost exactly like Bruce Campbell in the Evil Dead so I was happy. It's also possible to customize your vehicles to the tiniest detail as well as make somewhat minor changes to your wardrobe. It's a lot of fun to play around with.

Battlefield 3

2011-12-29T11:05:00.001-08:00

I hate Battlefield 3. I hate Battlefield 3 so very, very much. So many people love it, including many of my best friends. I hate it with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. Why? Oh, where to begin...

Well, let's start with the single player, as it will take the least amount of time to talk about. Why did they even give this game a single player, much less and entire disc of single player? The story, from the few minutes I played of it, revolves around a terror plot that the Secret Service agent from "24" and some other guy are trying to get out of the player character through boring flashback sequences. It's like Call of Duty: Black Ops, but with even less heart. Everything looks so generic that I just couldn't find a way to get into any aspect of it. Hey, that building's blowing up. Isn't that pretty? Look at those particle effects. Boring.

Now for the reason this game exists; multiplayer. There is nothing less satisfying that spawn-killing; for the killed and, I would hope, the killer. Say what you want about Call of Duty multiplayer, but I have yet to be spawn-killed once in the four games or so since the first Modern Warfare. Not once. On the other hand, I have been spawn-killed at least once in every match I've played in Battlefield 3. Camping is also the order of the day, with snipers lurking in every dark corner of the map. I am in the small camp of people who legitimately believes that camping is a legitimate strategy. However, it makes the game really annoying. I don't camp because running around stabbing guys or blasting them with shotguns is significantly more fun. I just enjoy the twitch shooter, or at least the shooter that allows for both camping and speedy fun, over fifteen minutes of bullets flying into my skull from across the map.

Speaking of maps, do you like the same two maps over and over again? Well then you're in luck! Every map in the game seems to be smaller portions of the same two maps; a European city and an industrial area filled with crates. That's all you get. Every other game in existence in this first-person shooter style has at least three maps, usually significantly more. How lazy can they be? And don't even get me started on the menus in this game, which may feature the worst game lobby ever made. When a match is over, you can't mess around with your loadouts, I don't think you can invite friends to your match and you most certainly cannot quit from the match without quitting out of the entire game and going to the dashboard. I don't understand how this could be screwed up. I just don't understand the thinking.

At the end of the day, I hate this game because of what it stands for and how it was sold. I'm so tired of these modern military shooters that I'm actually pining for a good ol' fashioned WWII shooter. At least you got some interesting history out of those. These clandestine modern games set in fake conflicts that tend to simultaneously wish the Cold War was still on while figuring out a way to demonize as many different kinds of brown people as possible. Battlefield's the worst because they try to make it seem realistic, which brings us to the way it was sold. How many times did you hear the phrase Frostbite 2 associated with this game? Hell, they actually have Frostbite 2 alongside DICE, the developer, in the opening credits. Does anyone give a rat's ass about an engine? Video games are an interesting crossroads between art, entertainment and technology, but Battlefield 3 almost seems like a really long tech demo at this point. Everything was so poorly thought-out and executed in the game that I get the feeling that all of the work went into their stupid engine. And you know what? It looks ok. The particle effects are pretty. I like the lighting. However, why does it matter that a game has the capacity to be good-looking when the level design is so boring and generic? Frostbite 2 might make some great games, but this isn't one of them.

So why do I hate this game? It's soulless, boring and against everything I stand for as a gamer. It doesn't feel polished. It's not fun. There's just nothing to enjoy. Single player is stupid and multiplayer is one of the most annoying experiences I've ever had the misfortune of getting myself into. Then there's the little things, like the stupid glitch effect they use when transitioning between menus, or the stupid menus themselves. If you're going to play the game, play it online with a friend because it's really the only way it's fun. Otherwise, please ditch this game and support innovation rather than an inaccurate and boring war sim.

Limbo

2011-12-29T02:16:00.000-08:00

The more I write these reviews, the more I am beginning to realize that it is damn near impossible to complete a game in a week. If it was all I did, maybe. However as it stands, I have a life outside of video games that seems to prevent me from totally finishing most of the games I play, especially when there are holidays and families around. I can still pick apart the flaws of a game and get a good sense about of its merits, but I am missing out on chunks of the game and I will try my very bestest to play more in the future. Are we good? Good.

I played Limbo this week, a haunting and beautiful 2D side-scrolling platformer from Danish developer Playdead. Platformers, if you don't know, are classically console games in which the player jumps around on platforms to reach some kind of goal. Platformers were all the rage in the 8 and 16-bit eras of gaming with Mario and Sonic games leading the pack, but they fell out of favor with the advent of 3D gaming. However, with the recent indie-gaming boom, 2D platformers with 3D backgrounds and setpieces have made a major comeback, and Limbo is easily the best I've played so far.

In the game, you play a boy who is traversing a bleak landscape to do...something. I've heard that the boy is looking for his sister; a development that is undoubtedly revealed past the choke-point on which I've been stuck for too long to say. Any kind of traditional narrative doesn't really matter in this game, though. Like minimalist films such as Meshes of the Afternoon, the story itself isn't the point of game. The game attempts to establish a mood and an emotion in the player. For all intents and purposes, this game is simply about a young boy trying to avoid death in a perilous environment.

The gameplay is as simple as can be. I bought it on Steam for my PC, so the controls for me were the left and right arrow keys to move side to side, the up arrow for jump and the control key to grab things. Those are really the only mechanics. However, much like the many uses for the portal gun in Portal, this simple gameplay leads to astonishing variety when combined with a physics engine. Pulling and jumping can only get you so far, unless things fall, slide and generally act in a way that is somewhat close to the real world. For instance, chains swing like they would in real life, so if a beam that you can pull is attached to a chain, you can pull it and use it to swing to a ledge or something. This opens up so many avenues through which developers can create fascinating puzzles.

Also, I can't move on without mentioning the beautiful art style of the game. Everything is in black and white, with varying shades of grey and strange depths of field creating a very dynamic environment. The visuals go so far in creating a sense of mystery and loneliness.

It's just so creepy and beautiful it's hard to explain. I don't know how Playdead made this game, but it is simply glorious.

One of the interesting and truly genius things that Playdead did in Limbo is make the player character a child. Ask anyone, especially Steven Spielberg, and they will tell you that children in danger will instantly cause the audience to pay attention. This is not a children's game. This is a very dark and very violent game. I don't know how many times I watched that boy impale himself on a spike because of a bad jump or fall off of a cliff. The interesting thing is that every time it happened, it hurt a little. I cared more for this character, who never speaks and has no real motivation, than most of the speaking characters I've encountered in dozens of other games. It's because I'm playing as a child, as well as the fact that the violence is so brutal and pervasive and the environment is so engrossing. This game hurts to play, but in a good way. It is a very simple story of survival, but also a very powerful one.

One of the most noticeable things in the game is the boy's eyes. They glow brightly and seem to always be the whitest thing on the screen. At first I thought the game developers threw that in there to make the game even creepier, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that they're a symbol for life. Whenever the boy dies, you can see that light drain from his eyes. It's heartbreaking. There are other people in the game, but they don't have the bright eyes that the boy does. He's a pure, wide-eyed child in a very dark and scary world; something everyone can connect to.

This is one of the best games I've ever played. It's simply stunning. I love the minimalism of the whole affair, from the visuals to controls, and how they evoke this feeling of dread, mystery and even excitement. There are some small problems, such as some inaccurate jump mechanics and the boy's tendency to hang onto boxes even when it causes him to drown or electrocute himself. None of that matters though and I suggest everyone buy it. It's beautiful, it's affecting and it may be one of the best games of all time.

Pure Laziness

2011-12-21T15:38:00.000-08:00

I've been a lazy son of a bitch this week. I've been playing a bunch of games on and off for the expressed purpose of-gasp-having fun. I've been going back to Shogun, which is interesting to me, and Skyrim mostly. I bought Blue Dragon because it was exceedingly cheap and I want to do a JRPG at some point, but I am really not in the mood right now. I also bought Amnesia: The Dark Descent because Steam is going crazy with sales and my girlfriend wants to watch me play it, but I may kill myself if I ever have to open another goddamn drawer. There are a few others I could play, but now I don't have enough time. Really, what this boils down to is that motivating yourself during winter break is tough and making yourself play video games you aren't necessarily that into does not make that job easier. Still, it's what I've chosen to do, so I should have followed through. Next week, you will almost certainly have a new review. Hell, you might have one tomorrow, we'll see. I hope it suffices to say that I will be back soon and we will just call this my winter break from blogging, even though I'm writing this message now. This was all over the place, but there you go. Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, a most splendid Kwanzaa, festive Festivus and whatever other celebrations there are out there.