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Whoever wrote the ending to Red Dead Redemption is one dumb cowpoke [Reasoned Reviews]

Aram Zucker-Scharff — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 02:23:39 +0000

So I finished Red Dead Redemption last month. It was a pretty fun game and, despite excessive horse riding, I enjoyed myself. Then I got to the end and I never wanted anything to do with the game again. This is why.

Below are spoilers, so if you intend to play through Red Dead yourself do so and come back.

Rockstar has a tendency to write reluctant protagonists. Niko Bellic, from GTA4, wouldn’t stop whining about how he wanted to live the American dream in peace, even while he was shooting people. Red Dead is no exception. The main character, John Marston, is so eager to be done with his mission he practically gets killed in the first 30 minutes of the game.

Thankfully, Marston has a good reason for his reluctance while on an armed rampage. Our player character is an ex-outlaw and the FBI is holding his family hostage to get him to kill off his old running buddies. For once, I’ve found an open world game with a plot that actually makes a great deal of sense. In fact, overall, the game is well written; the characters seem fairly three-dimensional; the narrative thread is coherent and enjoyable; and overall the game mechanics make it just fun to play.

If you played through the first 95% of the game, you might very well be justified if you thought it was one of the best games you’ve played.

Then came the end.

Red Dead contains a great deal of homage to the old Wild West films and stories of its genre, but it is rarely predictable. However, about 35 hours into the 38 hours I spent playing the game, I had beaten everyone. All the bosses were dead, I’d cleaned up most of my little corner of the west and completed many of the side quests. Marston’s family was and I went through a series of farming quests. I had to go hunting, pick up supplies, hang with Marston’s son and round-up cattle. I got a taste of the idyllic life of the Marston family farm. Of course, I knew what was coming. They were fattening me for the slaughter.

In this case the ‘they’ is the FBI, who have decided that, despite you having followed their orders and saved their lives throughout the game, you are clearly too much of an outlaw to live.

Now, you can play the game as a good or bad Marston but, no matter what you do, Marston is perpetually talking about his desire to just go home and settle down. The last few missions before the end are boring farm tasks. You just mosey around and build up a non-outlaw life for yourself. Despite this, the FBI send what is apparently an entire regiment of the American army to wipe out your farm. After killing what has to be a good 40 or 50 people, you and your family retreat to a barn. You make your wife and son go out through the back while you, in dramatic slow motion, push open the barn doors and confront about 12 enemies. You’re given the opportunity to kill some of them, but in the end they shoot you down.

This is not a bad concept. It’s easy to see that Rockstar was trying to emulate the old Westerns. In the typical western style it wasn’t entirely uncommon for the hero, running from a past he couldn’t escape, to die to protect the ones he loves. If that had been the case, the death scene and corresponding interactivity would have made a lot of sense. However, the scene, and indeed the whole final mission, did not fit in the existing narrative or character.

You spend the game fighting hard, even taking down governments, to gain back your family and farm. You’ve proved your potential usefulness and willingness to obey the FBI. You even spend the last few missions seeing just how much Marston loves his family and non-outlaw life.

There is just no real reason for the FBI to wait a week or two after letting Marston have everything back before hitting him. It’s just foolish to try to do so while he’s staying in a highly defensible position which he values. They could have just shot him in the back. Honestly. There are sniper rifles in the game, someone could have just taken a head shot. The agents could have just walked in the front door.

But ignoring that stupidity, there was no reason for the FBI to come after him to begin with. Marston had settled down. He’d spent all game talking about how much he wanted to become a farmer. If he had wanted to be an outlaw he could have gone off and never came back. He had just finished discrediting himself to the entire outlaw community by hunting down his brothers-in-crime, he was not a threat.

Then there is Marston’s behavior. They shot his uncle, they shot up his farm, they tried to shoot his family. While you play John Marston, you kill a fort filled with armed men, ride west, and start a Mexican revolution. You have friends and back-up all over. If the game hadn’t stopped me, I could have easily taken out all of those enemies. Marston, as a character, could fall back and gather friendly forces. He could even retreat to Mexico, where he’d be free from the FBI and probably able to put together a decent life.

There is another completely illogical element. That Marston would take a chance on a threat to his family continuing to exist. Marston is so in love with his wife that he refuses to have sex with the many prostitutes littered throughout the area (a serious act of self-control in a Rockstar game). He’s been all about his family this whole time. The game makes it abundantly clear that the West is still not a kind place to women who don’t have men. The strongest female character in the game still gets kidnapped and raped before you can save her, even with her having a father. Why, in god’s name, would Marston want to leave his family alone instead of going on the run with them? Isn’t that the opposite of what he’s been fighting for?

John Marston’s actions are essentially suicide without reason. It goes completely contrary to his character. Rockstar just wanted to shock you by killing off your character at the end of the game. But it’s a cheap shock, one existing outside of everything already established in the game and because of that it cheapens the whole game.

Grimm Just Can’t Make Me Care [Reasoned Reviews]

Aram Zucker-Scharff — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:11:00 +0000

I missed an episode of Grimm yesterday and I’ve discovered something, I don’t care enough to buy it.

So, I’ve been playing the episodes of Grimm as they’ve been coming out. The Grimm episodes are hardly special, merely arcade-style gaming with a more historical framing device than, say, Gauntlet. They are fun, I won’t disagree with that, but Gametap has made a fatal mistake with this episodic game if they intended it to sell their service.

There is no connection between episodes.

The reason people are hooked into TV shows like Lost, or American Idol, or games like Sam & Max, is because their is some common element between episodes, some sort of evolution of character or plot.

Unfortunately there is no evolution from episode to episode of Grimm. American McGee’s storytelling abilities seem to have gone to waste here. Yes, it is interesting to see the Disney versions of fairy tales turned into something more like their original versions. Yes, Grimm is an amusing character in that way that we are amused by characters who are dirty, grungy, and trying so very hard to be mean. The animation is clever, though considering they are using the Unreal engine, you are left asking: You really couldn’t have done something a little better than this? In principle, Grimm has most of the elements in place to become a good episodic game.

However, the complete lack of connection between episodes is a sale killer. While plenty of people will be willing to log in for some casual gaming fun, the audience has no reason to buy old episodes. There’s nothing to go back and review, as old episodes have no impact on new ones, and there’s no reason to replay, except to keep narrowing down your time, which you should be able to do within the time period of free play.

In fact, the whole idea of scoring the game on time-to-complete seems almost counter-intuitive. Both dark and light worlds are interesting to look at and explore and some of the results of Grimm’s filthy-field are just plain amusing to watch. Rushing through the game, you miss out on what makes it fun. Your spread of darkness and finding of secrets doesn’t change the score in the slightest as far as I can see, which means if you are going for time, there’s no point in Grimming up the whole world or hunting down secrets. And no time to squash those filthy cleaning NPCs as they so rightly deserve!

Even that wouldn’t be so bad, if it wasn’t for the complete lack of connection. McGee is partly known for his mastery of plot in Alice, yet that ability isn’t really displayed here.

Grimm isn’t a bad game, far from it. In fact, I’d highly recommend you try and check out each episode as it goes live and download the one continually free episode, the first. Grimm is good arcade-style fun. It just has no incentive, as an episodic game, to take my quarters. Sorry Gametap.

Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 1 [Assignment]

Aram Zucker-Scharff — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 07:20:00 +0000

I looked at three of the works in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, however I was entranced by Inanimate Alice, going so far as to pursue the other episodes. As I worked through each of the short interactive episodes, I couldn’t help but feel that this sort of thing was where the future lies. Semi-interactive and pure convergence.

The simplicity of the stories themselves were a strong point. We are rapidly coming to the point where we all have handhelds like Alice’s and we will be getting all of our media through them. In cases like that, a book cannot just be words. All the media elements, music, video, pictures, interactivity, have to come together and feed into the work, not just feed off it (in the case of transmedia). All the elements have to feed together in a seamless whole. In Alice’s case, they did and they did so because all the elements were simple ones. It was an even playing field.

The simplicity of the controls was important as well, opening up the work to people with all levels of computer knowledge. You could conceivably see this played with a remote on a TV screen.

A narrative is a delicate thing, and Alice has got it just right. Gardner called narrative “a fictional dream” and as such it is delicate, it can take the smallest mistype to disturb it and break the reader/viewer out of their dream. This is even harder with a convergent-based story because any of the multimedia elements could jar the viewer out of the narrative dream. The creators of Inanimate Alice understood that. It feels like some sort of future journal by this young girl who is just as confused as we are. The viewer sees the story unfold bit-by-bit along with Alice. The whole experience, blurred photos, odd and sometimes skipping music, and the story of a girl who seems so… lost… is haunting. As a work of fiction it is flawless.

The truth of the matter is that interactive (and convergent) storytelling does not lie purely with games. Normal games remain too insulated within their own culture and difficult for the regular consumer and casual games, in order to remain casual, rely on mechanics too simplistic for story-telling. In the future of convergence and storytelling, what will fulfill the casual readers’ niche? What sort of medium could (to use a rather crude test) you read on the toilet? Inanimate Alice is this future. In this medium we see where those of us who read books will soon be heading.

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I also looked at Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw which was just too weird and insular for me. I felt like there was a completely unattainable story and that anyone without previous knowledge of the real life event would be completely lost. Instead of telling me a story, it was just disturbing.

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The first work I looked at was The Fall of the Site of Marsha. It was very clearly inspired by horror movies, even directly sharing some of the imagery (the flickering angel). It is not a whole narrative, not really, but it is disturbing and the story is clear enough. Besides being a horror story it seemed interested in little else. The concept was interesting enough, but concept alone cannot make up for a failure of narrative. If this were a movie, it would be a B horror flick.

You can see my full notes on Marsha here.

All in all, quite interesting, I’ll have to take a look at some of the other works later.

Robot and the Cities That Built Him [Reasoned Reviews]

Aram Zucker-Scharff — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 16:29:00 +0000

2D Boy has come out with a new game called Robot and the Cities That Built Him this last week. I highly recommend the game, it’s a lot of fun and very stylized looking flash game. I played all the way to city 57 before setting it down, with my squadron of robots fully upgraded and eliminating everything in their path. Even more impressive, the game was built in seven days.

As it is with well built flash games the simplicity allows the player to really see the breakdown of game elements, how they fit in and how they create the game experience. “Robot” is not a completed game, so not all the elements are there and, if you do well and get to the later cities, you’ll see not all the balance elements are in place either.

However, it is interesting to take a look at the beginning of the game, as you build up your robot army and upgrades. The game has resources (the hearts that drop upon killing people and helicopters), units (the two available robots), rewards (more robots, upgrades, robot upgrades), and a system that forces you to use the resources, giving them value.

The resources–which come faster the better your units are and the more successful you are–can only be picked up by running the mouse over them, forcing you to manage your time between monitoring your robots, buying upgrades, and picking up the resources. This adds challenge to the game while restricting the players ability as the difficulty ramps up, you cannot manage a certain number of robots (to repair them, they have to be picked up by clicking on them) and pick up the resources required to repair them at the same time, especially early on, when you cannot kill things fast enough to get resources.

The two units, Perfect Bot and Clampy Bot, have two completely different functions, with each giving you a reward for using that bot, while punishing you if you do not use it. In any game, especially ones with a small number of units, it is important to force the player into using the units and creating a balanced game. Once you get outside of the basic formula of Archers, Ranged Calvary, Infantry, Heavy Calvary, Artillery unit balance, this sort of thing can become very difficult, and many an RTS has failed at providing such a balance.

There is the possibility of different units providing different measures of each role, meaning that a strategy can come into which type of each basic unit you use, but that tends to fail more often then not, and is extremely difficult. Here there are only two units, Clampy Bot (who you start off with) is your basic unit, he kills the little people below. Without him you get no resources and no protection from what appears to be enemy laser stick figures and ninjas. The other unit, Perfect Bot, must be purchased as the game goes on. However, in the early game he is especially rewarding, as he burns down buildings, releasing more innocent civilians to fry with Clampy Bot, meaning more resources. He becomes required later in the game, as he is the unit that can take down the deadly attack helicopters.

See the balance? By the time I ended the game, I had two of each robot, positioned with two Perfect Bots sandwiched between two Clampy Bots, letting me cover the Perfect Bots from the people on the ground while they took down the helicopters attacking my lead Clampy Bot. Positioning of each bot was also important for success, as each had a limited range.

The reward system is obviously only just starting to come into place, you can upgrade each robot, firing speed, and repair speed. Each upgrade has obvious and tangible results, giving value to the spent hearts and making them something important to your success as a player. This is also another thing that you can spend resources on, once again adding to the things the player must manage and worry about as the game continues.

Ignoring the parts towards the end, as you hit the obviously incomplete part of the game, you can see that the game does not allow you to stockpile resources, forcing the gameplay forward and keeping the player engaged. The robots require the hearts, not just for upgrades, but for repairs as well. Perhaps the most important balance element that 2D Boy has added here is the fact that even when the robots are doing nothing but walking forward they slowly become damaged, necessitating repair. This means the resource drain is constant, forcing accompanying constant player interaction, a recipe for success.