I’m very excited to announce that my very first solo album, “UNTRUE SONGS”, is now available for purchase, should that be something you wish to do.
http://jeremyvoss.bandcamp.com/
This is a collection of songs, sketches and loops written and recorded over the last 8 years or so; I picked the best 15 out of, say, 100 or so… cleaned them up a bit, trimmed a little fat, tried to put them in some sort of order that made sense, and, well, here you go. I hope you enjoy it.
I know posting’s been light around here lately, and so this post is here to explain that, unfortunately, it’s going to be light for considerably longer than I’d anticipated, as I woke up Sunday morning to see an error message on my PC indicating that my hard drive failed, and that I needed to back my shit up IMMEDIATELY and then turn everything off and don’t come back until a new hard drive is ready to be installed. I then spent around an hour with Dell customer support in an attempt to get a second opinion, and, well, yes – my hard drive is toast. Now, they tell me I ordered a new hard drive and some free Windows 7 installation discs, but I haven’t yet seen an email confirming any of this. So either my new drive shows up on the 20th, or else… it doesn’t, and I have to start paying attention to my newborn son on a more regular basis. (Joke.)
As the PC was becoming my primary – well, only – gaming hub, this is a real kick in the balls. My 3DS isn’t doing much for me, I still don’t have a lot of console time, and my iPhone 4 is dying a very slow death and running everything verrrrrrrry slow, which renders it pretty much useless as far as subway gaming goes.
Not that I was doing a tremendous amount of gaming anyway, to be honest. I’d mostly been dabbling in a bunch of things – the PC port of Fez (which I still love, but which is a weird game to replay after over a year), a few mid-game missions in Saints Row the Third (because I needed a little bit of mindless fun to suit my sleep-deprived state), the first level in Metro 2033 (because I’m curious about this week’s sequel and realized I’d never played the first one even though it was sitting in my Steam library all this time), and a little bit of Monaco (which I want to like a lot more than I actually am). I guess the biggest thing that I ought to mention is that I picked up System Shock 2 when it came out on Steam last week, and I played it for around 30 minutes or so – long enough to sorta get the hang of it, while also being confronted with the sad reality that even the best games of yesteryear do not age very well.
Anyhoo. My rental copy of Metro Last Light for the 360 should be arriving later this week, and I’ll see if I can fit that in during the wait between twilight feedings of the wee one. But that’s pretty much it, as far as gaming goes, here at SFTC HQ.
I was going to start this post by apologizing to Dishonored, but before I do I must address this news item that just appeared on my Twitter feed – Kotaku is reporting that as a consequence of the EA layoffs, there is no Tiger Woods game in production for next year, and that the franchise’s future is in doubt:
I have learned, from persons with knowledge of the series’ development, that Tiger Woods PGA Tour 15 is not happening. On any platform. EA’s plan was to outsource that edition of the game, to give the in-house team two years to make Tiger Woods 16, taking advantage of all the PS4 and the next Xbox would have to offer. When CEO John Riccitiello gave his resignation last month, that plan was scrapped as a cost-saving move. The game hasn’t been reassigned to the Tiger Woods team, either. Some of its personnel already have been sent to other teams in the EA Tiburon studio for the time being.
I went to an EA Sports spokesman with that rumor and was told they wouldn’t comment on it, which is not surprising. The latest game came out only a month ago, and publicly traded video game companies have investor relations divisions that don’t want people chattering about unannounced products, especially ones that have been unofficially canceled.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour is a 16-year-old annual series, one that presumably pays royalties to two parties—Augusta National Golf Club and Tiger Woods himself. It’s admirable that the development team got a two-year window to put out a game that would be truly distinctive, rather than incrementally updating or porting over something after publishing three titles in 33 months. But if EA Sports really does put it the series on ice for a year, that is a remarkable decision.
On the one hand, I think the Tiger franchise could actually use a year off, especially so as to really impress when it finally debuts on next-gen systems. I distinctly remember Tiger’s first appearance on the 360, which was, to put it incredibly mildly, a half-baked piece of shit. And while I’m enjoying this year’s edition – to the extent I’ve actually had a chance to play it, which admittedly isn’t much – it does feel a little stale. But on the other hand, HOLY SHIT. This is unprecedented. This isn’t like the NBA Live fiasco, where the games themselves were utterly broken and the franchise needed to be shut down to get its shit together; Tiger might be stale but the game still fundamentally works. If the franchise is being put on hiatus as a cost-cutting move… man. That doesn’t bode well.
* * * * *
Last October, I had to put Dishonored away. In this blog post, I went off a little bit. I’d gotten frustrated by a late-game mission, and that was right after I’d finished the previous mission in a hilariously stupid, inept fashion:
The mission required me to attend a masked ball being hosted by 3 sisters, one of whom I needed to kill/abduct. The recon work in determining which sister to nab was enormously fun, and the mansion itself was a wonder to explore and examine. But then I actually had to do the deed, and it must be noted that the manner in which I knocked out the sister and carried her to her waiting boatman/captor resulted in one of the most unintentionally hilarious chase sequences I’ve ever had the misfortune of participating in. Here’s the point, ultimately: while the poor execution in the woman’s abduction was undoubtedly my fault, it was the game’s reaction to what I did that made me wonder why I’d bothered being so careful and stealthy in the first place. It’s actually a bit difficult to describe just what happened, except to say that in a game that at that point had been remarkably graceful and poised, the game suddenly became very artless and charmless and basically just turned into very obvious AI routines that ultimately were defeated with comically swift decapitations of startled guards. I’m doing a terrible job describing what happened, I know. The result, though, is the important thing – all the grace and skill I performed in my stealthy preparation were rendered moot; once everything went to shit I bulldozed my way to the ending and achieved the exact same result, since my mark was never killed. So why even bother being stealthy? Why bother performing well? Suddenly the rich, detailed world of Dunwall instantly transformed into a clunky collection of polygons and AI scripts.
I didn’t actually explain what I’d done, of course; I set up the mission for you and then tried to explain how clumsy I was and how stupidly the game reacted to me, but I never got into the clumsiness. Now that I’ve finished the game – and specifically completed that particular mission in a much less ridiculous fashion – I don’t think the game was prepared for how stupid I was. Indeed, I give the game credit for at least letting me finish it in the clumsiest way possible.
So, then, let me explain what I’d done wrong, and then what I did right. Slight spoilers ahead, but only slight – it’s less about the plot and more about the actual mission. Think of this as less of a spoiler and more of a walkthrough / what-not-to-do.
As noted above, the mission asks you to attend a masked ball that is being held in a very elegant mansion. Your task is to find one of three sisters who has committed certain nefarious deeds; as you don’t know what the sister looks like, and since they’re all wearing masks anyway, it is up to you to figure out which sister is the guilty one, and then dispatch her without being caught. As with all missions, there is also a non-lethal way to solve this puzzle – the sister in question has a secret admirer who is also at the party, and he asks you to knock her out and deliver her unconscious body to her in the basement, where he will ferry her out on a boat, never to be seen again.
Now, the first time I’d done this mission, I’d done some recon work in the upstairs of the house, and I’d been able to figure out which of the three sisters I needed to nab. And I’d also decided to knock her out and give her to the admirer, rather than just killing her. But I didn’t quite know how to get her alone, and so, in my haste and growing frustration, I simply put a choke-hold on her in the corner of a dark room and then – hilariously – ran through the house, carrying her, fellow party-goers shrieking in panic, guards chasing me and shooting at me, until I somehow escaped capture and made it to the basement. It was completely absurd and stupid and I felt dumb when I somehow managed to get credit for finishing the mission.
So this second time, I still did my recon work in the upstairs of the house, but this time I also managed to find (and actually read) the chosen sister’s diary, wherein she revealed her growing paranoia that someone was after her. And so when I approached her at the party, a dialogue option appeared that wasn’t there before, and I managed to convince her to go with me to the basement so as to avoid being assassinated. This, as you might imagine, resulted in a much more elegant solution; there was no panic, there was no comedy of errors. We simply walked downstairs, and when we were alone, I knocked her out and brought her to the boat. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.
The rest of the game, at that point, was uncharted territory, but I was able to see it with a fresher perspective and much better mastery of my skills. (And, it should be noted, I didn’t care as much if I had to kill someone. I still stopped/reloaded if I found myself in a situation where stealth was not an option; I always prefer sneaking around to out-and-out combat, as combat rarely stays one-on-one – inevitably a swarm of guards arrives, and there’s just not much you can do at that point.) The plot twist wasn’t terribly surprising, though, and the end of the game was actually quite anticlimactic – I sort of assumed that there’d be a big boss fight or something, but in the end I simply snuck around a room, opened a door, and then the game was over.
All in all I enjoyed the game – the art style is impeccable and “Blink” remains one of my all-time favorite modes of videogame traversal. The story wasn’t as good, and some of the voice acting felt a little dull, but it was never distracting. Steam usually has it on sale every other month; if you haven’t picked it up yet, it’s an easy recommendation at 50% off.
I am now very excited to play the recently released DLC, “The Knife of Dunwall” – indeed, that was one of the primary reasons why I wanted to finally finish the main game in the first place. And now that I know who this main character is… well, that’s all the more reason to give it a go.
This post might be a little rambly and random; last night the baby had, to put it kindly, an “uneven night’s sleep.” I keep thinking I’m getting used to his sleeping patterns, but then every other day those patterns change into something totally different, and I get totally derailed. It’s funny; I used to complain that I didn’t have enough hours in the day to do all the stuff I need to do; but now it feels like each 24-hour day actually lasts for, say, 72 hours, and yet I feel more and more incapacitated.
As always, Steve Martin says it a lot better:
* * * * *
A few nights ago I attended a small, informal meeting of the NYVCC. It was a very pleasant evening and I met some super cool people and I might be getting involved in some interesting-sounding future projects, and so this is all wonderful… but to be honest I was just happy that I didn’t totally chicken out and not go. Social anxiety is still a very real pain in my ass, and even though I’ve gone to great lengths to overcome it (thank you, Ativan!), it’s still a source of frustration and agitation. Still: I showed up, which counts as a victory of sorts.
Of course, I should also mention that among the attendees were people who write for sites and outlets that I actually read on a semi-regular basis, and so I found myself engaged in this weird sort of social anxiety dance in which I was somewhat intimidated by the pedigree of my fellow peers and thus desperately over-compensating by spewing forth opinions that may or may not have been a little half-baked. It is an exceedingly strange phenomenon to find oneself pontificating about certain issues in front of the very people who provided one with the information in the first place, and so I am glad that I was a little drunk so as to dull the vertigo a bit, even if it loosened my tongue a bit too much. Maybe next time I’ll remember to eat something first.
* * * * *
It came out yesterday that Microsoft will be revealing its new console in less than a month. Why don’t I care?
I’m not necessarily an Xbox fanboy, but the truth is that at least 80% of my game time this generation was spent on the 360, primarily because that’s where the bulk of my friends were. And so I figured I’d get a bit more excited about hearing what’s next… but I’m finding myself surprisingly apathetic about what the big reveal will be.
I’m not sure it’s Microsoft’s fault, actually, even if Sony’s made tremendous strides of late in terms of courting and supporting indie developers (which is the very thing that XboxLive used to pride itself on).
I suppose it’s really just me and how my life has changed in the last few weeks. Having a baby – and the financial repercussions that follow from such an event – means that I’m not sure I’m going to be acquiring both a PS4 and a new Xbox, and if I can only pick one, then I need to pick the one that will offer the most bang for the buck. (And if we’re being brutally honest here, my choice between the Xbox and the PS4 becomes more or less null and void if the much-rumored Steam Box is actually a real thing and is sold at a reasonable price point.)
And I’m not even sure I know how to define “the most bang for the buck”, either. I presume that both devices will continue to offer streaming video services, and that the new Xbox will come with a Blu-ray drive. I also presume that both devices will have some sort of cloud-based storage system, and also that each will have a digital storefront that would allow me to download new games instead of buying discs.
Once again, it comes down to content. And Sony’s been terrific lately in terms of offering exclusive, high-quality content. And if the rumors are true and the PS4 is as easy to program for as the PS3 was difficult, then maybe the PS4 version of a multi-console release won’t be the “shitty” one.
But – again – if we’re talking about content, then what’s better than Steam right now?
If I look at my play habits over the last 6 months, I think it’s safe to say I’ve turned into a PC gamer almost exclusively; I’ve barely touched either of my consoles. The living room of my apartment is too busy a place these days for me to effectively kick everybody out; whereas my PC is in the office, where I don’t bother anyone and nobody bothers me. My aging PC still runs AAA games quite nicely, and Steam sales make acquiring those AAA games rather affordable.
And you know what else? I don’t quite care about Xbox Achievements the way I used to, which is a huge psychological burden that I don’t have to worry about anymore. It’s stupid, right? And yet I always felt obligated to get big Achievement scores so as to be able to prove (to whom?!) that I was hardcore, or something. Even if Steam has achievements, I don’t really care – there’s no “score”, and they don’t get all up in my face about it. I still appreciate how Achievements fundamentally changed the way I play games – in terms of really diving in and exploring certain facets of a game that I might have otherwise overlooked – but I’m not hyper-competitive about the actual number anymore.
I suppose I reserve the right to completely change my opinion once the new Xbox is revealed, and then after E3 rolls around and the actual list of upcoming games comes out – because by the time the new consoles are actually released, I expect my son to have established some more regular sleeping habits, and so I won’t feel so guilty about claiming the living room again.
It should sort of go without saying that posting here is going to be pretty light for the next few weeks. Taking care of my newborn son takes up a fair amount of time, and the time I have that’s left over is generally spent trying to get back to sleep as quickly as possible. There’s just not a whole hell of a lot of gaming going on.
But I think that would be the case even if I weren’t changing diapers and trying to stay awake. The release calendar is light, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. The only real must-have on my schedule for the rest of the year is GTA5, which doesn’t come out until September. Certainly I’m intrigued by Metro Last Light, and that Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon or whatever the hell it’s called looks pretty amazing, and I guess there’s some neat-looking 3DS stuff coming out over the next few months, but the pickings for fresh content are slim.
So I’m thinking that this is a marvelous opportunity – when I can carve out a few hours – to get back into games that I never finished. As there’s no real grand critical conversation that I feel that I’m missing out on, and since there’s no rush to finish something new before it gets spoiled, I feel like I could take my time and finish the games that, for whatever reason, I needed to put down.
Tops on this to-do list is Dishonored, especially as the new DLC that came out this week looks pretty great. I’d gotten pretty close to the end on the 360, but I think I’d gotten turned off by how rote the violence was getting. And yet my memories of it now are quite fond, actually, especially in light of all the things about Bioshock Infinite that turned me off. I’d already picked it up on the PC during a holiday Steam sale, so that’s as good a reason as any to give it another ago.
Also, for some reason, I’ve been thinking more and more about getting back into my PC save of Skyrim. A friend of mine has been playing it pretty continuously since it came out – he’s level 81 or something by now – and I’d asked him if, after all that time, there was still stuff he hadn’t yet done. Turns out there was plenty he hadn’t done, and in the meantime he was still enjoying doing the non-mission stuff, too. Now, I’d put that game down on the 360 in a fit of disgust, after sinking over 80 hours into it; too many quests were bugged, too many glitches broke my immersion, and I just stopped giving a shit about the stuff I hadn’t yet done. I’d given my 360 copy to a friend and to be honest I don’t really care if I ever get it back. But now, having been away from it for so long, and figuring that at least some of the bugs ought to have been squashed by now, and knowing that it looks pretty goddamned spectacular on my PC… well, I’m curious to give it another ago. And maybe I’ll make a conscious effort to stay away from the critical path and try doing some of the stuff I know I’d been putting off on the 360.
And I’d like to see if I could finish Antichamber. I can’t remember where I left off with it, so I might as well start over and try to brute-force my way back to where I’d gotten stuck.
I’m also pretty curious about Starseed Pilgrim, even though it’s brand new. I suppose I’m curious about it also because I’m thinking about getting Fez again once it comes out on Steam in a few weeks, and for some reason the two games remind me of each other. I’d gotten over 100% in Fez on the 360, but apparently I hadn’t truly finished it, and I was afraid to go back and dive in once Polytron decided to not patch certain game-breaking bugs.
On the 3DS side, I’ve put Etrian Odyssey 4 to the side – I’m in this weird limbo where I don’t have any quests but I’ve clearly got a long ways to go before the game ends, so I’m kinda just grinding, which isn’t all that interesting – and have fully invested myself in Super Mario 3D Land. I’m in the last level of World 8, which, as I understand it, means that I’m only 50% of the way through. That game is pretty goddamned terrific, even if it’s occasionally frustrating.
I’m sure there’s other titles that should go on this list, but I can’t remember what they are. I can’t remember much of anything these days, to be honest; it’s a wonder I can put matching socks on my feet before I walk out the door. In any event, I’m too annoyed with Bioshock Infinite right now to give it a proper second run-through, anyway, so I might as well try to have some fun.
So I’m just going to say this up front: this is going to be a weird post to write. I’ll do my best to keep it easy for you, but even getting these first few sentences out has been a lot more difficult than I’d anticipated.
My last post here was written on Friday, March 29th; I had intended to write a more critical, spoiler-laden post about Bioshock Infinite but wasn’t quite ready to do it, and so I half-assed a post about iOS games and Tiger Woods 14 instead. Still, Bioshock Infinite was running around in my brain, and I figured I’d maybe play the opening again over the weekend and see if I could start putting my thoughts into some order.
My wife went into labor Saturday evening, and my son was born on Sunday morning, March 31st.
Since then, I’ve been in this delirious, sleep-deprived haze of feedings, diaper changes and naps. Taking care of a newborn is not unlike maintaining a very delicate plant; or, to put it another way, it’s a lot like some sort of free-to-play resource management sim where everything is on a timer – 3 hours until next feeding; prepare a 2 oz bottle; press A repeatedly to burp; change diaper; very slowly put baby back in crib for nap; race back to bed, set alarm, sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I don’t mean to diminish the experience of having a baby by comparing it to Farmville, of course; there is no happier sensation in the world for me right now than in those post-feeding, post-diaper-change moments where I get to hang out with him, have him sit on my lap and hold my fingers with his tiny hands and watch him take in the world around him. It is bliss.
Anyway, that’s where I’ve been.
As you might imagine, there’s been very little gaming in my life over the last few weeks. I’ve played a few more rounds of Tiger Woods 14 during naptimes – the game is still very good, and even though I’ve already run into some paywall issues the game lets me get around it relatively unscathed. I’ve also gotten back into Super Mario 3D Land, which I’d put down when I’d gotten into Etrian Odyssey 4 a few weeks back.
I’ve also started replaying Bioshock Infinite in an attempt to see if the revelations of the ending change the way I approach the beginning. You know what? It has changed – it’s kinda dumb, now. Let’s just take the very beginning as an example. That amazingly creepy lighthouse that you ascend at the beginning? It doesn’t make any sense anymore. The first time you do it, after seeing that blood-stained note on the door and then the dead body on the 2nd floor – you get creeped out, you want to know what’s going to happen next. But the second time? After you know what you know? It doesn’t make any sense. Why is that note on the lighthouse door so threatening? Who is that dead body – why was he killed, and who killed him, and since there’s a still-lit cigarette next to his corpse, where is the killer, anyway?
The world of Columbia is still the best thing about the game, but I’m finding myself very disappointed in almost everything else about it. The action still feels obligatory, lazy, and not really all that fun; the fact that nobody else uses vigors besides you feels downright nonsensical; and the fiction – the reason we get excited about the Bioshock brand in the first place – simply doesn’t hold up for me the second time around. These games really just ought to be subtitled: HUBRIS IS BAD.
At some point I’ll get around to writing this in greater detail, but it’ll have to wait until I’m a bit less sleep-deprived and a bit more level-headed and coherent. In the meantime, there’s been some outstanding writing about the game by people who do it much better than I do, and I’ll link to them below:
Not quite ready to talk about the ending and other spoiler-laden topics of interest related to Bioshock Infinite. I replayed the ending last night just to make sure I’d remembered it correctly, but now I feel like I need to replay the whole game again and see if anything changes, now that I know what I know.
That might take a while, though, and in the meantime there’s a bunch of other games that I’m playing right now that ought to get talked about.
For starters, this week’s iOS hotness is Nimble Quest, from the makers of Pocket Planes and Tiny Tower. Instead of being a resource sim, however, this is an action RPG played as a game of Snake. Super charming art style and very, very addicting.
As a fan of endless runners, I’ve also been playing quite a bit of Bit.Trip Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, which is also super charming and has an amazing soundtrack and really goes out of its way to be as accessible and as challenging as you want it to be, and everything about it is great except that it tends to give me a headache, for some reason. I think the movement on the screen can get a little bit too fast, which makes me squint. Bit of a bummer, that, but when I need a quick aperitif it works just fine.
I’m still slowly moving along in my Road To the Show career in MLB 13: The Show. Not much more to report, except that it’s the best baseball game I’ve ever played.
I guess the biggest news – as well as the most welcome surprise – is that Tiger Woods 14 doesn’t totally suck. I’ve only played a round or two, but I’m very much enjoying what I’ve seen thus far. The swing mechanics feel just right, and the putting game finally feels fair, and the game feels like it’s been polished and cared for, which is more than I can say for previous editions. I can’t yet talk about the paywall or DLC courses or whatever – I’m still debating whether I want to buy my rental copy and get an online pass – but this could be a very pleasant way to spend baby nap times this summer.
I’m currently in Day 2 of a horrific stomach bug, so I’m home again. Yesterday, my day was spent finishing Bioshock Infinite. Today, my day will largely be spent thinking about how to talk about it.
In fact, I may have to do this in two posts, ultimately – one post devoted purely to how the game actually plays and looks and sounds and feels, and then another post about the story, necessarily filled with lots of spoilers, because, for better and for worse, there are things that need to be talked about. I think I can combine elements of the second into this first post without getting too spoilery, though – or at least I’ll do my best to keep spoilers well advertised.
You know, I don’t even know if I can do this properly yet. I’m still getting my thoughts together about the game, and trying to reconcile the stuff I liked with the stuff that didn’t make any sense, and it’s frustrating because I want to write this post RIGHT NOW instead of hours or possibly days from now, when the thoughts actually arrive.
That said, this is someone on tumblr’s reaction to the Bioshock Infinite ending, and it sums up my reaction pretty well, too:
So.
THE GAME: Whatever misgivings I might have about the story and certain other aspects of the game’s narrative, one thing I can say with absolute certainty is that Columbia is arguably an even more engrossing place than Rapture. It is an astonishing place; pretty much every where you look you’ll see something amazing. (I had to stop taking screenshots after a while, since it was getting ridiculous. And if you’d like to see some of those screenshots, you can click this link. I’ve labeled a few of them as spoiler-ish, and so you don’t have to see them unless you want to. I hard a hard time choosing which one I wanted to be my desktop background – I ended up going with this one.)
My concern over the shooting and murdering wasn’t necessarily misplaced – indeed, Elizabeth and Booker have more than a few conversations about all the killing that goes on and how hard it might be to live with yourself after you’ve killed someone, and there’s a bit more I could say here but that should probably wait until the spoiler post. The combat itself is fine; it’s never been why I like these games, but it works well enough. Still, I was far more interested in exploring the world and opening locked doors and finding hidden passages and even listening to recordings. As my friend Caro put it, regarding that last bit:
I really hope the audio log/voxophone/Tomb Raider journal goes away soon, and a better way to communicate such things is created.
— Carolyn Petit (@carolynmichelle) March 26, 2013
Yeah, so. Mechanically, the combat works fine, although I really only used a few guns, and even fewer Vigors (i.e., Plasmids). Some of the Vigors are introduced rather lazily, actually, and I almost missed picking a few of them up. Not that it would’ve changed my playstyle very dramatically, though – I mainly used Shock and Fire (not their real names) for crowd control before mopping up baddies with machine guns and shotguns. Most of the Vigors felt like afterthoughts, to be honest – as if the developers needed something to fill out the radial menu.
But there’s another reason we need to talk about those Vigors. There’s a fantastic Gameological (AVClub) review which I might as well quote directly since John Teti says exactly what I was thinking, and the whole review is worth a read:
Other parts of the BioShock carryover simply don’t make sense. It’s all well and good that the plasmids of the old game have been rechristened as Vigors for Infinite, but in the [first] BioShock, plasmid abuse was an integral part of Rapture’s downfall. More to the point, plasmids made sense in the culture of Rapture, where self-worship was the norm, and man’s freedom to improve his lot was sacrosanct.
Where do Vigors fit into Columbia? I don’t know, and neither does Infinite. There are advertisements for Vigors all over the city, and you can find bottles of the stuff lying around, but very few Columbians use them. In a society that espouses racial purity, you’d think Vigors would be more of an issue. After all, they can turn a person into a demigod regardless of race. But this never comes up. If anything, [the main villain] Comstock appears to tacitly embrace the sale of Vigors. There’s a difference between plot holes, which are excusable, and a disregard for internal logic. Vigors belong to the latter category.
And along those lines, it seems downright odd that there would be so many ammunition vending machines all over the place, especially since there’s this whole uprising/revolution that Comstock is trying to hard to quell. I can’t necessarily speak more about that until I get to the spoiler post, but purely in terms of game mechanics, it’s striding a very fine line between aiding the player in combat and distracting the player’s brain who’s trying to make sense of everything they see. In a game like this, where you can tell that every single object has been placed with deliberate care and purpose, it just seems weird.
I should probably stop now, before I start saying things that I shouldn’t say in a non-spoiler post.
I’d been suffering from shooter fatigue for quite a long time before I found that I was enjoying Far Cry 3 almost in spite of myself. The endless slaughter of virtual enemies was still somewhat tiresome, but FC3 had enough distractions and side projects to take on that I felt like I could still enjoy what the game had to offer.
And then the Newtown shooting happened, and suddenly I felt sick again.
From that link, which I wrote back in December:
The narrative [in FC3] is where the game’s more or less fallen apart for me, is the thing. While I appreciate that the game is actually attempting to say something (in that you start out as a whimpering trust-fund douchebag and gradually turn into a sociopathic killing-machine douchebag whose friends (the same friends who you’ve been trying to rescue) are super-creeped out by you and your murder-lust (they actually look into the camera (i.e., your eyes) as if they don’t recognize you)) – in other words, the game is saying that killing hundreds of people doesn’t necessarily make you a hero – the game also requires you to kill hundreds of people in order to advance the narrative; you don’t have a choice in the matter.
And then, a few paragraphs down, I wrote this:
I was originally going to start this post with a hypothetical challenge; would it be possible for me to play any games in 2013 that didn’t involve the firing of a gun? Then I remembered that Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider and GTA5 were coming, and that pretty much ended that – I won’t be missing any of those games unless my wife or my newborn son is on fire. BUT. I think I’m going to try and get through as much of 2013 as possible without playing any shooters.
Well, here we are. I’ve finished Tomb Raider – and enjoyed it, for the most part. And I have not played Gears of War: Judgment, or Crysis 3, or Metal Gear Revengeance, or Dead Space 3.
And when I get home tonight, I’m going to be firing up Bioshock Infinite. It’s one of the only big AAA games that’s coming out this year that I promised I wouldn’t miss. The original Bioshock is one of the watershed moments of this generation, after all – and even if the gameplay doesn’t quite hold up these days, the atmosphere and the storytelling still do.
But as much as I’m looking forward to checking it out, I’d be lying if I weren’t apprehensive about all the murdering I’m going to have to do. What does it say about games as a medium when the game that’s being touted and hyped as the most important story-driven game of the generation still makes you kill lots of things as you get from Point A to Point B – and how one of the game’s selling points is that you can kill these things in lots of interesting and unique ways?
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I’ve been trying with all my might to avoid any and all preview coverage of Bioshock Infinite. This even extends to reviews; I’m aware that it’s been getting very high scores, but I’ve not read any actual reviews or analysis. This has been very hard of late, as the game’s presence has blanketed pretty much every website I visit with ubiquitous advertising.
But I’m also contractually obliged to link to anything that Tom Bissell writes, and his Grantland interview with Ken Levine is, as usual, very interesting and informative without even really getting into the game itself. They talk about the game mostly from a writer’s point of view; how game writing differs from novels and screenplays, and they even get into this shooting business a little bit:
[TB:] Here’s the weird thing, to me, about BioShock. It draws in first-person-shooter nuts who love to electrocute people and set them on fire. It also draws in the disaffected philosophy PhD candidate and gives him something to think about while running amok. A belief of mine is that shooters are made for naughty children, and we all like to become naughty children sometimes. When a shooter can take that mischievous core impulse and enrich it with something that feels genuinely thoughtful, well, that’s lightning in a bottle, isn’t it?
[KL:] Look, I can’t say I’m a man of high taste. I’m a man of low taste. I like action movies and comic books — not that all comic books are of low taste. Not that all action movies are of low taste. I like things exploding. I like candy and cookies. I’m not a sophisticate in any way, shape, or form. My wife and I live the lives of 14-year-old kids; we just happen to be married and have enough disposable income that we don’t necessarily have a bedtime. If I could sit around and eat pizza and ice cream — and not fancy pizza — and watch Lord of the Rings and play video games, I’m a pretty happy guy.
Ken doesn’t quite answer the question, and even Tom’s question addresses the perception that I find somewhat troubling, which is that we should at least be grateful that Infinite is offering something more than just an opportunity to kill hundreds of things, even if killing hundreds of things is a vital, integral part of the experience.
Wouldn’t it be something if we could find something else to do to fill in the time between story beats besides shooting a gun?
So one of the reasons why I was so quiet last week was because I was working on a review of Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon for the New York Videogame Critics Circle, which can be found here.
This was my first experience writing a review the way the professionals do it: with a free download code given out a week before the game’s release. So not only was I flying somewhat blind (in terms of not knowing how the other gaming outlets were going to score it), but I was also flying without a walkthrough. This turned out to be not that big a deal, because the places where I was getting stuck were less about not knowing how to solve a puzzle and more about not being able to adjust to the rather sudden difficulty spike in the later levels. That being said, I would’ve hated to have not been able to finish the game because I couldn’t figure out what to do next!
Still, though, I wrote the review (and the epilogue) without having finished the game. Still haven’t finished the game. Haven’t even thought about the game since I turned in the epilogue on Thursday. Don’t want to think about the game. I’m so close to the end, but there’s no way that the actual end will be worth all the bullshit it takes to get there. If I am going to think about the game, I’d rather remember the parts that I liked. I still may go back and try to find all the stuff I didn’t find in the earlier levels, although I’m still pretty obsessed with Etrian Odyssey IV, and also my copy of Fire Emblem: Awakening just arrived, and that seems pretty awesome, too.
This was also the first time that I’ve written something that ultimately got looked over and edited by a much better writer than myself – and very much for the better, I might add, even if we had to cut out the footnotes. In any event, I did get to use (and keep) the phrase “core gameplay loop”, which is one of my favorite bits of industry jargon.
It was a pretty neat experience, all things considered. I hope I get to do it again.
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As for the rest of the weekend, I didn’t really get to play all that much. I ended up spraining my ankle on Saturday (as part of a story that I’ll feel better telling in a few weeks), and so I was mostly just laid up. As mentioned above, I’m still pushing along in EO4, and I played the first few levels of Fire Emblem. Fire Emblem seems pretty great, although I was terrible at the previous game on the DS, and I’m not necessarily all that into turn-based tactical RPGs. It’s a nice companion to EO4, though; when I get tired of one, the other seems to fill the void quite nicely.
Also, my rental copy of MLB 13: The Show arrived, and I started a Road To The Show career – my pitcher, Jervo McNervo, is 2-1 on the SF Giants Double A team, with 2 complete game shutouts and 34 Ks. As much as I respect this game franchise – it’s clearly the best in the business – I’ve always been terrible at the hitting part of the game, so being a pitcher makes sense – especially since I’m pretty good at the pitching part. Normally I tend to rage quit when I do terribly in sports games – if I’m not pitching perfect games and going 6-for-6 with 4 grand slams, then I start over – but I’m trying to keep myself honest this time around. So, yeah – my first two outings were complete game shutouts, but in my third outing I don’t think I made it out of the fifth inning. Sometimes your pitches don’t go where you want them to go; such is life. That being said, the fielding controls for the pitcher are backwards – I fielded a few infield choppers and inadvertently threw to third base each time, not realizing that the pitcher’s controls are inverted. (That would’ve been nice to tell me, Sony.)
In any event, this will all be moot soon enough; Bioshock Infinite is already preloaded on my PC, and as soon as it goes live, that’s where I’ll be for the rest of the week… unless the baby arrives, of course.
Shouts From The Couch 