Category: navel gazing

before the first few hours: Bioshock Infinite

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?

when the going gets tough, turn on God mode

A challenge, issued from Critical Distance’s “Blogs of the Round Table”:

“The past few years have seen a resurgence of challenging games: Dark Souls, Spelunky, FTL: Faster Than Light, XCOM: Enemy Unknown to name but a few. Do you think videogames have more value in providing a stern challenge for the player to overcome, or does difficulty serve to alienate and deter potential players, impeding their potential for inclusiveness?”

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The EASY way to answer this question is to simply say:  “It depends”, and then leave it at that.

The HARD way to answer this question is to get into an analysis of what difficulty actually means; and then figure out what a given game’s intent is and how that aligns with the player’s expectations; determine what the player actually wants to achieve; explore different kinds of challenges in games (i.e., how many bullets will it take to kill this enemy, what kind of il/logical thinking is required to solve this puzzle, is my hand/eye coordination quick and accurate enough to get me past this area); and then, once enough context has been established, ultimately form some sort of conclusion that more or less says “It depends.”

The way I’m going to answer this question, though, is to start by admitting up front that I am maybe the wrong person to give this question its proper due.  The games listed in the question above – alongside other notoriously difficult games I could mention, like Ninja Gaiden and Super Meat Boy – have never tickled my particular fancy.  I’ve played them, of course – I am enough of a consumer whore that if a game (regardless of genre) gets universally good word-of-mouth, I will more often than not play it – but I’ve never finished them.  I’ll do as much as I can do, but once the going gets tough, I either get a walkthrough, or turn the difficulty down, or move on to something else.

I guess the thing about this question that makes it tricky – at least for me – is that I don’t necessarily play games because of the challenge.   I tend to gravitate towards single-player open-world adventures like the Elder Scrolls games and Grand Theft Auto, and my favorite parts of those games aren’t the story missions, or even the actual gameplay mechanics – but, rather, when the game lets me do whatever I want, free of consequence (though not necessarily from danger).   If I’m enjoying a game’s story and characters and atmosphere but the game is suddenly throwing too many enemies at me (like, say, Uncharted), I’ve got no problem with turning the difficulty down just so I can get past that stuff and get on with the adventure.  The endorphin rush, for me, is simply tied to winning.

I love Civilization V, for example, but I’ve never played it on anything other than the easiest difficulty setting.  It’s still difficult for me, though, because there’s a part of me that, on a fundamental level, doesn’t get strategy games.  I don’t possess the inherent vocabulary; I feel like I’m always messing up.  Therefore, if I manage to win a single-player campaign in Civ V on the easiest difficulty setting, it’s a remarkable accomplishment for me regardless of the perceived level of challenge.

That being said, sometimes I do need a little bit of a challenge in order to stay interested.  I play lots of puzzle games on my iPhone, and the key to keeping me engaged is that the challenge must always feel fresh.  Right now I’m playing Poker Knight, a neat little RPG-ish puzzle game where you create poker hands to deal out damage.  While I’m always a sucker for getting RPG (chocolate) in my puzzle (peanut butter), my character has become so powerful that most of my battles end in less than 3 hands, without me even taking a scratch, and so finishing a level is now rather tedious, since there’s tons of enemies to fight but very little challenge.  But in other iOS puzzle games like Chip Chain and Pixel Defenders Puzzle, there is always a difficulty curve, regardless of how good you might be at the mechanics, and so the challenge there is to try to do better than you did the last time out. 

Let me switch gears for a moment, if I may.  A year or two ago, I was starting to work on a novel.  My protagonist was, among other things, a struggling crossword puzzle author.  (I’ve been into crosswords since I was a little kid, but I’m not a hard-core crossword puzzle solver, by any means – when I’m at my best, I can whip through a Monday NYT in 5 or 6 minutes, and can solve 90% of  a Wednesday or Thursday in around 20-30 before petering out.  Fridays are usually too hard for me, and so I don’t really bother with them.)   When I was attempting to develop his character, it was important for me to determine what kind of puzzles he wrote, what kinds of newspapers he was hoping to get published in, and what kind of audience he was hoping to attract.   While I never actually got around to building a grid of my own, I wanted his puzzles to be reminiscent of Brendan Emmett Quigley, one of my favorite grid authors.  BEQ’s puzzles in the AV Club were often very witty, opted for popular culture references instead of obscure trivia, and – most importantly – were compulsively solvable.  If I ever got stumped on one of his clues, I never felt that the clue was unfair; I just needed to think a little differently and come at it from a different (literal) direction.   The point, though, is that I could solve his puzzles while being pleasantly challenged, and that’s what gave me the endorphin rush.

I don’t necessarily mind difficult games, as long as I feel that the game is teaching me something – or, rather, that with every defeat, I’m learning something.   The Portal games are great examples where the later stages are fiendishly clever in their design, but they’re never unfair.  Especially since the game goes to great length to teach you how to play it, and also to give you ample opportunity to figure it out without feeling punished or pressured.  If you engage with the commentary tracks in either of the 2 games, they talk about the extensive playtesting they do to make sure that the player is never without the proper tools; they don’t mind if you’re stumped, but they want to make sure that you’ve been given enough information – whether through literal tutorials on mechanics or more subtle things like specific lighting to guide your eye – to figure out the solution.)

The truly special thing about the Portal games, though – at least for me – is that although you only get that Eureka moment once, the games are still enjoyable to play even after you know the solutions; the solutions themselves are elegant and are uniquely pleasurable in their execution, and the world of each game is rich with extraneous things that keep you entertained as you explore.

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The games cited in the challenge at the top of this post offer very different kinds of difficulty.  I’ve dabbled in three of the named games, but haven’t finished any of them.  My impressions of them are as follows:

  • Dark Souls is difficult in almost every sense of the word.  Death is punished severely.  Mistakes in combat are very costly.  Valuable information about the world is withheld from the player – or not even withheld, as that implies that it’s available to be found somewhere if you look hard enough.  That being said, as long as you remain patient and don’t act impulsively, the game doesn’t act unfairly; if you die, it’s your fault for not paying attention.
  • I’ve only completed the tutorial for FTL; my initial impression is that it’s very complicated, that there’s a lot of information to keep track of, and that the controls aren’t terribly intuitive.  I imagine that if I kept with it, I’d get a bit more comfortable with them; but I’m also under the impression that the game throws tons of challenges at you and that it can be stressful to manage everything successfully.
  • Of the listed games, I’ve gotten the farthest in XCOM, but I’m playing on the easiest difficulty, and even then I haven’t come close to finishing it.  The game requires an over-abundance of caution, possibly even more so than in Dark Souls; one false step of bravado will get your entire squad killed.  The game also gives the enemies a number of advantages that the player doesn’t have; this can feel unfair, but I think that’s an intentional part of the game’s design – you’re up against alien forces that are far more powerful than you, so of course it’s going to feel unfair.  Of course, a lot of your success in a level will depend on your dice rolls, and there’s not much you can do about that.  Even on the easiest difficulty, a bad roll can wipe out your team.

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To get back to the actual question posed in the challenge – for me, personally, I’d prefer a game to be as accessible as possible.  I know a lot of people are freaking out about an “easy mode” for Dark Souls 2 and are equivocating such a change to blasphemy.  My answer to those people would be: (a) calm down, and (b) don’t play it on easy mode.  The truth of the matter is that game design is a business, and if more people buy Dark Souls 2 because of an easy mode (like me, for example), then that makes it much easier to develop Dark Souls 3.  I’m fully aware that there are millions of gamers out there who prefer harder difficulty levels – they’ll only play shooters on the hardest mode, they’ll avoid single-player entirely to play multiplayer (which is generally much harder than single-player anyway), etc.  I don’t begrudge them their tastes, and I tend to stay out of their way.  

In the late 90s, I worked as a receptionist at an internet company; I was given a relatively powerful laptop for the time, and my friends in the IT department would hook me up with games.  At the time, I’d had very little experience playing shooters – I’d played bits of Doom in college on other people’s computers, and whenever I was home from school I’d play Duke Nukem 3D on my brother’s PC, but that was pretty much it.  In any event, I remember being somewhat obsessed with Quake 2 because it looked absolutely incredible – leaps and bounds over Doom and Duke – but I wasn’t very good at it.*  It was then that I found out about God Mode.  God Mode removed the challenge entirely, which meant I was free to explore every nook and cranny of the world without fear of being blindsided by enemy rockets – which was all that I wanted to do in the first place.

Here’s the point, though – God Mode existed for a reason.  And while that reason may very well have been legitimate – i.e., it might’ve been an easy way for developers to show off the game without getting killed, or to squash bugs, or other such game… building… stuff… – it was available and accessible for retail consumers, too, and it was a popular feature to have.  It filled a need that some of us craved.  I wasn’t necessarily using it to cheat – I was using it to explore.  I play shooters but most of the time I get bored with the actual shooting, and so this was a way for me to get past the boring stuff and get on with the rest of it.  Maybe that’s not the pure experience I’m supposed to have, but I still had a fulfilling experience; I got my money’s worth.

To answer the question of “value” as it applies to difficulty… well, that’s tricky.  If a game is difficult because it’s designed poorly – i.e., it has a broken checkpoint system, or it breaks its own rules, or if its rubber-band AI is so atrociously unbalanced that it feels like the game is cheating (and here I’m looking squarely at you, Need For Speed Most Wanted), then that just feels like a waste of time and money on everybody’s part – both the consumer and the developer.

But if a game is difficult on purpose, and is advertised as such, it will attract a certain kind of player, and I imagine that the players of those games will feel like their money was well spent.  And perhaps those games aren’t meant for wide audiences, just as certain films and books and music aren’t intended for wide audiences, either.  There’s nothing wrong with that; there’s no obligation for a game designer to please every potential customer, and such an effort would be impossible anyway.  Does it mean that I, personally, will enjoy it?  No, probably not.  But like I said before, I’m not necessarily in it for the challenge.

 

 

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* I guess I’ve always been a graphics whore.  The difference between my Atari 2600 and my younger brother’s Sega Genesis was profound enough to make me angry at the universe for being born in 1975 as opposed to 1982.

 

guns and games and a challenge for 2013

I’m feeling somewhat heartsick today.  It’s a combination of a bunch of different things; insomnia/anxiety at 3:30am, a distressing situation at my job, a lack of productivity over the weekend… and, of course, the events in Newtown, CT.

I’m 37 years old; this is, sadly, not the first mass shooting I’ve lived through.  But it is the first one that affected me this much.  I watched President Obama’s speech at the Newtown vigil last night with my arm around my wife and my hand on her pregnant belly, tears pouring down from our faces, knowing that our little boy is going to be arriving in just a few months, and that there will be times when he’s out of our immediate line of sight, and that we will feel helpless.

I don’t believe that violent video games cause mass shootings any more than violent movies and music do.  But in light of what happened on Friday – and in keeping with what I was already talking about last week before everything happened – I’m feeling a bit weird about playing shooters right now.

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Let me back up.

Part of the lack of productivity I mentioned above was due to a hectic weekend schedule and a post-Newtown shitty mood, but it was also certainly due to the marathon Far Cry 3 sessions I engaged in, since I felt too lethargic and shitty to do anything else.

I’m at an interesting crossroads, as far as the game goes.  I looked at a walkthrough just to see how far away from the end I was, and it turns out I’ve only got 2 missions left.  The mission I’m currently stuck on, the 2nd-to-last one, is rather difficult.  It’s difficult for a lot of reasons, not least of which is because it’s shockingly poor in design (especially when compared with the rest of the scripted missions).*  I gave it around 5 or 6 tries last night before giving up, feeling that the game suddenly turned on me.

That being said, I’ve also ascended every radio tower, crafted every craftable, and liberated every outpost; this means that, aside from the wild animals, there is literally nothing else to shoot on the rest of the islands.** This means I’m free to actually explore – to find all the hidden relics and lost WW2 letters and all the other nooks and crannies that I’ve not had time to check out, all without having to fire a weapon.  As this is the aspect of the game that made me fall in love with it in the first place, I think I’d be quite content to never actually finish the narrative.

The narrative 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.***

(That the game also frequently turns key plot points into hallucinogenic metaphors is a bit much, too.  It’s all a bit heavy-handed and ham-fisted and reeks of deus ex machina.)

Getting back to the crossroads, though – while the narrative is getting absurd and the act of firing a gun (even if it’s virtual) feels a bit distasteful, I still very much want to run around on the island and find all the cool stuff it has to offer.  And if so I stay away from those last two missions, I’m utterly free to do that.  And even if I never finish the story, I would have definitely gotten my money’s worth – I’ve sunk at least 20 hours into the game already, and to do all the side quests and find every last treasure would take at least a dozen more.

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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.  This will dramatically lower the amount of games that I end up playing – I’m looking at my Gamefly queue and this one single criteria pretty much omits everything besides Tiger Woods 14 and the South Park RPG.  That’s kinda fucked up, wouldn’t you say?  No Dead Space 3.  No Gears of War Judgment.  No Splinter Cell, no Metro Last Light, no Aliens: Colonial Marines.  No Metal Gear Revengeance or whatever the hell it’s called, although my history with Metal Gear games probably precludes me from enjoying it anyway.

I might just end up doing this by default – what with the baby, and the fact that I’m not particularly interested in those games, this might be easier than it looks.  If anything, this will cause me to seek out the kinds of non-shooter games that I know are out there but that I’ve ignored.  This might work out after all.

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* Why is it so shitty?  Let me count the ways.

  • The game, up to this point, has generally prioritized stealth as opposed to going in, guns blazing.  But this particular mission has you driving into a fuel depot with your compatriot working the mounted gun in the trunk, and you’re blowing the shit out of everything.  That doesn’t make it a bad mission on its own, but it does beg the question as to why stealth was so necessary before.
  • As it’s one of the last missions in the game, it’s supposed to be more difficult.  And in this case, “difficult” means a never-ending supply enemies spawning from empty rooms.  Empty-room enemy-spawns are a lazy, cheap way of making something artificially difficult.  And why there are 300 soldiers guarding this particular fuel depot is a narrative mystery.
  • Some of these enemies are “heavies”, which means they’re decked out in bomb-proof gear.  To the player, this means they’re bullet sponges (which is, again, super-cheap).  But, also – why are they wearing such gear in the first place?  If it’s to guard against fuel explosions, why aren’t all the soldiers wearing them?  Sure, that’s impractical, but since when does anything need to make sense?  Speaking of which, this is also a tropical island – those guys have gotta be sweltering.
  • One more time – enemies appearing out of rooms that you’d previously known to be empty is bullshit.

** I probably shouldn’t have used the word “literally”, since this is only true if you don’t count the bulletin board assassination missions, which I may or may not bother with.  My growing distaste for mass carnage notwithstanding, I did enjoy the strategy that went into liberating the outposts; there were only a limited number of guards (unless you let them sound an alarm), and each outpost had its own unique layout, which meant that each scenario was unique.   It could be looked at as a puzzle to be solved, is what I’m trying to say.

*** I can’t apologize enough for that sentence’s structure.

more FC3 prattle; some amateur rumination on game design

I’m having one of those days where I’m super-stressed out because of work and I’d like nothing more than to sink some quality brain-time into a post, but I’m having trouble thinking of anything to talk about other than “ZOMG Far Cry 3 is amazing.”

I sunk a fair amount of time in it last night –

  • first, taking care of some busywork (i.e., doing some Path of the Hunter missions in order to max out certain crafting paths – I can’t remember all the ones I’ve finished, but I know as of last night I’ve at least got the biggest wallet, the biggest syringe kit and maybe the biggest ammo pouch, which were the 3 most important things on my to-do list);
  • second, trying a few of the assassination missions (which are a bit contrived and probably not something I’ll keep pursuing – I haven’t found any tangible rewards beyond money and XP, unlike the Hunting missions which are the only ways to get certain crafting material);
  • third, getting distracted from the first and second tasks above by checking out some happened-upon ruins and picking up some relics (which aren’t necessarily all that rewarding, either, but these ruins scratch that Skyrim itch of pure exploration for exploration’s sake, which is something I’ll get to in a bit); and then
  • finally, diving into some actual story missions.  I’ve posted some screenshots from those missions below – I’m not sure if they constitute spoilers, since there aren’t any map locations or enemies, but they do show places that you can’t see on the actual island.  I’m close to the end of Chapter 5 – Buck’s sent me on something of a treasure hunt.

Buck (the character) is a disgusting, vile human being (who’s acted phenomenally well, by the way), and I certainly hope he gets what’s coming to him at the end of this particular mission arc, but these missions are among the most fun I’ve had in the game.  You’re off in these hidden underground ruins, looking for a mystical object; you’ll start off by doing some relatively painless first-person platforming, then you’ll encounter a group of enemies who are trying to open a locked door; you’ll dispatch those enemies, open the door they couldn’t unlock… and then it’s just you and these places, no enemies in sight (save for a few snakes and komodo dragons here and there), exploring without consequence, free from external pressure.  Even if the ruins themselves are extremely linear, and even if the “puzzles” barely qualify to be identified as such, it’s still a rush.  (They feel like extremely simplified (but gorgeous) versions of the catacombs in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, now that I think about it.)

I love that this stuff is in the game.  I love that while this is a big-budget, AAA first person shooter, that the game has the balls to take the shooting out of the equation entirely (even if it can’t remove your guns from your field of vision, as in the screenshots above).  I love that just as much as how much I love how truly dynamic this world actually is – how you can spend 10 minutes silently sneaking around an outpost, tagging enemies, plotting your attack, only to have a fucking grizzly bear run into camp and maul everything to death.

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In my post the other day I attempted to make the case that there’s too much killing in games.  Or, rather – that most games require the elimination of enemies (whether by gunfire, swordplay, magic, jumping on a turtle’s head, etc.) in order to achieve a win-state; that this has become, more or less, the default concept in contemporary game design.   There are certainly notable examples where this is not the case (Portal, Journey, and Fez come to mind), but those examples are few and far between, and they certainly don’t sell nearly as well.   

After that post, I had an enlightening Twitter conversation with @WGP_Josh, and we hypothesized about how awesome a combat-free Tomb Raider or Uncharted would be.  I’m guessing that a lot of  game designers – well, rather, game publishers – are frightened by the silence of pure exploration, and so they feel that it’s necessary that in between the truly free-form stuff like puzzle solving and narrative development there’s gotta be a lot of BANG and BOOM and rag-doll physics and basically anything that can justify a multiplayer suite.

I’ve been thinking about this problem ever since.  I know nothing about game design, and so I have no idea what comes first – the narrative?  the art?  the main character?  the marketing budget?  the gameplay hook?  the desired player experience?   I feel, in my gut, that those last two are probably the most important, but I truly don’t know.

If I were to design a game, I think I’d probably focus on that last bit – the desired player experience – and then try to figure out what sort of action the player would have to do in order to best achieve that experience.*  But I’d also want to make sure there was a compelling reason for the player to want to continue, and so I’d develop some sort of narrative thrust, however basic, to keep the player engaged.   Weirdly, I think art and sound come last in this equation.  I mean, I’m a graphics whore through and through, and I’d want my game to look and sound great, but I do think you need to keep the player engaged first by making sure the game’s primary action is compelling.

And here’s where the problem lies.  What is that primary action?  What is the hook?  What is the way from Point A to Point B – even if it’s the player, not the level designer, who ultimately determines that path?  Judging from the vast majority of the games that have been released over the last 10 years, it seems that the easiest answer is “combat.”  When those games then actually focus on the combat and make sure it’s something special in and of itself – i.e., Bulletstorm, the Rocksteady Batman games, even (dare I say) Gears of War – well, that works.  But then there’s something like Portal, which removes combat from the game completely, and yet is still incredibly gripping and absorbing and engaging.

I sincerely hope that someday I can find out the answers to these questions first-hand.

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Also: check out this amazing behind-the-scenes piece about Double Fine from Polygon.  And this interesting piece from Chris Dahlen over at Unwinnable about the undeserved anonymity of game design.

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*And when I think about my favorite games of the last 10 years, and I think about my favorite bits in each of those games, I realize that they all have several things in common.  And then I really start thinking about learning how to code.

moving past murder

I’m in the beginning stages of working on the 2012 GOTY post, which is normally a fun and exciting thing to work on.  This year’s edition is a bit tougher to put together than years past, though; it wasn’t a particularly strong year, for one thing, and I’ve been hard-pressed to find one title standing head and shoulders above the rest.  My top 10 feels very flimsy to me – I’ve tried several different orders and none of them feel right.  In previous years, there’d at least be a clear top 3-5 to choose from, with the bottom of the order eventually settling into place.  Right now, I’ve maybe got a clear top 2, but I haven’t even finished one of them yet.  (Hint hint.)

As I think about what I played this year, though, I’m a little troubled.  And maybe it’s because I’m going to be a father in the spring, and I’m suddenly going to have to be very aware of what I play and what I let my little boy see – I mean, I’m going to be changing diapers and getting 2 hours of sleep right when Bioshock Infinite and GTA5 come out; and maybe it’s because “shooter fatigue” is a real problem for me, even if I’m loving the hell out of Far Cry 3.

I guess I’m just concerned about how much virtual murder I’ve committed this year.  If I have the time (and I probably won’t), I’d like to check out the stats of each game I played and see just how many people, aliens and animals I killed.  Even if I just take into account that I hardly did any multiplayer gaming this year, and even if I also take into account that there were quite a few games that I didn’t even finish, I’m guessing I killed at least 10,000 things.  I’m pulling that number out of my ass, to be sure, but I did kill over 700 people just in Uncharted 3 last year, and this year I played Diablo 3 to completion 3 times – I might’ve killed 10,000 things in that game alone.

And of all the games I played, only Spec Ops: The Line had the flat-out balls to ask if all that killing was fun.

New consoles are probably coming out next year*, which means, among other things, that AAA games will be much more expensive to produce in order to look as good as they’re expected to; and as such, there’s probably not going to be a whole lot of risk-taking in the development of new IP.  And the truth of the matter is that shooting still sells better than anything else.  Sure, there’s always Madden, and there’s lots of non-murdering happening in the downloadable spaces like PSN and XBLA and iOS.  But nothing’s making money like Halo and Call of Duty, and you’d better believe that this console generation’s swan song, GTA5, is going to sell at least 20-40 gazillion units next year.   That’s a lot of virtual bullets yet to be fired.

I hope, though, that there will be developers courageous enough to create game experiences that are not focused around killing.  (The Mass Effect franchise, which I adore, is certainly not only about killing, but most of the missions involve killing in order to get from point A to point B.  I might also add that my favorite ME missions have almost always been the ones that don’t involve killing, but rather focus on exploration – if only because they’re such a refreshing change of pace.)   Games like Journey and Fez had no death, no end-state, no obliteration – only you and the environment and a goal to achieve, and they were magical experiences unlike anything else I’d played this year.  I’ve played the hell out a bunch of games on my iPhone and iPad this year, and almost none of them involved the firing of a gun, and they were all, for the most part, absorbing and interesting.  

It CAN be done, is the thing.  There is an audience for this kind of game experience.  It might not be as large as the millions of people who play shooters all the time, but it’s certainly there, and I think it’d really be something if game designers could evolve along with the technology they’re working with to create experiences where winning doesn’t necessarily have to mean killing.

 

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* There’s rumors now that a Steam Box is actually happening, and if it is, that might very well end up being my console of choice.  If it comes with a blu-ray drive?  Sold.

weekend recap – conquering fears, one drive at at time

Here’s hoping all of you (whoever you are) had a wonderful holiday break.  I can’t necessarily say that my break was relaxing, but I can say that I’ve come through the other side feeling almost like a changed man.

See, Thanksgiving is simultaneously the holiday I look forward to the most (since I get to see all of my family), and also the holiday I end up getting the most stressed out over.  There’s lots of travelling (which can stress me out), lots of food I can’t eat very much of (as I’ve got some annoying food allergies and a pretty sensitive GI system, generally speaking), the requisite family drama (which I’m sure everyone else has, too), and my day-to-day schedule is usually so busy that there’s hardly any time to chill out and relax and digest.   (I’ve got 3 different family units to visit, is the thing.)

This year’s edition was doubly stressful because I was also picking up my first car, a process that had already been stressing me out for the last 2 weeks as I dealt with epic DMV hassles and endless forms and insurance companies and such, and this car-acquiring process was going to end with me driving this car back to my apartment in Brooklyn, a process that necessarily involves driving through New York City.  I have lived in NYC since 1993, and the prospect of driving here has never ceased to freak me out.  (I have, in fact, driven in the city a few times, and even had a shitty moving van stall out and die – three times! – on a crowded, uphill onramp to the Queensborough Bridge, and I am still alive.)

And yet, even though the holiday was busy (as predicted) and there was drama (unfortunate), the food I did eat was quite delicious and didn’t kill me, and in general my stomach was quite cooperative, and it was wonderful to see everyone, and the drive back to the city on Saturday night was shockingly easy and stress-free, and we even had time to build a bureau for the baby’s room on Sunday AND go bowling in the afternoon with friends AND watch the first half of the Giants game before totally passing out from exhaustion.  This was a good weekend.

Conquering the drive, though; that was big.   That was the thing that was stressing me out more than anything else, and it turned out to be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.   I’m already dealing with general anxiety disorder, which has made me somewhat of a recluse in recent years.*   Medications have helped drag me out of my apartment, but sometimes you just have to face your fears head-on if you’re ever going to conquer them.  And let me tell you, when I finally pulled into our parking space, a part of me really wanted to hear the Achievement Unlocked! sound.

In any event, I’m back in town.

Not a lot of gaming stuff to report.  I’ve been more or less successful in avoiding the Steam sale, though I did buy a few things last night on steep discount (including Hotline Miami).  (And, as I write this, I see that there’s a Flash Sale where Tropico 4 is 80% off.  I suck at strategy games, and yet I’m close to pulling the trigger on this.)

One other bit of non-gaming news to report:  the Kindle Paperwhite is fantastic.  My previous Kindle was old and losing its charge pretty quickly, and the Kindle iPad app can be hard on the eyes at night (and is also too full of distractions to be truly useful as a reading device).  The Paperwhite, though, is super-easy on the eyes, rests very easy in the hands, and has gotten me back into a heavy reading rotation.  (I may end up doing a little Books of 2012 post here, as a matter of fact; my personal blog, where I usually post stuff like this, is more or less defunct these days, and I’ve been thinking about expanding this blog’s topical range anyway.  Hope that’s OK with you!)

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* That being said, being a semi-agoraphobe has also meant that I play a lot of videogames, and is a large reason why this blog even exists in the first place.

more AC3 talk, and some other people’s brilliance

I’m having one of those afternoons where I’m just kinda restless.  The day job has been a source of enormous stress and anxiety over the last few weeks, and yet I’m not feeling like I’m as busy as I should be, which makes me feel even worse.  Today, for example, I’ve basically been waiting for the massive workload that I know is coming, but I don’t know when, and I don’t know what it’s going to be.

I’d much rather be writing, but as you might imagine, I’m not really in a position right now where I can shut out the rest of the world and really get into it.  I mean, I played Assassin’s Creed 3 for a few more hours last night, and I’d like to continue talking about it, even though most of the 2000+ words I wrote yesterday cover pretty much everything.  Could I expect you to keep reading?

In any event, I realize now that I forgot to mention the meta-challenges, which are perhaps the most irritating thing about the game (and yet which, ironically, are in the game specifically to induce replayability).  These challenges basically ask you to complete each mission while also fulfilling certain requirements, such as only killing enemies with a certain weapon, or to kill enemies without using a certain weapon, or other such random nonsense.  I tried paying attention to them at first, but soon found that they hampering my natural gameplay rhythm; why couldn’t I just complete the mission the way I wanted to, responding to the way the scene naturally unfolded?  Of course, after you complete each mission, the game “grades” your performance, and each missed challenge shows up in bright red text.  This is bullshit.  I mean, I get this “grading” thing, and it works in certain contexts.  But not here.  After all, I don’t give the game a grade after each mission for how many times the broken AI prevented me from doing what I needed to do, right?  Or how often the controls don’t actually do what I ask them to, such as when I’m attempting to climb a tree but instead accidentally jump 50 feet to my death?  (That sentence would be ironic if I were a professional game critic.)

Anyway.  I did a few more missions, and then I spent around an hour in the Boston Underground, unlocking the rest of the Fast Travel locations (or, rather, as many as I could find – I think I’ve gotten 6 of the 10 available).   And it was in these quiet moments of exploration and occasional parkour that I remembered why I still love this franchise.   My favorite bits of the previous games were those side areas that eschewed combat entirely and instead focused purely on climbing, exploring, and puzzle solving – in short, the parts that reminded me of Prince of Persia.  The Boston Underground is pretty underwhelming in that regard, as it’s less about gigantic ancient buildings and more about mostly narrow tunnels and a few lever puzzles that can be solved in around 15 seconds, but it’s at least sort of scratches the relevant itch.

So, there.  There’s some words for you.

I really started this specific post, though, to highlight some other excellent words written by writers far better than I.

1.  Last week I wanted to write a big response to the Eurogamer mini-scandal, and about the ethics of game journalism, and what exactly a “mock review” is and why it’s so terrible.  And then the brilliant Leigh Alexander went ahead and wrote this, and that more or less took the wind out of my sails.

2.  My good friend Carolyn Petit over at Gamespot wrote this lovely story about a woman in Pittsburgh trying to build an arcade, and the struggles she’s run into.

3.  Brendan Kough, over at one of my new favorite sites, Unwinnable, has a great appreciation for the irreverent storytelling of Borderlands 2.

trust issues

First:  there are a bunch of things I want to write about, but it’s gonna be tough to find the time to write them.   The day job is particularly bananas this week as everybody’s trying to get caught up from last week’s insanity, and so finding consecutive free minutes with which to craft interesting sentences out of interesting thoughts will be few and far between.   Speaking of which, the fallout from Hurricane Sandy resulted in, among other things, me not receiving my copy of Need for Speed Most Wanted until today, and my rental copy of Assassin’s Creed 3 may very well have gotten lost in the mail.  Now, in the grand scheme of things, I am OBVIOUSLY extremely thankful and grateful that these are the only significant setbacks I’ve been dealing with, especially since there are so many of my fellow New Yorkers who are still without power, water, and (especially) heat.  Still, I’m going to want to be playing the hell out of these two games, and I’m going to have to find time to fit them both in – especially since Halo 4 comes out tomorrow.

Consider this a quick sketch of what I’d like to be posting about this week, if I can:

1.  Forza Horizon.  This has gotten the bulk of my playtime lately, and as such I’m curious to see how that will influence my time with Need for Speed, which I’m still thinking of as Burnout Paradise 1.5.  As for Horizon itself – it’s a marvel.  The only real negatives I can offer for the game are specifically aimed at all the stuff that isn’t directly tied to the driving experience itself – the radio personalities, the pre-race smack talk with your “rival”, the festival itself.  That’s all junk, basically, intended to give me a reason to keep driving – as if the driving itself weren’t enough.  Which it most certainly is.  And the game keeps rewarding me for driving, even if I’m just aimlessly hunting down the last few signs I haven’t crashed into, or the last 3 or 4 stretches of road I haven’t driven yet.  I’ll go into further detail when the opportunity arises, because the game deserves it.

2.  XCOM Enemy Unknown.  GAWD.  I don’t know that I’ve ever been so intimidated and afraid of a game that I’m enjoying the hell out of.  I can only play it in 30-minute chunks before the tension becomes too much.  AND I’M PLAYING IT ON EASY.  Last night I finally finished the Skeleton Key/Alien Base mission, which I suppose is the first real gauntlet I’ve had to run; those goddamned spider bastards wiped out half my crew.  And the only reason I finished with 3 guys alive instead of 2 is that I was able to snipe the psychic alien and get a critical hit, one-shot kill before he could damage the guy he’d mind-controlled.  I get it:  a vital and central component of the playing experience is that you’re going to lose some of your crew members, no matter how well you play (or how much you save-spam), and that losing those crew members is going to matter.  It’s going to hurt, and it’s going to suck.  MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, assholes.

3.  The most important thing that I want to get to – and man, I really hope I can find the time to do it – is in regards to this recent Eurogamer kerfuffle about games journalism, ethics, and trust.  Stephen Totilo just posted a pretty thorough article about this whole mess here, encompassing points of view from pretty much all sides of the spectrum, and I highly recommend checking it out.  For me, though – as an outsider looking in – this latest episode has prompted me to ask myself what it is I actually want out of the game journalism and criticism I read; and, as well, why I’d want to get into this business in the first place.   If I write nothing else this week, I sincerely hope I can write that post.

Here’s hoping your week goes smoother than mine.

a postcard from Brooklyn, post-Sandy

So, first thing’s first – everyone’s OK here at SFTC HQ.  As far as the hurricane goes, I came out pretty great – never lost power, heat, water or internet.  I’m a little stir crazy, I guess, since me and the wife have been more or less stuck inside since Monday, but that’s fine.  There are hundreds of thousands of fellow New Yorkers who did not get off so easy, and my heart breaks for them.

Our neighborhood is one of the few that survived pretty much unscathed, but we’re certainly not in the clear.  Because all the ports are closed, and because mass transportation is still screwed up and the roads in and out of the city are filled with traffic, supplies aren’t getting in.  The local grocery stores and bodegas are running low on pretty much everything; the gas station a few blocks away from my apartment is out of gas, surrounded by perhaps a dozen vacant cars.  And I would make the argument that when supplies finally arrive, they really ought to go to the neighborhoods that really need it first, of which there are far more than mine.

It’s a little messed up, to be honest.  I’ve been living in New York City since 1997, and I’ve never seen anything like this.  As horrible as 9/11 was – and I don’t mean to diminish how traumatic it was – the city never felt quite as isolated and cut-off as it does right now.  And I mean that in the literal sense – it is damned near impossible to get anywhere in the city, as tunnels and bridges have been closed and traffic has been nightmarish.  It’s true that mass transit has sort of returned today, but going from Brooklyn to Manhattan via subways and buses is still an exercise in futility – see this Gawker post, for example, and know that the picture in that link represents but one-sixth of the actual situation.

Still, the city is picking itself up, slowly but surely.  Indeed, the mail came today for the first time since last Saturday.  (Alas, my Gamefly copy of Assassin’s Creed 3 was not part of the delivery.)

Anyway, even though I’ve been stuck at home for the last few days, there hasn’t been a tremendous amount of gaming, to be honest.  When the TV has been on, the wife and I have more or less been glued to NY1 to stay updated, and we’ve only taken breaks to watch James Bond movies.  I’ve managed to squeeze in a little bit of Forza Horizon here and there, and last night I spent a little time with XCOM.

XCOM, as it turns out, is a perfect “horror” game.  I can only play it in 30-minute chunks, actually, because (a) the battlefield gameplay is absurdly tension-filled, and (b) I am a huge pussy. And even though I’m playing it on Easy, it’s still monstrously difficult at times; when shit starts going wrong, it goes wrong really fast and before you know it your entire squad is either dead or zombie-fied.  I thought I’d been making good progress, actually – I’d cleared a few alien abduction missions without losing anyone, and the world council was very pleased with my overall performance, and I’d finally been able to create the Skeleton Key that granted me access to the alien base.  My squad was filled with experienced soldiers who wielded top-of-the-line equipment – those laser sniper rifles are insane – and I carelessly assumed that even with my overly cautious and methodical play style, I wouldn’t have too much trouble.

How wrong I was.  I cleared the first room easily enough, but then I entered the second room and encountered the Chyrssalids for the first time, and within 5 minutes my entire squad was overrun.

The turn-based nature of the game is actually a large part of the horror.  I suppose “dread” might be a better choice of word, because that’s ultimately what the feeling is; you know that no matter how long you stall in trying to figure out what to do, one of your soldiers is totally fucked.  You might have to walk away, go to the bathroom, get a glass of water, all the while thinking of a solution – but when you get back to the computer, your soldier (who has the only medkit, because you weren’t paying attention) is still about to get destroyed, and your other squadmates are either out of position or, even worse, are out of ammo and need to waste a turn to reload.

It’s a marvelous game, and I hate it.  I hate that I love it so much, and I hate that I keep having to walk away from it because I can’t take the tension.  Considering how much tension there is in NYC these days anyway, there’s only so much more I can take.

There’s not much more to report.  My copy of Need For Speed Most Wanted is apparently at my office, but I’m not going into Manhattan until the subways are running again (which probably won’t be until Monday at the earliest).  And as I said above, my copy of AC3 is in USPS limbo, though hopefully it’ll arrive tomorrow.  But really, the most important news is that everything here is OK; we are safe and warm and our dogs are keeping us company.  

weekend recap: honorable intentions

[I had grand visions for this post, but then (of course) work got in the way, and so I have no idea if what follows is coherent or interesting or what.  Many apologies.]

Lots to talk about, and some of it has nothing to do with gaming.  In fact, I might as well dive in and get this shameless plug out of the way right now:  I’ve finally, FINALLY built a website for all my music-doings.  Please feel free to visit vosslandiamusic.com and check it out; there will be more content coming soon, but for now it’s, well, what it is.

Back to the subject at hand, now.  This was another in a series of inadvertent three-day weekends; I’d been somewhat successfully battling a cold last week but I woke up on Friday having lost the cold war, as it were, and so I stayed home and sneezed and coughed and decided to get caught up on gaming stuff, since the living room was all mine.

Last week I wrote about my Dishonored glitch:

…I completed Slackjaw’s quest, and was on my way to head back to his distillery to turn it in, when the game suddenly told me I’d failed the quest, and even though none of his men were trying to kill me, he certainly was.  I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong.  Tried re-loading several times, tried entering stealthily as opposed to waltzing right in – but no matter how I entered the zone, as soon as I’d crossed some invisible barrier, the game decided I’d failed.  This was very, very frustrating (as you might imagine), and since I didn’t see any solution (beyond waiting for a patch), I decided to take it out of the 360′s tray and leave it alone for a little while.  Some quick googling revealed that a lot of people are having the same problem – not everyone, but enough for me to feel like it’s not just my own peculiar problem.  That being said, since I don’t know when the patch is coming (if indeed it’s coming at all), I might just take the opportunity to start over from scratch, now that I actually know what I’m doing.

As it turned out, there was a patch ready for me to download Friday morning, but when I loaded my last save, the quest was still glitched out.  So I did end up restarting from the beginning, which also made it much easier, since I already knew what I was doing (and had a much better idea of how to do it better).  Took no time at all to get caught up to where I’d been glitched, and everything seemed to be working fine at that point.  Made much progress, then; I happened to glance at a walkthrough online just to see how far into it I was, and it would appear that if the game has three Acts, my next mission would be the end of Act 2/beginning of Act 3.

Here’s the thing; I kinda don’t know if I care enough about the game to bother finishing it.

And yet the game matters enough to me that I would really like to know why I’m feeling so apathetic about it.

This particular problem is made thornier in that after I took my leave from Dishonored on Friday, I also spent a great deal of time with the first bit of DLC for Borderlands 2, which is absolutely fantastic; and also that my weekend eventually got pretty busy with things wholly unrelated to gaming (see first paragraph above).  Also: my rental copy of Forza Horizon should be arriving later this week, which I’m very anxious to get my hands on; and next week comes Criterion’s Need For Speed Most Wanted, which is looking every bit like the spiritual successor to Burnout Paradise that I’ve been craving for years.  (And meanwhile my XCOM campaign lurks on in the background.)  Basically, I’m very much aware that I’ve got a very limited amount of time in which to give the rest of Dishonored the attention it probably deserves, so there’s a weird sort of pressure there.  I fully acknowledge that this isn’t Dishonored’s fault.

HOWEVA.  There are some things that are Dishonored’s fault.

Before I get around to killing it, though, let me first sing the praises of the art direction, which are absolutely wonderful.  Let me also say that my favorite parts of the game are, basically, everything I do before I have to dispose of my target.  I love Blink-ing around* – it’s fun and useful and arguably even more satisfying to pull off than Batman’s quick-evade.**  I love exploring every nook and cranny of the environment, which is very much designed to reward such exploration – every open apartment window on a non-ground-level floor holds at least one goodie (and, also, tells some wordless, sad story in its tableau).  I love doing reconnaissance, basically, and the game’s tools for performing such recon work are exquisitely designed and endlessly rewarding.

But, yeah, then I have to actually go about my business.   And that’s where I run into problems.

The game tells you that it’s better to not kill.  But it also gives you lots of ways to kill.  And sometimes you run into a situation where there’s nothing you can do but kill, unless you decide to reload your last save, and that can be tedious.  Furthermore, as far as I can tell, the game only tells you of the benefits of acting non-lethally during loading screens – nobody in the game actually tells you to not kill anyone.  Indeed, your handlers at the Hounds Pit are asking you to kill people in order to advance their cause.  Your sidequests generally offer you a way to achieve the same result without killing, and after each mission I’ve gotten a rather handsome reward waiting for me in my room, but I’ve also had to kill a number of guards in order to get where I need to go, too, and nobody gives me much grief about that.  It’s not like I’ve gone on a murder spree or anything – my overall chaos meter still reads “Low” at the end of each mission – but I’m certainly not getting the Achievements for mercy, and in any event, that kind of meta-challenge ends up changing the reason why I’m playing in the first place.

**SLIGHT STORY SPOILERS AHEAD, ALTHOUGH THE KEY WORD IS SLIGHT** The story isn’t terribly interesting, either; it’s not bad, but neither is it the sort of tale where I’m wondering what happens next.  The supernatural business seems a little hokey.  Hell, the assassins who appear in the beginning of the game are very much Blink-ing their way around, which leads me to believe that the Outsider isn’t necessarily laying all his cards on the table, and that’s not terribly surprising.  And in looking at that walkthrough I mentioned, I couldn’t help but notice that I’m about to be betrayed, but let’s be honest – that sort of “twist” is something you can see a mile away.  **END SPOILERS**

I suppose it was the end of the mission I’d just finished that really soured my attitude.  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.

Now, granted, the game’s artifice had already been made glaringly obvious by the aforementioned glitch.  Still, as a regular player of games, you take that stuff as part of the deal; code breaks all the time, the world’s an imperfect place.   It’s only when I’d surrendered to the game’s fiction and then had it clumsily torn from my hands that I started wondering just what the hell I was doing with my time.

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* Indeed, I was weirdly disappointed when I jumped over to Borderlands 2 and found that I had to walk everywhere, like a chump.

** I’m blanking on the name of this technique – it’s how you traverse long distances in Arkham City, swinging around, vaguely Spiderman-ish.