Punk Agent

What fascinates me about Crackdown 2 (2010, Ruffian / Microsoft, 360) is that it is absolutely unapologetic about what it is. It is mainstream gaming’s anti-hero, the two-fingered salute to the rest of the industry.  It may end up the place core gamers go to die .

Many of the reviews that I’ve read of the game concentrate on the lack of story, the familiarity of the city, the lack of graphical detail, the lack of genuine new features, the game’s slavish similarity to the first game. But what the reviews fail to appreciate, in my opinion, is that these so-called weaknesses are absolutely intentional. You are criticising a game for being exactly what it always wanted to be – isn’t that somehow missing the point?

I don’t think the purpose of a review is to complain about what a game doesn’t have, as if ticking boxes on a checklist – what is Crackdown 2 and why does it confound these criticisms? In my opinion, the design decisions made for Crackdown 2 are some of the bravest I’ve seen from a major release this year. They will doubtless restrict sales, and put off certain customers, but they service one of the purer gameplay experiences around. Which, after all, was the whole point of Crackdown in the first place.

The game actually has even less story than the original game, if that were possible – this immediately puts off a whole section of the gaming public. And at first this feels regressive – after a brief tutorial one is simply poured out onto the streets and invited to jump around shooting stuff and setting off a bunch of simple mini-missions to progress. The original Crackdown had a bunch of criminal bosses to track down like story missions, usually defended by scores of gunmen to dispatch. This game simply gets rid of the bosses, and puts all the gunmen out in the open.

By which it becomes less pretentious, and simply is what it is. No cut-scenes, little dialogue, just pure action. I find that refreshing, and I think it was a great decision. Like Borderlands or Left 4 Dead, this is simply a playground for you to create your own stories, and is a much purer gaming experience for it. A clever and brave move.

One gigantic decision with this sequel is to simply reproduce the same city from the first game. At first one cannot see the positives in this decision. But I think it works. There are no new major surprises in terms of discovering new bits of the landscape, but that is not what Crackdown is essentially about anyway. All one needs is a framework for gameplay. After all we don’t alter the chessboard for each new game of chess. Crackdown is all about making you as familiar as possible with your surroundings, then enabling fun gameplay in those surroundings. In the end, I think the decision to replay the same city is both clever and brave. Again!

Crackdown became synonymous with its orbs – the collectibles that litter the city. It’s a poster-boy for criticism of the so-called narrative dissonance of having to collect lots of things for an achievement. So what does Crackdown 2 do? It adds new orbs. More collectibles, including online-only ones. They become as synonymous with the city as the buildings and streets themselves – there’s no need to question their logic, because this is a game where only game logic applies anyway.

When you get an achievement in Crackdown 2, the American announcer that narrates the action announces it in loud terms, and congratulates you. It might be game-breaking in some worlds, but here it is fitting. This is a game that has no problem with immersion-breaking, because it is secure in what it is. There is no character to dispell, because you know you are a super-powered agent and that is it as far as the characterisation goes – the rest is all you, the player. There is no narrative to break, because the narrative is in playing the game in this cityscape playground.

And Crackdown 2 has simply some of the best online co-op in gaming. It’s completely stress-free – you can seek out players or just allow them to turn up in your city. You can join a city and help someone with their missions, or just dick around to your heart’s content. This is what the game was built to do. There is simply no stress involved – there is no aim for a griefer to spoil, no directive to follow or react against, one is simply in a gamespace expressing oneself. One can join a game and be on the opposite side of the city to the host and ignore them for an hour. No biggie.

So what do you do? You play, until you’ve had enough, then you switch off the game. You run and jump with ever-increasing prowess to reach new agility orbs. You fight and shoot with ever-increasing strength and accuracy. You drive with ever increasing speed. Your presence isn’t of value in terms of where in a story you are, or what items you have, or how much money you have made, but in what you can actually physically do with your virtual character. Your score is your body. It’s the purest embodiment of achievement in a game I can think of.

And it is anarchy, because it confounds many of the principles of game design. How can you design for verticality when a super-agent can circumvent it? How can you design for difficulty when a protagonist can simply outgrow it? So what Crackdown does is simply throw away the keys and unlock everything – an open space of a city, and an out-of-control player within it.

After all this, I look at Crackdown 2, and I salute how much it salutes and respects Crackdown’s spirit. It IS Crackdown, which is all it ever should be. I think it adds to Crackdown’s legacy – fuck the slings and arrows of modern gaming philosophies, this is a plaything for players to play. I think we will look back at Crackdown and its sequel as absolutely key titles of the last decade purely for that reason. They know exactly what they are, and are slices of perfection on those terms.

It makes me look at my list from this year – games of real ambition and with incredible production values (Heavy Rain, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect 2, Bayonetta) that this game cannot really match. But yet this is the game I would take to the desert island to play with, and isn’t that what gaming is supposed to be about?

The Pitfalls Of Atari

I consider myself a videogame historian. I have spent years piecing together my version of the medium’s history which may or may not see the light of day in book form. With the release of Replay: A History Of Videogames it seems unlikely that another book is required. And one topic in gaming history gets up my nose more than any other.

The obsession with Atari’s part in early games history is vastly overemphasised. Undoubtedly crucial popularisers of early videogames, and ground-breaking and original at times, the fact still remains that Atari is seen to cast too huge a shadow over the early history of videogames in what has become a sort of victor’s history. Yes, Atari made lots of money and lost lots of money – how is that relevant to anyone outside Atari? Should a cultural history be so dominated by the business acumen of one player?

One thing the Atari story has is plenty of colour. Renowned as a laid-back company, winging it in business, with a stoner culture, and apparently a hotbed for creativity. Without being unfair, it seems that many Atari employees have spent the last 30 years talking about what it was like working at Atari. And it’s always interesting to know where games come from. But it seems to me that the incredible amount of focus on the corporate history of one company is only of limited interest to anyone who cares about games.

Atari started with Pong, and its success kickstarted videogaming as we know it. But the idea was stolen, and Atari was forced to settle a lawsuit with Magnavox after Atari’s Nolan Bushnell lifted the Pong mechanics from one of the games on Magnavox’s Odyssey machine. History has had to be revised once this episode came to light. And of course there were many other machines before and after Pong in that era – indeed the Odyssey was being demonstrated with the original version of what became Pong before Atari were ever formed. Why no history of Magnavox’s huge contribution? If a thief had stolen Darwin’s Origin of Species and reprinted it with great success, should they get more credit than Darwin?

The early arcades were full of successful Atari games, for which it deserves great credit as a pioneer. But other manufacturers were around as well, and their games were often just as good or better than Ataris. Defender and Robotron came from Williams. Non-Atari games Warrior and Western Gun introduced player combat. Space Panic introduced platform gaming, but came from Universal not Atari. And the behemoth that was Space Invaders came from Japan, as did Galaxian, Galaga, PacMan, and Donkey Kong.

And does Atari’s VCS/2600 market-leader really stand up to scrutiny? It wasn’t the first of its kind, and was third to market by a distance, succeeding not because of its superiority to competitors (it was markedly inferior to the Odyssey 2) but simply because it had the back-catalogue and market muscle to smash the others. And of course it’s greatest contribution to gaming history is to license a fairly awful version of Space Invaders in 1980 to establish itself as the most famous console of its era. Most of the more famous 2600 games are really clunkily poor versions of much better arcade games – not all that inspiring to a modern eye.

Atari 2600 games aren’t rubbish, and some are excellent, but compared to other platforms of the era they are just primitive. Adventure is an undoubted early classic, and perhaps along with Pitfall (not an Atari game) the only games on the 2600 which really bear scrutiny today. But at a similar period Richard Garriott was introducing first-person dungeon exploration and open worlds in Alakabeth, and Richard Bartle was running the first MUD MMO, Plato was running complex simulations like Spasim  – there’s simply no comparison in terms of complexity and scale. Yet all we hear about is Atari.

And then there’s the crash of ’83, which has become legendary in videogaming history yet only occured in one country in the World, and is basically all about the fall of the Atari VCS. One reading is that the market was saturated with poor product and the bottom fell out of the market. My reading is that the 2600 was fairly primitive on its launch in 1977, and by 1983 was all but obliterated by better rivals. There wasn’t a crash – all that happened was that a product that wasn’t very good stopped selling because people realised it wasn’t very good.

Unfortunately Tristan Donovan’s Replay (an excellent read so far, review coming soon) falls into the same trap as every other history. Despite saying in the introduction that Donovan intends to talk about games and not industry, and talk about pioneering games not just popular ones, he still spends a good 50 pages dipping in and out of Atari’s business record. At the expense of what I consider fascinating developments in gaming. Barely a page on Garriott’s RPGs, barely a mention of the Plato community. Rather who was at which corporate position in Atari, who invested what company money in what machine, who sold which part of the business to who.

I’m utterly fed up with this version of videogames’ early history – like a history of fine dining dominated by McDonalds and Burger King.

Miyamoto Flow

Shigeru Miyamoto – legend of videogaming, 30-year veteran of the industry, the legendary creator of Donkey Kong, Zelda, Mario, Pikmin and Wii Fit/Music. He probably doesn’t have much to do with the daily nuts and bolts of game creation these days, but operates as a company-wide guru guiding Nintendo’s hand and the tone of Nintendo’s games. He’s the first name most people think of in connection with videogaming.

But where Miyamoto is most conspicuously absent is in the discussion of games as an art form. Barely a mention of gaming’s most famous creator in Tom Bissell’s recent book. When asked about ‘art’ games enthusiasts go to a ready flow of familiar titles – Shadow of the Colossus, Braid, Flower etc. Why doesn’t the discussion start with the greatest creator of them all?

But where does he belong in the discussion? I’ve been pondering what to write about him and Super Mario Galaxy 2 for a couple of weeks now – it’s a daunting prospect. Easy to bow in awe at the obvious mastery of the man, or at the legacy of worldwide hits that he has produced that nobody can match. But when it gets down to the nuts and bolts of what it is that he really represents, it’s much tougher to pinpoint.

For me Miyamoto is the master of flow. The experience of playing a game from moment to moment, the way that one moment leads on to the next moment, how they relate, and how what you do is controlled both in terms of content but in the way your control relates to the action onscreen. Call it pacing, call it flow, call it mise-en-scene, call it craft or art, it’s the thing that dominates all of ‘his’ games.

Miyamoto is perhaps becoming infamous for his apparent eschewing of story in favour of interface design and level design. Kind of like gaming’s greatest craftsman – the go-to guy for theatre sets rather than the playwright bowing to the gala audience. It’s a misconception, as at least a misclassification. If Miyamoto isn’t at the very heart of the discussion of gaming’s legacy, it’s purity and beauty, and where it is going as a thing, then the debate needs to be reshaped to let him in.

It’s e difference between narrative and story. It’s not that story is absent from his games, it’s that story is kept as a provider for action, rather than an end in itself. One is reminded of the approach of theatre purists like Pinter or Mamet, interested in the relation of one moment to the next rather than the grand classical story lines that one might associate with theatre. Super Mario galaxy 2 begins with bowser stealing the princess, and the trip through the galaxy to find her. It is made clear that stars that you collect enable the space travel that facilitates the rescue. Although it is a simple story sparely told, there are approaching 100 lines of written dialogue as the premise is set up – it’s so skilfully done that most players don’t notice the information being communicated.

It’s the same in each level – players might notice little more than a smooth gameplay experience, but the hidden hand is expertly controlling that action with subtle narrative nudges. A star luma might shout ‘over here’ and the moment is barely noticed, but quickly acknowledged, and these tiny moments dominate your motivation for the next section of the experience. One of the first moments of SMG2 takes place outside yoshi’s house on a small planet. A simple pathway guides one around the round house in 360 degree motion, all the meanwhile introducing players to the concepts of 3D space and movement. No moment is wasted – there is simply no irrelevance in a Miyamoto game. Each space is justified, each moment is judged, each jerk of the controller is anticipated. Not a story then, but the storytelling of a master.

SMG2 has it’s masterful pacing device built into the premise – each galaxy is a collection of planets, and Mario is propelled minute-by-minute from one to the next. This is pacing in situe – an all-action planet followed by an empty breather, followed by a chase planet, followed by a spaceship for narrative break and perhaps a luma shop, followed by a boss fight. One gets the sense that these little planets have been created, and shifted about the order, and altered to give flow to the story. Each planet lasts about a minute, and then the moment shifts on anew – it’s the perfect way to craft an experience. No moment outstays its welcome.

What to compare this feeling to? The way the eye is guided around a painting. The pacing of a Hitchcock suspense scene. The poetry of a Shakespeare soliloquy? Are these comparisons relevant or desperately pretentious? I think maybe both, and we (I) need to get over the embarrassment of comparing something beloved (a Mario platformer) with other cultural things that perhaps aren’t quite so beloved. Not be me anyway.

Miyamoto’s games also sell by the bucketload, and they are fun to play. But just saying that doesn’t really get anyone anywhere, yet that is all you usually read when his name comes up. Then again, if we could pin down what is so special about his games, perhaps they would lose their mystery and joy. Better just to bask in the brilliance? I don’t know.

Morality Bites

Not that I would recommend Dante’s Inferno (2010, Visceral / EA, Ps3 / 360) as a perfect vehicle for profound moral introspection. One has to dig for adult theme past layers of excessive gore, gaudy art direction, and arena after arena of button-porn grind. But then maybe that’s the point – I can’t be the only person who finds the grind of real life a distraction from higher contemplation, and were I dwelling in the nine layers of hell I might deem myself too busy with the business of eternal pain to navel-gave more than perhaps once a century.

But Dante does encounter moral choice in the form of regular encounters with classical figures, in hell, and one is invited to either punish or absolve them for their sins. Complete with a three-line précis of their plight, one must decide. How they might feel about having a wandering Christian warrior decide their eternal fate is unclear – perhaps when in hell one is inclined to take one’s chances with any passing warriors eager to mete out justice.

When I make it to hell I’ll be able to empathize so much more easily.

The first one you meet is Pontius Pilate, as if a token ‘easy decision’ to break the player in at the start. Choose to punish one of these figures and you stick a sword through their brain – I think that fits the description. Choose to absolve them and one is thrown into a rhythm-action mini-game in which sins have to be saved through carefully-timed button presses – a gameplay experience synonymous with the pits of hell. Perhaps priests should be introducing Parappa the Rapper to the confessional – 4 ‘Hail Mary’s and 3 run-throughs of the Onion Dojo.

A fascinating pair of these moral choices gave me pause for thought. Francesca da Polenta and Paolo Malatesta – the names mean nothing to me, but in-game they are presented as damned souls, along with an opportunity to absolve or punish them as adulterers. On absolving both I was surprised to hear the ping of achievement – 20 gamer points for absolving both characters.

So for absolving these people EA and Visceral will award me extra credit. Fair enough, and looking at the background of these characters they seem to be a couple that were treated with sympathy in the original Divine Comedy – perhaps Visceral’s encouragement for us to act kindly upon them is a tribute to Dante’s own presentation of them.

But I’m struck by the fact that had I looked at the achievement list beforehand, as many gamers undoubtedly do, I would have been inclined to absolve these characters regardless of my inclinations. Sod morality, we’re talking about a higher calling here – the gamerscore. And thus we uncover perhaps the real theme of dante’s inferno, at least this release – the moral corruption of a generation of gamers, for whom the hypnotic nature of gaming credits outweigh the forces of simple morality.

I jest. At least I think I do.

A quick glance through the achievement list. Apparently I will encounter a Brunetto Latini (who he?) later in my journey, and 10 gamer points are on offer if I absolve them. Note that no points are on offer for punishment – a politically expedient decision by EA / Visceral? But nevertheless a deal with the devil is on offer 10 point a for a soul. I’m actually excited about it – I hope that their crimes are utterly abhorrent. What will I do?

What would be great is to be given the option to absolve Hitler of his sins. With 100 gamer points on offer. Would everyone absolve the man who gave us the second world war and the final solution? For 100 points I might have my arm twisted, no matter what my moral inclination might actually be.

What will also be exciting is if I, Dante, am offered the chance to absolve or punish my own soul. It would be an embodiment of the entire theme of the story in one gameplay choice. For all it’s failings, this sort of choice would be the ultimate moment in a game that takes it’s adult themes and classic story quite seriously. Calling it a ‘God of War clone’, as I have in the past, is actually fundamentally narrow-minded and simply lazy.

Yes, i grant, the moral choices on offer here are too simplistic. We need to somehow get beyond either/or dilemmas. Fallout 3 was very good at this, allowing complex and ambivalent grey areas in which to operate. But while we get there I’ll take some shorthand moral dilemmas in my games, because they are an experience i just don’t think any other medium can even get close to.

You play a game, and you have to live with yourself afterwards. It lasts much longer than the time it takes to switch off the TV, close the book, or walk out of the cinema into the daylight. Because you’ve left something of yourself in there. In the hell we call the gamespace. I think it’s a fairly powerful platform for our expression of ourselves.

At the same time, some button-mash hack and slash may help me forget what I’ve done to those poor souls.

Road to Hell

Sometimes games try too hard and do too much. What used to be elegant becomes convoluted and complicated. What used to flow becomes stilted and staccato. What used to be essential gets lost in the mix. Originality and inspiration drown in a gigantic mixed bag.

ModNation Racers (2010, Ps3) tries way too hard in my opinion. This is a kart racer enveloped in a career mode enveloped with cut scenes enveloped in a free roam multiplayer hub enveloped with content creation tools from track designers to complex kart and character skinning. Enter the world hub in your colourful little kart and you are bewildered by a vast arena with about 15 different zones to enter for the different features that the game has to offer – I still don’t have the trophy for simply visiting them all.

I have played a game called Trackmania. I played the free version on my PC. It’s a driving game. You can connect online and play user-made tracks with other players – there’s the same sort of join-the-server-then-play-and-chat feel that you get from some multiplayer shooters. You can also make tracks. Pretty much gaming perfection. I know what I’m going to get and then I play it.

Here the simple act of playing with some players online is obfuscated beyond belief. Find the right bit of the hub, search for an online game by type, sit in the holding space with some strangers, then sit for a minute or so while the track loads, get thrown about the track in a hi-octane race, and then press x to go through the process again. There’s no room to breathe, no simplicity to the process, no space to chat and no desire to do it anyway.

The extremely extended loading delays are indicative of the problems here. Presumably the multitudes of art assets have to be loaded into the system, the enormous 3D zones primed for use, but when you actually race the track it’s all a blur anyway. The irony is that if you download a user track it takes about three seconds!!! So the actual creative components of the game are tiny in proportion. The relationship is all wrong.

But the experience makes me realise what LittleBigPlanet (the same idea applied to 2D platforming) got so right. Sackboy can be coloured and dressed, but it’s an aside – in Modnation Racers the design of the karts and drivers is an overwhelming distraction. It feels like style over content – it’s like playing an RPG and never getting past the character creation screen. LittleBigPlanet keeps the areas of the game ringfenced for clarity – if you don’t want to create then just enjoy what there is. The basic operation is to pick a level and hit play – the rest of it is the smallprint.

ModNation Racers even makes me question the need for community content, because it comes at you like a barrage of effluent rather than a thing of wonder. Part of it is the simplicity of it all – I created a track in about 2 minutes using the autocomplete tools, and it looked and played well. I downloaded a few of the highest-rated community tracks, and they looked a lot like mine. I pressed the randomize button on the driver creation tools and it made a presentable character. What you end up with is a gameworld full of content that takes a minute or two to create. It’s like that nightmare where the internet becomes a morass of inane twitter posts, photograph albums of a trip to the corner shop, youtube videos of me playing frisbee in the park.

The problem might well be kart-racing. It is what it is, and I don’t even think this kart-racer handles very well. But kart-racing certainly doesn’t lend itself to majestic community creations. Decorate your kart as much as you like – it is still just a kart. I don’t think kart-racing even needs a career mode.

I’ve ended up reacting to this game with almost political misgivings. It’s a paranoid victim of the pitching process, where everything is promised and delivered, but to no particular end and with no particular aim in mind. It tries to appeal to everyone and ends up appealing to nobody. It’s created almost out of a paranoid fear of leaving people behind, rather than pushing forward. Rather than paring down for elegance it has been pared up! It’s an overblown mess of a game.

Why gamers are worse than Roger Ebert

Gamers didn’t react too kindly to infamous critic Roger Ebert dismissing games recently – his blog post ‘Video Games Can Never Be Art‘ on the subject attracted 3000 comments. Rightly so – he deserved a good shoeing for some really ignorant rubbish. Today he offered a begrudging retraction of sorts on his blog…

I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.

I have no problem with Roger Ebert expressing his opinion. If he started embracing games I think I’d find the effect deadening to the critical atmosphere around the medium, and it might push it in a very specific direction. I wouldn’t expect a Roger Ebert to like games – Brit film reviewer Mark Kermode has similar opinions.

What does get up my nose is gamers, who have no excuse for not knowing their own medium, offering even more damaging retorts to Ebert than Ebert’s original criticism.

Many of the responses to Ebert seem to fall into certain categories.

Perhaps the most popular is the apologist response “You’re right that most games are rubbish but some, my personal favourites, are definitely art.” Many gamers cite Shadow of the Colossus, Flower, Braid etc, and dismiss the rest. It seems to me this response falls into exactly the same trap as Ebert – that which I do not rate or do not know I dismiss, the ones that I like are the only ones that are worthwhile.

It’s an attitude that doesn’t bear the merest scrutiny. It doesn’t allow for bad art, only good art. It runs the danger of having a checklist for ‘what constitutes gaming art?’ – evocative painterly graphics, an obscure or mysterious story, poignant music, and a pretentious tone. Things that somehow slightly resemble classic art – figurative painting, classical music, or pondering understated camerawork. Totally missing the point, and a desperately pathetic attempt to occupy the artistic high ground.

You don’t defend a medium by ditching the majority of it. I prefer Ebert’s attitude – at least he’s consistent and unpretentious about it.

The second attitude is the ‘Games are just fun, and on those terms it doesn’t matter if you don’t get it‘. Again, as someone who treasures videogaming and takes my fun seriously, I feel insulted by this response, because it basically dismisses my own experiences as irrelevant. Basically it is citing ignorance as a defence – ‘I don’t care what I don’t know, I just know what I like’. It’s the attitude frequently cited by people who don’t like art in the first place, and who rarely step outside the mainstream to experience the variety of it anyway. People who aren’t curious, who don’t want to learn and discuss something new. Gaming doesn’t need these sorts of people on its side.

There’s a version of this approach that is more palettable – it’s the ‘gaming is not art and doesn’t need to be.‘. I have some sympathy with this approach, as long as it doesn’t imply downing the critical tools and ignoring the issues and the experiences that gaming provokes. In some cases it’s the equivalent of picking up the ball and going home. It’s also counter-productive – does gaming need to find its own niche away from other things, and outside normal discussions? I would argue it needs to be absolutely central to any discussion of art and culture in the 21st century, if only to discuss why it falls outside the normal boundaries.

The other approach that gets up my nose is what I criticised Tom Bissell for – the approach by which story-based games occupy the artistic high ground while the gamey games are left to the kids. “Games with stories are just as much art as movies are, and sometimes better“. This ring-fencing is once again divisive, and leaves those of us who find all games of interest outside the loop. Again it is making the same mistake as Ebert – dismissing that in which it is not interested or invested. And it ignores what I consider the fundamental truth – that all games share similar narrative constructs, and the playing of them resembles a story no matter what the game, whether its chess, Tetris or Heavy Rain.

My worry is that we just replace Ebert’s ignorance with another slightly less ignorant replacement, and call that a victory. It’s not. It’s also not a victory to shrink from a difficult debate, or consider it unwinnable, because finding a way to clearly express and understand the complexities of gaming is undeniably valuable. But if what comes out of Ebert’s blog posts, and the responses (and some of them are thoughtful and considered), is that however frustrating the debate is, there’s always the merest chance of a greater understanding – can’t be a bad thing.

[ The pic is a chess set designed by British artist Rachel Whiteread ]

Redemption and the West

I think the Wild West of 1911 proves about the most perfect setting possible for a videogame. Red Dead Redemption (2010, Rockstar, PS3 / 360) exploits this to the full – it’s not perfect, far from it, but in many way it is a remarkable game.

There’s a rich cultural heritage to exploit here of course. The Western genre in film is just a great resource, especially for a videogame – think about Westerns and you usually think about the huge empty vistas, the canyons, the barren expanses, exactly the features that videogames can do in spades. Think of the characters and you will immediately visualise a few archetypes – the gunfighters, the impotent marshalls, the Mexican bandits, the whores, the blind old coots. Games work well drawing on types, they suffer in painting elaborate characters. But Red Dead is able to have its cake and eat it – it takes a second to introduce a gunfighter in the wilderness, and within that second you understand that it’s you or them. But at the same time Red Dead paints a vast selection of different characters, creations of real dramatic significance and merit.

And in a chaotic, lawless place, the impurities of videogame narrative find their perfect match. There’s something random about the old mythic west – you might be dead in two seconds. Someone might run into the distance and never be seen again. And in another way life is simple (like a videogame) – a collection of tiny dwellings in the wilderness constitutes a centre for civilisation, and these are the sort of scale of places that videogames can create with ease and make believable.

There’s always been a slight disconnect with Liberty City (Rockstar’s sister franchise, Grand Theft Auto). Awe-inspiring as it can be, it’s a mannered version of reality for sure – people wander streets but don’t do anything. There are no commuters, no people practising yoga in the park, nobody skateboarding being pulled by a dog. It only breathes to an extent. You know there must be a million stories in a big city that you are being denied – a million shop and house-fronts that are little more than a texture map.

But the Wild West – well it probably never breathed in such grand terms anyway, it is a history created as an artifice by the movies. It’s a world we know little enough about, but that has been mytholgised by fiction already, that we have nothing really to compare against. Brutality, excess, murder and corruption – are these the usual Rockstar extremes, or was it really like that? Who’s to say? The game creates its own history here, and it is believable and authentic in its own terms.

All that said, the way that Rockstar pull the strands and themes together in this game is quite incredible. Each little interaction, each character, each place, all adds to the rich themes and evocative sense of time and place. Every time anyone opens their mouth, there is a sub-text at work – their hopes and dreams seem destined to fail in such a harsh environment, and the bad folk seem more in touch with reality than the good.

The game starts with an early motor car being winched over from a boat – the modern world is arriving, watch out! The bad guys are the ones in the cars. The snake oil salesman is a cipher for notions of capitalism and exploitation, making the corrupt old west of the gunslingers seem refreshingly simple. The politically naive struggle in Mexican politics is depicted in revisionist terms straight out of modern notions of political apathy and frustration with authority. The evil corporation, Blackwater, suggesting oil, is also the name of a modern supplier of military mercenaries in Iraq and elsewhere – this can’t be coincidence. The early picture house presents short films warning against the women’s movement and modern medicine. Rich, potent asides are there if you choose to acknowledge them, which in my opinion is all games should aspire to achieve. The only aspect of this world that avoids the satirical Rockstar treatment is organised religion, which is a very strange omission.

I feel, like GTA, that this is a game about the American Dream. The illusion of the promise of prosperity and freedom, as ill-served by the lawless West as it is by the encroachment of big business and the powers of ‘progress’.

The West is a great practical setting as well. Freedom of movement isn’t a given, and on those terms the practicalities of telling a story in a game-world become that bit easier and more believable. One of the massive problems with GTA is the skyscrapers in the distance that you can’t get to (and my guess is that the great majority of players never make it there). This game-world is simply not as distinct – the only place you are missing out on is another canyon. It should be worse, boring even, but it turns out better. Instead of a sense of being lost in a big city, this is the freedom of making your own way in a wilderness, even though in practical terms you are doing the same thing.

This is a road movie as a game, and it simply doesn’t need to be as dramatically tight as more formal narratives. We accept that we might run into a stranger with a story, or we might wander around and see nothing for an hour. The wildlife doesn’t have to be coherent, or offer an explanation for its existence. A blacksmith might get out of bed and work for the day and then go to bed – this is authentic, and you can see all sorts of people going through these simple existences. I simply don’t know what happens if you follow someone in Liberty City – presumably they just keep wandering aimlessly through the streets.

Red Dead’s only problems are ones of story structure in such a sprawling expanse. I sympathise – this must be an enormous feat of organisation to tie together the strands of such an epic scope in terms of standard story structure. Most movies fail at 90 minutes, let alone 90 hours. The game succeeds here in its early sections, where your enemy is waiting in a fort while you amass the forces necessary to confront them. But then the game moves to Mexico, at which point motivation becomes very unclear or even conflicting and the game sinks into ‘here’s another mission’ mode. It’s a dreadful point to make in terms of value-for-money, but Rockstar’s stories are simply far too long and overwrought.

But then, what seems like the ending of the story is expanded into a long, poignant coda that would simply never appear in a movie or on TV. And maybe that’s a big advantage of a game as a vehicle for story – it can feel its own sense of entitlement to carry on a story – if you don’t want to see it, don’t do it. It’s your choice. It doesn’t hit every note, but games don’t and maybe can’t – that’s why they often defy traditional criticism. But the endgame here is expanded into something meaningful and, dare I say it, elegaic. Not often I make that claim for a videogame.

Extra Lives – Giving life to the conversation.

I read Tom Bissell’s new book “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter” within a day – almost unheard of for me. My average is about one year per chapter. I do have a personal interest here – in the list of ‘books about videogames that I was preparing to write‘ this book pretty much destroys option B. (As a side note my highly-researched option A has also been crushingly destroyed recently by Tristan Donovan’s excellent new history of the medium “Replay”, which I will write about another time).

What Bissell does extremely well in this book is introduce the concepts that surround some of the most interesting debate about videogames. He gives a platform to the views of Clint Hocking, Peter Molyneux, Cliff Bleszinski and Jonathan Blow – basically the go-to guys for his subject. What I couldn’t work out was whether Bissell bought into their ideas or grudgingly felt forced to concede ground to them (particularly Blow and Hocking) – it felt rather like the latter.

Bissell also parades at length his hypnotic addiction to the Grand Theft Auto series to a slightly counter-productive degree – I’ve never been that addicted to a game and I’ve never felt the need to complement the experience with class-A drugs, but then that’s maybe why I don’t have a killer book about video games in me. This section felt to me like a lesson in how to make games that matter seem that much less impressive by being a dick, and it sits uneasily with the rest of the book (I’d read the section before actually so Bissell must have published it elsewhere and shoe-horned it into this book).

It’s one of those books that are chock-full of opinions, many of which I disagree with. He falls firmly on the side of the phrase ‘videogames‘ being two words and not one – fundamentally wrong! His interpretation of Far Cry 2 falls so short of my experience that I wonder if he played more than a couple of hours of the game – maybe that’s a measure of the game’s brilliance. I hated his description of Left 4 Dead, only because it was dismissive of the story elements in the game which I feel are absolutely revolutionary and quite daringly original. I don’t get his criticism of the disconnect between the story and gameplay in Modern Warfare (a game I don’t particularely care for as it happens)  – his complaint is that there is only an illusion of agency in the single-player campaign, but this illusion exists in most or not all games (what is exploration in GTA but an illusion of agency, only a better one?). His criticism of Braid is that he had to look up the puzzles, but I didn’t and thought the game was a masterpiece – does that make it a bad or flawed game or an acquired taste? I suppose the problem might be that Bissell seems one of those guys who can often only look at a game from his own sphere of experience.

But, generally, it’s a fantastic book and a great read and gives voice to issues that I think matter. I don’t like the title – Extra Lives is a pun of course, but it also parades the ever-overplayed escapism angle that I don’t feel does gaming any favours.

Now for my big bone of contention. And it’s a dinosaur’s vertebrae of a bone. By openly narrowing down his selection of games to story-based ones, he basically cuts a huge proportion of what I understand as video gaming out of the discussion. Tetris is given a cursory mention as a game from the other school of thought, implied as those who think stories in games are a bad development. This is a mistake. Not least because it should change the subtitle of his book from “why video games matter” to “why story-based games that play with the relationship between story and game narrative matter”.

What comes across is that Bissell is one of those either/or type of guys. Either you like one thing (story-based games) or you like the other (the gamey games). My personal feeling is that there’s absolutely no real substantive difference between the two, and to build some sort of theoretical wall between them is hugely counter-productive. Rather like the wall between that which is considered art, and the other stuff. Or the argument that there is figurative painting, and then the other stuff. Or that there is Hollywood-style film-making, and then other stuff. All these arguments are essentially pointless – let’s not continue to perpetuate another.

And then Bissell (thankfully) spends the rest of the book undermining his own position anyway. He picks out many of the games with the loosest connection of storytelling and the strongest elements of ‘play’ (or ludo-narrative as you may like to call it). Classics of their kind certainly – Gears Of War, Resident Evil, Far Cry 2, Braid, Fallout 3, Oblivion, Left 4 Dead. He laments the lack of good dialogue and good voice-acting and good plots, but follows this with significant airtime for Blow (Braid) and Hocking (Far Cry 2) who explain why these traditional notions of story fail to explain what is truly significant in video gaming anyway.

Bissell’s personal ‘journey’, if that’s what it is, is all well and good, but it misses the opportunity to bridge the gap between his own gaming mores and the grand tradition of the medium. The revelatory lightness of touch in terms of story that he finds in Left 4 Dead existed in Space Invaders. The sort of narrative that exists wandering around an open-world does exist as blocks fall in Tetris – decisions are made and a narrative plays out. Dynamical meaning (the idea that it is what you actually do in a game that creates meaning, not the content around it) has existed since videogaming began and long before. These same arguments have played out in one form or another in pictorial art, books, films etc.

But this is also what I loved about the book. It made me think about what I actually think. Bissell may be wrong on some things, but he is not a bore (and it takes one to recognise another ). And he is advancing the conversation in an interesting direction. And as I have subsequently learned he is a huge advocate of Mirror’s Edge, which automatically makes us part of the same spiritual brotherhood.

Great podcast interview with Bissell here. Book is called Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. Another good review of the book here…

Last Orders

Never written about The Last Guy (2008, PS3), which is a lovely little maze game which is raised into something more by it’s post-apocalyptic milieu and its use of satellite-style overhead city maps. Survivors pour out of city buildings and you try to round them up while alien beings roam the streets. It starts as a Pac-Man esque experience, but you soon come to realise that levels are conquered through careful planning and tactics. Subtle gameplay changes from level to level, along with the variety of the cityscapes, make this a game with hidden depths and real replayability. The strange, eerie soundscape is a standout also.

E3 picks – Child Of Eden

Child Of Eden, the latest game from Tetsuya Mizuguchi, creator of Rez, Space Channel 5 and Lumines, looks absolutely inspired – a Rez-like trippy surreal shooter that looks ideally suited to Microsoft’s controller-less kinect device. The only downer – not out until 2011.

Mario jitters…

I’ve had Super Mario Galaxy sitting by my Wii since Saturday. It’s probably the game I’ve been looking forward to more than any other for the past year. Super Mario Galaxy is probably my favourite game of this generation. Super Mario Galaxy 2 currently has a 98% metacritic score – it is simply one of the most critically lauded games of all time.

Yet I haven’t played the game yet. It’s not a lack of time – heck I’ve started another playthrough of Half-Life 2! I keep hacking away at the Plants vs Zombies survival mode, which has no high-score, no online leaderboard, and always ends in death. What am I doing?

My worry, I think, is that I’m too wound up. I’m expecting too much. I’m too excited. No game can live up to the expectations I’m carrying in. Or alternatively the game is going to blow my mind, and it’s a slightly overwhelming thought. I don’t like being in this frame of mind about a game I haven’t spent a second with yet.

I just need to calm down a bit. Then I can play it.

Air traffic controller

Flight Control (2009, Iphone / DS / Ipad) and Harbour Master (2009, Iphone / Ipad) are two great games that really work both on the iphone and the ipad. I’m struggling to work out from whence Flight Control sprung – the game style immediately feels familiar yet I’m not sure I’ve ever played a similar game before.

In both games the basic idea is simple. Planes (in FC) or boats (in HM) arrive onscreen, and your job is to trace routes for them onto airstrips or into harbour berths. If the planes or boats collide it’s game over. Harbor Master (we call them harbours with a ‘u’ in the UK) has an extra dimension in that the boats have cargo that needs to be dropped off and the boats then need steering back out of the harbour again. Each game lasts about five minutes, but the temptation to click ‘play again’ is absolutely enormous. I have to really ration myself on both games.

It’s just quite an ingenious measure of skill. You trace your routes for each vehicle, many of which move at different speeds, and use your skills of judgement to avoid collisions. Rather than simply moving to avoid collisions you are predicting the lack of them. Speed of thought is crucial as the rate of the game increases. And you have the plain old panic moments as you act to avoid disaster, and rethink on your feet.

I’m trying to think what this is like. I suppose in Tetris you place your blocks with half a mind on what you are trying to do in the next few moves. In speed chess you play to a grander strategy, and use principles to try and avoid enough of the mistakes that can happen when you play fast. At speed you cannot be perfect, so it’s a measure of how you play in imperfect circumstances.

I think Flight Control is slightly the better game because it is a purer experience. You don’t have to fiddle with getting planes out again. Harbour Master’s worst feature is the whirlpool that wanders around to introduce a random element to the game, but these games just don’t need that extra factor – it frustrates but adds nothing to the game. There’s already the random factor of what boat or plane appears where on the screen.

Like my other favourite games on the iphone, I dismissed these games at first as decent time-wasters. A year later and the games simply haven’t lost their lustre – there is something very special going on here.

Move over indie darling…

Trine (2009, PC / PS3) doesn’t quite hang together in the end. It’s taken me the best part of a year of play attempts to realise this.

It’s full of good puzzles that encourage emergent play – you can switch character between your wizard for spells, your thief for arrow combat, and your knight for brawling. There’s lots of clever physics, jaw-droppingly beautiful 3D scenery, lovely music, a decent little levelling system, lots of hidden collectables.

But the actual act of playing is flawed. The business of continually switching about, of stopping and starting, of constantly having to stop and think, absolutely kills the experience. A wizard to build a block for a thief to jump on and swing onto a ledge to switch to a knight to bash a few skeletons, just to advance a few paces further – it’s too much work for too little reward.

The game lacks flow. That feeling of genuine elegance where your inputs on the gamepad naturally transfer into something on the screen. Perhaps it’s the level design – you just can’t move for five seconds without reaching a puzzle or an enemy to dispatch. The business of getting anywhere geographically feels like a struggle.

It’s also desperately mired in stock fantasy cliches. It wallows in them – your female thief chats with your snobby wizard. The story is wafer thin, and would insult a 3-year-old’s picture book. It’s filler. A game system that doesn’t quite work, telling a story that has no real purpose. It’s actually in a way more insulting than the blockbuster videogame that blows a high concept.

Trine has no concept other than to build a game that might sell to the indie crowd, the illusion of elements that look like they might have worked together. Like blending your favourite ingredients into a sickly paste.

Empty space spaces

Playing through Halo 3 (2007, 360) in co-op really immerses me in the things that Halo does best. At their worst the Halo games represent the utter tedium of the FPS genre to me – trudging through endless regular battles. But in co-op one is encouraged to continually experiment, to find a different way of approaching the problem than a partner, and to be able to take a risk safe in the knowledge that a partner can soak up the pressure of your own mistakes.

The architecture is the thing. I hesitate to call it level design, because Halo levels seem to be painted in very broad strokes. This battle in this space, a period of rest, and then a battle in a different space. The replay feature allows players to watch their own battles from a free camera view, and this gives a great opportunity to just appreciate the worlds that have been built here. The design of the environments is coherent in ways that you could never notice actually playing the game – it has integrity in every hidden corner, as if slavishly devoted to its world rather than its players.

Look at a virtual space and you can just tell it is Halo. Clean lines, built from peculiar oblique geometry, at once coherently formed but never square. Repetitious in ways that build familiarity – turn each corner and you just kind of know what the space you are in is all about. It won’t frustrate or surprise you – it’s a function of the combat that is designed to take place within it. It doesn’t quite make sense – it’s too empty to be genuinely alive. Like Tron. It takes place within a game – I don’t think players ever quite buy into the idea that they are taking part in a story.

It’s not quite science fiction, it’s combat space.

The GTA that ate itself

Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City (2009, 360 / PS3) contains a couple of new episodes, previously downloadable, and set in Liberty City, the dystopia setting for Grand Theft Auto 4. In one you work your way up the ranks of a biker gang. In the other you’re the muscle for a gay nightclub owner. Most GTA games worked as grand, almost lyrical westerns, but these pared down episodes are more gritty – they’re genuinely like little enclosed episodes from a longer TV series. They don’t quite breathe on their own terms.

Here people speak constantly, cut-scenes come and go, and the pieces are literally swimming in dialogue, but I find it all washes over me. If believable dialogue is the measure of what constitutes serious gaming, then count me out – this has it in spades, but it amounts to nothing. I’d rather play in silence.

What used to pass as complex satire seems to have turned in on itself. The connection with the original GTA conceit – a satire of modern Western values – seems to have been overrun by its own subject matter. It’s as if the thugs and lowlifes have taken over and all that is left is the crudeness and the violence itself. It’s a game that no longer knows what it means, and what it wants to say – all it has is the capacity to keep on moving on.

And what you do was never that strong. You drive around a believable city, but video gaming is swamped with such experiences these days. The 2-year-old engine is creaking. The shooting was never satisfying. I never enjoyed wrestling with the helicopter controls. The cars don’t handle how I want them to – the idiosyncracies used to give the game colour and variety, now they just frustrate.

If this was your first GTA it might blow you away – I’ve played 9 of them now, and countless open-world competitors and the concept feels almost totally redundant. As it should after so long. What felt like the best game in the World two years ago now feels like a relic. Time to go west.

I saw Saw

I think Saw (2010, 360 / ps3) works better as a game than a movie. The basic premise of the films was basically a series of games anyway – deranged killer devises grisly tests for his captives. Each level of the game works to a similar structure – a new area to explore, mini tests to endure, leading to a showpiece moment where you have to complete various puzzles to free a captive from a torture machine.

Similar to the recent Silent Hill game, and also Heavy Rain to some extent, the game parades game mechanics as experimental tests linked somehow to the psychological profile of the player. The premise is that somehow the way that you react in the game might inform how you are in real life. It’s treated with a light touch here, and the game has no great pretension to having any insight into your psyche. And I do feel that this element has a danger of being overplayed – we don’t want all games to become preachy educational tools for emotional well-being. It’s a short-hand narrative trick, it’s not a raisin d’être for gaming.

This is one of those games which might have worked much better with less gameplay. I was quite interested in watching a simple story play out, and solving little puzzles in the meantime. But when every other cupboard and door has a lock to pick the novelty starts to wear off. The combat, hand-to-hand and reminiscent of Condemned, is forgettable, though there are plenty of open-ended areas with traps and tricks with which to despatch enemies with panache.

I found the experience fun, unpretentious, and occasionally quite creepy.

Conviction, or lack of..?

Almost totally unimpressed by Splinter Cell: Conviction (2010, ps3 / 360, Ubisoft). High production values and plenty of actual content, let down by sloppy game mechanics and a mean-spirited dose of unnecessary violence. At the start of the second level you are invited to hit a woman, and no matter what you do to try and wriggle out of it, the game won’t progress until you do it. And when you do finally give up and strike, your character seems to take a relish in it. A game has to earn the right to such a provocative scene, but here it is just more violent window dressing to a general air of utter brutality throughout.

This is a stealth game that crucially lacks a sense of elegance to the control. Opening a door. Rather than peeking underneath it is a fiddle. Being noticed or not seems to often be arbitrary. The game is a constant battle to avoid being exposed by some clunky bit of pre-rendered animation. At this very basic level the game simply fails.

It’s also a game that wants to be empowering and open-ended, but ends up just seeming either random or frustrating. Yes you can take people out in a different way each time, but it’s still just a parade of predictable murder. And once your cover is blown, the game turns into a sub-par actioner.

And there is certainly nothing here to appeal to the intellect. A vague plot about private security firms threatens to touch on more interesting ground, but you quickly come to realize it’s a very thin narrative device to link increasingly predictable play areas. In terms of gameplay this is now a very well trodden path – I’m not even sure it was ever a very interesting franchise from the start.

Games don’t come much more inessential!

New IPad on the Block

I suppose I am an iPad early adopter – a quick look at the machine in the Apple shop on Regent Street here in London, and there was absolutely no chance that I would pass up the purchase. It’s just a wonderful piece of design, and a scaled-up iphone seems much more than an oversized copy. It has a feel all of its own, and the gauntlet is now thrown to the game designers. What is it and what games will suit it?

In case you’ve been under a rock for a few years, the iPad copies the same innovations as the iPhone but on a bigger scale. There’s a touchscreen so many games are controlled by swipes on the screen, by pointing at targets, or even by controlling little virtual joysticks onscreen. The iPad also has the same tilt functions, and the microphone for potential voice control, and obviously it is easily integrated onto the net for online functionality.

At the moment most, if not all, of the available games are iPhone upgrades – HD versions of already-released titles from the iPhone’s library. Clearly a very easy sell, but not very inspiring really – in fact I feel miffed at the idea of republishing the same game at a higher resolution and expecting iphone owners to pay again. It’s not all sheer greed – there’s no way of allowing players a free pass for a game in the App Store (apparently).

But also the iPad is simply a different machine and many games do not suit both machines. Tilt games from the iPhone are simply unwieldy on the iPad. My favourite game on the iPhone, Drop7, is simply too small-scale for the iPad – it would feel like a waste of the bigger machine’s capabilities.

There’s also the simple difference in the way iPads are used. The massive battery life simply doesn’t necessitate 5-minutes-of-fun games – something deeper is required. You don’t just grab your ipad out of your pocket on the train and bus. It’s an entirely different beast. Obviously these games will have a place on the iPad as they have done on every other platform, but I don’t think they will dominate.

My first thought was that the group of games that would really benefit would be the 3D games from the iphone, but a quick experiment with a few of them has changed my mind. There’s still no need for first-person shooters or space flight games on the iPad, and there’s still the same problem that they just aren’t that easy to control on the system. There’s still the inherent problem that if you own a PC (or a Mac these days) or a console, why would you want your iPad to deliver a stripped down version of the popular genres on more powerful machines?

The notable successes for me so far have been the MMOs, or more accurately the Facebook-games. Farm Story is a clone of Farmville, and it really works well on the iPad – it can even push messages on to the screen when your carrots are ready to be harvested. These are real-time games that encourage regular chunks of play and also work on social interaction with other players – as the iPad easily ties up with Facebook and Twitter and a multitude of other networks it actually seems better placed than any other system to exploit this new style of gaming. We Rule could be the game that really breaks through – I didn’t like fiddling about on an iphone screen with it, but on here it’s an absolute joy to build up your civilisation with such a well-presented game.

It doesn’t have to stop with Facebook games. If Blizzard wanted to do it, I think World Of Warcraft would be fantastic on the iPad. Or maybe the other established MMOs would muscle in. The thing about MMOs is that the actual control systems have always been fairly simple in order to cover for latency issues online, so there’s no reason why they couldn’t be easily replicated. In fact I think WOW or the games like it might really benefit from touchscreen control – they’re all about pressing icons at speed and in the right order, after all.

The other game type I could see flourishing here is the adventure game. Machinarium would absolutely storm the iPad – I hope and pray they’re already at work with it. Zack & Wiki would be great too. The machine just seems to suit pretty-looking 2D backdrops and animation. And these adventure games, that you might spend a couple of hours with rather than just a few minutes, seem like a genre that has been in the doldrums looking for a new home. And the iPad is screaming out for games with that bit more depth, but light and pretty enough to avoid being poor copies of better hardcore games.

The iPad has charm, and it feels different to what has come before. It just needs the games – I think in a year or so it will be absolutely swarming with great games and will start to become a real contender.

Skate Inc.

Skate 3 (2010, Black Box / EA, PS3 / 360) is more of the same – Skate 2 was one of my favourite games of last year. I just love the basics of the simulation, where it feels that every pulse of your fingers is translated to your skater onscreen. There are more tricks, a new city, and lots of little tweaks that improve the game by small degrees. The skate park editor looks great. The security guards and locked environments are gone – this is just free and fun, and you can literally just wander around the zones if you want.

The online is still the game’s killer feature. I love the fact you can press a couple of buttons and skate freely with others wherever you are. There are more team-based events in this release, which is interesting. It can still be embarrassing if you’re the worst skater who lets the whole group down. I would still love it more if the online was simply there by default – a little like Demon’s Souls, why not just let other online players be skating around you while you do your thing?

The other slight problem is that you’re encouraged not to simply enjoy the spaces in the same way as the previous game. It’s so easy to skip to the next event that you quickly give up on the idea of exploration. For a game with a great ‘feel’ there’s still something slightly ‘uncool’ about the menu systems and constant teleporting from space to space. I think the potential for this series is in the social networking aspects of skating, not the rather forced series of quests and events on offer here.

It’s also missed an opportunity. There’s a great idea bubbling under here – the story has you setting up a skating group and selling your soul to advertising through sponsorship etc. But rather than lay on the irony of stoners going corporate, and going for the humour of the situation, the game pretty much plays it straight up. Unfortunately it ends up embracing the soul-less nature of a counter-culture hobby being swallowed up by corporate interests – a pity.

Metroland

Metro 2033 (2010, PC / 360) feels like one of those old-school PC shooters. It’s relentlessly dark both in tone and visuals, and has that slightly janky feel reminscent of the classic PC games, with dodgy AI and jerky animation. It belongs with the titles from Eastern Europe and Russia that seem to visually speak somehow of a post-soviet post-Chernobyl bleakness (the Stalker series, Cryostasis). Here it’s a post-apocalypse Russia, with the metro system as a home for the displaced, and mutant beasts and ghosts that seem like mutated science experiments rather than genuine spirits.

One thing I really liked was ammunition as currency – you can swap your high grade ammo for the lower grade to last longer, and spend it on upgrades at a cost that might become crucial in the middle of a later gunfight. The bleak tone wouldn’t suit the stockpiling of riches and upgrades, and the game works well on that basis – you never have much going for you at the best of times.

Story – as usual it’s vaguely coherent at best, and works as a backdrop for the variety of action on offer. As a shooter it is bog-standard, and as an atmospheric linear tale it’s barely any better. Yet it has an undeniable appeal, rather like a generic potboiler – you know exactly what’s coming, yet there’s entertainment to be had in trudging through it waiting for the odd set-piece or combat tweak. They could literally sell these games in tins.

Kameo – Word Up

I played Kameo: Elements Of Power (2005, Rare, Xbox 360) in co-op with my daughter about a year ago. It was a dreadful experience – controls too finicky, all too complicated, and the level and monster design just a bit dull and dated. On the shelf it went, then on the ‘to be sold’ pile. A cute action game with nothing going for it – about a million miles beneath Mario.

This was a launch title for the Xbox 360 – it carries all of that baggage. I feel that many launch titles are lambs to the slaughter, destined to be considered as tech demoes for the machine, and also to get lost in the mix for all but the early adopters. There are plenty of signs of this – the game is utterly obsessed with showing us hundreds of monsters onscreen at once, and with sweeping camera shots over nicely rendered vast landscapes. It also feels like the forgotten Rare title – the one that you forget about.

Playing it again now I enjoyed it much more and went through it in one sitting. The opening level, designed as a sort of teaser for the powers you have to try and regain later in the game, is dreadful and easily the worst bit of the game. The game’s hook is that you can transform at will into different creatures with different powers, but the game is at its worst when you’re forced to work out what creature you need for each puzzle. It’s better when it’s just about moving about, dodging enemies and finding stuff. It has an open landscape to explore, lots of hidden corners and extras, and reminds me very much of Brutal Legend actually. It is lovingly crafted, and frequently visually stunning. It’s a pleasure rather than a chore (apart from the odd spot).

The problem with Rare’s games in general, is that they really defy any sort of deeper analysis. This is simply an exploration/action game – the characters too weak and the monsters too silly to remind one of anything other than a cheap cartoon. Rare are one of the World’s best at delivering a polished and well-crafted experience, but among the world’s worst at creating any hint of genuine art. It’s as if they specifically strip their titles of real personality – their very best stuff has the hint of British humour in it (Banjo Kazooie, Viva Pinata). I love Rare, but it’s hard to make any grand case for their relevance in the World.

Miyamoto’s classic games seem to connect somehow with our unconscious, or resonate somehow with notions of play from childhood – Rare’s games seem only to resonate as quality copies of other classics, as if the building blocks of their creations are borrowed somehow. The lead character here, Kameo, is a female in name only – she doesn’t seem to say anything to us. Compare her even to Lara Croft, or better still to Beyond Good And Evil’s Jade – they speak to us, even in simple terms. Kameo says nothing, and is nothing. There’s a supporting cast of morphable creatures, but none of them breathe – they are all functional. Get to a climbing wall, you need the ice beast. A tube, you need the armadillo that turns into a ball. It’s strange – how do you create a cast of characters with no charisma at all, it’s almost a feat in itself.

So an enjoyable, action-packed, epic experience without a hint of real soul.

Fragile gameplay

Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins Of The Moon (2010, XSeed, Wii). Eek what a title. Are we saying farewell to the ruins of the moon in this game? Doesn’t seem like it. It’s the ruins of the Earth – an overgrown post-apocalypse where weeds have grown but everything else seems empty and rather ghostly. A strong Hayao Miyazaki influence here – unfortunately a bit too ‘spiritual’ for my tastes. Everyone speaks emoti-speak, like they’re vocalising their internal monologue. It’s all a bit too mannered and pretentious for me.

Not enough game here for me either. Long cut-scenes that seem to be aimed at young teenagers, a bit of very linear exploration, some very simple object interaction. Some of the backdrops are absolutely beautiful though. The killer blow is the combat – press A to slash, and that’s about it. Nope, sorry. This is one of many Japanese games where actual game design seems to have come so low on the to-do list that the finished product never quite comes to life. There’s no room for it to breathe, or rather for us as players to breathe within it. Pity…

Monkey magic

Super Monkey Ball: Step And Roll (2010, Sega, Wii) is the first of this series of games that I have played, yet I feel instinctively that I know these games inside out. You’re a monkey, in a ball, and you roll through bright and surreal obstacle courses to jolly music. What’s not to like?

One problem – the physics-inspired joy that used to come from rolling a virtual ball around a virtual environment just isn’t novel anymore. Everything has real physics now. And in my opinion the physics here aren’t even nuanced or accurate.

Second problem – rolling a ball is absolutely no fun using a balance board. It just isn’t. It’s not the game’s fault as such – it just isn’t as easy as using a gamepad. So that’s the game’s novelty feature totally stuffed then. And even worse, they’ve stripped a ‘hop’ mechanic from the game to stop people jumping on their balance boards. So you get a worse game, that is less fun. Oops.

It’s hard to enthuse about the game at a more inspired level, when the simple practicalities of its existence are so plain.

Sword Play

Red Steel 2 (2010, Wii). A sword-wielding action game designed for motion control. It’s rather successful.

It looks a bit like Borderlands – a bit of feudal looking Japan, a few wild-west tropes, and some ‘dirty future’ thrown in – dilapidated vending machines, modified bikes and trucks, bits of industrial tech. The desire to get away from the shit-brown coloured post-apocalypse that has become the cliche, and also the grey shiny Halo future as well. Mad Max is a key influence on this visual style. There’s something unreal about it, the cel-shaded look – it’s quite bold and brassy, as computer graphics tend to be.

Swinging your wii-mote as a sword should still be a novelty, but already feels over-familiar. Learning combos and carrying them out ad-nauseum. It’s probably as good as a swordfighting game is going to get, but there’s something underwhelming about it. It’s just never going to be as exciting as holding an actual weapon in your hand. Aren’t videogames supposed to be an escape, rather than a poor pastiche of reality?

A first-person hand combat game is going to get up close and disorientating – no escape from this. Headless chicken mode is default – turn, swipe, dodge, run, turn, swipe. It feels too in my face – I can’t back off and take things in a more measured way. Always getting my hands dirty. It makes it, by design, a little one-paced.

Still this has a quality about it. A nice mission structure. Linear yet explorable. The story is easily skippable. It should add up to more than it does…

God Of War 3

I’m kind of deciding what to do with my blog at the moment. But I did enjoy a few things about God Of War 3 (PS3, 2010) that I wanted to remember…

The first is the notion of (visual) scaleability, which apparently was a key consideration for this development team from the start, and was mentioned by N’Gai Croal recently to remind me. In the first level the game states its intent – a distant long-shot of the Titan God Gaia scaling mount Olympus. Swooping into a medium view of the God with your character Kratos like a stickman hanging onto its back. Then getting closer as you battle the nasties as you travel over Gaia’s body. Then getting right up to a close-up as you shimmy in full-screen through a small space in Gaia’s insides.

It’s just a really nice sensation to see these different scales in the same sequence with no join inbetween. It’s actually the best thing about Dark Void as well. It’s at once epic in scale but also interactive in design. You really get to see your connection with the environment. And it destroys the usual notion of having a foreground and a background, because at every turn the camera may swoop around and literally turn the environment on its head. There’s a truly fantastic battle with Cronos using a similar scale about halfway through the game which is the highpoint.

Another thing I liked was the use of repetition and motifs in this game. Despite being totally linear, it actually reminded me of one of those explorathon games like Shadow Complex where you really get to know the place inside out. There are a number of environments (Hades, the Labyrinth, Olympus etc) but the hero Kratos has to weave his way in and out of each pursuing his goal. Many scenes are revisited or totally transformed with a new twist etc. And so landmarks and places don’t just become the next parade of set-dressing – they are places that you come to recognise, and you kind of know how they join up in principle.

I particularly liked one puzzle in the game, which uses a set viewpoint that you can toggle to work in an Escher-inspired visual puzzle. Platforms and stairs that aren’t adjacent in one view look seamless once you’re locked into one viewpoint accessed from the eye of a statue, and you can defy physics on that basis. It’s a little bit like Echochrome could be in a full 3D environment. It even has a puzzle with trickling water that just adds a real visual frisson to the scene. I can’t imagine how they even began to make the puzzle work within a 3D engine.

And there’s also one brilliant visual trick which I think I can describe without it being a spoiler. God Of War as a series is about an alpha-male sense of simplicity, in that the lead character Kratos seems to reject and hint of complex thought and pacifism from the start – it’s a liberating experience, as you think only of revenge and do what you have to to get to that end. But there’s a great scene where, as you’re smashing an enemy to a pulp, the vision becomes totally obscured with blood but the usual quick-time event prompts remain – you get the sense that the game has finished its scene but is inviting you to carry on in the same spirit “if you want to”. It’s a brilliant moment, because you keep mashing the buttons for a while and then you start to wonder quite why you’re doing it. And then at some point you have to stop. It’s a lovely moment where you’re actually invited to consider what you actually feel about Kratos and his violent ways, but almost outside of the game for a moment.

God Of War 3 isn’t my favourite game of the year so far by any means, but there is so much polish and richness throughout that it did give me some great moments. And I’ll drink to those…

Games Played – 13-19 March 2010

A quiet week for me. I tried to spend it all non-gaming but I got bored yesterday and had a binge .

Cursed Mountain (Wii, 2009) is a game that I very much wanted to love. Another Resident-Evil inspired creep-a-thon, this time at high altitude, it has a scary tone, and that slow methodical pace that can make these horror adventures quite hypnotic and compelling. Lots of clever bits of level design that re-use the spaces in each section of the story. A Scottish accent on the voice-overs. A nice ‘ghost’ mode where you press C to go into the dark side where secret signs are visible. But a dreadful difficulty spike on the third level, and the uninspired nature of the combat really threw me off to the extent that I bailed. There’s a few hours of solid entertainment in here somewhere, and I respect the game, but I’ve played too many that are better.

And some that are worse. Resident Evil Zero (2009, Wii) is a Gamecube classic repackaged for the Wii, and by God it has aged. Absolutely the worst movement and combat system you could possibly imagine – you end up spinning in the general direction of zombies that are currently off-screen because of the crazy cinematic angles, and wasting your ammo in the vague hope of hitting something. The things that I love about RE are there – the weird presentation, the usual array of objects, the oblique puzzles. But I’ve played games of this type that are absolutely enthralling. This one is a turn-off. Why was it a hit in 2002? Because the graphics were state of the art at the time I guess, and it was pre Resident Evil 4 which just set the benchmarks that this consistently fails to match.

Best game of the week has been Darksiders (2010, PS3 / 360), the Vigil Games sleeper hit that seemed to appear out of nowhere early in the year, and perhaps has been lost a little due to the volume of games that have come out since. I don’t have a single complaint – the game has vast explorable post-apocalyptic worlds, Zelda-style puzzles, God Of War style combat that is a pleasure, and a pretty decent story about the four horsemen of the apocalypse and the balance of the universe. It’s suitably grand for an all-action title. What it doesn’t have is something really special to recommend it – it’s not as wacky or inventive as Bayonetta, not as lovable as its peers, not as hardcore or graphic as God Of War. In fact it’s best feature may be the way that it just steals hours off you as you wander from one section to the next with barely a load screen or a pause. It reminds me of Infamous last year – games that are so well-presented that they actually wash through you without leaving any real residue. I won’t be thinking about this game next week, but I am enjoying it immensely.

Games – 6-12 March 2010

Been trying a few games on Xbox Live this week, seeing as I’ve been using the console to chip away at Borderlands. Only 1 game completion though – Silent Hill: Shattered Memories on the Wii, described elsewhere.

The Just Cause 2 (Mar 26 2010, PS3 / 360 / PC) demo is impressive in so many ways. The first game was such a ‘nearly’ title – great action, a great open world island, but there was something just bog-standard about the way it knitted together. It looks here like the open world is even better realised this time around, and the in-game physics (ie the explosions) look absolutely remarkable. But the demo is packaged with a bite-size chunk of cheesy voiceover nonsense that looks very likely to get in the way once again. The open-world structure seems to borrow that missions / destroying tactical points / faction loyalty stuff from the likes of Prototype, The Saboteur, Crackdown, Infamous etc. It is looking extremely tired at this stage, no matter how good the wrapping.

Xbox Live has tried to stagger a bunch of interesting XBLA titles over the last few weeks – it seems to create an extra buzz when you get a wave of quality titles at the same time.

The first and best is Greed Corp (2010, 360 / PS3), which is also on PSN. It’s a tile-based strategy game, which would be an immediate turn-off for most, but it is wonderfully presented with destroyable hexes floating in mid-air, and is also pretty quick-fire, as most of the terrain gets obliterated within the first few minutes of battle (in the early stages anyway). You build cannons, harvest the terrain, and fling your walkers (troops) at each other in pretty quick succession. The problem I have with the game is that because it’s quick matches and turn-based its quite easy to get into a downward spiral to a very obvious conclusion – if you don’t play the early turns correctly there’s no real way to turn the match around. And the game is too light for its own good – not that you can’t ponder the strategies in depth, but the game is basic enough to make it barely worth the bother.

The second XBLA game is Toy Soldiers (2010, 360), which is a WW2-themed tower defence game with terrific toy-box graphics and a couple of nice twists. The first is that you can drop in and control your units in full 3D, from snipers on towers to actual planes flying around dropping bombs on the opponents. Multiplayer is still quite a rarity for tower defence games as well. There are significant problems though – seeing as it is that much more effective to control your units, the game becomes less about overall strategy and more about simple shooting gallery mechanics, as if the game can’t decide if it’s a shooter or a strategy game and ends up falling between the two stools. I found the experience quite frustrating – you simply end up wanting to be in five places at once.

And this week the XBLA release is Scrap Metal (2010, 360), an overhead (ish) arcade racer that tries to bring depth to what was a fairly throwaway genre in the past. During the trial I played a simple race, a demolition derby, a survival mode and even an escort the VIP mode – all within a fairly simple set of tracks. No doubt there’s a capture the flag mode for little cars as well later in the game. It felt like an over-reach for me – the simple fact is that I play racing games essentially to race, and this game seems to never focus on the key thing that makes racing games work – the handling and the driving lines. I’d rather fire up MAME and have a blast on Super Sprint, a classic arcade game that blows this one, with all its complexity, totally out of the water.

All this said, despite not loving any of the recent releases I really appreciate that XBLA is offering significant and extremely polished games for download – I can’t get enough of this market model. Most of my favourite games of the last couple of years have been this style of ‘single-A’ titles, games where the polish has been with the basic game mechanics rather than set-pieces and graphical flourishes. Braid, Geometry Wars 2, Shadow Complex, Noby Noby Boy, Fat Princess, ‘Splosion Man, Trine, Plants Vs Zombies, Flower. One of that standard a week would do very nicely from now until the end of time…