Thumbs down to Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

While starting off fairly strong in the awesomeness department, Metal Gear Rising: Revengance, overall, isn't a very good game.

First, it is very short.  I got to the final boss fight and it was around four hours of play.  While the gameplay itself was mostly okay, and it's hard to grow tired of chopping your opponents to bits and pulling their guts out, both the stealth and platforming elements were not very well integrated into the game.  Ninja Run was a constant disappointment.  Running around and killing people has a high (Assassin's Creed high) bar, but this was pretty badly implemented.  It was easy to get Raiden stuck in all manner of places using Ninja Run, which is a less cool version of AC's freerunning where you can't really climb anything any any small overhang gets you caught.  And in all other ways, it was clear that stealth wasn't really that much of a priority in game design, either.  I've got a lot of experience at stealth games - and Kojima has a lot of experience making them, virtually inventing the genre - so this was both noteworthy and atrocious.

Worse, though, I had . . . forgotten how awful the faux philosophy got.  Pretty much before any given boss fight, you're going to have half an hour of idiots spouting platitudes at you - and just the most awful, small-minded, reprehensible bullshit.  That people are cruel by nature, so this rationalizes mass murder!  Free will means being able to kill you who want, when you want to kill them!  Ugh.  It sounded like the sort of thing you'd get from an Internet bully.

It is also one of those things that could be done well, but no video game has ever really done it well: making the bad guys plausible and relatable.  Well, let me tell you, bad philosophy isn't it.  It would have been far better to have a good revenge story than sophomoric attempts at philosophy.

But the part where it just grows awful beyond measure is the final boss fight.  I played it for over an hour before quitting.  Every so often, he would just become invulnerable and regenerate all his health.  Huh.  After, oh, I dunno, the fifth time of this happening, I decided that the final boss fight was bullshit and decided not to do it.  I'm sure there's some trick I was missing, but I did miss it and the game gave me zero clues how to beat him.  I could have kept fighting him forever, I felt.  Since I didn't like the fight very much - boss fights always give the best powers to the bad guys, often neutralizing your own special powers in the process - this did not please me.

I am also not a fan of that thing where, in the middle of the fight, the boss gets to take some time off, just jump up somewhere and hurl things or throw more enemies at you.

Long does not mean good.  It also works against the idea of a climax, which should be brief in duration.  A "climax" that goes on and on is no longer climatic.

The different stages of the boss fight were also interspersed with more sophomoric philosophical rambling.  It's actually hard to tell you what he said because it made no sense, but apparently it has to do with war being freedom, and killing "weak" people because they don't want to kill, and how he'll be elected to be PRESIDENT OF AMERICA with his pro-killing-the-weak stance or something.  And nanomachines!  Which, of course, do everything.  There is nothing nanomachines don't do!  For instance, they make bosses invulnerable.

A game of *very* brief duration (again, this is contrary to every other Metal Gear game I've either hear or played, where there was a lot of content), the poorly integrated stealth (which struck me as extremely strange given that this is a Metal Gear game) and freerunning elements and the awful, just painfully bad attempts to philosophy - yes, and for the last time, yes, everyone has reasons why they do the terrible things that they do, but it doesn't obligate anyone to take those reasons seriously, at the end of the day, every MGR boss did nothing but rationalize why genocide was justifiable in the most banal way possible, subverting the language of freedom to promote tyranny - and the reprehensibly bad final boss fight (even before you get to the part where you can beat the final boss, you must endure over half an hour of tedious speeches) means I give this game a Metal Gear Solid thumbs down.  While the action game elements are solid, there are just too many checks in the minus column for this game and the checks are too big.

Grasping why people like some games and not others

One of the things that truly, really baffles me is how video games are judged.  Not by reviews and magazines - I understand those people are chosen, in part, because they are shills.  But by the public.  So, Bioshock Infinity is a greatly beloved game.  I didn't see it.  Bad shooter mechanics combined with having to comb an area for freaking apples and candy bars to restore health is simply bad game design.

I've had the experience, before.  Assassin's Creed III, Grand Theft Auto IV, among others.  People kept telling me these games were great and I just didn't see it.  On the other hand, games I thought were splendid, like The Saboteur and Alpha Protocol, didn't do very well . . . even if they had gameplay that was the same as or better than other, similar, games that did very well, indeed.

To me, comparisons between GTA 4 and The Saboteur are pretty clear.  The shooting mechanics in The Saboteur were crisper than in GTA 4 - the protagonist would just take cover if near cover without prompting, you could blind fire over cover and do aimed fire.  The driving mechanics were just about the same, too, with the exception that The Saboteur had more tanks, which was awesome, and fewer sloppy, unresponsive vehicles (?!).  So, in shooting and driving, the games were quite a bit alike except The Saboteur had somewhat cleaner and intuitive mechanics and driving around was more fun.  Which . . . you would think would make it a wildly popular game, especially give that you get to kill a bunch of Nazis.

But that's not all The Saboteur was.  Every building could be climbed.  You could use stealth.  You could adopt disguises.  It did everything GTA 4 did and then it added a freerunning stealth game on top of it.  Not a bad one, either.

You couldn't fault The Saboteur for being an insufficiently visually impressive game.  It was a very visually impressive game.  It was a well-rounded, well-designed, good looking game.

Yet, The Saboteur did poorly and GTA 4 was lauded.

With Alpha Protocol, well, the game comparison is really with Deus Ex Human Revolution.  Shooting and stealth were handled about the same in both games, with Alpha Protocol having a more cinematic flair than Human Revolution.  Both had different skill trees that could be developed over the course of the game.  In addition, though, Alpha Protocol had honest-to-god role-playing moments - tricking interrogators by getting under their skins, banging boots with spies (both foreign and domestic, if you get what I mean), actions bearing consequences stuff.  Which Human Revolution was supposed to have but really didn't.

I am without a clue why one did well and the other did not (though in this case, I liked both games).

The only thing that makes sense to me is that video game audiences basically do what they're told . . . though this should not be surprising, they do the same thing with movies, too.  (Talking about The Avengers movie is hard for me, because people will agree on all the things I think make it a bad movie and then conclude they don't matter.  Wooden performances, uneven characterization, frequently absurd characterization, lack of plot . . . I mean, these aren't minor issues.  If you agree that much of the acting was wooden, that characterization was bad and the plot both contrived and full of holes . . . and then go on to conclude that a few laughs make up for this?  Wow.)  This is the only thing that makes sense when considering Bioshock Infinite.  The game mechanics would have been considered uninspiring in 1995.  They were the game mechanics that made a bunch of people predict the death of FPS games as being tired and predictable.  "Go down this rail and shoot everyone you see."  The addition of some superpowers?  Please.  Go play Psi-Ops.  A cover-based third person shooter with stealth and psychic powers.  Three years before Bioshock came out there was a game with a similar game mechanics system just better.  But six years after Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite still plays like a game from the 90s.  A mediocre game from the 90s.

Yet, almost no one says this and few think it's important.  It's bizarre.  Sure, the game is pretty, but it's also downright crude with play . . . not very different from Doom.  But the game is fabulously lauded despite its mediocre and dated gameplay.

For me, the real fuss is . . . trying to find games I like.  There are no reliable narrators!  People tend to follow aggressive ad copy rather than trying to evaluate the game absent the corporate scripted message.  But that makes it hard to find games like The Saboteur, which does everything I want a video game to do and does it well.  When the waters are so hopelessly muddied that you can't tell good reviews from bad ones, how does one accurately find games you want to play?

Bioshock Infinity sucks

Everyone loved this game and I can't see why.  The game is downright crude in its implementation, really.  Here's a partial list of its crude implementations.

First person.  Really?  The continuation of first person shooters baffles me.  When Gears of War came out, this smooth shooting experience of moving from cover to cover in tactical situations, I thought, "This is the end of first person."  Even before then, first person had become . . . limited.  The lack of any hint of peripheral vision made it frustrating, especially when the game contained a melee component (as Bioshock Infinite does).

Health packs.  Really?  When Halo's - the original Halo - had a shooting game that was as thrilling as could be without a single health pack, I thought health packs were gone.  As opposed to first person perspective, this one is mostly gone from other games.  At no point did I have to look for a health pack when playing Tomb Raider.

Can't fire from cover.  Really?  You can't lean over or fire over low cover.  That's just . . . baffling to me.  Even most first person shooters have this one.

"The spas defense."  In first person games with a melee component, one of the truly stupid, awful things that happens is enemies in melee combat will step out of the character's line of sight.  If you see it happen, it is often accompanied by a spas as they hop to one side.  What this does is take advantage of the limitations of the first person perspective to aid in their defense.  It's just an awful gameplay element, really highlighting the fact that characters in first person games can only turn around slowly and can't move their goddamn heads.  It highlights the weaknesses in perspective of the first person format, which is bad on its own but also draws attention to a weakness in the interface to gain advantage over the player.  Ugh.

The game also lacks any radar or other mechanism so you can keep track of what's going on around you.  Again, this really highlights that the first person perspective has a very limited range of vision.  This is doubly so because game levels are getting downright enormous.  Characters can attack you from such a range that I struggled - with a sixty inch television! - to find their muzzle flashes to determine their location.  (Of course, they never have any problem finding you.  They know exactly where you are at all times, even when you hide.)

Lack of aimed shots.  This one, like so many others, just amazes me that it doesn't have it.  They animated that when you shoot someone in the fucking face their hat falls off but not the little tidbit about how when you shoot someone in the fucking face three or four times they tend to die.

These are, I think, fairly objective reasons to conclude that the game is crude.  Things like the inability to fire over or around cover and lack of headshot quick kills is just preposterous.

Then there's the platforming elements.  I . . . have few words.  You can jump from hook to hook but . . . so fucking what?  Is this supposed to somehow impress me?  Characters of superhuman athletic prowess are commonplace in video games.  Compare swinging from hook to hook to the last Tomb Raider offering, or Drake's Fortune, or - and this becomes cruel - Assassin's Creed or Splinter Cell.  Jesus, this is your exciting mechanism to get around a floating city?  Like the shooting, this is just crude.  It's visually uninspiring after the displays of awesome athletic prowess we see even in other shooters.

Sure, I get it that the art direction is slick.  I wholly approve of getting away from those dystopian grays and browns, putting a game in the sunshine.  Great.  Okay.  I've heard the story is good but . . . it didn't grab me from the onset, something about saving a girl, who I then gathers becomes your sidekick.  Great, another girl sidekick.  Jesus.  Can we get past that, already?  Really, guys.  While I appreciate art direction in a game, you don't play art direction.  If stuff like art direction and music is what your game has going for it, you should probably be in movies, not games.

Anyway, the game sucks.  People who like it are wrong.  Nuff said.

Integration of writing and gameplay in video games

One of the biggest problems with video games, structurally  is just plain awful writing in the gameplay parts. Sometimes games can have quite brisk acting and quality writing in the cutscenes, but it's like no one wants to apply any real critical thinking to the game elements.  I might be bitching about this one for a while, because it's really hard to miss when you think about it. Woe is me for thinking about it!

I've started Hitman: Redemption. First, the title. I don't think anyone really considered what redemption means because, apparently, it's compatible with killing cops. Let's lay that one straight out. To protect an abused young woman the character somehow rationalizes killing cops. Not even corrupt cops, just any old, plain, ordinary in-your-way police officer is likely to get his throat slit – in the tutorial of the game, you're required to do this.  You can't avoid it.

Here's another example of baffling bad writing for the purpose of creating gameplay. Your character was KO'd and framed for a murder, and the hotel room was set on fire. Somehow, in the tiny number of minutes that it takes for a fire to spread, a detective was dispatched to the scene . . . and outside is a helicopter that seems to know YOU'RE THE GUILTY PARTY. That's okay, because in all the building surrounding the hotel, there are squads – multiple – of cops in them, including an abandoned library and then a maze-like, I dunno, drug bust?

It's the sort of thing that doesn't hold up to a moment's thought. When a murder is called in, yes, police are sent. Like, one or two. I know because I have, personally, reported a shooting. Cops take the description of the shooter, in this case, and drive around the neighborhood looking for the guy. This often works. Most people are not, after all, experts at disguise and stealth.

There was no helicopter. No police occupied deserted buildings nearby. A shooting is a very serious crime, right?  And there was actual evidence of a crime - the shot man.

Of course, sometimes police do surround a building with armored dudes with assault rifles. Absolutely. But generally as a planned raid or as a developing armed stalemate. That was not this situation.

Indeed, the fire would have vastly complicated any potential murder investigation. The person's throat was slit and then you set them on fire?  Are you a fucking moron? And then, because it's a video game and must be ridiculous, the building explodes. It would take days for the fire department to uncover any bodies at all, much less determine how they died . . . assuming it was possible, assuming the fire and explosions and collapsing building didn't destroy the corpse past the point of useful examination. At most, the protagonist would be a person of interest in the investigation because it would take some time – days – to determine if a crime had been committed at all.

After all, all the cops I had to kill to escape, well, I hide their bodies and no one saw me. What does the word "redemption" mean?

In subsequent play, too, there are cops everywhere who are still, apparently, looking solely for you. They are located in tunnels underneath abandoned buildings, they are on the rickety top floors of other abandoned buildings. There is literally no place where the police are not looking for you.

This is stupid. I understand what they're doing. It's a stealth game. You need people looking for you for there to be any, well, stealth. I think, though, that if you have to have people behave stupidly in order to put them in your game, you're not trying very hard. And, really, this one is just a goddamn gimmee. Have the missions be about infiltrating the dens of drug lords and crime bosses, or military bases, or whatever. Places that it is reasonable for there to be armed, alert security. But to imagine a world where every police officer in Chicago is looking for you, specifically for you, in places that it is both unlikely that your character – or anyone – would be, not to mention dangerous to be in, don't do that.

I think it will be some years, yet, before most games integrate story and play together. Some of the more successful games along this line has been done by Bioware, going back to The Knights of the Old Republic and straight on through to the Mass Effect and Dragon Age games. Though not done as seamlessly, the Bethesda – Skyrim and Fallout – seem to be trying the same thing. And for years, often with shockingly poor implementation, Japanese role-playing games have tried that, too.  But, right now, not even most computer role-playing games work to actually write the action scenes as much as the cutscenes.

But I long for a day when there it is routine to have guys at the office saying, “Why did the building explode? Did someone have a collection of oil soaked rags in there? Perhaps a collection of half-full gasoline cans and det cord?” There is no excuse for it, regardless of the type of game. If you want exploding buildings, put the action in a place where one might believe the building would explode – a chemical factory or fuel depot, the kind of places where explosions occur. Or make sure that the building being rigged with explosives is part of the plot. Something. It's not that hard. Or all the things that happen in video games, writing is among the absolute cheapest. You don't need buildings full of machines rendering 3D graphics, you don't need a hundred interns doing motion tracking or anything like that, it's just a few guys in a room with caffeine and laptops. It's even cheaper than music in video games. The cost would be superficial to the end cost of the game and you would produce a superior product.

I did not like Assassin's Creed 3

Assassin's Creed 3 stinks, I'm sad to say

I have been a fan of the Assassin's Creed games since the first one. A open world platformer/stealth game? Hell, yes. By the time AC3 came out, they had four games to figure things out, too. Which it looked like they had. AC2 was a huge improvement on AC1. The post-assassination sophomoric explication was very much cut down, the personality free Altair was replaced with the extremely likable Ezio Auditore and the lengthy fight sequences were dramatically shortened by Ezio's incredible ability to kill a person. Ezio also got a laundry list of nifty gadgets, a hidden wrist gun, dual hidden blades, a crossbow, more weapons to choose from, poisoned daggers and darts, the ability to use ziplines and gadgets to climb faster, parachutes and eventually bombs and grenades, too. He was like a Renaissance Batman. Additionally, Ezio got three games and you could see him transform from a callow, but likable youth, to a serious and mature man who accepted responsibility and taught others his arts. Ezio was a great character, fun and likable  who matured believably (in a video game sense) without the tedious monologues of AC1.

In Assassin's Creed 3, they decided to fuck that up.

First, the combat regression. In short, the AC3 protagonist, Conner, is not nearly so well armed as Ezio. First, they removed throwing knives. In the four previous AC games, the protagonists could throw knives quickly and accurately. Most foes fell after one knife hit. Conner can't throw knives. Sure, he starts out with a gun, but it is in all ways inferior to Ezio's gun – when someone was targeting Ezio with a gun, Ezio could generally shoot them before getting shot. Conner draws much slower and is likely to be shot before he can do anything (well, he can grab people to use as a human shield, and it's cool when there's someone around for it to work on, but there often isn't). I have no idea why Ezio's gun is technologically superior to Conner's, or why knife throwing is out, but it is. Sure, Conner has a bow but it's no better than Ezio's crossbow and since Conner has fewer arrows it is in some ways worse.

Additionally, when on a ledge, Conner has no ranged weapons he can use. Both Altair and Ezio could knife throw from ledges, which was useful.

In the AC2 games, they made combat shorter and more interesting than in AC1. In AC3, they regress by making combat less interesting (difficult to use ranged weapons in combat, elimination of dodges) while radically increasing the number of people you have to fight. In AC2, a guard patrol was between two and four guys, generally. In AC3, a patrol is a dozen people. It also takes Conner longer to counter-kill someone than Ezio, which means combats take longer and you're less likely to get a combo kill going because you'll be taken out of it by someone stabbing you when you're engaged.

The game will also, for no good reason, fairly often put you on the highest notoriety. The British couriers will sound the alarm even if you've got no interest in them, so you'll be minding your business and suddenly you'll be surrounded by literally thirty guys. So, there are random fights that are either extremely long and tedious or chases where 2/3rds of everyone around you is a guard, making it hard to get away.

And on the guard note, apparently the colonials work with the British in chasing you. This is baffling but whatever.

So, there is more combat, it is longer and less interesting, and your weapons suck compared to Ezio's – they do less damage and take longer to use. Didn't Ubisoft learn this lesson from The Warrior Within?

Let's move on to Conner, himself. First, the simple one. He's boring. He's incredibly dull. It's like all they could think of for a Mohawk character was “noble savage”. The liveliness they introduced with Ezio vanished in AC3 and Conner's stoicism. Conner does not smile, he, nor does anyone about him has the least sense of humor.

Second, there's the racism. He is a noble savage, which is a stereotype. It's painful to watch. This is mixed up with the atrocious writing, generally, which I'll talk more about in a bit, but Conner's stereotypical noble savage motive is to save his village's land from British expansionism . . .

Which is also a complete reverse of actual history. The Indians were overwhelmingly on the British side because the Crown had started limiting intrusion into Indian lands. An English High Justice had even opined in a newspaper that he saw no reason why England's white subjects should be allowed to steal the land of England's red subjects. In the Revolutionary War, around 13,000 Indians fought for the British. Around 1200 for the colonials. The knew that the colonials were no friends of the Indians and, of course, they were not.

But Conner is just so painfully boring. Combined with that noble savage bullshit and the idiocy of proposing the colonials were better for the Indians than the English, ugh.

The writing is generally awful. One of the things I learned is that no one in colonial America is either pleasant or attractive. And the pedantry that was so awful in Assassin's Creed 1 returns in full goddamn force. Many “missions” are Conner walking around protecting some famous historical figure as they ramble on about the sad plight of rich white men.

I mean, I'm an American, but I honestly don't know what side I would have been on during the Revolutionary War. When the war started, it was not obvious that the US would become a republic and usher in a new global democratic era. But it's hard for me to have too much sympathy for the colonials. The whole “taxation without representation” business wasn't some cruel trick of the English, but a fact arising from the fact England and the Americas were two months travel time apart. The trip, in addition to being long, was dangerous. It is a bad idea to let the weather hold a government hostage.

Second, you look at the “tyranny” of the English and it's really . . . not that tyrannical. It's mostly very modest tax increases on items on paper and tea. Tea! It'd be like rebelling because the government taxed Coca-Cola!

Then there are the reasons few people talk about – particularly England's growing unease with slavery (the English would outlaw it altogether in 1820, forty-five years before America got around to it) and England's limits of colonization westward. Many immigrants came to America for land, equating Indian lands with free lands. The English court system was starting to rule in favor of the Indians. This was unacceptable.

About the worst thing the English actually did was housing troops in private dwellings without getting the consent of the owners. The English and French were doing a fair bit of fighting in the Americas and the colonies wanted protection, but barracks were in short supply. So the English quartered troops in private houses, forcing their way in.

Mind you, they paid for the soldiers being quartered. And heavy knows I'd hate it if I was told that four guys were going to move into my house and I would be responsible for feeding them, no matter how much I was paid. It would really piss me off. There are also canards of the English troops behaving badly to their landlords, but there are no specifics. I'm sure that more than one soldier seduced more than one wife or daughter, and that would also fuel my rage, but I don't think that revolution is the answer, there, more like . . . build some damn barracks.

The real reason the Revolution happened is a growing sense among Americans that they weren't English. Many of them had been there a while and the American experience was so little like the English experience that the divide between the two places grew large, particularly during the period of Salutatory Neglect. The English had unintentionally allowed the colonists to grow more attached to local government than the English government, so after the French and Indian War when the English came in and treated the Americans like subjects, when the English started to pay attention to the colonials, again, it heightened the feeling that the Americans weren't the English. But that reason is pretty hard to sum up in a game about running through trees and knifing people.

In the game, this manifests, like I said, with Conner being nattered at by various figures, pontificating in the most tasteless ways imaginable about the causes of revolution. Case in point, Conner is walking around Boston with Sam Adams, and Sam is mentioning the unjust nature of British soldiers being quartered in private homes. Conner says, basically, “Well, you keep slaves.” Then the game has the fucked up audacity to equate quartering troops with owning human beings. There is a scene with some British soldiers behaving badly to the people quartering them and Sam Adams smugly says that it proves his point about the quartering soldiers is worse than slavery.

I mean, I almost stopped playing right there that shit is so fucked up. Slaves were flogged, raped, humiliated, mutilated. They were owned. No, they did not quarter troops. They didn't have homes, after all. The idea that the struggles of a land owner being inconvenienced is the same as the savagery of chattel slavery is racist and detestable. I understand where it comes from – there has to be a justification for rebellion and the real reasons aren't, like I said, that good or defensible. But it's horrible to suggest that anything is as bad as slavery this side of genocide.

Plus there's the whole Indian thing. The idea that the colonials would be better for the Indians is farcical and obviously untrue. Sure, some Mohicans fought for the colonials, but as mercenaries. Not exactly high-minded motives, there.

For additional racism, Conner's mentor is black. So, we have an Indian and a black guy who are involved with the Revolutionary War? Like the Revolutionary War improved conditions for black people in America? It's boggling, just boggling.

The game is also not about Conner. As far as I got, the main missions were about people like Paul Revere or Sam Adams, with Conner being their ethnic sidekick as they accomplished various historical acts. While I understand how things got there, I don't know why someone didn't notice. If they wanted the game to be about Sam Adams, they should have made him a goddamn Assassin. (Which would have been wicked, come to think about it. It would have provided motivation sorely lacking in Conner.) But the supporting cast, who are actually the stars, go on at great and tedious length about everything. None of the characters are interesting or even personable.

Other gameplay issues . . . the game has a lot of tedious bits relative to other games. So in AC2, the Assassin's become capitalists. Ezio goes around buying land and businesses to get the money he needs to do what he needs to do (including buying art). But the way it's handled in that game is . . . Ezio goes up to a shop, buys it and every so often money is deposited in his account. Every so often he had to go get it. That's it.

Conner, on the other hand, has to actively take a hand in transactions. He has to manage the estate's affairs – personally selecting what is made and where it is sold, and to whom. If you don't go into their menu intensive trading interface, you don't make any money.

Well, you can by hunting. The glories of hunting. You spread bait near a snare. Animal goes into snare. You skin the animal. Exciting!

Also, something that vexes me a little bit, is the wolves. Wolves will attack you pretty much on site. That perpetrates the canard that wolves are man-eaters when, in North America, there are zero unprovoked wolf attacks. Zero, as in “none”. Gray wolves are endangered, for crying out loud!

You also go around performing a beaver holocaust. There's good money in beaver pelts and they're more or less helpless. But, c'mon! Assassin's Creed III: the Extinction!

Funniest moment for me – the man-eating black bear. I . . . laughed aloud when I heard that one. Black bears are famously cowardly.

So the game has a lot of tedious gameplay. Some of it, like the trading, is reasonably important to the game. You need to buy things to succeed in the game so you have to use their silly trading interface to make money, rather than trade being something that just arises from your estate's growth. Hunting is amusing for about ten minutes but then it's a drag.

There are some improvements over the AC2 games. Well, one improvement. The freerunning – which is the core of the game – is greatly improved. And, yet, they seem to want to use it less, there are far fewer jumping puzzles than in previous games, at least as far as I got (and since I was about halfway done when I gave up, it would be a long stretch otherwise).

Mostly what AC3 did was make me want to play AC2, Brotherhood and Revelations, again. Which is okay since those games are great.

Split Second and driving games in general

I really should love driving games. I love cars and I love driving. And with Split Second, I certainly love blowing up the landscape and destroying my enemies. But I've never finished a driving game. I've never even gotten close. Which I would say is "weird" because I seem to have about average twitch, which one might infer would mean that I can finish the average game, or at least get close to finishing the average game. But the truth is that some kinds of video games are niche games and consistently demand more from players until players of average ability are left far, far behind. Driving games, which hale back to simulationist games trying to create a perfect vehicular physics and then to statistically model professional race car drivers . . . which they have now succeeded at pretty adeptly. However, as a result, the people who are "into" driving games are pretty dedicated.

Some of the problem, for me, is the fine motion involved. Modern controllers are fairly delicate but their range of motion is tiny. Theoretically, you can turn the steering of the little video car to various degrees, but for me? When charged with adrenalin, functionally my fine motion is "turning as hard as I can", "accelerating as hard as I can" and "braking as hard as I can". I'm jamming the buttons and hitting the stick. The games, uniformly in my experience, are about fine control and delicate maneuvering -- something I find utterly impossible with the actual PS3 controller. And, of course, is quite a bit different than how I normally drive. Delicate control is pretty second nature in a car because, y'know, otherwise you die.

So, Split Second went from "the best game ever made" into "holy shit, this is hard" in a couple of hours. I've had similar experiences with other driving games. Regardless of the reason, driving games, even arcade driving games, are extremely unforgiving, usually possessing nothing like difficulty settings or adaptive play. The pressure of the game is mere to make your opponents much, much better than you are (and, usually, to have them focus on destroying you while, more or less, leaving each other alone). It makes them, as a group, almost unplayable by anyone but the extremely dedicated.

Or, y'know, maybe people who buy $150 controllers to make the experience more natural and realistic. Maybe playing a game like that with a steering wheel is useful. But for the time being, well, I enjoyed the experience of Split Second insofar as I played it. I would have liked to have been able to play more of it, but the parts I did play were just crazy fun.

Alan Wake not enough to keep me A.Wake. Get it?

About halfway through the second chapter of Alan Wake, I decided I'd had enough. I got the game because I thought it would be a psychological thriller, for reals, at least as real as, say, Hard Rain. What I got is an annoying rail shooter.

I like a good rail shooter, don't get me wrong. But what Alan Wake has in common with an increasingly high number of shooters is lack of an enemy radar. Some people might say that an enemy radar is unrealistic or takes away from immersion. You know what else takes away from immersion? Lack of stereoscopic hearing and peripheral vision. In the real world, you in fact have a number of cues from the environment when someone is coming up behind you with an ax. As a result, I think games that both don't have a radar and base their gameplay around enemies pouncing you from all directions as faulty game design. At no point with a video game should the game be designed around weaknesses in the interface (in this case, the fact the game is 2D and will be heard without stereoscopic sound), and a game that has enemies appear behind you while at the same time depriving you any meaningful cues that you're about to get hit with an ax is using the interface against you. It's a cheap way to make a game more difficult and I don't like it. I like my interfaces to work with me, not against me.

The game also had spawning enemies without having spawning resources. While it wasn't particularly a problem when I stopped, it would, I'm sure, eventually become a problem. It should be basic game design -- if your enemies spawn, so should bullets.

But the real reason I quit the game, which will be the bulk of this post, is because the plot elements of the game stank to high heaven. There are going to be considerable spoilers from this point out.

The first really big problem is that Alan Wake is an idiot. He's totally that guy who, in horror movies, you say, "Don't go out alone" and who always goes out alone. Except he's your character and because the game includes no choices whatsoever, you have to do the stupid things that you know are stupid. And when you bill your game as being "psychological horror", you've got an obligation to the audience not to be stupid. When psychological horror works, it works in part because we can see ourselves having made those same decisions, that we can imagine a reasonable person making such decisions.

The hero has a dream and that dream seems to be real, including darkness zombies that appear out of nowhere and a light that is suspiciously like many people's interpretation of the Christian god. When his wife, who is completely helpless, of course, with the additional enforced helplessness of having a crippling phobia of the dark (ugh), vanishes, he tries to find her . . . though when he speaks to the police he learns the place where his wife vanished does not exist.

See, that would bring me up full stop and I think pretty much every reasonable person out there -- when your internal narrative has places that don't physically, objectively exist. When your wife vanishes from the place that doesn't exist, an intelligent, sane person would start to consider things in a very particular way. Either your worldview is totally wrong and the universe is fulled with supernatural events or you'd have to consider the very real possibility that you're deeply insane. In the first place, if you become convinced of your sanity and the existence of supernatural events, then you should reasonably and logically proceed from that understanding. Your wife is in the hands of supernatural beings, or perhaps is an illusion or supernatural manifestation of some kind.

Or you say you're insane and realize that you can't help your wife. You're crazy. "Doing something" would be a crazy something and you shouldn't do it, you should institutionalize yourself immediately.

Of course, there is supernatural stuff in the world . . . at which point is stops being "psychological horror" and becomes "supernatural horror". And only slightly "horror", really, because, y'know, it's really an action game, so it's more like dark modern fantasy. The character never seems to make this jump, though, that he's now in a world of magic -- that the world has, in fact, always been magic and he has simply been ignorant to this fundamental truth. So, y'know, maybe the worst idea to follow would be to dance to the strings of your supernatural puppeteer who has kidnapped your wife.

This also makes sense from a purely criminology point of view. Kidnappers want something. As far as I got, Alan never bothered to ask what the kidnapper was or what the kidnapper wanted. In short, he was an idiot. His wife is being held prisoner by supernatural creatures and he doesn't ask a single bloody question of himself or anyone else in the game. (I am given to understand that he eventually does ask questions, when an Explainer makes herself clearly known. More bad writing. If you need an Explainer to explain your plot, you need to do a rewrite.)

He was an idiot who didn't even get properly equipped. The idiot, for instance, knows that darkness damages his foes and enough light holds them entirely at bay. So, he never once stops and gets an industrial strength flashlight, relying on the flashlight from the glove box of his car. While, of course, it would be unlikely for a small town to have a 5000 dollar battery operated searchlight on the shelves, since they're next to a state park, they would have a camp store where one could get . . . elaborate lightage, including lamps that are really, really bright in a radius and very large, intense flashlights. Not to mention he could also get a gun a little more macho than a .32 revolver at the local gun shop.

Additionally, he might want to bring his friend along. Another set of hands, another big ass flashlight and another gun. Or, y'know, the fuckin' cops who might believe you a little more when you can demonstrate the existence of the supernatural. They absolutely do have ten thousand dollar portable searchlights and paramilitary weaponry. I mean, come on, the kidnapper says to you not to talk to the cops you ignore them. Yeah, maybe if there is a supernatural force involved, that force might magically know. But even then . . . so? Maybe doing the bidding of monsters is a bad idea, y'know? He never considers that following the advice of a monster is a bad idea.

This might come off as being a little big "boy gaming". Y'know, that "real people" would not actually do that. I guess that depends on the real people. I consider myself a real person and, amongst my friends, I'm actually the pacifist of the bunch. I have several friends who have several of these things just hanging around their house and a number of them wouldn't even imagine visiting a state park without a couple of guns and they'd definitely arrive with a lot of light sources. Indeed, I'd arrive with more light sources than these guys.

But the disturbing thing is . . . this is simply never discussed. The "psychological horror" element seems to be the character is an idiot who does what monsters tell him, even though he knows they're monsters. You can't even say that the fear and terror of his wife being in their hands drives him to irrational decisions -- he is very calm. Indeed, far, far calmer than I find plausible from this wimpy writer guy who has not, who admits he'd never shot a gun before, and yet seems comfortable and capable of gunning down multiple attackers in a world turned topsy-turvy because of all the, y'know, monsters and magic. The character just makes no kind of sense.

He's also a jerk. He's a writer who hasn't written anything in two years, even though he's otherwise a national best seller. When they go off to the woods together, his wife gives him a manual typewriter to encourage him to write. (As a writer, I was definitely, "WTF?" A manual typewriter? Really? Not, y'know, a Macbook Air? It was another one of those poorly scripted moments that took me out of the story. I understand it was an homage to Kubrick and Stephen King and The Shining, but the book was written in a time where many writers still did write with typewriters. Y'know. Decades ago.) He freaks out, bites off her head completely out of proportion to her "offense" -- which was a well-meaning attempt to be helpful. I believe it was meant to demonstrate that Alan Wake was sensitive about not being able to write. But it came off like he kicks puppies in the nutsack. He verbally and physically bullied his wife and stormed out into the dark, knowing her crippling phobia would prevent her from following him.

When his friend, after a week incommunicado, comes down to check up on Alan and his wife, that guy gets treated with the same sensitivity -- which is to say, none. Alan is a jerk. So, not only is he an idiot he also has no human emotions. By this time, the psychological horror angle is in absolute tatters. Yet, that's why I got the game. If I had known it was really just another horror shooter, I wouldn't have bothered. I find horror shooters insipid. It's evil . . . that you can shoot! Seriously, you're going to go with that for your plot? Shootable evil? I understand that video games are a bad format to discuss teleological questions, but it's not like there's someone making them do it. Really, it's okay to make the enemy something that could plausibly be beaten with a gun. Or, y'know, in your game of psychological horror make it about, I dunno, psychological horror. Start with putting a character with accessible human emotions into the game, even just one would have been nice.

The plot is also juvenile. I think it's an indictment of video games that their reviewers are so debased as to give a plot that starts off with saving the helpless woman a passing grade. That is, in and of itself, a terribly, horribly hackneyed plot. Great. Another helpless girl to save. Whatever. Unsurprisingly, the plot under that plot is the incredibly predictable "the world needs to be saved" plot. Which is the plot of something like eighty percent of video games. So the game slides from the clichéd to utterly, remorselessly predictable. Of course, video game reviewers and most video game players have painfully debased ideas on what constitutes a "good story". Almost none of them realize that an infinite procession of games about saving the game world from ultimate evil simply cannot be called "creative".

The plot was also a pastiche of things much better than in. In particular, many of the salient features of the plot seem lifted fairly wholesale from John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (but also The Shining, The Dark Half and old school World of Darkness that I could see in my limited play of the game). Reading the plot summary strengthened this idea quite dramatically. It's always a bad idea to remind someone of a good movie in your bad game.

Kirby's Epic Yarn vs. Alan Wake -- FIGHT!

I just finished playing Kirby's Epic Yarn, which is a weapons grade adorable side scrolling platformer, and started playing Alan Wakem which is supposed to be a game of psychological horror but the first bit has play like a Resident Evil-style shooter. The transition is pretty brutal.

Kirby games are beginner's and children's games. They're good games, even great games, but they're not designed to be hard. As a result, they're often very fun in a low pressure way. Indeed, they're reminders that you don't really need a lot of complexity to make a game fun. And Nintendo is, as always, the master of platformers. The game is short on complexity and difficulty, but long on creativity.

Alan Wake, at least the shooter parts, remind me of some of the cliches I dislike most about shooter games and why, increasingly, I avoid a game that's primarily a shooter. Especially horror shooters. The game has limited ammunition, making it possible your only recourse is to dodge wildly and hope your foes don't hack you down. It has enemies that spawn in the most inconvenient places, meaning the designers confuse "annoying" with "exciting". And then there's the flashlight. A modern flashlight can be expected to run a dozen hours or so. This one eeks out a minute, tops. This is one gaming cliche that needs to be stamped out of existence. I've played in games where the character's suit is nuclear powered by the flashlight lasts a few seconds. I understand the reason why they do it, but it has reached the point of an overused cliche and a crutch. When I'm playing a video game and I'm given a gimmicky flashlight, all I'm thinking about is how flashlights aren't even vaguely like that and how it'd be a nice change of pace to get one that works.

I've also just gotten to the point where I'm frustrated by "horror games" where the horror can be shot in the head. The game opens up with a quotation from Stephen King about how unanswered questions are the ones that stay with us the longest. Well, shooting doods with a gun doesn't really address that. Maybe the rest of the game does, I dunno, but I do know that I would really like to see a new kind of horror game, a stealth game and a platformer (both of them actually fairly obvious, if you think about it -- foes that you have to avoid either through athletics or sneakiness) or a role-playing game (also obvious, horror tabletop role-playing games being the third kind invented, after fantasy and sci-fi), anything that isn't just another shooter! In the end, almost all horror shooters are just an excuse to make a really hard shooter. (I've heard Alan Wake isn't particularly difficult, but that's certainly generally true about horror shooters.)

Part of the reason I'm already unsure about this game is because Kirby's Epic Yarn was so totally the antithesis of Alan Wake. Rather than boring us with dialog that is already forced and acting that is already stilted, with a plot that makes a person grind their teeth at the cliches -- looking for the lost girlfriend, really? though I'm also aware most video games audiences are inured to plots of that pedestrian mediocrity though there are hints of one of video games' greater stupidities, saving the world, might also be in the offing -- Kirby's Epic Yarn is light, fast and enjoyable with a minimalistic control scheme that gets a person into the game immediately while creating clever levels that you enjoy playing and a beautiful art direction. Did I mention the cute? The game is so cute that your primarily "enemies" are so adorable it's hard to hurt them. When disarmed, easily done, their sole "attack" consists of flumphing towards Kirby, which knocks him back a little. You have to be a kitten crushing chicken rapist to want to hurt the Waddle Dees, pictured left. Kirby's Epic Yarn reminds us it's actually pretty easy to make a really fun game. It doesn't need a lot of gimmicks or a complex control scheme, just some solid art and music direction and some clever game design. Alan Wake reminds me that state-of-the-art game design refers to polygons per second, not creativity.

Maybe I'm being harsh on a game that I've played for forty minutes. And maybe it's nostalgia that makes me crown Kirby's Epic Yarn with such laurels. But going from a game that was immediately engaging and intuitive to play into yet another complex control schemed horror shooter stripped my gears pretty hard.