Lost, Damned, Finished, and Left for Dead

So I have spent the last few days playing through the first Downloadable Content (when I was a kid the word was Expansion Pack but whatever) of Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and the Damned.

Overall, I was as impressed with it as I was with the original story arc. It was really interesting to see Liberty City through the eyes of a character without the naivety and, I guess 'innocence' of Nico Bellic. While exploring Liberty City as Johnny, I noticed so many things (small things--buildings, alleyways, people) that I never had as Nico.

This makes sense. Nico just got the boat. He would see the top of skyscrapers and the statue of Happiness and, I guess, the 'tourist' America. Johnny, on the otherhand, has been here his whole life. He is in a gang; he has a clubhouse; he rides the streets confidently like a king (a president), not some nervous tourist (not even a nervous tourish with psycotic tendencies).

The characters and the acting was as top notch as the original. I truly believe no game has acting (or character animation, whatever you wish to call it) like GTA4. The dialogue is so fresh, so real, the character movements and behaviours in cutscenes is exaggerated but so real. TLAD did just as well and each member of Lost MC had a distinct personality while still fitting into the redneck-bikie stereotype.

One criticism is the speed with which the game pushes the player through the story. You finish one mission, then almost instantly get the phonecall that something has happened and they are ready for you to do the next mission. I gues this makes sense as the player has more than likely already explored all there is to Liberty City and making them wait three game days to do something might get annoying... but it made it difficult to sympathise with the characters' situation when they have supposedly been suffering for days since the last cutscene but you watched it only ten minutes ago.

I finally bought Left4Dead yesterday. Hopefully it lives up to all I have heard.

I wanted to make a post about the playstation-fanboy riots over at Edge when they gave 7/10 to Killzone2. Instead, I will just say that graphics aren't everything (though it looks damn impressive for, yknow, a pre-rendered video), and if the gameplay is anything as repetitve as Killzone, then I think 7/10 is quite good. Nevermind the fact that some amazing games get 7/10 from Edge--Fallout 3 comes to mind. 7/10 means pretty good. If you think 7/10 is a bad score, stop reading Official [console name] Magazines.

Stereotypes in Gaming

There is an interesting article over at Edge about the portrayal of Black characters in gaming. Though, it does read a bit too much like a University essay. Then again, it probably is.

I agree with everything the article says about Black characters in gaming being limited to already-accepted stereotypes such as Cole in Gears of War; though, the commenters on the thread point out several characters and games that deal with race a lot better (Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2, etc).

But I think the article is narrowing what is a wider issue in gaming: every stereotype is overly simplified. Look at the only female character is Gears of War--or any character in Gears of War for that matter. Gaming narrative is still so young and so reliant on tried-and-tested formulae that I think many game writers still only feel safe with stereotypes.

That said, the exceptions are there, and are generally in the better games: Nico Bellic, Alyx (black and female!), and others that wil lsurely come to mind the second i hit 'post'.

Of course the only game to treat all colours and creeds equally is Geometry Wars.

Assassin's Creed 2 Confirmed

[Assassin's Creed Spoilers]

http://www.edge-online.com/news/new-ghost-recon-assassins-red-steel-confirmed

I knew it had to be coming, and I'm cautiously excited, too. Things went crazy at the end of Assassin's Creed and I'm really curious to see what happen next.

What I want is AC2 to be based entired in the near-future. Like, completely move away from the medieval thing (as awesome as that was) and play as the decendant trying to escape and things. AC1 tempted the player with so much not-quite-information about the 'real' world and I really want to see more of it.

Hope Ubisoft don't screw it up.

Well done, Sparrow!

Well I finally got around to completing Fable II last night. I must say that despite its many, many, many technical and gameplay faults, the story was one of the most intriguing game stories I have played through for a very long time.

The entire tone of the storytelling was very mature and professional, for lack of better words. I think it was because it didn't play around. It was honest and blunt with the player in a way that most games fail to be. A simple example is you have sex. You don't have 'hot coffee' or a 'chat'... you have sex. Similarly, key story events just happen the way they do in any good adventure novel or movie.

Perhaps the story of Fable II is not trying to be a game-story, but just a story. There are plenty of more-compelling stories out there; when you look at the plot of Fable II, it is really quite simple. Look at Fallout 3: the sole reason it has taken me so long to complete Fable II. The story was, for me, far more interesting, but that said, it was still very much a computer game story--a story that knew it was a computer game and was careful not to be anything more than that. Fable II, on the other hand didn't sell itself so short to fall into good guy/bad guy blue blip/red blip divisions. The decision making aspects, the just-living aspects of it, the entire game embraced themes of just being... human. There are no good decisions and bad decisions, just favourable and unfavourable consequences.

[slight spoiler in this paragraph]
The story was certainly loose in parts and non-existent in others. How you actually defeated Lucien is never really explained beyond "It's your destiny." But no game before this has made me feel so responsible for my character's decisions nor has a game before this made me feel so affected by the consequences of those decisions.

Perhaps that is it: the sheer intimacy you develop with your personal character draws you, the player, further in Albion than a typical game world and thus ingrains the experience of the story that much deeper.

There's gold in them hills!

Firstly, I will admit that the only reason I purchased Battlefield: Bad Company for my 360 was because of the above trailer. When marketing does its job well, I don't mind getting down from my anti-consumerism high horse to congratulate a well-made advertisement.

With that confession out of the road, I have another one. I generally I don't really like war-sim FPS games. You know, the Call of Dutys, the Medal of Honors, the entire Tom Clancy franchise. I was just never a big fan. I appreciated them; some of them did amazing things and had great scenes and drama. But after I played the early Medal of Honours on my playstation and the first Call of Duty, I had basically played all of them. You are always the same silent, American soldier whose skill seems to far surpass his rank, fighting in the same campains over and over again.

Yet, the trailers of these games always look so good; the gameplay always looks so enthralling. I've always harboured a little jealousy that I can't get into these games. So I think that was my attraction to Bad Company: here was my chance to really get into a war game with the quick deaths, the aiming every shot, the stupidly loud tanks, but without the really cliche, reiterated storylines.

While I have to agree with practically all of the criticisms in Edge's review of the game, I must say I really enjoyed it and it was everything I hoped it would be. I got my typical war-FPS gameplay, the typical go-here-destroy-this objectives, but the story, the characters, while being cliches in their own right, were refreshing to the genre and made the experience more enjoyable. I think it was the simplicity. We aren't saving the world; we are trying to get some gold, and we are going AWOL to do it. I really enjoyed it.

It's nothing new, but I think there is a lot to be said for taking a tried-and-tested approach to games (or books, or movies, or anything) and twisting it, vandalising it, just enough to create a totally new experience. A good example of this would be PS3's Resistance. Again, Resistance took the stale war genre and turned it on its head by having aliens invade halfway throught the Europeans campain of World War II. Genius! Certainly, Bad Company isn't anything as extreme as Resistance, and cetainly the actual gameplay is fairly derivative war-FPS style, but the motivation behind it is different, and I think that makes all the difference to the player.... I've shot Russians to prevent a nuclear holocaust more times that I can remember; but shooting Russians for my own personal mansion built out of gold bars? Sure, hand me that AK.

"Man of few words, aren't you?"

In Half-Life, Gordon Freeman didn’t really need a voice. All he was trying to do (or at least, so he thought) was escape from Black Mesa alive. The fact that, majority of the time, he was completely alone further justified him not needing to speak. The silent protagonist wasn’t something new to the FPS genre; even today, few protagonists of FPS games speak during gameplay, saving all their witty one-liners for the cutscene before the next level—Master Chief, for example.

This poses several issues for Gordon’s continued silence into Half-Life 2. No longer is he simply trying to escape Black Mesa and, a lot of the time, he isn’t alone. However, although this may at first appear to mean Gordon Freeman must speak in Half-Life 2, things get complicated when you consider Half-Life’s trademark lack of cutscenes, with all action happening in-game.

Some people argue that the (unsuccessful) goal of the silent protagonist in gaming is to increase a player’s agency in a situation and, consequentially, “it can often feel like the player is just being jerked around through the whole game like a puppet without any real power over what is going on.” I would argue that this isn’t a consequence of the silent protagonist, but its actual goal. The silent protagonist doesn’t try to further immerse the player, nor does it give him or her more agency within the game world. Contradictory in all respects, implementing a silent protagonist intentionally removes the protagonist’s agency.

Master Chief speaks—he’s on top of things; he’s got it all under control. Gordon Freeman doesn’t. Gordon Freeman is a puppet. He is nothing but the G-man’s puppet. Even throughout Half-Life, Gordon isn’t just trying to escape Black Mesa (though, the player is tricked into thinking that is all he or she is doing); he is doing exactly what the G-man wants him to do.

I think, for the purpose of Half-Life 2, not being able to speak, combined with being suddenly dropped in a dystopic future, emphasises just how much Gordon Freeman is a victim, not an agent. The first few hours of the game are spent wondering what the hell has happened, and the fact that you can’t just ask someone—as frustrating as it is—just furthers the player’s alienation to the world. I think Valve pull this off quite well. To me, it rarely feels as though I, the player, should be speaking. Between Eli, Alyx, Barney, and the others—the ones who actually have agency over the events of the game—, the way they talk around Gordon, as though he has no say in anything comes across as natural.

It could be argued, then, that from the start Episode 1, when the Vortigaunts prevent the G-man from getting to Gordon, that he should then be able to speak, as he is no longer under the G-man’s pursuasion. Yet, in Episode 1, it could be argued that Gordon isn't even truly the protagonist anymore, but Alyx. At this point in the narrative, Gordon just allows us a third-person perspective from which to view Alyx and the decisions she makes. Kind of like Raiden viewing Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid 2.

Another instance of the silent protagonist having no agency would be Grand Theft Auto III when compared to Vice City and San Andreas. Each GTA title has a very different protagonist. The protagonist of Grand Theft Auto III—let’s call him Clyde—is just a lackey. He is content to do jobs for people and to make money from doing those jobs. Clyde doesn’t need a voice; he just needs ears. As rich as he might end up, he never ‘owns’ Liberty City; he still lives in a back-alley apartment, and he seems content to do so.

Tommy Vercetti isn’t. Tommy has goals for Vice City and thus, Tommy needs to be able to speak. The same goes for Carl Jackson: he doesn’t want to own San Andreas, but he has very clear goals for himself, and having a voice emphasises that.

This argument of the silent protagonist being implemented in order to remove the protagonist’s agency, as I have claimed it here, only really stands up when used to analyse action games. I think the role of the silent protagonist in other genres—such as rpgs—achieves completely different ends. It would be hard to argue that the protagonists of Pokémon or Oblivion don’t have a say in their world. But that’s a different topic altogether.

Maybe, one day, Gordon Freeman will break free of the G-man. Then, maybe, he might have a chance to make his own decisions and voice them. Though, from the less-than-optimistic ends every other protagonist in the Half-Life universe has met (Opposing Force, Portal ,etc.), I’m not hoping for too much.

Welcome

Welcome to Critical Damage! My goal for this site is to make critical analyses of different aspects of computer games that are generally overlooked or taken for granted by the general audience. By this I mean looking at things such as (for example) the role of the silent protagonist in game-series such as Zelda or Half-Life, or the narrative devices used in Halo, or whether Grand Theft Auto 4 is immature crudity or intelligent social criticism. Basically, i want to go beyond the typical "This game has cool graphics!" technical assessment of games and look at the elements more typical of any other medium of storytelling--such as film or literature.

Hopefully I can manage to do this in a professional and interesting way, without taking all the ingrained fun of cool graphics and leet explosions out of games.

If it is important to know, I am a 22-year-old student, almost finished a BA in Creative Writing and Japanese. Before this, I spent eighteen-months in an IT and Multimedia degree before realising I have little interesting in the technical side of gaming, only the storytelling side. I began playing games with Sonic The Hedgehog 2 and Alex Kidd on the Sega Master System II and haven't looked back since.

So that's about it, really. Hopefully I can keep committed to this and publish some interesting article that people might find worthy of reading.