tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34029150427804905742024-03-18T09:09:49.926-07:00Critical DamageTrying to hear the dumb machine sing.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.comBlogger157125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-89704360917732850002014-08-18T16:59:00.004-07:002014-08-18T16:59:59.562-07:00Critically DamagedHello. So after six years of sharpening my teeth on <i>Critical Damage</i>, I've decided it is time I stop relying on a Blogspot website and make a simple, more straightforward website for myself to serve as a central place for my various identities and blogs on the web. So now you can find me at <a href="http://brkeogh.com/">brkeogh.com</a>. It has links to my academic research, my freelancing work, and my various other projects. I'm also going to start writing whatever blog posts I would normally have written here, over there. So, effectively, this is the end of updates to <i>Critical Damage</i>. It will all stay here, of course. I won't be removing any content (I am a strong believer in writers leaving their older writing up so that newer writers can gain confidence from seeing how terrible established writers used to be (not that I really count as 'established' yet)), but I probably won't be updating any more. So thank you for your support reading this blog, and if you want to find my more recent stuff, head on over to <a href="http://brkeogh.com/">brkeogh.com</a>.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com177tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-74512477231885294932014-07-28T20:42:00.002-07:002014-07-29T20:43:08.944-07:00Modern Warfare Critical Let's Play Series<br />
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For a while I've been toying with the idea of doing a 'Critical Let's Play' of the <i>Modern Warfare</i> trilogy. It's no secret that I guiltily thoroughly enjoy the <i>Modern Warfare</i> single-player campaigns a great deal, even as I know they are incredibly messed up for their glorifying of Western militarism. I always struggle to explain to people why I enjoy them so much, as it is really the moment-to-moment pacing and framing of the storytelling that I enjoy, more than any broad themes that are easy to explain in writing. So I thought I might record myself playing through the games, talking through them as I go, pointing at the particular little <i>things </i>that I like while being able to bring my audience a long and show what I mean about the pacing and about the framing of particular scenes and whatnot.<br />
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So I have started this. There is a Youtube playlist <a href="http://youtu.be/zH-sDMLGR8c?list=PLoN-AaQc-uK76KW5lXuLyKqGR-OyxiGYH">here</a> (and embedded above) that I will be adding videos to over the coming months as I play my way through. I've put up four videos to start with, playing up to the nuclear explosion in <i>Modern Warfare</i>, and from now I might put up two more videos every week or so. We'll see. I don't want to just pile hours of footage in there at once as I really can't imagine anyone wanting to watch it all in one go.<br />
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I'm not the most experienced at capturing videogame footage, or at expressing myself vocally, so any and all feedback is appreciated, negative or positive. I'd love to know if you think this style of analysis is interesting and engaging, what works for you and what doesn't. Some things I've already realised: there is a slight delay between the footage and my voiceover. I think this is because the Elgato Game Capture software I use to capture from my Xbox 360 doesn't really like my iphone earphones+microphone I'm using. I'm not sure what to do about this, but I'll be sure to linger at scenes I want to speak about for a moment longer in future videos. Related to this, I need to not stop recording as soon as I say 'Thanks for watching', because I am losing the last few seconds of my talking. Finally, I clearly need to trim my beard because you can hear the iphone mic scraping against my facial hair in the second video, haha. #bro<br />
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I'm also toying with the idea of starting a Patreon (<a href="http://patreon.com/brkeogh">whoops, I did it</a>) before I produce any more of these, on the off chance people are willing to throw a few dollars my way. I can't imagine this being a massive fund that would make me a lot of money, but I think if I am willing to put in the hours of work of playing through all these games again with an analytical eye, I might at the very least provide people the opportunity to pay me for it, since, after all, games criticism is labour worth being paid for. Again, I'd certainly appreciate any thoughts people have on this. I'd rather not put ads all over the videos, obviously.<br />
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So that's what I'm doing. If you watch them, do please let me know how you find them because, frankly, I have no idea what I am doing.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com81tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-48938970363848975742014-06-25T18:18:00.000-07:002014-06-25T20:59:49.599-07:00Notes on Final Fantasy XII<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1. To understand my current fixation with (and deep, deep satisfaction of) <i>Final Fantasy XII</i> and all its intricacies, one must first understand the game’s failings. <i>Final Fantasy XII</i> has a unique brand of ludonarrative dissonance (sorry). The story and the game do not match each other—not due to any kind of thematic dissonance between ‘story’ and ‘game’, but in the level of exclusive attention each demands of the player. The ‘story’ is one of competing kingdoms and arms races and both inter- and intranational diplomacy and bureaucracy. The player must keep track of name, militaries, geographies, family trees, timelines, and peace treaties if they are to follow what is happening. It is simultaneously the most mundane, most grounded, and most compelling story I have encountered in a Final Fantasy. The ‘game’, meanwhile, is a fascinatingly deep and intricate web of battle systems and side quests and hunts and secrets and rare items. The player is <i>expected</i>—at times almost forced by difficulty spikes—to put aside the story and spend tens of hours hunting a giant turtle or diving into an utterly optional area. It is, all of it, incredibly enjoyable, but then you return to the story and have lost all track of who is at war with who and the difference between magicite and nethicite (nuclear and atom bombs, I think) and just why you are going where you are going. Is the evil country Rozarria or is that the good guys? The first time I played <i>FFXII</i>, when it was new, I was eighty-hours in when I finally gave up. I had never before gotten eighty hours into a game without the end even being remotely in sight. I had just spent so much time doing <i>other</i> things that I didn’t even know what was happening, so I gave up. I had never before given up on a Final Fantasy. </div>
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2. <i>FFXII</i> refuses to be played how it wants to be played. It is impossible. It wants 90% of your attention on this half and 90% on that half. It demands 180% of your attention. It is impossible to play <i>FFXII</i> how it wants to be played. But, just like <i>Metal Gear Solid</i> demands the player to accept they will be spending as much time watching as playing (or: watching is a major component of playing <i>Metal Gear Solid</i>), one can enter <i>FFXII</i> with a particular mindset, with a particular goal on what they want to get out of the game, and it can be the most engrossing thing. I’ve long wanted to return to <i>FFXII</i> to better explore its design: the gambits, the sidequests, the particularities of Yasumi Matsuno’s grubby design fingerprints smeared all over it. So I began again with an agenda: I am playing for the design, not for the story. I will focus all my attention on this aspect of the game, and ignore that aspect, rebalancing what the game gets so wrong. To stress, I chose to play a JRPG not for the story. This is not something I ever thought I would do.</div>
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3. If we ignore the story and how it is told, then, the design of <i>FFXII</i> is immaculate. By ‘the design’ I mean the way everything works together. The way it sets out to achieve certain forms of engagements with its rules and systems and mechanics. The way it translates the decades-old turn-based battle system into real-time, streamlining it and giving it a rhythm while holding on to its core focuses of tactics and strategy. The way it is so transparently influenced by MMO design. As long as one ignores the story, it becomes so explicit what the game is tying to do, and it just does it with a mighty level of confidence.</div>
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4. The ‘real-time’ battles. <i>FFXII</i> does away with the battle scenes of most JRPGS. In place of the stop-start pacing of running around a map and then, every few steps, everything blurring and a whole new battle screen appearing, enemies are visible and fought on the map. You just walk up to them, fight them, and keep walking. On the surface, this solves the various pacing issues that turn-based battle scenes have always been plagued by. But it introduces new challenges. Turn-based battles allow for deep, strategic choice and clear communication of intent without needing to hastily press the right buttons in the right order. The design of <i>FFXII</i> is at its most fascinating where it adapts the strengths of turn-based battles into its semi real-time design, while leaving aside the monotonous and boring parts. The transition from ‘walking around’ to ‘fighting’ is as simple as the characters pausing for a split second to pull out their weapons. From here, the player can press X to pause time and open a small menu no different to any turn-based Final Fantasy. You can choose attack, magic, item, etc. With the menu open, you can press left and right to scroll between the menus of different characters. The battle does not require a separate screen, but it still manages to use menus seamlessly and intuitively to ensure no lower level of strategic control.</div>
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5. The main restriction on real-time combat is the inability to control multiple people at once. You see this in other real-time JRPGS, like <i>Kingdom Hearts</i>, where the player is in charge of Sora, and Goofy and Donald just do their own thing. You can set vague AI behaviour (defensive or support or aggressive) but you lose the fine-grained control that turn-based combat can give you over an entire party. <i>FFXII</i>’s answer to this is the gambit system: the ability to finely program each character with conditional behaviour. I can set a character to cast Cure on any ally whose health is below 30%. I can tell a different character to Steal from any enemy with 100% health: they will steal once; my other characters will attack; and then they won’t steal again. I can set these gambits in a ordered list of priorities. My support character will stop attacking to cure anyone, but my tanks will only stop attacking to cure once there are no more enemies about. </div>
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At any point, the gambits can be manually overridden by the easily accessible menu system but, for the most part, I can program my characters into a well-oiled machine that does exactly what I want to do. And it is <i>terrific</i> and streamlined. It feels like the antithesis of the labour required by <a href="http://infinitelag.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/taylors-tower.html">a game like <i>Tiny Tower</i></a> (or any previous Final Fantasy, really) that <i>never</i> lets you automate or make more efficient the mundane level of action. <i>FFXII</i> let’s me prove, once, that I know what I’m doing, and then never forces me to do that thing again. Why should I have to manually choose to cure every time I know I need to cast cure anyway? Why shouldn’t I be able to prove to the game that I know I need to cure when health is low just once, and then have it automated? The beauty of <i>FFXII</i> is that it has the confidence to let me not press buttons. It has the confidence to play itself.<br />
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6. More on gambits. Not just a simplified programming language, gambits are also incorporated into the grind loop of JRPG play through the need to buy new gambits and use experience points on new gambit slots. Before you can set an “If ally: health lower than 30% then ‘cure’” gambit, you need to go to a gambit store and buy the condition “ally: health lower than 30%”. This probably annoys some people, but for me it incorporates the ability to set an intricate, well-oiled machine into that same grinding feedback loop as the one that lets me buy an expensive sword or use advanced magic. When I watch my team destroy an enemy without me pressing a single button I don’t just get the satisfaction of watching them do exactly what I told them to do, but of seeing my time and labour spent <i>buying</i> those gambits pay off. </div>
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7. <i>FFXII</i> came out at a time that MMOs were all the rage. <i>World of Warcraft</i> was in full-swing. The previous Final Fantasy, <i>Final Fantasy XI</i>, itself was an MMO. MMOs was both what was trendy and what much of the development team had experience in. <i>FFXII</i> plays like a single-player MMO. I vaguely remember this annoying people (probably including myself) at the time, as thought it had just jumped on a bandwagon. But now I just find it fascinating, like everything else in the game. The real-time-ish combat is one element of this, with the way my team surround an enemy on the map and do their own thing reminding me of watching an old roommate doing raids in <i>World of Warcraft</i>. But the MMO influence is so ingrained. The countless sidequests and ‘hunts’ and secrets. Like an MMO, <i>FFXII</i> is selfconsciously full of <i>stuff</i> to do, as though the player should be paying a subscription fee. Of course, it is exactly this vast quantity of <i>stuff</i> that detracts from the story, so those critical of the MMO influence probably had a point. But the counter to this is that now that I am playing with an utter disregard for the story, I find myself loading up the game and thinking, “What should I do today?”. I have never thought this in a JRPG before. </div>
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8. <i>FFXII</i> is also a game designed to be played with a game guide in hand. Or, to word that more cynically, it is a game designed in such a way to punish people who don’t fork out money for the game guide. This is before wikis and gameFAQs made such a business model rapidly outdated. But it means the game is full of the most hilariously obtuse sidequests and weapons. The <a href="http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Zodiac_Spear">Zodiac Spear</a>, for example, is the most powerful spear in the game. To get it late in the game, the main condition the player has to meet is to <i>not</i> open a variety of chests earlier in the game. The game doesn’t tell you which chests, but there are chests in various obvious places and if you open them, you won’t get this spear. The only way you will know not to open them is to read the game guide (or, now, a wiki). Apparently people quit the game in disgust when they heard this (kitting all the characters out in the best weapons is, after all, a major ambition for many FF players). When my partner read these instructions out from the wiki page, I laughed and laughed. It was just so absurd. Another example is an unlockable fishing mini game which, among other conditions, requires you to talk to a man, run across one area to another area <i>but not enter it</i>, run back to the man, and then gain access to the mini game. To get a better fishing rod, you must first kill Gilgamesh. Maybe I’ve just lost my completionist streak in recent years, but none of this makes me mad. In fact, the idea of such an obscure, dense game existing makes me happy.</div>
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9. Yasumi Matsuno’s games remind me of <i>Dark Souls</i>. It’s something I first thought of when I played <i>Vagrant Story</i> (some thoughts <a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-3.html">here</a>) earlier this year. Tonally and environmentally, it felt like the world of <i>Dark Souls</i>: alone in an obtuse, undead city; muted music (except for the occasional and unexpected boss battles) and just the ambient environmental sounds. <i>Final Fantasy XII</i>, similarly, reminds me of <i>Dark Souls</i> but not in atmosphere so much as obnoxiousness. <i>Dark Souls</i> is deliberately vague in what you are meant to do and where you are meant to go. It is a post-Twitter game, <a href="http://www.bitcreature.com/editorials/here-with-me/">as Matthew Burns once said to me</a>. It expects players to gather around the bonfires of social media and share tales of secrets they found. <i>Final Fantasy XII</i> just wants you to buy a game guide, but it gives it a similar sensation of depth, of jumping into a pitch black hole and not knowing how long you are going to fall for.</div>
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10. <i>Final Fantasy XII</i> is beautiful. There’s a particular aesthetic of late-Playstation 2 games (and late-Playstation 1 games, in a similar way) where the resolution of the textures is disproportionately intricate compared to the low polycount of the models. The characters are these most basic models but the lattice-work of Fran’s armour or Balthier’s cuffs or Basch’s blonde locks or Ash’s belts are all so immaculate and intricate. It’s this really wonderful aesthetic juxtaposition, low-poly and high-res. I don’t have the art language to really describe why its beautiful, but I could look at these characters and their world all day, just as I could with <i>Vagrant Story</i>’s similar juxtaposition.</div>
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11. Yasumi Matsuno’s fingerprints are all over <i>Final Fantasy XII</i> and it is the most fascinating thing about he. He was the co-director before stepping down (over disagreements with changes Square wanted to make, I believe). So <i>FFXII</i>, at the same time, displays a clear lineage with Matsuno’s earlier games, but its an imperfect lineage. I think I just have a fascination of late of being able to sense an oeuvre of a game creator’s work. So Matsuno made <i>Final Fantasy Tactics</i> (which <i>XII</i> is based in the same world of), and <i>Vagrant Story</i>. He also directed <i>Tactics Ogre,</i> but I haven’t played that so I can’t talk to it. So let’s talk similarities across the games I have played. There is, on the most obvious level, the unorthodox battle systems, each game being <i>mechanically interesting</i> in a way the other Final Fantasies are not, with their semi-real-time battle systems or focus on tactics. There’s also little visual flourishes that connect the games. In, say <i>Final Fantasy VII</i>, casting magic is something very external, with green circles rippling out from the character. In both FF<i>XII</i> and <i>Vagrant Story</i>, meanwhile, magic feels like something introverted, like an inward focusing of energy rather than an outward pouring. The character raising their hand to their head and the blurs and lines kind of ripple more inwards than outwards. It is tiny, but it feels like a common strand. There is the aforementioned <i>Dark Souls</i> oppressiveness and the high-res-low-poly look. It’s risky to attribute too much to a single member of a large production team, but <i>XII</i> feels like a game conceived by the person who conceived it. It has a personality and a style.</div>
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12. But there’s more than fingerprints on <i>FFXII</i>’s design. There’s a transparency in is flaws. The late, hamfisted addition of both the license board and protagonist Vaan, added at the last minute as an androgynous anime teenage boy protagonist to a story originally written about Balthier (or so the story goes). In one scene, not far in to the game, Vaan stands up front and centre while, off to the side in the background Balthier calls himself the leading man, as though the voice acting had already been done and they just had to deal with it. And it’s true: the leading man is off to the side. It’s a flaw, to be sure, but such a fascinating one. <i>FFFXII</i> wears its design on its sleeve, and it makes it a much more interesting game to engage with.</div>
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13. Boss battles are usually dreadful in<i> </i>Final Fantasy games. They are boring and mindless, requiring more endurance than intelligence. I didn’t realise quite how bad they were until I played <i>Persona 4 Golden</i>, with its legitimately enjoyable boss battles The key difference: <i>Persona 4</i>’s bosses were not immune to every single status change. You could poison them, you could screw with their stats. In most Final Fantasy games, meanwhile, bosses are immune to <i>everything</i> except perhaps for an elemental weakness. Your inventory of tactical support spells is reduced to nothing more advanced than Rock Paper Scissors. <i>FFXII</i>, however, with its many hunts (optional boss battles) and rare hunts, has no shortage of giant enemies to endure and, importantly, they often <i>are</i> susceptible to this or that status effect. You can screw over their accuracy, you can silence their magic, you can dispel their shields. It makes <i>such</i> a difference. Suddenly, you can use tactics against them, not just mash away with attacks. My partner would look up the wikis about what particular tactics would work against which hunts and—this is important—it would be <i>so satisfying</i> to just execute the strategies the guide suggested, watching them unfolding in their intricacies. Like the time I set up my gambits to cast Reflect on all allies and then to cast Thundaga on those allies so that three Thundaga spells would all reflect onto the single, giant enemy, smashing its massive reserves of HP. It was satisfying to watch it unfold, as both a strategy and a system. </div>
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14. <i>Final Fantasy XII</i> is a hot mess. </div>
Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com146tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-45988903813412758842014-06-15T20:53:00.003-07:002014-06-16T14:23:01.470-07:00Another Quick UpdateApologies for continuing to not update this website. I've been teaching the last semester and that's taken up most of my time. I have been writing elsewhere, though. I've written a few quick columns for <i>The Conversation</i>. <a href="https://theconversation.com/games-evangelists-and-naysayers-25006">This one</a> about Jane McGonigal's dubious play-Tetris-to-cure-PTSD project/blog was pretty popular. I've also written about how the Liberal Government's draconian, scorched-earth budget <a href="https://theconversation.com/no-country-for-new-games-26739">effects game makers in Australia</a>, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/no-country-for-new-games-26739">my presumptive hostility</a> towards blockbuster games with Themes. I wrote a piece for ABC's <i>The Drum </i>about <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-03/keogh-videogames-as-a-spectator-sport/5495870">esports and videogame spectatorship</a>. I wrote a piece for <i>Overland</i>'s print journal that has since been republished online, where <a href="http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-214/feature-brendan-keogh/">I write the letter I would have written to Susan Sontag about games criticism</a> if she were still alive. I'm pretty happy with that one. And, for the newly launched <i>Unwinnable Weekly</i>, I have a "Notes on Luftrausers" post in <a href="http://www.unwinnable.com/2014/06/12/unwinnable-weekly-issue-two/">Issue 2</a>, which I strongly encourage you to chip in some money for. I think this is my favourite Notes post yet, maybe, and I'm so thrilled to be able to get it published somewhere.<br />
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I've also been taking advantage of my <i>ungaming</i> tumblr to throw out a whole heap of super rough, unfinished thoughts. The kind of stuff that probably would end up as blog posts here eventually if I had more time. It's been really liberating to just dump them there, half-formed, and get people to engage with them. I really love how the design of tumblr kind of encourages that messiness. I've been using that blog for both gaming and non-gaming things. Here are some <a href="http://ungaming.tumblr.com/post/87445144150/on-final-fantasy-xii">really rough thoughts on <i>Final Fantasy XII</i></a> that I am currently fleshing out into a Notes post. Here are some thoughts on why this console generation transition is really interesting because <a href="http://ungaming.tumblr.com/post/82168951534/this-next-gen">nothing is happening</a>. <a href="http://ungaming.tumblr.com/post/85619665710/so-the-budget-was-announced-today-and-while-we">Here are</a> <a href="http://ungaming.tumblr.com/post/85802340145/lets-pretend-just-for-a-moment-that-there">some thoughts</a> about the federal budget which was, literally, forged from satan's own toilet paper. Here are <a href="http://ungaming.tumblr.com/post/87072429305/on-pilgrim-in-the-microworld">some notes on David Sudnow's <i>Pilgrim in the Microworld</i></a>, which is a really great book.<br />
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Oh yeah, let's talk about what I've been reading. I read both of David Sudnow's books, <i>Ways of the Hand</i> (about becoming a jazz pianist) and <i>Pilgrims in the Microworld</i> (about getting really good at <i>Breakout!</i>) and both are excellent, closely descriptive accounts of what the hands do at various tools. Both are definitely worth a read if you have an interest in the bodily, phenomenological pleasures of videogames.<br />
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I also just this last week read Anna Anthropy's new book on <i><a href="http://bossfightbooks.com/products/zzt-by-anna-anthropy">ZZT</a></i>, written for Boss Fight Books, and it is really remarkable. It does this incredible job of transitioning from a close, detailed look at 'the game itself' as this kind of seed in the first chapter that then shoots outwards into this vast discussion of communities and an important snapshot of a particular moment in time. Not only is it a really great analysis of a game, capturing both personal and broader cultural implications, but a really significant contribution to videogame history. Here is <a href="http://ungaming.tumblr.com/post/88924220045/a-generation-is-growing-up-in-a-world-where">a cool quote</a> from towards the end of the book on exactly why that history is important. Here is Cameron Kunzelman's <a href="http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/06/zzt-by-anna-anthropy-review.html">review</a> for <i>Paste</i>.<br />
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I bought a WiiU last week for <i>Mario Kart 8</i>, and have since been instagram-ing countless slow-motion replays. I should have <a href="http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2014/06/rebuilding-old-worlds-in-mario-kart-8.html">a piece up soon about how spectacular</a> (in the most literal sense) that game is. I also finally played <i>A Dark Room</i> to completion on iOS after reading Cara Ellison's piece on the first <i>Unwinnable Weekly</i>, and it was truly remarkable. I've also gotten sucked into <i>Pocket Trains </i>because NimbleBit knows how to hook me.<br />
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And that is what I am up to.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-58652307433765865632014-03-12T00:07:00.004-07:002014-03-12T00:07:47.574-07:00Quick UpdateSorry I haven't been updating here as much as I used to. I was backpacking around Europe for a month and now teaching has started again so everything is pretty hectic. It might be a while before you see another 'Notes' post on here (though I'd like to write one about <i>Final Fantasy XII</i> and one about <i>Netrunner</i> after I've played each game for a bit longer).<br />
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I'll be in San Francisco next week for GDC, Lost Levels, Critical Proximity, and Wild Rumpus. I'll be charing <a href="http://schedule.gdconf.com/session-id/828330">this panel at GDC</a>, and giving talks at both <a href="http://lostlevels.net/">Lost Levels</a> and <a href="http://critical-proximity.com/">Critical Proximity</a>. At Wild Rumpus I'll probably just be drinking a lot. If you are around, do feel free to say hi to me if you see me at any time during the week.<br />
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I haven't had too much writing published yet this year. <a href="https://theconversation.com/columns/brendan-keogh-8315">My column at </a><i><a href="https://theconversation.com/columns/brendan-keogh-8315">The Conversation</a> </i>has been going alright. My recent piece on Ken Levine firing everyone and getting patted on the back about it got quite a bit of traction. I wrote on <i>Unwinnable</i> about <a href="http://www.unwinnable.com/2014/02/11/flappy-bird/#.UyAG6ueSyos">the shameful response to <i>Flappy Bird</i></a>, and I wrote for the American men's magazine <i>M</i> about videogames and masculinity (available online <a href="http://www.wwd.com/menswear-news/lifestyle/m-playing-to-lose-7514181?full=true">here</a>). I also have a piece forthcoming in the next print issue of <i><a href="http://overland.org.au/">Overland</a></i> about videogame criticism and Susan Sontag. I've also been rambling a bit on my new-ish tumblr, <i><a href="http://ungaming.tumblr.com/">ungaming</a></i>, which I mostly started to have somewhere to dump incomplete thoughts and junk that was longer than a tweet but messier than a blog post. I've written a few games-related rambles there and some non-games rambles. Also posted lots of gifs.<br />
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And that is what I am up to of late.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com120tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-61912149115957330712014-01-03T23:25:00.000-08:002014-01-04T15:35:10.498-08:00Games of 2013: Part Four<div class="p1">
[<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/games-of-2013-part-one.html">Part One</a>] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-two.html">Part Two</a>] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-3.html">Part Three</a>] [Part Four]</div>
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<b><i>Spelunky</i> (Mossmouth)</b></div>
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<i>Spelunky</i> <i>just</i> made it onto my list last year. More out of respect than anything, I guess, looking back now. Kind of like my first dabbling with <i>Dark Souls</i>, I don’t think I really truly appreciated <i>Spelunky</i> back when it came out on Xbox Live. I’d learned to appreciate it as a slapstick comedy because that is all I was capable of appreciating it as.</div>
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This year, however, when the game made its way to PSN and Windows, I picked it up to play on Vita. It seemed like a perfect portable title to play a little bit here and there. I found myself playing it a bit every night before sleeping, getting better and better at it. Soon, I had surpassed my ability (and score) from the time spent sitting in front of my Xbox.</div>
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Significantly, I also started watching livestreams of PC players completing the daily challenge (most notably Jason Killingsworth), and learned all kinds of tricks and secrets I had no knowledge of (Black Markets, Temples, Cities of Gold, Bosses). I learned tricks like how to kill shopkeepers without committing suicide and how to aim bomb throws. Much as with <i>Dark Souls</i>, I felt like I finally <i>got it</i>. </div>
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600 deaths later and I’m still going. Thanks to Sony’s Crossplay, I am playing both on my Vita here-and-there, and again on the big screen through my PS3. I’ve ‘finished’ the game the ‘easy’ way several times, and gotten to Hell several more. I’ve even reached Yama, the final boss at the end of Hell once, but died before I could defeat him. My relationship with <i>Spelunky</i> in 2013 has been nothing like it was in 2012. I feel like I am actually getting somewhere. I feel like, miraculously, like I have learned a whole lot, like I am still learning. </div>
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Douglas Wilson’s <a href="http://[part%20one]%20[part%20two]%20[part%20three]%20[part%20four]/">breakdown of Bananasaurus Rex’s Eggplant Run</a> is a great piece of games writing from this year I heartily recommend. Joel McPherson made <a href="http://deadspelunkers.tumblr.com/">a fascinating bot</a> that records animated gifs of people's deaths and uploads them to tumblr. </div>
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<b><i>Final Fantasy XII</i> (Square)</b></div>
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<i>Final Fantasy XII</i> is another game I played on release that I’d been feeling the desire to return to for quite some time now. When it was new, it was the first Final Fantasy since I entered the series at <i>VII</i> that I did not play to completion. I gave up because the story made no sense to me. The story made no sense to me not because it was poorly told, but because the game gives you so much <i>other stuff</i> to do that it is so easy to lose track of the intricacies of which made-up pseudo-European-sounding King is from which kingdom. I enjoyed both the story and the <i>stuff</i>, but the two together were incompatible, so I gave up. </div>
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I returned to <i>FFXII</i> not to find out what happens in the story but because I had this striking memory of all that <i>stuff</i>, all the ‘gamey bits’ being incredibly weird. When <i>FFXII</i> came out in 2006, MMORPGs were all the rage and looked, for a time, like the dominant way forward for RPGs generally. This lead to <i>FFXII</i> functioning as a kind of single-player MMORPG. You have guilds and a gazillion sidequests and this kind of battle system that isn’t separate from the world you walk around in. You have all this <i>stuff</i> to do, as though Square were trying to get a monthly subscription fee out of you. Also <i>Final Fantasy XI</i> <i>was</i> an MMO, so I imagine a whole heap of design ideas were carried over from one to the other.</div>
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Returning to it now, I find the transparency of <i>FFXII</i>’s design history fascinating. On one layer there is that MMORPG-inspired design, but there is also the clear fingerprints of Yasumi Matsuno threaded throughout the game’s design. Most explicit are the game’s connections to <i>Final Fantasy: Tactics</i> (another of Matsuno’s games) through the use of the same world and species. But there are also connections to Matsuno’s previous work <i>Vagrant Story</i> in both the kind-of-real-time-but-not battle system and the game’s broader visual aesthetics. Most explicitly, the downplayed aura of light when casting magic spells as opposed to the spectacle of other Final Fantasys strikes me as a very personal flourish of Mitsuno’s. </div>
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But also fascinating in the transparent design is everything that went wrong. Matsuno stepped down from his leading role before <i>FFXII</i> was finished, and Square apparently made all sorts of changes that he wasn’t happy with. The license board was something he apparently loathed to see implemented, and it feels bluntly jammed on. More visibly, Balthier is <i>clearly</i> intended as the protagonist before Square decided the game needed a preppy young anime boy for the marketing. The way Vaan seems so hastily jammed into the plot is fascinating. There are several cut-scenes where, in the background, Balthier refers to himself as the leading man. </div>
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Beyond all that, I found the game sincerely enjoyable. The fluidity of the real-time-but-turn-based combat is excellent, effortlessly combining the strategy and mediation of turn-based combat with the stronger rhythms and engagement of real-time. It feels like the developers marched into the cobweb-filled attic of the series’ Active Time Battle and threw out everything that didn’t need to be there. What could be automated is now automated; what needs to be manually controlled can still be. Fighting in <i>FFXII</i> feels like walking in <i>Dear Esther</i> and makes fighting in previous games feel like walking in <i>QWOP</i>. It’s an act of design minimalism pulled off with great elegance. </div>
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Most ingenious of all are the gambits, something I’ve come to appreciate over time, having played too many games with terrible AI-controlled companions. Gambits are a basic programming language used to script your companions. This allows companions to be, at once, automated but also doing what you want them to do. Why click ‘cure’ every time your health gets below 50% when you can just program a companion to heal you if your health goes below 50%? Further, not all gambit conditions are available from the start, but must be bought from Gambit Stores, adding a new level of upgrading. Essentially, gambits allow NPC behaviour to be incorporated into the personalised sense of character building. It feels natural, both streamlined and meaningful. </div>
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I still haven’t finished <i>FFXII</i>—I haven’t even gotten as far as I did when I last played. But by trying to care less about the story that I will inevitably lose track of anyway and more about the design and the systems, I’ve learned to appreciate it on a far deeper level than previously.</div>
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<b><i>Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater</i> (Konami)</b></div>
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First, an explanation for why I have not yet played <i>Metal Gear Solid 3</i>. I missed a whole heap of the glorious Playstation 2 games that came out in 2004 and 2005. Ironically, perhaps, this is because I lived in Japan for all of 2004, and had no access to my game consoles. When I returned to Australia in 2005, I moved out of home and started university, becoming incredibly poor in both time and money. Several years later, my brother gave me a copy of <i>Metal Gear Solid </i>for my birthday, but it was too late. Console generations and game design had moved on and I really struggled to play this strange relic that seemed to age so quickly. So, despite someone who considers himself quite learned in the Metal Gear Solid series, <i>Metal Gear Solid 3</i> remained a conspicuous hole in my knowledge.</div>
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Which, now that I have played it through, I’m amazed I ever allowed that to happen. <i>Metal Gear Solid 3</i> is, with no mistake, the best realised game in the series. It is the most <i>Metal Gear Solidest</i> of the <i>Metal Gear Solid</i>s. It is, on the one hand, the most solid stealth game in the series, with long uninterrupted segments that allow an objective to be approached from a variety of directions and approaches. On the other hand, it is Hideo Kojima at his most self-indulgent and absurd, and simultaneously his most confident and experimental. Entire boss battles can be avoided by shooting a dude in the distance or, simply, not playing the game for a few days. Magic realism emerges far more explicitly than other games in the series as a scar transforms into a snake and slithers off a woman’s body. At one point, Snake dies and travels to the afterworld where he is haunted by every human and animal the player has killed over the course of the game.</div>
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It was wonderful, utterly wonderful. I think my favourite thing about <i>Metal Gear Solid 3</i>, and the Metal Gear Solids generally, is that they exist. I want more self-indulgent games by auteurs that don’t know how to edit themselves. It would be a welcomed respite from the waves of utterly depersonalised paint-by-numbers blockbuster games devoid of any personality. When I play <i>Metal Gear Solid 3</i>, I can tell a human being made this game.</div>
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I had not played a Metal Gear Solid for quite some time when I played <i>Metal Gear Solid. 3</i>, so I readied myself to approach it a certain way. I readied my body for an experience that was going to be as much about watching cut-scenes and listening to dialogue as it would be moving through environments and menus. I approached <i>Metal Gear Solid 3</i> on its own terms, and I loved every minute of it.</div>
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<b><i>UN EP</i> (Ian Snyder)</b></div>
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Music and videogames have a long, intimate relationship, as musician/games critic <a href="http://kotaku.com/5920350/the-case-for-video-games-as-music"><span class="s1">Kirk Hamilton</span></a> and musician/game designer <a href="http://wombflashforest.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/elements-of-music-as-elements-of-games.html"><span class="s1">David Kanaga</span></a> have both pointed out. The short version: it’s no coincidence that we talk about both music and games as things that are ‘played’. The past few years have seen no shortage of music-based games—not least of all <a href="http://www.visitproteus.com/"><span class="s1"><i>Proteus</i></span></a>, created by Kanaga and Ed Key, where the soundscape and the landscape are <a href="http://meanjin.com.au/articles/post/listening-to-proteus/"><span class="s1">symbiotically connected</span></a>. It’s a space ripe with experimentation as developers pick apartand stitch together the feel of games and the rhythm of music. </div>
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One music game from this year that has passed with tragically little fanfare is Ian Snyder’s <a href="http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/10/08/playable-un-ep/"><span class="s1"><i>UN EP</i></span></a>. Created as part of <i>Unwinnable</i>’s “Playable” series that teams up developers with writers to create games and writing about said games side-by-side, <i>UN EP</i> is somewhere between a child’s toy and a musician’s scrapbook. Various ‘worlds’ offer unique combinations of visuals and audio, tied to the click or movement of the mouse. There are no goals; there is no ‘point’ beyond the simple pleasure of playing with the game to make wonderful sounds and sights splash before your ears and eyes. But the experience is magical and memorable, and I find myself returning to each of <i>UN EP</i>’s worlds again and again just to touch them, just to hear them.</div>
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<b><i>Katamari Damacy & We Love Katamari </i>(Namco)</b></div>
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Keita Takahashi’s Katamari games suffered the same fate as <i>Metal Gear Solid 3</i>: lost to that same Playstation 2 Golden Age in which I was not buying new games. I discovered a digital copy of <i>Katamari Damacy</i> hiding on the US PSN store and, finally, picked it up. And, man, what an utterly wonderful and delightful game. There’s this sincerity to the game, a full-heartedness, a happiness, and a vibrancy. It’s the kind of game you get when the person making them is more interested in being an artists or a designer than in Making Games™. It is not just a “whacky Japanese game” (indeed, no game really is), but is an incredibly clever and self-aware game that David Surman has aligned with <a href="http://refractory.unimelb.edu.au/2008/05/23/notes-on-superflat-and-its-expression-in-videogames-david-surman/">the superflat aesthetic of Takahashi Murakami</a>. </div>
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At the core of each game is that pleasure of getting larger without ever really noticing when exactly you got larger. You go from rolling around a tabletop, bumping into dominoes, to being just large enough to realise that shape looming over you is a sleeping man’s head. Eventually, you are picking up the man and the entire house. You roll around a city, then you pick up the skyscrapers, then you pick up the continent. It is a simple pleasure of shifting dimensions that never gets old.</div>
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It’s an ever fluctuating relationship with objects (something <a href="http://darius%20kazemi%20explores%20with%20a%20great%20essay%29.%20%0Adarius%20kazemi%20explores%20with%20a%20great%20essay%29.%20%0Adarius%20kazemi%20explores%20with%20a%20great%20essay%29.%20%0Ahttp//tinysubversions.com/2012/05/the-prince-of-objects-katamari-and-ontology/">Darius Kazemi explores with a great essay</a>). Everyday objects are replicated and distributed across areas they never should be, like Andy Warhol putting soup cans in an art gallery. There’s something calming about all these objects—mundane and mythical, everyday and ecentric—just waiting to be collected, and something even more calming about the bubblewrap-popping sound as you roll each one up.</div>
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The vibrant pop aesthetic is crucial to the game’s success, from the bright colours to the campy and teeny attitude of the King to the lively renditions and remixes of the music. Then there is the self-aware sequel, <i>We Love Katamari</i>, that mirrors Takahashi’s own surprise at the success of the original. He made a sequel because people loved the original; the game’s plot is that the King sends the Prince to roll up more Katamari’s because people loved the first game. But this isn’t some overly serious meta-commentary. It’s just flat is-what-it-is sincerity, and it’s lovely. Everything about these games is lovely.</div>
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<b><i>Max Payne 3</i> (Rockstar)</b></div>
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I’ve come to realise this year, above all else, that I value a game with a clear and consistent aesthetic direction. I care less about what a game is trying to do, and much more about how well it is doing what it is trying to do. It could be trying to make some insightful social commentary, or just be a good action game, or just be a bit of a time waster, but if it does that <i>well</i>, then I really appreciate it. So games where the music, characters, gameplay, user interface, menu colours, sounds, HUD design, every all seem to contribute and reinforce a central aesthetic tone. It’s why <i>Killzone: Mercenary </i>is on this list. It’s why I really love <i>Spec Ops: The Line</i> and <i>The Last of Us</i>. <i>Bulletstorm</i> but not <i>Bioshock: Infinite</i>. <i>Splinter Cell: Conviction</i> with its black/white/red HUD and seeping aesthetic of a broken man, but not <i>Splinter Cell: Blacklist</i> with its HUD of full-colour Playstation buttons and loadouts and <i>Conviction</i> hangovers that seem to have nothing to do with what <i>Blacklist</i> is going for. I am far more interested in the overall tone of a game, how all the <i>bits</i> fit together, than in simply how the ‘core’ game functions.</div>
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I realised this when I fell in love with <i>Max Payne 3</i>. It’s not that the story is particularly deep or intelligent, but that the game knows exactly what it wants to be, and it does everything it can to be that. From the drone of Health’s magnificent soundtrack, to the way Max holds his weapons, to the gritty and pointless mundanity of his plight. It’s almost restrained in its commitment to be what it wants to be. </div>
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Most of all, I love the pacing. That slow, snowball build across the levels to the final, almost-but-not-quite redemptive stage in the airport where Max just walks in the front door, knowing full well what he is doing for once. This magnificent pacing is in the little things. It’s in the way Max will walk a few steps automatically after a cut-scene instead of fading to black, stitching cut-scene and action together instead of jarring them apart. It’s in Max’s slowly changing appearance and the constant drone of the music. It’s that slow build across all the levels up to the final moment of the penultimate level where Max kicks a locked door and literally howls “<i>Fuck</i>” before marching into the airport. It’s not until the game’s closing scenes, where Max picks up a grenade launcher and chases a airplane with a car that the game finally lets itself run free from its own constraints. But even then, it doesn’t feel like a lack of self-control but more like a final flourish, like an encore. Like a celebration of itself. Like the developers knew they’d done something magnificent and wanted to let their hair down to celebrate.</div>
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I loved it. It’s just such an incredibly well put-together game that tries to do something and just does it. This isn’t a ranked list, but I think <i>Max Payne 3</i> is my favourite game that I played in 2013. </div>
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[<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/games-of-2013-part-one.html">Part One</a>] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-two.html">Part Two</a>] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-3.html">Part Three</a>] [Part Four]</div>
Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-3628663282536199872014-01-02T15:06:00.001-08:002014-01-03T23:32:33.685-08:00Games of 2013: Part Three<div class="p1">
[<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/games-of-2013-part-one.html">Part One</a>] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-two.html">Part Two</a>] [Part Three] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-four.html">Part Four</a>]</div>
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<b><i>Dark Souls</i> (From Software)</b></div>
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I first played <i>Dark Souls</i> in 2012, but I never got far. After <a href="http://www.gameranx.com/features/id/3595/article/dark-souls-a-time-to-grind/">much grinding</a>, I reached the gargoyles on the church roof, decided I ‘got it’, and put it aside. But I continued to hear stories. Whispered rumours of forests and tombs and painted worlds and an ancient city and demonic ruins. I read “<a href="http://nightmaremode.net/2012/11/dark-souls-the-hollowed-killer-of-lordran-22991/">The Hollowed Killer of Lordran</a>” and was captivated by the mention of these names and places that were uttered, like foreign countries on continents I had never heard of. My Twitter feed was still a crossfire of characters and spells and tactics and other words that I didn’t even know what they signified. Eventually, it felt like I had read the opening chapter of <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> but never left The Shire. I needed to know what everyone else was talking about. I needed to see what else was out there.</div>
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So I returned. This time, I was willing to use guides and walkthroughs all the way through. I was less concerned with ‘beating’ the game than ‘getting through it’ just to see what was there. I started a new character, a pyromancer on Twitter’s recommendation, and went on my way. What took me about twelve hours on my previous game took me about two. A few hours later and with a bit of help I beat the gargoyles and rang the first bell. I ventured into Blighttown and Queelag’s Lair by myself to ring the second bell. With a guide’s help, I defeated the Iron Golem of Sen’s Fortress and took photos of my television screen as I set foot in Anor Londo. With the help of human strangers I defeated both the painted world, and Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough. I didn’t finish the game—at least, not yet—but I got that bit further. There’s still more to see, but I feel like I understand and appreciate <i>Dark Souls</i> and its world that bit more.</div>
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Most satisfying of all was that feeling of camaraderie with other players past and present. Anyone who has played <i>Dark Souls</i> is more than happy to help a newcomer. I felt this bug myself when I saw people start the game after me; so eager I was to jump in and give them tips. It’s because people who have played the game understand the joy of <i>Dark Souls</i> is not in overcoming the game by yourself, as ostensibly single-player as the game might be, but in the sense of solidarity with other players. The joy of the game is in overcoming this cruel game <i>together</i>: in being helped by those that come before you, and helping those that come after you. It’s players versus game both inside the game and outside of it. The <a href="http://www.bitcreature.com/editorials/youre-not-supposed-to-be-here/">world feels so hostile</a> to make <a href="http://www.bitcreature.com/editorials/here-with-me/">friendship feel so warm</a>. </div>
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So when I decided I would use guides and walkthroughs to see the world at any cost, I was accidentally approaching the game how the game should be approached: defeated at any cost. When I put aside my stubborn sense of ‘fair play’ and ‘doing it myself’, I realised that there is no ‘fair play’ where <i>Dark Souls</i> is concerned. It refused to treat the player fairly, so why should the player treat the game fairly? Swallowing my pride and using guides just to get through the game didn’t weaken my experience in the game, but made my antagonistic relationship with it all the more vivid.</div>
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<b><i>Vagrant Story</i> (Square)</b></div>
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I didn’t return to <i>Dark Souls</i> the moment I thought about doing so. I spent several months hesitating beforehand. I felt the desire to play it again, but not the confidence. So, instead, I returned to Square’s very odd and fascinating<i> </i>Playstation title <i>Vagrant Story. </i>It had been years since I last played <i>Vagrant Story</i>, but my memory of it gave it a kind of <i>Dark Souls</i> vibe. Not necessarily in mechanics, but in atmosphere: the solitary character in a quiet and dead city full of monsters. Just without the finger acrobatics demanded of <i>Dark Souls</i>.</div>
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So, on my Vita, I started a new game of <i>Vagrant Story. </i>I found Yasumi Matsuno’s game fascinating for the ways it mutated and mashed together both traditional JRPG and action RPG elements, combining command menus with semi-real-time combat. </div>
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I enjoyed its systems, as dense as they are deep. There is the peculiar mechanic that the more you use a weapon on a type of enemy, the stronger that weapon becomes against that type of enemy (and the weaker it becomes against an opposite enemy type). This requires both grinding and planning. Attacking every enemy with the same sword will get you nowhere. Instead, you must use this sword for beasts, that hammer for zombies, that crossbow for humans, etc. Where it breaks down, however, is when you come across a boss that is a type that you have rarely confronted before. So, to be sure, it is not a balanced game.</div>
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Having to constantly change weapons has the potential to be terrible, especially in a game that predates the normalisation of hotkeys on console games. Every time you want to change weapons, you must open your menu system, open the equipment menu, scroll to your weapon, open the menu of all your weapons, find the right weapon, equip it, and press cancel about five times to climb up out of the menu pit. This can get pretty infuriating, especially as you want to be changing weapons every third or fourth enemy. Indeed, I remember it infuriating me last time I played the game. What got me through this time, though, was a desire to play the game ‘slow’. I wasn’t rushing; I didn’t need to get anywhere quickly. I would play the game at its own pace, and <i>Vagrant Story</i>’s pace is <i>slow</i>. The minimal background music and the environmental stillness makes <i>Vagrant Story</i>’s world feels timeless much as <i>Dark Souls</i>’s world feels timeless. It wants you to take your time, so I took my time. When I did this, constant burrowing through menus felt a bit more tolerable.</div>
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Most of all, though, I enjoyed the game overarching aesthetic, both in the world and in the menus. In menus, the audio and visual design is satisfying. Every menu dongs like a grandfather clock as you enter it, and swipes away with a ‘swoosh’ as you go back up a level. There are vast swathes of information about every piece of equipment, but it is all relatively easy to parse. In the world itself, however, the game’s visual style really shines. <i>Vagrant Story</i> is one of the few games I have played that takes the graphical look imposed on so many Playstation-era games (chunky with low-res textures) and turns it into a <i>style</i>. Rooms, enemies, and characters are all modelled in very intentful and particular ways. These are not just low-polygon, chunky humans, but stylisied humans that fit the game’s technological constraints majestically. Often I would enter first-person (which would have the surreal effect of pausing game time, but not character animations, so enemy skeletons would just sway and breathe contently in front of you) to look around the wonderful buildings and at the phenomenally detailed character models. Indeed, so much detail is only visible from that first-person perspective. Make no mistake: <i>Vagrant Story</i> is a beautiful game.</div>
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Ultimately, it was the outdated save system that defeated me. I encountered a difficult boss a significant distance from the closest save point and felt my enthusiasm be sapped from my body. So I never finished <i>Vagrant Story</i>, but I’m incredibly glad I returned to it.</div>
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<b><i>Earth Defense Force 2017 </i>(Sandlot)</b></div>
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<i>Earth Defense Force</i> <i>2017</i> (<i>EDF</i>) is one of those Japanese games people like to point at and laugh about being “So bad it’s good” when, really, what they mean is “that game is incredibly good despite being made on a tight budget”. “So bad it’s good” claims<i>, </i>especially when applied to Japanese games, usually just refers to an imagined level of graphical fidelity not reached, of a certain sincerity to its ‘wackiness’, of a jangliness and a clunkiness. <i>Binary Domain</i> and<i> Deadly Premonition</i> are examples of sincerely good games that are sidelined under the “so bad it’s good” label when, really, they are only bad if you use the wrong measuring stick.</div>
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<i>EDF</i> places you in the role of a single soldier alongside many others, defending Tokyo from giant bugs and aliens. Though, I get less of a sense of the bugs as ‘giant’ and more of a sense that I, in fact, am really small. I feel like a toy soldier in a Tokyo diorama put too close to an anthill. Regardless, the sense of drama and scale are the same. The visuals are lo-fi and the animations are jangly, but none of this detracts from the breathtaking spectacle that is watching a wave of giant ants pour over skyscrapers towards you. The b-grade horror music looping in the background only adds to the atmosphere.</div>
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This is a game with no pretension, a game that does so well exactly what it is trying to do. Yes, it is ‘<a href="http://games.on.net/2013/05/you-know-what-i-love-rough-games/">rough</a>’ and low budget, but time and labour have clearly been dedicated to the places it needs to be dedicated for the game to achieve what it wants to achieve. The sense of scale, in both quantity and sheer size, in <i>EDF</i> is unmatched by any other game I can recall playing, with the possible exception of <i>Shadow of the Colossus</i>.</div>
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<b><i>Doom 3 </i>(Id Software)</b></div>
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<i>Doom</i> turned twenty years old this year. That feels like a big deal, and I’ve been enjoying the various retrospectives coming out that are trying to appreciate just why it was so special (none more than Liz Ryerson’s <a href="http://ellaguro.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/an-in-depth-look-back-at-doom-episode-1.html">excellent video series</a>). <i>Doom 3</i>, however, seems to be often dismissed for not reaching some ideal, nostalgia of the original games. For not ‘being <i>Doom</i>’. At the same time, though, it also seemed to fail at being what, on the surface, it looked like it wanted to be: namely, a survival horror game. It seemed torn between wanting to be a run’n’gun game and a survival horror game. Playing it directly after a replay of the first <i>Doom</i>, though, I found it incredibly enjoyable. I approached it like <i>Doom</i>, running and gunning through its corridors. This gave me, through the jump scares, a constant sense of paranoia. Playing it ‘like <i>Doom</i>’ drastically changed my experience of the game, for the better.</div>
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I’ve already <a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/notes-on-doom-3.html">written quite extensively about <i>Doom 3</i> in a Notes posts</a> so I won’t repeat myself here.</div>
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<b><i>Spider </i>(Vector Park)</b></div>
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<a href="http://www.vectorpark.com/etc/spider.html">This guy</a>.</div>
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Amazing animation and a simple idea incredibly executed.</div>
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[<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/games-of-2013-part-one.html">Part One</a>] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-two.html">Part Two</a>] [Part Three] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-four.html">Part Four</a>]</div>
Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-40880847875636030332014-01-01T16:15:00.002-08:002014-01-03T23:34:22.230-08:00Games of 2013: Part Two<div class="p1">
[<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/games-of-2013-part-one.html">Part One</a>] [Part Two] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-3.html">Part Three</a>] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-four.html">Part Four</a>]</div>
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<b><i>Ridiculous Fishing </i>(Vlambeer)</b></div>
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<i>Ridiculous Fishing</i> is an arcade game with a three-act structure. Act 1: A fisher in his boat, you drop your line into the sea. Tilt the phone left and right to <i>avoid</i> fish and get as deep as you possibly can. Act 2 begins once you eventually and inevitably fail Act 1: bump into a fish, and you begin to reel the line in. Now you must <i>hit</i> as many fish as possible, accumulating dozens of them on the end of the line. Act 3 begins once the line returns to the surface: the fish are flung high into the air and must be blasted with the fisherman’s firearm for cash that can be spent on longer fishing lines, better weapons, and other upgrades.</div>
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It’s a hypnotic rhythm in itself, but the upgrades also add a sense of exploration. The deeper you go the more exotic fish you will find. The more fish you capture, the higher you will fling them, and the more celestial bodies you will see. The game constantly swings from seeing how low you can go, to how high. Decorating it all is a distinct and eye-catching visual style of thick borders and slanted lines and diamond fish. </div>
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The cloning saga that saw another company duplicate their earlier <i>Radical Fishing</i> before <i>Ridiculous Fishing</i> was finished almost destroyed Vlambeer, sapping their motivation. But for anyone on the outside who has followed Vlambeer and their various incredible games, it was clear this wouldn’t destroy them. Vlambeer’s ideas might be easily cloned, but the feel of their games is something only Vlambeer can achieve. There is a crunchiness to the interactions in their games, a satisfying meatiness to every button press. And, sure enough, when <i>Ridiculous Fishing</i> finally did come out earlier this year, it far surpassed its cloner on its own merit. It was the kind of game only Vlambeer could make, and it gave them the success they well deserved.</div>
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<b>FJORDS<i> </i>(Kyle Reimergartin)</b></div>
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I haven’t played enough <i>Fjords</i> to really understand or appreciate it yet, but I’ve played enough to know I need to put it on this list. I am intimidated by <i>Fjords</i> and my ability to hack (a term I use literally) its world. It feels like walking into a pitch black room I have never entered before and not knowing if it is a ballroom or a broom closet. It’s remarkable but I still don’t quite know why or how. <i>Indiestatik</i> perhaps can give you <a href="http://indiestatik.com/2013/10/31/fjords/">more information</a>.</div>
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<b><i>Time Surfer</i> (Kumobius)</b></div>
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2013 was not a particularly exciting year for iOS. There were some really standout games, to be sure, but I certainly spent less time checking Game Center leaderboards than previous years. Or, perhaps 3DS and Vita games just started dominating the time I would have usually spent on iOS titles. <a href="http://https//itunes.apple.com/au/app/time-surfer/id549361775?mt=8"><i>Time Surfer</i></a> was an exception, though, and I spent many a train ride or night on the couch chasing those highscores, boasting and lamenting on Twitter.</div>
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Some have dismissed it as a <i>Tiny Wings </i>clone, but I prefer to see it as <i>Tiny Wings</i> with a solution proposed for the one thing I hated about <i>Tiny Wings</i>. That is, in <i>Tiny Wings</i>, all that hard-earned momentum could be lost in an instant with a mistimed swoop. Once you picked up speed, it became a matter of luck whether you landed properly or not. <i>Time Surfer</i>’s time-reversal mechanic offers a solution to this—you still make the inevitable mistake, but now you can rewind to undo the mistake. Rewinding is a valuable energy, however, and you want to react the <i>instant</i> you land wrong, rewinding just far enough to adjust. There’s a twitchiness to it as you stay attentive, hoping not to miss your own mistake. You need to know that <i>that one</i> is the one you should rewind to keep your momentum up. </div>
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It’s unfortunate and unfair, the clone label, applied simply for building a game with the same fundamental mechanic. As though every FPS is a <i>Wolfenstein 3D</i> clone. As though a song can’t use the same core instruments as another to do something original. I am no less interested in the games that fine tune and iterate than I am in the games hat attempt something that has never been done before. To only be interested in those games that are ‘completely’ new is to like precious few games.</div>
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<b><i>Stickets</i></b> <b>(Wanderlands)</b></div>
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Melbourne-based game designer <a href="http://www.harry-lee.com/"><span class="s1">Harry Lee</span></a> has been making a bit of a splash on the local scene over the past couple of years. His minimal but ingenious games such as <a href="http://harry-lee.com/impasse.html"><span class="s1"><i>Impasse</i></span></a> and <a href="http://wanderlands.org/main/midas"><span class="s1"><i>Midas</i></span></a> have turned heads, their deceptively simple presentation hiding oceans of clever design. He’s been central for a range of local groups and events, such as the Glitchmark meetings and, perhaps most importantly, as co-director of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival. Oh, and he is twenty-years-old.</div>
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<span class="s1"><a href="http://sticketsgame.com/"><i>Stickets</i></a></span> is Lee’s two-man studio Wanderland’s first commercial release. Like all his games, it at first seems deceptively simple: a match-3 game mixed with a tile game. Place L-shaped tiles, each constructed from three different coloured squares, on a grid. When three squares of the same colour are touching, tap that group to make those squares disappear. The goal is to place as many L-shaped tiles as you possibly can before you can place no more. It’s slow, deliberate, and meditative. You have all the time in the world to choose where to place the next tile, and where you might need to place the one after that. It’s a game about thinking and planning, not about rash decisions or reflexes. This is no less true for the Timed mode, that required you to completely reprogram how your mind approaches the game, but still rewarded careful deliberation over rash actions. The turning point in this mode, for me, was the realisation that time only counted down if I made an action; I still had all the time in the world to just <i>think</i>.</div>
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Underlying it all is subtle but ingenious sound design. Each position on the grid makes a different sound when tapped. Move a three-square tile over the grid, and chords are strummed. I’ve spent many minutes just playing with the <i>Stickets</i> board like some kind of abstract instrument.</div>
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Despite Lee’s youth, <i>Stickets</i> has the feel of a confident designer that knows exactly what they are doing. It’s a wonderful achievement from someone who is going to be a defining character in Australian videogames in the coming years.</div>
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<b><i>American Dream </i>(Terry Cavanagh, Stephen Lavelle, Jasper Byrne, Tom Morgan-Jones)</b></div>
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Apparently this game is <a href="http://distractionware.com/blog/2011/02/american-dream/">over two years old</a>, but I had never heard of it before going through Terry Cavanagh’s collection on the Ouya store (side note: I wish more developers would use the Ouya as a dumping ground for their otherwise browser-based and free small games). Much like with <i>Knightmare Tower</i>, I lost an entire night sucked into <i>American Dream</i>’s absurd world of trendy furniture, cartoon orgies, and celebrities traded on the stock market. </div>
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That’s… pretty much it, really. You move between a screen of your house, where you are able to spend money on seasonably trendy furniture to replace that furniture you bought last season, and the stock market, where you buy and sell shares on Sylvester Stallone and Madonna and Michael Jackson. Make enough furniture, and then you can buy more furniture. The ultimate goal is, simply, to make a million dollars, but if you want crazy sex parties, then keeping your furniture up to date is essential. </div>
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It’s a simple, cynical, and nonsensical game, but its slick and lo-fi presentation is like having your eyeballs sucked into a whirlpool. Of utmost importance are the quick transitions between the game’s various screens. These tie everything together. Be it the quick screen that representations your character travelling from home to the stockmarket, or the montage orgies of the sex parties. They all give the game this hyperalert feeling that everything has to be done <i>now</i>. You must <i>buy</i> and <i>sell</i> and <i>fuck</i> and <i>buy furniture</i> and it all has to be done yesterday, like some 80s cocaine-fuelled capitalist dream. No time to talk, I gotta go buy 200 shares in Barbara Streisand. </div>
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If I had attempted to play this game on my computer, sitting at my desk lurched over a keyboard, I would have played it for a few minutes, thought, “heh, that’s cool” and moved on. On a console in my loungeroom, however, lounging on my couch with a controller in my hand, I got sucked into the game fully, staying up late to see it through. It’s a prime example of why I think the Ouya (and micro-consoles generally) are important: to take that experience that was previously constricted to the desktop and put it in the loungeroom, an environment where many such as myself feel far more able to devote time and attention to a game. </div>
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<div class="p1">
[<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/games-of-2013-part-one.html">Part One</a>] [Part Two] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-3.html">Part Three</a>] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-four.html">Part Four</a>]</div>
Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com47tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-68840339449956812492013-12-31T17:13:00.000-08:002014-01-03T23:32:55.246-08:00Games of 2013: Part One<div class="p1">
Contents: [Part One] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-two.html">Part Two</a>] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-3.html">Part Three</a>] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-four.html">Part Four</a>]</div>
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Normally around this time of year I write a <a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/search/label/Games%2520of%25202010">series</a> of <a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/my-top-twenty-games-of-2011-part-one.html">posts</a> <a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/25-games-of-2012-part-one-25-21.html">discussing</a> my favourite games of the past year. I usually write about 20 to 25 games, spread over five posts. Most would be games that were released that year, with a few outliers from the year before that I did not play when they were new. This year, conditions are slightly different for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I was asked to write Game Of The Year posts for both <a href="http://overland.org.au/2013/12/2013-in-games/"><i>Overland</i></a> and <a href="http://https//theconversation.com/fishing-puzzles-and-music-videogames-of-2013-21177"><i>The Conversation</i></a>, and I contributed two games to <i>Game Critics</i>'s excellent <a href="http://www.gamecritics.com/sparky-clarkson/the-year-of-the-games-2013">“The Year of the Games 2013” mega-post</a>. Secondly, I found precious few of 2013’s AAA releases worthy of my time, and instead committed much of my game-playing time to older games and platforms that I had either never played before or wanted to return to. What this means is that this series of posts will serve less as “The Best Games That Came Out in 2013” and more as “The Games I Played In 2013 That Were Really Good”. Really, that is what I think all GOTY lists should be, a reflection of what was played, not of what was released. But anyway.</div>
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So, first things first then, if you are interested in what I thought were the seven best games that came out in 2013, the <i>Overland</i> piece has you covered. I think they are <i>Tearaway</i>, <i>The Last of Us</i>, <i>Crystal Warrior Ke$ha</i>, <i>868-Hack</i>, <i>Candy Box</i>, <i>Towerfall</i>, and <i>Gone Home</i>. <i>Animal Crossing: New Leaf</i> was also memorable, and is written about on the <i>Game Critics </i>post. The games I wrote about on <i>The Conversation</i>, I am going to re-include here as I had to edit down that piece quite substantially, and I didn’t get to say everything I wanted to say about those games. I also had to cut two games from that list for length reasons (webpages don’t grow on trees you know) and they will be on this list too.</div>
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What I’m saying is don’t read too much into the ordering of this list. </div>
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There are <strike>20</strike> 21 games on this list, and I'll post it in four parts over the coming days. So without further delay, here are My Most Memorable Games Of 2013 Except For Those Other Memorable Games</div>
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<b>Tomb Raider (Crystal Dynamics)</b></div>
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Any longrunning franchises risks stagnation. After nearly two decades, Tomb Raider had long since fallen into insignificance, with forgettable release after forgettable release. Before its release, the game was riddled with poor press and marketing faux-pas, as developers made it sound like there would be an 'edgy' rape scene from which (male) players would want to <a href="http://kotaku.com/5917400/youll-want-to-protect-the-new-less-curvy-lara-croft"><span class="s1">'protect'</span></a> Lara. A traditionally strong woman seemed reduced to a crying, quivering girl in <a href="http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=8620"><span class="s1">a torture-porn adventure</span></a> for men.</div>
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Either the marketing department failed miserably (not unlikely), or the developers listened to <a href="http://kotaku.com/5917400/youll-want-to-protect-the-new-less-curvy-lara-croft"><span class="s1">the critical feedback</span></a>, as the actual game when released was a satisfying romp of gritty survivalism and platforming. Some understandably criticised the shooting as excessive and detrimental to that sense of ‘fighting to survive’ (Lara’s journey from traumatic first murder to gunning down a room of men is pretty swift). Personally, I found it just right (once I made the personal rule to not use the machine gun, limiting myself to the messy shotgun, desperate pistol, and elegant bow). After the Uncharted serious successfully reimagined the Tomb Raider series through the adventures of Nathan Drake, <i>Tomb Raider</i> came along and reimagined <i>Uncharted</i>, combining cinematic set-pieces and impossible acrobatics with tense but fluid gun battles. It was bombastic and ridiculous, to be sure, but it was a joyous frolic. This wasn't a game about 'survival' like, say, <i>DayZ</i>, but it successfully depicted an aesthetic of survivalism.</div>
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Lara, meanwhile, sat in a paradoxical space. <a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/22/rhi-light-my-fire-rhianna-pratchett-on-tea-cakes-lara/"><span class="s1">Rhianna Pratchett</span></a> succeeded at writing a young and naive yet strong and intentful Lara that the marketing campaign failed to demonstrate. She makes her own choices, holding her own again viscous and aggressive men. She never gets raped, and shoots in the face the one man who tries. Yet, the camera gazing at her is very much a man, lingering just that bit too long on her buttocks or breast, or listening to her gasps as a tree branch skewers her after a failed quick-time event over and over and over. Ultimately, then, the new Tomb Raider succeeds at depicting Lara Croft as what she has always been: <a href="http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2013/02/tomb-raider-review-multi-platform.html"><span class="s1">simultaneously strong woman subject and passive woman object</span></a>, a character far more interesting than the games she has often found herself in. </div>
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I wrote a <a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/notes-on-tomb-raider.html">Notes</a> post on <i>Tomb Raider</i> with more thoughts. I really related to Justin Keverne's discussion of <a href="http://gropingtheelephant.com/blog/?p=3936">how he prioritised Lara's performance over simply playing the game 'well'</a>. </div>
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<b><i>Devil May Cry</i> (Ninja Theory)</b></div>
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Another long running franchise revamped. Unlike <i>Tomb Raider</i>, <i>Devil May Cry</i> (or ‘<i>DmC</i>’), is not an origin story but a stylistic overhaul. Like <i>Tomb Raider</i>, <i>DmC</i> struggled before its release against a fan base unhappy with the direction the series was being taken. The series' protagonist Dante has received a makeover, replacing his white mop of hair and red trenchcoat with a more generic crop and singlet. "He looks like a male model," someone described it to me recently and, actually, I think that is the best way to put it. But at a brief glance and he looks like any other videogame dudebro. The series looked diluted to appeal to a mass audience. People were unimpressed.</div>
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Having zero attachments to the serious in its previous iterations (perhaps the best way to approach any relaunched franchise), I found <i>DmC</i> to be a delightful, campy, and utterly absurd romp. It was, perhaps, 'bad' in places. The characters were flat and the metaphors of the plot were utterly transparent in their fifteen-year-old-goth-boy ludicrousness (a braindead conformist public can't tell they are being controlled by the mainstream media and junk food). Banter with one boss is, literally 'No, fuck you!" yelled at increasingly loud volumes back and forward for an awkward length of time.</div>
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But this isn't the typical terrible videogame writing accepted as inevitable in most videogames. The badness of <i>DmC</i> transcends that, not dissimilar to <i>Bulletstorm</i> (except perhaps not quite as clever). The lewd dialog and ugly characters (covered in cellulite and sneers) is not simply 'so bad its good', but instead reaches a level of masterful campiness in its innuendo and flourishes and artifice. Meanwhile, the level design is sincerely spectacular, with upside-down cities and demonic nightclubs pulsing to the dubstep and torn apart by invisible forces. </div>
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Combat is streamlined, with moves simply requiring you to hold down the right or left trigger as you press a single button—no rhythmic patterns or obscure combination to memorise. It's something else diehard fans of the series lament, but for newcomers it allows a fluidity to the combat: what you want to do you can do. The game also boasts what are perhaps the only enjoyable boss battles from the last few years. I won't soon forget fighting a giant, hardly disguised cyborg Bill O’Reilly <i>Tron</i>-demon, or the ham-fisted Freudian boss of a woman demon and her unborn demon foetus.</div>
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There's a self-awareness to <i>DmC</i>’s camp. An eye-winking that suggests that the game knows exactly what it is doing. That the tenth "No, fuck <i>you</i>" is not just generic videogame dialogue, but a serious and deliberate attempt at a certain aesthetic, a certain tone. </div>
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It's not for everyone, that's for sure. It doesn't want to be for everyone. At times it actively goads the fans that miss Dante’s <span class="s1"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFgRpxKr-do">white mop</a>, essentially giving the finger to its fanbase while blowing a rasberry</span>. But I love that irreverence. In an industry/medium that usually just pampers its fanbase with whatever they want, it's refreshing to see a developer just not give a shit. It is, easily, one of the more enjoyable Triple-A games I played this year.</div>
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<b><i>Knightmare Tower</i> (Juicy Beast)</b></div>
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I feel slightly dirty enjoying <i>Knightmare Tower</i> as much as I did. A random and casual download from the Ouya store/gulag, I played it for several hours straight one afternoon, unlocking all the features and playing it to completion. A fairly traditionally moulded mobile-esque games for the Ouya (and browser and Android, too), the goal is to fly high into a tower while bouncing off monsters beneath you for extra speed. It’s a <i>Dragonball Z</i> aerial battle, with your knight at the top of the screen using his downward attacks to stay afloat. </div>
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There’s a satisfying rhythm to the controls, pulling the trigger as the character thrusts down in a meaty swing of his blade before bouncing back up. Progression is carefully crafted if not entirely conventional as you encounter enemies that are too tough and incrementally get further as you upgrade your power and health and speed and all that. </div>
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I played <i>Knightmare Tower</i> at exactly the right time. I was interested in my Ouya and bored of all the games on my other consoles. I spent 4 or so hours grinding through the game, and have not touched it again since. I felt more than a little dirty putting so many hours into such a straightforward game, but I don’t regret it.</div>
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<b><i>Killzone Mercenary </i>(Guerrilla Cambridge)</b></div>
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I’ve always had a strange fascination with the Killzone games. This is, largely, due to simply being a kid with a Playstation 2, desperate for a shooter to match Halo (Killzone does not match Halo). There’s always been, I thought, a subtlety lurking beneath the surface of blue good guys (ISA, one vowel away from USA) versus red-eyed pseudo-Nazi bad guys. At face value, it is a mindless bro-shooter narrative. But you listen to the <i>rhetoric</i> of the dialog in the cut-scenes and it becomes slightly more complex. You realise the ‘bad’ guys have quite a few justified grievances and the ‘good’ guys are self-righteous aggressors. It’s not high literature, but the face-value bluntness makes the implicit multi-facedness of each side much more interesting.</div>
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In <i>Mercenary</i>, on the Playstation Vita, you play both alongside and against each side. Unlike previous entries in the series, neither side is good or bad but, simply, a means of making money. It’s still hamfisted, but it’s a blunt and cynical comment on war-as-profiteering that fits the series' broader themes perfectly.</div>
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Of course, then, the game is at its weakest during the opening levels, where your beanie-and-sunglass-and-beard wearing bro companion (seriously he looks like he stepped right out of Every Shooter Ever) seems more interested in fighting The Good Fight than in making money. “That’s one Hig bastard I’d kill for free,” he says of one of the game’s antagonists at one stage, in the most blatant of thematic dissonances. This is a game about making money, not doing what is ‘right’. Thankfully, bro dies before too long.</div>
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But where <i>Mercenary</i> really shines is how this whole narrative and thematic conceit of mercantility and war-profiteering is used to strengthen the design of a <i>mobile</i> first-person shooter. <i>Mercenary</i> is not just a console FPS dumped on a handheld device as a graphical demo (though, it is also that); it has been designed with a consideration of how players engage with portable devices. It draws from mobile and casual design to use a ‘loadout’ system that I can actually tolerate. In single-player games, I generally hate loadout systems, where I have to choose my equipment before each level, pre-determining how I will approach each level; it utterly killed <i>Splinter Cell: Blacklist</i> for me. It feels like it cheapens individual missions for me. With loadouts, I don’t feel like I am playing through one long narrative whole but interrupted segments that I am expected to play over and over again. It makes games feel, well, too gamey.</div>
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But that’s on home consoles, where I am much more committed to some kind of overarching narrative. On a portable device, individual missions should be self-contained for brief encounters on the train or before bed or whatever. In this environment, loadout systems and a focus on replaying missions makes perfect sense, and <i>Mercenary</i> knows this.</div>
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Most cleverly, and with surprising nuance, are the different approaches available in each mission. It might be possible to stealth through half a mission, with NPCs only commenting after the fact that you did so. On the first mission, you are told to blow up a door to access a control centre which, of course, triggers an alarm. What you are not told is you can throw a smoke grenade through an air vent to quietly lure the guards out (if you brought smoke grenades with you). Do this, and you skip an entire defend-the-hill kind of segment. This is dramatically and fascinatingly at odds with the hand-holding FPS design popular in both the Killzone series and many others.</div>
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It’s formalised through the availability of three alternative missions for each stage, asking you to replay each mission with different loadouts and objectives: stealth the whole mission; destroy three crates; get X number of headshots; etc. These alternative missions don’t re-introduce the hand-holding so much as nudge the player towards discovering the alternative approaches themselves. Over recent holidays and airplane trips I’ve found myself replaying missions over and over with these different objectives. It’s become the perfect travelling game.</div>
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The other pleasure of <i>Mercenary</i> is a very simple one: good graphics (and yes, I mean ‘graphics’, not ‘visuals’). There is a simple pleasure in playing a game with this many polygons on such a small handheld device. It’s a technological spectacle, and I won’t deny the simple entertainment that offers.</div>
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So, what I’m ultimately saying is that <i>Killzone: Mercenary</i> is the <i>Angry Birds</i> of <i>Call of Duty</i> games. That might not sound too appealing, but its overall design does such a remarkable job of tailoring a certain experience to a certain platform, and then connecting that experience/platform combination to an existing franchise’s themes.</div>
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<b><i>Saints Row IV</i> (Volition)</b></div>
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I was unimpressed with <i>Saints Row IV</i> when it first came out. Using an identical city to <i>Saints Row: The Third</i>, it was hard to shake the suspicion that new publishers Deep Silver had coerced the developers into relabelling a final DLC project into a numbered sequel. It felt flippant and insincere, not just in the typical clever nonchalance of the previous game, but in the same kind of ‘B-side’ way as <i>Red Dead Redemption</i>’s “Undead Nightmare” DLC. I played it for maybe an hour at Cameron Kunzelman’s house, jetlagged as all hell, and felt equal parts bored and deceived. When I returned home to find my own press copy in the mail, I didn’t even bother unsealing it.</div>
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Then, in early December, I had done all my writing for the year, and I wanted a mindless grind to chill out to, so I returned to <i>Saints Row IV</i> with fresh eyes and the right mindset. It still feels cheap and flippant and kind of just ‘thrown together’, but there is a keen edge to the satire that I’d not sensed earlier, one that takes a while to emerge as the game begins at a glacially slow pace. There’s the typical satire of making nods to things that exist, that base level of satire that <i>Grand Theft Auto V</i> <a href="http://overland.org.au/2013/10/talking-loud-and-saying-nothing-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-grand-theft-auto/">never surpassed</a> (“Hey, remember this moment in that game?”), but there are also moments of incredible subtlety. Parody in a camera angle, such as the Sorkin-esque walk through the White House, which the game never explicitly draws attention to. Another mission digs deep into theoretical musings on fan fiction and alternative universes. What on the surface feels like a typical videogame adolescence is a subtle, almost modest intelligence. </div>
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But what is most fascinating about the game is its <a href="http://iam.benabraham.net/2013/08/gone-home-jump-scares-and-ludonarative-harmony/">ludonarrative harmony</a> and glitch aesthetic. People have long mused about whether you could deliberately produce glitches, and if you did, would they still be glitches? There’s an artistry to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfl33Tn0pYc"><i>Skate 3</i> glitches</a> or the body horror of <a href="http://s3.amazonaws.com/br-cdn/temp_images/2013/10/07/FIFA14Ronaldoglitch.gif"><i>Fifa</i></a> or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwpP32NH9Ic"><i>Oblivion</i></a>. It’s like going right up to a painting and looking at the individual brush strokes. It’s the materiality of digital media, often repressed and rarely embraced by anyone except individual digital artists. <i>Saints Row IV</i> is the first commercial game I’ve played committed to this aesthetic. Tears in the system (the whole games takes place with a program, a game in a game) glitch out nearby NPCs and cars. Pedestrians' limbs warp and stretch; an upside down person walks by; an invisible car driven by two giant eyeballs bumps along. It’s a deliberate glitch aesthetic, but one majestically achieved.</div>
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But on another level than just visual glitches, the game is unabashedly <i>broken</i>. Pick up a few superpower upgrades and the world that contained <i>Saints Row The Third</i> is unable to hold you now. You are able to engage with the world in ways that this world was never designed to be engaged with. Challenges become ridiculously easy; vehicles of any kind become redundant. Whereas most games of a similar plot would give you challenges within that world you require superpowers for; <i>Saints Row IV</i> gives you challenges utterly unmatched by your super powers. It matches perfectly with a plot about breaking the simulated world—because you <i>actually break a simulated world</i>. But A broken and unbalanced game simulates a breaking and unbalanced game. It’s clever, very clever, and far far more than the cheap DLC-cum-sequel I initially thought I was playing. This is a game I am glad I gave a second chance.</div>
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Oh yeah, and the dubstep gun.</div>
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Contents: [Part One] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-two.html">Part Two</a>] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-3.html">Part Three</a>] [<a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/games-of-2013-part-four.html">Part Four</a>] </div>
Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com91tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-11360183952516505742013-12-05T21:55:00.000-08:002013-12-05T21:55:14.026-08:002013: Some Writing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2013 is almost over. It's been a pretty intense year! My December is going to be full of travel and events and I'm going to have precious little time to spend on my usual, self-gratifying retrospective end-of-year posts. So this is going to be a bit rushed, but here is a list of some of the writing I did this year that I am still pretty happy with.<br />
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1. <a href="http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/04/09/talking-is-harmful/#.UqFfpWQW31g">My interview with <i>Spec Ops: The Line</i> writer Walt Williams</a>. I mostly wanted to talk to Walt about what it is like to read criticism about your own game, but our conversation went much further than that. I didn't want to dissect it into pull quotes, so instead I published the entire transcript on <i>Unwinnable</i>. Related, that there is a site like <i>Unwinnable</i> where I know I can always publish an article makes me very happy.<br />
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2. <a href="http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/5/24/4341042/the-queer-games-scene">My feature on the Queer Games Scene for <i>Polygon</i></a>. I struggle to feel proud about this piece because I know it isn't perfect. I know that, despite my best efforts, it still homogenises a diverse range of creators under that 'queer' label. I know that, as a straight white dude, I wrote the article from a position of extreme privilege over my interviewees. But I also wrote the article with the sincerest intentions. The creators I speak to in this feature remain, I am convinced, the most important and exciting people making and writing about videogames today. I wrote this piece because I want other people to be excited about these people. Not in a weird, exotic animal kind of way, but in a "these are the people that are going to convince others your beloved medium is art" kind of way. I don't know. Writing it was exhausting. Seeing a select few people criticise it on Twitter even as so many others applauded it was exhausting. Knowing I could only ever do an imperfect job of this article was exhausting. Still, I know various people who have said to me they had no idea this side of games existed before reading this article, which is exactly what I wanted it to do. So I should be proud of that I guess.<br />
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3. <a href="http://www.edge-online.com/features/from-ludum-dare-to-molyjam-how-game-jams-became-part-of-game-development/">My feature on game jams for <i>Edge</i></a>. This was a piece I was asked to write, but I'm really happy with how it turned out. I like how I try to complicate game jams and look at how they've seeped into the Triple-A space, and that blurry line between jamming and crunching.<br />
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4. <a href="http://www.edge-online.com/features/meet-douglas-wilson-the-mind-behind-johann-sebastian-joust/">My profile of Douglas Wilson for <i>Edge</i></a>. Essentially, I just wanted an excuse to meet Douglas Wilson and talk about his amazing games and research. Still pretty happy with how this turned out.<br />
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5. <a href="http://overland.org.au/2013/10/talking-loud-and-saying-nothing-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-grand-theft-auto/">My article on <i>Grand Theft Auto V</i> for Overland</a>. One of my goals for this year was to write for one of Australia's literary journals, to write 'criticism about games' rather than 'games criticism', if that makes sense. I guess the website of a literary journal is close enough (the actual literary journal is happening next year!). This was technically meant to be a review of <i>Grand Theft Auto V</i> but it turned into a longer discussion of how<i> </i>despite talking loudly, <i>Grand Theft Auto V</i> fails to say anything of substance at all.<br />
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6. <a href="http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/12/05/not-your-world/#.UqEA0GQW31g">My essay on <i>Tearaway</i> and Sontag and Immersion</a>. Okay, this piece only got published today but I'm still pretty happy with it.<br />
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7. <a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/search/label/notes">My Notes series of blog posts</a>. I really enjoyed writing my Notes posts. It started as an experiment. Okay, it started after reading Susan Sontag's "Notes On Camp" and not being able to repress my desire to imitate every great author I read's style. But it turned out pretty well. The Notes format gave me the breathing room to just touch on ideas and move on to the next with no concerns for how the paragraphs flow, without having to make a singular 'point' about a game. Others have also done this this year, most notable Cameron Kunzelman's <a href="http://thiscageisworms.com/2013/06/18/on-the-last-of-us/">excellent post on <i>The Last of Us</i></a>. I would have liked to publish more Notes posts than I did (I still have drafts for <i>Metal Gear Solid 3</i>, <i>Problem Attic, </i>and <i>Towerfall</i>, but I'm also really happy with the ones I did post.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com50tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-88845339881104396102013-11-28T21:13:00.000-08:002013-11-28T21:13:04.860-08:00Notes on Metro: Last Light<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1. I went into <i>Last Light</i> braced for disappointment. <i>Metro 2033</i> had been one of those games that I loved for its roughness, from its personality that came precisely from not being polished to within an inch of its life. It had this jagged silhouette that if it walked into the room, you knew exactly what game it was. That kind of roughness can only come from a team with a big heart and a small budget. When that kind of game does good, and a larger budget is given to a sequel, that roughness rarely survives. It almost is impossible for it to survive. So I went into <i>Last Light</i> excited for more <i>Metro</i> but ready to accept that more of what made <i>Metro</i> good might be impossible.<br />
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I was ultimately surprised, then, to find that <i>Last Light</i>, largely held onto much of what made <i>Metro 2033</i> feel so good. The oppressiveness, the bleakness, the kind of stand-off-ish design that will just dump you in a place with no clear waypointing or objectives and just let you figure it out. Some parts of the game have been polished up, but only selectively and to the game's benefit. Guns in <i>2033</i> felt jangly like you would expect a gun built from scrap to feel, but they lacked a punch. <i>Last Light</i>'s guns are punchy enough that skirmishes are enjoyable, while still feeling super messy. It feels like they tried to polish the jags into being more pronounced, not just polish them away to a curved nothing. So that is nice. It still lacks some of what made <i>Metro 2033</i> special, but it is about as good as a sequel to a rough game could hope to be.<br />
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2. Which is not to call the game perfect. <i>Last Light</i> still seemed to lose focus on what made <i>2033</i> so special. In particular, the sense of <i>life</i> in the metro the first game evoked. There was this real sense of being a commuter, fittingly enough, of just passing through this towns that were other people's entire lives. The people in the bunks on old carriages, or the way a station is sectioned off into small houses. It was always amazing to stop and look at these places, but always fleetingly as you were always on your way to meet someone. <i>Last Light</i> still has a bit of that, and when it does, it is terrific. A moment near the start of the game where you are dashing through a nazi station under fire and you get this faint glimpse of everyday life as you dash past. The theatre station and the flooded station of Venice are particularly strong highlights of just 'life on the metro'. As is the refugee train.<br />
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But, for the most part, with the story focusing on WAR and militaries and all that, we don't get the same diversity of lives and lifestyles <i>2033</i> gave us. We have army bases and prisons and dead towns and army dudes and more army dudes. It feels less like a place and more like a serious of videogame levels at times. It felt more like a videogame story than an adaption of a novel this time, essentially.<br />
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3. Related to that is the sheer number of men in the game (or the lack of women, more accurately). It's just a bunch of gruff dudes and the occasional woman (they all look the same) sobbing in the background. <i>2033</i> was largely men doing things, to be sure, but the places felt alive with children and grannies and dogs and all kinds of people. Now we just get soldiers. The two women who speak in the game are a prostitute (whose nipples you can see while she offers you sex) and a sniper lady (whose nipples you can see while she offers you sex. Also she has your son, of course). How to sap any atmosphere from your world: homogenise the people you populate it with.<br />
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4. I really enjoy the stealth of <i>Last Light</i>. It's that kind of stealth that goes really good until you screw up, and then you pull out your shotgun and improvise. That kind of stealth works in very few games, because usually there is some fictional context that makes that kind of stealth feel very wrong, even when it is mechanically possible. Some games get it right. <i>Splinter Cell: Conviction</i> always presented contexts where the enemy knew Fisher was around somewhere, so if things devolved into a gunfight, it felt natural. The same goes for <i>Last Light</i>. I never felt like I needed to reload the game when I was seen, just change my tactics.<br />
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5. That grittiness of <i>2033</i> remains. The constantly pressure of needing to recharge your batteries, needing to replace your oxygen mask filters, needing to pump your airgun. All these little things always taking up your attention just to stay alive. It's incredible effective here as it was in <i>2033</i>. It is weakened, though, by a timer giving you the exact number of seconds of filter life you have left. It is strengthened, though, by the need to press a button to wipe water or blood off your oxygen mask to see clearly.<br />
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6. I really like the subtly of both <i>2033</i>'s and now <i>Last Light</i>'s approach to the supernatural. Not so much with the 'dark ones' who are just some generic alien monster things, but with the shadow-ghosts that disappear if you shine a light directly at them, or hallucinations of a thousand arms stretching out to get you. They never really try to explain it; they just do it and it's kind of cool.<br />
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7. <i>Last Light</i>'s ending is <i>terrible</i>. There are two endings, to be sure (like <i>2033</i>, <i>Last Light</i> has this very subtle series of choices through the game that never tell the player they are about to make a choice, and I really love that), but the ending I got was <i>terrible</i>, and I don't doubt the other one was just as bad. The game has this slow steady build up of 'war is coming' and needing to find answers and needing to make peace and all of that. Then, while there are still all these loose narrative threads unresolved, the 'war' happens, and it is just a terrible stand-your-ground turret section, and then some dude tells you, by the way, I rigged the place to blow, and you blow the place up, making the Ultimate Sacrifice. Then you find out Sniper Women Who You Had Sex With was telling this whole story to your son because <i>of course</i> if you have sex once you are going to have a child.<br />
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It is actually the most terrible ending I've experienced since <i>Far Cry 3</i> (<i>Far Cry 3'</i>s endings (both of them) made me laugh at my television they were both so terrible). It is the most generic, bullshit, 'oh I guess we should wrap things up now' kind of ending. It's the kind of ending of the fantasy stories I wrote in my teenage years with absolutely zero planning about how they would end. One day I'd just get bored of all these action sequences I was ripping right out of <i>Dragon Ball Z</i> and stick an ending on them. That is how <i>Last Light</i> ends and it is appallingly bad, to the extent that it damaged my overall feelings about the game.<br />
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<br />Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-59682192406892716572013-11-27T15:41:00.000-08:002013-11-27T15:41:28.438-08:00Notes on Doom 3<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1. I have played <i>Doom 3</i> before. It was new; I was 17; our family's computer could hardly run it. It was the most terrifying thing I had played in my life (unless I had already played <i>Project Zero</i>, but I think that might have been a few months later). I would play it in the study, in the dark, with headphones on. Every jump-scare would be followed by several moments of lag even as the Imp's scream continued to loop. It was <i>oppressive</i>. I tolerated it as far as your first steps into hell, at which stage it became both too intimidating and too intolerable. So when I started playing the BFG edition on the Playstation 3 recently, I was entering it with a half-memory of the game: a memory of being terrified but not really remembering any of the specifics (except Delta Labs 1, but we'll get to that).<br />
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2. <i>Doom 3</i> is intense. Not in the way we just throw that word at games as a synonym of 'fun', but in the way that it has this remarkable level of intensity, an absurd level. On the surface, it is a horror game: demons and foreboding and dark corridors and all that. But horror is all about what you don't see, about the suspense and the atmosphere and the 'what if?'. <i>Doom 3</i> has very little downtime, and instead attacks you with one scripted scare after another. An invisible sensor opens a trapdoor behind you with an Imp in it. The floor collapses in front of you and drops you in a pit of zombies. A previously empty hallway is now filled with waves of spider creatures. It is a constant barrage of frights that is, ultimately, exhausting. Like sitting on a rollercoaster for an hour. You just feel this strange sense of dread if you play for too long. You just want it to stop. It's unorthodox or heavy-handed, perhaps, but a game that has me thinking "please, stop" must be doing horror somewhat successfully.<br />
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3. <i>Doom 3</i> feels like <i>Doom</i>. Or, rather, it is possible to play <i>Doom 3</i> in a way that feels like <i>Doom</i>, and I believe that is the way it was intended to be played. I played through the original <i>Doom</i> just before starting <i>Doom 3</i>, and it <i>felt</i> the same. The things I was doing with my hands in <i>Doom 3</i> (always moving, always strafing, squiggling out from behind a wall to fire a shotgun blast then back behind the wall between shots, spinning in circles looking for traps) were the things I do with my hands playing <i>Doom</i>. On the surface, though, they could not be more different. <i>Doom</i> is more 'arcadey', with maybe a dozen monsters attacking you in a hallway. <i>Doom 3</i> rarely throws more than two or three enemies at you at once, and every encounter feels like a Big Deal. There is the fanfare of a single Imp teleporting in, or the screech of a Cacodemon.<br />
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It is strange to me that a game where you fight a single enemy can feel the same as a game where you fight a dozen. I think it is that each games make me play in a very 'twitchy' style but through different means. <i>Doom</i> does it by giving me a dozen targets at once I have to pay attention to. <i>Doom 3</i> does it through that oppressive intensity that makes me utterly paranoid as I move through it. I am twitchy because I do not know what this game is going to do to me next. So I am spinning in circles and putting my back against the wall and then refusing to trust that wall because it feels like at anytime there <i>could</i> be a dozen enemies coming for me. So <i>Doom 3</i> feels like <i>Doom</i>, but for very different reasons.<br />
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4. More on that. I said <i>Doom 3</i> 'can' feel like <i>Doom </i>if you play it a certain way. When I played <i>Doom 3</i> as a teenager on the PC, I played it incredibly slowly, creeping forward slowly, trying to pre-empt every jump-scare. This time, I ran headfirst into every room then dealt with what the game threw at me. Because I had just played the first <i>Doom</i>, I approached it like <i>Doom</i>, and this required me to be more twitchy. It is possible to play different games in different ways, and those different ways are going to drastically change how you approach it. I hate it when people say the player is always right and there is no wrong way to play a game. There is. There is a way a game is intended to be played and ways it is not intended to be played (I watched a student this semester play <i>30 Flights of Loving</i> like he was playing <i>Counter-Strike</i> and it was the most surreal thing). No one is going to stop you from playing a game the 'wrong way', but personally I prefer getting out of the game what the game wants me to get out of it. Anyway, what I'm saying is I think <i>Doom 3</i> wants to be played like the original <i>Doom</i>, and I think playing it in that way makes it a vastly more enjoyable (and exhausting) experience.<br />
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5. An aside to this: I think the significant change that the BFG Edition allows you to hold a gun and have your torch on at the same time greatly encourages the 'just run forward' approach, while the original was much more standoffish, since you knew the moment you pulled your gun out you would be thrown into darkness. Which, I guess, means that I am saying that I think being able to hold your gun and your torch at the same time is actually better. Though, many of the game's greater moments of lighting design are still ruined by this change.<br />
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6. One more note about <i>Doom 3</i>'s relationship with the original <i>Doom</i>. I really enjoy watching longrunning franchises evolve. I like playing a revamped entry to an old franchise and seeing how they re-imagined certain things. Or, related, I like playing new entries in a longrunning franchise and noting the design decisions of previous games that are lingering and influencing the current game. Like the way the more recent Call of Duty games cannot escape that series' origins in World War II cinematic battlefield simulation. Or the things that continue from one Final Fantasy to the next. I love how <i>Doom 3</i> reimagines all of <i>Doom</i>'s bizarre demon/alien/monsters. How it has 'updated' them all while still clearly grounded in this mid 90s masculine adolescence of <i>Robocop</i> and Marilyn Manson. Of course there are zombies and robotic demons and squirming torsos used as torches and some random reason for there being chainsaws on Mars. This is <i>Doom</i>. Those things have to be there.<br />
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But it is more subtle than that, too. <i>Doom 3</i>'s most obvious inspiration beyond its own predecessors is, quite clearly, <i>Half-Life</i>. Like <i>Half-Life</i>, it tries to build a convincing world out of very directed levels, rather than the very distinct levels of early <i>Doom</i> games. It wants to tell a story environmentally. For the most part, it achieves this. The Mars Labs feel like actual places on Mars. But then, suddenly, the <i>Doom</i> is back as panels suddenly open up behind a piece of body armour and a demon runs out at you. There's often no attempt to justify why these monster closets exist: they are there because this is <i>Doom</i>.<br />
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So there's this clash of design styles in the environment. Just moving through this game is like peeling off layers of old wallpaper of a centuries-old house. They all just mash together and create this weird thing that is <i>Doom 3</i>—glorious on its own terms, absurd on any others.<br />
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On this note, there is a moment late in the game where the player encounters some ancient stone tablets from the long gone Mars civilisation. One of the tablets, quite clearly, is the cover art of the original <i>Doom, </i>making a clear nod to the game's own pre-history that can't help but to pervade every aspect of the game.<br />
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7. I guess I've already covered the monster closets, but they seem to also deserve their own note. They are <i>Doom 3</i>'s most often criticised moments. I guess people like to feel like they can master a game, or pre-empt it. They don't like games that cheat (see also: <i>Limbo</i>). I love games that cheat. I love games that are jerks to the player. <i>Doom 3</i> has so many sudden jump-scares and monster closets, but each one is so deliberate, so considered in its layout and timing that it is hard not to appreciate them. Each time, the developers have clearly thought about what direction the player is going to be looking, and use that to their advantage. Sometimes lighting or a sound will direct you to look in one direction, then something will jump at you from the opposite direction. The game is always one step ahead of you, always (often literally) laughing at you. So it gets to a point where you are double-guessing the game, where you no longer trust it. You become paranoid. You begin expecting every wall to peel back and throw zombies at you. It gets to a point where the game has trained you so well that it doesn't need any monster-closets. You begin filling the closets yourself.<br />
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8. <i>Doom 3</i>'s monitors are still some of my favourite monitors in any game. It was a big deal when the game was new, that these computer monitors within the world were of high enough resolution to display real information without having to open another screen. I love the seamlessness of moving close enough to a monitor for your camera to start controlling the on-screen cursor, pressing buttons and controlling devices. It's such a small, subtle thing, but just so well done.<br />
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9. One section of <i>Doom 3</i> I remembered clearly from playing it as a teen was the Delta Labs. I was actually a little nervous as characters started mentioning that I was getting closer to them this time though. I couldn't remember why I dreaded the Delta Labs, but I did. When I got there (<a href="http://www.twitch.tv/brkeogh/b/481652883">and I recorded it when I did</a>), I discovered one of the few times <i>Doom 3</i> exploits downtime to terrorise the player. You are walking through empty corridors for what must be the longest uninterrupted segment of the game. You are constantly waiting for the next thing to jump out at you. There are demons crawling on the outside of the facility, throwing long shadows over the walls. There is an automated robotic woman's voice on loop for the entire section telling you about the power outage. Once the fighting does start again, there are some masterful jump-scares and misdirections. It's just a very well designed part of the game.<br />
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10. I really enjoyed <i>Doom 3</i>.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-7425068670153297722013-11-08T18:55:00.000-08:002013-11-27T15:41:53.086-08:00Notes on Call of Duty: Ghosts<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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(With thanks to my girlfriend <a href="http://cuentosdecolombia.tumblr.com/">Helen Berents</a>, who is all over South American politics and conflicts, for helping me think through some of these ideas, and giving me the words for them.)<br />
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(I don't play <i>Call of Duty</i> multiplayer and am only discussion the campaign here.)<br />
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1. People remain perplexed whenever I mention my interest in <i>Call of Duty</i> games. They don't understand what of value one could possibly get out of a franchise that pumps out a nearly identical game every year or so. To be sure, there are all kinds of valid reasons to dismiss the <i>Call of Duty</i> series out of hand: the hypermasculinity, the military-entertainment complex (as the credits rolled on <i>Ghosts</i>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_Arms">Remington Arms Company Inc</a>. were on the list of people Activision "would like to thank"), the fact that the only way to engage with the world and others in it is by shooting them. These are all, without a doubt, valid reasons to never touch a <i>Call of Duty</i> game.<br />
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But there are a whole lot of other reasons often cited that, to me, highlight these uncritically accepted values at the core of games culture: the idea that <i>Call of Duty</i> is bad because the player has no freedom and can only do what they're told (as though the only games that are valuable are those that offer unparalleled freedom), the idea that <i>Call of Duty</i> is not 'innovative' enough (as though games always have to do 'something new' to be worthy). This is going to sound super weird and I fully acknowledge the irony of this statement, but I feel the measuring stick people use to dismiss <i>Call of Duty</i> out of hand is the same measuring stick they regularly use to sideline games by marginalised creators as 'non-games' or some kind of 'low culture'. This is not to say that <i>Call of Duty</i> requires the game critic's energy to defend it as much as <i>Dys4ia, </i>but simply that there is totally some kind of high/low culture divide being implemented by those critics who turn their noses at such a popular franchise.<br />
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Even if I didn't enjoy the core feedback loop of <i>Call of Duty</i> (and I would be lying to myself and to you if I tried to pretend I didn't enjoy it), as a critic I don't want to ignore those games that a huge proportion of our culture engages with. I want to understand them. I want to understand how they work. I want to understand the cultural values that emerge from them. I want to understand what is happening here and why it is happening. Dismissing a game out of hand makes it much harder to be meaningfully critical of that game.<br />
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And, yeah, I enjoy the core feedback loop.<br />
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Anyway. That is why I played <i>Call of Duty: Ghosts.</i><br />
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2. <i>Ghosts</i> narrative is fascinatingly nonsensical. It is nothing but the condensation of North American paranoia of South Americans crossing the border. 'The Federation' (which is just all of South America as one, homogenised nation) hates America and wants to destroy it. One of the first levels, you are literally patrolling a 10-story wall to make sure no South Americans have made it into the country. Of course, the most popular media of a culture is going to highlight just who the imagined, antagonist Other is in the contemporary cultural imagining. It was Russians and then Middle Easterns as America's power spread across the word. Now, as it recedes on itself, the most terrifying enemy is the one at the front door, sneaking in to take our jobs and destroy our way of life. That is <i>Ghosts</i> entire story: the South Americans want to destroy us.<br />
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3. Okay, that's not the entire story. There is also one American who wants to destroy us. One American who had his own Kurtz experience in "the heart of the Amazon" where "natives" have mastered the art of torture to break a man. The South Americans have the magic voodoo power to turn Us into Them. South America is the new Africa, where its own history of colonialisation is demolished as all South Americans are branded as 'natives'. These are the two narratives of <i>Ghosts</i>: South Americans want to destroy us, and this American dude with Marcus Fenix's manrag wants to destroy us so we should probably kill both of them.<br />
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4. <i>Ghosts</i> is the first <i>Call of Duty</i> I've played not contextualised in a fictional version of a real-world conflict (I never played <i>Black Ops 2</i>). the <i>Modern Warfare</i> games and <i>Black Ops</i> didn't need a whole heap of time spent contextualising the world or politics because you already knew them. In <i>Ghosts</i>, nothing makes sense. America is simultaneously a post-apocalyptic ruin and a burgeoning army. One mission simultaneously deploys "our last remaining carrier" and a space shuttle launch. 'The Federation' is a homogenous evil blob with no clear commander or dictator (the Evil American's connection to this army is never fleshed out). There is no discussion of life beyond either army. No one ever mentions what the rest of the world is doing while these two continents battle it out. This is a world reduced to a battlefield between two purified armies detached from any socio-political body or nation. There is only war. The world makes no sense, and you are never given a reason to care about it or its characters.<br />
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5. "It's <i>Call of Duty</i>, did you really expect a good story?" Yes, actually. The <i>Modern Warfare</i> trilogy and <i>Black Ops</i> did not tell good stories <i>per se</i> but they told stories well. For a series derided for churning out the same thing over and over, it experiments with storytelling in a whole heap of fascinating ways. Most significantly, through the constant swapping of perspective. Loading screens aside, you are never looking at the world of a <i>Call of Duty</i> game from a disembodied nowhere; you are always embodied in a particular subject's point of view. <i>Call of Duty</i> doesn't have cut scenes; it has a small level from another character's point of view. I think this is fascinating, the confidence to just take the player out of one character and insert them into another. You can trace this historically to the early games desire to show that World War II was won by "countless men, not a few heroes" I think it was the box said. The multiple POVs are meant to give the player a sense of this networked, intersubjective military. That is gross for a whole heap of reasons, but the purely formal mechanic of <i>only using bodies</i> to let the player see the world is a fascinating one I would like to see more of.<br />
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Tellingly, <i>Ghosts</i> rarely swaps your point of view (with the exception of the end of the game). For the vast majority of the game, you are one blank slate character following his brother (his literal bro) around the battle field. Where the <i>Modern Warfares</i> could show a large, complex, (absurd) network of war spreading across the world, <i>Ghosts</i> is restrained to a boring, head-to-head conflict of the Americas and is forced to ignore the rest of the world.<br />
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Also, for all that military shooters embody this jingoistic love of American militarism, it was always refreshing to spend so much of the <i>Modern Warfares</i> not as an American.<br />
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So, yes, I do expect to enjoy the story of a <i>Call of Duty</i>, but I didn't this time.<br />
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6. The story was claustrophobic. I felt restricted being trapped inside Logan's boring body for so much of the game, on the same goddamn continent the entire time. But even interpersonally, you spend the entire game alongside your brother and your father. The army-as-family is literalised. One mission gives you the objective "Get to dad". It's weird. It's really, really weird. I don't care about this blank slate white bro family. What the hell even is this?<br />
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7. The dog. The dog is the most boring, embarrassingly forced story component ever. Special effects always have a dual spectacle, as much in games as in film: there is the spectacle of the cool thing happening in the fictional world, and the spectacle of the technology that allows that cool thing to be produced as a real thing. Neo dodging bullets in the <i>Matrix</i> was cool because he was following bullets, and it was cool because a camera spun in a circle. Infinity Ward are so excited about <a href="https://vine.co/v/hIWDzVeZHJF">this damn dog</a> they spent a whole lot of money on. You spend the first few levels forced to look at this dog do its dog things. You are riding a tank and its head is popped out of the manhole in front of you to force you to pay attention to its 3D many-polygon model. If someone from Infinity Ward had telephoned me once per level to remind me how <span id="goog_882504938"></span>they animated this dog<span id="goog_882504939"></span> to put in this game, it couldn't have been much more pathetic.<br />
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8. There are a few levels in the middle of the game that stand out, that made me think, okay, this is why I bother playing <i>Call of Duty</i> games. These are the levels that aren't just this one, constant, boring gunfight, but a well and deliberately paced script of down-time followed by up-time followed by down-time. The levels that don't feel like filler.<br />
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The first one is in Caracas (of course the capital of Evil South America is the capital of Venezuela). The level progresses from abseiling down skyscrapers to parachuting while that skyscraper is falling on you. Every moment of the level feels considered and there for a reason, like Infinity Ward actually, deliberately built this level with a certain goal in mind—like they did with most of the <i>Modern Warfare</i> levels.<br />
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Another one is when you are attacking... I don't know... some lab in the snow. You steal uniforms and sneak into the lab quietly. You have a massive stand-your-ground gun fight. You escape on a lift and head out the same way you came in: blending in. You are forced to walk slow through the wreckage you caused as the injured you left behind are helped. It's this seamless escalation from just walking down corridors to explosive action and back to just walking down corridors and then, to end it, you drive a jeap across a frozen ocean, sinking other jeeps with a grenade launcher, and drive your jeep <i>onto a submarine</i>. It's a wonderfully paced stage that hits a high level that the game never again achieves.<br />
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9. You've probably seen the video of how the intro of <i>Ghosts</i> uses <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E82ZkHTiVU">an identical animation sequence</a> to the end of <i>Modern Warfare 2</i>. It's the most explicit example of it, but the same animations and moments are used throughout <i>Ghosts</i>. It's either intended as laziness, apathy, or deliberate intertextuality—it functions as all three. The entire game feels like a collage of moments from the previous games. Not just the same mechanics or the same features but literally the same moments. The moment your bro looked into the distance then helped you up. The moment your bro was fighting the bad dude while you were crawling towards a gun. The moment an explosion knocked you off your feet in slow motion.<br />
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Where these because interesting is where <i>Ghosts</i> is clearly, deliberately using these to subvert expectations. At one point, a tank bursts out of a carpark wall to save you, exactly as it does in <i>Modern Warfare 3</i>. Except, instead of saving you, it gets blown up as well and you have to run for your life. At another moment you are about to breach a door like you have done a million times when your bro tackles you to the ground a moment before a hail of bullets splinters the door. There are these little snippets where the copy-pasted moments feel cleverly used.<br />
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But even if it is just laziness, I still find that fascinating. Like peeling back layers of wallpaper from an old house. I kind of like that you can see the history of this series and these studios in the game.<br />
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10. Towards the end of the game is this absurd tank level. You are driving a tank at super high speed in a battalion of tanks in a bizarre sandbox-y level. It felt like I was playing <i><a href="http://youtu.be/oetRhvBTVGg?t=3m">Tokyo Wars</a></i>. It was weird.<br />
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11. A reason most people can't tolerate <i>Call of Duty</i> is a reason I can't tolerate most AAA games: because it takes itself too seriously. When you spend millions of dollars on a game and you need to make millions in return, you have to be bombastic and absurd and ridiculous. When that bombastic, absurd ridiculousness gets painted up as GRIM and SERIOUS, there is this weird jarring that doesn't always work. I am increasingly convinced that AAA games can not, and perhaps even should not, be 'serious'. At least, they can't be serious for as long as their primary goal is to just be 'fun', and they're primary goal isn't going to stop being 'fun' for as long as they need to make millions of dollars.<br />
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But I think this is exactly the reason I am able to enjoy a <i>Call of Duty</i>, despite everything: because they are <i>so absurd</i> that I don't think anyone, not even Activision, really takes them serious. <i>Medal of Honor</i> takes itself serious, with all its bullshit 'Lest we forget' quotes around its 'real' battles told by 'real' soldiers in a self-gratifying fellatio. <i>Call of Duty</i>, though, with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3AmD9bB1cw">its commercials</a> that quite explicitly note that it only sees itself as a 'fun game', and its partnership with <a href="http://www.polygon.com/2013/10/8/4817030/call-of-duty-ghosts-eminem-survival-video">Eminem</a> has me convinced that it doesn't take itself seriously. Or, perhaps more justifiably, makes it impossible for me to take serious. I don't take <i>Call of Duty</i> serious. I take it as I would take a Michael Bay film. I think that is how I can tolerate all the shit of each <i>Call of Duty</i> to explore the things I find fascinating: by only ever taking it at face value, as nothing more than a ridiculous, military-themed story for a little while.<br />
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Of course, that is not a reason to excuse or justify the many issues I've stated with the game.<br />
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12. The loading screen animations are really great.<br />
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13. Although the world has <i>finally</i> reached a level of technological advancement that <a href="http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/14/4622852/why-call-of-duty-ghosts-finally-has-female-soldiers-in-multiplayer">Infinity Ward is able to animate a 3D model of a woman</a>, there are still next to no women in the campaign, with the exception of one significant companion for a single mission towards the start of the game. Unsurprising, but still disappointing. Notably, <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-tale-of-two-trailers-19852">the game's marketing was no better</a>.<br />
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14. People like to say that <i>Call of Duty</i> studios just tack on the campaign as an afterthought to the multiplayer that is their main consideration. <i>Ghosts</i> is the first time that I am anywhere near convinced of that argument. Infinity Ward doesn't care about this story or these characters.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-77332590775358778262013-11-02T03:01:00.000-07:002013-11-02T03:01:35.034-07:00Proteus for Playstation 3<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/919001647895836548/63ADBB8B536CF113B4C528E208C8357E46B86AD5/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/919001647895836548/63ADBB8B536CF113B4C528E208C8357E46B86AD5/" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">(</span><i>Proteus</i><span style="background-color: white;"> spoilers below)</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>I.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The other night I dreamed that I <span class="il" style="color: #222222;">died.</span> It was super weird. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">I was aware I was </span><span class="il" style="color: #222222;">dying</span><span style="background-color: white;">. I knew it was happening. Other people were there. Maybe I was elderly and fading. maybe I was ill. I don't remember being in pain, so I don't think it was an injury. I was pretty calm at first, but as I closed by eyes and saw only black, I started to think. Thinking made me panic. It dawned on me what was going on. Wait, I'm dying. I really am </span><span class="il" style="color: #222222;">dying</span><span style="background-color: white;">. Not at some abstract point in the future but <i>right now</i>. What happens next? What is it going to feel like? Is it going to feel like anything? Will I know I'm dead? Will I have a moment where I sense the world continuing on without me before I dissipate? Each question made me more terrified that the last, and I continued to die with each thought I thought.</span></span></div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then the blackness slowly, gradually changed to nothing. I don't know how nothingness looks any different from blackness, but it does. It was a tonal difference, I guess. I knew I wasn't looking at the inside of my eyelids anymore; I just wasn't looking anymore. Then there was a silent 'ping', like a very specific moment. A snap, like that moment the kid gets electrocuted in <i>Limbo </i>and stops being a living body and starts being a sack of silhouette meat. And then I felt like I was floating in Space inside my own head and I felt the network of my own consciousness kind of stretch and fade like water spreading too thin on a flat surface. Then from the edges of my non-vision the nothingness slowly shifted to a white that took me over.</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then I woke up. </span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Yes," I thought to myself. "That is probably what dying would feel like."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>II.</b></span></div>
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<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Several nights later, <i>Proteus </i>was released on Playstation 3. I sat on the couch with my girlfriend and we played through it together. We chased squirrels and frogs (she thinks they are rabbits) and stood under the castle ruins (she thinks they are tree stumps). We watched the mushrooms trumpet in Spring and the owls fly in front of the stars on a Summer night. In Autumn we stood in the circle of Deer Gods, as we decided they were called, and the sky turned red.</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've played <i>Proteus </i>several times before on computer. I knew how it ended. You rise into sky and close your eyes, returning back to the main menu. It never really struck me as particularly emotional or powerful on my previous plays, just a timely end to a beautiful experience.</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But my dream left a mark on me. Not in a particularly scary or depressing way, but I remembered it. I have what I think is <a href="http://www.unwinnable.com/2012/11/01/to-know-time/#.UnTIR5Q8r1g">a pretty healthy fear of the inevitability of death</a> if I dwell on it too much, so perhaps that is why I remembered my dream so vividly. </span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When our <i>Proteus</i> game reached Winter, I suddenly felt the tiniest pang of panic. This would all be over soon. This play session, our character's life: over. I suddenly regretted voluntarily progressing the seasons. Why didn't we just sit in Autumn forever? Why did we come to Winter? Now there was nothing we could do.</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I had to see as much of the island as I could before it ended. The Deer Gods, the house by the sea, the forest beyond the mountain. I had to see them all one last time.</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But then, walking down a hill, I never reached the bottom. Our character had started to lift. It was coming to an end and there was nothing I could do about it. We were among the tree tops. Then we were in the clouds, the ground obscured beneath us. Then we were passing over the mountains.</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I remembered my dream, there with my character's legs dangling feet above the tallest mountain, with the Deer Gods turning into little dots in the snow. </span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It <i>was</i> my dream. The inevitability. The sense of 'shit this is happening <i>right now</i>'. The strange sense of floating in nothingness. The sense of wanting to extend my connection with this word for just a moment longer.</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And then, looking down at the island, the maximum draw distance the game could render began to suck up the mountain peaks in whiteness, disappearing them. No land left beneath me, I looked up at the moon and stars, trying to take it all in as quickly as I could because in any moment--</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">--my eyes closed, and I returned to the main menu.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And, yeah, that is probably what dying feels like.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">III.</span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Proteus is really lovely on PS3. Play it with someone you love.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you were wanting a real essay on <i>Proteus</i>, you could do a lot worse than <a href="http://meanjin.com.au/articles/post/listening-to-proteus/">Dan Golding's piece on <i>Meanjin</i></a>.</span></div>
</div>
Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-65941496698400072242013-10-01T22:53:00.003-07:002013-10-01T22:53:44.540-07:00Freeplay and Other Haps<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9_kb9kz_FbRxA4LXx4pIIL91w-rvhia0abNtk2HZVLWdIZWu7LNlKtN9piQBTV0mt-pwWC1nx_8RafcgIlGYzFKO2Wx1mfamtY0z4A4KfC-fV3e24pQ6tLuM8IeAaIvwmjdNkzjtdYO2X/s1600/1234483_571599366220661_862558281_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9_kb9kz_FbRxA4LXx4pIIL91w-rvhia0abNtk2HZVLWdIZWu7LNlKtN9piQBTV0mt-pwWC1nx_8RafcgIlGYzFKO2Wx1mfamtY0z4A4KfC-fV3e24pQ6tLuM8IeAaIvwmjdNkzjtdYO2X/s400/1234483_571599366220661_862558281_n.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>MegaGIRP</i>? <i>MegaGIRP</i>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Hello.<br />
<br />
It's been a very busy and exciting week with a lot of things happening. First and foremost, <a href="http://freeplay.net.au/">Freeplay</a> happened in Melbourne last week and over the weekend. It was my fourth Freeplay event in as many years. It was a really great event with plenty of talks full of fury, passion, and optimism. Not the generic kind of games industry optimism of "believe in yourself and be Indie and things will be cool, yay!" but a real sense that things are slowly changing. Actually, changing is a terrible word that gets thrown around at Freeplay as much as it does at every event. In previous years, there has always been some kind of 'politics' panel where politics and culture and games gets talked about. This year, that stuff just kind of permeated the entire event. That pissed off some people who were more excited about learning how to use Unity to make platformers or something, but for those of us attending Freeplay as a cultural festival, it was really great to see.<br />
<br />
Also great was the large percentage of young and inexperienced speakers. So many young people saying so many great things instead of the old guard saying the same old old guard things. Great! Exemplary of this was Sam Crisp/Stephen Swift (I don't even know anymore) and Marigold Bartlett's "How To Destroy Everything" talk which was just the most phenomenal thing. I highly recommend you read the <a href="http://samcrisp.tumblr.com/post/62718211352/how-to-destroy-everything-or-why-video-games-do-not">manuscript</a>. Also, speaking of young and inexperienced people. The event was directed this year by Harry Lee and Katie Williams, who have never directed an event before. They did an incredible job. Freeplay was incredible, is what I am saying.<br />
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Andrew Brophy and Chad Toprack also did a great job with the <a href="http://hovergarden.org/">Hovergarden</a> party (pictured). On par with the Wild Rumpus and Kill Screen parties I've attended at GDC.<br />
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I've been trying to think of a US equivalent to try to explain to people why Freeplay is special. I think it would be <a href="http://noshowconf.com/">No Show Conference</a>, from what I have heard of that event. An event for hobbyists and people interested in the culture of games not necessarily connected to The Industry of games. I love it. Mary Hamilton's <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2013/oct/01/games-culture-destroy-itself-reborn">writeup for <i>The Guardian</i></a> gives a pretty good gist of things.<br />
<br />
At Freeplay, I spoke with Leena van Deventer on a panel called "Travel Diaries". I spoke about <i><a href="http://towardsdawns.blogspot.com/">Towards Dawn</a></i> and Leena wrote about her <i><a href="http://siminterrupted.grassisleena.com/">Sim, Interrupted</a></i> project. I recorded the talk and you can download the audio I recorded <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B33Td7FsI64FNGljTDg1Q1R1T0k/edit?usp=sharing">here</a>. I didn't start recording until halfway through Leena's introduction, accidentally, so allow me to say that she is rad and does rad stuff and maybe check out <a href="http://widgetau.org/">Widget</a>, her Women in Development project.<br />
<br />
After Freeplay I had an Academic Conference at RMIT, the <a href="http://ieconference.org/ie2013/">IE Conference</a>. I presented a paper on <i>Towards Dawn</i> and permanent death. I've uploaded it to <a href="http://rmit.academia.edu/StripeyMcStripeworth">my Academia.edu page</a> if you want to read it. The paper I presented at DiGRA on <i>Spec Ops: The Line</i> is there as well, if you were after that.<br />
<br />
And, finally, I have two articles in the newest issue of <i><a href="http://fiveoutoftenmagazine.com/">Five Out Of Ten</a></i> that just got released. I write about writing about <i>868-Hack</i> and embodiment in games. This is the fifth issue of <i>Five Out Of Ten</i>. It's exciting to see an independent project for games writing be so successful!<br />
<br />
Aaaaaand that is about everything for now.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-31040713516786520752013-09-25T02:19:00.001-07:002013-09-25T02:30:40.328-07:00Grand Theft Auto V and Everyday PhotographyI have a lot of things to say about <i>GTA V</i>. Lots of things about the absolutely failed satire, the shameless and explicit misogyny, the phenomenally beautiful world, the terrible writing and the great storytelling, the identity crisis of being stranded in the no-person's land between <i>GTA IV</i> and <i>Saints R</i>ow<i>. </i>Lots of things! I have a review forthcoming and there will probably also be a Notes post at some point.<br />
<br />
For now, just a quick note about how much I dig the in-game screenshot system. What I really admired about <i>GTA IV</i> was the 'everyday' mundanity. It wasn't about jetpacks or hovercrafts or aliens or absurdity, but about being embedded in and weighed down by Niko Bellic's mundane, everyday existence as a criminal in Liberty City. In a lot of ways, <i>GTA V</i> has abandoned that sense of everyday-ness in its return to the PS2 era absurdity, but here and there, it is there.<br />
<br />
Primarily, it is in the screenshot system. Like <i>GTA IV</i>, you can pull out the character's mobile phone to send text messages and make phone calls to other characters. This increased the feeling of Liberty City being a thriving city in <i>GTA IV</i>. You got the sense of other characters living in the city as you live in the city. There's the concept of 'co-presence' that mobile media theorists talk about, that sense of being in two places at once. While Niko is stealing a helicopter and Roman is ringing him wanting him to hang-out, that is co-presence. Understanding the city from two perspectives through mobile media.<br />
<br />
Since <i>GTA IV</i> was released, mobile media has become so much more convergent and ubiquitous. We use these things in our pockets for talking, texting, surfing the web, taking photos and capturing videos, recording talks, checking-in to Facebook. <i>GTA V</i> shows this through the increased use of the mobile phones. No longer do you have to visit an internet cafe to get online. Now you just pull out the phone and enter the web browser.<br />
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Part of this is the game's in-game screenshot system, Snapmatic. Players can take low quality, low resolution photos full of fake noise. I'm sure some people are grumpy about the poor quality of these images (I'm just annoyed at the need to go through and bypass Rockstar's terrible social media thing as opposed to saving them directly to the PS3), but I love this replication of everyday photography in a game. For many people, photography is no longer a big deal. You don't stop and perfectly compose a photo with your expensive camera any more. You pull out a phone, take some snaps, throw a fake filter on it, and throw it on social media. Photography is now fleeting as often as it is permanent.<br />
<br />
So I really love how this very modern everyday practice has been translated into the game world. It makes the world of Los Santos feel even 'more real' as you explore and archive it just as we explore and archive our real urban environment: with low quality, mundane photography.<br />
<br />
And all of this is reinforced through the genius inclusion of the ability to take selfies.<br />
<br />
<i>GTA V</i> falls short in many, many areas, but its depiction of everyday practices through mobile media is as fascinating as it was in <i>GTA IV</i>. So, anyway, this wasn't the first thing I expected to write about <i>GTA V</i> but there you go. So those are some rough thoughts on why I find the in-game screenshot functionality cool. Here are some of the photos I've captured in my first week of play.<br />
<br />
EDIT: Patricia Hernandez just reminded me that the new <a href="http://kotaku.com/the-best-part-of-wind-waker-hd-isnt-the-beautiful-visu-1378098237">HD release of <i>Wind Waker</i> similarly has a selfie mechanic</a>. This is the greatest thing. More of this, please.<br />
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<iframe class="imgur-album" frameborder="0" height="550" src="http://imgur.com/a/bNjNI/embed" width="100%"></iframe>
Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-56454129981846981012013-09-03T18:13:00.000-07:002013-09-03T18:13:05.915-07:00Sir, You Are Being HuntedI've been playing the alpha build of <i>Sir, You Are Being Hunted</i>. It's really nice. It feels like a single-player <i>DayZ. </i>There is not a whole heap to 'do' in the game, but the few objectives you do have are so stretched out and extended just to force you to have to really get to know an environment and care about your survival. It feels like the kind of survival game that would never be commercially viable but which a small subset of people would really want to exist. Which is exactly what Kickstarter projects do, I guess. Anyway. Here are some screenshots.<br />
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<iframe class="imgur-album" frameborder="0" height="550" src="http://imgur.com/a/0imJC/embed" width="100%"></iframe>Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-16118651229604053422013-09-02T21:47:00.002-07:002013-09-02T21:47:30.450-07:00Disconnected Updates. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Hello. It has been a pretty intense, trans-pacific, grits-fuelled couple of weeks. Here is a rundown of important and exciting and disconnected things I've been up to:<br />
<br />
1. Dan Golding and I launched our own company. It is called <a href="http://pressselectpublishing.com/">Press Select</a>, and it is a publishing label for long-form game criticism. We have some truly incredible authors lined up to write about some landmark games. We wrote <a href="http://pressselectpublishing.com/blogs/news/8672969-welcome-to-press-select">a blog post</a> to tell you more about what we are doing, or you can read <a href="http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/21/4645686/press-select-launches-to-publish-long-form-games-criticism">the article Polygon wrote about us</a>.<br />
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2. I travelled to Atlanta, Georgia to attend the 2013 DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) conference last week. It is games studies' biggest international journal, and was full of awesome papers by intelligent people. It was a pretty great week! I am utterly indebted to <a href="http://thiscageisworms.com/">Cameron Kunzelman</a> for putting me up for the week so I could actually afford to attend. I presented a paper drawing from my work with <i>Killing is Harmless</i>. It is about <i>Spec Ops: The Line, </i>genre conventions of the military shooter genre, and how the genre gets caught up in the military-entertainment complex. There's a full version of the paper available <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16317852/paper_55.pdf">here</a> if you are into that.<br />
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3. Michael Brough's <i><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/868-hack/id635749911?mt=8">868-Hack</a></i> (pictured) was released on the App Store. I've been playing the pre-release build for a couple of months, and it is one of my favourite games of the year. I'll have more to say about it in the future, but for now I'll just note that it is responsible for breaking my <i>Animal Crossing</i> addiction as it started to dominate my portable gaming time.<br />
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And that is that!Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-89869635655776384652013-08-16T20:45:00.000-07:002013-08-19T16:49:22.203-07:00Notes on Gone Home<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1. As the credits rolled on <i>Gone Home</i> I felt happy, sad, and old.<br />
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2. <i>Gone Home</i> is a game you don't want to read about before you play. All you want to know about it first is that it is lovely, that is is beautiful, that it will take maybe 2-3 hours to play, and that you should wait until you can give it your undivided and uninterrupted attention so that you can let it all sink in in one playthrough. That is all you want to know before you play it. <b>So stop reading now if you haven't played it yet</b>.<br />
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3. I think <a href="http://thiscageisworms.com/2013/08/16/on-gone-home/">Cameron Kunzelman has already sad everything I will say about the game here far more succinctly</a>.<br />
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4. <i>Gone Home</i> is a scary game. The things that scare you are the things that scare you as a teenager. Childish fears that you are old enough to know are silly but not old enough to completely disbelieve. Ghosts, dark rooms, absent parents, eery answering phone messages. When you're a teenager, the world is so dramatic. Everything that could go wrong will go wrong. Playing through <i>Gone Home</i>, I was certain from the start that everything was going wrong (but surely it wouldn't). There would be ghosts (but surely not, right?). Something would move in a dark room (but it wouldn't, surely (but I should leave all the lights on just in case)). My entirely family was going to be dead (well probably not, but <i>surely</i>). Lots of things made me nostalgic and melancholy in <i>Gone Home</i>, but its defining sensation was one of dread amplified by a hyperbolic, adolescent imagination.<br />
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5. Which, now that I write that, makes me think back to <a href="http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/04/09/talking-is-harmful/">when I talked to Walt Williams at GDC</a> and we discussed how videogames aren't a 'young' medium but an adolescent medium in the way they think they are being all dark and serious in really immature ways. <i>Gone Home</i> plays to the strengths of an adolescent medium, feeding on my juvenile fears that <i>something terrible</i> is surely going to happen eventually because this is a videogame.<br />
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6. I love the way <i>Gone Home</i> plays on Horror tropes to build that sense of trepidation and forewarning. The stormy night in the woods, the eerie old mansion, the missing family, those (at first) messed up answering machine messages. I was terrified for most of the game, just waiting for the inevitable ghost. When the lightbulb burst as I picked up the crucifix, I almost had to stop playing. When I found a room in the basement where the light wouldn't turn on, I refused to enter. My mind turned the shapes of curtains and shadows into people staring at me. The tropes of the Horror genre reverted me back to being a terrified teenager who should probably know better but really doesn't. Like the time I freaked out when I was 15 because there was a guy getting out of a car in front of the house and it was just dad's friend dropping by. Something about being a teenager means you always expect the worst. Because being a teenager is dramatic, right? It's a time of constant change and impermanence and everything new that you discover you want to hold onto but it's going to be lost the moment you finish high school or move to a new town or enter puberty or whatever. Until the closing moments of <i>Gone Home</i>, I expected the worst.<br />
<br />
7. But then it all makes sense. My parents are away at a counselling retreat (for reasons I understand based on the objects scattered around the house). My sister hasn't killed herself like some <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuryYourGays">TV-trope</a> depressed gay teenager. She has run off with the love of her life. <i>Of course</i> the house is a mess, then. <i>Of course</i>! it makes sense now. Like the shadow of a terrifying monster turning into a coatrack, everything makes sense in hindsight. How silly was I! Everything that was scary wasn't actually scary. It was just my imagination, moulded like clay by this masterful game and its genius creators. This is why you want to play the game not knowing anything about it. To feel that trepidation. To not be sure if there are ghosts or not but <i>surely</i> there aren't but <i>maybe</i> there are. To bring in your expectations from other media that the gay teenager surely killed herself and have that expectation shattered.<br />
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8. <i>Gone Home</i> is yet another indie game that proves that videogames do not need to be packed with action and violence to maintain the player's attention. A space to move through and things to look at. Those elements alone will carry a game far. <i>Gone Home, Dear Esther, Proteus, Journey</i>. I hope the creators of AAA games start to realise this. I want more big blockbuster games that are not afraid of downtime or a slow pace. <i><a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/notes-on-last-of-us.html">Last Of Us</a></i> was a step in the right direction, to be sure, but you can carry a game so much further with so much less action and I hope we finally begin to see more of this in the AAA space. Maybe.<br />
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9. I love <i>Gone Home's </i>characters. I love that Katie is a real person, fleshed out by her own postcards and her voice on the answering machine. I love how she is situated for the player: someone who has been away for a year while her family moved homes. It's the perfect setup for the character being disorientated in this big, bizarre house, feeling as out-of-place as the player even as all the objects that fill up this space are familiar to her. Familiar memories in an alien environment. Like some kind of dissonant memory palace.<br />
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10. BUT! I love that this game isn't about Katie. Kind of like the way <i>Metal Gear Solid 2</i> isn't about Raiden. The main character in this story is not the playable character. Katie is unearthing the story of Sam, her sister, about which <i>Gone Home</i>'s story is based. We follow in Sam's footsteps unearthing her story and her feelings and her memories (almost like Raiden follows in Snake's footsteps but let's not do a <i>Gone Home</i>/<i>Metal Gear Solid 2</i> comparative essay just now). We make predictions (mostly negative) about how her life has played out and why she isn't here now. We feel jubilant when the game ends and we realise her ending was a happy one (if not bittersweet). I smiled and wanted to cry for a character that I had never seen or directly engaged with throughout the game.<br />
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11. Perhaps <i>Gone Home</i> feels so melancholy even at the end because I never got to hug my younger sister.<br />
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12. I miss the 90s. Like, I <i>really</i> miss the 90s. To be certain, the 90s I miss is probably not the same 90s as those just a bit older than me miss. I was born in 1986. I was not old enough for half the 90s to really appreciate it at the time, but I built up a storage of memories of things that I saw and heard and, in more recent years, have made sense of those memories. Now I feel this strange, aching loss for the decade that I lived out for most of my childhood (if not my adolescence).<br />
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It's something I've been struggling with for maybe a year now, this strange kind of late-20s crisis of being old enough to contextualise my existence within a much broader history of humanity to realise just how small and fleeting I am. I remember my dad listen to 70s music in the 90s, music from a decade back in some pre-history of humankind. The 70s were as far back in time then as the 90s are now. I was born in the 80s. The 80s are as far away from now as the 50s were from the 80s. The Pub Trivia I go to plays 'old' songs by The Cranberries and Garbage and Hole. I know <i>adults</i> who remember September 11 about as poorly as I remember the Berlin War falling down.<br />
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This is not to say I am old. Everyone older than me would scoff at such a statement. I am saying that I am <i>old enough</i> for time to feel like it is moving pretty fucking fast and my childhood is something that doesn't exist anymore. It's a memory that's trapped back in the 90s, locked up with Sega Megadrives and Riot Grrls and Marilyn Manson and purple Hang Ten t-shirts. I'm pretty happy with my present life, but that realisation that the past is, well, past, hits pretty hard.<br />
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So <i>Gone Home</i> was nostalgic for me in the most literal possible sense. Nostalgia is derived from the Greek <i>nostos</i> ("homecoming") + <i>algos</i> ("pain, grief, distress") (thanks, Google). <i>Gone Home</i> was a painful homecoming. For Katie, to be sure, but also for me. And also for a lot of people my age and a bit older, I imagine. Not because it says "Hey, remember Super Nintendo?" which is the extent of most game's use of nostalgia. But because it teleported me back to a time and decade in my life that I am just now coming to terms with being over. <i>Gone Home</i> isn't a memory palace; it's a memory museum.<br />
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To be sure, I wasn't a riot grrrl struggling with having to come out to my parents. But I was a kid in the 90s, and all the minutiae <i>things</i> around this house created a painful homecoming for me. Or maybe this was more like leaving home. Of having to accept that the 90s were the 90s and that's where they have to stay. I dunno. It's an emotion that I still don't really have the words for. All I know is that this is the first contemporary creative work (with <a href="http://www.unwinnable.com/2012/10/02/pocket-treasures-cool-pizza/">one vague exception</a>) that helped me come to terms with my already-here-but-not-quite-accepted adulthood in a weird way that I don't quite have the words for, and it was an incredibly powerful experience.<br />
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13. Courtney Stanton <a href="https://twitter.com/q0rt/status/368212318674751488">mentioned on Twitter</a> that <i>Gone Home</i> has replaced <i>Portal</i> for her game-to-show-people-who-don't-like-games-what-videogames-are-capable-of (I'm paraphrasing). I could not agree more.<br />
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14. Ben Abraham wrote a really interesting piece on how the game plays off tropes to create a <a href="http://iam.benabraham.net/2013/08/gone-home-jump-scares-and-ludonarative-harmony/">ludonarrative harmony</a> (oh no he didn't (oh yes he did)).<br />
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15. Merritt Kopas's <a href="http://mkopas.net/2013/08/on-gone-home/">personal thoughts on the game and her own childhood</a> are really moving.<br />
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16. Some thoughts by Mattie Brice about her relationship with <a href="http://www.mattiebrice.com/ghosts/">the 90s and indie games and nostalgia and <i>Gone Home</i></a>.<br />
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17. Anna Anthropy's <a href="http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=2127">thoughts on the game</a>.<br />
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18. Kim Delicious's <a href="http://kimfullydelicious.postach.io/post/you-cant-always-go-home">thoughts on the game</a>.<br />
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19. At the risk of sounding like some privileged cisdude exoticising queer experiences, I'm really fascinated and moved by the various reactions queer writers are having to <i>Gone Home</i>. Some are melancholically remembering when they were queer teenage girls in the 90s; others are lamenting that they weren't teenage girls in the 90s (be it because of age or of gender). There are so many different emotional responses to <i>Gone Home, </i>so many different people being reminded of something they either never had or have since lost by the game. I think there's something really special about that.<br />
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20. Naomi Clarke wrote a <a href="http://deadpixel.co/2013/08/not-gonna-happen/">really in-depth analysis of a single piece of paper in the game world</a> and what the player's limited interactions with it say about the game.<br />
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21. Cameron Kunzelman is putting together a post of <a href="http://thiscageisworms.com/2013/08/19/a-collection-of-criticism-about-gone-home/">writings about <i>Gone Home</i></a>, so I will stop updating this notes post now with my favourite posts about it since they are all already there.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-25507369299125370792013-08-04T16:42:00.000-07:002013-08-04T16:42:06.654-07:00Notes on The Last Of Us<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1.<i> The Last Of Us</i> is a game of impossible tensions. A game of having cake and eating it too. A game that wants to walk a tightrope that so many games before it have fallen from. It wants its tightly-authored narrative and it wants the player to feel like their actions from one moment to the next are actually consequential. <i>The Last Of Us</i> is a remarkable game because, more often than not it finds this impossible balance. <i>The Last Of Us</i> is an infuriating game because the few times it does stumble, it plummets.<br />
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2. I once wrote in an article for <i>Hyper</i> (that I keep meaning to make available online) that the reason I loved <i>DayZ</i> was that it is the closest videogames have even gotten to evoking the feelings and themes of Cormac McCarthy's novel <i>The Road</i>. The loneliness coupled with a terror that <i>someone</i> could be <i>anywhere.</i> The savage wasteland stripped bare of resources. Spending hours in a single town, risking your life in the hope you might find a single can of beans, maybe even some bullets. Sitting on a hill and looking at a barn for a full five minutes to see if anyone exits it before you enter. The knowledge that if you worked with the other players on the map you could be invincible coupled with your finger tense over the mouse's left button, ready to fire in case you do actually see another player.<br />
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<i>DayZ</i> isn't a narrative equivalent to <i>The Road, </i>but it is a thematic equivalent. Because there is no story designed by the developers that must be seen through, it can focus purely on the non-story that is the entire mind and body consumed in the simple acts of managing resources and not trusting your fellow human. The simple act of not dying.<br />
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3. <i>The Last Of Us</i> wants to be <i>The Road</i> both thematically and narratively. It wants <i>DayZ</i>'s sense of brutal survivalism, but it also wants to tell an pre-authored story about a man and a child walking across the United States that will play out a certain way. I have no qualms with "a veneer of survivalism" to reappropriate <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s3733057.htm">Dan Golding's critique of <i>Bioshock: Infinite</i></a>. I like how <i><a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/notes-on-tomb-raider.html">Tomb Raider</a></i> and <i><a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/notes-on-max-payne-3-or-brendan-tries.html">Max Payne 3</a></i> and <i>Spec Ops: The Line</i> communicate the desperate, gritty survival of their characters without necessarily ever making me feel like that maybe, just maybe, I might actually die. Even <i>Metal Gear Solid 3</i>, with its non-realistic focus on hunger and injuries, gave a good veneer of survivalism, an ambience, without me as the player ever feeling like that my character might die from hunger or my wounds. Resources were always plentiful enough, but it was something to pester my mind constantly. Little concerns that don't go away.<br />
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<i>The Last Of Us</i> wants both, and this is the key tension that had me tipping back and forward from being in awe at the game and wanting to rage quit and never come back. It wanted to limit my supplies to such an extreme extent that I might feel like I would actually die. Like I might forget that there is a narrative in this game that is going to play out in a certain way and that the game has an obligation to make sure it is impossible for me, the player, to screw up to such an extent that I can't get through it.<br />
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And, truly, it is so incredibly remarkable that for the vast majority of the time, it pulls this off. I would spend half an hour or more steering Joel around, clutching a revolver with a single bullet in the chamber. The number "1" in the lower-right screen glaring at me, not letting me forget. Like McCarthy<i> </i>constantly reminding <i>The Road</i>'s reader exactly how many bullets are left in the gun. I might find two shotgun shells. I haven't used my shotgun for two hours, but I know it has no ammo. I stop, pull my shotgun out of my backpack, load the two shells into the five-shell chamber, and put it back in my backpack. I stand back up with my single revolver bullet and carry on. That these little moments are able to exist in a tightly authored game is remarkable.<br />
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4. But then it doesn't work. You are trapped in a room and you have to fight zombies for five minutes. Or you are hanging upside down from the ceiling protecting Ellie with an unlimited supply of revolver bullets. It's not that these segments aren't explained within the game (Ellie finds more bullets, magically, and throws them to Joel), but they completely jar with the gravity that the rest of the game has built up around firing a gun. It <i>devalues</i> bullets by making you use more of them in a single scene than you have previously used in the entire game. No single scene in <i>The Last Of Us</i> is bad in itself, but many of them jarred with the experience of desperate frugalness. Most particular the upside-down-with-unlimited-ammo segment (a segment I would be utterly delighted to play in, say, an <i>Uncharted</i> game). But this is that impossible tension. I usually have no qualms with doing what the designer wants me to do when I am playing an authored game. But <i>The Last Of Us</i> does such a great job of making me feel like I <i>might</i> run out of ammo and die that the times I had to do a lot of shooting, I really struggled.<br />
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5. Another (related) tension: <i>The Last Of Us</i> is an expensive blockbuster game that is, simultaneously, trying not to be a blockbuster game, and not wanting to stray too far from the conventions of blockbuster games. It doesn't want to be the same as every other game, but it doesn't want to stray too far from the path, either. It's a tension that underpins <a href="http://www.edge-online.com/features/the-last-of-us-the-definitive-postmortem-spoilers-be-damned/">this entire interview</a> on <i>Edge</i> with the game's creators. For every actually-creative choice they discuss, there is an anxiety that people won't get it (indeed, their focus testers apparently didn't). The idea that a game doesn't need multiple endings or choices or anything to be engaging. The idea that you can play a teenage girl in a dark and gritty game.<br />
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6. But the 'gamey-ness' is still there in <i>The Last Of Us</i>. It hasn't fully gone away. Every now and then it can't help but remind you that you are playing a AAA videogame. This is most apparent at the start. After an <i>incredible</i> opening, after a nicely-paced, slow tutorial out of the city and back in again, you have the most amazing sense of place. The military forces, life Outside The Walls, what these zombies have done to society, the toughness of life inside the walls. It's all there. Walking through the marketplace stitched together with tarps between old buses, where vendors sell barbecued rats, you <i>get</i> this place.<br />
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Then you walk into a square area full of waist-high boxes, and you know exactly what is going to happen.<br />
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The same happens at the water station. As I walk through it from one side of the other, with Joel's brother telling me his hopeful stories for the future, all I can see is the Videogame Cover everywhere, yelling at me that there will soon be a gunfight (and, indeed, it is a gunfight that exists for a gunfight's sake, adding nothing to the game).<br />
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I still go back and forward on whether or not this is a fair criticism. Should a videogame try to not be a videogame? I often speak highly of Hideo Kojima's games for <i>not</i> shying away from their own videogame-ness, but for embracing it. I think it bugged me in <i>The Last Of Us</i>, though, because it was inconsistent. For long stretches of time it was interested only in evoking its sensation of darkness, of getting me wrapped up and lost inside the story of these characters that I was controlling. But then, in pockets, it just wanted to be a videogame with 'videogame bits', because a videogame should have 'videogame bits'. I think those bits just felt like an inability to commit to a vision. But, they only stand out here because <i>The Last Of Us</i>, by and large, is committed to its vision like almost no other recent blockbuster.<br />
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7. And while I could complain that there is <i>still</i> too much shooting in this game (and I truly believe there is), there is no denying that those skirmishes feel unlike any other game. There is a weight to the guns, to the bullets. Every time you pull the trigger is a Big Deal (this is greatly helped by the fact you don't have access to an assault rifle for the vast majority of the game). And, wonderfully, you often get the sense that the same is true for your opponents, that they don't want to waste their ammo, either. The way these core mechanics that differ little from <i>Uncharted</i> have been converted into an entirely different genre and given an entirely different <i>feel</i> is an excellent achievement. I just wish I was doing it less often.<br />
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8. Others have, quite keenly, noted a trend of 'dadification' in videogames like <i>The Last Of Us</i>. As the young, twenty-something, mostly-male creators of blockbuster videogames start to get older and have their own families, we are seeing more videogames with themes of fathers protecting children/families. <i>The Last Of Us</i> is undeniably part of this trend. But I think <i>The Last Of Us</i> is also more interesting in that it isn't just using the relationship between a father and a child to frame a story; it is a story <i>about</i> fatherhood (and, more broadly, parenthood). That is far more interesting. There is the relationship between Joel and Sarah. Between Joel and Ellie. Between Sam and Henry. Between Ellie and David. Between Ellie and Marlene. What I find fascinating is that, apart from Joel and Sarah at the start of the game, none of these relationships are about the relationship between a kid and their birth parent, instead it is always a surrogate. Someone else who has stepped into the role of parent for one reason or another. <i>The Last Of Us </i>is a dadified game of dadified characters.<br />
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9. When <i>The Last Of Us</i> starts, you are playing as a teenage girl. After the intro is over, your partner (and boss, more or less), is a woman. The next major plot character you meet, who follows you for a time, is a black woman. Then Ellie, another teenage girl, joins you. A while later, the first male to ever join your party who is not Joel is, it is implied but never explicitly stated, gay. The next two people that join up with you are a black man and boy.<br />
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Make no mistake: all of these characters are in support roles. <i>The Last Of Us</i> is, at its core, another videogame about a straight, white, grizzly man with facial hair. But, I was incredibly pleased to see this diverse range of characters in the game. They never felt like lip service. They never felt like a quota that was trying to be filled. They never felt stereotypical (to me, at least). It just felt like a believably diverse representation of the kinds of people in this world. I really appreciated the effort. Though, it would've been nice to actually encounter some female bandits or guards or soldiers, apart from one in a single cut-scene.<br />
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10. But then there are the cannibals. Cannibalism is used to great effect in <i>The Road</i> and many other post-apocalypse narratives to convey the hardness of life, the desperation of the people. In these post-apocalypses, the Earth has been stripped bare of resources. In <i>The Road</i>, next to nothing lives. It makes sense that humans would, as a last resort, eat each other. In <i>The Last Of Us</i>, the world is more rich of life and plants than ever before. This isn't an apocalypse for Earth, just for mankind. Without humans dominating the world, wildlife has returned to the world in force. In such a world, I'm unconvinced that people would become cannibals.<br />
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Which is not to nitpick the realism of a zombie apocalypse. Yes, maybe the winter months push them over the edge. Yes, maybe they have created some weird, whacky ritual out of cannibalism. But that is exactly my problem: <i>The Last Of Us</i> wants to be one of those post-apocalypses where there aren't 'good' and 'bad' guys, but just humanity tearing itself apart as everyone tries to fend for themselves. In that world, 'cannibalism' feels like a lazily deployed shorthand for 'crazy post-apocalypse evil people'. You may as well replace them with demonic Nazis. They weren't interesting cannibals. They were Bad Guys and nothing more.<br />
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11. At various points in the game, I did not know how I was meant to be approaching a scene. In a game authored like this, I expect the game to find a way to tell me if it expects me to go in guns blazing, stealthily, or if I have the choice. Because I was playing on hard and because supplies felt so intensely sparse, I always tried stealth. But sometimes this wasn't always possible. Maybe a cut-scene would demand that the zombies are chasing me, and all the ones I've managed to sneak past suddenly are alerted to me after I step over an invisible tripwire. Maybe I restart a scene ten times because I want to stealth it successfully—only to get to the far side and realise I can't advance until I go back through the place and kill everyone.<br />
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If, maybe, Joel had more regularly muttered to himself or Ellie, "There's no way around these guys" or something, I would've got the hint of what was expected of me. Instead, I'd waste time frustrated that a certain approach wasn't working, unaware that I was just playing it the wrong way. For this reason, I think <i>The Last Of Us</i> is a game I will thoroughly enjoy a second time.<br />
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12. Just like the <i>Uncharted</i> games, <i>The Last Of Us</i> is a game of finely crafted moments. Two kids playing darts. Walking through the woods. Standing on a roof looking down on some grazing giraffes. <i>My god</i>, the giraffes. I think it is, perhaps, my single favourite design decision in the game, to have Joel and Ellie just lean on that rail and watch the giraffes for as long as the player will let them. They just stand there until the player presses a button and nudges them forward. It took me a long time to press a button. I wanted my characters to have this serenity forever. I didn't want them to go back into the darkness.<br />
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13. <i>The Last Of Us</i> is a game of jump cuts, not a game of fade-ins and fade-outs. Most videogames fade, but <i>The Last Of Us</i> cuts. Time skips forward. Scenes end abruptly. The <i>whole game</i> ends abruptly (and magnificently). Time cuts forward with each scene. It gives the game a very distinct ambience. Something... minimal. Something essentially. All the frayed ends have been shaved clean. This game won't waste your time with drawn out fade-ins or unnecessary plot. When it's done telling you something, it's done.<br />
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This is a style so consistent that you encounter it before you even get to the main menu. 'Sony Computer Entertainment presents' and 'Naughty Dog' appear suddenly on a black screen in silence, one right after the other, each cutting in then cutting out. Before I was even at the menu, I knew something about what this game was going for.<br />
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14. That consistency of tone is so important and so incredibly well achieved. <a href="http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=3056">Tim Rogers's review</a> details this much better than I could.<br />
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15. The boss battle against the bloater-or-whatever-they-are-called was terrible (and despite what the developers say, it <i>was</i> a boss battle). The boss battle against David was pretty great.<br />
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16. I have always liked how Naughty Dog deals with companions. I love that they can look after themselves and, occasionally, might even look after you. I like that I never have to worry about them. It didn't bother me the few times Ellie would stand right out in front of a guard while I am stealthing around, totally invisible to the guy walking past her. I can live with that. What did bother me, though, was when my companions would shout loudly around clickers or humans. Designing them to whisper when whispering is appropriate could've been a nice touch.<br />
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17. <i>The Last Of Us</i> has one of the best openings of any videogame. And one of the best endings.<br />
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18. Clickers were great. I am glad they killed in one hit. Unlike the other kinds of zombies, I could actually read them and understand how to act around them.<br />
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19. Naughty Dog are masters of environment design. The way they can take a building, age it twenty years and turn it on its side and have an environment that is both convincingly detailed and still fully navigable is a testament to their ability. Each and every place in <i>The Last Of Us</i> was a pleasure to just move through. So much so that the game, not to harp on, could have supported my engagement with fewer skirmishes. <br />
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20. While I was playing <i>The Last Of Us</i> and complaining about all the individual segments that really frustrated me, I predicted that those segments would not bother me in hindsight. I was right about this. Once I had finished the game, I was left with only admiration for this game. For the plot, for the characters, for the moment-to-moment things I had done throughout the game. It is still a game of tensions, of things that are incredible and things that are incredibly frustrating. But I don't think it could be one of these without the other. Here is a blockbuster game that is trying to do something interesting, pushing against the mould if not entirely breaking out of it. The final result, then, is a warped mould rather than something entirely unique. Frustrating because it doesn't always act the way you expect it to. Incredible because it doesn't seem particularly concerned about your expectations.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-9477279282708668272013-07-15T01:39:00.001-07:002013-07-15T01:56:23.321-07:00On On Games Criticism Criticism<div class="p1">
<i>[In an email, </i><a href="https://twitter.com/frederik_vdb"><span class="s1"><i>Frederik Van den Bosch</i></span></a><i> asked me how I felt about <a href="http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-07-09-warren-spector-wheres-gamings-roger-ebert">Warren Spector's </a></i><a href="http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-07-09-warren-spector-wheres-gamings-roger-ebert">GamesIndustry</a><i><a href="http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-07-09-warren-spector-wheres-gamings-roger-ebert"> op-ed about games criticism</a>. I wrote a sprawling, rambling reply because I find "Why don't we have any games criticism??" op-eds really interesting for a whole range of conflicting reasons. Anyway, I already wrote some rough thoughts out on the topic on Twitter when it happened but here are my conflicted, cyclical thoughts on the topic written no less roughly but in more words!] </i></div>
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It's the kind of piece that has been appearing every few months lately and will keep appearing more and more regularly into the future. Game criticism is becoming a 'thing'. That is, it's been around for ages, but it's very gradually and steadily snowballing and more people are realising it exists and, more importantly, that it <i>should</i> exist. That a healthy and diverse critical discourse is an essential component for any maturing medium, and one that videogames desperately needs. So people like Warren Spector or <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2012/11/why-are-we-still-so-bad-talking-about-video-games"><span class="s2">Helen Lewis</span></a> realise that games criticism matters because they've started to see it around and then, with fully good intentions, go and write op-eds about why game criticism is important.</div>
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So, on the surface, that is great! And I agree with the sentiment. But then, they tend to miss that people have been writing games criticism for <i>years</i> now. Decades even! I started blogging in 2009 and there had already been a vibrant critical culture online for years. Yes, it was mostly on blogs and a few games journalism outlets, but in the years since it has spread outwards and now you can find games criticism on The Guardian, Crikey, New Statesman, ABC Arts, Boston Phoenix (before it died), New Yorker, New York Times, etc. So my issue with articles like Spector's is they don't acknowledge all the work that has already been done to make a space for game criticism over, at the very least, the past decade.</div>
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BUT THEN. People not 'inside' games criticism can certainly be forgiven for not knowing it already exists. Game culture is insular enough as it is. Game criticism culture is <strike>insular</strike> a niche medium of writing that wants to expand but finds itself trapped within an insular subculture. People don't know it is there and I totally understand that. So when Helen Lewis wrote her piece last year, i responded with <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/helen-lewis/2012/12/where-find-good-videogames-criticism"><span class="s2">where the good writing is</span></a> instead of an angry rebuttal. Because I get that people don't know it is out there and that it is, in part, on us to make the case that we matter. (<a href="http://maryhamilton.co.uk/2013/07/where-is-the-roger-eberts-commissioning-editor-of-games/"><span class="s2">Though it is also on commissioning editors, too, really</span></a>). </div>
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BUT THEN! If you are going to write an op-ed about a subject, maybe do a bit of research to make sure that when you say something doesn't exist, it actually doesn't exist? But I don't know how you would actually find game criticism without knowing where to look for it (again, hence my New Statesman piece). I dunno. I'm frustrated that they don't seem to realise we exist, but I also totally get why they don't know so I struggle to get angry about it. Like, some people on twitter seemed amazed that he called for books about videogames without acknowledging <i>Killing is Harmless</i>. But I just Bing'ed "book about a video game" (Bing is good for neutral searches to counter your own google search history bias) and got no articles about <i>Killing is Harmless</i> so, again, I get it. (Though a bing search for 'videogame criticism' does seem to turn up a bunch of good results on the very first page, including one of my own blog posts, and <a href="http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2011/02/tom-bissell-and-simon-ferrari-on-games-criticism.html"><span class="s1">this great exchange between Simon Ferrari and Tom Bissell at</span><span class="s3"> <i>Paste</i></span></a>.)</div>
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(but then I'm conflating 'real journalism' with googling so... yeah.)</div>
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I guess, ultimately, the responsibility is on people like me who want to become known as game critics (in the "critics who write about games" sense) to make people realise a) why we matter; and b) that we are already here. And I guess we are already doing that, and that is why op-eds like Spector's saying we need more game criticism are starting to appear. We're clearly getting into their heads. They just don't quite realise that we're in there yet!</div>
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Also, as someone who reads and writes academically a lot, I know that "no one is writing X" often accidentally comes to stand for "I want more people to write X". </div>
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And then there's also issues with his claims to 'normal people' and which are problematic and normative. Though, I totally get that he means 'people beyond the super niche, hobbyist <i>gamer</i> culture', and I totally agree that that is a border we should be transgressing/space we should be evacuating. But yeah, 'normal people' is hella :-/. </div>
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Oh also [this isn't the email I wrote anymore but I just thought of this]. People got uppity about Spector's constant drawing parallels between games and film. I can't say that bothered me at all. No, videogames aren't films, but I'm getting pretty frustrated with people completely dismissing the overlaps between two mediums that largely depend on moving images presented on a screen. And the comparisons of the growth/maturation of a critical body of work around an emerging popular medium seem completely justified. I think I preferred when videogames had an inferiority complex to cinema much more than this current superiority complex but that is way off topic now. </div>
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Anyway. I could talk in circles about the topic of mainstream acceptance of videogame criticism for ever because I have super conflicted thoughts about it, as you can probably tell. So, in short: it's great to see more people acknowledge that games criticism is a necessary component of the medium, but it's disappointing to see the same people not acknowledge all the great writing that has already been done to make this possible, but it's totally understandable why they don't.</div>
Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-64050910778598215122013-06-16T01:31:00.000-07:002013-06-16T03:30:43.937-07:00Animal Crossing: My First DaysA few weeks ago when I bought a friend's old, secondhand 3DS, someone asked me if I was excited about <i>New Leaf</i>, to which I responded: "What is <i>New Leaf</i>?". Nintendo generally and the 3DS in particular have been a blindspot in my knowledge of what is going on in videogames for many years now and I had not even heard of the new <i>Animal Crossing </i>game—nor had I ever played an <i>Animal Crossing</i> before! Over the following weeks, my Twitter feed was slowly taken over by people playing it and, as I learned more about the game, I got pretty excited for it myself. When it was finally released here in Australia on Friday night, I downloaded it and started playing.<br />
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I don't know exactly what this blog post is. This games seems like something that is going unfold incredibly slowly and gradually and might not fit a post-play reflective kind of 'Notes' post. Instead, I guess it is an exploration of my first days of <i>Animal Crossing</i> as told through my inconsistent use of the 3DS screenshot function. If you, like me, have absolutely no prior experience with the series, maybe this will give you some insights.<br />
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It was about 10pm when I arrived in the town of Biddyton. 'Biddyton' because I asked my girlfriend to "think of a word that implies 'cute'" because I understood that <i>Animal Crossing</i> is pretty cute. She thought of <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/the-fantastic-adventures-of-biddy-the-hedgehog">Biddy the hedgehog</a> and that was that.<br />
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I normally play a woman in any game where I can choose my own gender. There's a whole heap of reasons for this. But <i>Animal Crossing</i> seemed like one of those individualistic games about <i>you</i> so I went with a guy. It seems incredibly weird and more than a little bit problematic than in such an individualistic game you have no choice but to be white, however.<br />
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I wandered around the late night of Biddyton for a while. Everyone was walking around and chilling out, probably excited by the hustle and bustle of their new mayor.<br />
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I found the Re-tail store. Then I went out again, picked a whole heap of cherries, then went back and bought myself a bed.<br />
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There wasn't a whole heap to do since everywhere was already closed, but I really wanted to play this game so I just walked around a whole heap. It was my undoing:<br />
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An hour later even Re-Tail had closed, but some of my peeps were still just out and about One of them gave me a striped shirt to wear. Then I made a pretty terrible hat.<br />
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Eventually, I accepted there really wasn't anything for me to do.<br />
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The real-time gameplay is really interesting. I have experienced it in other game in the need to wait for certain lengths of real time for a task to be completed (like in <i>Tiny Tower</i>) but this coupling of the game world to the real-world time is really interesting. On one hand, <i>Animal Crossing</i> is the kind of game you can play for as little as a few minutes a day. On the other hand, it demands you play at certain times to actually do things. It's somehow more flexible and more demanding than a typical game.<br />
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I already have a habit of returning to my house when I stop playing. So I walked back to my tent, laid down on my new bed, and closed the 3DS.<br />
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On Saturday I got a new parasol, apparently. I... have no memory of this happening.<br />
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Now that the shops were open, I was able to put the downpayment on my house. My character was really happy about this.<br />
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Also on Saturday I participated in the Bug Off, where I had to catch a good bug before 6pm. Again, the coupling to real-time is super interesting. By 6pm of the actual day, the competition would be over. Then I would have to attend the ceremony before 9pm. Stressful! I ended up taking my 3DS with me in a coat pocket out to a birthday party in a bar. Even then, I only came third as I hadn't had time to chase bugs from about 3pm. <i>Animal Crossing</i> is more punishing to people with actual lives than even a typical game!<br />
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On Saturday night I checked my station and saw I could visit <a href="http://nyarlu.net/">Brandon's</a> town, and so went on my first inter-town travel. He gave me some oranges and I felt bad for not having brought any cherries with me. Apparently fruit can be sold for different amounts in different towns. Supply and demand. I also felt awkward about not knowing proper etiquette for being in someone else's town. Multiplayer stresses me out.<br />
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On Sunday my house was completed and I moved out of my tent!<br />
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On Sunday morning I briefly visited <a href="http://about.me/hamface">Hammond</a>, but then his friend came for brunch and I had to go home again.</div>
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After I posted the above photo on Twitter, <a href="http://www.poopdoggyballs.com/">Daphny</a> commented on my "Morpheus glasses" and I lamented on my lack of cool fashion. She invited me to her town, Farrrrrt, and I went over and grabbed some cool new clothes. Her amazing town flag had me in high hopes that I would head back to Biddyton decked out in some pretty trendy clothes. </div>
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She met me at the station!</div>
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We went and saw the hedgehog ladies who sell clothes and she let me take whatever designs I wanted. I was still nervous about multiplayer etiquette and I wasn't sure if I was stealing things but it seemed like I could take designs and also leave designs there. I don't really understand how clothes work so far. I have clothes items but I also seem to be able to just apply materials to my character. Regardless, I got a cool Ghost Bro shirt.<br />
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I also went to her shop and, after asking permission, was able to buy a fishing rod to take home!<br />
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Daphny scared me with a Zelda mask and then I said I would go home. These two events were unrelated!<br />
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Back home, I used my new fishing rod to test out fishing. Then I just walked around my town in my new clothes and spoke to my peeps.<br />
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Oh yeah I almost got a new hat.<br />
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One of my peeps, Tutu I think her name is, wanted to see my house. She came over and I went to bed.<br />
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Then I ran down to the beach and spent the rest of the afternoon fishing.<br />
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So that is my first few days of <i>Animal Crossing: New Leaf</i>. I had nothing to do because it was too late, then I got stressed out by time constraints, then I chilled out with some friends and did nothing. So far it is a lovely, mundane, and slow moving game. The kind of game I would describe with the word 'nice' and actually mean it.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-68748066948418477692013-06-14T02:18:00.000-07:002013-12-05T21:27:03.376-08:00Notes on Max Payne 3 (or, Brendan Tries To Explain Why Max Payne 3 Is The Best Game He Has Played This Year)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1. <i>Max Payne 3</i> is the most pleasurable videogame I've played all year. 'Pleasurable' in the sense that I hate using the word 'fun' as a qualifier for a good videogame but don't really have a choice here. <i>Max Payne 3</i> is just a pleasure to play. I played it for the first time earlier this year when Xbox Live was selling the digital copy for $5. Just this week I decided to play through a second time. Not on a harder difficulty. Not to unlock or complete more side quests or achievements or anything. I just wanted to go through the motions a second time, to experience it a second time, watch Max's body in its world a second time.<br />
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2. Max's body. I could talk forever about Max's body. Rockstar get that a third-person game character's body is as much a spectacle to be looked at as a vehicle to control. They know how to give that body <i>weight</i>. Max controls well and, importantly, he looks good as you control him. He is meaty. He is heavy. He is not just a model with a dot-point list of moves; he is a body that exists in and reacts to a world. He is a presence. It's in the way he tenses and breathes out as a cut scene bleeds into gameplay. It's in the way he holds his two-handed gun by the barrel in his other hand while firing his pistol, in the way he has to drop that gun if he wants to hold two pistols, in the way he wedges that gun under his shoulder while reloading the pistol. It's in the constant changing of his body as the game progresses—in both injuries and clothes. It's in the way you have pull yourself off the ground after a dive. It's in the way he screams "God <i>damn</i> it!" at a locked door at the end of the penultimate level. It is a pleasure to watch yourself control Max.<br />
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3. <i>Max Payne 3</i> is a cinematic game. It is a game that is about the pleasure of moving images as much as it is about control. It is a game about making things look cool.<br />
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4. The pornographic fixation on gore and violence is gratuitous but unlike in, say, <i>Bioshock: Infinite</i>, doesn't feel out of place. It feels like it belongs here, for better or worse. I don't think I really need to follow the last bullet from my gun to the final dude's face and out the other side, but there's something undeniably and ashamedly attractive about it all the same. The dynamism. The slow-mo gratuitous deaths are rendered more... bearable because they 'actually' happen in the world. If you keep pulling the trigger to pump more slow-mo bullets into that corpse you will be wasting real bullets.<br />
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5. The use of slow-mo and bullet time generally means the world is rendered in immaculate detail. Countless little props waiting to be knocked over by stray bullets. Every skirmish leaves an incidental mess in its wake. A mess that is ironically satisfying to stop and stare at once the fight is done. "I did that."<br />
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6. Not being able to go straight from prone (after diving through the air) to in cover is a pain. Having to stand fully erect between the two animations is a huge irritation, and the only time the game reminds me that Max is indeed just a character model with a finite number of moves and not a fluid, existing body.<br />
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7. Why do I love some shooters but despise others? It's all in how well the game does what it tries to do. So many games want to be 'about' something else and just use generic shooting gameplay to fill in the gaps because they don't know what else to put there. <i>Max Payne 3</i> is a game <i>about</i> shooting. It knows it is a shooter and it focuses all its energy on being a <i>good</i> shooter in the way <i>Die Hard</i> spends all its energy on being a <i>good</i> action film (yes, I just called <i>Max Payne 3</i> the <i>Die Hard</i> of videogames). For all of Max's waxing poetic and moping, it's all within the self-referential frame of game about a guy who shoots a bunch of people. "I'm a dumb move kind of guy," max says towards the end. He knows exactly what he is.<br />
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8. Related, <i>Max Payne 3</i> is a videogame that isn't ashamed to be a videogame. Videogames present so many tropes that players use to stitch together a reality. We know that a medkit 'represents' a character recovering from their injuries. All those individual bullets that our character shrugged off 'represent' near misses that we can make sense in our head. When we play videogames we use our imagination to fill in the gaps of what 'really' happened. We don't suspend disbelief so much as we actively make the game make sense. Which is why I find <i>Max Payne 3</i> so fascinating because it is less concerned with the player making the world make sense but in Max as a character ignoring the things the player usually has to ignore. The most obvious example is the use of painkillers instead of a medkit. Max doesn't get better from his injuries. He <i>ignores</i> them. He suppresses the pain. In the next cut scene his clothes are still red from where actual bullets passed through his body. But fuck it. He is a playable character. That's what playable characters go through. he just pushes on.<br />
But it also shines through more subtly throughout the game. It's in the way Max acknowledges the simply bizarre number of enemies running at him. In the way he makes explicitly thoughtless decisions to keep getting in a mess. In a way, <i>Max Payne 3</i> is about the curse that is being the playable character in a AAA game: you are going to do some nasty shit and you going to be a not very good person. It doesn't make sense. Just take some pain killers and push through.<br />
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9. I say in <i>Killing is Harmless</i>, I think, that what <i>Spec Ops: The Line</i> changed for me was not that I would no longer play shooters, but that I could no longer accept that the character in a shooter is a good guy. Max is not a good guy. He is the kind of guy that the main character of a shooter would have to be. He is the kind of guy that shoots first then realises maybe he shouldn't have shot the gangster's kid later but damn it felt good so whatever.<br />
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10. Also on <i>Spec Ops</i>, <i>Max Payne 3</i> is the kind of game I really enjoy but can totally see why others might hate it, and I couldn't fault them for it.<br />
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11. <i>Max Payne 3</i> has a conflicted core when it comes to the depiction of poverty. It acknowledges in passing the socioeconomic reasons why kids (well, at least boys) will join gangs in Sao Paulo. it acknowledges that systems of capitalism mean the rich get richer and the poor get desperate. Max snidely comments on a rooftop party of rich people drinking cocktails looking down over the favelas as a trickle down economy. Yet, despite the occasional quips, the game is still happy to play into the same tropes for the majority of the game where you shoot a whole bunch of dark-skinned gangsters. Max himself acknowledges this is problematic, but the game doesn't.<br />
Though, I do like that it is ultimately the rich people that are at fault, that Max feels some kind of allegiance with the people of the favela. I like that Serrano is allowed to walk away. I like that when Passos says "How many are there??" at one point, Max replies flatly, "How many kids want new sneakers?" I like that when Max walks into the favela, there is the only non-violent sequence in the whole game, that the game makes us stop and tells us, hey, this is a generic and cool place for an action game or film to have skirmishes, but also real people live here, okay? Max and the player are made to feel like outsiders before they shoot up the favela like every other American action hero in South America. But for all its acknowledgements of social issues, you still spend a lot of the game shooting evil poor people.<br />
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12. Women aren't treated any better. <i>Max Payne 3</i> found itself in the second episode of "<a href="http://www.feministfrequency.com/2013/05/damsel-in-distress-part-2-tropes-vs-women/">Tropes vs Women in Videogames</a>", and rightly so. I enjoy the game's story and Max's development over it greatly, but there is no denying that it heavily relies on the damsel trope. Women are reduced to objects against which masculinity can be commented on. Discussing heterosexual, masculine identities through relationships isn't a problem, but it is when it is such a dominant, commonly repeated trope at the expense of fleshed our representations of other identities. There are no women in <i>Max Payne 3</i> who are no victims of violence waiting for Max to try to save them. Yes, that is Max's schtick: reacting against women being beaten/killed/kidnapped. But the fact that is his schtick is hugely problematic.<br />
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13. Rockstar are often commended on the sheer size of their worlds, but it is their attention to minute detail that I fall for. Any single square foot of space in any <i>Max Payne 3</i> level will be busy with litter, rubble, signs, rust, shelves, props. The dilapidated hotel is alive with rubble. The favela is a sprawling mess of dead ends and chicken coops and buildings stacked impossibly on buildings. There is one bit where some old plastic chairs are atop a corrugated iron roof in a makeshift balcony. So much excruciating detail that brings the world to life.<br />
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14. I didn't notice the game's music for my entire first play of the game until TEARS started playing on the final level in the airport. Max has walked into this airport giving no fucks, storming into the passenger terminal. It is the first and only time in the game that he is doing something on his own accord. No more blindly trying to rescue someone else. No more just going where De Silva points him. He is here because he wants to kill a man, and he is pissed off. You move through the terminal and the vocals emerge just as you start to gain ground over the UFE. It just fits.<br />
For the rest of the game, Health's soundtrack is flat and dull, but always in a good way. It perfectly mirrors Max's drug-softened senses. Like the music of a much livelier action game being played two houses away. Even as action picks up, the music hardly does. Maybe adding a drum beat or a guitar to the drone. Always slightly disinterested and not quite there. Just like Max.<br />
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15. Ah. The airport. I love how pathetic Max feels by that point. He always knew he was pathetic but that self-loathing just made him even more pathetic and by the final stages he has finally realised it. Marching into that police station (well, marching out of it) is a good start, but Max is still doing what he is told to do, and he still doesn't get his pay off at the end. The <i>rage</i> with which he yells "God <i>damn</i> it" at that door is equal parts frightening and therapeutic because your character <i>finally</i> has some emotional release (watching Max go off at the organ harvesting doctor is up there, too). But it is when he just walks into that airport that Max is on the front foot. It's like, right, this character has had a real mess of a life and he is not a good person but here he can finally just do what he wants to do. And he does. He kills everyone in the airport, picks up a grenade launcher, chases down the main bad guy, and breaks his legs. It's not 'good' by any stretch, but Max getting his way, just this once, is a good place to end things. As he walks off into the sunset, there is no more voice over narration. There's nothing more to say. He got his way.<br />
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16. I have a thing for non-diegetic writing. I like words splashed on my screen in a stylistic matter utterly disinterested in 'immersion'. I loved it in <i>Splinter Cell Conviction</i>, in the way it was like a projector splashing Fisher's thoughts and memories on every surface like the game is an exploration of a conflicted mind. <i>Max Payne 3</i> doesn't try to put its words 'in' the world; it just splashes them on top of it. I think perhaps they could've been more restrained with the approach. Some of the words they highlight as not as clever as they think they are. But I like the idea and, for the most part, I love the execution. I guess I just like words.<br />
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17. <i>Max Payne 3</i> is the first game I've played for a very, very long time that I will concede, yes, probably is better on a PC. The pixel-wide crosshair demands pinpoint accuracy. The need in places to shoot grenades out of midair is near impossible on a controller without aim-assist.<br />
But the aim-assist is great and makes the game perfectly playable, to be sure—except when it decides to lock on to that guy behind the pillar instead of the three in plain sight. The lock-on-to-torso and need to manually aim for the head is a good compromise of Max looking like a badass and the player feeling like a badass. I also was not too concerned with pinpoint accuracy, and was far more interested in creating an interesting, chaotic mess of a gunfight, much like in <i>Tomb Raider</i>. But another run of the game on a harder difficulty with only free-aim is not something I will be doing with a controller.<br />
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18. I liked finding the bits of golden guns but Christ I hate having to carry golden guns around. I liked the extra story elements of the clues on each level.<br />
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19. It is hard to over-estimate the sheer polish of the presentation. The way all the things I've already talked about come together to create this seamless experience from start to end. The care in modelling a different Max for nearly every level. The blood on his t-shirt from when he got punched in the face on the previous level, still lingering. The care paid to the world. The care paid to the music. <i>Max Payne 3</i> is one of those cinematic blockbuster games where it all just comes together to be a work that—for the most part—is a joy to just sit back and have wash over you.<br />
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20. So many games over the past two years have turned me off with unnecessary boss battles. With maybe two exceptions, all of <i>Max Payne 3</i>'s notable bad guys are given insignificant cut scene deaths, or have 'boss battles' that simply ask you to kill all the dudes around them. No glory. Just dead and move on. I loved the ambivalence.<br />
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21. QTEs where I have all the time in the world to press the button. That is how you do QTEs that I don't hate.<br />
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22. There is a character in the game that, on my play, I hated. The retired American cop that you first meet locked up in the nightclub then again working at a charity organisation down in the favela. Max asks him to help shoot the gangsters in the club but he refuses, having retired. In the favela, he is just some chummy, baffoonish man who is more interested in smalltalk about his family than anything else. But on my second game, I realised that this character wasn't some throwaway sketch. This is exactly the man that Max wants to be but never can. The cop who had a normal family life, then retired to do charity work. The ex-cop who refuses to get in a gun fight because he is retired. That isn't Max. The fact you meet him for the second time right at the end of the nonviolent sequence, when Max goes for his longest time without shooting anyone, speaks volumes. I love how much the game doesn't linger on this. Max doesn't have some smart one liner to compare himself to the other ex-cop. He probably doesn't even notice the irony. He just moves on and shoots up a stripjoint.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-32727071922617432842013-05-18T01:17:00.001-07:002013-12-05T21:27:28.962-08:00Notes on Badland<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1. Think: the dark humour of <i>Lemmings </i>meets the aesthetics of <i>Limbo</i> meets the controls of <i>Jetpack Joyride</i>.<br />
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2. <i>Badland</i> is a simple creation. Your creator is on the lefthand side of the screen. It's like a hairless doll's head (like the spider thing in <i>Toy Story</i>) with little bat wings that are far too weak to carry it competently. Holding to fly upwards; release to fall downwards. Forward momentum is automatic. Your only goal is to get to the end of the level before the auto-scrolling screen leaves you behind.<br />
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3. Holding the screen to fly up feels counterintuitive when the action you are performing is flapping wings. It feels like you should be tapping repetitively. I'm clearly not the only person who feels like this. After struggling with the first few levels, I went to the in-game help where it explicitly tells you that you shouldn't be tapping—like the creators knew that is what the player would naturally do. Which begs the question: why didn't they just do what feels natural?<br />
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4. There are puzzles, in a sense, but hardly any. There are 'points', in a sense, but they don't really matter in any meaningful way. <i>Badland</i> is one of those precious few iPhone games which simply exists to be experienced, to just get to the end, to just see it happen. Forget high scores or challenging puzzles.<br />
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5. As you move through each world there are pickups. Some make you faster, some slower. Some make your doll-head-bat character grow in size; some make it shrink. Some, significantly, create clones of your character. Some create a <i>lot</i> of clones. The closest the game has to points is the number of clones that make it safely to the end of the level.<br />
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6. The thing is, you can't control the clones. Or, rather, you can, but they are all controlled by the same input, but they are not all in the same space. So safely guiding this creature around boulders means those other ten are going to fly directly into a buzzsaw. You can't save everyone.<br />
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7. Sometimes the sheer number of clones are their own downfall. A scene: there are five clones flapping flaccid across the screen. You accidentally pick up a series of powerups that make each of them grow as the passageway narrows. Suddenly, you have five oversized dollheads all jammed into a small tunnel, and none of them can move. You tap and they just flap and their eyes open wide and then they are eaten by the side of the screen.<br />
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8. In <i>Badland</i>, your character is pathetic. They are so pathetic. They flap and fall and rise because their wings are too small. They bang into pipes and thud into boulders. The splat themselves on buzzsaws and squish themselves in tunnels. They are stupid, like lemmings. It's a dark, sadistic game, where most of the satisfaction of playing is just in trying to move this bloated, pathetic little creature through this bad land that hates him.<br />
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<br />Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3402915042780490574.post-65050039326340640082013-05-07T17:39:00.003-07:002013-05-07T18:27:17.355-07:00Notes on Tomb Raider<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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1. Just like <i>Uncharted</i> did a good job of riffing off <i>Tomb Raider</i> without just copying <i>Tomb Raider</i>, <i>Tomb Raider</i> does a good job of riffing off <i>Uncharted</i> without just copying <i>Uncharted</i>. It is very much inspired by that character-driven, action/platforming model, but it feels like its own game with its own vibe, not just a reskin.<br />
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2. I love how Lara moves. I love watching her even as I enact her. I love feeling like I am acting. I love the way the animations change to shift the tones of my inputs. The way she will run when we are alone but then cower and creep with the same weight put on the thumbstick when enemies are around. She is a tremendously well animated model and it is such a pleasure to just <i>be</i> her.<br />
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3. I am a big fan of sticky-cover shooters, but after playing <i>Tomb Raider</i> I am left wondering why I ever had to push a button to stick to cover. The way Lara just naturally hides behind a wall, just organically sticks to it, is so fluid and intuitive.<br />
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4. Is it a problem that <i>Tomb Raider</i> is, first and foremost, a cover shooter? Two answers: yes; no. I enjoyed the cover shooting. It felt gritty. The guns felt messy. The enemies felt as amateur and confused and unprofessional as Lara. As far as a cover shooter trying to portray a sense of gritty survival, I think it did that well.<br />
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5. <i>But</i>, there was certainly <i>too much</i> cover shooting for the story it was trying to tell and the scene it was trying to set. Excuse me while I go armchair developer for a moment, but I found myself at multiple times wishing the game had taken a <i>Splinter Cell: Conviction</i> approach. That is: pseudo-messy-stealth until you inevitably screw up and then have to use loud guns. A few scenes do embrace that, where Lara sneaks around and uses silent arrows for a few kills before she is spotted. It creates this great, <i>Far Cry 2</i>-esque in control/out of control seesaw. But too often <i>Tomb Raider</i> just has waves of men running right at you from the start. I don't mind that I spent most of <i>Tomb Raider</i> killing dudes, but I wish I had spent that time killing less dudes with more consideration.<br />
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6. On the dudes:<i> </i>the game made some interesting attempts to make them clearly <i>not</i> elite soldiers, but just stranded survivors who actually have a disadvantage to Lara (they are not 'Crofts'). Most of them had bows because they are not an army decked out with unlimited firearms. A lot of them were as scared of Lara as they were angry. A few overheard conversations later in the game really humanise them. You heard them talk about how they are grouped into squads on the island based on which ship they were on that crashed. One group jokes and teases another group in some kind of tribal rivalry. For the most part, it didn't feel 'unbelievable' (which is different from unrealistic) that Lara was holding her own against these men, because these men were not elite soldiers. I liked that. The only problem was the game did not commit to this. It made allusions to the amateur status of your enemies, but never really committed to it long-term over the entire game. So, too often, it just became 'shooting bros' again and again. Fun 'just shooting bros', but 'just shooting bros' all the same.<br />
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7. <i>Tomb Raider</i>'s biggest improvement over <i>Uncharted</i> is that the act-three enemies did not break the game.<br />
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8. The limit of weaponry was excellent. When I got the machine gun and the game went all <i>Modern Warfare Slow Motion</i> so I could use it to wipe out a room of dudes, I distinctly remember saying, "URGH." Then I vowed I would play the entire game just the pistol and bow. But then I got the shotgun and that was enjoyably messy and loud. So I only used those three weapons (and the machine gun when I really had to). I like having a character with a quantifiable, knowable amount of gear. I like knowing exactly what is on my character's body. It adds to the survival sense the game is going for. I liked that I wasn't just picking up new guns every thirty seconds. Though, that worked for <i>Uncharted</i>. <i>Uncharted</i> gave me a sense of desperation, of clawing for a new gun frantically. <i>Tomb Raider</i> gives me a sense of possessive aggression, of refusing to let go of any of my gear. Both work in their own way.<br />
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9. The game has an unhealthy obsession with gore. I think it wanted to shock me, with the mass graves of random messy meaty bits. But it was equal parts terrible and laughable. It was beyond believable that this many corpses could possibly be on this island. Several small countries would have to have been depopulated to make this many corpses. Unless the game was trying to make me laugh, it utterly failed to do whatever it was trying to do with all those corpses.<br />
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10. One of my favourite things is characters wearing permanent scars throughout a game. Martin Walker. Max Payne. John McClane (not a game, but same deal). I'm not sure if I mentioned in my <a href="http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/notes-on-bioshock-infinite.html"><i>Bioshock Infinite</i> notes</a> how much I liked that Booker's hand stayed bandaged for the entire game after it was stabbed. The permanence of experience inscribed on the body is a nice touch. For the most part, <i>Tomb Raider</i> did this well. It's a risky thing, mutilating a woman's body for the camera. There is a lot of ways that can go wrong, can seem like exploitation, can actually be exploitation. It very much <i>was</i> exploitation in the marketing material leading up to <i>Tomb Raider</i>'s release: here is a girl panting and sighing as she is injured. The opening scenes of <i>Tomb Raider</i> are pretty bad, too. She takes a pretty dramatic, unnecessary beating before I have even done anything. I guess they wanted to throw her in the deep end and see if she could swim. It made me uncomfortable at the start of the game, but as the blood and mud from those opening cut scenes faded and were replaced with scars and injuries from Lara's and my joint experiences, it was better. It didn't feel like (to me, at least) that they were just mutilating some woman's body for no reason. It felt like she was earning scars to be proud of in a way usually only allowed of male bodies.<br />
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<i>Edit 10b. </i>Lara's overly gory deaths <b>were</b> terrible and exploitative and cringe-worthy for totally the wrong reasons. Watching her get punctured by tree branches or smashed agains the same aquatic rock no matter where abouts on the island she falls into the water was super gross. It didn't add anything. It was just, "Hey, watch this woman get beat up before you get back to the action."<br />
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11. With the exception of Lara's girlfriend, Sam, I have no idea who any of the other 'good guy' characters were meant to be. Apparently Roth meant a whole heap to Lara, but I have no idea who he actually was. For the first part of the game where everyone was separated, names were appearing in the subtitles and over the radio and I had no faces to connect them to. I did not care for any of these characters the way Lara seemed to. Also, they were all terrible. White geek dude who looks like Harry Potter (and who gets to sacrifice himself to save Lara in a weirdly symbolic way). Tribal islander who Lara turns to for support whenever she just 'feels' something in a spiritual way (he is Tribal so he will totally get her, you know?). Angry Irish man who is from Glasgow, in case you missed him telling you five times. I cared about Sam. The rest of the characters were just filler for plot points.<br />
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12. Apparently these characters are fleshed out by the diary entries they left scattered all over the island before they crashed onto the island (yep). I wouldn't know because I didn't pay attention to any of these. How to do a good in-game diary: record the character speaking it so I can listen to it even as I continue to play the game. How to do a tolerable in-game diary: have a paragraph of text for me to quickly read before I return to play the game. How to do a totally frustrating in-game diary: force me to look at the wall of text <i>while</i> the character reads it. If the character has recorded voice over of this text, why am I being forced to look at it while they read it?<br />
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13. So <i>Tomb Raider</i>'s story is ridiculous, prevented from falling in on itself only by the strength of Lara's character (I <i>really</i> liked Lara as a character). But it was so much more enjoyable than <i>Bioshock Infinite</i>. Why? I've been thinking about this for some time. I think, ultimately, <i>Tomb Raider</i> never tried to be anything it wasn't. It never tried to not be a game about shooting a bunch of dudes to get off an island. It was honest. <i>Bioshock: Infinite</i> pretended to be about racism and nationalism and parallel universes when it was actually just about shooting dudes. It was dishonesty. <i>Tomb Raider</i> set up my expectations adequately for the game I was going to play; <i>Bioshock: Infinite</i> did not. I spend a lot of time comparing different games and my reactions to them.<br />
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14. Lots of little things made <i>Tomb Raider</i>'s platforming really nice. Just a few extra button presses demanded of the player to couple you to whatever flimsy structure Lara is hanging onto just that bit more intimately. When Lara makes a wide jump and only manages to grab with one hand, you have to tap X to get the other hand to grab. When you jump at a wall that Lara needs to use her pick to hold onto, you have to tap X as you sail past it to latch on. To scamper up high walls, you need to tap A a second time for Lara to kind of wall-jump and get a bit extra height. It helped make the platforming feel a bit more intimiate than just finding the path for Lara to stick to. It felt more perilous.<br />
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15. My god. The split-second insta-fail quick time events. How are these actually still appearing in games?<br />
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16. At the very end of the game, just before the credits, the screen goes white and the line "A SURVIVOR IS BORN" splashes across the screen. It is pretty terrible. It would be like if at the end of <i>Romeo & Juliet</i> someone just yelled out: "TWO LOVERS JUST DIED." It served no purpose other than to turn the entire game into a ten-hour trailer for the inevitable sequel. It also just totally belittles all of Lara's later achievements in the previous games. Lara is much more than a survivor. We know that. We've seen what she goes on to do. By labelling her as <i>just</i> a survivor makes her too reactionary, too much on the back foot. That isn't Lara. Lara is headstrong and determined. She doesn't go on to just survive. She goes on to live.<br />
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17. The camera work is exceptional. Someone went through this game with a fine comb, tweaking the exact placement of the camera in every scene to be in an optimal, cinematic position. I don't think it ever <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/180-degree_rule">crossed the line</a>, as far as I recall, and always felt organic even as it was clearly staged. Throughout the game, you often perform the same action, like climbing a wall, but with the camera positioned differently, and it breathes new life into the same old actions.<br />
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18. 50 Shades of Brown.<br />
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19. It is really, really refreshing to just be a woman in a game. Or, perhaps more accurately, to not be some well-built white dude <i>yet again</i>. It's not for me to say if Lara is or isn't sexist, but I felt like the game walked a fine line where she was very much a woman (not just a man with breasts) without being reduced to an object. It was just really nice to be a woman for once.<br />
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20. <i>Tomb Raider</i> is the kind of disposable genre game I would play again just because it feels good to play and it is fun to watch myself play.Brendan Keoghhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01772283679871140397noreply@blogger.com5