Proteus for Playstation 3

(Proteus spoilers below)

I.

The other night I dreamed that I died. It was super weird. 

I was aware I was dying. 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 dying. Not at some abstract point in the future but right now. 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.

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 Limbo 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.

Then I woke up. 

"Yes," I thought to myself. "That is probably what dying would feel like."

II.

Several nights later, Proteus 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.

I've played Proteus 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.

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 pretty healthy fear of the inevitability of death if I dwell on it too much, so perhaps that is why I remembered my dream so vividly. 

When our Proteus 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.

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.

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.

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. 

It was my dream. The inevitability. The sense of 'shit this is happening right now'. The strange sense of floating in nothingness. The sense of wanting to extend my connection with this word for just a moment longer.

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--

--my eyes closed, and I returned to the main menu.

And, yeah, that is probably what dying feels like.

III.

Proteus is really lovely on PS3. Play it with someone you love.

If you were wanting a real essay on Proteus, you could do a lot worse than Dan Golding's piece on Meanjin.

Freeplay and Other Haps

MegaGIRP? MegaGIRP.

Hello.

It's been a very busy and exciting week with a lot of things happening. First and foremost, Freeplay 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.

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 manuscript. 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.

Andrew Brophy and Chad Toprack also did a great job with the Hovergarden party (pictured). On par with the Wild Rumpus and Kill Screen parties I've attended at GDC.

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 No Show Conference, 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 writeup for The Guardian gives a pretty good gist of things.

At Freeplay, I spoke with Leena van Deventer on a panel called "Travel Diaries". I spoke about Towards Dawn and Leena wrote about her Sim, Interrupted project. I recorded the talk and you can download the audio I recorded here. 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 Widget, her Women in Development project.

After Freeplay I had an Academic Conference at RMIT, the IE Conference. I presented a paper on Towards Dawn and permanent death. I've uploaded it to my Academia.edu page if you want to read it. The paper I presented at DiGRA on Spec Ops: The Line is there as well, if you were after that.

And, finally, I have two articles in the newest issue of Five Out Of Ten that just got released. I write about writing about 868-Hack and embodiment in games. This is the fifth issue of Five Out Of Ten. It's exciting to see an independent project for games writing be so successful!

Aaaaaand that is about everything for now.

Grand Theft Auto V and Everyday Photography

I have a lot of things to say about GTA V. 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 GTA IV and Saints Row. Lots of things! I have a review forthcoming and there will probably also be a Notes post at some point.

For now, just a quick note about how much I dig the in-game screenshot system. What I really admired about GTA IV 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, GTA V has abandoned that sense of everyday-ness in its return to the PS2 era absurdity, but here and there, it is there.

Primarily, it is in the screenshot system. Like GTA IV, 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 GTA IV. 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.

Since GTA IV 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. GTA V 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.

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.

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.

And all of this is reinforced through the genius inclusion of the ability to take selfies.

GTA V falls short in many, many areas, but its depiction of everyday practices through mobile media is as fascinating as it was in GTA IV. So, anyway, this wasn't the first thing I expected to write about GTA V 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.

EDIT: Patricia Hernandez just reminded me that the new HD release of Wind Waker similarly has a selfie mechanic. This is the greatest thing. More of this, please.

Sir, You Are Being Hunted

I've been playing the alpha build of Sir, You Are Being Hunted. It's really nice. It feels like a single-player DayZ. 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.

Disconnected Updates.

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:

1. Dan Golding and I launched our own company. It is called Press Select, 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 blog post to tell you more about what we are doing, or you can read the article Polygon wrote about us.

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 Cameron Kunzelman for putting me up for the week so I could actually afford to attend. I presented a paper drawing from my work with Killing is Harmless. It is about Spec Ops: The Line, 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 here if you are into that.

3. Michael Brough's 868-Hack (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 Animal Crossing addiction as it started to dominate my portable gaming time.

And that is that!

Notes on Gone Home

1. As the credits rolled on Gone Home I felt happy, sad, and old.

2. Gone Home 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. So stop reading now if you haven't played it yet.

3. I think Cameron Kunzelman has already sad everything I will say about the game here far more succinctly.

4. Gone Home 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 Gone Home, 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 surely). Lots of things made me nostalgic and melancholy in Gone Home, but its defining sensation was one of dread amplified by a hyperbolic, adolescent imagination.

5. Which, now that I write that, makes me think back to when I talked to Walt Williams at GDC 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. Gone Home plays to the strengths of an adolescent medium, feeding on my juvenile fears that something terrible is surely going to happen eventually because this is a videogame.

6. I love the way Gone Home 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 Gone Home, I expected the worst.

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 TV-trope depressed gay teenager. She has run off with the love of her life. Of course the house is a mess, then. Of course! 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 surely there aren't but maybe there are. To bring in your expectations from other media that the gay teenager surely killed herself and have that expectation shattered.

8. Gone Home 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. Gone Home, Dear Esther, Proteus, Journey. 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. Last Of Us 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.

9. I love Gone Home's 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.

10. BUT! I love that this game isn't about Katie. Kind of like the way Metal Gear Solid 2 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 Gone Home'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 Gone Home/Metal Gear Solid 2 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.

11. Perhaps Gone Home feels so melancholy even at the end because I never got to hug my younger sister.

12. I miss the 90s. Like, I really 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).

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 adults who remember September 11 about as poorly as I remember the Berlin War falling down.

This is not to say I am old. Everyone older than me would scoff at such a statement. I am saying that I am old enough 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.

So Gone Home was nostalgic for me in the most literal possible sense. Nostalgia is derived from the Greek nostos ("homecoming") + algos ("pain, grief, distress") (thanks, Google). Gone Home 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. Gone Home isn't a memory palace; it's a memory museum.

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 things 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 one vague exception) 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.

13. Courtney Stanton mentioned on Twitter that Gone Home has replaced Portal for her game-to-show-people-who-don't-like-games-what-videogames-are-capable-of (I'm paraphrasing). I could not agree more.

14. Ben Abraham wrote a really interesting piece on how the game plays off tropes to create a ludonarrative harmony (oh no he didn't (oh yes he did)).

15. Merritt Kopas's personal thoughts on the game and her own childhood are really moving.

16. Some thoughts by Mattie Brice about her relationship with the 90s and indie games and nostalgia and Gone Home.

17. Anna Anthropy's thoughts on the game.

18. Kim Delicious's thoughts on the game.

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 Gone Home. 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 Gone Home, 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.

20. Naomi Clarke wrote a really in-depth analysis of a single piece of paper in the game world and what the player's limited interactions with it say about the game.

21. Cameron Kunzelman is putting together a post of writings about Gone Home, so I will stop updating this notes post now with my favourite posts about it since they are all already there.

Notes on The Last Of Us

1. The Last Of Us 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. The Last Of Us is a remarkable game because, more often than not it finds this impossible balance. The Last Of Us is an infuriating game because the few times it does stumble, it plummets.

2. I once wrote in an article for Hyper (that I keep meaning to make available online) that the reason I loved DayZ was that it is the closest videogames have even gotten to evoking the feelings and themes of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road. The loneliness coupled with a terror that someone could be anywhere. 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.

DayZ isn't a narrative equivalent to The Road, 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.

3. The Last Of Us wants to be The Road both thematically and narratively. It wants DayZ'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 Dan Golding's critique of Bioshock: Infinite. I like how Tomb Raider and Max Payne 3 and Spec Ops: The Line communicate the desperate, gritty survival of their characters without necessarily ever making me feel like that maybe, just maybe, I might actually die. Even Metal Gear Solid 3, 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.

The Last Of Us 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.

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 constantly reminding The Road'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.

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 devalues 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 The Last Of Us 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 Uncharted 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 The Last Of Us does such a great job of making me feel like I might run out of ammo and die that the times I had to do a lot of shooting, I really struggled.

5. Another (related) tension: The Last Of Us 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 this entire interview on Edge 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.

6. But the 'gamey-ness' is still there in The Last Of Us. 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 incredible 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 get this place.

Then you walk into a square area full of waist-high boxes, and you know exactly what is going to happen.

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).

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 not shying away from their own videogame-ness, but for embracing it. I think it bugged me in The Last Of Us, 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 The Last Of Us, by and large, is committed to its vision like almost no other recent blockbuster.

7. And while I could complain that there is still 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 Uncharted have been converted into an entirely different genre and given an entirely different feel is an excellent achievement. I just wish I was doing it less often.

8. Others have, quite keenly, noted a trend of 'dadification' in videogames like The Last Of Us. 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. The Last Of Us is undeniably part of this trend. But I think The Last Of Us 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 about 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. The Last Of Us is a dadified game of dadified characters.

9. When The Last Of Us 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.

Make no mistake: all of these characters are in support roles. The Last Of Us 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.

10. But then there are the cannibals. Cannibalism is used to great effect in The Road 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 The Road, next to nothing lives. It makes sense that humans would, as a last resort, eat each other. In The Last Of Us, 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.

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: The Last Of Us 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.

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.

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 The Last Of Us is a game I will thoroughly enjoy a second time.

12. Just like the Uncharted games, The Last Of Us 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. My god, 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.

13. The Last Of Us is a game of jump cuts, not a game of fade-ins and fade-outs. Most videogames fade, but The Last Of Us cuts. Time skips forward. Scenes end abruptly. The whole game 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.

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.

14. That consistency of tone is so important and so incredibly well achieved. Tim Rogers's review details this much better than I could.

15. The boss battle against the bloater-or-whatever-they-are-called was terrible (and despite what the developers say, it was a boss battle). The boss battle against David was pretty great.

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.

17. The Last Of Us has one of the best openings of any videogame. And one of the best endings.

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.

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 The Last Of Us 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. 

20. While I was playing The Last Of Us 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.

On On Games Criticism Criticism

[In an email, Frederik Van den Bosch asked me how I felt about Warren Spector's GamesIndustry op-ed about games criticism. 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!]  

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 should 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 Helen Lewis 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.

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 years 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.

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 insular 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 where the good writing is 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. (Though it is also on commissioning editors, too, really). 

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 Killing is Harmless. 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 Killing is Harmless 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 this great exchange between Simon Ferrari and Tom Bissell at Paste.)

(but then I'm conflating 'real journalism' with googling so... yeah.)

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!

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". 

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 gamer 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 :-/. 

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. 

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.

Animal Crossing: My First Days

A few weeks ago when I bought a friend's old, secondhand 3DS, someone asked me if I was excited about New Leaf, to which I responded: "What is New Leaf?". 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 Animal Crossing game—nor had I ever played an Animal Crossing 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.

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 Animal Crossing 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.

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 Animal Crossing is pretty cute. She thought of Biddy the hedgehog and that was that.

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 Animal Crossing seemed like one of those individualistic games about you 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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

Eventually, I accepted there really wasn't anything for me to do.

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 Tiny Tower) but this coupling of the game world to the real-world time is really interesting. On one hand, Animal Crossing 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.

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.

On Saturday I got a new parasol, apparently. I... have no memory of this happening.

Now that the shops were open, I was able to put the downpayment on my house. My character was really happy about this.

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. Animal Crossing is more punishing to people with actual lives than even a typical game!

On Saturday night I checked my station and saw I could visit Brandon's 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.

On Sunday my house was completed and I moved out of my tent!

On Sunday morning I briefly visited Hammond, but then his friend came for brunch and I had to go home again.

After I posted the above photo on Twitter, Daphny 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. 

She met me at the station!

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.

I also went to her shop and, after asking permission, was able to buy a fishing rod to take home!

Daphny scared me with a Zelda mask and then I said I would go home. These two events were unrelated!

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.

Oh yeah I almost got a new hat.

One of my peeps, Tutu I think her name is, wanted to see my house. She came over and I went to bed.

Then I ran down to the beach and spent the rest of the afternoon fishing.

So that is my first few days of Animal Crossing: New Leaf. 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.

Notes on Max Payne 3 (or, Brendan Tries To Explain Why Max Payne 3 Is The Best Game He Has Played This Year)

1. Max Payne 3 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. Max Payne 3 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.

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 weight. 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 damn it!" at a locked door at the end of the penultimate level. It is a pleasure to watch yourself control Max.

3. Max Payne 3 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.

4. The pornographic fixation on gore and violence is gratuitous but unlike in, say, Bioshock: Infinite, 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.

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."

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.

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. Max Payne 3 is a game about shooting. It knows it is a shooter and it focuses all its energy on being a good shooter in the way Die Hard spends all its energy on being a good action film (yes, I just called Max Payne 3 the Die Hard 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.

8. Related, Max Payne 3 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 Max Payne 3 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 ignores 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.
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, Max Payne 3 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.

9. I say in Killing is Harmless, I think, that what Spec Ops: The Line 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.

10. Also on Spec Ops, Max Payne 3 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.

11. Max Payne 3 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.
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.

12. Women aren't treated any better. Max Payne 3 found itself in the second episode of "Tropes vs Women in Videogames", 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 Max Payne 3 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.

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 Max Payne 3 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.

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.
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.

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 rage with which he yells "God damn it" at that door is equal parts frightening and therapeutic because your character finally 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.

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 Splinter Cell Conviction, 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. Max Payne 3 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.

17. Max Payne 3 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.
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 Tomb Raider. But another run of the game on a harder difficulty with only free-aim is not something I will be doing with a controller.

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.

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. Max Payne 3 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.

20. So many games over the past two years have turned me off with unnecessary boss battles. With maybe two exceptions, all of Max Payne 3'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.

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.

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.