A revival

So it seems that I fail at this constant, academic-quality updating, so I will attempt to revive Critical Damage with some more casual, less analytical entries. Pretty much, it is now just going to be the journal of my gaming adventures.

Though, it is a silly time to try this revival as we seem to be in a gaming lull at the moment. There are quite a few games coming out next month that I am interested in: ODST, Wet, and most of all, Scribblenauts . But last month and this month, there has been very little. I made the mistake of buying Tales of Vesperia, thinking it was time to give the ol' JRPG a go again, but I should have known better. I will probably trade it in when Final Fantasy XIII is released.

To keep myself occupied in the meantime, I picked up Burnout Paradise cheap. I loved Burnout 2, but never played the later ones that everyone praised, so it is pretty cool to get back into it, even if every single race feels like it is following the one road. Road Rage mode is amazing fun, and the seamless trasition between online and offline play is great. On a negative note, though, whoever thought "DJ Atomica on Crash FM" was clever should not be let anywhere near another game script.

Anyhow, hopefully that gets me through to the end of this month. If not, I still need to finish Point Lookout.

My housemate is currently taking part in a Left 4 Dead ladder run by cybergamer.com.au. His team, TeamOGL, are undefeated on 7 wins and currently in fourth position. Their most recent game was last night against Scrubs and was broadcast live on gamestah. I tried to watch the video but it streamed horribly, so I just listened to the audio commentators while playing Burnout. It was an incredible experience. I've never listened to so-called "e-sports" before and to hear people treat their game as seriously as people treat sport was incredible. It reminded me of dad listening to the cricket on ABC radio. At several times I had to pause Burnout and just listen as the commentators went crazy as Bill on 1hp shot two Hunters out of the air mid-pounce. It was pretty incredible to listen to. Only suggestions to the commentators would be a) write the score down on a piece of paper as the game is going so you remember it and can tell listeners who is winning, and b) stop with the immature sexist jokes tacked on the end of every sentence about Zoey; no, i do not think she enjoyed being "pounded" by the tank. No wonder no one takes gaming seriously. That aside it was exciting to listen to.

In geekier news, my 360 gamerscore hit 10,000 yesterday. I'm trying not to be proud of this.

Storyliving

Chinatown Wars has given me Liberty City nostalgia and I have caught myself hitting up my unfinished second play-through of GTA4.

I was thinking while taking a random phonecall from Little Jacob how I really love how GTA4 encourages you to live the story, as opposed to telling it to you.

While Nico's blind thirst for revenge and the American empire's fall from grace permiates the entire story, many of the events towards the end of the game are quite unrelated to events at the start. This is not a story of a character in a single situation, the story of GTA4 is a slice of time in Nico Bellic's life and video games is the perfect medium for such a story.

You live Nico Bellic's life for several months. You don't just do missions; you live his life. This is expressed so well through the interactions with characters outside of missions with the mobile phone and social meetings. So many of the characters are so complicated, yet the player would know nothing about them if not for the time spent with them outside of missions.

I think this style of storyliving (see what i did there?) is what has garnished the most criticism for the game, as people have an expectation that sandbox games will let them do whatever the hell they want (a la Saints Row). But for me, GTA4 shows the true storytelling potential of sandbox environments. Without being rushed through a fast paced campain that takes place in 24 hours of gametime, the player is really able to explore the characters and world and bring so much more life to the world.

I don't think anything I said in this entry is new, but on this second, more analytical play of the game, it is really standing out to me.

Also, happy 20th birthday Gameboy, that is amazing.

And yay for a new Fallout game in the near future.

My brother finally got Gears of War 2 and we are hammering away at Horde mode on Jacinto. After a few nights, we have gotten to Wave 30. Not looking forward to Waves 45+, not at all....

Drug Dealing

So after two impatient weeks, my copy of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars finally arrived yesterday. I had read all the positive reviews (9.3, I think, at last glance at metacritic) and was quite excited.

The drug dealing sidequests are amazing yet simple fun... Buying cheap when people sell cheap and selling high when people buy high, not much brains required for that. But the risk factor is very well implemented.

For instance, I spent a good two hours doing taxi fares and selling antidepressants and weed before I could afford any of the hard stuff like cocaine and heroine. Then I got up to like $6000 dealing some cocaine, then spent all that money on a massive amount of cheap heroin I though I could move for a massive amount... only for the cops to bust the deal and for me to get arrested and lose all my heroin that I had just spent all my money on. So I was back to $94 and smuggling cheap antidepressants for $50. The build up, all-or-nothing, gambling with the cops thing is excellently implemented. I got so distracted trying to get my small fortune back that I totally forgot about the missions.

Which, sadly, isn't that bad a thing as the 'cutscenes' are dreadfully written, which is very dissapointing after the amazing acting and dialogue in GTAIV and even the GTA3s. If anything, it is the lame dialogue inbetween missions that isolates this game from the universe of GTA4. But still, the gameplay is utterly amazing. I was laughing with delight so hardly the first time I tried to make molotovs, I spilled half the petrol on the ground.

The PDA UI is also excellent and feels just like using some iPhone equivalent. Only criticism there is the inconsistencies between different touch screens. I think I would prefer to have every touchscreen mini-game to have similarly themed navigation than the different style for different things which it is at the moment. But still, that is a minor criticism. The minigames remind me so much of WarioWare Inc. And that is a good thing.

I forsee productivity stalling in the near future due to this game.

Moral Ambiguity

Wow. I really need to learn to update more frequently.

Last night I reached what I assume is the major decision-point of Fallout 3's DLC, The Pitt. The summary of the plot was simply that the player would "choose to rise up against the slavers, or side with them".

This almost put me off getting the game because I thought it would be too black-and-white for my character. Qwae, the nimble, stealthy, small-guns-and-ranged-weapons character i play in both Fallout3 and TES games draws a firm line when it comes to slavery--she opposes it. She spent hours and hours trekking over Vvardenfell looking for the Twin Lamps and hoarding slave bracelets; she slaughtered every last slaver at Paradise Falls. I thought for this character, the Pitt may be boring because, obviously, i would side with the slaves.

Well, last night proved to me the impermanence of any belief, no matter how firm. Without spoiling anything, the decision Qwae was forced to make in the Pitt was a hard one, and she found herself having to shoot slaves and side with raiders just to defend herself after making the decision.

I had to stop playing and spent at least an hour in bed rethinking my decision. Had I made th eright choice? Had I been weak? Could I really destroy the slaves' only chance at freedom because I felt doing wha thtey wanted me to do was ethically wrong?

Overall, The Pitt feels hastily developed and rushed, and I think the story could have been easily spread out and developed over many more quests and hours of gameplay... as seems to be a reoccuring flaw in DLC releases. Still, an in-game decision like this one hasn't affected me so much since Fable II's Spire. Actually, this may have even stayed with me longer after turning the console off than the Spire did. Amazing.

I may adress this again in a later post when I actually finish The Pitt. I love moral ambiguity in games.

Lost, Damned, Finished, and Left for Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stereotypes in Gaming

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

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

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

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

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

Assassin's Creed 2 Confirmed

[Assassin's Creed Spoilers]

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

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

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

Hope Ubisoft don't screw it up.

Well done, Sparrow!

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

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

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

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

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

There's gold in them hills!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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