Tunnels of Doom

Kyle Orland of Games For Lunch likes to say, when presented with a cinematic or cut scene that depicts action, how much he would rather be playing such an exhilarating sequence as opposed to just observing it. It’s a valid point. Ostensibly we—the game players—are here to simulate action-packed sequences via inpt methods, somehow a game that has to show you something cool because it cannot allow you to perform it seems like it missed a key point somewhere. I think the rule of thumb is that you can get away with pulling players out of the driver’s seat for short periods if you need exposition because even games that specifically set out to include conversational elements into the mechanics often struggle with a decent implementation, but if there is something that needs doing, you’d better find a way for the players to get involved.

I’m obviously thinking about this because I’ve been playing Metal Gear Solid 4 this week and as such I have a lot of downtime to think about the nature of cut scenes and non-interactive sequences considering I’ve put about 10 hours into the title and I’d be surprised to find that a full half of that actually required me to have my hands on the controller. Oh, and giving me a couple of buttons to push to change the camera angle or to flash some indistinguishable memory jog from a previous game now and then doesn’t count, Kojima. Just saying. There are times when these mental exercises are all I have to sustain me as the game I’m supposed to be relaxing with wallows self-indulgently in its own cleverness and awkward drama. During the game’s many interminable loading screens it anachronistically directs the player to make sure to take a 15-minute break once every hour. I find this amusing as the game itself has made quite sure to enforce this policy strictly.

But back to cinematics. I’m beginning to really appreciate the storytelling devices employed by games like Dead Space and BioShock where the story takes place via essentially the same mechanism which is like a radio drama acted out over the top of the essential game action. Sure it necessitates solid voice acting but honestly it really shouldn’t be as hard to come by as it seems from a lot of the PS1 era games that gave voiceover work in games its bad rep. Meanwhile you can avoid a lot of unnecessary game resources spent on elaborate animation renders, the player doesn’t get bored. There are two wins in this situation and no losses.

Please don’t think I’m one of these gameplay purists who disdains cut scenes on their basic premise thinking story is the unwelcome nuts in my oatmeal cookie of a game. Quite the contrary. But like films that have to stop everything and grind to a halt for 15 minutes so they can spell out to the audience what’s happened and what’s about to transpire, the premise of narrative entertainment has been butchered in the execution, and there are few patrons sufficiently famished to buy those awkward cuts.

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For the second time since I acquired one, my Xbox 360 flashed the well-known Red Ring of Death. I had been playing The Force Unleashed and for the last few sessions there had been some sort of static in the graphics output. Initially I chalked it up to a crummy game or a weird issue with the disc but didn’t worry about it too much since the game was still playable.

The screen did lock several times which was a bummer but it wasn’t until after one of these locks and I kicked the power button to restart it that the boot up logo sequence had the static glitching that I became concerned. After all, one game being messed up is hardly unexpected considering 90% of all my games have come second hand. But there is something more going on when a system-level operation exhibits some sort of aberrant behavior.

Sure enough I finally got a lock and when I went to reboot it I saw the E 74 error message. I went immediately to Microsoft’s Xbox support site and followed their gimpy troubleshooting steps which included restarting the console (again) and disconnecting peripherals. After doing that I got several instances of the memetic Ring followed by a couple more E 74s and finally I had to accept that it was going to need to be replaced.

So I’m lacking a 360 for the next month or so while I get mine replaced; the biggest drag about the whole thing is that all the games I’ve picked up that I’ve had backlogged for a few weeks now were 360 titles. I had nothing waiting in the wings for DS, PSP or PS3 that hadn’t been back burnered for months or more. So for now I’ll have to try to get back into Jeanne D’Arc or Disgaea or Etrian Odyssey II, but I did head fairly quickly over to Goozex and put a few PS3 titles on there, hoping they would be enough to keep me distracted until I can get what I must now fully concede is my platform of choice back in working order.

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I don’t want to oversell anything, so let’s get the caveats out of the way: Pregnant women can and will cry at the drop of the hat. The principal tear-jerkers for the last seven months in my corner of the world has been menu planning and food acquisition. Also, commercials. Still, in most cases I can evaluate the scenario and say, you know, if I were to amplify my emotional response threshold to, say, seventy weepowatts, I could totally understand getting worked up over these things. So I mean it in the most sincere fashion when I say that it is a testament to the resonance felt by soul-bearing humans that this video game trailer made my wife cry.

I’ve never finished Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, to my great shame. I own them both. They’re sitting here in my nightstand and across the room is a connected PS2 with a memory card containing partially completed save games. My lack of follow-through in finishing them is largely a product of my endless fascination with new and shinier things which is why I’m playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and not these modern classics. Honestly I could take or leave Ico. I fully grasp the enthusiasm it elicits but in terms of playing a game, I prefer Shadow.

E3 was last week, so I probably followed gaming news more closely than I typically do. I listened to the daily Listen UP podcasts and was happy to hear most of the positive buzz about games (largely sequels) that I’m interested in. Assassin’s Creed II, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Uncharted 2, Mass Effect 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Modern Warfare 2, God of War III, Brutal Legend, Scribblenauts and Alan Wake all sounded like they were shaping up very nicely. Of that list I think I’m probably the most excited about Left 4 Dead 2 and Assassin’s Creed II because I feel like I never got quite enough of L4D with the first title but had more or less exhausted the content it had. I griped last week about the very un-Valve like iteration but honestly I’m hanging onto the original now for nostalgia which is something I try very hard not to do, in the past seven days I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m actually ready for a full new game but the truth is I’m never excited about the prospect of spending $60. Meanwhile Assassin’s Creed was one of my surprise favorites from that wash of high quality titles a couple years ago which included the original Mass Effect, Halo 3, Orange Box, BioShock and others. I recognized its faults without allowing them to interfere with my enjoyment, I can very honestly say I’m ready for more.

Contrast that with Mass Effect which I pre-ordered and practically begged myself to love, but found it to be good but not actually fantastic. I’ll play the sequel because I have enough invested to want to know what they do with the story and I think Bioware has earned a bit of patience on my part. But while I dove into the original with my mind prepared to revel in hyperbolic praise, I’m approaching this one more cautiously, as if the rabies of disappointment might surge again through my blood.

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Gaming this week was sparse, especially following the mania that was KublaCon week. I didn’t exactly burn myself out of gaming but we’re getting toward crunch time with the baby preparations plus I’ve felt in some ways like a lot of my entertainment gaming has been disappointing in a narrative sense lately so I went back and read a few books to try and scratch the itch for good storytelling.

Frankly I like getting story from games more than I maybe should. It’s pretty self-evident that game stories are well behind the sophistication curve from other media formats, but honestly my imagination can be really well served even in a mediocre story as long as I can insert myself into the plot. Games provide that dynamic element that I crave, but sometimes yeah I get burnt out on Saturday Morning Cartoon quality writing. It usually doesn’t last too long and it only takes one decent game to make me believe in interactive storytelling again, but after Prince of Persia (see this week’s Spoiler Alert for a rundown of how bad that one got), Fable II, Kane & Lynch, Resident Evil 5 and Half-Life 2, I just had to get a decent story into my head.

The good news is that so far Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is tolerable plot-wise and we’re planning on starting a short series of Traveller RPG adventures on Monday nights which should give me that interactive fiction boost I’m looking for. In the meantime you probably aren’t going to have 6500 words to read this week. I’m all about the “everybody wins” scenario.

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My wife, gentle saint that she is, practically had to force me to go to KublaCon this weekend. I recognize the incongruousness of that but the explanation is pretty straightforward: Cons are expensive. We’ve been pinching pennies quite a bit (understand that I’ve played all the games I’ve played this year to date based on Goozex trades excepting the purchase of Fallout 3 and the rental of Resident Evil 5) so my only resource to attend Kubla this year was a tax refund check. When it came time to decide whether or not to pre-register, I balked because I kept thinking about all the things that smallish amount of cash could buy for the baby. Nik eventually coaxed me to commit to one full day at the con so I would at least have the chance to go considering I missed DunDraCon for similar reasons.

Then she realized that she had finals coming up the week following Memorial Day and decided she wanted me as far out of her hair as she could get me so she more or less demanded that I attend a second day. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go, but I wouldn’t have a room, I’d have to pay full price for the weekend pass, drive back and forth across a bridge and I just felt like it wasn’t a “pure” con experience. I grumbled and fussed but she was pretty adamant that due to her schedule and the fact that the arrival of our child would probably preclude any con trips for at least a while, this was likely my last chance to experience one for a bit and it should be taken advantage of, even if it wasn’t some version of ideal.

I’m sure the irony is not particularly thick to note that it was one of my better con experiences.

I love the full-weekend cons with two night hotel stays and supposed game-all-night sessions but to be honest a lot of times those shared vacations end up being exercises in scheduling. It’s less “Gamer Paradise” and more “Executive Administrative Assistant Boot Camp.” You’ve got between four and nine people usually, all who have different eating, playing and shopping schedules and you’re trying to coordinate what games you can get in with who needs to be where by when and at what point you can squeeze in sufficient meals for everyone. It’s pretty exhausting and in the end I think a lot of the gaming sputters and putters along excepting maybe one big—usually pre-planned—event.

This weekend however we simply arrived each day sometime in the morning, sat down and played until people began drifting away. Each session was adjusted for how many people were available and interested and those who were engaged in other activities were welcome to stop by for a short while and join us or simply chat until their next game. As a result I got in more gaming than any con I can recall and it was all great, great fun.

I thought the one disappointment was going to be that with the inclusion of my restricted budget I wouldn’t have much in the way of funds for the dealer’s room. That turned out to only be partially true since the real setback was that I went in wanting to find a fun Zombie-themed game to buy and the ones I found were low rated and badly reviewed on BoardGameGeek.com. The game that was recommended, Last Night on Earth, was nowhere to be found in any booth. However, I did manage to get an incredible dealer’s room score as I found unlicensed Blood Bowl blocking dice at the Chessex booth and managed to find the last matched set (black on green). So for less than $10 I walked away with what I felt was a huge DR coup. There was really no way to count it as anything but a huge success.

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My expectations are peculiar beasts. Take, for instance, the odd contrast in gaming to conventional knowledge regarding in the cinema world: Sequels are always inferior. I’ve so long held this to be true that in many cases that “knowledge” spills over into other media and I start reviling follow-ups without having any firsthand knowledge of their content. In truth, many video game sequels are actually better than their forebears. This actually makes a certain sense because many first efforts in games are technological and mechanical experiments such that sequels can be and often are more refinements than anything else. Many games don’t have the same onus as films or books to “recapture” some nebulous attribute of the original (in many cases a sense of surprise and freshness that, by definition, cannot be recaptured).

Logically, I know this and yet I find I regularly stumble when presented with an announced sequel as my first thought is often, “Here’s where they ruin it.” Some games don’t carry this burden and I think it has something to do with my appetite for more of some particular title or my sense that there is yet more to be done with the systems or stories presented. Dead Space, for one recent example, feels like a game they could easily do more of and I would welcome it due to the broad reach of the setting yet unexplored. On the other hand I have nothing but skepticism for the upcoming BioShock 2 because I can’t help but feel that the original’s story and progression were complete in that package, a tidy bow put on top. Could they have improved BioShock 1? Sure. Should they try to find a way to shoehorn those improvements into some narratively-questionable rehash? I’m not so positive.

The good thing about my expectations though is that I’m willing to allow them to be tested. This is how I end up playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Fable II which both seemed upon initial evaluation to be better than I had reasonably hoped they would be. It’s how I end up loving something like Portal or Mirror’s Edge. Of course, it’s also how I end up suffering through Haze and Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, but you get some bad with the good.

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Classification is a tricky business although one I know humans in general have a difficult time resisting. Causing stumbling awkwardness the whole time is the regular occurrence of things which either defy classification or force the labels to grow ever more specific. It’s like trying to assign genre labels to your iTunes library: Is Primus “Comedy Music” or “Rock”? It seems a bit pedantic to create a genre called “Funk-Influenced Alternative Psychadelic Rock with Comic Lyrical Themes.” It depends also what your intended purpose is: If your efforts are focused on grouping you may find that while Johnny Cash is often stuck in “Country” music, you may find (as I do) that lumping him with Faith Hill and Garth Brooks feels like an affront to the man in black.

Which is all why the discussion of what qualifies someone as a “gamer” or “hardcore” has felt sort of forced or irrelevant to me. People seem to have a hard time classifying even themselves, and yet they take umbrage to the notion of those they deem unworthy encroaching on their preferred labels. I do find it fascinating to watch people struggle to accept the truth of their perceptions when presented with hard evidence that subverts it; more often I find humor when aggro youths demand credentials for someone’s self-proclamations. They’re like tiny gamer hall monitors, patrolling hallowed halls without pondering the footfalls of their predecessors, mired in the present as if it were the only thing of relevance.

Even in those cases I try to avoid the obvious scorn. It speaks no better of me to challenge them with qualifications that extend beyond their chronology permits. After all, no one expects that anyone born in the 1970s would have seen as many black and white films as one born thirty years prior. The only catch is you want to be cautious speaking with authority on cinema if you don’t have at least a passing knowledge of pertinent historical films. And in any case a touch of humility—an endangered quality on these here Inter-connected Nets—is appropriate: There is always someone with experience and context of greater breadth and depth than your own, you can lay a bet on that.

You quickly reach a point trying to compare similar enthusiasts where you’re forced to fabricate ludicrous sounding faux-words like “hardcasual” which have neither meaning nor legitimate applicability to any known human. The factor most of the classification-obsessed ‘net denizen overlooks is that classifying humans is trying to draw bead on a moving target, especially when you’re discussing leisure. Assuming an activity is preferable to some other activity, you can be relatively confident that a person will engage in it when presented with the opportunity. Given heaps of delicious, creamy chance, they will dive in and lather themselves with it as long as possible. Restrict that access and they will pine for it, wish that they could devote more time to its pursuit but likely won’t forsake it. You can say that someone who finds work commitments too taxing to engage in, say, regular golf games is not a “golfer” based on some arbitrary equation measuring games played divided by time. I have to question whether the distinction holds value; self-identifaction in this case feels like the test and the answer sheet stapled together.

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The plan was to write about Fable II in this Edition. After finishing Gears 2 last week I went onto Goozex and pulled a couple of games from my Hold queue into my Request queue so I could pick up something new to play. I got matched fairly quickly with a seller for Fable II and anticipated getting the game probably toward the end of the week but at least with enough time to get a decent start on it over the weekend.

Unfortunately the game didn’t arrive until fairly late on Saturday (after my typical Saturday morning game session, essentially) but I was pretty enthusiastic about it when I finally found it in the mailbox. As a mild digression, I picked up the original Fable thinking it was going to be just so-so and ended up really enjoying it. It certainly had its issues and the magazine article I read that had informed me of its existence was based on an interview with Peter Molyneux, whose pie-in-the-sky descriptions of Fable were… hopeful. The final product ended up being less ambitious than those descriptions but still a game well worth playing. Curiously, the announcement of Fable II didn’t really grab me the way a sequel announcement for a game I enjoyed typically might; it wasn’t until the prospect of actually trying it was sort of real and present that I felt and sense of anticipation worth mentioning.

In any case, when you tear open a package you expect will contain an epic swords and sorcery role-playing adventure and instead you find Skate-It for Wii (a system you don’t even own), anticipation quickly dissolves, like an ice cube frozen around a hard lump of disappointment dropped into boiling sulfur. To be fair, the heavy use of Goozex creates a situation in which this sort of mistake can be made fairly readily: You ship games to people who are basically strangers, sometimes even mostly masked by the anonymity of an online handle. These mysterious entities are a faraway address and an abbreviated name, mostly you think of them in terms of the game you’re shipping out. If several of these requests come in at once, confusing the packaging in a scramble to coordinate postage with game with shipping address across three or four shipments is understandable: Structured organizations devote entire departments of workers to managing this sort of endeavor and they certainly don’t operate at a 100% success rate.

It wasn’t the fact that I received the wrong game that turned my mood sour, it was more the notion that I was relying on a successful transaction to provide me with fresh gaming material for this week. Coupled with an appointment that precludes Monday Board Game Night, pickings were bound to be fairly slim to begin with. The hassle represented by the mistake wasn’t malicious, it was just poorly timed.

I attempted to remedy the situation by stepping outside the comfort zone I’ve lived in for a couple of months now and actually spent the money to rent a game. I went with Resident Evil 5 rather than Fable II even though at this point there is no certainty that I’ll end up with Fable in the near future; however it shakes out Fable II will end up being sent by this seller or another at some juncture. Instead I went with RE5 because a) Zombies and b) I can either wait for the game to drop from it’s lofty trade points price or slam through it in a week and save myself a trade for something that didn’t disappoint me by its mere premise.

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For whatever reason a lot of the games I played this week were violent and bloody. I guess that’s not super unusual, glancing over my shelf of games I see a lot of M-rated titles there. But I like horror-themed games, especially zombies, so typically those feature a lot of splattering gore.

Then there is Gears of War, which I both picked up and finished during the week. As the first did, it features a lot of the sort of overtly gratuitous bloodshed that packs many shooter games, although Gears has a particular fondness for the ol’ ultra-violence with its chainsaw gibbing and such.

The curious thing to me is that as some of these games progress from relatively simple narratives and lightly graze the surface of something that resonates on an emotional level, they have this weird dichotomy that I think stunts the effort. I mean, it’s not impossible for something loud and brash to also transition into tenderness, but I think especially in the language of games it can be too surreal for you to be applying a power tool to someone’s groin in one moment and less than 60 seconds later you have a crescendo of strings following the caress of a space marine’s glove on his dying wife’s cheek or whatever. There is an air of insincerity that plays in this type of juxtaposition; where film directors have sometimes been able to use gritty, harsh scenes of brutality as counter-punches against scenes of innocence or longing, games are still too drenched in their comic book adolescence to locate that place.

I’m not saying I don’t appreciate the effort or that I’m unwilling to follow along through the awkward puberty of gaming narrative, I’m just saying that if people want this stuff to click, they need to consider more than just their cutscenes. As a matter of fact, when you think about how infrequently these shooter cutscenes (and I think Gears is a fantastic example of exactly what I’m talking about) make any sense whatsoever, a little passing nod toward context would go a long way to pushing past these bouts of voice cracking and patches of dubious facial hair that pass for genuine maturity.

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I guess I was in a space-faring mood this week as my principal play time was spent in the voids of Dead Space and Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. But the truth is there wasn’t a lot of gaming happening overall, what with a busy weekend and some inexplicable exhaustion that had me retiring for bed early rather than staying up and playing games as is my typical regimen.

Plus, you know, hockey playoffs.

You may note that I actually completed Dead Space last week and sort of intended to just fiddle with it a bit more until I got bored and moved on, but suddenly the week is over and despite not much play time I find myself on the second to the last chapter of Round 2. I don’t know when you reach the point at which you can stop qualifying yourself and have to admit that something has changed: I think of myself as the kind of gamer who doesn’t stick with games long and rarely replays anything. Maybe it’s just the achievements system, maybe it’s that this generation of games has just managed to capture what I love about them but I’ve replayed more titles in the last three years than I think I had in my entire life to that point. I have games sitting on my shelf that I own still with the express intent to replay them again.

This is unprecedented.

But then again, it does feel like my approach to games is undergoing a bit of a transformation. My patience for games is thinner, as I discuss in this week’s Lock’s Quest review, but my interest in games that I enjoy is equivalently enriched. I think it may have come from realizing that I had blown through a lot of games in the previous decade that I could no longer recall much about except that I had enjoyed them. Rather than treating my beloved experiences in games in as disposable a manner as games I played only as mindless entertainment, I think I’ve begun to relish games that speak to me at a level above that of “diversion.”

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