Tunnels of Doom

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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Turns out, I’m pretty forgiving of games. It makes sense, I suppose, since with a few key exceptions at any given moment my preferred activity is playing some sort of game. That being the case, I believe most games have at least some redeeming feature. It’s actually difficult for me to think of a game that I simply loathe, that I can’t stand to play. Even one of my least favorites, Monopoly, does have some redeeming characteristics.

I don’t really think of myself as an optimist; but somehow with games I’m always looking for something that I can latch onto as the thing that makes it worth my time. The amount of time is certainly variable, but I truly want every game I play to offer me something.

Of course, when you play as many games as I do, you’re bound to find some stinkers and I’m opinionated enough to lay into a game I dislike. But I think unlike some people I really try to find the silver lining. What’s odd is that usually I learn what games I like by what I find myself searching for opportunities to play, and in return I discover which games I don’t care for by noting which games I always seem to omit from my mental checklist of possibilities. Presented with a three-hour block of spare time and a stack of games including Animal Crossing DS, Syphon Filter for PSP, Dead Rising for Xbox and BioShock for PS3 I might tell myself that they all sound good but realistically I will play the Xbox or PS3 game 10 out of 10 times because AC got tedious for me and I couldn’t stand Syphon FIlter’s control scheme. I haven’t played either in literally years and yet I don’t get rid of them because I still tell myself I want to enjoy them.

This is basically the long way of me explaining why I put almost eight hours into Too Human, when the truth is I can’t remember a game I actively disliked this much.

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I was sitting there, enjoying the end-of-GDC special edition of the Listen Up podcast when they got to the part where they were talking to Insomniac Games’ James Stevenson and Ryan Schneider. At one point during the discussion of Resistance 2, Stevenson and Schneider are addressing some of Garnett Lee’s complaints about the game and they have this to say:

“At the end of the day, we made three games into one in a very short amount of time… We did a solid job making a [big] game and… could we have done things better to make it a more consistent experience all the way around? Yeah.” Then, shortly after they follow up with this: “It always comes down to time versus resources versus where do we allocate our time and resources to [sic]? People say, ‘Well, why didn’t you do that?’ It’s like, well, if we had done that the game costs this much more to make, which means we make less money. Or, we have to charge more for the game.”

I paused the iPod at this point and just had to sit back and marvel for a moment at the patently ridiculous nature of what was being conveyed in that conversation. Essentially Insomniac is saying that they made a product that was three games in one and they recognize that they didn’t produce something with all the “consistency” it could have had. Their defense for this is that given the time and resources they had, they chose to sacrifice on overall quality rather than sacrifice what I can only presume is their vision of three games in one. I can’t comprehend this logic. I talked a little about this last week, how Valve has created Left 4 Dead which is simply phenomenal. It’s a polished, taut experience that, perhaps as a result of that polish, lacks a little breadth.

It’s utterly backwards that someone would say, “Our design document was too big, too ambitious for us to be bothered with making it good unless we wanted to charge you extra for it.” No. Just… no. You do not get to blame the consumers or suggest that it is somehow my fault that your game sucks in some way. If you over-reached, you screwed up in your job function and you don’t get to sit there thinking that there is some valid excuse for that.

The crazy thing is that I didn’t even play Resistance 2 because, as forgiving of first person shooters as I am, I couldn’t get through the original Resistance: Fall of Man because it was so uninspired. Come to think of it, I couldn’t be bothered to finish their other game, Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, either. So thanks, Insomniac. You just confirmed that I never need to bother with one of your games again. Charge whatever you like for ‘em. Maybe eventually you’ll put out something good that I still won’t play because I can’t afford your idea of quality.

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