Tunnels of Doom

Following Bayonetta there was a lull in the flow of games for a little bit which, frankly, I sort of welcomed after Capcom’s weird-heavy bullet ballet destroyed my capacity to evaluate a game rationally. Considering I was waiting for some newer games to be made available from Goozex and there was an indeterminate wait inherent in that endeavor, I decided to brave the video store once again and managed to procure a copy of Uncharted 2.

I was pretty positive a couple of years ago when I played the original Uncharted and it quickly became the one game I played following my acquisition of a PS3 that sort of felt like it was welcome in my home for reasons other than its Blu-Ray drive. I’m not sure it should have been such a surprise then that if I really, really liked Uncharted, I absolutely adore Uncharted 2. For all my grumbling about video game stories and their lack of really executing on their potential, I sometimes forget that the standard gameplay-interrupted-by-cutscene format can be—when done right—a very effective way to tell an immersive story. I can think of few more shining examples of this than Uncharted 2. In truth, Uncharted 2′s compelling 10-hour tale is more richly realized, more exciting and more completely enjoyable than any movie I’ve seen in a year. This is no longer just what Tomb Raider should have been, this is what the last Indiana Jones film should have been.

The basic formula from Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is nearly unchanged. The controls are the same, the gameplay is more or less identical, but where the original was content with a smaller story and a more limited take on the concept, Uncharted 2 busts out of its conceptual arena with smart, dynamic moments that always feel like you are the hero of this action/adventure movie. The already astounding graphics of the original look even better, with just the right amount of stylization to avoid the uncanny valley and a voice acting dialogue combination that I swear could be up for some kind of oscar or emmy if such things were applied to video games. It’s not that anything feels particularly noteworthy, it’s that it doesn’t feel noteworthy. It wasn’t until hours into the game that I even stopped to consider that someone was writing and then acting the banter between the characters. What it kind of comes down to is something I can best describe as game chemistry. The writers, the voice talent, the animators, the engine and level designers all hit not just on their individual high notes but on a collective, harmonious high chord so that the game feels cohesive and does more to draw you into the action, the world and the adventure than any single element could alone.

Nearly all my complaints from the first game are addressed: The action and gameplay varies much more than before, the puzzles are more devious but not obscure or frustrating, the enemy AI is improved making the combat more exciting and the companions don’t feel as much like dead weight. Speaking of companions, I also have to point out that Uncharted 2 makes masterful use of the AI buddy since, when you think about it, it’s difficult to tell a story or make a character develop if they’re exploring someplace in solitude. Maybe this is why Lara Croft’s personality is still impossible to describe (due to lack of development) some eight or nine games in. There are very, very few moments in Uncharted 2 where Nathan is going it alone, though you’re never meant to babysit some idiot accident-prone AI doofus.

So yeah, I liked the game. It does look like it’s going to drift off course into a silly supernatural hokum-driven mess toward the end of the second act but it mostly corrects itself and it even addresses the most head-scratching element of the series (namely the genocide Nathan commits on the mercenary thugs) as the game’s antagonist whispers venomously to a pistol-wielding Nate, “How many men have you killed? Just today?” It’s a minor jab that doesn’t really undo the fact that Nathan is twice now responsible for a widespread massacre, but it does mean the writers of the game recognize that the gameplay elements play a part in the reality of the game’s story (which isn’t always necessarily true in video game writing) and the casualness with which Our Hero approaches murder—even justifiable homicide—is actually a part of his character. I loved that.

The only other miniscule quibble I have is that the game, for as taut and engaging as its story is, could have easily made it less guided and allowed for some player choice to impact the outcome of the game, even if just at the end. Still, I appreciate the genius of making what is a playable movie and I don’t think everything has to be BioWare, but it is the strength of the medium, you know?

Coming Soon

So having spent a week or so completing Uncharted 2 that leaves me just a couple of games left from 2009 that I wanted to finish and fortunately both of them arrived late in the week from Goozex (after all): Assassin’s Creed II and Borderlands. I also got Red Faction: Guerilla which looks pretty interesting so I guess I’ll lump that one in there as part of the mandatory research I need to complete before I can do my “Best of 09″ rundown. So far I’m no more than a couple of hours into any of the games but my initial assessments are that Assassin’s Creed II picks up the awesome right where the original AC left off (both literally and metaphorically), Borderlands is visually stunning but strangely not as engaging as I expected it to be and Red Faction is Borderland’s opposite being a game I had very few hopes for that I’m surprised to find I can’t wait to get back to. My intention was to do them in AC2, Borderlands, RF order since the first two are more likely to retain their value if I get through them quickly but I’m thinking I may swap the latter two just because I’d rather knock over a bunch of martian buildings than do MMO-style fetch and kill collection quests in an FPS. Expectations are funny things.

With a minor lull in my flow of fresh games, I resorted to rentals which I felt was justified because I had a long weekend set up ostensibly out of necessity but the proximity to my birthday was let’s just say highly suspect. I went to the store in hopes of getting Uncharted 2 which I desperately want to play but struggle to find rationale to support either a purchase or even a trade at 1,000 Goozex points since I suspect it is similar to the original which is to say maybe nine hours long and possessing little to no replay outside the multiplayer which I doubt I’d ever even attempt. Sadly they didn’t have a copy of Uncharted 2 so I settled on Bayonetta.

Listen, no one can reasonably accuse me of being blindly devoted or even especially enticed by products coming out of Japan. Like any nerd there are bits of Japanese culture that have trickled down to me that I have found exceptional like Cowboy Bebop or Unagi, but I’m hardly the guy wearing the Bubblegum Crisis T-shirt and importing copies of Final Fantasy XIII demos so I can play them “as they were meant to be heard.” However, I am a gamer with a respect for the culture of games so when the notoriously stingy reviewers at Japanese video game rag Famitsu give a game 10/10, I make a mental note.

If you want to skip a long diatribe about Bayonetta, let me summarize it for you here at the top: The only thing Famitsu giving the game 10 out of 10 signifies is that those magazine writers and editors are absolutely nuts. Really just complete loons. Not only because they put Bayonetta on par with what they consider to be the best games of all time but because they clearly experienced the same game I did and didn’t even dock half a point for having the most stupidly inane and incomprehensible storyline ever presented from one human to another in any medium which I can only interpret to mean they—Lord have mercy—must have actually liked the plot of Bayonetta.

Let me try and outline Bayonetta’s “story” and be aware that I wish I could say this was spoiler-free but I honestly couldn’t tell you which parts of the story are significant enough to qualify as spoliers, so you’ll have to trust that no matter what I say, you will be surprised by the story, though probably not in the way you might appreciate: A woman awakens after a 500 year long sleep at the bottom of a lake at which point she may or may not have killed a young boy named Luka’s father in front of his eyes. She spends what I presume to be roughly 25 years making alleged mafia ties and cozies up to an arms dealer who may or may not be a demon with a penchant for breaking the fourth wall while the young boy grows up to be a journalist of some sort. After an encounter with a woman who seems to be nearly as combat-capable as she, our heroine sets off on a journey to find something or find herself or… well, it’s never entirely clear. But she does wind up in a city that may or may not be the center of the universe as far as the cosmic powers are concerned and we learn that Bayonetta may or may not be the last of a line of witches who may or may not have been responsible for the steady decline of society for the last 500 years. Using the investigative subtlety of a molotov cocktail she fights hordes of creatures who may or may not be angels from heaven but whom also may or may not be paradoxically devious and vile. Anyway she comes across a little girl who may or may not be her daughter and/or may or may not be herself in a younger incarnation and they eventually wind up confronting the CEO of a company—that may or may not be a front for a private military whose funding and firepower outpaces that of the global superpowers—who may or may not be Bayonetta’s father. And then things get weird.

But okay, Bayonetta is hardly the first game to have a ridiculous plot. In a way, the ceaselessly indulgent storytelling could be viewed as a stylistic choice and honestly you can’t say the game isn’t consistently over-the-top so it’s never disingenuous. It’s certainly not my cup of tea but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t win me over a little bit by the end; after about a dozen chapters of deriding the game I started to simply shrug in bemusement at the game’s gleeful narrative excesses. “Oh, that statue/tower is actually a rocket ship? Sure, why not?” Et cetera.

Where the game stumbles is that it applies this gluttony to every aspect of the game, not just the plot. It’s like they had a design meeting toward the beginning of development and they were just brainstorming ideas and throwing them up on the whiteboard as they were shouted aloud. The problem is that at no point in the ensuing months and years did they get rid of a single idea from that board. The “no concept left behind” is present in the character design (glasses! beauty mark! ribbons! british accent! magical clothes made of hair!), in the systems (upgrades! alchemy! hidden collectables! combos! mini-games! quick time events!), in the presentation (full motion video cut scenes! slideshow/ken burns cut scenes! in-engine cut scenes! map screens! menu screens!) all the way up through the fact that the game has like 15 endings (faux ending! surprise twist ending! post fake credit-roll ending! post real credit-roll ending! unnecessarily long extraneous final dance sequence!). The quickest way to sum up Bayonetta is that it is exhausting.

And then of course there is the sex. Not that Bayonetta is ever graphic beyond the level of, say, the TBS re-runs of Sex and the City. It’s certainly saturated with innuendo, sensuality and various flavors of eroticism, but it stops short of being explicit. Bayonetta herself is a character basically defined by sex from her costume being made of her hair which is also her weapon such that she functionally disrobes in order to execute her most potent attacks through her fetishist’s checklist (I originally mistyped that “checklust” which may be more appropriate) of character design elements like the glasses and accent and ubiquitous lollipop. In between she displays a strong dominatrix vibe with her “torture attacks” and spends a lot of her time during the hyper-stylized combat doing splits and hip thrusts and deep back bends.

Leigh Alexander, the Internet’s go-to girl for thoughts on girls in gaming, wrote a piece for GamePro indicating that Bayonetta is actually an empowering character because she is a strong female figure in games that doesn’t have to surgically excise her sexuality in order to be taken seriously. I appreciate the point, because I agree that characters can be both strong females and sexy at the same time, there are good examples in other, older mediums. I’d actually venture an opinion that the strongest female characters are as complete as real life strong women are, and that by definition must include their sexuality. But this is where Bayonetta stumbles, because she isn’t a complete character in that for all her laundry list of reasons why you’re supposed to find her sexy (and I don’t think that assessment is meant to be exclusive to guys), there’s no room left in there for you to find her interesting. Among her other dimensional handicaps, she lacks any real character flaws (and no, amnesia isn’t a character flaw). When all the belt buckles and disappearing costumes subside, Bayonetta is only sex and style. She isn’t identifiable because she’s a messiah in a tight jumpsuit.

Now lest you think I hated Bayonetta, let me say that it does have some strong points. The one aspect of Bayonetta that is actually engaging is the relationship she develops with the young Cereza who thinks Bayonetta is her mother. The emergence of Bayonetta’s maternal instinct is fun to watch and is certainly fertile enough fodder for an entire plot, one that I think would have been miles and miles above the fatigue-inducing madness that they went with instead. Somehow they even managed to make the relationship feel genuine, the one human thread in the entire story—not surprisingly the only one that really works. Also the game’s stylish action is satisfying and enjoyable most of the time although on the easier levels it feels less like you’re playing the game and more like you’re merely suggesting things to it, but that worked for me because I’m fairly useless when it comes to combo-heavy action games like this. And the biggest advantage of the kitchen sink method of game design is that there is never an opportunity to get bored due to the constant adjustment of the gameplay dynamic (fight scene! exploration! puzzle section! vehicle combat! mini-game!). It took me about a dozen hours to work through the campaign and despite the tiring chore of trying to make some kind of sense out of the tale, I never felt like I was dragging my way through the game.

So I can’t say Famitsu led me astray, exactly. Sometimes it’s good to experience things you might not otherwise try. I certainly don’t think the game is in the same area code as the top echelon of games and I can’t even give it a meek “Rent This” recommendation but I wouldn’t say I’m sorry I played it. But you know, now that it’s over, I really wish Uncharted 2 had been in stock.

While I may have taken a week or two off from posting in deference to the holidays and some necessary traveling, I did squeeze in a few games. It’s sort of my thing.

The newest title to grace my consoles has been Modern Warfare 2, which I picked up as sort of an ownership rental if that makes any sense. Honestly I had MW2 on my list of games to try from this holiday season but it wasn’t anywhere near the top of that list. I thought that I had acquired Left 4 Dead 2 early enough and removed it from any wishlists in time to avoid having it be a part of any gift-giving festivities but alas I did get an additional copy so I returned it to the store from whence it came only to discover that without any sort of receipt I had to accept the lowest sale price for the item and apparently in the few short weeks it has been on sale it has at one point or another gone for $39.99. Armed with less than a full retail game’s worth of store credit I had the choice of either spending some of my own money on the game I originally hoped to exchange the duplicate for (Assassin’s Creed II), buying something else like a World of Warcraft time card or going with one of the games they currently had on sale for the $40 amount. I nixed the first notion, my wife nixed the second (apparently I “stay up too late” when I play WoW, which interferes with my ability to tend to the early morning baby feedings that are distressingly common) so I went with the third option and grabbed MW2.

My plan all along was to play through the single player campaign and then trade the title to Goozex for the 1,000 points. I had few intentions of keeping the game because the multiplayer may be phenomenal but since my New Year’s Resolution is to be honest with myself I have to admit that I don’t play games to have the kinds of experiences that multiplayer gamers search for and I definitely don’t have the patience to wade through dozens of matches of slavering Xbox Live prepubescents hurling off-color slurs into their headset mics in vengeful falsettos on the off chance that I’ll have that magical match.

So I went through the campaign.

Long time readers may recall that I had lots of high praise for CoD4. I’ve heard by turns that Modern Warfare 2 is basically more of the same which one might interpret as A Good Thing but honestly I don’t think MW2 works even remotely as well as CoD4 did.

For one thing the narrative hook that CoD4 relied on was protagonist mortality. Among the most memorable and remarkable moments in any game of the benchmark 2007 was the slow radiation death experienced in gut-wrenching first-person about halfway through the game (sorry spoiler hounds, it’s been two years—you can still be impressed with it even if you know it’s coming). But I have to say, returning to that particular well pretty much undermined the impact of both the new instances of virtual death simulation and the original. It’s like movies with Hitchcockian startle-scares: It only works once. If you know it’s coming, you won’t be startled. Likewise once you know that basically any character whose shoes you don in Modern Warfare games could croak at any moment, you sort of expect it to happen or at least you understand that it could happen. It cheapens the experience and makes it as pedestrian as all the other deaths you experience in video games where you come right back and start over after the game over screen (or, increasingly in the current generation, a momentary reload of the last quick save or checkpoint).

I realize there were some people who grumbled that the death in CoD4 was sort of lame because CoD games are pretty challenging to begin with so you probably died a bunch of times before the death that actually “took,” which makes you wonder why dozens of flying bullets don’t do you in but radiation poisoning from a nuclear explosion finally does the trick. I ignored the criticism at the time because the impact was so forceful and the scene handled in such a novel way I was able to accept it. But after the third protagonist death in MW2 I started to see the point. In a lot of ways it is stupid that only the game’s pre-determined narrative decides when it’s okay to die.

Unfortunately, that’s not MW2′s only misstep. While the plot of CoD4 was sort of ridiculous and Jerry Bruckheimer-ish, it managed to stay compelling because it didn’t have to top itself. It was able to maintain enough of a grounding in plausibility to feel authentic in some key, fundamental fashion. MW2 is Big Dumb Action Movie all the way, complete with corny/serious dialogue, ludicrous Evil Master Plans and eye-roll inducing Shocking Twists. That doesn’t even take into consideration the snowmobile scene which I could easily forgive if it didn’t support the argument that Infinity War lost their minds with regards to the boundaries on suspension of disbelief.

It’s not that I hated MW2, one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to try to find good in the world: The trademark CoD set piece battles are still there and still provide some fun shooter goodness. They’ve mostly eliminated the infinite-spawning killboxes although there are still a few places where I found myself having to just hold the sprint button and hope my magical regenerating health held out until I reached the next checkpoint because if you don’t do it The Way the Designers Intended, you can plan to spend the next 30 minutes replaying the same section over and over. And I will concede that Infinity Ward still make the best looking realistic visuals around: Some of the lighting effects especially during the night fighting through a burning Washington D.C. are astounding. The downside of that is the action is frequently so frantic and the flow from cover point to cover point so forces you to fixate on relatively drab level details like desks and rocks, it’s easy to miss a lot of the remarkable artistry on display. If you don’t mind Dumb Action, MW2 is still a fun way to spend a half dozen hours.

The problem is that the bar was set for something amazing. Sadly there wasn’t enough progress made narratively—and I’d argue that envelope wasn’t even picked up, much less pushed—to make it a worthy successor to CoD4. Let me put it this way: It should have been called Call of Duty 4.5: Now With More Stupid.

Meanwhile, I finished Infamous (it was one of my New Year’s Resolutions) and unlike MW2 I wasn’t disappointed in the least. I said when I talked about it before that Infamous was like a comic book and that stayed true through the end, even as the story got a little convoluted and silly. I can forgive silly when it’s thematically appropriate and Infamous is right on that line of being silly to my 33 year-old self but still pretty cool to my internal 12 year-old self who, let’s face it, is the one running the show when it comes to me playing video games all the time.

Eventually the missions (especially the story missions indicated by the blue markers at the starting points) got longer but I still appreciated that the game maintained a very busy-adult-friendly pick up and play vibe throughout. Well, at least until the final boss fight which was infuriatingly difficult but just within the bounds of that rewarding box. Fighting Kessler was delightfully reminiscent of the boss battles from my youth in the NES/SNES eras: Full of trial and error, pattern memorization, finding weak spots, experimenting with the tools at my disposal. It was the best end boss battle I can remember in a very, very long time.

I highly recommend the game but I must admit my one minor quibble is that I wish the morality path-exclusive powers were more effective. I chose the Evil path partially because Arc Lightning sounded really cool but it’s utility turned out to be pretty limited. I mean, either way it was still fun to run around Bio Leeching random pedestrians because it suited my needs and I doubt I could have beaten the game on the Hard difficulty if I’d needed to be careful about my surroundings to maintain a Good karma level, but still. I want Evil to be, well, freakin’ evil and capable of near genocidal levels of mayhem and carnage. Still, it seemed like they were setting the stage for a sequel with the end of the game and I have no shame in saying I’m all over that.

The other thing I spent a lot of the break doing is playing iPhone games. I initially dismissed the iPhone in its original incarnation but like most things Apple does the iterations eventually caught up with the potential and I found my desire for a device that was a microcosm of my digital life—only persistent—to be increasing. So when the contracts for our old phones expired my wife and I used some saved cash and a generous Christmas gift of cash from my parents to get 3GS iPhones. One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to head over to the App Store to try and find some cool games.

It took me a while to find anything really interesting: I guess most of the games/genres I’m interested in are firmly in the paid-app realm and I’m enough of an iPhone newbie to not want to be saddled with lame software I dropped money for, even if it is mostly minimal investments. I did eventually find a few games, among them being a clever if not exactly perfect port of Nethack. Using tiles and mapping most of the game’s controls to gestures, it’s a cool little project but even though Nethack has never really worked very hard to be user-friendly, this version is particularly esoteric especially since players of the unix console version have to re-learn all the commands they’ve committed to memory as sets of gestures which work only most of the time when you want them to. I think a different interface would make it the game I played most on the device, but as is I’ve played it a handful of times and thought it was cool but mostly missed my terminal version.

I also experimented with some free versions of paid software including a little number called DropZap Lite. It’s a familiar-feeling drop-the-bricks puzzle game that isn’t based on speed at all, in fact it could be described as turn-based. The blocks in this case are sized large to small and as you drop new blocks the other blocks in the same row and column are reduced in size by one level. Once they reach the smallest size, new blocks remove them and gravity pulls them down and the chain continues with each successive drop increasing the score multiplier. The Lite version allows you to progress through up to three levels (you move up a level whenever you clear 50 bricks) and try to beat your highest score. It’s quite fun though I’m not sure if the novelty would last long enough for a full paid version, even if it’s only 99 cents. (Note that as of this writing I’m not able to locate the Lite version on the App Store.)

My friend Jim turned me on to GeoDefense Lite, which is a path-based tower defense game with a Geometry Wars aesthetic. Being a fan of GeoWars and, to a certain extent, tower defense, it’s kind of right up my alley although I think I prefer the open TD variety. Still this one is pretty nice and I like that the upgrades are more than just stat-based but actually change the graphics and effects of the shots as well. I wasn’t crazy about the fact that there isn’t much information available about the enemy units (unlike, say, Desktop Tower Defense) and the placement interface is kind of frustrating as the location circle doesn’t seem to map to your finger location on the touch screen very well, but I was able to have fun with it once I got used to its peculiarities. The Lite version has several Easy and Medium levels; the paid app is $1.99.

Jim also talked about Song Summoner Lite long before I even got an iPhone of my own so I sought it out when I was a platform owner. It’s a turn based strategy role playing game in the vein of Final Fantasy Advance and in fact created by SquareSoft. The hook though is that it has a Monster Rancher like method of generating solider units for you based on the waveforms of your iTunes tracks. I’m not sure if it’s due to the app being the free version or it has something to do with my song selection or maybe just a quirk of the game engine but no matter how dynamic a song I picked the characters I generated were all fairly low ranked out of the gate; my friend confirmed that he had a similar experience and I believe he purchased the full game. I haven’t done much more in it besides the tutorial and playing with the soldier generator, but it’s a cool enough concept and it’s close enough to what I’m looking for in an iPhone game that I felt compelled to mention it. One bad thing is the full version is a pretty hefty $9.99, so I’d have to really love the Lite version before I felt okay with dropping ten bucks on a game for my phone.

I also checked out Atoms, which as near as I can tell is an exclusively free game. It reminds me a little of the pacifism mode in Geometry Wars 2: You drag your blue ring around the screen, avoiding the deadly red circles. Eventually the red circles change into green and they can be run into at which point they explode like bombs to clear out reds and earn you points. I think the familiarity comes from the passive, indirect method of combat. My main problem with Atoms is that it relies on you placing your finger directly over the play field which suggests that the most effective way to play the game is to be invisible, something I haven’t yet mastered but is one of my New Year’s Resolutions.

Probably my biggest surprise is that I’m playing iMobsters/Zombies, two games in a pantheon of Storm8 games that are very much like the Mafia Wars/Vampire Wars games that clutter everyone’s news feed on Facebook. I’m not interested enough to research which games came first but in any case they’re curious turn-based strategy/adventure games that are very similar to text-based adventure games of old. Basically you are given a handful of action points (all the games play the same, the only difference is the thematic metaphor) with which to execute quests with a simple button click. These quests provide some sort of experience points and a form of currency which you can exchange for income sources or equipment that makes you more effective at PvP combat (some of the equipment often cuts into your income with upkeep costs as well). The kick is the social aspect which allows you to join forces with other players to add them as an item carrier slot in your PvP attempts by linking your accounts into each other’s groups. Again, the detail is in the theme but the perpetuation hook is that the action points refresh based on a real-time countdown so you have to log in regularly to continue your XP grind. The games are also micro-transaction based so you can speed up your progress for a small fee based on some kind of loyalty points which are also given infrequently for various in-game actions.

It’s hard to portray why I’d be inclined to continue with what is, essentially, narrative-deprived interactive fiction. iMobsters makes a little more sense thematically and in execution than Zombies, which I’m playing basically because if it says or hints at zombies I’ll probably give it a long leash. My New Year’s Resolution is to lay off the zombiephilia a little bit. In either case though they’re not particularly compelling in a rational sense, it’s more that once you get started it’s easy to think they’re something mildly interesting to do with your hands when you experience some sort of lull. The fact that they can easily be played with one hand while doing something else, say, eating or rocking a baby to sleep probably plays a role as well.

I keep hearing that Facebook and mobile phones will shortly become the principal platform for video games and honestly I’m not the kind of person who gets all “nuh-uh!” about those sorts of predictions, but on a personal level that kind of thing will only work for my gaming habits if the games themselves offer something more compelling than what I’m seeing now. I have a hard time understanding why there aren’t more games along the lines of what you see at Kongregate on Facebook: Rich, clever experiences that maybe don’t rival the kinds of things you can get on consoles but offer a variety of depths and levels of sophistication. So far everything I’ve seen on social network platforms is the ultimate in casual. These iPhone games are a bit closer to what I’m looking for but a lot of them feel very much like early DS games where people are still trying to figure out how to leverage the platform without being gimmicky or trying to shoehorn experiences onto it that simply don’t fit.

It’s worth seeing where this goes, though, because I see a lot of potential around. And my New Year’s Resolution is to make sure I don’t miss the revolution.