Gaming Weekend: Silent Protagonist Edition
“What do you think,” she asked. I simply stared at her. “Yeah,” she conceded after a few seconds, “We should just play it by ear.” I glanced around the room, paying more attention to the entry points and available ammunition than the conversation. It’s how all our little talks went: She speaks. I listen. Mostly. When I’m not busy killing stuff and half-listening over the clatter of automatic rifle fire.
It’s not that I don’t care or that I don’t have any desire to answer. But I can’t, and so every question becomes rhetorical. Every comment passes by without reaction. Every emotional confession and every awe-inspiring moment is greeted with cold silence and casual observation.
And people are creeped out by the guy in the suit. Go figure.
It’s Missing Something
I finished Half-Life 2 over the weekend. For the most part, I enjoyed it. A few sections were a bit too long and some of it felt a bit… gamey. I say that like it’s a bad thing but what I mean is that some games which draw a lot of obvious inspiration from Half-Life (the original) like F.E.A.R., BioShock, Prey and so on have made obvious efforts to create a world that feels authentic in as many ways as possible. For example, things like climbing ladders feel really cheesy in Half-Life because you can do it without dropping whatever is in your hands. Even small details such as the fact that you don’t see your hands on the steering wheels of vehicles and the fact that you have no inventory but instead have to use health packs as you encounter them (which means for moderate difficulties they have to be everywhere) sort of break the spell of the game.
It’s minor details like that, which I totally accepted in the original, that make me feel like there is a barrier between me and the avatar I’m supposed to inhabit. But none more so than the fact that Gordon Freeman doesn’t speak.
In Half-Life, Freeman’s silence was less of a problem. It was like the silence of Portal’s protagonist: There was never a point in the proceedings where it felt out of place, like you were ignoring people. Mostly the atmosphere of Half-Life was one of desperation and shock at the strange, incomprehensible events unfolding all around. In the intentionally vague framework of the original’s story, it even made sense to me that Freeman might have been too shell-shocked to speak. He had come to work that morning as a physicist and was now taking lives and shooting guns and fighting against dimensional aliens for his very survival… maybe he was the kind of person who just clammed up when faced with this much stress.
But HL2 is a different story. Freeman is admired, in some cases even adored. He is a cult of personality who lacks any such thing. And time and again I found myself frustrated because Freeman’s silence became a conceit to convention and then, as the Alyx character began to grow and be fleshed out into this remarkable and often vibrant personality, an active frustration. By the end of the game I was feeling like I wanted to connect with Alyx vicariously through my in-game avatar because Valve did such a remarkable job at bringing her to life but each time it became clear that the writers were trying to fashion a relationship between these two characters—which ought to have worked as if the player were living through an action movie plot—I was instead yanked out of the moment and found myself thinking: What on earth could she be seeing in this sketchy creep who never says a single word? How can a character so otherwise wholly believable be expected to find any sort of companionship or solace or comfort in the presence of this functional zombie who is no different, personality-wise, from the headcrab-infested drones he slaughters by the dozen?
At one point late in the game, the antagonist Dr. Breem asks me/Gordon, “You have destroyed so much—what is it exactly that you have created?” I find he has a point, and I start to feel as if this person whose role I’ve assumed is really someone I want to connect with Alyx and Dr. Vance and Barney and Dr. Kleiner after all. They all seem real and noble. Me, I’m just a zombie with a gravity gun. Wind me up and watch me go.
Other Titles
- Beautiful Katamari – I unlocked all the stages this week, which is sort of like finishing the game, I suppose. But really the fun of the game is in simply playing it since the story—as it were—is pointless and uninteresting. There are still a lot of achievements I could unlock from this game so I’ll probably hang onto it for a little while before listing it on Goozex, but since Nik isn’t really interested in it the way I thought she might be and the best mission (Uranus, which is basically an unlimited time mode) is essentially the last mission with no time pressure, I don’t know that I’ll be playing it for months to come. I’m glad I finally got to experience a Katamari game, but I’m also glad I only played $40 for it.
- Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass – This has become my short-form game of choice since I picked it up last week. The visuals continue to delight me and I’m even finding some of the puzzles to be clever and fun. I do find that the DS isn’t terribly comfortable to hold in horizontal mode when using stylus-only games for long periods of time. I’d kind of like to dive in a bit more but I get uncomfortable too quickly to play for more than maybe 45 minutes at a stretch, and that’s usually pushing it. But it’s good enough that I don’t mind extending it out a bit.
- Rule of Rose – I was really intrigued by this game when it was being previewed prior to release. Then it actually came out and virtually disappeared under an avalanche of mixed reviews skewing to the awful. Some of the complaints like the game’s slow pace I can tolerate. Others that suggest combat is atrocious have me worried, but after a couple of hours of playing the game late at night I a) have yet to fight anything and b) have yet to feel even remotely creeped out, much less scared. I consider myself to be a pretty easy audience in horror games: Even the original Resident Evil scared me on the PS1. But this ought to have been… something and so far it isn’t. I’ve heard the only redeeming aspect of the game is the story and I’m such a sucker for a good story in games that I’m tempted to press on. I’ll give it one more session, I think, and if it hasn’t compelled me by then I won’t stick around and wait for it to magically impress me.
- Half-Life 2: Episode One – Immediately after the ruthless cliffhanger ending of HL2 I fired up EpOne, feeling sorry for folks who played the game when it first came out and had to wait around for this to get released. It’s got a different vibe from most of HL2, but the silent protagonist issue is more prevalent here than ever before. I hate the phony flashlight charge mechanic in every game, but making a whole level around it is sticking in my craw already. I do like that the AI for Alyx is good enough to make for a tolerable trip through enemy-infested areas even when you have practically no ammunition of your own, but I’m ready to have my guns back now.
- Tiger Woods 08 – I only played the game for a few minutes, but I’ll say this: I love the idea of the DS mechanic. The execution, so far at least, eh… not so much.
- Puzzle Quest – I’m still slowly slogging my way through the game’s many, many quests. It has kind of reached its peak fun threshold I think, which is okay because I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it and by now I’m so invested that I’ll see it through until I get 200 points, but I don’t anticipate it getting a lot more fun all of a sudden.
- Psychonauts – Got this title from Goozex and popped it in for an hour or so. It looks nice for an Xbox game, but I didn’t see where all the oft-reported humor was. Maybe the funny stuff comes later, but it was kind of slow to get started and I was falling asleep. I’ll definitely give it more time, but so far I’m underwhelmed.
Demo Watch
This week I played one retail title demo for Blazing Angels which was decent but mostly an arcadey flight shooter which isn’t really my genre. I might rent it from Gameznflix if there was literally nothing else I wanted, but while I had a reasonable amount of fun for fifteen minutes I turned it off after I died once which suggests that was about as much fun as I was ever going to have with the game.
I also checked out a couple of XBLA titles: Battlestar Galactica and Exit. BSG felt like almost the same game as Wing Commander Arena from earlier this year, all the way down to the 2D plane in space which is just a strange, strange concession. The backgrounds looked nice and it was semi-entertaining for a few minutes but I’d rather see a real (read: complete) BSG game on the 360. The other title, Exit, I liked better with it’s Prince of Persia (the old-school side-scroller) vibe. The art style is fun and the puzzles were interesting but the companions had some very PC-feeling controls (cursors? clicks? really?) that I didn’t care for and I didn’t feel like another 90 levels of the same thing were going to be enough to part me with my $10.