ACTIONBUTTONNET
2006
text by tim rogers
★★★☆
“A BOTTOMLESS BOWL OF CAP'N CRUNCH ON A FIFTY-HOUR SATURDAY MORNING.”
Quite accidentally — that’s how obsessive-compulsize behavior gets started. Case in point: I was eight years old when I first played Dragon Quest, and the game boggled my overweight mind from so many directions — here I’d spent most of my sentient life making Super Mario run and jump, and here was a game that required me to open a menu and click a command to open a door. I needed to sit and review the instruction manual, which I did upon waking early one Saturday morning. I poured a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and read over the instruction manual at my family’s dinner table.
Ever since then, I can’t play a new RPG without reading the instruction manual over a bowl of cold cereal. They used to be big and fascinating. They used to have cryptic, six-to-twelve-page-long story descriptions and tons of character art; Final Fantasy VI for the Super Famicom easily had the best RPG instruction manual of all-time. Most RPGs these days don’t break much new ground in their instruction manuals; part of me wants to groan at every Square-Enix manual, where they will spell everything out in extended notation: “Use the directional buttons up or down to move the cursor up or down; when the cursor has highlighted the ‘Fight’ command, press the O button to confirm.” Namco’s Tales of manuals, on the other hand, are fresh, clean, and honest, three words you’re seldom to hear used about anything made by Namco: they all start with a big chart, in which the directional buttons’ use is described as “On the field: move character” “In menus: move cursor” and the O button is described as “In menus: confirm” “On the field: speak / investigate”. Square-Enix’s games’ manuals earn their lengths by describing the menu selection confirming process every time they explain the function of a different menu selection. Tales of games earn their length and weight when they drift into extended segments about the unique in-game magic systems.
RPG instruction manuals nowadays are rendered unnecessary by droning, in-game tutorials that make sure no newbie is left behind. The manuals continue to exist, it seems, to satisfy the obsessive, now-archetypal desire that sleeps deep within the RPG-playing hordes: the package must be heavy. It must be heavy, and it must be shiny. People like me didn’t use a razor blade to open our Super Nintendo games for nothing: we wanted as much plastic clinging to the package, forever, as possible. This was part of the reason why we balked at Final Fantasy VII‘s being on the PlayStation: because the Nintendo 64 was going to have proper boxes for its games, boxes with plastic wrap, and plenty of room for superfluous maps and posters and posters of maps. Promises of three discs — three ridiculous discs — swayed us, and we stayed when we saw the big instruction manual; years later, with Final Fantasy X, it became dreadfully apparent that DVD cases, made of soft plastic, are lighter than CD jewel cases, and DVDs hold more information, making multi-disc games obsolete; and thus the Heavy-box RPG of yore has faded into the past. People tried to bring it back, by stuffing trinkets and/or soundtrack CDs into the cases, though those people happened to mostly be idiots or, worse, Working Designs.
The Heavy-box RPG has returned to spectacular form, however, with Hironobu Sakaguchi, Mistwalker, and Artoon’s Blue Dragon, which sports a forty-seven-page (not too huge, not too short) glossy instruction manual and a foil-stamped mirror-shiny label (reversible!) over a DVD case that weighs about as much as a loaded laser pistol will weigh in the year 2148. Taped to the outside of the case, when I bought the game back in December of 2006, was a fat, pristine plastic package of stickers to put on anything I wanted, as long as anything I wanted was an Xbox 360 or related peripheral. Breathing through my mouth, I tore open the package, and screamed like a clown on fire when I saw what lay inside: an Xbox-green plastic hinging apparatus, containing one disc on each side, and then a third disc sitting on a spindle inside the back of the case. Three discs! Why hadn’t I, in all my obsessive, news-combing, information-gathering frenzy, known that this game was three discs? Why hadn’t Microsoft advertised such a fact? I suppose game companies aren’t proud of three discs, or of heavy boxes, anymore. It’s something to reflect on that a country like Japan is able to produce values of this caliber, when they’ve gone out of their way to reject value in all other forms; a six-pack of beer, here, is precisely the price of six cans of beer, plus ten extra yen for the package.
Hironobu Sakaguchi saw a grand vision; it told him to get together the most talented artists, programmers, game designers, writers, and musicians, and throw them at several videogames until he had successfully defeated his former home of Square-Enix. In minds as idealistic and pure-hearted as Sakaguchi’s, there’s no way this plan could fail: if you’re able to think on his wavelength there’s no way his RPG Lost Odyssey, featuring the art of Takehiko Inoue and a story by Kiyoshi Shigematsu — both immense talents from outside the videogame industry — will not be awesome. However, this corner of the industry is currently in a stinking state of inbreeding; the first young man in line to purchase Final Fantasy XII, when allowed to ask a question of Square-Enix president Yoichi Wada before a television audience, meekly spoke “Please remake Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation 3 thank you” and shuffled away. The people like Tetsuya Nomura; they don’t care that he got started as a one-bit pixel-chopper in the Super Famicom days, or that his art style has slowly fluctuated from idiocy to madness. As far as the hardest-cored RPG fans are concerned, Nomura is one of them. Never mind that the first RPGs in the legacy of Japanese RPGs were made by bold, daring people on risk-taking budgets, pouring more money into the pockets of an artist who ended up only ever drawing a couple of shots for the instruction manual than they would pay the programmers. Yuji Horii scored white-hot manga artist Akira Toriyama for Dragon Quest back in 1986, and the move helped the game sell millions. Sakaguchi, meanwhile, in building his counter-Dragon Quest, sought out semi-fine artist Yostuffaka Amano to lend a lofty air to Final Fantasy.
Since those two series exploded all over the world, kids with access to pens and pencils have sought to be as awesome as their idols, and this has resulted in many a Japanese elementary schoolchild telling his teacher he longed to design characters for RPGs when he grew up. What kids are doing, with their cute little dreams, is cutting out the middleman — which, in this case, happens to be “Earn recognition outside the field of videogames before being asked to collaborate on a videogame” — and the videogame industry has never stopped to slap them and tell them to eat their vegetables. Is this a bad thing? Maybe not! I’m certainly not one to judge people provably more successful than me (I’ve never designed characters for a major videogame, et cetera), though certainly, the quality is growing me-too-ish and even dull. Namco’s Tales of games are an ironically good example of uneven distribution of talent. They’ll get a hot rock band like Bump of Chicken to do the theme song, and then let said theme song play out over an animated scene of ferocious vapidity: the camera pans slowly toward each character as they stand perfectly still, and then, just as the camera stops, the character makes some crudely vague gesture with their weapon or magical pet. Sakaguchi must have seen this tsunami coming from miles away. He apparently wanted no part of Final Fantasy VII because he thought the technology wasn’t up to the vision yet. He wanted to keep making games on Nintendo systems, with sprite graphics, while the other half of his team worked squeaked out FMV-laden adventures. When Square subsequently got huge, he probably entertained the idea of sacking Nomura and using the Huge Revenues to hire an awesome artist, like Kentarou Miura, artist of the manga Berserk, which had inspired both the story and the character designs for Final Fantasy VII. He knew from the start that he wouldn’t be able to do this, though; the managers around him were growing increasingly hard-headed, and success would only make their heads harder, and their souls paranoid as hell. Sakaguchi knew that with great power came great potential to piss off one’s fans, and he knew that RPG fans were, more than anything else, fans of the package: if someone likes Final Fantasy VII, then they are fans of Nobuo Uematsu’s music, and of Tetsuya Nomura’s characters. The managers would have considered swapping in a new artist to be like admitting that the previous one hadn’t quite been exactly all that he could have been. It would have been like confessing to a lapse in judgment. It would have been flipping off the fans. To exist in the world, for an artist, is to have fans. Sakaguchi probably knew all these things, and he would have rather loved for Squaresoft to die in loud obscurity.
Even if that had happened — and even though it didn’t — I’ll tell you what that all makes Sakaguchi: it makes him a man. A trooper. He’s wanted little else than to stick to his guns. Even his majorly unsuccessful film debut, “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”, while bland, was the work of a man: it wanted nothing more than to push an envelope, and whether you liked it or not (hint: I didn’t), even if the people’s faces were creepy and surreal, it’s just not kosher to diss Sakaguchi about it, when you consider that he was the first to attempt to make a feature-length computer-animated motion picture about realistic-looking human beings, and that no one’s tried such a feat since.
You have to wonder, though, playing Blue Dragon: would Sakaguchi have stayed a film director for life, had “The Spirits Within” been popular? It was well-made enough, and it was even critically acclaimed. Had it set the world on fire, would Sakaguchi still be a film director today? Blue Dragon leaves one with the distinct impression of “maybe”, and that either way, Sakaguchi truly possesses more of the love-like attention to detail necessary to craft a videogame world than any RPG producer outside of Yuji Horii. Sakaguchi said in an interview prior to Blue Dragon‘s release that he wanted to stick with what he knew, with the field and the format he spent years working in, that of the Japanese RPG. After leading the Final Fantasy series slowly down a flaming corridor from utter normalcy to complete nonsense, after spending more time reinventing himself than he ever spent being himself, Sakaguchi has finally settled down, given in, and admitted that there is something he can do better than he can do anything else. Back in the old days, it was a pissing contest, Hironobu Sakaguchi versus Yuji Horii, Final Fantasy versus Dragon Quest, Relentless Reinvention versus Astute Revision. A few hours of Blue Dragon is enough to sound the gong: the war is over, Yuji Horii kind of won, and Hironobu Sakaguchi wears his fatalism pretty well.
If you’ve never played a Japanese RPG before, or if you hate them, or especially if you despise them, you’re probably just going to sigh a lot at Blue Dragon. If you’ve never played a Japanese RPG, at least, you might be able to really get into the game. It’s as good a first RPG as any, and it’s a better one than most. Though if you hate the genre, be not fooled by the precious, amazing graphics. It’s the same old-school game, the same old-school story progressions, the same old-school focus on numbers that go up and hit points that go down. In design, it’s far more reined-in and focused than perhaps any Japanese RPG has ever been, though if you don’t like these games, you’re not going to like this one. If you’ve played dozens of these games and ever loved one of them while hating a couple other ones, chances are you’ll be able to play Blue Dragon, like it a fair deal, and shrug at the end and kind of feel like you’re qualified to judge it as superiorly well-made. Just don’t walk in expecting it to find your hecking car keys and/or change peanut butter into jelly.
There’s certainly a fine-wine quality about this game. Akira Toriyama’s character designs are subtle — the most amazing hairstyle is a pretty average shaggy ponytail — darker, and less fantastic than something he’d submit for Dragon Quest, though if you’ve ever appreciated his work, you’ll no doubt consider these designs sublime. Likewise, Nobuo Uematsu’s musical compositions, while lacking the chintzy flourishes and brassy motifs of his celebrated Final Fantasy VI soundtrack, are rounder and far more musician-like than anything he’s ever composed. Some tracks even approach a Kenji-Ito-like level of pop-song-esque fullness; when Ito makes such music, it tends to stand out so strongly that it distracts from the game, so that the graphics become a background for the music. Uematsu’s score is just subtle enough to fit in, and just catchy enough to make buyers of the soundtrack scratch their heads and wonder why it’s not a little more catchy. And Hironobu Sakaguchi’s scenario is a thing of beauty. After ripping through literally a dozen Tales of games over the years (such was my hunger for scenario-heavy entertainment-focused RPGs), it’s revealing how effortlessly Sakaguchi manages to make “Go to the castle to speak to the king” seem like something legendary heroes really do have to do every other day. Blue Dragon is Sakaguchi blowing steam out of his system; he plays the RPG cliches like a trumpet. Not minutes after we go to a castle to speak with a king, here’s an enemy army invading. Here’s the sky clouded purple. Here’s an opportunity for our heroes to help. The story starts as something of a fractured steampunk yarn, in which our young heroes fight several battles and eventually find themselves aboard a giant flying fortress.
We get to know the characters as they journey back home, and shortly after they discover their purpose — after about fifteen hours of action-packed wandering — the game does something of a snickering little 180. It’s as though, suddenly, the game is now in color, even though it hadn’t quite been in black and white before. It’s something of a low-key “Wizard of Oz”, then. Beyond all expectations, there’s a point where, suddenly, the gorgeous graphics become infinitely more gorgeous, where the lazy threads of the story suddenly and fiercely tie themselves tight together, and the game straightens up and begins, finally, to gain momentum. This is fascinating among modern RPGs, where the plot usually starts hot and heavy, and then gradually loses steam. In Blue Dragon, you’re plinking around dungeons until, at last, the game adopts something of a Chrono Trigger stance, and starts creating elaborate events and set-pieces. More than anything else — even the Active Time Battle system, yes, especially that — this is Sakaguchi’s contribution to the Japanese RPG: where Dragon Quest focused on tricky mazes filled with complex puzzles, Final Fantasy games, as of IV, shifted their focus to short, straightforward, corridor-like dungeons in which dynamic things were happening. A play-through of some of Blue Dragon‘s more complex, domino-like events will perhaps reveal why Sakaguchi is currently so in love with Gears of War: that’s precisely the kind of thing Sakaguchi has always been trying to make, only without the guns, or the action. Sakaguchi’s curb stomps be words.
Once Blue Dragon hits its crescendo, you probably won’t stop playing. Its final act — its third disc — manages to make you actually care about these big-headed kid-like characters (who are all supposed to be sixteen years old, which is kind of creepy, given how tiny their hands are) and what happens to them.
On the whole, it feels like Final Fantasy IV, plot full of gleeful twists and turns. At many points, you can almost imagine the scenario writer snickering as he writes the scene where the characters finally get on a boat and almost instantly get attacked by a sea monster. Every other battle or event in Blue Dragon is like an all-new episode of the only cartoon in the world that could cause you to wake up at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning after a full week of hating elementary school. If there’s anything negative I can say about it, it’s that the beginning part isn’t nearly as much fun as the middle part, though I only noticed that in hindsight: I had been, truthfully, hyperventilating in my excitement to play the game, so I hardly noticed. I had high-definition three-dimensional quasi-realistic super-deformed Akira Toriyama characters before me — the game could have been an interactive paper-doll-dressing simulation, and I would have played it for at least twenty hours.
As I warned earlier, if you hate the genre of Japanese RPG, you won’t like this game. Though if you sincerely like the genre, as far as RPGs go, this one’s pretty great. The battle system is mostly borrowed from Final Fantasy X — an excellent move, as that battle system could benefit from a second chance and some tweaking — though instead of three characters, you have five. Characters’ turns come up based on their agility statistic; you choose an action for them; they execute the action. The similarity to Final Fantasy X‘s battle system is more than skin-deep — it penetrates to the soul. FFX made a ballsy move by eliminating the Active Time Battle system, which is what had differentiated Final Fantasy from Dragon Quest in the first place. The designers of FFX knew that the Active Time Battle system was, effectively, bullstuff. It was a heavy handed and somewhat jack-offish way of making the player feel rushed during battles, though someone, somewhere, must have realized that making players hurry to make menu choices was kind of unnecessarily mean. FFX made the conscientious choice by making the battles truly time-based, tactical contests, rather than forcing players to press buttons and squeal like speds.
The battle system is as stoic as it is frantic. You can see characters’ and enemies’ turns displayed at the top of the screen; highlight an enemy with your attack cursor, and his position in the timeline, also, will be displayed. Use this knowledge to plan your tactics, et cetera. Only FFX kind of flunked out early, by having somewhat tacky disparities: you can only have three party members at a time, and at the start of the game, you basically have one character who can use white magic (for healing), one character who can use black magic (for killing enemies that can only be killed by black magic), one character with an aerial attack (for killing flying enemies), and one character with an armor-piercing attack (for killing armored enemies). This made the battle system kind of cheap: “Oh, there’s a flying enemy — gotta switch in my flying-enemy-killing dude now!” The effect was kind of like walking into an empty room thirty hours into a Zelda game and being asked to light a torch in order to open the door, which you’ve been doing for thirty hecking hours now, even though you’d only ever been playing the game for maybe fifteen minutes.
FFX eventually let you customize your characters, and make them all equal — maybe make them all able to kill flying, piercing, or magical enemies. Blue Dragon, slightly similarly, starts with all of your characters in a gray area. Like in Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy V, you’re constantly changing the focus of your characters, and hard work (of the level-grinding variety) is rewarded by winning your characters extra, class-specific abilities that can be equipped to any other job class. As you level up your “Black” class, for example, you’ll earn “Black Magic Level 1” or “Level 2” or “Level 3”, allowing you to use different levels of black magic even if you’ve switched back to the “White” class. In this way, you’re mixing and matching your abilities to make “custom” characters — though this isn’t always what makes the battle system interesting. That would be the charge attacks; in any other game using a pseudo-real-time battle system, like Final Fantasy Tactics, magic spells and special attacks carry a basic casting time. Choose to cast a fire spell, and then wait patiently until it’s casted. In Blue Dragon, you can cast any spell or special attack right away — or you can cast it later. It’s all your choice: just after you’ve selected a spell and a target, a charge meter is displayed; the charge meter is marked at the appropriate places with icons representing your fellow party members and the enemy party. Hold down the attack button to charge your attack. Let go when you think you’ve held it down for long enough. At first, it seems like an innocent little tedium-breaker, though it ends up being executed rather brilliantly. Not a third of the way into the game, enemies start showing up who can kill your party members in one violent hit, 100% of the time. You’ll need to hit them before they hit you, while also hitting them hard. A lesser game, like Grandia III, would concentrate your party’s tactics on slowing the enemies down, or canceling their actions. Blue Dragon, on the other hand, forces you to think hard about your own actions. Say you’re fighting an enemy you know to be somewhat vulnerable to paralysis spells. You want to cast a paralysis spell on him, so as to render him immobile for your boys to beat on him for a couple of rounds, and you want to charge the spell up as much as possible — charging increases effectiveness — though you also want the spell to execute before the enemy’s next turn. So you need to think about it for a bit, and you might end up making a compromise that costs one character his (revivable) life. A similar “fine-wine” delicacy creeps into dozens upon dozens of battles throughout the game, and again, if you love these games, it’s a real treat.
There’s a freewheeling, casino-like nature to battling, so that when you win, whatever you get feels like a pay-out. The ability to battle multiple enemy parties at once at first feels kind of a throwaway feature, though it ends up miraculously making grinding more than entertaining for anyone who’s ever played, say, a “Mysterious Dungeon” game. Press the right trigger on the field map to see a list of all the enemies within battling range — choose to fight all of them, and you’ll fight each party, one after another, in sequence. Between enemy parties, a slot machine will pop up on screen, and award you with a bonus: increased strength, speed, et cetera. Interestingly, the only negative effect on the slots is “remove all bonuses”. The game understands, as all Dragon Quest games do, that the game doesn’t lose when players win. It’s already an oath of bravery to take on six enemy parties at once, so the game cuts you a little slack and applauds appropriately when you win.
After more than twenty hours of playing this game, a question popped into my head, and I had to consult the instruction manual. I can’t remember this happening with any other game in the last ten years. My question was about the little red blip on the magic / special attack charge meter. Did I get a bonus if I stopped the bar on that red blip? Or did it do less damage? I honestly couldn’t tell. The instruction manual told me that stopping the bar on the red blip (sometimes very difficult) resulted in the spell doing maximum damage and costing only half as much MP as usual. I felt a little dumb for having not noticed that, though I quickly justified my dumbness by remembering that I’d been avoiding the red blip most of the time because it seldom puts me in a good strategic position. Sometimes the red blip appears at the beginning of the charge bar, sometimes at the end. The battle system kind of starts to philosophically unravel when you realize that a red blip at the beginning is subtly stressing how important it is to attack as quickly as possible and as hard as possible. It’s a slick little quirk, almost worthy of a Romancing SaGa game, though it’s far more philanthropic. Either way, it’s applaudable that the game doesn’t spell this out for you — nor, really, does it spell out anything for you. It expects you to figure things out for yourself, or to read the manual.
That day, I spent an extra twenty minutes or so re-reading the manual. There’s a two-page section at the end, called “Jiro’s tips”, where Jiro, the boy-genius of your party, offers dozens of tips, such as “If the monsters are too strong, try leveling up!” or “You should probably save your game whenever you see a save point!” In the lower-right corner of the second page of the tips section is Maro, the semi-unintelligent, loudmouthed character. He says: “Hey, let me give some tips, too!” and then gives the reader precisely two tips: “Accessories and armor boost your stats” and “Raise your agility statistic to attack more quickly!” Why it has to be Maro giving these two tips, I have no idea. Though I guess that’s the long and short of it, for you. Why bother releasing a Japanese-style RPG, when the genre has been astray so long, and innovated so infrequently, misunderstood by its detractors whenever it does wrong, misunderstood by its fans whenever it tries to reach out? Why step into this minefield, and make another breezy, entertaining game that’s happy not really changing anything? Why, because accessories and armor boost your stats, of course.
★★★☆
“A BOTTOMLESS BOWL OF CAP'N CRUNCH ON A FIFTY-HOUR SATURDAY MORNING.”
Quite accidentally — that’s how obsessive-compulsize behavior gets started. Case in point: I was eight years old when I first played Dragon Quest, and the game boggled my overweight mind from so many directions — here I’d spent most of my sentient life making Super Mario run and jump, and here was a game that required me to open a menu and click a command to open a door. I needed to sit and review the instruction manual, which I did upon waking early one Saturday morning. I poured a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and read over the instruction manual at my family’s dinner table.
Ever since then, I can’t play a new RPG without reading the instruction manual over a bowl of cold cereal. They used to be big and fascinating. They used to have cryptic, six-to-twelve-page-long story descriptions and tons of character art; Final Fantasy VI for the Super Famicom easily had the best RPG instruction manual of all-time. Most RPGs these days don’t break much new ground in their instruction manuals; part of me wants to groan at every Square-Enix manual, where they will spell everything out in extended notation: “Use the directional buttons up or down to move the cursor up or down; when the cursor has highlighted the ‘Fight’ command, press the O button to confirm.” Namco’s Tales of manuals, on the other hand, are fresh, clean, and honest, three words you’re seldom to hear used about anything made by Namco: they all start with a big chart, in which the directional buttons’ use is described as “On the field: move character” “In menus: move cursor” and the O button is described as “In menus: confirm” “On the field: speak / investigate”. Square-Enix’s games’ manuals earn their lengths by describing the menu selection confirming process every time they explain the function of a different menu selection. Tales of games earn their length and weight when they drift into extended segments about the unique in-game magic systems.
RPG instruction manuals nowadays are rendered unnecessary by droning, in-game tutorials that make sure no newbie is left behind. The manuals continue to exist, it seems, to satisfy the obsessive, now-archetypal desire that sleeps deep within the RPG-playing hordes: the package must be heavy. It must be heavy, and it must be shiny. People like me didn’t use a razor blade to open our Super Nintendo games for nothing: we wanted as much plastic clinging to the package, forever, as possible. This was part of the reason why we balked at Final Fantasy VII‘s being on the PlayStation: because the Nintendo 64 was going to have proper boxes for its games, boxes with plastic wrap, and plenty of room for superfluous maps and posters and posters of maps. Promises of three discs — three ridiculous discs — swayed us, and we stayed when we saw the big instruction manual; years later, with Final Fantasy X, it became dreadfully apparent that DVD cases, made of soft plastic, are lighter than CD jewel cases, and DVDs hold more information, making multi-disc games obsolete; and thus the Heavy-box RPG of yore has faded into the past. People tried to bring it back, by stuffing trinkets and/or soundtrack CDs into the cases, though those people happened to mostly be idiots or, worse, Working Designs.
The Heavy-box RPG has returned to spectacular form, however, with Hironobu Sakaguchi, Mistwalker, and Artoon’s Blue Dragon, which sports a forty-seven-page (not too huge, not too short) glossy instruction manual and a foil-stamped mirror-shiny label (reversible!) over a DVD case that weighs about as much as a loaded laser pistol will weigh in the year 2148. Taped to the outside of the case, when I bought the game back in December of 2006, was a fat, pristine plastic package of stickers to put on anything I wanted, as long as anything I wanted was an Xbox 360 or related peripheral. Breathing through my mouth, I tore open the package, and screamed like a clown on fire when I saw what lay inside: an Xbox-green plastic hinging apparatus, containing one disc on each side, and then a third disc sitting on a spindle inside the back of the case. Three discs! Why hadn’t I, in all my obsessive, news-combing, information-gathering frenzy, known that this game was three discs? Why hadn’t Microsoft advertised such a fact? I suppose game companies aren’t proud of three discs, or of heavy boxes, anymore. It’s something to reflect on that a country like Japan is able to produce values of this caliber, when they’ve gone out of their way to reject value in all other forms; a six-pack of beer, here, is precisely the price of six cans of beer, plus ten extra yen for the package.
Hironobu Sakaguchi saw a grand vision; it told him to get together the most talented artists, programmers, game designers, writers, and musicians, and throw them at several videogames until he had successfully defeated his former home of Square-Enix. In minds as idealistic and pure-hearted as Sakaguchi’s, there’s no way this plan could fail: if you’re able to think on his wavelength there’s no way his RPG Lost Odyssey, featuring the art of Takehiko Inoue and a story by Kiyoshi Shigematsu — both immense talents from outside the videogame industry — will not be awesome. However, this corner of the industry is currently in a stinking state of inbreeding; the first young man in line to purchase Final Fantasy XII, when allowed to ask a question of Square-Enix president Yoichi Wada before a television audience, meekly spoke “Please remake Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation 3 thank you” and shuffled away. The people like Tetsuya Nomura; they don’t care that he got started as a one-bit pixel-chopper in the Super Famicom days, or that his art style has slowly fluctuated from idiocy to madness. As far as the hardest-cored RPG fans are concerned, Nomura is one of them. Never mind that the first RPGs in the legacy of Japanese RPGs were made by bold, daring people on risk-taking budgets, pouring more money into the pockets of an artist who ended up only ever drawing a couple of shots for the instruction manual than they would pay the programmers. Yuji Horii scored white-hot manga artist Akira Toriyama for Dragon Quest back in 1986, and the move helped the game sell millions. Sakaguchi, meanwhile, in building his counter-Dragon Quest, sought out semi-fine artist Yostuffaka Amano to lend a lofty air to Final Fantasy.
Since those two series exploded all over the world, kids with access to pens and pencils have sought to be as awesome as their idols, and this has resulted in many a Japanese elementary schoolchild telling his teacher he longed to design characters for RPGs when he grew up. What kids are doing, with their cute little dreams, is cutting out the middleman — which, in this case, happens to be “Earn recognition outside the field of videogames before being asked to collaborate on a videogame” — and the videogame industry has never stopped to slap them and tell them to eat their vegetables. Is this a bad thing? Maybe not! I’m certainly not one to judge people provably more successful than me (I’ve never designed characters for a major videogame, et cetera), though certainly, the quality is growing me-too-ish and even dull. Namco’s Tales of games are an ironically good example of uneven distribution of talent. They’ll get a hot rock band like Bump of Chicken to do the theme song, and then let said theme song play out over an animated scene of ferocious vapidity: the camera pans slowly toward each character as they stand perfectly still, and then, just as the camera stops, the character makes some crudely vague gesture with their weapon or magical pet. Sakaguchi must have seen this tsunami coming from miles away. He apparently wanted no part of Final Fantasy VII because he thought the technology wasn’t up to the vision yet. He wanted to keep making games on Nintendo systems, with sprite graphics, while the other half of his team worked squeaked out FMV-laden adventures. When Square subsequently got huge, he probably entertained the idea of sacking Nomura and using the Huge Revenues to hire an awesome artist, like Kentarou Miura, artist of the manga Berserk, which had inspired both the story and the character designs for Final Fantasy VII. He knew from the start that he wouldn’t be able to do this, though; the managers around him were growing increasingly hard-headed, and success would only make their heads harder, and their souls paranoid as hell. Sakaguchi knew that with great power came great potential to piss off one’s fans, and he knew that RPG fans were, more than anything else, fans of the package: if someone likes Final Fantasy VII, then they are fans of Nobuo Uematsu’s music, and of Tetsuya Nomura’s characters. The managers would have considered swapping in a new artist to be like admitting that the previous one hadn’t quite been exactly all that he could have been. It would have been like confessing to a lapse in judgment. It would have been flipping off the fans. To exist in the world, for an artist, is to have fans. Sakaguchi probably knew all these things, and he would have rather loved for Squaresoft to die in loud obscurity.
Even if that had happened — and even though it didn’t — I’ll tell you what that all makes Sakaguchi: it makes him a man. A trooper. He’s wanted little else than to stick to his guns. Even his majorly unsuccessful film debut, “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”, while bland, was the work of a man: it wanted nothing more than to push an envelope, and whether you liked it or not (hint: I didn’t), even if the people’s faces were creepy and surreal, it’s just not kosher to diss Sakaguchi about it, when you consider that he was the first to attempt to make a feature-length computer-animated motion picture about realistic-looking human beings, and that no one’s tried such a feat since.
You have to wonder, though, playing Blue Dragon: would Sakaguchi have stayed a film director for life, had “The Spirits Within” been popular? It was well-made enough, and it was even critically acclaimed. Had it set the world on fire, would Sakaguchi still be a film director today? Blue Dragon leaves one with the distinct impression of “maybe”, and that either way, Sakaguchi truly possesses more of the love-like attention to detail necessary to craft a videogame world than any RPG producer outside of Yuji Horii. Sakaguchi said in an interview prior to Blue Dragon‘s release that he wanted to stick with what he knew, with the field and the format he spent years working in, that of the Japanese RPG. After leading the Final Fantasy series slowly down a flaming corridor from utter normalcy to complete nonsense, after spending more time reinventing himself than he ever spent being himself, Sakaguchi has finally settled down, given in, and admitted that there is something he can do better than he can do anything else. Back in the old days, it was a pissing contest, Hironobu Sakaguchi versus Yuji Horii, Final Fantasy versus Dragon Quest, Relentless Reinvention versus Astute Revision. A few hours of Blue Dragon is enough to sound the gong: the war is over, Yuji Horii kind of won, and Hironobu Sakaguchi wears his fatalism pretty well.
If you’ve never played a Japanese RPG before, or if you hate them, or especially if you despise them, you’re probably just going to sigh a lot at Blue Dragon. If you’ve never played a Japanese RPG, at least, you might be able to really get into the game. It’s as good a first RPG as any, and it’s a better one than most. Though if you hate the genre, be not fooled by the precious, amazing graphics. It’s the same old-school game, the same old-school story progressions, the same old-school focus on numbers that go up and hit points that go down. In design, it’s far more reined-in and focused than perhaps any Japanese RPG has ever been, though if you don’t like these games, you’re not going to like this one. If you’ve played dozens of these games and ever loved one of them while hating a couple other ones, chances are you’ll be able to play Blue Dragon, like it a fair deal, and shrug at the end and kind of feel like you’re qualified to judge it as superiorly well-made. Just don’t walk in expecting it to find your hecking car keys and/or change peanut butter into jelly.
There’s certainly a fine-wine quality about this game. Akira Toriyama’s character designs are subtle — the most amazing hairstyle is a pretty average shaggy ponytail — darker, and less fantastic than something he’d submit for Dragon Quest, though if you’ve ever appreciated his work, you’ll no doubt consider these designs sublime. Likewise, Nobuo Uematsu’s musical compositions, while lacking the chintzy flourishes and brassy motifs of his celebrated Final Fantasy VI soundtrack, are rounder and far more musician-like than anything he’s ever composed. Some tracks even approach a Kenji-Ito-like level of pop-song-esque fullness; when Ito makes such music, it tends to stand out so strongly that it distracts from the game, so that the graphics become a background for the music. Uematsu’s score is just subtle enough to fit in, and just catchy enough to make buyers of the soundtrack scratch their heads and wonder why it’s not a little more catchy. And Hironobu Sakaguchi’s scenario is a thing of beauty. After ripping through literally a dozen Tales of games over the years (such was my hunger for scenario-heavy entertainment-focused RPGs), it’s revealing how effortlessly Sakaguchi manages to make “Go to the castle to speak to the king” seem like something legendary heroes really do have to do every other day. Blue Dragon is Sakaguchi blowing steam out of his system; he plays the RPG cliches like a trumpet. Not minutes after we go to a castle to speak with a king, here’s an enemy army invading. Here’s the sky clouded purple. Here’s an opportunity for our heroes to help. The story starts as something of a fractured steampunk yarn, in which our young heroes fight several battles and eventually find themselves aboard a giant flying fortress.
We get to know the characters as they journey back home, and shortly after they discover their purpose — after about fifteen hours of action-packed wandering — the game does something of a snickering little 180. It’s as though, suddenly, the game is now in color, even though it hadn’t quite been in black and white before. It’s something of a low-key “Wizard of Oz”, then. Beyond all expectations, there’s a point where, suddenly, the gorgeous graphics become infinitely more gorgeous, where the lazy threads of the story suddenly and fiercely tie themselves tight together, and the game straightens up and begins, finally, to gain momentum. This is fascinating among modern RPGs, where the plot usually starts hot and heavy, and then gradually loses steam. In Blue Dragon, you’re plinking around dungeons until, at last, the game adopts something of a Chrono Trigger stance, and starts creating elaborate events and set-pieces. More than anything else — even the Active Time Battle system, yes, especially that — this is Sakaguchi’s contribution to the Japanese RPG: where Dragon Quest focused on tricky mazes filled with complex puzzles, Final Fantasy games, as of IV, shifted their focus to short, straightforward, corridor-like dungeons in which dynamic things were happening. A play-through of some of Blue Dragon‘s more complex, domino-like events will perhaps reveal why Sakaguchi is currently so in love with Gears of War: that’s precisely the kind of thing Sakaguchi has always been trying to make, only without the guns, or the action. Sakaguchi’s curb stomps be words.
Once Blue Dragon hits its crescendo, you probably won’t stop playing. Its final act — its third disc — manages to make you actually care about these big-headed kid-like characters (who are all supposed to be sixteen years old, which is kind of creepy, given how tiny their hands are) and what happens to them.
On the whole, it feels like Final Fantasy IV, plot full of gleeful twists and turns. At many points, you can almost imagine the scenario writer snickering as he writes the scene where the characters finally get on a boat and almost instantly get attacked by a sea monster. Every other battle or event in Blue Dragon is like an all-new episode of the only cartoon in the world that could cause you to wake up at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning after a full week of hating elementary school. If there’s anything negative I can say about it, it’s that the beginning part isn’t nearly as much fun as the middle part, though I only noticed that in hindsight: I had been, truthfully, hyperventilating in my excitement to play the game, so I hardly noticed. I had high-definition three-dimensional quasi-realistic super-deformed Akira Toriyama characters before me — the game could have been an interactive paper-doll-dressing simulation, and I would have played it for at least twenty hours.
As I warned earlier, if you hate the genre of Japanese RPG, you won’t like this game. Though if you sincerely like the genre, as far as RPGs go, this one’s pretty great. The battle system is mostly borrowed from Final Fantasy X — an excellent move, as that battle system could benefit from a second chance and some tweaking — though instead of three characters, you have five. Characters’ turns come up based on their agility statistic; you choose an action for them; they execute the action. The similarity to Final Fantasy X‘s battle system is more than skin-deep — it penetrates to the soul. FFX made a ballsy move by eliminating the Active Time Battle system, which is what had differentiated Final Fantasy from Dragon Quest in the first place. The designers of FFX knew that the Active Time Battle system was, effectively, bullstuff. It was a heavy handed and somewhat jack-offish way of making the player feel rushed during battles, though someone, somewhere, must have realized that making players hurry to make menu choices was kind of unnecessarily mean. FFX made the conscientious choice by making the battles truly time-based, tactical contests, rather than forcing players to press buttons and squeal like speds.
The battle system is as stoic as it is frantic. You can see characters’ and enemies’ turns displayed at the top of the screen; highlight an enemy with your attack cursor, and his position in the timeline, also, will be displayed. Use this knowledge to plan your tactics, et cetera. Only FFX kind of flunked out early, by having somewhat tacky disparities: you can only have three party members at a time, and at the start of the game, you basically have one character who can use white magic (for healing), one character who can use black magic (for killing enemies that can only be killed by black magic), one character with an aerial attack (for killing flying enemies), and one character with an armor-piercing attack (for killing armored enemies). This made the battle system kind of cheap: “Oh, there’s a flying enemy — gotta switch in my flying-enemy-killing dude now!” The effect was kind of like walking into an empty room thirty hours into a Zelda game and being asked to light a torch in order to open the door, which you’ve been doing for thirty hecking hours now, even though you’d only ever been playing the game for maybe fifteen minutes.
FFX eventually let you customize your characters, and make them all equal — maybe make them all able to kill flying, piercing, or magical enemies. Blue Dragon, slightly similarly, starts with all of your characters in a gray area. Like in Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy V, you’re constantly changing the focus of your characters, and hard work (of the level-grinding variety) is rewarded by winning your characters extra, class-specific abilities that can be equipped to any other job class. As you level up your “Black” class, for example, you’ll earn “Black Magic Level 1” or “Level 2” or “Level 3”, allowing you to use different levels of black magic even if you’ve switched back to the “White” class. In this way, you’re mixing and matching your abilities to make “custom” characters — though this isn’t always what makes the battle system interesting. That would be the charge attacks; in any other game using a pseudo-real-time battle system, like Final Fantasy Tactics, magic spells and special attacks carry a basic casting time. Choose to cast a fire spell, and then wait patiently until it’s casted. In Blue Dragon, you can cast any spell or special attack right away — or you can cast it later. It’s all your choice: just after you’ve selected a spell and a target, a charge meter is displayed; the charge meter is marked at the appropriate places with icons representing your fellow party members and the enemy party. Hold down the attack button to charge your attack. Let go when you think you’ve held it down for long enough. At first, it seems like an innocent little tedium-breaker, though it ends up being executed rather brilliantly. Not a third of the way into the game, enemies start showing up who can kill your party members in one violent hit, 100% of the time. You’ll need to hit them before they hit you, while also hitting them hard. A lesser game, like Grandia III, would concentrate your party’s tactics on slowing the enemies down, or canceling their actions. Blue Dragon, on the other hand, forces you to think hard about your own actions. Say you’re fighting an enemy you know to be somewhat vulnerable to paralysis spells. You want to cast a paralysis spell on him, so as to render him immobile for your boys to beat on him for a couple of rounds, and you want to charge the spell up as much as possible — charging increases effectiveness — though you also want the spell to execute before the enemy’s next turn. So you need to think about it for a bit, and you might end up making a compromise that costs one character his (revivable) life. A similar “fine-wine” delicacy creeps into dozens upon dozens of battles throughout the game, and again, if you love these games, it’s a real treat.
There’s a freewheeling, casino-like nature to battling, so that when you win, whatever you get feels like a pay-out. The ability to battle multiple enemy parties at once at first feels kind of a throwaway feature, though it ends up miraculously making grinding more than entertaining for anyone who’s ever played, say, a “Mysterious Dungeon” game. Press the right trigger on the field map to see a list of all the enemies within battling range — choose to fight all of them, and you’ll fight each party, one after another, in sequence. Between enemy parties, a slot machine will pop up on screen, and award you with a bonus: increased strength, speed, et cetera. Interestingly, the only negative effect on the slots is “remove all bonuses”. The game understands, as all Dragon Quest games do, that the game doesn’t lose when players win. It’s already an oath of bravery to take on six enemy parties at once, so the game cuts you a little slack and applauds appropriately when you win.
After more than twenty hours of playing this game, a question popped into my head, and I had to consult the instruction manual. I can’t remember this happening with any other game in the last ten years. My question was about the little red blip on the magic / special attack charge meter. Did I get a bonus if I stopped the bar on that red blip? Or did it do less damage? I honestly couldn’t tell. The instruction manual told me that stopping the bar on the red blip (sometimes very difficult) resulted in the spell doing maximum damage and costing only half as much MP as usual. I felt a little dumb for having not noticed that, though I quickly justified my dumbness by remembering that I’d been avoiding the red blip most of the time because it seldom puts me in a good strategic position. Sometimes the red blip appears at the beginning of the charge bar, sometimes at the end. The battle system kind of starts to philosophically unravel when you realize that a red blip at the beginning is subtly stressing how important it is to attack as quickly as possible and as hard as possible. It’s a slick little quirk, almost worthy of a Romancing SaGa game, though it’s far more philanthropic. Either way, it’s applaudable that the game doesn’t spell this out for you — nor, really, does it spell out anything for you. It expects you to figure things out for yourself, or to read the manual.
That day, I spent an extra twenty minutes or so re-reading the manual. There’s a two-page section at the end, called “Jiro’s tips”, where Jiro, the boy-genius of your party, offers dozens of tips, such as “If the monsters are too strong, try leveling up!” or “You should probably save your game whenever you see a save point!” In the lower-right corner of the second page of the tips section is Maro, the semi-unintelligent, loudmouthed character. He says: “Hey, let me give some tips, too!” and then gives the reader precisely two tips: “Accessories and armor boost your stats” and “Raise your agility statistic to attack more quickly!” Why it has to be Maro giving these two tips, I have no idea. Though I guess that’s the long and short of it, for you. Why bother releasing a Japanese-style RPG, when the genre has been astray so long, and innovated so infrequently, misunderstood by its detractors whenever it does wrong, misunderstood by its fans whenever it tries to reach out? Why step into this minefield, and make another breezy, entertaining game that’s happy not really changing anything? Why, because accessories and armor boost your stats, of course.
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“ABSOLUTELY NOT THE BEST VIDEOGAME OF ALL-TIME.”
Metal Gear Solid 4 is your birthday; on this most special birthday, your grandmother is miraculously still alive — and she remembers that you used to own a closet full of Pound Puppies.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is Kingdom Hearts minus the Disney and the Final Fantasy. It is an archaeological effort to unearth and lie face-up in the sun every ridiculous, ancient, and embarrassing truth regarding We the People Who Really Like Videogames.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is delicious, edible slander.
Life, and everything in it — The World — The Videogame Industry — is a battlefield. One day, sitting on a porch somewhere in Alabama, Metal Gear Solid 4 might have been our cousin; today, it is our enemy.
Remember when you were five years old, and you told your mother that you were never going to smoke a cigarette, and she blew smoke in your face and called you a “Stupid kid”, and, with that next puff of nicotine in her lungs, muttered “who does he think he is, a psychic?” She was trying to say that you can’t predict the future; maybe, long ago, she’d made the same promise to her mother, and look where it got her. Well, twenty-four years have passed and you’ve never touched a cigarette, possibly because your mother’s pathos, on that day, left a lasting impression. You might have started to think that you are and always will be invincible to the ebb and flow of taste: one opinion you held as a preschooler holds up even today; nothing will ever change, and regardless of whether or not you are, in fact, also stupid, you will die happy. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots Tactical Espionage Action shows up ten years after you played Metal Gear Solid Tactical Espionage Action and knew with your entire body that it was great and amazing, amazing and great; by the end of its doily-fluffing twenty hours of cut scenes incomprehensible to non-kleptomaniacs, it has cast burning, ultraviolet light on its own history, and asked you “How Do You Like Me Now?” no less than a hundred and eight times. At one specific point very late in the game, director Hideo Kojima offers the player a sparkling opportunity to flip the screen a middle finger and declare “heck You, Solid Snake!” We here at Action Button Dot Net, deeply absorbed into the moment, playing this game with Sony-brand Dolby 7.1 headphones on a 40-inch Bravia in the cockpit of an abandoned fighter jet, seized this opportunity with great vigor. We went on to complete the game; three seconds after we were certain the credits had actually stopped rolling, we disembarked the jet, walked into the hangar, and checked the internet, where it became frightfully apparent that no one who gets paid to review videogames has anything resembling actual taste.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is Hideo Kojima’s “Springtime for Hitler”.
The previous sentence presumes Actual Intelligence exists inside Hideo Kojima’s brain. This is not meant as an insult. We’re certain the man is, at least, not mentally &^#$#ed. We’ve read interviews for years now in which he complains that Metal Gear Solid is a ball and chain. He wants to be free. He wants to make something else. We can’t blame him; no one wants to do the same thing forever. Scientists have proven it. Our girlfriends never believe us when we try to explain this, so of course the average videogamer isn’t going to explain it. The PR maelstrom surrounding Metal Gear Solid 4 devoted two years and literally thousands of human-hours of work into drilling holes in the craniums of every MGS-lover: 4 will be the end; 4 will tie up everything; 4 will be Kojima’s opus.
If it’s a fact that Metal Gear Solid 4 sucks on purpose, we can hardly blame Kojima for that, either. Given his previously well-documented disinterest in the series, its having been promoted as his “opus” must have turned his stomach. It’s clear that Kojima’s priority was the game’s plot, and making sure it “satisfied” fans: like the world’s fattest kid circa 1989 winning a Toys R Us shopping spree, Kojima struts zombie-like into the warehouse of his past work and proceeds to remove absolutely everything from the shelf, dropping one item at a time into his bottomless shopping cart. He eventually gets up to the cash register, leaves the cart unattended, pulls his smokes out of his jacket, and steps outside.
Tycho at Penny Arcade said that Metal Gear Solid 4 is better if you skip the cut-scenes. We’re pretty sure he’d played less than half of the game before writing that. We don’t blame him, nor do we hate him, for saying this. The truth is, if you’re playing Metal Gear Solid 4 as a game, the beginning is pretty compelling if you play it context-free. You’re an intruder on a battlefield being currently raped and pillaged by two opposing forces. One of the overarching themes of the story being “war is kinda not nice”, it’s actually somewhat accidentally poignant to experience the high-definition terrors of war from the perspective of an outsider just trying to get from point A to point B. It reminds us of our great idea to make a game where you play as a three-year-old boy in a Middle-Eastern warzone, too weak to pick up a gun, hiding and fleeing in terror from legions of unsympathetic troops. Of course, in Metal Gear Solid 4, you can shoot and kill dudes, so you can’t exactly play it as a statement. As a core mechanic and overarching theme, the “mind your own business here in the warzone” angle works. One of the two armies is grayly defined as the lesser of two kinda-not-nicenesses, so if you cap one of the other motherheckers while the slightly sympathetic dudes are watching, they might start to not immediately hate you. Its vaguely compelling, in an obsessive-compulsive way (which must be a real treat for MGS series fans), that in order to do something to prove you’re on these guys’ side, they have to see you doing it, though if they see you doing something that’s in the least bit suspicious, they will not hesitate to kill you. This turns the act of batlefield-navigation into a sort of seamless blend of Pac-Man and any given Japanese role-playing game of the 1990s: narrow roads cut city blocks into a rough labyrinth, though there’s really only ever one path you can possibly take, and it’s always obviously right there in front of you.
Soon enough, the falcon loses sight of the falconer, things fall apart, the story introduces a guy whose dominant character trait is acute diarrhea, et cetera. The game exploits the virtue of its own Fun Factor well into its second act, where the context rudely enters the equation and refuses to leave. We are no longer merely engaged in thrilling little meta-skirmishes where we must pick an alliance (help one side, kill both sides, help neither side, hurt neither side, little of column A little of column B et cetera): we are standing on top of a speeding Armored Patrol Carrier being piloted by Dennis Rodman and his soda-drinking pet monkey, being screamed at to shoot down oncoming enemy troops. The APC turns a corner and the screen goes black. “NOW LOADING”. Isn’t this supposed to be the Toughest Games Machine On Earth?
By act three, the game has abandoned its neat little idea in favor of a far neater one: we are now following a guy through a European city. Snake is wearing a trenchcoat, looking like Gillian Seed from Snatcher (the fans swoon), and it’s quaintly foggy. Ironically, this proved to be our Absolute Favorite Part of the Game. Since age nine, we have wanted to wander a European metropolis after curfew, letting a shady man obliviously lead us to his shady headquarters. This is the reason we studied Russian and Chinese in elementary school while everyone else was busy pretending they knew something about sex. We carried this dream in the palm of our hand until college, when it dawned upon us that we could Actually Die from doing Stuff Like This, so we started writing about videogames in the first-person plural instead. Metal Gear Solid 4 manages to get the mood and the pace of Euro-man-stalking just right. Our target is “Side A”, and the enemy troops enforcing the curfew are “Side B”. We are “Side C”. The level design in this part of the game is ferociously cute: both we and Side A are in violation of Side B’s rules; while avoiding Side A’s detection, we have to ensure that Side A avoids Side C’s detection. This ends up pretty fascinating, whether you have watched the opening cut scene or not. Eventually, you get to the goal, and suddenly you’re riding shotgun on a motorcycle in yet another ropey on-rails shooting sequence. It’s like waking up from a dream about the Bahamas to find out you’re actually in Bermuda. Instead of intimately sharing military secrets with a woman you picked up at a poker table, you’ve got your mother asking you to shoot a helicopter down.
Then there’s a boss sequence. It’s the second boss sequence of the game, actually. Like the one before it, it thrusts a character of considerable personality (compared to the typical drone, at least) into your face and asks you to kill them. You oblige, and then the boss reveals that it had, in fact, been a beautiful woman all along. Now the beautiful woman walks toward you, attempting to drain all of your life force with her mysteriously psychic embrace. There’s an in-game explanation for why her embrace can kill you, though as we’re ignoring the story for the time being, we’ll pretend to be confused. Let’s put this one on the table, then: the girls are all very hot. Why are they so hot? Huge amounts of money were likely spent making these boss-character-girls hot as fresh-baked lava rocks. Director Hideo Kojima (DHK) says that one of the “themes” of Metal Gear Solid 4 is “beauty and the beast”, though what does that mean, really? The bosses are “beasts” before their nasty mechanical suits are stripped from them; then they’re just helpless “beauties”. We could go on to suppose that Snake, a wrinkled old man with a Charles Bronson mustache, is the gray area between “beauty” and “beast”, though if we started saying things like that, Kojima would win, so nuh-uh.
The point is that, for a split-second at least, the game makes you care about the boss characters. If you’d been trying to ignore the story, you’ll be out of luck for that split-second. A split-second is all it takes for you to care about Metal Gear Solid 4 on a level that is not immediately superficial.
Then act four comes; the garbageman rings your doorbell and says that from this day forth, you don’t need to take the garbage out — he’s going to personally come into your home and do it for you. One dead-silent moment hours later, it becomes apparent that the garbageman was lying, and he just wanted to take a dump in your bathtub.
That is to say, it becomes presently obvious that you cannot ignore the story of Metal Gear Solid 4. The game absolutely, positively will not permit any ignorance re: its plot. It speaks, oddly politely, that if you’re not paying attention, you’re not doing it right.
We will disclaim, right here, that we have, for the past decade of jacked-into-the-netness, chuckled and rolled our eyes whenever anyone complained about the length of the cut-scenes in a Metal Gear Solid game. Some people said they just wanted to enjoy the “gameplay” (like that’s a real word); some people said they just wanted to enjoy the “atmosphere”. It puzzled us, to the point of rubbing our bellies in amusement, that someone would dare to want to play Metal Gear Solid with absolutely no invested interest in the characters. It’s not that the story and the characters are necessarily great literature so much as they’re insperable from the game’s progression and atmosphere. If you only like the game mechanics, you’d be better off playing Pac-Man — it’s basically the same thing. Conversely, if you only like the story, you’d be better off reading a book. (Crucial: notice how we recommended Pac-Man for players who only like Metal Gear Solid as a game, whereas we recommended any book in existence for those who enjoy it as a story.) If nothing else, the original Metal Gear Solid had a dignified flow to it: the characters were all rough sketches, all vaguely likable. Conceptual Bullstuff was kept to a minimum, and by minimum, we mean “Maximum, in Hindsight”. There was a hecking “boss” who you didn’t fight, who you instead met and talked to, and he died six hours before you even knew he was a boss. The game shows you this level of virtuosity for a while without once flexing its muscles in the mirror; at a certain point, it starts delivering soliloquies about love blooming on the battlefield; by this time, we are so into it that we can’t give up now. The game has worked its spell on us.
Metal Gear Solid 2 was a joke. We knew it was a joke; that’s why we wrote an article about how it was literature; that everyone thought that article was serious and in turn started to seriously assess Metal Gear Solid 2 as literature speaks volumes about how good a joke Metal Gear Solid 2 was. It’s rumored that Hideo Kojima had wanted to call Metal Gear Solid “Metal Gear 3”, though was advised not to, because “times had changed” and “the average gamer” would feel “dumb” jumping in on part three of a series. Maybe this was a good idea, maybe not. Either way, he wanted to call Metal Gear Solid 2 something else — maybe, just, replace the word “Solid” with another adjective, maybe “Moist”. The pseudo-hypocritical marketing department allegedly told him that he can’t change the name of the series now that it’s been established and made a big splash: they needed a numeral to ensure more sales. So Metal Gear Solid 2 was a massive joke, with the main character’s “death” partway through and the introduction of a man-pansy hero; it was Kojima ejecting bile for “the fans” of Solid Snake, by imprisoning them in the body of a character who could only ever see Solid Snake from a distance. The game was massively (mis)interepreted on various internet forums as some kind of artistic statement, something rich and deep in “literary themes” the likes of which can only be executed in games, where the player controls a character. Looking at it again, this far removed, we find it kind of precious: the player wanted to pretend to be this one guy, and then they end up having to pretend to be some other guy, and only watch the guy they wanted to pretend to be. If we were to write this out in mathematical symbols, insinuating that it didn’t even matter if guy A (the one we wanted to pretend to be) had been less manly or videogame-character-like than guy B (the guy we ended up having to pretend to be), some Wall-Street man’s monocle would pop out and he would tell us something about a “jolly good show”. The hypothesis would be that “fans will be fans”, and the conclusion would be a resounding “yes”.
Metal Gear Solid 3 was the “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” of the Metal Gear Solid series — stepping aside, showing us something different, indicating that the mythology surrounding its characters and plot
1. Was immortal, timeless, infinite, untellable in full no matter how many angles the storyteller showed us
2. Didn’t matter that much, in the grand scheme of everything
It was a videogame masterpiece. It was a sharp little spike-like game; its “big concepts” showed up like blood-stained stones on the side of the road. When, at the end, the main character pointed a gun at someone’s head and the camera panned out, it took us maybe thirty seconds to realize that we were supposed to press the “fire” button to pull the trigger. Our momentary ignorance — our failure to acknowledge that we were still in control was at once a statement on the subject of entertainment media, a statement on the subject of videogames, a commentary regarding criticism of the works of Hideo Kojima (“too many cut-scenes”, the people say), and an absolutely not-arrogant, in-character pseudo-inadvertent representation of the hesitation the main character feels at that very point in time. It was perfect. It was amazing. The full brunt of Hideo Kojima’s potential for future interactive entertainment masterpieces came within view. Kojima had said that Metal Gear Solid 3 was to be his last, and following its noble climax, we didn’t scorn him for wanting to move on to other things.
Of course, fans will be fans, and videogame companies will be deathly afraid of new things.
With Metal Gear Solid 4, Kojima came sprinting back. We can say with confidence that this move was perhaps conscientious. He might (or might not) have said in an interview that he came back to direct this game because “the fans wanted it”. “The fans wanted Kojima to direct” is industry-speak for “the fans didn’t want Kojima to not direct”. The reason for this is straightforward: the people associate the name “Hideo Kojima” with Metal Gear Solid. To have one without the other is to defy their blind love. It’d be like asking them to eat a cake that isn’t chocolate, or a chocolate that isn’t cake.
The truth is, we were younger when Metal Gear Solid first hit the scene. We were ten years younger. Though we were old enough to be proud of having kept our promise to our mothers re: never smoking a cigarette, we were perhaps not old enough to know exactly what art — or love — is. Hindsight will tell us that, in concept and execution and everything in between, Metal Gear Solid is better than Metal Gear Solid 4, though this hardly matters. What matters is that we have grown up, and Metal Gear Solid has grown down. Hands firmly planted on hips, we rotate slowly, low groan echoing from our throats, and survey the internet: everywhere, everywhere, we see that people still have not opened their eyes and ears to true love. They still are utterly up to the tops of their eyeballs in blind devotion to Metal Gear Solid. One key, stunning example of this blindness comes from people’s love of David Hayter, the voice of Solid Snake, whose idea of an “old” voice is to imagine he’s gargling asphalt. He sounds hecking ridiculous. Kotaku had a story about David Hayter once, and the comments section erupted into people badmouthing the Japanese Solid Snake, Akio Otsuka, because #1 he’s Japanese, and Snake is American and #2 he doesn’t even sound old. If you people had ever gone outside, you’d realize that old people only “sound old” in hecking cartoons. Akio Otsuka is an exceptionally talented dramatist (did you know he does the voices of Solid Snake, Liquid Snake, and Solidus?); David Hayter is just a name in the credits of something people know they like. Metal Gear Solid 4, in execution, in pathology, is more of a David Hayter than an Akio Otsuka.
We played Metal Gear Solid 4 from start to finish, watching all of the cut scenes, and then played it again, skipping all the cut-scenes, though remembering what happened in them whenever one scene cut sharply from one thing to something else. Then we “played” the game a third time, by watching a friend play, watching some cut-scenes and skipping others. This latter method proved the most ridiculous. Our friend had carved a direct path to the end of the game in less than three hours; he let each segment of the 90-minute ending play for around five minutes before skipping to the next one. While he was doing this, we flipped through a copy of Anna Karenina and read the sentence in the center of random even-numbered pages: Anna Karenina was winning.
The “problem” with Metal Gear Solid 4 is hardly the self-importance, or the stupidity of its narrative — it’s how damnedly “well” the narrative and the game are married. You just can’t have one without the other, try as you might. Many critics groaned at the length of the cut-scenes without addressing the simple fact that the cut-scenes are &^#$#ed. For the past few years, some critics have exhausted their lungs moaning about Quick Time Events (Action Button Events, they’re called in Japan): those little interjections where a button icon appears front and center on the screen, and you have to mash it quickly in order to make your character do something that no amount of regular controller input could produce under any other circumstances. Metal Gear Solid 4‘s most regularly occurring Quick Timer Events happen to involve pressing a button during a long, talky cut-scene in order to produce a momentary flash of a screen image or piece of concept art from another game in the series. Other critics have plunged stakes into the heart of the cut-scene itself, suggesting that games should tell stories in other ways — perhaps, as Gears of War or Half-Life 2 do, in three-second bursts while the game is actually happening. Few have squinted hard enough and complained about the moments where, as in Metal Gear Solid 4, cut-scenes become Quick Time Events where you’re not required to press buttons: the (seemingly) hour-long sequence in which Ninja Raiden Riverdance-Duels a gay vampire in order to buy Snake, Otacon, and their pet robot enough time to escape from the hell of South America via helicopter is a chief offender: look at those moves! The moment we, as a “player”, behold a scene in a “videogame” and think “Man, someone should make a videogame out of that”, the ghost is essentially given up.
Eventually, Metal Gear Solid 4, in all its attention to detail, all its wide-armed to-the-club welcoming, begins to frighten us. We remember that time we were walking back to our car with a girl, in university, and the Vietnam veteran in our advanced Chinese class — he’d waited literally twenty-some insane years before cashing in on the US government’s offer of a free education — drove up in his Pontiac, said hello, and began to tell us a story about his “bastard ex-wife”, which ended with him explaining how, if someone were to hold their right hand out all the way to one side, and you were to shoot the tip of their index finger with an M-60 from two hundred yards away, it’d not just blow the finger off — it’d tear their arm out of the socket. The blood would spurt so fast out of the severed arm socket that the victim would be unconscious before they hit the ground, and dead before they could get back up. Bizarre as this was, and freaked-out as the girl was, it’d perhaps facilitate our getting laid later, and it was kind of cool to hear someone who’d actually shot someone before talk about guns. At the end of the day, though, once you’ve killed one person, it goes from being “something you’ve never done” to being “something you do”, and once you’ve killed more than three people, it kind of becomes something you do “all the time”. Hearing a genuine Vietnam vet talk about shooting peoples’ arms off is really about as exciting as listening to your mom explain her meatloaf recipe over the phone to your aunt. When Kojima steps back into his fancy shoes and begins to work the orchestra of Metal Gear Solid 4 into a crescendo, we witness an amazing mix of the schlock-handed and the masterful. On the one hand, there’s a beautiful (“beautiful” is Japanese for “hilarious”) story reveal wherein Meryl finds herself engaged; on the other hand, if you haven’t purchased every game in the series and their accompanying glossy art books, you’re hardly going to give a stuff. The entire final mission feels like a meatloaf recipe: when you kill the last Girlboss — the Girlboss who had, in fact, been psychically controlling all of the other Girlbosses, and it’s revealed that this Girlboss was in fact only being mind-controlled by Psycho Mantis, a boss you killed in Metal Gear Solid, you may be tempted, as we were, to get on the internet and look at pornography instead. This scene is followed by abovementioned Meryl-gets-engaged cut-scene, and then by a virtuoso sequence in which the screen splits, the top half showing all the characters from the game living out what will be Their Final Moments If Snake Doesn’t Succeed, and the bottom half showing Snake as he worm-crawls through a microwave tunnel while the player slams the triangle button ferociously. On the one hand, this may be brilliant; on the other hand, it might be an accident. If it’s brilliant, it’s only brilliant because it’s a direct commentary on the nature of cut-scenes, player control, and the much-maligned Quick-Timer Events plaguing action game design today. On the one hand, if it’s a commentary on Quick-Timer Events and/or the Wiimote-masturbating nature of modern “cinematic” action games, effective as it may be, we’d probably rather have games that bother to have a story make that story comment on real issues (Shout out to Infinity Ward: Hello, Infinity Ward!), not videogame design. On the other one hand, it’s kind of an interesting cinematic presentation: the player literally gets tired of hammering that triangle button before the grueling sequence is over. However, on the other other hand, if the player had been skipping all of the cut-scenes up to this point, he’s just going to look at the top of the screen and wonder who the hell all of these people are. The pooch is essentially screwed at this point: you’re damned if you did, and damned if you didn’t: far worse than being merely damned no matter what you do, you are already damned by something you already did.
Despite Metal Gear Solid 4‘s not being a “great game”, it ends in the tradition of great games: by forcing the player to play something else. As Halo ends by turning into a Driving Game and Sin and Punishment ends by turning into Missile Command, as the kids in the movie “The Wizard” had to compete in the then-unreleased Super Mario Bros. 3 in order to prove who was better at Tetris, Metal Gear Solid 4 turns into a somewhat shockingly brilliant fighting game at the end. For a moment, right there, the exhausted and cautiously optimistic player might say that this is the perfect end to the entire franchise, not to mention this meandering, idiotic story: the hero and his opponent are both old men, older even than Danny Glover when he told Mel Gibson he was “too old for this stuff”. Perhaps the whole mumbo-jumboful story up to this point, with its self-defeating conclusion, had been for the purpose of establishing the out-of-placeness of these two old men, for the purpose of presenting the the mountain-size of the Can’t-Give-a-heckness. They brawl, fists blazing, refreshingly, deliciously, at a high speed. It doesn’t matter who wins. At this point in the game, our first time through, the area beneath our lungs began to vibrate with actual anticipation: might this be the Metal Gear Solid 3 “execution” moment, brought around into perfect form? Might it be so that if we lose right here, if Snake loses to Ocelot, that’s the end of the game? We got a game over; we got a second chance. We deflated a bit. We won, anticipating that maybe Kojima was going to kill off Snake in a different way: maybe Snake would just sit down, victorious, and die nonchalantly. That didn’t happen, either. Eventually, the snake starts to eat its own tail, and ninety minutes later, we have a look on our face like an ostrich with a dry lump of cotton candy kacked halfway down its ridiculously long throat (protip: birds don’t salivate). We’ve said before that, once you learn scales and all the barre chord shapes, learning to play the guitar is like a high-rise office building with a light switch in each room and a broken elevator: take the stairs up, open a door, enter the room, turn on the lights, exit the room, close the door, go to the next door, repeat until you feel safe becoming famous. Light switches in an office building is a compelling concept if you’re a man, and alone, with a thousand and one nights to spare before the showdown; watching someone else turn on the light switches for more than five minutes is terrifying. Have you ever had a neighbor with a seven-year-old just starting out on the violin? It’s like that. Metal Gear Solid 4, in its overwrought conclusion, stumbles, drunken, from room to room, flicking some light switches ruthlessly, and blinking others on and off for ten minutes before flipping off the ceiling and slamming the door.
Eventually, the game turned us off to the concept of entertainment in general. Eventually, the game makes us start drinking.
Upon completing Metal Gear Solid 4, we put a DVD of “The Graduate” in our PlayStation 3 and watched it, upscaled.
Yeah. That’s a pretty good movie.
Controversy erupted, on the internets, when someone close to a working copy of the retail version of Metal Gear Solid 4 let loose the claim that some of the cut-scenes approached ninety minutes in length. The ensuing groans could have sucked the air out of a baseball stadium. One prevailing sentiment among Metal Gear Solid 4 pledged pre-fans was that they would be worried about ninety-minute cut-scenes in any other game, though since it was Hideo Kojima, they wouldn’t mind. Konami’s cartilage-headed PR was quick to counter: the cut-scenes are so not ninety minutes long, and you can skip them, if you want. There we have it: a chill silence soaks the internet from head to toes. The makers of the games industry’s flagship champion for cut-scenes as a valid form of storytelling have just told us that the story segments are skippable. Also, saying that no cut-scenes approach ninety minutes in length is kind of a cop-out, because there are segments where one ten-minute cut-scene leads to three minutes of playing, then ten more minutes of cut-scene, then five minutes of play, repeat. This feels worse than a ninety-minute cut-scene. The term “blue-balling” is appropriate (make your own sentence here if you want).
No website or magazine seems to address this point, perhaps because they’d feel mean: the cut-scenes in Metal Gear Solid 4 are bad. They are bad because they are not good. The mission briefing sequences prior to each of the game’s major segments tend to be more than 40 minutes long. Some critics might have said “That’s about as long as an episode of a TV show!” That would be correct. Some apologists might have said “That’s only about as long as an episode of a TV show!” That would be correct, as well. However, the fact of the matter is that these mission briefing segments are not as entertaining as an episode of a TV show. They have no flow, no “beginning”, “middle”, and “end”. Watch any awful filler episode of “Lost” and you’ll see that there, at least, the writers understand how to structure a story. Here we could inject some meta-argument about how if you invented a remote-control that, when pointed at someone’s head, could make them forget The Holy Bible existed, and then you used said device on a Giant Publishing Company’s Elite Reader shortly before handing him a manuscript of the Bible, he’d frown and say the whole thing was too chaotic and not at all what the market was looking for. This argument would go on to go nowhere. Chances are — so say the bureaucrats in the “Industry” — if a person is playing a game, they don’t want literature. This, more often than not, gets misinterpreted as “games don’t want a coherent story, or even a well-told one”. Nonetheless, we can’t presume the average games industry executive to have any knowledge of narrative structure: the majority of them got their start managing Pizza Huts (Nintendo’s Reggie), not reading manuscripts. Not that reading a manuscript ever gets a man anything aside from the right to read better manuscripts. What we’re saying, right here, is that there existed a shimmering chance for Metal Gear Solid 4‘s story to be an excellent tale excellently told: we have played enough Metal Gear Solid 3 to know that Kojima has the tools, and the dedication. His men had the money, they had the technology, they had the willpower, they had a devoted development of Kojima-lovers working round the clock for several years to bring this mimeograph of an “artistic vision” to life.
We played Metal Gear Solid 4 expecting no more and no less than an answer to the question “Is Hideo Kojima actually a genius?” We got an answer, though we would have preferred the answer be a clear “Yes” or “No”. Instead, we got a “Maybe not”. We’re not ignoring the possibility that Kojima was trying to shoot his series in the head, because it’s obvious that he was — we’re just not going to rely on that as an explanation. What we’re saying is, he could have shot his series in the head so much more elegantly. As is, the pacing of this tale blesses the player of an ethereal understanding of why Kojima never actually got a novel published before he entered the games industry. As mentioned in the above paragraph, there’s a chance for art even (especially!) in the most meandering narrative. We’d go so far as to say that the world needs more stories told in the “Rio Bravo” tradition — you know, “hangout movie” style, where the characters kind of sit around talking about stuff until and even after Something Starts Happening. Metal Gear Solid 4‘s “Snake and The Gang In a Big Airplane” scenes possess wonderful potential — they are fiercely skippable, absolutely unnecessary, television-program-length episodes that allow us the opportunity to get to know our videogame characters better. The only reason we’d skip them is if we just wanted to play the game; if we’re not skipping them, we must want to get to know the characters better. It all makes so much sense. Unfortunately, Kojima betrays this wonderful opportunity by making his characters robotic drones instead of realistic people. On the one hand, we have big robots and Riverdancing ninjas; on the only other hand, it’s talking heads and sitting bodies.
To be blunt: our ability to enjoy (or at least not be repulsed by) Metal Gear Solid 4‘s characters is shot in the head due to how hecking easy we find it to fry a hecking egg in the real world.
One of the characters — Sunny, a little girl who dresses inexplicably in Harajuku fashion, in what might be a conscientious shout-out to the closeted pedophiles lurking in the Japanese shadows (conscientious because if these people had to go twenty hours without seeing a simulated little girl, they’d have to rape a real one) — tries her best to cook eggs for Snake and Otacon. She asks Snake, “Would you like some eggs?” And he says “Uhhh . . . no thanks”. She makes him eggs anyway. She brings the eggs downstairs and sets them in front of Snake. She takes a cigarette from his fingers just before he can put it in his lips. “No smoking in the plane!” she says. She goes back up into the kitchen. Snake looks at the eggs. “Otacon, can’t you teach her how to fry an egg?” Otacon shrugs. “Do I look like someone who knows how to fry an egg?”
Are you hecking serious? Neither Snake nor Otacon nor this little girl knows how to fry an egg? The only person who does know how to fry eggs is the genome-expert science-genius female? You’d think that the one person who would not know how to fry an egg would be the determined, professional, full-grown woman. Otacon is a lonely bachelor, and Snake — for heck’s sake — is a trained US Ranger, the most elite force in the goddamned world, called “Snake Eaters” because they’re capable of eating raw snakes if they have to. You figure, if Snake couldn’t make eggs for himself, he’d at least be able to stomach disgusting ones. More than this, what’s so disgusting about the eggs? Are they too runny? Are they burnt? Rocky, in the movie “Rocky”, drinks raw eggs for breakfast, so Snake should be able to handle runny eggs. And burnt ones? See the “Snake Eater” comment. Do they need salt? We realize that Sunny is a girl with a troubled past, a dead mother, and many rape innuendos, though how painful would it be, really, to explain to this girl — a computer genius, by the way — that some people like their eggs cooked differently than other people, that there exist a myriad of possible ways to cook eggs? The girl can likely multiply seventeen-digit numbers in her head with a snap of her fingers — she’d probably be open to the permutations of egg-cookery.
It’s apparent, here, that Hideo Kojima can cook eggs by himself. He’s probably been able to prepare eggs delicious enough for his own standards for several decades. He’s probably never given any thought to whether or not he ever found egg-cooking to be difficult. Chances are, he arrived at the blank pages preemptively marked “Mission Briefing Script” in need of a metaphor, and just plucked one out of thin air: “Lots of people probably find it hard to fry eggs!” It almost looks, at a point, like the egg metaphor had been constructed out of a hare-brained assumption that Kojima himself was a genius for being able to fry eggs so well without instruction. It’s conceivable, in the shadow of the moment, that Kojima saw himself as stepping down from a pedestal, getting real with his audience, and sympathizing with their inability to cook eggs. This is evidence that the fuel for Kojima’s fiction may not actually come from Experience in the Real World. Like, say you’re in line at the grocery store and you add up the total price of all your purchases while the old woman in front of you is fumbling with her checkbook, and you make sure to have the precise amount of post-tax cash ready: do you assume that this is something only you can do, simply because you’ve never seen someone else do it? Do you go ahead and make it the defining character trait of a character in a piece of fiction? For serious, one thing we’re taken to screaming at Videogame Industry Professionals, these days, when they say things like “being able to buy ammunition from the menu must be a good idea, because Metal Gear Solid 4 did it” is that they should probably quit their jobs making videogames and work in a hecking convenient store for a couple of years. You know, to study the looks on actual human faces when they buy beer, or potato chips, or Marlboros.
It’s also obvious that Kojima doesn’t smoke. If Kojima smoked, there’s no way Snake would let that little girl snatch his cigarette. He’d be all like, heck you, if I want to smoke, I’m going to smoke. The man has the energy to traipse through jungles and tundras with a machine gun; he’s Meters From Death. He has a right to not give a heck.
Much of Metal Gear Solid 4‘s surgically irremovable tumor of a plot indulges in fierce second-guessing of the player’s expectations and an even fiercer insecurity complex, where you feel the writer falter, assuming he’s not being clever enough. These complexes make for terrible fiction; we’ve already established that no high-ranking officials in the videogame industry are competent judges of narrative, so there you have it. Little, vaguely embarrassing moments pop up that make us consider the phrase “Kojima Done Right” — like when Drebin, our weapons specialist, radioes us after each boss fight to explain the gruesome past of that boss character, and why she ended up turned into such a monster. By the end of the game, we will realize that each girl’s story is essentially the same. In addition to making us recall Alfred Hitchcock’s opinion that an artist only ever tells the same story over and over again, it also seems perfectly in line with the conceptual core of videogames: we might as well make a series called In Which One Guy Shoots A Bunch Of Other Guys.
It’s ultimately painful, however, that every character has to have a “purpose”. Drebin, bringer of the post-boss monologues, can’t, in good conscience, be just the guy who gives us the post-boss monologues (the way every Dragon Quest town has the guy who exists just to tell you the name of the town). He has to have some other “purpose” in the story to explain his existence in the first place. Metal Gear Solid 4, being already a game that exists to tie up all loose ends left behind by its heritage, cannot, pathologically, introduce a character like Drebin without giving him a “purpose” (weapons guy), a secondary purpose (deliverer of post-boss monologues), and a place in the grand scheme of things (complete with spotlight time during the monster of an ending).
Do not confuse this sentence for a compliment: there has never been and there will never again be a game quite like Metal Gear Solid 4. During the mission briefing scenes, the screen cuts up into segments, including a window in which characters talk, a C-SPAN-like news ticker reporting your play statistics, and a mini-window in which a little girl toils in a kitchen. You might never realize that you can use one of the analog sticks to pilot a little camera-armed robot around, butting in and out of the main cut scene window. The game proper is studded with enough eerie little touches to choke a Kingdom Hearts fangirl: take, for instance, the part when the game ritualistically revists Shadow Moses Island, the setting of the first game, and you can just barely see power-ups spinning helplessly on the landings of the now-inaccesible communications tower in the distance. This brings back stinging memories of Metal Gear Solid 2‘s Big Shell, where you could see Shell B on the map, yet would never be able to go there. Quite frankly, it should fiercely creep out any fan to remember things like that in the context of things like this. Entire segments of the game’s story offer the player two sources for possible entertainment: the geopoliticalish conversation of an old soldier and his weapons supplier, or the antics of a soda-drinking monkey wearing boy’s briefs. That sentence makes it sound hilarious, and sure, it is. Though when you get right down to it, when you’re watching a monkey drinking soda and belching as two characters talk about weapons and war and death and the Purpose of the Mission, you start to want to quit your job and join a nudist colony. Think of the hundreds of human-hours of brain-numbing work that went into rendering that monkey and those underpants, into animating that pornographic soda-drinking. These people — these MGS-devotees, these nearsighted Kojima fans bluntly stepping up to the plate to bunt in the name of a career — could have spent that time in the Amazon, searching for the beetle whose blood is the cure for cancer. Or at least they could have stayed at home, with their families. How heavy is the conscience of the man who tells his grandson, on his deathbed, that, as the world turned, he spent six hundred hours of 2007 lovingly animating an underpants-wearing monkey drinking a can of Hebrew Coca-Cola for a videogame cut-scene that was, quite frankly, skippable anyway.
You will have to forgive us, for a moment, for knowing something about Japan: in Japanese, there exists a single umbrella-word for things like lovingly, fetishistically animated Hebrew-Coca-Cola-drinking underpants-wearing monkeys, for careful deluges of unforeseen details: that word is “kodawari“. The perfect “40” review of Metal Gear Solid 4 in Weekly Famitsu did not fail to mention this word three times. As far as Japan’s loose concept of a “critic” of “media” is concerned, the very existence of any kodawari at all should be taken as a sign that the creator of said kodawari would be deeply and irreparably offended if you were to insinuate that they were not a genius. It’s likely that Famitsu‘s reviewers only played ten minutes into Metal Gear Solid 4, witnessed the bravado of the cut-scenes, the movie-like camerawork, and the painstakingly pitch-perfect sound design before throwing their hands up in the air and deciding unanimously that they could not dare to not call this work perfect. Nearly every other critic in the world went on to praise this orchestral fatuosity on the virtue of its being a Metal Gear game, and having some kind of confidence in its style. We are not so easily impressed; in order to illustrate its shortcomings perfectly, we’d like to draw a parallel between Metal Gear Solid 4‘s plot and a certain classic Hollywood film, though we believe the film is very great, and we wouldn’t want to spoil it for you. (*Subtlety note: this is us insinuating that if you consider Metal Gear Solid 4 great entertainment, you probably haven’t ever seen any good films.)
What we end up with, in Metal Gear Solid 4, is a game that, when viewed from the perspective of other clusterhecks, is a masterpiece for countless horrifying reasons. The stone-cold fear and coddling of fans is so rich and absolute that, in some alternate universe, it is no doubt the highest form of human expression. However, right here, on earth, on this Macbook Pro, in this fighter-jet cockpit, Metal Gear Solid 4 is and always will be dreck.
It is no longer 1998. It is 2008. It is the future, and we are awake.
Director Hideo Kojima has recently expressed pangs of regret for having told the story entirely in cut-scenes, and he has invoked the dangerous name of Bioshock when asked to elaborate on a better way to tell a story. We are scared halfway out of our minds when he talks about his “future involvement” with the Metal Gear Solid series, likening himself to Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki, who often comes out of retirement to direct one more (increasingly insane) film. It’s a scary remark for Kojima to make, and it’s an even scarier remark for people to shrug off, because Hayao Miyazaki’s movies are not always about the same exact character. Kojima speaks of wanting to be “free” of Metal Gear Solid, and we suspect that forming “Kojima Productions” and putting their logo front and center has been, from the start, a meta-clever attempt to synchronize public opinion of Metal Gear and of Kojima. We can’t say for sure whether or not it’s working; videogames are a young and weird medium, so when Kotaku reported that Kojima had literally gone on the record as saying he would like to do “something completely different and new” after Metal Gear Solid 4, the first hundred or so comments indicated that the average human-being-who-cares-enough-to-speak let these words fly in one ear and then promptly transform into “Zone of the Enders and Snatcher sequels confirmed”. People are scary; far scarier than people are Hideo Kojima fans. Kojima himself is scared of them. If Metal Gear Solid 4 was in fact intended as his “Springtime For Hitler” (and maybe it wasn’t, given its doily-fluffing mealy-mouthed cop-out asshole of an ending), then Kojima likely forgot to realize that, even in the realms of a satire author’s imagination, “Springtime For Hitler” doesn’t work: if nothing else, it is true that people love dreck even more than they love art. That’s why the world isn’t perfect. hecking duh, people. Well, for what it’s worth, Kojima, here’s a negative review. Do with it what you will (lol).
This brings us back to the subject of Metal Gear Solid 4 as a game: it’s not very good. It starts with nice concepts; by act four, it’s ditched the nice concepts. By act five, it’s Rambo On A Boat. Then it slowly jerks you off for an hour and a half. The game looks like a modern videogame; it has amazing sound design. It plays like Metal Gear. Some Metal Gear fans think it’s too tight, too much like an FPS. Some FPS fans think it’s too loose, too much like Metal Gear. We say that game graphics can only approach a certain level of realism before we expect headshots to kill someone, before we cannot forgive the game designers for allowing the main character to carry literally thousands of pounds’ worth of steel weaponry as he sneaks undetected through a battlefield. Metal Gear is very much a game about the logistics; like all the greats of the Famicom era, its initial game design was fashioned as something to work within the constraints of a medium. On the MSX, Kojima couldn’t have more than one enemy moving at a time, so he made avoiding the enemy the key to getting through any given challenge. That gave the game balls. Now, in the future, we can go anywhere or do anything. Rocket launchers are cool, and so is a controllable pet robot, so there you go, you got it. It’s just that when the game intends for the player to get as involved as he’s likely to get involved in the experience on plot- and play-related levels, it’s going to always seem fundamentally hecking Ridiculous that you can press the START button during a boss fight, access the ammunition store, and buy bullets for your empty gun. Know this: right now, today, right this minute, fledgling Japanese game designers are hip-deep in the belief that “buy ammo from the pause menu” is a “good idea” merely because it was in a Metal Gear Solid game. It’s an icky notion to consider; let it flow over you. It reminds us of that day we were confronted by a Scientologist on Hollywood Boulevard and handed a ticket to a free live hip-hop duel celebrating L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday (this actually happened).
We’d feel bad leaving this review on a scientology reference (fitting as it might actually be), so we’re going to try to discuss how to make Metal Gear Solid 4 better: don’t. Just don’t touch it. If you’re already touching it, stop touching it. hecking touch something else, already. Kojima, your talent comes from birthing quirks, not from digging them up and molesting them after they’re dead. The most immediately compelling and interesting part of Metal Gear Solid 4 is when Snake meets Meryl’s little troop of ragtag misfit soldiers, and one of them, sleeping with a mohawk, sits up suddenly, revealing that his hair actually forms the shape of an exclamation point on the back of his head. We need you to make a whole game out of that kind of nuance, Kojima. You’ve talked recently about how much you love the old classics like Out Of This World or Septentrion; you’ve mentioned Bioshock‘s straightforward storytelling approach, you’ve appreciated Gears of War, and yet you hint at having some brilliant “new idea” for how to tell a story in a future game. We (kind of) hope his solution isn’t to just remove all game elements and make another graphical adventure. (That would be hilarious, though.)
In closing, let us praise the one certifiably great thing about Metal Gear Solid 4, and the one shining beacon that fills us with faith in Kojima’s future productions: the flow of the dialogue. It’s occasionally hilarious how well Kojima is able to write rhythmic dialogue. It clips and breezes along; the most portentous sentences become urgent poetic moments that transcend the base stupidity of the plot. Of course, you’d never know this if you played the game in English — the script appears to have been translated by the Elephant Man banging his head on a keyboard. There’s a line where Naomi says “If you want to change your fate, you’ll have to meet your destiny”. What the stuff? In Japanese, she uses the same word for “fate” (unmei) twice, one instance of which being the first word of the sentence. This is to lend the sentence some kind of parallel structure. Even given the flipping idiocy of the moment, it makes for a neat little verbal-ironic turnaround: “The only way to change your fate is to go forth and meet it.” In other words, the only way Snake can possibly outlive his terrible fate (death) is by running straight at it, instead of letting it crash into him while he sits there doing nothing. This is a nice little sentence that no doubt has already inspired several dozen fanfiction-writing Japanese fourteen-year-olds. In English, it’s a dud; the translator must have majored in newspaper journalism, had a professor tell him to never use the same word — even (ESPECIALLY) “the” — twice in one sentence. However, this isn’t reporting — this isn’t regurgitation of earthquake statistics. It’s “art” (term used loosely). The moral of the story is that there’s no concept of the word “it” in Japanese, which is why so many sentences resort to (eventually poetic) repetition. We mustn’t forget this — this is perhaps one of the keys of Kojima’s artistic conscience, here, seriously (okay, not so seriously). Popping in needless synonyms is not what the games industry needs in order to gain artistic reputation — soon enough, everyone will be substituting 3s and 4s in their tax forms because they’re getting tired of writing 2s, and by then, we’re all literally and figuratively hecked, so help us Shigeru Miyamoto.
–tim rogers
Yes, we realize that this is like a big twist ending story where instead of ____ going “____”, it’s more like “lol”. If you’d like, you can pretend that we seriously do have a #1 “best game of all-time” that we’re going to reveal. If we did have such a game, we’d probbbbbably reveal it next Wednesday. Though who knows. By then, we might not even feel like it anymore. You are invited to stay tuned, in turgid hope, anyway.
★★☆☆
“ABSOLUTELY NOT THE BEST VIDEOGAME OF ALL-TIME.”
Metal Gear Solid 4 is your birthday; on this most special birthday, your grandmother is miraculously still alive — and she remembers that you used to own a closet full of Pound Puppies.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is Kingdom Hearts minus the Disney and the Final Fantasy. It is an archaeological effort to unearth and lie face-up in the sun every ridiculous, ancient, and embarrassing truth regarding We the People Who Really Like Videogames.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is delicious, edible slander.
Life, and everything in it — The World — The Videogame Industry — is a battlefield. One day, sitting on a porch somewhere in Alabama, Metal Gear Solid 4 might have been our cousin; today, it is our enemy.
Remember when you were five years old, and you told your mother that you were never going to smoke a cigarette, and she blew smoke in your face and called you a “Stupid kid”, and, with that next puff of nicotine in her lungs, muttered “who does he think he is, a psychic?” She was trying to say that you can’t predict the future; maybe, long ago, she’d made the same promise to her mother, and look where it got her. Well, twenty-four years have passed and you’ve never touched a cigarette, possibly because your mother’s pathos, on that day, left a lasting impression. You might have started to think that you are and always will be invincible to the ebb and flow of taste: one opinion you held as a preschooler holds up even today; nothing will ever change, and regardless of whether or not you are, in fact, also stupid, you will die happy. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots Tactical Espionage Action shows up ten years after you played Metal Gear Solid Tactical Espionage Action and knew with your entire body that it was great and amazing, amazing and great; by the end of its doily-fluffing twenty hours of cut scenes incomprehensible to non-kleptomaniacs, it has cast burning, ultraviolet light on its own history, and asked you “How Do You Like Me Now?” no less than a hundred and eight times. At one specific point very late in the game, director Hideo Kojima offers the player a sparkling opportunity to flip the screen a middle finger and declare “heck You, Solid Snake!” We here at Action Button Dot Net, deeply absorbed into the moment, playing this game with Sony-brand Dolby 7.1 headphones on a 40-inch Bravia in the cockpit of an abandoned fighter jet, seized this opportunity with great vigor. We went on to complete the game; three seconds after we were certain the credits had actually stopped rolling, we disembarked the jet, walked into the hangar, and checked the internet, where it became frightfully apparent that no one who gets paid to review videogames has anything resembling actual taste.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is Hideo Kojima’s “Springtime for Hitler”.
The previous sentence presumes Actual Intelligence exists inside Hideo Kojima’s brain. This is not meant as an insult. We’re certain the man is, at least, not mentally &^#$#ed. We’ve read interviews for years now in which he complains that Metal Gear Solid is a ball and chain. He wants to be free. He wants to make something else. We can’t blame him; no one wants to do the same thing forever. Scientists have proven it. Our girlfriends never believe us when we try to explain this, so of course the average videogamer isn’t going to explain it. The PR maelstrom surrounding Metal Gear Solid 4 devoted two years and literally thousands of human-hours of work into drilling holes in the craniums of every MGS-lover: 4 will be the end; 4 will tie up everything; 4 will be Kojima’s opus.
If it’s a fact that Metal Gear Solid 4 sucks on purpose, we can hardly blame Kojima for that, either. Given his previously well-documented disinterest in the series, its having been promoted as his “opus” must have turned his stomach. It’s clear that Kojima’s priority was the game’s plot, and making sure it “satisfied” fans: like the world’s fattest kid circa 1989 winning a Toys R Us shopping spree, Kojima struts zombie-like into the warehouse of his past work and proceeds to remove absolutely everything from the shelf, dropping one item at a time into his bottomless shopping cart. He eventually gets up to the cash register, leaves the cart unattended, pulls his smokes out of his jacket, and steps outside.
Tycho at Penny Arcade said that Metal Gear Solid 4 is better if you skip the cut-scenes. We’re pretty sure he’d played less than half of the game before writing that. We don’t blame him, nor do we hate him, for saying this. The truth is, if you’re playing Metal Gear Solid 4 as a game, the beginning is pretty compelling if you play it context-free. You’re an intruder on a battlefield being currently raped and pillaged by two opposing forces. One of the overarching themes of the story being “war is kinda not nice”, it’s actually somewhat accidentally poignant to experience the high-definition terrors of war from the perspective of an outsider just trying to get from point A to point B. It reminds us of our great idea to make a game where you play as a three-year-old boy in a Middle-Eastern warzone, too weak to pick up a gun, hiding and fleeing in terror from legions of unsympathetic troops. Of course, in Metal Gear Solid 4, you can shoot and kill dudes, so you can’t exactly play it as a statement. As a core mechanic and overarching theme, the “mind your own business here in the warzone” angle works. One of the two armies is grayly defined as the lesser of two kinda-not-nicenesses, so if you cap one of the other motherheckers while the slightly sympathetic dudes are watching, they might start to not immediately hate you. Its vaguely compelling, in an obsessive-compulsive way (which must be a real treat for MGS series fans), that in order to do something to prove you’re on these guys’ side, they have to see you doing it, though if they see you doing something that’s in the least bit suspicious, they will not hesitate to kill you. This turns the act of batlefield-navigation into a sort of seamless blend of Pac-Man and any given Japanese role-playing game of the 1990s: narrow roads cut city blocks into a rough labyrinth, though there’s really only ever one path you can possibly take, and it’s always obviously right there in front of you.
Soon enough, the falcon loses sight of the falconer, things fall apart, the story introduces a guy whose dominant character trait is acute diarrhea, et cetera. The game exploits the virtue of its own Fun Factor well into its second act, where the context rudely enters the equation and refuses to leave. We are no longer merely engaged in thrilling little meta-skirmishes where we must pick an alliance (help one side, kill both sides, help neither side, hurt neither side, little of column A little of column B et cetera): we are standing on top of a speeding Armored Patrol Carrier being piloted by Dennis Rodman and his soda-drinking pet monkey, being screamed at to shoot down oncoming enemy troops. The APC turns a corner and the screen goes black. “NOW LOADING”. Isn’t this supposed to be the Toughest Games Machine On Earth?
By act three, the game has abandoned its neat little idea in favor of a far neater one: we are now following a guy through a European city. Snake is wearing a trenchcoat, looking like Gillian Seed from Snatcher (the fans swoon), and it’s quaintly foggy. Ironically, this proved to be our Absolute Favorite Part of the Game. Since age nine, we have wanted to wander a European metropolis after curfew, letting a shady man obliviously lead us to his shady headquarters. This is the reason we studied Russian and Chinese in elementary school while everyone else was busy pretending they knew something about sex. We carried this dream in the palm of our hand until college, when it dawned upon us that we could Actually Die from doing Stuff Like This, so we started writing about videogames in the first-person plural instead. Metal Gear Solid 4 manages to get the mood and the pace of Euro-man-stalking just right. Our target is “Side A”, and the enemy troops enforcing the curfew are “Side B”. We are “Side C”. The level design in this part of the game is ferociously cute: both we and Side A are in violation of Side B’s rules; while avoiding Side A’s detection, we have to ensure that Side A avoids Side C’s detection. This ends up pretty fascinating, whether you have watched the opening cut scene or not. Eventually, you get to the goal, and suddenly you’re riding shotgun on a motorcycle in yet another ropey on-rails shooting sequence. It’s like waking up from a dream about the Bahamas to find out you’re actually in Bermuda. Instead of intimately sharing military secrets with a woman you picked up at a poker table, you’ve got your mother asking you to shoot a helicopter down.
Then there’s a boss sequence. It’s the second boss sequence of the game, actually. Like the one before it, it thrusts a character of considerable personality (compared to the typical drone, at least) into your face and asks you to kill them. You oblige, and then the boss reveals that it had, in fact, been a beautiful woman all along. Now the beautiful woman walks toward you, attempting to drain all of your life force with her mysteriously psychic embrace. There’s an in-game explanation for why her embrace can kill you, though as we’re ignoring the story for the time being, we’ll pretend to be confused. Let’s put this one on the table, then: the girls are all very hot. Why are they so hot? Huge amounts of money were likely spent making these boss-character-girls hot as fresh-baked lava rocks. Director Hideo Kojima (DHK) says that one of the “themes” of Metal Gear Solid 4 is “beauty and the beast”, though what does that mean, really? The bosses are “beasts” before their nasty mechanical suits are stripped from them; then they’re just helpless “beauties”. We could go on to suppose that Snake, a wrinkled old man with a Charles Bronson mustache, is the gray area between “beauty” and “beast”, though if we started saying things like that, Kojima would win, so nuh-uh.
The point is that, for a split-second at least, the game makes you care about the boss characters. If you’d been trying to ignore the story, you’ll be out of luck for that split-second. A split-second is all it takes for you to care about Metal Gear Solid 4 on a level that is not immediately superficial.
Then act four comes; the garbageman rings your doorbell and says that from this day forth, you don’t need to take the garbage out — he’s going to personally come into your home and do it for you. One dead-silent moment hours later, it becomes apparent that the garbageman was lying, and he just wanted to take a dump in your bathtub.
That is to say, it becomes presently obvious that you cannot ignore the story of Metal Gear Solid 4. The game absolutely, positively will not permit any ignorance re: its plot. It speaks, oddly politely, that if you’re not paying attention, you’re not doing it right.
We will disclaim, right here, that we have, for the past decade of jacked-into-the-netness, chuckled and rolled our eyes whenever anyone complained about the length of the cut-scenes in a Metal Gear Solid game. Some people said they just wanted to enjoy the “gameplay” (like that’s a real word); some people said they just wanted to enjoy the “atmosphere”. It puzzled us, to the point of rubbing our bellies in amusement, that someone would dare to want to play Metal Gear Solid with absolutely no invested interest in the characters. It’s not that the story and the characters are necessarily great literature so much as they’re insperable from the game’s progression and atmosphere. If you only like the game mechanics, you’d be better off playing Pac-Man — it’s basically the same thing. Conversely, if you only like the story, you’d be better off reading a book. (Crucial: notice how we recommended Pac-Man for players who only like Metal Gear Solid as a game, whereas we recommended any book in existence for those who enjoy it as a story.) If nothing else, the original Metal Gear Solid had a dignified flow to it: the characters were all rough sketches, all vaguely likable. Conceptual Bullstuff was kept to a minimum, and by minimum, we mean “Maximum, in Hindsight”. There was a hecking “boss” who you didn’t fight, who you instead met and talked to, and he died six hours before you even knew he was a boss. The game shows you this level of virtuosity for a while without once flexing its muscles in the mirror; at a certain point, it starts delivering soliloquies about love blooming on the battlefield; by this time, we are so into it that we can’t give up now. The game has worked its spell on us.
Metal Gear Solid 2 was a joke. We knew it was a joke; that’s why we wrote an article about how it was literature; that everyone thought that article was serious and in turn started to seriously assess Metal Gear Solid 2 as literature speaks volumes about how good a joke Metal Gear Solid 2 was. It’s rumored that Hideo Kojima had wanted to call Metal Gear Solid “Metal Gear 3”, though was advised not to, because “times had changed” and “the average gamer” would feel “dumb” jumping in on part three of a series. Maybe this was a good idea, maybe not. Either way, he wanted to call Metal Gear Solid 2 something else — maybe, just, replace the word “Solid” with another adjective, maybe “Moist”. The pseudo-hypocritical marketing department allegedly told him that he can’t change the name of the series now that it’s been established and made a big splash: they needed a numeral to ensure more sales. So Metal Gear Solid 2 was a massive joke, with the main character’s “death” partway through and the introduction of a man-pansy hero; it was Kojima ejecting bile for “the fans” of Solid Snake, by imprisoning them in the body of a character who could only ever see Solid Snake from a distance. The game was massively (mis)interepreted on various internet forums as some kind of artistic statement, something rich and deep in “literary themes” the likes of which can only be executed in games, where the player controls a character. Looking at it again, this far removed, we find it kind of precious: the player wanted to pretend to be this one guy, and then they end up having to pretend to be some other guy, and only watch the guy they wanted to pretend to be. If we were to write this out in mathematical symbols, insinuating that it didn’t even matter if guy A (the one we wanted to pretend to be) had been less manly or videogame-character-like than guy B (the guy we ended up having to pretend to be), some Wall-Street man’s monocle would pop out and he would tell us something about a “jolly good show”. The hypothesis would be that “fans will be fans”, and the conclusion would be a resounding “yes”.
Metal Gear Solid 3 was the “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” of the Metal Gear Solid series — stepping aside, showing us something different, indicating that the mythology surrounding its characters and plot
1. Was immortal, timeless, infinite, untellable in full no matter how many angles the storyteller showed us
2. Didn’t matter that much, in the grand scheme of everything
It was a videogame masterpiece. It was a sharp little spike-like game; its “big concepts” showed up like blood-stained stones on the side of the road. When, at the end, the main character pointed a gun at someone’s head and the camera panned out, it took us maybe thirty seconds to realize that we were supposed to press the “fire” button to pull the trigger. Our momentary ignorance — our failure to acknowledge that we were still in control was at once a statement on the subject of entertainment media, a statement on the subject of videogames, a commentary regarding criticism of the works of Hideo Kojima (“too many cut-scenes”, the people say), and an absolutely not-arrogant, in-character pseudo-inadvertent representation of the hesitation the main character feels at that very point in time. It was perfect. It was amazing. The full brunt of Hideo Kojima’s potential for future interactive entertainment masterpieces came within view. Kojima had said that Metal Gear Solid 3 was to be his last, and following its noble climax, we didn’t scorn him for wanting to move on to other things.
Of course, fans will be fans, and videogame companies will be deathly afraid of new things.
With Metal Gear Solid 4, Kojima came sprinting back. We can say with confidence that this move was perhaps conscientious. He might (or might not) have said in an interview that he came back to direct this game because “the fans wanted it”. “The fans wanted Kojima to direct” is industry-speak for “the fans didn’t want Kojima to not direct”. The reason for this is straightforward: the people associate the name “Hideo Kojima” with Metal Gear Solid. To have one without the other is to defy their blind love. It’d be like asking them to eat a cake that isn’t chocolate, or a chocolate that isn’t cake.
The truth is, we were younger when Metal Gear Solid first hit the scene. We were ten years younger. Though we were old enough to be proud of having kept our promise to our mothers re: never smoking a cigarette, we were perhaps not old enough to know exactly what art — or love — is. Hindsight will tell us that, in concept and execution and everything in between, Metal Gear Solid is better than Metal Gear Solid 4, though this hardly matters. What matters is that we have grown up, and Metal Gear Solid has grown down. Hands firmly planted on hips, we rotate slowly, low groan echoing from our throats, and survey the internet: everywhere, everywhere, we see that people still have not opened their eyes and ears to true love. They still are utterly up to the tops of their eyeballs in blind devotion to Metal Gear Solid. One key, stunning example of this blindness comes from people’s love of David Hayter, the voice of Solid Snake, whose idea of an “old” voice is to imagine he’s gargling asphalt. He sounds hecking ridiculous. Kotaku had a story about David Hayter once, and the comments section erupted into people badmouthing the Japanese Solid Snake, Akio Otsuka, because #1 he’s Japanese, and Snake is American and #2 he doesn’t even sound old. If you people had ever gone outside, you’d realize that old people only “sound old” in hecking cartoons. Akio Otsuka is an exceptionally talented dramatist (did you know he does the voices of Solid Snake, Liquid Snake, and Solidus?); David Hayter is just a name in the credits of something people know they like. Metal Gear Solid 4, in execution, in pathology, is more of a David Hayter than an Akio Otsuka.
We played Metal Gear Solid 4 from start to finish, watching all of the cut scenes, and then played it again, skipping all the cut-scenes, though remembering what happened in them whenever one scene cut sharply from one thing to something else. Then we “played” the game a third time, by watching a friend play, watching some cut-scenes and skipping others. This latter method proved the most ridiculous. Our friend had carved a direct path to the end of the game in less than three hours; he let each segment of the 90-minute ending play for around five minutes before skipping to the next one. While he was doing this, we flipped through a copy of Anna Karenina and read the sentence in the center of random even-numbered pages: Anna Karenina was winning.
The “problem” with Metal Gear Solid 4 is hardly the self-importance, or the stupidity of its narrative — it’s how damnedly “well” the narrative and the game are married. You just can’t have one without the other, try as you might. Many critics groaned at the length of the cut-scenes without addressing the simple fact that the cut-scenes are &^#$#ed. For the past few years, some critics have exhausted their lungs moaning about Quick Time Events (Action Button Events, they’re called in Japan): those little interjections where a button icon appears front and center on the screen, and you have to mash it quickly in order to make your character do something that no amount of regular controller input could produce under any other circumstances. Metal Gear Solid 4‘s most regularly occurring Quick Timer Events happen to involve pressing a button during a long, talky cut-scene in order to produce a momentary flash of a screen image or piece of concept art from another game in the series. Other critics have plunged stakes into the heart of the cut-scene itself, suggesting that games should tell stories in other ways — perhaps, as Gears of War or Half-Life 2 do, in three-second bursts while the game is actually happening. Few have squinted hard enough and complained about the moments where, as in Metal Gear Solid 4, cut-scenes become Quick Time Events where you’re not required to press buttons: the (seemingly) hour-long sequence in which Ninja Raiden Riverdance-Duels a gay vampire in order to buy Snake, Otacon, and their pet robot enough time to escape from the hell of South America via helicopter is a chief offender: look at those moves! The moment we, as a “player”, behold a scene in a “videogame” and think “Man, someone should make a videogame out of that”, the ghost is essentially given up.
Eventually, Metal Gear Solid 4, in all its attention to detail, all its wide-armed to-the-club welcoming, begins to frighten us. We remember that time we were walking back to our car with a girl, in university, and the Vietnam veteran in our advanced Chinese class — he’d waited literally twenty-some insane years before cashing in on the US government’s offer of a free education — drove up in his Pontiac, said hello, and began to tell us a story about his “bastard ex-wife”, which ended with him explaining how, if someone were to hold their right hand out all the way to one side, and you were to shoot the tip of their index finger with an M-60 from two hundred yards away, it’d not just blow the finger off — it’d tear their arm out of the socket. The blood would spurt so fast out of the severed arm socket that the victim would be unconscious before they hit the ground, and dead before they could get back up. Bizarre as this was, and freaked-out as the girl was, it’d perhaps facilitate our getting laid later, and it was kind of cool to hear someone who’d actually shot someone before talk about guns. At the end of the day, though, once you’ve killed one person, it goes from being “something you’ve never done” to being “something you do”, and once you’ve killed more than three people, it kind of becomes something you do “all the time”. Hearing a genuine Vietnam vet talk about shooting peoples’ arms off is really about as exciting as listening to your mom explain her meatloaf recipe over the phone to your aunt. When Kojima steps back into his fancy shoes and begins to work the orchestra of Metal Gear Solid 4 into a crescendo, we witness an amazing mix of the schlock-handed and the masterful. On the one hand, there’s a beautiful (“beautiful” is Japanese for “hilarious”) story reveal wherein Meryl finds herself engaged; on the other hand, if you haven’t purchased every game in the series and their accompanying glossy art books, you’re hardly going to give a stuff. The entire final mission feels like a meatloaf recipe: when you kill the last Girlboss — the Girlboss who had, in fact, been psychically controlling all of the other Girlbosses, and it’s revealed that this Girlboss was in fact only being mind-controlled by Psycho Mantis, a boss you killed in Metal Gear Solid, you may be tempted, as we were, to get on the internet and look at pornography instead. This scene is followed by abovementioned Meryl-gets-engaged cut-scene, and then by a virtuoso sequence in which the screen splits, the top half showing all the characters from the game living out what will be Their Final Moments If Snake Doesn’t Succeed, and the bottom half showing Snake as he worm-crawls through a microwave tunnel while the player slams the triangle button ferociously. On the one hand, this may be brilliant; on the other hand, it might be an accident. If it’s brilliant, it’s only brilliant because it’s a direct commentary on the nature of cut-scenes, player control, and the much-maligned Quick-Timer Events plaguing action game design today. On the one hand, if it’s a commentary on Quick-Timer Events and/or the Wiimote-masturbating nature of modern “cinematic” action games, effective as it may be, we’d probably rather have games that bother to have a story make that story comment on real issues (Shout out to Infinity Ward: Hello, Infinity Ward!), not videogame design. On the other one hand, it’s kind of an interesting cinematic presentation: the player literally gets tired of hammering that triangle button before the grueling sequence is over. However, on the other other hand, if the player had been skipping all of the cut-scenes up to this point, he’s just going to look at the top of the screen and wonder who the hell all of these people are. The pooch is essentially screwed at this point: you’re damned if you did, and damned if you didn’t: far worse than being merely damned no matter what you do, you are already damned by something you already did.
Despite Metal Gear Solid 4‘s not being a “great game”, it ends in the tradition of great games: by forcing the player to play something else. As Halo ends by turning into a Driving Game and Sin and Punishment ends by turning into Missile Command, as the kids in the movie “The Wizard” had to compete in the then-unreleased Super Mario Bros. 3 in order to prove who was better at Tetris, Metal Gear Solid 4 turns into a somewhat shockingly brilliant fighting game at the end. For a moment, right there, the exhausted and cautiously optimistic player might say that this is the perfect end to the entire franchise, not to mention this meandering, idiotic story: the hero and his opponent are both old men, older even than Danny Glover when he told Mel Gibson he was “too old for this stuff”. Perhaps the whole mumbo-jumboful story up to this point, with its self-defeating conclusion, had been for the purpose of establishing the out-of-placeness of these two old men, for the purpose of presenting the the mountain-size of the Can’t-Give-a-heckness. They brawl, fists blazing, refreshingly, deliciously, at a high speed. It doesn’t matter who wins. At this point in the game, our first time through, the area beneath our lungs began to vibrate with actual anticipation: might this be the Metal Gear Solid 3 “execution” moment, brought around into perfect form? Might it be so that if we lose right here, if Snake loses to Ocelot, that’s the end of the game? We got a game over; we got a second chance. We deflated a bit. We won, anticipating that maybe Kojima was going to kill off Snake in a different way: maybe Snake would just sit down, victorious, and die nonchalantly. That didn’t happen, either. Eventually, the snake starts to eat its own tail, and ninety minutes later, we have a look on our face like an ostrich with a dry lump of cotton candy kacked halfway down its ridiculously long throat (protip: birds don’t salivate). We’ve said before that, once you learn scales and all the barre chord shapes, learning to play the guitar is like a high-rise office building with a light switch in each room and a broken elevator: take the stairs up, open a door, enter the room, turn on the lights, exit the room, close the door, go to the next door, repeat until you feel safe becoming famous. Light switches in an office building is a compelling concept if you’re a man, and alone, with a thousand and one nights to spare before the showdown; watching someone else turn on the light switches for more than five minutes is terrifying. Have you ever had a neighbor with a seven-year-old just starting out on the violin? It’s like that. Metal Gear Solid 4, in its overwrought conclusion, stumbles, drunken, from room to room, flicking some light switches ruthlessly, and blinking others on and off for ten minutes before flipping off the ceiling and slamming the door.
Eventually, the game turned us off to the concept of entertainment in general. Eventually, the game makes us start drinking.
Upon completing Metal Gear Solid 4, we put a DVD of “The Graduate” in our PlayStation 3 and watched it, upscaled.
Yeah. That’s a pretty good movie.
Controversy erupted, on the internets, when someone close to a working copy of the retail version of Metal Gear Solid 4 let loose the claim that some of the cut-scenes approached ninety minutes in length. The ensuing groans could have sucked the air out of a baseball stadium. One prevailing sentiment among Metal Gear Solid 4 pledged pre-fans was that they would be worried about ninety-minute cut-scenes in any other game, though since it was Hideo Kojima, they wouldn’t mind. Konami’s cartilage-headed PR was quick to counter: the cut-scenes are so not ninety minutes long, and you can skip them, if you want. There we have it: a chill silence soaks the internet from head to toes. The makers of the games industry’s flagship champion for cut-scenes as a valid form of storytelling have just told us that the story segments are skippable. Also, saying that no cut-scenes approach ninety minutes in length is kind of a cop-out, because there are segments where one ten-minute cut-scene leads to three minutes of playing, then ten more minutes of cut-scene, then five minutes of play, repeat. This feels worse than a ninety-minute cut-scene. The term “blue-balling” is appropriate (make your own sentence here if you want).
No website or magazine seems to address this point, perhaps because they’d feel mean: the cut-scenes in Metal Gear Solid 4 are bad. They are bad because they are not good. The mission briefing sequences prior to each of the game’s major segments tend to be more than 40 minutes long. Some critics might have said “That’s about as long as an episode of a TV show!” That would be correct. Some apologists might have said “That’s only about as long as an episode of a TV show!” That would be correct, as well. However, the fact of the matter is that these mission briefing segments are not as entertaining as an episode of a TV show. They have no flow, no “beginning”, “middle”, and “end”. Watch any awful filler episode of “Lost” and you’ll see that there, at least, the writers understand how to structure a story. Here we could inject some meta-argument about how if you invented a remote-control that, when pointed at someone’s head, could make them forget The Holy Bible existed, and then you used said device on a Giant Publishing Company’s Elite Reader shortly before handing him a manuscript of the Bible, he’d frown and say the whole thing was too chaotic and not at all what the market was looking for. This argument would go on to go nowhere. Chances are — so say the bureaucrats in the “Industry” — if a person is playing a game, they don’t want literature. This, more often than not, gets misinterpreted as “games don’t want a coherent story, or even a well-told one”. Nonetheless, we can’t presume the average games industry executive to have any knowledge of narrative structure: the majority of them got their start managing Pizza Huts (Nintendo’s Reggie), not reading manuscripts. Not that reading a manuscript ever gets a man anything aside from the right to read better manuscripts. What we’re saying, right here, is that there existed a shimmering chance for Metal Gear Solid 4‘s story to be an excellent tale excellently told: we have played enough Metal Gear Solid 3 to know that Kojima has the tools, and the dedication. His men had the money, they had the technology, they had the willpower, they had a devoted development of Kojima-lovers working round the clock for several years to bring this mimeograph of an “artistic vision” to life.
We played Metal Gear Solid 4 expecting no more and no less than an answer to the question “Is Hideo Kojima actually a genius?” We got an answer, though we would have preferred the answer be a clear “Yes” or “No”. Instead, we got a “Maybe not”. We’re not ignoring the possibility that Kojima was trying to shoot his series in the head, because it’s obvious that he was — we’re just not going to rely on that as an explanation. What we’re saying is, he could have shot his series in the head so much more elegantly. As is, the pacing of this tale blesses the player of an ethereal understanding of why Kojima never actually got a novel published before he entered the games industry. As mentioned in the above paragraph, there’s a chance for art even (especially!) in the most meandering narrative. We’d go so far as to say that the world needs more stories told in the “Rio Bravo” tradition — you know, “hangout movie” style, where the characters kind of sit around talking about stuff until and even after Something Starts Happening. Metal Gear Solid 4‘s “Snake and The Gang In a Big Airplane” scenes possess wonderful potential — they are fiercely skippable, absolutely unnecessary, television-program-length episodes that allow us the opportunity to get to know our videogame characters better. The only reason we’d skip them is if we just wanted to play the game; if we’re not skipping them, we must want to get to know the characters better. It all makes so much sense. Unfortunately, Kojima betrays this wonderful opportunity by making his characters robotic drones instead of realistic people. On the one hand, we have big robots and Riverdancing ninjas; on the only other hand, it’s talking heads and sitting bodies.
To be blunt: our ability to enjoy (or at least not be repulsed by) Metal Gear Solid 4‘s characters is shot in the head due to how hecking easy we find it to fry a hecking egg in the real world.
One of the characters — Sunny, a little girl who dresses inexplicably in Harajuku fashion, in what might be a conscientious shout-out to the closeted pedophiles lurking in the Japanese shadows (conscientious because if these people had to go twenty hours without seeing a simulated little girl, they’d have to rape a real one) — tries her best to cook eggs for Snake and Otacon. She asks Snake, “Would you like some eggs?” And he says “Uhhh . . . no thanks”. She makes him eggs anyway. She brings the eggs downstairs and sets them in front of Snake. She takes a cigarette from his fingers just before he can put it in his lips. “No smoking in the plane!” she says. She goes back up into the kitchen. Snake looks at the eggs. “Otacon, can’t you teach her how to fry an egg?” Otacon shrugs. “Do I look like someone who knows how to fry an egg?”
Are you hecking serious? Neither Snake nor Otacon nor this little girl knows how to fry an egg? The only person who does know how to fry eggs is the genome-expert science-genius female? You’d think that the one person who would not know how to fry an egg would be the determined, professional, full-grown woman. Otacon is a lonely bachelor, and Snake — for heck’s sake — is a trained US Ranger, the most elite force in the goddamned world, called “Snake Eaters” because they’re capable of eating raw snakes if they have to. You figure, if Snake couldn’t make eggs for himself, he’d at least be able to stomach disgusting ones. More than this, what’s so disgusting about the eggs? Are they too runny? Are they burnt? Rocky, in the movie “Rocky”, drinks raw eggs for breakfast, so Snake should be able to handle runny eggs. And burnt ones? See the “Snake Eater” comment. Do they need salt? We realize that Sunny is a girl with a troubled past, a dead mother, and many rape innuendos, though how painful would it be, really, to explain to this girl — a computer genius, by the way — that some people like their eggs cooked differently than other people, that there exist a myriad of possible ways to cook eggs? The girl can likely multiply seventeen-digit numbers in her head with a snap of her fingers — she’d probably be open to the permutations of egg-cookery.
It’s apparent, here, that Hideo Kojima can cook eggs by himself. He’s probably been able to prepare eggs delicious enough for his own standards for several decades. He’s probably never given any thought to whether or not he ever found egg-cooking to be difficult. Chances are, he arrived at the blank pages preemptively marked “Mission Briefing Script” in need of a metaphor, and just plucked one out of thin air: “Lots of people probably find it hard to fry eggs!” It almost looks, at a point, like the egg metaphor had been constructed out of a hare-brained assumption that Kojima himself was a genius for being able to fry eggs so well without instruction. It’s conceivable, in the shadow of the moment, that Kojima saw himself as stepping down from a pedestal, getting real with his audience, and sympathizing with their inability to cook eggs. This is evidence that the fuel for Kojima’s fiction may not actually come from Experience in the Real World. Like, say you’re in line at the grocery store and you add up the total price of all your purchases while the old woman in front of you is fumbling with her checkbook, and you make sure to have the precise amount of post-tax cash ready: do you assume that this is something only you can do, simply because you’ve never seen someone else do it? Do you go ahead and make it the defining character trait of a character in a piece of fiction? For serious, one thing we’re taken to screaming at Videogame Industry Professionals, these days, when they say things like “being able to buy ammunition from the menu must be a good idea, because Metal Gear Solid 4 did it” is that they should probably quit their jobs making videogames and work in a hecking convenient store for a couple of years. You know, to study the looks on actual human faces when they buy beer, or potato chips, or Marlboros.
It’s also obvious that Kojima doesn’t smoke. If Kojima smoked, there’s no way Snake would let that little girl snatch his cigarette. He’d be all like, heck you, if I want to smoke, I’m going to smoke. The man has the energy to traipse through jungles and tundras with a machine gun; he’s Meters From Death. He has a right to not give a heck.
Much of Metal Gear Solid 4‘s surgically irremovable tumor of a plot indulges in fierce second-guessing of the player’s expectations and an even fiercer insecurity complex, where you feel the writer falter, assuming he’s not being clever enough. These complexes make for terrible fiction; we’ve already established that no high-ranking officials in the videogame industry are competent judges of narrative, so there you have it. Little, vaguely embarrassing moments pop up that make us consider the phrase “Kojima Done Right” — like when Drebin, our weapons specialist, radioes us after each boss fight to explain the gruesome past of that boss character, and why she ended up turned into such a monster. By the end of the game, we will realize that each girl’s story is essentially the same. In addition to making us recall Alfred Hitchcock’s opinion that an artist only ever tells the same story over and over again, it also seems perfectly in line with the conceptual core of videogames: we might as well make a series called In Which One Guy Shoots A Bunch Of Other Guys.
It’s ultimately painful, however, that every character has to have a “purpose”. Drebin, bringer of the post-boss monologues, can’t, in good conscience, be just the guy who gives us the post-boss monologues (the way every Dragon Quest town has the guy who exists just to tell you the name of the town). He has to have some other “purpose” in the story to explain his existence in the first place. Metal Gear Solid 4, being already a game that exists to tie up all loose ends left behind by its heritage, cannot, pathologically, introduce a character like Drebin without giving him a “purpose” (weapons guy), a secondary purpose (deliverer of post-boss monologues), and a place in the grand scheme of things (complete with spotlight time during the monster of an ending).
Do not confuse this sentence for a compliment: there has never been and there will never again be a game quite like Metal Gear Solid 4. During the mission briefing scenes, the screen cuts up into segments, including a window in which characters talk, a C-SPAN-like news ticker reporting your play statistics, and a mini-window in which a little girl toils in a kitchen. You might never realize that you can use one of the analog sticks to pilot a little camera-armed robot around, butting in and out of the main cut scene window. The game proper is studded with enough eerie little touches to choke a Kingdom Hearts fangirl: take, for instance, the part when the game ritualistically revists Shadow Moses Island, the setting of the first game, and you can just barely see power-ups spinning helplessly on the landings of the now-inaccesible communications tower in the distance. This brings back stinging memories of Metal Gear Solid 2‘s Big Shell, where you could see Shell B on the map, yet would never be able to go there. Quite frankly, it should fiercely creep out any fan to remember things like that in the context of things like this. Entire segments of the game’s story offer the player two sources for possible entertainment: the geopoliticalish conversation of an old soldier and his weapons supplier, or the antics of a soda-drinking monkey wearing boy’s briefs. That sentence makes it sound hilarious, and sure, it is. Though when you get right down to it, when you’re watching a monkey drinking soda and belching as two characters talk about weapons and war and death and the Purpose of the Mission, you start to want to quit your job and join a nudist colony. Think of the hundreds of human-hours of brain-numbing work that went into rendering that monkey and those underpants, into animating that pornographic soda-drinking. These people — these MGS-devotees, these nearsighted Kojima fans bluntly stepping up to the plate to bunt in the name of a career — could have spent that time in the Amazon, searching for the beetle whose blood is the cure for cancer. Or at least they could have stayed at home, with their families. How heavy is the conscience of the man who tells his grandson, on his deathbed, that, as the world turned, he spent six hundred hours of 2007 lovingly animating an underpants-wearing monkey drinking a can of Hebrew Coca-Cola for a videogame cut-scene that was, quite frankly, skippable anyway.
You will have to forgive us, for a moment, for knowing something about Japan: in Japanese, there exists a single umbrella-word for things like lovingly, fetishistically animated Hebrew-Coca-Cola-drinking underpants-wearing monkeys, for careful deluges of unforeseen details: that word is “kodawari“. The perfect “40” review of Metal Gear Solid 4 in Weekly Famitsu did not fail to mention this word three times. As far as Japan’s loose concept of a “critic” of “media” is concerned, the very existence of any kodawari at all should be taken as a sign that the creator of said kodawari would be deeply and irreparably offended if you were to insinuate that they were not a genius. It’s likely that Famitsu‘s reviewers only played ten minutes into Metal Gear Solid 4, witnessed the bravado of the cut-scenes, the movie-like camerawork, and the painstakingly pitch-perfect sound design before throwing their hands up in the air and deciding unanimously that they could not dare to not call this work perfect. Nearly every other critic in the world went on to praise this orchestral fatuosity on the virtue of its being a Metal Gear game, and having some kind of confidence in its style. We are not so easily impressed; in order to illustrate its shortcomings perfectly, we’d like to draw a parallel between Metal Gear Solid 4‘s plot and a certain classic Hollywood film, though we believe the film is very great, and we wouldn’t want to spoil it for you. (*Subtlety note: this is us insinuating that if you consider Metal Gear Solid 4 great entertainment, you probably haven’t ever seen any good films.)
What we end up with, in Metal Gear Solid 4, is a game that, when viewed from the perspective of other clusterhecks, is a masterpiece for countless horrifying reasons. The stone-cold fear and coddling of fans is so rich and absolute that, in some alternate universe, it is no doubt the highest form of human expression. However, right here, on earth, on this Macbook Pro, in this fighter-jet cockpit, Metal Gear Solid 4 is and always will be dreck.
It is no longer 1998. It is 2008. It is the future, and we are awake.
Director Hideo Kojima has recently expressed pangs of regret for having told the story entirely in cut-scenes, and he has invoked the dangerous name of Bioshock when asked to elaborate on a better way to tell a story. We are scared halfway out of our minds when he talks about his “future involvement” with the Metal Gear Solid series, likening himself to Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki, who often comes out of retirement to direct one more (increasingly insane) film. It’s a scary remark for Kojima to make, and it’s an even scarier remark for people to shrug off, because Hayao Miyazaki’s movies are not always about the same exact character. Kojima speaks of wanting to be “free” of Metal Gear Solid, and we suspect that forming “Kojima Productions” and putting their logo front and center has been, from the start, a meta-clever attempt to synchronize public opinion of Metal Gear and of Kojima. We can’t say for sure whether or not it’s working; videogames are a young and weird medium, so when Kotaku reported that Kojima had literally gone on the record as saying he would like to do “something completely different and new” after Metal Gear Solid 4, the first hundred or so comments indicated that the average human-being-who-cares-enough-to-speak let these words fly in one ear and then promptly transform into “Zone of the Enders and Snatcher sequels confirmed”. People are scary; far scarier than people are Hideo Kojima fans. Kojima himself is scared of them. If Metal Gear Solid 4 was in fact intended as his “Springtime For Hitler” (and maybe it wasn’t, given its doily-fluffing mealy-mouthed cop-out asshole of an ending), then Kojima likely forgot to realize that, even in the realms of a satire author’s imagination, “Springtime For Hitler” doesn’t work: if nothing else, it is true that people love dreck even more than they love art. That’s why the world isn’t perfect. hecking duh, people. Well, for what it’s worth, Kojima, here’s a negative review. Do with it what you will (lol).
This brings us back to the subject of Metal Gear Solid 4 as a game: it’s not very good. It starts with nice concepts; by act four, it’s ditched the nice concepts. By act five, it’s Rambo On A Boat. Then it slowly jerks you off for an hour and a half. The game looks like a modern videogame; it has amazing sound design. It plays like Metal Gear. Some Metal Gear fans think it’s too tight, too much like an FPS. Some FPS fans think it’s too loose, too much like Metal Gear. We say that game graphics can only approach a certain level of realism before we expect headshots to kill someone, before we cannot forgive the game designers for allowing the main character to carry literally thousands of pounds’ worth of steel weaponry as he sneaks undetected through a battlefield. Metal Gear is very much a game about the logistics; like all the greats of the Famicom era, its initial game design was fashioned as something to work within the constraints of a medium. On the MSX, Kojima couldn’t have more than one enemy moving at a time, so he made avoiding the enemy the key to getting through any given challenge. That gave the game balls. Now, in the future, we can go anywhere or do anything. Rocket launchers are cool, and so is a controllable pet robot, so there you go, you got it. It’s just that when the game intends for the player to get as involved as he’s likely to get involved in the experience on plot- and play-related levels, it’s going to always seem fundamentally hecking Ridiculous that you can press the START button during a boss fight, access the ammunition store, and buy bullets for your empty gun. Know this: right now, today, right this minute, fledgling Japanese game designers are hip-deep in the belief that “buy ammo from the pause menu” is a “good idea” merely because it was in a Metal Gear Solid game. It’s an icky notion to consider; let it flow over you. It reminds us of that day we were confronted by a Scientologist on Hollywood Boulevard and handed a ticket to a free live hip-hop duel celebrating L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday (this actually happened).
We’d feel bad leaving this review on a scientology reference (fitting as it might actually be), so we’re going to try to discuss how to make Metal Gear Solid 4 better: don’t. Just don’t touch it. If you’re already touching it, stop touching it. hecking touch something else, already. Kojima, your talent comes from birthing quirks, not from digging them up and molesting them after they’re dead. The most immediately compelling and interesting part of Metal Gear Solid 4 is when Snake meets Meryl’s little troop of ragtag misfit soldiers, and one of them, sleeping with a mohawk, sits up suddenly, revealing that his hair actually forms the shape of an exclamation point on the back of his head. We need you to make a whole game out of that kind of nuance, Kojima. You’ve talked recently about how much you love the old classics like Out Of This World or Septentrion; you’ve mentioned Bioshock‘s straightforward storytelling approach, you’ve appreciated Gears of War, and yet you hint at having some brilliant “new idea” for how to tell a story in a future game. We (kind of) hope his solution isn’t to just remove all game elements and make another graphical adventure. (That would be hilarious, though.)
In closing, let us praise the one certifiably great thing about Metal Gear Solid 4, and the one shining beacon that fills us with faith in Kojima’s future productions: the flow of the dialogue. It’s occasionally hilarious how well Kojima is able to write rhythmic dialogue. It clips and breezes along; the most portentous sentences become urgent poetic moments that transcend the base stupidity of the plot. Of course, you’d never know this if you played the game in English — the script appears to have been translated by the Elephant Man banging his head on a keyboard. There’s a line where Naomi says “If you want to change your fate, you’ll have to meet your destiny”. What the stuff? In Japanese, she uses the same word for “fate” (unmei) twice, one instance of which being the first word of the sentence. This is to lend the sentence some kind of parallel structure. Even given the flipping idiocy of the moment, it makes for a neat little verbal-ironic turnaround: “The only way to change your fate is to go forth and meet it.” In other words, the only way Snake can possibly outlive his terrible fate (death) is by running straight at it, instead of letting it crash into him while he sits there doing nothing. This is a nice little sentence that no doubt has already inspired several dozen fanfiction-writing Japanese fourteen-year-olds. In English, it’s a dud; the translator must have majored in newspaper journalism, had a professor tell him to never use the same word — even (ESPECIALLY) “the” — twice in one sentence. However, this isn’t reporting — this isn’t regurgitation of earthquake statistics. It’s “art” (term used loosely). The moral of the story is that there’s no concept of the word “it” in Japanese, which is why so many sentences resort to (eventually poetic) repetition. We mustn’t forget this — this is perhaps one of the keys of Kojima’s artistic conscience, here, seriously (okay, not so seriously). Popping in needless synonyms is not what the games industry needs in order to gain artistic reputation — soon enough, everyone will be substituting 3s and 4s in their tax forms because they’re getting tired of writing 2s, and by then, we’re all literally and figuratively hecked, so help us Shigeru Miyamoto.
–tim rogers
Yes, we realize that this is like a big twist ending story where instead of ____ going “____”, it’s more like “lol”. If you’d like, you can pretend that we seriously do have a #1 “best game of all-time” that we’re going to reveal. If we did have such a game, we’d probbbbbably reveal it next Wednesday. Though who knows. By then, we might not even feel like it anymore. You are invited to stay tuned, in turgid hope, anyway.
2008
text by Brandon Parker
★★★☆
“KEEPING ME AWAKE AT NIGHT.”
I remember my tenth birthday. I was at the hospital because I only get sick one day of the year, which is my birthday. So you might wonder how I remember this specific hospital visit in particular. Well, I’ll tell you: I was in the waiting room and my mother said this birthday was very important because “you only hit double digits once.” While talking about getting older and whatnot, she asked me what I thought I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said, “Retired.” I couldn’t wait, I said. That was ridiculous, was what she said, that I had my whole life ahead me and etcetera. That was the point, though, because I had wisely realized very early in my life that I would never like working, wanted to waste as little of my life doing it as possible, and have yet to feel otherwise about the matter.
So at some point later on I realized mine would absolutely have to be a life as either a writer or bank robber. Obviously, I decided to try out bank robbing first, as it’s the most interesting and feasible of the two. However, on the day of the first big heist, I ended up with one hell of a stubbed toe and, being the cautious man I am, didn’t want to take even the slightest of chances, so I put that on hold for awhile.
That’s all in the past, however. Now I’m living the dream as a career criminal, currently spending some time in Liberty City, and a while back I came into contact with a particular Irish family, the McReary’s. There’s five brothers, four of whom are gangsters, while the other one, Francis, he’s a cop. You might think maybe he’s still close with the rest of them, or maybe he’s an inside man for them. Well, no. Whey talk about what a piece of stuff he is, so I’m thinking he probably doesn’t get invited to the family happenings and get togethers for a little bowling or anything.
Let me tell you about the four criminal brothers. Gerry is the scary oldest brother all the others follow and look up to, who seems like he probably kills people on regular basis without thinking much of it. Michael is the youngest and an imbecile. Derrick is a heroin addict, but he doesn’t let it interfere with his work, and he makes the bombs. He seems like a pretty smart guy. And then there is Packie, who was my introduction to the family. He enjoys cocaine and on one job where he proposed to steal money from the mob, he compared himself to Robin Hood. As far as I’m concerned, Robin Hood is one of the historical Badass Worthies, and anyone who uses him as a model for their way of life is a man of quality.
Not so long ago, Patrick, Derrick, Michael, and myself – we did a bank job, and you might say things “didn’t go as planned,” or that any and all stuff “went south.” Michael was shot and killed right in the goddamned bank lobby, and the remaining three of us had to shoot our way through three stuffloads of cops, two hecktons of SWAT guys, one goddamn attack chopper of some kind, all while navigating through alleys, streets, and the damn subway system. In the course of shooting our way out of that scenario, I think a real bond had been established between myself, Packie and Derrick. Since then, Packie had started calling me up, wanting to go out drinking, encouraging me to date his sister, asking me to look out for Derrick (who was riding the white horse real hard, if you know what I mean. He was doing a lot of heroin, I mean). I was getting involved, is what I’m trying to tell you. Emotions were coming into play. It wasn’t just for money anymore, dammit.
Anyway, some time passed, there’d been a turn of events, etc. – the point is that something came up. The cop brother, Francis; I’d done some work with him in the past. Well, he calls me up and tells me that he’s meeting his brother Derrick in the park and he needs me to kill him, because he’s going to talk to reporters and cause trouble. He’s not real specific. I assume it’s going to lead to some corruption on Francis’ part being revealed, being that that’s the same reason I had done work for him before. Right after that, Derrick also calls me and says his brother has just asked to meet with him, and could I do something because he’s real scared he’s going to be killed.
Now, I was in a real quandary here. I mean, an honest bind, a genuine fix, I didn’t know what to do. In fact, I was a little confused at first because I got mixed up and thought it was the older brother, Gerry, that Francis wanted killed, since he’d previously mentioned doing something about him, and Gerry, he’s headed for prison, soon, so I thought maybe he was trying to get out of that here. But then, as I was watching the meeting place through my rifle scope and the reality of the situation was finally setting in, Derrick is the one that shows up, making me extra befuddled, and so now I had to think extra quick.
Francis – he’s obviously a corrupt cop. In the past he’s also hired me to kill; even a damn lawyer, once, who was trying to clean up corruption and had dirt on him. Francis claims he’s only just had some bad luck, that he’s really trying to do good, and that he’s had to resort to illegal methods to fight crime in Liberty City. Maybe he’s right, maybe he does do good and once he becomes commissioner he’ll really have the ability and resources to do some good. He probably has the better chance of accomplishing something meaningful with his life at this point than Derrick. In a place like Liberty City, where I drive like a maniac, damaging other cars and injuring and killing numerous pedestrians because I’m not patient enough to follow the rules of the road, too lazy to try subway and too much of a miser to take a taxi, who am I to disagree with a policeman’s stance on crime or his methods of operating?
Meanwhile, Derrick spends most of his days high and sprawled out on a bench in some stuff hole of a park over in Alderney. He doesn’t seem to value his life much, but, then again, he also says he’s just been dealt a bad hand for a lot of his life, and that he’d like a way to start fresh. I’ve been trying to help him out with that, too, because I’d like to see him pull out of this rut he’s stuck in. I have to admit, I’m more than a little disgusted with myself for initially favoring him for the shooting, and almost unconsciously pulled the trigger without giving any real thought to it when I realized it was him instead of Gerry showing up. Oh, the heroin addict brother, my subconscious must have said – here I though it was Gerry. I disgust myself sometimes.
I remember the drive on the way to that bank job. Derrick voiced some concerns he had for his brother Packie, who seemed to have a meaner temperament that he remembered, since Derrick had only just recently returned from a long stay in Ireland. He spoke of Packie being such a “sweet kid” in the before times. Derrick’s obviously got a good heart. But most importantly, during the robbery itself, after setting up the explosives on the vault, he took the time to explain to the hostages that they shouldn’t worry about their money, the bank’s insured, it’s going to a good cause anyway, etc. I thought that was pretty great of him, though Patrick yelled at him for it. Derrick replied that he was only trying to be honest with the customers. We were putting them through a pretty stressful situation, after all.
Francis does not seem genuine in the least bit. Maybe he did originally believe in something, but he seems to have lost his way. I don’t believe he’s interested in getting actual policing and public defending done, rogue methods or not. He’s just a politician, now, wanting only to climb the ladder and make rank. The other brothers, while leading criminal lives, aren’t leading dishonest lives at least. When Derrick apologized to those bank customers, he sorta reminded me of myself, actually (which I told him when he asked why I was later helping him). And I knew Packie and those customers didn’t appreciate his honesty at that moment, but I did, and it’s what ended up saving his life.
Besides, if Derrick was really up to something terrible, Francis shouldn’t have been so vague, the dumbass. He really brought that bullet in his head on himself. Still, it wasn’t an easy decision. Thank god for Pause.
Well, there it is. That’s what I thought about when deciding which of two lives had more worth to the world. A responsibility I enjoyed not enjoying. I don’t think I was entirely sure of myself until now, but after getting it all out here, I know I made the right choice. Probably.
As for the rest of Liberty City, I don’t have much to say, other than something is going to have to be done eventually about these regular citizens and tax payers. Some government programs are going to have to be enacted, here. They need their quality or life improved. They walk around like mindless automatons who spawn into view just out of sight and come preprogrammed to say a handful of phrases. I don’t kill them because I’m concerned for their lives. It’s more like I don’t kill them for the same reason I don’t just walk up and stark kicking over other people’s sandcastles, or try to avoid driving through some guy’s yard, running over his garden and hedgework and stuff. Back in my day, in a place called Britannia, every citizen had a name and a job and a schedule for the day. I know you damn kids in Liberty City have always been like this, but your condition is only made all the more obvious now compared to the better expressiveness available to my close circle of friends and enemies, who have the luxury of cinematic non-interactive viewing scenes and all. I can’t empathize with the common man. The best I can do for them is jack a police car and hunt down ne’er-do-wells of society that aren’t myself using Johnny Law’s computer system.
Maybe the apathy of the citizens has something to do with there being not a whole lot to do in such a big metropolis. Just miles of empty stuff, looking like it could be easily made into something interesting that you have to drive past for forever to finally get to somewhere that is even vaguely interesting. Reminds me a lot of Missouri, actually, except you’d need a lot more effort to make the empty stuff into anything interesting.
And I was kidding about Pause. Good for Derrick there’s Pause. I hope he prays to the Pause every night, now, but I think my excitement would have benefited more with its absence. That’s about it, I guess.
★★★☆
“KEEPING ME AWAKE AT NIGHT.”
I remember my tenth birthday. I was at the hospital because I only get sick one day of the year, which is my birthday. So you might wonder how I remember this specific hospital visit in particular. Well, I’ll tell you: I was in the waiting room and my mother said this birthday was very important because “you only hit double digits once.” While talking about getting older and whatnot, she asked me what I thought I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said, “Retired.” I couldn’t wait, I said. That was ridiculous, was what she said, that I had my whole life ahead me and etcetera. That was the point, though, because I had wisely realized very early in my life that I would never like working, wanted to waste as little of my life doing it as possible, and have yet to feel otherwise about the matter.
So at some point later on I realized mine would absolutely have to be a life as either a writer or bank robber. Obviously, I decided to try out bank robbing first, as it’s the most interesting and feasible of the two. However, on the day of the first big heist, I ended up with one hell of a stubbed toe and, being the cautious man I am, didn’t want to take even the slightest of chances, so I put that on hold for awhile.
That’s all in the past, however. Now I’m living the dream as a career criminal, currently spending some time in Liberty City, and a while back I came into contact with a particular Irish family, the McReary’s. There’s five brothers, four of whom are gangsters, while the other one, Francis, he’s a cop. You might think maybe he’s still close with the rest of them, or maybe he’s an inside man for them. Well, no. Whey talk about what a piece of stuff he is, so I’m thinking he probably doesn’t get invited to the family happenings and get togethers for a little bowling or anything.
Let me tell you about the four criminal brothers. Gerry is the scary oldest brother all the others follow and look up to, who seems like he probably kills people on regular basis without thinking much of it. Michael is the youngest and an imbecile. Derrick is a heroin addict, but he doesn’t let it interfere with his work, and he makes the bombs. He seems like a pretty smart guy. And then there is Packie, who was my introduction to the family. He enjoys cocaine and on one job where he proposed to steal money from the mob, he compared himself to Robin Hood. As far as I’m concerned, Robin Hood is one of the historical Badass Worthies, and anyone who uses him as a model for their way of life is a man of quality.
Not so long ago, Patrick, Derrick, Michael, and myself – we did a bank job, and you might say things “didn’t go as planned,” or that any and all stuff “went south.” Michael was shot and killed right in the goddamned bank lobby, and the remaining three of us had to shoot our way through three stuffloads of cops, two hecktons of SWAT guys, one goddamn attack chopper of some kind, all while navigating through alleys, streets, and the damn subway system. In the course of shooting our way out of that scenario, I think a real bond had been established between myself, Packie and Derrick. Since then, Packie had started calling me up, wanting to go out drinking, encouraging me to date his sister, asking me to look out for Derrick (who was riding the white horse real hard, if you know what I mean. He was doing a lot of heroin, I mean). I was getting involved, is what I’m trying to tell you. Emotions were coming into play. It wasn’t just for money anymore, dammit.
Anyway, some time passed, there’d been a turn of events, etc. – the point is that something came up. The cop brother, Francis; I’d done some work with him in the past. Well, he calls me up and tells me that he’s meeting his brother Derrick in the park and he needs me to kill him, because he’s going to talk to reporters and cause trouble. He’s not real specific. I assume it’s going to lead to some corruption on Francis’ part being revealed, being that that’s the same reason I had done work for him before. Right after that, Derrick also calls me and says his brother has just asked to meet with him, and could I do something because he’s real scared he’s going to be killed.
Now, I was in a real quandary here. I mean, an honest bind, a genuine fix, I didn’t know what to do. In fact, I was a little confused at first because I got mixed up and thought it was the older brother, Gerry, that Francis wanted killed, since he’d previously mentioned doing something about him, and Gerry, he’s headed for prison, soon, so I thought maybe he was trying to get out of that here. But then, as I was watching the meeting place through my rifle scope and the reality of the situation was finally setting in, Derrick is the one that shows up, making me extra befuddled, and so now I had to think extra quick.
Francis – he’s obviously a corrupt cop. In the past he’s also hired me to kill; even a damn lawyer, once, who was trying to clean up corruption and had dirt on him. Francis claims he’s only just had some bad luck, that he’s really trying to do good, and that he’s had to resort to illegal methods to fight crime in Liberty City. Maybe he’s right, maybe he does do good and once he becomes commissioner he’ll really have the ability and resources to do some good. He probably has the better chance of accomplishing something meaningful with his life at this point than Derrick. In a place like Liberty City, where I drive like a maniac, damaging other cars and injuring and killing numerous pedestrians because I’m not patient enough to follow the rules of the road, too lazy to try subway and too much of a miser to take a taxi, who am I to disagree with a policeman’s stance on crime or his methods of operating?
Meanwhile, Derrick spends most of his days high and sprawled out on a bench in some stuff hole of a park over in Alderney. He doesn’t seem to value his life much, but, then again, he also says he’s just been dealt a bad hand for a lot of his life, and that he’d like a way to start fresh. I’ve been trying to help him out with that, too, because I’d like to see him pull out of this rut he’s stuck in. I have to admit, I’m more than a little disgusted with myself for initially favoring him for the shooting, and almost unconsciously pulled the trigger without giving any real thought to it when I realized it was him instead of Gerry showing up. Oh, the heroin addict brother, my subconscious must have said – here I though it was Gerry. I disgust myself sometimes.
I remember the drive on the way to that bank job. Derrick voiced some concerns he had for his brother Packie, who seemed to have a meaner temperament that he remembered, since Derrick had only just recently returned from a long stay in Ireland. He spoke of Packie being such a “sweet kid” in the before times. Derrick’s obviously got a good heart. But most importantly, during the robbery itself, after setting up the explosives on the vault, he took the time to explain to the hostages that they shouldn’t worry about their money, the bank’s insured, it’s going to a good cause anyway, etc. I thought that was pretty great of him, though Patrick yelled at him for it. Derrick replied that he was only trying to be honest with the customers. We were putting them through a pretty stressful situation, after all.
Francis does not seem genuine in the least bit. Maybe he did originally believe in something, but he seems to have lost his way. I don’t believe he’s interested in getting actual policing and public defending done, rogue methods or not. He’s just a politician, now, wanting only to climb the ladder and make rank. The other brothers, while leading criminal lives, aren’t leading dishonest lives at least. When Derrick apologized to those bank customers, he sorta reminded me of myself, actually (which I told him when he asked why I was later helping him). And I knew Packie and those customers didn’t appreciate his honesty at that moment, but I did, and it’s what ended up saving his life.
Besides, if Derrick was really up to something terrible, Francis shouldn’t have been so vague, the dumbass. He really brought that bullet in his head on himself. Still, it wasn’t an easy decision. Thank god for Pause.
Well, there it is. That’s what I thought about when deciding which of two lives had more worth to the world. A responsibility I enjoyed not enjoying. I don’t think I was entirely sure of myself until now, but after getting it all out here, I know I made the right choice. Probably.
As for the rest of Liberty City, I don’t have much to say, other than something is going to have to be done eventually about these regular citizens and tax payers. Some government programs are going to have to be enacted, here. They need their quality or life improved. They walk around like mindless automatons who spawn into view just out of sight and come preprogrammed to say a handful of phrases. I don’t kill them because I’m concerned for their lives. It’s more like I don’t kill them for the same reason I don’t just walk up and stark kicking over other people’s sandcastles, or try to avoid driving through some guy’s yard, running over his garden and hedgework and stuff. Back in my day, in a place called Britannia, every citizen had a name and a job and a schedule for the day. I know you damn kids in Liberty City have always been like this, but your condition is only made all the more obvious now compared to the better expressiveness available to my close circle of friends and enemies, who have the luxury of cinematic non-interactive viewing scenes and all. I can’t empathize with the common man. The best I can do for them is jack a police car and hunt down ne’er-do-wells of society that aren’t myself using Johnny Law’s computer system.
Maybe the apathy of the citizens has something to do with there being not a whole lot to do in such a big metropolis. Just miles of empty stuff, looking like it could be easily made into something interesting that you have to drive past for forever to finally get to somewhere that is even vaguely interesting. Reminds me a lot of Missouri, actually, except you’d need a lot more effort to make the empty stuff into anything interesting.
And I was kidding about Pause. Good for Derrick there’s Pause. I hope he prays to the Pause every night, now, but I think my excitement would have benefited more with its absence. That’s about it, I guess.
2006
text by Christian McCrea
★★★★
“BEAT THEM UP. BEAT THEM ALL THE WAY UP.”
The litmus test is this: are you the type of person that played Gears of War and thought, “Yes: this is the future I was promised by my gaming forebears”? If so, then go right ahead and do whatever it is you do in your sad, blinkered, little worlds. It’s clear Tim Rogers liked it because he has a giant television, so he’s excused. The rest of you, those of you who thought Gears‘ “There’s the grub! Push him back into his hole!” was a tad creepy, from a “Forced Entry III: Boys Behind Bars” perspective, may want your camp heroics a little more with it, as it were. Before the dissolution of the promising Clover Studio, it was widely thought that God Hand could become the new Devil May Cry. If you looked at the electric fora, you would find people frothing at the chance to play an old-school beat-em-up. God Hand promised a return to the epoch of pain, where trigger-happy players had to scale mountains of difficulty to assert themselves over an unforgiving and cruel system. Combine that with a self-aware action hero and a gang of ready-to-beat mohawked punks, and you had what seemed a perfect formula. So who stuff the blanket on this one?
The sad truth is that nobody really got the joke. I don’t much give a damn as to the industrial side of games, because, frankly, the veil between being one of those people hitting refresh on a gaming forum three times a minute is thin. Given that, I don’t really understand how an outfit could turn out something so self-assured and potent and get the arse. Even as a branding exercise, Clover was surely worth spending a few. The menace and swagger with which both this and Okami take over your senses is pretty bewildering. In an era of cotton-wrapped, market-tested rubbish like Kingdom Hearts 2 and Gears of War (sorry, Tim), that one outfit decided to take daddy’s money, go out in the middle of the street and punch a nun – merely to prove their manhood – just leaves me in awe.
That’s all an aside. Nobody cares about who makes games. They’re all pigs. They earn the human card by escaping the pen and producing something startling. If you begin to rattle the numbers around briefly and come to grips with the difference between total gaming-time with actual positive life experience you can build something out of – even if it’s some dumb socialising with a fellow electric chap or lady – you’ll get The Fear. The Fear creeps in whenever you realise that something beautiful could have happened, it didn’t, but you’ll go through ten, maybe twenty or more, hours just to see it through.
So it is with God Hand, which opens with a soft parody of Fist of the North Star and a good, solid forty-five minutes of pure pain. No introduction, no real tutorial outside a rudimentary set of “dodging will save your life” pop ups. You are in a fight, son, with the machine you bought with your hard-earned, videostore nightshift sweat (Do they even have videostores anymore?). You are thrown into an impossible situation; a bare understanding of a baroque control system, a stream of poorly drawn enemies, the need to devastate virtual men, and camp music. I must have shown the first level to every gamer within local reach; not one could pass it without multiple deaths.
Consider this; while my friends are obviously a bit soft, we still have opposable thumbs. This thing – this piece of software – could quite possibly be capable of hate, or something like it. A digital form of contempt for the input mechanism it recognises as a user on the end of a Dualshock. The bastard PS2 dangles the control at you like a bucket into an oubliette as it tucks its little emotion engine between its legs. You are essentially doomed. Essentially.
You don’t ‘slowly get it’ or ‘learn the system’. You get it beat into you like Kumon mathematics. Your body – God help me for visualising it – is trained to accept that in a game wrapped around the idea of style, what you actually need is a razor-sharp reflex mechanism with very few choices in order to progress. Where Ninja Gaiden (***) will shave you in the morning and give you a piece of honey toast before taking you out in the garden for a spot of ginseng tea, just to warm you up, God Hand wakes you up with a kick in the tit. He pays the doctor’s bills. He’ll break what he wants.
The situations are not even dumb game scenarios; they are like bad hallucinegenic daydreams of a game. Everybody is openly gay, everybody is screaming, boxes explode, giant fruit replenish health. Remember; Gears of War‘s bloody circle is ‘mature’ and an ‘evolved mechanic,’ while fruit and a health bar are ‘outdated’. This is what it’s come to; the videogame medium’s penis envy of other media has finally made it insane. Now, it’s freaking out and telling people a growing red circle in the middle of the screen is somehow different than a simple health bar differential. Remember when a thousand journalists giggled and whooped at the GDC news that Halo 2 would have dual-wielding? This – and that – is what God Hand is up against. That sort of person. This sort of world. Where Oblivion is a ‘rich open world’ (it isn’t), where Viva Pinata is ‘fresh and innovative’ (it isn’t) and every bit of marketing double-speak passes for some semblance of a movement forward. You may remember this classic from the release of the Tribal Game Boy Advance SP: “We feel we have created a product in the Tribal Edition that reflects the sentiments of today’s youth – rebellion, attractiveness and spirituality. The new console allows gamers to express these emotions in a fun and interactive way, enabling them to communicate their individuality.â€
This is the corporate culture that infects games; people who believe ‘rebellion, attractiveness and spirituality’ are sentiments that will go on to make decisions which subtly alter the lives of young people.
God Hand is not an alternative to this; don’t get me wrong. It’s Capcom’s money. But something honest can happen in the midst of something as vast as a corporation, sometimes. By freak accident, the machine makes a noise that sounds like a song. And when you’ve set your punch system up for the 50th time in as many minutes, that’s what you feel. That something harsh but fair has happened. A sluice for the control of pleasure in your brain is broken. The game pushes and pushes and hurts and kills and maims – and at one point, it just melts away, completely folds in an instant and you never look back. It doesn’t balance the game this way; it’s just what occurs to you. In Soviet Russia, game plays you.
If there’s a problem with God Hand, it’s that the ultra-cheap production values aren’t fully followed through. Some elemental decisions seem to fray at the edges, amongst them the totally bizarre camera/movement quirks – as if Clover could not decide what to do with this mechanic or that. You can see it; bits fall away at the edges like a sentence drifting away. “Hey, you know what I’d like to – ahhh, damnit.”
Yet nothing pulls you away from the central conceit. It’s one thing done forcibly, powerfully, incredibly right. It offers an alternative where only certain things matter. Where you know you’re in front of a painting looking for the strokes and streaks. Where the only way forward in life is through the fighting mechanic it has taught you to fear. God Hand is a tilt to an essentially dead people; a game built from the ground up to reward a pre-existing obsession with punching men in the bells. It will not be anyone’s first computer game.
★★★★
“BEAT THEM UP. BEAT THEM ALL THE WAY UP.”
The litmus test is this: are you the type of person that played Gears of War and thought, “Yes: this is the future I was promised by my gaming forebears”? If so, then go right ahead and do whatever it is you do in your sad, blinkered, little worlds. It’s clear Tim Rogers liked it because he has a giant television, so he’s excused. The rest of you, those of you who thought Gears‘ “There’s the grub! Push him back into his hole!” was a tad creepy, from a “Forced Entry III: Boys Behind Bars” perspective, may want your camp heroics a little more with it, as it were. Before the dissolution of the promising Clover Studio, it was widely thought that God Hand could become the new Devil May Cry. If you looked at the electric fora, you would find people frothing at the chance to play an old-school beat-em-up. God Hand promised a return to the epoch of pain, where trigger-happy players had to scale mountains of difficulty to assert themselves over an unforgiving and cruel system. Combine that with a self-aware action hero and a gang of ready-to-beat mohawked punks, and you had what seemed a perfect formula. So who stuff the blanket on this one?
The sad truth is that nobody really got the joke. I don’t much give a damn as to the industrial side of games, because, frankly, the veil between being one of those people hitting refresh on a gaming forum three times a minute is thin. Given that, I don’t really understand how an outfit could turn out something so self-assured and potent and get the arse. Even as a branding exercise, Clover was surely worth spending a few. The menace and swagger with which both this and Okami take over your senses is pretty bewildering. In an era of cotton-wrapped, market-tested rubbish like Kingdom Hearts 2 and Gears of War (sorry, Tim), that one outfit decided to take daddy’s money, go out in the middle of the street and punch a nun – merely to prove their manhood – just leaves me in awe.
That’s all an aside. Nobody cares about who makes games. They’re all pigs. They earn the human card by escaping the pen and producing something startling. If you begin to rattle the numbers around briefly and come to grips with the difference between total gaming-time with actual positive life experience you can build something out of – even if it’s some dumb socialising with a fellow electric chap or lady – you’ll get The Fear. The Fear creeps in whenever you realise that something beautiful could have happened, it didn’t, but you’ll go through ten, maybe twenty or more, hours just to see it through.
So it is with God Hand, which opens with a soft parody of Fist of the North Star and a good, solid forty-five minutes of pure pain. No introduction, no real tutorial outside a rudimentary set of “dodging will save your life” pop ups. You are in a fight, son, with the machine you bought with your hard-earned, videostore nightshift sweat (Do they even have videostores anymore?). You are thrown into an impossible situation; a bare understanding of a baroque control system, a stream of poorly drawn enemies, the need to devastate virtual men, and camp music. I must have shown the first level to every gamer within local reach; not one could pass it without multiple deaths.
Consider this; while my friends are obviously a bit soft, we still have opposable thumbs. This thing – this piece of software – could quite possibly be capable of hate, or something like it. A digital form of contempt for the input mechanism it recognises as a user on the end of a Dualshock. The bastard PS2 dangles the control at you like a bucket into an oubliette as it tucks its little emotion engine between its legs. You are essentially doomed. Essentially.
You don’t ‘slowly get it’ or ‘learn the system’. You get it beat into you like Kumon mathematics. Your body – God help me for visualising it – is trained to accept that in a game wrapped around the idea of style, what you actually need is a razor-sharp reflex mechanism with very few choices in order to progress. Where Ninja Gaiden (***) will shave you in the morning and give you a piece of honey toast before taking you out in the garden for a spot of ginseng tea, just to warm you up, God Hand wakes you up with a kick in the tit. He pays the doctor’s bills. He’ll break what he wants.
The situations are not even dumb game scenarios; they are like bad hallucinegenic daydreams of a game. Everybody is openly gay, everybody is screaming, boxes explode, giant fruit replenish health. Remember; Gears of War‘s bloody circle is ‘mature’ and an ‘evolved mechanic,’ while fruit and a health bar are ‘outdated’. This is what it’s come to; the videogame medium’s penis envy of other media has finally made it insane. Now, it’s freaking out and telling people a growing red circle in the middle of the screen is somehow different than a simple health bar differential. Remember when a thousand journalists giggled and whooped at the GDC news that Halo 2 would have dual-wielding? This – and that – is what God Hand is up against. That sort of person. This sort of world. Where Oblivion is a ‘rich open world’ (it isn’t), where Viva Pinata is ‘fresh and innovative’ (it isn’t) and every bit of marketing double-speak passes for some semblance of a movement forward. You may remember this classic from the release of the Tribal Game Boy Advance SP: “We feel we have created a product in the Tribal Edition that reflects the sentiments of today’s youth – rebellion, attractiveness and spirituality. The new console allows gamers to express these emotions in a fun and interactive way, enabling them to communicate their individuality.â€
This is the corporate culture that infects games; people who believe ‘rebellion, attractiveness and spirituality’ are sentiments that will go on to make decisions which subtly alter the lives of young people.
God Hand is not an alternative to this; don’t get me wrong. It’s Capcom’s money. But something honest can happen in the midst of something as vast as a corporation, sometimes. By freak accident, the machine makes a noise that sounds like a song. And when you’ve set your punch system up for the 50th time in as many minutes, that’s what you feel. That something harsh but fair has happened. A sluice for the control of pleasure in your brain is broken. The game pushes and pushes and hurts and kills and maims – and at one point, it just melts away, completely folds in an instant and you never look back. It doesn’t balance the game this way; it’s just what occurs to you. In Soviet Russia, game plays you.
If there’s a problem with God Hand, it’s that the ultra-cheap production values aren’t fully followed through. Some elemental decisions seem to fray at the edges, amongst them the totally bizarre camera/movement quirks – as if Clover could not decide what to do with this mechanic or that. You can see it; bits fall away at the edges like a sentence drifting away. “Hey, you know what I’d like to – ahhh, damnit.”
Yet nothing pulls you away from the central conceit. It’s one thing done forcibly, powerfully, incredibly right. It offers an alternative where only certain things matter. Where you know you’re in front of a painting looking for the strokes and streaks. Where the only way forward in life is through the fighting mechanic it has taught you to fear. God Hand is a tilt to an essentially dead people; a game built from the ground up to reward a pre-existing obsession with punching men in the bells. It will not be anyone’s first computer game.
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“THE MOST ENTERTAINING -- AND AFFORDABLE -- PSYCHOLOGY TEXTBOOK YOU CAN FIND AT A VIDEOGAME SHOP.”
Global A Entertainment’s first game of any importance, and one of the best Japanese games of 2006, Chronicles of Dungeon Maker (Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground in its American release) is the chief reason I wish I didn’t loathe the Sony PlayStation Portable. It’s crisp, elegant, crunchy, meaty, deep, and a multitude of other food-like adjectives, wrapped in a tasty videogame shell, piping hot and fresh full of classy, bubbly music that recalls Taito’s illustrious history of making games that refuse to attempt to appeal to everyone at the same time.
Back in 1986, when everyone was entranced with plumbers eating mushrooms, growing to twice their height, stomping turtles, and rescuing princesses, there was Taito, making a splash with a game about soap-bubble-blowing dinosaurs who made a living by killing little wind-up toy-gadgets to get to the next screen, which may or may not have been just “too weird” for some people. Taito’s one-offishness has manifested itself at many points in their history, usually to their inconvenience. They’ve repeatedly made games — like the excellent RPG Estopolis (Lufia) II — which might have been the top of their genre if someone somewhere had just thrown a little extra effort or money at them. At other times, they go and make these games that kind of fit into existing genres, and kind of don’t. They’re a hardcore gamer’s game-maker, and they also sadly prove the obvious: sometimes, being open-minded and risky is not the best way to make a lot of money.
When the Sony PSP came out, most developers took a look at the specification sheet and then called a board meeting to brainstorm a single idea: that is, how to shoehorn a PlayStation 2 game onto that greasy brick, with its ghosty screen and its painful buttons and its low headphone volume and its awful loading times. Taito took a different route, and tried to make a game that took into account certain faults of the PSP — like how most people with hands larger than those of infants can’t touch the shoulder buttons without experiencing Awesome Searing Tendon Pain. Their risky project was called Exit — it was a miraculous little thing that was simultaneously frantic and slow-paced, like watching a high-speed car chase on “COPS” while lightly stoned and blessed with delicious pizza. The game wasn’t, precisely, much of a success, though Square-Enix top-brass producer Akitoshi Kawazu (Action Button Dot Net‘s official pick for “Best Dressed Man in Gaming”) was quoted as telling a meeting room “This is what portable gaming should be. This is the kind of thing I want you to make.”
Eventually, Square-Enix released Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II as “Anniversary Editions” for the PSP, and after that, they broke major ground in the field of originality by releasing a remake of their nine-year old classic Final Fantasy Tactics. Well, hey. Let’s put it this way: if Square-Enix were in the habit of listening to Akitoshi Kawazu — the mastermind of SaGa — the numbers would overtake the graphics in their RPGs, while experience levels ceased to mean anything.
Or: eventually, Square-Enix bought Taito.
Moving right along, after a sequel to Exit (smartly called “Thinking Exit” in Japan, so as to better communicate the game’s simple, common-sense appeal by way of more words), Taito introduced and subsequently plopped out Chronicle of Dungeon Maker, a game that apparently had anime characters’ faces in the dialogue windows (a big “+” for the anime fans out there) and also dealt somehow with dungeon questing, shown in a third-person Zelda-like perspective (a big “-” to those hoping it would be more or less exactly like Wizardry VII Gaiden 2). It fell off the map before it landed on the map. Then Weekly Famitsu, Japan’s most blindly trusted videogame publication (they’re blindly trusted because they get scoops and exclusive screenshots, and are kind of enough to run them in exchange for protection money from game developers) broke some serious convention by having four reviews about it that more or less disagreed. You’ve got to love the non-paid-for Famitsu reviews. It’s so easy to spot them.
Chronicle of Dungeon Maker received a straight flush: 7, 8, 9, 10. On Famitsu‘s “everybody gets out alive” grading scale, that’s like a 1, 2, 3, 4. That’s dynamic stuff. I read the ground-pounding, earth-shattering sixteen-word reviews with shaking curiosity. They all said: the game is fun. Holy lord! I needed to buy this game right away. I let my misty eyes (always tearing up when I’m looking at Famitsu, so engorged is my soul with the thrill of the realization that I LIVE IN JAPAN where they SELL FAMITSU AT THE 7-ELEVEN which totally proves that MY MOM WAS WRONG) drift over to the “10” review, and let them slip into soft focus, like I was looking at one of those magic eye puzzles. The words popped out: if you have an enthusiastic friend, this game will last forever, and you shall never tire of it.
Thanks to my job at a Large Japanese Videogame Corporation, I was able to walk over to the secretary and say something that sounded urgent: I need a copy of this game on my desk before lunch tomorrow. Investigating a potential problem, is all. PR stuff. “Yes, sir!” (She didn’t actually say that.)
What glory the game ended up being. I’ve played it more or less an hour a week for nine months. It has never gotten old.
The story goes like this: there’s a town in a fantasy world. It’s being overrun with monsters. You are an apprentice dungeon-maker (yeah, like that‘s a real job!) who shows up in town with a plan: build a dungeon for all the monsters to go and play in. This will, of course, keep the monsters away from the town. The dungeon-maker must have some kind of weird little sympathy for the monsters, you might think — he realizes that all they want is a place of their own to cavort, something with homey decorations, chairs, and such. Well, when you actually play the game, and you discover that the dungeon-maker goes into the dungeon and mercilessly slaughters the monsters, it starts to make more sense. Kill the monsters, take their treasures, use the money to buy provisions in town, repeat, repeat. Buy building supplies at the construction shop, buy weapons and armor at the warrior shop, sell your miscellaneous monster droppings at the market in town square. Not in that order — preferably, you’ll sell the monster droppings (jewels and the like) first, and then spend your money. Go to the food market to buy food supplies, go home, make yourself dinner, and go to bed. The new day in the dungeon begins.
When you head back into the dungeon the next day, your character is stronger — each meal you prepare (from a list of recipes) will increase one or more of your statistics — and is carrying more building materials. Build hallways or rooms, plant a fountain or a luxurious bedroom set to attract bigger monsters the next day. Save up enough money, and you can plant a treasure chest room. When you go into the dungeon the next day, the treasure chest room door will be locked. One of the monsters in the dungeon has the key. Find him and kill him to gain access to the treasure chest room and empty the treasure chests. Sell the treasure in town a couple of days in a row, and the chest room has paid for itself. Build enough of a dungeon to earn the right to buy a boss room; place it wherever you like. Beat the boss to earn the elevator key to the next floor. Now, build the next floor.
You can build up to twenty floors, though just because you’ve moved on to floor two doesn’t mean you’re done with floor one. Not by a long shot — you can always buy new wood kits to spruce up the hallways — change those bare wood frames into luxurious mansion walls if you’re willing to spend enough hours — which ends up attracting higher-level monsters. Break down walls and add swerving, confusing paths away from the central dungeon elevator; put a treasure room as far from the boss room as possible, so as to drive any hypothetical intruders mad: they’ll see the treasure room door, and they’ll need the treasure enough to trudge around looking for the key until their health is chipped so low they can’t in their right mind challenge the boss.
If you’re playing the game all alone, this is compelling as few games ever can be. You might start to forget where things are in your own dungeon, after you’ve built five rounded-out floors or so. Things might start to surprise you. This game, then, presents a rare opportunity to the average Jotaro Tanaka: learn how Bill Gates feels when he takes a wrong turn and, “Hey, I didn’t know there was a jacuzzi in here.”
This game is ingenious as a single-player brass-polishing exercise, to be sure, and it does for the collectathon-itis of recent game design (Castlevania of late, et al) what Edward Norton’s performance as a fake &^#$# / master thief in “The Score” did for Hollywood’s Academy-Award-nominated &^#$#s: that is to say, it exposes the painful simplicity in the most poetic fashion. Why are you collecting things in Dungeon Maker, some out-of-the-loop someone might ask. And you’ll answer, “To make the dungeon bigger”. That’s one thing Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow can’t provide — nothing you do can make the game bigger; nothing you do can make you own Dracula’s castle.
Ideally, though, you’re not going to be playing alone. In most excellent fashion, this game includes a dungeon-trading feature. Once your friend (or foe) trades dungeons with you, his (or her) dungeon appears outside your town map. It’s marked as “Ancient Ruins”, most cleverly. Ah-ha. You can explore your friend’s dungeon as deeply as you’ve built your own dungeon. If your dungeon is ten floors, and your friend’s is twelve, you can only progress to floor ten. Progress to floor twelve of your own dungeon, and you can progress to floor twelve of your friend’s. Keep in touch with your friend, via your preferred method of voice or text communication (cellular phone, for example), to let him know how you’re enjoying his dungeon. He’ll tell you he’s smoothed out some spots, and even added another floor, and you’ll say, hey, I should download that from you sometime.
For the singleplayer mode, thrilling and fulfilling on its on, is only focus-testing for the miles-apart multiplayer experience. In each day of the game’s internal timer, you are entering and penetrating a dungeon of your design. If you get into a tight spot, you’ll also have to make it out alive. If you can’t make it out of your own dungeon alive, you’re playing the game wrong. No — you’re playing the game impossibly. Because see, for whatever it’s worth, of all the things that are possible in this game, it’s impossible to make your dungeon impossible. Dungeon Maker is the current trend of “user-generated content”, it is the future, where you don’t have to be part of some hidden, shady internet chat community in order to have access to some hilarious user-created first-person shooter maps. It’s a complete package, captured in one UMD.
And when your friend tells you he decided to kind of stop seeing that one girl he was thinking of going out with, and you ask him why, and he says because she introduced him to this guy, at a party, who she used to “kind of go out” with, and he says, “I never knew I was that kind of guy, you know, to just, kind of, flake out like that”, you can nod, and recall how he put all of the treasure chests on floor one of his dungeon as far from the elevator as possible, which only tricks you the first time you try to explore the whole floor, and you can just say, “It kind of makes sense to me, man.”
As something to do on a bus or a train, this game is worth its weight in gold, minus a hundred dollars for every ten seconds of loading time. As an exercise in amateur psychology, it’s priceless. As an answer to our suspicions that there was something almost therapeutic lurking just beyond the shadow of the mouse-bashing in Diablo II, that there was some great possibility embedded in the half-assed casinos and mini-games of classic RPGs, that the “Hidden Base” mini-game of Pokemon really does deserve to be explored in its own game, Dungeon Maker is something of a godsend. Up alongside recent releases like Microsoft’s Shadowrun, which feels so hollow and lonely without a singleplayer mode, Dungeon Maker proves that it can be a good idea for developers to focus a game on one brilliant knife-point, so long as they follow through with vigor.
It may or may not have a couple of tiny control issues, though hey! So did Elevator Action Returns: that stuff was floaty, and that’s why we loved it. Yes. I am saying, right here, that Dungeon Maker is up there with Elevator Action Returns: it is rife with charismatic, glory-full floatiness in the swings and hacks of its swords and axes, in the castings of its fire-breathing magic spells. It grips that floatiness like floatiness was the Olympic torch.
The American version of this game, called Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground, was released on June 19th, 2007 — hey, that’s yesterday! — by X-SEED Games, which is a silly name for a games publisher, though hey, at least the letters make a nice shape. Many critics will gloss over this game with extreme prejudice, so we here at Action Button Dot Net make a conscientious decision to break one of our own unwritten rules (that being the one that states we refuse to rate any PSP game higher than three stars because the PSP blows) and give it four stars for emphasis.
Dungeon Maker is the second of X-SEED Games’ 2007 releases to score four stars from Action Button Dot Net (the first was Wild Arms V) — and it will not be the last (stay tuned for the next one). Lest the reader assume we here have some kind of agreement with X-SEED Games, I will now say some bad things about them: they ruined the box art, which was some of the best box art I’ve ever seen on a Japanese game, and I’m not even kidding (see the official site for a huge picture). Second, the URL for their official site is too long. And third, some of the writing on said official site is pretty hokey: “While it’s important to keep expanding your dungeon, do not forget to take time to improve your attack and defensive capabilities. If you do, you might find yourself in the unenviable position of being turned into mulch by stronger, faster enemies.” See — that’s just kind of hokey. I like this one, too: “be sure to pay attention to the types of items you have equipped as well as talk to some of the people around town.” In some cultures, these kinds of aborted sentence structures are revered as highly as pottery.
Man! Taking the proverbial piss out of a videogame publisher is a lot of fun! It feels like work, it feels like pumping iron! It’s satisfying! Though you know what? It’s not nearly as satisfying as hacking through hundreds of monsters of your own invitation in [Chronicle of]Dungeon Maker[: Hunting Ground], available now for the Sony PSP! Buy it today, or just wait until they release a PSP with a screen that doesn’t ghost like a haunted house. (Warning: this game deals with dark subject matter. As in, the backgrounds are black or dark brown most of the time.)
I believe that’s what we in the games journalism industry call a “conclusion”!
★★★★
“THE MOST ENTERTAINING -- AND AFFORDABLE -- PSYCHOLOGY TEXTBOOK YOU CAN FIND AT A VIDEOGAME SHOP.”
Global A Entertainment’s first game of any importance, and one of the best Japanese games of 2006, Chronicles of Dungeon Maker (Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground in its American release) is the chief reason I wish I didn’t loathe the Sony PlayStation Portable. It’s crisp, elegant, crunchy, meaty, deep, and a multitude of other food-like adjectives, wrapped in a tasty videogame shell, piping hot and fresh full of classy, bubbly music that recalls Taito’s illustrious history of making games that refuse to attempt to appeal to everyone at the same time.
Back in 1986, when everyone was entranced with plumbers eating mushrooms, growing to twice their height, stomping turtles, and rescuing princesses, there was Taito, making a splash with a game about soap-bubble-blowing dinosaurs who made a living by killing little wind-up toy-gadgets to get to the next screen, which may or may not have been just “too weird” for some people. Taito’s one-offishness has manifested itself at many points in their history, usually to their inconvenience. They’ve repeatedly made games — like the excellent RPG Estopolis (Lufia) II — which might have been the top of their genre if someone somewhere had just thrown a little extra effort or money at them. At other times, they go and make these games that kind of fit into existing genres, and kind of don’t. They’re a hardcore gamer’s game-maker, and they also sadly prove the obvious: sometimes, being open-minded and risky is not the best way to make a lot of money.
When the Sony PSP came out, most developers took a look at the specification sheet and then called a board meeting to brainstorm a single idea: that is, how to shoehorn a PlayStation 2 game onto that greasy brick, with its ghosty screen and its painful buttons and its low headphone volume and its awful loading times. Taito took a different route, and tried to make a game that took into account certain faults of the PSP — like how most people with hands larger than those of infants can’t touch the shoulder buttons without experiencing Awesome Searing Tendon Pain. Their risky project was called Exit — it was a miraculous little thing that was simultaneously frantic and slow-paced, like watching a high-speed car chase on “COPS” while lightly stoned and blessed with delicious pizza. The game wasn’t, precisely, much of a success, though Square-Enix top-brass producer Akitoshi Kawazu (Action Button Dot Net‘s official pick for “Best Dressed Man in Gaming”) was quoted as telling a meeting room “This is what portable gaming should be. This is the kind of thing I want you to make.”
Eventually, Square-Enix released Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II as “Anniversary Editions” for the PSP, and after that, they broke major ground in the field of originality by releasing a remake of their nine-year old classic Final Fantasy Tactics. Well, hey. Let’s put it this way: if Square-Enix were in the habit of listening to Akitoshi Kawazu — the mastermind of SaGa — the numbers would overtake the graphics in their RPGs, while experience levels ceased to mean anything.
Or: eventually, Square-Enix bought Taito.
Moving right along, after a sequel to Exit (smartly called “Thinking Exit” in Japan, so as to better communicate the game’s simple, common-sense appeal by way of more words), Taito introduced and subsequently plopped out Chronicle of Dungeon Maker, a game that apparently had anime characters’ faces in the dialogue windows (a big “+” for the anime fans out there) and also dealt somehow with dungeon questing, shown in a third-person Zelda-like perspective (a big “-” to those hoping it would be more or less exactly like Wizardry VII Gaiden 2). It fell off the map before it landed on the map. Then Weekly Famitsu, Japan’s most blindly trusted videogame publication (they’re blindly trusted because they get scoops and exclusive screenshots, and are kind of enough to run them in exchange for protection money from game developers) broke some serious convention by having four reviews about it that more or less disagreed. You’ve got to love the non-paid-for Famitsu reviews. It’s so easy to spot them.
Chronicle of Dungeon Maker received a straight flush: 7, 8, 9, 10. On Famitsu‘s “everybody gets out alive” grading scale, that’s like a 1, 2, 3, 4. That’s dynamic stuff. I read the ground-pounding, earth-shattering sixteen-word reviews with shaking curiosity. They all said: the game is fun. Holy lord! I needed to buy this game right away. I let my misty eyes (always tearing up when I’m looking at Famitsu, so engorged is my soul with the thrill of the realization that I LIVE IN JAPAN where they SELL FAMITSU AT THE 7-ELEVEN which totally proves that MY MOM WAS WRONG) drift over to the “10” review, and let them slip into soft focus, like I was looking at one of those magic eye puzzles. The words popped out: if you have an enthusiastic friend, this game will last forever, and you shall never tire of it.
Thanks to my job at a Large Japanese Videogame Corporation, I was able to walk over to the secretary and say something that sounded urgent: I need a copy of this game on my desk before lunch tomorrow. Investigating a potential problem, is all. PR stuff. “Yes, sir!” (She didn’t actually say that.)
What glory the game ended up being. I’ve played it more or less an hour a week for nine months. It has never gotten old.
The story goes like this: there’s a town in a fantasy world. It’s being overrun with monsters. You are an apprentice dungeon-maker (yeah, like that‘s a real job!) who shows up in town with a plan: build a dungeon for all the monsters to go and play in. This will, of course, keep the monsters away from the town. The dungeon-maker must have some kind of weird little sympathy for the monsters, you might think — he realizes that all they want is a place of their own to cavort, something with homey decorations, chairs, and such. Well, when you actually play the game, and you discover that the dungeon-maker goes into the dungeon and mercilessly slaughters the monsters, it starts to make more sense. Kill the monsters, take their treasures, use the money to buy provisions in town, repeat, repeat. Buy building supplies at the construction shop, buy weapons and armor at the warrior shop, sell your miscellaneous monster droppings at the market in town square. Not in that order — preferably, you’ll sell the monster droppings (jewels and the like) first, and then spend your money. Go to the food market to buy food supplies, go home, make yourself dinner, and go to bed. The new day in the dungeon begins.
When you head back into the dungeon the next day, your character is stronger — each meal you prepare (from a list of recipes) will increase one or more of your statistics — and is carrying more building materials. Build hallways or rooms, plant a fountain or a luxurious bedroom set to attract bigger monsters the next day. Save up enough money, and you can plant a treasure chest room. When you go into the dungeon the next day, the treasure chest room door will be locked. One of the monsters in the dungeon has the key. Find him and kill him to gain access to the treasure chest room and empty the treasure chests. Sell the treasure in town a couple of days in a row, and the chest room has paid for itself. Build enough of a dungeon to earn the right to buy a boss room; place it wherever you like. Beat the boss to earn the elevator key to the next floor. Now, build the next floor.
You can build up to twenty floors, though just because you’ve moved on to floor two doesn’t mean you’re done with floor one. Not by a long shot — you can always buy new wood kits to spruce up the hallways — change those bare wood frames into luxurious mansion walls if you’re willing to spend enough hours — which ends up attracting higher-level monsters. Break down walls and add swerving, confusing paths away from the central dungeon elevator; put a treasure room as far from the boss room as possible, so as to drive any hypothetical intruders mad: they’ll see the treasure room door, and they’ll need the treasure enough to trudge around looking for the key until their health is chipped so low they can’t in their right mind challenge the boss.
If you’re playing the game all alone, this is compelling as few games ever can be. You might start to forget where things are in your own dungeon, after you’ve built five rounded-out floors or so. Things might start to surprise you. This game, then, presents a rare opportunity to the average Jotaro Tanaka: learn how Bill Gates feels when he takes a wrong turn and, “Hey, I didn’t know there was a jacuzzi in here.”
This game is ingenious as a single-player brass-polishing exercise, to be sure, and it does for the collectathon-itis of recent game design (Castlevania of late, et al) what Edward Norton’s performance as a fake &^#$# / master thief in “The Score” did for Hollywood’s Academy-Award-nominated &^#$#s: that is to say, it exposes the painful simplicity in the most poetic fashion. Why are you collecting things in Dungeon Maker, some out-of-the-loop someone might ask. And you’ll answer, “To make the dungeon bigger”. That’s one thing Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow can’t provide — nothing you do can make the game bigger; nothing you do can make you own Dracula’s castle.
Ideally, though, you’re not going to be playing alone. In most excellent fashion, this game includes a dungeon-trading feature. Once your friend (or foe) trades dungeons with you, his (or her) dungeon appears outside your town map. It’s marked as “Ancient Ruins”, most cleverly. Ah-ha. You can explore your friend’s dungeon as deeply as you’ve built your own dungeon. If your dungeon is ten floors, and your friend’s is twelve, you can only progress to floor ten. Progress to floor twelve of your own dungeon, and you can progress to floor twelve of your friend’s. Keep in touch with your friend, via your preferred method of voice or text communication (cellular phone, for example), to let him know how you’re enjoying his dungeon. He’ll tell you he’s smoothed out some spots, and even added another floor, and you’ll say, hey, I should download that from you sometime.
For the singleplayer mode, thrilling and fulfilling on its on, is only focus-testing for the miles-apart multiplayer experience. In each day of the game’s internal timer, you are entering and penetrating a dungeon of your design. If you get into a tight spot, you’ll also have to make it out alive. If you can’t make it out of your own dungeon alive, you’re playing the game wrong. No — you’re playing the game impossibly. Because see, for whatever it’s worth, of all the things that are possible in this game, it’s impossible to make your dungeon impossible. Dungeon Maker is the current trend of “user-generated content”, it is the future, where you don’t have to be part of some hidden, shady internet chat community in order to have access to some hilarious user-created first-person shooter maps. It’s a complete package, captured in one UMD.
And when your friend tells you he decided to kind of stop seeing that one girl he was thinking of going out with, and you ask him why, and he says because she introduced him to this guy, at a party, who she used to “kind of go out” with, and he says, “I never knew I was that kind of guy, you know, to just, kind of, flake out like that”, you can nod, and recall how he put all of the treasure chests on floor one of his dungeon as far from the elevator as possible, which only tricks you the first time you try to explore the whole floor, and you can just say, “It kind of makes sense to me, man.”
As something to do on a bus or a train, this game is worth its weight in gold, minus a hundred dollars for every ten seconds of loading time. As an exercise in amateur psychology, it’s priceless. As an answer to our suspicions that there was something almost therapeutic lurking just beyond the shadow of the mouse-bashing in Diablo II, that there was some great possibility embedded in the half-assed casinos and mini-games of classic RPGs, that the “Hidden Base” mini-game of Pokemon really does deserve to be explored in its own game, Dungeon Maker is something of a godsend. Up alongside recent releases like Microsoft’s Shadowrun, which feels so hollow and lonely without a singleplayer mode, Dungeon Maker proves that it can be a good idea for developers to focus a game on one brilliant knife-point, so long as they follow through with vigor.
It may or may not have a couple of tiny control issues, though hey! So did Elevator Action Returns: that stuff was floaty, and that’s why we loved it. Yes. I am saying, right here, that Dungeon Maker is up there with Elevator Action Returns: it is rife with charismatic, glory-full floatiness in the swings and hacks of its swords and axes, in the castings of its fire-breathing magic spells. It grips that floatiness like floatiness was the Olympic torch.
The American version of this game, called Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground, was released on June 19th, 2007 — hey, that’s yesterday! — by X-SEED Games, which is a silly name for a games publisher, though hey, at least the letters make a nice shape. Many critics will gloss over this game with extreme prejudice, so we here at Action Button Dot Net make a conscientious decision to break one of our own unwritten rules (that being the one that states we refuse to rate any PSP game higher than three stars because the PSP blows) and give it four stars for emphasis.
Dungeon Maker is the second of X-SEED Games’ 2007 releases to score four stars from Action Button Dot Net (the first was Wild Arms V) — and it will not be the last (stay tuned for the next one). Lest the reader assume we here have some kind of agreement with X-SEED Games, I will now say some bad things about them: they ruined the box art, which was some of the best box art I’ve ever seen on a Japanese game, and I’m not even kidding (see the official site for a huge picture). Second, the URL for their official site is too long. And third, some of the writing on said official site is pretty hokey: “While it’s important to keep expanding your dungeon, do not forget to take time to improve your attack and defensive capabilities. If you do, you might find yourself in the unenviable position of being turned into mulch by stronger, faster enemies.” See — that’s just kind of hokey. I like this one, too: “be sure to pay attention to the types of items you have equipped as well as talk to some of the people around town.” In some cultures, these kinds of aborted sentence structures are revered as highly as pottery.
Man! Taking the proverbial piss out of a videogame publisher is a lot of fun! It feels like work, it feels like pumping iron! It’s satisfying! Though you know what? It’s not nearly as satisfying as hacking through hundreds of monsters of your own invitation in [Chronicle of]Dungeon Maker[: Hunting Ground], available now for the Sony PSP! Buy it today, or just wait until they release a PSP with a screen that doesn’t ghost like a haunted house. (Warning: this game deals with dark subject matter. As in, the backgrounds are black or dark brown most of the time.)
I believe that’s what we in the games journalism industry call a “conclusion”!
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“NOT REMOTELY AS 'ADVANCED' AS IT NEEDS TO BE.”
In all the official writings, the title of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 is written as Final Fantasy Tactics A2. Anyone who’s played the previous game in this now-two-game “series” knows that the “A” stands for “Advance”, because the first game was called Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. That game was produced by videogame legend Yasumi Matsuno. It was also for Gameboy Advance. The sequel is neither produced by Yasumi Matsuno, nor is it for Gameboy Advance. Though games are generally better on the Nintendo DS than they were on the Gameboy Advance, and generally worse when they’re not produced by Yasumi Matsuno, weirdly, neither of these things make the game in question exponentially better or worse.
The most interesting thing about this game, if you’re forced to talk about it, is probably its branding. Square-Enix’s business model has come to feel more like a big tobacco company than a videogame developer, these days. In 2007, the mega-publisher is releasing a staggering fourteen Final Fantasy products, all of them belonging to the “Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary” brand, some of them belonging to the “Final Fantasy VII 10th Anniversary” brand, and some of them belonging to the somewhat conceptually hilarious “Final Fantasy XI 5th Anniversary” brand. The Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series, in which three titles were announced this year, oddly doesn’t get its own brand. You’d think that, by now, they’d be slightly ashamed of the fact that almost every game they release has a title that begins with the same two words. Why not call them Crystal Chronicles: Final Fantasy? “Crystal Chronicles” is a pleasant, striking combination of words. I guess someone in the company isn’t willing to let anyone mention taking a risk until he finishes having his new mansion built. Or maybe not: the Wii-exclusive download-only Crystal Chronicles game’s title is going to begin with seven whole words preceding the words “Final Fantasy” — The Little King and the Promised Country: Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, is what they’re calling it. I guess someone was able to slap together a pitch-perfect PowerPoint presentation detailing that it’s okay to bury the keywords in the middle of the title so long as that title includes two colons. You know, there used to be a time this company was proud of their own name, where customers were trusted enough to buy the games because of the maker’s logo on the box. I wonder what happened.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 belongs to the “Ivalice Alliance” brand, in which three other titles were also released this year: Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War, a remake of the original Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSP, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, a pleasant-enough, stupidly simple strategy game for the Nintendo DS, and Final Fantasy XII: International Zodiac Job System, which might be the worst subtitle they’ve ever put on a game. I mean, seriously, they’re mentioning one of the most absolutely technical aspects of the game, right there in the title. Final Fantasy Tactics A2 also belongs, of course, to the “Final Fantasy Tactics” brand, which I suppose is a sub-brand of the “Ivalice Alliance” brand, unless they decide some day to make a Tactics game with Crystal Chronicles characters in it. That would be amazing. That would be hilarious. Either way, I wouldn’t put it past them. At any rate, slap a “Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary” sticker on the box, and here you have it: a triple-branded game, by Square-Enix, which is kind of like a fourth brand, kind of like a pseudo-brand. How can it not sell at least a quarter million copies?
As what it is — branded, polished, focus-tested — it’s pretty much a perfect little package. The graphics are almost overwhelmingly pleasant, with rich colors and delicious little animations. The music, by Kenji Ito (probably the best (capitalized) Game Music Composer in the world right now), is fascinating: he took Hitoshi Sakimoto’s iconic Final Fantasy Tactics jams and somehow mated them with Italian 1950s pre-proto-pop, little dinging bells and all. The arrangements are literally miraculous. And then there are the sound effects — I swear to god, I’d thought for the longest time that Square’s menu cursor sound effect was perfect, and that they’d be fools to mess with it. Well, FFTA2 messes with it, and the results are gaspingly gorgeous. If you’re anything like me, you will find yourself — figuratively — filled, many times during each battle, with the strong desire to rip the earbuds out of your ears and lick them, expecting honey to be dripping out.
You have a tremendous 56 job classes to choose from this time, some of them total conceptual cop-outs (like “Animal User”, who can use a “Sheep” spell to protect himself with “Wool”, which guards against cold), and others are pretty simply awesome (Fencer, who specializes in thrusting sword attacks that push enemies back). At the end of the day, though, you might wonder why there are three elementary classes (Fencer, Soldier, Warrior) for sword techniques, though hey, they all have different techniques, and it’s pretty cool to learn new techniques.
The back of the box describes this game as “A pick-up-and-play simulation RPG for all players!” Maybe they should have said “A pick-up-and-play simulation RPG for all players who know what ‘RPG’ stands for”. Maybe that would have taken up too much precious real estate on the back of the box, though hey, maybe they could have spared it: the back of the box is mostly text, anyway, with only one actual screenshot of the game at play. The other two (tiny) screenshots show a dialogue in one of the many towns’ many bars and the hecking map screen. Yeah, good work, there.
This weird shame is confusing, because A2 is a much better game, as far as games go, than its predecessor. This is funny, because the first one was, you know, actually directed by an actual genius. Geniuses make weird decisions sometimes, I guess: the first game ditched the brilliant (and now simulation-RPG standard) “Active Time” turn-based battle system in favor of a “player side attacks, enemy side attacks” style. This type of battle system, as present in Matsuno’s Tactics Ogre, wasn’t so bad because it gave us a peculiar sensation: go to the bathroom (or cook an omelette) while the enemy side is attacking, and then come back into the living room, where the game screen has changed, either drastically or subtly. Sit down, pick up the controller, and feel something like a forensics expert as you plan your strategy. This didn’t work so well when the game console is something you carry around in your hands. The reinstatement of the AT system, now without a name — now just something that is — works wonders for FFTA2. Each battle is a polished, cute little challenge. The battlefields sometimes feel a little bit flat, which is a real shame: at last, the ability to push an opponent back one square is a lot more executable, and there just aren’t enough heights to knock the enemies down from. I suppose the flat battlefields are on account of the game’s not being presented in actual, rotatable 3D. Why isn’t it in 3D, though? The Dragon Quest IV remake for DS, from what I could tell at Tokyo Game Show, handles 3D exceptionally well, if in a “Porno for Pixelantes” kind of way.
Moreover, why doesn’t this game support touch screen controls at all? It seems like an amazing omission to me. I suppose to controller-only inputs are clean and simple enough — press the L and R buttons during battle to zip between enemy targets when targeting spells, or press them while in free-targeting mode to peruse each troop on the battlefield, in the order that they’re going to attack. Though really, some people like the pointing and clicking. It’s really weird — the window size and fonts seem optimized for touching with a stylus. Though maybe they cut out stylus controls because that way you wouldn’t be able to hear that delicious cursor sound so much. The game includes an option to set the “main screen” as the top or the bottom, though, and I guess couldn’t do that with touch-screen controls.
The most glaring omission in this game — and it glares pretty ferociously — is the multiplayer. The back of the box says that players can “Enjoy wireless play with a friend!” It also says that the friend needs a copy of the game — this must mean . . . yes, that there are multiplayer battles! In a Final Fantasy Tactics game! On the DS, a system my friends actually own and play! I figured that multiplayer battles were a shoe-in, seeing as the battle system has been reverted to the glory of the original FFT‘s AT. I mean, no one would want to play a two-player competitive battle if it was the old “one side attacks, other side attacks” system, yeah? And this is the Nintendo DS, the home of the eight-million-selling Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. And the, uhh, half-million selling Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Square-Enix knows that players love to play together. They’ve already got the most intensive co-op RPG-esque experience on the system; why not go for the monopoly on awesome versus strategy, as well?
Well, a quick tear through the instruction manual will leave you cursing like a sailor: it’s hecking Item Trading. No versus mode for you — you’ll have to buy the PSP Final Fantasy Tactics remake, and then convince your friends to all buy PSPs, jackass. Man, what a rip-off. I guess, ultimately, Square-Enix didn’t want to cannibalize their own sales. Which makes about as much sense as, well, it doesn’t. This is where the in-branding becomes interesting again: “Traditional” FFT and FFT “Advance” are two different sub-sub-brands within one sub-brand (FFT) of another sub-brand (“Ivalice Alliance”) within the “Final Fantasy” brand. If they share too many features — despite the fact that they’re on different consoles — then the publisher will be philosophically defeated. And we wouldn’t want that — otherwise we’d never get that remake of Final Fantasy VII!
Speaking of remakes of Final Fantasy VII: the same in-breeding apparent in every other recent Square-Enix release is oozing out of the corners of Final Fantasy Tactics A2. It should be a given at this point, I guess: remember Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories for the Gameboy Advance, in which Sora, the hero of Kingdom Hearts, a PlayStation 2 game about Disney characters and Final Fantasy characters meeting and having long philosophical discussions and legally constricted brawls with blunt objects, forgets the events of the previous canonical game, and must relive them in portable game form by using an artifact called the “Chain of Memories”. Flash forward to Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix for PlayStation 2, which includes the entirety of Chain of Memories, now upgraded to look and play like the PlayStation 2 that originally inspired it. Copies of copies of copies of copies — that’s what suffices for blockbuster material these days. Well, Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is pretty much just a cover band of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance — it’s so busy trying to be the exact same game that it ends up completely missing the point.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a gentle, slow-moving little game, and as such, it was enjoyable. The tutorial, which should be more famous than it is, involved characters having a snowball fight. When these real-world characters got transported into the Final Fantasy universe, things got more mortal, though the sense of innocence never quite lifted. It added up to a quirky kind of pleasant aura. In the Final Fantasy world, our young hero joins a “clan” of warriors, takes “missions”, and fights “battles” in order to raise his reputation. The game plays out in episodes. Take a mission, fight the battle, save the game, get off the train, et cetera. A story (and one with a weirdly powerful moral message), however, comes creeping slowly in, and that story unfolds as we take more missions, fight more battles, and get off more trains.
FFT-A2 is essentially the same game, without the creeping story. A young boy, while serving detention in the library on the eve of his school summer vacation, is sucked into an old book. Now he joins a clan led by a man named Cid (absolute earliest-ever appearance of Cid in a Final Fantasy game: check), and goes off on an adventure! By “adventure” I mean he takes on missions at identical pubs in identical cities all around the world. He revels boyishly in the logistics of combat. “Wow! Earning new job-specific abilities and then equipping them while in another job class is fun!” There’s a weird kind of Pokemon-esque sheen covering the whole thing, and it might even be more disturbing — though only because it’s a bit harder to place — than the plucky main character in Advance Wars, grinning and saying “Cool! Tanks are super-strong against infantry!” after witnessing a battalion of cartoon tanks wiping out a hundred men on foot. At times, as you start and finish your fiftieth or hundredth battle and still no story pokes its head out of the ground, as the main character continues to expresses profound interest in the book-keeping elements of raising an army, it starts to feel like maybe this isn’t an RPG after all. Maybe it’s a middle-school pre-primer for one of those business-manners-training games that are flooding the market these days, with some critical thinking exercises (strategic battles) thrown in for good measure.
This microthin story facade doesn’t change the fact that the game sparkles when it comes down to dudes fighting dudes. With 56 job classes (for God’s sake!) and a total of twenty-four soldiers in your reserve army, it’s very flexible and very open to experimentation. Taken one mission at a time, played like a board game, it’s a heck of a polished package — and some of the battles are pretty tough. That there’s no versus mode, however, is a crippling flaw that cannot be ignored. You’d think that, you know, when the game is so light on story and loose with regards to structure, that a versus mode would just be a given. Oh well. I will continue to raise my job levels in horrible solitude, with nothing human to fling my made men against. There certainly exist many worse things to do on the train.
★★☆☆
“NOT REMOTELY AS 'ADVANCED' AS IT NEEDS TO BE.”
In all the official writings, the title of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 is written as Final Fantasy Tactics A2. Anyone who’s played the previous game in this now-two-game “series” knows that the “A” stands for “Advance”, because the first game was called Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. That game was produced by videogame legend Yasumi Matsuno. It was also for Gameboy Advance. The sequel is neither produced by Yasumi Matsuno, nor is it for Gameboy Advance. Though games are generally better on the Nintendo DS than they were on the Gameboy Advance, and generally worse when they’re not produced by Yasumi Matsuno, weirdly, neither of these things make the game in question exponentially better or worse.
The most interesting thing about this game, if you’re forced to talk about it, is probably its branding. Square-Enix’s business model has come to feel more like a big tobacco company than a videogame developer, these days. In 2007, the mega-publisher is releasing a staggering fourteen Final Fantasy products, all of them belonging to the “Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary” brand, some of them belonging to the “Final Fantasy VII 10th Anniversary” brand, and some of them belonging to the somewhat conceptually hilarious “Final Fantasy XI 5th Anniversary” brand. The Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series, in which three titles were announced this year, oddly doesn’t get its own brand. You’d think that, by now, they’d be slightly ashamed of the fact that almost every game they release has a title that begins with the same two words. Why not call them Crystal Chronicles: Final Fantasy? “Crystal Chronicles” is a pleasant, striking combination of words. I guess someone in the company isn’t willing to let anyone mention taking a risk until he finishes having his new mansion built. Or maybe not: the Wii-exclusive download-only Crystal Chronicles game’s title is going to begin with seven whole words preceding the words “Final Fantasy” — The Little King and the Promised Country: Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, is what they’re calling it. I guess someone was able to slap together a pitch-perfect PowerPoint presentation detailing that it’s okay to bury the keywords in the middle of the title so long as that title includes two colons. You know, there used to be a time this company was proud of their own name, where customers were trusted enough to buy the games because of the maker’s logo on the box. I wonder what happened.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 belongs to the “Ivalice Alliance” brand, in which three other titles were also released this year: Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War, a remake of the original Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSP, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, a pleasant-enough, stupidly simple strategy game for the Nintendo DS, and Final Fantasy XII: International Zodiac Job System, which might be the worst subtitle they’ve ever put on a game. I mean, seriously, they’re mentioning one of the most absolutely technical aspects of the game, right there in the title. Final Fantasy Tactics A2 also belongs, of course, to the “Final Fantasy Tactics” brand, which I suppose is a sub-brand of the “Ivalice Alliance” brand, unless they decide some day to make a Tactics game with Crystal Chronicles characters in it. That would be amazing. That would be hilarious. Either way, I wouldn’t put it past them. At any rate, slap a “Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary” sticker on the box, and here you have it: a triple-branded game, by Square-Enix, which is kind of like a fourth brand, kind of like a pseudo-brand. How can it not sell at least a quarter million copies?
As what it is — branded, polished, focus-tested — it’s pretty much a perfect little package. The graphics are almost overwhelmingly pleasant, with rich colors and delicious little animations. The music, by Kenji Ito (probably the best (capitalized) Game Music Composer in the world right now), is fascinating: he took Hitoshi Sakimoto’s iconic Final Fantasy Tactics jams and somehow mated them with Italian 1950s pre-proto-pop, little dinging bells and all. The arrangements are literally miraculous. And then there are the sound effects — I swear to god, I’d thought for the longest time that Square’s menu cursor sound effect was perfect, and that they’d be fools to mess with it. Well, FFTA2 messes with it, and the results are gaspingly gorgeous. If you’re anything like me, you will find yourself — figuratively — filled, many times during each battle, with the strong desire to rip the earbuds out of your ears and lick them, expecting honey to be dripping out.
You have a tremendous 56 job classes to choose from this time, some of them total conceptual cop-outs (like “Animal User”, who can use a “Sheep” spell to protect himself with “Wool”, which guards against cold), and others are pretty simply awesome (Fencer, who specializes in thrusting sword attacks that push enemies back). At the end of the day, though, you might wonder why there are three elementary classes (Fencer, Soldier, Warrior) for sword techniques, though hey, they all have different techniques, and it’s pretty cool to learn new techniques.
The back of the box describes this game as “A pick-up-and-play simulation RPG for all players!” Maybe they should have said “A pick-up-and-play simulation RPG for all players who know what ‘RPG’ stands for”. Maybe that would have taken up too much precious real estate on the back of the box, though hey, maybe they could have spared it: the back of the box is mostly text, anyway, with only one actual screenshot of the game at play. The other two (tiny) screenshots show a dialogue in one of the many towns’ many bars and the hecking map screen. Yeah, good work, there.
This weird shame is confusing, because A2 is a much better game, as far as games go, than its predecessor. This is funny, because the first one was, you know, actually directed by an actual genius. Geniuses make weird decisions sometimes, I guess: the first game ditched the brilliant (and now simulation-RPG standard) “Active Time” turn-based battle system in favor of a “player side attacks, enemy side attacks” style. This type of battle system, as present in Matsuno’s Tactics Ogre, wasn’t so bad because it gave us a peculiar sensation: go to the bathroom (or cook an omelette) while the enemy side is attacking, and then come back into the living room, where the game screen has changed, either drastically or subtly. Sit down, pick up the controller, and feel something like a forensics expert as you plan your strategy. This didn’t work so well when the game console is something you carry around in your hands. The reinstatement of the AT system, now without a name — now just something that is — works wonders for FFTA2. Each battle is a polished, cute little challenge. The battlefields sometimes feel a little bit flat, which is a real shame: at last, the ability to push an opponent back one square is a lot more executable, and there just aren’t enough heights to knock the enemies down from. I suppose the flat battlefields are on account of the game’s not being presented in actual, rotatable 3D. Why isn’t it in 3D, though? The Dragon Quest IV remake for DS, from what I could tell at Tokyo Game Show, handles 3D exceptionally well, if in a “Porno for Pixelantes” kind of way.
Moreover, why doesn’t this game support touch screen controls at all? It seems like an amazing omission to me. I suppose to controller-only inputs are clean and simple enough — press the L and R buttons during battle to zip between enemy targets when targeting spells, or press them while in free-targeting mode to peruse each troop on the battlefield, in the order that they’re going to attack. Though really, some people like the pointing and clicking. It’s really weird — the window size and fonts seem optimized for touching with a stylus. Though maybe they cut out stylus controls because that way you wouldn’t be able to hear that delicious cursor sound so much. The game includes an option to set the “main screen” as the top or the bottom, though, and I guess couldn’t do that with touch-screen controls.
The most glaring omission in this game — and it glares pretty ferociously — is the multiplayer. The back of the box says that players can “Enjoy wireless play with a friend!” It also says that the friend needs a copy of the game — this must mean . . . yes, that there are multiplayer battles! In a Final Fantasy Tactics game! On the DS, a system my friends actually own and play! I figured that multiplayer battles were a shoe-in, seeing as the battle system has been reverted to the glory of the original FFT‘s AT. I mean, no one would want to play a two-player competitive battle if it was the old “one side attacks, other side attacks” system, yeah? And this is the Nintendo DS, the home of the eight-million-selling Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. And the, uhh, half-million selling Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Square-Enix knows that players love to play together. They’ve already got the most intensive co-op RPG-esque experience on the system; why not go for the monopoly on awesome versus strategy, as well?
Well, a quick tear through the instruction manual will leave you cursing like a sailor: it’s hecking Item Trading. No versus mode for you — you’ll have to buy the PSP Final Fantasy Tactics remake, and then convince your friends to all buy PSPs, jackass. Man, what a rip-off. I guess, ultimately, Square-Enix didn’t want to cannibalize their own sales. Which makes about as much sense as, well, it doesn’t. This is where the in-branding becomes interesting again: “Traditional” FFT and FFT “Advance” are two different sub-sub-brands within one sub-brand (FFT) of another sub-brand (“Ivalice Alliance”) within the “Final Fantasy” brand. If they share too many features — despite the fact that they’re on different consoles — then the publisher will be philosophically defeated. And we wouldn’t want that — otherwise we’d never get that remake of Final Fantasy VII!
Speaking of remakes of Final Fantasy VII: the same in-breeding apparent in every other recent Square-Enix release is oozing out of the corners of Final Fantasy Tactics A2. It should be a given at this point, I guess: remember Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories for the Gameboy Advance, in which Sora, the hero of Kingdom Hearts, a PlayStation 2 game about Disney characters and Final Fantasy characters meeting and having long philosophical discussions and legally constricted brawls with blunt objects, forgets the events of the previous canonical game, and must relive them in portable game form by using an artifact called the “Chain of Memories”. Flash forward to Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix for PlayStation 2, which includes the entirety of Chain of Memories, now upgraded to look and play like the PlayStation 2 that originally inspired it. Copies of copies of copies of copies — that’s what suffices for blockbuster material these days. Well, Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is pretty much just a cover band of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance — it’s so busy trying to be the exact same game that it ends up completely missing the point.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a gentle, slow-moving little game, and as such, it was enjoyable. The tutorial, which should be more famous than it is, involved characters having a snowball fight. When these real-world characters got transported into the Final Fantasy universe, things got more mortal, though the sense of innocence never quite lifted. It added up to a quirky kind of pleasant aura. In the Final Fantasy world, our young hero joins a “clan” of warriors, takes “missions”, and fights “battles” in order to raise his reputation. The game plays out in episodes. Take a mission, fight the battle, save the game, get off the train, et cetera. A story (and one with a weirdly powerful moral message), however, comes creeping slowly in, and that story unfolds as we take more missions, fight more battles, and get off more trains.
FFT-A2 is essentially the same game, without the creeping story. A young boy, while serving detention in the library on the eve of his school summer vacation, is sucked into an old book. Now he joins a clan led by a man named Cid (absolute earliest-ever appearance of Cid in a Final Fantasy game: check), and goes off on an adventure! By “adventure” I mean he takes on missions at identical pubs in identical cities all around the world. He revels boyishly in the logistics of combat. “Wow! Earning new job-specific abilities and then equipping them while in another job class is fun!” There’s a weird kind of Pokemon-esque sheen covering the whole thing, and it might even be more disturbing — though only because it’s a bit harder to place — than the plucky main character in Advance Wars, grinning and saying “Cool! Tanks are super-strong against infantry!” after witnessing a battalion of cartoon tanks wiping out a hundred men on foot. At times, as you start and finish your fiftieth or hundredth battle and still no story pokes its head out of the ground, as the main character continues to expresses profound interest in the book-keeping elements of raising an army, it starts to feel like maybe this isn’t an RPG after all. Maybe it’s a middle-school pre-primer for one of those business-manners-training games that are flooding the market these days, with some critical thinking exercises (strategic battles) thrown in for good measure.
This microthin story facade doesn’t change the fact that the game sparkles when it comes down to dudes fighting dudes. With 56 job classes (for God’s sake!) and a total of twenty-four soldiers in your reserve army, it’s very flexible and very open to experimentation. Taken one mission at a time, played like a board game, it’s a heck of a polished package — and some of the battles are pretty tough. That there’s no versus mode, however, is a crippling flaw that cannot be ignored. You’d think that, you know, when the game is so light on story and loose with regards to structure, that a versus mode would just be a given. Oh well. I will continue to raise my job levels in horrible solitude, with nothing human to fling my made men against. There certainly exist many worse things to do on the train.
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“THE FIRST VIDEOGAME OF THE REST OF OUR LIVES.”
If you imagine for a moment that all of the emails I got last year asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, and then you also pretended that the overwhelming majority of emails asking me why I haven’t reviewed BioShock yet, when I’m going to review BioShock, or if there’s some reason I am blatantly ignoring BioShock also didn’t exist, that would leave me with a healthy stack of emails asking me when I was going to review Call of Duty 4, how much I loved Call of Duty 4, or if I was going to call Call of Duty 4 the “best game ever” or not. Well, to answer those three questions:
1. Right now!
2. A lot!
3. Nope!
If you were to imagine for a moment that all the emails I got last week asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, that would leave you with an overwhelming majority of emails asking me “Why don’t you die?”, and if you were to imagine that those emails didn’t exist, you’d have a pretty significant number of emails asking me “If BioShock isn’t a great game, what is?” To answer those two questions:
1. Let me ask my secretary!
2. Call of Duty 4!
The truth is, I didn’t really feel like reviewing Call of Duty 4 because it’s kind of too good. Also, because I wasn’t sure what the name of the game is — that “4” there is definitely raised. It is definitely an exponent. Am I supposed to call the game “Call of Duty To The Fourth Power”? How many powers do we have to put on our duty before it’s patriotic enough for Joe Sixpack and Jennifer Twoliter to enjoy on Memorial Day?
Anyway, the short version of this review is that I liked the game a lot, as much as I probably can like a game — even if I might never play it again.
The long version is this:
Unlike BioShock, Call of Duty 4 has everything: seamless atmosphere, a compelling narrative, focused play mechanics, and moments of actual cathartic power that take advantage of the whole package. More than just a crotch massage plugged into a television set, Call of Duty 4 boldly toes the bizarrely forbidden line between “videogame” and “entertainment”. It’s made by people who get it so ferociously that they might not even know that there’s an “it” they’re getting. It’s hard, it’s fast, it’s lean, it’s learned, and it’s a dynamo. Developers of big-budget action-adventure games: please, if you have any common sense, this is the one you’re supposed to study. It’s the first game of the rest of our lives.
I can’t say I’ve been the biggest fan of the series. Or even the smallest one, or even the most medium-sized one. I first encountered Call of Duty 4 at a demo station at Tokyo Game Show 2007, where my brother Brandon Sheffield (of Gamasutra) played through the first mission under the enthusiastic guidance of an Activision / Infinity Ward representative. The guy was telling us how it was: you’re infiltrating a tanker, trying to get some enemy intel. You have to kill the crew, get the intel, get out, and get on your chopper. See this, now? The ship is sinking. Look at the water effects. Notice how the boat is tipping. Brandon handled it all with grace; I guess, since his magazine and website carry advertisements, occasionally rely on videogame developers to write features, and are genuinely in the habit of being as polite as possible to as many people as possible at all times, he was used to having people explain what was plainly visible. I guess I’m used to it, to, what with the line of work I’m in (let’s not even get into it), though maybe I would have minded it a whole lot less had I been actually playing. From what I could tell, the action on the screen looked distinctly, nonchalantly amazing: here we were, invading a tanker on the ocean, and outside the immediate scope of soldiers with guns versus soldiers with guns, things were happening: the ship was sinking, and it looked like the ship was sinking. We here at Action Button Dot Net are people of refined tastes: we go whole days, sometimes, listening only to The Stone Roses’ song “Breaking Into Heaven” on loop for twenty-four straight hours. I don’t need anyone telling me that something that is stuff-hot is stuff-hot, though I guess if the Activision guy had just been repeatedly saying “This Game Is Shit Hot” in a text-to-speech voice for the duration of the play session, I would have purchased the game and reviewed it immediately, just to compliment their amazing PR.
When I eventually played the game, it was after the fact; it was after every fact. Here’s what I knew, before I started playing Call of Duty 4:
1. Call of Duty and Medal of Honor are not related;
2. The previous Call of Duty games were all about World War II;
3. The first two Call of Duty games were developed by Infinity Ward;
4. The third Call of Duty game was not developed by Infinity Ward;
5. The fourth Call of Duty game was developed by Infinity Ward again;
6. The fourth Call of Duty game is not about World War II; it is set in modern times;
7. According to Wikipedia, “The Call of Duty Real-time Card Game was announced by card manufacturer Upper Deck”;
8. I’m pretty sure any card game is actually played in real-time;
9. I could be mistaken, because maybe the concept of time isn’t exactly “real” for people who spend their time playing collectible card games.
I very highly respect the idea of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, then, because Call of Duty is obviously a “strong enough” “intellectual property” to have a Real-time Card Game based on it, and messing with the formula (“the formula” being “World War II”) is a pretty bold move in this dead-horse-throttling industry we live in. Furthermore, I guess you could say my interest was piqued because World War II games have always managed to amazingly bore me. I don’t really get why: I find World War II a fascinating subject. Now that I think about it, I’ve never actually read a book about World War II on purpose, nor have I ever watched a movie about World War II because I had to, though I’ve heard a couple of people talk about World War II, and they seem to think it’s really interesting. There was a whole lot going on. Hitler was probably the last objectively evil human being history will allow; in a way, media — like newspapers, television, movies, and (hey!) videogames — spread the message of those terrible things that happened, of how even Russia and America were able to agree on something, and team up and just about literally save the world. I guess the games don’t do anything for me because — and call this a cop-out reason if you like — their graphics aren’t good enough. We’ve had decades of film dramatizations and Spielbergizations to go on, and the games just don’t look dead convincing enough. Modern War, though, hell, why not? After seeing that scene in “Fahrenheit 9/11” where an American hickboy explains that he listens to The Bloodhound Gang’s “The Roof is on Fire” while running over Iraqis in his M-1 Abrams battle tank, because “the roof is on fire” is a “metaphor”, because “Baghdad is also kinda on fire”, I figure, heck, go ahead and make a videogame out of this, already. There are moments when the events on the screen resemble things that happen in videogames — like when the AC-130 TV operator tells you that the friendlies are carrying IR beacons, so they’re glowing, so as to help you recognize who to not shoot. It strikes me that as much as games are training our kids how to join the military and/or murder civilian hookers, games (or, uh, software user interfaces in general) are teaching the military a thing or two. There was that DARPA prototype robo-tank recently, that operated by remote-control: the remote control was an Xbox 360 controller. I guess, if Call of Duty 4 had been made after the video footage of that DARPA prototype hit the internet, they would have had a perfect excuse to incorporate an Xbox 360 controller into the game and not be prickishly self-referential about it.
Call of Duty 4 is a videogame about modern-day US Marines and British SAS, taking part in small- and large-scale armed skirmishes in either some Middle-Eastern desert city or beneath the mauve-skied dawn of some rural Russian village. There’s a plot, though who the hell knows what’s going on, really? Games shouldn’t be about “narrative”; they should be about feeling like you’re an important (or at least active) part of some kind of important event. Ninety percent of the time, you’re taking orders from a man with lamb chops; your squad mates shout about tangos and charlies and bravos and tangos; sometimes, they’ll tell you that they’ve got lookout in front of this door frame, and that you are to go in and neutralize any threats (military speak for “blast anything breathing”); sometimes they scream that you need to run. Usually, whenever the latter happens, some cataclysmic event is occurring on the screen. That’s good — games should strive to, you know, have actual stuff happening. That’s the sort of thing “professional” reviewers should be able to commend: “The stuff happening on screen was interesting, and lovingly presented”. Instead, we just get people complimenting water effects: “Just looking at the water is very soothing. It’s so real it made me thirsty. –IGN.” Look higher, people!
Very early in the game, when you’re escaping a sinking ship, the level design offers you a multitude of choices which way to run. Your team is full of experienced, hard dudes, and they know where to go. So you follow them, and you get out alive. However, the game is sure to give you the choice to go some other route, though that will promptly get you killed. In the interest of science, I’ve put a controller in the hands of various friends, and not a single one of them has escaped from the tanker on the first try. At the end, they always go the wrong way, and Dreaded White Text tells them “You went the wrong way”. And that’s it. This seemed to frustrate many of my friends to no end, though I found it chaotically intriguing. I kind of wish the game had done more of that.
For the most part, though, actually playing Call of Duty 4 is entertaining in the most tenuous way. The game’s atmosphere works as hard as it can to simply make you feel like you’re a part of these big events. You get a very strong sense that you’re fighting with a team, probably because your teammates don’t ever say &^#$#ed things to one another, or high-five one-another, and because they actually obtain a significant amount of the kills during a firefight. And some of the gunfights are tough; tough enough to make you wonder how real soldiers put up with this stuff without, you know, dying. I guess the absolute animal fear of death has something to do with it. However, eventually, Call of Duty 4 managed to win me over, and greatly; its expertly executed atmosphere, and very focused play mechanics didn’t get tiring even as I dropped countless nickels into the slot machine of the moment on some of the more brutal gunfights. I started to respect the level design on deeper levels: usually, you’re heading toward waypoints, sometimes while being pursued by bad guys, or sometimes while avoiding lookouts. Every once in a while, all hell breaks loose and there are maybe fifteen guys on the top of a hill, which has two staircases and a couple of dirt roads leading up it. There’s no set-in-stone way to win each momentary skirmish, though “thinking on your feet” is a really good place to start. Shades of Metal Gear Solid 3 start to leak in, eventually, as the game allows you to feel for yourself when you’re doing well or phoning it in: sometimes, a fight will end without you scoring more than four or five kills; you’ll feel like stuff for having let your dudes do all the work, and then you’ll notice that two of them died. This feeling runs weirdly parallel to the arcade-like action feel of dropping nickels into the slot machine, trying wild tactics, getting shot in the head, trying something crazier next time. There you go: Call of Duty 4 effortlessly manages equal parts dramatic catharsis and arcade action.
There’s a conscientious, well-played part midway through the game, where a soldier on point races up a staircase, only to be grabbed by a Middle-Eastern Individual of Opposing Political Views: if you manage to shoot the attacker, the game awards you with an Xbox Achievement for having saved the guy (who, I notice from the credits, is named after a member of the development team). This is clever, mostly, because in many games (even this one) Xbox Achievements tend to award the player for doing arbitrary things that he doesn’t have to do in order to succeed at the game. There’s a word that game designers throw around often: “Visual language”. Basically, how the game, visually, tells the player that he’s doing something right or wrong; “Achievements”, with their big, bombastic, bloated, banal on-screen explosion of Old-Navy-worthy graphic design, are, to me, at least, the exact opposite of satisfaction: killing the final boss of a game and seeing “Achievement Unlocked: The End!” elicits a VH1 Pop-Up Video sound effect in the middle of my head, and I get something like the inverse of an erection (we call it a “turtle”). Yes, “Achievements” are a fragment of the devil, in this “videogame industry”; you can’t even use the points to buy anything. I suspect that giving a player an achievement for, you know, ensuring that one of his comrades doesn’t die is Infinity Ward’s way of subverting the masses in as clever a way as possible. For one thing, looking out for your own is something someone in the military, fighting a war, is obligated to do. On the other hand, each of Call of Duty 4‘s tenuous little gun-versus-gun contests sees you walking the razor’s edge between life and death, and the life and death of your expendable squad-mates; the game is constantly telling the player with its visual language whether he is doing well or not. This game is whispering that we don’t need “Achievements”, really, if the game is expertly well-made.
TANGENT “RE: DEATH” BEGINS
I kind of wonder, a lot more than is probably healthy, about death in videogames. Call of Duty 4 brings up the question of death many times, as your guy is shot in the side of the head and you scream “Who shot me?” and your friend, who is half-drunk, says “Dude, in a real war, you’d never see the bullets coming, either.” Eventually, he goes from being half-drunk to fully drunk, and that makes his words all the more consideration-worthy: Man, what kinds of people actually go out and fight real wars? What the heck is wrong with these people? Politics aside, who is willing to die for anything, much less the concept of a country? And what’s with these kids playing these FPSes, anyway? What the hell are they thinking? Do they see these games as training exercises for the one day when they’ll get to wield an AK in the name of shooting ragheads from the back of a Hummer? I’m not going to pretend that these kids possess a single political atom in their bodies; I know the score: they just want to kill. What I can say, with serious scientific certainty, is that I once saw a YouTube video of I think it was Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (boring game, by the way) where the first comment was “Awesome game” and the third comment accused the game of being for homosexuals because the graphics weren’t photo-realistic enough. I defecate you negative. I suppose this is why Call of Duty 4‘s Big Back-of-Box Quote is “The most PHOTO-REALISTIC video game WE’VE EVER SEEN.” (Game Informer.) I’m hardly even going to make fun of that quote; Activision PR did what they had to do.
On a high-enough difficulty level, Call of Duty 4 recreates some of the dread of war. I honestly tend to avoid FPSes where you can’t see the bullets “because you can’t see the bullets in real life”, because this isn’t real life, it’s a game. Though as I’ve said above, it plays well as a game; you feel like you did something when you win, you know you messed up when you lose, no matter how many dozens of times you lose. And the presentation remains seamless.
Anyway. There’s a part where Call of Duty 4 does something shocking; I don’t really know how to explain it without spoiling it, so let’s just say that it steps back through the fourth wall for a moment. Yes, I’m saying it had been standing in front of the fourth wall for its entire running time until that moment, when it stepped back behind the fourth wall. The scene involves death — though not in a videogame-y, “Looney Tunes”-y, “if at first you don’t succeed” way, and not in a melodramatic movie way, either. It’s easy to say that “the character you’re controlling dies as a result of the narrative”, and it’s easy to look at that statement, as what it is, and nitpick away: well, in the game, you can die so many times, in the middle of so many inconsequential skirmishes, and then you just respawn almost immediately (after reading a nice little anti-war quote by some famous person whose pacifist attitude didn’t stop them from dying) and try again like nothing had ever happened.
How can narrative-related death be special at all in a piece of work in a medium where the player must die repeatedly? The answer to these question is, of course, “The death must be shocking, and awful”. It must be a huge sentence-ending punctuation mark, where previous deaths had been commas. It’s a tall order, though Call of Duty 4 pulls it off, and when it does, it leaves you feeling deeply sad, or deeply confused. Either way, it’s made its point, and it’s perhaps even more brilliant than even I’ve given it credit for: if you be a cranberry-juice-sipping, organic red onion connoisseur who’s forty-five seconds away from coining the phrase “Post-Kojima”, you will say, “Interesting”, and you will continue playing; if you be review-writer for a website with expanding advertisements for “NEW! Pepsi-Filled Doritos!” plastered all over your reviews, you will say, “The publisher sent me this for free!”, and you will keep playing; if you be an iron-pumping jock-face frat boy, you will say, “Gonna kill me them heckin’ rag heads, them heckin’ commie bastards!” and you will keep playing, to keep killing you them heckin’ rag heads, them heckin’ commie bastards.
Welcome to Post-Kojima: a world where game designers do quirky little abnormal things with their games and nobody complains.
We can only pretend to complain (which is something we excel at): after being shocked by “that scene”, I will never be shocked by it again, nor is it hardly possible for me to be shocked by anything resembling it.
And part of me wonders if they could have pulled it off so the Guy Who Dies can’t die a single “normal” “in-game” death before the Big Moment. In fact, if they’d managed to do this, I might have had to call Call of Duty 4 the best game of all-time. They’ve already orchestrated every stage of the game so that there are air-strikes, visible helicopters firing at enemies you’ll never see, and adverse weather conditions; why not go the extra (ten (thousand)) mile(s), and orchestrate it so that your guy can’t die? Oh man, I’m talking out my ass here, I know, though wouldn’t that be really cool? I’d like to say that you could have one friendly soldier “accidentally” take the hit for you every time an enemy checkmates you, though that would require there to be a lot of friendlies, in the case of the player being a total jerk and putting the controller down just to see what happens.
I guess the game’s heavy-handed treatment of friendly fire is compensation enough: namely, if you shoot and kill one of the “main” characters, the screen will sharply fade, and Dreaded White Text informs you “Friendly Fire Will Not Be Tolerated!” I got curious, after a while, and it turns out that — hey — the main characters don’t ever get mortally wounded by the enemy on their own. Interesting.
Either way, game-y deaths included, Call of Duty 4 is all “visual language”. If you “die”, the game visually tells you that you messed up, and then it visually tells you that you’re alive again. Visual language is about more than color saturation and camera angles, though. For example, I’ve seen enough military movies to know, at least, that when the guy leading me stops in place and raises his hand, that means I should stop moving forward and crouch down on the ground, or that when all the guys in front of me run up and take cover behind a low wall, I should pop into place wherever there’s room. How novel, then, that Call of Duty 4 makes these common-sense reactions the correct thing to do game-wise whenever it seems right to do them. Meanwhile, other war FPSes, like Brothers in Arms, have game-like representations for things like suppressing fire: shoot enough at a distant enemy, and the aiming circle turns red, indicating that the enemy is suppressed. In Call of Duty 4, the game doesn’t tell you when your tactics are working. They just work — or they don’t. It’s hardly even a videogame, anymore, once you’ve plunged into it. It’s mostly “entertainment”. Mostly.
Call of Duty 4‘s instruction manual is eight pages long, six if you subtract the table of contents and the blank “NOTES” page (on which I drew a picture of a thumbs-up). No character in this game ever says anything about playing the game; no one voice actor was asked to speak actual words about in-game weapons, or name a single button on the videogame controller in your hands. The people represented in this game know what they’re doing; they’re soldiers; moreover, they’re serious soldiers, serious enough to literally say “target neutralized” immediately after shooting a dog. So when you’re in a city that has been deserted, soaking in the silent awe of what might have previously been a community center of some sort, your characters are free to say things like, “Fifty thousand people used to live here.” That’s the “narrative” “emerging”; they’re not even talking about the mission — possibly because the mission is the same as it ever is: move forward, follow orders, shoot anyone who would shoot you, throw grenades when prudent. If someone says jump, don’t even ask how high — just jump as high as you can. It’ll either be high enough, or you’ll be dead. That’s all the “game” there is to Call of Duty 4: now get out there and experience Modern Warfare.
I suppose this is where Call of Duty 4 wins versus something like BioShock — and it wins quite triumphantly, and instantly (by default, almost): because it’s easy to explain. Though its narrative does indeed hide things from the player, and though it does make many (successful, virtuoso) attempts to surprise the player, it never lies; it never feels cheap. In something like BioShock, you’ve got this fantastic, imaginative underwater world, and with something that loopy, the game designers also have a huge responsibility to explain everything, and they feel a crushing pressure to dazzle the player: no body renders a computer-animated dragon if they’re not going to make that dragon breate fire. Game designers tend to (“tend to”, yes) not quite always be Tolstoy, or even Dostoyevsky, so in cases like BioShock, we end up with “Your dude was being mind-controlled by a dude with a mind-control plasmid lol”; that still doesn’t answer the question of why things like mind-control psychic powers are available from vending machines in your game world; that still doesn’t change the fact that the game’s proudest moment is ridiculous: it shows you a Defenseless Little Girl and expects you to scream “art!” because the game offers you the “moral choice” to kill or not kill the Defenseless Little Girl, like killing little girls was something normal, non-evil people might occasionally do, et cetera.
In Call of Duty 4, story-wise and game-wise, there is nothing to explain: we’re fighting a war. We’re shooting these guys because if they saw us they’d shoot us. There’s no pandering and moping about how war is bad, because, quite frankly, this game makes war look hellish, and kind of sad, which I guess is the undeniable reality of war, anyway; when you weigh my “overall impression” of this game, the impact of the representation of the somewhat depressing (in a horrific way) nature of war and the satisfying snap of the combat are about 50-50. Like BioShock, this is a game that is essentially all mood; though the playable experience disappears so completely into that mood that when the game throws us a heavily post-Kojima “mission” where we “play” as a captive powerful man, waiting to be executed, or where we operate the guns of an AC-130 gunship, scorching faceless foes, witlessly staring through a videogame within a videogame, it’s more than interesting: it’s fantastic, moving, surprising, and, most impressively, it’s absolutely effortless. Hardly any “ingenuity” went into the crafting of this experience, and I say that with the utmost respect. Rather, Call of Duty 4 was seemingly constructed like that other great Russian invention, the rollercoaster: you get some graph paper and a straightedge, you decide, right here and right now, how tall that first hill is going to be, and the rest of the hills just build themselves.
It does so many hilariously right things, like condition you to believe that every single dog you’re ever going to encounter is going to be some one-hit-killing uber-difficult enemy monsterfreak, and then it’ll suddenly throw you a part in the middle of an extended stealth segment where you have a silenced sniper rifle and there’s a downright frightening-looking wild dog hovering around a carcass nearby. You can shoot the dog and not attract any attention, though your superior says we should just navigate around the dog. It turns out, even if the dog sees you, all he does is look at you and growl. That’s pretty fantastic: here we have evidence that the world of this game actually does contain some kind of semblance of life. All it takes is one little spark. I remember the very elementary example from Dragon Quest VII: of all the dozens of cities and all the thousands of citizens in those cities, in one little town, there’s a bar, and at that bar, there’s a woman wearing a red dress, sitting alone. If you talk to the girl, she says she’s perfectly fine and she doesn’t need your company. If you talk to a man on the other side of the bar, he says, “What’s the deal with that woman in the red dress, drinking alone?” A woman in a red dress and a man wondering why she’s alone: that’s all it takes, really, to make your “entertainment software virtual field map” into a “simulated world”.
Seriously, some of the stuff in here — the ecstatically brief “final boss” comes sharply to mind — makes Hideo Kojima look like a rank amateur. We can forgive — and even love — Kojima, at the end of the day, for being something of a prankster prodding at the videogame medium just to see what kind of noises it makes, though I’m pretty sure, as he is only one man, he’d be at a loss if asked to make a game that actually, really, literally approaches the craftsmanship of, say, a Scorsese film; the people behind Call of Duty 4, on the other hand, though I have reason to believe they have studied Metal Gear, Shadow of the Colossus, and many other important games, might not be “influenced” by any of them so much as they just have a rock-solid grip on common sense. Common sense, above all else, is usually the essential ingredient in being good at anything. For a game designer, common sense involves knowing that “experience” is more important than “narrative”, that “narrative” need only be the birds in the sky (or the helicopters raging by, guns blazing).
It’s like, rather than write down a million ideas for what kind of violent psychic powers our undersea-dwelling philosophers and artists might have been able to buy from a vending machine, this is a game where missions are conceived as “Yeah, you’re going to snipe some guy, then you’re going to run away from dudes who try to blow up the hotel you’re using as a sniper base; you’re going to run about a kilometer away, there’s going to be an abandoned swimming pool, and then you’re going to hold a position while you wait for your evacuation chopper to get there. Your partner is wounded, so when the chopper gets there, you have to pick him up and carry him into the chopper.” It might not mean everything to gamers or even game-designers these days, though the fact that you actually manipulate your character all the way into the chopper, and can then aim your gun out the back and shoot at the ground as you take off is pretty crucial.
One thing that kind of got me was the mission where you play a flashback; in a lesser game, I guess it works, because who gives a stuff, really, about where Spider-Man was last Friday, as long as stuff exploded? In this game, a regular virtuoso piece when it comes to impressing us with the impact and the, uh, presence of the present, when it asks me to play something in the past, and I make a mistake in that flashback, and a message on the screen tells me “Your actions got [so and so] killed”, I think, so what? Isn’t someone supposed to be just telling this story to a bunch of marines in some god-forsaken rat-hole in western Russia right now? If he messes up in his storytelling, or forgets a detail, says “So there were some guys on the left, and I, uhh, went to the left–I mean, the right–” does that erase his former commanding officer from existence, and alter future events?
On the other hand, when the situation comes to a head and I’m aiming a sniper rifle for an extended period of time, listening to very technical explanations of how wind speed affects bullet path from my superior, I’m thinking, in my Real Life Head over here, “Well, wait, isn’t this guy I’m aiming at still alive in the present?” And suddenly, there you go — that’s kind of an interesting feeling.
There are certain situations (like when you’re sneaking around, your cover gets blown, and the enemies open fire on you) wherein your character will literally be completely helpless, and in those situations, the game does not wrest controls from your hands; instead, it lets you feel what it’s like to die because you made a mistake. Compare this to platform games like Super Mario Galaxy, where you sometimes float down into a bottomless pit, helpless, in control, yet not in control, because you made a mistake. The feeling of helplessness is far more pronounced, far more obnoxious, and, weirdly, far more forgivable in Call of Duty 4, because the said helpless situations literally always involve your dude, you gun, your grenades, and some other dudes with guns and grenades. There are no bottomless pits, bottomless for the sake of being “something that can kill you”. It’s quite deceptively impressive how effectively the game communicates to you that you can’t solve all situations with a gun or grenades — either in real life, or even in this game, where your actions are limited to shooting, throwing grenades, and moving. Yes, sometimes “Moving” is the solution to your problems. So it is that all situations in Call of Duty 4 can and will be solved by shooting, throwing grenades, running away, hiding, or some combination thereof. Well, sometimes, you have to break a dog’s neck, though it’s as much a quick-time event as not a quick-time event: the button used to kill them is always, after all, the same button as a regular melee attack. The game does not ask you — even once — to throw a lightning bolt at a pool of water in which an enemy is standing, or use a key to open a door.
I guess if I had to nitpick something, it would be that sometimes the loading times are too short to read the bountiful anti-war quotes displayed on screen whenever you die.
Okay, no, I thought of another one: in this world of Modern Warfare, there exist doors that simply will not open no matter how many times you shoot them with an Uzi or stab them with your combat knife. No, these doors will only open when your commanding officer walks up to them and deems them fit to be opened. I can’t really call this a fault of the game, because,
1. How would my character know where to go, really? He’s just a grunt; he doesn’t have the intel.
2. Poking around at random doors is not listed as one of his orders.
3. 99% of the time, the game is very good about giving the player orders, and telling him where to go, and where to be.
4. If you play the game like a good soldier and not like a jerk, you should be able to make everything look pretty smooth.
I’ve said, before, that games can perhaps never be “art” because I seriously can’t think of a single game that some jerk can’t just pick up and immediately tilt the right analog stick to one side, cackling as the camera spins in circles — or some equivalent action. I was disappointed quite ferociously when I tried to show a particular friend the first stage of Stranglehold, a game that, if played correctly, looks really cool (though still not as cool as an actual John Woo movie); he immediately identified how silly it looks when the protagonist slides back and forth across a countertop. We here at Action Button Dot Net collectively say: heck that guy. I’m guaranteeing you, game developers: if you make a game that aspires to “art” if played all the way through, adjusting the camera a minimal amount of times and performing only the necessary actions, we will gladly attempt to play the game that way. Because, I mean, why not? I don’t see anyone else making that particular promise. I might as well make it.
Is Call of Duty 4 art if played perfectly, pristinely, quickly, and efficiently? If you never die, if you never get shot, is Call of Duty 4 as emotionally affecting as Saving Private Ryan? (Here we refrain from asking whether or not “Saving Private Ryan” is art.) The answer to this question is — surprise! — that that’s a &^#$#ed question: if you’re good enough at the game to not die or not get hit, then you’re probably not having “fun”; if you’re just watching someone else play, you’re more prone to ask questions like “why are there numbers on the screen?” “what does ‘checkpoint reached’ mean?” or “why does the camera almost never show anyone’s face?” In-game death, sometimes of the meaningless, un-telegraphed variety, motivates the player to be more observant; surviving the same challenge on a subsequent attempt makes him feel accomplished, or even entertained. So, in asking the question of how we can make a game that entertains the player without requiring the player to perform perfectly, we end up back at that boring question of how we can motivate the player to do better without making his on-screen avatar realistically die and then come right back to life.
For now, maybe just tweaking the respawn presentation is all we need. Just make the screen fade to black really quick, and then fade back up. Maybe make every checkpoint occur immediately after a memorable line of dialog: no one will be able to complain about hearing a particular line over and over again, because that would mean revealing when and where you died multiple times. “Looks like Christmas is coming three times this year — for the second time today!” you hear, just as you respawn, and you think, “Oh — I’m back here”.
I’m picking this nit really, really hard, right here, because it’s all I have; maybe you’ve come to realize that that’s the nature of this website. Call of Duty 4‘s singleplayer mode is a focused, tight game, of a voraciously consumable, short running time, with minimal filler or nonsense. It strokes the player’s ego sometimes, sure, with all the Tangoes and Charlies being bandied about, though hey, we might as well just chalk that up to etiquette: the player isn’t lying to himself; he’s admitting that he’s obviously the type of person to sit in his underwear in the dark in the dead of night controlling a pretend soldier in a pretend war. Might as well be nice to him. The play mechanics disappear almost completely into the structure and flow of the campaign, et cetera et cetera — so why can’t I turn off all the HUD elements? Much as I like that Einstein quote about how World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones, why can’t I turn those quotes off? What if I don’t want to know precisely how many bullets are left in my clip, or whenever the game has just saved itself?
Actually, I’m playing this online, multiplayer, right now (review of Call of Duty 4 multiplayer: fun!), and I’ve just noticed that my gun doesn’t bob up and down realistically when I move while crouched. Yes! That’s another significant complaint right there!
A less significant complaint is that I’m not quite sure what “throw back” means, even after beating the game — am I picking a grenade up off the ground and then throwing it back at the enemy? If so, why does the grenade just manage to suddenly appear in my hand? There’s no bend-over-and-grab animation. It’s a little confusing.
Also, I suppose I could mention that the textures on some of the surfaces are pretty low-resolution, though I reckon nobody would learn anything from my pointing that out. They obviously chose the lower textures so they could concentrate on performance, et cetera.
Many of my friends had trouble with the dreaded “Ferris Wheel” mission, so I guess that’s worth pointing out: there’s a Ferris wheel. You have one guy sniping enemy dudes from a grassy hill. The game gives you thirty seconds to plant some mines and C4 before going to hide in the shadows. You shoot some dudes, then shoot some more dudes, then you get a checkpoint; then a load of dudes comes in. The thing is, the C4 is really handy for the load of dudes; however, if you already placed the C4 in a not-perfect place, you’re hecked. I’ve polled my Gmail chat list, and something like one-third of the people I know who played this game gave up entirely at that mission. That kind of sucks; I reloaded my save, gladly played the run-up to the Ferris Wheel again, and planted C4 on the cars, so as to bomb the guys as they slid down the helicopter ropes. It did pretty good!
I really don’t know what else to say about this game; having just mentioned helicopters and ropes in the preceding paragraph, I am thinking about Choplifter, and wishing that Infinity Ward would make something of a Choplifter reboot / remake for next-generation consoles. Call it Call of Duty: Chopper. Let me fly a helicopter, rescuing dudes from the heat of battle, or dropping dudes off. Ascend or descend with L1 and R1; drop bombs with the L trigger, and firemachine guns with the R trigger. Let me use a badass rope ladder to rescue dudes if the “landing zone” (that’s “LZ” from now on) is “too hot”. There could be an online multiplayer mode, only it’d be more like Rock Band, because people would be forced to cooperate — you’ve got one guy flying the chopper, the other aiming the machine gun, and, uhh, I’m sure the pilot could handle the bombs and ladder himself, actually. So yeah — two-player co-op isn’t too bad! Your army would be ideally competing with another army, with their own two-man chopper team. You could build a pretty great game out of piloting a helicopter, with clever enough level design, like those Strike games EA made forever ago. What do you say, Infinity Ward? Pay me $100,000 a year and I’ll come over there and design the triumphant return of helicopter games for you. I’ll lease a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution — a red one — not six minutes after getting off the plane, just so I can drive over to your office and design a game about a helicopter. I’m not even kidding. I’ll design it all day and all night. Helicopters, man. They’re the next big thing, I’m not even kidding.
To sum up: Call of Duty 4 is a tight-as-hell game with seamless atmosphere, a compelling narrative that’s more about the Hollywoodian moment-to-moment nature of its experience than about any straightforward plot, and moments of actual cathartic power that take advantage of the whole package. Though the multiplayer is fun, I might never play through the singleplayer campaign again, much as I will fondly remember it as a thrilling piece of work and recommend it to friends and game designers for the next several years. No, dear readers, it’s not the “Best Game Ever” — and I won’t dare say that I could think of a better game (even though I can: I mean, just make a Zelda game with the focus and attention to detail of something like Call of Duty 4; I say this as a person who feels pretty much zero emotion when I hear the word “Zelda”, so take it or leave it) — and I still like Gears of War a tiny bit better, just because of the sheer ridiculousness of it. Much as I love Gears, though, I recognize that it’s not for everyone, so I wholeheartedly, hereby, allow the people of the world to like Call of Duty 4. And if you’re a game developer, please: this is the one (well, this and Portal) that you should rip off.
★★★★
“THE FIRST VIDEOGAME OF THE REST OF OUR LIVES.”
If you imagine for a moment that all of the emails I got last year asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, and then you also pretended that the overwhelming majority of emails asking me why I haven’t reviewed BioShock yet, when I’m going to review BioShock, or if there’s some reason I am blatantly ignoring BioShock also didn’t exist, that would leave me with a healthy stack of emails asking me when I was going to review Call of Duty 4, how much I loved Call of Duty 4, or if I was going to call Call of Duty 4 the “best game ever” or not. Well, to answer those three questions:
1. Right now!
2. A lot!
3. Nope!
If you were to imagine for a moment that all the emails I got last week asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, that would leave you with an overwhelming majority of emails asking me “Why don’t you die?”, and if you were to imagine that those emails didn’t exist, you’d have a pretty significant number of emails asking me “If BioShock isn’t a great game, what is?” To answer those two questions:
1. Let me ask my secretary!
2. Call of Duty 4!
The truth is, I didn’t really feel like reviewing Call of Duty 4 because it’s kind of too good. Also, because I wasn’t sure what the name of the game is — that “4” there is definitely raised. It is definitely an exponent. Am I supposed to call the game “Call of Duty To The Fourth Power”? How many powers do we have to put on our duty before it’s patriotic enough for Joe Sixpack and Jennifer Twoliter to enjoy on Memorial Day?
Anyway, the short version of this review is that I liked the game a lot, as much as I probably can like a game — even if I might never play it again.
The long version is this:
Unlike BioShock, Call of Duty 4 has everything: seamless atmosphere, a compelling narrative, focused play mechanics, and moments of actual cathartic power that take advantage of the whole package. More than just a crotch massage plugged into a television set, Call of Duty 4 boldly toes the bizarrely forbidden line between “videogame” and “entertainment”. It’s made by people who get it so ferociously that they might not even know that there’s an “it” they’re getting. It’s hard, it’s fast, it’s lean, it’s learned, and it’s a dynamo. Developers of big-budget action-adventure games: please, if you have any common sense, this is the one you’re supposed to study. It’s the first game of the rest of our lives.
I can’t say I’ve been the biggest fan of the series. Or even the smallest one, or even the most medium-sized one. I first encountered Call of Duty 4 at a demo station at Tokyo Game Show 2007, where my brother Brandon Sheffield (of Gamasutra) played through the first mission under the enthusiastic guidance of an Activision / Infinity Ward representative. The guy was telling us how it was: you’re infiltrating a tanker, trying to get some enemy intel. You have to kill the crew, get the intel, get out, and get on your chopper. See this, now? The ship is sinking. Look at the water effects. Notice how the boat is tipping. Brandon handled it all with grace; I guess, since his magazine and website carry advertisements, occasionally rely on videogame developers to write features, and are genuinely in the habit of being as polite as possible to as many people as possible at all times, he was used to having people explain what was plainly visible. I guess I’m used to it, to, what with the line of work I’m in (let’s not even get into it), though maybe I would have minded it a whole lot less had I been actually playing. From what I could tell, the action on the screen looked distinctly, nonchalantly amazing: here we were, invading a tanker on the ocean, and outside the immediate scope of soldiers with guns versus soldiers with guns, things were happening: the ship was sinking, and it looked like the ship was sinking. We here at Action Button Dot Net are people of refined tastes: we go whole days, sometimes, listening only to The Stone Roses’ song “Breaking Into Heaven” on loop for twenty-four straight hours. I don’t need anyone telling me that something that is stuff-hot is stuff-hot, though I guess if the Activision guy had just been repeatedly saying “This Game Is Shit Hot” in a text-to-speech voice for the duration of the play session, I would have purchased the game and reviewed it immediately, just to compliment their amazing PR.
When I eventually played the game, it was after the fact; it was after every fact. Here’s what I knew, before I started playing Call of Duty 4:
1. Call of Duty and Medal of Honor are not related;
2. The previous Call of Duty games were all about World War II;
3. The first two Call of Duty games were developed by Infinity Ward;
4. The third Call of Duty game was not developed by Infinity Ward;
5. The fourth Call of Duty game was developed by Infinity Ward again;
6. The fourth Call of Duty game is not about World War II; it is set in modern times;
7. According to Wikipedia, “The Call of Duty Real-time Card Game was announced by card manufacturer Upper Deck”;
8. I’m pretty sure any card game is actually played in real-time;
9. I could be mistaken, because maybe the concept of time isn’t exactly “real” for people who spend their time playing collectible card games.
I very highly respect the idea of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, then, because Call of Duty is obviously a “strong enough” “intellectual property” to have a Real-time Card Game based on it, and messing with the formula (“the formula” being “World War II”) is a pretty bold move in this dead-horse-throttling industry we live in. Furthermore, I guess you could say my interest was piqued because World War II games have always managed to amazingly bore me. I don’t really get why: I find World War II a fascinating subject. Now that I think about it, I’ve never actually read a book about World War II on purpose, nor have I ever watched a movie about World War II because I had to, though I’ve heard a couple of people talk about World War II, and they seem to think it’s really interesting. There was a whole lot going on. Hitler was probably the last objectively evil human being history will allow; in a way, media — like newspapers, television, movies, and (hey!) videogames — spread the message of those terrible things that happened, of how even Russia and America were able to agree on something, and team up and just about literally save the world. I guess the games don’t do anything for me because — and call this a cop-out reason if you like — their graphics aren’t good enough. We’ve had decades of film dramatizations and Spielbergizations to go on, and the games just don’t look dead convincing enough. Modern War, though, hell, why not? After seeing that scene in “Fahrenheit 9/11” where an American hickboy explains that he listens to The Bloodhound Gang’s “The Roof is on Fire” while running over Iraqis in his M-1 Abrams battle tank, because “the roof is on fire” is a “metaphor”, because “Baghdad is also kinda on fire”, I figure, heck, go ahead and make a videogame out of this, already. There are moments when the events on the screen resemble things that happen in videogames — like when the AC-130 TV operator tells you that the friendlies are carrying IR beacons, so they’re glowing, so as to help you recognize who to not shoot. It strikes me that as much as games are training our kids how to join the military and/or murder civilian hookers, games (or, uh, software user interfaces in general) are teaching the military a thing or two. There was that DARPA prototype robo-tank recently, that operated by remote-control: the remote control was an Xbox 360 controller. I guess, if Call of Duty 4 had been made after the video footage of that DARPA prototype hit the internet, they would have had a perfect excuse to incorporate an Xbox 360 controller into the game and not be prickishly self-referential about it.
Call of Duty 4 is a videogame about modern-day US Marines and British SAS, taking part in small- and large-scale armed skirmishes in either some Middle-Eastern desert city or beneath the mauve-skied dawn of some rural Russian village. There’s a plot, though who the hell knows what’s going on, really? Games shouldn’t be about “narrative”; they should be about feeling like you’re an important (or at least active) part of some kind of important event. Ninety percent of the time, you’re taking orders from a man with lamb chops; your squad mates shout about tangos and charlies and bravos and tangos; sometimes, they’ll tell you that they’ve got lookout in front of this door frame, and that you are to go in and neutralize any threats (military speak for “blast anything breathing”); sometimes they scream that you need to run. Usually, whenever the latter happens, some cataclysmic event is occurring on the screen. That’s good — games should strive to, you know, have actual stuff happening. That’s the sort of thing “professional” reviewers should be able to commend: “The stuff happening on screen was interesting, and lovingly presented”. Instead, we just get people complimenting water effects: “Just looking at the water is very soothing. It’s so real it made me thirsty. –IGN.” Look higher, people!
Very early in the game, when you’re escaping a sinking ship, the level design offers you a multitude of choices which way to run. Your team is full of experienced, hard dudes, and they know where to go. So you follow them, and you get out alive. However, the game is sure to give you the choice to go some other route, though that will promptly get you killed. In the interest of science, I’ve put a controller in the hands of various friends, and not a single one of them has escaped from the tanker on the first try. At the end, they always go the wrong way, and Dreaded White Text tells them “You went the wrong way”. And that’s it. This seemed to frustrate many of my friends to no end, though I found it chaotically intriguing. I kind of wish the game had done more of that.
For the most part, though, actually playing Call of Duty 4 is entertaining in the most tenuous way. The game’s atmosphere works as hard as it can to simply make you feel like you’re a part of these big events. You get a very strong sense that you’re fighting with a team, probably because your teammates don’t ever say &^#$#ed things to one another, or high-five one-another, and because they actually obtain a significant amount of the kills during a firefight. And some of the gunfights are tough; tough enough to make you wonder how real soldiers put up with this stuff without, you know, dying. I guess the absolute animal fear of death has something to do with it. However, eventually, Call of Duty 4 managed to win me over, and greatly; its expertly executed atmosphere, and very focused play mechanics didn’t get tiring even as I dropped countless nickels into the slot machine of the moment on some of the more brutal gunfights. I started to respect the level design on deeper levels: usually, you’re heading toward waypoints, sometimes while being pursued by bad guys, or sometimes while avoiding lookouts. Every once in a while, all hell breaks loose and there are maybe fifteen guys on the top of a hill, which has two staircases and a couple of dirt roads leading up it. There’s no set-in-stone way to win each momentary skirmish, though “thinking on your feet” is a really good place to start. Shades of Metal Gear Solid 3 start to leak in, eventually, as the game allows you to feel for yourself when you’re doing well or phoning it in: sometimes, a fight will end without you scoring more than four or five kills; you’ll feel like stuff for having let your dudes do all the work, and then you’ll notice that two of them died. This feeling runs weirdly parallel to the arcade-like action feel of dropping nickels into the slot machine, trying wild tactics, getting shot in the head, trying something crazier next time. There you go: Call of Duty 4 effortlessly manages equal parts dramatic catharsis and arcade action.
There’s a conscientious, well-played part midway through the game, where a soldier on point races up a staircase, only to be grabbed by a Middle-Eastern Individual of Opposing Political Views: if you manage to shoot the attacker, the game awards you with an Xbox Achievement for having saved the guy (who, I notice from the credits, is named after a member of the development team). This is clever, mostly, because in many games (even this one) Xbox Achievements tend to award the player for doing arbitrary things that he doesn’t have to do in order to succeed at the game. There’s a word that game designers throw around often: “Visual language”. Basically, how the game, visually, tells the player that he’s doing something right or wrong; “Achievements”, with their big, bombastic, bloated, banal on-screen explosion of Old-Navy-worthy graphic design, are, to me, at least, the exact opposite of satisfaction: killing the final boss of a game and seeing “Achievement Unlocked: The End!” elicits a VH1 Pop-Up Video sound effect in the middle of my head, and I get something like the inverse of an erection (we call it a “turtle”). Yes, “Achievements” are a fragment of the devil, in this “videogame industry”; you can’t even use the points to buy anything. I suspect that giving a player an achievement for, you know, ensuring that one of his comrades doesn’t die is Infinity Ward’s way of subverting the masses in as clever a way as possible. For one thing, looking out for your own is something someone in the military, fighting a war, is obligated to do. On the other hand, each of Call of Duty 4‘s tenuous little gun-versus-gun contests sees you walking the razor’s edge between life and death, and the life and death of your expendable squad-mates; the game is constantly telling the player with its visual language whether he is doing well or not. This game is whispering that we don’t need “Achievements”, really, if the game is expertly well-made.
TANGENT “RE: DEATH” BEGINS
I kind of wonder, a lot more than is probably healthy, about death in videogames. Call of Duty 4 brings up the question of death many times, as your guy is shot in the side of the head and you scream “Who shot me?” and your friend, who is half-drunk, says “Dude, in a real war, you’d never see the bullets coming, either.” Eventually, he goes from being half-drunk to fully drunk, and that makes his words all the more consideration-worthy: Man, what kinds of people actually go out and fight real wars? What the heck is wrong with these people? Politics aside, who is willing to die for anything, much less the concept of a country? And what’s with these kids playing these FPSes, anyway? What the hell are they thinking? Do they see these games as training exercises for the one day when they’ll get to wield an AK in the name of shooting ragheads from the back of a Hummer? I’m not going to pretend that these kids possess a single political atom in their bodies; I know the score: they just want to kill. What I can say, with serious scientific certainty, is that I once saw a YouTube video of I think it was Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (boring game, by the way) where the first comment was “Awesome game” and the third comment accused the game of being for homosexuals because the graphics weren’t photo-realistic enough. I defecate you negative. I suppose this is why Call of Duty 4‘s Big Back-of-Box Quote is “The most PHOTO-REALISTIC video game WE’VE EVER SEEN.” (Game Informer.) I’m hardly even going to make fun of that quote; Activision PR did what they had to do.
On a high-enough difficulty level, Call of Duty 4 recreates some of the dread of war. I honestly tend to avoid FPSes where you can’t see the bullets “because you can’t see the bullets in real life”, because this isn’t real life, it’s a game. Though as I’ve said above, it plays well as a game; you feel like you did something when you win, you know you messed up when you lose, no matter how many dozens of times you lose. And the presentation remains seamless.
Anyway. There’s a part where Call of Duty 4 does something shocking; I don’t really know how to explain it without spoiling it, so let’s just say that it steps back through the fourth wall for a moment. Yes, I’m saying it had been standing in front of the fourth wall for its entire running time until that moment, when it stepped back behind the fourth wall. The scene involves death — though not in a videogame-y, “Looney Tunes”-y, “if at first you don’t succeed” way, and not in a melodramatic movie way, either. It’s easy to say that “the character you’re controlling dies as a result of the narrative”, and it’s easy to look at that statement, as what it is, and nitpick away: well, in the game, you can die so many times, in the middle of so many inconsequential skirmishes, and then you just respawn almost immediately (after reading a nice little anti-war quote by some famous person whose pacifist attitude didn’t stop them from dying) and try again like nothing had ever happened.
How can narrative-related death be special at all in a piece of work in a medium where the player must die repeatedly? The answer to these question is, of course, “The death must be shocking, and awful”. It must be a huge sentence-ending punctuation mark, where previous deaths had been commas. It’s a tall order, though Call of Duty 4 pulls it off, and when it does, it leaves you feeling deeply sad, or deeply confused. Either way, it’s made its point, and it’s perhaps even more brilliant than even I’ve given it credit for: if you be a cranberry-juice-sipping, organic red onion connoisseur who’s forty-five seconds away from coining the phrase “Post-Kojima”, you will say, “Interesting”, and you will continue playing; if you be review-writer for a website with expanding advertisements for “NEW! Pepsi-Filled Doritos!” plastered all over your reviews, you will say, “The publisher sent me this for free!”, and you will keep playing; if you be an iron-pumping jock-face frat boy, you will say, “Gonna kill me them heckin’ rag heads, them heckin’ commie bastards!” and you will keep playing, to keep killing you them heckin’ rag heads, them heckin’ commie bastards.
Welcome to Post-Kojima: a world where game designers do quirky little abnormal things with their games and nobody complains.
We can only pretend to complain (which is something we excel at): after being shocked by “that scene”, I will never be shocked by it again, nor is it hardly possible for me to be shocked by anything resembling it.
And part of me wonders if they could have pulled it off so the Guy Who Dies can’t die a single “normal” “in-game” death before the Big Moment. In fact, if they’d managed to do this, I might have had to call Call of Duty 4 the best game of all-time. They’ve already orchestrated every stage of the game so that there are air-strikes, visible helicopters firing at enemies you’ll never see, and adverse weather conditions; why not go the extra (ten (thousand)) mile(s), and orchestrate it so that your guy can’t die? Oh man, I’m talking out my ass here, I know, though wouldn’t that be really cool? I’d like to say that you could have one friendly soldier “accidentally” take the hit for you every time an enemy checkmates you, though that would require there to be a lot of friendlies, in the case of the player being a total jerk and putting the controller down just to see what happens.
I guess the game’s heavy-handed treatment of friendly fire is compensation enough: namely, if you shoot and kill one of the “main” characters, the screen will sharply fade, and Dreaded White Text informs you “Friendly Fire Will Not Be Tolerated!” I got curious, after a while, and it turns out that — hey — the main characters don’t ever get mortally wounded by the enemy on their own. Interesting.
Either way, game-y deaths included, Call of Duty 4 is all “visual language”. If you “die”, the game visually tells you that you messed up, and then it visually tells you that you’re alive again. Visual language is about more than color saturation and camera angles, though. For example, I’ve seen enough military movies to know, at least, that when the guy leading me stops in place and raises his hand, that means I should stop moving forward and crouch down on the ground, or that when all the guys in front of me run up and take cover behind a low wall, I should pop into place wherever there’s room. How novel, then, that Call of Duty 4 makes these common-sense reactions the correct thing to do game-wise whenever it seems right to do them. Meanwhile, other war FPSes, like Brothers in Arms, have game-like representations for things like suppressing fire: shoot enough at a distant enemy, and the aiming circle turns red, indicating that the enemy is suppressed. In Call of Duty 4, the game doesn’t tell you when your tactics are working. They just work — or they don’t. It’s hardly even a videogame, anymore, once you’ve plunged into it. It’s mostly “entertainment”. Mostly.
Call of Duty 4‘s instruction manual is eight pages long, six if you subtract the table of contents and the blank “NOTES” page (on which I drew a picture of a thumbs-up). No character in this game ever says anything about playing the game; no one voice actor was asked to speak actual words about in-game weapons, or name a single button on the videogame controller in your hands. The people represented in this game know what they’re doing; they’re soldiers; moreover, they’re serious soldiers, serious enough to literally say “target neutralized” immediately after shooting a dog. So when you’re in a city that has been deserted, soaking in the silent awe of what might have previously been a community center of some sort, your characters are free to say things like, “Fifty thousand people used to live here.” That’s the “narrative” “emerging”; they’re not even talking about the mission — possibly because the mission is the same as it ever is: move forward, follow orders, shoot anyone who would shoot you, throw grenades when prudent. If someone says jump, don’t even ask how high — just jump as high as you can. It’ll either be high enough, or you’ll be dead. That’s all the “game” there is to Call of Duty 4: now get out there and experience Modern Warfare.
I suppose this is where Call of Duty 4 wins versus something like BioShock — and it wins quite triumphantly, and instantly (by default, almost): because it’s easy to explain. Though its narrative does indeed hide things from the player, and though it does make many (successful, virtuoso) attempts to surprise the player, it never lies; it never feels cheap. In something like BioShock, you’ve got this fantastic, imaginative underwater world, and with something that loopy, the game designers also have a huge responsibility to explain everything, and they feel a crushing pressure to dazzle the player: no body renders a computer-animated dragon if they’re not going to make that dragon breate fire. Game designers tend to (“tend to”, yes) not quite always be Tolstoy, or even Dostoyevsky, so in cases like BioShock, we end up with “Your dude was being mind-controlled by a dude with a mind-control plasmid lol”; that still doesn’t answer the question of why things like mind-control psychic powers are available from vending machines in your game world; that still doesn’t change the fact that the game’s proudest moment is ridiculous: it shows you a Defenseless Little Girl and expects you to scream “art!” because the game offers you the “moral choice” to kill or not kill the Defenseless Little Girl, like killing little girls was something normal, non-evil people might occasionally do, et cetera.
In Call of Duty 4, story-wise and game-wise, there is nothing to explain: we’re fighting a war. We’re shooting these guys because if they saw us they’d shoot us. There’s no pandering and moping about how war is bad, because, quite frankly, this game makes war look hellish, and kind of sad, which I guess is the undeniable reality of war, anyway; when you weigh my “overall impression” of this game, the impact of the representation of the somewhat depressing (in a horrific way) nature of war and the satisfying snap of the combat are about 50-50. Like BioShock, this is a game that is essentially all mood; though the playable experience disappears so completely into that mood that when the game throws us a heavily post-Kojima “mission” where we “play” as a captive powerful man, waiting to be executed, or where we operate the guns of an AC-130 gunship, scorching faceless foes, witlessly staring through a videogame within a videogame, it’s more than interesting: it’s fantastic, moving, surprising, and, most impressively, it’s absolutely effortless. Hardly any “ingenuity” went into the crafting of this experience, and I say that with the utmost respect. Rather, Call of Duty 4 was seemingly constructed like that other great Russian invention, the rollercoaster: you get some graph paper and a straightedge, you decide, right here and right now, how tall that first hill is going to be, and the rest of the hills just build themselves.
It does so many hilariously right things, like condition you to believe that every single dog you’re ever going to encounter is going to be some one-hit-killing uber-difficult enemy monsterfreak, and then it’ll suddenly throw you a part in the middle of an extended stealth segment where you have a silenced sniper rifle and there’s a downright frightening-looking wild dog hovering around a carcass nearby. You can shoot the dog and not attract any attention, though your superior says we should just navigate around the dog. It turns out, even if the dog sees you, all he does is look at you and growl. That’s pretty fantastic: here we have evidence that the world of this game actually does contain some kind of semblance of life. All it takes is one little spark. I remember the very elementary example from Dragon Quest VII: of all the dozens of cities and all the thousands of citizens in those cities, in one little town, there’s a bar, and at that bar, there’s a woman wearing a red dress, sitting alone. If you talk to the girl, she says she’s perfectly fine and she doesn’t need your company. If you talk to a man on the other side of the bar, he says, “What’s the deal with that woman in the red dress, drinking alone?” A woman in a red dress and a man wondering why she’s alone: that’s all it takes, really, to make your “entertainment software virtual field map” into a “simulated world”.
Seriously, some of the stuff in here — the ecstatically brief “final boss” comes sharply to mind — makes Hideo Kojima look like a rank amateur. We can forgive — and even love — Kojima, at the end of the day, for being something of a prankster prodding at the videogame medium just to see what kind of noises it makes, though I’m pretty sure, as he is only one man, he’d be at a loss if asked to make a game that actually, really, literally approaches the craftsmanship of, say, a Scorsese film; the people behind Call of Duty 4, on the other hand, though I have reason to believe they have studied Metal Gear, Shadow of the Colossus, and many other important games, might not be “influenced” by any of them so much as they just have a rock-solid grip on common sense. Common sense, above all else, is usually the essential ingredient in being good at anything. For a game designer, common sense involves knowing that “experience” is more important than “narrative”, that “narrative” need only be the birds in the sky (or the helicopters raging by, guns blazing).
It’s like, rather than write down a million ideas for what kind of violent psychic powers our undersea-dwelling philosophers and artists might have been able to buy from a vending machine, this is a game where missions are conceived as “Yeah, you’re going to snipe some guy, then you’re going to run away from dudes who try to blow up the hotel you’re using as a sniper base; you’re going to run about a kilometer away, there’s going to be an abandoned swimming pool, and then you’re going to hold a position while you wait for your evacuation chopper to get there. Your partner is wounded, so when the chopper gets there, you have to pick him up and carry him into the chopper.” It might not mean everything to gamers or even game-designers these days, though the fact that you actually manipulate your character all the way into the chopper, and can then aim your gun out the back and shoot at the ground as you take off is pretty crucial.
One thing that kind of got me was the mission where you play a flashback; in a lesser game, I guess it works, because who gives a stuff, really, about where Spider-Man was last Friday, as long as stuff exploded? In this game, a regular virtuoso piece when it comes to impressing us with the impact and the, uh, presence of the present, when it asks me to play something in the past, and I make a mistake in that flashback, and a message on the screen tells me “Your actions got [so and so] killed”, I think, so what? Isn’t someone supposed to be just telling this story to a bunch of marines in some god-forsaken rat-hole in western Russia right now? If he messes up in his storytelling, or forgets a detail, says “So there were some guys on the left, and I, uhh, went to the left–I mean, the right–” does that erase his former commanding officer from existence, and alter future events?
On the other hand, when the situation comes to a head and I’m aiming a sniper rifle for an extended period of time, listening to very technical explanations of how wind speed affects bullet path from my superior, I’m thinking, in my Real Life Head over here, “Well, wait, isn’t this guy I’m aiming at still alive in the present?” And suddenly, there you go — that’s kind of an interesting feeling.
There are certain situations (like when you’re sneaking around, your cover gets blown, and the enemies open fire on you) wherein your character will literally be completely helpless, and in those situations, the game does not wrest controls from your hands; instead, it lets you feel what it’s like to die because you made a mistake. Compare this to platform games like Super Mario Galaxy, where you sometimes float down into a bottomless pit, helpless, in control, yet not in control, because you made a mistake. The feeling of helplessness is far more pronounced, far more obnoxious, and, weirdly, far more forgivable in Call of Duty 4, because the said helpless situations literally always involve your dude, you gun, your grenades, and some other dudes with guns and grenades. There are no bottomless pits, bottomless for the sake of being “something that can kill you”. It’s quite deceptively impressive how effectively the game communicates to you that you can’t solve all situations with a gun or grenades — either in real life, or even in this game, where your actions are limited to shooting, throwing grenades, and moving. Yes, sometimes “Moving” is the solution to your problems. So it is that all situations in Call of Duty 4 can and will be solved by shooting, throwing grenades, running away, hiding, or some combination thereof. Well, sometimes, you have to break a dog’s neck, though it’s as much a quick-time event as not a quick-time event: the button used to kill them is always, after all, the same button as a regular melee attack. The game does not ask you — even once — to throw a lightning bolt at a pool of water in which an enemy is standing, or use a key to open a door.
I guess if I had to nitpick something, it would be that sometimes the loading times are too short to read the bountiful anti-war quotes displayed on screen whenever you die.
Okay, no, I thought of another one: in this world of Modern Warfare, there exist doors that simply will not open no matter how many times you shoot them with an Uzi or stab them with your combat knife. No, these doors will only open when your commanding officer walks up to them and deems them fit to be opened. I can’t really call this a fault of the game, because,
1. How would my character know where to go, really? He’s just a grunt; he doesn’t have the intel.
2. Poking around at random doors is not listed as one of his orders.
3. 99% of the time, the game is very good about giving the player orders, and telling him where to go, and where to be.
4. If you play the game like a good soldier and not like a jerk, you should be able to make everything look pretty smooth.
I’ve said, before, that games can perhaps never be “art” because I seriously can’t think of a single game that some jerk can’t just pick up and immediately tilt the right analog stick to one side, cackling as the camera spins in circles — or some equivalent action. I was disappointed quite ferociously when I tried to show a particular friend the first stage of Stranglehold, a game that, if played correctly, looks really cool (though still not as cool as an actual John Woo movie); he immediately identified how silly it looks when the protagonist slides back and forth across a countertop. We here at Action Button Dot Net collectively say: heck that guy. I’m guaranteeing you, game developers: if you make a game that aspires to “art” if played all the way through, adjusting the camera a minimal amount of times and performing only the necessary actions, we will gladly attempt to play the game that way. Because, I mean, why not? I don’t see anyone else making that particular promise. I might as well make it.
Is Call of Duty 4 art if played perfectly, pristinely, quickly, and efficiently? If you never die, if you never get shot, is Call of Duty 4 as emotionally affecting as Saving Private Ryan? (Here we refrain from asking whether or not “Saving Private Ryan” is art.) The answer to this question is — surprise! — that that’s a &^#$#ed question: if you’re good enough at the game to not die or not get hit, then you’re probably not having “fun”; if you’re just watching someone else play, you’re more prone to ask questions like “why are there numbers on the screen?” “what does ‘checkpoint reached’ mean?” or “why does the camera almost never show anyone’s face?” In-game death, sometimes of the meaningless, un-telegraphed variety, motivates the player to be more observant; surviving the same challenge on a subsequent attempt makes him feel accomplished, or even entertained. So, in asking the question of how we can make a game that entertains the player without requiring the player to perform perfectly, we end up back at that boring question of how we can motivate the player to do better without making his on-screen avatar realistically die and then come right back to life.
For now, maybe just tweaking the respawn presentation is all we need. Just make the screen fade to black really quick, and then fade back up. Maybe make every checkpoint occur immediately after a memorable line of dialog: no one will be able to complain about hearing a particular line over and over again, because that would mean revealing when and where you died multiple times. “Looks like Christmas is coming three times this year — for the second time today!” you hear, just as you respawn, and you think, “Oh — I’m back here”.
I’m picking this nit really, really hard, right here, because it’s all I have; maybe you’ve come to realize that that’s the nature of this website. Call of Duty 4‘s singleplayer mode is a focused, tight game, of a voraciously consumable, short running time, with minimal filler or nonsense. It strokes the player’s ego sometimes, sure, with all the Tangoes and Charlies being bandied about, though hey, we might as well just chalk that up to etiquette: the player isn’t lying to himself; he’s admitting that he’s obviously the type of person to sit in his underwear in the dark in the dead of night controlling a pretend soldier in a pretend war. Might as well be nice to him. The play mechanics disappear almost completely into the structure and flow of the campaign, et cetera et cetera — so why can’t I turn off all the HUD elements? Much as I like that Einstein quote about how World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones, why can’t I turn those quotes off? What if I don’t want to know precisely how many bullets are left in my clip, or whenever the game has just saved itself?
Actually, I’m playing this online, multiplayer, right now (review of Call of Duty 4 multiplayer: fun!), and I’ve just noticed that my gun doesn’t bob up and down realistically when I move while crouched. Yes! That’s another significant complaint right there!
A less significant complaint is that I’m not quite sure what “throw back” means, even after beating the game — am I picking a grenade up off the ground and then throwing it back at the enemy? If so, why does the grenade just manage to suddenly appear in my hand? There’s no bend-over-and-grab animation. It’s a little confusing.
Also, I suppose I could mention that the textures on some of the surfaces are pretty low-resolution, though I reckon nobody would learn anything from my pointing that out. They obviously chose the lower textures so they could concentrate on performance, et cetera.
Many of my friends had trouble with the dreaded “Ferris Wheel” mission, so I guess that’s worth pointing out: there’s a Ferris wheel. You have one guy sniping enemy dudes from a grassy hill. The game gives you thirty seconds to plant some mines and C4 before going to hide in the shadows. You shoot some dudes, then shoot some more dudes, then you get a checkpoint; then a load of dudes comes in. The thing is, the C4 is really handy for the load of dudes; however, if you already placed the C4 in a not-perfect place, you’re hecked. I’ve polled my Gmail chat list, and something like one-third of the people I know who played this game gave up entirely at that mission. That kind of sucks; I reloaded my save, gladly played the run-up to the Ferris Wheel again, and planted C4 on the cars, so as to bomb the guys as they slid down the helicopter ropes. It did pretty good!
I really don’t know what else to say about this game; having just mentioned helicopters and ropes in the preceding paragraph, I am thinking about Choplifter, and wishing that Infinity Ward would make something of a Choplifter reboot / remake for next-generation consoles. Call it Call of Duty: Chopper. Let me fly a helicopter, rescuing dudes from the heat of battle, or dropping dudes off. Ascend or descend with L1 and R1; drop bombs with the L trigger, and firemachine guns with the R trigger. Let me use a badass rope ladder to rescue dudes if the “landing zone” (that’s “LZ” from now on) is “too hot”. There could be an online multiplayer mode, only it’d be more like Rock Band, because people would be forced to cooperate — you’ve got one guy flying the chopper, the other aiming the machine gun, and, uhh, I’m sure the pilot could handle the bombs and ladder himself, actually. So yeah — two-player co-op isn’t too bad! Your army would be ideally competing with another army, with their own two-man chopper team. You could build a pretty great game out of piloting a helicopter, with clever enough level design, like those Strike games EA made forever ago. What do you say, Infinity Ward? Pay me $100,000 a year and I’ll come over there and design the triumphant return of helicopter games for you. I’ll lease a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution — a red one — not six minutes after getting off the plane, just so I can drive over to your office and design a game about a helicopter. I’m not even kidding. I’ll design it all day and all night. Helicopters, man. They’re the next big thing, I’m not even kidding.
To sum up: Call of Duty 4 is a tight-as-hell game with seamless atmosphere, a compelling narrative that’s more about the Hollywoodian moment-to-moment nature of its experience than about any straightforward plot, and moments of actual cathartic power that take advantage of the whole package. Though the multiplayer is fun, I might never play through the singleplayer campaign again, much as I will fondly remember it as a thrilling piece of work and recommend it to friends and game designers for the next several years. No, dear readers, it’s not the “Best Game Ever” — and I won’t dare say that I could think of a better game (even though I can: I mean, just make a Zelda game with the focus and attention to detail of something like Call of Duty 4; I say this as a person who feels pretty much zero emotion when I hear the word “Zelda”, so take it or leave it) — and I still like Gears of War a tiny bit better, just because of the sheer ridiculousness of it. Much as I love Gears, though, I recognize that it’s not for everyone, so I wholeheartedly, hereby, allow the people of the world to like Call of Duty 4. And if you’re a game developer, please: this is the one (well, this and Portal) that you should rip off.
2008
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“A GRINNING CORPSE.”
And so this is Christmas — and what have we Mario Kart Wii.
Actually, so proud of that first sentence right there, I let this review sit untouched for an hour and a half, and now that air has returned to my lungs and the pain in the pit of my stomach has evaporated, I have no idea what I was going to say. It was going to all be very coherent and straightforward, and I was probably going to call this game the “Best Mario Kart Yet!” and maybe even give it a perfect score. I don’t know anymore, though. So it often goes with criticism — you have to nip opinions in the bud, or else they start to change. Looks like I’m going to just have to complain about this game’s box for seven or eight paragraphs before actually talking about the game, and by the time I start talking about the game, you’ll have already counted all the paragraphs and reported the tally on your favorite web forum, and damned me repeatedly to the Special Hell for obese, homosexual serial murderers. Which, if only you’d stick around to the end of the review, you’d see is precisely the thing that a person who “likes” Mario Kart is supposed to do, anyway.
Insert the sound of me sighing! (If you need help imagining what I look like, imagine the World’s Fattest, Gayest Serial Murderer.)
Before I commence a long, perhaps-planned (“second-degree”) tangent about the box, let’s take a look at this sentence, which I’m pretty sure I had planned out in my head long before I lost concentration:
“Mario Kart Wii turns any weeknight into Christmas Eve.”
I’m pretty sure that when I first cooked that sentence up in my brain I meant to use it in a fairly straightforward review, in which I compared Mario Kart Wii fondly to what many human beings growing up in first-world countries consider to be a delicious and savorable evening of family togetherness and friendly rivalry as each prodigal brothers communicates the girth of his derring-dos far away from the fireplace.
Now, though, a few hours (during which “office work” was done) and several espressos removed from the original typing of that sentence, I’m capable of a more linear forensic analysis: perhaps, subconsciously, the writer of that sentence (“me”) was considering his own definition of Christmas Eve, which includes references to being locked in his room upstairs (by his own hand), gritting his teeth at the sound of pleasure rumbling up from downstairs, and girding up his loins for the morning, when he, despite pulling in a 4.0 GPA for his entire life and never speaking a single profane word, will not receive a single gift. More to the point, he’s going to have to sit there by the Christmas tree and watch his little brother open morbidly expensive present after morbidly expensive present — or else be excommunicated from his parents’ idea of the Catholic Church.
That is to say, yes, “Christmas” for me is synonymous with gritting my teeth and hissing like a rabid fairy whilst all the world becomes an orchestra in the name of pleasing someone even fatter than I am.
To be fair, Mario Kart Wii isn’t exactly like Christmas — in the case of real Christmas, my little brother would hop aboard the Fun Train at “YESSSSSSSSSSSS” Station and crash immediately into a wall, almost as animalistically pleased to report that “THIS SHIT IS BROKEN ALREADY WHAT THE heck” as he had been five minutes ago when he said “SWEET DUDE THIS IS ALL I EVER WANTED”. With Mario Kart Wii, no one complains that dad is a limp-noodle moron for not buying enough AA batteries, because they’re all “having fun” pointing the remote control at their RC cars and pretending it’s moving.
Here is where I am tempted, as I usually am, to say all the positive things about the game, just to get it out of the way. That means it’s time, once again, to engage my masterminded plan to Get the Kids off my Lawn — ie, begin the tongue-speaking tangent ritual. Lucky for you guys, I might have actually had this tangent written out for, like, two months already:
So Mario Kart Wii is the next title in a long line of games that come with a plastic accessory to snap the Wii Remote into. This time, it’s a steering wheel. Snap your Wiimote into this plastic steering wheel — made of delicious, vinyl smelling, pistol-heavy white plastic — and now you can pretend you’re driving a car. On your sofa! Welcome to the future!
The Wii Wheel is Nintendo’s first perhaps-inadvertent acknowledgement of just how silly the name “Wii” is, particularly because it repeats the “Whee” sound twice in a row, giving us a play on “Wee-wee”, which is a “cute” name that young parents frighteningly think up when it comes time to tell their male children what that shrunken sausage between their thighs is, or explain to their little girls what a dictionary would have to say about when water starts voluntarily leaking out the crack between their legs. Why didn’t they just call the accessory the “Wiil”? Probably because it would look ridiculous. You know how you can repeat a word over and over and over again, and then suddenly the word loses all meaning (Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove)? It’d be a lot like that. For over a year now, I personally have been comfortable with the name “Wii”. It has, for the longest time, struck me as entirely juvenile that any adult (at least, I’m pretty sure that anyone smart enough to type words on the internet must be an adult) would see the name “Wii” and think of “Wee-wee” — a maturity-archaic descriptor for urinary evacuation and/or the penis itself — before they would think of, I don’t know, “We”, the preferred first-person plural pronoun of English students worldwide.
If you set your mind to it, you can make any molehill into an apocalypse, so let’s try with the Wii Wheel: it is rigidly documented that when Nintendo’s concept-men got together under the Fellowship of the Revolution, desiring only to reinvent the way people think about budget-priced half-hearted morally void videogames, they had absolutely no idea what they were going to make in the end. On Kotaku there was this story linked once, with a bunch of pictures of concept sketches for the Nintendo “Revolution”‘s eventual controller. One of them was shaped like a huge Super Mario invincibility star (I can’t call it a “Starman” in good faith because that would be infringing on the David Bowie song, and infringing on David Bowie (he’s a big fan of the site) is something the Action Button Action Legal Team has told me repeatedly not to do), and it had like five buttons on it, one at each point. I guess players were supposed to press the Happy Button whenever they started to feel sad, and the various games (yet with pre-production titles like “Next Mario Game” and “Next Zelda Game” and “Next Animal Crossing“) would reciprocate by playing back a happy, encouraging text-message related to the day’s weather (internet connection required): “Six days of rain in a row means the price of brown rice will be sixteen yen cheaper per kilogram three months from now!”
Flash back way before this, and remember that time at an E3 press conference when Satoru Iwata, who we at Action Button Dot Net are dead convinced is absolutely not a stupid person, walked on-stage and presented the audience with their reward for bearing the heat of the afternoon and stale muffins: a little plastic box. “This is our new games console. It’s finished, and it’s the size of three DVD cases stacked on top of one another!” Amazed, shrieking applause followed.
Basically, that was Satoru Iwata talking out his balls, though not in the way you think: the console most certainly was complete. I mean, let’s face it, the thing’s just a Gamecube with a spec bump. I’m not knocking that aspect of the Wii, not by a longshot. In fact, I’m applauding the size of its testicles: Nintendo had slaved away for years under a liverspotted coal-tar-stuffting octogenarian with an epic mean streak, Sunday-driving down one wrong boulevard after another, and eventually they’d lost touch with the “people” that had made them rich in the first place. If Iwata were a character in Final Fantasy Tactics, he’d be a level 99 Calculator, for sure: with one swift flick of his wrist, he was able to make an epicly large percentage of Japanese Human Beings go bug-eyed at the sight of outdated graphics and tinny sound. All it took to pull off this magic trick was one bite-sized cypher: the idea-nugget that there are gamers, and there are non-gamers, and that non-gamers can be divided up into “people who have never played games” and “people who played games before and then stopped”, and that “people who played games before and then stopped”, while perhaps a smaller group than “people who have never played games”, are in fact probably a larger group than “gamers”. The point of Nintendo’s Revolution Vigil, during which I’m guessing a dozen greying men huddled in a bomb shelter subsisting on a meat-locker full of Boss Coffee for three months was to figure out how, exactly, to package the Same Old Shit in a way that made Grandma and Grandpa stuff their same old pants with excitement.
In the end, the “Wii”, a moniker chosen for its “first-person plural” aspect as well as its similarity to a shout of uncontrollable glee, was born and branded as “The DS, on your TV — only now, the stylus is invisible“. The DS, of course, had been the result of Satoru Iwata having conveniently eaten a Very Grotesquely Large Salad and a bowl of rice precisely twenty-two hours before first seeing the television commercials for Sony’s EyeToy: during that forty-five minute breakneck brickstuff, Iwata must have screamed “Eureka!” so many times that he couldn’t not invent the Nintendo DS by the time he began washing his hands. If only Sony Japan had had a little faith, if only they hadn’t dismissed “casual games” as something the Japanese don’t “do”, or if only Sony Europe had developed some solid concepts (like, say, EyeToy games that were deeper than window-washing and/or don’t feature the player’s horrifyingly-lit slack-jawed visage as the “protagonist”) to sell said septegenarian board members, then maybe the PlayStation 2 would be the top-selling console instead of the Wii, and the PlayStation 3 would either look more or less depressing, given your perspective.
Alternate sentence-clump I couldn’t fit in the above paragraph: long before I obtained an interest in poetry and my penis got so inexplicably large, I worked at a GameStop in Indiana, from roughly the Dreamcast launch to the PlayStation 2 launch. Right before the PlayStation 2 was released, Sony sent us demo stations, with fiber-optic blue track-lighting embedded in frosted glass: “PlayStation 2”, it said. We put this demo kiosk right next to the Dreamcast demo kiosk, and the kids who we accidentally babysat while their mother stood in the women’s shoe store across the hall looking lonely would stand there and squeal at the sphere-eyed, single-complexioned John Madden Football Warriors on screen: “PlayStation Two is toight!” We switched the PlayStation 2 inside for a Dreamcast, with the objectively-better-looking NFL 2K1, and the kids began to ogle it, and squeal: “PlayStation Two is toight!” In the end, we probably hecked up the world economy in a chaos-theory sort of way — maybe our trickery of those dumb kids, for selfish purposes, had been the butterfly-wing-flap that brought about the DS/Wii hurricane, who knows. Though at the time, it really, honestly seemed like something to do.
Back in the real world, here we are with this Nintendo Wii wheel. I’m not going to make too much fun of it, because it has a delicious weight and it smells like vintage vinyl records. It also manages to miraculously fill in some kind of psychological gap and feel, most of the time, not at all like bullstuff. This is remarkable, I guess, because games like Excitetruck on the Wii and Motorstorm on the PlayStation 3 have featured controller-tilting steering wheel controls and mostly ended up feeling cheap instead of psychically immersive. The Wii Wheel is no second coming of Christ or anything, though playing Mario Kart Wii with and without it leads me to mathematically declare that yes, it does make a difference.
Still, there’s a sort of weird pseudo-backwardness about it. If Nintendo’s goal with the Wii was to create new genres of fun while lighting peoples’ imaginations on fire, and if this goal required them to make a controller that was as simple as possible, why complicate things? What’s with all the add-ons? Like, I was at the presentation where Iwata revealed the new controller; I heard him say their goal was to make the simplest game controller possible, because a PlayStation pad was too daunting and the sight of an Xbox controller gave grandpa epilepsy; I thought it was hilarious, brilliant. Then they rolled out the nunchuk attachment, as if to say, “You can play regular games on it, too.” That left me a tiny bit confused. I don’t even feel like finishing this paragraph now, to be honest, so I’ll just say, and objectively, that if this world we live in is one where a PlayStation 3 controller, with four face buttons, a D-pad, four triggers, and two analog sticks, can and will make your aunt call the cops, then the Nintendo Wii Remote, plus protective rubber safety condom, plus nunchuk, is obviously a hybrid sextoy / murder-weapon, and you will need a Catholic priest to perform an exorcism on your eventual death bed if you’ve ever so much looked at one.
Though the initial Nintendo “Revolution” controller concept reel clearly showed a guy playing (from a point of view inside the TV, looking out — a crucial point for what we’re going to discuss later) a first-person shooter of some sort, Nintendo eventually released a “Zapper” peripheral, which is no more than a hollow shell that cheaply binds your remote and nunchuk together into the shape of a crude gun. It’s supposed to help the players’ imaginations, or something. If you ask me, it looks like what happens when the cinematographer for “Star Trek” drinks on the set.
If Nintendo is all about giving us this magnificent magic wand — and the Wiimote is a grand technological icon on par with the iPod, don’t get me wrong — and letting our imaginations run wild, why must they continually doubt our imaginations?
I would put that question in huge, bold letters, though something holds me back. I guess it’s the fact that, yes, I find that the Wii Wheel really does enhance the experience of using controller tilts to steer in Mario Kart Wii. Instead, all I can do is whimper: though the controller is shaped like a steering wheel, we have to press the “2” button on the Wiimote in order to accelerate, which makes it absolutely impossible to employ the 10-2 position on the wheel while playing the game. Why bother to simulate driving, if you’re going to force people to do so in such a manner that would, in the case of a real-life head-on collision and airbag deployment, result in the driver’s right hand flipping backward at a high enough speed to possibly break the passenger’s neck? (I smell a very loose class-action lawsuit, though I suppose Japan is exempt, for obvious reasons.)
When Nintendo announced — at the same press conference where they revealed the remote — that they’d be making “shells” for enhancing the remote, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I thought “shell” had been a slip — I thought they meant they’d keep making attachments like the nunchuk, things with buttons or whatever on them.
Therefore: if the upcoming Super Mario Sluggers baseball game comes with a baseball bat shell for the remote, it will be the Piece of White Plastic that Broke the Aircraft Carrier’s Back, and I will walk down to my local convenient store, withdraw 6,000 yen from the ATM, and proceed to eat it right there, in front of the super-hot visual-kei cashier dude. Maybe he’ll mistake me for a hardass, or else a wounded lunatic, and he’ll ask for my phone number, and we can have tea parties.
This, of course, is not even the tangent I meant to go on. No, it’s all just context for what I’m about to say:
Mario Kart Wii‘s box, in addition to being shiny, delicious, and somehow both white and colorful, in addition to being packed just firmly enough to squeeze with the tips of the fingers, setting off “I am holding a High-Quality Videogame Product, I must run home and eat a bowl of cereal AQAP” alarms within my obese human brain, also features a picture of Super Mario himself, and his brother Luigi, both holding Wii Wheels.
Why are they holding the Wii Wheel? Well, they’re playing Mario Kart Wii, of course.
An open-mouthed forensic analysis of this follows:
Mario and Luigi are holding the Wii Wheel on the front of the box for Mario Kart Wii.
They are floating on air, with feet kicking wildly and surprised expressions on their faces.
Their feet are, for the record, not in the position that people’s feet would need to be in to operate an automobile.
Beneath their bodies are shadows of what look to be formula-1 race cars.
The Wii Wheel is included in the box, as is a copy of Mario Kart Wii.
The photograph of the Wii Wheel in the background of the cover image is the actual size of the Wii Wheel in the box.
The DVD case containing the Mario Kart Wii software also features the picture of Mario and Luigi using the Wii Wheel.
The Wii Wheel in the background image of the instruction manual cover is a drawing, not a photograph.
It is also not actual size, for obvious reasons.
The Wii Wheel is not needed to play Mario Kart Wii.
The Seventh Circle of Hell is revealed on the game’s title screen, which features a (much-lower-resolution) instance of the aforementioned image.
(An inside-the-box observation: Amazon.co.jp’s official image of this game’s box is an actual photograph of the actual box, with an airbrushed shadow and all.)
(An outside-the-box observation: videogames are about us pretending to do things; in Mario Kart, we step into Mario’s virtual shoes as we hold a real-like steering wheel. Mario’s use of the wheel on this box can then only be seen as a mockery of us flesh-and-blood creations: if this game is about pretending to drive a car, then Mario is pretending to pretend to drive a car. Et cetera.)
Now, it is quite possible that Mario and Luigi are sitting on a sofa, though the sofa has been invisibled for presumably the same reasons that music comes even out of the trash cans at Disneyland. That’s not the point. The point is that here were are, adults, Horny As Hell in the 21st Century, possibly fornicating three or four times a week, possibly enjoying fornicating more than our forefathers did, and here’s Mario and Luigi, holding the same controller I’m holding, freaking out as they look in my direction. I’m about to press the A button and begin the enthralling user registration process, and they’re already having fun, albeit in freeze-frame. This is when the Nintendo “Revolution” concept reel showed off at Tokyo Game Show 2005 all comes rushing back to me: cheap horror-movie sounds, a young boy in a yellow T-shirt aiming the Wiimote with his right hand and twiddling an analog stick with his left hand while his girlfriend’s teeth chatter; some said that the “Revolution” was Nintendo giving a spiritual tax refund to those numb nincompoops who thought pulling the NES controller sharply upward might make Mario jump higher, and maybe those people were right; at the time, all that was certain was that Nintendo was now inside the game, looking out at us. We would be the stars in their new games, just as “You” would be TIME magazine’s “person of the year” in 2006. When the “Wii” was eventually named, and then quickly launched, the brilliant gateway for many non-players was the opportunity to craft a “Mii”, a videogame character that would essentially look like you — if you were a videogame character (with somewhat stuffty graphics).
Flash forward to 2008, an era some have dubbed “The Now”: here we have Established Videogame Characters, the Super Mario Brothers, aka Mario and Luigi, holding the game controller that real-life you and me are using to control said Established Videogame Characters in said Established Videogame Franchise. It’s easy to generalize, and raise up scarecrow debates, like how it’s bizarre that the box art (and title screen) portrays videogame characters doing something human beings can do on their own instead of portray them doing the fantastic, escapist things they can do in the ame, or ask hilarious questions like “What’s next, Little Sister using an Xbox 360 controller to control Big Daddy on the front of BioShock 2?”
More to the point: Part of Nintendo’s policy for Wii software was (and continues to be) that the advertisements always feature real-life human beings enjoying the games. Wii Play‘s box shows a real human hand clinging to a Wiimote, for example. With games like Smash Bros., with strong brand appeal and old-school controls, the advertising standards didn’t enter the equation. With Mario Kart Wii, Nintendo had themselves painted into a corner — on the one hand, we’ve got this orgasmically beloved characters, and on the other hand, we have a clever new way to engorge the players’ endorphins, to make them feel the car. That they went with advertising both at once is a no-brainer; that they made said image into their game’s title screen is the trumpet of a kind of third-world apocalypse. It bangs a gong in the brain: at Nintendo, something has changed.
Then you realize that, by playing Mario Kart Wii for enough hours, you can unlock the ability to use your Mii in a race.
The argument that ensues is awesome. You can figure it out yourself, because I have to throw up right now, for reasons completely not related to this article, or even videogames. It’ll be like a mad-lib. I’ll write the beginning:
“If and when they make a Wii2, with 720p graphics and a hard-drive, if and when they upgrade the Miis so their appendages don’t look as gimpy and/or so they can have more interesting clothes and a couple more face part options (multicolored hair, et cetera), there will still be a ‘Classic Mii’ option, for people who want the gimpy appendages or more limited selection of noses.”
And then the ending:
“And when, at last, Classic Mii Kart Wii 2 is released, you’ll be able to unlock Baby Mario.”
ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE GAME NOW
That was fun!
Now let’s talk about Mario Kart Wii. I’ll use the inverted pyramid method to summarize:
Mario Kart Wii for the Nintendo Wii, by Nintendo: you’ve played it already, or it’s definitely not your favorite game ever. I despise the weapons and everything they represent. The tracks are shining examples of good videogame level design — great videogame level design, even. We’re talking Original-Super Mario Bros.-worthy level design. Even the jerk-off parts in two tracks where you get fired out of a cannon and thus are not controlling the game for a whole three seconds are forgivable when, upon landing, you’re, like, going down a snowboard slope, with awesome speed-boosting half-pipes. The motorcycles are cool, with appropriately floaty drift mechanics, and the ability to do wheelies for extra speed boost. The graphics are colorful and sharp, with gritty textures that look actually cute, even confectionary-like; it’s like the Wii’s hamster-wheel graphics processor is finding a niche as some kind of sideways “new retro”. The character voices are hateful trash, a cacophony of homicidal crocodiles kacking down cotton candy, schizophrenic ostriches kacking down skittles, kleptomanic velociraptors kacking down broken glass; the music, for the most part, sounds like something a Brazilian community college professor would compose as a tool for conditioning the more gorillia-like breed of human &^#$# to masturbate to, thus sparing the lives and virginities of entire city blocks. Donkey Kong is great, and it’s sad that his voice sounds like Goofy drowning in Jell-O.
Now that that’s over with, I’m going to go back and expand on the second sentence of the above paragraph re: weapons.
I hate the weapons. Well, not all of them. The green shell and the banana peel can stay. And, of course, the speed-boost mushroom, which isn’t a “weapon”, anyway.
Anyway, most of the rest of the weapons are hateful. Let’s go ahead and make a list, in order from least to most hateful:
Red Shells: I guess these are kind of okay. They target the person in front of you — or right behind you — and they’re usually a sure hit, though they can be avoided.
Bob-omb: throw in any direction to cause a big explosion that can possibly catch many other drivers at once. I guess it’s decent because it takes a bit of skill to use, and it’s dangerous because you can get yourself caught up in the blast.
Thunder cloud: a thunder cloud appears above your car and hisses at you for a bit; wait too long and it’ll strike you with lightning and shrink you; tag another racer before the lightning comes out and the cloud will stick to his car, instead. Decent because it makes for a nice little game of hot potato and it carries a risk.
Super dash mushroom: a dash mushroom that can be used something like twenty times in rapid succession. Basically the game’s way of telling you that you suck, though you might stand a chance of getting better if only you win a couple of races and feel good about yourself.
Mega mushroom: turns your car twice the size and jacks the speed up to 200%. You can also crush any drivers you run over. Mostly fair because there’s a risk accompanying the reward (ie, your car is harder to control).
Invincibility Star: makes you invincible and about 200% faster. Kind of almost the same thing as the Mega Mushroom.
Bullet Bill: turns your car and driver into a Bullet Bill, which flies at about 1000% the speed of your car, flattening anything in its path and usually jumping you ahead ten or so places in the race; really easy to control. Kind of really stupidly unfair in a “Yay Button” sort of way.
POW Block: use this to cause an earthquake, flattening every car that’s touching the ground. Wouldn’t be quite so hateful if it was a tiny bit easier to avoid the quakes. I suppose you’re supposed to jump at some precise millisecond to avoid it, though I haven’t succeeded at it once. Always seems to impact just as you land on a tiny island before a ramp that will jump you to another tiny island, meaning that you fall into a pit and lose about twelve places in the race.
hecking Squid Thing: No, I’m not going to call it by its canonical name. Use this stupid thing to telepathically squirt ink on every driver in front of you, making it “harder” for them to “see”. If you get hit with this yourself, that means there’s going to be a big ugly black “ink” effect on the screen, obstructing your view. If you use this against computer racers, the “ink driving” AI algorithm kicks in, everyone starts bizarrely wobbling back and forth, and it’s horribly depressing: for a split-split second, your brain becomes unable to differentiate between the phrases “next time I get laid” and “the day I die”. Seriously, obstructing the view is not a good idea for a videogame. Have you ever heard about that blind kid who can beat anyone at Mortal Kombat? Yeah, that’s because Mortal Kombat isn’t a real videogame.
Lightning Bolt: awarded only to the most headgear-wearing-&^#$#ed of players, those who are in twelfth place and deserve to be there forever. When used, it shrinks every other kart on the course to half speed and half size, making them instantly crushable by the lightning-bolt-using driver. However, it does not change the fact that the driver who used it most likely sucks. It awards them only hope, for a few seconds, before restoring everything to normal and telling the jerk who used it to get to the back of the bus again. In short, it just causes immense annoyance to anyone who’s not losing to everyone.
The Fake Item Box: for heck’s sake, it doesn’t look anything like a real item box. For one thing, it’s red, and for another thing, the question mark is upside-down. According to the Japanese manual, “It looks exactly like a real item box.” That’s hecking false advertising, right there. I mean, I suppose that the average Japanese person doesn’t immediately reject an upside-down question mark, and — well, I realize that the average American can’t identify the North American continent on a map, though hell. It’s really, stupidly embarrassing, this thing. Anyone who hits one is either stupid enough to think it’s a real item box or just forced into a position where there’s no alternative, and in the latter case, they’re just going to think (if they’re like me, which I’m sure everyone is) of how ridiculous it is that these game designers might seriously think (or, even worse, be pretending to think) that people will mistake this thing for a real item box.
The Blue Shell: . . . well.
The Blue Shell is a sign of the times; it’s the first nail in the coffin of game design. Know that I come from a proud heritage of people who play Virtua Fighter 5 and genuinely enjoy losing because it teaches you something.
If you’re in a losing position and have been for a good amount of time, an algorithm behind the scenes kicks in and awards you a Blue Shell. Use it, and it rushes to the head of the pack and crashes into the person in first place with absolute certainty. Other drivers in the general area will also be decimated.
I’m sure that the general idea of the Blue Shell when it first appeared, in Super Mario Kart 64, was that a person in last place would obtain it, shudder with joy, and then be filled with the turgid urge to claw their way to the head of the pack and use it when within strategic range of the leaders.
In the current “videogame industry”, though, things like the Blue Shell are communistic concessions thrown to the people who Aren’t Getting Better. If my little brother, say, spent twenty hours a day doing something other than playing videogames — that is to say, if he sucked at videogames — the Blue Shell would be his “Best Thing Ever”: something to use when bitter and bored, to ruin the chances of the person who’s just so happening to win. The Blue Shell, simply described, is an easy way to strike back at the person who’s beating everyone, when you are the one losing to everyone. If that’s not heady, frothy communism in action, I really don’t know what the hell is. How is this a more family-friendly experience than killing hookers in Grand Theft Auto? If anything, the sugar-coating just makes the arsenic more dangerous, and it can’t be too hard to prove, from here, that Nintendo fanboys — big, sweaty, mouth-breathing — are actually individuals of scarier morals than most self-mutilating suicide-bombing terrorists.
Since the Nintendo Wii is the game console of the proletariat (“the game console of the proletariat” is the nice way to say “they should sell most of the games in the supermarket tabloid rack, next to ‘1,001 Baby Names for Girls (Now with more mixed-race names)'”), Nintendo has seen about sharpening the item randomization algorithms to razor edges. Everyone always has a chance to be in first place in Mario Kart Wii, which seems to make sense because I suppose it’s meant to be a “party” game for people with “friends”, though when you’re playing it dead alone, against a cold last-gen computer chip that’s only just barely powerful enough to keep a graphing calculator from meeting “six divided by three” with “ERROR”, and you’re about to cross the hecking finish line in first place and get hit by a POW Block, a Lightning Bolt, a Blue Shell, a Red Shell, and then the hecking Squid Thing — all it seems to do is present striking evidence that the world is full of pricks.
The theories seem stable enough: if we construct a few detailed Venn diagrams, we can prove that the person using the Blue Shell now might be the most technically skilled of players. He might just be having a run of stuffty luck because, of all the things we can mathematically prove about a race with more than two live (as in “not dead”) racers, someone must be losing at any given time, meaning that someone is getting these Almighty Items, and then using them, either out of bitterness or out of hope.
If you’ve got a pen and paper (or MSPaint), start making a flowchart of this: it is possible for a Good Player to be hecked back into last place, though Almighty Items only appear if one is in last place for a set period of time; a Good Player will most likely be able to advance a few places before being awarded an Almighty Item.
With a little bit of work I’m not 100% willing to do right now (got an erection again T-T), it can be quite easily proven that the only reason these items were originally conceived, in earlier installments of the series, was to make it possible for losers to become winners occasionally, and that in Mario Kart Wii, the items mainly exist to “liven up” the contest.
I have seen police officers who will accuse a man of being a homosexual for insisting that Mario Kart should just let the best man win. I’m well aware that I’m going to get at least a dozen half-sentence emails telling me that I obviously don’t like having fun. I’m fully prepared to ignore them. I stand by my assertion that maybe there’s a way to make an amazingly fun game with just a few weapons that require a small amount of skill to use.
In the name of research, I ironed my hair, donned designer eyeglasses, and gathered up a group of fourteen carrot-skinned, silver-lipped, corkscrew-beehive-headed Dolce-and-Gabbana-sunglasses-wearing Japanese part-time prostitutes and made them wait outside my apartment in single file while I forced each one in turn to play Mario Kart Wii for an hour. Twelve of them would ask me for money, six would report me to the police and press rape charges, and I think two of them actually didn’t have brains or eyes, though all of them managed to win first, second, or third place on cumulative points in the 50cc Mushroom Cup, despite them all whipping the wheel around over their heads and flailing like a lunatic, like they’d never even seen a guy driving a car in a movie.
In the end, there was me, trying to win the 150cc Special Cup, being hecked over countless times by jerk-off Lightning Bolts or Blue Shells and winding up in second place overall, maybe a dozen times in a row. It comes to feel almost like video poker, after a while — the computer obviously knows what you need in order to win, and though it’s illegal in a sense if it relies on anything more than raw math to determine what cards are dealt, when you do lose, you feel like stuff and you’re dead positive that god hates you.
It can be surmised even by an elementary school dropout that Mario Kart Wii is designed from the ground up to be “a game that people enjoy with their friends”. At what cost to our dignity, though? By “our” I don’t just mean “Hardcore video-gamers”, I mean “the human race”. There’s some Brave-New-World-style stuff peeking out from behind mama’s skirt, here: why would someone even care to get “better” if it’s possible to just keep relying on the jerk-ass weapons and occasionally getting a lucky break, just for being a jerk? With Virtua Fighter 5, it’s like, if you lose to a guy, it’s because he’s better than you. If you really like the game, you’ll keep playing whether you win or lose — with the idea being that you should want to win. Mario Kart Wii imagines a world where “it’s not whether you win or lose — it’s how you play the game” or “it’s all in good fun” or “they’re just jealous” are not just something gym teachers tell the fat kid the day he gets hazed to death in the showers; it imagines that world, and then it runs with it, straight for the gates of Hell, nose to the sky. That ain’t how it always is, jack. They wouldn’t call it a “game” if it was possible to not want to win. Someone up there needs to respect that. Rather than rely on its existing, sharp, utterly enjoyable core mechanics to encourage players to play more and get better, the game scoops out its right eye and offers it to the gods of $$$. And it sold 300,000 units on its launch day in Japan.
Mario Kart Wii unfolds as a game-design exercise with the personality of that sniveling rat bastard at every Japanese corporate party, the one who squints at a spreadsheet all day, doing no real work, and feels inadequate that he’s not bench-pressing intertwined naked lesbians on his lunch breaks, who decides in his dead samurai heart that he must go around, get in everyone’s face, take their drinks out of their hands, hold them just out of reach, chortle, guffaw, and make sure everyone is having Adequate Amounts of Fun. Some day he’ll blackmail a decently not-unattractive woman into marrying him, and when his child gets kicked in the balls at school because his dad is an asshole, he’ll tell his wife that it’s a tough world and people have to learn. Deep within the jumble of motives and execution-style hiccups called Mario Kart Wii is a mathematical proof for why you should never let the Boss speak a single suggestive word at a meeting requiring creativity: the Boss, if nothing else, exists only to ask the most hideously obvious, stupid questions at the latest time possible, and usually, if he doesn’t do this, the whole company will figuratively go down the drain. By the end of a brain-dead night of trophy collecting, of the coin-toss-like stiff odds, of the pachinko race dynamics, of the unbelievable, improbable luck that the same two racers keep finishing in the top three even though you and everyone else are bouncing all over the place, of shuddering that a gorilla named “Donkey” can share a winner’s circle with a fairy-tale princess and another instance of said fairy-tale princess as a baby, the world starts to feel the wrong color. Your mind wanders back to the Miis, to Mario holding the controller on the box, to the shadows of racecars, to the Lightning Bolt, to the Blue Shell: it’s like, all of a sudden, a publicist informs the YMCA that every “we regret to inform you that a toddler shat in our olympic-sized swimming pool” letter is bad enough for their reputation to the point that they’re probably legally better off just pumping their pools nationwide full of human feces and calling it a day: People who find the possibility of stuff in the water repulsive are a liability, whereas people who don’t mind swimming in steaming feces can be classified as, among many other things, “loyal customers”.
In short, Mario Kart Wii is a snappy little racing game with some bright happy graphics and some smashing great track design best enjoyed at your own pace in the time attack mode. It is also a sign of an three-quarters-decent-sized apocalypse, though hey, as long as everyone is having fun, that’s all that counts!
In closing, the back of the Japanese box says, and I quote (in translation):
“Battle it out in twelve-player races with rivals from all over the world! Your friends far away, or people from anywhere in the world!”
The semantics are intriguing, indicating dully to the reader that their friends are “far away”, and that anyone they haven’t ever met is a “people”, from “anywhere in the world”.
The applicable footnote reads:
“*You will need an internet connection.”
Welcome to the world, then. Hope you guys are enjoying the revolution.
★★☆☆
“A GRINNING CORPSE.”
And so this is Christmas — and what have we Mario Kart Wii.
Actually, so proud of that first sentence right there, I let this review sit untouched for an hour and a half, and now that air has returned to my lungs and the pain in the pit of my stomach has evaporated, I have no idea what I was going to say. It was going to all be very coherent and straightforward, and I was probably going to call this game the “Best Mario Kart Yet!” and maybe even give it a perfect score. I don’t know anymore, though. So it often goes with criticism — you have to nip opinions in the bud, or else they start to change. Looks like I’m going to just have to complain about this game’s box for seven or eight paragraphs before actually talking about the game, and by the time I start talking about the game, you’ll have already counted all the paragraphs and reported the tally on your favorite web forum, and damned me repeatedly to the Special Hell for obese, homosexual serial murderers. Which, if only you’d stick around to the end of the review, you’d see is precisely the thing that a person who “likes” Mario Kart is supposed to do, anyway.
Insert the sound of me sighing! (If you need help imagining what I look like, imagine the World’s Fattest, Gayest Serial Murderer.)
Before I commence a long, perhaps-planned (“second-degree”) tangent about the box, let’s take a look at this sentence, which I’m pretty sure I had planned out in my head long before I lost concentration:
“Mario Kart Wii turns any weeknight into Christmas Eve.”
I’m pretty sure that when I first cooked that sentence up in my brain I meant to use it in a fairly straightforward review, in which I compared Mario Kart Wii fondly to what many human beings growing up in first-world countries consider to be a delicious and savorable evening of family togetherness and friendly rivalry as each prodigal brothers communicates the girth of his derring-dos far away from the fireplace.
Now, though, a few hours (during which “office work” was done) and several espressos removed from the original typing of that sentence, I’m capable of a more linear forensic analysis: perhaps, subconsciously, the writer of that sentence (“me”) was considering his own definition of Christmas Eve, which includes references to being locked in his room upstairs (by his own hand), gritting his teeth at the sound of pleasure rumbling up from downstairs, and girding up his loins for the morning, when he, despite pulling in a 4.0 GPA for his entire life and never speaking a single profane word, will not receive a single gift. More to the point, he’s going to have to sit there by the Christmas tree and watch his little brother open morbidly expensive present after morbidly expensive present — or else be excommunicated from his parents’ idea of the Catholic Church.
That is to say, yes, “Christmas” for me is synonymous with gritting my teeth and hissing like a rabid fairy whilst all the world becomes an orchestra in the name of pleasing someone even fatter than I am.
To be fair, Mario Kart Wii isn’t exactly like Christmas — in the case of real Christmas, my little brother would hop aboard the Fun Train at “YESSSSSSSSSSSS” Station and crash immediately into a wall, almost as animalistically pleased to report that “THIS SHIT IS BROKEN ALREADY WHAT THE heck” as he had been five minutes ago when he said “SWEET DUDE THIS IS ALL I EVER WANTED”. With Mario Kart Wii, no one complains that dad is a limp-noodle moron for not buying enough AA batteries, because they’re all “having fun” pointing the remote control at their RC cars and pretending it’s moving.
Here is where I am tempted, as I usually am, to say all the positive things about the game, just to get it out of the way. That means it’s time, once again, to engage my masterminded plan to Get the Kids off my Lawn — ie, begin the tongue-speaking tangent ritual. Lucky for you guys, I might have actually had this tangent written out for, like, two months already:
So Mario Kart Wii is the next title in a long line of games that come with a plastic accessory to snap the Wii Remote into. This time, it’s a steering wheel. Snap your Wiimote into this plastic steering wheel — made of delicious, vinyl smelling, pistol-heavy white plastic — and now you can pretend you’re driving a car. On your sofa! Welcome to the future!
The Wii Wheel is Nintendo’s first perhaps-inadvertent acknowledgement of just how silly the name “Wii” is, particularly because it repeats the “Whee” sound twice in a row, giving us a play on “Wee-wee”, which is a “cute” name that young parents frighteningly think up when it comes time to tell their male children what that shrunken sausage between their thighs is, or explain to their little girls what a dictionary would have to say about when water starts voluntarily leaking out the crack between their legs. Why didn’t they just call the accessory the “Wiil”? Probably because it would look ridiculous. You know how you can repeat a word over and over and over again, and then suddenly the word loses all meaning (Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove Glove)? It’d be a lot like that. For over a year now, I personally have been comfortable with the name “Wii”. It has, for the longest time, struck me as entirely juvenile that any adult (at least, I’m pretty sure that anyone smart enough to type words on the internet must be an adult) would see the name “Wii” and think of “Wee-wee” — a maturity-archaic descriptor for urinary evacuation and/or the penis itself — before they would think of, I don’t know, “We”, the preferred first-person plural pronoun of English students worldwide.
If you set your mind to it, you can make any molehill into an apocalypse, so let’s try with the Wii Wheel: it is rigidly documented that when Nintendo’s concept-men got together under the Fellowship of the Revolution, desiring only to reinvent the way people think about budget-priced half-hearted morally void videogames, they had absolutely no idea what they were going to make in the end. On Kotaku there was this story linked once, with a bunch of pictures of concept sketches for the Nintendo “Revolution”‘s eventual controller. One of them was shaped like a huge Super Mario invincibility star (I can’t call it a “Starman” in good faith because that would be infringing on the David Bowie song, and infringing on David Bowie (he’s a big fan of the site) is something the Action Button Action Legal Team has told me repeatedly not to do), and it had like five buttons on it, one at each point. I guess players were supposed to press the Happy Button whenever they started to feel sad, and the various games (yet with pre-production titles like “Next Mario Game” and “Next Zelda Game” and “Next Animal Crossing“) would reciprocate by playing back a happy, encouraging text-message related to the day’s weather (internet connection required): “Six days of rain in a row means the price of brown rice will be sixteen yen cheaper per kilogram three months from now!”
Flash back way before this, and remember that time at an E3 press conference when Satoru Iwata, who we at Action Button Dot Net are dead convinced is absolutely not a stupid person, walked on-stage and presented the audience with their reward for bearing the heat of the afternoon and stale muffins: a little plastic box. “This is our new games console. It’s finished, and it’s the size of three DVD cases stacked on top of one another!” Amazed, shrieking applause followed.
Basically, that was Satoru Iwata talking out his balls, though not in the way you think: the console most certainly was complete. I mean, let’s face it, the thing’s just a Gamecube with a spec bump. I’m not knocking that aspect of the Wii, not by a longshot. In fact, I’m applauding the size of its testicles: Nintendo had slaved away for years under a liverspotted coal-tar-stuffting octogenarian with an epic mean streak, Sunday-driving down one wrong boulevard after another, and eventually they’d lost touch with the “people” that had made them rich in the first place. If Iwata were a character in Final Fantasy Tactics, he’d be a level 99 Calculator, for sure: with one swift flick of his wrist, he was able to make an epicly large percentage of Japanese Human Beings go bug-eyed at the sight of outdated graphics and tinny sound. All it took to pull off this magic trick was one bite-sized cypher: the idea-nugget that there are gamers, and there are non-gamers, and that non-gamers can be divided up into “people who have never played games” and “people who played games before and then stopped”, and that “people who played games before and then stopped”, while perhaps a smaller group than “people who have never played games”, are in fact probably a larger group than “gamers”. The point of Nintendo’s Revolution Vigil, during which I’m guessing a dozen greying men huddled in a bomb shelter subsisting on a meat-locker full of Boss Coffee for three months was to figure out how, exactly, to package the Same Old Shit in a way that made Grandma and Grandpa stuff their same old pants with excitement.
In the end, the “Wii”, a moniker chosen for its “first-person plural” aspect as well as its similarity to a shout of uncontrollable glee, was born and branded as “The DS, on your TV — only now, the stylus is invisible“. The DS, of course, had been the result of Satoru Iwata having conveniently eaten a Very Grotesquely Large Salad and a bowl of rice precisely twenty-two hours before first seeing the television commercials for Sony’s EyeToy: during that forty-five minute breakneck brickstuff, Iwata must have screamed “Eureka!” so many times that he couldn’t not invent the Nintendo DS by the time he began washing his hands. If only Sony Japan had had a little faith, if only they hadn’t dismissed “casual games” as something the Japanese don’t “do”, or if only Sony Europe had developed some solid concepts (like, say, EyeToy games that were deeper than window-washing and/or don’t feature the player’s horrifyingly-lit slack-jawed visage as the “protagonist”) to sell said septegenarian board members, then maybe the PlayStation 2 would be the top-selling console instead of the Wii, and the PlayStation 3 would either look more or less depressing, given your perspective.
Alternate sentence-clump I couldn’t fit in the above paragraph: long before I obtained an interest in poetry and my penis got so inexplicably large, I worked at a GameStop in Indiana, from roughly the Dreamcast launch to the PlayStation 2 launch. Right before the PlayStation 2 was released, Sony sent us demo stations, with fiber-optic blue track-lighting embedded in frosted glass: “PlayStation 2”, it said. We put this demo kiosk right next to the Dreamcast demo kiosk, and the kids who we accidentally babysat while their mother stood in the women’s shoe store across the hall looking lonely would stand there and squeal at the sphere-eyed, single-complexioned John Madden Football Warriors on screen: “PlayStation Two is toight!” We switched the PlayStation 2 inside for a Dreamcast, with the objectively-better-looking NFL 2K1, and the kids began to ogle it, and squeal: “PlayStation Two is toight!” In the end, we probably hecked up the world economy in a chaos-theory sort of way — maybe our trickery of those dumb kids, for selfish purposes, had been the butterfly-wing-flap that brought about the DS/Wii hurricane, who knows. Though at the time, it really, honestly seemed like something to do.
Back in the real world, here we are with this Nintendo Wii wheel. I’m not going to make too much fun of it, because it has a delicious weight and it smells like vintage vinyl records. It also manages to miraculously fill in some kind of psychological gap and feel, most of the time, not at all like bullstuff. This is remarkable, I guess, because games like Excitetruck on the Wii and Motorstorm on the PlayStation 3 have featured controller-tilting steering wheel controls and mostly ended up feeling cheap instead of psychically immersive. The Wii Wheel is no second coming of Christ or anything, though playing Mario Kart Wii with and without it leads me to mathematically declare that yes, it does make a difference.
Still, there’s a sort of weird pseudo-backwardness about it. If Nintendo’s goal with the Wii was to create new genres of fun while lighting peoples’ imaginations on fire, and if this goal required them to make a controller that was as simple as possible, why complicate things? What’s with all the add-ons? Like, I was at the presentation where Iwata revealed the new controller; I heard him say their goal was to make the simplest game controller possible, because a PlayStation pad was too daunting and the sight of an Xbox controller gave grandpa epilepsy; I thought it was hilarious, brilliant. Then they rolled out the nunchuk attachment, as if to say, “You can play regular games on it, too.” That left me a tiny bit confused. I don’t even feel like finishing this paragraph now, to be honest, so I’ll just say, and objectively, that if this world we live in is one where a PlayStation 3 controller, with four face buttons, a D-pad, four triggers, and two analog sticks, can and will make your aunt call the cops, then the Nintendo Wii Remote, plus protective rubber safety condom, plus nunchuk, is obviously a hybrid sextoy / murder-weapon, and you will need a Catholic priest to perform an exorcism on your eventual death bed if you’ve ever so much looked at one.
Though the initial Nintendo “Revolution” controller concept reel clearly showed a guy playing (from a point of view inside the TV, looking out — a crucial point for what we’re going to discuss later) a first-person shooter of some sort, Nintendo eventually released a “Zapper” peripheral, which is no more than a hollow shell that cheaply binds your remote and nunchuk together into the shape of a crude gun. It’s supposed to help the players’ imaginations, or something. If you ask me, it looks like what happens when the cinematographer for “Star Trek” drinks on the set.
If Nintendo is all about giving us this magnificent magic wand — and the Wiimote is a grand technological icon on par with the iPod, don’t get me wrong — and letting our imaginations run wild, why must they continually doubt our imaginations?
I would put that question in huge, bold letters, though something holds me back. I guess it’s the fact that, yes, I find that the Wii Wheel really does enhance the experience of using controller tilts to steer in Mario Kart Wii. Instead, all I can do is whimper: though the controller is shaped like a steering wheel, we have to press the “2” button on the Wiimote in order to accelerate, which makes it absolutely impossible to employ the 10-2 position on the wheel while playing the game. Why bother to simulate driving, if you’re going to force people to do so in such a manner that would, in the case of a real-life head-on collision and airbag deployment, result in the driver’s right hand flipping backward at a high enough speed to possibly break the passenger’s neck? (I smell a very loose class-action lawsuit, though I suppose Japan is exempt, for obvious reasons.)
When Nintendo announced — at the same press conference where they revealed the remote — that they’d be making “shells” for enhancing the remote, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I thought “shell” had been a slip — I thought they meant they’d keep making attachments like the nunchuk, things with buttons or whatever on them.
Therefore: if the upcoming Super Mario Sluggers baseball game comes with a baseball bat shell for the remote, it will be the Piece of White Plastic that Broke the Aircraft Carrier’s Back, and I will walk down to my local convenient store, withdraw 6,000 yen from the ATM, and proceed to eat it right there, in front of the super-hot visual-kei cashier dude. Maybe he’ll mistake me for a hardass, or else a wounded lunatic, and he’ll ask for my phone number, and we can have tea parties.
This, of course, is not even the tangent I meant to go on. No, it’s all just context for what I’m about to say:
Mario Kart Wii‘s box, in addition to being shiny, delicious, and somehow both white and colorful, in addition to being packed just firmly enough to squeeze with the tips of the fingers, setting off “I am holding a High-Quality Videogame Product, I must run home and eat a bowl of cereal AQAP” alarms within my obese human brain, also features a picture of Super Mario himself, and his brother Luigi, both holding Wii Wheels.
Why are they holding the Wii Wheel? Well, they’re playing Mario Kart Wii, of course.
An open-mouthed forensic analysis of this follows:
Mario and Luigi are holding the Wii Wheel on the front of the box for Mario Kart Wii.
They are floating on air, with feet kicking wildly and surprised expressions on their faces.
Their feet are, for the record, not in the position that people’s feet would need to be in to operate an automobile.
Beneath their bodies are shadows of what look to be formula-1 race cars.
The Wii Wheel is included in the box, as is a copy of Mario Kart Wii.
The photograph of the Wii Wheel in the background of the cover image is the actual size of the Wii Wheel in the box.
The DVD case containing the Mario Kart Wii software also features the picture of Mario and Luigi using the Wii Wheel.
The Wii Wheel in the background image of the instruction manual cover is a drawing, not a photograph.
It is also not actual size, for obvious reasons.
The Wii Wheel is not needed to play Mario Kart Wii.
The Seventh Circle of Hell is revealed on the game’s title screen, which features a (much-lower-resolution) instance of the aforementioned image.
(An inside-the-box observation: Amazon.co.jp’s official image of this game’s box is an actual photograph of the actual box, with an airbrushed shadow and all.)
(An outside-the-box observation: videogames are about us pretending to do things; in Mario Kart, we step into Mario’s virtual shoes as we hold a real-like steering wheel. Mario’s use of the wheel on this box can then only be seen as a mockery of us flesh-and-blood creations: if this game is about pretending to drive a car, then Mario is pretending to pretend to drive a car. Et cetera.)
Now, it is quite possible that Mario and Luigi are sitting on a sofa, though the sofa has been invisibled for presumably the same reasons that music comes even out of the trash cans at Disneyland. That’s not the point. The point is that here were are, adults, Horny As Hell in the 21st Century, possibly fornicating three or four times a week, possibly enjoying fornicating more than our forefathers did, and here’s Mario and Luigi, holding the same controller I’m holding, freaking out as they look in my direction. I’m about to press the A button and begin the enthralling user registration process, and they’re already having fun, albeit in freeze-frame. This is when the Nintendo “Revolution” concept reel showed off at Tokyo Game Show 2005 all comes rushing back to me: cheap horror-movie sounds, a young boy in a yellow T-shirt aiming the Wiimote with his right hand and twiddling an analog stick with his left hand while his girlfriend’s teeth chatter; some said that the “Revolution” was Nintendo giving a spiritual tax refund to those numb nincompoops who thought pulling the NES controller sharply upward might make Mario jump higher, and maybe those people were right; at the time, all that was certain was that Nintendo was now inside the game, looking out at us. We would be the stars in their new games, just as “You” would be TIME magazine’s “person of the year” in 2006. When the “Wii” was eventually named, and then quickly launched, the brilliant gateway for many non-players was the opportunity to craft a “Mii”, a videogame character that would essentially look like you — if you were a videogame character (with somewhat stuffty graphics).
Flash forward to 2008, an era some have dubbed “The Now”: here we have Established Videogame Characters, the Super Mario Brothers, aka Mario and Luigi, holding the game controller that real-life you and me are using to control said Established Videogame Characters in said Established Videogame Franchise. It’s easy to generalize, and raise up scarecrow debates, like how it’s bizarre that the box art (and title screen) portrays videogame characters doing something human beings can do on their own instead of portray them doing the fantastic, escapist things they can do in the ame, or ask hilarious questions like “What’s next, Little Sister using an Xbox 360 controller to control Big Daddy on the front of BioShock 2?”
More to the point: Part of Nintendo’s policy for Wii software was (and continues to be) that the advertisements always feature real-life human beings enjoying the games. Wii Play‘s box shows a real human hand clinging to a Wiimote, for example. With games like Smash Bros., with strong brand appeal and old-school controls, the advertising standards didn’t enter the equation. With Mario Kart Wii, Nintendo had themselves painted into a corner — on the one hand, we’ve got this orgasmically beloved characters, and on the other hand, we have a clever new way to engorge the players’ endorphins, to make them feel the car. That they went with advertising both at once is a no-brainer; that they made said image into their game’s title screen is the trumpet of a kind of third-world apocalypse. It bangs a gong in the brain: at Nintendo, something has changed.
Then you realize that, by playing Mario Kart Wii for enough hours, you can unlock the ability to use your Mii in a race.
The argument that ensues is awesome. You can figure it out yourself, because I have to throw up right now, for reasons completely not related to this article, or even videogames. It’ll be like a mad-lib. I’ll write the beginning:
“If and when they make a Wii2, with 720p graphics and a hard-drive, if and when they upgrade the Miis so their appendages don’t look as gimpy and/or so they can have more interesting clothes and a couple more face part options (multicolored hair, et cetera), there will still be a ‘Classic Mii’ option, for people who want the gimpy appendages or more limited selection of noses.”
And then the ending:
“And when, at last, Classic Mii Kart Wii 2 is released, you’ll be able to unlock Baby Mario.”
ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE GAME NOW
That was fun!
Now let’s talk about Mario Kart Wii. I’ll use the inverted pyramid method to summarize:
Mario Kart Wii for the Nintendo Wii, by Nintendo: you’ve played it already, or it’s definitely not your favorite game ever. I despise the weapons and everything they represent. The tracks are shining examples of good videogame level design — great videogame level design, even. We’re talking Original-Super Mario Bros.-worthy level design. Even the jerk-off parts in two tracks where you get fired out of a cannon and thus are not controlling the game for a whole three seconds are forgivable when, upon landing, you’re, like, going down a snowboard slope, with awesome speed-boosting half-pipes. The motorcycles are cool, with appropriately floaty drift mechanics, and the ability to do wheelies for extra speed boost. The graphics are colorful and sharp, with gritty textures that look actually cute, even confectionary-like; it’s like the Wii’s hamster-wheel graphics processor is finding a niche as some kind of sideways “new retro”. The character voices are hateful trash, a cacophony of homicidal crocodiles kacking down cotton candy, schizophrenic ostriches kacking down skittles, kleptomanic velociraptors kacking down broken glass; the music, for the most part, sounds like something a Brazilian community college professor would compose as a tool for conditioning the more gorillia-like breed of human &^#$# to masturbate to, thus sparing the lives and virginities of entire city blocks. Donkey Kong is great, and it’s sad that his voice sounds like Goofy drowning in Jell-O.
Now that that’s over with, I’m going to go back and expand on the second sentence of the above paragraph re: weapons.
I hate the weapons. Well, not all of them. The green shell and the banana peel can stay. And, of course, the speed-boost mushroom, which isn’t a “weapon”, anyway.
Anyway, most of the rest of the weapons are hateful. Let’s go ahead and make a list, in order from least to most hateful:
Red Shells: I guess these are kind of okay. They target the person in front of you — or right behind you — and they’re usually a sure hit, though they can be avoided.
Bob-omb: throw in any direction to cause a big explosion that can possibly catch many other drivers at once. I guess it’s decent because it takes a bit of skill to use, and it’s dangerous because you can get yourself caught up in the blast.
Thunder cloud: a thunder cloud appears above your car and hisses at you for a bit; wait too long and it’ll strike you with lightning and shrink you; tag another racer before the lightning comes out and the cloud will stick to his car, instead. Decent because it makes for a nice little game of hot potato and it carries a risk.
Super dash mushroom: a dash mushroom that can be used something like twenty times in rapid succession. Basically the game’s way of telling you that you suck, though you might stand a chance of getting better if only you win a couple of races and feel good about yourself.
Mega mushroom: turns your car twice the size and jacks the speed up to 200%. You can also crush any drivers you run over. Mostly fair because there’s a risk accompanying the reward (ie, your car is harder to control).
Invincibility Star: makes you invincible and about 200% faster. Kind of almost the same thing as the Mega Mushroom.
Bullet Bill: turns your car and driver into a Bullet Bill, which flies at about 1000% the speed of your car, flattening anything in its path and usually jumping you ahead ten or so places in the race; really easy to control. Kind of really stupidly unfair in a “Yay Button” sort of way.
POW Block: use this to cause an earthquake, flattening every car that’s touching the ground. Wouldn’t be quite so hateful if it was a tiny bit easier to avoid the quakes. I suppose you’re supposed to jump at some precise millisecond to avoid it, though I haven’t succeeded at it once. Always seems to impact just as you land on a tiny island before a ramp that will jump you to another tiny island, meaning that you fall into a pit and lose about twelve places in the race.
hecking Squid Thing: No, I’m not going to call it by its canonical name. Use this stupid thing to telepathically squirt ink on every driver in front of you, making it “harder” for them to “see”. If you get hit with this yourself, that means there’s going to be a big ugly black “ink” effect on the screen, obstructing your view. If you use this against computer racers, the “ink driving” AI algorithm kicks in, everyone starts bizarrely wobbling back and forth, and it’s horribly depressing: for a split-split second, your brain becomes unable to differentiate between the phrases “next time I get laid” and “the day I die”. Seriously, obstructing the view is not a good idea for a videogame. Have you ever heard about that blind kid who can beat anyone at Mortal Kombat? Yeah, that’s because Mortal Kombat isn’t a real videogame.
Lightning Bolt: awarded only to the most headgear-wearing-&^#$#ed of players, those who are in twelfth place and deserve to be there forever. When used, it shrinks every other kart on the course to half speed and half size, making them instantly crushable by the lightning-bolt-using driver. However, it does not change the fact that the driver who used it most likely sucks. It awards them only hope, for a few seconds, before restoring everything to normal and telling the jerk who used it to get to the back of the bus again. In short, it just causes immense annoyance to anyone who’s not losing to everyone.
The Fake Item Box: for heck’s sake, it doesn’t look anything like a real item box. For one thing, it’s red, and for another thing, the question mark is upside-down. According to the Japanese manual, “It looks exactly like a real item box.” That’s hecking false advertising, right there. I mean, I suppose that the average Japanese person doesn’t immediately reject an upside-down question mark, and — well, I realize that the average American can’t identify the North American continent on a map, though hell. It’s really, stupidly embarrassing, this thing. Anyone who hits one is either stupid enough to think it’s a real item box or just forced into a position where there’s no alternative, and in the latter case, they’re just going to think (if they’re like me, which I’m sure everyone is) of how ridiculous it is that these game designers might seriously think (or, even worse, be pretending to think) that people will mistake this thing for a real item box.
The Blue Shell: . . . well.
The Blue Shell is a sign of the times; it’s the first nail in the coffin of game design. Know that I come from a proud heritage of people who play Virtua Fighter 5 and genuinely enjoy losing because it teaches you something.
If you’re in a losing position and have been for a good amount of time, an algorithm behind the scenes kicks in and awards you a Blue Shell. Use it, and it rushes to the head of the pack and crashes into the person in first place with absolute certainty. Other drivers in the general area will also be decimated.
I’m sure that the general idea of the Blue Shell when it first appeared, in Super Mario Kart 64, was that a person in last place would obtain it, shudder with joy, and then be filled with the turgid urge to claw their way to the head of the pack and use it when within strategic range of the leaders.
In the current “videogame industry”, though, things like the Blue Shell are communistic concessions thrown to the people who Aren’t Getting Better. If my little brother, say, spent twenty hours a day doing something other than playing videogames — that is to say, if he sucked at videogames — the Blue Shell would be his “Best Thing Ever”: something to use when bitter and bored, to ruin the chances of the person who’s just so happening to win. The Blue Shell, simply described, is an easy way to strike back at the person who’s beating everyone, when you are the one losing to everyone. If that’s not heady, frothy communism in action, I really don’t know what the hell is. How is this a more family-friendly experience than killing hookers in Grand Theft Auto? If anything, the sugar-coating just makes the arsenic more dangerous, and it can’t be too hard to prove, from here, that Nintendo fanboys — big, sweaty, mouth-breathing — are actually individuals of scarier morals than most self-mutilating suicide-bombing terrorists.
Since the Nintendo Wii is the game console of the proletariat (“the game console of the proletariat” is the nice way to say “they should sell most of the games in the supermarket tabloid rack, next to ‘1,001 Baby Names for Girls (Now with more mixed-race names)'”), Nintendo has seen about sharpening the item randomization algorithms to razor edges. Everyone always has a chance to be in first place in Mario Kart Wii, which seems to make sense because I suppose it’s meant to be a “party” game for people with “friends”, though when you’re playing it dead alone, against a cold last-gen computer chip that’s only just barely powerful enough to keep a graphing calculator from meeting “six divided by three” with “ERROR”, and you’re about to cross the hecking finish line in first place and get hit by a POW Block, a Lightning Bolt, a Blue Shell, a Red Shell, and then the hecking Squid Thing — all it seems to do is present striking evidence that the world is full of pricks.
The theories seem stable enough: if we construct a few detailed Venn diagrams, we can prove that the person using the Blue Shell now might be the most technically skilled of players. He might just be having a run of stuffty luck because, of all the things we can mathematically prove about a race with more than two live (as in “not dead”) racers, someone must be losing at any given time, meaning that someone is getting these Almighty Items, and then using them, either out of bitterness or out of hope.
If you’ve got a pen and paper (or MSPaint), start making a flowchart of this: it is possible for a Good Player to be hecked back into last place, though Almighty Items only appear if one is in last place for a set period of time; a Good Player will most likely be able to advance a few places before being awarded an Almighty Item.
With a little bit of work I’m not 100% willing to do right now (got an erection again T-T), it can be quite easily proven that the only reason these items were originally conceived, in earlier installments of the series, was to make it possible for losers to become winners occasionally, and that in Mario Kart Wii, the items mainly exist to “liven up” the contest.
I have seen police officers who will accuse a man of being a homosexual for insisting that Mario Kart should just let the best man win. I’m well aware that I’m going to get at least a dozen half-sentence emails telling me that I obviously don’t like having fun. I’m fully prepared to ignore them. I stand by my assertion that maybe there’s a way to make an amazingly fun game with just a few weapons that require a small amount of skill to use.
In the name of research, I ironed my hair, donned designer eyeglasses, and gathered up a group of fourteen carrot-skinned, silver-lipped, corkscrew-beehive-headed Dolce-and-Gabbana-sunglasses-wearing Japanese part-time prostitutes and made them wait outside my apartment in single file while I forced each one in turn to play Mario Kart Wii for an hour. Twelve of them would ask me for money, six would report me to the police and press rape charges, and I think two of them actually didn’t have brains or eyes, though all of them managed to win first, second, or third place on cumulative points in the 50cc Mushroom Cup, despite them all whipping the wheel around over their heads and flailing like a lunatic, like they’d never even seen a guy driving a car in a movie.
In the end, there was me, trying to win the 150cc Special Cup, being hecked over countless times by jerk-off Lightning Bolts or Blue Shells and winding up in second place overall, maybe a dozen times in a row. It comes to feel almost like video poker, after a while — the computer obviously knows what you need in order to win, and though it’s illegal in a sense if it relies on anything more than raw math to determine what cards are dealt, when you do lose, you feel like stuff and you’re dead positive that god hates you.
It can be surmised even by an elementary school dropout that Mario Kart Wii is designed from the ground up to be “a game that people enjoy with their friends”. At what cost to our dignity, though? By “our” I don’t just mean “Hardcore video-gamers”, I mean “the human race”. There’s some Brave-New-World-style stuff peeking out from behind mama’s skirt, here: why would someone even care to get “better” if it’s possible to just keep relying on the jerk-ass weapons and occasionally getting a lucky break, just for being a jerk? With Virtua Fighter 5, it’s like, if you lose to a guy, it’s because he’s better than you. If you really like the game, you’ll keep playing whether you win or lose — with the idea being that you should want to win. Mario Kart Wii imagines a world where “it’s not whether you win or lose — it’s how you play the game” or “it’s all in good fun” or “they’re just jealous” are not just something gym teachers tell the fat kid the day he gets hazed to death in the showers; it imagines that world, and then it runs with it, straight for the gates of Hell, nose to the sky. That ain’t how it always is, jack. They wouldn’t call it a “game” if it was possible to not want to win. Someone up there needs to respect that. Rather than rely on its existing, sharp, utterly enjoyable core mechanics to encourage players to play more and get better, the game scoops out its right eye and offers it to the gods of $$$. And it sold 300,000 units on its launch day in Japan.
Mario Kart Wii unfolds as a game-design exercise with the personality of that sniveling rat bastard at every Japanese corporate party, the one who squints at a spreadsheet all day, doing no real work, and feels inadequate that he’s not bench-pressing intertwined naked lesbians on his lunch breaks, who decides in his dead samurai heart that he must go around, get in everyone’s face, take their drinks out of their hands, hold them just out of reach, chortle, guffaw, and make sure everyone is having Adequate Amounts of Fun. Some day he’ll blackmail a decently not-unattractive woman into marrying him, and when his child gets kicked in the balls at school because his dad is an asshole, he’ll tell his wife that it’s a tough world and people have to learn. Deep within the jumble of motives and execution-style hiccups called Mario Kart Wii is a mathematical proof for why you should never let the Boss speak a single suggestive word at a meeting requiring creativity: the Boss, if nothing else, exists only to ask the most hideously obvious, stupid questions at the latest time possible, and usually, if he doesn’t do this, the whole company will figuratively go down the drain. By the end of a brain-dead night of trophy collecting, of the coin-toss-like stiff odds, of the pachinko race dynamics, of the unbelievable, improbable luck that the same two racers keep finishing in the top three even though you and everyone else are bouncing all over the place, of shuddering that a gorilla named “Donkey” can share a winner’s circle with a fairy-tale princess and another instance of said fairy-tale princess as a baby, the world starts to feel the wrong color. Your mind wanders back to the Miis, to Mario holding the controller on the box, to the shadows of racecars, to the Lightning Bolt, to the Blue Shell: it’s like, all of a sudden, a publicist informs the YMCA that every “we regret to inform you that a toddler shat in our olympic-sized swimming pool” letter is bad enough for their reputation to the point that they’re probably legally better off just pumping their pools nationwide full of human feces and calling it a day: People who find the possibility of stuff in the water repulsive are a liability, whereas people who don’t mind swimming in steaming feces can be classified as, among many other things, “loyal customers”.
In short, Mario Kart Wii is a snappy little racing game with some bright happy graphics and some smashing great track design best enjoyed at your own pace in the time attack mode. It is also a sign of an three-quarters-decent-sized apocalypse, though hey, as long as everyone is having fun, that’s all that counts!
In closing, the back of the Japanese box says, and I quote (in translation):
“Battle it out in twelve-player races with rivals from all over the world! Your friends far away, or people from anywhere in the world!”
The semantics are intriguing, indicating dully to the reader that their friends are “far away”, and that anyone they haven’t ever met is a “people”, from “anywhere in the world”.
The applicable footnote reads:
“*You will need an internet connection.”
Welcome to the world, then. Hope you guys are enjoying the revolution.
2008
text by tim rogers
★★★⋆
“ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE HOLODECK FROM 'STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION'.”
I’m not even going to think about “lucid” dreams. Let’s cut to the chase — until the day scientists develop a fool-proof method for me to have overtly erotic dreams about the woman of my choice one hundred percent of the time, Grand Theft Auto IV, for all it’s worth, is the Most Entertaining Thing on Earth. Much as I’d like to spend a third my salary on special condoms that are safe to apply before bedtime, I guess I’ll have to make do with Grand Theft Auto IV‘s online multiplayer for now.
Alternate first sentence: Grand Theft Auto IV is a videogame so hot that the first Amazon.com customer-submitted image of it is a fetishized photo of a man opening up a cardboard box full of copies of the game.
I’d reckon it’s even better than any of us dreamed Virtual Reality would ever be, even if we proudly own the experience of having spent four dollars to play, say, Dactyl Nightmare for three minutes. Back then, our idea of VR was that, someday, we’d be able to wear a huge heavy helmet on our heads and run around in a world that didn’t look real, doing things as complicated as shooting other characters who were being controlled by other players, who are also wearing heavy helmets. The “dream” of VR, way back when, involved a clever clause, which we can probably safely call the “Lawnmower Man Effect” — we didn’t care that this supposed “reality” didn’t look “real”, so long as it was immersed us, and made us “feel” like we were “there”. In other words, it had to be interesting.
In a way, graphics engineers of the early 1990s were lucky that the virtual reality programs of popular culture had succeeded in glamorizing bizarre and warped landscapes. If the “sex scene” in “The Lawnmower Man” had portrayed two absolutely real-looking individuals having sex in, say, a canopy bed in a windswept room in a castle on a mountaintop in Europe as opposed to portraying two mirror-skinned humanoid figures floating in a blue polygonal void, with bubbles protruding out of genitals and then touching, the “videogame industry” might have crashed before 1999. It perhaps also helped that the “virtual reality” of “The Lawnmower Man” was a vaguely religiously sinister entity, in which a man was turned into a genius and then a killing monster, and later imprisoned. That didn’t exactly make kids think “Man, pretending sucks“, though it perhaps subliminally reinforced the idea that there is kind of some fun stuff to do in reality.
Here we are, now, in 2008. “The future”, as foretold by the best science-fiction, began one year and some change ago. People are, presently, as entertained by the idea of sending text messages on their cellular phones as the mid-1990s had imagined people would be with the idea of taking a date to a virtual-reality pub and experiencing some surreal sex, and then maybe talking about philosophy whilst huffing grapefruit-flavored oxygen. The dream of VR isn’t dead; it’s only sleeping. It’s tossing and turning in Japan, where reasonably obese persons with low standards and addictive personalities will gladly line up for upwards of twenty foodless minutes to pay five dollars to play six minutes worth of a PSOne-era flat-shaded polygon buffet with a Gundam license slapped on it, just because, well, there’s a Gundam license slapped on it, and because in order to play the game, you have to sit in a chair inside a big, plastic, egg-shaped dome screen. The game itself is ugly and insipid, and I don’t want to talk about it, though hey, there you go: the closest modern equivalent to the VR dream of yesteryear. Digging a little deeper, we can identify Sony’s EyeToy and Nintendo’s DS and Wii controllers as a fragment of the dream of VR — translating real movements into on-screen movements. Meanwhile, massively multiplayer online role-playing games like Everquest and World of Warcraft have always just been finely flawed potshots at the Cyberspace dream of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash: this character is you, this world is fantastic, this sword is big, and on fire, and yes, there are a few (hundred thousand) numbers on-screen at any given time for you to forget that you forgot to file your taxes this year. In a Japanese hot-spring inn, there’s always a family-friendly section, where mom and dad and the kids can all go together — instead of a full bath, it’s an ankle-high, super-long trough. Foot-bathing. That’s what MMORPGs are — foot baths. A closer stab at the Neal Stephenson dream is Second Life, which is like an MMORPG except it has no clearly defined purpose — it’s just a “virtual playground” — is both objectively hideous on an aesthetic level (because there will always be some jerk with a vagina for a face wandering around the most minutely detailed and lush piece of virtual architecture) and cataclysmically uninteresting, because this sort of surreal landscape is the sort of thing we’d expected to have to wear a heavy helmet to experience: no helmet, no deal.
Not all videogames in existence are trying to be the Holodeck from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, which is simultaneously kind of a shame and kind of a relief. It’s a shame because the Holodeck is a good idea — such a good idea that they devoted entire whole arcs of episodes to what is essentially defined by the writers as “the way people entertain themselves in the 25th century” (Captain Jean-Luc Picard living out Shakespearean roles, et cetera) — and it’s a relief because there are so many uncannily horrifying ways to heck it up. What you’ll see, though, over the next couple years in this “Videogame Industry”, is that every time someone takes a step closer to the Holodeck, that game will sell two to six million copies upon release. It’s what people want, whether they want to want it or not.
The majority of MMORPGs take place in swords-and-sorcerers, dungeons-and-dragons settings because, quite frankly, taking place in the future, with robots and laserguns and hover-Vespas, would just remind people that they’re using a computer, and that would totally kill millions of buzzes on impact. Second Life is a gimpy mutant areality because People Are Jerks, and the developers know that if they poured all their “talent” into making the graphics look real, that would only make the sight of the people walking around in flat-shaded purple cat suits all the more jarring.
For taking place in a world that strives to be “real”, Grand Theft Auto is something of an anomaly among MMORPGs, and at the same time, it succeeds on levels that they never have. I’m going to put a paragraph break, now, so you can tab over to Hotmail (god, use Gmail already) and send me a paragraph of hate, accusing me ofbestiality or whatever, because “GTA isn’t an MMORPG”.
“MMORPG” stands for “Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Game”. The “first reference” rule of AP journalism dictates that I must spell out all the words of an abbreviation before using the abbreviation; I’m sure that every fat hack writing about videogames for money on the internet holds a doctorate in journalism, however, so I guess that means that whenever they use the term “MMORPG” in an article without first explaining what the letters stand for, that they’re referring to something other than a “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game”. Therefore, their journalistic perhaps-lapse frees me of the guilt associated with using the abbreviation “MMORPG” to talk about a game that just so happens to not be massively multiplayer or online.
Whether you don’t believe Grand Theft Auto is an MMORPG or not isn’t important — it’s the game that all MMORPG developers should be looking at above all other games — even their own games — and very seriously. MMORPGs present detailed worlds that, while perhaps not “realistic”, are at least “believable”. Grand Theft Auto has, since 2001, labored to produce a more minutely detailed and believable world than any other game on the market. And it succeeds for the simplest, most mathematical of reasons. The scientific calculators must have been working overtime at Rockstar North these past few laborious years, because with Grand Theft Auto IV, they have graduated another step toward the Holodeck, while “other” MMORPGs still smolder in Mathematician’s Hell.
Grand Theft Auto for the PlayStation, though primitive in presentation, gave players a solidly-structured city with one amazing quirk: the existence of innocence. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world now, that Grand Theft Auto gained immense popularity because it “lets you kill innocent people”, though was the “killing” of the innocent people ever the point? The more precise way to define Grand Theft Auto‘s revelation is that it allowed innocence to exist in the same world as the core of the game design. In other words: you can do the same things to innocent people or objects that you can do to the not-innocent people or objects.
As something of my hobby (most clearly defined as “pursuing a PhD in economics”), I’ve been reading a lot of thick high-level books on probability and combinatorics lately, and some of the real-life applications are fascinating. It’d take miles of paper to explain it in full detail, though the more you think about entertainment in mathematical terms, the more of a crock the idea of narrative comes to be. To imbue this paragraph with another tangent, let’s mention how I was watching the movie “Out of Sight” the other day, during which Jennifer Lopez, as a federal marshall, and George Clooney, as a bank robber breaking out of prison, somehow end up stuffed together in the trunk of a car as the first plot point. Miraculously, they begin talking about movies, namely Sydney Pollack’s “Three Days of the Condor“, starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway: “It always seemed so phony to me, how they got together so quickly like that”. The irony of this J-Lo-musing is manifold, considering her current situation as a character in a motion picture. Most poignantly, however, it points a fat, sharp finger at the very foundation of the idea of narrative: it’s a challenge for a writer to make something seem like a coincidence — for something to seem “phony” — in fiction. It requires the writer to establish clearly defined boundaries, and rules: to make the subject small enough to seem ridiculous in context, the writer needs to craft huge rules. We, the audience, need to know a massive load about the two characters before we can consider it “phony” that they fall in love so quickly. Because, ultimately, the writer wouldn’t be writing a story with these two people in it for no reason. For another example, let’s say we have a story about a man’s life. In one scene, we see him strike oil. In the next scene, we see him losing money on a stock market crash. Is it a “coincidence” that these things happen one right after another? Of course not — the writer / director / editor are conspiring to tell a story in terms of relevant events.
Videogames have, fundamentally, “failed” as “narrative” in the past because they fail to establish the finer workings of their worlds, and sometimes their characters. In a movie, we might see a guy whose girlfriend is killed during a robbery; an hour later in the movie, and years later in the man’s fictional life, we might see him take a bullet to defend a woman he doesn’t even know. One event is shown to us so that the other has context. In games with “narrative”, we rarely even get the scene where the hero tips his shoe-shine guy an extra nickel, and thus comes up short when it’s time to pay the check on his Big Date with the Hot Girl. Hell, we hardly ever get shoe-shine boys, period, in videogames.
BioShock, a recent, acclaimed, jiggling pile of protoplasm, initially tells us plenty about its world though no more about its character than that he’s the type of guy to immediately eat a bag of potato chips found in a garbage can even when he’s not hungry. Videogames tend to be straightforward sequences of dudes blasting demons because that’s what they’re about. There are no coincidences. I recall, now, a part from a scene in Super Mario Galaxy, in a stage called “The Rabbits Are Looking For Something”, where a bumblebee tells me “The rabbits are looking for something”, and then a rabbit three feet away tells me “We’re looking for something.” He says the somethings they’re looking for are star chips, just as the camera pulls up to show a star chip hovering in the sky. There are also three pegs in the ground, which the player will know he possesses the ability to pound down; two minutes later, a rabbit says he can “smell” a star chip, and the camera pans over to a crate, which the player knows he possesses the ability to shatter by shaking the Wiimote. In both cases, doing what you “can” do yields the star chip in question — one of them is inside the crate, and the other is bizarrely obtained by using a trampoline that materializes when you pound all three pegs into the ground; here, pathologically, is the root of The Modern Videogame’s failure: for remembering how to do what he can do without asking why, the game “rewards” the player with what it has contrived the player to “need“. This isn’t game design — it’s kleptomania. It’s no coincidence that all those packs of gum ended up in your jacket pocket.
It’s so horribly, disgustingly obvious, in the end, what the existence of innocence does for golden-age game design. Let’s retrofit the “essence” of Grand Theft Auto into Super Mario Bros., as an exercise: in Super Mario Bros., Super Mario is a Hero. He is saving the Princess. In order to save the Princess, he must navigate a thrown-down gauntlet of thousands and hundreds of enemy grunts. Mario’s quest — so says the manual — takes place in “The Mushroom Kingdom”, though as far as kingdoms go, it seems to only be full of Evil Monsters.
Mario’s quest takes him from the left side of the screen to the ever-unfolding right side of the screen. The enemies come from the right side to the left. Every four stages, there’s a castle, which Mario goes inside, in hopes of rescuing the princess. At the end of every castle, he finds a mushroom-headed kid-thing who tells him “Our princess is in another castle.”
Now, take your archetypal, fond memories of mushrooms and fire flowers and goombas and koopas, and superimpose this idea over it: the innocent, mushroom-headed kid-things are also running from the right side of the screen to the left, in the same direction as the enemies. Let’s say that they possess shared traits of both Mario — in that they die if they touch the enemies — and of the enemies — in that they also die if stomped by Mario.
Let that idea ferment in your head for a minute.
Stomp the enemies before the innocents run into them. Lose points every time an innocent dies. Stomp the innocents by accident, and lose points. If you’re a sadistic heck, you can stomp the innocents for the thrill of watching their pathetic death animations.
Nintendo games like Gyromite! would play around with the idea of “protecting” an on-screen avatar, though that was always the whole point of such games. If Mario is a Hero, why is “saving” someone something he only does once? Get Shigeru Miyamoto on the phone — seriously — if it was never even an “idea” to have rescuable innocent Toads in the stages in Super Mario Bros., then inform Nintendo that I’m more worthy of his job than he is.
The closest we would ever get to this kind of game, eventually, would be in tacky light-gun shooters, where “innocent civilians” would occasionally pop up. As there’s no on-screen player character in such games, it just doesn’t feel as “bad” when you shoot them as it does when you first run over an innocent person in Grand Theft Auto III. And the penalty for shooting innocent people in light-gun games has only ever been a loss of points.
Super Mario Bros. was inspired by the cream of the current crop, and it would go on to paint an entire genre (“action games”) right down to its bones: stumbling on the very first rung of the narrative ladder, “the hero fights bad guys” came to equal “the hero exists in a world where (aside from himself) only bad guys exist”. Again, no coincidences: only laziness, only lack of imagination.
I’m not knocking Super Mario Bros., of course. It was entertaining as all hell, is what it was. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, though to be fair I’d yet to see even a photograph of a naked woman at that point.
All I’m trying to say is that, at least conceptually, Grand Theft Auto had beaten Super Mario Bros. at its own game. No one seemed to notice, however, because the game’s presentation was subjectively flawed, and its attempts at mimicking reality just didn’t taste right when you still had to press a button to make a guy punch another guy.
Super Mario 64 popped open a frighteningly huge can of worms — 3D action with dynamic personality (the use of the words “dynamic personality” is my way of avoiding Tomb Raider et al). So it was that Grand Theft Auto III was born in the alternate dimension we call “Obviously Awesome, Financially Impossible”. When Rockstar had at last rotated the meat-grinder of life enough times, GTA III plopped itself down on the doorstep of mankind, and Maxim compared the hecking thing to “Pulp Fiction”, which is about as good and as bad as anything can probably get. Rockstar instantly ascended to the next spiritual plane. Their game was so huge in terms of scale, sales, and magnitude that it took years for everyone’s parents and local religious pundit of choice to finally catch on to its sinister side.
The simple way to put it is that Grand Theft Auto lets you kill in-game representations of “innocent” people in situations where no one is otherwise doing anything violent. It lets you turn peace into violence.
“Innocent” people in GTA are easy for any open mind to define: they are the people who are not immediately trying to kill you. Digital representations of human beings don’t need psychological profiles, most of the time: all they need to do is be standing there. Their role, at all times, is “potential victim” of simulated “violence”.
Since more money is poured into the graphical effects that happen when things explode that the graphical effects that happen when people group hug, Grand Theft Auto is mathematically doomed to be objectively “violent”. The simplest straw-man argument in defense of GTA is that in real-life, things can and will explode, as well, so in order to represent a “real” world in a videogame, one needs to account for the more highly improbable side of physics, for the more top-of-the-show side of nightly news. Why craft a detailed, yet ultimately fake world if spectacular things aren’t going to happen? Death is one of the handful of great truths in life; to not account for it in a videogame or any narrative presenting a depiction of reality is a hideous oversight — and (here I begin to crack) to not consider death of innocent people a thing of spectacular fascination, as an author, is to miss the point of not being hit by a bus every morning.
(Of course, perceiving the killing of an innocent person as “fun” is still kind of fundamentally sick.)
So here’s the truth: I personally have always perceived the Grand Theft Auto games as very simple IQ test questions. Through the miracle of graphic design and bare story cues, the game informs you that your character is a thug. The blip on your radar is the location of the MacGuffin. Go get the MacGuffin. Anyone who tries to stop you from getting the MacGuffin is Not An Innocent Person. All of the other cars on the road are full of people trying to mind their own business. In a MegaMan game, they would be the spinning blades the player must avoid to get at the bad guys. (“Obstacles”.)
In other words, I personally have always viewed the innocent people in Grand Theft Auto as things to avoid dangerous contact with. Only the relationship between the Main Character in a GTA and innocent pedestrians and the relationship between spinning obstacles in MegaMan is different — in GTA, the main character hurts the obstacles, not the other way around.
It’s pretty obvious that Grand Theft Auto was, initially, an experiment in “letting the player do ‘anything'” in a rigidly defined world. GTA III, gifted with the canvas of 3D and the experiment of two and a half other games under its belt, was more focused: it was to be an experiment to see how much the game designers could allow the player to do in a 3D space. The two GTA III pseudo-sequels that followed ticked off additional boxes on GTA III‘s initial checklist (“Ride motorcycles”, “Fly a jetliner”).
It seems to me, from a brief forensic analysis, that the purpose of GTA never was to make a game that lets players “be the bad guy”, that lets players “kill innocent people”. The idea was, essentially, to “let the player be free” — hence, perhaps, the name “Liberty City”. The idea of setting the game in a “realistic, modern city” was so obvious a third-grader could have come up with it and still flunked arithmetic. That the game designers chose to make the “hero” a bad man instead of a good man is, in the right twisted context, proof of their human virtue: it’s possible, in their game, to kill anyone, to drive around in traffic like a jerk-off, bumping cars off the road. If you make the “hero” of the game a good person — like a spy or a tax-man, or a cop — the idea of absolute freedom would run counter to the narrative context. The narrative context, of course, only exists because when we, as human beings, see a digital representation of a city, when we tilt an analog stick and see one person in the digital crowd move, we are biologically wired to wonder “Who’s That Guy?” “What’s His Story?” On the contrary, if GTA were a game about piloting a sphere and bumping cubes out of the rectangular pathway, shooting little squares at cylinders and watching them blink and disappear, no one would think it was very “fun” at all. “Entertainment” and “context” are, in many cases, the same exact thing. It’s regrettable sometimes, and sometimes you just kind of shrug and move on.
So yeah, in GTA, you’re a “bad guy” for reasons of cold mathematics, because, if by design players are allowed to “do anything”, that’s precisely what they’ll do. A thousand words on the nature of escapism could very easily flow forth from here: the more realistic the world inside the television screen looks, the more the average twelve-to-seventy-year-old is going to want to see Something heckin’ Nuts happen. Think of all the people who gave up on Sega’s 70-million-dollar disasterpiece Shenmue. I swear, that game is a story written by a first-year creative-writing student who literally cringes when she types the words “And then, Veronica slapped her boyfriend in the mouth.”
Games like Driver stumbled a bit, back in the day; inspired by GTA, the folks behind Driver set about making a true-crime focused opus of a game that took one aspect of the newly minted “crime genre” and expanded it. Namely, they wanted to make a game that was entirely focused on the idea of driving criminals away from robbery scenes. You were a getaway driver. The original idea of the game was that you’d just play it as a string of missions, with no context outside of “the police are chasing you”. Afraid, eventually, that the yet-invisible media pundits would jump out of nowhere and snipe the game’s “glorification” of “criminal activity”, they shoehorned in a narrative: don’t worry, you’re not really a bad guy. You’re an undercover FBI agent working for the mob. Some doctors would clinically diagnose this as a “lack of balls”, others would say it was a group of dudes sticking to their guns, refusing to turn the police cars with blaring sirens into contextless floating rectangular prisms.
History has muted the answer to that particular riddle. And yet, Grand Theft Auto went on using the police as threats and targets. The police are the simple, beautiful key to the dynamic of Grand Theft Auto‘s world; their presence is under- and over-estimated simultaneously by so many critics worldwide that I’m surprised any television on earth is capable of displaying them. In a GTA game, we have
1. The player character (the “main character”, the “protagonist”, the “person we want to see succeed”)
2. The innocent people (bystanders and onlookers, pedestrians and commuters, the “people minding their own business”)
3. The guilty people (assassination targets, gang bosses, henchmen, obstacles placed strategically around our goals, “the tyranny of evil men”)
4. The police
The police, simply put, show up when you do something “wrong”, as dictated by a simple algorithm. The police uphold the “order” of GTA; they’re the reason the game won’t ever turn into Second Life, and it’s better off for it. Let’s assume for a minute that GTA was crafted from the ground up to be a “videogame”, not a “narrative”: if GTA is “based” on “reality”, and the main character is a “bad” man by mathematical necessity, then the police are the developers’ injection of conscience. If you shoot an innocent person, the game sends police your way; so the line between “the innocent” and “the law” becomes invisible, and the line that separates your player character from the law and the innocent becomes embarrassingly fat. And then: if you’re having a firefight out in the street with some gangsters as part of a “mission”, the game is going to send police to the scene. Moral gray areas abound: mathematically, the player is wired to know that anyone shooting at his on-screen avatar is a threat to be eliminated. However, thanks to an elegant veneer of context, the player also knows that the police are the “good” guys. So the line between “self preservation” and “being an evil bastard” becomes thin, and fuzzy, and perversely entertaining. Thrilling. It is in that unholy region that GTA goes from being a well-executed game to being a multi-million-selling cultural phenomenon.
All it took to graduate from naughty pixel-play to genuine sales dynamo was years of probably-tedious checklist-filling by the developers: get real music on the radio, give the protagonist a name and a face, get Hollywood voice talent, let the player earn proficiencies by repeating simple actions, let them fly helicopters, let them order hamburgers at fast food joints, et cetera. The problem, “morally”, with “let the player eat at fast food joints” is that the main pillar of the game design is that NPCs, bad guys, good guys, and the police all exist in the same space, and can have the same actions performed on them. If you can shoot a bad guy, then the game is obligated to also let you shoot a good guy, or shoot the cashier at a fast-food joint. You don’t even have to rob the fast food joint — you can just shoot the guy and walk out.
Since the game development community finally caught on that GTA is amazing, we’ve seen stumbler after stumbler literally presume that the point of “let the player eat fast food” is “let the player shoot the cashier”. Okay, maybe I’m just talking about Saints Row, where your main character is supposed to be a member of a street-cleaning gang, though if you shoot an old lady at random, your positively religious partner won’t even dare to consider you a monster. In fact, he’ll start shooting along with you. The makers of Saints Row, in addition to perhaps not knowing how to use apostrophes, were inspired less by GTA as a slab of sparkling game design as they were inspired by the idea that some kids’ parents kinda thought it was the devil. See Exhibit A, a video trailer for Saints Row 2, in which theinexplicably paid Gary Busey spouts amateurishly-written one-liners about the glory of heavy weaponry. There’s a part where he says, as an on-screen character cuts an off-screen someone in half with a chainsaw, “Here’s a way to get back at your parents for how they raised you.” A shot of someone using a flamethrower: “Flamethrowers work.”
It’s painfully obvious — at least, to me — what the marketing guys at THQ and Volition are going for, in this age of YouTube, of the Blogosphere, of Web 2.0, of World 2.0; years ago, Acclaim got hilariously bold with their World 1.5 marketing scheme for some Turok game that probably sucked: they offered free copies of their game to any parents who actually named their child “Turok” and agreed not to have the name legally changed for something like three years. There was another game that they offered, like, free copies of, and a couple Cadbury’s chocolate bars, or something, if you’d agree to place an advertisement for the game on a tombstone that you happen to own (like, your grandfather’s). I remember, back then, a few people asking, “What the hell? Who are they advertising to? Who’s considering videogame purchases in a cemetery?” Anyone dull enough to even ask such a question, I wager, has probably thought of videogames in church. The point of Acclaim’s “advertising” wasn’t to “advertise” — it was to get people talking. It was to create “news” stories in “blogs”, about this crazy advertising stunt. Whether anyone took them up or not — I’m pretty sure no one did; I’d check Wikipedia and report back to you with some tidy facts, if for some reason, in this World 2.0 Age, that didn’t actually feel cheaper and dumber than just admitting that I don’t know — isn’t the point. The point is that it was advertising about advertising, directed at the core of the news media. All it took, in World 1.5, to cause a sensation, is to suggest a ridiculous reward for something improbable. “Acclaim will give you money if you name your child Turok” is a hilarious concept; if someone actually had named their baby Turok, that would have made a hell of a follow-up story. Either way, the follow-up story wasn’t necessary, especially because (and in spite of the fact) that the game no doubt sucked.
In World 2.0, in order to make a sensation, you have to Be Completely Innocent, and Cause Something Bad. Grand Theft Auto didn’t exactly cause world wars or anything — it gets blamed significantly less for the War in Iraq than it gets blamed for each shooting death in middle America — though it certainly is universally recognized as a driving force in the worldwide popular culture. I’d argue that it really is innocent escapism, and that the publishers’ hands are pretty clean in the event of any kids’ getting a hold of the game, because the rating on the box says kids shouldn’t have it. I play GTA like a mafia movie — Sonny Corleone sure as stuff doesn’t shoot the cashier every time he buys a bag of oranges, for example — kids too young to have seen a mafia movie, or understood it, will probably just start running over people and giggling. Who knows. At any rate, it’s quite safe to say that GTA put something into the world, and that the signs of the seed are starting to surface. Saints Row 2‘s “viral” video trailers with Gary Busey are a weird kind of devil-fragment: someone on the marketing team said, “Let’s actually make a game that makes a kid kill someone; let’s actually say ‘kill your parents’ in a subtle enough way to keep a lawsuit running for several months, to get the name of our game on the front page of a thousand newspapers worldwide. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, and the profit from sales and the name recognition will be more than worth the legal costs.” The world we live in — it’s kind of scary. People like THQ are stuffting in the marketing pool, and people like Nintendo are stuffting in the game design pool; sooner or later, this “industry”‘s pool is going to be figuratively full of stuff.
In a way, I respect Rockstar’s aloof, interview-shunning attitude. It shows that they have immense confidence in their games. I remember their “booth” at E3 in 2004 — a huge square of floor space, surrounded by barbed-wire fences with buses parked inside. No one was allowed in, because there was nothing to see. Just big “Grand Theft Auto” logos on the sides of buses. Rockstar knew — and know — that people like, love, want, and need their games, and here, in this transformed world, “No comment” has graduated from being the most strategic thing to say when confronted with a nasty rumor or accusation to being the most awesome thing you can say when given a glowing, dudely compliment.
The GTA games have been the hamster-water-bottle of the gaming populace since 2001, hung upside-down, dripping, sucked on long and hard from beneath by fuzzy, vaguely adorable, vaguely disgusting, absolutely tireless creatures. Rockstar is in a “do no wrong” position, as far as the press is concerned: each release is called the “best game ever” by literally every hobbyist magazine or fanboy blog. When Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was released, the US Official PlayStation Magazine’s front cover literally said “Is this the BEST GAME EVER? . . . We Think So!”
I was convinced it wasn’t quite the best game ever, nor even the best thing ever, though it certainly was nice. It did nice things. It saw Rockstar toying with the GTA III dynamite formula on a grander scale. You could now take girls out on dates, and possibly get laid, if you talked to them nicely enough. You could tap lots of buttons at the gym, to make your character grow bigger and more muscular. Or you could run around a lot on foot in the city, to make your character holocaust-skinny, with incredible endurance. Pedal a bike a lot to earn “bike” skill, and suddenly you’re able to jump over a semi truck while pedaling sixty miles per hour on a freeway. San Andreas topped Vice City and Liberty City by providing a whole state, complete with mini replicas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. At the end of the day, however — and I’m pretty sure this is obvious to everyone by now — “more stuff” doesn’t mean “better game”. Actually, maybe it’s not obvious. Someone on an internet forum I read was once listing his favorite games of all time, and said Space Harrier was number one and Shenmue was number two — then, minutes later, he realized that you can play Space Harrier inside Shenmue, so Shenmue was bumped up to number one. I saw that, and thought about how to respond for a second, and that second turned into a minute, and then I decided to go get a cup of coffee, and then I forgot about it until just now, years later. Was this Guy On The Internet wrong, even by his own standards? By all means. Mathematically. More to the point, was there Too Much Stuff in San Andreas? Most definitely. Some of it was good — the semi-deep clothing customization was hot (my Carl “CJ” Johnson wore green track pants, a sapphire blue button-down shirt, a sweet brown cowboy hat, and a wicked eyepatch, and he actually looked Tokyo-fashionable as opposed to just Hollywood-ridiculous), being able to recruit three AI companions was great (just talk to anyone wearing green in your neighborhood) and the “turf war” mini-game was conceptually excellent: stand in enemy “turf” and shoot enough rival gang members to initiate a “battle”. Defend the turf long enough, and it becomes yours. Try and conquer as much of the map as possible, though beware — leave one spot of your turf surrounded by enemy turf for too long, and they’ll fight back, even (especially) when you’re not there.
It’s just that a lot of the game was too rough and unfinished. Jagged moral edges stuck out here and there — though your hero is a guy who left the city because he hated gang activity, and has only come back to attend his mama’s funeral, when the first girl he dates says “Let’s do a drive-by!”, he replies with “Shit, you my kinda girl!” Mourning his dead mother, hateful of gang violence, he is nonetheless deeply pleased when a girl expresses interest in recklessly killing innocent people. When you recruit gang members and enter a car, they will immediately stick their guns out the windows and shoot at everything. Now, I’ve been to Los Angeles, and I know that people do die and kill there, though I’m pretty sure they don’t stick their guns out the window every time they get into a car.
And the story missions of San Andreas: it’s like a little girl throws a Frisbee, the camera follows it as the blue sky turns to outer space, and then the Frisbee turns into an intercontinental ballistic missile, and there’s a lobster-headed vagina-shaped alien being where we’d expected a happy puppy to be. And then there’s an explosion, and a rain of gold coins. In other words, San Andreas starts with a guy in town for his moms’ funeral, hounded by the jerkoff cops; it ends with you robbing a casino in Vegas and making hundreds of millions of dollars. The American Dream, huh? In between point A and point B, there are (literally and figuratively) many miles of dead countryside — just like America! — and copy-pasted neighborhoods of lifeless cookie-cutter houses — just like America! The producers had once said that the cities in GTA aren’t fully “realistic” because real cities weren’t designed with fun videogames in mind. That’s nice enough, as far as platitudes go, and I guess it’s even kind of true. In the same way, I guess the lives depicted in GTA aren’t “realistic” because real life isn’t designed with fun videogames in mind. Carl “CJ” Johnson is torn between being a Human Being and being a Videogame Character. Evidence existed in San Andreas that Rockstar understood their social role; GTA III had let the player have sex with virtual prostitutes, and as (once again) the game design’s central pillar dictated that all characters must live under the same rules, it must be as possible to kill a prostitute as it is to kill anyone else. It was only a matter of time before someone — not Rockstar — wrote on The Internet that you can have sex with a prostitute and then immediately kill her to get your money back. Because of all the adolescent LOLs and ROFLs and ROFLMAOs that this caused, Rockstar made sure that every prostitute in San Andreas carried a pistol. On the other hand, they made it so that the crack dealers — scary, threatening bastards — carried huge amounts of money. If that’s not dropping a dime in the “social responsibility” collection plate, I don’t know what is.
San Andreas, eventually, inspired game designers more than any other GTA game, because it was bigger, realer, rawer, and simply more present in the mass media and the pop culture. It was the most ticked-out checklist of them all, with more area, more stuff you could do, more ridiculous missions (complete with story-explained reasons to actually wear a jetpack, for god’s sake). Incomplete and sketchy as it was, it was more than a game: it was a comprehensive State of the Industry address, and everything that entails: many hours too long, kind of boring, it droned in explicit detail, outlining “Precisely Everything You Can Do With The Videogame Medium”. The curse of San Andreas is that you can only put so much stuff into a game before the player wonders “What can’t you do in this game?” — and then immediately answers the question: water-skiing. Why can I fly a jetliner when I can’t go water-skiing? Seriously? It’s like throwing in “everything”, even the kitchen sink, and forgetting to throw in the greasy frying pan that was in the kitchen sink.
Nonetheless, the world kowtowed to San Andreas, and more than a few good things came of it. Hell, we can probably say that Realtime Worlds’ “sandbox” action game Crackdown took the turf war concept and expanded it into an entire game — one more revisiting, and “sandbox turf war” could actually become its own genre. Crackdown was designed by one of the guys who made GTA in the first place, so maybe that’s why Crackdown seems to understand so many of GTA‘s shortcomings. The most strategic criticism one can levy at GTA is that everywhere you look (on the internet, or, hey, even in IGN’s video reviews), people are talking about the glory of ignoring the “story” and just going on crazy killing sprees. Crackdown makes the bold hypothesis that perhaps the reason so many people ignore the story and refer to killing sprees as “just having fun” with the game is because the story missions aren’t fun enough. Crackdown nearly cuts “story” out; the goal of the game is to heck stuff up, and if you’re a Christian, you’re in luck, because literally everyone (okay, almost everyone) in the city is a drug-shooting, casual-sexing junkie/murderer. And you, behold, are a cop. On top of all this, you can also jump three stories straight up and lift a car over your head. “Have fun, heckers!” Crackdown says, and proves a Big Fat Point: the people of the world will have fun, if that fun is fun, even if they’re forced to play the part of a do-gooding police officer instead of a hooker-slashing freak-off.
I guess, around the time the GTA-likes started to come out of the woodwork — Driv-Three-Er, The Getaway, the True Crime series, et al — the concept of the “Perfect Sandbox” game was born. Capcom took a stab at it from an obtuse angle, with Dead Rising, a game that requires the player, who is otherwise free to do whatever he can to survive, to “perform”, in a hopelessly constrained environment, according to the story’s strictly set schedule. Meanwhile, in the Rockstar Citadel, Bully was developed and released as a sly one-off. The conservative media went nuts, theorizing that the game was about school shootings. Rockstar ignored the buzz. This was strategic. When Bully was eventually plopped out for public consumption, it was a wee bit misunderstood, though there’s a fair deal of its game-design philosophizing all over GTA IV. With a constrained environment — a school — a mostly wholesome story — through pranks and staged beat-downs, teach the bad bullies
what for — and equal focuses on the life of the protagonist as human being and as a videogame character, Bully spoke to the golden future of videogames: the age of the Holodeck, of Square-Enix’s Anna Karenina, of the age of Smell-o-Vision and 8.1 Dolby Surround-Flavor, when “just being there”, in the game world, will be enough to make you say, “Well, yep, that’s entertainment.”
ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE GAME NOW
Describing the “perfect”, “ideal”, “optimal” Grand Theft Auto game, in detail, would be an extremely boring exercise. It’d be like describing concrete graphical details of Madden that need to be brushed up before we can say it looks absolutely real. Madden is lucky to be dealing with just a sport, played on a mostly solid-colored field; Grand Theft Auto has garbage littering the streets, homeless people asleep in gutters, strip clubs with busted neon signs. There’s more of a connection between the goals of Madden and the goals of GTA than you’d initially think (in other words, not just “money”) — they’re both striving to recreate an experience as accurately and precisely as possible. Neither game, alas, will ever succeed at its ultimate goal, which actually makes it very awesome that the developers keep trying. I’d assume it was because they were dense or something, though I don’t know. People with that much money can’t be stupid. Rockstar “took a break” from producing purely crime-fiction sagas to put out Table Tennis, which the press OMG’d and LOL’d at quite heartily. It was nonetheless a bold and perfectly understandable move: they wanted to try to make something perfect, for the same reason that lesser men occasionally feel like destroying something beautiful. Table tennis just happened to be the simplest sport to represent in a game. Ultimately, we here at Action Button Dot Net (“ABDN” on the NASDAQ) can’t give Grand Theft Auto IV a perfect four-star rating, because the darts mini-game kind of sucks, and this wouldn’t be an issue if Things Like Darts weren’t So Important to the flow of the game. It’s not like Rockstar is short on glowing reviews or anything. I’m pretty sure they won’t mind a less-than-perfect score from us. Hey guys, next time, if you want a perfect score, don’t make us buy the game ourselves! That’s not too much to ask, is it?
Rockstar’s Table Tennis rite-of-passage lends a certain sheen of life to GTA IV. It’s like, remember the computer-generated cut-scenes in Final Fantasy VII? Square spent $35 million on that stuff back in 1997, and now talking-head professors in productivity non-games on the Nintendo DS look better than that stuff. In other words, it’s only a matter of time before all of the mini-games in GTA are as good as Table Tennis. In the meanwhile, I suppose it goes without saying that GTA IV is definitely a step in the right direction, toward the “ideal” GTA game.
The graphics are better: it takes genuine hate-fueled passion to find an instance where a building model is used twice. At last, the night-time color palettes don’t look so muddy and unattractive (they still need a tiny bit more purple and turquoise). Unfortunately, however, the interiors of some buildings still look PlayStation 2-ish. Like the first two safehouses; I understand they’re not supposed to be “nice”. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have proper textures.
The story is leaner: not once in the game are you asked to drive a fire engine with a broken ladder into the Clown District to round up fifty unemployed mimes to form a makeshift ladder so you can climb into the top window of an apple-pie factory and crack the safe so as to steal the Cocaine Recipes within, and then escape with a nearby jet-pack. No, this time around, it’s all about shooting guys. Viewed from the air, some of the shoot-out stages are obviously plotted with Gears-of-War-caliber attention to level design. Some people, if you go by the internet, seem to not like the “sticking-to-walls bullstuff” of the game, though I find that complaint kind of weirdly ironic. It’s a game that presents a breathing simulation of a “realistic” world. These games have always had police officers who do their best to shoot you dead if you kill a random pedestrian; why shouldn’t the consequences of the bullets themselves have, you know, a tiny bit more weight? The cover mechanic is a gorgeous sweater from a prodigal grandma — too bad it’s two sizes too big, and, um, it’s really hard to slip in and out of cover, or slip into the cover you want to slip into, sometimes. The ability to press the cover button long before you approach the cover (so as to initiate a dramatic slide) is pretty sweet, though sometimes it’ll mean you’re now crouched on the wrong side of the cover, which means you get buckshot in the side of the head. Introduction of free-aiming into the series is a god-send: I realize they’ve had it in the PC versions forever, now, though it’s even more intuitive now: press the left trigger to initiate a clever auto-lock-on, and then use the right analog stick to tweak the finer points. It’s kind of creepy that there exist human beings who will say manually aiming is “better” or even “more realistic” because, yes, though I’ve never fired a gun, I don’t reckon I’d have to hold it in front of my face and track it very slowly to the right in order to shoot someone. On the other hand, I can’t call the combat system perfect, because sometimes the auto-lock-on still locks on to a hecking corpse, or sometimes it still locks on to an innocent bystander. I kind of don’t like that! I’m pretty sure that the corpse-lock-on could be justified away as a “pseudo-realistic portrayal of, uhh, how sometimes you don’t know, during a real-life gunfight, if a particular opponent is, uhh, dead or not”, though seriously, jack, we’re playing a videogame, here. You’ve already got life-meters on these guys. Also, seriously, how hard can it be to program the auto-aim so that it automatically locks on to the guy standing right in front of me with a shotgun pointed at my upper chest, instead of the guy upstairs and sixty feet away crouched behind a box and barely visible? Seriously, I’ve just ordered a book that promises to teach me C++ in 21 days — let’s see if I can’t figure this out by the end of next month. (Protip: I probably won’t.) While I’m at it, I’m going to figure out a way to classify “innocents” as their own AI class, and completely remove them from the auto-aim target queue when “hostile” class AI targets are present. Man, look at me — using big words, like I know what they mean! If it’s so easy for me to pretend I know what this stuff means, it must be even easier for Rockstar’s hotshot programmers to implement. A recent issue of Game Developer Magazine tells me that the median yearly salary for a “hotshot game programmer” is something like $93,000. Holy stuff! They can’t be stupid to be that rich, so it’s obvious that they just hate nice people. Can you believe that someone with that much money could resent innocent people, and wish them dead of accidental shotgun wounds? I mean, lawyers get paid six figures, and they protect people all the time! Politicians are millionaires, and they pass laws keeping gay people from getting married — that’s about as pro-life as you can get!
Someone on an internet forum I frequent poignantly expressed some confusion as to why the missions in GTA IV are “constrained” and “set-piecey”, despite the surrounding game being so wide-open and free. I can understand his mild disappointment, though I certainly don’t share it. It makes poetic sense, that more often than not there’s only one or two ways to best a mission. When, at any given time in the story, I have a choice of more than five different mob bosses, thugs, or drug dealers to accept a mission from, when I’m expected to choose what I’m even going to be doing in the first place, I like not having to think about how I’m going to do it. It speaks volumes that the design of the city streets — surprise surprise — in GTA IV is much more real-like than in previous games, where, if you recall several paragraphs ago, the producers had claimed it was more important to make the cities interesting as “a level in a videogame”. They’ve made the right sacrifice, I think: they’ve made a city that is real-like, breathing, living, worth experiencing in a slow-walking leisurely Second-Life-y pace. So it’s all the more fitting that the missions are more straightforward movie action scenes. When everyone sees a Big Movie, and they talk about it at the pizza parlor, they say specific things: “Man, that part where Darth Vader cut off Luke’s hand was awesome.” Imagine if that scene were under the viewer’s control — maybe you could make Darth Vader cut off Luke’s foot, instead. There’s a chance that people will simply say “The fight between Darth Vader and Luke was great”, though it won’t penetrate as deeply into the pop-culture unless there’s something everyone could agree upon. Everyone keeps citing the assassination of Salvatore Leone from GTA III — how it gave you multiple choices for how to complete the mission, and though that was the very essence of GTA at the time, in this post-San Andreas, post-Bully, post-Dead Rising world, the specific is all the more intriguing. There are certain very-well-planned missions with a bit of wiggle room in GTA IV — you just have to either be really, really skilled, or have a lot of imagination. There’s a bike chase halfway through the game where you chase two guys on motorcycles, and if you let the chase drag out long enough, they’ll duck into the subway tunnels, and it’ll beheckin ‘ awesome, because now you’re dodging trains. The “Salvatore Leone” mission of GTA III lets you choose how you’re going to kill the guy from the first-degree phases; GTA IV‘s more well-planned missions are all crimes of passion. In the bike chase, it’s highly possible for you to shoot the guys off their bikes from a distance, if you’re hot enough with the machine gun. The game gives them a fair enough lead, and even contextualizes their lead-off with a cut-scene during which protagonist Niko scrambles for a motorcycle of his own. Whether you pick the guys off from a distance with your machine gun using free-aim or side-swipe them into an oncoming train in the subway tunnels, or sideswipe them off the elevated train track when the chase emerges into the daylight again, or cap the son of a bitch immediately as he veers back onto the highway after the whole train-track chase, you’re going to feel like a badass, like a dude with a stuffed stomach full of videogame. Likewise, there’s another mission where you car-chase some diamond thieves all the way to Central Park. The game has scripted it so that their car will crash in Central Park and they’ll get out, and a gunfight ensues behind pillars under a bridge, escalating to a chase into a public restroom. However, if you be bad, you can end it all before they have a chance to crash. Hey, I’ll take that. Another mission, involving a spectacular jewish-mafia shootout in a museum, ends with a car chase during which you’re told to “lose” the guys. Does that mean run away? I stole a fast car and drove away. They killed me. I tried the mission again. (After reloading my save — hospitals charge ten thousand damn dollars! LOL @ American health care!) The next time, I stole the car in the front of the other two cars, and dropped a grenade out my window, effectively toasting the second car. The third car followed me tenaciously, attracting the attention of the cops. I lost the cops, though I couldn’t lose the mob. I ramped my car off the side of the road and onto the beach. I ran up and crouched beneath a wall, watching the big red blip draw closer. I stood up to get a better look. I remembered I had a rocket launcher. I crouched and prepared it. I stood up and fired at the front of the car. It flew about fifty feet up in the air. “MISSION CLEAR!” I pumped my fist, and the eternally iron-pumping black dude named “My Inner Monologue” shouted “Hell Yeah Motherhecker“. Et cetera, et cetera — there are enough moments like this written about on messageboards all over the internet; poke around, or play the game and make your own.
This is to say nothing of the gloriously straightforward, huge, multi-part mission where you rob a bank. Or any of the several clever Hideo-Kojima-worthy missions like the one where you have a sniper rifle, you’re on a roof, and the target is watching TV and you can’t get a shot. You have to zoom in to the telephone on the table, read the phone number written on it, dial said number on your cell phone, and then shoot him when he gets up to answer the phone.
There are a couple of “emotional” doozies among the mission, like where one main character asks you to kill another, at roughly the same time the other guy asks you to kill the other guy. It’s baffling. I made the “correct” choice, then saved in a new file, then reloaded my save, and tried it the other way. Holy lord, the other way was depressing, and when it was done, the other guy gave me $25,000, told me via cell-phone that I was a sick son of a bitch, and said he never wanted to see me again. Excellent. I didn’t save that file. Curiosity satisfied.
Despite this sort of thing, there’s another mission where you’re supposed to follow a guy in a car to his “crew”‘s house, so that you can kill the whole crew. It’s a satisfying low-speed chase, crashing through fences and people’s backyards in Videogame Jersey. You can kill the guy long before you get to his house, though that will fail you the mission. And then you’re yanked out of the immersive experience, and asked if you want to reset time, and retry. This is kind of a shame. Why can’t “failing” in this regard branch the mission off so that now the “crew” in question — their location lost, because you killed the guy before he could lead you to them — now gears up for revenge, and you have to smoke them out?
I understand that dynamically emergent narrative in a game is Very Complicated, and I’d probably snap my plastic Starbucks’ coffee stir in two and slit my wrists with the shard right here at my desk if The Boss asked me to “make it happen”. Still, Rockstar North has a thousand dudes, all of them no doubt huge with muscles, with wrists so coated with meat as to be impermeable to even the sharpest razors. They consistently manage to put together huge, epic games in pseudo-living cities. I’m pretty sure they could at least make it so that, I don’t know, there’s a little bit more choice in the flow of the story. This is the dream of “interactive cinema”, the corpse of which has long been absorbed into the game-design philosophy, ever since we found 3D. Why do I need to have so many people giving me missions? The main character, Niko, has a story. He has someone he needs to find, in Liberty City. That’s a good concept. He’s also got a cousin with a gambling problem. That’s a good concept as well. Might we see a GTA, some day, where I don’t have thirteen people supplying me with tips on what to do, where the main character’s conversations in his depressing living room with his gambling-addicted cousin determine who the next target is, or what they’re going to do next? Maybe give me one boss telling me what to do, make me feel like I’m actually part of a gang war. Make the “pass/fail” for the missions not so black and white — make it so that, sometimes, the guy might get away, and he’ll just get angry and want revenge, and that figures into the plot.
I know this is a lot of work, though you know what? Rockstar put a lot of work into this game. Too much work, even. There are too many god damnedsingleplayer missions. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy almost every one of them — it’s just that, eventually, there’s too much. Why not make it possible to get “an ending” in ten hours, and plaster it all over the box that the game has “dynamic branching paths”, and can be played again and again? More often than not, in the “videogame business”, game developers will Keep Every Feature of the original game when designing a sequel; that Rockstar North cut out jets and the weight-gain/weight-loss systems from San Andreas seems to me like absolute proof that they wanted GTA IV to be a slimmer game. I’m sure we can all agree with that. Yet, despite cutting out jets and hockey masks and pogo sticks and kitchen sinks and BMX bikes, they left the “dating” system in. And now you can take your male friends — even gay ones — on “dates” to play darts or shoot pool. It’s obvious that they wanted “normal human social interaction” to be a core element of the game — I mean, they chose it over plane-hijacking, for god’s sake — so might their aspirations already be pointing toward a sharp, focused, truly branching narrative? (Or might their choice just be indicating that they finally noticed that the absence of a “hug button” was probably why every jerk handed a controller immediately started running over pedestrians in a stolen car?)
It doesn’t even have to be every mission — just every once in a while. It couldn’t be that much harder than what these godmen are doing already, and it’d make a huge difference, and the critics would no doubt scream again. I know I would. I’d scream until my throat was raw; I’d black out, I’d wake up, and by god, I’d scream some more.
IGN managed to miraculously cause a controversy recently when their “video review” (or something) of GTA IV portrayed the protagonist beating a hooker to death. Rockstar claimed that they didn’t tell IGN to play up the hooker-killing aspect of the game. Nonetheless, it is Rockstar who must shoulder the blame, long after IGN apologizes. I could ruminate here for a bit on how this incident basically exposes IGN once and for all as the knuckle-dragging losers they no doubt are, most likely devoid enough of common sense to reach for their six-week-old plastic disposable Bic razors whenever they get an outbreak of pimples on their faces. Somehow, thanks to years of Nintenditioning, the jerk-offs at IGN had come to equate “things it is possible to do in a videogame” with “features of said videogame”. I’ve been over this before, in this review, though this time, I’m doing it after the “actually talking about the game now” headline, so I assume at least someone is paying attention.
At any rate, we here at Action Button Dot Net don’t shave when we have blemishes, and when we do shave, it’s with genuine badger hair shaving brushes, avocado-oil soap, and vintage-style German double-edge safety razors. We also recognize videogames as a deliberate medium, full of both things “to” do and things you “can” do. Some political pundits sniped at GTA IV, right on cue, saying that “in this game, it’s possible to have sex with a prostitute, kill her afterward, get your money back, and then, when the police show up, you can either cut them in half with a chainsaw or shoot them in the head with a shotgun”. For example, it’s possible to break any music CD, even one of gospel music, in two, and use it to stab a baby in the top of the head. It requires about as much imagination as killing a hooker in GTA IV — that doesn’t mean people go around doing it! Seriously.
If I were a killer in real life, I would probably find killing in GTA IV kind of boring. Likewise, though I don’t particularly mind reloading and then doing missions over all the way from the start when I fail or die, I get all weirdly antsy when bowling with an in-game “friend”. It lets me skip the “friend”‘s turn, though it doesn’t let me skip the animation of the ball coming out of the ball return. So there we have the framework of a mathematical proof that Games Do Not Create Evil: I am bored by the finer points of the in-game virtual bowling experience, just as some kids are enthralled by the ability to kill anyone in the game. In other words, when the game asks me to bear numb-faced witness to something I can do in real life, I am bored; the inverse of this is that I am enthralled when it offers me the chance to do something I can’t do in real life, like kill someone. I’m pretty certain that I’m psychologically incapable of actual murder, even in self-defense; if all the kids out there are equally excited when killing innocent people, that must mean that they, too, consider it something they could not possibly do in the real world. Maybe I’m on to something or maybe I’m being a jerk, though hey, there you have it. Fill in the blanks and win a Nobel Peace Prize.
The irony-loving mass media is alive, of course, with “sarcastic” “news” regarding the “lighter side” of GTA. How it’s not all about an eastern-European immigrant seeking revenge in a dark city — you can also eat hot dogs from street vendors, go bowling, play pool, obey traffic laws, et cetera. Few people, however, are adequately applauding the taxi system. What a brilliant addition — you can now hail a taxi, or call your cousin (who runs a car service) to summon a limo to your current location. This element right here isn’t “new” — it’s been around since Earthbound on the Super Nintendo, where you could order a pizza and have it delivered a randomly calculated interval of time later, even way outside of town — though it is quite necessary if a game is to create a “believable” world. It’s not just “realistic” — it’s courteous, and at the same time dead obvious. How bizarre was it, anyway, that the only way to travel in previous GTA games, at the beginning, was to literally steal an innocent person’s car? That’s a pretty huge oversight, I dare say. Of course, many cash-hungry game designers lifted the idea verbatim, resulting in all travel in Jak II, a game where you’re supposed to be saving people from oppression, being the result of hijacking the innocent peoples’ vehicles. By putting taxis into GTA IV they’ve elevated the game to the next plane — a higher plane than even the ability to pilot jet planes. Their simple presence makes the game all at once come together into something harmonious. Try riding a taxi from one end of the city to the other, and not skipping the driving scene. You can use the right analog stick to look out the window as the taxi streams over a bridge, golden sunset outside. It’s gorgeous. For an instant, that Holodeck future slips into view, and anything looks possible. Sometimes your taxi is stopped at an intersection in thick traffic, and the guy in the car next to you says in a loud voice “Man, this why I need a helicopter.” Classic. Then the weird little uncanny valley touches pop in: you’re walking down the street, and the game’s physics engine is excited enough to show you how people can drop cups of coffee if you bump into them. Of course they don’t pick the coffee up — it’s spilled, gone — though when it’s raining and you bump into someone and they drop their umbrella, they get appropriately peeved, and then just keep walking without picking the umbrella up again. No one remembered to tell that AI that it didn’t want to get wet — just that it should be carrying an umbrella until being interrupted.
And then there are the vast deserts of the brain: here, in this city, you can go to a comedy club, you can get drunk and watch the screen wobble terrifyingly. You can browse a hilariously-written semi-parody internet, with dead-hilarious PR copy for things like fictional beverages; you can read a “child beauty pageant” website and then, upon logging off, find yourself assaulted by a SWAT team. So why can’t you sit on a bench by the side of the road? Why can’t Niko sit down in a diner when he orders a hamburger? Why does he have to eat standing up? When you consider all the budget that must have been appropriated to the awesome radio stations, you really have to wonder about things like this.
In spite of how delicious and heavy and perfect I find the vehicle physics in GTA IV — this is GTA post-Burnout, of course, so the mouse-cursor physics of previous games just won’t do anymore — I labored, for the first twenty hours of play, to complete GTA IV without “stealing” a single car. Once I realized that cars taken during missions — like, when there’s a bike right there in front of you at the start of a mission, and you’re obviously supposed to ride it — don’t count as “stolen”, my quest was energized. I eventually gave up, though, because I accidentally stole taxis too many times. You have to hold the Y button to enter as a passenger. If you don’t hold the button all the way up to the part where Niko opens the back door, then he decides to steal the car. You might say that it doesn’t matter, or that it’s a weird thing to complain about, though really, with GTA IV, Rockstar has given the vehicles realistic physics, it has gifted the human bodies with realistic weight, it has included missions where you must choose to kill the target or let him live. It’s a “small” oversight that the game underestimates the difference between “I’m going to open the back door of this cab and get in as a passenger, and tell the man I want to go home” and “I’m going to walk up to this cab I just hailed, break the driver’s-side window with my elbow, drag the driver out by his neck, throw him onto the pavement, kick him in the ribs, get in his car, slam the door, sneer, and say ‘Nice car — JERK!'” Even in the mind of a man who was, say, in the military, I’m pretty sure there’s a cosmos-wide ravine in the mind between these two notions.
Then again, there’s apparently an Xbox Achievement, or something, awarded if you steal something like 600 cars. (I think?) Why can’t there be an Achievement for “clear all story missions without stealing a single innocent person’s car”? Probably because the game isn’t programmed to track something like that. They should get on it. It would be . . . nice, I guess. Maybe, if you manage to beat the game in such a way, you get a free super-car of some sort.
Of course, once I’m playing this game online, I have no qualms about being a jerk, stealing cars, standing in the middle of the road with a pistol, free-aiming, shooting drivers in the head, et cetera. It’s the New Hilarious. Once GTA IV emerges on the other end of the tunnel as The Only Game On Earth for Xbox Live kids, maybe that’ll spur on the team’s confidence in making a more strictly focused singleplayer. Who knows. Either way, I guess it’s a testament to the main character’s likability and his placement in the story — I didn’t want to make him do anything ridiculous. Speaking of Niko — I really think his voice could have been better. That they got a guy who isn’t Eastern-European kind of makes sense, if you think that maybe it’s, I don’t know, a jab at Super Mario. Still, they hadheckin’ Ray Liotta for Vice City — the least they could have done is get the lead singer from Gogol Bordello to do the voice of the main character. I mean, he’s a pretty great actor himself, and he’s even from New York. If you asked me, they kind of missed an opportunity.
Having seen how well they did with the GPS / cellular phone age, I kind of hope that the next GTA side-story will be set at least twenty years in the future, and possibly in some gritty Tokyo or Hong Kong replica, though maybe that wouldn’t work out, because what would the people talk about on the radio? They’d have to get so much more creative. (“Creative” is not a word I’d apply to the humor in GTA IV, perfect as it is most of the time — you need only read the comments thread on aYouTube video of a presidential debate or see two beer commercials or stand in an American supermarket for three minutes to be able to write a thousand jokes of this quality.) Part of GTA‘s charm is the heaps of social satire; in GTA IV, the radio segments are so well-written that they make even homophobia clever: the pundits will slam the violence in the game, though say nothing of the heaps of homophobia. While we’re at it, I have to wonder, since when are the “conservative” people the ones who support war? Since when is not wanting anyone to die unnecessarily strictly a belief of nose-pierced purple-haired freaks? No — must not start typing about things like that. Must go back to finishing this paragraph, and this review, with something that looks like the fantasy of a very fat person, so that people reading just the last sentence will get the impression they want to get: Yeah, I’d like a GTA: Near-Future Asian Metropolis, with squealing math-rock on every radio station. Man, I’d play that game all night! I’d probably have to switch this website’s rating scale to one-to-ten, just so I could give it a ten!
★★★⋆
“ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE HOLODECK FROM 'STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION'.”
I’m not even going to think about “lucid” dreams. Let’s cut to the chase — until the day scientists develop a fool-proof method for me to have overtly erotic dreams about the woman of my choice one hundred percent of the time, Grand Theft Auto IV, for all it’s worth, is the Most Entertaining Thing on Earth. Much as I’d like to spend a third my salary on special condoms that are safe to apply before bedtime, I guess I’ll have to make do with Grand Theft Auto IV‘s online multiplayer for now.
Alternate first sentence: Grand Theft Auto IV is a videogame so hot that the first Amazon.com customer-submitted image of it is a fetishized photo of a man opening up a cardboard box full of copies of the game.
I’d reckon it’s even better than any of us dreamed Virtual Reality would ever be, even if we proudly own the experience of having spent four dollars to play, say, Dactyl Nightmare for three minutes. Back then, our idea of VR was that, someday, we’d be able to wear a huge heavy helmet on our heads and run around in a world that didn’t look real, doing things as complicated as shooting other characters who were being controlled by other players, who are also wearing heavy helmets. The “dream” of VR, way back when, involved a clever clause, which we can probably safely call the “Lawnmower Man Effect” — we didn’t care that this supposed “reality” didn’t look “real”, so long as it was immersed us, and made us “feel” like we were “there”. In other words, it had to be interesting.
In a way, graphics engineers of the early 1990s were lucky that the virtual reality programs of popular culture had succeeded in glamorizing bizarre and warped landscapes. If the “sex scene” in “The Lawnmower Man” had portrayed two absolutely real-looking individuals having sex in, say, a canopy bed in a windswept room in a castle on a mountaintop in Europe as opposed to portraying two mirror-skinned humanoid figures floating in a blue polygonal void, with bubbles protruding out of genitals and then touching, the “videogame industry” might have crashed before 1999. It perhaps also helped that the “virtual reality” of “The Lawnmower Man” was a vaguely religiously sinister entity, in which a man was turned into a genius and then a killing monster, and later imprisoned. That didn’t exactly make kids think “Man, pretending sucks“, though it perhaps subliminally reinforced the idea that there is kind of some fun stuff to do in reality.
Here we are, now, in 2008. “The future”, as foretold by the best science-fiction, began one year and some change ago. People are, presently, as entertained by the idea of sending text messages on their cellular phones as the mid-1990s had imagined people would be with the idea of taking a date to a virtual-reality pub and experiencing some surreal sex, and then maybe talking about philosophy whilst huffing grapefruit-flavored oxygen. The dream of VR isn’t dead; it’s only sleeping. It’s tossing and turning in Japan, where reasonably obese persons with low standards and addictive personalities will gladly line up for upwards of twenty foodless minutes to pay five dollars to play six minutes worth of a PSOne-era flat-shaded polygon buffet with a Gundam license slapped on it, just because, well, there’s a Gundam license slapped on it, and because in order to play the game, you have to sit in a chair inside a big, plastic, egg-shaped dome screen. The game itself is ugly and insipid, and I don’t want to talk about it, though hey, there you go: the closest modern equivalent to the VR dream of yesteryear. Digging a little deeper, we can identify Sony’s EyeToy and Nintendo’s DS and Wii controllers as a fragment of the dream of VR — translating real movements into on-screen movements. Meanwhile, massively multiplayer online role-playing games like Everquest and World of Warcraft have always just been finely flawed potshots at the Cyberspace dream of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash: this character is you, this world is fantastic, this sword is big, and on fire, and yes, there are a few (hundred thousand) numbers on-screen at any given time for you to forget that you forgot to file your taxes this year. In a Japanese hot-spring inn, there’s always a family-friendly section, where mom and dad and the kids can all go together — instead of a full bath, it’s an ankle-high, super-long trough. Foot-bathing. That’s what MMORPGs are — foot baths. A closer stab at the Neal Stephenson dream is Second Life, which is like an MMORPG except it has no clearly defined purpose — it’s just a “virtual playground” — is both objectively hideous on an aesthetic level (because there will always be some jerk with a vagina for a face wandering around the most minutely detailed and lush piece of virtual architecture) and cataclysmically uninteresting, because this sort of surreal landscape is the sort of thing we’d expected to have to wear a heavy helmet to experience: no helmet, no deal.
Not all videogames in existence are trying to be the Holodeck from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, which is simultaneously kind of a shame and kind of a relief. It’s a shame because the Holodeck is a good idea — such a good idea that they devoted entire whole arcs of episodes to what is essentially defined by the writers as “the way people entertain themselves in the 25th century” (Captain Jean-Luc Picard living out Shakespearean roles, et cetera) — and it’s a relief because there are so many uncannily horrifying ways to heck it up. What you’ll see, though, over the next couple years in this “Videogame Industry”, is that every time someone takes a step closer to the Holodeck, that game will sell two to six million copies upon release. It’s what people want, whether they want to want it or not.
The majority of MMORPGs take place in swords-and-sorcerers, dungeons-and-dragons settings because, quite frankly, taking place in the future, with robots and laserguns and hover-Vespas, would just remind people that they’re using a computer, and that would totally kill millions of buzzes on impact. Second Life is a gimpy mutant areality because People Are Jerks, and the developers know that if they poured all their “talent” into making the graphics look real, that would only make the sight of the people walking around in flat-shaded purple cat suits all the more jarring.
For taking place in a world that strives to be “real”, Grand Theft Auto is something of an anomaly among MMORPGs, and at the same time, it succeeds on levels that they never have. I’m going to put a paragraph break, now, so you can tab over to Hotmail (god, use Gmail already) and send me a paragraph of hate, accusing me ofbestiality or whatever, because “GTA isn’t an MMORPG”.
“MMORPG” stands for “Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Game”. The “first reference” rule of AP journalism dictates that I must spell out all the words of an abbreviation before using the abbreviation; I’m sure that every fat hack writing about videogames for money on the internet holds a doctorate in journalism, however, so I guess that means that whenever they use the term “MMORPG” in an article without first explaining what the letters stand for, that they’re referring to something other than a “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game”. Therefore, their journalistic perhaps-lapse frees me of the guilt associated with using the abbreviation “MMORPG” to talk about a game that just so happens to not be massively multiplayer or online.
Whether you don’t believe Grand Theft Auto is an MMORPG or not isn’t important — it’s the game that all MMORPG developers should be looking at above all other games — even their own games — and very seriously. MMORPGs present detailed worlds that, while perhaps not “realistic”, are at least “believable”. Grand Theft Auto has, since 2001, labored to produce a more minutely detailed and believable world than any other game on the market. And it succeeds for the simplest, most mathematical of reasons. The scientific calculators must have been working overtime at Rockstar North these past few laborious years, because with Grand Theft Auto IV, they have graduated another step toward the Holodeck, while “other” MMORPGs still smolder in Mathematician’s Hell.
Grand Theft Auto for the PlayStation, though primitive in presentation, gave players a solidly-structured city with one amazing quirk: the existence of innocence. It seems like the most obvious thing in the world now, that Grand Theft Auto gained immense popularity because it “lets you kill innocent people”, though was the “killing” of the innocent people ever the point? The more precise way to define Grand Theft Auto‘s revelation is that it allowed innocence to exist in the same world as the core of the game design. In other words: you can do the same things to innocent people or objects that you can do to the not-innocent people or objects.
As something of my hobby (most clearly defined as “pursuing a PhD in economics”), I’ve been reading a lot of thick high-level books on probability and combinatorics lately, and some of the real-life applications are fascinating. It’d take miles of paper to explain it in full detail, though the more you think about entertainment in mathematical terms, the more of a crock the idea of narrative comes to be. To imbue this paragraph with another tangent, let’s mention how I was watching the movie “Out of Sight” the other day, during which Jennifer Lopez, as a federal marshall, and George Clooney, as a bank robber breaking out of prison, somehow end up stuffed together in the trunk of a car as the first plot point. Miraculously, they begin talking about movies, namely Sydney Pollack’s “Three Days of the Condor“, starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway: “It always seemed so phony to me, how they got together so quickly like that”. The irony of this J-Lo-musing is manifold, considering her current situation as a character in a motion picture. Most poignantly, however, it points a fat, sharp finger at the very foundation of the idea of narrative: it’s a challenge for a writer to make something seem like a coincidence — for something to seem “phony” — in fiction. It requires the writer to establish clearly defined boundaries, and rules: to make the subject small enough to seem ridiculous in context, the writer needs to craft huge rules. We, the audience, need to know a massive load about the two characters before we can consider it “phony” that they fall in love so quickly. Because, ultimately, the writer wouldn’t be writing a story with these two people in it for no reason. For another example, let’s say we have a story about a man’s life. In one scene, we see him strike oil. In the next scene, we see him losing money on a stock market crash. Is it a “coincidence” that these things happen one right after another? Of course not — the writer / director / editor are conspiring to tell a story in terms of relevant events.
Videogames have, fundamentally, “failed” as “narrative” in the past because they fail to establish the finer workings of their worlds, and sometimes their characters. In a movie, we might see a guy whose girlfriend is killed during a robbery; an hour later in the movie, and years later in the man’s fictional life, we might see him take a bullet to defend a woman he doesn’t even know. One event is shown to us so that the other has context. In games with “narrative”, we rarely even get the scene where the hero tips his shoe-shine guy an extra nickel, and thus comes up short when it’s time to pay the check on his Big Date with the Hot Girl. Hell, we hardly ever get shoe-shine boys, period, in videogames.
BioShock, a recent, acclaimed, jiggling pile of protoplasm, initially tells us plenty about its world though no more about its character than that he’s the type of guy to immediately eat a bag of potato chips found in a garbage can even when he’s not hungry. Videogames tend to be straightforward sequences of dudes blasting demons because that’s what they’re about. There are no coincidences. I recall, now, a part from a scene in Super Mario Galaxy, in a stage called “The Rabbits Are Looking For Something”, where a bumblebee tells me “The rabbits are looking for something”, and then a rabbit three feet away tells me “We’re looking for something.” He says the somethings they’re looking for are star chips, just as the camera pulls up to show a star chip hovering in the sky. There are also three pegs in the ground, which the player will know he possesses the ability to pound down; two minutes later, a rabbit says he can “smell” a star chip, and the camera pans over to a crate, which the player knows he possesses the ability to shatter by shaking the Wiimote. In both cases, doing what you “can” do yields the star chip in question — one of them is inside the crate, and the other is bizarrely obtained by using a trampoline that materializes when you pound all three pegs into the ground; here, pathologically, is the root of The Modern Videogame’s failure: for remembering how to do what he can do without asking why, the game “rewards” the player with what it has contrived the player to “need“. This isn’t game design — it’s kleptomania. It’s no coincidence that all those packs of gum ended up in your jacket pocket.
It’s so horribly, disgustingly obvious, in the end, what the existence of innocence does for golden-age game design. Let’s retrofit the “essence” of Grand Theft Auto into Super Mario Bros., as an exercise: in Super Mario Bros., Super Mario is a Hero. He is saving the Princess. In order to save the Princess, he must navigate a thrown-down gauntlet of thousands and hundreds of enemy grunts. Mario’s quest — so says the manual — takes place in “The Mushroom Kingdom”, though as far as kingdoms go, it seems to only be full of Evil Monsters.
Mario’s quest takes him from the left side of the screen to the ever-unfolding right side of the screen. The enemies come from the right side to the left. Every four stages, there’s a castle, which Mario goes inside, in hopes of rescuing the princess. At the end of every castle, he finds a mushroom-headed kid-thing who tells him “Our princess is in another castle.”
Now, take your archetypal, fond memories of mushrooms and fire flowers and goombas and koopas, and superimpose this idea over it: the innocent, mushroom-headed kid-things are also running from the right side of the screen to the left, in the same direction as the enemies. Let’s say that they possess shared traits of both Mario — in that they die if they touch the enemies — and of the enemies — in that they also die if stomped by Mario.
Let that idea ferment in your head for a minute.
Stomp the enemies before the innocents run into them. Lose points every time an innocent dies. Stomp the innocents by accident, and lose points. If you’re a sadistic heck, you can stomp the innocents for the thrill of watching their pathetic death animations.
Nintendo games like Gyromite! would play around with the idea of “protecting” an on-screen avatar, though that was always the whole point of such games. If Mario is a Hero, why is “saving” someone something he only does once? Get Shigeru Miyamoto on the phone — seriously — if it was never even an “idea” to have rescuable innocent Toads in the stages in Super Mario Bros., then inform Nintendo that I’m more worthy of his job than he is.
The closest we would ever get to this kind of game, eventually, would be in tacky light-gun shooters, where “innocent civilians” would occasionally pop up. As there’s no on-screen player character in such games, it just doesn’t feel as “bad” when you shoot them as it does when you first run over an innocent person in Grand Theft Auto III. And the penalty for shooting innocent people in light-gun games has only ever been a loss of points.
Super Mario Bros. was inspired by the cream of the current crop, and it would go on to paint an entire genre (“action games”) right down to its bones: stumbling on the very first rung of the narrative ladder, “the hero fights bad guys” came to equal “the hero exists in a world where (aside from himself) only bad guys exist”. Again, no coincidences: only laziness, only lack of imagination.
I’m not knocking Super Mario Bros., of course. It was entertaining as all hell, is what it was. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, though to be fair I’d yet to see even a photograph of a naked woman at that point.
All I’m trying to say is that, at least conceptually, Grand Theft Auto had beaten Super Mario Bros. at its own game. No one seemed to notice, however, because the game’s presentation was subjectively flawed, and its attempts at mimicking reality just didn’t taste right when you still had to press a button to make a guy punch another guy.
Super Mario 64 popped open a frighteningly huge can of worms — 3D action with dynamic personality (the use of the words “dynamic personality” is my way of avoiding Tomb Raider et al). So it was that Grand Theft Auto III was born in the alternate dimension we call “Obviously Awesome, Financially Impossible”. When Rockstar had at last rotated the meat-grinder of life enough times, GTA III plopped itself down on the doorstep of mankind, and Maxim compared the hecking thing to “Pulp Fiction”, which is about as good and as bad as anything can probably get. Rockstar instantly ascended to the next spiritual plane. Their game was so huge in terms of scale, sales, and magnitude that it took years for everyone’s parents and local religious pundit of choice to finally catch on to its sinister side.
The simple way to put it is that Grand Theft Auto lets you kill in-game representations of “innocent” people in situations where no one is otherwise doing anything violent. It lets you turn peace into violence.
“Innocent” people in GTA are easy for any open mind to define: they are the people who are not immediately trying to kill you. Digital representations of human beings don’t need psychological profiles, most of the time: all they need to do is be standing there. Their role, at all times, is “potential victim” of simulated “violence”.
Since more money is poured into the graphical effects that happen when things explode that the graphical effects that happen when people group hug, Grand Theft Auto is mathematically doomed to be objectively “violent”. The simplest straw-man argument in defense of GTA is that in real-life, things can and will explode, as well, so in order to represent a “real” world in a videogame, one needs to account for the more highly improbable side of physics, for the more top-of-the-show side of nightly news. Why craft a detailed, yet ultimately fake world if spectacular things aren’t going to happen? Death is one of the handful of great truths in life; to not account for it in a videogame or any narrative presenting a depiction of reality is a hideous oversight — and (here I begin to crack) to not consider death of innocent people a thing of spectacular fascination, as an author, is to miss the point of not being hit by a bus every morning.
(Of course, perceiving the killing of an innocent person as “fun” is still kind of fundamentally sick.)
So here’s the truth: I personally have always perceived the Grand Theft Auto games as very simple IQ test questions. Through the miracle of graphic design and bare story cues, the game informs you that your character is a thug. The blip on your radar is the location of the MacGuffin. Go get the MacGuffin. Anyone who tries to stop you from getting the MacGuffin is Not An Innocent Person. All of the other cars on the road are full of people trying to mind their own business. In a MegaMan game, they would be the spinning blades the player must avoid to get at the bad guys. (“Obstacles”.)
In other words, I personally have always viewed the innocent people in Grand Theft Auto as things to avoid dangerous contact with. Only the relationship between the Main Character in a GTA and innocent pedestrians and the relationship between spinning obstacles in MegaMan is different — in GTA, the main character hurts the obstacles, not the other way around.
It’s pretty obvious that Grand Theft Auto was, initially, an experiment in “letting the player do ‘anything'” in a rigidly defined world. GTA III, gifted with the canvas of 3D and the experiment of two and a half other games under its belt, was more focused: it was to be an experiment to see how much the game designers could allow the player to do in a 3D space. The two GTA III pseudo-sequels that followed ticked off additional boxes on GTA III‘s initial checklist (“Ride motorcycles”, “Fly a jetliner”).
It seems to me, from a brief forensic analysis, that the purpose of GTA never was to make a game that lets players “be the bad guy”, that lets players “kill innocent people”. The idea was, essentially, to “let the player be free” — hence, perhaps, the name “Liberty City”. The idea of setting the game in a “realistic, modern city” was so obvious a third-grader could have come up with it and still flunked arithmetic. That the game designers chose to make the “hero” a bad man instead of a good man is, in the right twisted context, proof of their human virtue: it’s possible, in their game, to kill anyone, to drive around in traffic like a jerk-off, bumping cars off the road. If you make the “hero” of the game a good person — like a spy or a tax-man, or a cop — the idea of absolute freedom would run counter to the narrative context. The narrative context, of course, only exists because when we, as human beings, see a digital representation of a city, when we tilt an analog stick and see one person in the digital crowd move, we are biologically wired to wonder “Who’s That Guy?” “What’s His Story?” On the contrary, if GTA were a game about piloting a sphere and bumping cubes out of the rectangular pathway, shooting little squares at cylinders and watching them blink and disappear, no one would think it was very “fun” at all. “Entertainment” and “context” are, in many cases, the same exact thing. It’s regrettable sometimes, and sometimes you just kind of shrug and move on.
So yeah, in GTA, you’re a “bad guy” for reasons of cold mathematics, because, if by design players are allowed to “do anything”, that’s precisely what they’ll do. A thousand words on the nature of escapism could very easily flow forth from here: the more realistic the world inside the television screen looks, the more the average twelve-to-seventy-year-old is going to want to see Something heckin’ Nuts happen. Think of all the people who gave up on Sega’s 70-million-dollar disasterpiece Shenmue. I swear, that game is a story written by a first-year creative-writing student who literally cringes when she types the words “And then, Veronica slapped her boyfriend in the mouth.”
Games like Driver stumbled a bit, back in the day; inspired by GTA, the folks behind Driver set about making a true-crime focused opus of a game that took one aspect of the newly minted “crime genre” and expanded it. Namely, they wanted to make a game that was entirely focused on the idea of driving criminals away from robbery scenes. You were a getaway driver. The original idea of the game was that you’d just play it as a string of missions, with no context outside of “the police are chasing you”. Afraid, eventually, that the yet-invisible media pundits would jump out of nowhere and snipe the game’s “glorification” of “criminal activity”, they shoehorned in a narrative: don’t worry, you’re not really a bad guy. You’re an undercover FBI agent working for the mob. Some doctors would clinically diagnose this as a “lack of balls”, others would say it was a group of dudes sticking to their guns, refusing to turn the police cars with blaring sirens into contextless floating rectangular prisms.
History has muted the answer to that particular riddle. And yet, Grand Theft Auto went on using the police as threats and targets. The police are the simple, beautiful key to the dynamic of Grand Theft Auto‘s world; their presence is under- and over-estimated simultaneously by so many critics worldwide that I’m surprised any television on earth is capable of displaying them. In a GTA game, we have
1. The player character (the “main character”, the “protagonist”, the “person we want to see succeed”)
2. The innocent people (bystanders and onlookers, pedestrians and commuters, the “people minding their own business”)
3. The guilty people (assassination targets, gang bosses, henchmen, obstacles placed strategically around our goals, “the tyranny of evil men”)
4. The police
The police, simply put, show up when you do something “wrong”, as dictated by a simple algorithm. The police uphold the “order” of GTA; they’re the reason the game won’t ever turn into Second Life, and it’s better off for it. Let’s assume for a minute that GTA was crafted from the ground up to be a “videogame”, not a “narrative”: if GTA is “based” on “reality”, and the main character is a “bad” man by mathematical necessity, then the police are the developers’ injection of conscience. If you shoot an innocent person, the game sends police your way; so the line between “the innocent” and “the law” becomes invisible, and the line that separates your player character from the law and the innocent becomes embarrassingly fat. And then: if you’re having a firefight out in the street with some gangsters as part of a “mission”, the game is going to send police to the scene. Moral gray areas abound: mathematically, the player is wired to know that anyone shooting at his on-screen avatar is a threat to be eliminated. However, thanks to an elegant veneer of context, the player also knows that the police are the “good” guys. So the line between “self preservation” and “being an evil bastard” becomes thin, and fuzzy, and perversely entertaining. Thrilling. It is in that unholy region that GTA goes from being a well-executed game to being a multi-million-selling cultural phenomenon.
All it took to graduate from naughty pixel-play to genuine sales dynamo was years of probably-tedious checklist-filling by the developers: get real music on the radio, give the protagonist a name and a face, get Hollywood voice talent, let the player earn proficiencies by repeating simple actions, let them fly helicopters, let them order hamburgers at fast food joints, et cetera. The problem, “morally”, with “let the player eat at fast food joints” is that the main pillar of the game design is that NPCs, bad guys, good guys, and the police all exist in the same space, and can have the same actions performed on them. If you can shoot a bad guy, then the game is obligated to also let you shoot a good guy, or shoot the cashier at a fast-food joint. You don’t even have to rob the fast food joint — you can just shoot the guy and walk out.
Since the game development community finally caught on that GTA is amazing, we’ve seen stumbler after stumbler literally presume that the point of “let the player eat fast food” is “let the player shoot the cashier”. Okay, maybe I’m just talking about Saints Row, where your main character is supposed to be a member of a street-cleaning gang, though if you shoot an old lady at random, your positively religious partner won’t even dare to consider you a monster. In fact, he’ll start shooting along with you. The makers of Saints Row, in addition to perhaps not knowing how to use apostrophes, were inspired less by GTA as a slab of sparkling game design as they were inspired by the idea that some kids’ parents kinda thought it was the devil. See Exhibit A, a video trailer for Saints Row 2, in which theinexplicably paid Gary Busey spouts amateurishly-written one-liners about the glory of heavy weaponry. There’s a part where he says, as an on-screen character cuts an off-screen someone in half with a chainsaw, “Here’s a way to get back at your parents for how they raised you.” A shot of someone using a flamethrower: “Flamethrowers work.”
It’s painfully obvious — at least, to me — what the marketing guys at THQ and Volition are going for, in this age of YouTube, of the Blogosphere, of Web 2.0, of World 2.0; years ago, Acclaim got hilariously bold with their World 1.5 marketing scheme for some Turok game that probably sucked: they offered free copies of their game to any parents who actually named their child “Turok” and agreed not to have the name legally changed for something like three years. There was another game that they offered, like, free copies of, and a couple Cadbury’s chocolate bars, or something, if you’d agree to place an advertisement for the game on a tombstone that you happen to own (like, your grandfather’s). I remember, back then, a few people asking, “What the hell? Who are they advertising to? Who’s considering videogame purchases in a cemetery?” Anyone dull enough to even ask such a question, I wager, has probably thought of videogames in church. The point of Acclaim’s “advertising” wasn’t to “advertise” — it was to get people talking. It was to create “news” stories in “blogs”, about this crazy advertising stunt. Whether anyone took them up or not — I’m pretty sure no one did; I’d check Wikipedia and report back to you with some tidy facts, if for some reason, in this World 2.0 Age, that didn’t actually feel cheaper and dumber than just admitting that I don’t know — isn’t the point. The point is that it was advertising about advertising, directed at the core of the news media. All it took, in World 1.5, to cause a sensation, is to suggest a ridiculous reward for something improbable. “Acclaim will give you money if you name your child Turok” is a hilarious concept; if someone actually had named their baby Turok, that would have made a hell of a follow-up story. Either way, the follow-up story wasn’t necessary, especially because (and in spite of the fact) that the game no doubt sucked.
In World 2.0, in order to make a sensation, you have to Be Completely Innocent, and Cause Something Bad. Grand Theft Auto didn’t exactly cause world wars or anything — it gets blamed significantly less for the War in Iraq than it gets blamed for each shooting death in middle America — though it certainly is universally recognized as a driving force in the worldwide popular culture. I’d argue that it really is innocent escapism, and that the publishers’ hands are pretty clean in the event of any kids’ getting a hold of the game, because the rating on the box says kids shouldn’t have it. I play GTA like a mafia movie — Sonny Corleone sure as stuff doesn’t shoot the cashier every time he buys a bag of oranges, for example — kids too young to have seen a mafia movie, or understood it, will probably just start running over people and giggling. Who knows. At any rate, it’s quite safe to say that GTA put something into the world, and that the signs of the seed are starting to surface. Saints Row 2‘s “viral” video trailers with Gary Busey are a weird kind of devil-fragment: someone on the marketing team said, “Let’s actually make a game that makes a kid kill someone; let’s actually say ‘kill your parents’ in a subtle enough way to keep a lawsuit running for several months, to get the name of our game on the front page of a thousand newspapers worldwide. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, and the profit from sales and the name recognition will be more than worth the legal costs.” The world we live in — it’s kind of scary. People like THQ are stuffting in the marketing pool, and people like Nintendo are stuffting in the game design pool; sooner or later, this “industry”‘s pool is going to be figuratively full of stuff.
In a way, I respect Rockstar’s aloof, interview-shunning attitude. It shows that they have immense confidence in their games. I remember their “booth” at E3 in 2004 — a huge square of floor space, surrounded by barbed-wire fences with buses parked inside. No one was allowed in, because there was nothing to see. Just big “Grand Theft Auto” logos on the sides of buses. Rockstar knew — and know — that people like, love, want, and need their games, and here, in this transformed world, “No comment” has graduated from being the most strategic thing to say when confronted with a nasty rumor or accusation to being the most awesome thing you can say when given a glowing, dudely compliment.
The GTA games have been the hamster-water-bottle of the gaming populace since 2001, hung upside-down, dripping, sucked on long and hard from beneath by fuzzy, vaguely adorable, vaguely disgusting, absolutely tireless creatures. Rockstar is in a “do no wrong” position, as far as the press is concerned: each release is called the “best game ever” by literally every hobbyist magazine or fanboy blog. When Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was released, the US Official PlayStation Magazine’s front cover literally said “Is this the BEST GAME EVER? . . . We Think So!”
I was convinced it wasn’t quite the best game ever, nor even the best thing ever, though it certainly was nice. It did nice things. It saw Rockstar toying with the GTA III dynamite formula on a grander scale. You could now take girls out on dates, and possibly get laid, if you talked to them nicely enough. You could tap lots of buttons at the gym, to make your character grow bigger and more muscular. Or you could run around a lot on foot in the city, to make your character holocaust-skinny, with incredible endurance. Pedal a bike a lot to earn “bike” skill, and suddenly you’re able to jump over a semi truck while pedaling sixty miles per hour on a freeway. San Andreas topped Vice City and Liberty City by providing a whole state, complete with mini replicas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. At the end of the day, however — and I’m pretty sure this is obvious to everyone by now — “more stuff” doesn’t mean “better game”. Actually, maybe it’s not obvious. Someone on an internet forum I read was once listing his favorite games of all time, and said Space Harrier was number one and Shenmue was number two — then, minutes later, he realized that you can play Space Harrier inside Shenmue, so Shenmue was bumped up to number one. I saw that, and thought about how to respond for a second, and that second turned into a minute, and then I decided to go get a cup of coffee, and then I forgot about it until just now, years later. Was this Guy On The Internet wrong, even by his own standards? By all means. Mathematically. More to the point, was there Too Much Stuff in San Andreas? Most definitely. Some of it was good — the semi-deep clothing customization was hot (my Carl “CJ” Johnson wore green track pants, a sapphire blue button-down shirt, a sweet brown cowboy hat, and a wicked eyepatch, and he actually looked Tokyo-fashionable as opposed to just Hollywood-ridiculous), being able to recruit three AI companions was great (just talk to anyone wearing green in your neighborhood) and the “turf war” mini-game was conceptually excellent: stand in enemy “turf” and shoot enough rival gang members to initiate a “battle”. Defend the turf long enough, and it becomes yours. Try and conquer as much of the map as possible, though beware — leave one spot of your turf surrounded by enemy turf for too long, and they’ll fight back, even (especially) when you’re not there.
It’s just that a lot of the game was too rough and unfinished. Jagged moral edges stuck out here and there — though your hero is a guy who left the city because he hated gang activity, and has only come back to attend his mama’s funeral, when the first girl he dates says “Let’s do a drive-by!”, he replies with “Shit, you my kinda girl!” Mourning his dead mother, hateful of gang violence, he is nonetheless deeply pleased when a girl expresses interest in recklessly killing innocent people. When you recruit gang members and enter a car, they will immediately stick their guns out the windows and shoot at everything. Now, I’ve been to Los Angeles, and I know that people do die and kill there, though I’m pretty sure they don’t stick their guns out the window every time they get into a car.
And the story missions of San Andreas: it’s like a little girl throws a Frisbee, the camera follows it as the blue sky turns to outer space, and then the Frisbee turns into an intercontinental ballistic missile, and there’s a lobster-headed vagina-shaped alien being where we’d expected a happy puppy to be. And then there’s an explosion, and a rain of gold coins. In other words, San Andreas starts with a guy in town for his moms’ funeral, hounded by the jerkoff cops; it ends with you robbing a casino in Vegas and making hundreds of millions of dollars. The American Dream, huh? In between point A and point B, there are (literally and figuratively) many miles of dead countryside — just like America! — and copy-pasted neighborhoods of lifeless cookie-cutter houses — just like America! The producers had once said that the cities in GTA aren’t fully “realistic” because real cities weren’t designed with fun videogames in mind. That’s nice enough, as far as platitudes go, and I guess it’s even kind of true. In the same way, I guess the lives depicted in GTA aren’t “realistic” because real life isn’t designed with fun videogames in mind. Carl “CJ” Johnson is torn between being a Human Being and being a Videogame Character. Evidence existed in San Andreas that Rockstar understood their social role; GTA III had let the player have sex with virtual prostitutes, and as (once again) the game design’s central pillar dictated that all characters must live under the same rules, it must be as possible to kill a prostitute as it is to kill anyone else. It was only a matter of time before someone — not Rockstar — wrote on The Internet that you can have sex with a prostitute and then immediately kill her to get your money back. Because of all the adolescent LOLs and ROFLs and ROFLMAOs that this caused, Rockstar made sure that every prostitute in San Andreas carried a pistol. On the other hand, they made it so that the crack dealers — scary, threatening bastards — carried huge amounts of money. If that’s not dropping a dime in the “social responsibility” collection plate, I don’t know what is.
San Andreas, eventually, inspired game designers more than any other GTA game, because it was bigger, realer, rawer, and simply more present in the mass media and the pop culture. It was the most ticked-out checklist of them all, with more area, more stuff you could do, more ridiculous missions (complete with story-explained reasons to actually wear a jetpack, for god’s sake). Incomplete and sketchy as it was, it was more than a game: it was a comprehensive State of the Industry address, and everything that entails: many hours too long, kind of boring, it droned in explicit detail, outlining “Precisely Everything You Can Do With The Videogame Medium”. The curse of San Andreas is that you can only put so much stuff into a game before the player wonders “What can’t you do in this game?” — and then immediately answers the question: water-skiing. Why can I fly a jetliner when I can’t go water-skiing? Seriously? It’s like throwing in “everything”, even the kitchen sink, and forgetting to throw in the greasy frying pan that was in the kitchen sink.
Nonetheless, the world kowtowed to San Andreas, and more than a few good things came of it. Hell, we can probably say that Realtime Worlds’ “sandbox” action game Crackdown took the turf war concept and expanded it into an entire game — one more revisiting, and “sandbox turf war” could actually become its own genre. Crackdown was designed by one of the guys who made GTA in the first place, so maybe that’s why Crackdown seems to understand so many of GTA‘s shortcomings. The most strategic criticism one can levy at GTA is that everywhere you look (on the internet, or, hey, even in IGN’s video reviews), people are talking about the glory of ignoring the “story” and just going on crazy killing sprees. Crackdown makes the bold hypothesis that perhaps the reason so many people ignore the story and refer to killing sprees as “just having fun” with the game is because the story missions aren’t fun enough. Crackdown nearly cuts “story” out; the goal of the game is to heck stuff up, and if you’re a Christian, you’re in luck, because literally everyone (okay, almost everyone) in the city is a drug-shooting, casual-sexing junkie/murderer. And you, behold, are a cop. On top of all this, you can also jump three stories straight up and lift a car over your head. “Have fun, heckers!” Crackdown says, and proves a Big Fat Point: the people of the world will have fun, if that fun is fun, even if they’re forced to play the part of a do-gooding police officer instead of a hooker-slashing freak-off.
I guess, around the time the GTA-likes started to come out of the woodwork — Driv-Three-Er, The Getaway, the True Crime series, et al — the concept of the “Perfect Sandbox” game was born. Capcom took a stab at it from an obtuse angle, with Dead Rising, a game that requires the player, who is otherwise free to do whatever he can to survive, to “perform”, in a hopelessly constrained environment, according to the story’s strictly set schedule. Meanwhile, in the Rockstar Citadel, Bully was developed and released as a sly one-off. The conservative media went nuts, theorizing that the game was about school shootings. Rockstar ignored the buzz. This was strategic. When Bully was eventually plopped out for public consumption, it was a wee bit misunderstood, though there’s a fair deal of its game-design philosophizing all over GTA IV. With a constrained environment — a school — a mostly wholesome story — through pranks and staged beat-downs, teach the bad bullies
what for — and equal focuses on the life of the protagonist as human being and as a videogame character, Bully spoke to the golden future of videogames: the age of the Holodeck, of Square-Enix’s Anna Karenina, of the age of Smell-o-Vision and 8.1 Dolby Surround-Flavor, when “just being there”, in the game world, will be enough to make you say, “Well, yep, that’s entertainment.”
ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE GAME NOW
Describing the “perfect”, “ideal”, “optimal” Grand Theft Auto game, in detail, would be an extremely boring exercise. It’d be like describing concrete graphical details of Madden that need to be brushed up before we can say it looks absolutely real. Madden is lucky to be dealing with just a sport, played on a mostly solid-colored field; Grand Theft Auto has garbage littering the streets, homeless people asleep in gutters, strip clubs with busted neon signs. There’s more of a connection between the goals of Madden and the goals of GTA than you’d initially think (in other words, not just “money”) — they’re both striving to recreate an experience as accurately and precisely as possible. Neither game, alas, will ever succeed at its ultimate goal, which actually makes it very awesome that the developers keep trying. I’d assume it was because they were dense or something, though I don’t know. People with that much money can’t be stupid. Rockstar “took a break” from producing purely crime-fiction sagas to put out Table Tennis, which the press OMG’d and LOL’d at quite heartily. It was nonetheless a bold and perfectly understandable move: they wanted to try to make something perfect, for the same reason that lesser men occasionally feel like destroying something beautiful. Table tennis just happened to be the simplest sport to represent in a game. Ultimately, we here at Action Button Dot Net (“ABDN” on the NASDAQ) can’t give Grand Theft Auto IV a perfect four-star rating, because the darts mini-game kind of sucks, and this wouldn’t be an issue if Things Like Darts weren’t So Important to the flow of the game. It’s not like Rockstar is short on glowing reviews or anything. I’m pretty sure they won’t mind a less-than-perfect score from us. Hey guys, next time, if you want a perfect score, don’t make us buy the game ourselves! That’s not too much to ask, is it?
Rockstar’s Table Tennis rite-of-passage lends a certain sheen of life to GTA IV. It’s like, remember the computer-generated cut-scenes in Final Fantasy VII? Square spent $35 million on that stuff back in 1997, and now talking-head professors in productivity non-games on the Nintendo DS look better than that stuff. In other words, it’s only a matter of time before all of the mini-games in GTA are as good as Table Tennis. In the meanwhile, I suppose it goes without saying that GTA IV is definitely a step in the right direction, toward the “ideal” GTA game.
The graphics are better: it takes genuine hate-fueled passion to find an instance where a building model is used twice. At last, the night-time color palettes don’t look so muddy and unattractive (they still need a tiny bit more purple and turquoise). Unfortunately, however, the interiors of some buildings still look PlayStation 2-ish. Like the first two safehouses; I understand they’re not supposed to be “nice”. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have proper textures.
The story is leaner: not once in the game are you asked to drive a fire engine with a broken ladder into the Clown District to round up fifty unemployed mimes to form a makeshift ladder so you can climb into the top window of an apple-pie factory and crack the safe so as to steal the Cocaine Recipes within, and then escape with a nearby jet-pack. No, this time around, it’s all about shooting guys. Viewed from the air, some of the shoot-out stages are obviously plotted with Gears-of-War-caliber attention to level design. Some people, if you go by the internet, seem to not like the “sticking-to-walls bullstuff” of the game, though I find that complaint kind of weirdly ironic. It’s a game that presents a breathing simulation of a “realistic” world. These games have always had police officers who do their best to shoot you dead if you kill a random pedestrian; why shouldn’t the consequences of the bullets themselves have, you know, a tiny bit more weight? The cover mechanic is a gorgeous sweater from a prodigal grandma — too bad it’s two sizes too big, and, um, it’s really hard to slip in and out of cover, or slip into the cover you want to slip into, sometimes. The ability to press the cover button long before you approach the cover (so as to initiate a dramatic slide) is pretty sweet, though sometimes it’ll mean you’re now crouched on the wrong side of the cover, which means you get buckshot in the side of the head. Introduction of free-aiming into the series is a god-send: I realize they’ve had it in the PC versions forever, now, though it’s even more intuitive now: press the left trigger to initiate a clever auto-lock-on, and then use the right analog stick to tweak the finer points. It’s kind of creepy that there exist human beings who will say manually aiming is “better” or even “more realistic” because, yes, though I’ve never fired a gun, I don’t reckon I’d have to hold it in front of my face and track it very slowly to the right in order to shoot someone. On the other hand, I can’t call the combat system perfect, because sometimes the auto-lock-on still locks on to a hecking corpse, or sometimes it still locks on to an innocent bystander. I kind of don’t like that! I’m pretty sure that the corpse-lock-on could be justified away as a “pseudo-realistic portrayal of, uhh, how sometimes you don’t know, during a real-life gunfight, if a particular opponent is, uhh, dead or not”, though seriously, jack, we’re playing a videogame, here. You’ve already got life-meters on these guys. Also, seriously, how hard can it be to program the auto-aim so that it automatically locks on to the guy standing right in front of me with a shotgun pointed at my upper chest, instead of the guy upstairs and sixty feet away crouched behind a box and barely visible? Seriously, I’ve just ordered a book that promises to teach me C++ in 21 days — let’s see if I can’t figure this out by the end of next month. (Protip: I probably won’t.) While I’m at it, I’m going to figure out a way to classify “innocents” as their own AI class, and completely remove them from the auto-aim target queue when “hostile” class AI targets are present. Man, look at me — using big words, like I know what they mean! If it’s so easy for me to pretend I know what this stuff means, it must be even easier for Rockstar’s hotshot programmers to implement. A recent issue of Game Developer Magazine tells me that the median yearly salary for a “hotshot game programmer” is something like $93,000. Holy stuff! They can’t be stupid to be that rich, so it’s obvious that they just hate nice people. Can you believe that someone with that much money could resent innocent people, and wish them dead of accidental shotgun wounds? I mean, lawyers get paid six figures, and they protect people all the time! Politicians are millionaires, and they pass laws keeping gay people from getting married — that’s about as pro-life as you can get!
Someone on an internet forum I frequent poignantly expressed some confusion as to why the missions in GTA IV are “constrained” and “set-piecey”, despite the surrounding game being so wide-open and free. I can understand his mild disappointment, though I certainly don’t share it. It makes poetic sense, that more often than not there’s only one or two ways to best a mission. When, at any given time in the story, I have a choice of more than five different mob bosses, thugs, or drug dealers to accept a mission from, when I’m expected to choose what I’m even going to be doing in the first place, I like not having to think about how I’m going to do it. It speaks volumes that the design of the city streets — surprise surprise — in GTA IV is much more real-like than in previous games, where, if you recall several paragraphs ago, the producers had claimed it was more important to make the cities interesting as “a level in a videogame”. They’ve made the right sacrifice, I think: they’ve made a city that is real-like, breathing, living, worth experiencing in a slow-walking leisurely Second-Life-y pace. So it’s all the more fitting that the missions are more straightforward movie action scenes. When everyone sees a Big Movie, and they talk about it at the pizza parlor, they say specific things: “Man, that part where Darth Vader cut off Luke’s hand was awesome.” Imagine if that scene were under the viewer’s control — maybe you could make Darth Vader cut off Luke’s foot, instead. There’s a chance that people will simply say “The fight between Darth Vader and Luke was great”, though it won’t penetrate as deeply into the pop-culture unless there’s something everyone could agree upon. Everyone keeps citing the assassination of Salvatore Leone from GTA III — how it gave you multiple choices for how to complete the mission, and though that was the very essence of GTA at the time, in this post-San Andreas, post-Bully, post-Dead Rising world, the specific is all the more intriguing. There are certain very-well-planned missions with a bit of wiggle room in GTA IV — you just have to either be really, really skilled, or have a lot of imagination. There’s a bike chase halfway through the game where you chase two guys on motorcycles, and if you let the chase drag out long enough, they’ll duck into the subway tunnels, and it’ll beheckin ‘ awesome, because now you’re dodging trains. The “Salvatore Leone” mission of GTA III lets you choose how you’re going to kill the guy from the first-degree phases; GTA IV‘s more well-planned missions are all crimes of passion. In the bike chase, it’s highly possible for you to shoot the guys off their bikes from a distance, if you’re hot enough with the machine gun. The game gives them a fair enough lead, and even contextualizes their lead-off with a cut-scene during which protagonist Niko scrambles for a motorcycle of his own. Whether you pick the guys off from a distance with your machine gun using free-aim or side-swipe them into an oncoming train in the subway tunnels, or sideswipe them off the elevated train track when the chase emerges into the daylight again, or cap the son of a bitch immediately as he veers back onto the highway after the whole train-track chase, you’re going to feel like a badass, like a dude with a stuffed stomach full of videogame. Likewise, there’s another mission where you car-chase some diamond thieves all the way to Central Park. The game has scripted it so that their car will crash in Central Park and they’ll get out, and a gunfight ensues behind pillars under a bridge, escalating to a chase into a public restroom. However, if you be bad, you can end it all before they have a chance to crash. Hey, I’ll take that. Another mission, involving a spectacular jewish-mafia shootout in a museum, ends with a car chase during which you’re told to “lose” the guys. Does that mean run away? I stole a fast car and drove away. They killed me. I tried the mission again. (After reloading my save — hospitals charge ten thousand damn dollars! LOL @ American health care!) The next time, I stole the car in the front of the other two cars, and dropped a grenade out my window, effectively toasting the second car. The third car followed me tenaciously, attracting the attention of the cops. I lost the cops, though I couldn’t lose the mob. I ramped my car off the side of the road and onto the beach. I ran up and crouched beneath a wall, watching the big red blip draw closer. I stood up to get a better look. I remembered I had a rocket launcher. I crouched and prepared it. I stood up and fired at the front of the car. It flew about fifty feet up in the air. “MISSION CLEAR!” I pumped my fist, and the eternally iron-pumping black dude named “My Inner Monologue” shouted “Hell Yeah Motherhecker“. Et cetera, et cetera — there are enough moments like this written about on messageboards all over the internet; poke around, or play the game and make your own.
This is to say nothing of the gloriously straightforward, huge, multi-part mission where you rob a bank. Or any of the several clever Hideo-Kojima-worthy missions like the one where you have a sniper rifle, you’re on a roof, and the target is watching TV and you can’t get a shot. You have to zoom in to the telephone on the table, read the phone number written on it, dial said number on your cell phone, and then shoot him when he gets up to answer the phone.
There are a couple of “emotional” doozies among the mission, like where one main character asks you to kill another, at roughly the same time the other guy asks you to kill the other guy. It’s baffling. I made the “correct” choice, then saved in a new file, then reloaded my save, and tried it the other way. Holy lord, the other way was depressing, and when it was done, the other guy gave me $25,000, told me via cell-phone that I was a sick son of a bitch, and said he never wanted to see me again. Excellent. I didn’t save that file. Curiosity satisfied.
Despite this sort of thing, there’s another mission where you’re supposed to follow a guy in a car to his “crew”‘s house, so that you can kill the whole crew. It’s a satisfying low-speed chase, crashing through fences and people’s backyards in Videogame Jersey. You can kill the guy long before you get to his house, though that will fail you the mission. And then you’re yanked out of the immersive experience, and asked if you want to reset time, and retry. This is kind of a shame. Why can’t “failing” in this regard branch the mission off so that now the “crew” in question — their location lost, because you killed the guy before he could lead you to them — now gears up for revenge, and you have to smoke them out?
I understand that dynamically emergent narrative in a game is Very Complicated, and I’d probably snap my plastic Starbucks’ coffee stir in two and slit my wrists with the shard right here at my desk if The Boss asked me to “make it happen”. Still, Rockstar North has a thousand dudes, all of them no doubt huge with muscles, with wrists so coated with meat as to be impermeable to even the sharpest razors. They consistently manage to put together huge, epic games in pseudo-living cities. I’m pretty sure they could at least make it so that, I don’t know, there’s a little bit more choice in the flow of the story. This is the dream of “interactive cinema”, the corpse of which has long been absorbed into the game-design philosophy, ever since we found 3D. Why do I need to have so many people giving me missions? The main character, Niko, has a story. He has someone he needs to find, in Liberty City. That’s a good concept. He’s also got a cousin with a gambling problem. That’s a good concept as well. Might we see a GTA, some day, where I don’t have thirteen people supplying me with tips on what to do, where the main character’s conversations in his depressing living room with his gambling-addicted cousin determine who the next target is, or what they’re going to do next? Maybe give me one boss telling me what to do, make me feel like I’m actually part of a gang war. Make the “pass/fail” for the missions not so black and white — make it so that, sometimes, the guy might get away, and he’ll just get angry and want revenge, and that figures into the plot.
I know this is a lot of work, though you know what? Rockstar put a lot of work into this game. Too much work, even. There are too many god damnedsingleplayer missions. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy almost every one of them — it’s just that, eventually, there’s too much. Why not make it possible to get “an ending” in ten hours, and plaster it all over the box that the game has “dynamic branching paths”, and can be played again and again? More often than not, in the “videogame business”, game developers will Keep Every Feature of the original game when designing a sequel; that Rockstar North cut out jets and the weight-gain/weight-loss systems from San Andreas seems to me like absolute proof that they wanted GTA IV to be a slimmer game. I’m sure we can all agree with that. Yet, despite cutting out jets and hockey masks and pogo sticks and kitchen sinks and BMX bikes, they left the “dating” system in. And now you can take your male friends — even gay ones — on “dates” to play darts or shoot pool. It’s obvious that they wanted “normal human social interaction” to be a core element of the game — I mean, they chose it over plane-hijacking, for god’s sake — so might their aspirations already be pointing toward a sharp, focused, truly branching narrative? (Or might their choice just be indicating that they finally noticed that the absence of a “hug button” was probably why every jerk handed a controller immediately started running over pedestrians in a stolen car?)
It doesn’t even have to be every mission — just every once in a while. It couldn’t be that much harder than what these godmen are doing already, and it’d make a huge difference, and the critics would no doubt scream again. I know I would. I’d scream until my throat was raw; I’d black out, I’d wake up, and by god, I’d scream some more.
IGN managed to miraculously cause a controversy recently when their “video review” (or something) of GTA IV portrayed the protagonist beating a hooker to death. Rockstar claimed that they didn’t tell IGN to play up the hooker-killing aspect of the game. Nonetheless, it is Rockstar who must shoulder the blame, long after IGN apologizes. I could ruminate here for a bit on how this incident basically exposes IGN once and for all as the knuckle-dragging losers they no doubt are, most likely devoid enough of common sense to reach for their six-week-old plastic disposable Bic razors whenever they get an outbreak of pimples on their faces. Somehow, thanks to years of Nintenditioning, the jerk-offs at IGN had come to equate “things it is possible to do in a videogame” with “features of said videogame”. I’ve been over this before, in this review, though this time, I’m doing it after the “actually talking about the game now” headline, so I assume at least someone is paying attention.
At any rate, we here at Action Button Dot Net don’t shave when we have blemishes, and when we do shave, it’s with genuine badger hair shaving brushes, avocado-oil soap, and vintage-style German double-edge safety razors. We also recognize videogames as a deliberate medium, full of both things “to” do and things you “can” do. Some political pundits sniped at GTA IV, right on cue, saying that “in this game, it’s possible to have sex with a prostitute, kill her afterward, get your money back, and then, when the police show up, you can either cut them in half with a chainsaw or shoot them in the head with a shotgun”. For example, it’s possible to break any music CD, even one of gospel music, in two, and use it to stab a baby in the top of the head. It requires about as much imagination as killing a hooker in GTA IV — that doesn’t mean people go around doing it! Seriously.
If I were a killer in real life, I would probably find killing in GTA IV kind of boring. Likewise, though I don’t particularly mind reloading and then doing missions over all the way from the start when I fail or die, I get all weirdly antsy when bowling with an in-game “friend”. It lets me skip the “friend”‘s turn, though it doesn’t let me skip the animation of the ball coming out of the ball return. So there we have the framework of a mathematical proof that Games Do Not Create Evil: I am bored by the finer points of the in-game virtual bowling experience, just as some kids are enthralled by the ability to kill anyone in the game. In other words, when the game asks me to bear numb-faced witness to something I can do in real life, I am bored; the inverse of this is that I am enthralled when it offers me the chance to do something I can’t do in real life, like kill someone. I’m pretty certain that I’m psychologically incapable of actual murder, even in self-defense; if all the kids out there are equally excited when killing innocent people, that must mean that they, too, consider it something they could not possibly do in the real world. Maybe I’m on to something or maybe I’m being a jerk, though hey, there you have it. Fill in the blanks and win a Nobel Peace Prize.
The irony-loving mass media is alive, of course, with “sarcastic” “news” regarding the “lighter side” of GTA. How it’s not all about an eastern-European immigrant seeking revenge in a dark city — you can also eat hot dogs from street vendors, go bowling, play pool, obey traffic laws, et cetera. Few people, however, are adequately applauding the taxi system. What a brilliant addition — you can now hail a taxi, or call your cousin (who runs a car service) to summon a limo to your current location. This element right here isn’t “new” — it’s been around since Earthbound on the Super Nintendo, where you could order a pizza and have it delivered a randomly calculated interval of time later, even way outside of town — though it is quite necessary if a game is to create a “believable” world. It’s not just “realistic” — it’s courteous, and at the same time dead obvious. How bizarre was it, anyway, that the only way to travel in previous GTA games, at the beginning, was to literally steal an innocent person’s car? That’s a pretty huge oversight, I dare say. Of course, many cash-hungry game designers lifted the idea verbatim, resulting in all travel in Jak II, a game where you’re supposed to be saving people from oppression, being the result of hijacking the innocent peoples’ vehicles. By putting taxis into GTA IV they’ve elevated the game to the next plane — a higher plane than even the ability to pilot jet planes. Their simple presence makes the game all at once come together into something harmonious. Try riding a taxi from one end of the city to the other, and not skipping the driving scene. You can use the right analog stick to look out the window as the taxi streams over a bridge, golden sunset outside. It’s gorgeous. For an instant, that Holodeck future slips into view, and anything looks possible. Sometimes your taxi is stopped at an intersection in thick traffic, and the guy in the car next to you says in a loud voice “Man, this why I need a helicopter.” Classic. Then the weird little uncanny valley touches pop in: you’re walking down the street, and the game’s physics engine is excited enough to show you how people can drop cups of coffee if you bump into them. Of course they don’t pick the coffee up — it’s spilled, gone — though when it’s raining and you bump into someone and they drop their umbrella, they get appropriately peeved, and then just keep walking without picking the umbrella up again. No one remembered to tell that AI that it didn’t want to get wet — just that it should be carrying an umbrella until being interrupted.
And then there are the vast deserts of the brain: here, in this city, you can go to a comedy club, you can get drunk and watch the screen wobble terrifyingly. You can browse a hilariously-written semi-parody internet, with dead-hilarious PR copy for things like fictional beverages; you can read a “child beauty pageant” website and then, upon logging off, find yourself assaulted by a SWAT team. So why can’t you sit on a bench by the side of the road? Why can’t Niko sit down in a diner when he orders a hamburger? Why does he have to eat standing up? When you consider all the budget that must have been appropriated to the awesome radio stations, you really have to wonder about things like this.
In spite of how delicious and heavy and perfect I find the vehicle physics in GTA IV — this is GTA post-Burnout, of course, so the mouse-cursor physics of previous games just won’t do anymore — I labored, for the first twenty hours of play, to complete GTA IV without “stealing” a single car. Once I realized that cars taken during missions — like, when there’s a bike right there in front of you at the start of a mission, and you’re obviously supposed to ride it — don’t count as “stolen”, my quest was energized. I eventually gave up, though, because I accidentally stole taxis too many times. You have to hold the Y button to enter as a passenger. If you don’t hold the button all the way up to the part where Niko opens the back door, then he decides to steal the car. You might say that it doesn’t matter, or that it’s a weird thing to complain about, though really, with GTA IV, Rockstar has given the vehicles realistic physics, it has gifted the human bodies with realistic weight, it has included missions where you must choose to kill the target or let him live. It’s a “small” oversight that the game underestimates the difference between “I’m going to open the back door of this cab and get in as a passenger, and tell the man I want to go home” and “I’m going to walk up to this cab I just hailed, break the driver’s-side window with my elbow, drag the driver out by his neck, throw him onto the pavement, kick him in the ribs, get in his car, slam the door, sneer, and say ‘Nice car — JERK!'” Even in the mind of a man who was, say, in the military, I’m pretty sure there’s a cosmos-wide ravine in the mind between these two notions.
Then again, there’s apparently an Xbox Achievement, or something, awarded if you steal something like 600 cars. (I think?) Why can’t there be an Achievement for “clear all story missions without stealing a single innocent person’s car”? Probably because the game isn’t programmed to track something like that. They should get on it. It would be . . . nice, I guess. Maybe, if you manage to beat the game in such a way, you get a free super-car of some sort.
Of course, once I’m playing this game online, I have no qualms about being a jerk, stealing cars, standing in the middle of the road with a pistol, free-aiming, shooting drivers in the head, et cetera. It’s the New Hilarious. Once GTA IV emerges on the other end of the tunnel as The Only Game On Earth for Xbox Live kids, maybe that’ll spur on the team’s confidence in making a more strictly focused singleplayer. Who knows. Either way, I guess it’s a testament to the main character’s likability and his placement in the story — I didn’t want to make him do anything ridiculous. Speaking of Niko — I really think his voice could have been better. That they got a guy who isn’t Eastern-European kind of makes sense, if you think that maybe it’s, I don’t know, a jab at Super Mario. Still, they hadheckin’ Ray Liotta for Vice City — the least they could have done is get the lead singer from Gogol Bordello to do the voice of the main character. I mean, he’s a pretty great actor himself, and he’s even from New York. If you asked me, they kind of missed an opportunity.
Having seen how well they did with the GPS / cellular phone age, I kind of hope that the next GTA side-story will be set at least twenty years in the future, and possibly in some gritty Tokyo or Hong Kong replica, though maybe that wouldn’t work out, because what would the people talk about on the radio? They’d have to get so much more creative. (“Creative” is not a word I’d apply to the humor in GTA IV, perfect as it is most of the time — you need only read the comments thread on aYouTube video of a presidential debate or see two beer commercials or stand in an American supermarket for three minutes to be able to write a thousand jokes of this quality.) Part of GTA‘s charm is the heaps of social satire; in GTA IV, the radio segments are so well-written that they make even homophobia clever: the pundits will slam the violence in the game, though say nothing of the heaps of homophobia. While we’re at it, I have to wonder, since when are the “conservative” people the ones who support war? Since when is not wanting anyone to die unnecessarily strictly a belief of nose-pierced purple-haired freaks? No — must not start typing about things like that. Must go back to finishing this paragraph, and this review, with something that looks like the fantasy of a very fat person, so that people reading just the last sentence will get the impression they want to get: Yeah, I’d like a GTA: Near-Future Asian Metropolis, with squealing math-rock on every radio station. Man, I’d play that game all night! I’d probably have to switch this website’s rating scale to one-to-ten, just so I could give it a ten!
text by Ario Barzan
★★☆☆
“A BEAUTIFUL BED-TIME STORY THAT€™S CONSTANTLY INTERRUPTED BY THE MONSTERS UNDER YOUR BED.”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. This is a video game that managed to make me plunk down three days’ worth of hours, never to complete it, to speak of it as the most beautiful little monster. A great title that’s not great because it cheats itself out of true potential – accomplished by way of fetishistic and arid adherence to long-pointless craft, now cuddled by baroque swirls of Tradition – Dragon Quest VIII is presented as a young, budding musician in a shop who forsakes his talent and inherits his father’s business of shoe making. He’s forming the most wonderful compositions in his head – but, look, he’s in a shoe shop.
The story, here, is simple and straight, if sometimes embarrassing because of the (unusually good) voice acting that brings out the absurdity of situations (talking evil dogs with death vendettas). And, really, the voices are good, but I and the game could do without them. You are cast into the boots of Silent Hero Nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine, and your journey started before you started the game. Some time ago, a magician put a spell on the castle you guarded, turning most everyone into plants. Mysteriously, you weren’t affected. Now, you are stopping by a town for information, and your companions are a princess horse, a gremlin king, and a squat ruffian.
Your first battle is with three blue, bouncing, happy-faced dollops called Slimes, seemingly the series’ mascot, who leap out from the grass at your camp site. The screen’s colors smudge, then refocus. A first-person view shows the enemies with text saying “A slime appears!” three times. You select “Attack” from a menu displaying battle options, and you or the ruffian named Yangus will lash out with sword or club. You exchange blows with the Slimes until they are dead. It’s quick, mindless. The slimes are cute. Were this a one-time, referential throwback, I’d be slinging an arm around Dragon Quest VIII‘s back and telling it, “Listen – let’s hit the town, tonight. Drinks are on me.” But, no. Japanese RPGs come and go, faceless drones pumped out of the unloving corporate womb, and it’s a shame that here is Dragon Quest VIII, containing more character than damn near everything, and it’s a tragedy of design.
For forcing me into a three-to-five-or-more-minute situation every fifteen seconds, the game doesn’t do a very good job in validation. It’s not even that I have a big problem with the turn-based mold. Super Mario RPG was excellence. This realizes its format and hands in a circle with two dots and an upward crescent as a portrait for its figure drawing class. Simplicity is fine, provided there’s a constant verve. Dragon Quest VIII‘s mechanics are grayed by a tired prosaicism: there are no tweaks that produce even mildly involving combat.
The timing of button presses in Super Mario RPG let you better your attacks or reduce the potency of enemies’, and that simple element slipped such a deceptively thin layer into the fighting, leading to great results, like taking out bosses in a single usage of the Super Jump because you were awesome enough. Dragon Quest VIII‘s “timing,” then, is the Tension feature. Select “Psyche Up” and watch your avatar attempt to ease their constipation and incrementally increase their strength. This simply makes them into a pacifist; if you want your hit to be powerful enough to matter, you’ve go to keep selecting “Psyche Up” with each turn and refrain from all other actions until you’ve become a pseudo-Super Saiyan. Sometimes you won’t even fully power up. I guess that’s the game’s idea of a cute technical quirk. It’s cardboard-flavored, and relies on arbitrary oppositional behavior for proper execution (i.e. oh god I hope this boss doesn’t kill me before I can get a hit in at MAXIMUM POWER).
None of the fighting you do – and you do a hell of a lot of fighting – seems to matter, because you aren’t doing any fighting. Every attack is an animated substitute backed up by statistics, numbed by a wash of NES RPGs’ graph-paper-white and the disconnect from player input. It’s your numbers crunching against others’, and the so-called skill required for progress translates to the path of time consumption and “paper beats rock.” It doesn’t help that equipment is sold at merciless prices. The blur of the screen and the swell of the battle music sends a sickness through the gut similar to the feeling upon looking at the clock and knowing your shift at a hateful job is about to begin. The fighting isn’t something to be enjoyed within itself; it’s an aspect to get over with as soon as possible, which is sort of morbidly hilarious, considering how dragging the fights really are. There are awkwardly long pauses for loading and “charming” padding that drags. If Yangus hits an enemy and paralyzes them, the screen will say “X is paralyzed!” below, and represent this with zig-zagging lines around the monster. Then, the camera will zoom in on the monster and repeat the line, “X is paralyzed!” These annoyances build up to form speed bumps. Even saving is a bunch of drawn-out nonsense.
It’s a weird twist that part of Dragon Quest VIII‘s undoing is its own sincerity regarding its format. Seams are touted as time-honored triumphs (Look! I’m like what you played when you were little!). I surprise myself when I say the thing could be better off with a slice of dishonesty. Or, preferably, guts. I mean, okay – random fights. Why don’t we give them reasons for happening, rather than warping us to scuffles with three dragons when there were not three dragons in front of us on a huge field four-seconds ago? Logic, people. As part of any game becomes literalized, the remaining abstractions clash more furiously. The cohesiveness, pacing of Dragon Quest VIII‘s world cracks when naturalness is split up with antiques. Chrono Trigger did it right, and maybe if we’d stop being so afraid of it, maybe if we were willing to digest its ideas and stop treating it as that game – maybe we’d be somewhere.
So what else is left? Everything you do outside of the killing, and that, ladies and sirs, is the running, which is some of the most gorgeously divine running next to Shadow of the Colossus. It’s so good, hell, you might want to walk. I don’t care what you think about Akira Toriyama, his imprisoned character style be damned, because Dragon Quest VIII is luscious to gaze upon. When it’s on the television screen, I am playing 3D for the first time, as it were, using the camera like a madman to sop up blue, blue skies and bending trees on green, rolling hills. Heaven help those who’re insufferable maintainers of the same Mature Gamer pride that kept them from appreciating the joy of Wind Waker‘s style (God knows what would happen if they weren’t found chewing beef jerky, guffawing at a Chuck Norris joke, and sniping someone’s head via Sam Fisher). You could live in Dragon Quest VIII‘s buildings, warmed by fireplaces and thick colors, supported by velvety beams of wood and brickwork you want to touch. It’s disgustingly rich. Yes, I invested close to seventy hours on my file, and it was all for the running and the clean shorelines and the freshness of a pale sunrise.
Koichi Sugiyama, close to being in his eighties, and a gear in the series’ distinct trio (the other two being Toriyama and Yuji Horii), really got me to buy Dragon Quest VIII. The man is Bernstein, Debussy, Hubert Parry – a wealth of composers rolled into one distinct mind. He’s another Hitoshi Sakimoto, writing compositions not bound by the usual play-required context of game music. As far as I’m concerned, Sugiyama still hasn’t gotten past the peak of Dragon Quest V, a commonality in the field (Uematsu has his Final Fantasy 6, etc.), but it’s difficult to get disappointed with how consistent he is. This consistency, admittedly, has made some of his output feel a bit recurrent. Dragon Quest VIII‘s non-Japan release has (usually) orchestrated music, a decision I can appreciate, not being the world’s most rabid fan of MIDI. The soundtrack is sweet, clear, waiting to be explored, though it could use some restraint at points, or extra spice. The overworld theme gets too loud and too loopy after a while. On the other hand, the music for sailing is the greatest sailing music in the world, anything and everything it should be.
There is a part in Dragon Quest VIII where you’ve exited a town near the sea. The town is renowned for its sculptors. Beyond it, the climate has changed. Trees’ leaves and the grass are coated in autumn tones, a result of the Northern location and its nearby snowy lands. Between you and your ulterior motive is a Pisa-like building called Rydon’s Tower. Rydon, a man obsessed with height in his architecture, is supposedly still in the tower, still building up to the sky, still trying to outdo himself. Each slice of a floor is supported by columns, and their spacing exposes the blue enamel of the sky and brown, limber trees. The wind and Sugiyama’s in-game masterpiece quietly mingle. It’s a dream. As a professor is more critical of the slacker genius than the brain-dead slob, I pick on Dragon Quest VIII. While the coating is generally matured, sparkling, the mechanics remain rooted in the diaper they shat in two decades ago. An invocation of nostalgia is used as a crutch for entertainment, and the battle design isn’t “daringly antique” or “classically refreshing” – it’s stagnantly unaltered and impotent. People fear change above all else: this fear squashed and wrinkled Dragon Quest IX‘s intention to put us in the action. I hope Square-Enix has the balls to give the series’ pants a kick in the future. Dragon Quest VIII is a frustrating mixture: both sub-mediocre and soaring above the crowd. For that, I recommend it and say, “Stay the hell away.”
★★☆☆
“A BEAUTIFUL BED-TIME STORY THAT€™S CONSTANTLY INTERRUPTED BY THE MONSTERS UNDER YOUR BED.”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. This is a video game that managed to make me plunk down three days’ worth of hours, never to complete it, to speak of it as the most beautiful little monster. A great title that’s not great because it cheats itself out of true potential – accomplished by way of fetishistic and arid adherence to long-pointless craft, now cuddled by baroque swirls of Tradition – Dragon Quest VIII is presented as a young, budding musician in a shop who forsakes his talent and inherits his father’s business of shoe making. He’s forming the most wonderful compositions in his head – but, look, he’s in a shoe shop.
The story, here, is simple and straight, if sometimes embarrassing because of the (unusually good) voice acting that brings out the absurdity of situations (talking evil dogs with death vendettas). And, really, the voices are good, but I and the game could do without them. You are cast into the boots of Silent Hero Nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine, and your journey started before you started the game. Some time ago, a magician put a spell on the castle you guarded, turning most everyone into plants. Mysteriously, you weren’t affected. Now, you are stopping by a town for information, and your companions are a princess horse, a gremlin king, and a squat ruffian.
Your first battle is with three blue, bouncing, happy-faced dollops called Slimes, seemingly the series’ mascot, who leap out from the grass at your camp site. The screen’s colors smudge, then refocus. A first-person view shows the enemies with text saying “A slime appears!” three times. You select “Attack” from a menu displaying battle options, and you or the ruffian named Yangus will lash out with sword or club. You exchange blows with the Slimes until they are dead. It’s quick, mindless. The slimes are cute. Were this a one-time, referential throwback, I’d be slinging an arm around Dragon Quest VIII‘s back and telling it, “Listen – let’s hit the town, tonight. Drinks are on me.” But, no. Japanese RPGs come and go, faceless drones pumped out of the unloving corporate womb, and it’s a shame that here is Dragon Quest VIII, containing more character than damn near everything, and it’s a tragedy of design.
For forcing me into a three-to-five-or-more-minute situation every fifteen seconds, the game doesn’t do a very good job in validation. It’s not even that I have a big problem with the turn-based mold. Super Mario RPG was excellence. This realizes its format and hands in a circle with two dots and an upward crescent as a portrait for its figure drawing class. Simplicity is fine, provided there’s a constant verve. Dragon Quest VIII‘s mechanics are grayed by a tired prosaicism: there are no tweaks that produce even mildly involving combat.
The timing of button presses in Super Mario RPG let you better your attacks or reduce the potency of enemies’, and that simple element slipped such a deceptively thin layer into the fighting, leading to great results, like taking out bosses in a single usage of the Super Jump because you were awesome enough. Dragon Quest VIII‘s “timing,” then, is the Tension feature. Select “Psyche Up” and watch your avatar attempt to ease their constipation and incrementally increase their strength. This simply makes them into a pacifist; if you want your hit to be powerful enough to matter, you’ve go to keep selecting “Psyche Up” with each turn and refrain from all other actions until you’ve become a pseudo-Super Saiyan. Sometimes you won’t even fully power up. I guess that’s the game’s idea of a cute technical quirk. It’s cardboard-flavored, and relies on arbitrary oppositional behavior for proper execution (i.e. oh god I hope this boss doesn’t kill me before I can get a hit in at MAXIMUM POWER).
None of the fighting you do – and you do a hell of a lot of fighting – seems to matter, because you aren’t doing any fighting. Every attack is an animated substitute backed up by statistics, numbed by a wash of NES RPGs’ graph-paper-white and the disconnect from player input. It’s your numbers crunching against others’, and the so-called skill required for progress translates to the path of time consumption and “paper beats rock.” It doesn’t help that equipment is sold at merciless prices. The blur of the screen and the swell of the battle music sends a sickness through the gut similar to the feeling upon looking at the clock and knowing your shift at a hateful job is about to begin. The fighting isn’t something to be enjoyed within itself; it’s an aspect to get over with as soon as possible, which is sort of morbidly hilarious, considering how dragging the fights really are. There are awkwardly long pauses for loading and “charming” padding that drags. If Yangus hits an enemy and paralyzes them, the screen will say “X is paralyzed!” below, and represent this with zig-zagging lines around the monster. Then, the camera will zoom in on the monster and repeat the line, “X is paralyzed!” These annoyances build up to form speed bumps. Even saving is a bunch of drawn-out nonsense.
It’s a weird twist that part of Dragon Quest VIII‘s undoing is its own sincerity regarding its format. Seams are touted as time-honored triumphs (Look! I’m like what you played when you were little!). I surprise myself when I say the thing could be better off with a slice of dishonesty. Or, preferably, guts. I mean, okay – random fights. Why don’t we give them reasons for happening, rather than warping us to scuffles with three dragons when there were not three dragons in front of us on a huge field four-seconds ago? Logic, people. As part of any game becomes literalized, the remaining abstractions clash more furiously. The cohesiveness, pacing of Dragon Quest VIII‘s world cracks when naturalness is split up with antiques. Chrono Trigger did it right, and maybe if we’d stop being so afraid of it, maybe if we were willing to digest its ideas and stop treating it as that game – maybe we’d be somewhere.
So what else is left? Everything you do outside of the killing, and that, ladies and sirs, is the running, which is some of the most gorgeously divine running next to Shadow of the Colossus. It’s so good, hell, you might want to walk. I don’t care what you think about Akira Toriyama, his imprisoned character style be damned, because Dragon Quest VIII is luscious to gaze upon. When it’s on the television screen, I am playing 3D for the first time, as it were, using the camera like a madman to sop up blue, blue skies and bending trees on green, rolling hills. Heaven help those who’re insufferable maintainers of the same Mature Gamer pride that kept them from appreciating the joy of Wind Waker‘s style (God knows what would happen if they weren’t found chewing beef jerky, guffawing at a Chuck Norris joke, and sniping someone’s head via Sam Fisher). You could live in Dragon Quest VIII‘s buildings, warmed by fireplaces and thick colors, supported by velvety beams of wood and brickwork you want to touch. It’s disgustingly rich. Yes, I invested close to seventy hours on my file, and it was all for the running and the clean shorelines and the freshness of a pale sunrise.
Koichi Sugiyama, close to being in his eighties, and a gear in the series’ distinct trio (the other two being Toriyama and Yuji Horii), really got me to buy Dragon Quest VIII. The man is Bernstein, Debussy, Hubert Parry – a wealth of composers rolled into one distinct mind. He’s another Hitoshi Sakimoto, writing compositions not bound by the usual play-required context of game music. As far as I’m concerned, Sugiyama still hasn’t gotten past the peak of Dragon Quest V, a commonality in the field (Uematsu has his Final Fantasy 6, etc.), but it’s difficult to get disappointed with how consistent he is. This consistency, admittedly, has made some of his output feel a bit recurrent. Dragon Quest VIII‘s non-Japan release has (usually) orchestrated music, a decision I can appreciate, not being the world’s most rabid fan of MIDI. The soundtrack is sweet, clear, waiting to be explored, though it could use some restraint at points, or extra spice. The overworld theme gets too loud and too loopy after a while. On the other hand, the music for sailing is the greatest sailing music in the world, anything and everything it should be.
There is a part in Dragon Quest VIII where you’ve exited a town near the sea. The town is renowned for its sculptors. Beyond it, the climate has changed. Trees’ leaves and the grass are coated in autumn tones, a result of the Northern location and its nearby snowy lands. Between you and your ulterior motive is a Pisa-like building called Rydon’s Tower. Rydon, a man obsessed with height in his architecture, is supposedly still in the tower, still building up to the sky, still trying to outdo himself. Each slice of a floor is supported by columns, and their spacing exposes the blue enamel of the sky and brown, limber trees. The wind and Sugiyama’s in-game masterpiece quietly mingle. It’s a dream. As a professor is more critical of the slacker genius than the brain-dead slob, I pick on Dragon Quest VIII. While the coating is generally matured, sparkling, the mechanics remain rooted in the diaper they shat in two decades ago. An invocation of nostalgia is used as a crutch for entertainment, and the battle design isn’t “daringly antique” or “classically refreshing” – it’s stagnantly unaltered and impotent. People fear change above all else: this fear squashed and wrinkled Dragon Quest IX‘s intention to put us in the action. I hope Square-Enix has the balls to give the series’ pants a kick in the future. Dragon Quest VIII is a frustrating mixture: both sub-mediocre and soaring above the crowd. For that, I recommend it and say, “Stay the hell away.”
text by Brandon Parker
★★★☆
“A STRANGE AND RARE DESERT PLANT THAT ONLY COMES UP OUT OF THE GROUND EVERY 20 YEARS OR SO, AND SO ALIEN IS ITS SHAPE AND UNIQUE ITS BEAUTY THAT THE SNAKES, LIZARDS, AND OTHER DESERT ANIMALS ALL STOP FIGHTING AND KILLING EACH OTHER OUT THERE, AND THEY ALL CALL A TRUCE JUST FOR THE CHANCE TO GET A GOOD LOOK AND WONDER IF IT'S EDIBLE OR NOT.”
I recently played Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsène Lupin, and let me inform you how excited I got after I had started that game up: real excited. Right as you settle into the game proper, instead of your everyday, commonplace tutorial screen popping up to educate you on the controls for your intial playthrough or whathaveyou, this game’s tutorial just tells you to get a damned notepad and pencil. Being that this is a Sherlock Holmes game, you’ll be playing as Sherlock Holmes, of course, and they won’t be cutting corners to make it easy on your theoretically ignorant selves. Only the beginning of the game, though, lives up to that intial assurance, in my opinion. The rest is the usual adventure game ridiculousness. Oh, well, they tried. Good for them. The main thing is, there’s a part early on where you have to find a certain painting in an art gallery. You have to type in an answer to a question, the question being, “What is depicted in the painting?” After spending half an hour typing in as many ways as I could think of to say, “HMS Victory,” I quit the game to look up a walkthrough and found the answer. It was “boat.” So: Brandon Parker is smarter than Sherlock Holmes. This is a historic fact, now. You can even add it to Wikipedia and reference this review.
Now, I worry about the kids sometimes, and myself. Back in “the fair time,” as I call it, you used to have your King’s Quests or your Monkey Islands, but nowadays, if you want a game that doesn’t involve shooting small nations of foreign men over and over in dull grey and brown environments, you’re stuck with either licensed stuff based off of Pixar movies or boring platformers with stupid animal mascots. And that’s another thing. Current kid movies have the same problem as current adventure games. Compare those beautiful, hand painted Disney movies of old to this lifeless, 3D animated computer stuff. I think a link could be drawn between adventure games and Disney movies. I don’t feel like doing it at the moment, though. Forgive me – I am exaggerating, slightly. There are the Icos and Katamaris and whatnot, but do kids even know about those things? Do those games get commercials, or do kids even watch television anymore? For all I know, these days they come out of the womb with hand cupped to the side of their ear, room for a cellphone to be slid in there, and then it’s straight to 4chan boot camp. We might be lost already.
It’s not that I don’t think they can’t handle the violence, or anything. I’m sure most can, and those that can’t will just end up as republicans, or spree killers, or something. I know I used think, wouldn’t it be great if Inspector Gadget wasn’t a dumbass and had hands that could turn into machine guns, or something useful, at the least? You’re not fooling anybody, there. Kids know that that kind of crap is dumbed down for them. That’s not what I’m asking for, however. It doesn’t have to be dumbed down or made for kids in particular at all. It just doesn’t have to be nonstop violence. I guess that’s what I’m saying. Say there’s a kid who wants to play something other than Halo. He just doesn’t know it yet. I’m sure the peer pressure to play Halo and “pwn bitches” with his peers on Xbox Live is enormous, but let’s say this guy is going to strike out on his own. Good for him. Yet, after trying to make it on his own out the real world, Poor Little Ness finds he has so few options that he ends up taking the weak man’s road of used Spec-Ops games for PSX. And he was such a good, promising young lad. Now doesn’t that break your god-damned heart?
I’m only emphasizing the kids, here, since they don’t call them your formative years because you’re free to completey heck them up however you want and change your mind later. I know I wouldn’t be the man I am today if I didn’t have all these fond memories of walking around all those green environments in old adventure games, back when trees were in games, constructing tools out of pocket lint. And personally, I’m also sick as hell of shooting people myself, anyway. By the time I play MGS4 I think the line will be dangerously blurred between player and character. I already feel like a tired, old veteran, sick of battle and death, now, so I won’t be playing so much as method acting.
I’d simply like to see something that has room for your imagination to get in there. The modern videogame is an alkali desert when it really needs to be something more, uh, fertile. Man didn’t abandon painting when he learned to sculpt. Let’s get some colors in there, some majestic green trees and clear blue skies. The imagination can’t grow in the desert. Anything creative or weird doesn’t have to be an abstract handheld game with a clever game play hook anymore. More Balloon Fight and Kiwi Kraze is what I want, I think. Remember Kiwi Kraze? You were a bird in New Zealand rescuing your bird buddies. I don’t know if anyone would even think to make something like that anymore. If they did, they’d use satellite imagery to recreate New Zealand exactly, or some bullstuff. You can do all sorts of weird stuff in games that’d be a lot harder to pull off in a movie or book. Let’s see some of that.
Back in the Fair Time, a company called Electronic Arts (you might’ve heard of them) didn’t look at those games from Sierra and Lucas Arts and see all the happy childhoods, the greenary, the cherished memories born from those games. No, to people like them, they could and can only see “markets” that need “penetrating.” Every bit as horrible as it sounds. These are the kinds of people that invent their own doublespeak business language to say things without really saying anything. The kind of people that up and buy the NFL when too many people start to buy their competition’s NFL game. Well, back when they were wanting to make adventure games, being incapable of ever creating a Full Throttle or a Gabriel Knight themselves, they merely waved their money around and brought in Sherlock Holmes, who, at the time, was the greatest detective (I’m now the best). They were decent enough adventure games, but poor Sherlock Holmes games. They were also damn ugly and lacking in the use of the color green, though I guess it’s the same for London.
Anyway, someone finally made a good Sherlock Holmes game, and it’s not even a real Sherlock Holmes game. It’s about some dude named Layton. A couple of guys making up their own stuff made a better Sherlock Holmes game than EA did, with the actual Sherlock Holmes. Is there something other than spending money that they can handle doing properly? Yeah, we’re not supposed to hate them anymore, being that they apologized for the murders of Origin, Bullfrog, and all – a standup thing to do, I’ll admit, but I won’t fall for that. I know how these people operate. They’re not like you and me. They don’t have a conscience. They’re machines, programmed to simply want more money. They’ll only show a response to anyone other than themselves if their income is threatened. They look at their invented graphs and formulas and follow them to the letter. When something new and original that doesn’t fit in these formulas does well, it’s a “big suprise” that “exceeds all expectations,” and so they imitate the hell out of it, thinking that’s all there is to it. You know at the end of FernGully: The Last Rainforest, when that machine is possessed by a demon and is going through the forest cutting everything down? EA is that demon possessed machine, and they’re cutting down that forest to make room for a new alkali desert, where, as you know, imagination is unable to grow.
Usually what makes an adventure game a stuff one is that the puzzles are just plain hecking nonsense. And, often, I think that happens because the game is just too damn long. The designers aren’t smart enough come up with enough clever puzzles to fit in the entire game for every situation, so they get desperate, and when they get desperate this leads to madness, which leads to the bizarro moonside logic. All of us here know of the Gabriel Knight Moustache Massacre of ’99. This is something now told to small children as a warning. I even think it’s in the latest edition of Bullfinch’s Mythology, under “Tragedies.” I was there at ground zero. I remember it clearly: I finally had a computer all my own for the first time, and, to celebrate, the two latest entries in my favorite game series’ at time – the games being GK3 and Ultima IX. I tell you, it did something to me, something whose effect still lingers to this day. I’d also like to point out that Ultima IX was diddled with by Electronic Arts, known by their true name, “Hexxus“. Hexxus was voiced by Tim Curry, who also voiced Gabriel Knight in his third game, and is known for sounding like a child molester. I personally believe that when the universe is trying to tell you something, you should listen.
So maybe it’s just too hard to come up with enough sensible puzzles to cover an entire game. The Big Sleep didn’t make complete sense to Raymond Chandler, and he wrote the damn thing. And remember the Holmes story where the guy injected monkey blood or something and started climbing trees? What in the heck was that all about? And what a literal pushover Moriarty was. Holmes was too smart for Doyle’s own good, in my opinion. So you wonder what hope there is for there ever being a great detective game that makes sense. But then you remember something like Full Throttle, a game so good that I actually forget it’s an adventure game, and then you think, maybe everyone else is just lazy. Well, you think too much. Just take it easy. What they’ve done here for Professor Layton is side-step that problem by just getting together a bunch of good puzzles that don’t really have much to do with jack stuff. It’s just a series of puzzles that usually come from some guy coming up and saying, “Have you heard of this one?” But they can get away with it because they’re all good ones. It’s really a puzzle game disguised as an adventure game, and therefore actually ends up being a better Sherlock Holmes simulator game than what any adventure game could ever be. Also, it’s a real nice looking game. It doesn’t look like anything else out there. A cartoon, but more The Little Prince than some anime horsestuff. So that’s pretty good.
I guess Japan has only one videogame magazine, and it’s called Famitsu. If any others exist, I have no knowledge of them. If you’re a hip American, perhaps you know all about this magazine, already. But in an issue, there was an article about Professor Layton, and the title of the article was, “Level 5’s new game’s genre is unknown? New style game to train your brain,” except it said that in Japanese, rather than English. Yeah, it seems that in Japan they see an adventure game and, to them, it is some kind of crazy Brain Training knock-off. Ha, ha, those lovable, crazy Japanese. The closest thing those primitive deviants have for comparison is cartoon sex games and Phoenix Wright, so this is a bold new step for them. I hope it takes off.
Anyway, according to the opening cutscene, Layton and I are under some sort of non-disclosure agreement by the curious village, so I can’t exactly talk in specifics about the events of The Case. Sorry. I’ll just say you missed out. A great time was had by all.
★★★☆
“A STRANGE AND RARE DESERT PLANT THAT ONLY COMES UP OUT OF THE GROUND EVERY 20 YEARS OR SO, AND SO ALIEN IS ITS SHAPE AND UNIQUE ITS BEAUTY THAT THE SNAKES, LIZARDS, AND OTHER DESERT ANIMALS ALL STOP FIGHTING AND KILLING EACH OTHER OUT THERE, AND THEY ALL CALL A TRUCE JUST FOR THE CHANCE TO GET A GOOD LOOK AND WONDER IF IT'S EDIBLE OR NOT.”
I recently played Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsène Lupin, and let me inform you how excited I got after I had started that game up: real excited. Right as you settle into the game proper, instead of your everyday, commonplace tutorial screen popping up to educate you on the controls for your intial playthrough or whathaveyou, this game’s tutorial just tells you to get a damned notepad and pencil. Being that this is a Sherlock Holmes game, you’ll be playing as Sherlock Holmes, of course, and they won’t be cutting corners to make it easy on your theoretically ignorant selves. Only the beginning of the game, though, lives up to that intial assurance, in my opinion. The rest is the usual adventure game ridiculousness. Oh, well, they tried. Good for them. The main thing is, there’s a part early on where you have to find a certain painting in an art gallery. You have to type in an answer to a question, the question being, “What is depicted in the painting?” After spending half an hour typing in as many ways as I could think of to say, “HMS Victory,” I quit the game to look up a walkthrough and found the answer. It was “boat.” So: Brandon Parker is smarter than Sherlock Holmes. This is a historic fact, now. You can even add it to Wikipedia and reference this review.
Now, I worry about the kids sometimes, and myself. Back in “the fair time,” as I call it, you used to have your King’s Quests or your Monkey Islands, but nowadays, if you want a game that doesn’t involve shooting small nations of foreign men over and over in dull grey and brown environments, you’re stuck with either licensed stuff based off of Pixar movies or boring platformers with stupid animal mascots. And that’s another thing. Current kid movies have the same problem as current adventure games. Compare those beautiful, hand painted Disney movies of old to this lifeless, 3D animated computer stuff. I think a link could be drawn between adventure games and Disney movies. I don’t feel like doing it at the moment, though. Forgive me – I am exaggerating, slightly. There are the Icos and Katamaris and whatnot, but do kids even know about those things? Do those games get commercials, or do kids even watch television anymore? For all I know, these days they come out of the womb with hand cupped to the side of their ear, room for a cellphone to be slid in there, and then it’s straight to 4chan boot camp. We might be lost already.
It’s not that I don’t think they can’t handle the violence, or anything. I’m sure most can, and those that can’t will just end up as republicans, or spree killers, or something. I know I used think, wouldn’t it be great if Inspector Gadget wasn’t a dumbass and had hands that could turn into machine guns, or something useful, at the least? You’re not fooling anybody, there. Kids know that that kind of crap is dumbed down for them. That’s not what I’m asking for, however. It doesn’t have to be dumbed down or made for kids in particular at all. It just doesn’t have to be nonstop violence. I guess that’s what I’m saying. Say there’s a kid who wants to play something other than Halo. He just doesn’t know it yet. I’m sure the peer pressure to play Halo and “pwn bitches” with his peers on Xbox Live is enormous, but let’s say this guy is going to strike out on his own. Good for him. Yet, after trying to make it on his own out the real world, Poor Little Ness finds he has so few options that he ends up taking the weak man’s road of used Spec-Ops games for PSX. And he was such a good, promising young lad. Now doesn’t that break your god-damned heart?
I’m only emphasizing the kids, here, since they don’t call them your formative years because you’re free to completey heck them up however you want and change your mind later. I know I wouldn’t be the man I am today if I didn’t have all these fond memories of walking around all those green environments in old adventure games, back when trees were in games, constructing tools out of pocket lint. And personally, I’m also sick as hell of shooting people myself, anyway. By the time I play MGS4 I think the line will be dangerously blurred between player and character. I already feel like a tired, old veteran, sick of battle and death, now, so I won’t be playing so much as method acting.
I’d simply like to see something that has room for your imagination to get in there. The modern videogame is an alkali desert when it really needs to be something more, uh, fertile. Man didn’t abandon painting when he learned to sculpt. Let’s get some colors in there, some majestic green trees and clear blue skies. The imagination can’t grow in the desert. Anything creative or weird doesn’t have to be an abstract handheld game with a clever game play hook anymore. More Balloon Fight and Kiwi Kraze is what I want, I think. Remember Kiwi Kraze? You were a bird in New Zealand rescuing your bird buddies. I don’t know if anyone would even think to make something like that anymore. If they did, they’d use satellite imagery to recreate New Zealand exactly, or some bullstuff. You can do all sorts of weird stuff in games that’d be a lot harder to pull off in a movie or book. Let’s see some of that.
Back in the Fair Time, a company called Electronic Arts (you might’ve heard of them) didn’t look at those games from Sierra and Lucas Arts and see all the happy childhoods, the greenary, the cherished memories born from those games. No, to people like them, they could and can only see “markets” that need “penetrating.” Every bit as horrible as it sounds. These are the kinds of people that invent their own doublespeak business language to say things without really saying anything. The kind of people that up and buy the NFL when too many people start to buy their competition’s NFL game. Well, back when they were wanting to make adventure games, being incapable of ever creating a Full Throttle or a Gabriel Knight themselves, they merely waved their money around and brought in Sherlock Holmes, who, at the time, was the greatest detective (I’m now the best). They were decent enough adventure games, but poor Sherlock Holmes games. They were also damn ugly and lacking in the use of the color green, though I guess it’s the same for London.
Anyway, someone finally made a good Sherlock Holmes game, and it’s not even a real Sherlock Holmes game. It’s about some dude named Layton. A couple of guys making up their own stuff made a better Sherlock Holmes game than EA did, with the actual Sherlock Holmes. Is there something other than spending money that they can handle doing properly? Yeah, we’re not supposed to hate them anymore, being that they apologized for the murders of Origin, Bullfrog, and all – a standup thing to do, I’ll admit, but I won’t fall for that. I know how these people operate. They’re not like you and me. They don’t have a conscience. They’re machines, programmed to simply want more money. They’ll only show a response to anyone other than themselves if their income is threatened. They look at their invented graphs and formulas and follow them to the letter. When something new and original that doesn’t fit in these formulas does well, it’s a “big suprise” that “exceeds all expectations,” and so they imitate the hell out of it, thinking that’s all there is to it. You know at the end of FernGully: The Last Rainforest, when that machine is possessed by a demon and is going through the forest cutting everything down? EA is that demon possessed machine, and they’re cutting down that forest to make room for a new alkali desert, where, as you know, imagination is unable to grow.
Usually what makes an adventure game a stuff one is that the puzzles are just plain hecking nonsense. And, often, I think that happens because the game is just too damn long. The designers aren’t smart enough come up with enough clever puzzles to fit in the entire game for every situation, so they get desperate, and when they get desperate this leads to madness, which leads to the bizarro moonside logic. All of us here know of the Gabriel Knight Moustache Massacre of ’99. This is something now told to small children as a warning. I even think it’s in the latest edition of Bullfinch’s Mythology, under “Tragedies.” I was there at ground zero. I remember it clearly: I finally had a computer all my own for the first time, and, to celebrate, the two latest entries in my favorite game series’ at time – the games being GK3 and Ultima IX. I tell you, it did something to me, something whose effect still lingers to this day. I’d also like to point out that Ultima IX was diddled with by Electronic Arts, known by their true name, “Hexxus“. Hexxus was voiced by Tim Curry, who also voiced Gabriel Knight in his third game, and is known for sounding like a child molester. I personally believe that when the universe is trying to tell you something, you should listen.
So maybe it’s just too hard to come up with enough sensible puzzles to cover an entire game. The Big Sleep didn’t make complete sense to Raymond Chandler, and he wrote the damn thing. And remember the Holmes story where the guy injected monkey blood or something and started climbing trees? What in the heck was that all about? And what a literal pushover Moriarty was. Holmes was too smart for Doyle’s own good, in my opinion. So you wonder what hope there is for there ever being a great detective game that makes sense. But then you remember something like Full Throttle, a game so good that I actually forget it’s an adventure game, and then you think, maybe everyone else is just lazy. Well, you think too much. Just take it easy. What they’ve done here for Professor Layton is side-step that problem by just getting together a bunch of good puzzles that don’t really have much to do with jack stuff. It’s just a series of puzzles that usually come from some guy coming up and saying, “Have you heard of this one?” But they can get away with it because they’re all good ones. It’s really a puzzle game disguised as an adventure game, and therefore actually ends up being a better Sherlock Holmes simulator game than what any adventure game could ever be. Also, it’s a real nice looking game. It doesn’t look like anything else out there. A cartoon, but more The Little Prince than some anime horsestuff. So that’s pretty good.
I guess Japan has only one videogame magazine, and it’s called Famitsu. If any others exist, I have no knowledge of them. If you’re a hip American, perhaps you know all about this magazine, already. But in an issue, there was an article about Professor Layton, and the title of the article was, “Level 5’s new game’s genre is unknown? New style game to train your brain,” except it said that in Japanese, rather than English. Yeah, it seems that in Japan they see an adventure game and, to them, it is some kind of crazy Brain Training knock-off. Ha, ha, those lovable, crazy Japanese. The closest thing those primitive deviants have for comparison is cartoon sex games and Phoenix Wright, so this is a bold new step for them. I hope it takes off.
Anyway, according to the opening cutscene, Layton and I are under some sort of non-disclosure agreement by the curious village, so I can’t exactly talk in specifics about the events of The Case. Sorry. I’ll just say you missed out. A great time was had by all.
2007
text by tim rogers
★⋆☆☆
“A PAINLESS, FORGETTABLE LITTLE EXERCISE IN POINT-MISSING.”
As human beings blessed with remarkable patience, we here at Action Button Dot Net didn’t immediately scream ourselves into comas when we heard that an American — that is, a non-Japanese — developer was being put in charge of Contra 4 for the Nintendo DS. With Zen-like resolve, we refrained from jamming out a pre-emptive review that centered on the fact that developer WayForward Technologies’ previous effort had, for the record, been Shrek the 3rd: Ogres and Donkeys (rated E for Everyone). For one thing, as a group of individuals so convinced that half of the people who do make blockbuster videogames should probably be imprisoned for petty theft, we’re all about handing out the benefit of the doubt to anyone who actually hasn’t had the opportunity to make a game that IGN is going to pretend to give a stuff about. Furthermore, while WayForward’s Sigma Star Saga was, in execution, a piece of greasy stuff, it was so full of out-of-left-field, balls-to-floor concepts (a role-playing game where the “battle system” involves “old-school shoot-em-upping” is welcome, by default, in a world where RPG “battle systems” are normally focused on selecting “fight” from a menu and then watching your dudes fight) that it gets a miraculous passing grade. If Contra 4 is these guys’ chance to work with a budget, more power to them. What’s next, Square-Enix putting a D-team of unknowns on Final Fantasy XIII? Go right ahead! Why not put the development team who brought us Marc Ecko’s Getting Up in charge of the next Silent Hill game, while you’re at it? (Being dead serious here.) Let’s put Darth Vader into Soul Calibur, too, while we’re at it. I mean, let’s face it, when it comes to Japanese videogames, “experience” usually means little more than “an octogenarian in charge”. Well, unless you’re talking about Contra‘s esteemed director / designer Nobuya Nakazato, still alive, still kicking, still brilliant, whose latest two Contra games for the PlayStation 2 were both amazing and written off by critics the Western world over as “not exactly the same thing as the original Contra“. That man — well, simply put, he’s a genius, and we’d like to marry him. Did you know he directed Vandal Hearts, the only strategy RPG you can play from start to finish without getting hit once? (The maps are small enough so that the enemies don’t possess “AI”, they just move in pre-programmed “patterns” to accommodate for the player’s actions.) Here’s Irem making R-Type Tactics, when Nakazato had already made Contra Tactics a decade ago.
Enough about awesome stuff, though, and on with the disappointment: it’s a shame that Contra 4 kind of misses the point all around. It’s got enough flow and enough snap, for one thing, though it really just doesn’t crunch enough. It mushes along. Whereas Neo Contra is the epitome of crunch, Contra 4 is too stop-starty for its own good. Review-writers whistling, yee-hawing, moosecalling, and hi-ho-ing about the game’s “extreme difficulty” need to dump a bottle of chill pills in their tomato soup tomorrow at lunch. What are these people doing, just holding right on the control pad, and tapping the Action Button with the stylus? Contra 4 is easily playable by anyone with a cool head (and, say, the ability to win Virtua Fighter 5 tournaments despite actually, methodically sucking at Guilty Gear) if you shift your damn paradigm for three seconds, stop in place, look at where the enemies are coming from, and rush the holes. Play it like a runningback, not a linebacker, for God’s sake. (Finally! A similie everyone in our readership will understand!) I hated the game, personally, for my first two clumsy attempts, and then went on to get all the way to stage five on my next credit, and lord knows I’m not a rocket scientist. When I got to the end, I was convinced that I’d had it all wrong when I said I hated this stupid game. In the end, it’s not worth hating. It’s just there.
Contra games have always been about sadistic locomotion. Hell, all classic Konami games are about locomotion. Observe how little this skilled player stops in his entire playthrough of the original Castlevania. Now check out Contra III. Or Contra. These are speed runs by highly skilled players, though really, it’s not impossible to think that these games can’t be cleared flawlessly on a first attempt by someone who’s just really good at videogames. It’s a tenuous point we’re trying to make here: Contra 4‘s idea of “insane difficulty” comes less from the actual heart of the Contra games and more from playground rumors — about this game called Contra that’s so hard because you die in one hit and there’s even a thirty lives code because it’s that hard. Contra 4 strives to make a difficult game by flooding every corner of every stage with endlessly spawning, somersaulting enemies and furious blinking bullets. The level designers tossed off each little monsterpiece probably without bothering to play-test them. Let’s see how the jerks like this! In the end, though, the game is missing the fleeting flow and motion that previous (ahem, Japanese-developed) Contra titles had all sharpened into perfection, maybe because the (Japanese) developers had originally conceived the games as arcade entertainment devices, or maybe because the (Japanese) developers just employed a lot of common sense. If breathing deeply and rushing the holes in the enemy lines (while never letting go of the fire button) is how the (American) developer wants us to play Contra 4, however, then we’ll have to call them more clever than we might have given credit for — and then scold them for making the game otherwise kind of flat and bland.
Review-writers all over the internet were able to excuse the so-called “insane difficulty” because the game has plenty of “old-school charm”. Huh. “Old-school charm” is a tough demon to quantify, though I’m pretty sure they’re all talking about the little quippy liner notes strewn all over the game. I’ve removed the game from my DS since playing it, and there’s a copy of Dragon Quest IV lodged in the cartridge slot right now and it will require surgery to be removed, so I can’t check and make sure, though I vaguely remember the “help” text on Contra 4‘s title menu proclaiming that “Arcade Mode” is “All about beefy dudes and spread gun. Just what the Contra ordered. Heck yeah!” (Warning: embellished.) The (black-and-white) instruction manual cringingly recalls fond memories of the over-the-top, rage-against-the-Reaganomics leveling-with-the-kids Konami instruction manuals of the 1980s. It’s like, man, when we were kids, this stuff was hilarious! Now, it’s kind of like your uncle flying three thousand miles to come to your wedding, and then dying on the plane (drug overdose) while wearing a Santa Claus suit.
That’s the way Konami classics were, way back when — stone-faced beef-dudes with spread guns raging against nameless alien threats while their instruction manuals ranged from cheeky to lippy to jerky. Now, the global climate has mutated; scientists and the police have determined that precisely half of the anonymous saps stepping forward to type “lol” at the latest regurgitation of the “eternal battle between pirates and ninjas” meme as reported by Kotaku.com either played high school football or tried out for it. We’re sixteen years away from a generation of Al Bundys who would rather play Guitar Hero than watch John Wayne as “Hondo”. John Wayne never needed a hecking spread gun.
We can’t really blame WayForward for pandering to these people, anyway: they’re where the money is at — all of the money. Still, once again, an innate quality of Contra is lost on these new Western overlords: though it’s exceedingly hard to tell from the first couple of installments, the entire Contra series — big dudes, big guns, big monsters — is a gradually accelerating elbow jab directed at the ribs of American pop culture. Exhibit A would be that your dual-rifle-wielding Schwarzenegger-like hero motherhecker, arms heavier than nuclear missiles, manages to somersault no less than nine times in the air every time he jumps. Contra Hard Corps, with its ladlefuls of bizarre, should have gotten the message across that the over-the-top violence in these games was clearly a gleeful pastiche. It seems that in America, a country where half the people can’t read, 75% of the people can’t locate the North American continent on a map, and 95% couldn’t succinctly explain the difference between Jerry Lewis and Alan Greenspan, it just didn’t get through. Kids genuinely thought that “beefy dude hanging onto soaring intercontinental ballistic missile with one arm while shooting a shotgun with an endless supply of ammunition with the other arm” was a worthy role model, like they were going to be able to pick up a brochure at the career fair. (In the case of Neo Contra, the brochure’s cover would read “Beefy dude who takes on an entire air-force-worth of planes with just a machinegun while running in place atop spinning helicopter blades”.) Years later, we had the “stylish hard action” of Devil May Cry, and years after that, we had Devil May Cry 3, which kids on the internet squealed about: the hero, Dante, is such a badass, like when he surfs on that missile and stuff, though what the heck is with the pizza in the first cut-scene man that stuff is so hecking gay. Lo and behold, Devil May Cry 4 casts a CG scientologist pederast in the role of Dante and a tight-faced emomaniac in the role of the main character, Nero.
Neo Contra, most poignantly, casts a katana-wielding black samurai as one of its beefy heroes. There’s a CG cut-scene (essential viewing) where said badass black samurai cuts a group of rushing soldiers in half with his katana — “Awesome!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a Hummer comes blasting at him full-speed — with a shoulder-thrust, he knocks the hecking thing over. “BADASS!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a group of a hundred men come charging at him — with one vicious slash, he turns them into a volcano of blood. “heck YEAH!!” shouts YouTube. Then a huge, monolithic threat shows itself, and our very black, very samurai hero summons power from the depths of his soul, and unleashes a slash that cuts the very planet earth in half. “TOO heckING RADICAL!!” ejaculates YouTube. The screen grows black. Ten seconds later, we see our two heroes swimming through space in their underwear. Like, somehow, the destruction of the planet earth had also stripped them of their clothes. Suddenly, the internet is afraid — deathly so — that mass media might, as their preacher insists, be intent on turning them into homosexuals:
“WTF??! That was great up to the point those two appearing swimming in space humming. Eww.”
“WTF!? is this the reward for getting overall S rank in the game… are you kidding me!!! I lost my respect for the S rank after seeing this -_-“
“2 gay guys swimming on space WTF!!!”
“It went from pretty cool to real gay”
(Ignore the comments that call the video brilliant. Those people are obviously from the UK.)
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: Contra, in the words of its most treasured (and paying) fans, “went from pretty cool to real gay“. This is why an American team was called in to handle Contra 4 — to keep this eternally told tale of shirtless men with large machine rifles as heterosexual as possible. There is to be no hecking with the average gamer’s grip on sexuality.
We could say that, ever since Nobuya Nakazato breathed life into Contra, Japanese videogame designers’ respect for the medium in general has been dwindling into a razor-sharp point. Game characters’ hairstyles come to resemble behives on top of layer cakes; robots crafted by pedophile scientists to look like little girls and wear skirts short enough to show off their panties utter bone-dry dialogue as cogs in a rat-hecking nonsense-plot machine forged by a supercomputer bent on intergalactic terrorism. Contra was too subtle for the times it occupied, and Contra 4, as a bald-faced re-painting, sure as hell isn’t any less subtle. Mind you, there’s nothing terrible about it. It’s not worth a groan — just a little, high-pitched sigh. If anything, it’s nice enough anti-proof that if ever there was a time for literature in videogames, it might as well be right now.
Reading Contra 4‘s Wikipedia page is a headache and a half. Particularly the section about unlockable characters. Apparently, when the original Contra was released in the US, Konami of America, missing the point as they would many times again in the future, altered the game’s storyline so that it took place in modern times. When Contra 3 was released, with stages that were obviously set in some far-off future, Konami of America had no choice — they had to admit to the future setting, and rename the main characters so that they were “descendents” of the main characters from the original Contra. Now we have Contra 4, with its lovingly compiled unlockable encyclopedias on the history of the series, with two playable characters named “Mad Dog” and “Scorpion”, names that were originally used in the American versions of Contra and Super C as the code names for Bill and Lance. Contrary to the game’s supposed “respect” for the series “canon”, they are treated as “new characters”. Furthermore, Mad Dog is black, which is cool, though that doesn’t change the fact that he’s just a palette-swap of all the other characters, for stuff’s sake.
In short, the missteps of Contra 4, on its short trip from concept to videogame, or bill to law, or whatever, can be summarized by this paragraph from Wikipedia:
“The continuity of Contra 4 is based on the Japanese canon that was adapted into the English localization of series with the release of Contra: Shattered Soldier. However, the game’s producers took a few mild liberties with the established canon by integrating elements of the American localizations of the older games. The alien Black Viper was originally mentioned only in the American manual of Operation C, whereas the original plot of that game was about an unnamed superpower creating new weapons using an alien cell. In the timeline presented in the manual and official website, the events of Operation C are interpreted as a previous mission of Mad Dog and Scorpion (the new characters in the game) against Black Viper (whereas the original game was a solo mission of Bill Rizer).”
The inverse erection caused by reading that has officially punctured my bladder. I just did a test urination, and I predict I will be pissing blood for six weeks at the least.
WayForward Technologies said in interviews with “gaming blogs” all over the place that they were really glad they’d been offered the chance to make a Contra game, and they promised they wouldn’t mess it up. On the surface, they kept their promise. Though we kind of wish they would have tried to, you know, make up some actual compelling game concepts instead of gazing at their shoes the whole damned time, dead scared of pissing off people who know the difference between Red Falcon and Black Viper (people who probably can’t tie their shoes, don’t have jobs, and are playing your game via an emulator and a flash cartridge, anyway). Instead, all we get is this lame little tacked-on grappling hook, which the official site proclaims “allows for new combat situations and dramatic set pieces that underscore the game’s adrenaline-soaked pedigree”. Actually, it just lets you slurm up to the top screen whenever there’s a grabbable platform up there, and usually only at points where you absolutely have to go up there, anyway.
It’d be nice to say something, right here, about the two-player co-op, though the game requires multiple god damned cartridges, so there goes that.
Really. Is “it’s old-school” or “bound not to disappoint fans of the original Contra” the best praise WayForward could have hoped for? What kind of world are we living in? For Contra‘s 20th Anniversary, if you’re not going to put something new on the table, why not just release a cartridge with all the old Contra games on it? I’d take a compilation with flawless emulations of Contra III and Hard Corps both on it over Contra 4‘s vanilla remake of the original Contra any day. Thank god MegaDrive emulation on PSP is so perfect! Hard Corps and Ranger X are probably all a man needs, to be honest.
If you arrive at the end of this still looking for the evolution of Contra, look no further than Gears of War. Remember the last stage, on the deathtrain streaking under a blood-red, post-apocalyptic sky? There’s a cut-scene where a subhumanoid alien monster berserker freak charges through a stack of crates. The crates shatter and explode, and for an instant, their contents are revealed: boxes of cereal. With 98% of the world’s population wiped out, someone is still shipping cereal from one place to another. That’s a classy little jab right there. That Cliffy B guy gets it.
–tim rogers
paragraph i couldn’t fit anywhere else: Likewise, when From Software released Metal Wolf Chaos for the Xbox — a game in which the hotshot president of the United States sets off on a continent-spanning giant robot battle against a coup-staging vice president — the internet’s children didn’t go “heck yeah! Satire!” — they went “heck yeah! Awesome!”
★⋆☆☆
“A PAINLESS, FORGETTABLE LITTLE EXERCISE IN POINT-MISSING.”
As human beings blessed with remarkable patience, we here at Action Button Dot Net didn’t immediately scream ourselves into comas when we heard that an American — that is, a non-Japanese — developer was being put in charge of Contra 4 for the Nintendo DS. With Zen-like resolve, we refrained from jamming out a pre-emptive review that centered on the fact that developer WayForward Technologies’ previous effort had, for the record, been Shrek the 3rd: Ogres and Donkeys (rated E for Everyone). For one thing, as a group of individuals so convinced that half of the people who do make blockbuster videogames should probably be imprisoned for petty theft, we’re all about handing out the benefit of the doubt to anyone who actually hasn’t had the opportunity to make a game that IGN is going to pretend to give a stuff about. Furthermore, while WayForward’s Sigma Star Saga was, in execution, a piece of greasy stuff, it was so full of out-of-left-field, balls-to-floor concepts (a role-playing game where the “battle system” involves “old-school shoot-em-upping” is welcome, by default, in a world where RPG “battle systems” are normally focused on selecting “fight” from a menu and then watching your dudes fight) that it gets a miraculous passing grade. If Contra 4 is these guys’ chance to work with a budget, more power to them. What’s next, Square-Enix putting a D-team of unknowns on Final Fantasy XIII? Go right ahead! Why not put the development team who brought us Marc Ecko’s Getting Up in charge of the next Silent Hill game, while you’re at it? (Being dead serious here.) Let’s put Darth Vader into Soul Calibur, too, while we’re at it. I mean, let’s face it, when it comes to Japanese videogames, “experience” usually means little more than “an octogenarian in charge”. Well, unless you’re talking about Contra‘s esteemed director / designer Nobuya Nakazato, still alive, still kicking, still brilliant, whose latest two Contra games for the PlayStation 2 were both amazing and written off by critics the Western world over as “not exactly the same thing as the original Contra“. That man — well, simply put, he’s a genius, and we’d like to marry him. Did you know he directed Vandal Hearts, the only strategy RPG you can play from start to finish without getting hit once? (The maps are small enough so that the enemies don’t possess “AI”, they just move in pre-programmed “patterns” to accommodate for the player’s actions.) Here’s Irem making R-Type Tactics, when Nakazato had already made Contra Tactics a decade ago.
Enough about awesome stuff, though, and on with the disappointment: it’s a shame that Contra 4 kind of misses the point all around. It’s got enough flow and enough snap, for one thing, though it really just doesn’t crunch enough. It mushes along. Whereas Neo Contra is the epitome of crunch, Contra 4 is too stop-starty for its own good. Review-writers whistling, yee-hawing, moosecalling, and hi-ho-ing about the game’s “extreme difficulty” need to dump a bottle of chill pills in their tomato soup tomorrow at lunch. What are these people doing, just holding right on the control pad, and tapping the Action Button with the stylus? Contra 4 is easily playable by anyone with a cool head (and, say, the ability to win Virtua Fighter 5 tournaments despite actually, methodically sucking at Guilty Gear) if you shift your damn paradigm for three seconds, stop in place, look at where the enemies are coming from, and rush the holes. Play it like a runningback, not a linebacker, for God’s sake. (Finally! A similie everyone in our readership will understand!) I hated the game, personally, for my first two clumsy attempts, and then went on to get all the way to stage five on my next credit, and lord knows I’m not a rocket scientist. When I got to the end, I was convinced that I’d had it all wrong when I said I hated this stupid game. In the end, it’s not worth hating. It’s just there.
Contra games have always been about sadistic locomotion. Hell, all classic Konami games are about locomotion. Observe how little this skilled player stops in his entire playthrough of the original Castlevania. Now check out Contra III. Or Contra. These are speed runs by highly skilled players, though really, it’s not impossible to think that these games can’t be cleared flawlessly on a first attempt by someone who’s just really good at videogames. It’s a tenuous point we’re trying to make here: Contra 4‘s idea of “insane difficulty” comes less from the actual heart of the Contra games and more from playground rumors — about this game called Contra that’s so hard because you die in one hit and there’s even a thirty lives code because it’s that hard. Contra 4 strives to make a difficult game by flooding every corner of every stage with endlessly spawning, somersaulting enemies and furious blinking bullets. The level designers tossed off each little monsterpiece probably without bothering to play-test them. Let’s see how the jerks like this! In the end, though, the game is missing the fleeting flow and motion that previous (ahem, Japanese-developed) Contra titles had all sharpened into perfection, maybe because the (Japanese) developers had originally conceived the games as arcade entertainment devices, or maybe because the (Japanese) developers just employed a lot of common sense. If breathing deeply and rushing the holes in the enemy lines (while never letting go of the fire button) is how the (American) developer wants us to play Contra 4, however, then we’ll have to call them more clever than we might have given credit for — and then scold them for making the game otherwise kind of flat and bland.
Review-writers all over the internet were able to excuse the so-called “insane difficulty” because the game has plenty of “old-school charm”. Huh. “Old-school charm” is a tough demon to quantify, though I’m pretty sure they’re all talking about the little quippy liner notes strewn all over the game. I’ve removed the game from my DS since playing it, and there’s a copy of Dragon Quest IV lodged in the cartridge slot right now and it will require surgery to be removed, so I can’t check and make sure, though I vaguely remember the “help” text on Contra 4‘s title menu proclaiming that “Arcade Mode” is “All about beefy dudes and spread gun. Just what the Contra ordered. Heck yeah!” (Warning: embellished.) The (black-and-white) instruction manual cringingly recalls fond memories of the over-the-top, rage-against-the-Reaganomics leveling-with-the-kids Konami instruction manuals of the 1980s. It’s like, man, when we were kids, this stuff was hilarious! Now, it’s kind of like your uncle flying three thousand miles to come to your wedding, and then dying on the plane (drug overdose) while wearing a Santa Claus suit.
That’s the way Konami classics were, way back when — stone-faced beef-dudes with spread guns raging against nameless alien threats while their instruction manuals ranged from cheeky to lippy to jerky. Now, the global climate has mutated; scientists and the police have determined that precisely half of the anonymous saps stepping forward to type “lol” at the latest regurgitation of the “eternal battle between pirates and ninjas” meme as reported by Kotaku.com either played high school football or tried out for it. We’re sixteen years away from a generation of Al Bundys who would rather play Guitar Hero than watch John Wayne as “Hondo”. John Wayne never needed a hecking spread gun.
We can’t really blame WayForward for pandering to these people, anyway: they’re where the money is at — all of the money. Still, once again, an innate quality of Contra is lost on these new Western overlords: though it’s exceedingly hard to tell from the first couple of installments, the entire Contra series — big dudes, big guns, big monsters — is a gradually accelerating elbow jab directed at the ribs of American pop culture. Exhibit A would be that your dual-rifle-wielding Schwarzenegger-like hero motherhecker, arms heavier than nuclear missiles, manages to somersault no less than nine times in the air every time he jumps. Contra Hard Corps, with its ladlefuls of bizarre, should have gotten the message across that the over-the-top violence in these games was clearly a gleeful pastiche. It seems that in America, a country where half the people can’t read, 75% of the people can’t locate the North American continent on a map, and 95% couldn’t succinctly explain the difference between Jerry Lewis and Alan Greenspan, it just didn’t get through. Kids genuinely thought that “beefy dude hanging onto soaring intercontinental ballistic missile with one arm while shooting a shotgun with an endless supply of ammunition with the other arm” was a worthy role model, like they were going to be able to pick up a brochure at the career fair. (In the case of Neo Contra, the brochure’s cover would read “Beefy dude who takes on an entire air-force-worth of planes with just a machinegun while running in place atop spinning helicopter blades”.) Years later, we had the “stylish hard action” of Devil May Cry, and years after that, we had Devil May Cry 3, which kids on the internet squealed about: the hero, Dante, is such a badass, like when he surfs on that missile and stuff, though what the heck is with the pizza in the first cut-scene man that stuff is so hecking gay. Lo and behold, Devil May Cry 4 casts a CG scientologist pederast in the role of Dante and a tight-faced emomaniac in the role of the main character, Nero.
Neo Contra, most poignantly, casts a katana-wielding black samurai as one of its beefy heroes. There’s a CG cut-scene (essential viewing) where said badass black samurai cuts a group of rushing soldiers in half with his katana — “Awesome!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a Hummer comes blasting at him full-speed — with a shoulder-thrust, he knocks the hecking thing over. “BADASS!” shout the YouTube kids. Then a group of a hundred men come charging at him — with one vicious slash, he turns them into a volcano of blood. “heck YEAH!!” shouts YouTube. Then a huge, monolithic threat shows itself, and our very black, very samurai hero summons power from the depths of his soul, and unleashes a slash that cuts the very planet earth in half. “TOO heckING RADICAL!!” ejaculates YouTube. The screen grows black. Ten seconds later, we see our two heroes swimming through space in their underwear. Like, somehow, the destruction of the planet earth had also stripped them of their clothes. Suddenly, the internet is afraid — deathly so — that mass media might, as their preacher insists, be intent on turning them into homosexuals:
“WTF??! That was great up to the point those two appearing swimming in space humming. Eww.”
“WTF!? is this the reward for getting overall S rank in the game… are you kidding me!!! I lost my respect for the S rank after seeing this -_-“
“2 gay guys swimming on space WTF!!!”
“It went from pretty cool to real gay”
(Ignore the comments that call the video brilliant. Those people are obviously from the UK.)
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: Contra, in the words of its most treasured (and paying) fans, “went from pretty cool to real gay“. This is why an American team was called in to handle Contra 4 — to keep this eternally told tale of shirtless men with large machine rifles as heterosexual as possible. There is to be no hecking with the average gamer’s grip on sexuality.
We could say that, ever since Nobuya Nakazato breathed life into Contra, Japanese videogame designers’ respect for the medium in general has been dwindling into a razor-sharp point. Game characters’ hairstyles come to resemble behives on top of layer cakes; robots crafted by pedophile scientists to look like little girls and wear skirts short enough to show off their panties utter bone-dry dialogue as cogs in a rat-hecking nonsense-plot machine forged by a supercomputer bent on intergalactic terrorism. Contra was too subtle for the times it occupied, and Contra 4, as a bald-faced re-painting, sure as hell isn’t any less subtle. Mind you, there’s nothing terrible about it. It’s not worth a groan — just a little, high-pitched sigh. If anything, it’s nice enough anti-proof that if ever there was a time for literature in videogames, it might as well be right now.
Reading Contra 4‘s Wikipedia page is a headache and a half. Particularly the section about unlockable characters. Apparently, when the original Contra was released in the US, Konami of America, missing the point as they would many times again in the future, altered the game’s storyline so that it took place in modern times. When Contra 3 was released, with stages that were obviously set in some far-off future, Konami of America had no choice — they had to admit to the future setting, and rename the main characters so that they were “descendents” of the main characters from the original Contra. Now we have Contra 4, with its lovingly compiled unlockable encyclopedias on the history of the series, with two playable characters named “Mad Dog” and “Scorpion”, names that were originally used in the American versions of Contra and Super C as the code names for Bill and Lance. Contrary to the game’s supposed “respect” for the series “canon”, they are treated as “new characters”. Furthermore, Mad Dog is black, which is cool, though that doesn’t change the fact that he’s just a palette-swap of all the other characters, for stuff’s sake.
In short, the missteps of Contra 4, on its short trip from concept to videogame, or bill to law, or whatever, can be summarized by this paragraph from Wikipedia:
“The continuity of Contra 4 is based on the Japanese canon that was adapted into the English localization of series with the release of Contra: Shattered Soldier. However, the game’s producers took a few mild liberties with the established canon by integrating elements of the American localizations of the older games. The alien Black Viper was originally mentioned only in the American manual of Operation C, whereas the original plot of that game was about an unnamed superpower creating new weapons using an alien cell. In the timeline presented in the manual and official website, the events of Operation C are interpreted as a previous mission of Mad Dog and Scorpion (the new characters in the game) against Black Viper (whereas the original game was a solo mission of Bill Rizer).”
The inverse erection caused by reading that has officially punctured my bladder. I just did a test urination, and I predict I will be pissing blood for six weeks at the least.
WayForward Technologies said in interviews with “gaming blogs” all over the place that they were really glad they’d been offered the chance to make a Contra game, and they promised they wouldn’t mess it up. On the surface, they kept their promise. Though we kind of wish they would have tried to, you know, make up some actual compelling game concepts instead of gazing at their shoes the whole damned time, dead scared of pissing off people who know the difference between Red Falcon and Black Viper (people who probably can’t tie their shoes, don’t have jobs, and are playing your game via an emulator and a flash cartridge, anyway). Instead, all we get is this lame little tacked-on grappling hook, which the official site proclaims “allows for new combat situations and dramatic set pieces that underscore the game’s adrenaline-soaked pedigree”. Actually, it just lets you slurm up to the top screen whenever there’s a grabbable platform up there, and usually only at points where you absolutely have to go up there, anyway.
It’d be nice to say something, right here, about the two-player co-op, though the game requires multiple god damned cartridges, so there goes that.
Really. Is “it’s old-school” or “bound not to disappoint fans of the original Contra” the best praise WayForward could have hoped for? What kind of world are we living in? For Contra‘s 20th Anniversary, if you’re not going to put something new on the table, why not just release a cartridge with all the old Contra games on it? I’d take a compilation with flawless emulations of Contra III and Hard Corps both on it over Contra 4‘s vanilla remake of the original Contra any day. Thank god MegaDrive emulation on PSP is so perfect! Hard Corps and Ranger X are probably all a man needs, to be honest.
If you arrive at the end of this still looking for the evolution of Contra, look no further than Gears of War. Remember the last stage, on the deathtrain streaking under a blood-red, post-apocalyptic sky? There’s a cut-scene where a subhumanoid alien monster berserker freak charges through a stack of crates. The crates shatter and explode, and for an instant, their contents are revealed: boxes of cereal. With 98% of the world’s population wiped out, someone is still shipping cereal from one place to another. That’s a classy little jab right there. That Cliffy B guy gets it.
–tim rogers
paragraph i couldn’t fit anywhere else: Likewise, when From Software released Metal Wolf Chaos for the Xbox — a game in which the hotshot president of the United States sets off on a continent-spanning giant robot battle against a coup-staging vice president — the internet’s children didn’t go “heck yeah! Satire!” — they went “heck yeah! Awesome!”
2012
text by Bennett
★★★★
“LIKE ALL THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE, NOT FOR KIDS.”
Let’s talk about difficulty in games.
In the early days, games were usually written, drawn, coded and directed by one lone nerd. The nerd usually had around six weeks to produce a game which would suck down a billion coins in video arcades worldwide. The nerd’s goal was onefold: the game had to suck down as many coins as possible.
The obstacle in the path of the nerd’s goal was also onefold. Because of time and manpower constraints, the game would have around twenty minutes worth of unique content, meaning that players could quickly become bored, and take their precious coins elsewhere. Thus there was a problem: videogames could not reach commercial success until the obstacle could be overcome and the goal could be met.
In 1980, Eugene Jarvis solved the problem at Williams when he was programming ‘Defender‘: he made the game amazingly hard, and it went on to suck down more coins than any other game other than Pacman. (Full disclosure: these facts have been dramatized.)
The eighties saw a large number of very difficult games introduced into arcades and even into homes. Of course, on a home console, Jarvis’ elegant solution for attracting coins to the slot was irrelevant; every sale of a cartridge, disk or a tape was – and is – final. But since many of the most popular games were written for the arcades and ported for the home, the difficulty remained.
In the 90s, though, the arcades gradually died, and there was no longer any commercial reason for games to be hard. And gradually, the difficulty went away. The old Prince of Persia gave you no option to save your game, and one hour to finish the entire game. The new Prince of Persia gives you a rewind button. Every PC game lets you save at will, inching through the game by trial and error like a climber on a two-inch safety rope, because they get much lower review scores if they do not. Games today offer step-by-step tutorials, balloon help, and almost never require you to read the manual. It’s not a matter of controversy: modern games are easy.
Every year a survey tells us that the median age of gamers has increased. Last year, the average US gamer was 33. This means that majority of today’s gamers were weaned on games which were exceedingly difficult. But they cannot buy games to test their skills and their patience. They are like Spartan warriors or Vikings who have been forcibly migrated to modern Sweden.
It is no longer a viable commercial proposition to write a game for these hardened champions. The only way that these games can be made is if they are made for free, and distributed for free.
Which brings us to La Mulana, a Japanese freeware indie game in the mold of Castlevania and Metroid. The developers want you to feel as though they have released a sequel to Maze of Galious for your dusty, electrically-unsafe MSX console. From the collectible MSX game cartridges in the game’s dungeons, to the portable MSX laptop which is used to decipher inscriptions and read maps, this game is a 100-hour love letter to the ‘Xbox of 1983’. It runs happily on a Pentium 66, and it’s reasonable to describe it as ‘retro stylee’.
Yet somehow, La Mulana manages to avoid the clunky presentation and gameplay which has aged the real 1980s games so dramatically. Operating without real 8-bit constraints, the developers have made an 8-bit game with modern ambition. It makes me want to throw away my next-gen devices, but at the same time it is richer and more satisfying than any game I could find for an emulator. La Mulana is deeper and more complicated than any other game with 16-colour graphics, though it is never inaccessible or obtuse. It is exceedingly difficult without ever feeling arbitrary.
Did I just say difficult? La Mulana, unlike almost every other recent game of merit, is more than difficult. It is the kind of difficult which is no longer present outside of Japanese arcades.
Let me paint a picture. Your character is Professor Lemeza Kosugi, but let’s call him ‘Indiana Jones’ for short. Dr. Jones has come to a room which is pitch black. Somewhere in the room, there is a torch which can be lit with his newly-acquired flare gun, but he only has seven flares, and the torch will only stay lit for around five seconds. This is nowhere near long enough to traverse the platforms and spike traps which line the room. But he cannot simply step through the room flailing his whip like a coward. For if he accidentally whips a sacred monument in the darkness, an angry god will strike him with lightning. Dr. Jones will have to memorise the room!
In La Mulana, you cannot save your game until you get enough money to buy a save card. Even then, you can’t save without returning to the beginning of the game. You’ll certainly get stuck. You may have to call your friends to ask them how to solve a particular puzzle, or overcome a particular boss. You’ll need to read the (html) manual from cover to cover. You’ll want to write the game to a floppy disk so you can wrench it out of the drive and throw it across the room and stomp on it.
It is such a refreshment. For the last few years, most games I’ve played have given me a feeling of inevitability – as though I will certainly reach the end, even if I play like a brain-dead cabbage with Lou Gehrig’s disease. It can feel like reading a repetitive book. By contrast, La Mulana makes it feel like you are changing the outcome through your actions. You can fail, even to the point where you might give up. Since it is possible to fail, it becomes possible to succeed.
Satoru Iwata recently described the appeal of Zelda thus:
“Whenever I solve a difficult puzzle in Zelda, it always makes me think “I might be pretty smart!”
When I cleared the first boss in La Mulana, I knew I was smart. This feeling totally eclipsed my feelings of guilt for having forsaken my work, my dinner, and my personal hygiene for the preceding 48 hours.
Yes, there are other hard games out there. There are other games where it is possible to fail. But not many of them are platformers, and not many of them have La Mulana’s quality. La Mulana is not ‘good for an indie game’ or ‘good for a freeware title’. It’s the best game I’ve played in a year. You get the feeling that the history of video games went awry about 20 years ago, and that La Mulana somehow came to us through a wormhole from a beautiful parallel universe.
★★★★
“LIKE ALL THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE, NOT FOR KIDS.”
Let’s talk about difficulty in games.
In the early days, games were usually written, drawn, coded and directed by one lone nerd. The nerd usually had around six weeks to produce a game which would suck down a billion coins in video arcades worldwide. The nerd’s goal was onefold: the game had to suck down as many coins as possible.
The obstacle in the path of the nerd’s goal was also onefold. Because of time and manpower constraints, the game would have around twenty minutes worth of unique content, meaning that players could quickly become bored, and take their precious coins elsewhere. Thus there was a problem: videogames could not reach commercial success until the obstacle could be overcome and the goal could be met.
In 1980, Eugene Jarvis solved the problem at Williams when he was programming ‘Defender‘: he made the game amazingly hard, and it went on to suck down more coins than any other game other than Pacman. (Full disclosure: these facts have been dramatized.)
The eighties saw a large number of very difficult games introduced into arcades and even into homes. Of course, on a home console, Jarvis’ elegant solution for attracting coins to the slot was irrelevant; every sale of a cartridge, disk or a tape was – and is – final. But since many of the most popular games were written for the arcades and ported for the home, the difficulty remained.
In the 90s, though, the arcades gradually died, and there was no longer any commercial reason for games to be hard. And gradually, the difficulty went away. The old Prince of Persia gave you no option to save your game, and one hour to finish the entire game. The new Prince of Persia gives you a rewind button. Every PC game lets you save at will, inching through the game by trial and error like a climber on a two-inch safety rope, because they get much lower review scores if they do not. Games today offer step-by-step tutorials, balloon help, and almost never require you to read the manual. It’s not a matter of controversy: modern games are easy.
Every year a survey tells us that the median age of gamers has increased. Last year, the average US gamer was 33. This means that majority of today’s gamers were weaned on games which were exceedingly difficult. But they cannot buy games to test their skills and their patience. They are like Spartan warriors or Vikings who have been forcibly migrated to modern Sweden.
It is no longer a viable commercial proposition to write a game for these hardened champions. The only way that these games can be made is if they are made for free, and distributed for free.
Which brings us to La Mulana, a Japanese freeware indie game in the mold of Castlevania and Metroid. The developers want you to feel as though they have released a sequel to Maze of Galious for your dusty, electrically-unsafe MSX console. From the collectible MSX game cartridges in the game’s dungeons, to the portable MSX laptop which is used to decipher inscriptions and read maps, this game is a 100-hour love letter to the ‘Xbox of 1983’. It runs happily on a Pentium 66, and it’s reasonable to describe it as ‘retro stylee’.
Yet somehow, La Mulana manages to avoid the clunky presentation and gameplay which has aged the real 1980s games so dramatically. Operating without real 8-bit constraints, the developers have made an 8-bit game with modern ambition. It makes me want to throw away my next-gen devices, but at the same time it is richer and more satisfying than any game I could find for an emulator. La Mulana is deeper and more complicated than any other game with 16-colour graphics, though it is never inaccessible or obtuse. It is exceedingly difficult without ever feeling arbitrary.
Did I just say difficult? La Mulana, unlike almost every other recent game of merit, is more than difficult. It is the kind of difficult which is no longer present outside of Japanese arcades.
Let me paint a picture. Your character is Professor Lemeza Kosugi, but let’s call him ‘Indiana Jones’ for short. Dr. Jones has come to a room which is pitch black. Somewhere in the room, there is a torch which can be lit with his newly-acquired flare gun, but he only has seven flares, and the torch will only stay lit for around five seconds. This is nowhere near long enough to traverse the platforms and spike traps which line the room. But he cannot simply step through the room flailing his whip like a coward. For if he accidentally whips a sacred monument in the darkness, an angry god will strike him with lightning. Dr. Jones will have to memorise the room!
In La Mulana, you cannot save your game until you get enough money to buy a save card. Even then, you can’t save without returning to the beginning of the game. You’ll certainly get stuck. You may have to call your friends to ask them how to solve a particular puzzle, or overcome a particular boss. You’ll need to read the (html) manual from cover to cover. You’ll want to write the game to a floppy disk so you can wrench it out of the drive and throw it across the room and stomp on it.
It is such a refreshment. For the last few years, most games I’ve played have given me a feeling of inevitability – as though I will certainly reach the end, even if I play like a brain-dead cabbage with Lou Gehrig’s disease. It can feel like reading a repetitive book. By contrast, La Mulana makes it feel like you are changing the outcome through your actions. You can fail, even to the point where you might give up. Since it is possible to fail, it becomes possible to succeed.
Satoru Iwata recently described the appeal of Zelda thus:
“Whenever I solve a difficult puzzle in Zelda, it always makes me think “I might be pretty smart!”
When I cleared the first boss in La Mulana, I knew I was smart. This feeling totally eclipsed my feelings of guilt for having forsaken my work, my dinner, and my personal hygiene for the preceding 48 hours.
Yes, there are other hard games out there. There are other games where it is possible to fail. But not many of them are platformers, and not many of them have La Mulana’s quality. La Mulana is not ‘good for an indie game’ or ‘good for a freeware title’. It’s the best game I’ve played in a year. You get the feeling that the history of video games went awry about 20 years ago, and that La Mulana somehow came to us through a wormhole from a beautiful parallel universe.
2003
text by Thomas Callahan
★★★☆
“NEAT AND TIDY.”
Racecourses are lumped together into “peaksâ€, then stitched between dead-end “slopestyle†and “superpipe†runs. Win exactly three races, one slopestyle competition and one superpipe event to achieve Peak Completion, and Unlock the next peak.
The upshot is that these courses are interconnected, albeit pretty artificially. It’s very important that you can finish barreling down a racecourse (participation is entirely optional) and carve directly into the next one without a loading screen, a signpost, or any sort of hiccup. When you Unlock Final Peak Three, you can drop in directly onto the precarious, finely pointed tip of Big Mountain and tumble downhill for 30 minutes without interruption. This shouldn’t be absolutely exceptional, but it is. Anyone who has pedantically compared Half-Life’s insistence on seamless videogaming and removal of uninteractive cutscenes to cinéma verité will surely scrounge up something of interest here.
Perhaps that came off as a bit harsh. SSX 3’s breathless, mountain-encompassing half-hour of continuous play really does feel as bold and absorbing an endeavor as any meticulously composed extended take. The game boots up with a lengthy series of logos (as per the norm with EA), has you wait around a moment before skipping the intro, and puts you through a sizable loading sequence before granting access to Big Mountain — the tradeoff being that it will never stop you pushing buttons again. Judging by the sporadic clicking of machinery in my GameCube, memory/RAM is hauled up during the occasional “base runsâ€, which serve as gateways to different Events. That these runs are fairly barren has something to do with disc-reading, I suppose. All the same, they keep up illusions far better than menus, meters or videoclips; though they are visibly contrived, at the very least they continue the constant engagement of my thumbs and reflexes.
On that note: SSX 3 is wonderfully satisfying in terms of tactile feedback. To pull off tricks, you must reach your hand over to your controller’s four-way “directional pad” (speaking in generalities here because this is a multi-console affair), tapping it in one of eight directions while, simultaneously, jamming down one, two or three of your controller’s “shoulder buttons”, midair. This kind of bracing, effortful clunkiness makes onscreen response all the more compelling — it’s the same principle that makes Nintendo 64 first-person shooters, with their stilted combination of genuine analog movement with purely digital C-Button “strafe†and “look up/downâ€, eminently enjoyable in a way weightless modern-day “dual-stick” setups are not.
Also contributing here is a kind of odd application of RPG mechanics. While you compete in events, or even while you pull off jumps and grabs in your spare time, you accumulate cash, and the money can be put towards Acceleration, or Edging, or Stability, or Toughness. Character attributes are rated on a scale of 11; you’ll pay through the nose. Odd because leveling-up is usually implemented as a substitute for actual, trial-and-error bred improvement in videogames: pattern recognition, pattern memorization, grasp of in-game physics . . . all the little factors which fall into place, ideally, as a game’s difficulty level ramps up. (Few recent games manage to coordinate this learning curve/tension ratio elegantly. Super Monkey Ball does, brilliantly, and I suppose Metroid Prime does too.) Such is not the case here: your numbers go up and your “real” skill level increases at the same time. The two are indistinguishable. You merely notice, faintly, that while you continue exploring the mountain, stumbling upon shortcuts and little rail-to-rail sequences, your snowboarder’s response to your button-pushing feels increasingly fluid, increasingly smooth. It happens gradually, under your nose. Jump from an 11/11 stats-maxed-out character to a new one, though, and you’ll feel it, you’ll feel sort of vaguely stuffty, that’s it.
(A quibble: the 2-player splitscreen mode forces you to use the same character profiles you use in the main mode, which means that — unless you have two people actively playing through the main, peak-unlocking Quest at the same time on the same disc, leveling up two characters at an equal rate — one player will control a responsive, graceful character, and the other will be stuck with some loose and dinky counterpart. This little oversight renders the multiplayer quite irrelevant.)
I’ve owned this game for about two years. Every month or so I put it on and attempt to make it down from the summit to the village without falling or slipping up. It’s amazing how much can go wrong in 30 minutes of unbroken concentration, and with enough repetition, it’s amazing how mindless the half-hour marathon becomes. Pure autopilot — yet it remains gripping simply for the kind of flow state it puts you in. Videogames are generally stressful experiences; this alone separates SSX 3, with its serene all-mountain glide, from most of my (unenviable) games collection. Add onto this a completely inoffensive, banal aesthetic: generic arcadey clutter is coupled with Big Mountain’s increasingly fractured courses, a soft-spoken DJ mutters about trail conditions. Hell, even if you do find this stuff aesthetically offensive, you can turn off the HUD and the arcade SFX and the DJ and his pop-punk, streamlining the interface to something as lonesome as you like.
There’s something to be said for convenient videogames, games you can glean a pleasant response out of without significant time input or emotional investment. A swift double-punch — economic inflation, coupled with mainstream reviews solemnly emphasizing, above all things, “replay value†— has lent sheer game length a new importance. Developers hasten to pad their games out, advertising raw hours on the back of their “box-artâ€. It’s, yeah, infantile and powerful as hell: filler is bang for your buck, because digestibility, before you know it, is digested. Still, you know. A certain degree of detachment here is worthwhile. Yes, industry-wide nostalgia-riding is relentless; yes, the medium’s narrative potential looks to remain unfulfilled for obvious logistic reasons; yes, videogames are, on average, deeply mediocre. But I don’t have the energy nor the idealism to get truly angry over this carnivalesque little market. Lucky exceptions, coincidences and successes pop up with enough frequency to make the console-owning experience worthwhile. SSX 3's 30-minute full-mountain run is exceptionally good instant gratification. A neat, self-contained burst of escapism. I can casually speed down SSX 3‘s Big Mountain — or through chunks of Mega Man 2 or Super Mario Bros. 3 or Goldeneye 007 or other such rhythmically entrancing, expertly paced entertainment — when I want to punctuate my schedule with this specific, delightful sensation.
★★★☆
“NEAT AND TIDY.”
Racecourses are lumped together into “peaksâ€, then stitched between dead-end “slopestyle†and “superpipe†runs. Win exactly three races, one slopestyle competition and one superpipe event to achieve Peak Completion, and Unlock the next peak.
The upshot is that these courses are interconnected, albeit pretty artificially. It’s very important that you can finish barreling down a racecourse (participation is entirely optional) and carve directly into the next one without a loading screen, a signpost, or any sort of hiccup. When you Unlock Final Peak Three, you can drop in directly onto the precarious, finely pointed tip of Big Mountain and tumble downhill for 30 minutes without interruption. This shouldn’t be absolutely exceptional, but it is. Anyone who has pedantically compared Half-Life’s insistence on seamless videogaming and removal of uninteractive cutscenes to cinéma verité will surely scrounge up something of interest here.
Perhaps that came off as a bit harsh. SSX 3’s breathless, mountain-encompassing half-hour of continuous play really does feel as bold and absorbing an endeavor as any meticulously composed extended take. The game boots up with a lengthy series of logos (as per the norm with EA), has you wait around a moment before skipping the intro, and puts you through a sizable loading sequence before granting access to Big Mountain — the tradeoff being that it will never stop you pushing buttons again. Judging by the sporadic clicking of machinery in my GameCube, memory/RAM is hauled up during the occasional “base runsâ€, which serve as gateways to different Events. That these runs are fairly barren has something to do with disc-reading, I suppose. All the same, they keep up illusions far better than menus, meters or videoclips; though they are visibly contrived, at the very least they continue the constant engagement of my thumbs and reflexes.
On that note: SSX 3 is wonderfully satisfying in terms of tactile feedback. To pull off tricks, you must reach your hand over to your controller’s four-way “directional pad” (speaking in generalities here because this is a multi-console affair), tapping it in one of eight directions while, simultaneously, jamming down one, two or three of your controller’s “shoulder buttons”, midair. This kind of bracing, effortful clunkiness makes onscreen response all the more compelling — it’s the same principle that makes Nintendo 64 first-person shooters, with their stilted combination of genuine analog movement with purely digital C-Button “strafe†and “look up/downâ€, eminently enjoyable in a way weightless modern-day “dual-stick” setups are not.
Also contributing here is a kind of odd application of RPG mechanics. While you compete in events, or even while you pull off jumps and grabs in your spare time, you accumulate cash, and the money can be put towards Acceleration, or Edging, or Stability, or Toughness. Character attributes are rated on a scale of 11; you’ll pay through the nose. Odd because leveling-up is usually implemented as a substitute for actual, trial-and-error bred improvement in videogames: pattern recognition, pattern memorization, grasp of in-game physics . . . all the little factors which fall into place, ideally, as a game’s difficulty level ramps up. (Few recent games manage to coordinate this learning curve/tension ratio elegantly. Super Monkey Ball does, brilliantly, and I suppose Metroid Prime does too.) Such is not the case here: your numbers go up and your “real” skill level increases at the same time. The two are indistinguishable. You merely notice, faintly, that while you continue exploring the mountain, stumbling upon shortcuts and little rail-to-rail sequences, your snowboarder’s response to your button-pushing feels increasingly fluid, increasingly smooth. It happens gradually, under your nose. Jump from an 11/11 stats-maxed-out character to a new one, though, and you’ll feel it, you’ll feel sort of vaguely stuffty, that’s it.
(A quibble: the 2-player splitscreen mode forces you to use the same character profiles you use in the main mode, which means that — unless you have two people actively playing through the main, peak-unlocking Quest at the same time on the same disc, leveling up two characters at an equal rate — one player will control a responsive, graceful character, and the other will be stuck with some loose and dinky counterpart. This little oversight renders the multiplayer quite irrelevant.)
I’ve owned this game for about two years. Every month or so I put it on and attempt to make it down from the summit to the village without falling or slipping up. It’s amazing how much can go wrong in 30 minutes of unbroken concentration, and with enough repetition, it’s amazing how mindless the half-hour marathon becomes. Pure autopilot — yet it remains gripping simply for the kind of flow state it puts you in. Videogames are generally stressful experiences; this alone separates SSX 3, with its serene all-mountain glide, from most of my (unenviable) games collection. Add onto this a completely inoffensive, banal aesthetic: generic arcadey clutter is coupled with Big Mountain’s increasingly fractured courses, a soft-spoken DJ mutters about trail conditions. Hell, even if you do find this stuff aesthetically offensive, you can turn off the HUD and the arcade SFX and the DJ and his pop-punk, streamlining the interface to something as lonesome as you like.
There’s something to be said for convenient videogames, games you can glean a pleasant response out of without significant time input or emotional investment. A swift double-punch — economic inflation, coupled with mainstream reviews solemnly emphasizing, above all things, “replay value†— has lent sheer game length a new importance. Developers hasten to pad their games out, advertising raw hours on the back of their “box-artâ€. It’s, yeah, infantile and powerful as hell: filler is bang for your buck, because digestibility, before you know it, is digested. Still, you know. A certain degree of detachment here is worthwhile. Yes, industry-wide nostalgia-riding is relentless; yes, the medium’s narrative potential looks to remain unfulfilled for obvious logistic reasons; yes, videogames are, on average, deeply mediocre. But I don’t have the energy nor the idealism to get truly angry over this carnivalesque little market. Lucky exceptions, coincidences and successes pop up with enough frequency to make the console-owning experience worthwhile. SSX 3's 30-minute full-mountain run is exceptionally good instant gratification. A neat, self-contained burst of escapism. I can casually speed down SSX 3‘s Big Mountain — or through chunks of Mega Man 2 or Super Mario Bros. 3 or Goldeneye 007 or other such rhythmically entrancing, expertly paced entertainment — when I want to punctuate my schedule with this specific, delightful sensation.
2007
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“THE PRECISE REASON KIDS DON'T PLAY WITH G.I. JOES ANYMORE.”
Halo 3 is one of the best videogames of 2007 for many of the same reasons that doing push-ups is better than not doing pushups. It’s a game about a human man in a robot battle suit; armed with pistols and rifles, he shoots inhuman alien freak bastards in the head; he rides bitching all-terrain vehicles at high speeds, ramping off the peaks of a construction site, landing atop giant enemy robotic spiders. He snipes dudes, he overcomes odds, and by the end of the game he saves the universe and finishes a fight. Just about everyone — TIME magazine and Newsweek and The New York Times and every other major news publication in North America — ran a feature-length article on the Halo phenomenon, calling it “certifiably huge” and going on to detail, using diction reminiscent of a Catholic priest denying rape charges, that there are action figures and novels already on sale, and a major motion picture in the works. One writer admirably went so far as to actually play the game, and came out convinced that, among other things, videogames are not movies, nor are they literature. We here at Action Button Dot Net wish to salute that guy, whoever he is: Duh. We wholly acknowledge that Halo 3‘s musical score is likely based on the sound of trash collectors emptying the bin outside a small-town symphony orchestra, that its screenplay of rhythmic grunts and screams is about as entertaining, at face value, as a play starring fourth-graders in crocodile costumes.
Still, Halo isn’t about all that, man. It’s about shooting stuff – and more than that, it’s about shooting stuff brilliantly. Halo wins its bet by not being an asshole. Unlike other games with tacked-on husks for storylines (Super Mario Galaxy, for example), Halo 3 manages to focus, 99% of the time, on the construction and flow of its stages. When a guy screams at us about how the enemies are coming, he’s serious as a heart-attack, and we have to kill those enemies or we’re going to die. Sometimes there’s a vehicle to get in, and you get in it and drive it, down a big tunnel or a picturesque beach. If you die, you kind of start back just seconds before you died. The game doesn’t have “extra lives”, and it doesn’t ever ask you if you want to continue. It knows, at all times, that the fact that the console’s power is engaged means that the player is willing to play. It leaves the decision to stop playing entirely outside the realm of its menus and on-screen prompts.
Prior to playing Halo 3, I played through Halo 2 for the first time — it was released in extremely limited quantities in the country where I live, and it only saw a wide release years later, as part of a two-pack commemorating Halo 3‘s launch. I found Halo 2‘s single-player mode to be rambling and occasionally desolate. I can’t be too sure, though I think the final boss accidentally killed himself around thirty seconds into the battle. The story was, as far as I could tell, a collection of the scenes in “Star Wars” episodes one through three where morbidly boring aliens with faux Korean accents argue with each other about space taxes, space tariffs, and space embargoes, plus the sound of realistic machine-gun fire. Halo 3, played alone, would probably be no less desolate and scoff-worthy, though thanks to the power of the internet, I was able to tear through the campaign mode with an actual real-life friend who lives halfway around the world. In this day and age of AI engineers teaching robots to play Ms. Pac-Man, it is still amazingly, gloriously more fun to play with actual people. A robot might be able to pull a headshot, sure, though can it share feta cheese recipes or spread rumors about which professional wrestlers are actually, really, truly gay? You can add two more players to the game, which is more dudes than you can fit in a Warthog; four-player co-op, if it’s with people you know and like, ranges from hilarious to visceral and over-competitive. I’ve found, in fact, that playing campaign mode with three actual friends will result in surprisingly more spur-of-the-moment slander than playing a deathmatch against people you don’t know. For me, two or three is enough. Having a relaxing conversation with two friends is one thing; having a relaxing conversation with two friends while driving Future Jeeps and firing Future Rifles is another thing. If one of you sucks at videogames, it’s still cool. Who really cares about the story, anyway? Halo is all about the moment-to-moment skirmishes, the shooting, the halting in a monologue about modern rock music to say “Okay, seriously, you take the guys on the left this time”, and the big action set-pieces — bigger, longer, harder, and more relentless than the shiniest firefights in the movies. The set-pieces are thrilling even from a logistical standpoint: here, at last, you get to live out a movie action scene where the slow parts aren’t cut out. And so the game pumps and chugs along. Maybe, this time, you’ll be the one to destroy the big ominous weapon at the end of that one stage, or maybe not — though individual set-pieces and stages occasionally stand out, Halo 3 is clearly a game about moments, about playing.
One of the more outstanding of the set-pieces is the thrilling escape at the end: it’s just you (and your buddies, if you’re doing co-op) in a Warthog, driving at top speed across a mega-huge, collapsing . . . something. Maybe it’s a space station. Who knows what it is! Whatever it is, it’s huge, and it’s falling apart. There are second-hand-ticks where the game’s physics engine struggles under the weight of such bold-faced execution — you might steer wrong, and now the front of your Space Hummer is chacking uncomfortably against the edge of a fragment of crumbling floor, and seconds later, you’re dead, and you’re starting over — and the tacky music doesn’t stop pumping. This is the way the best videogames (like Sin and Punishment) end — like old-school videogame tournaments (which might not have existed outside of “The Wizard”): the game acknowledges the reality that you have mastered it, grins, and says, “Yes, you’ve mastered the game — now, to complete the challenge, try this game you’ve never played“. This kind of attitude is half throwback to Halo 1‘s final escape sequence and half the very essence of Halo: more than a “multimedia franchise spanning novels and videogames, with a feature film in the works” or whatever other bullstuff the PR guys ask their wives to whisper to them every night, Halo is the precise reason kids don’t play with G.I. Joes anymore. Why use your imagination to think up situations in which Duke and Cobra Commander would need to team up to tackle Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader (must also think up reason for Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader to be working together)? Why bother to fill that Tonka dump truck with “explosive” Troll dolls and send it crashing at Darth Vader’s Lego Medieval Knights Castle? You’re just going to have to clean up afterward. Besides, is it really healthy for a young mind to butcher continuity in the name of fun? Really? With Halo, a child can be no less and no more violent than he would be with a fistful of G.I. Joes, only now he’s forced to stick to the plot — and he doesn’t mind sticking to the plot. It’s all eyes-forward, here. Move forward to keep blowing stuff up, utilizing virtually untraceable problem-solving skills. The kids won’t even have to know that their critical thinking skills are expanding gradually. It’s a bit of a shame that imaginary guns seem to be more educational than textbooks these days, though why not? Simulations of death are pretty much the only thing that’s entertained or educated anyone in civilized history. Ask Shakespeare.
I had a chance to sit down with a man from Bungie at Tokyo Game Show last year. I’m not really sure what his name or position in the company was, though he was just about award-winningly British. Inspired by a blinking, possibly narcoleptic limey who had, earlier in the day, after witnessing a ten-minute demonstration playthrough of Ninja Gaiden II, dared to begin a question with “We’ve read that the game is quite violent” — no stuff, Sherlock! — I asked this British man from Bungie about violence in Halo. The games consistently get an “M” rating despite there being no blood, no profanity, and no human-killing. Even the “Star Wars” movies have featured actual human dismemberment in semi-graphic detail, and only one of them cracked “PG”. The British man gave me a suitably vague (and therefore British) answer: Well, there’s the Flood, who kind of somewhat resemble humans. Zombies are kind of a hot button, you see. I’d really hoped he would have gone out and just told the truth; I’m going to tell the truth here, and say that he said it (even though he didn’t): “Older gamers wouldn’t want to play a game that kids are specifically allowed to play, and younger kids are certain that any game not intended strictly for adults will turn them into hydrophobic homosexuals.”
The weird pathological zeitgeist of Bush-loving America penetrates Halo 3 in all legal orificies; the laws of the internet hold stone-faced, iron-fisted rule. That the only way to verbally communicate with the opposing team in an online deathmatch requires you to be standing quite close to them is many things: an appreciated riff on reality, for starters. It might perhaps be a well-meaning device intended to cut down on trash talk between players, though in my experience it seems to only sharpen rage to a sucked-on candy-cane point. Halo players with testicles nestled firmly beneath their kidneys know, above all else, one thing: Must Hate the faceless motherheckers of the other color; if hate does not happen, commence sliding down the slippery slope toward Hell, toward being an actual anus-loving queer. The existence of proximity chat only fills the young boys of America with the urge to get as close as possible, to pistol whip, while shouting the most potent one or two syllables that pop to mind. Their message will be heard, and it will be heard in its entirety, before the dead player’s corpse disappears and they re-spawn somewhere else. Is there any hate greater than that that can be summed up, however subconsciously, in one syllable? It wasn’t three seconds into my first-ever Halo 3 online deathmatch before someone had cold-cocked me (female covenant, just for the hell of it) with a shotgun and then screamed my least-favorite synonym for “Black Person”. Wow! The next time he killed me, he called me my least-favorite synonym for “Gay”. His voice sounded like he had braces. At the end of the match, he called me “Sivvy” (my Xbox Live name is “cviii”, add me if you like) and asked me how I like chugging on my least favorite synonym for penis. It was then that I spoke to him the first time. “Does your mom restrict profanity to the basement?” I don’t think he understood the question, because he started sending me hateful voice messages with diarrhea frequency for something like six hours after that, as I played through campaign mode with a friend. Eventually, he sounded like he was simultaneously drunk, thirteen, and with braces. That’s got to be at least a misdemeanor. His most well-constructed argument, eventually, was that I couldn’t get a girlfriend — because I was gay. At that, his sixty-somethingth message, I graced him with a response — “Well, I guess if I was gay I wouldn’t want a girlfriend, though, would I?” His reply was that oh my god I actually sound gay, too. (I’ll admit, I’m not Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or Barrack Obama!) He didn’t send a single message after that, though an hour later he did invite me to join a game. The moment his invite came, that almost made me think Halo 3 was the game of the year, right there. Perhaps I’d been the only person to give that kid the time of day and actually respond to his fetal hatred. That he invited me to a game — and that I quietly refused his request — gives me hope that some day, he might grow up, and the rest of the world might grow up with him. And maybe that Halo movie will get made, you know, the one produced by Peter Jackson and directed by a man with actual talent and vision. I must admit, in a world where even the game producers acknowledge that the plot of their game is a whole load of balls, it’s simultaneously weird and not for the executive producers to shrug off a game-based film because it’s based on a game and films based on games tend to suck, despite the fact that this particular game is pretty much a blank slate and we have two very talented artists willing to pick up the chalk.
Recently, I read a story on the internet about how the producers of the “Halo” movie would want to make Master Chief not the main character. It’s kind of hilarious how many people find this idea terrible. Master Chief isn’t a character or a person — he’s an icon. He never takes off his mask, because, as one of Halo 3‘s producers said, “if he took off that helmet, it’d be you inside”. A “Halo” movie presents an opportunity to make a fresh new story about humans fighting aliens; why not make Master Chief an object of wonder, like the aliens themselves? In a movie, we’re always looking at the character; would Halo be as popular if we had to stare at Master Chief the whole time, rather than see it through his eyes?
At the end of the day, Halo 3 is both a videogame — a great videogame, even — and a whole class of hobby in and of itself. Like Halo 2 before it, it will be the only game that some people ever play. Only, unlike Halo 2, Halo 3 is complete: it has four-player online co-op, it has a brilliant “Forge” mode for tweaking deathmatch stages (more of a “sandbox” than Grand Theft Auto, in the most basic sense), and it has the most awesome movie playback feature. When a man from Bungie first introduced me to this feature, showing how far you can scale back the camera from the playing stage, I was kind of stupidly amazed. When he said you could save multiple playthroughs of the entire campaign mode, I was shocked for a second, and asked him how. He said well, it’s not really that complicated: it just saves button inputs. That kind of burst my bubble for a second, like the time I realized that Hot Shots Golf‘s replay-saving feature was only memorizing the just-entered club, wind, and shot angle configurations and playing itself. In practice, though, Halo 3‘s playback mode is an eerie out-of-body experience. It gives you time to look at everything freely. To appreciate the world, and the context of the violence more thoroughly. It’s inevitable that the average human will find playing the game more rewarding, though much like the game itself, as what it is, hell if it isn’t an awesome little toy.
★★★★
“THE PRECISE REASON KIDS DON'T PLAY WITH G.I. JOES ANYMORE.”
Halo 3 is one of the best videogames of 2007 for many of the same reasons that doing push-ups is better than not doing pushups. It’s a game about a human man in a robot battle suit; armed with pistols and rifles, he shoots inhuman alien freak bastards in the head; he rides bitching all-terrain vehicles at high speeds, ramping off the peaks of a construction site, landing atop giant enemy robotic spiders. He snipes dudes, he overcomes odds, and by the end of the game he saves the universe and finishes a fight. Just about everyone — TIME magazine and Newsweek and The New York Times and every other major news publication in North America — ran a feature-length article on the Halo phenomenon, calling it “certifiably huge” and going on to detail, using diction reminiscent of a Catholic priest denying rape charges, that there are action figures and novels already on sale, and a major motion picture in the works. One writer admirably went so far as to actually play the game, and came out convinced that, among other things, videogames are not movies, nor are they literature. We here at Action Button Dot Net wish to salute that guy, whoever he is: Duh. We wholly acknowledge that Halo 3‘s musical score is likely based on the sound of trash collectors emptying the bin outside a small-town symphony orchestra, that its screenplay of rhythmic grunts and screams is about as entertaining, at face value, as a play starring fourth-graders in crocodile costumes.
Still, Halo isn’t about all that, man. It’s about shooting stuff – and more than that, it’s about shooting stuff brilliantly. Halo wins its bet by not being an asshole. Unlike other games with tacked-on husks for storylines (Super Mario Galaxy, for example), Halo 3 manages to focus, 99% of the time, on the construction and flow of its stages. When a guy screams at us about how the enemies are coming, he’s serious as a heart-attack, and we have to kill those enemies or we’re going to die. Sometimes there’s a vehicle to get in, and you get in it and drive it, down a big tunnel or a picturesque beach. If you die, you kind of start back just seconds before you died. The game doesn’t have “extra lives”, and it doesn’t ever ask you if you want to continue. It knows, at all times, that the fact that the console’s power is engaged means that the player is willing to play. It leaves the decision to stop playing entirely outside the realm of its menus and on-screen prompts.
Prior to playing Halo 3, I played through Halo 2 for the first time — it was released in extremely limited quantities in the country where I live, and it only saw a wide release years later, as part of a two-pack commemorating Halo 3‘s launch. I found Halo 2‘s single-player mode to be rambling and occasionally desolate. I can’t be too sure, though I think the final boss accidentally killed himself around thirty seconds into the battle. The story was, as far as I could tell, a collection of the scenes in “Star Wars” episodes one through three where morbidly boring aliens with faux Korean accents argue with each other about space taxes, space tariffs, and space embargoes, plus the sound of realistic machine-gun fire. Halo 3, played alone, would probably be no less desolate and scoff-worthy, though thanks to the power of the internet, I was able to tear through the campaign mode with an actual real-life friend who lives halfway around the world. In this day and age of AI engineers teaching robots to play Ms. Pac-Man, it is still amazingly, gloriously more fun to play with actual people. A robot might be able to pull a headshot, sure, though can it share feta cheese recipes or spread rumors about which professional wrestlers are actually, really, truly gay? You can add two more players to the game, which is more dudes than you can fit in a Warthog; four-player co-op, if it’s with people you know and like, ranges from hilarious to visceral and over-competitive. I’ve found, in fact, that playing campaign mode with three actual friends will result in surprisingly more spur-of-the-moment slander than playing a deathmatch against people you don’t know. For me, two or three is enough. Having a relaxing conversation with two friends is one thing; having a relaxing conversation with two friends while driving Future Jeeps and firing Future Rifles is another thing. If one of you sucks at videogames, it’s still cool. Who really cares about the story, anyway? Halo is all about the moment-to-moment skirmishes, the shooting, the halting in a monologue about modern rock music to say “Okay, seriously, you take the guys on the left this time”, and the big action set-pieces — bigger, longer, harder, and more relentless than the shiniest firefights in the movies. The set-pieces are thrilling even from a logistical standpoint: here, at last, you get to live out a movie action scene where the slow parts aren’t cut out. And so the game pumps and chugs along. Maybe, this time, you’ll be the one to destroy the big ominous weapon at the end of that one stage, or maybe not — though individual set-pieces and stages occasionally stand out, Halo 3 is clearly a game about moments, about playing.
One of the more outstanding of the set-pieces is the thrilling escape at the end: it’s just you (and your buddies, if you’re doing co-op) in a Warthog, driving at top speed across a mega-huge, collapsing . . . something. Maybe it’s a space station. Who knows what it is! Whatever it is, it’s huge, and it’s falling apart. There are second-hand-ticks where the game’s physics engine struggles under the weight of such bold-faced execution — you might steer wrong, and now the front of your Space Hummer is chacking uncomfortably against the edge of a fragment of crumbling floor, and seconds later, you’re dead, and you’re starting over — and the tacky music doesn’t stop pumping. This is the way the best videogames (like Sin and Punishment) end — like old-school videogame tournaments (which might not have existed outside of “The Wizard”): the game acknowledges the reality that you have mastered it, grins, and says, “Yes, you’ve mastered the game — now, to complete the challenge, try this game you’ve never played“. This kind of attitude is half throwback to Halo 1‘s final escape sequence and half the very essence of Halo: more than a “multimedia franchise spanning novels and videogames, with a feature film in the works” or whatever other bullstuff the PR guys ask their wives to whisper to them every night, Halo is the precise reason kids don’t play with G.I. Joes anymore. Why use your imagination to think up situations in which Duke and Cobra Commander would need to team up to tackle Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader (must also think up reason for Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader to be working together)? Why bother to fill that Tonka dump truck with “explosive” Troll dolls and send it crashing at Darth Vader’s Lego Medieval Knights Castle? You’re just going to have to clean up afterward. Besides, is it really healthy for a young mind to butcher continuity in the name of fun? Really? With Halo, a child can be no less and no more violent than he would be with a fistful of G.I. Joes, only now he’s forced to stick to the plot — and he doesn’t mind sticking to the plot. It’s all eyes-forward, here. Move forward to keep blowing stuff up, utilizing virtually untraceable problem-solving skills. The kids won’t even have to know that their critical thinking skills are expanding gradually. It’s a bit of a shame that imaginary guns seem to be more educational than textbooks these days, though why not? Simulations of death are pretty much the only thing that’s entertained or educated anyone in civilized history. Ask Shakespeare.
I had a chance to sit down with a man from Bungie at Tokyo Game Show last year. I’m not really sure what his name or position in the company was, though he was just about award-winningly British. Inspired by a blinking, possibly narcoleptic limey who had, earlier in the day, after witnessing a ten-minute demonstration playthrough of Ninja Gaiden II, dared to begin a question with “We’ve read that the game is quite violent” — no stuff, Sherlock! — I asked this British man from Bungie about violence in Halo. The games consistently get an “M” rating despite there being no blood, no profanity, and no human-killing. Even the “Star Wars” movies have featured actual human dismemberment in semi-graphic detail, and only one of them cracked “PG”. The British man gave me a suitably vague (and therefore British) answer: Well, there’s the Flood, who kind of somewhat resemble humans. Zombies are kind of a hot button, you see. I’d really hoped he would have gone out and just told the truth; I’m going to tell the truth here, and say that he said it (even though he didn’t): “Older gamers wouldn’t want to play a game that kids are specifically allowed to play, and younger kids are certain that any game not intended strictly for adults will turn them into hydrophobic homosexuals.”
The weird pathological zeitgeist of Bush-loving America penetrates Halo 3 in all legal orificies; the laws of the internet hold stone-faced, iron-fisted rule. That the only way to verbally communicate with the opposing team in an online deathmatch requires you to be standing quite close to them is many things: an appreciated riff on reality, for starters. It might perhaps be a well-meaning device intended to cut down on trash talk between players, though in my experience it seems to only sharpen rage to a sucked-on candy-cane point. Halo players with testicles nestled firmly beneath their kidneys know, above all else, one thing: Must Hate the faceless motherheckers of the other color; if hate does not happen, commence sliding down the slippery slope toward Hell, toward being an actual anus-loving queer. The existence of proximity chat only fills the young boys of America with the urge to get as close as possible, to pistol whip, while shouting the most potent one or two syllables that pop to mind. Their message will be heard, and it will be heard in its entirety, before the dead player’s corpse disappears and they re-spawn somewhere else. Is there any hate greater than that that can be summed up, however subconsciously, in one syllable? It wasn’t three seconds into my first-ever Halo 3 online deathmatch before someone had cold-cocked me (female covenant, just for the hell of it) with a shotgun and then screamed my least-favorite synonym for “Black Person”. Wow! The next time he killed me, he called me my least-favorite synonym for “Gay”. His voice sounded like he had braces. At the end of the match, he called me “Sivvy” (my Xbox Live name is “cviii”, add me if you like) and asked me how I like chugging on my least favorite synonym for penis. It was then that I spoke to him the first time. “Does your mom restrict profanity to the basement?” I don’t think he understood the question, because he started sending me hateful voice messages with diarrhea frequency for something like six hours after that, as I played through campaign mode with a friend. Eventually, he sounded like he was simultaneously drunk, thirteen, and with braces. That’s got to be at least a misdemeanor. His most well-constructed argument, eventually, was that I couldn’t get a girlfriend — because I was gay. At that, his sixty-somethingth message, I graced him with a response — “Well, I guess if I was gay I wouldn’t want a girlfriend, though, would I?” His reply was that oh my god I actually sound gay, too. (I’ll admit, I’m not Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or Barrack Obama!) He didn’t send a single message after that, though an hour later he did invite me to join a game. The moment his invite came, that almost made me think Halo 3 was the game of the year, right there. Perhaps I’d been the only person to give that kid the time of day and actually respond to his fetal hatred. That he invited me to a game — and that I quietly refused his request — gives me hope that some day, he might grow up, and the rest of the world might grow up with him. And maybe that Halo movie will get made, you know, the one produced by Peter Jackson and directed by a man with actual talent and vision. I must admit, in a world where even the game producers acknowledge that the plot of their game is a whole load of balls, it’s simultaneously weird and not for the executive producers to shrug off a game-based film because it’s based on a game and films based on games tend to suck, despite the fact that this particular game is pretty much a blank slate and we have two very talented artists willing to pick up the chalk.
Recently, I read a story on the internet about how the producers of the “Halo” movie would want to make Master Chief not the main character. It’s kind of hilarious how many people find this idea terrible. Master Chief isn’t a character or a person — he’s an icon. He never takes off his mask, because, as one of Halo 3‘s producers said, “if he took off that helmet, it’d be you inside”. A “Halo” movie presents an opportunity to make a fresh new story about humans fighting aliens; why not make Master Chief an object of wonder, like the aliens themselves? In a movie, we’re always looking at the character; would Halo be as popular if we had to stare at Master Chief the whole time, rather than see it through his eyes?
At the end of the day, Halo 3 is both a videogame — a great videogame, even — and a whole class of hobby in and of itself. Like Halo 2 before it, it will be the only game that some people ever play. Only, unlike Halo 2, Halo 3 is complete: it has four-player online co-op, it has a brilliant “Forge” mode for tweaking deathmatch stages (more of a “sandbox” than Grand Theft Auto, in the most basic sense), and it has the most awesome movie playback feature. When a man from Bungie first introduced me to this feature, showing how far you can scale back the camera from the playing stage, I was kind of stupidly amazed. When he said you could save multiple playthroughs of the entire campaign mode, I was shocked for a second, and asked him how. He said well, it’s not really that complicated: it just saves button inputs. That kind of burst my bubble for a second, like the time I realized that Hot Shots Golf‘s replay-saving feature was only memorizing the just-entered club, wind, and shot angle configurations and playing itself. In practice, though, Halo 3‘s playback mode is an eerie out-of-body experience. It gives you time to look at everything freely. To appreciate the world, and the context of the violence more thoroughly. It’s inevitable that the average human will find playing the game more rewarding, though much like the game itself, as what it is, hell if it isn’t an awesome little toy.