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!

text by Brandon Parker

⋆☆☆☆

“LONG LIVE SADDAAAAAAAAAM!”

Here’s an exact quote taken from the back of Army of TWO‘s box, except for the italics. I added those.

“The United States have awarded contracts to TWO ex-Army Rangers from the unprecedented Private Military Cooperation (PMC). The challenges they face can only be achieved through intensive teamwork and flawless execution.”

Reading the box, you might get the idea that this is a co-op game for TWO players that have to cooperate – that is, the both of them, together. You’d be right, but if you missed out on that feature, they also misspelled and misinformed you as to the nature of PMCs just so they could have one more place on the box that mentioned working together somehow. I’m sure you know this already, but for the people who made the game, a PMC is a Private Military Corporation, of which there are several. It’s not just one big company called PMC that all mercenaries come from. It’s almost like that typo is at once a kind of metaphor for the entire game, while also subconsciously expressing That-One-Company’s desire to be the only videogame corporation in existence. No, not just the typo. Both of those sentences are a perfect metaphor for the game. A random assortment of words and phrases stuck together that don’t make any kind of sense on close inspection, but stand back and squint a bit and you get the idea that this game might be about AWESOME ACTION and INTENSIVE MILITARY ASS KICKING of SOME KIND, and it has CO-OP. Also, I’m pretty sure you want to overcome challenges, or just avoid them altogether – not achieve them.

Out at this place called 1Up, they got this thing called the 1Up Show. On one episode of this show, they were having a preview of Kane & Lynch, and they mentioned how everyone was referring to Kane & Lynch as, “that other co-op game besides Army of TWO,” which was true. Meanwhile, over at the EGM paper magazine, at some point they had some deal called “The Top 50 Original Games We’re Looking Forward To,” with Army of TWO on there taking first place. And people wonder why print is dead. Really, though, that must have bugged the hell out of whoever was in charge of all the TWOs. For how long must he toil while his TWOs’ go unnoticed? I haven’t seen the actual list. Still, I have to wonder: in what world did this game ever seem like it’d be a good game, much less a more original one than Kane & Lynch? And what the hell were these other “original” games? Apparently there’s 49 of them out there, somewhere. I almost think I want to see the list now, but then if Army of TWO was the best of the bunch, then no, I guess I actually don’t really want to see the list.

Kane & Lynch did actually have some potential, some inkling that, at the very least, one guy involved with the game in some cubicle somewhere was putting forth some real heart and effort into the damn thing. There was an attempt at some meaningful stuff that sort of came through. Kane and Lynch themselves were an attempt at putting some real characters into an action game. They were just two guys, a couple of violent criminal types, with families and whatnot, not some big goofy marine bastards (space or standard) or even pre-GTA IV GTA-esque caricatures. Unlike a lot of videogame characters, they almost somehow came off as real characters on their own, instead of a facsimile cobbled together from whatever movies the programmers had seen last. Yeah, Kane & Lynch attempted a lot of the things people are praising GTA IV for getting right. And I think the only reason GTA IV did it better is because, being a free roaming game, there’s all those opportunities for dialogue between the characters on car rides, stops at clothing stores, the phone calls. They were too stuck in their action game, the level-to-level, your character only shoots, reloads or crouches mold.

I kept my copy of Kane & Lynch instead of selling it like a man more capable of reason might, thinking that, while working on the sequel, maybe they’d put down the Tarantino for a while. They can stick with Michael Mann but watch some more Peckinpah, maybe check out Thunderbolt &amp, Lightfoot, definitely The Outfit, more of the old crime classics. Then when the second, good game came out, I could have them both up on the shelf there for completeness. That would be nice. I’d like that. All the sequel needs is some character moments. Have Kane and Lynch just hang out or do something besides nonstop shooting, and improve the actual shooting parts themselves a bit. Come up with some heist mechanic that goes beyond one dude shooting and the other dude holding a button to unlock doors. Don’t throw in any unnecessary crazy plot twist bullstuff either, try to keep it simple. And use the hecking trailer music. That would be pretty solid, I think. Hell, just work in that whole Gamespot business into the teaser trailer. “The two outlaws with nothing to lose are back! So scant and flimsy is the give-a-heck of these two hardasses, they even tried to PAY OFF REVIEWERS for their last game! RETURNING IN 2009!”

How did anybody ever find two jackasses with skull helmets more interesting or original than two aged, balding, badass criminals? You can’t get anymore unoriginal than space marine at this point, and they’re practically space marines in Iraq. I guess the ridiculousness of it all might have seemed appealing. “Two Skullheaded Idiots Shoot The Shit Out People and Can Tear Off Car Doors For Shields. And it’s Co-op.” Yeah, maybe I can sympathize with that a little more. And when you get into the game it definitely follows through on all this promise of being stupid as hell. You can spend money to “pimp” your guns with gold plated grips and stuff, buy new goofy helmets, that sort of crap. But THEN, there’s a cutscene where they show one of the characters asleep on his couch, and on his tv screen is the flaming, smoking towers of World Trade Center. Next I think he gets a phone call waking him up, the exact dialogue of which I don’t remember, though I’m sure it was something like, “Are you watching the news? It’s REAL BAD. This changes EVERYTHING, etc.” Then there’s a montage with big, booming music playing because it’s pump up time, and whoo! Let’s kick some terrorist ass, yeah!

No, see, I don’t think it works that way. You can’t depict an event like that, an event everyone playing your game who wasn’t in a coma at the time should remember witnessing for themselves at least in slow-mo x100 on TV, an event which resulted in the deaths of real life people, and because of which we’re engaged to this day in a real hecking questionable conflict that is still getting real-life people killed, and people I actually personally know are risking their lives in for – the reason, uh, I’m not entirely sure of. You can’t have that and your hecking skull helmets and “pimped” firearms. You can’t have it both ways. It just doesn’t work that way. There’s not even a single damned reason for that to even be in the game, other than a quick and cheap attempt at seeming relevant. There’s no message, no lesson or ideas or moral here behind this game that I can see. I can’t believe there’s any way this game is supposed to be some sort of clever commentary on war or the military or anything either. If they were that smart, they could have done it without using a real life tragedy. It’s like a wrestler coming out and saying, “It’s great/terrible to be here in [YOUR HOMETOWN]!” in an attempt to get booed/cheered.

I’m sort of surprised how much I’m bothered by this. When 9/11 actually happened, I didn’t sit around wondering “what next,” or need to talk about it, or anything like that which a lot of other people seemed to do then and for a while after. It didn’t really mean much to me at all. My reasons here are probably more vain. It’s probably just that I feel insulted that a game as stuffty and tasteless as this thinks it’s capable of stirring any deep feeling or thoughts in me. But I don’t even know for sure if the game does think that. I can’t for the life of me tell you what anyone making this game thought, other than “being a mercenary is an awesome and viable career choice for sociopaths, who are also awesome in their own right.” Yet, I’d like to think that if I, or someone I know, had died in the World Trade Center and then I had to put up with video clips of the Twin Towers being cut out of what I thought was a pretty poignant ending in Metal Gear Solid 2: The Sons of Liberty, only for a fully CGI recreation of the FLAMING and SMOKING Twin Towers on 9/11 to end up in something like Army of TWO, then I or Person I Knew would be pissed as hell and would haunt the stuff out of The-Company-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named until some vengeance was had.

Once in the game, they briefly reference President Eisenhower’s speech on the dangers of a growing industrial military complex. Shortly after that, you meet a character named Eisenhower whom they blow the living heck out of, almost as if they were trying to tell us they didn’t agree with the speech and the existence of the rest of the entire hecking game itself was too subtle to get that message across. That’s the only kind of opinion or point of view I’m picking up on, here. It shows some thought went into this, I guess. Only one thought, but there it is. There are, of course, no civilians on the battlefield. Personally, I would think a game that shows you 9/11, then shortly after sends you into battle in Afghanistan and Iraq, should incorporate something like that, but I know You-Know-Who is only capable of expanding horizons and raising bars in terms of depravity and tastelessness, so don’t worry. I wasn’t disappointed or anything.

Did you know Call of Duty 4 was a great game? Yeah, I liked that one. Remember that part where you barely stop the missiles from launching? My brother had already finished the game and was watching me, sharing in my excitement. When I barely succeeded, we cheered and high-fived each other, just like they’re supposed to do in stuffty action movies with similar scenes (not to say Call of Duty 4 itself is a stuffty action film. I would rate it a Die Hard 2 in terms of action videogame intelligence, which is pretty damn good for a videogame, in my opinion). See, we were in the moment, there. We bought into the scenario the game had setup to entertain us. Whe game was working. You could also easily say it’s the more “realistic” of the two games, and yet it didn’t need to bring in any real life murders to get me to go along with the damn game. How about that, huh? Really, what possessed Army of TWO, with its damn pimp rifles, to think it was up to the task of incorporating real life death and destruction into its stuffty, skullhelmet game? Only for reasons I can’t imagine. Reasons that I don’t think were real or ever existed at any time.

CoD4’s pretend scenarios made me feel more emotion than your stuffty CGI imitation of a real tragedy. How about that? How does that make you feel, What’s-Your-Faces? I’m kidding, of course. I know you don’t feel anything resembling emotion besides excitement or disappoint at sales numbers/forecasts/tea leaf readings. Call of Duty 4, though; now there’s a game you can actually tell that was made by actual living, breathing, thinking, feeling, reasoning-capable human beings. They cared enough about their game that they used all the money they made from Call of Duty 4 just to make sure only they could make games named Call of Duty from now on. All because they were tired of Activision, who, in their quest to be more like you guys, were stuffting all over Infinity Ward’s good name by hiring a group of trash peddlers called Treyarch to throw out some junk crafted with that loving let’s-just-get-this-done-so-we-can-go-get-paid-and-go-home attitude well all love. Just so they could have a new box with the label Call of Duty out there at least once a year, to penetrate all those markets and so forth. I bet they even tried to throw in some extra money just to get Treyarch to cancel their last and upcoming Call of Duty game, or call it something else, at least. Oh, well. heck Army of TWO and the high horse with Down syndrome it not so much rode in on (not anymore than Fred Flintstone “drives” his car, I’d say), but dragged between its feet as it straddled it for hundreds of miles.





Mental illness isn’t funny, though. I only brought up Down syndrome in conjunction with Army of TWO to illustrate the severity of its issues. In this game, you can buy Dirty Harry’s gun and modify it to where it’s some sort of shotgun looking thing. And let me tell you about co-op. Co-op saves anything. It turns bad games into gold, or good games into relics to be hoarded and traded for bear pelts in the future. I used to work in a videogame store, and one time a handicapped woman came in to trade her old Sega games. She wanted money for them, probably needing to pay off some extravagant medical bills. We only gave in-store credit for old stuff like that, so I couldn’t help her. Frustrated, she just left, leaving her games there on the counter. I’m going to come right out and say it: this lady, who was deaf and needed not one, but TWO, canes just to stand upright – I pilfered her Toe Jam & Earl. I wonder if she ever returned to that store. You tell me what else I was supposed to do in my situation. I’d never seen that game come in before or anytime after, and I already had the sequel. Anyway, co-op doesn’t do a damn thing for Army of TWO. When Dirty Harry’s gun and co-op don’t save the game, you’ve got some serious problems. That deaf, crippled lady has some good hecking prospects for the future compared to you.

Even if you took out that stupid 9/11 stuff, there’d still be something incredibly dumb about this game. And not a good, entertaining kind of dumb. It’s not even dumb in a Rayman’s Raving Rabbids kind of way. More like a kind of frustrated, angry kid snaps one day, gets a gun, shoots some people, thinks to himself, “Oh, heck. I just did something real hecking dumb, didn’t I?” kind of dumb. I feel terrible just from talking someone else into renting the game because I didn’t want to risk my precious dollars on it. And if that wasn’t enough, I made them play through it with me! I mean, stealing a crippled girls Toe Jam & Earl, yeah, okay, that’s understandable, but making another human being play through Army of TWO? I hope my tombstone reads: “Currently Burning In Hell For His Sins,” because I don’t want to lie, and that’s right where I’ll be if there’s any justice in this world. Let there be no bullstuff from my epitaph.

For now, though, I want everyone to turn around and march on up to IO Interactive and apologize right now. Say you’re sorry for not giving Kane & Lynch a fair shake, for how you threw your little sissy fit just because a few assholes at Eidos employed some bought-out heckers to trump up praise for their game, which had jack all to do with IO or the actual game itself. All in all, there were some notable efforts in that game. I mean it, everyone who didn’t should play it now and pretend it’s a GTA IV spinoff mission with hecked up aiming. Imagine that, between missions, you’re driving and chatting with Lynch, stopping on the way at drug stores to pick up more haliperodol, or whatever. Are you seeing what I’m seeing with my mind’s eye, here? It’s beautiful. As for you Army of TWO, watch as I place a dunce cap on your head and leave you in a corner as a warning to your peers. You don’t like that, do you? Although you’ve earned yourself a quarter of a star for having Dirty Harry’s gun and one more quarter of a star for making me realize I was too hard on Kane & Lynch. Thanks, Army of TWO.

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.

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.

text by tim rogers

★★☆☆

“NOT ART.”

If you imagine for a moment that all of the emails I received between last November and today asking me the eternal question “Why don’t you have cancer?” didn’t exist, that would leave an overwhelming majority of emails asking me why I haven’t reviewed BioShock yet, with runner-up email topics being when I’m going to review BioShock, or if there’s some reason I am blatantly ignoring BioShock. I imagine that a good percentage of those of you sending me such emails are genuinely confused, because you know deep in your bones that reviewing BioShock is something I need to do as a “critic” of videogames. The rest of you are probably sneering in anticipation of some belly-laugh worthy one-liner smackdowns. You probably have a bottle of brandy in your cupboard, and your best snifter polished and at the ready. I’d like to say that I will make sure your brandies do not go to waste. Though a small part of me (definitely not my brain!) is a little hesitant, because I just plain don’t like BioShock enough to tear it a new butt-hole, and I don’t hate it enough to pretend I love it. It’s just kind of . . . there.

Here we are, anyway, with today’s installment of the Action Button Fashionably Late Review:

Oh, the critics screamed themselves red-eyed, they did. Though we must be careful when we call the game-review-writing masses “critics” — a vast majority of them really just got into the habit of writing about the games “industry” so they could get free passes to E3, where they could get free, XXXL, radical, awesome black T-shirts with centered, capitalized company names in sans-serif font. This was before that sort of thing was even ironic. I saw a hip kid at a party the other night wearing a T-shirt that said “T-Shirt” in the middle of the chest, in Arial font, for example. I don’t want to name names (though by the end of this paragraph I might end up doing just that) — just believe me when I say that the majority of “game critics” have really poor taste regarding pretty much anything that qualifies as entertainment. The first time I met Chris Kohler, for example, I learned that he’s actually not pretending when he says his favorite band is Fleetwood Mac! For stuff’s sake, that guy gets paid a robust salary by WIRED, of all people, to blog about videogames!

And, according to Game Set Watch, “he’s the best mainstream commentator on digital download matters right now”. We are so screwed, my fellow gamer-kinds!

Here at Action Button Dot Net, we listen exclusively to music like this, or this, or sometimes this (when we’re having awesome 2P co-op sex). So you can bet your bottom dollar that we’re not going to be fooled by something just because it has Django Reinhardt in it.

For the record, Django Reinhardt is more of a father to me than Jesus ever was, and I grew up Catholic. I sat and listened to his recordings in dumbstruck silence for probably more hours of my young life than I spent trying to perfect a play-through of both quests of the original Zelda. I didn’t realize that the man was able to make such beautiful, complicated music with just two complete fingers until many years later, when I saw the Woody Allen film “Sweet and Lowdown”. There; I’ve just succeeded in mentioning Woody Allen in a videogame review. This will likely get me more emails asking me why I don’t have cancer, though hey, so be it. What I’m trying to prove here, perhaps a little snidely, is that I have interests outside videogames, interests in things like other forms of entertainment. I might even mention that I enjoy swimming and weightlifting. Might as well! Now I’ll step back, put my toes on the other side of the line, and say that I liked Japanese hardcore music before I played Jet Set Radio. What I’m trying to say is that videogames are not necessarily a poor introduction to culture as they are a weird one. There’s really no insight to be gained from this statement of opinion; I’m just throwing it out there. I find it weird that some people are suddenly pretending to have always been deeply interested in Art Deco, the literary works of Ayn Rand, and the expert guitarring of Django Reinhardt just because of a videogame. It’s like, at this point, with so much qualified culture in your videogame, it doesn’t even need to be “good“.

Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli’s “Beyond the Sea” is a timeless, objectively brilliant piece of music; its inclusion in the opening of BioShock is a no-brainer in almost every sense of the word: obviously, this is the kind of music that would play over the PA at the supermarkets of choice of elite artists and urban refugee philosophers in an alternate-reality 1950-something. On the other hand, it is also a “no-brainer” because this is a game about a community beneath the sea; hours into BioShock, which soon proves to be little more than a videogame, the possibility that the people in charge of music selection might have been confusing it with that song from “The Little Mermaid” becomes strikingly relevant.

What I’m saying is that BioShock is a pretty shell.

This game is not a masterpiece — it is the bare minimum. Its attention to detail with regard to its atmosphere and its narrative is not, in and of itself, a glorious feast: it is the very least we should expect from now on.

I have said before that “Each work of expression humankind creates will sit at the bottom of a gazed-down-upon canyon for centuries to come, as messages from the past.” BioShock will, I’m afraid, for the futuristic alien-robots that eventually come to earth to sift through the nuclear wreckage, most likely be virtually indistinguishable from those 1990s short-film monsterpieces about dudes driving a mine cart into a volcano full of dinosaurs, where the theater chairs tilted left and right and fans blew your hair back and eyes dry.

To explain it simply, without re-referencing the game’s core wallpaper themettes of Ayn Rand, Art Deco, and beautiful triumphant jazz music, here is a description of BioShock‘s story: a man is flying over the ocean in a plane. The plane crashes. He survives. He swims toward a monolithic structure. He goes inside. Without questioning why, he boards a deep-sea-diving vessel, and finds himself in an underwater “utopia” built years before by scholars, artists, and philosophers who found the then-modern society not suited to their ideals. Upon entering the city, he discovers it has been destroyed, and is currently teeming with drugged-out brain-thirsty genetic psycho-freaks. A man contacts the hero via short-wave radio, and offers guidance. He wants the hero to save his family, and himself, and help the last few sane survivors of this nightmare get to the surface and go back to the society that they had once seen fit to leave.

Of course, between point A and point B, there’s going to be a whole lot of psycho-freak smashing. “That sounds good”, says the entertainment connoisseur. “That sounds plausible”, says the literati. “That sounds hecking bad-butt“, says the gamer.

Unfortunately, the cracks in BioShock‘s facade start to show themselves sooner rather than later. Most pointedly, the hero is a boring, nameless, voiceless dunce. He speaks one line at the beginning of the story, and then undergoes a vow of word-silence (grunts only) for the duration of the tale. There are thousands of people, no doubt, capable of constructing arguments that seem convincing to themselves, who can defend the nameless silent protagonist in a videogame, though it just doesn’t cut it for me anymore: if you’re going to build a rich atmosphere, if you’re going to try to tell a story, you’re probably going to need more than just “a character” — you’ll need an interesting character. Even Grand Theft Auto started giving the hero a voice and a personality after Grand Theft Auto III, and that game’s main goal was presumably just to let the player mess around and live out stupid fantasies involving casino roofs, rocket launchers, city buses, and digital law enforcement.

Say what you will about the silent protagonist thing: we can all at least agree that the hero in this game is a bit weird. He will eat potato chips that might be a year old immediately upon finding pulling them out of a garbage can in a city full of genetic freak-out zompeople; where hypodermic needles are as “daily-routine” for the citizens as a cup of coffee, you’d think that the basic idea of “this place is a filthy bio-hazard” would at least be on the tip of one’s subconscious when one finds food in a waste receptacle.

He’s also the type of guy to have a tattoo of a chain on his left wrist (“Maybe he was in prison?” the thirteen-year-old gamers wonder, and feel like geniuses), and make a medium-pitched grunting sound once every twenty times he jumps. I’m no expert in Hard Dudes, though I imagine that a man crawling on his stomach through a knee-high sewer hole would probably stop repeatedly and nonchalantly smacking his wrench against the palm of his free hand every few seconds. Not so with our hero.

Also, judging by the various sounds he makes when eating food, I have to say he would never be allowed in my house. (Or within fifty feet of my house. (I have Dog Ears. (While we’re on the subject, please don’t ever, ever, ever call me on the phone if you’re chewing gum. I’m hecking serious as a heart attack. If I call you and you happen to be chewing, hey, I can accept that as my mistake. Just don’t do it the other way around. In addition to being disgusting, it’s also rude.)))

Not ten minutes into the monster-smashing portion of the game, the player comes across his first ever hypodermic needle — a “Plasmid”, the game calls them — and upon plucking it out of a busted vending machine, he immediately jams it into his arm, goes into wicked convulsions, crashes through a banister, and slams into the floor twenty feet below. The potato chips thing had made me laugh; this thing involving the instant hypodermic needle snapped me out of my trance; all at once, I was awake in the world of BioShock, watching the dream armed with rubber gloves and forceps. Our guiding spirit contacts us via the short-wave: “You’ve just used your first Plasmid! It’s a bit of a doozy! Your genetic code is being re-written!” Thanks for telling us that before we jammed it into our arm! I bet your starving family finds it hecking hilarious that you’re willing to let their only chance of salvation flail around on the floor while an entire troop of psycho-freaks walks by, stares at him, and laughs.

As it turns out, the first Plasmid our silent hero obtains gives him the power to shoot lightning bolts from his fingertips. Wonderful. In case you’ve forgotten what happened one paragraph ago, yes, this Plasmid came out of a vending machine. So here I am, awake in the dream of BioShock‘s cluttered study, thinking up reasons that artists and scholars and philosophers who saw fit to run away from modern society would want to be able to shoot lightning from their fingertips, much less be able to purchase this ability from a vending machine. What would honest, society-loathing, government-rejecting artists, scholars, and philosophers need the power of telepathic electricity for? To recharge batteries? The game has some cute little graphic designs explaining the power of each Plasmid as you obtain them, though they always make the powers look like little more than fuel for painful pranks. And here begins the slippery slope of my One Night With BioShock.

BioShock fails, and quite embarrassingly hard, as far as I’m concerned, when it comes time to tie all of its genuinely enthralling atmospheric concepts (underwater city, inspired art design, excellent music, political message, overt genetic enhancement as common and convenient as multivitamins) into an actual knife of entertainment. As-is, there’s just too much to do, too many choices to make. I like having to choose my weapon upgrades wisely, and I can honestly see the pure-hearted intent of the game designers in making me do so; it’s just that, in something like BioShock, the richer and more excellently executed the atmosphere, the more shocking and bubble-bursting are the whip-cracks of context.

Now, 95% of Bioshock‘s appeal for me, personally, is the mystery of this destroyed undersea utopia, and the pleasure of wondering what exactly went wrong. Early on, I felt like Sherlock Holmes as I pieced together the smaller clues: I saw the signboards discarded at the dock, displaying messages such as “WE DON’T BELONG TO YOU, RYAN”, and thought, “Aha! These people wanted to leave! Something was going wrong here — and someone named ‘Ryan’ was to blame!” It would have been really nice if these sort of hints had built gradually in momentum. Not so: eventually, quite early on, you get to the point where you can purchase the “Enrage” plasmid, which, according to its item description, “ENRAGES target, causing it to attack someone other than you”. In a game so steeped in lore and godly details, I can’t help wondering for a second what function such a genetic enhancement would serve in a society focused on self-betterment.

Ultimately, I come to the conclusion that this society failed and exploded because people are jerks: the people making these biological “enhancements” were jerks, and the people buying them were jerks. It really only takes one jerk to destroy a world.

I now stand a precarious step away from implying that the people who made this game are jerks as well, though I’ve seen that one photograph Kotaku always uses whenever BioShock director Ken Levine says something in an interview, and he doesn’t look like a bad guy at all (if you’re ever in Tokyo, Ken, we must do lunch, seriously; I know an excellent ethnic-mixture vegan curry place).

Still: they could have buried the mystery a little more deftly.

Or: I can sort of believe vending machines in the middle of the city, though why are there vending machines for Expensive Things in these god-forsaken maintenance tunnels under the city? It doesn’t make sense — how often did workers suddenly find themselves in need of psychic power upgrades in the middle of a walk up to the surface? Wouldn’t they have dealt with their psychic inventory management on the way to work in the morning, or waited to do it after their shift was over and they were headed back home?

The thing about giving all of the videogame-power-up dispensers in your immersive videogame concrete, in-world justifications, with tastefully tacky, interesting, exuberant neon graphic design, is that you’re begging for the player to supply real-world-logic to explain why they exist where they exist. At one point, your constant narrator informs you, of the ruin of the city: “Nobody knows exactly what happened . . . maybe he found he just didn’t like people.” Duh! What other kind of human being would take a look at a scientific research lab where a man had accidentally created a psychic-power-modifying injection that imbued the user with the ability to send any target into fits of violent rage and say “Yeah, sure, let’s put that in the hecking vending machines all over the city, see what happens.” And seriously, what kind of society-shunning undersea magical enclave of artists and scholars would literally need plentiful vending machines, complete with a stereotypical cigarollo-chomping Mexican mascot, to dispense weapons and ammunition for cash? You can say that they were having problems with smugglers, or that the genetic-splicing freak-bastards were overrunning the city and the people needed to defend themselves, though seriously, I’d imagine that, at a point like that, you’d just have government officials handing out guns in the street (err, “glass connecting tubes”). Maybe if they hadn’t taken time to convene the hecking Board of Artists and decide on what kind of rugged yet cute gun-belt-wearing mascot to stamp all over all of the gun-vending machines, they would have had time to fight back the threat before it ruined the whole damned place. In this, a game so reliant upon its immersing environmental qualities, In many ways — dare I say it — these context-ful vending machines are actually worse than the ammo crates of yesteryear. Nice job on that, guys! Try nuclear fusion, next!

Here I could ask the burning question: “Did no one in this society detect that maybe something about the psychic-enhancement thing was asking for trouble?” Though I’m pretty sure someone would link me to the Wikipedia page on Scientology, and then I’d have to pretend to feel ridiculous.

Around the time the game introduced the interestingly modeled neon-glowing vending machines that let me manage my psychic power slots — that is, let me un-equip one psychic power to make room for another — my Night-Vision was on, and I was seeing pink all over the place. I had a bunch of guns, and I was shooting lots of dudes, and I kind of wasn’t feeling it. Then there was this “boss” encounter where I had to put all of my weapons into a pneumatic tube before entering the room. I got to the end of the encounter and reclaimed my weapons from the other end of the pneumatic tube, at which time my characters hands flipped up and down, wielding each weapon for a split-second before snapping to another one. If only this had been Burnout Paradise on the PlayStation 3, where users with PlayStation(R)Eye(TM) cameras connected to their USB(C) ports will have a snapshot of their face taken at the precise moment of fatal impact with a rival racer in an online match; I would love to see what facial expression I was wearing when that thing happened with the pneumatic tube. I’d put it on every time I go to Starbucks; that way, when I saunter up and say “Shot of whiskey” to the gorgeous girl at the register, she might actually realize that I’m joking, instead of saying “We only have coffees and teas here, sir.” Seriously, I used to work at a Target store, for crying out loud, where three out of ten male customers over forty would spout such small-talky “jokes” as “Workin’ hard, or hardly workin’?” or “‘Tar-zhay’, huh? Fancy French establishment you got yourself here”. Walking into Starbucks and asking for a shot of whiskey in a perfect rendition of a Japanese Clint Eastwood is pretty hecking hilarious, compared to the stuff I had to put up with!

At any rate, I’m officially bored enough of writing about BioShock to begin thinking about what I’m going to actually order at Starbucks tonight, so I’m going to pause for ten minutes to do some deep knee bends, some crunches, and some push-ups.



TEN MINUTES LATER

I believe I was talking about my “Night Vision” being turned on, about my “seeing pink” all over BioShock. “Seeing pink” is a catch phrase I just copyrighted, meaning, well, that I am officially distanced enough from a work of media to see all of its logical inconsistencies as though they be made of neon. Even so, without my critical night vision, I’d be able to see BioShock‘s trespasses, because it’s just so eager to show them to me: Majestic vistas such as water cascading out of a cracked roof and onto a dilapidated dental chair are undermined by the glinting, glowing boxes of shotgun shells conveniently forgotten — and dry — atop nearby cabinets.

Seeing all drawers of said cabinet suddenly flip open when you press the A button is jarring. It makes you think, “A cabinet that well-rendered and normal-mapped shouldn’t pop open that quickly”, which is a strange sentence to put into cognition. (Then again, Physics are Weird, here in Rapture — sliding metal doors make creaking sounds, for example.) If you’re going to spend so many thousands of man-hours on rendering glossy torn upholstery, you could at least put in a drawer-opening animation. A fast drawer-opening animation.

And so many of the damned drawers are completely empty, as well. Why even show me three little empty bubbles with the word “Empty” by them, anyway? Can’t I see that the bubbles are empty? If it’s empty, why even show me the bubbles? Why not just show the cabinet as flipped-open and ransacked to begin with? Even if the item placement is random, it can’t be that hard to program, can it? Can it?

The weirdest of the little logic hiccups unfortunately involve the game’s strongest element — that would be “the mood”. All over the ruined city are these . . . tape-recorders, just lying on tables or desks, or hanging from hooks on walls. You pick them up, and you get to hear a private voice-diary from someone’s life. The first one you find is sitting on a table in a bar, overlooking a frankly spectacular view of the ocean. The voice of a woman echoes out of the tape, with microphone clarity, over the din of people enjoying themselves in a quietly lively place. She says she’s getting drunk, and alone, on New Year’s Eve. She laments what a “fool” she is, for “falling in love with Andrew Ryan!” It’s not impossible to believe that this woman would be drunk enough to tape-blog about her Deepest Personal Secrets in such a public place on New Years Eve; the very candor in her voice indicates immediately that she’s That Type of Woman. Her tape diary ends abruptly with an explosion sound and an “Oh my god!” So the story creeps up and seeps into our brains: something happened on New Year’s Eve, and this woman’s tape diary was forgotten here on the table.

As things progress, though, the tapes start to seem vaguely . . . rude. There’s a point where you see a frozen-solid pipe-tunnel leading to another hub of the undersea city; there’s a tape recorder lying on the ground, glinting ferociously, as you approach. You play the tape, and out comes a thick Cockney squawking: “These frozen pipes! I keep telling Mister Ryan, frozen pipes break easily! We have to fix the frozen pipes, or we’ll have some serious trouble.” I hear this and think, “Uhh, thanks for that?” The little monologue comes within millimeters of saying “We’ll need to use fire plasmids to melt this ice, if it gets too thick!” I imagine the original script must have called for such a line, though someone on the Quality Assurance assembly line must have realized how dumb that would sound. However, without such a connection to the flow of the game as a game, this disembodied flavor-monologue just seems wickedly out of place. It’s damned if it do, damned if it don’t. Around then, the Awakened gamer should begin wondering about the tapes; wondering why these supposed private diaries have been exhumed and strewn about in convenient locations. What with the weird satanic costume-ball masks being worn by the weird klepto-psychos gallavanting all over the place, it’s not hard to make some kind of synapse connection between “Crazy People” and “Crazy Behavior”; maybe one of these genetic blowouts made it a personal mission to arrange these tapes in convenient locations. If you’re like me, and you’re thinking this critically about BioShock, you start to notice, even, that someone was apparently being cremated in the mortuary at the exact moment this underwater apocalypse went down, and you begin to feel a deep dread — like you’re in the audience at your little brother’s school play, and he’s on stage, dressed up as an ostrich, and you know for a fact that he’s going to go stuff-ballistic, vomit blood all over someone, and storm through the audience biting people’s throats — you start to kind of pray, whether you Know God or Not, that at some point soon, this game is not going to try to explain this. Like you’ll get to the Final Boss, and he’ll be standing atop his Ziggurat Of Glory with his imperial cape billowing and his monocle glinting, and he’ll drop the megaton bombshell that he is both your father and he placed all those tapes so that you would find him — and then proceed to die by his hand.

Six hours or so into the experience, I’m kind of tired. The introduction of the oft-discussed Big-Daddy/Little Sister dynamic has come and gone, and the plot has at last let go its iron grip. The storyteller has succeeded in getting us drunk, and proceeds to stand us up and push us out the front door of the bar. We look back, and he’s dusting off his hands, turning around, and setting up the “CLOSED” sign. We are now free. Free to Move Forward in this Meticulous World. Free to Enjoy the “Game Play”.

Well.

I’m not going to lie to anyone, here. I know how “game development” goes. I know it involves a Lot of People with a Lot of Ideas, working a Lot of Hours in a big, fancy office. I know that some of the ideas some people work on end up being a whole lot better-executed than some of the other ideas other people work on (witness how great the driving is in Burnout 3, and how drop-dead terrible the menus and interface are). And though I do believe I originally said that Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was not a perfect game, I believe it demonstrates a much “more perfect” way to appropriately use an epic amount of human resources: basically, you write down what the player can do in your game, then you figure out what’s going to happen in your game, then you build a story around that, then you tell everyone, “This is the plan, and we’re sticking to it”. BioShock has too many ideas; too many Little Things To Do. And it’s a shame, because, as I might have said a dozen times before in this very article, the game has some drop-dead genuinely brilliant concepts. It’s just that everything turns into a grind in the end.

It’s like, in an action movie, yeah, where there’s a montage depicting a character’s recovery and/or training in the martial arts. Can you imagine what it would be like if the first forty-five minutes of “Rocky” breezed by, only to pause for three real-time months of footage of Rocky Balboa punching a heavy bag, jogging, eating oatmeal, doing sit-ups, perusing Reader’s Digest while taking epic stuffs? That’s kind of what happens to BioShock: it’s top-heavy, and then it’s boring. A little rearranging of the Feng Shui is in order: a little, gasp, Zelda-ism.

Take the Big Daddy / Little Sister dynamic I touched on earlier. This has been a firecracker of media discussion; this was the darling pet feature of the game. Basically, there are little girls, turned into demon-children by genetic experimentation, who represent the physical embodiment of some Great Power. They are accompanied, at all times, by giant bio-behemoth men in modified deep-sea diving suits. The image of the “Big Daddy” is so striking that it adorns the game’s box, that a metal “Big Daddy” figurine was the Grand Prize awarded to all rabid pre-installed fans savvy enough to pay an extra twenty dollars for the Limited Edition. Basically, the situation is this: The Little Sister is a harmless Little Girl. She has Great Power. If you so choose, you can “harvest” her for that power, making your in-game avatar stronger. However, the only way to get close to the Little Sister is to kill the Big Daddy. Do so, and the Little Sister will cower sadly. Save her, and your character does a Jesus Hand Dance, and sucks the evil out of her with his fingertips. Harvest her, and she sinks off screen, and there’s a scream.

In this day and age where Mass Effect can feature two muppet-like human beings having purely consensual prime-time network-TV Clothed Sex preceded by Literally a Dozen Hours of Accountant-worthy Courtship and cause even mildly Christian people to accuse games of instilling Our Children with the Hunger To Rape Other Children, one has to wonder whether the underlying “problem” with the videogame “industry” is one of people pressing too many buttons or not enough buttons. BioShock‘s “kill little girls for profit” mechanic is a surefire conversation-starter, though in the game, it’s handled with such sterile laryngitis that it might as well just not let you kill them at all.

My “idea” for how to “fix” this element of BioShock‘s game design, I’m afraid, is easier said than done. I’m going to go ahead and give the dudes and babes at 2K Boston the benefit of the doubt, and say that they probably thought of it first:

My idea is that there should have only ever been one Big Daddy, and one Little Sister. The story of the game would branch depending on whether you kill the Little Sister, and at which opportunity you kill her. Maybe the Big Daddy has some kind of card-key and can open doors that your character can’t, so it’s to your advantage to slink around behind them. Every time your path converges with theirs, there’d be some kind of big cathartic showdown. Maybe enemies would attack the Big Daddy, and he would destroy them, and you’d have to avoid getting caught in the fray, or else join the fight to take the Big Daddy down. Maybe the Big Daddy, ultimately, would perish at the end of the game if you let him live long enough, forcing you to make a decision about what to do with the girl.

Of course, this is easier said than done; it would require construction of actual thoughtful set-pieces; it would require the Big Daddy to be an epic, impossibly, amazingly difficult and worthy adversary; furthermore, it would require the Little Sister to be an actual character in the plot, even though she might be presented as an incidental bystander in the context of the greater story. Allowing context to render bystanders as “characters” is one of the great organic traits of modern fiction. BioShock, unfortunately, fails as “fiction” — and as “entertainment” — because its characters are as sharp as lead pipes. Everything that could be emotional or poignant is constantly having its lungs punctured by a rusty spike named “This Is A Videogame”. I stuff you not: at one point, just as the plot is about to let you go and plop you into The World, armed with your Fantastic Weapons and Psychic Powers, your guardian angel on the other side of the short-wave radio exclaims, in tears: “We’ll find the bastard! We’ll find him — and we’ll tear his heart out!” and at this exact moment, I spontaneously picked up a “battery” from the floor, resulting in harsh letters jumping up on the screen and poking their fingers into my eyeballs: “You got a component! Use components to invent things at a U-Invent!”

Eventually, everything in BioShock becomes “Something To Do In A Videogame”. Harvesting Little Sisters or Setting Them Free becomes a decision you make every fifteen minutes. Instead of a punctuation mark, it becomes a verb — and not just any verb, it becomes like a conjugation of “to be”. Killing Big Daddies, even on the hardest difficulty (we here at ABDN wouldn’t have it any other way), is repetitive and hollow. Just lob a bunch of grenades at him, electro-shock him, blast him with a tommy gun. Blow the heckers right up. Who gives a stuff? Not you, that’s for sure.

There was some talk — I think on Gama Sutra — wherein a BioShock game designer or someone related to a BioShock game designer talked about how there was too much stuff to do in the game, and that ultimately detracted from what could have been a tasty, crunchy flowing, living experience. To this, I say: no stuff, Sherlock. I’d like to congratulate you guys for acknowledging your flaws, and I’d like to hold out hope that you might turn out a brilliant game in the future, though seeing as you only recognized BioShock‘s packrattism in hindsight, I can’t be too optimistic.

BioShock means well, at least — its thrilling, thoughtful presentation is a testament to that — as at first it shows you an oblivious enemy standing in a puddle of water, and your guide whispers over the radio (how he can see what I can see, I don’t know): use your electric bolt on the water! Fry him! You do this. Said bad guy fries. Now he’s dead. Nice.

Six hours later, when you’re spilled out into the Game Proper, you’re still seeing guys standing hip-deep in water, and you’re still shocking them. There’s no catharsis in it anymore.

There’s a “puzzle” slightly before the game pushes you out into the street, where a door is locked and you need to find the combination. Amazingly, the combination is written on a piece of paper on a shelf just five meters away from the door. This is precisely where BioShock‘s good intentions crumbled into dust, and made me feel kind of sad; the game’s MO had been, from the outset, to “relay information to the player through atmospheric elements”. The beginning of the game, with luggage stacked on the dock at the city entrance and declarations of protest written on discarded picket signs, had felt like a triumph; now here I am, looking at a number scrawled very legibly on a sheet of paper. It’s four digits. The combination lock on the other side of the room requires four numbers. This absolutely, positively has to be the correct combination. I feel like I’m Sherlock Holmes, and Watson just confessed to me that every mystery I’ve ever “solved” had just been elaborate dinner-party skits concocted by him and a bunch of friends I’ve never met. For one thing, the revelation that Watson has friends is a real downer; for another thing, I’m still a smart guy, though only in the context of some drunk people’s idea of “fun”.

Night-vision goggles on, in the back of my brain, I’m solving ancient riddles: I now know why modern Zelda games are so heavy-handed and sucky. It’s because they spend so much time on them. They’ve got dungeons, plotted out like works of architecture, with hallways of yea length and pits of yea depth. Nintendo’s quality assurance period is so deafeningly long that the level designers must sit around tinkering with the dungeons sixteen hours a day, hoping they’ll get an order from above to “announce the release date already”.

“We’ve got this hallway here, see? In dungeon number six. It’s about fifty meters long. Tanaka put a lantern here, and you light the lantern, and this iron grate opens. That still leaves us with, uhh, like, thirty more meters. So check out what I did. I made a pit of spikes here. And see that wall over there?”

“Awwwwwwww stuff, Yamamoto-kun, is that a hookshot panel?”

“Yes, sir. The player obtains the hookshot in dungeon number four, and it’s only used three times up to this point in dungeon number six, so–“

“You are getting a ray-zuh!”

Et cetera. Or I could mention Rare’s Star Fox Adventures, where you get this “flame” “attachment” that lets you shoot “balls of fire” out of your “magic staff”, and how rather than be used to actually light things on fire, it’s usually used to shoot a “ball of fire” at a “flame panel” on a wall somewhere so that a door opens. Some ten hours of your life after getting that flame attachment, you might be at the end of a cavernous dungeon room, all the enemies dead, all of the blocks pushed, wondering what the hell you’re supposed to do to open the sealed door. You go into first-person view mode and scan the walls. There, way, way up behind you, is a “flame panel”. Both because there’s nothing else you can do and because you know this is the solution to the “puzzle”, you shoot the flame panel with your flame rod, and the door opens.

Seriously, aren’t there more clever things to do with 3D cameras than make me look for a flame panel to shoot with my flame rod?

This applies to BioShock all over the place, into infinity. Except it’s never as clearly offensive as the Star Fox Adventures Flame Rod Example. In fact, in giving me a “choice” of which gizmo from my Santa-sack of Stuff to use to conquer each pseudo-situation, BioShock is actually kind of worse off.

To wit: It used to be that characters would do stuff like fall asleep and dream about ravioli if you didn’t touch the controller. In BioShock, if you don’t press any buttons for a few moments, the words “Hold the right directional button to get a hint if you are stuck” appear on the screen.

The little puzzle-like mini-game you “play” every time you attempt to hack a downed turret or hover-drone-bot is about as fun as those rare, bizarrely self-important moments during your day at the office in which you actually have to use your cellular phone’s calculator function. Really, though, with all the concessions this game offers inexperienced players, I have to wonder when someone is going to make a puzzle element in a game that lets you end the whole charade with a single button press when you see the solution and have far more than adequate time to implement it. Call it the “I Get It Button”. While we’re at it, someone call Sony and tell them to include a feature in the next PlayStation 3 firmware that allows me to navigate several backdoor selections and eventually find a huge-text menu allowing me to disable the mandatory warning in front of every hecking game that tells me not to unplug the console from the wall and/or throw it out the window and/or experience a sudden power outage while the hard drive access light is blinking?

Eventually, the game gets just plain sloppy. There are several copy-editing related errors I have stored in the back of my head for some reason, like this one on-screen message that read “Your maximum health has been increased, allowing you to take more hits before being sent to a Resurrection Station”. I thought they were called Vita-Chambers?

Vita-Chambers are explained, very, very early in the game, as capsules that can re-energize your tired (and even dead) body, using some kind of mystical cloning technology. I’ll admit that I winced when I first read the explanation of Vita-Chambers, first because the description tells me that there’s “no need to touch or otherwise interact with a Vita-Chamber in order to activate it”, which is really dumb and silly, and second of all because I knew in the pit of my stomach that the game — a game with a story about life and death (and politics) — would not be able to roll on until its conclusion without somehow using the Vita-Chamber as a Key Element in the Plot. And when it did, my groan could have shattered a gazelle, had a gazelle been lurking outside my window, nuzzling through my sweet, hot garbage.



Tons of objects — beer bottles, some crates — have physics, and can be burst and blasted apart to reveal Delicious Items. Other crates, the likes of which are used to impede your progress and force you to seek Some Other Route, simply won’t budge.

When your main character gets wet, his field of vision becomes blurry the way that a camera lens does.

If a videogame is to be rightly hailed as a “masterpiece” and/or a work of “genius”, things like these need to not happen in the game, at the very least.

What we have here, with BioShock, is a well-meaning game with some excellent concepts and an iron grip on its execution. It’s just a shame that “its execution” equals “execution of absolutely hecking everything written in every draft of the design document.”

There’s been talk lately of Gore Verbinski, director of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” flicks, signing on to helm a film based on BioShock. The inevitable fanboy knee-jerk reaction was that it’d be “impossible” to relate BioShock‘s deep atmosphere in a movie. Are you kidding me? The only parts of BioShock that wouldn’t “translate” to a movie are the heavy-handed bullstuff things. Are the fan-creatures afraid that the film would neglect to inform the audience that the thing the main character rides down to the undersea city of Rapture at the beginning of the story is called a “Bathysphere”? Come to think of it, maybe that was my first hint that I would neither love nor hate BioShock: when the big white help text floated into view, telling me to press the A button to “Use Bathysphere”. Mac OSX’s spell checker doesn’t even say “Bathysphere” isn’t a real word, though, so maybe all of the internet forum-dwellers who instantly regaled friends with tales of “OMG” re: “the part in the bathysphere at the beginning” were just really big undersea lore aficionados.

At any rate, I think a BioShock film is a tremendous idea, and that Gore Verbinski is the perfect director, not because he’s amazingly capable of sculpting, like, actual art so much as because he at least has the conscience to request that his screen-writers use Microsoft Excel instead of Microsoft Word, you know, so that they can go to the bottom of the columns and see if there are any arithmetical errors before shipping it off to the storyboard artists: I swear, when I went to see the third film in a theater in Tokyo, they handed me a heckin’ flowchart explaining the relationships between the characters. Who hates who, who loves who, who’s being paid to backstab who, et cetera. I thought for a second that the flow-chart only covered the first two movies, though apparently it turned out pretty useful for piecing together the third. In the end, the story, though idiotic, was air-tight. What the hell more could you expect from a movie based on a theme park ride featuring animatronic cartoon pirates? That the film looked really good and was nominated for a record-breaking number of Academy Awards for “Best Johnny Depping” — that must have been Verbinski’s idea. It looks to me like it’s Verbinski 1, theme-park rides 0. And what is BioShock, in its present state, if not a theme-park ride with more Shit To Do? The presence of a pre-installed plot, the very idea of catharsis existing between the Big Daddy and the Little Sister is more than enough feeling to shape a compelling narrative. The game misses the opportunity to be Something That Is, because it is too busy concentrating on being Something To Do; a film could really capitalize, whether or not it offers the lead character the choice of lightning or fire rounds for his shotgun, whether or not the character recovers psychic power and loses health when he smokes a pack of cigarettes. Or at least it could bring Django Reinhardt back to the pop-culture pre-conscious.

Well.

I arrive at the end of this review, then, wanting to say something positive aside from my constant beating the dead horse of “lovingly crafted atmosphere”. Here’s all I can think of:

1. The water looks great!

2. It’s perfectly fine to set games in destroyed places because it gives level designers a perfect excuse for why there’s so much stuff unnaturally thrown around.

3. The arrow that guides you to objectives is smart, guiding you in the direction of the stairs and then in the direction of the door. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a guiding arrow do something like that in a game before, though it’s possible that I played a game with such an arrow and just didn’t notice because I otherwise wasn’t lost.



We here at Action Button Dot Net are planning something. It’s to be called “The Action Button Dot Net Manifesto”. It can and will be a list of what I (uhh, “we”) consider the best twenty-five games of all-time, ranked in order and everything. Naturally, these will all be games that would score four stars on the Action Button zero-to-four review scale.

I mention this because the game we will crown as the number one best game of all-time shares many, many traits in common with BioShock. However, it absolutely nails everything it aspires to. It is a tremendously great videogame, the likes of which BioShock had every opportunity to be; yes, I am rating BioShock as harshly as I have because I genuinely recognize and respect its potential when held up alongside the Best Game Ever. I’ve offered plenty of hints to the identity of that throughout this review. Feel free to guess, in the comments thread, what you think the game is (and if you already know, please don’t spoil it T-T).

The game is not Gears of War, so I’m fully free to use Gears as an example for my conclusion. Yes, we’re still operating under the belief that, game-design-wise, Gears of War is As Good As It Gets For Now.

Gears of War‘s simple mechanics are like a survival knife stabbing into an invincible watermelon: a delicious crunch of impact every time; we delight in beholding each and every watermelon tumble down the stairs, or come flying out of a window. BioShock‘s unwieldy choices-laden limp-noodle of a “game system”, on the other hand, is like swishing a chopstick in a glass of water. Eventually, it lets you swish a chopstick in a bathtub. The point is, both of these actions produce sounds — it’s just that one of them is just magnitudes more satisfying than the other.

Ultimately, what we need is a game with BioShock‘s love of details and Gears of War‘s crunch and flow. Because God help us if all of our “intelligent” games are going to be boring to play, and all our exciting games are going to star oatmeal-skinned meatheads. Come on, people. Let’s show a little creativity, a little diligence.