Chapter 3: It’s the Goddamn Weekend

…and that means a lot of these shots, and a lot of detoxing from work and otherwise attempting to reduce the amount and frequency of grey hairs I will inevitably receive.  Yes, it’s a bit of a cop-out, and some might argue that the weekend is the perfect time for writing, but what kind of neglectful dolt would I be if I used the weekend for writing about vidjamagames?  I’d rather be out somewhere pastoral, being attacked by overly-attractive people while being photographed.

Yep, I’ve lost my mind.  If that’s the case, more is likely on the way.

Chapter 2: Gordon’s Vodka

In short: now I know why people insist that there are generally accepted times in one’s life to drink.  And owners of websites about video games should not be allowed near this stuff at any time.  Or Powerade.  Or be able to mix them together and form extremely alcoholic Powerade.  Why?  Well, now I get to play Metroid Prime Trilogy while drunk.  That’ll help me get that grapple beam so much faster!

At least I had the audacity to mix it into the Powerade I got with my meatball sandwich from Subway.  Dammit, this is sounding more and more like a series of advertisements, so I’m killing it there.  Damn you, Gordon’s Vodka.  And/or my roommate for buying so much of it it.  And/or Subway for stocking Powerade.  And/or me for writing a post on my website while tipsy.

Dear my very Precious VGPanda.com,

Since I seem incapable of updating you anymore due to a combination of factors within and without my control, I’ve decided to expose their insidious nature here, naked in all its glory, for you to see.  Let’s hope there’s nothing smelly or… pornographic.  That’s just icky.

Since I’m not known for my brevity, let’s start by breaking that trend and get right into it:

Chapter 1: Metroid Prime Trilogy

I both hate and love this game.  The love is obvious — all three Metroid Prime games with Wii controls, widescreen presentation, and all those nifty little upgrades that our European and Japanese brothers and sisters got (oh, how I love you 10 missile pickups!) all on one disc?  Sounds like an easy thing to love.  Except that I already own all three of these games, and the argument against me being a consumer whore becomes more difficult with the release of each one of these things.  “Why must you sit on the shelf all cute-like until my eye scans across it?”, I asked.  “VGPanda.com is my one true love, and you could never take him..  a..way…. f-from…  I must have you!”  I admit it — I am weak in the face of such a seductive master.

Truth be told, my sweet, I was in a Best Buy when I first learned of the existence of this game at all (my god I am out of the loop) and it, along with my other new discovery “Cursed Mountain” turned what should have been an obvious joke (Ha ha ha! Let me check out the Wii games to see if there’s anything worth getting! What rubbish!) into a genuine debate.  I succumbed to familiarity because like all Americans, I am afraid of the new and unfamiliar, reasoning that Cursed Mountain couldn’t possibly be good enough for me anyway.

I mean, come on!  Never heard of it?  Check.  Unknown developer? Check.  Mature horror-themed game for the Wii that I’m actually supposed to think has a chance of not sucking?  Well.. we’ll file that one under maybe.  I try to be a fair man, if nothing else.  And in the end, I walked outta that store with my $50 fling, confident that I would have been burned otherwise.

*checks reviews for Cursed Mountain*  Well, shit.  Now I have to go back to Best Buy..  right after I finish playing through all three Metroid Prime games.  Again.  Practically guaranteeing that I’ll not update you for another six months or so.  Yes, dear, I’m aware that I have other projects in the works, but it’s not like I had any chance of actually finishing my video review of…  Oops!  Almost gave it away!  Why do you try and trick me when I am only here to be honest with you?  Oh, you twist me hither and thither, my love, but you always know I shall return to you..

This letter is not over.  I shall write more tomorrow, I promise!  Until then, I am ashamed to say, I hear the master calling me.  He says… he says…?  S-something about… I can barely hear him from the other room…!

“…grapple beam…”
“…you must come back and find…”
“..the grapple beam…”

Damn you, Metroid Prime Trilogy.

This title can only be described as “Run up and press circle on every single bad guy and you win.”  Because that’s all I did.  I didn’t use cover, I didn’t shoot my guns (long enough to hit someone anyway — you’re only given about twelve rounds to start), and I couldn’t do any neat acrobatics.  What I could do is run up to guys and press circle.  If you like software in which all you have to do is maneuver a character through 3D rendered environments until they are adjacent to another character and press circle to make them die instantly, this may be for you.  However, if you prefer to play video games, you may find yourself wondering what the hell this thing was doing in the Playstation Store as it fails to meet the basic criteria.  In that case, you might also be me.

Basically, this game sucks.

I… am a strange person.  To anyone who knows me, this is not new information, but for the rest of you, I want no ambiguity.  I’m an oddball, and I am reminded of this on a daily basis.  To illustrate this point, I present you with an e-mail exchange I had with the sales manager of the Warwick Seattle Hotel.  For those not in the know, the Warwick is an international chain of four and five star hotels that people of, shall we say some import stay at.  Exempli gratia: When the prince of Saudi Arabia is coming to town, this place is on his list.

Anyway, this communication began with a cold call he made to my office asking if we ever had any people coming to town that we would put up in a hotel.  After giggling a little bit, I told him that most people don’t think our office is nearly important enough to visit with any regularity, and even though I don’t actually know what we do with those few who visit, I very much doubt we provide them with anything more illustrious than a Motel 8.  Undaunted, he requested an e-mail address to send a flyer to and asked me to keep their establishment in my thoughts.  Now, my e-mail I could easily provide.  My thoughts, however, are limited.  So, after his e-mail arrived, I paid no more mind to it until about a week later, when I got this:

“Panda-

Great to speak with you last week on the phone.  Just checking to see if you received the e-mail that I sent to you with the attachments?  I just wanted to check and see if you have any questions or if you passed it to someone who might.  Hope all is well in your world.  Let me know if you and your company may have any future hotel needs.”

Now, I typically feel obligated to respond to these sorts of things out of some professional business reflex I’ve somehow picked up.  However, some other mysterious force requires me to respond to them like this:

“Yeah, um, I got the e-mail and all its accoutrements just dandy.  Everything looks rather posh and also rather outside my personal spending ability, not that that really matters.  I did notice the conspicuous absence of any numbers (as in, the bling) though I guess it’s not so posh to include those on a brochure.   It’s probably on my mind first and foremost given what I make here, not that it really matters.  Again.

That’s how well things go in my world.

Anyway, it doesn’t seem like we have any questions about this sorta thing at the moment.  I don’t know how far off it is for the next person to come visit us, and I also don’t know how (or if) we accommodate them when they do, but I’ll see if anyone’s down with y’all th’next time it comes up.

- Panda “This Is Why I’m Not in Sales” Johnson”

Yeah.  See what I mean?

As you can tell, I am of two minds about this.  I can tell that I am being odd, and that this is more often than not an undesirable trait when in the realm of professionalism.  And yet, I also feel as though it is preferable to being drab and stodgy, as I imagine most e-mail communication with this particular fellow is.  My personal motivation is to be interesting and lively, but not rude or disrespectful.  I suspect that some believe that these are mutually-exclusive goals within this space, but I’ve decided that I’m not going to try to reconcile that perspective with my own anymore.  Put another way, I am someone who just refuses to be boring, and by extension, to be bored.

For the curious, his response to that was short and clearly uninterested in addressing my strange personality and vernacular.  And y’know what?  I’m totally cool with that.  My takeaway is that this is why he is the sales manager for a chain of expensive hotels and I am the guy who answers the phone all day at a small office staffed by quiet, mild, and otherwise normal people.  I wonder with what frequency my boss wonders how he ended up with me.

My experiences have led me to understand one thing for sure:  Culture and society is made up of an incredible hodgepodge of games that people must play in order to get what they want.  And I seem compelled, if not somehow required to play them wrong.

…why is that?

Part of it is personal amusement, I admit.  However, I think it has more to do with how I find the stoic adherence to routine and repetition to be the single biggest flaw with society’s complex interpersonal systems.  I also understand why it’s necessary, and therefore do not seek to disassemble the entire construct and reform it into something more agreeable to me.  Rather, I’m the guy pointing at the squeaking gears, echoing the sound it makes with my voice and looking around to see who smiles.

Very few do.

Wouldn’t you know it, all that inspired me thus was playing Age of Conan yesterday.  It began with a small thing, just the repeated requests from other players to have me group up with them as I went about doing my own thing.  Every time, without any real consideration, I would deny it, my gut saying “Why on earth would I want to do that?”  Upon reflection, this is a Strange reaction to have.  I mean, this is ostensibly what people play MMO games for.  Yet here I am, my immediate reaction firmly set to reject random offers to play in a group.

This, I have realized, is because I play MMOs when I want to play by myself.  When I click that icon on my desktop, my head is in a “please leave me alone” space.  That is also a handy explanation for why I enjoy Age of Conan to the incredible degree that I do — there is an entire single-player game complimenting the traditional MMO experience that tells your character’s history and ongoing storyline.  A band-aid on the issue of MMO storytelling, granted, but I still find it quite effective at doing what other MMOs don’t even try.  Personally, it’s exactly what I want out of this game space: MMO mechanics and longevity wrapped in an environment that I can play in completely by myself.

The more I considered it, I came to realize that the converse of this personal phenomenon is also true.  I think playing single-player games, especially those with complex story arcs and dense gameplay, is much more fulfilling with others present.  However the logistics work out, the experience (dare I say “emergent game-playing”?) is unlike anything that an intentionally multiplayer game has ever given me.  I wish I knew of one, or had an idea on how to make one, or even just how to convey how much it would mean to me to have something something deliberately designed to be that way.  Perhaps I am alone in this feeling, and such a thing should therefore never exist.  And y’know what?  I’m totally cool with that.

The point with all this is, admittedly, a selfish one.  I wish to understand myself, why I’m constantly asking questions that no one else asks, only to get answers that no one else seems to care about.  Working this out here has, at least, illuminated one corner of a very broad, dark picture.  So, score one for me.  As for you, well…  I have to ask — have you smiled yet?

Anyone who follows the game industry and reads as much about it as I do should be able to see a popular trend amongst “indie” sites like Joystiq and Kotaku.  They pride themselves on a snarky tone and juvenile “humor” which seems to consist mostly of lame strikethrough text jokes.  Bloggers, lazy that they are (and given the frequency with which I update this site, I am including myself with) go with the simple and the easy.  They’ve all come to the conclusion that the best way to be noticeable is to write spiteful and nasty things about every topic as often as possible.  This morning, after reading a particular article I’ll reference later, it occurred to me that this is a pretty lousy state to be in.  Frankly, I’m ashamed it took me so long just to think about it and it’s been begging the question to me ever since — why is it so hard to find some joy in my favorite hobby?

Part of it is the reality.  There’s a lot of suck in games these days.  And, when I spend my time and money on something that sucks, I want to get back at it somehow.  Since I can’t go slap around some programmer, I’ll summon my best hate-demon and unleash 500 words of bile all over what wasted my freakin’ time.  And y’know what?  That’s a little too much fun.  It’s a trap, something that can cause me to think that it’s the best way to handle everything I see.  Eventually, I envision getting to a point where that’s all I do until I turn myself into an internet pariah.

Why is it becoming so prevalent?  Maybe it’s something cultural, like how we’re conditioned to be nice to everyone so going against the norm sets off a primal rebellion nerve, which both feels good and gives you cred with the kids, as it were.  Maybe it’s that some people believe all enthusiasm and positive buzz is evidence of fanboyism and scrutinize it to death, yet those same readers will accept the same writer saying the opposite in a blink.  Whether it’s in a sarcastic review on Kotaku, or in one of Ben Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation videos, or even just the number of hits on 1/10 reviews on GameSpot, it’s clear that people love themselves some hate.

This article on Rock Paper Shotgun is what I was referring to earlier, specifically where Kieron Gillen talks about how anger is essentially an infantile reaction to something we don’t like, which eventually turns into (or grows up to become) bitterness.  Whether you agree, or even whether you draw any value statements from it at all, I think it’s hard to argue that there aren’t a lot of pissed off people who have been angrily writing about games for far too long these days.  That in turn made me realize just how many of my reactions to games are negative, and how that really isn’t how I’d like to feel about something I spend so much time on… and profess to love, besides.

My immediate response to this realization is one I’ve been banging on about for quite some time — I’ve already played a game that I consider to be the ultimate, quintessential gaming experience, and it will therefore take an awesome effort to surpass it, assuming it ever happens.  Unfortunately, the economic reality and expanding demographics of video game players are forcing developers to make games designed to appease only our most fundamental entertainment triggers.  Put another way, the games that most people will buy will consist of burly men blowing up a ton of shit on their Xbox 360s.  Given the ridiculous cost these days of making a game that people will care about or even notice, I completely understand why the bet being made by investors is not to bet at all.  “Play it safe,” I hear.  “Don’t take any more risks than you have to,” they say.  The result is becoming clear:  As my mum puts it, “a whole lot of shooty-shooty bang-bang.”

The worst thing about all this is that part of it is my fault.  I’m spoiled rotten!  AAA games look amazing, but are often just a pretty shell on a very mediocre experience.  The games that are really doing something innovative almost always have a junky feel to them.  It’s so hard for me to play a game whose style is fresh and exciting when it has poorly-designed menus, lame music and sound effects, or archaic graphics.  A recent example: I’ve heard some positive things about Culpa Innata and always wanted to give it a shot since I really enjoy adventure games.  I picked it up during the Steam holiday sale for less than ten bucks and decided to sit down with it last week.  The first thing I did was check the graphics options, and there are only two — “Resolution: High/Low” and “Antialiasing: On/Off”.  And just what is “high resolution”?  1024×768.  Eesh.  And then seeing the janky characters, wonky animations, static backgrounds and wooden voice acting just in the opening cutscene?  Even the first two minutes couldn’t keep my interest.  Even if it does something amazing (which I’ve been assured it does) I may never see it, and only for bad reasons.

What it comes down to is this:  I need to do a “reboot” of my thinking, my standards, and my perspective just to see the good things again.  While I realize that very bad games are out there, and can even deserve the things people say about them, there really is more to gaming than that.  It is so important to have some balance in the things you say, as that directly influences how you think.  Without balance, you’re just a bitter old man yelling about the proverbial kids on the lawn.  Having come this far, I think I know the answer to that question I asked myself this morning.  Despite the masses screaming for nothing but sequels, insisting that Halo is the finest thing in all Creation, stealing games with a self-entitled smirk on their faces, I truly believe that there is still something to like.  I only wish the folks at Joystiq would do the same.

First off, apologies for ignoring the site as of late.  Today’s excuse is that I’m currently in the honeymoon phase with a new PC, and the marriage is good. It’s surprising to me that right now, all it takes is about a thousand dollars to put together an awesome gaming rig.  And yes, a thousand dollars is a lot of money, but I maintain that if you were to buy a PS3 and then a television good enough to actually show you what the games look like, then you’re looking at about the same amount of cash.  It may be said that money is the problem, but I think the difficulty people really have is willingness and ability to take on a project like building a PC, setting it up, and then maintaining it.  It takes a lot of knowledge and experience to do it right, so I definitely understand the reticence.  All I hear, though, is that it costs too much money.

But I digress.  The real reason for me being here now is that I wanted to say a few quick blurbs about all the PC games I’ve been playing lately.  Being able to see Crysis with everything set to max and still getting something that could be called a “framerate” is incredible, so it’s been a veritable feeding frenzy with this new machine.  Across the past week, I’ve been testing out damn near every game I’ve bought in the past 18 months.  And to that end, Crysis still stands out on top as the best-looking game out there.  Question:  Why did Call of Duty 4 win the graphics darling award at E3 2007 again?  Oh, right, because it was the newest in a respected series of console shooters, and the vast majority of gaming press loves to ignore the PC as a gaming platform.

Haaaaaaaaaate.

Anyway, here’s a few blurbs about what I’ve been playing lately in no particular order:

Dead Space: I’ve already been through this game on PS3, and I loved it there.  Playing it again on PC is just reminding me of why I loved it so much.  It’s fairly well-known that I think the best game ever made is System Shock 2, and I think that’s the reason why I don’t get blown away like everyone else by most games these days.  In my mind, they have to be better than SS2 to get me really excited, and so far, nothing has been.  That said, I think if Dead Space had a little more RPG in it, it would have had a shot.  As it is, it’s damn close.  As far as I’m concerned, everything Dead Space does, it does right.  The atmosphere, the pacing, the sound (oh my god, the sound) is just perfect.  This is as good as monster-based horror gets, frankly.  As I played, I kept thinking that I’d love to do a special presentation on Halloween in someone’s living room.  Set up my PC, hook the audio into a nice 5.1 system, and play through the whole game in a dark room with a captive audience.  It’d be a fantastic way to sink into the world and have a scary-good time.  Ah, dreams.

P.S.  Fuck you, EA, for lowing the price on Steam to $39.99 from $49.99 the day after I buy it.  Why?  Your other items in the recently-released-for-console-but-now-on-PC bin like Mirror’s Edge are still fifty bucks.  Rarr!

Prince of Persia: Y’know, I loved the last Prince of Persia trilogy.  Yes, even Warrior Within.  Actually, especially Warrior Within.  I have this weird “problem” where I tend to love the black sheep of a series, because I appreciate it for being daring and different whereas it sounds like most people resist those changes.  Whatever the case, I think perhaps now I can understand people hating changes when I play this game.  Besides the annoyance of the characters saying “Fur-tyle” Grounds all the time, the platforming feels completely wonky and bad.  I understand that the game is based on the Assassin’s Creed engine, and the weird thing about that is that Assassin’s Creed’s platforming felt great, but here, the controls fight me every step of the way.  You’re not so much controlling things as you are directing a series of canned animations, and since they are canned (and thus don’t respond to you), the feedback you get as the player is misleading.  I find myself pressing the wrong buttons all the time because my guy just doesn’t move the way I expect him to, or the way he seemed to the last time I tried it.  And what’s up with triggering all that extra dialogue that, hey, maybe I want to hear, but maybe I don’t want to stand around for five minutes listening to.  Why couldn’t they talk while I walk around or something?  Aggravating.

Crysis Warhead: This game, as an overall package, is better than Crysis.  However, this meant shaving off both the lows and the highs of the original game.  The first third of the game is pure Crysis magic, with the nonlinear environments and cool scenarios made fun all over again with the addition of the cool nanosuit powers.   Aaaand then, it becomes a series of linear setpieces, where you are shuttled along a path to enemy compound after enemy compound that I could infiltrate and subdue in the same exact way every time.  It felt incredibly repetitive, and I realized that when I was wishing for a little more indoor stuff in the first game, I was actually kidding and would beg the developers to not do that again please.  Or at least, don’t do them like “series of straight hallways with stuff in them = fun!”  The other head-scratcher is that even though you play as a character who showed up every now and then in Crysis, you don’t do anything that he did in that game, and instead do all kinds of things that he didn’t.  I thought the story was supposed to be running parallel, and that you’d meet up with Nomad every now and then as seen in Crysis.  You don’t.  Also:  dramatic scene near the end of the game was unexpected, but actually quite good.  The cynic in me wonders how many people laughed at it because they’re unable to handle a serious moment in what is otherwise a summer action flick-type game.

Grand Theft Auto IV: Ah yes, the new granddaddy of system-taxing games.  Even though I’ve got a system with the best Radeon 4870 money can buy, four gigs of RAM and a quad-core 2.5 GHz AMD CPU, I still hesitated purchasing this game given all I’ve heard about single-digit framerates for people with six CPUs and twelve video cards and nine terabytes of RAM.  The hyperbole of that last sentence matches the hyperbole of how much system you need to run this game.  Everything is set at maximum on my system, except the various detail distance sliders, but since everything is already way beyond what either console can do, I’m satisfied.  And you know what?  It runs just dandy.  However, the game in general is less dandy, and I feel the same way now as I did when playing it on the PS3.  The experience I get out of it is a surreal one, where it’s amazing to watch this game and see all that that a hundred million dollars and who-knows-how-many years of work can do, and yet still come up with a game that is the exact same thing as the previous games.  You still just drive around, shoot people, and watch cutscenes of your character acting like an asshole.  The only difference is, this time you’re not playing an asshole from America.  He may as well be though, as the only thing that motivates him is money.  In the first ten hours, I killed two different people, both of whom I had done terrible things for, and only because someone paid me to do it.  I can’t sympathize with anything my character goes through, because he’s so clearly a sociopath whose only evident motivation is money.  The guy from GTA III had no personality, so there was nothing to identify with.  Tommy Vercetti in GTA: Vice City was only taking out other assholes, and never pretended to be anything but a gangster, so no problem there.  And Carl from GTA: San Andreas?  I just couldn’t reconcile the story of avenging his mum with the story of destroying a supertanker while flying around with a jetpack.  What the hell was up with that?

Anyway, all that said, GTA IV is still a lot of fun.  I just wish that Rockstar would do something more with this.  I’m tired of playing a jerk, and I’m sick of all the stereotypes and the “gay people as punchline” writing that has infected so much of popular comedy lately.  The best idea I’d heard for solving this problem was on GFW Radio, where someone imagined how cool it would have been if the second half of the game had done something totally unexpected and awesome with its otherwise formulaic setup.  What if the city was subjected to a natural disaster of some kind, or even better, became ground zero for the zombie apocalypse?  A game that plays like GTA but has the sense and styling of 28 Weeks Later would be incredible.  Rounding up survivors, hiding out in buildings, scrounging up resources in broken-down shopping centers, and then eventually escaping the city — It’d be like Dead Rising, except even bigger in scale.  Oh, and fun.

Stranglehold: This game is just a freaking blast.  It’s a shame the storyline is complete ass, and oh, that the PC version is 12.6 goddamn gigs (and therefore comes on two dual-layer DVDs) just because the developers didn’t feel like reprogramming shaders used only during cutscenes.  Instead, you get to fill your hard drive with gigs of 720p video of lame story you don’t even want to see.  ‘hem.  Rest of the game is awesome, though.  Setting the difficulty to “Casual” (hey, screw you Midway) frees you to go through the game as fast as you want, causing tons of mayhem and seeing the incredible setpieces go up in a storm of particles.  Y’know, what they said it was going to be like.  Some parts are complete garbage (running around attaching bombs to things = not fun) and others are just rooms to blast away bad guys (taking out three guys with a shotgun blast that also destroys a poker machine, causing sparks, coins, and blood to spray everywhere = fun) but overall, it’s just plain awesome.  You don’t even need a PC like mine to play this at the highest settings.  My last system, running on AGP for cryin’ out loud, got me through the whole game on the highest settings just dandy.  That’s the Unreal Engine for ya.  Just don’t think that because it plays a bit like Max Payne means that it’s actually going to have a great story like Max Payne.

Fallout 3: Yeah, I already played through this game once, but I thought I’d give it another spin with what I know now and not spend perks on leveling up even faster than you do already.  That level cap is just a complete buzzkill for me.  If I’m not progressing, then fighting enemies is just a chore.  I’m gonna try and level up as sloooow as possible this second time through.  Anecdote:  After just emerging from the Vault and heading over to Megaton, I saved my game thinking I was going to head to bed.  But, just for fun, I thought I’d see how far I could get killing random people in the town at level 2.  Result?  Everyone in Megaton died.  I killed everyone in the first major city, all by myself, at level 2.  Wow.  I guess having all that experience of the game’s mechanics helped more than I thought.  Oh, and the game is clearly leveling itself along with me (Oblivion says hi!) and yet people don’t complain about it here.  Silly people.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Uhm.  I’m pretty sure this game is a fan mod of Half-Life 2.  Except that I paid for it.  And it didn’t actually have the possibility of being good.  And I am an idiot.

Space Siege: Tickets for the most banal, boring, soulless, developers-gave-up-on-this-game game of all time are available on Steam for the low, low price of $19.99.  Yes, I’m actually playing this to keep me occupied (dare I say, “satisfied”?) until Diablo III comes out.  No, it’s not working.  But hey, it does satisfy my curiosity about whether Gas Powered Games is continuing its fine tradition of creating the most phlegmatic-but-technically-apt games for PC.  They are the hot button studio for games like that, so if you like burning your finger (as I do, on occasion), press away.

Devil May Cry 4: All I know about you is that I got the perfect score when doing your benchmark, earning me my coveted S ranking and the game telling me that only now will I get the real Devil May Cry 4 experience.  A thousand dollar PC is all it took to get this game running at a constant 60 FPS no matter how many enemies are on screen.  I am satisfied.  Now, to actually beat this game that I’ve had for a year.

GRID: Best racing game of 2008?  Probably.  I would also file it under the “Most Motherfuckery in a Game in 2008″ category.  Why?  Well, I think they decided that since they’ve given you the (totally awesome) ability to rewind and undo a mistake, that provides the mandate for making it the hardest frigging racing game of all time.  I played through most of DiRT on the second-to-hardest setting with little trouble, but I can’t get past the first freakin’ tier of races in this game without putting it on baby mode, and then it’s so easy that I blast past everyone in the first five seconds and never see them again.  Balanced?  I think not.  Oh, and the inability for anyone without an Xbox 360 controller to use the replay function to its fullest (like being able to throttle the playback speed or just rotate the camera) was a nice little bonus “screw you.”

Kane and Lynch – Dead Men: Continuing my tradition of really enjoying games that everyone hates, I really enjoyed this game.  It’s a perfect example of playing an asshole that has redeeming qualities, and even manages to be sympathetic.  You’re forced to do terrible things, but they are pitched to the character, and to me by extension, in a way that makes sense.  These things aren’t right, but it’s arguable about whether it could be avoided given the circumstances and one’s own natural compulsion to survive.  This game pulls no punches, shows you what most stories are afraid to, and lets you make an actual, meaningful decision or two.  More than once, I had to stop and think about what I had been doing, and that’s more than I can say for pretty much every game I play.  The presentation and the acting (especially the acting — some of the finest ever heard in the history of the medium) sell the whole package, and I eagerly bought it.  One thing about the graphics –  After finishing it, I realized that in the same way that Crysis is trying to emulate reality with its look, Kane and Lynch is trying to emulate what a movie looks like.  A critical distinction, but once you see the special effects in Crysis and then compare them to the special effects in Kane and Lynch, you should be able to see what I’m talking about.  One is meant to emulate what a person’s eyes would see, and the other is meant to emulate what a camera’s lens would see.  That is what makes Kane and Lynch an incredible cinematic experience, and therefore, an amazing achievement for video games.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky: Why do you run worse than Crysis?  Like, unplayably worse?  Well, whatever.  I’ll get back to you later.

And that about sums up what I played this past week.

…

Holy shit.

Piracy has always been a big issue with me.  From what I have gathered, most people seem to think either that piracy doesn’t really exist, or that it is nowhere near as bad as it is made out to be.  And yet, what I see now is that piracy is so commonplace that I am regularly offered stolen goods by otherwisen normal, law-abiding people.  It seems that folks have a hard time understanding how digital property works, and this has turned into one of the most frustrating things I have to deal with on a regular basis.  Insofar as how it has affected PC gaming, basically “home court” for my favorite hobby, we now stand at a point where the mainstream industry is seriously considering canning PC gaming altogether, leaving only MMOs or similar where DRM (unnecessarily considered a four-letter word nowadays) is accepted on the whole without question.

I would love to do an encompassing, in-depth article examining all the arguments surrounding the issue and coming to well-founded conclusions backed by hard data, but as it turns out, someone else did it for me.  Koroush Ghazi, the guy behind the excellent one-man site TweakGuides.com, has created an incredible article that says everything that I could or would want to say about piracy, and I highly recommend that everyone read it all the way through.  It’s long, but I promise that it’s worth it.  You may find it here:

PC Game Piracy Examined

Additionally, I highly recommend checking out anything else on his site that may be relevant to you.  His tweak guides for games have never lead me astray and I follow his Tweaking Companion guide to the letter every time I set up a new machine.  As a result, I’ve always had games running faster on a machine that is more stable than I’d previously thought possible, and all because I was willing to spend a little more time making sure everything is installed properly.  Over the years, the amount of time I’ve saved not having to deal with issues that poorly set-up system will give you has made the extra time investment worth it a thousand times over.

Oh, and to assuage any suspicion from any cynics out there, I’ve never had any interaction with Koroush beyond reading what he puts on his site.  I’m writing this here now simply as a way to share the love, get some edjumucashun goin’, and with any luck, prevent an unimaginable number of headaches.

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Ports

When I was in second grade, every Tuesday some of the kids (including myself) would be whisked out of school an hour early to go to the church next door for something called “The Good News Club.”  I don’t know how this ever got approved as an official school event because it was an hour of listening to adults tell us about the Bible and Christianity.  Now, I haven’t turned out even remotely religious, so why am I thinking about this now?  Well, because one day I was asked something by one of the hosts and my answer to it, I’ve realized, helps explain something that I’ve always found strange about myself.

The subject that day was “Heaven”, and the person doing the presentation asked all the kids what they thought heaven would be like.  Most of the kids said things that I expected to hear — never getting old, having tons of toys or candy, not having to listen to their parents anymore, and that sort of thing.  When it came to my turn, I realized I didn’t have to try to come up with an answer as I usually did.  I told them that my idea of heaven would be a place where I could watch a movie or read a book as many times as I wanted, and each time would be as memorable and enjoyable as the first.  I recall a lot of strange looks from my peers, probably because I described reading in the context of desirable.  Go figure.

Fast-forward to today, and just looking around my room I’ve realized how often I find myself buying the same game multiple times for different platforms.  Any time this is brought up to me, it’s as a negative.  “You shouldn’t pay more than the bare minimum for something” at best or “You’re a consumer whore” at worst.  Hey, on some level, I understand.  Many ports are the exact same game as before with only a change in interface or screen to differentiate them.  Others, like console-to-PC ports, can suffer from horrible consolitis with horrible control schemes and screwed up (or dumbed-down) graphics.  And still, I keep coming back.

Part of it has always been curiosity — I love digging into the minutiae of things, to see how they change the controls, the balance, the levels, or anything at all.  Even little things, like how the way armor negated damage in Doom 3 for the Xbox was changed from the PC version, can be exciting.  But that can’t be it, right?  Seriously, I do this too often and substantial changes are too few and far between to keep me going for just that reason.  It wasn’t until I decided to examine this strange habit of mine that I started to think back to my idea of the perfect place, where it’s possible to have or feel anything… even being able to experience something as though it were the first time, every time.

Ports are my way of grasping that impossibility, and the most amazing thing about it is that it’s almost completely successful.  Somehow, just a little change in the interface or playing it on a different screen is enough to fool my brain into thinking that I’m doing something I haven’t done before.  The experience works on two levels, the part that is acknowledging what differences there are and the part that remembers how good it was the first time.  If I handle things just right, I can keep myself from remembering too much and lose myself in the experience, just like I did the first time.  And when it works, it’s the closest I’ve ever come to feeling something like… magic.

In many ways, Left 4 Dead is exactly the multiplayer game I’ve been waiting for.  I’ve got a lot to say on multiplayer games in general (especially competitive ones) but for the sake of brevity I’ll stick with the short version.  Basically, the more like a sport a video game is, the less I like it.  Repetitious motions and ridiculous emphasis on scores and trash-talking, all of that is just pointless nonsense to me.  Since this is all the typical online shooter is, I rarely play them.  When Left 4 Dead came around, and I saw that it’s explicitly designed for cooperative play and made to outright destroy those who won’t.  This sounded perfect for me.  Despite what it may sound like, I actually love playing games with other people.  I just don’t want the point of the game to be centered on beating someone up.

This game’s first impression is second-to-none.  The awesome concept by Turtle Rock delivers, and Valve’s signature polish is immediately clear.  This game has a long history in the public eye — I remember hearing about the many challenges they faced in development on GFW Radio two years ago.  The most difficult obstacle seemed to be how to make a story-based game persistently interesting in a multiplayer setting.  Now that I’ve spent a dozen hours or so with everything the game has to offer, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I think went right, and also some concerns I have about the game’s longevity.

I started by going through all four campaigns on Advanced difficulty in single player.  I felt it’d be the perfect way to learn all the game’s basic mechanics so I won’t come out looking like an idiot when I start playing online.  My experience with this was very positive — I barely made it through each level but never actually died.  It was tense, exciting, and a pitch-perfect blend of the atmosphere and setting that I love in shooters.  It also took me about three and a half hours to finish.  I knew the game was going to be brief, but I was still a bit surprised at just how brief.  I’d heard all about how the AI director would change things up, and plus I would hardly want a typical multiplayer match to last several hours, so I wasn’t complaining.  After listening to the commentary (which is excellent, as usual) I was ready to try it with other people.

My first online game (which was with complete strangers by the way) was incredible.  The three other folks all had headsets and none of them had seen the entire game yet.  One was actually in his very first game, and the other two had played other campaigns but not the one we were on.  Therefore, I was the only person who had seen the whole game (and on the second-to-hardest difficulty setting) so I decided to become the leader.  Coordinating was no problem since we all listened to eachother and I could tell they were determined to have the best experience possible.  I couldn’t have asked for a better group to start off with.

Things were even more intense and fun than what single player had been for me.  The experience was just as I hoped –  barely making it to each checkpoint and working hard to keep everyone together and alive in the meantime.  We cooperated very well; no one ever actually died, and by the end we really felt like a team.  And then, we came to the finale.  Now, since I was the only one who knew what was coming while we waited for rescue, I helped the team get set up for the insanity that would follow.  This actually turned out to be a whole new aspect of gameplay that I didn’t get with the bots, since they don’t set up defenses or use grenades.  “But hey,” I told myself, “I could get through this without much preparation before, so this should be even better.”

Instead, it was a complete disaster.  The first time, two of my teammates got punted off the roof by the tank which made getting rid of the rest of us a cakewalk.  The second time, my comrades defending me on the minigun got pulled off the roof by smokers and the third guy who went to rescue them got pounced by a hunter, leaving me defenseless and unable to rescue any of them.  Each subsequent restart, we revised our strategy, and each time, we failed.  By the time it was our sixth try, our tactics were better than ever, but we were too tired and frustrated to properly execute on them.  We never once saw the rescue helicopter, which might have given us just a little taste of success.  And so, spawning at the beginning for the seventh time after being ripped to shreds by zombies, we agreed it was time to go to bed.  After saying goodnight, some smartass threw a molotov into the safe room, burning all of us alive, putting a resounding period on the end of the night’s sentence.

I quit the game, and went to go lay down for the evening.  Before long, I started feeling really let down.  Now, part of that was just that I really wanted to see everyone’s stats at the end.  During that 90 minutes we spent together, I was really getting to know how my teammates were playing.  Seeing the stats scroll by would have been the perfect, proverbial cherry-on-top conclusion that I wanted.  It would have also been an opportunity to talk about the game a bit and unwind from all the tension.  As it was, and this might sound lame, I actually had trouble sleeping that night because I didn’t have any downtime before bed.  I guess that speaks to how intense it is, but it also speaks to how deeply unsatisifiying it felt without an ending.

Multiplayer games are built, intentionally or otherwise, to destroy suspension of disbelief.  This is another reason why I have trouble enjoying them as much as other games.  Left 4 Dead’s greatest achievement in my eyes is being able to keep me immersed in the linear narrative despite all the things that normally drag me out of it.  Though specific encounters do change, as promised, the overall story remains the same.  Even though I know how things end, I still need to get to the end to feel satisifed.  The feeling I got from that night was like watching a movie I’d already seen and having it turned off 20 minutes before it ends.  Yes, I already know how it ends, but by then, I’m ready (and indeed, expectant) to be carried all the way through to the credits.  In Left 4 Dead’s case, I’m just surprised at how much this very same thing mattered to me.

So now, many more multiplayer and versus games later, I fear I’ve arrived at an even worse spot — total burnout.  This has to be a new world record for me, having a game start out so rad and then get so unappealing so fast.  I think the problem is that the things they do to freshen up the experience through multiple playthroughs ultimately amount to very little.  As I become more accustomed to handling different types of situations, where they happen ends up mattering very little.  Without something like having the levels change, I’m finding very little in the way of new experiences each time I play.  This is perhaps the worst problem I have with other multiplayer games, though I usually see through the veil much faster.  Playing an online multiplayer game for over a dozen hours must be another world record for me.

But you know what?  I’m gonna keep playing, at least for a while.  Who knows, maybe something with a narrative just can’t be good for me this many times through.  And yet… maybe it can.  In either case, Valve has an excellent record of post-release support and I want to be around to see it.  I’m confident that it’ll just get better from here on out.