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.

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.

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.

Wow.  To think that I hadn’t even planned on picking this game up this year.  It wasn’t until a friend of mine (who happens to be a Microsoft employee) messaged me out of the blue offering to pick up a copy for me from the company store that I considered playing it.  At half off regular MSRP, I figured it was a fairly safe bet.  Still, I was thinking that I’d tuck it away at least until I finished Fallout 3 and Mirror’s Edge and Left 4 Dead and…  well, it was gonna to be a while.

The way it actually turned out was that I was playing Fallout 3 this past Sunday morning, having a grand olde time, and then it crashed on me.  Even though this only amounted to losing about five minutes of progress, it was enough to give me one of those “Yeah… this is why PC gaming is so great” moments.  I got up, stretched myself out, and happened to glance over to where my shiny new copy of Gears of War 2 lay… which swiftly lead to me throwing it on my 360.

My history with this series is, as usual, purely single player.  Having never tried to play with other folks, my experience was free from whatever negativity that experience brought to the table.  As I had it, it was a total blast beginning to end.  I remember being quite surprised that I felt this way;  It was so clearly marketed as the Big Tough Manly Game of the Century, appealing to a demographic completely alien to me.  I mean, I love a good shooter, but a game drenched in machismo isn’t likely to appeal to me.

What Epic delivered turned out to be so much more than that.  Sure, all the testosterone and manliness one could ever want was there, but what I took away from it was a sense of some of the best moment-to-moment gameplay I’d ever seen.  It was visceral, loud, and immensely satisfying.  About the only thing that bothered me was how every so often, they presented a challenge so far above the events before it that it required numerous reloads to get through.  The worst of these was an area filled with snipers who shot exploding arrows that would instantly kill you with a direct hit.  It was the first time I’d felt distinctly held back by using a controller, but since I’d held off so long on playing it the PC version had already come out… so I got that and finished it there instead.  Fast-forward to last Sunday, and as my friend hands me my copy, he’s telling me about how he had to repeat a particular section at the end of Act 1 nearly a dozen times. [Ed: He was playing on the hardest difficulty level initially available, I later discovered] This doesn’t look good.

Next thing I know, I’ve been playing Gears 2 for seven hours, my hands sweaty and crooked like a badly-crimped tree, and I’m on the third chapter of Act 5 (less than an hour from the end) and I couldn’t be happier.  Every single problem I had with the first game is gone.  It feels perfectly balanced, the story is much better (though still a simple summer blockbuster plot), and the variety of gameplay and environments truly brings the game to new heights.  I desperately wanted to have the complete experience in one go, but with my body actively shutting down on me, I decided it was time to turn in.

I finished it the next afternoon and started to get a feel for how the community was receiving the game.  To my surprise, much of the conversation is surrounding the game’s difficulty.  Since my experience was of a perfectly tuned challenge that never frustrated, it was a little bewildering to see so many people saying things that I feel are only true of the first game.  More specifically, I’ve read threads about a confusing boss encounter or endlessly repeating a section where you have to protect X thing, and each thing I remember having no trouble with at all.  Across the entire campaign, I must’ve died less than ten times, and each time it happened it was clearly my fault.  I never once felt punished by an unfair mechanic or screwed over by an unbalanced encounter, and it’s a shame to see a lot of people having that experience.

Thinking back, one of the most prevalent issues I feel many games have is being fundamentally unfair to the player.  What constitutes “unfair” instead of merely “challenging” is different for everyone, but what it boils down to for me is when I screw up, do I feel like it’s my fault?  It is a rare game indeed where I take every failure as a chance to do better rather than something I’m going to have to brute-force through.  Now, I’m sure everyone feels like they’re screwed by crappy game mechanics every so often.  For them, I would imagine playing a game whose interface and control scheme is so tightly integrated that both seem to disappear would be a dream come true.  However, I tend to see something different happen.

The first game I remember consciously noticing how perfect the controls and gameplay were was Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy.  This is a game that, in hindsight, is seen by some as forgiving and to the less charitable folks as pathetically easy.  Calling a game “easy” is an accepted form of derision, shorthand for a game whose goals are “possible” enough to actually be finished by most that start it.  All I know is when I’m constantly having a good time and not having to re-do entire pieces of the game (which I consider to be far more detrimental to the experience than the alternative) I consider that to be a resounding success.  And for me, Gears of War 2 is the most recent example of a game made in precisely this way, and yet still supports ramping up the challenge for players who want it.

All these things came together so well during the campaign that it’s no wonder I was kept in front of the TV for so long.  I was never losing momentum, never repeating a section over and over, and never having a needlessly frustrating encounter.  I was just having an amazing ride all the way through and I can’t wait to play more games like this.  I hope more developers seriously look at what makes a game like this work, because this is a prime example of design done right.

I’m just over 20 hours in and, much like when I reached this point in Oblivion, I feel like I’m just getting started.  This is actually a great feeling to me, especially since I was just thinking that I’d love another good free-roaming RPG.  It’s actually the reason I bought Fable II.  It turned out that in addition to all the other things I disliked about that game, the wonky area transitions and long loading times in Fable II killed any sense of continuity in the world.  Fallout 3, then, should be absolutely ideal for me.

I’m pleased to say that in many ways it lives up to be exactly what I want.  Nearly everything I heard about the game is turning out to be just as presented, from the smaller-but-denser world (a welcome design decision) to the incredible range of roleplaying possibilities.  I found myself really enjoy the combat too, all the “just an Oblivion FPS” rhetoric aside.  The VATS targeting is a fantastic idea, the perfect way to get some turn-based gameplay into a very differently-styled game.

With everything working so well, I have to say there is one thing that isn’t going over very smoothly with me.  It centers on how they chose to present the main quest… and really, the issue may lie with the fact that there is a “main quest”.  I find myself asking, “Why is it here?”  I really don’t think it’s necessary, especially the way it’s being done.  If this one particular aspect were removed, I would probably feel more immersed in the world.  As it is, I have to go against my natural roleplaying urges in order to get the full experience.

The central plot is one of urgency, leaving your only home in chaos and being thrust into an unfamiliar wasteland to search for your father.  Its purpose is to give the feeling of being just on the cusp of important events, and to urge you to catch up or else.  This serves the purpose of letting the player know what to do and where to go to reach the game’s conclusion, but I find it counterintuitive to the game’s biggest accomplishments.  To follow it directly to its end is to ignore 90% of a world that hundreds of people have spent years crafting, and because I know that, I’m forced to put the Main Event on hold until I’ve had a chance to see the sights.  I feel further vindicated because my roommate beat the game after playing only about 12 hours to find that (zomg spoilarz) the game has a hard stop after the main quest has been finished.

When I sit down and think about it, there are only certain kinds of games where a “flashing-arrow-to-the-end” actually bothers me.  With Bioshock or Dead Space for example, I love having the ability to see exactly where to go to complete my current objective.  This allows me to, almost paradoxically, explore with complete freedom since I know that getting back on the right track is just a button press away.  Since these games are fundamentally linear experiences (especially when compared to Fallout 3), I don’t mind the game acknowledging that with its own version of a glowing trail on the floor.  If a game isn’t telling me it’s an open world, I don’t have any problem with it not being one.  Since Fallout 3 is, having a rigidly linear path to follow (especially as the main impetus to proceed) doesn’t work anymore.

Honestly, I don’t see why the story wouldn’t work as-is if the main quest were removed entirely.  For example, here was my experience of the very beginning of the game:  Immediately after leaving the vault I was drawn towards a big settlement just a few hundred meters away from Vault 101.  After going around meeting the folks in the town, I spoke to a local shop owner who had what turned out to be a very lengthy quest chain to do.  This one conversation ended up taking me all over the wasteland and actively rewarded me for exploring my surroundings.  Going about these tasks naturally lead me through other populated areas, and thus more people, who had more things to do.  And even further, (though I admit I may be the only person who feels this way) I didn’t need even that.  Wandering around out in the wastes just trying to survive would have been compelling enough.

As I’ve completed more and more quests, I’ve come to realize how I personally would have tried to shape the experience.  If the game had been built on meshing together all the stories and quests into a final event tailored to you, based on how you handled yourself, that would have been totally rad.  Yes, I have heard all the hooplah about the two hundred-whatever endings, but my guess is that it’ll be like a series of on/off switches dependant on whether you did objective X on quest Y and play out like a montage of Where Are They Now? character cameos.  Now of course, I won’t really know until I see it and this is only my guess.  I’m completely open to being very impressed.

The only thing that’s clear is that it’s looking like Pappy’s gonna have to wait a long time for me.

Objection!

At this point, three cases into the third game in the series, I’m really trying to remember why I decided to invest in the whole series in the first place.  Before I finished the first one, I went out and bought the other three just so my momentum wouldn’t get interrupted.  Halfway through the second one, I found myself feeling like the series had become a chore, and now?  Now it seems that all the things I liked about the first one have somehow lost their impact after repeated uses.  The only thing left that could carry the experience, that being the story, is only really turning out to be a series of silly, juvenile encounters.  Why do I even bother?

The game has one incredibly redeeming feature for someone like me:  It’s almost impossible not to progress.  If you play it slowly and carefully, as I often do, you’ll constantly press forward and keep things moving.  The pace tends to be awfully slow, however — I can tell the writers and designers made it as pick-up-and-play as possible by constantly referring to things you’ve just seen, in case you had to leave at any point and come back a lot later.  There’s an intruiging, almost trance-like state I get into when a game is constantly moving along, doubly so for something that requires very little input from me.  It’s the same sort of thing that keeps Peggle interesting far longer than it should.  Forward momentum is a powerful draw to me, even when I don’t really care where I’m going.

I’ll probably end up finishing all four of them, just to say I have and to not leave another dangling plot thread in my brain.  I’m just wishing the charm and wit that brought me in could have taken me all the way to the end.  And hey, there’s always the series re-vamp Apollo Justice.  Maybe that’ll end up surprising me.

The first thing this demo did right was to load up in delicious 1080i.  To list everything it did right after that would be to list every moment I experienced until the demo ended.  This game is one of the most conceptually ambitious games I’ve ever played, and Dice appears to have done it exactly right.  Those who wish the game were in third person are missing the point of the perspective, and are ignoring everything that has been done to make that perspective work.  The game that we have here would not work any other way.

Being in first person while doing all of these amazing things creates a kind of visceral feel that I’ve never experienced before.  The look of the game to a third party observer is likely that of chaos, or nonsense.  I imagine most people would feel that way if they could see through someone else’s eyes but be unable to control it.  For me, I felt at one with the controls right away and thus the barrier between me and the character was dissolved.

It really makes me think about what a company like Valve has chosen to do with Gordon Freeman.  They claim by never taking your control away and never having him speak, the player is allowed to truly be him since he does nothing to break that belief.  I, however, feel even less like myself when I play a character with no personality.  A non-speaking protagonist doesn’t work, especially when you’re in control of him, because everyone you meet would either have to constantly point out that fact or have awkwardly-written dialogue in place of something you would say.  Immersion isn’t broken by having your character say something; it’s by having them say something stupid.  Strange that Valve, a company staffed with some of the finest writers in the industry, wouldn’t have the confidence that they could write dialogue that most people wouldn’t object to.

Needless to say, I was thrilled that Faith is allowed to speak in Mirror’s Edge, and I can’t wait until this game comes out to see the rest of what it has to offer.

I picked up Fable II last weekend, looking forward to sinking into a charming fantasy world.  I’d been eagerly anticipating it because I really enjoyed the first game.  Its sense of progression was immensely satisfying — just looking at my character reminded me of everywhere I’d been and how much I’d done (and since I was playing The Lost Chapters, that actually amounted to more than six hours of gameplay).  Very few games give me this kind of feeling, and I was eager feel it again.

To preface, here’s the sum total of what I knew about Fable II before picking it up:  You have a dog.  Sold.

At this point I’ve put just shy of ten hours into the game, and I’m finding it less enjoyable than expected.  My issues are with three specific aspects of the game:

The first is the insane level of “motion” blurring.  I don’t really want to call it motion blur, because what I’m talking about is in addition to the regular motion blur.  This kind of blur is like the low refresh rate of an old LCD monitor, or like the PSP’s original screen.  As the camera moves, the image leaves a slight smear, like it’s blurring the frames together.  I’ve seen games use this before (like in Resident Evil: Code Veronica X for the PS2) and it was used to give the impression of a smoother framerate.  I don’t think this should be necessary for games in this generation, and it’s probably not there for that reason, but it gives me the same effect.  For the record, I have a quality (though admittedly old) CRT HDTV, and I’m playing it in 1080i with component cables, and nothing else on the 360 (or anything else, for that matter) looks like this.

The second issue is controlling your character.  Moving him around feels like steering a bowling ball, or say, driving the cars in Grand Theft Auto IV.  After building up speed in one direction, it takes much longer to change direction than I expected, making the controls feel “heavy”.  Looking back, the first game had a similar feel, but your character felt much lighter.  It was bad enough that after playing for an hour, I was worried I wasn’t going to get used to steering myself through the entire game, careening around like I was riding in a go-cart.  Thankfully, I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of it.  I just don’t understand why I should have had to.

The last issue is with the melee combat.  I remember when Peter Molyneaux previewing the combat for the press, saying that its greatest feature was the one button combat.  I’ve heard people compare it to the style of Assassin’s Creed (whose simple system of “tap the button when your strike connects to follow up with a stronger hit” I loved) but I’d have to disagree with that comparison.  After leveling up your melee skill to get all your moves, I found the rhythm to be really messy.  In order to do your strongest strikes, or “flourishes”, you have to hold the melee button down, wait a short time for it to charge, push the thumbstick in the direction of a bad guy, and then release it to attack.  Trying to use a flourish when you’re in the middle of a mob of thugs can be maddening because you have to stop attacking, press X, hold it, point the stick, and then release to hit one guy.  I’ve found that the only way to make it work for me is to do nothing but flourishes or combos, but never mix the two.  I think they want me to use some variety, but it’s too annoying.

To be honest, none of these are dealbreakers.  The game has a lot going for it, and I’m finding myself encouraged to continue because of those other things.  I’m just amazed that these things either didn’t exist or worked better for me in the first game.  The sequel is supposed to be where they iterate on everything they got right and improve on things they didn’t, right?  I guess I can’t have it all this time.

Now then, it’s back to being a bartender.  My husband wants to move to a new house!

Since my PC is currently unstable (and I’m very disappointed in you, young man) I’m going to have to pick up Fallout 3 for a console.  Strike that, for the Xbox 360.  As soon as someone at Sony gets the 1080i upscaling working universally for the PS3, I’ll come home.  Until then I’m very disappointed in you too, old man.  In the meantime, I thought give my European import copy of Fallout (which I’ve had for years) a spin.

I’ve played Fallout just once, about ten years ago when I found a double jewel case of the first and second games.  All I remember is that I killed a few rats and couldn’t figure out what the hell to do.  Going into it now, I promised myself I’d make an earnest effort to get as far into it as possible.  I’ve got to wait for my paycheck to pick up the third one, so now feels like a good time.

After just a couple hours, I’ve determined that this game is absolutely unforgiving.  Maybe I’ve just gotten too used to games saving checkpoints for me, but I’ve had to re-do large chunks of this game over and over again.  I’m amazed that they would throw you into random situations you can’t possibly survive right off the bat.  This is one aspect of older game design I definitely don’t miss.

For example, I had a random encounter with four giant scorpions five steps out of the vault at the beginning of the game.  At level one, I had absolutely no chance of defeating them and died.  Then, I walked into a town and saw that a guard asked me to lower my weapon.  By the time I was done reading what he said, the entire town had gone hostile to me and I was annihilated.  I tried again, having put my weapon away first, and walked up to a hospital I saw.  There was a doctor inside, and I’d just fought off some scorpions so I thought I’d have him examine me to see if I was poisoned.  He said I was fine and charged me ten bucks just for looking at me.  After some initial incredulity, I buckled and said I’d pay him.  That’s when I found out I was broke, and my punishment was to have his guards execute me.

This game doesn’t mess around.  It’s like playing Ultima VIII all over again.  And I remember liking that game.  Yeesh.

So, I really want to get through this game so I can fully Fallout 3, but it looks like I’m gonna have to wuss out and use a walkthrough the entire way.  Normally, I’m against doing that the first time, but…  ah, hell.  Maybe I should just admit that I suck now and roll out the GameFAQs.  I’ll think about it while I play some more Fable II.  At least that game loves me.  *sniffle*