Science Fiction in an Interactive Medium

(06/09/2011)  Whilst busy crawling through the many convenient air ducts of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, obsessively hacking everyone's email account and occasionally stopping to give some hapless security guard who no doubt hates his job a few broken limbs and a serious case of concussion, I came to the conclusion that videogames may be the perfect platform for science-fiction stories.

There are two main elements to science fiction, whether on page or screen; the narrative, that is, what the characters are doing, and the idea, the special set of rules that make a specific sci-fi universe unique.  Whether writing for page, screen or stage, the art of writing good science fiction is in the balancing of these two elements.

Focus too much on the narrative at the expense of the idea, and your left with characters navigating a world that seems vague and badly thought out.  Focus too much on the idea, and your left with a detailed and nuanced world populated by boring characters doing nothing much at all.  In my experience with the genre, the balance of narrative and idea is one of the most difficult aspects of writing science fiction.

 Videogames circumvent this issue of balance by allowing the player to control these elements, to govern how much of the world’s lore they want to absorb.  If they’re only interested in the drives of their character and the immediate plot, then they can effectively ignore the world around them and barrel through the main story.  Those of us more inclined to become immersed in a game’s fiction can spent time pawing through every environment, constructing a great mental map of the world the writers’ have built for us.

All the great science fiction games do this, from Deus Ex and Mass Effect through to Half Life and Bioshock.  All of these games build their fictional world by hiding the details away, there to find for those that are willing to search but of no crucial importance to those who would rather just reach the next checkpoint.

By far and away my favourite part of Human Revolution is the way the writers have built their fiction, through liberal dispersion of eBooks, pocket secretaries and emails, strewn throughout the game world waiting to be uncovered by my inquisitive, level-5-lock-hacking fingers.

But I also realise that many people’s favourite part of the game will be a perfectly executed stealth assault, or conquering the next boss, or fully upgrading their pistol.  These people won’t bother seeking out all that hidden information, beyond perhaps promise of an achievement.  What’s great about the interactive format is that it’s entirely possible to cater to any and all audiences.

When writing passive fiction, you’re always going to alienate a section of the possible audience, however finely you strike the balance between narrative and idea.  I can’t write a novel that is at the same time a great action novel and a studied theory of a future society.  I can choose to do one or the other, or strike a compromise and land somewhere in between, an exercise that will still alienate those geared heavily towards one preference or the other.

It is possible for a game to be a great action game and a great story game, however.  A game writer can create content that is both broad and deep, and leave it up the player how they want to experience the story.  It’s a different approach from the games-as-cinema ideal that many modern blockbusters ascribe to, also to the interactive narrative approach hailed by games like Heavy Rain, and, topically, Deus Ex.  The story itself doesn’t have to be interactive, but the way that it is told can be.  The player decides how much of the story they’re willing to absorb, and thus craft their own experience.

RPGs have been doing multi-level storytelling for years, but the trait has now crossed into other genres; even mainstream heavyweights such as Gears Of War and Halo feature optional diaries that fill in the game’s underlying narrative.  Portal’s wall scrawls hint at a deeper plot untouched by GladOS’ narration, there for those who are willing to speculate.  A game doesn’t have to be a ‘story game’ to be a solid work of science fiction, it merely needs those two crucial elements, narrative and idea, and to allow the player the freedom to explore both of these as they see fit.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have facilities to infiltrate, walls to punch through and conspiracies to uncover.  And probably another hundred or so virtual eBooks to read.

The Imagination Gap

(07/07/2011)  I crouch in cover, the red rock hot against my back.  I’m down to my last few clips of ammo, and I can only hope that my assailant is too.  I can hear him moving, drawing closer to my hiding place, heavy steel-capped boots loud against the compacted dust of the wasteland.  I take a breath, ready myself, and dive from cover.  Time slows as I open fire.  He fires too, and I feel something white-hot sear my arm, but my bullets find their target first.  He jerks back, blood spraying onto the hot dust, weapon falling from his suddenly-slack grasp...

At least, this is what happens in my head.  In reality, or the reality of Fallout: New Vegas at least, my opponent and I are standing a couple of metres apart, both crouched, both firing.  My crosshairs are lined up on his head, and my bullets are hitting him repeatedly in the face.  He doesn’t react, although blood does periodically spurt from his skull.  His bullets are hitting me too, which only serves to make my screen blur a bit and my health bar to dip a little lower.  Inevitably his health bar runs down before mine, at which point his head explodes into several chunks, his body drops to the floor, and I walk over and nick all his clothes.

A regualar occurance in the old West.

Videogames have come a long way since their tabletop origins, but as the above hopefully demonstrates, the player still often needs to make a significant leap of imagination to experience a game’s fiction as intended.  My fight with the wasteland bandit is evidently meant to be a desperate struggle for survival.  The fact that it’s more like race to see who can deplete the other’s health bar goes to show that, well, we might have come a long way, but we’re not quite ‘there’ yet.

Some games require greater leaps of imagination than others.  The RPG genre, still a hotbed of statistics stables and static decision-making, requires more imaginative input from the player than, say, a racing game.  Turn-based battles are a wonderful example of the imagination required to justify the fiction; what is clearly supposed to be an epic battle of world-ending proportion is in fact four dudes standing in a row, literally trading blows with another, bigger, evil-looking dude.

And this differentiation seems to affect which types games are the most popular, for quite a simple reason; it’s easier for a non-gamer to become invested in something that doesn’t require a great deal of imagination to understand.  We, the player, understand that what’s happening in Fallout is in fact a life-or-death struggle between two desperados, but if someone who had not played the game were to walk in and witness what’s going on, then, well, they’d just think it looks stupid.

Fifa 12.

Our mega-selling franchises are those that most accurately represent their intended fiction.  Watch someone playing Call of Duty, for example, and it’s pretty obvious what’s going on; everyone’s seen war films, everyone knows what war should look like, and the game is going everything right.  Guns look like real, men die when they get shot, buildings crumble and collapse when hit with an explosive.  It looks like what people expect war to look like, and therefore grabs the interest of the uninitiated more easily than an approximation such as Fallout.

Real football.

It explains why sport games are so well-received by those who don't play many other games; Fifa’s only job is to look like football.  It doesn’t have to create an alternate reality or juggle a complex narrative; it just has to look like a game of football on the telly does.  Everyone knows what football looks like, and everyone can see that Fifa looks like football.

One day, ‘fiction games’ will be able to catch up.  A future Fallout will manage to play just how people would imagine life in an apocalyptic wasteland to be.  We’re getting there already; id’s Rage looks like a much more believable approximation of a post-apocalyptic world, although I don’t doubt it will lack a lot the depth that we enjoy in Fallout.

One day, games will have grown up properly.  Non-gamers will be able to sit down in front of a game, without necessarily even having play, and they’ll understand what’s going on.  It won’t look silly.  It will be fully-formed fictional world.  Until then, thought, we’ll just have to keep fighting those titanic battles half in our minds, and half in brilliant but flawed approximations.

First Impressions Matter

(06/07/2011) They say a novel has to grab the reader in the first paragraph.  A novel must make a good first impression, even more so than a film or a TV show, because a novel is asking for a lot more of a reader’s time.  A film will be over in 90 minutes or so (unless it’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the running time of which is closer to a full calendar month), a TV show in under an hour.  If you didn’t enjoy it that much, it’s not taken up a serious chunk of your time.  No biggie.  A novel, however, requires a more serious time investment, and if it doesn’t draw you in immediately, the urge to put it down and save wasted hours is greater.

A playable essay on terrible openings.

The same should be true of videogames.  Even a ‘short’ game is at least three times the length of an average film, and a ‘long’ game can last longer than the most studied read-through of War and Peace.  We commit a lot of time to these games, so the onus should be on the developer to create an introduction that is compelling enough to keep us playing.

Why is it then, that the beginning of a videogame is almost always the weakest section?  The play mechanics are certainly part of it; games are obliged to drag us through a tutorial at the first chance they get.  Certainly, frustration at not knowing how to play the game properly would be a key factor in a player giving up early on, but so is a badly-designed tutorial section that almost invariably makes the game seem way less interesting than it might be an hour down the line.

No one wants to look at this.

This problem has worsened since developers have realised that no one gives so much as a cursory glance at a game’s manual any more, meaning they have to clarify the function of every damn button with massive icons right at the point when the game should be drawing the player into its world.  What most developers fail to grasp is that the reason no one reads the manual is because reading the manual is incredibly dull; turning the first half-hour of your game into an interactive version of its own manual only serves to make the game itself appear incredibly dull.  It’s the equivalent of a novel opening with a brief recap of the alphabet followed by a description of what a paragraph is.

What’s the solution?  We can’t demand that gamers read the game’s manual; inflicting reading upon a person is heinous.  The obvious answer, of course, is to make a good tutorial section.  Does anyone remember the tutorial sections in Half Life 2 or Bioshock?  No?  Well they were there, believe me, they were just interwoven with the narrative and gameplay in a way that meant the player absorbs the tutorial whilst convinced they are in fact already engrossed in the game proper.  And they are, because in a well-designed game the tutorial is part of the game proper, not a tacked-on-at-the-last-minute training course that teaches you to shoot cardboard men and how to identify the ‘do a knife stab’ button.

The worst offenders for dreadful introductions are almost certain RPG and adventure games.  The crime of the terrible intro is worsened by the fact that these are usually the games that last the longest, and therefore have the most pressure to make a good first impression.  Who wants to spend 70 hours playing a game that is no fun for the first 5?  Anyone remember the 15-hour tutorial in Final Fantasy XIII?  Of course they do, because it half of the whole damn game and sucked, enormously, for just the longest time.  I know plenty of people who gave up on that game way before it deigned to take the training wheels off, and I don’t blame them in the slightest.

My pet hate, and one pretty much exclusive to the RPG genre, is the obligatory ‘make a character and do all their stats’ part.  This usually happens before you even start the tutorial, and can take anything from a few minutes to up to an hour.  And it’s boring.  Really boring.  You’re not even playing the game; you are, in fact, giving the game instructions on how it should play when it can be bothered to start.  It’s like the programmers got bored, and decided to leave the last little bit of tweaking up to the player.

I totally would.

Now there’s not really a way around character creation; it’s a necessary part of these games, and besides, you can usually just pick a preset and fire away in a few seconds.  Mass Effect does a good job, in that it has an ‘official’ Shepard, who goes on the box art and everything, which everyone can use hassle-free.  If a player wants to spend an hour making Shepard’s face look like someone ran over a mongoose, then they can, and that’s great.  That’s choice, and that’s what videogames are all about.

What hacks me off is when the game demands that I customise my character’s stats before I’ve even started playing.  Now, I’m the kind of player that gets a perverse pleasure from stat-tweaking once I’m playing a game.  I like fiddling around to give my sword a +2 fire stat.  As an RPG fan, the right amount of stat-twiddling gets me sort of excited. 

The trouble with making the player set their stats right at the start is that there’s no context to the stats themselves at this point.  I don’t have a clue what a ‘perception’ stat does when I haven’t been allowed to play the game yet, so how the hell should I know how many arbitrary points I want to put into it?  What if I put all my points into the ‘perception’ stat only to discover, upon actual gameplay being introduced, that the ‘perception’ stat sucks?  “Tough shit,” says the game, “you used up all your starting-the-game points in that laborious, context-lacking create-a-character section that you spent an hour swearing through earlier.  Deal with it.”

Nothing makes me less inclined to play a game than the first thing I see being a massive stats table that the game expects me to absorb, understand and manage before it lets me actually play.  As an example, I’m going to look at Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.  These two games are almost exactly alike except that one has a good introduction and the other has a terrible one.

Fallout 3 merges its stat-building into the narrative; you start the game as a child growing up in an underground vault.  You grow up, and as you do, you go through a number of experiences common to childhood.  Things every player will be able to relate to.  You have to deal with the local bully.  You experience your first childhood romance.  You have to go school and take exams.  You get given a rifle for your birthday and use a giant mutated cockroach as target practice (alright, maybe not everyone can relate to that one).

Not only does this give your rubber-faced character some narrative weight and a level of player involvement – you helped this character grow up, after all – but the game is setting your character’s stats in the background, based on the actions you take.  When it’s time to leave the vault, you get the option to tweak these stats as much as you like, but if you don’t want to, you can leave reasonably safe in the knowledge that you’re using a character that you’ve shaped through your own actions.

The stat screen, or, the antithesis of fun.

In New Vegas, you play as some guy who has recently emerged from a bullet-to-the-head induced coma, and as a result has lost all sense of his identity.  It turns out the only way to forge a new identity for yourself is to walk over to a machine and spend ten minutes pressing ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ keys on the stat screen.  Then you answer some completely context-free questions.  Then you choose some ‘perks’.  All before you have the slightest clue what any of these decisions you are making mean.  And do you get a chance to change your mind if it turns out you made a bad decision?  Nope; you deal with it.

The resulting feeling is something akin to anxiety.  I desperately want to skip this section to get to the actual game, but I know that the decisions I make at this point will affect the entire of the game’s billion-hour length.  Anxiety is not the emotion a game should be invoking with its introduction.  Awe, yes.  Joy, wonderful.  Anxiety?  You’re doing it wrong.

The solution is the same as the solution to the much-maligned Tutorial Section; weave your stat-building into the actual game.  Make the player’s choices matter in the context of playing the actual game, not in a tedious menu screen.  Having a character evolve as we play builds up a relationship between the player and their character – the way you play the game affects the way your character behaves.  Making us define the character before we’ve even started is just annoying.

It’s like a novel opening with a ten-page description of its main character, including vital statistics such as what they eat for breakfast and whether they prefer cats or dogs.  Would you want to read that?  I sure as hell wouldn’t, so I don’t understand why we have to sit through the equivalent at the start of so many purportedly ‘epic’ videogames.  I propose that a game, however grand and deep it might eventually become, cannot be deemed ‘epic’ if it starts with a series of sliders and a description of what the A button is.

Themes In Art And Videogames

The argument of whether videogames should be considered art one frequently voiced.  To attempt a personal conclusion, I asked Google to define art for me; humans have been debating the true definition of art for thousands of years, but Google is made of internet-magic and is therefore smarter than humans.  It found the answer in 0.19 seconds.

It answered: ‘The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.’

There are several points in the above answer that can be related to videogames.  The easiest is ‘...works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.’

It would be very easy to argue that there’s little pertaining to beauty or emotional power in a game of Halo, but I’d have to disagree.  It’s certainly a different kind of beauty to that of an evocative sculpture, and a different emotional response.

A game’s beauty is primarily a mechanical one, the meshing of hard code with graphical fidelity to make an interactive experience.  Taken as a still frame, few games can be seen as beautiful, but there’s a mechanical beauty to landing a jump spot-on whilst executing a perfect headshot.  And there’s a subsequent emotional response, but it’s an adrenalin gut-punch rather than a moment of serene reflection.  It’s this emotional hook that draws players into the next match, then the next, then the next.

So if videogames evoke the desired emotional response, why are most so disposable?  We’ll play a game until its next mechanical upgrade, at which point the original is discarded.  Very few videogames are ever considered one or two years beyond their release.  A great videogame lingers long enough to see a sequel.  Great art, conversely, is considered timeless, studied and appreciated for countless generations after the death of the artist.

The answer must lie in the first part of that definition, then; the ‘application of human creative skill and imagination.’  It is here that videogames, as primarily mechanical entities, fall short of consideration as art.

Most videogames are designed around a mechanic.  This is most evident in the way we classify videogame genres; ‘the first-person shooter’ or ‘the racing game’.  They are named for their central mechanic; ‘this is a game in which you will shoot from a first person perspective’, ‘this is a game in which you race against opponents on a pre-defined course’.

Art is rarely classified by the medium with which it was created.  Paintings are not grouped into categories like ‘oil painting’, ‘watercolour’ or ‘pen-drawn.’  Rather, they are defined by the intention of the artist, by their ‘creative skill and imagination’; ‘expressionism’, ‘realism’ or ‘surrealism’.  They explore concepts.  They have themes.

It would be foolish to dismiss mechanics as the least important aspect of a videogame – all a game is, at its heart, is a collection of digital mechanics dressed up to be aesthetically appealing – but it is the mechanics that fade first from memory.  We don’t remember that Modern Warfare 2 had a refined aiming mechanic; we remember running through the burning ruins of the White House.  It’s the imagery that is evocative, and will become the thing that people talk about when the game is discussed years later.

When considering the mechanics first, and the theme second, we are always going to creative technically accomplished yet ultimately forgettable experiences.  A ‘theme’ encompasses everything but the mechanical aspects of a production; the tone, the aesthetic design, the use of audio.  Other media such as film, literature and music – which fit the definition of art much easier than do videogames – focus on a theme, on an author’s intention.  The final product, the technical accomplishment, is built entirely around this theme.

By creating a mechanic, then building a game around it, you end up with a game like Mirror’s Edge.  Mirrors edge was mechanically interesting and inventive, and played excellently, but was let down by a complete lack of direction in any other aspect of its design.  It’s levels were huge and bland, it’s setting lifeless and dull, it’s story inconsequential and poorly delivered, it’s conflict unconvincing and shakily executed.

The failure of experiments like Mirror’s Edge force companies to play it safe, to stick to established mechanical models without considering that the failure of that game was based on everything but its mechanics.  It was mechanically accomplished, but artistically devoid of merit.

Rarely, games are designed around a theme rather than a mechanic, and the results are often those games that are discussed many years after release, and are the closest videogames come to art.  Fumitu Ueda’s Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are probably the best-known examples.  Each is built around a theme; ‘companionship’ and ‘overcoming unassailable odds’ respectively; and every aspect of those games - from the art direction to the core mechanics themselves - complement these themes.

The benefit shows in how these games are remembered.  People still write articles on these games today, and Ico is now ten years old.  Another example; 1991’s Another World - a singularly artistic vision, now twenty years old, that not only still stands up today but is often cited as a key inspiration for many recent influential indie games.

It’s true that for a videogame to work, it needs to be mechanically sound.  But we’ve been designing videogames for long enough now that there’s no excuse for not getting the mechanics right.  We got videogame mechanics right ten, twenty years ago.

If videogames are to be properly considered art, we need to take a step back from the technological arms-race and really consider how we design games.  Rather than continually trying to inject more life into the medium through new mechanics, would it not be beneficial to use existing mechanical models to create real artistic vision?

If we take ‘first-person shooter’ for granted and factor it out of our design considerations, then we could focus on the aspects that make great art; on injecting real creative skill and imagination into game design.  Creativity has already been proven to work in games; now it’s time for the industry to make it front-and-centre, to help the medium grow out of its confused adolescence and into an acknowledged art-form.

 How We Value Games

A calmer, more reflective look at the 'back-lash' against the perceived 'shortness' of videogames.

Games are often deemed 'too-short'.  Indeed, it seems at times that being 'too short' is the worst thing a game can possibly be.  I've known people who have looked forward to a game for months, only to not play the thing when it comes out because of rumours that it doesn't 'last' the desired amount of playtime.

Games are almost never deemed 'too long', but I've played a good few games that are too long; games that charm initially but run out of ideas early on and rely on tedious padding to artificially lengthen their playtime.

It comes down to how we value the games that we play.  It seems strange that 'length' is the defining value that people seem to hang on.  After all, we don't pay twice a much to see a 3 hour film instead of a 90-minute one.  Rather than query the length, we go to see the film based off all sorts of other values; trailers, hype, reviews, opinions of friends, a love of a certain director and actor.  And afterwards, we may complain that a film is too long or too short, but length is pretty much never the reason we see, or don't see, a particular film.

If you look at value in pure numbers, it does seem silly that we're asked to pay the same amount for an 8-hour game as we are for a 30-hour one.  And if the games were identical in every aspect other than length, then it would be silly.

And while I've played a lot of 8-hour games that feel too short, I've played a lot of 30-hour ones that could do with being half that length.  Also, I've played some 60-hour games that I wish were even longer; for me, that's incredible value for money.  And I've also played some 8-hour games that feel way too long.

The point I'm trying to make is that length is one way to assign value to a game, but it's not the only one, and far from the most important.  Do things like gameplay, depth, narrative, replayability, social play, style, setting and pretty much every other aspect of a game matter far more than how many hours of a person's life it takes up?

And we have to take into account that the value of a game differs greatly from person to person.  When looking purely at play-time, an obvious example for me is Call of Duty (pick whichever post-Modern Warfare one you like).  Call of Duty's campaign is short, very short, running somewhere between 4 and 5 hours.  But Call of Duty also features deep and diverse multiplayer modes that can last for as long a player is willing to play them for.

For some people, Call of Duty will outstrip the most expansive RPG in sheer playtime.  But for me, as someone who has never been able to 'get' online competitive multiplayer, it's just a 5-hour long campaign.  And while it's a very good campaign that is incredibly well paced, it's difficult for me to justify buying Call of Duty at the same price as another game with a more substantial single-player campaign that suits my taste better.

I'm not saying that Call of Duty is a bad game.  It's a great game.  I'm not saying it's too short; the campaign is paced perfectly, and was it any longer, might start to drag.  I'm just saying that with my subjective set of values, Call of Duty is not worth the £40 asking price.

And that's absolutely fine.  Evidently, many millions of people do consider it worth the asking price.  For the people that play the multiplayer every day for months, £40 is a bargain.  But it's about time we started looking at games as a subjective form of entertainment.  A game that's too short for someone might be perfect for someone else, and too long for another.

No game is going to be able to fit the values of every single person.  And that's great; it means we can all work out what it is we like about games, and buy the games that fit those values.  And, hopefully, stop complaining whenever a game doesn't fit our specific set of values.

Elitism, and how to Shut The Hell Up

Some people are idiots.  While this is a certified fact, the specific people in question today are those who refer to themselves as 'die hard PC gamers', those currently occupied by posting angry negative user reviews of Portal 2 on Metacritic.

Their complaints with Valve's latest range from anything from the price (the same as every other major release videogame) the game's length (in line with pretty much every first-person blockbuster released in the last four years) to its 'sub-standard' graphics (it doesn't look quite as good as Crysis 2, but then the PC idiots screamed about Crysis 2 as well, so who knows what astonishing level of graphical fidelity is required to shut these fools up.)

Also in the firing line are the apparently aggressive and somehow outrageous ARG, something that I'm not entirely sure what it even is and something which I never encountered whilst acquiring my copy of Portal 2, and the completely optional in-game store that lets you purchase robot hats which actually has nothing to do with the game whatsoever.

Now I'm not claiming that everyone who styles themselves a 'PC gamer' is a complete dickhead.  The ones that aren't are probably enjoying Portal 2 right now, quietly, while the entitled elitist assholes scream around on Metacritic using dreadful grammar to try and disparage Valve because Portal 2 doesn't require every ounce of power their £1000+ gaming PCs can throw out.

There are certain games that I definitely think are better played on a PC.  There aren't that many of them anymore, but Portal 2 is definitely one of them.  In fact, all of Valves games, despite now having pretty much perfect console ports, are designed specifically for the PC, and it shows in the gameplay.

It seems that what annoys the PC elitists most of all is that console versions of PC games are now no longer noticably inferior to their PC versions.  This somehow means that PC gamers are losing out.  It's as if the games industry is expected to cater specifically to the tiny minority of people who own £1000+ gaming rigs, specifically because they own £1000+ gaming rigs.

These people act like they are doing games companies a favour by purchasing these ludicrous machines, and that as such the industry owes them something.  And when they don't feel they're getting what they want, they ungraciously kick off all over their forum of choice.  Or a game's metacritic page.  This now happens pretty much any time a game is released for PC.

What these idiots don't seem to realise is that they're biting the hand that feeds them.  The big-budget PC market is dwindling, and has been for ages, and there's increasingly little incentive for developers to specifically target PC gamers.

Valve is one of the only developers still genuinely dedicated to producing first-class PC games.  That these are then ported to console is incidental, and has been for about four years now.  But what incentive do Valve have to continue to cater to this market if when they release a game, their supposed fans act like jackasses and slam that game all over review sites because it doesn't their person crazy high standard?

I genuinely think that PC gamers are a big reason that PC gaming is 'dying out'.  They're bringing about their own demise by acting like ungracious assholes every time a developer takes a risk and actually makes a game with the PC as the lead platform.

How much longer is this going to continue before developers have had enough?  With Steam now available on both PS3 and Mac, Valve have less of a tie to the PC platform than ever before; if their own fans on PC decide they hate the games that are supposed to have been made specifically for them, then maybe they don't deserve to play Half Life 2: Episode 3 after all.

As an end-note, I'd like to applaud the 700-or-so gamers behind the Metacritic 'back-backlash'; those posting positive reviews along the lines of 'these guys are idiots and the ARG has nothing to do with Portal 2 as a game.'  It's good that the rational voices of PC gamers are being heard over the voices of those who seem hell-bent on spoiling everyone's fun, permanently.

Humour in Videogames

I was worried that Portal 2 might turn out to be less than fantastic.  I never thought it would actually be bad, of course, but the first game was so perfectly executed that I was concerned that a sequel couldn't match it, let alone exceed it.

Well, I've played a few hours into Portal 2, and, so far, it is fantastic.  Almost every feature of it exceeds videogame standards.  But there's one thing that Portal does, as a series (is two a series?  I think that counts.) that is so far ahead of its peers as to make them look embarrassed.  And that's its script, and more specifically its excellent use of humour.

The humour in Portal is great.  And it's genuinely great, not great in the great-for-a-videogame sense either.  There are numerous one-liners in just the first couple of hours of the sequel which caused a genuine chuckle and made me want to applaud the writers; I know I couldn't come up with material of this calibre.

The humour in Portal stands up when compared to other mediums like TV and film.  I think this is possibly the only case where this has been true; even the old classics like Monkey Island and Sam and Max, the old-guard adventure games built almost entirely around humour, couldn't (great as they are) stand up next to, say, a well-written TV comedy.  I think Portal can.  And that's one of its greatest achievements.

It's even more of an achievement when you consider that other games are not even trying, not even in the same ballpark.  Most videogame humour stretches about as far as the schlocky slapstick of Dead Rising or else introverted self-referential material, a 'commentary' on videogames along the lines of the recently un-spectacular Comic Jumper or the Mat Hazzard games.

These are examples are absolutely fine, and as examples of purely videogame-related humour they work well, but they'd wilt when compared to even the least funny comedy TV show (I'm thinking of the Big Bang Theory; that's humour so mild that it verges on the embarrassing.  But it's still a whole lot funnier than Comic Jumper.)

Portal excels in the one area that videogames almost universally fail to address; genuine excellent writing, not just 'writing that's a bit better than other videogames.'

Good comedy is hard to write.  Really hard.  Which is probably why most games tend to skirt the subject, and that's fine.  But if not for any other of it myriad achievements in the medium, Portal should be applauded for proving that a good video game and a good script are not mutually exclusive, and that humour absolutely can work in a videogame environment.

I'd like to challenge other videogame writers to step up to the plate; let's try and compete with writing outside of the industry, rather than settling for better than average for the medium.  Because let's be honest, the average for the medium is really pretty low.

 The Other Used Game Argument

There's much furore in the games industry at the moment about the used game market, and how damaging it is to developers and publishers.  Companies like EA are now pulling off bullshit that rivals PC piracy protection to stop consumers from purchasing used games.

I'm once again not going to discuss the ethics of locking part of your content against those who choose not to buy the product in quite the right way, although my opinion on said practice is probably implied.  Short of just realising that they're fighting a losing battle and giving up on this sort of shit, this method is actually probably the best way for publishers to encourage purchasing of new games.

But in the rush to stamp out the used games market, publishers seem to be missing quite a big point.  The used games market allows many customers to buy a lot more of their games.

I buy games new.  A small part of this is to do with my desire for the people who made the product I'm purchasing to actually get paid for it, but a much larger part of this is that I like to play games as soon as they come out, when a used copy tends to only be £2 cheaper than a new one anyway.  £2 seems to be a reasonable premium for a nice sealed copy with a disk that no one has wiped their arse with.

But if I couldn't trade in my games when I'm finished with them, there's no way I'd be able to play all the games I do new.  Part of this is that I've been playing games for a long time, and have a reasonable idea of what a game is worth, to me, compared to other forms of media, and they're very rarely worth their £40 asking price.

Most games these days are blockbusters designed to be played through once, then sustained with online multiplayer.  And being as no game has yet to feature online multiplayer that has kept me interested for more than a couple of hours, asking £40 for 5-10 hours of entertainment seems steep, especially when games that cost that much five years ago would have had almost double the content (that's content, as opposed to texture resolution.)

But thanks to trade-in store credit, particularly at HMV where they are prone to give you ludicrously high returns for recent games, it's possible for me to play these games, new, with money going to the developers and everything, without paying the steep asking price.  I recently bought Bulletstorm for £40, and traded it in for £35 three weeks later.  Providing I keep shopping at HMV, I effectively got Bulletstorm for £5, and it's worth way more than that.  Bonus.

This means I'm typically paying £15-£20 for a new game, which is a vastly more reasonable asking price for the majority of today's games.  If I couldn't trade in my used games for credit, then I wouldn't be able to afford to buy all these new blockbuster games, and EA wouldn't ever see any of my money.

I'd end up only ever putting down cash for the games I know will be worth their asking price, and in my case there are only 2 or 3 of these every year.  Everything else I'd be picking up months after release, when the price has fallen below £20 and the fate of the game and the studio that made it would have long since been decided.

Basically, I don't really believe that the purchase of used games is actually going to put companies like EA out of business, and while it definately sucks that developers don't see a cent of a used game sale, this is problem with the whole market, and the big companies should be taking on the retailers, not their consumers.

Because if EA got their wish and there was no used game market, then I wouldn't have bothered playing Dead Space 2 or Bulletstorm, which means I'd have missed out on a couple of almost-great games, and their developers would have missed out on getting paid for making them.

It might be something companies should consider before they decide to lock the use of the analogue sticks until you enter a 56-digit code on their next middling-to-average blockbuster.

(Note that while I've single out EA here, they are not by any means the only company doing this.  It's just that the last few games I've played have been by EA, and so they sprung to mind as the best example of corporate consumer-shafting.)

 The Final Boss

This post contains spoilers for the videogames Alan Wake, Batman Arkham Asylum and Bioshock.  If you have not finished any of these games, and care about what happens in them, then don't read this.

What is it with videogames and final boss battles?  While pretty much every other staple of the arcade era of games has fallen by the wayside in favour of accessibility and overall experience, the final boss battle is one thing that stubbornly refuses to go away.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan off boss battles in games where boss battles make sense.  Combat-centric games like God Of War, Devil May Cry and Bayonetta are made by their fantastic boss battles.  The same goes for a lot of RPGs, with the most of the game pretty much making up the time between epic boss battles.  Boss battles in these games rock.

But there are certain games that really don't suit boss battles.  And yet they're still rammed in there; without fail, there will be a final boss encounter to overcome at the end of the game.  And these often go a good way towards ruining otherwise excellent games.  I'm going to use four fairly recent games as examples of dreadful final boss fights.

Bioshock - There are no boss fights in Bioshock, prior to the final boss.  Big Daddies don't count; they're an intrinsic part of the environment, which you can choose to avoid.  Bioshock is a game that focuses on choice, freeform combat and atmosphere.  Great, chunky, tangible atmosphere.

Yet Bioshock ends with a simply dreadful boss fight against a pointlessly super-enhanced Atlas/Fontaine.  All strategy, choice and atmosphere goes out of the window and what for the most part has been a delicately blend of genres becomes a dreary shooter from a decade ago.  You strafe about blasting Mega-Fontaine with whatever your biggest gun is until he falls over and you win the game.  Dreadful.

Batman: Arkham Asylum - There are boss fights in Arkham Asylum, but they are by far its weakest aspect, throwing out the satisfying crunch of the game's combat in favour of hackneyed learn-the-pattern-shoot-the-weakspot frustration.

And the final fight with the Joker, again rendered enormous for no real reason other than the lore of videogames dictates that this must be so, is the worst of the lot.  It's teeth-grindingly frustrating as he takes you down with a few hits, forcing you to learn his movements and repeat the same actions again and again and again until he falls.

Alan Wake - There are no boss fights at all in Alan Wake.  Your main opponents in the game are largely human in scale, stalking you through the moody shadows, aside from the odd possessed tractor to provide some bizarre differentiation.  For the most part, your opponent in Alan Wake is the darkness itself.

Yet there's a final boss battle to be had, and it's against a goddamn tornado.  A tornado you kill with flashbang grenades.  I mean really, what the hell?

Dead Space 2 - The most recent candidate for the incredibly misjudged and redundant final boss battle award.  Dead Space, like Alan Wake, is best when you are taking on a few human-sized, moderately powerful opponents.  The larger the enemy is in Dead Space, the more it breaks the games otherwise stellar tension and shows up the problems with its otherwise excellently designed control system.

And the final boss battle is just dreadful.  I'm not going to go into it, as the game is definitely worth playing if you haven't already, but it is bad.  Possibly worse than Alan Wake's friggin' evil tornado.

All the above games are not games that are about combat.  There's combat in them, sure, but it's not the real focus.  The focus of all these games is atmosphere, narrative and experience.  It's something the above examples excel at more than most games.

And when they finish with a crappy boss battle, it ruins the lasting impression you have of that game.  Because the final boss is that last thing you see, it's what sticks in your memory.  However good the game is up to that point, if the last boss is frustrating and unnecessary, then it's that frustration that comes to mind when you recall that game.

And it's a shame, because all of these games would have been better without their final bosses.  I understand the need for a climax to the game, but another thing the above games are very good at is compelling set-pieces.  Why can't we end with a gripping set piece, a chunk of action that underscores a game's strong points, rather than a pointless boss fight that only serves to highlight the reasons why the game is not, in fact, a combat game.

Difficulty Curves

Videogames never end well.  I can tell I'm approaching the end of Dead Space 2, because it's stopped being any fun to play.

Dead Space 2 is a game that excels at pace and tension, of tight encounters spaced out by foreboding treks through a dilapidated space station.  Or at least it is until the final act, where it becomes a bad shooting gallery.  Every room you walk into fills with fleshy tentacle baddies, and you shoot them until they are dead.  Rinse and repeat.  Tension is lost in favour of jacking up the difficulty to create an 'exciting' end game.

Dead Space 2 is not a great shooting game, and when it tries to become one, it stops being very enjoyable.

Difficulty curves are something games developers have yet to grow out of.  The rule goes that the last thing you do needs to be the hardest thing there is in the game.  It's usually a boss battle.  It's usually not much fun.

The trouble with this format is that the last thing you do is also usually the most frustrating thing you have to do in the game, and this means that's the lasting memory you have of the game.  There are so many games I've played that I've enjoyed pretty much all the way through, only to get pissed off in the last hour or so due to an onslaught of enemies, a poorly designed boss battle, or some other badly thought out difficulty-raising device.  And I always remember these games less fondly for it.

I understand the reason for the difficulty spike; as the player grows familiar with the game, the challenge needs to grow too, or they'll become bored with it.  But it needs to be handled better.  Difficulty should not ramp up incessantly until some final, teeth-grinding battle, followed by a cutscene.  There should be some downtime at the end of the game, a period to reflect on what you've achieved.  Players will remember the game more fondly for it.

Metroid (pretty much all of them, I think) is a good example.  You fight the final boss, the climax of the difficulty curve, but the climax of the actual game is the subsequent escape from the exploding planet/space-station/whatever.  The escape sequence isn't hard, in the traditional sense, in that it's unlikely that you'll lose at this point, but it's still tense and exhilarating.  You're left with that feeling of exhilaration, rather than the memory of the boss fight that you might have died numerous times on beforehand.

I have many issues with the way games treat difficulty and progression.  There's always a point where 'challenge' surpasses 'entertainment', and most games cross it at some point.  They almost universally have frustrating difficulty spikes.

I think a good thing for developers to study is the three-act film structure.  Films don't end immediately after the last climactic struggle.  If they did, people would be pissed off.  There's always a cool-down period, where the characters come to terms with their accomplishments and their character arcs are tied off.

Games don't do this, or if they do, it's usually expressed through a cutscene, which doesn't really count.  Why can't we have a nice cathartic slice of actual gameplay, where the real threat is over but there're still a few smaller hurdles to overcome?  This would go a long way towards softening the often frustrating climax of a game's difficulty curve.

The New PSP Is A Fat Lump

This chunky mother is the new PSP, which I refuse to call the Next Generation Portable or any acronym thereof.

Say what you like about it's OMFGOLED screens, PS3-level graphics, built-in 3GPS WiFi balls, fourteen touchpads and six cameras, I think the fact that it's a giant ugly bastard is absolutely the best thing about it.  It is in no way trying to look like some sort of trendy media gadget for people who wear suits in the house.

This thing has been designed to play GAMES on.  It's got proper sticky-out fat analogue sticks and great big rubber grippy things on the back.  It's totally aware of the fact that it'll never fit in anyone's pocket and it doesn't even give a shit.

The main issue with the original PSP was that it was trying so hard to resemble a trendy media device that it made playing games on it a bit of a nightmare.  However well developers fudged the controls around to compensate for the single nasty analogue slider, you never got the console-level experience that they were clearly attempting to deliver.  And if the PSP was awkward to use, the PSPgo was cancer for the hands.

I think Sony made a good decision in not trying to compete directly with any of Apple's iStuff; they've finally gone for function over form, which should be a blessing for people who want to play actual games on the thing.  And they should be big chunky games, too.

It won't actually be good, of course.  Sony haven't had a good product launch since the PS1.  There's no way with all the uber-tech-shit on that device that it's going to be remotely affordable; I wouldn't be at all surprised if it lurched on to the shelves at over £300, or one metric fuckton of cash.

Also, this being a Sony product, expect the launch line-up to be devoid of anything remotely good.  And expect this to be the case for a good long while, what with developers now having to spend next-gen amounts of cash on making games for the thing.

However, when the good games finally do come out, this time there's a chance that they'll be genuinely good games, rather than simply 'good for the PSP'.  There's not a single 'great' game on the PSP that isn't in some way crippled by its nasty control layout.  With the PSP NEW ONE, featuring what must be the most inputs ever seen on a device, there's a good chance that the games might actually exceed those on home consoles.

Plus, it's highly likely that this will eventually let me play a new Monster Hunter game with real camera controls, and not on the Wii, which makes it an almost definite future purchase.  Whenever it costs less than a small country.

Image courtesy of Kotaku.com

Why We Need A New FFVII

This is far from the first article about the stagnation of the Japanese RPG, but when even genre grandfather Hironobu Sakaguchi thinks JRPG stereotypes are stale, designers ought to bloody listen.

The JRPG genre needs another Final Fantasy VII.  And I don't mean it needs another entry in the dubiously titled FFVII 'series'.  I also don't mean an HD remake of the original FFVII, or anything of that sort.

What I mean when I say We Need A New FFVII, is we need another game to come along that redefines the cultural impact of the genre in the same way FFVII did when it was released in 1997.

FFVII defined the RPG for many people.  It certainly defined the RPG for western audiences, who pre-FFVII had largely not cared about what seemed like a totally inacessible genre of game.  FFVII, by combining genre staples with lavish (for the time) production values and the kind of sci-fi storyline a western audience could just about digest, established the genre for the western market.

And the JRPG developers noticed this.  Since then, they've largely been content to try and turn out clones of FFVII in a hope to emulate its success, and for a while it worked.  However, 14 years later, when the genre has moved forwards so little, things are getting a bit desperate for the genre as a whole.

Think about the leaps forward other genres in gaming have made since 1997.  Then think about how little the JRPG genre has moved on in that time.  Genre designers are seeming unwilling to break away from design cliches, and as a result, the once-popular genre is now severely in decline.

That's not to say there aren't good examples of JRPGs that have left staple cliches behind and made efforts to bring the genre up to date.  Demon's Souls is a JRPG, as is Monster Hunter.  The fact that you wouldn't identify them as such from watching someone playing them only shows how successful they have been at moving the genre forwards.

These games have taken what works best from the JRPG genre and brought merged them with modern game design in ways that make them truly standout experiences, and two of the best games I've played this console generation.

You could say the Monster Hunter, with its phenomenal success in Japan and growing presence in the west, is the New FFVII.  The surprising (even to the developer) success of Demon's Souls is also promising.

However, it is telling of the state of the Japanese games industry that even in the wake of Monster Hunter's success, few companies are trying to emulate its formula, with many preferring to stay mired in the familiar territory of menu micro-management and static combat.

Will there be a JRPG that truly shakes the world's perception of the genre in the way FFVII did?  If there is, I'd say it's unlikely to come out of Square Enix (my previous blog post does a good enough job relaying my opinion on their recent output).  Maybe Sakaguchi and Mistwalker will produce something truly marvellous in the coming years, or maybe someone else will step up and unveil the New FFVII.

Hell, if someone gives me a huge pile of money, I'll design the damn thing.  I'll even give it to Square Enix so they can pretend its their idea, instead of releasing FFXIII-2.  Even abbreviated, it is almost impossible to type the name of that game correctly on the first try.

The Square Enix Issue

Despite the fact that Square Enix's output of the last, well, almost decade, has been at best middling-to-poor...I still can't help but get a bit excited every time they release trailers for their latest games.

Here are there new trailers, although we're not supposed to be able to see them yet - SE have a stupid precedent for showing new trailers in a media blackout, as if they don't want us - the people who (might(probably, let's be honsest)) actually buy their games to actually see the actually games.

It's probably safe to say at this point in time that SE are better at making trailers than they are at making games.  I remember the trailer for FFXIII more fondly than I remember actual FFXIII.

I think this is because these days SE design their games as if they were designing trailers.  They're probably pretty annoyed about having to put in the bits where people can press buttons and move shit around; they'd rather skip that and spend more time on the bits where cool stuff whooshes around and then explodes.

That's impression that you get from playing recent fair like FFXIII and Kingdom Hearts (2, and any of the pre/sequel/spinoff crap you care to mention).  These games are way more fun to look at than they are to play.

If you walk in on someone playing FFXIII with no idea how the game works, you'll be blown away by the amount of stuff going on on the screen.  It looks like the most exciting thing ever, until you look what the player is actually doing with their hands.  Which is pretty much just hammering the X button.  Again and again and again.

For this reason, I highly expect that FF Versus XIII (I don't even know how I'm supposed to write that properly), despite looking great and massive and whooshy and exciting, and being some sort of reality/fantasy crossover which I am all about, will probably end up being more of an interactive tech demo than a proper video game.

And I'll probably buy the bastard anyway, mostly because it LOOKS awesome, and I'll probably play through it largely convinced that it is awesome until I get to the end and realise all I've done for the whole damn thing is wailed on the X button.

But by that point it will too late, Square Enix will have more of my money, and will continue to use it to push out even more pretty-but-utterly-vapid  videogames.  Which I'll probably then go and fucking buy.

Shooting Games #2

Another pair of good and bad points about everybody's favorite thing in the world, shooting games.

Good point - Exciting set-pieces

The more ludicrous and over-the-top, the better.  Modern Warfare 2 is great for these.  There's a bit where you jump over a ravine on a snowmobile whilst firing a pistol.  There's a bit where you fight through the White House, while it's on fire, after it's been hit by a nuke.  There's a bit where you pull a knife out of your own chest and throw it into the evil bad man.

It's all very exciting, and it's something that suits the first person perspective perfectly.  All the big shooters should be full of set-pieces that make over-excited teenagers punch the air and shout 'FUCK YEAH' whilst choking on their Mountain Dew.

Bad point - The screen going more red the closer you are to death.

Good grief this is annoying.  More so now that it has graduated from shooting games to every single bloody game ever.  I admit that health bars are not the most attractive thing to have on your screen, but at least they only take up a small part of the screen and don't obscure the whole damn game.

I kind of get the idea behind the whole screen-reddening, close-to-death-blurred-vision thing, but it's just no fun.  At all.  It makes dying way more frustrating than it already is by making it so that when you actually die you don't have a clue what killed you because you couldn't see shit through the massive red filter.

The world would be a better place if everyone just forgot this particular mechanic existed.  Was it really so bad looking at health bars?

What The Internet Sounds Like

So I was wandering around the Science Museum absorbing all the science when I came across this thing.

It's called the Listening Post, and it's quite brilliant.  Basically, it's monitoring a load of different internet chat-rooms and feeds in real time, and it reads out the things it picks up in an awesome robot voice, to some haunting music.  It's quite eerie, and often quite hilarious.

While I was sat there, it was filtering stuff using the phrase 'I like/love'.  Some of the things it came out with:

"I like Germans."   "I like thunderstorms."  "I like Static-X."  "I like my ass too."  "I like this movie."  "I like sex with animals."  "I like a good Pinot Grigio."  "I like it down there."   "I like sex with animals."  "I love Krispy-G."

It's a strange feeling, sitting in a darkened room and listening in on people's private conversations.  It's a strange high-tech voyeurism.  It's all totally anonymous, so there's no way to find out who likes sex with animals, or indeed who/what Krispy-G is.  But it's still an oddly unsettling experience.  I'd highly recommend checking it out if you can.

Anyone for 3D?

Television manufacturers and the cinema, and now games console manufacturers, are currently busy trying to foist 3D technology on us.  Now that's fine and all, but does anyone actually want 3D technology.  I have not met one person who is actually genuinely interested in seeing things in 3D, for any amount of money.

3D, for certain films, does look good.  Avatar looked good in 3D.  So do Pixar films.  But it hardly redefines anyones perception of film.  I haven't tried any 3D games yet, so I can't really comment, but they probably look quite good, just not good enough to justify the astronomical price of a 3DTV or, of course, wearing the stupid glasses.

This, price aside, is the main problem with 3D technology.  However much they say they don't mind, no one, anywhere, wants to wear those stupid glasses.  It's massively presumptuous of a piece of consumer electronics equipment to assume that everyone is willing to dress up in order to use it properly.  I can't think of any other entertainment device that demands I wear a specific item of clothing before I'm allowed to see it properly.  This is before you take into account that I, at least, have to wear glasses to see the TV anyway.  Which means if I want to watch in 3D, I have to wear double glasses.  Which looks ridiculous on a cosmic level.

And no, I'm not switching to contact lenses just so I can watch television in 3D without looking like a monumental idiot.

There are numerous articles that I can't be bothered to cite right now where 3DTV manufacturers claim, after their pointless product has sold below their expectations, that consumers 'need time to adjust to the idea of 3D glasses' or some such balls.

Surely this is not how consumerism is supposed to work?  Their job, as manufacturers, is surely to provide us, the consumers, with products we want or need?  Not come up with a product that nobody wants, then try and ram it down our throats and claim we only don't want it because we 'haven't got used to it yet.'

Generally, new consumer products come along to make our lives easier, because we're all fundamentally lazy bastards and like that sort of thing.  3DTV actually makes life more difficult, because you have to wear the stupid glasses.  And sit in the right place.  And not move your head.  I'd kind of get if there were people all over the place watching films and saying 'wow, if only I could see this in 3D!'  Only NOBODY does that.  So what, actually, is the point?

Oh, also, watching stuff in 3D for a long period of time makes your eyes hurt.  Which is great, obviously.

Quick-Time Events

Enough of these.  Just don't do them anymore.  Were they ever really that fun?  Do they really add anything fun to a game?

So I've been looking at reviews for the new Castlevania.  Now I never expected the new Castlevania to actually be good; it couldn't look more like God of War if it tried, and even God of War got bored of being God of War by the end so how the hell anyone else can improve on the formula I have no idea.

But while I was looking at reviews I saw quick-time events.  And they made me ANGRY.  I just don't get the point.  QTE's was novel in GoW, because they made a PS2 game look big and exciting and cinematic.  In basically every game since, they've just sucked.

It's as if the game just wants to show you cool stuff, but realises that because it's a game you ought to have some input, so it grudgingly makes you arbitarity press buttons while stuff goes whoosh all over the place.  And if you don't do it right, it makes you do it again.

How is this remotely fun?  There's no real skill involved, and most of the time you can't even watch the cool shit that you're supposedly doing because you're staring at the middle of the screen waiting for a stupid button prompt to appear.

If your game doesn't look cool and exciting during normal gameplay, shoving quick-time events in there is not going to fool anyone.  If you have to rely on something that is barely interactive to make your game exciting, your game is probably shit.  So stop doing it.  Unless you WANT your game to be shit.  In which case, why not just make your whole game one great big Quick-Time Event?

 Health Packs

What the hell are health packs anyway?  Who came up with that idea?  Which game first used health packs?

Health packs seem to contain some sort of magic ingrediant that instantly heals all wounds, replenishes lost blood and presumably disappears any bullets lodged in the body.  Often they can also be consumed through some sort of instant osmosis, without the player character actually having to physically consume them.  Basically, health packs are the kind of thing too stupid to exist even in the most crazy sci-fi stories, but have been a staple of video games for basically ever.

The first time I became aware of what a stupid idea health packs were was the original Tomb Raider.  I mean, she didn't even eat them or anything.  You just selected them off a menu and Lara's bones spontaneously knitted themselves back together.  You could do it while a lion was eating your leg.  Presumably the health pack grows back more leg, which the lion continues to eat until you kill it or run out of health packs.

That said, health packs are feasably less stupid than inexplicable recovering health.  Like in Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, where a man wearing a t-shirt can recover from taking a full clip of ammo in the chest by crouching behind a crate for 10 seconds.

Presumably, Drake is some kind of genetically-engineered mutant who actually lives off bullets, the process of crouching converting all the bullets in his body into vitality and healing his wounds.  I mean, you never actually see him eat human food, do you?  Why they missed this quite important part of the story out of the game I don't know.

Also, why hasn't real life taken cues from videogames and invented real health packs?  It would make shit like war loads better, and considerably cut down on hospital waiting times.

Shooting Games #1

So I recently finished Halo Reach.  It was quite good.  The fact that Halo has been around for almost 10 years, has barely changed gameplay-wise, and is still pretty good, says something about the shooter genre.

I think I have now played enough shooting games that I know what's good and what isn't.  I could probably make a fantastic shooting game with this knowledge, but I don't want to so I won't.

What I will do, however, is occasionally list one good element and one bad element of shooting games in general.  So here we go:

GOOD ELEMENT: Recharging health.

Remember when shooting games used to make us collect health packs to restore our health?  Yeah, it was shit.  It used to break the flow of the game, and led to some massively annoying checkpointing issues.  Well done Halo for a) inventing regenerating health, and b) justifying the recharging of the health by calling it a shield.  Less well done all the games that came after, where the protagonists magically recover from bullet wounds after 10 seconds for no real reason.  But hey, at least its not as annoying as having to collect health packs.

And yes, I know the more recent Halo games reintroduced health packs, but this made them a bit more shitty so we'll ignore that for now.

BAD ELEMENT:  The bit where you wait for an elevator or something while baddies infinately spawn at you.

Almost every shooting game does this at some point, and it's one of the worst bits of gameplay filler ever.  Halo Reach does it 3 or 4 times.  You know the bit; where you press and elevator button, and the elevator starts coming, but takes an excruciatingly long time, and then a load of baddies turn up and you have no choice but to shoot them all while you wait for it.

Halo's version has one character hack...something, and you have to 'defend' them until they're finished.  It's still shit.  Developers: please never put this gameplay mechanic in your games ever again.  Is it too much to ask to press and elevator button and have the elevator actually arrive, like, on time, and without four hundred baddies appearing?